Jimmy Maher (maher@filfre.net)

The Digital Antiquarian
Volume 11: 1989
Comments Edition

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Contents

1. Will Wright’s City in a Box

1. Comments

2. Acorn and Amstrad

1. Comments

3. Peter Molyneux’s Kingdom in a Box

1. Comments

4. Shogun

1. Comments

5. Journey

1. Comments

6. Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur

1. Comments

7. Moving to California

1. Comments

8. AGT

1. Comments

9. A Conversation with Lane Barrow

1. Comments

10. IBM’s New Flavor

1. Comments

11. Sierra Gets Creative

1. Comments

12. So You Want to Be a Hero?

1. Comments

13. Cracking Open the Mac

1. Comments

14. The Freedom to Associate

1. Comments

15. A Slow-Motion Revolution

1. Comments

16. The Manhole

1. Comments

17. Cinemaware’s Year in the Desert

1. Comments

18. How Jordan Mechner Made a Different Sort of Interactive Movie (or, The Virtues of Restraint)

1. Comments

19. The Prophet of Cyberspace

1. Comments

20. Turning on, Booting up, and Jacking into Neuromancer

1. Comments

Will Wright’s City in a Box
June 10, 2016

Will Wright, 1990

In “The Seventh Sally,” a story by the great Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, a god-like “constructor” named Trurl comes upon a former tyrant named Excelsius, now exiled to a lonely asteroid by the peoples of the planets he used to terrorize. Upon learning of Trurl’s powers, Excelsius demands that he restore him to his throne. Trurl, however, is wise enough to consider what suffering Excelsius’s reinstatement would bring to his subjects. So, he instead fashions an intricate simulacrum of a kingdom for Excelsius to rule over.

And all of this, connected, mounted, and ground to precision, fit into a box, and not a very large box, but just the size that could be carried about with ease. This Trurl presented to Excelsius, to rule and have dominion over forever; but first he showed him where the input and output of his brand-new kingdom were, and how to program wars, quell rebellions, exact tribute, collect taxes, and also instructed him in the critical points and transition states of that microminiaturized society — in other words the maxima and minima of palace coups and revolutions — and explained everything so well that the king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions and, without hesitation, while the constructor watched, issued a few trial proclamations, correctly manipulating the control knobs, which were carved with imperial eagles and regal lions. These proclamations declared a state of emergency, martial law, a curfew, and a special levy. After a year had passed in the kingdom, which amounted to hardly a minute for Trurl and the king, by an act of the greatest magnanimity — that is, by a flick of the finger at the controls — the king abolished one death penalty, lightened the levy, and deigned to annul the state of emergency, whereupon a tumultuous cry of gratitude, like the squeaking of tiny mice lifted by their tails, rose up from the box, and through its curved glass cover one could see, on the dusty highways and along the banks of lazy rivers that reflected the fluffy clouds, the people rejoicing and praising the great and unsurpassed benevolence of their sovereign lord.

And so, though at first he had felt insulted by Trurl’s gift, in that the kingdom was too small and very like a child’s toy, the monarch saw that the thick glass lid made everything inside seem large; perhaps too he dully understood that size was not what mattered here, for government is not measured in meters and kilograms, and emotions are somehow the same, whether experienced by giants or dwarfs — and so he thanked the constructor, if somewhat stiffly. Who knows, he might even have liked to order him thrown in chains and tortured to death, just to be safe — that would have been a sure way of nipping in the bud any gossip about how some common vagabond tinkerer presented a mighty monarch with a kingdom. Excelsius was sensible enough, however, to see that this was out of the question, owing to a very fundamental disproportion, for fleas could sooner take their host into captivity than the king’s army seize Trurl. So with another cold nod, he stuck his orb and scepter under his arm, lifted the box kingdom with a grunt, and took it to his humble hut of exile. And as blazing day alternated with murky night outside, according to the rhythm of the asteroid’s rotation, the king, who was acknowledged by his subjects as the greatest in the world, diligently reigned, bidding this, forbidding that, beheading, rewarding — in all these ways incessantly spurring his little ones on to perfect fealty and worship of the throne.

When first published in 1965, Lem’s tale was the most purely speculative of speculative fictions, set as it was thousands if not millions of years in the future. Yet it would take just another quarter of a century before real-world Excelsiuses got the chance to play with little boxed kingdoms of their own, nurturing their subjects and tormenting them as the mood struck. The new strain of living, dynamic worlds filled with apparently living, dynamic beings was soon given the name of “god game” to distinguish it from the more static games of war and grand strategy that had preceded it.

The first of the great god-game constructors, the one whose name would always be most associated with the genre, was a hyperactive chain-smoking, chain-talking Southerner named Will Wright. This is the story of him and his first living world — or, actually, living city — in a box.

Will Wright has always been a constructor. As a boy in the 1960s and 1970s, he built hundreds of models of ships, cars, and planes. At age 10, he made a replica of the bridge of the Enterprise out of balsa wood and lugged it to a Star Trek convention; it won a prize there, the first of many Wright would get to enjoy during his life. When developments in electronics miniaturization made it possible, he started making his creations move, constructing primitive robots out of Lego bricks, model kits, and the contents of his local Radio Shack’s wall of hobbyist doodads. In 1980, the 20-year-old Wright and his partner Rick Doherty won the U.S. Express, an illegal coast-to-coast automobile race created by the organizer of the earlier Cannonball Run. A fighter jet’s worth of electronics allowed them to drive from New York City to Santa Monica in 33 hours and 39 minutes in a Mazda RX-7, cruising for long stretches of time at 120 miles per hour.

Wright was able to indulge these passions and others thanks to his late father, a materials engineer who invented a lucrative new process for manufacturing plastic packaging before dying of leukemia when his son was just 9 years old. His widow was very patient with her eccentric tinkerer of a son, similar in some ways to his practical-minded father but in others very different. Wright spent five years at various universities in and out of his home state of Louisiana, excelling in the subjects that caught his fancy — like architecture, economics, mechanical engineering, and military history — while ignoring entirely all the others. Through it all, his mother never put any undue pressure on him to settle on something, buckle down, and get an actual degree. When he told her in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t be taking over the family business his father had left in trust for him, she accepted that as well. Yet even she must have struggled to accept the notion of her 22-year-old son running off to California with Joell Jones, a painter 11 years his senior; the two had bonded when Jones severed a nerve in her wrist and Wright built a gadget out of metal and rubber bands to allow her to continue to paint. The two would marry in 1984.

Given his love for electronic gadgetry, it will likely come as no surprise that Wright was snared quickly by the nascent PC revolution. Already by 1980 he had added an Apple II to his collection of toys, and with it computer programming and computer gaming to his long list of hobbies; his first computerized love was Bruce Artwick’s primitive original Flight Simulator. But it was only after moving to Oakland with Jones that he started thinking seriously about writing a game of his own. This first and arguably last entirely practical, commercial project of his life was apparently prompted by his now living permanently away from home, an adult at last. At some point even a dreamer has to do something with his life, and making computer games seemed as good a choice as any.

His first game was in some ways the antithesis of everything he would do later: a conventional experience in a proven genre, a game designed to suit the existing market rather than a game designed to create its own new market, and the only Will Wright game that can actually be won in the conventional sense. Like many games of its era, its design was inspired by a technical trick. Wright, who had moved on from his Apple II to a Commodore 64 by this time, had figured out a way to scroll smoothly over what appeared to be a single huge background image. “I knew the Apple couldn’t begin to move that much in the way of graphics around the screen that quickly,” he says. “So I designed the game around that feature.”

Raid on Bungeling Bay on the Commodore 64

Raid on Bungeling Bay owed a lot to Choplifter and a little to Beach-Head, sending you off in a futuristic helicopter to strike at the heart of the evil Bungeling Empire, returning when necessary to your home base for repairs and more ammunition. The most impressive aspect of the game, even more so than its graphical tricks, was the sophisticated modeling of the enemy forces. The Bungeling factories would turn out more advanced hardware as time went on, while your ability and need to disrupt supply lines and to monitor and attack the enemy on multiple fronts created a craving for at least a modicum of strategy as well as reflexes.

Wright sold Raid on Bungeling Bay to Brøderbund Software, who published it in 1984, whereupon it sold a reasonable if hardly overwhelming 30,000 copies on the Commodore 64. But, in contrast to so many of its peers, that wasn’t the end of the story. Hudson Soft in Japan took note of the game, paying Brøderbund and Wright for the right to make it into a cartridge for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Wright claims it sold an astonishing 750,000 copies on the NES in Japan and later the United States, giving him a steady income while he played around with the ideas that would become his next project, the one that would really make his name.

As it happened, the first project merged into the second almost seamlessly. Wright had written a tool for his own use in creating the Bungeling Empire’s cities, a little world editor that would let him scroll around a virtual space, laying down tiles to represent land and sea, factories and gun turrets. He realized at some point — perhaps after his game had shipped and yet he was still tinkering with his world inside the editor — that he found this task of creation much more compelling than the act of destruction that was actually playing the game. Might there be others who felt like him? Based on the success of Electronic Arts’s Pinball Construction Set, a program he hugely admired, he thought there just might be.

One fateful day Wright shared his world editor and his still half-baked ideas about what to do with it with his neighbor Bruce Joffe. An established architect and urban planner, Joffe had studied under Jay Wright Forrester at MIT, generally regarded as the founder of the entire field of system dynamics — i.e., using a computer to simulate a complex, dynamic reality. When he saw Wright’s little Bungeling Empire cities, Joffe was immediately reminded of Forrester’s work. He wasted no time in telling his friend that he really needed to check this guy out.

Even though the two have never to my knowledge met, Jay Wright Forrester and Will Wright were a match made in heaven; they shared much beyond the name of “Wright.” Both, to name one example, got their start in the field of simulation with a flight simulator, Jay Wright Forrester trying to build one and Will Wright trying to figure out how Bruce Artwick’s Flight Simulator really worked.

Driven by his desire to make a flight simulator, Forrester had been instrumental in the creation of Whirlwind, the first real computer, in the sense that we understand the term today, to be built in the United States.[1] The flight simulator never quite came together, but an undaunted Forrester moved on to Project SAGE, an air-defense early-warning system that became easily the most elaborate computing project of the 1950s. From there, he pioneered economic and industrial modeling on computers, and finally, in the late 1960s, arrived at what he called “urban dynamics.” Forrester’s urban modeling created a firestorm of controversy among city planners and social activists; as he put it in his dry way, it “was the first of my modeling work that produced strong, emotional reactions.” He was accused of everything from incompetence to racism when his models insisted that low-cost urban public housing, heretofore widely regarded as a potent tool for fighting poverty, was in reality “a powerful tool for creating poverty, not alleviating it.”

Of more immediate interest to us, however, is the reaction one Will Wright had to Forrester’s work many years after all the controversy had died away. The jacket copy of Forrester’s book Urban Dynamics reads like a synopsis of the simulation Wright was now about to create on a microcomputer: “a computer model describing the major internal forces controlling the balance of population, housing, and industry within an urban area,” which “simulates the life cycle of a city and predicts the impact of proposed remedies on the system.” When Wright’s neighbor Joffe had studied under Forrester in the 1970s, the latter had been constructing physical scale models of his urban subjects, updating them as time went on with the latest data extracted from his computer programs. If he could build a similar program to live behind his graphical Bungeling Empire cities, Wright would have found a much easier way to study the lives of cities. At about the same time that he had that initial conversation with Joffe, Wright happened to read the Stanislaw Lem story that opened this article. If he needed further inspiration to create his own city in a box, he found plenty of it there.

Never one to shy away from difficult or esoteric academic literature, Wright plunged into the arcane theoretical world of system dynamics. He wound up drawing almost as much from John Horton Conway’s 1970 Game of Life, another major landmark in the field, as he did from Forrester. Wright:

System dynamics is a way to look at a system and divide it into, basically, stocks and flows. Stocks are quantities, like population, and flows are rates, like the death rate, the birth rate, immigration. You can model almost anything using those two features. That was how he [Forrester] started system dynamics and that was the approach he took to his modeling. I uncovered his stuff when I started working on SimCity and started teaching myself modeling techniques. I also came across the more recent stuff with cellular automata [i.e., Conway’s Game of Life], and SimCity is really a hybrid of those two approaches. Because his [Forrester’s] approach was not spatial at all, whereas the cellular automata gives you a lot of really interesting spatial tools for propagation, network flow, proximity, and so forth. So the fact that pollution starts here, spreads over here, and slowly gets less and less, and you can actually simulate propagation waves through these spatial structures. So SimCity in some sense is like a big three-dimensional cellular automata, with each layer being some feature of the landscape like crime or pollution or land value. But the layers can interact on the third dimension. So the layers of crime and pollution can impact the land-value layer.

This description subtly reveals something about the eventual SimCity that is too often misunderstood. The model of urban planning that underpins Wright’s simulation is grossly simplified and, often, grossly biased to match its author’s own preexisting political views. SimCity is far more defensible as an abstract exploration of system dynamics than as a concrete contribution to urban planning. All this talk about “stocks” and “flows” illustrates where Wright’s passion truly lay. For him the what that was being simulated was less interesting than the way it was being simulated. Wright:

I think the primary goal of this [SimCity] is to show people how intertwined such things can get. I’m not so concerned with predicting the future accurately as I am with showing which things have influence over which other things, sort of a chaos introduction, where the system is so complex that it can get very hard to predict the future ramifications of a decision or policy.

After working on the idea for about six months, Wright brought a very primitive SimCity to Brøderbund, who were intrigued enough to sign him to a contract. But over the next year or so of work a disturbing trend manifested. Each time Wright would bring the latest version to Brøderbund, they’d nod approvingly as he showed all the latest features, only to ask, gently but persistently, a question Wright learned to loathe: when would he be making an actual game out of the simulation? You know, something with a winning state, perhaps with a computer opponent to play against?

Even as it was, SimCity was hardly without challenge. You had to plan and manage your city reasonably well or it would go bankrupt or drown in a sea of crime or other urban blights and you, the mayor, would get run out of town on a rail. Yet it was also true that there wasn’t a conventional winning screen to go along with all those potential losing ones. Wright tried to explain that the simulation was the game, that the fun would come from trying things out in this huge, wide-open possibility space and seeing what happened. He thought he had ample evidence from his friends that he wasn’t the only one who liked to play this way. They would dutifully build their cities to a point and then, just like Excelsius in the story, would have just as much fun tearing them down, just to see what happened. Indeed, they found the virtual destruction so enjoyable that Wright added disasters to the program — fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, even a rampaging Godzilla monster — that they could unleash at will. As with everything else in SimCity, the motivation for a player consciously choosing to destroy all her labor was just to see what would happen. After all, you could always save the game first. Wright:

When I first started showing the Commodore version, the only thing that was in there was a bulldozer, basically to erase mistakes. So if you accidentally built a road or a building in the wrong place you could erase it with the bulldozer. What I found was that, invariably, in the first five minutes people would discover the bulldozer, and they would blow up a building with it by accident. And then they would laugh. And then they would go and attack the city with the bulldozer. And they’d blow up all the buildings, and they’d be laughing their heads off. And it really intrigued me because it was like someone coming across an ant pile and poking it with a stick to see what happens. And they would get that out of their system in about ten minutes, and then they would realize that the hard part wasn’t destroying, but building it back up. And so people would have a great time destroying the city with a bulldozer, and then they would discover, “Wow, the power’s out. Wow, there’s a fire starting.” And that’s when they would start the rebuilding process, and that’s what would really hook them. Because they would realize that the destruction was so easy in this game, it was the creation that was the hard part. And this is back when all games were about destruction. After seeing that happen with so many people, I finally decided, “Well I might as well let them get it out of their systems. I’ll add disasters to the game.” And that’s what gave me the idea for the disasters menu.

Wright asked Brøderbund to look at his “game” not as a conventional zero-sum ludic experience, but as a doll house or a train set, an open-ended, interactive creative experience — or, to use the term the market would later choose, as a “sandbox” for the player. Wright:

I think it [sandbox gaming] attracts a different kind of player. In fact, some people play it very goal-directed. What it really does is force you to determine the goals. So when you start SimCity, one of the most interesting things that happens is that you have to decide, “What do I want to make? Do I want to make the biggest possible city, or the city with the happiest residents, or the most parks, or the lowest crime?” Every time you have to idealize in your head, “What does the ideal city mean to me?” It requires a bit more motivated player. What that buys you in a sense is more replayability because we aren’t enforcing any strict goal on you. We could have said, “Get your city to 10,000 people in ten years or you lose.” And you would always have to play that way. And there would be strategies to get there, and people would figure out the strategies, and that would be that. By leaving it more open-ended, people can play the game in a lot of different ways. And that’s where it’s becomes more like a toy.

But Brøderbund just couldn’t seem to understand what he was on about. At last, Wright and his publisher parted ways in a haze of mutual incomprehension. By the time they did so, the Commodore 64 SimCity was essentially complete; it would finally be released virtually unchanged more than two years later.

SimCity on the Commodore 64

For the moment, though, nobody seemed interested at all. After halfheartedly shopping SimCity around to some other publishers (among them Cinemaware) without a bite, Wright largely gave up on the idea of ever getting it released. But then in early 1987, with SimCity apparently dead in the water, he was invited to a pizza party for game developers hosted by a young businessman named Jeff Braun. Braun, who envisioned himself as the next great software entrepreneur, had an ulterior motive: he was looking for the next great game idea. “Will is a very shy guy, and he was sitting by himself, and I felt sorry for him,” Braun says. In marked contrast to Brøderbund, Braun saw the appeal of SimCity before he ever even saw the program in action, as soon as a very reluctant, thoroughly dispirited Wright started to tell him about it. His interest was piqued despite Wright being far from a compelling pitchman: “Will kept saying that this won’t work, that no one likes it.”

Braun nevertheless suggested that he and Wright found their own little company to port the program from the Commodore 64 to the Apple Macintosh and Commodore Amiga, more expensive machines whose older and presumably more sophisticated buyers might be more receptive to the idea of an urban-planning simulation. Thus was Maxis Software born.

Wright ported the heart of the simulation from Commodore 64 assembler to platform-independent C while a few other programmers Braun had found developed user interfaces and graphics for the Macintosh and Amiga. The simulation grew somewhat more complex on the bigger machines, but not as much as you might think. “It got more elaborate, more layers were added, and there was higher resolution on the map,” says Wright, “but it had the same basic structure for the simulation and the same basic sets of tools.”

SimCity on the Macintosh

While Wright and the other programmers were finishing up the new versions of SimCity, Braun scared up a very surprising partner for their tiny company. He visited Brøderbund again with the latest versions, and found them much more receptive to Wright’s project this time around, a switch that Wright attributes to the generally “more impressive” new versions and the fact that by this point “the market was getting into much more interesting games.” Still somewhat concerned about how gamers would perceive Wright’s non-game, Brøderbund did convince Maxis to add a set of optional “scenarios” to the sandbox simulation, time-limited challenges the player could either meet or fail to meet, thus definitively winning or losing. The eight scenarios, some historical (the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the fire-bombing of Hamburg in 1944), some hypothetical (a nuclear meltdown in Boston in 2010, the flooding of Rio de Janeiro in 2047 thanks to global warming), and some unabashedly fanciful (a monster attack on Tokyo in 1957), were all ultimately less compelling than they initially sounded, being all too clearly shoehorned into an engine that had never been designed for this mode of play. Still, Brøderbund’s perceived need to be able to honestly call SimCity a game was met, and that was the most important thing. Brøderbund happily agreed to become little Maxis’s distributor, a desperately needed big brother to look after them in a cutthroat industry.

SimCity shipped for the Macintosh in February of 1989, for the Commodore 64 in April, and for the Amiga in May. Some people immediately sat up to take notice of this clearly new thing; sales were, all things considered, quite strong right out of the gate. In an online conference hosted on June 19, 1989, Wright said that they had already sold 11,000 copies of the Macintosh version and 8000 of the Amiga, big numbers in a short span of time for those relatively small American gaming markets. Presaging the real explosion of interest still to come, he noted that Maxis had had “many inquiries from universities and planning departments.” And indeed, already in August of 1989 the first academic paper on SimCity would be presented at an urban-planning conference. Realizing all too well himself how non-rigorous an exercise in urban planning SimCity really was, Wright sounded almost sheepish in contemplating “a more serious version” for the future.

SimCity for MS-DOS

SimCity would begin to sell in really big numbers that September, when the all-important MS-DOS version appeared. Ports to virtually every commercially viable or semi-viable computer in the world appeared over the next couple of years, culminating in a version for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in August of 1991.

SimCity for Super Nintendo

It’s at this point that our history of SimCity the private passion project must inevitably become the history of SimCity the public sensation. For, make no mistake, a public sensation SimCity most definitely became. It sold and sold and sold, and then sold some more, for years on end. In 1991, the year it celebrated its second anniversary on the market, it still managed to top the charts as the annum’s best-selling single computer game. Even five years after its release, with Wright’s belated “more serious” — or at least more complicated — version about to ship as SimCity 2000, the original was still selling so well that Maxis decided to rename it SimCity Classic and to continue to offer it alongside its more advanced variant. In that form it continued to sell for yet several more years. Shelf lives like this were all but unheard of in the fickle world of entertainment software.

In all, the original SimCity sold at least 500,000 copies on personal computers, while the Super Nintendo version alone sold another 500,000 to console gamers. Spin-offs, sequels, and derivatives added millions and millions more to those numbers in the years that followed the original’s long heyday; at no point between 1989 and today has there not been at least one SimCity title available for purchase. And, believe me, people have continued to purchase. SimCity 2000 (1994) and SimCity 3000 (1999) both became the best-selling single computer games of their respective release years, while post-millennial iterations have sold in the millions as a matter of routine.

But almost more important than the quantities in which the original SimCity sold and the veritable cottage industry it spawned are the people to whom it was selling. By the time they signed Maxis to a distribution contract, Brøderbund had long since demonstrated their knack for getting past the nerdy hardcore of computer users, for bypassing Dungeons & Dragons and military simulations and all the rest to reach the great unwashed masses of Middle America. Brøderbund’s The Print Shop and their Carmen Sandiego series in particular remain icons of ordinary American life during the 1980s. SimCity must be added to that list for the 1990s. Beginning with a June 15, 1989, piece in no less august a journal than The New York Times, seemingly every newspaper and news magazine in the country wrote about SimCity. For a mainstream media that has never known quite what to make of computer games, this was the rare game that, like Carmen Sandiego, was clearly good for you and your kids.

SimCity even penetrated into the political sphere. With a mayoral election pending in 1990, The Providence Journal set up a contest for the five candidates for the post, letting each have his way with a simulated version of Providence, Rhode Island. The winner of that contest also wound up winning the election. More amusing was the experiment conducted by Detroit News columnist Chuck Moss. He sent Godzilla rampaging through a simulated Detroit, then compared the result with the carnage wrought by Coleman Young during his two-decade real-world reign as mayor. His conclusion? Godzilla had nothing on Mayor Young.

If the interest SimCity prompted in the mainstream media wasn’t unusual enough, academia’s eagerness to jump on the bandwagon in these years long before “game studies” became an accepted area of interest is even more astonishing. Articles and anecdotes about Will Wright’s creation were almost as prevalent in the pages of psychology and urban-planning journals as they were in newspapers. Plenty of the papers in the latter journals, written though they were by professionals in their field who really should have known better, credited Wright’s experiment with an authority out of all proportion to the fairly simplistic reality of the simulation, in spite of candid admissions of its limitations from the people who knew the program best. “I wouldn’t want to predict a real city with it,” Wright said. Bruce Joffe, the urban planner who had set Wright down the road to SimCity, responded with one word when asked if he would use the program to simulate any aspect of a city he was designing in the real world: “No.” And yet SimCity came to offer perhaps the most compelling demonstration of the Eliza Effect since Joseph Weizenbaum’s simple chatbot that had given the phenomenon its name. The world, SimCity proved once again, is full of Fox Mulders. We all want to believe.

In that spirit, SimCity also found a home in a reported 10,000 elementary-, middle-, and high-school classrooms across the country, prompting Maxis to offer a new pedagogical version of the manual, focused on techniques for using the simulation as a teaching tool. And SimCity started showing up on university syllabi as well; the construction of your own simulated city became a requirement in many sociology and economics classes.

Back in May of 1989, Computer Gaming World had concluded their superlative review of SimCity — one of the first to appear anywhere in print — by asking their readers to “buy this game. We want them to make lots of money so they’ll develop SimCounty, SimState, SimNation, SimPlanet, SimUniverse… billions and billions of games!” The hyperbole proved prescient; Maxis spent the 1990s flooding the market with new Sim titles.

SimEarth on MS-DOS

Jay Wright Forrester’s follow-up to his book Urban Dynamics had been Global Dynamics, an inquiry into the possibility of simulating the entire world as a dynamic system. Wright’s own next game, then, was 1990’s SimEarth, which attempted to do just that, putting you in charge of a planet through 10 billion years of geological and biological evolution. SimEarth became a huge success in its day, one almost comparable to SimCity. The same year-end chart that shows SimCity as the best-selling single title of 1991 has SimEarth at number two — quite a coup for Maxis. Yet, like virtually all of the later Sim efforts, SimEarth is far less fondly remembered today than is its predecessor. The ambitious planet simulator just wasn’t all that much fun to play, as even Wright himself admits today.

But then, one could make the same complaint about many of Maxis’s later efforts, which simulated everything from ant colonies to office towers, healthcare systems (!) to rain forests. New Sim games began to feel not just like failed experiments but downright uninspired, iterating and reiterating endlessly over the same concept of the open-ended “software toy” even as other designers found ways to build SimCity‘s innovations into warmer and more compelling game designs. Relying heavily as always on his readings of the latest scientific literature, Wright could perhaps have stood to put away the academic journals from time to time and crack open a good novel; he struggled to find the human dimension in his simulations. The result was a slow but steady decline in commercial returns as the decade wore on, a trend from which only the evergreen SimCity and its sequels were excepted. Not until 2000 would Maxis finally enjoy a new breakthrough title, one that would dwarf even the success of SimCity… but that is most definitely a story for another time.

Given its storied history and the passion it once inspired in so many players, playing the original SimCity as well for the first time today is all but guaranteed to be a somewhat underwhelming experience. Even allowing for what now feels like a crude, slow user interface and absurdly low-resolution graphics, everything just feels so needlessly obscure, leaving you with the supreme frustration of losing again and again without being able to figure out why you’re losing. Not for nothing was this game among the first to spawn a book-length strategy guide — in fact, two of them. You need inside information just to understand what’s going on much of the time. There are games that are of their time and games that are for all time. In my perhaps controversial opinion, the original SimCity largely falls into the former category.

But, far from negating SimCity‘s claim to our attention, this judgment only means that we, as dutiful students of history, need to try even harder to understand what it was that so many people first saw in what may strike us today as a perversely frustrating simulation. Those who played the original SimCity for the first time, like those who played the original Adventure, Defender of the Crown, and a bare handful of other landmark games in the history of the hobby, felt the full shock of a genuinely new experience that was destined to change the very nature of gaming. It’s a shock we can try to appreciate today but can never fully replicate.

You can see traces of SimCity in many if not most of the games we play today, from casual social games to hardcore CRPG and strategy titles. Sid Meier, when asked in 2008 to name the three most important innovations in the history of electronic gaming, listed the invention of the IBM PC, the Nintendo Seal of Quality… and, yes, SimCity. “SimCity was a revelation to most of us game designers,” says Meier. “The idea that players enjoyed a game that was open-ended, non-combative, and emphasized construction over destruction opened up many new avenues and possibilities for game concepts.” Many years before Meier’s statement, Russell Sipe, the respected founder of Computer Gaming World, said simply that “SimCity has changed the face of computer-entertainment software.” He was and is absolutely correct. Its influence really has been that immense.

(Sources: Magazines include Amazing Computing of October 1989; Game Developer from April 2006; MacWorld from April 1990; Computer Gaming World from May 1989; Compute! from January 1992; The New Yorker from November 6 2006. Newspapers include The San Francisco Chronicle from November 3 2003; The New York Times from June 15 1989; The Los Angeles Times from October 2 1992. Books include The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem; The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook by Johnny L. Wilson; Game Design Theory and Practice by Richard Rouse III; The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning by Le Corbusier; The Second Self by Sherry Turkle. Current and archived online sources include John Cutter’s blog; Game Research; articles about Will Wright and Sid Meier on Wired; The Next American City; Reform; GameSpot; a 1989 talk given by Jay Wright Forrester, which is hosted at MIT; First Monday; Taylor Francis Online. And finally, there’s the collection of Brøderbund archives I went through during my visit to the Strong Museum of Play.

Beginning with SimCity 2000, the more playable later iterations of the franchise are all available for purchase in various places online. For those of an historical bent who’d like to experience the original, I offer a zip that includes the first three versions — for the Macintosh, Commodore 64, and Amiga.)

1. The more canonical example in American textbooks, the ENIAC, could only be “programmed” by physically rewiring its internals. It’s probably better understood as an elaborate calculating machine than a true computer; its original purpose was to calculate static artillery firing tables. As in so many things, politics plays a role in ENIAC’s anointment. The first computer programmable entirely in software, pre-dating even Whirlwind, was EDSAC-1, built at Cambridge University in Britain. That such a feat was first managed abroad seems to be just a bit more than some Americans in Silicon Valley and elsewhere can bring themselves to accept. ↩

Comments
41 Responses

- Ken Rutsky

June 10, 2016 at 6:10 pm

Nice, as always.

My first brush with SimCity was in 1993-4, my senior year of high school. The art department had a Computer Art course, which was really just a fun playground for the art students to mess around in. Our projects encompassed laying out brochures and fliers, using scanners and photo manipulation software, 3-d modeling, MIDI music and the like.

Mr. Greene, our teacher, also ran a yearlong contest with SimCity 2000. Whoever built the largest and most successful city (to be determined by class votes) would win a little prize. I was obsessed with the game, coming in during lunches and study periods and staying after school in order to come to grips with this fascinating piece of software. A couple of my classmates were similarly addicted, and we shared new tips and discoveries among ourselves (all of our cities ended up having huge hills covered with waterfalls…hydro power was the ticket!).

My city eventually became on of the largest and most successful, but fell victim (as so many projects in that class) to a computer crash that corrupted my save file, so I was disqualified from the competition. Damn Macs.

(I did make the best piece of MIDI music, but I was the only one in class who knew both how to play an instrument and use MIDI…)

- Jimmy Maher

June 11, 2016 at 7:18 am

In the original SimCity, it was either coal or nuclear power. A choice of pest or cholera if ever there was one, especially as the nukes were hard-coded to always melt down at some point.

- Gnoman

June 12, 2016 at 8:19 pm

I don’t think they were, at least not in the original. I’ve had several multi-century cities in both the original MS-DOS version and the SNES one and I’ve never seen a meltdown outside of a scenario. As far as I know, nukes just have a very small chance of meltdown. While it could be said that this makes it hardcoded in the sense that “if you leave the simulation running long enough, even the most unlikely event will occur”, I don’t think that’s what you meant.

In later games, where building life cycles were implemented and periodic replacements were necessary it is quite correct to say that they will melt down – that is the consequence of not refreshing your infrastructure, and most other power plants either had a similar drawback or just polluted heavily.

- Jimmy Maher

June 13, 2016 at 9:56 am

Interesting. Johnny Wilson’s SimCity Planning Commission Handbook, my source for that comment, says that meltdowns depend strongly on the age of the plants. He says they’re 100 percent safe for the first 75 years, but thereafter are guaranteed to melt down at some point between 75 and 150 years of age.

The source code (for Metropolis) doesn’t bear this out, however. There the chance of meltdown is strictly random, with age of the plant playing no role at all. Every phase, a nuclear plant has a 1 in 30,000 chance of meltdown at the lowest difficulty level, 1 in 20,000 at medium, and 1 in 10,000 at hard. (There are 48 phases in a year, so each one corresponds to just a little over a week.) This does also seem to square more with your anecdotal experience.

Assuming the Micropolis source is indeed exactly the same as the original when it comes to the mechanics of the simulation model, as its maintainers say it is, this provides an another interesting illustration of the Eliza Effect that was so prevalent with SimCity — i.e., people crediting the simulation with much more sophistication than it really possesses. Thanks!

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- David Boddie

June 10, 2016 at 11:37 pm

When I started reading this article, I wondered if you’d already covered Utopia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_%28video_game%29) in another strand of gaming history.

- Jimmy Maher

June 11, 2016 at 7:24 am

Interesting. I feel certain I’ve heard of Utopia, but, no, I’ve never written about it and never thought about it at all when writing this piece. It doesn’t appear that Will Wright was aware of it either.

- AguyinaRPG

June 12, 2016 at 4:23 am

Don’t worry, it’s not really relevant in the sense of ludic narrative. It’s merely got the same management theme, as does Fortune Builder on the Colecovision (an outwardly capitalist game!).

- Keith Palmer

June 10, 2016 at 11:58 pm

Learning (not that long ago) SimCity was released for the Commodore 64 evokes elegiac “sunset’s last glow” impressions for me (as does knowing “Prince of Persia” was released for the Apple II), but we are getting to a point where I was actually playing some of these computer games around when they came out (if not on my family’s home computer; we stuck with the Tandy Color Computer 3 to the end of 1992, which I believe was because of my father’s conviction a new computer shouldn’t cost as much as even generic MS-DOS boxes did…) I don’t know how deep I ever got into SimCity, which was installed on a PC at my high school, but I do remember tidying up with the bulldozer the run-down houses that kept popping up in residential zones. The next instalment, in any case, sounds that much more interesting.

- Jimmy Maher

June 11, 2016 at 7:27 am

I think you were supposed to address the underlying causes of poverty rather than just plow the houses under with a bulldozer. Your solution sounds a little like those of certain politicians. I do hope you also built a ring of police stations around the area in order to be “tough on crime.” :)

- Allan

June 11, 2016 at 4:34 am

typo: “Carmen Sandigo”

SimCity is also available as “Micropolis” on some Linux systems—with source code:
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-games/micropolis-activity.git/tree/src/sim

- Jimmy Maher

June 11, 2016 at 7:29 am

Thanks!

I do plan to dig into the source code just a little in my next article.

- Alex Smith

June 11, 2016 at 5:36 am

Small correction: Raid on Bungeling Bay was licensed by Hudson Soft for release on the Famicom, not Nintendo. Hudson also had a major hit in Japan with Broederbund’s Lode Runner. Also, I believe the Famicom version came first. The arcade version appeared on Nintendo’s VS. System hardware, which was essentially a Famicom repackaged in an arcade cabinet. Nintendo released many of its own Famicom games on the system and also licensed hits from its third party console publishers, such as Hudson’s console port of Bungeling Bay.

- Jimmy Maher

June 11, 2016 at 7:32 am

Thanks! Correction made.

- Felix

June 11, 2016 at 1:51 pm

Oh dear. I must have read The Cyberiad around the same time as I was struggling with SimCity on a Speccy, but I never quite made the connection, I think. And I was SO surprised to learn from a computer magazine years later that Raid on Bungeling Bay, a game I had noticed on the NES, was made by the same Will Wright…

It was many years until I could “graduate” to SimCity 2000 on a 486, which remains one of my favorite games ever. And even more years before I was able to try out the original again in the form of Micropolis on Linux. And while the latter is so limited in comparison, I still spent quite a few hours playing it again.

As for the game’s educational value, I think it’s very real, however unrealistic the simulation. Like with Civilization and its theme park view of history, the point is learning to make decisions in the face of complex situations, and having to deal with any consequences, expected or not, that arise. (Another game that’s highly educational in the same way is Settlers, with its simulated economic chain.) And while some of the rules do need to be explained, others really want to be learned by trial and error. A much better way to train future decision makers than making them learn dry theory by heart, in my opinion.

- Anonymous

June 11, 2016 at 2:59 pm

For anyone interested in playing these games, it just so happens that SimCity 2000 and SimCity 4 are on sale this week at gog.com, at $1.50 and $4.00, respectively.

- Gerry Quinn

June 12, 2016 at 5:39 pm

I used to love Sim Life on the Amiga, though I don;t think it was a huge hit in general. It was very hard to get a stable ecosystem going – in a relatively small space everything tended to go chaotic. Realistic, in retrospect. But I never tired of trying.

- Abraham Limpo Martinez

June 12, 2016 at 11:07 pm

I would like to point that although SimTower was distributed by Maxis, it was the fruit of a small team of japanese developers and was only distributed by Maxis after it was a success in Japan. A bit like what happened with Raid on Bungeling Bay but in reverse.

- CdrJameson

June 13, 2016 at 7:15 am

Shouldn’t it be just:

“constructing primitive robots out of Lego”

Without having to use that odd ‘s’? cf. wood, brick, stone, plastic, tarmac etc. etc.

- Jimmy Maher

June 13, 2016 at 10:03 am

Sounds odd to me to put it that way, as “Lego” isn’t a material in the same sense of those others. Maybe I should change it to “Lego blocks?” Yeah, that’s the ticket!

- Lisa H.

June 13, 2016 at 7:19 pm

I think the company themselves likes to have the things referred to as “LEGO bricks” (note capitalization), but colloquial “Legos” is pretty common.

- Jimmy Maher

June 14, 2016 at 9:16 am

Bricks it is, then. Much as I want to support one of the biggest national success stories here in Denmark, however, all caps I just can’t bring myself to do. ;)

- Wade

June 13, 2016 at 8:24 am

The game completed for the Apple IIGS by Burger Bill, too, but never released. A video of that version plus a bit more info:

http://www.callapple.org/software/the-long-fabled-simcity-for-the-apple-iigs-exists/

- Alexander Freeman

June 15, 2016 at 3:57 am

Oh, man, I remember getting Sim City Classic for Windows 3.1 when I was 12! I once actually got a city up running smoothly, but some random earthquake wrecked it, and I somehow accidentally saved my game AFTER that. I was never able to replicate my success although I suspect I could it again now.

Anyhow, this may be slightly off topic, but what are your thoughts on simulation/emergent systems for adventure games? I know Adventure was going for something like that, but I’m not so sure it succeeded since I don’t see how you’re supposed to plan out a cave expedition if you don’t already know what’s inside the cave, and I don’t see how you can know that in Adventure except through trial and error (assuming you don’t consult something like a walkthrough of course).

- Jimmy Maher

June 15, 2016 at 8:19 am

It’s a big topic, but:

I’ve never seen an attempt at entirely procedurally generated storytelling that felt all that compelling to me. I have, however, seen some blended approaches that were quite successful.

From a modern perspective at least, I’m not sure I’d put early games like Adventure and Zork in the category of complete successes, since, as you alluded, most of their emergent/logistical aspects — limited light sources, the thief and dwarfs, etc. — just feel like annoyances rather than real challenges. Beyond Zork comes closer, but in my view falls down a bit due to some philosophical clashes between its adventure and CRPG sides that it doesn’t quite know how to resolve. As the comments to my article on Beyond Zork will attest, however, there are quite a few who hold a more favorable view of that game than I do.

I’ll be writing about the Quest For Glory series before too long. I judge that to be perhaps the earliest completely successful blending of an emergent CRPG with set-piece adventure-game puzzles and plot that I’ve seen. We can maybe talk about this more when I get to that topic. In the meantime, if you haven’t played the Quest For Glory games, they do come highly recommended, both to appreciate their gameplay innovations and just because they’re a hell of a lot of fun.

- Alexander Freeman

June 15, 2016 at 5:43 pm

Well, it’s interesting you should mention the dwarfs. Jason Dyer thinks they and the pirate make a compelling emergent story of cat and mouse:
https://bluerenga.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/adventure-350-points-best-maze-ever/

I have indeed played QFG. I really like the original game (not so much the remake, though). I also like the second although a lot was underimplemented, and it doesn’t have the “you’re on your own” feeling of the first. The less said about the third, the better. I like just about everything about the fourth, including the “you’re on your own” feeling that it brings back, although I didn’t like the point-and-click interface, which had the effect of making many puzzles not much of puzzles at all, and the bugginess of course. I’ll have to finish the fifth one some day.

- Jimmy Maher

June 16, 2016 at 8:29 am

I just found them annoying. ;)

I’ve actually been playing the second Quest for Glory on and off recently, and, yeah, it’s definitely a little more rough around the edges than the first. The linear plot means you spend lots of time just waiting around for things to happen. Still heaps of charm, though, which makes it hard for me to judge the game too harshly. It’s been so long that I can’t really speak to the later Quest for Glory games until I give them another play.

- Peter Smith

June 17, 2016 at 2:38 pm

Trial by Fire is probably my favorite. The setting is just more fresh than the kind of Germanic standard of the first one. Which I also love, and which also has tons of wonderful details–like the frost giant “from the northlands” who speaks in the alliterative verse of Anglo-Saxon poetry… hmm, they’re all pretty great actually. I also love Wages of War (again, a setting totally unusual to games, plus some nice open-ended themes) and I’m not sure how it got its bad reputation.

- Alexander Freeman

June 21, 2016 at 3:46 am

“I also love Wages of War (again, a setting totally unusual to games, plus some nice open-ended themes) and I’m not sure how it got its bad reputation.”

Seriously? Well, OK, this is why it has such a bad reputation:

First of all, it has a threadbare story. The main plot plays out in a far too straightforward a manner. You are told at the very beginning that demons are probably to blame the tensions breaking out in Tarna, and that sure enough turns out to be true. Discovering the demons’ secret plot might have been a surprising plot twist if it had only been subtly hinted at. As it is, though, the “story” consists of just going out there to confirm what you’ve been told, so there’s no sense of suspense or build up at all.

There’s also hardly any character development. As a result, all the QFG3-only characters are completely forgettable.

The game’s challenge is shallow, even for a point-and-click game. Combat is pathetically easy. Once you hit the enemy, the recoil lasts so long you can keep whaling on him ’til he drops dead. The puzzles are just a little more difficult. In some cases, the player is even TOLD how to solve these puzzles by some NPC.

Many skills and spells are of little use and, as such, are a waste of skill points, only something that becomes evident far after you’ve spent them in the game. The thief in particular has little opportunity to use his skills. The wizard’s side quest involves making a magic staff, which anti-climactically has little utility.

Although the setting is indeed unique for an RPG, that can’t make up for the fact it’s almost as threadbare as the story. The land of Tarna, at first glance, looks massive. Undulating savannahs, spacious grasslands, forbidding jungles, and various terrain features such as waterfalls, rock formations, and waterholes, combined with the city Tarna and the Simbani village, make for what seems to be a very large and interesting game world. Unfortunately, this illusion lasts only minutes once the player realizes the supposedly large city of Tarna consists solely of an inn, an apothecary, a royal hall, one house, a temple, and a bazaar. The royal hall and the inn are even only visited during cut scenes.

Even the jungle is really small. Gone is the screen-by-screen navigation used in the first previous games of the series. Instead, the wilderness is a four-screen map decorated with the occasional landmark that’s worthy only of a single visit. As a result, the jungle is actually a vast wasteland.

The Simbani village has only 6 places: 3 huts, 2 practice areas, and a place where you can play a board game.

Finally, the ending is almost non-existent and serves only to advertise the next game. This, perhaps more than anything, underscores the fact that the third game is just some filler game intended as padding between the two “real” games.

- Corey Cole

July 7, 2016 at 2:00 am

It’s interesting that I’ve seen the comment about “having to wait” in Quest for Glory II a few times in the last few years, but never when the game was in initial release. It may be that – even with DOSBox – that newer computers speed up game play enough that player actions don’t take up enough time.

Remember that Sierra games topped out at (and, in the better-programmed ones, were throttled to) ten FPS. Quest for Glory was real-time, so you can probably do far more actions in a game day now that you could originally.

We also assumed that players would talk to all of the NPC’s multiple times – their dialogue changes as the game progresses – and would spend a lot of time exploring the city and the desert.

So while it’s possible that the pacing has always been too slow, that might also be an artifact of playing on much faster computers, and being more sophisticated players.

The time scale in Quest for Glory II was 150 real seconds to one game hour, or one real hour to a game day. Since the Hero will typically sleep 8-10 hours, you have 40 minutes or less to complete a game day. With a typing interface, places to go, and people to talk to, we thought that was pretty tight timing. :-) By today’s standards, it might have been too generous.

- Jimmy Maher

July 7, 2016 at 8:31 am

Partly it may be an artifact of my being too seasoned a an adventure-game player. When I see a time limit, my instinct is to heavily optimize my play. This goes doubly when it’s a Sierra game, since they weren’t particularly known for their fairness, mercy, or player-focused design sensibility. The Quest For Glory games are very much an exception to that rule, but still… that name on the box can scare a guy.

Also, I imported my character from the first game, which I think probably makes a big difference in the experience of the game. He was strong enough that he could win most of the fights from the outset, meaning there wasn’t much point to grinding. I didn’t particularly mind this, as I don’t enjoy grinding, but it probably affected my experience somewhat. No idea, of course, how many players back in the day imported versus started from scratch…

- ZUrlocker

June 18, 2016 at 10:32 pm

Great post! I loved SimCity and played the original PC version and SimCity 2K for many months in the early 90s. Hard to explain the appeal but it was definitely innovative and addictive.

Is there an easy-to-install Mac OS/X version of the open source Micropolis port?

- Pedro Timóteo

June 20, 2016 at 10:59 am

Found a typo while re-reading: “Rio de Janero” (should be “Janeiro”).

- Jimmy Maher

June 20, 2016 at 11:58 am

Thanks!

- Soh Kam Yung

July 1, 2016 at 7:42 am

Great article. Thanks for putting it up.

BTW, there a “the the” typo: “Wright ported the the heart of the simulation from Commodore 64 assembler to platform-independent C …”

- Jimmy Maher

July 1, 2016 at 8:10 am

Thanks!

- Corey Cole

July 7, 2016 at 1:26 am

Interesting article. Something I have always wondered about SimCity, but didn’t come up – in the mid-1970’s, I took several “political science simulations” classes at UC Santa Barbara. Teams of players made decisions each turn, which were entered into the simulation. The TA’s posted printouts showing the results prior to the next class session.

One of these simulations was a city simulation in which the players were city planners. Their decisions affected the city’s growth, pollution, and so on. When I first played SimCity, I assumed it was a PC port of the game I played in College. I wonder whether Will Wright ever “played” the mainframe simulation and was influenced by it.

In another class, we played Guetzkow’s Inter-Nation Simulation. One of my first games was a simplified version of INS on PLATO. Each team played leaders of an imaginary country and tried to balance productivity with military strength and diplomacy.

Incidentally, if you have questions about Hero’s Quest / Quest for Glory or Lori’s and my backgrounds, we’ll be happy to answer them by email.

- Jimmy Maher

July 7, 2016 at 8:24 am

Sounds like it might have been something either written by Jay Wright Forrester or derivative of his work. Urban Dynamics was published in 1969, I believe, and was quite influential in academia (in addition, of course, to later influencing Will Wright so heavily).

I’d been planning to reach out to you anyway, so will definitely take you up on your offer. Will be in touch soon. Thanks!

- Peter Piers

July 27, 2016 at 6:21 pm

“In that spirit”

Stray italics there.

- Jimmy Maher

July 28, 2016 at 7:08 am

Thanks!

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Acorn and Amstrad
June 23, 2016

…he explains to her that Sinclair, the British inventor, had a way of getting things right, but also exactly wrong. Foreseeing the market for affordable personal computers, Sinclair decided that what people would want to do with them was to learn programming. The ZX81, marketed in the United States as the Timex 1000, cost less than the equivalent of a hundred dollars, but required the user to key in programs, tapping away on that little motel keyboard-sticker. This had resulted both in the short market-life of the product and, in Voytek’s opinion, twenty years on, in the relative preponderance of skilled programmers in the United Kingdom. They had had their heads turned by these little boxes, he believes, and by the need to program them. “Like hackers in Bulgaria,” he adds, obscurely.

“But if Timex sold it in the United States,” she asks him, “why didn’t we get the programmers?”

“You have programmers, but America is different. America wanted Nintendo. Nintendo gives you no programmers…”

— William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

A couple of years ago I ventured out of the man cave to give a talk about the Amiga at a small game-development conference in Oslo. I blazed through as much of the platform’s history as I could in 45 minutes or so, emphasizing for my audience of mostly young students from a nearby university the Amiga’s status as the preeminent gaming platform in Europe for a fair number of years. They didn’t take much convincing; even this crowd, young as they were, had their share of childhood memories involving Amiga 500s and 1200s. Mostly they seemed surprised that the Amiga hadn’t ever been all that terribly popular in the United States. During the question-and-answer session, someone asked a question that stopped me short: if American kids hadn’t been playing games on their Amigas, just what the hell had they been playing on?

The answer itself wasn’t hard to arrive at: the sorts of kids who migrated from 8-bit Sinclairs, Acorns, Amstrads, and Commodores to 16-bit Amigas and Atari STs in Britain made a much more lateral move in the United States, migrating to the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System.

More complex and interesting are the ramifications of these trends. Because the Atari VCS console was never a major presence in Britain and the rest of Europe during its heyday, and because Nintendo arrived only very belatedly, for many years videogames played in the home there meant games played on home computers. One could say much about how having a device useful for creation as well as consumption as the favored platform of most people affected the market across Europe. The magazines were filled with stories of bedroom gamers who had become bedroom coders and finally Software Stars. Such stories make a marked contrast to an American console-gaming magazine like Nintendo Power, all about consumption without the accompanying ethos of creation.

But most importantly for our purposes today, the relative neglect of Britain in particular by the big computing powers in the United States and Japan — for many years, Commodore was the only company of either nation to make a serious effort to sell their machines into British homes — gave space for a flourishing domestic trade in homegrown machines. When Britain became the nation with the most computers per capita on the planet at mid-decade, most of the computers in question bore the logo of either Acorn or Sinclair, the two great rivals at the heart of the young British microcomputer industry.

Acorn, co-founded by Clive Sinclair’s former right-hand man Chris Curry and an Austrian academic named Hermann Hauser, was an archetypal example of an engineering-driven company. Their machines were a little more baroque, a little better built, and consequently a little more expensive than they needed to be, while their public persona was reserved and just a little condescending, much like that of the BBC that had given its official imprimatur to Acorn’s most popular machine, the BBC Micro. Despite “Uncle Clive’s” public reputation as the British Inspector Gadget, Sinclair was just the opposite; cheap and cheerful, they had the common touch. Acorns sold to the educators, to the serious hobbyists, and to the posh, while Sinclairs dominated with the masses.

Yet Acorn and Sinclair were similar in one important respect: they were both in their own ways very poorly managed companies. When the British home-computer market hit an iceberg in 1985, both were caught in untenable positions, drowning in excess inventory. Acorn — quintessentially British, based in the storied heart of Britain’s “Silicon Fen” of Cambridge — was faced with a choice between dissolution and selling themselves to the Italian typewriter manufacturer Olivetti; after some hand-wringing, they chose the latter course. Sinclair also sold out: to the new kid on the block of British computing, Amstrad, owned by a gruff Cockney with a penchant for controversy named Alan Sugar who was well on his way to becoming the British Donald Trump.

Ever mindful of the practical concerns of their largely working-class customers, Amstrad made much of the CPC’s bundled monitor in their advertising, noting that Junior could play on the CPC without tying up the family television.

Amstrad had already been well-established as a maker of inexpensive stereo equipment and other consumer electronics when their first computers, the CPC (“Colour Personal Computer”) line, debuted in June of 1984. The CPC range was created and sold as a somewhat more capable Sinclair Spectrum. It consisted of well-built and smartly priced if technically unimaginative computers that were fine choices for gaming, boasting as they did reasonably good if hardly revolutionary graphics and sound. Like most Amstrad products, they strained to be as easy to use as possible, shipping as complete units — tape or disk drive and monitor included — at a time when virtually all of their rivals had to be assembled piece by piece via separate purchases.

The CPC line did very well from the outset, even as Acorn and Sinclair were soon watching their own sales implode. Pundits attributed the line’s success to what they called “the Amstrad Effect”: Alan Sugar’s instinct for delivering practical products at a good price at the precise instant when the technology behind them was ready for the mass market — i.e., was about to become desirable to his oft-stated target demographic of “the truck driver and his wife.” Sugar preferred to let others advance the technical state of the art, then swoop in to reap the rewards of their innovations when the time was right. The CPC line was a great example of him doing just that.

But the most dramatic and surprising iteration of the Amstrad Effect didn’t just feed the existing market for colorful game machines; it found an entirely new market segment, one that Amstrad’s competitors had completely missed until now. The story of the creation of the Amstrad PCW line is a classic tale of Alan Sugar, a man who knew almost nothing about computers but knew all he needed to about the people who bought them.

One day just a few months after the release of the first CPC machines, Sugar found himself in an airplane over Asia with Bob Watkins, one of his most trusted executives. A restless Sugar asked Watkins for a piece of paper, and proceeded to draw on it a contraption that included a computer, a monitor, a disk drive, and a printer, all in one unit. Looking at the market during the run-up to the CPC launch, Sugar had recognized that the only true mainstream uses for the current generation of computers in the home were as game machines and word processors. With the CPC, he had the former application covered. But what about the latter? All of the inexpensive machines currently on the market, like the Sinclair Spectrum, were oriented toward playing games rather than word processing, trading the possibility of displaying crisp 80-column text for colorful graphics in lower resolutions. Meanwhile all of the more expensive ones, like the BBC Micro, were created by and for hardcore techies rather than Sugar’s truck drivers. If they could apply their patented technology-for-the-masses approach to a word processor for the home and small business — making a cheap, well-built, all-in-one design emphasizing ease of use for the common person — Amstrad might just have another hit on their hands, this time in a market of their own utterly without competition. Internally, the project was named after Sugar’s secretary Joyce, since it would hopefully make her job and those of many like her much easier. It would eventually come to market as the “PCW,” or “Personal Computer Word Processor.”

The first Amstrad PCW machine, complete with bundled printer. Note how the disk drive and the computer itself are built into the same case as the monitor, a very unusual design for the period.

Even more so than the CPC, the PCW was a thoroughly underwhelming package for technophiles. It was build around the tried-and-true Z80 8-bit CPU and ran CP/M, an operating system already considered obsolete by big business, MS-DOS having become the standard in the wake of the IBM PC. The bundled word-processing software, contracted out to a company called Locomotive Software, wasn’t likely to impress power users of WordStar or WordPerfect overmuch — but it was, in keeping with the Amstrad philosophy, unusually friendly and easy to use. Sugar knew his target customers, knew that they “didn’t give a shit whether there was an elastic band or an 8086 or a 286 driving the thing. They wouldn’t know what you were talking about.”

As usual, most of Amstrad’s hardware-engineering efforts went into packaging and cost-cutting. It was decided that the printer would have to be housed separately from the system unit for technical reasons, but otherwise the finished machine conformed remarkably well to Sugar’s original vision. Best of all, it had a price of just £399. By way of comparison, Acorn’s most recent BBC Micro Model B+ had half as much memory and no disk drive, monitor, or printer included — and was priced at £499.

Nervous as ever about intimidating potential customers, Amstrad was at pains to market the PCW first and foremost as a turnkey word-processing solution for homes and small businesses, as a general-purpose computer only secondarily if at all. “It’s more than a word processor for less than most typewriters,” ran their tagline. At the launch event in the heart of the City in August of 1985, three female secretaries paraded across the stage: a snooty one who demanded one of the competition’s expensive computer systems; a tarty one who said a typewriter was more than good enough; and a smart, reasonable one who naturally preferred the PCW. Man-of-the-people Sugar crowed extravagantly that Amstrad had “brought word-processing within the reach of every small business, one-man band, home-worker, and two-finger typist in the country.” Harping on one of his favorite themes, he noted that once again Amstrad had “produced what the customer wants and not a boffin’s ego trip.”

Sugar’s aggressive manner may have grated with many buttoned-down trade journalists, but few could deny that he might just open up a whole new market for computers with the PCW. Electrical Retailer and Trader was typical, calling the PCW “a grown-up computer that does something people want, packaged and sold in a way they can understand, at a price they’ll accept.” But even that note of optimism proved far too mild for the reality of the machine’s success. The PCW exploded out of the gate, selling 350,000 units in the first eight months. It probably could have sold a lot more than that, but Amstrad, caught off-guard by the sales numbers despite their founder’s own bullishness on the product, couldn’t make and ship them fast enough.

Level 9’s Time and Magik text adventure running on a PCW.

Surprisingly for such a utilitarian package, the PCW garnered considerable loyalty and even love among the millions in Britain and all across Europe who eventually bought one. Their enthusiasm was enough to sustain a big, glossy newsstand magazine dedicated to the PCW alone — an odd development indeed for this machine that seemed on the face of it to be anything but a hacker’s darling. A thriving software ecosystem that reached well beyond word processing sprung up around the machine. Despite the PCW’s monochrome display and virtually nonexistent animation and sound capabilities, even games were far from unheard of on the platform. For obvious reasons, text adventures in particular became big favorites of PCW owners; with its comfortable full-travel keyboard, its fast disk drive, its relatively cavernous 256 K of memory, and its 80-column text display, a PCW was actually a far better fit for the genre than the likes of a Sinclair Spectrum. The PCW market for text adventures was strong enough to quite possibly allow companies like Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9 to hang on a year or two longer than they might otherwise have managed.

So, Amstrad was already soaring on the strength of the CPC and especially the PCW when they shocked the nation and cemented their position as the dominant force in mainstream British computing with the acquisition of Sinclair in April of 1986. Eminently practical man of business that he was, Sugar bought Sinclair partly to eliminate a rival, but also because he realized that, home-computer slump or no, the market for a machine as popular as the Sinclair Spectrum wasn’t likely to just disappear overnight. He could pick up right where Uncle Clive had left off, selling the existing machine just as it was to new buyers who wanted access to the staggering number of cheap games available for the platform. Sugar thought he could make a hell of a lot of money this way while needing to expend very little effort.

Once again, time proved him more correct than even he had ever imagined. Driven by that huge base of games, demand for new Spectrums persisted into the 1990s. Amstrad repackaged the technology from time to time and, perhaps most importantly, dramatically improved on Sinclair’s infamously shoddy quality control. But they never seriously re-imagined the Spectrum. It was now what Sugar liked to call “a commodity product.” He compared it to suntan lotion of all things: the department stores “put it in their window in July and August and they take it away in the winter.” The Spectrum’s version of July and August was of course November and December; every Christmas sparked a new rush of sales to the parents of a new group of youngsters just coming of age and discovering the magic of videogames.

A battered and uncertain Acorn, now a subsidiary of Olivetti, faced a formidable rival indeed in Alan Sugar’s organization. In a sense, the fundamental dichotomies hadn’t changed that much since Amstrad took Sinclair’s place as the yin to Acorn’s yang. Acorn remained as technology-driven as ever, while Amstrad was all about giving the masses what they craved in the form of cheap computers that were technically just good enough. Amstrad, however, was a much more dangerous form of people’s computer company than had been their predecessor in the role. After releasing some notoriously shoddy stereo equipment under the Amstrad banner in the 1970s and paying the price in returns and reputation, Alan Sugar had learned a lesson that continued to elude Clive Sinclair: that selling well-built, reliable products, even at a price of a few more quid on the final price tag and/or a few less in the profit margin, pays off more than corner-cutting in the long run. Unlike Uncle Clive, who had bumbled and stumbled his way to huge success and just as quickly back to failure, Sugar was a seasoned businessman and a master marketer. The diffident boffins of Acorn looked destined to have a hard time against a seasoned brawler like Sugar, raised on the mean streets of the cutthroat Tottenham Court Road electronics trade. It hardly seemed a fair fight at all.

But then, in the immediate wake of their acquisition by Olivetti nothing at all boded all that well for Acorn. New hardware releases were limited to enhanced versions of the 1981-vintage, 8-bit BBC Micro line that were little more ambitious than Amstrad’s re-packagings of the Spectrum. It was an open secret that Acorn was putting much effort into designing a new CPU in-house to serve as the heart of their eventual next-generation machine, an unprecedented step in an industry where CPU-makers and computer-makers had always been separate entities. For many, it seemed yet one more example of Acorn’s boffinish tendencies getting the best of them, causing them to laboriously reinvent the wheel rather than do what the rest of the microcomputer world was doing: grabbing a 68000 from Motorola or an 80286 from Intel and just getting on with the 16-bit machine their customers were clamoring for. While Acorn dithered with their new chip, they continued to fall further and further behind Amstrad, who in the wake of the Sinclair acquisition had now gone from a British home-computer market share of 0 to 60 percent in less than two years. Acorn was beginning to look downright irrelevant to many Britons in the market for the sorts of affordable, practical computer systems Amstrad was happily providing them with by the bucketful.

Measured in terms of public prominence, Acorn’s best days were indeed already behind them; they would never recapture those high-profile halcyon days of the early 1980s, when the BBC Micro had first been anointed as the British establishment’s officially designated choice for those looking to get in on the ground floor of the computer revolution. Yet the new CPU they were now in the midst of creating, far from being a pointless boondoggle, would ultimately have a far greater impact than anything they’d done before — and not just in Britain but over the entire world. For the CPU architecture Acorn was creating in those uncertain mid-1980s was the one that has gone on to be become the most popular ever: the ubiquitous ARM. Since retrofitted into “Advanced RISC Machine,” “ARM” originally stood for “Acorn RISC Machine.” Needless to say, no one at Acorn had any idea of the monster they were creating. How could they?

ARM, the chip that changed the world.

“RISC” stands for “Reduced Instruction Set Computer.” The idea didn’t originate with Acorn, but had already been kicking around American university and corporate engineering departments for some time. (As Hermann Hauser later wryly noted, “Normally British people invent something, and the exploitation is in America. But this is a counterexample.”) Still, the philosophy behind ARM was adhered to by only a strident minority before Acorn first picked it up in 1983.

The overwhelming trend in commercial microprocessor design up to that point had been for chips to offer ever larger and more complex instruction sets. By making “opcodes” — single instructions issued directly to the CPU — capable of doing more in a single step, machine-level code could be made more comprehensible for programmers and the programs themselves more compact. RISC advocates came to call this traditional approach to CPU architecture “CISC,” or “Complex Instruction Set Computing.” They believed that CISC was becoming increasingly counterproductive with each new generation of microprocessors. Seeing how the price and size of memory chips continued to drop significantly almost every year, they judged — in the long term, correctly — that memory usage would become much less important than raw speed in future computers. They therefore also judged that it would be more than acceptable in the future to trade smaller programs for faster ones. And they judged that they could accomplish exactly that trade-off by traveling directly against the prevailing winds in CPU design — by making a CPU that offered a radically reduced instruction set of extremely simple opcodes that were each ruthlessly optimized to execute very, very quickly.

A program written for a RISC processor might need to execute far more opcodes than the same program written for a CISC processor, but those opcodes would execute so quickly that the end result would still be a dramatic increase in throughput. Yes, it would use more memory, and, yes, it would be harder to read as machine code — but already fewer and fewer people were programming computers at such a low level anyway. The trend, which they judged likely only to accelerate, was toward high-level languages that abstracted away the details of processor design. In this prediction again, time would prove the RISC advocates correct. Programs may not even need to be as much larger as one might think; RISC advocates argued, with some evidence to back up their claims, that few programs really took full advantage of the more esoteric opcodes of the CISC chips, that the CISC chips were in effect being programed as if they were RISC chips much of the time anyway. In short, then, a definite but not insubstantial minority of academic and corporate researchers were beginning to believe that the time was ripe to replace CISC with RISC.

And now Acorn was about to act on their belief. In typical boffinish fashion, their ARM project was begun as essentially a personal passion project by Roger Wilson[1] and Steve Furber, two key engineers behind the original BBC Micro. Hermann Hauser admits that for quite some time he gave them “no people” and “no money” to help with the work, making ARM “the only microprocessor ever to be designed by just two people.” When talks began with Olivetti in early 1985, ARM remained such a back-burner long-shot that Acorn never even bothered to tell their potential saviors about it. But as time went on the ARM chip came more and more to the fore as potentially the best thing Acorn had ever done. Having, almost perversely in the view of many, refused to produce a 16-bit replacement for the BBC Micro line for so long, Acorn now proposed to leapfrog that generation entirely; the ARM, you see, was a 32-bit chip. Early tests of the first prototype in April of 1985 showed that at 8 MHz it yielded an average throughput of about 3.5 MIPS, compared to 2.5 MIPS at 10 MHz for the 68020, the first 32-bit entry in Motorola’s popular 68000 line of CISC processors. And the ARM was much, much cheaper and simpler to produce than the 68020. It appeared that Wilson and Furber’s shoestring project had yielded a world-class microprocessor.

ARM made its public bow via a series of little-noticed blurbs that appeared in the British trade press around October of 1985, even as the stockbrokers in the City and BBC Micro owners in their homes were still trying to digest the news of Acorn’s acquisition by Olivetti. Acorn was testing a new “super-fast chip,” announced the magazine Acorn User, which had “worked the first time”: “It is designed to do a limited set of tasks very quickly, and is the result of the latest thinking in chip design.” From such small seeds are great empires sown.

The Acorn Archimedes

The machine that Acorn designed as a home for the new chip was called the Acorn Archimedes — or at times, because Acorn at been able to retain the official imprimatur of the BBC, the BBC Archimedes. It was on the whole a magnificent piece of kit, in a different league entirely from the competition in terms of pure performance. It was, for instance, several times faster than a 68000-based Amiga, Macintosh, or Atari ST in many benchmarks despite running at a clock speed of just 8 MHz, roughly the same as all of the aforementioned competitors. Its graphic capabilities were almost as impressive, offering 256 colors onscreen at once from a palette of 4096 at resolutions as high as 640 X 512. So, Acorn had the hardware side of the house well in hand. The problem was the software.

Graphical user interfaces being all the rage in the wake of the Apple Macintosh’s 1984 debut, Acorn judged that the Archimedes as well had to be so equipped. Deciding to go to the source of the world’s very first GUI, they opened a new office for operating-system development a long, long way from their Cambridge home: right next door to Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. But the operating-system team’s progress was slow. Communication and coordination were difficult over such a distance, and the team seemed to be infected with the same preference for abstract research over practical product development that had always marked Xerox’s own facility in Palo Alto. The new operating system, to be called ARX, lagged far behind hardware development. “It became a black hole into which we poured effort,” remembers Wilson.

At last, with the completed Archimedes hardware waiting only on some software to make it run, Acorn decided to replace ARX with something they called Arthur, a BASIC-based operating environment very similar to the old BBC BASIC with a rudimentary GUI stuck on top. “All operating-system geniuses were firmly working on ARX,” says Wilson, “so we couldn’t actually spare any of the experts to work on Arthur.” The end result did indeed look like something put together by Acorn’s B team. Parts of Arthur were actually written in interpreted BASIC, which Acorn was able to get away with thanks to the blazing speed of the Archimedes hardware. Still, running Arthur on hardware designed for a cutting-edge Unix-like operating system with preemptive multitasking and the whole lot was rather like dropping a two-speed gearbox into a Lamborghini; it got the job done, after a fashion, but felt rather against the spirit of the thing.

When the Archimedes debuted in August of 1987, its price tag of £975 and up along with all of its infelicities on the software side gave little hope to those not blinded with loyalty to Acorn that this extraordinary machine would be able to compete with Amstrad’s good-enough models. The Archimedes was yet another Acorn machine for the boffins and the posh. Most of all, though, it would be bought by educators who were looking to replace aging BBC Micros and might still be attracted by the BBC branding and the partial compatibility of the new machine with the old, thanks to software emulators and the much-loved BBC BASIC still found as the heart of Arthur.

Even as Amstrad continued to dominate the mass market, a small but loyal ecosystem sprang up around the Archimedes, enough to support a software scene strong on educational software and technical tools for programming and engineering, all a natural fit for the typical Acorn user. And, while the Archimedes was never likely to become the first choice for pure game lovers, a fair number of popular games did get ported. After all, even boffins and educators — or, perhaps more likely, their students — liked to indulge in a bit of pure fun sometimes.

In April of 1989, after almost two long, frustrating years of delays, Acorn released a revision of Arthur comprehensive enough to be given a whole new name. The new RISC OS incorporated many if not all of the original ambitions for ARX, at last providing the Archimedes with an attractive modern operating system worthy of its hardware. But by then, of course, it was far too late to capture the buzz a more complete Archimedes package might have garnered at its launch back in 1987.

Much to the frustration of many of their most loyal customers, Acorn still seemed not so much inept at marketing their wares to the common person as completely disinterested in doing so. It was as if they felt themselves somehow above it all. Perhaps they had taken a lesson from their one earlier attempt to climb down from their ivory tower and sell a computer for the masses. That attempt had taken the form of the Acorn Electron, a cut-down version of the BBC Micro released in 1983 as a direct competitor to the Sinclair Spectrum. Poor sales and overproduction of the Electron had been the biggest single contributor to Acorn’s mid-decade financial collapse and the loss of their independence to Olivetti. Having survived that trauma (after a fashion), Acorn seemed content to tinker away with technology for its own sake and to let the chips fall where they would when it came to actually selling the stuff that resulted.

Alan Sugar shows off the first of his new line of PC clones.

If it provided any comfort to frustrated Acorn loyalists, Amstrad also began to seem more and more at sea after their triumphant first couple of years in the computer market. In September of 1986, they added a fourth line of computers to their catalog with the release of the PC — as opposed to PCW — range. The first IBM clones targeted at the British mass market, the Amstrad PC line might have played a role in its homeland similar to that of the Tandy 1000 in the United States, popularizing these heretofore business-centric machines among home users. As usual with Amstrad, the price certainly looked right for the task. The cheapest Amstrad PC model, with a generous 512 K of memory but no hard drive, cost £399; the most expensive, which included a 20 Mb hard drive, £949. Before the Amstrad PC’s release, the cheapest IBM clone on the British market had retailed for £1429.

But, while not a flop, the PC range never took off quite as meteorically as some had expected. For months the line was dogged by reports of overheating brought on by the machine’s lack of a fan (shades of the Apple III fiasco) that may or may not have had a firm basis in fact. Alan Sugar himself was convinced that the reports could be traced back to skulduggery by IBM and other clone manufacturers trying to torpedo his cheaper machines. When he finally bowed to the pressure to add a fan, he did so as gracelessly as imaginable.

I’m a realistic person and we are a marketing organization, so if it’s the difference between people buying the machine or not, I’ll stick a bloody fan in it. And if they say they want bright pink spots on it, I’ll do that too. What is the use of me banging my head against a brick wall and saying, “You don’t need the damn fan, sunshine?”

But there were other problems as well, problems that were less easily fixed. Amstrad struggled to source hard disks, which had proved a far more popular option than expected, resulting in huge production backlogs on many models. And, worst of all, they found that they had finally overreached themselves by setting the prices too low to be realistically sustainable; prices began to creep upward almost immediately.

For that matter, prices were creeping upward across Amstrad’s entire range of computers. In 1986, after years of controversy over the alleged dumping of memory chips into the international market on the part of the Japanese semiconductor industry, the United States pressured Japan into signing a trade pact that would force them to throttle back their production and increase their prices. Absent the Japanese deluge, however, there simply weren’t enough memory chips being made in the world to fill an ever more voracious demand. By 1988, the situation had escalated into a full-blown crisis for volume computer manufacturers like Amstrad, who couldn’t find enough memory chips to build all the computers their customers wanted — and certainly not at the prices their customers were used to paying for them. Amstrad’s annual sales declined for the first time in a long time in 1988 after they were forced to raise prices and cut production dramatically due to the memory shortage. Desperate to secure a steady supply of chips so he could ramp up production again, Sugar bought into Micron Technology, one of only two American firms making memory chips, in October of 1988 to the tune of £45 million. But within a year the memory-chip crisis, anticipated by virtually everyone at the time of the Micron buy-in to go on for years yet, petered out when factories in other parts of Asia began to come online with new technologies to produce memory chips more cheaply and quickly than ever. Micron’s stock plummeted, another major loss for Amstrad. The buy-in hadn’t been “the greatest deal I’ve ever done,” admitted Sugar.

Many saw in the Amstrad of these final years of the 1980s an all too typical story in business: that of a company that had been born and grown wildly as a cult of personality around its founder, until one day it got too big for any one man to oversee. The founder’s vision seemed to bleed away as the middle managers and the layers of bureaucracy moved in. Seduced by the higher profits margins enjoyed by business computers, Amstrad strayed ever further from Sugar’s old target demographic. New models in the PC range crept north of £1000, even £2000 for the top-of-the-line machines, while the more truck-driver-focused PCW and CPC lines were increasingly neglected. The CPC line would be discontinued entirely in 1990, leaving only the antique Spectrum to soldier on for a couple more years for Amstrad in the role of general-purpose home computer. It seemed that Amstrad at some fundamental level didn’t really know how to go about producing a brand new machine in the spirit of the CPC in this era when making a new home computer was much more complicated than plugging together some off-the-shelf chips and hiring a few hackers to knock out a BASIC for the thing. Amstrad would continue to make computers for many years to come, but by the time the 1990s dawned their brief-lived glory days of 60 percent market share were already fading into the rosy glow of nostalgia.

For all their very real achievements over the course of a very remarkable decade in British computing, Acorn and Amstrad each had their own unique blind spot that kept them from achieving even more. In the Archimedes, Acorn had a machine that was a match for any other microcomputer in the world in any application you cared to name, from games to business to education. Yet they released it in half-baked form at too high a price, then failed to market it properly. In their various ranges, Amstrad had the most comprehensive lineup of computers of anyone in Britain during the mid- to late-1980s. Yet they lacked the corporate culture to imagine what people would want five years from now in addition to what they wanted today. The world needs visionaries and commodifiers alike. What British computing lacked in the 1980s was a company capable of integrating the two.

That lack left wide open a huge gap in the market: space for a next-generation home computer with a lot more power and much better graphics and sound than the likes of the old Sinclair Spectrum, but that still wouldn’t cost a fortune. Packaged, priced, and marketed differently, the Archimedes might have been that machine. As it was, buyers looked to foreign companies to provide. Neglected as Europe still was by the console makers of Japan, the British punters’ choice largely came down to one of two American imports, the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST. Both — especially the former — would live very well in this gap that neither Acorn nor Amstrad deigned to fill for too long. Acorn did belatedly try with the release of the Archimedes A3000 model in mid-1989 — laid out in the all-in-one-case, disk-drive-on-the-side fashion of an Amiga 500, styled to resemble the old BBC Micro, and priced at a more reasonable if still not quite reasonable enough £745. But by that time the Archimedes’s fate as a boutique computer for the wealthy, the dedicated, and the well-connected was already decided. As the decade ended, an astute observer could already detect that the wild and woolly days of British computing as a unique culture unto itself were numbered.

The Archimedes A3000 marked the end of an era, the last Acorn machine to bear the BBC logo.

And that would be that, but for one detail: the fairly earth-shattering detail of ARM. The ARM CPU’s ability to get extraordinary performance out of a relatively low clock speed had a huge unintended benefit that was barely even noticed by Acorn when they were in the process of designing it. In the world of computer engineering, higher clock speeds translate quite directly into higher power usage. Thus the ARM chip could do more with less power, a quality that, along with its cheapness and simplicity, made it the ideal choice for an emerging new breed of mobile computing devices. In 1990 Apple Computer, hard at work on a revolutionary “personal digital assistant” called the Newton, came calling on Acorn. A new spinoff was formed in November of 1990, a partnership among Acorn, Apple, and the semiconductor firm VLSI Technology, who had been fabricating Acorn’s ARM chips from the start. Called simply ARM Holdings, it was intended as a way to popularize the ARM architecture, particularly in the emerging mobile space, among end-user computer manufacturers like Apple who might be leery of buying ARM chips directly from a direct competitor like Acorn.

And popularize it has. To date about ten ARM CPUs have been made for every man, woman, and child on the planet, and the numbers look likely to continue to soar almost exponentially for many years to come. ARM CPUs are found today in more than 95 percent of all mobile phones. Throw in laptops (even laptops built around Intel processors usually boast several ARM chips as well), tablets, music players, cameras, GPS units… well, you get the picture. If it’s portable and it’s vaguely computery, chances are there’s an ARM inside. ARM, the most successful CPU architecture the world has ever known, looks likely to continue to thrive for many, many years to come, a classic example of unintended consequences and unintended benefits in engineering. Not a bad legacy for an era, is it?

(Sources: the book Sugar: The Amstrad Story by David Thomas; Acorn User of July 1985, October 1985, March 1986, September 1986, November 1986, June 1987, August 1987, September 1987, October 1988, November 1988, December 1988, February 1989, June 1989, and December 1989; Byte of November 1984; 8000 Plus of October 1986; Amstrad Action of November 1985; interviews with Hermann Hauser, Sophie Wilson, and Steve Furber at the Computer History Museum.)

1. Roger Wilson now lives as Sophie Wilson. 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
56 Responses

- whomever

June 23, 2016 at 6:15 pm

“Truck driver”…Lorry Driver, surely?

- Jimmy Maher

June 24, 2016 at 7:58 am

In the biography of Sugar by David Thomas, he’s quoted many times as saying, “truck driver.” I admit it never occurred to me until now to see it as an odd usage, being American myself. I have to assume that either some British dialects do favor “truck” over “lorry,” or for some (perhaps obscurely rhetorical) reason Sugar himself just favored the Americanism.

- Michael Davis

June 23, 2016 at 7:53 pm

“Amstrad was already been well-established”

“had already been” or “was already”, probs :)

- Jimmy Maher

June 24, 2016 at 8:00 am

Thanks!

- John Elliot

June 23, 2016 at 7:53 pm

In the light of your opening paragraphs, it’s perhaps noteworthy that the PCW,, marketed entirely as a word processor, was nevertheless supplied with a BASIC interpreter (and, for that matter, a LOGO interpreter).

Internally, the PCW design was based on ANT [Arnold Number Two], which would have been another computer for the CPC niche.The PCW hardware has some implemented-but-unused features from the ANT, such as joystick support in the keyboard controller, and a CPC-compatible memory paging mode.

- Roger

June 23, 2016 at 8:30 pm

The amusing thing is that your “standard” Intel PC is stuffed full of ARM chips too (and some MIPS) – far more than the solitary Intel x86 chip. For example they are in storage (spinning and flash media need something internal for processing), networking interfaces, USB, and various other controllers and peripherals. Consensus is around 10 of those non-x86 chips per “Intel” computer!

- Jimmy Maher

June 24, 2016 at 8:01 am

Interesting. I actually didn’t realize that. Made a little edit to the ending. Thanks!

- Pierre

June 23, 2016 at 11:25 pm

The ARM origin story is one of my favourites. Thanks for telling it again. It never gets old.

- Keith Palmer

June 24, 2016 at 12:37 am

I was generally familiar with “RISC vs. CISC” from a Macworld article or two from around the time of the PowerPC processor’s introduction, but not so much with the beginning of ARM and its own connections to that; that provided a good bit of interest to this piece. I seem to recall a comment or two in works by Graham Nelson about the Acorn Archimedes, though…

- Jimmy Maher

June 24, 2016 at 8:08 am

Yes, all of his hugely important early work reverse-engineering the Z-Machine, developing the Inform language, and writing Curses! was done on an Archimedes running RISC OS. An Oxford academic, Nelson was right in the usual Acorn demographic. ;)

- skg

June 24, 2016 at 1:05 am

Great article, fascinating as always.

Although you probably did not have enough space for it, I would have love have seen an expansion of this passage:

“Many saw in the Amstrad of these final years of the 1980s an all too typical story in business: that of a company that had been born and grown wildly as a cult of personality around its founder, until one day it got too big for any one man to oversee.”

Do you see it this way? Or are you summarizing a consensus?

I’m curious, because Sugar seems like an interesting parallel to Jack Tramiel, in that both were businessmen first, and therefore computer magnates primarily for business reasons.

For this reason, it seems just as likely that the problem was Sugar’s vision itself (of the lack thereof)- if the company was too dominated by a strong personality, then any trend he could not foresee, the company as a whole could not foresee.

Since Sugar’s genius was understanding a demographic previous computer manufacturers had ignored, not from any understanding of computers themselves, an inability to adjust to the fact that “making a new home computer was much more complicated than plugging together some off-the-shelf chips and hiring a few hackers to knock out a BASIC for the thing” seems like the kind of flaw that can be squarely placed in Sugar’s lap.

- Jimmy Maher

June 24, 2016 at 8:32 am

The consensus I refer to is that of several pundits mentioned in David Thomas’s excellent book Sugar, which I relied on heavily for the Amstrad side of this article. I actually thought of the parallels with the Jack Tramiel-led Commodore myself, and thought about introducing them into the article, but judged that would be roaming a little too far afield.

It is true that, judging again from Thomas’s book, Sugar began to step back a bit from the day-to-day business of running Amstrad in the latter 1980s, and this took its toll on the company. On the other hand, he seems to have been pretty much exhausted with building such a huge business from nothing over the course of almost two decades, and had doubtless earned a little more free time. I tend to see what happened to Amstrad more as simply in the nature of the sort of beast the company was — a cult of personality around its founder, built to exploit existing technology but not to develop visionary new technology — than as a reason to point fingers too enthusiastically. But yes, I think the consensus I mentioned of what went “wrong” with Amstrad is largely correct.

- Pedro Timóteo

June 24, 2016 at 10:02 am

Even more so than the CPC, the PCW was a thoroughly underwhelming package for technophiles. It was build around the tried-and-true Z80 8-bit CPU and ran CP/M, an operating system already considered obsolete by big business,

It had one advantage: that’s how the PCW (and the CPC, whose disk versions could also run CP/M) got many Infocom adventures; Infocom simply copied their CP/M Z-Machine interpreter and data files to 3 inch disks, and instantly had PCW / CPC versions of their games.

I don’t know how well they sold, though.

- Jimmy Maher

June 24, 2016 at 10:20 am

While we have the North American sales for Infocom, we unfortunately lack the European numbers. They’re given a fairly prominent place in many issues of 8000 Plus, however, which makes me think they tended to do pretty well on the PCW. Their biggest drawback was always their high price in comparison to homegrown games.

Your anecdote raises another interesting question: is it possible to run the CP/M versions of older Infocom games on the Commodore 128 in CP/M mode? It could actually be a more pleasant experience than playing in 64 mode — 80 columns, more memory for buffering, etc. Anyone know?

- David Kinder

June 24, 2016 at 9:01 pm

At least AMFV, Beyond Zork, Bureaucracy and Trinity were released for the C128’s CP/M 80 column mode – you can play them with the x128 interpreter in VICE.

- Jimmy Maher

June 25, 2016 at 7:05 am

Those actually run in the 128’s native mode, not under CP/M. I was curious whether you could buy the CP/M version of, say, the original Zork, and run it on a 128 in CP/M mode. I’m guessing the biggest stumbling block might be the disk format. I seem to recall that the 1571 couldn’t read some or many CP/M disks, but could be mistaken.

- Pedro Timóteo

June 25, 2016 at 9:59 am

I’ve thought of that, too. Theoretically, it should be possible; it should be a question of getting the CP/M interpreter and data file in a disk (image?) that the C128 (emulator?) can access.

I’ll try to do something like this in the next few days. The first problem may be where to find the CP/M interpreters, which I think aren’t that common out there. Maybe from Amstrad .DSK images? I’ll let you know how it goes.

- Jimmy Maher

June 25, 2016 at 10:12 am

The original Zork trilogy for CP/M is here: http://www.retroarchive.org/cpm/games/games.htm.

- Pedro Timóteo

June 26, 2016 at 1:54 pm

I’ve had success with Zork I from that link… though I had to work around some VICE bugs (I couldn’t even format a CP/M disk using an emulated 1571, I had to change the drive to a 1541 for it to work). It worked fine, though Zork I (in its Solid Gold re-release) happens to be one of the games that actually runs in native C128 mode.

Next I’ll try to extract the Amstrad CPC version of a game that didn’t run in C128 mode…

- Jimmy Maher

June 27, 2016 at 7:17 am

Interesting. Thanks for taking the time to do this. I’m surprised no one back in the day ever seems to have caught on to this, especially as 128 owners were always looking for ways to play games without just going to 64 mode all the time. Maybe because by the time the 128 debuted the CP/M versions were getting hard to find?

It should be possible to play lots of other games using the Zork III interpreter. Just rename the new story files to match the old, and you’re off.

- Pedro Timóteo

June 27, 2016 at 11:08 am

OK, here’s a zip with a CP/M boot disk for the C128, one with “extra” utilities” for C128 CP/M (including rdcbm, which I used to copy files from a C64 .D64 image to a CP/M .D64 image; I found no way to do it directly; I also had to use a D64 editor to first copy files from my Windows PC to the C64 disk image), Zork 1 from the link you provided, and Enchanter extracted from the Amstrad CPC version.

The latter works, but instead of running enchante.com as I would in a CPC (in CP/M mode), I have to run ench64.com or ench128.com, both of which were also included in the CPC disk. Also, it seems to lose the ability to position text on the screen, which means the status bar’s text is repeated after each command entry. Maybe there was some CP/M code in there specific to the Amstrad?

I haven’t tried your suggestion of using the Zork 3 interpreter and renaming files; I’ll try doing so later.

- Pedro Timóteo

June 27, 2016 at 5:32 pm

For extra fun: the ZX Spectrum +3 can also run CP/M (although it wasn’t included with it, it required an additional purchase, instead of having it in ROM (accessed by typing |cpm (that’s a pipe) as in an Amstrad CPC 6128), and it can read Amstrad disks (or disk images in a Spectrum emulator) directly.

Just tried it with the CPC version of Planetfall, and it works! Like Enchanter, it had several executables in the disk: planet.com, plan64.com, plan128.com, and plan256.com (I hadn’t copied the latter to a C128 CP/M disk, as the disk ran out of space). Much like on the C128, the “normal” executable (planet.com) just returns you to the CP/M prompt, but the others work. Each “size” seems to be more fully featured (in terms of screen positioning) than the one before; plan64.com can’t do a status bar, 128 does so but seems to cut some text, and plan256.com seems fully featured, even on the Spectrum’s 40×24 screen under CP/M.

I wonder why there are these several executables… I assume they correspond to memory sizes, though no CPC had 256KB. Maybe it was for the PCW? And planet.com would just detect the available system and run the appropriate executable on an Amstrad machine, but on a Spectrum or C128 it does nothing?

Anyway, I’ll have to try copying just the “256” executable to a C128 disk (plus the data file), to see if the screen will work fine.

- Pedro Timóteo

June 27, 2016 at 6:50 pm

I was probably wrong about the CPC having CP/M in ROM. :)

- whomever

June 27, 2016 at 7:00 pm

Interesting thread. I wonder if you could also run the CP/M version on an Apple ][ with the Microsoft Z80 softcard? I actually did my AP CS (which was Pascal back in the day) on Turbo Pascal running on Apple ][es with Softcards, infinitely better than Apple Pascal.

- Pedro Timóteo

June 27, 2016 at 7:32 pm

Just checked: I loaded CP/M 3 on a CPC emulator, then tried the three versions (plan64.com, 128 and 256) of Planetfall on the CPC version’s disk. (*)

plan256 seems to believe the screen has more than 80 colums (it correctly wraps around to the next line when it needs, but then writes a couple more words and unnecessarily begins a new line). This is apparently for the PCW’s 90 column screen.

plan128 works best on the CPC.

plan64, like I’d seen on the Spectrum, is more basic; it doesn’t show a status bar, and repeats the text in it after you enter each command. Maybe it was for the short-lived CPC 664, or for a 464 with an external drive?

I can also confirm that running planet.com on a CPC starts up the plan128 version. On a Spectrum +3 or C128, it just returns to the CP/M prompt.

(*) note that you don’t actually need to boot the CP/M disk to run Infocom games, you just insert the game disk and type “|cpm”. That’s why I thought it was in the ROM. :)

- Jimmy Maher

June 28, 2016 at 8:33 am

Cool! Very interesting. Again, if there’s a separate story file it should be possible to play just about any pre-1987, non-Interactive Fiction Plus Infocom game by renaming files. This was commonly done by owners of several orphaned platforms for which Infocom dropped official support.

- Andrew Paul

July 10, 2016 at 8:02 pm

It’s worth noting that Acorn offered a CP/M solution too, in the shape of their Z80 second processor. http://classic.technology/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/acornz80processor.pdf

- Kroc Camen

June 25, 2016 at 12:34 am

The PCW had a 90-column display, not 80; it was a requirement that it could display 80 cols + margins. :)

I strongly recommend Lord Sugar’s book “What you see is what you get” for lots of background info on the ideas behind the CPC/PCW et al, I’m honestly surprised you hadn’t used it as a source!

- Jimmy Maher

June 25, 2016 at 7:16 am

Yes, I was aware that it was technically 90 columns, but judged it one of those details likely to distract more than enlighten in an overview like this one.

I tend to be leery of glossy lessons-of-my-buisness-success autobiographies, especially from accomplished self-promoters like Sugar. But the reviews on Amazon would seem to indicate that I may have underestimated this one.

- Carl

June 25, 2016 at 12:39 am

Since I’m a professional chip designer I was a bit worried when you started discussing CISC vs. RISC and the like but I shouldn’t have been… you have a very cogent and accurate description and account of the different philosophies of processor design.

One interesting trivia tidbit:

While Intel processors still provide a CISC instruction set, they are RISC internally and instructions are translated on the fly into an internal instruction set that is more efficient. So RISC really did end up winning the day, even if most RISC chips (and ARM is included here) include some relatively complex instructions that would have been considered heresy back in the RISC crusade of the early 80s.

And for the CPU nerds reading, probably the pinnacle of the CISC approach was the VAX instruction set… if you look through it there are some ludicrously complex instructions (that almost never got used in practice, hence the migration to RISC).

- Jimmy Maher

June 25, 2016 at 7:16 am

Always great to be validated by an expert. :) Thanks!

- Nate

June 26, 2016 at 2:10 am

With Intel instructions like AES-NI, the pendulum is swinging back to CISC or even VLIW like Cray.

- Martin

October 9, 2016 at 4:22 am

The IBM mainframe CPUs have always been CISC and the latest instructions added are to aid in the running of Java on the mainframe. Will anyone use these new instructions in their programs, probably not but the point is that IBM will use these instructions in their Java virtual machine code giving them faster Java execution. I guess what I am saying is that these days, CISC instructions seem to be expanding to deal with specific problems rather than more general usage complex instructions.

- Alexander Freeman

June 25, 2016 at 3:49 am

I guess I’m a bit puzzled. I understand that RISC has simpler instructions, yet Wikipedia states:

In the C programming language, the subtraction-based Euclidean algorithm is:
while (i != j) // We enter the loop when ij, not when i==j
{
if (i > j) // When i>j we do that
i -= j;
else // When i j) // When i>j we do that
i -= j;
else if (i < j) // When i j),
; or “LT” if (i < j)
SUBGT Ri, Ri, Rj ; if "GT" (Greater Than), i = i-j;
SUBLT Rj, Rj, Ri ; if "LT" (Less Than), j = j-i;
BNE loop ; if "NE" (Not Equal), then loop

However, in IBM PC assembly language, a CISC language, it would be something like this:

MOV AX,i
MOV CX,j
LOOP:
CMP AX,CX
JE FINISH
JL SECOND
SUB AX,CX
SECOND:
SUB CX,AX
JMP LOOP
FINISH:

The latter seems to consist of simpler instructions and more of them even if you overlook the two preliminary MOV instructions.

- Jimmy Maher

June 25, 2016 at 7:37 am

The instructions being written there in ARM assembler don’t really correspond to individual opcodes. Almost any ARM opcode can be executed conditionally, based on the currently set flags. So what’s written there for the convenience of the programmer as “SUBGT,” for instance, is really just a “SUB” with a condition-code selector set to cause it to only execute if the last comparison yielded a “greater than” result. This is one of the ways that ARM is able to reduce the instruction set so radically — by making almost *all* opcodes responsive to the same set of conditional flags.

But you are correct that in this case and doubtless some others ARM will actually yield a shorter program than a CISC processor.

- Alexander Freeman

June 25, 2016 at 5:19 pm

True, but a conditional subtraction statement is more complex than an unconditional one, and my point is that that seems to go against the idea of RISC instructions being simpler. I’ve decided to look this up, and page 6 of this explains it in more detail:
http://bear.ces.cwru.edu/eecs_382/ARM7-TDMI-manual-pt2.pdf

The first four bits of something such as a subtraction statement are used to determine the condition if there is one. The last four bits determine the operand.

Well, anyway, I’d like to say how much I enjoy reading your blog. You know the topics so well and make them easy to read about. If I ever get to live my dream somehow of designing a museum for computer science and games, I’d be sure to reach out to you. It’s also nice to be able to discuss things meta-ethics and the existential implications of evolution. I think you’re the only person I’ve come across so far who can talk about those AND obscure computer topics like RISC vs. CISC. I’ve decided to donate to this blog.

Oh, I’ve just noticed I forgot a JMP LOOP instruction after SUB AX,CX in my IBM code snippet. ^_^()

- Jimmy Maher

June 26, 2016 at 8:16 am

Thank you!

- Carl

June 27, 2016 at 5:27 pm

I should say there that ARM isn’t strictly RISC and x86 ISA isn’t strictly CISC… RISC and CISC have heavily influenced and cross-pollinated each other, as any vibrant technology should.I can tell you from experience that CISC/RISC discussions quickly descend to No True Scotsman type arguments and are best considered “design philosophies” as much as anything.

Nate makes an interesting point regarding VLIW (or Very Long Instruction Word… a technology in which the compiler is heavily leaned on to do the optimizations). Clock speed increases enabled RISC, and now that we’ve hit the Power Wall CISC is interesting again…

Also interesting that Nate would mention Cray. While he made no claim to its invention, The CDC 6600, designed primarily by Seymour Cray, had a stripped-down ISA that was definitely informed by a “proto-RISC philosophy”.

Interesting stuff!

- Jimmy Maher

June 28, 2016 at 8:24 am

I did come upon the 1970s Crays as examples of a RISC architecture in my research. I even mentioned it in the article for a while, but I wound up cutting it as a needless distraction (the most important aspect of making articles like this one readable is often what you leave out). I’m not sure that anyone at Acorn was aware that RISC had effectively already been implemented in a commercial project at Cray. They’ve always pointed back to the Berkeley research, which is discussed in some detail in the November 1984 Byte, as their wellspring of ideas.

- Mike Spooner

July 11, 2016 at 12:32 pm

It has often been observed that the IBM 801 CPU (1975) a was an early RISC processor, with anecdotal evidence that it was so for similar reasons to those mentioned in the article; and that Patterson’s Berkeley team were well aware of it and what it could do.

- Jimmy Maher

July 11, 2016 at 1:57 pm

Yes, along with the Cray Supercomputer the IBM 801 is the most likely candidate for the title of RISC “prior art” to ARM. Both predate the acronym, however, and neither was a mass-produced consumer-grade item like ARM.

- Alexander Freeman

June 25, 2016 at 3:51 am

Eh, something went wrong with the formatting. You can look here for what I mean:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Conditional_execution

- Paul

June 25, 2016 at 5:41 am

s/boost/boast/

It might be worth adding something of the engineering mindset/methodology that was used during ARM development?

They used the old Victorian methodology of adding in an order of magnitude as a rule of thumb. So if you’re aiming for a bridge to withstand 10 tonnes build for for 100 tonnes to be safe.

Having heard Sophie talk about this as a key part of their thinking, and how in the end, this was part of the reason it delivered so much for so little.

Not sure if you also want to retread the fact that they initially went shopping for 69k/x86 but weren’t happy with their memory access times or throughput per instruction. After visiting WDC, with the legendary Bill Mensch, they realised they could actually do what they want themselves from scratch.

- Jimmy Maher

June 25, 2016 at 7:43 am

Interesting stuff all of it, but I think a little too far down in the weeds for what’s intended to be a very readable high-level overview.

- Kroc Camen

June 25, 2016 at 8:12 am

Interesting anecdote — the screenshot on the CPC ad is of Bugaboo the flea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugaboo_%28The_Flea%29 I had it on C64, but had no idea it had also been released on CPC

- J Griffin

June 28, 2016 at 5:27 am

As mentioned on that wiki article, it was best known to CPC owners as Roland In The Caves, given the typically mystifying Amsoft rebranding where “Roland” could be anything from a bug to an intrepid explorer (who looked a lot like the dude from “Fred”).

It might actually be better known to Amstrad players than on any other format, as it was often part of the bundled software that came with the system.

- ZUrlocker

June 26, 2016 at 7:06 pm

I forget if this has been mentioned previously on this blog, but the BBC did a fun (if somewhat fictionalized) drama-documentary on the rivalry between Sinclair and the BBC Micro team called Micro Men
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

- Pedro Timóteo

June 28, 2016 at 8:06 pm

Just follow the very first link in this post. :)

- ZUrlocker

June 30, 2016 at 12:23 pm

Doh

- Ibrahim Gucukoglu

June 29, 2016 at 7:42 pm

I was going to suggest to you that you watch the Mico Men documentary, OK, it’s drama but it is lovingly produced and tells the story of the lively and ill-fated British computer industry of the early eighties and the dynamic friendship and rivalry between Clive and Chris. Another highly readable and enjoyable look back is Tom Lean’s book Electronic Dreams, available in both audio and digital eBook formats which charts the history of the British computing industry. As always, a great article, keep up the great work!

- UNIX admin

July 9, 2016 at 1:58 pm

Technical correction which nags at me like a splinter in my eye:

Motorola’s first 32-bit processor in the 68000 family is the 68000, and not the 68020. While the 68000 had a 24-bit address bus multiplexer, the central processing unit is fully 32-bit internally. For example, this 32-bit code is perfectly valid and will move 32-bit values from memory into a processor registers on a vanilla 68000:

move.l #$deadbeef, d0
move.l #$d00fd00d, a0

the 68020 was the first in the family to have a 32-bit address bus.

- Jimmy Maher

July 9, 2016 at 2:16 pm

I do understand what you’re saying, but in common usage that just wasn’t how the 68000 was regarded. The Amiga, Atari ST, and Mac, all of which used the 68000 in their most common 1980s variants, were always considered 16-bit machines. For instance, a British magazine that focused on the ST and Amiga, The One, trumpeted on its cover that it was “for 16-bit games.” In a more technical article, sure, your point would be worth elaborating at length. In an article designed to be readable and accessible for the layperson, as this one was intended to be, it’s worthy of at best a footnote… which you’ve just helpfully provided. ;) Please understand that I don’t mean to be dismissive. It’s just that readable writing is often defined more by what you leave out than what you put in.

- Ed Dorosh

July 9, 2016 at 5:23 pm

I lived in Iceland from 1980 until the summer of 1986. There I learned about and bought a Beeb. It took me to levels of programming that for me was a lot of fun, especially the 6502 coding. At that time I had very little sense of where computing was going, it was just fun and I suspect for most that’s what it was. Thank you for the well put together article giving a reasonable history of that era and of the one I was distanced from due to moving back to Canada.

- xxx

July 11, 2016 at 3:40 am

Typo: “boost several ARM chips”.

- Jimmy Maher

July 11, 2016 at 7:26 am

Thanks!

- Jonathan Graham

September 18, 2016 at 7:26 pm

I’ll point out that RISC assembly code is usually easier to read when it comes to looking at hex dumps. RISC ISAs are generally fixed width making finding the next instruction easier. OItherwise you have to be constantly remembering how many parameters an instruction uses in order to find the next instruction. Similarly RISC instruction sets are more likely to be orthogonal which are also easier to read because the ISA is structured so that particular bits represent things like addressing modes.

Peter Molyneux’s Kingdom in a Box
June 30, 2016

Peter Molyneux, circa 1990.

I have this idea of a living world, which I have never achieved. It’s based upon this picture in my head, and I can see what it’s like to play that game. Every time I do it, then it maybe gets closer to that ideal. But it’s an ambitious thing.

— Peter Molyneux

One day as a young boy, Peter Molyneux stumbled upon an ant hill. He promptly did what young boys do in such situations: he poked it with a stick, watching the inhabitants scramble around as destruction rained down from above. But then, Molyneux did something that set him apart from most young boys. Feeling curious and maybe a little guilty, he gave the ants some sugar for energy and watched quietly as they methodically undid the damage to their home. Just like that, he woke up to the the idea of little living worlds with lots of little living inhabitants — and to the idea of he himself, the outsider, being able to affect the lives of those inhabitants. The blueprint had been laid for one of the most prominent and influential careers in the history of game design. “I have always found this an interesting mechanic, the idea that you influence the game as opposed to controlling the game,” he would say years later. “Also, the idea that the game can continue without you.” When Molyneux finally grew bored and walked away from the ant hill on that summer day in his childhood, it presumably did just that, the acts of God that had nearly destroyed it quickly forgotten. Earth — and ants — abide.

Peter Molyneux was born in the Surrey town of Guildford (also hometown of, read into it what you will, Ford Prefect) in 1959, the son of an oil-company executive and a toy-shop proprietor. To hear him tell it, he was qualified for a career in computer programming largely by virtue of being so hopeless at everything else. Being dyslexic, he found reading and writing extremely difficult, a handicap that played havoc with his marks at Bearwood College, the boarding school in the English county of Berkshire to which his family sent him for most of his teenage years. Meanwhile his less than imposing physique boded ill for a career in the military or manual labor. Thankfully, near the end of his time at Bearwood the mathematics department acquired a Commodore PET,  while the student union almost simultaneously installed a Space Invaders machine. Seeing a correspondence between these two pieces of technology that eluded his fellow students, Molyneux set about trying to program his own Space Invaders on the PET, using crude character glyphs to represent the graphics that the PET, being a text-only machine, couldn’t actually draw. No matter. A programmer had been born.

These events, followed shortly by Molyneux’s departure from Bearwood to face the daunting prospect of the adult world, were happening at the tail end of the 1970s. Like so many of the people I’ve profiled on this blog, Molyneux was thus fortunate enough to be born not only into a place and circumstances that would permit a career in games, but at seemingly the perfect instant to get in on the ground floor as well. But, surprisingly for a fellow who would come to wear his huge passion for the medium on his sleeve — often almost as much to the detriment as to the benefit of his games and his professional life — Molyneux took a meandering path filling fully another decade to rise to prominence in the field. Or, to put it less kindly: he failed, repeatedly and comprehensively, at every venture he tried for most of the 1980s before he finally found the one that clicked.

Perhaps inspired by his mother’s toy shop, his original dream was to be not so much a game designer as a computer entrepreneur. After earning a degree in computer science from Southampton University, he found himself a job working days as a systems analyst for a big company. By night, he formed a very small company called Vulcan in his hometown of Guildford to implement a novel scheme for selling blank disks. He wrote several simple programs: a music creator, some mathematics drills, a business simulator, a spelling quiz. (The last, having been created by a dyslexic and terrible speller in general, was a bit of a disaster.) For every ten disks you bought for £10, you would get one of the programs for free along with your blank disks. After placing his tiny advertisement in a single magazine, Molyneux was so confident of the results that he told his local post office to prepare for a deluge of mail, and bought a bigger mailbox for his house to hold it all. He got five orders in the first ten days, less than fifty in the scheme’s total lifespan — along with about fifty more inquiries from people who had no interest in the blank disks but just wanted to buy his software.

Taking their interest to heart, Molyneux embarked on Scheme #2. He improved the music creator and the business simulator and tried to sell them as products in their own right. Even years later he would remain proud of the latter in particular — his first original game, which he named Entrepreneur: “I really put loads of features into it. You ran a business and you could produce anything you liked. You had to do things like keep the manufacturing line going, set the price for your product, decide what advertising you wanted, and these random events would happen.” With contests all the rage in British games at the time, he offered £100 to the first person to make £1 million in Entrepreneur. The prize went unclaimed; the game sold exactly two copies despite being released near the zenith of the early-1980s British mania for home computers. “Everybody around me was making an absolute fortune,” Molyneux remembers. “You had to be a complete imbecile in those days not to make a fortune. Yet here I was with Entrepreneur and Composer, making nothing.” He wasn’t, it appeared, very good at playing his own game of entrepreneurship; his own £1 million remained far out of reach. Nevertheless, he moved on to the next scheme.

Scheme #3 was to crack the business and personal-productivity markets via a new venture called Taurus, initiated by Molyneux and his friend Les Edgar, who were later joined by one Kevin Donkin. Molyneux having studied accounting at one time in preparation for a possible career in the field (“the figures would look so messy that no one would ever employ me”), it was decided that Taurus would initially specialize in financial software with exciting names like Taurus Accounts, Taurus Invoicing, and Taurus Stock Control. Those products, like all the others Molyneux had created, went nowhere. But now came a bizarre story of mistaken identity that… well, it wouldn’t make Molyneux a prominent game designer just yet, but it would move him further down the road to that destination.

Commodore was about to launch the Amiga in Britain, and, this being early on when they still saw it as potential competition for the IBMs of the world, was looking to convince makers of productivity software to write for the machine.  They called up insignificant little Taurus of all people to request a meeting to discuss porting the “new software” the latter had in the works to the Amiga. Molyneux and Edgar assumed Commodore must have somehow gotten wind of a database program they were working on. In a state of no small excitement, they showed up at Commodore UK’s headquarters on the big day and met a representative. Molyneux:

He kept talking about “the product,” and I thought they were talking about the database. At the end of the meeting, they say, “We’re really looking forward to getting your network running on the Amiga.” And it suddenly dawned on me that this guy didn’t know who we were. Now, we were called Taurus, as in the star sign. He thought we were Torus, a company that produced networking systems. I suddenly had this crisis of conscience. I thought, “If this guy finds out, there go my free computers down the drain.” So I just shook his hand and ran out of that office.

An appropriately businesslike advertisement for Taurus’s database manager gives no hint of what actually lies in the company’s future…

By the time Commodore figured out they had made a terrible mistake, Taurus had already been signed as official Amiga developers and given five free Amigas. They parlayed those things into a two-year career as makers of somewhat higher-profile but still less than financially successful productivity software for the Amiga. After the database, which they named Acquisition and declared “the most complete database system conceived on any microcomputer” — Peter Molyneux’s habit of over-promising, which gamers would come to know all too well, was already in evidence — they started on a computer-aided-design package called X-CAD Designer. Selling in the United States for the optimistic prices of $300 and $500 respectively, both programs got lukewarm reviews; they were judged powerful but kind of incomprehensible to actually use. But even had the reviews been better, high-priced productivity software was always going to be a hard sell on the Amiga. There were just three places to really make money in Amiga software: in personal-creativity software like paint programs, in video-production tools, and, most of all, in games. In spite of all of Commodore’s earnest efforts to the contrary, the Amiga had by now become known first and foremost as the world’s greatest gaming computer.

The inspiration for Bullfrog Software.

Molyneux and his colleagues therefore began to wind down their efforts in productivity software in favor of a new identity. They renamed their company Bullfrog after a ceramic figurine they had lying around in the “squalor” of what Molyneux describes as their “absolutely shite” office in a Guildford pensioner’s attic. Under the new name, they planned to specialize in games — Scheme #4 for Peter Molyneux. “We had a simple choice of hitting our head against a brick wall with business software,” he remembers, “or doing what I really wanted to do with my life anyway, which was write games.” Having made the choice to make Bullfrog a game developer, their first actual product was not a game but a simple drum sequencer for the Amiga called A-Drum. Hobgoblins and little minds and all the rest. When A-Drum duly flopped, they finally got around to games.

A friend of Molyneux’s had written a budget-priced action-adventure for the Commodore 64 called Druid II: Enlightenment, and was looking for someone to do an Amiga conversion. Bullfrog jumped at the chance, even though Molyneux, who would always persist in describing himself as a “rubbish” programmer, had very little idea how to program an action game. When asked by Enlightenment‘s publisher Firebird whether he could do the game in one frame — i.e., whether he could update everything onscreen within a single pass of the electron gun painting the screen to maintain the impression of smooth, fluid movement — an overeager Molyneux replied, “Are you kidding me? I can do it in ten frames!” It wasn’t quite the answer Firebird was looking for. But in spite of it all, Bullfrog somehow got the job, producing what Molyneux describes as a “technically rather poor” port of what had been a rather middling game in the first place. (Molyneux’s technique for getting everything drawn in one frame was to simply keep shrinking the size of the display until even his inefficient routines could do the job.) And then, as usual for everything Molyneux touched, it flopped. But Bullfrog did get two important things out of the project: they learned much about game programming, and they recruited as artist for the project one Glenn Corpes, who was not only a talented pixel pusher but also a talented programmer and fount of ideas almost the equal of Molyneux.

Despite the promising addition of Corpes, the first original game conjured up by the slowly expanding Bullfrog fared little better than Enlightenment. Corpes and Kevin Donkin turned out a very of-its-time top-down shoot-em-up called Fusion, which Electronic Arts agreed to release. Dismissed as “a mixture of old ideas presented in a very unexciting manner” by reviewers, Fusion was even less impressive technically than had been the Enlightenment port, being plagued by clashing colors and jittery scrolling — not at all the sort of thing to impress the notoriously audiovisually-obsessed Amiga market. Thus Fusion flopped as well, keeping Molyneux’s long record of futility intact. But then, unexpectedly from this group who’d shown so little sign of ever rising above mediocrity, came genius.

To describe Populous as a stroke of genius would be a misnomer. It was rather a game that grew slowly into its genius over a considerable period of time, a game that Molyneux himself considers more an exercise in evolution than conscious design. “It wasn’t an idea that suddenly went ‘Bang!'” he says. “It was an idea that grew and grew.” And its genesis had as much to do with Glenn Corpes as it did with Peter Molyneux.

Every Populous world is built out of combinations of just 56 blocks.

It all began when Corpes started showing off a routine he had written which let him build isometric landscapes out of three-dimensional blocks, like a virtual Lego set. You could move the viewpoint about the landscape, raising and lowering the land by left-clicking to add new blocks, right-clicking to remove them. Molyneux was immediately sure there was a game in there somewhere. His childhood memory of the ant farm leaping to mind, he said, “Let’s have a thousand people running around on it.”

Populous thus began with those little people in lieu of ants, wandering independently over Corpes’s isometric landscapes in real time. When they found a patch they liked, they would settle down, building little huts. Since, this being a computer game, the player would obviously need something to do as well, Molyneux started adding ways for you, as a sort of God on high, to influence the people’s behavior in indirect ways. He added something he called a “Papal Magnet,” a huge ankh you could place in the world to draw your people toward a given spot. But there would come a problem if the way to the Ankh happened to be blocked by, say, a lake. Molyneux claims he added Populous‘s most basic mechanic, the thing you spend by far the most time doing when playing the game, as a response to his “incompetence” as a coder and resulting inability to write a proper path-finding algorithm: when your people get stuck somewhere, you can, subject to your mana reserves — even gods have limits — raise or lower the land to help them out. With that innovation, Populous from the player’s perspective became largely an exercise in terraforming, creating smooth, even landscapes on which your people can build their huts, villages, and eventually castles. As your people become fruitful and multiply, their prayers fuel your mana reserves.

Next, Molyneux added warfare to the picture. Now you would be erecting mountains and lakes to protect your people from their enemies, who start out walking about independently on the other side of the world. The ultimate goal of the game, of course, is to use your people to wipe out your enemy’s people before they do the same to you; this is a very Old Testament sort of religious experience. To aid in that goal, Molyneux gradually added lots of other godly powers to your arsenal, more impressive than the mere raising and lowering of land if also far more expensive in terms of precious mana: flash floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc. You know, all your standard acts of God, as found in the Bible and insurance claims.

Lego Populous. Bullfrog had so much fun with this implementation of the idea that they seriously discussed trying to turn it into a commercial board game.

Parts of Populous were prototyped on the tabletop. Bullfrog used Lego bricks to represent the landscapes, a handy way of implementing the raising-and-lowering mechanic in a physical space. They went so far as to discuss a license with Lego, only to be told that Lego didn’t support “violent games.” Molyneux admits that the board game, while playable, was very different from the computerized Populous, playing out as a slow-moving, chess-like exercise in strategy. The computer Populous, by contrast, can get as frantic as any action game, especially in the final phase when all the early- and mid-game maneuvering and feinting comes down to the inevitable final genocidal struggle between Good and Evil.

Bullfrog. From left: Glenn Corpes (artist and programmer), Shaun Cooper (artist and tester), Peter Molyneux (designer and programmer), Kevin Donkin (designer and programmer), Les Edgar (office manager), Andy Jones (artist and tester).

Ultimately far more important to the finished product than Bullfrog’s Lego Populous were the countless matches Molyneux played on the computer against Glenn Corpes. Apart from all of its other innovations in helping to invent the god-game and real-time-strategy genres, Populous was also a pioneering effort in online gaming. Multi-player games — the only way to play Populous for many months — took place between two people seated at two separate Amigas, connected together via modem or, if together in the same room as Molyneux and Corpes were, via a cable. Vanishingly few other designers were working in this space at the time, for understandable reasons: even leaving aside the fact that the majority of computer owners didn’t own modems, running a multi-player game in real-time over a connection as slow as 1200 baud was hardly a programming challenge for the faint-hearted. The fact that it works at all in Populous rather puts the lie to Molyneux’s self-deprecating description of himself as a “rubbish” coder.

You draw your people toward different parts of the map by placing the Papal Magnet. The first one to touch it becomes the leader. There are very few words in the game, which only made it that much easier for Electronic Arts to localize and popularize across Europe. Everything is instead done using the initially incomprehensible suite of icons you near the bottom of the screen. Populous does become intuitive in time, but it’s not without a learning curve.

Development of Populous fell into a comfortable pattern. Molyneux and Corpes would play together for several hours every evening, then nip off to the pub to talk about their experiences. Next day, they’d tweak the game, then they’d go at it again. It’s here that we come to the beating heart of Molyneux’s description of Populous as a game evolved rather than designed. Almost everything in the finished game beyond the basic concept was added in response to Molyneux and Corpes’s daily wars. For instance, Molyneux initially added knights, super-powered individuals who can rampage through enemy territory and cause a great deal of havoc in a very short period of time, to prevent their games from devolving into endless stalemates. “A game could get to the point where both players had massive populations,” he says, “and there was just no way to win.” With knights, the stronger player “could go and massacre the other side and end the game at a stroke.”

A constant theme of all the tweaking was to make a more viscerally exciting game that played more quickly. For commercial as well as artistic reasons — Amiga owners weren’t particularly noted for their patience with slow-paced, cerebral games — this was considered a priority. Over the course of development, the length of the typical game Molyneux played with Corpes shrank from several hours to well under one.

Give them time, and your people will turn their primitive huts into castles.

Even tweaked to play quickly and violently, Populous was quite a departure from the tried-and-true Amiga fare of shoot-em-ups, platformers, and action-adventures. The unenviable task of trying to sell the thing to a publisher was given to Les Edgar. After visiting about a dozen publishers, he convinced Electronic Arts take a chance on it. Bullfrog promised EA a finished Populous in time for Christmas 1988. By the time that deadline arrived, however, it was still an online multiplayer-only game, a prospect EA knew to be commercially untenable. Molyneux and his colleagues thus spent the next few months creating Populous‘s single-player “Conquest Mode.”

In addition to the green and pleasant land of the early levels, there are also worlds of snow and ice, desert worlds, and even worlds of fire and lava to conquer.

Perilously close to being an afterthought to the multi-player experience though it was, Conquest Mode would be the side of the game that the vast majority of its eventual players would come to know best if not exclusively. Rather than design a bunch of scenarios by hand, Bullfrog wrote an algorithm to procedurally generate 500 different “worlds” for play against a computer opponent whose artificial intelligence also had to be created from scratch during this period. This method of content creation, used most famously by Ian Bell and David Braben in Elite, was something of a specialty and signpost of British game designers, who, plagued by hardware limitations far more stringent than their counterparts in the United States, often used it as a way to minimize the space their games consumed in memory and on disk. Most recently, Geoff Crammond’s hit game The Sentinel, published by Firebird, had used a similar scheme. Glenn Corpes believes it may have been an EA executive named Joss Ellis who first suggested it to Bullfrog.

Populous‘s implementation is fairly typical of the form. Each of the 500 worlds except the first is protected by a password that is, like everything else, itself procedurally generated. When you win at a given level, you’re given the password to a higher, harder level; whether and how many levels you get to skip is determined by how resounding a victory you’ve just managed. It’s a clever scheme, packing a hell of a lot of potential gameplay onto a single floppy disk and even making an effort to avoid boring the good player — and all without forcing Bullfrog to deal with the complications of actually storing any state whatsoever onto disk.

It inevitably all comes down to a frantic final free-for-all between your people and those of your enemy.

Given their previous failures, Bullfrog understandably wasn’t the most confident group when a well-known British games journalist named Bob Wade, who had already played a pre-release version of the game, came by for a visit. For hours, Molyneux remained too insecure to actually ask Wade the all-important question of what he thought of the game. At last, after Wade had joined the gang for “God knows how many” pints at their local, Molyneux worked up the courage to pop the question. Wade replied that it was the best game he’d ever played, and he couldn’t wait to get back to it — prompting Molyneux to think he must have made some sort of mistake, and that under no circumstances should he be allowed to play another minute of it in case his opinion should change. It was Wade and the magazine he was writing for at the time, ACE (Advanced Computer Entertainment), who coined the term “god game” in the glowing review that followed, the first trickle of a deluge of praise from the gaming press in Britain and, soon enough, much of the world.

Bullfrog’s first royalty check for Populous was for a modest £13,000. Their next was for £250,000, prompting a naive Les Edgar to call Electronic Arts about it, sure it was a mistake. It was no mistake; Populous alone reportedly accounted for one-third of EA’s revenue during its first year on the market. That Bullfrog wasn’t getting even bigger checks was a sign only of the extremely unfavorable deal they’d signed with EA from their position of weakness. Populous finally and definitively ended the now 30-year-old Peter Molyneux’s long run of obscurity and failure at everything he attempted. In his words, he went overnight from “urinating in the sink” and “owing more money than I could ever imagine paying back” to “an incredible life” in games. Port after port came out for the next couple of years, each of them becoming a bestseller on its platform. Populous was selected to become one of the launch titles for the Super Nintendo console in Japan, spawning a full-blown fad there that came to encompass comic books, tee-shirts, collectibles, and even a symphony concert. When they visited Japan for the first time on a promotional tour, Molyneux and Les Edgar were treated like… well, appropriately enough, like gods. Populous sold 3 million copies in all according to some reports, an almost inconceivable figure for a game during this period.

The One magazine and Electronic Arts hosted a tournament to find the best Populous player in Britain.

While a relatively small percentage of Populous players played online, those who did became pioneers of sorts in their own right. Some bulletin-board systems set up matchmaking services to pair up players looking for a game, any time, day or night; the resulting connections sometimes spanned national borders or even oceans. The matchmakers were aided greatly by Bullfrog’s forward-thinking decision to make all versions of Populous compatible with one another in terms of online play. In making it so quick and easy to find an online opponent, these services prefigured the modern world of Internet-enabled online gaming. Molyneux pronounced them “pretty amazing,” and at the time they really were. In 1992, he spoke excitedly of a recent trip to Japan, where’d he seen a town “with 10,000 homes all linked together. You can play games with anybody in the place. It’s enormous, really enormous, and it’s growing.” If only he’d known what online gaming would grow into in the next decade or two…

A youngster named Andrew Reader wound up winning the tournament, only to get trounced in an exhibition match by the master, Peter Molyneux himself. There was talk of televising a follow-up tournament on Sky TV, but it doesn’t appear to have happened.

The original Amiga version of Populous had been released all but simultaneously with the Amiga version of SimCity. Press and public alike immediately linked the two games together; AmigaWorld magazine, for instance, went so far as to review them jointly in a single article. Both Will Wright of SimCity fame and Peter Molyneux were repeatedly asked in interviews whether they’d played the other’s game. Wright was polite but, one senses, a little disinterested in Populous, saying he “liked the idea of playing God and having a population follow you,” but “sort of wish they’d gone for a slightly more educational angle.” Molyneux was much more enthusiastic about his American counterpart’s work, repeatedly floating a scheme to somehow link the two games together in more literal fashion for online play.  He claimed at one point that Maxis (developers of SimCity) and his own Bullfrog had agreed on a liaison “to go backwards and forwards” between their two companies to work on linking their games. The liaison, he claimed, had “the Populous landscape moving to and from SimCity,” and a finished product would be out sometime in 1992. Like quite a number of the more unbelievable schemes Molyneux has floated over the years, it never happened.

The idea of a linkage between SimCity and Populous, whether taking place online or in the minds of press and public, can seem on the face of it an exceedingly strange one today. How would the online linkage actually work anyway? Would the little Medieval warriors from Populous suddenly start attacking SimCity‘s peaceful modern utopias? Or would Wright’s Sims plop themselves down in the middle of Molyneux’s apocalyptic battles and start building stadiums and power plants? These were very different games: Wright’s a noncompetitive, peaceful exercise in urban planning with strong overtones of edutainment; Molyneux’s a zero-sum game of genocidal warfare that aspired to nothing beyond entertainment. Knowing as we do today the future paths of these two designers — i.e., ever further in the directions laid down by these their first significant works — only heightens the seeming dichotomy.

That said, there actually were and are good reasons to think of SimCity and Populous as two sides of the same coin. For us today, the list includes first of all the reasons of simple historical concordance. Each marks the coming-out party of one of the most important game designers of all time, occurring within bare weeks of one another.

But of course the long-term importance of these two designers to their field wasn’t yet evident in 1989; obviously players were responding to something else in associating their games with one another. Once you stripped away their very different surface trappings and personalities, the very similar set of innovations at the heart of each was laid bare. AmigaWorld said it very well in that joint review: “The real joy of these programs is the interlocking relationships. Sure, you’re a creator, but even more a facilitator, influencer, and stage-setter for little computer people who act on your wishes in their own time and fashion.” It’s no coincidence that, just as Peter Molyneux was partly inspired by an ant hill to create Populous, one of Will Wright’s projects of the near future would be the virtual ant farm SimAnt. In creating the first two god games, the two were indeed implementing a very similar core idea, albeit each in his own very different way.

Joel Billings of the king of American strategy games SSI had founded his company back in 1979 with the explicit goal of making computerized versions of the board games he loved. SimCity and Populous can be seen as the point when computer strategy games transcended that traditional approach. The real-time nature of these games makes them impossible to conceive of as anything other than computer-based works, while their emergent complexity makes them objects of endless fascination for their designers as much or more so for than their players.

In winning so many awards and entrancing so many players for so long, SimCity and Populous undoubtedly benefited hugely from their sheer novelty. Their flaws stand out more clearly today. With its low-resolution graphics and without the aid of modern niceties like tool tips and graphical overlays, SimCity struggles to find ways to communicate vital information about what your city is really doing and why, making the game into something of an unsatisfying black box unless and until you devote a lot of time and effort to understanding what affects what. Populous has many of the same interface frustrations, along with other problems that feel still more fundamental and intractable, especially if you, like the vast majority of players back in its day, experience it through its single-player Conquest Mode. Clever as they are, the procedurally generated levels combined with the fairly rudimentary artificial intelligence of your computer opponent introduce a lot of infelicities. Eventually you begin to realize that one level is pretty much the same as any other; you just need to execute the same set of strategies and tactics more efficiently to have success at the higher levels.

Both Will Wright and Peter Molyneux are firm adherents to the experimental, boundary-pushing school of game design — an approach that yields innovative games but not necessarily holistically good games every time out. And indeed, throughout his long career each of them has produced at least as many misses as hits, even if we dismiss the complaints of curmudgeons like me and lump SimCity and Populous into the category of the hits. Both designers have often fallen into the trap, if trap it be, of making games that are more interesting for creators and commentators than they are fun for actual players. And certainly both have, like all of us, their own blind spots: in relying so heavily on scientific literature to inform his games, Wright has often produced end results with something of the feel of a textbook, while Molyneux has often lacked the discipline and gravitas to fully deliver on his most grandiose schemes.

But you know what? It really doesn’t matter. We need our innovative experimentalists to blaze new trails, just as we need our more sober, holistically-minded designers to exploit the terrain they discover. SimCity and Populous would be followed by decades of games that built on the possibilities they revealed — many of which I’d frankly prefer to play today than these two original ground-breakers. But, again, that reality doesn’t mean we should celebrate SimCity and Populous one iota less, for both resoundingly pass the test of historical significance. The world of gaming would be a much poorer place without Will Wright and Peter Molyneux and their first living worlds inside a box.

(Sources: The Official Strategy Guide for Populous and Populous II by Laurence Scotford; Master Populous: Blueprints for World Power by Clayton Walnum; Amazing Computing of October 1989; Next Generation of November 1998; PC Review of July 1992; The One of April 1989, September 1989, and May 1991; Retro Gamer 44; AmigaWorld of December 1987, June 1989, and November 1989; The Games Machine of November 1988; ACE of April 1989; the bonus content to the film From Bedrooms to Billions. Archived online sources include features on Peter Molyneux and Bullfrog for Wired Online, GameSpot, and Edge Online. Finally, Molyneux’s postmortem on Populous at the 2011 Game Developers Conference.

Populous is available for purchase from GOG.com.)

Comments
23 Responses

- Lisa H.

June 30, 2016 at 7:45 pm

I barely touched SimCity and I don’t think I ever played SimAnt, but I sure played a lot of Populous. (Although being that it was likely around the early 90s for me, I think what I was really playing constantly was Star Control 2…)

- Pedro Timóteo

July 1, 2016 at 9:04 am

I think what I was really playing constantly was Star Control 2

Can’t fault you there; it’s still my favorite game from the entire 90s. :)

- Lisa H.

July 1, 2016 at 8:21 pm

Certainly one of mine as well. Even though I know exactly what to do in the story, I still replay it from time to time. And I guess Spacewar was on to something as a game design, because even Super Melee is still fun.

- David Boddie

June 30, 2016 at 9:17 pm

I’m guessing you mean that each Populous world is made from 56 types of block, not 16.

Also, if I’m not mistaken, The Sentinel was published by Firebird, unless it was published by EA in the US.

- Jimmy Maher

July 1, 2016 at 8:03 am

Right on both counts. Thanks!

- Pedro Timóteo

June 30, 2016 at 10:15 pm

Geoff Crammand’s hit game The Sentinal

The Sentinel, right?

When you win at a given level, you’re given the password to a higher, harder level; whether and how many levels you get to skip is determined by how resounding a victory you’ve just managed.

Funny thing, that’s exactly how it worked in The Sentinel; I had forgotten that Populous did it too. I think The Sentinel went a bit overboard in its level count: 10.000. Like you had said in your Elite post, a number like this makes it far too obvious that the levels are generated from a seed… but, then again, the game didn’t really require manually created levels, and they tended to look more distinct than Elite’s 2D galaxy maps did.

- Pedro Timóteo

June 30, 2016 at 10:16 pm

Also, Geoff Crammond. :)

- CdrJameson

June 30, 2016 at 10:57 pm

Also, published by Firebird, not EA (Unless there was some kind of cross-licencing deal)

- Jimmy Maher

July 1, 2016 at 8:08 am

Thanks!

- Jimmy Maher

July 1, 2016 at 8:07 am

Thanks!

I’ve often wondered whether anyone ever actually won either Populous or The Sentinel by getting through all the levels. In my experience, everyone gets hung up on a level well before the end, which raises the question of whether victory is even a realistic human possibility. Populous did have a winning screen, put in at the behest of Electronic Arts at the last minute when the game was undergoing the final QA. I wonder if anyone ever (fairly) saw it…

- Pedro Timóteo

July 1, 2016 at 8:56 am

My guess is that, in either game, the generator could theoretically create an impossible (or at least extremely difficult) level once in a while, but a clever player would just go back to the previously beaten level (whose password he or she would still have) and beat it again, almost surely doing a bit better (or worse), and getting a password to a different higher level.

I have to admit I didn’t play either game extensively (I found both amazing at the beginning, but I thought they quickly became a bit repetitive… Elite, on the other hand, had the promise of expensive equipment to buy later, plus unique events and missions.)

- matt w

July 8, 2016 at 3:00 am

As far as the Sentinel goes, apparently someone did beat it–there’s a walkthrough on YouTube. Link is to part 1 of 7. You see, YouTube has a maximum video length of 12 hours, so the 79-hour walkthrough had to be broken up.

(Of course I haven’t watched much of it–after the first ten minutes it might just be a shot of the uploader’s butt. Honestly for all the sense I can make of the walkthrough the part I watched might also be the uploader’s butt, crudely digitized.)

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 8:13 am

That’s pretty much how I feel when trying to play it. One of those game where I sense there must be genius in there somewhere, but it’s just so, so not for me.

- CdrJameson

June 30, 2016 at 11:04 pm

So the magazine’s Populous competition was won by ‘A. Reader’. Hmm…

- Jimmy Maher

July 1, 2016 at 8:09 am

That wasn’t lost on the magazine. They had a lot of fun with it…

- Peter Piers

September 5, 2016 at 4:56 pm

In a game with no text, no less!

- Ken Rutsky

July 1, 2016 at 2:52 pm

Nice article. I never played Populous, but I remember drooling with envy over screenshots of it in gaming magazines at the time. All I had was my rapidly-dying C-128…

Found one typo:

“That said, there actually were and are good reasons to think of SimCity and Populace as two sides of the same coin.”

Populace > Populous

- Jimmy Maher

July 1, 2016 at 3:14 pm

Thanks!

- AguyinaRPG

July 1, 2016 at 3:35 pm

Had no idea that Moleneux was dyslexic. Goes you show you can never really tell what drives some people! He also doesn’t age. His ears are his only sign of growth.

Populous isn’t really so much a simulation of anything, but it is enjoyable to do in short bursts. I also did an examination of its (and other Bullfrog games) user interface for one project because it’s technically diegetic, being from the first person view of a god. It provokes a lot of interesting thought experiments, but it’s ultimately a game that’s best enjoyed in ten minute sessions. Once you have a grip on it the whole system becomes more fun to toy with.

- Pressurizer

July 2, 2016 at 11:47 am

Thanks for another great read, Jimmy! It’s strange I never played either SimCity or Populous on my A500 back in the day. Though I remember seeing them on a friend’s Atari ST. I share your opinion of them as flawed but brilliant trailblazers. They fascinated me but didn’t really hook me for a long time. I think the first comparable game that did was Civilization.

- coze

July 5, 2016 at 2:05 am

Thanks for the great read Jimmy !
Are you thinking to followup with Populous’ successor, Powermonger ? In was interesting in the sense that this time around you get to interact with your people, and could directly command / influence their actions. Which meant you get to do more micro management, which was sometimes good, but overall made the game more repetitive at times.
What do you think ? Also comparison with Megalomania might be interesting.

- Jimmy Maher

July 5, 2016 at 8:34 am

Probably not, I’m afraid. While they certainly have some interesting ideas, Powermonger and Populous II aren’t held in terribly high esteem even by Molyneux today. I think we’ll likely pick up with Molyneux again with Syndicate, prefaced by a fairly quick overview of what went on between Populous and that game.

- Ingo Warnke

July 11, 2016 at 12:18 pm

Not sure if you know or care, but since the start of June 2016 there is an ongoing series of videos by Kim Justice about “The Rise and Fall of Peter Molyneux”, part one being
here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAuvaAGnqQw

and it is part 4 at the moment.

Shogun
July 7, 2016

One of the generation of male writers forged in the crucible of World War II, James Clavell had a much harder war of it than such peers as Norman Mailer, James Jones, Herman Wouk, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, and James Michener. As a young man of barely twenty years, he found himself facing the Japanese onslaught on the Malay Peninsula at the onset of hostilities in the Pacific Theater. Following the most humiliating British defeat of the entire war, he spent the next three and a half years in prisoner-of-war camps, watching as more than nine out of every ten of his fellow soldiers succumbed to malnutrition, disease, and random acts of violence. Somehow he survived it all and made it home.

In 1953, he emigrated from his native England to Hollywood in the hope of becoming a film director, despite knowing only as much about how movies were made as his actress wife had deigned to tell him. He never actually became a director, but he did gradually establish himself by dint of pluck and sheer stubbornness as a screenwriter. Clavell claimed he learned how to write stories with mass appeal in Hollywood, developing a style that would preclude more than the merest flirtations with the sort of literary respectability enjoyed by the list of names that opened this article. To hear him tell it, that was just fine with him: “The first time you write a novel you go into ecstasy with the purple prose — how the clouds look, what the sunset is like. All bullshit. What happens? Who does what to whom? That’s all you need.”

If one James Clavell novel was going to please serious students of the literary arts, it would have to be his first, a very personal book in comparison to the epic doorstops for which he would later become known. Holding true to the old adage that everyone’s first novel is autobiographical, King Rat was a novelized account of Clavell’s grim experience as a prisoner-of-war. Published in 1962, its success, combined with his difficulty finding sufficient screenwriting gigs, led him to gradually shift his focus from screenplays to novels. The next book he published, Tai-Pan (1966), was a much longer, more impersonal, wider-angle historical novel of the early years of Hong Kong. Four similar doorstops would follow at widely spaced intervals over the next thirty years or so, all chronicling the experiences of Westerners in the Asia of various historical epochs.

James Clavell’s fiction was in many ways no more thoughtful than the majority of the books clogging up the airport bestseller racks then and now. His were novels of adventure, excitement, and titillation, not introspection. Yet there is one aspect of his work that still stands out as surprising, even a little noble. Despite the three and a half years of torture and privation he had endured at the hands of his Japanese captors, he was genuinely fascinated by Asian and especially Japanese culture and history; one might even say he came to love it. And nowhere was that love more evident than in Clavell’s third novel, his most popular of all and the one that most of his fans agree stands as his best: 1975’s Shogun.

The star of Shogun is a typical Clavell hero, a Capable Man whose inner life doesn’t seem to run much deeper than loving queen and country and hating Papists. John Blackthorne is the English pilot — i.e., navigator — of the Erasmus, the first Dutch vessel to discover Japan, circa 1600. Unfortunately, the Spanish and Portuguese are already there when the Erasmus arrives, a situation from which will spring much of the drama of this very lengthy tale of 1100-plus pages. Blackthorne becomes Clavell’s reader surrogate, our window into the strangeness, wonder, mystery, and beauty of feudal Japan.

While Blackthorne’s adventures in Japan are (very) roughly based on those of an actual English adventurer named William Adams, Clavell plays up the violence and the sex for all its worth. Many a youthful reader went to bed at night dreaming fever dreams of inscrutable and lovely geishas and the boxes of toys they kept to hand: “The beads are carefully placed in the back passage and then, at the moment of the Clouds and the Rain, the beads are pulled out slowly, one by one.” (Did finding that sort of thing enticing mean you were — my God! — gay?) Read by adults, such passages… er, extracts are still riotously entertaining in the way that only truly committed Bad Writing can be. My wife Dorte and I used Shogun as our bedtime reading recently. While it didn’t do much to encourage conjugal sexy times, it certainly did make us laugh; Dorte still thinks “pillowing,” Shogun‘s favorite Japanese euphemism for sex, is unaccountably hilarious, and is forever going on about pillowing this and pillowing that. (She also loves the notion of a “poop deck,” but I suppose I can’t blame Clavell for that.)

Unsubtle prose and dodgy euphemisms aside, the first 25 to 30 percent of Shogun is by far the most compelling. Long enough to form a novel of reasonable length in their own right, the early chapters detail the arrival of Blackthorne and his Dutch cohorts in Japan, upon whose shores they literally wash up, starving and demoralized after their long voyage across the Pacific. I’ve occasionally heard the beginning of Shogun described as one of the finest stories of first contact between two alien cultures ever written, worthy of careful study by any science-fiction author who proposes to tell of a meeting between even more far-flung cultures than those of Europe and Japan. To that suggestion I can only heartily concur. As Blackthorne and his cohorts pass from honored guests to condemned prisoners and back again, struggling all the while to figure out what these people want from them, what they want from each other, and how to communicate at all, the story is compulsively readable, the tension at times nearly unbearable. (One suspects that some of the most horrific scenes, like the ones after Blackthorne and the crew are cast into a tiny hole and left to languish there in sweltering heat and their own bodily filth, once again draw from Clavell’s own prisoner-of-war experiences.) While I admit to being far from intimately familiar with the whole of the James Clavell oeuvre, I’d be very surprised if he ever wrote anything better than this.

After Blackthorne, stalwart Capable Man that he is, manages to negotiate a reprieve for the crew and a place for himself as a trusted advisor to a powerful daimyo named Toranaga, the book takes on a different, to my mind less satisfying character. It ceases to focus so much on Blackthorne’s personal plight as a stranger in a strange land in favor of a struggle for control of the entire country, once again based loosely on actual history, that looms between Toranaga, very broadly speaking the good guy (or at least the one with whom our hero Blackthorne allies himself), and another daimyo named Ishido. At the same time, the Portuguese Jesuits are trying to stake out a place in the middle that will preserve their influence regardless of who wins, whilst also working righteously to find some way to do away with Blackthorne and the Dutch sailors, who if allowed to return to Europe with information on exactly where Japan lies represent an existential threat to everything they’ve built there. Plot piles on counter-plot on conspiracy on counter-conspiracy, interspersed with regular action-movie set-pieces, as all of the various factions maneuver toward the inevitable civil war that will decide the fate of all Japan for decades or centuries to come.

In the meantime, Blackthorne, apparently deciding his life isn’t already dangerous enough, is carrying on an illicit romance with the beautiful Mariko, wife of one of Toranaga’s most highly placed samurai. Their relationship was much discussed in Shogun‘s first bloom of popularity as being the key to the book’s considerable attraction for female readers; very unusually for such a two-fisted tale of war, adventure, and history, Shogun supposedly enjoyed more female readers than male. True to Clavell’s roots, however, Blackthorne and Mariko’s is a depressingly conventional Hollywood romance. We’re expected to believe that these two characters are wildly, passionately in love with one another simply because Clavell tells us they are, according to the Hollywood logic that two attractive people of the opposite sex thrown into proximity with one another must automatically fall in love — and of course lots of sex must follow.

The plot continues to grow ever more byzantine as the remaining page-count continues to dwindle, and one goes from wondering how Clavell is possibly going to wrap all this up to checking Amazon to be sure there isn’t a direct sequel. And then it all just… stops, leaving more loose threads dangling than my most raggedy tee-shirt. I’ve read many books with unsatisfying endings, but I’ve never read an ending quite as half-assed as this one. It’s all finally come down to the war that’s been looming throughout the previous 1100-plus pages. We’re all ready for the bloody climax. Instead Clavell gives us a three-page summary of what might have happened next if he’d actually bothered to write it. It’s for all the world like Clavell, who admitted that he wrote his novels with no plan whatsoever, simply got tired of this one, decided 1100 pages was more than enough and just stopped in medias res. Shogun manages the feat, perhaps unique in the annals of anticlimax, of feeling massively bloated and half-finished at the same time. This is a Lord of the Rings that ends just as Frodo and Sam arrive in Mordor; a Tale of Two Cities that ends just as Carton is about to make his final sacrifice. I’ve never felt so duped by a book as this one.

But I must admit that I seem to be the exception here. Whether because of the masterfully taut beginning of the story, the torrid love affair, or the lurid portrayal of Japanese culture that pokes always through the tangled edifice of plot, few readers then or now seem to share my reservations. Shogun became an instant bestseller. In 1980, a television miniseries of the book was aired in five parts, filling more than nine hours sans commercials. It became the most-watched show ever aired on NBC and the second most popular in the history of American television, its numbers exceeded only by those of Roots, another miniseries event which had aired on ABC in 1977. When many people think of Blackthorne today, they still picture Richard Chamberlain, the dashing actor who played him on television. Together the book and the miniseries ignited a craze for Japanese culture in the West that, however distorted or exaggerated Shogun‘s portrayal of same may have been, did serve as a useful counterbalance to lingering resentments over World War II and, increasingly, fears that Japan’s exploding technological and industrial base was about to usurp the United States’s place at the head of the world’s economy.

At this point, at last, Shogun‘s huge popularity on page and screen brings us in our roundabout way to Infocom — or, more accurately, to their corporate masters Mediagenic.[1] (If the preface to the real point of this article seemed crazily extended, I can only plead that, with Shogun the game having little identity of its own apart from the novel on which it’s based, it’s hard to discuss it through any other framework.)

Shogun the game at least looks pretty good.

Mediagenic’s absolute mania for licensed games following the accession of Bruce Davis to the CEO’s chair has been well-established in other articles by now. Infocom was able to find some excuse to head off most of the ideas in that vein that Mediagenic proposed, but Shogun was an exception. When Mediagenic came to Infocom with a signed deal already in place in late 1987 to base a game on this literary property — from Bruce Davis’s perspective, the idea was right in Infocom’s wheelhouse — their problem child of a subsidiary just wasn’t in any position to say no. Dave Lebling, having recently finished The Lurking Horror and being without an active project, drew the short straw.

Shogun the game was a misbegotten, unloved project from the start, a project for which absolutely no one in the Infocom, Mediagenic, or Clavell camps had the slightest creative passion. The deal had been done entirely by Clavell’s agent; the author seemed barely aware of the project’s existence, and seemed to care about it still less. It was a weird choice even in the terms of dollars and cents upon which Bruce Davis was always so fixated. Yes, Shogun had been massively popular on page and screen years earlier, and still generated strong catalog sales every year. It was hard to imagine, however, that there was a huge crowd of computer gamers dying to relive the adventures of John Blackthorne interactively. Why this of all licenses? Why now?

Dave Lebling was duly dispatched to visit Clavell for a few days at his chalet in the Swiss Alps to discuss ideas for the adaptation; he got barely more than a few words of greeting out of the man. His written requests for guidance were answered with the blunt reply that Clavell had written the book more than a decade ago and didn’t remember that much about it; the subtext was that he couldn’t be bothered with any of it, that to him Lebling’s game represented just another check arranged by his agent. Lebling was left entirely on his own to adapt another author’s work, with no idea of where the boundaries to his own creative empowerment might lie. In the past, Infocom had always taken care to avoid just this sort of collaboration-in-name-only. Now they’d had it imposed upon them.

Lebling chose to structure his version of Shogun as a series of Reader’s Digest “scenes from” the novel, cutting and pasting unwieldy chunks of Clavell’s prose into the game and demanding that the player respond by doing exactly what Blackthorne did in the novel in order to advance to the next canned scene. The player who has read the novel will find little interest or challenge in pantomiming her way through a re-creation of same, while the player who hasn’t will have no idea whatsoever what’s expected of her at any given juncture. It’s peculiar to see such a threadbare design from a company as serious about the craft of interactive fiction as Infocom had always been. Everyone there, not least Lebling himself, understood all too well the problems inherent in this approach to adaptation; these very same problems were the main reason Infocom had so steadfastly avoided literary licenses that didn’t come with their authors attached in earlier years. One can only presume that Lebling, unsure of how far his creative license extended and bored to death with the whole project anyway, either couldn’t come up with anything better or just couldn’t be bothered to try.

Shogun includes one graphical puzzle reminiscent of those in Zork Zero, a maze representing the tangled alleys of Osaka.

Consider the game’s handling of an early scene from the novel: the first time Blackthorne meets Yabu and Omi, respectively the daimyo and his samurai henchman who have dominion over Anjiro, the small fishing village where the Erasmus has washed up. Also present as translator is a Portuguese priest, Blackthorne’s sworn enemy, who would like nothing better than to see him condemned and executed on the spot. In the book, Blackthorne’s observations of the priest’s interactions with the two samurai convince him that there is no love lost between him and them, that Yabu and Omi hate and mistrust the priest almost as much as Blackthorne does. Blackthorne wants to communicate that he shares their sentiment, but of course all of his words are being translated into Japanese by the priest himself — obviously a highly unreliable means of communication in this situation. Desperate to show his captors that he’s different from this other foreigner, he lunges at the priest, grabs his crucifix, and breaks it in two, a deadly sin for a Catholic but a good day’s work for a Protestant like him. Yabu and especially Omi are left curious and more than a little impressed; Blackthorne’s action quite possibly staves off his imminent execution.

In the book, this all hangs together well enough, based on what we know and what we soon learn of the personalities, histories, and cultures involved. But for the game to expect the player to come up with such a seemingly random action as lunging for the crucifix and breaking it is asking an awful lot of anyone unfamiliar with the novel. It’s not impossible to imagine the uninitiated player eventually coming up with it on her own, especially as Lebling is good enough to drop some subtle hints about the crucifix “on its long chain waving mockingly before your face,” but she’ll likely do so only by dying and restoring many times.

Shogun is the only Infocom game outside of Leather Goddesses of Phobos in which you have to “make love to” someone — or type another euphemism, if you like — in order to score points. (Unfortunately, you can’t use “pillow” as a verb. This Dorte finds deeply disappointing.) It’s also, needless to say, the only one with nudity. Too bad Blackthorne is covering up his legendary manly member, whose size is a constant point of discussion in the book.

And this is far from the worst of Lebling’s “read James Clavell’s mind” moments. In their announcement of the game in their newsletter, Infocom noted that “the key to success in the interactive Shogun is the ability to act as the British pilot-major Blackthorne would.” For the player who hasn’t read the book and thus doesn’t know Blackthorne, this is quite a confusing proposition. For the player who has, the game falls into a rote pattern. Remember (or look up) what Blackthorne did in the book, figure out how and when to phrase it to the parser, and you get some points and get to live a little longer. Do anything else, and you die or get a message saying “this scene is no longer winnable” and get to try again. In between, you do a lot of waiting and examining, and lots of reading of textual cut scenes — called “interludes” by the game — that grow steadily lengthier as the story progresses and Blackthorne’s part in it becomes more and more ancillary.

In a telling indication of how the times had changed for Infocom, by far the most impressive aspect of Shogun is its visual presentation. Promoted, like the earlier Zork Zero, as “graphical interactive fiction,” it and the simultaneously released Journey are the first Infocom games to unabashedly indulge in pictures for their own sake, abandoning Steve Mereztky’s insistence that his game’s graphics always serve a practical gameplay function. Shogun‘s pictures, drawn in the style of classical Japanese woodcuts by Donald Langosy, are lovely to look at and perfectly suit the atmosphere of the novel. The game’s one truly innovative aspect is the same pictures’ presentation onscreen. Rather than being displayed in a static window, they’re scattered around and within the scrolling text in various positions, giving the game the look of an unfurling illustrated scroll. Infocom had had their share of trouble figuring out the graphics thing, but Shogun demonstrates that, clever bunch that they were, they were learning quickly. Already Infocom’s visual palette was far more sophisticated than that of competitors like Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9 who had been doing text adventures with pictures for years. Pity they wouldn’t have much more time to experiment.

“The socks stay on, Mariko!”[2]

But of course, as Infocom’s vintage advertisements loved to tell us, visuals alone do not a great game make. Shogun stands today as the most unloved and unlovable of all Infocom’s games, a soulless exercise in pure commerce that didn’t make a whole lot of sense even on that basis. Released in March of 1989, its sales were, like those of all of this final run of graphical games, minuscule. In my opinion and, I would venture, that of a substantial number of others, it represents the absolute nadir of Infocom’s 35-game catalog. It is, needless to say, the merest footnote to the bestselling catalog of James Clavell, who died in 1994. And, indeed, it’s little more worthy of discussion in the context of Infocom’s history; the words I’ve devoted to it already are far more than it deserves. I have two more Infocom games to discuss in future articles, each with problems of their own, but we can take consolation in one thing: it will never, ever get as bad as this again. This, my friends, is what the bottom of the barrel looks like.

(Sources: As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Some of it is also drawn from Jason’s “Infocom Cabinet” of vintage documents. And the very last issue of Infocom’s The Status Line newsletter, from Spring 1989.)

1. Mediagenic was known as Activision until mid-1988. To avoid confusion, I just stick with the name “Mediagenic” in this article. ↩

2. Al and Peg ↩

Comments
55 Responses

- Pedro Timóteo

July 7, 2016 at 4:57 pm

First, great as always. :)

Second, yes, the novel (which I have read several times, and also listened to the excellent audiobook)’s end is quite abrupt and disappointing, but I still love the book and would recommend it to anyone. The problem with writing about the war is that it would add more years to the story, and Blackthorne would be little more than an observer (which was already happening to a degree near the end of the book).

Third, a typo: “diamyo” should be “daimyo”. Look for it at least 3 times. :)

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 7:45 am

Thanks!

- djogo patrao

July 7, 2016 at 5:05 pm

Great article, as always! I actually liked the book and didn’t missed a “big ending” – although by hollywood standards it should have one. For me, the overall strategy of Toranaga is the most compelling aspect of the book.

Btw , I think “diamyo” should be “daimyo”.

Thanks!

- Duncan Stevens

July 7, 2016 at 5:26 pm

I read the book as a kid, a very long time ago, and I don’t recall the non-ending for some reason. (I do remember snickering at the euphemisms for sex and anatomy, though.)

I never played the game, and even if I were inclined to, it’s…rather hard to find now. (Indeed, I’m curious about how you managed to get a copy.) I hope you had fun laughing at it, even if that’s not the usual Infocom experience.

- Marcus Johnson

July 7, 2016 at 7:54 pm

You can play the DOS version in your browser at the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/msdos_James_Clavells_Shogun_1988

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 7:49 am

Like a lot of the stuff I play and write about, my source was not, strictly speaking, legal. ;) It’s available on lots of the abandonware archives, including even archive.org. I did make the mistake of buying Shogun for my Amiga back in the day — one of a bare handful of thousands who did so — so I figure I’m ethically covered.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 8, 2016 at 9:27 am

Yes, I don’t think you can get Shogun legally these days, except perhaps buying it second-hand on eBay.

Personally, I have no qualms about “abandonwaring” a game that absolutely isn’t available for sale, but opinions may vary. :)

- Matthew Heiti

July 7, 2016 at 5:30 pm

Excellent article! I remember that book looming on the shelf at home. I never did read it and opted for the equally lenghty Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa.

Might be of interest to you that there was actually another computer game released based on this book in 1986 (link to the lemon page here – http://www.lemon64.com/games/details.php?ID=2300)

I owned this Mastertronic version for the C64 growing up. It was a lovely game; a little pocket universe of tactics, alliances, betrayal and negotiation.

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 7:52 am

Yeah, I did discover that and thought about trying to work it in, but it would have ruined the article’s flow and didn’t seem all that ultimately important to the Infocom game. Thanks for mentioning it here, though! I have no personal experience with it, but it sounds like it was more interesting than the Infocom game.

- Andrew Plotkin

July 7, 2016 at 5:38 pm

It’s worth talking about the availability issue, actually. HHGG and Shogun are the two Infocom parser games that completely vanished from Activision’s catalog after the LTOI era (1992). HHGG reappeared on Douglas Adams’ personal web site, and Shogun was just gone.

Because of this, we’ve always assumed that the copyrights of those games were handed over to the titular authors. (And that Adams was much happier with his game than Clavell, or Clavell’s estate, was about his.) But this has only ever been an assumption.

In your researches, have you come across anything to confirm or deny this?

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 7:55 am

I know that in the case of Douglas Adams the game reverted to him after a certain window of time, probably ten years. His estate, as you noted, later began to license it to the BBC, making it the easiest of all Infocom games for the casual player to access today. Circumstantial evidence would indicate that Shogun had the same deal, but, it being a bad game of no commercial value whatsoever, the Clavell estate may not even know they own it.

- Merman

July 7, 2016 at 5:40 pm

It is also worth mentioning the other Shogun game based on the novel, created by Virgin Games.

http://www.gb64.com/game.php?id=6777&d=18&h=0

This is an arcade adventure, with the player choosing a character type and then exploring stylised areas to gain allies, fight enemies and earn enough respect to be made Shogun.

James Clavell’s Tai-Pan also inspired an 8-bit game.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 8, 2016 at 9:24 am

James Clavell’s Tai-Pan also inspired an 8-bit game.

Yes. Interestingly, the closest thing to Sid Meier’s Pirates! on the Spectrum. Decent game (with great graphics and music for the time), but it had a big problem, IMO: when in town, instead of picking options from a menu, you had to walk through the maze-like streets, which mostly looked the same, and each town had a *different* map (generated from a seed, so it didn’t change from game to game). It quickly became *quite* boring, especially at the beginning of the game, where you had to walk around press-ganging drunken citizens until you filled your crew.

The mini-games were far more action-oriented than Pirates!’s (including one that was basically a Gauntlet clone), but also quite harder.

Pity the Spectrum (which I had back then) never got Pirates!. The Amstrad CPC did, but it was a very poor port of the C64 original, including automatically converted graphics, and playing much slower…

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 10:33 am

Another version of Tai-Pan was quite popular on the Apple II in the early days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taipan!/. Given the nature of the industry at the time, I would guess it to have been unlicensed. I’ve often suspected it to have been an influence on Elite and later Pirates!, but, given I’ve never found any hard evidence to back up my suspicion, never wrote that in the articles on those games.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 11, 2016 at 2:09 pm

I found out about that when, some >10 years ago, I was experimenting with an Apple II emulator and trying out its games (as, being Portuguese, I never even saw a physical Apple II in front of me, although my stepmother (a teacher) once mentioned her school having at least a single IIc). I tried out that game wondering if it was a port of the 1987 game, in fact. It wasn’t, of course.

By the way, apparently your WordPress removed the exclamation mark from the end of the URL in your comment above, so it’s now pointing to the wrong Wikipedia article.

- Jimmy Maher

July 11, 2016 at 2:27 pm

Thanks! Should be fixed now.

- Captain Rufus

July 7, 2016 at 7:14 pm

Oddly enough there is also a C64 action adventure game based on the book that came out roughly at the same time.

- Lisa H.

July 7, 2016 at 7:36 pm

Do anything else, and you die or get a message saying “this scene is no longer winnable”

Wow. Disheartening, eh? Although I suppose I should be glad they saw fit to tell you outright, rather than leaving you to flounder.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 7, 2016 at 9:16 pm

There’s a funny example in the last screenshot: don’t get in the bathtub with Mariko in time, the romance never begins… game over.

- Jayle Enn

July 7, 2016 at 9:27 pm

…while the player who hasn’t will have no idea whatsoever what’s expected of her at any given juncture.

Oh god, that was me. I got through the first scene by using the hint system as a walkthrough, then… I think I got peed on by the Daimyo. Somewhere in there I realized that I was playing high-stakes mad-libs with a transcript and gave up on it. :(

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 7:59 am

For what it’s worth, you’re *supposed* to get peed on. Fail to do so (or, maybe better said, fail to have it done to you) and it’s game over again. Why? Because that’s what happened in the book, of course!

- Kaitain

July 7, 2016 at 10:30 pm

Minor typo:

diamyo -> daimyo

I remember the Chamberlain series very well. It seemed very dark and violent for the time…no doubt would come across as being very tame stuff these days. Sean Connery was the producers’ first choice for the role of Blackthorne, but he wasn’t interested (or they didn’t offer enough).

- Keith Palmer

July 8, 2016 at 12:03 am

Knowing we’d get to this game in time, and fully aware of the old dismissals of it (it is sort of interesting to know just how it began at last; I might have supposed Infocom was “scraping on its own for something that might be successful by that point”), I found and read an old copy of the novel not that long ago. I did muse a bit about the ambiguous fate a certain number of “best-sellers” seem to reach sooner or later (I do seem to put Herman Wouk’s roughly contemporaneous The Winds of War in the same category and might even have been a bit surprised to see him in the opening list; I suppose The Caine Mutiny could be invoked to correct me). All the same, I still seemed to plug through the pages with dispatch. (The only problem there is how often I wonder these days if I’m stuck thinking that if I don’t sweat and struggle to get through prose fiction, it must be “not worth the attention anyway…”) I certainly did wonder whether the character interaction was something that would “work” in interactive fiction; the early part of the novel, with the language barriers in place, might have seemed more interesting that way.

So far as the ending goes anyway, I suppose I was simply surprised; not seeming to recognize the name “Toranaga,” I supposed the protagonists had to be on the losing side. It took finishing the novel to realise it was a “all the characters have slightly different names from their historical inspirations” deal.

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 8:10 am

By coincidence, I’m actually reading The Caine Mutiny right now and enjoying the hell out of it. Is Herman Wouk not in literary fashion anymore? I’d never read him before. The Winds of War and War and Remembrance aren’t the sort of thing I usually go for anymore — as a kid I remember looking at them hard, but, little warmonger that I was, I wanted lots of combat action, and they seemed full of too much family/relationship stuff — but I was thinking about giving them a go at some point based on how good The Caine Mutiny is.

Michener is the most interesting figure on that list in terms of literary respectability. Once considered on a par with writers like Vidal and Mailer when his first book won the Pulitzer Prize, he pissed all his literary respectability away to start writing all those workmanlike historical doorstops. In compensation, he did sell 75 to 100 million books in his lifetime, which I’m sure helped to ease some of the pain of the critics’ sneers.

- Duncan Stevens

July 8, 2016 at 4:29 pm

I haven’t read Caine Mutiny, but both Winds of War and War and Remembrance are…not bad, once you accept that members of a specific family just happen to be in so many key places over the course of the war. The prose occasionally veers toward the purple, as I recall, but only occasionally. (I read them quite a while ago, but I was old enough that I’d have put down badly-written stuff of that length.) One device I found particularly interesting in the second one is that the action is intercut with a (fictional) German general’s dissenting view on why the war played out as it did.

- Keith Palmer

July 8, 2016 at 4:47 pm

Maybe that’s a fair enough summary of Winds of War/War and Remembrance. I can’t say I “disliked” them (the General’s commentary was also an interesting part of them to me), but perhaps my feeling was that as a sort of “everything in World War II fit into one fictional narrative” work, it was somehow “less profound” than a more focused novel (like The Caine Mutiny). This, though, might be a matter of “trying to present a personal reaction as a definitive judgment…”

- Alexander Freeman

July 8, 2016 at 3:34 am

“James Clavell’s fiction was in many ways no more thoughtful than the majority of the books clogging up the airport bestseller racks then and now…

Read by adults, such passages… er, extracts are still riotously entertaining in the way that only truly committed Bad Writing can be.

And then it all just… stops, leaving more loose threads dangling than my most raggedy tee-shirt. I’ve read many books with unsatisfying endings, but I’ve never read an ending quite as half-assed as this one. It’s all finally come down to the war that’s been looming throughout the previous 1100-plus pages. We’re all ready for the bloody climax. Instead Clavell gives us a three-page summary of what might have happened next if he’d actually bothered to write it. It’s for all the world like Clavell, who admitted that he wrote his novels with no plan whatsoever, simply got tired of this one, decided 1100 pages was more than enough and just stopped in medias res…

His written requests for guidance were answered with the blunt reply that Clavell had written the book more than a decade ago and didn’t remember that much about it…”

Well, no wonder I’ve never heard anything about Clavell outside Shogun and Infocom! It sounds as though he was just some mediocre writer who didn’t take pride in his work.

“Shogun the game was a misbegotten, unloved project from the start, a project for which absolutely no one in the Infocom, Mediagenic, or Clavell camps had the slightest creative passion… It was hard to imagine, however, that there was a huge crowd of computer gamers dying to relive the adventures of John Blackthorne interactively. Why this of all licenses? Why now?”

That makes me wonder why Activision agreed to it.

“The game’s one truly innovative aspect is the same pictures’ presentation onscreen. Rather than being displayed in a static window, they’re scattered around and within the scrolling text in various positions, giving the game the look of an unfurling illustrated scroll.”

*Shrugs shoulders* Well, I dunno. I kind of like how a static window lets the picture remain on the screen. Maybe the “illustrated scroll” approach works better with the Japanese-style artwork here, but I don’t think it would work better with other illustrated games. The fact that Arthur took the static-window approach later makes me think Infocom thought the same way.

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 8:15 am

“Just some mediocre writer” is pretty harsh. There’s something in Clavell and especially Shogun to which a whole lot of people respond. I’m not one of those people — to me he *is* just a mediocre (at best) writer — but, hey, different strokes for different folks and all that.

- Poddy

July 8, 2016 at 4:26 am

I remember Shogun fondly as one of those doorstops I lugged from class to class as an unloved teenager, and it had struck me as a really interesting First Contact story at the time.

Real question, though, are those illustrations actually considered nice by many people? I keep scrolling up to go look at naked Mariko because I am sure, deadly sure, that women’s legs don’t attach that way.

- Lisa H.

July 8, 2016 at 5:40 am

*sings* “The left hip’s connected to the… right knee!”

Wait, that can’t be right…

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 8:17 am

I think the pictures are deliberately stylized to resemble classical Japanese woodcuts. But, knowing nothing about classical Japanese woodcuts, I could be wrong.

- Alexander Freeman

July 8, 2016 at 3:56 pm

There definitely supposed to look like that. In fact, this:
http://www.filfre.net/2016/07/shogun/james_clavells_shogun_r295_1988activision_001/
bears a passing resemblance to this:
http://blog.art.com/artwiki/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/hokusai-great-wave-at-kanagawa-japanese-artwork.png

- Cliffy

October 7, 2016 at 6:41 pm

A few years back I saw an exhibition of that woodcut series, most of them early pressings (when printing off the woodcuts, the process would eventually damage the carving, so prints made earlier in the run have much sharper lines). Those things are no joke. If you ever get a chance to see an original print of the Great Wave at Kanagawa, **go**.

- Duncan Stevens

July 8, 2016 at 4:12 pm

FYI, I’m no expert here, but a considerably better-written novel about the Dutch in Japan during the Edo period is David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

- matt w

July 9, 2016 at 12:32 pm

It certainly is much better written, but I had problems with the idea that there was all this meticulously researched stuff and then the plot hinged on a pnaavonyvfgvp onol-zheqrevat frk fynir vzzbegnyvgl phyg (rot13 for extreme spoilage of the first degree), which as far as I can tell has no basis in fact whatsoever. Which is a problem both because it doesn’t fit well with the meticulously researched stuff and also because it comes across as pretty racist. Imagine if a similar plot were part of a historical novel about medieval Jewish communities.

- Lisa H.

July 10, 2016 at 2:57 am

the plot hinged on a pnaavonyvfgvp onol-zheqrevat frk fynir vzzbegnyvgl phyg

Wow, what? Seriously?! Maybe I’m glad I haven’t played this game.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 10, 2016 at 2:12 pm

Either I misunderstood something, or that had nothing to do with this game (and there’s certainly nothing like it in the Shogun novel)…

- Jubal

July 11, 2016 at 12:55 am

The “frk fynir vzzbegnyvgl phyg” is in the David Mitchell novel mentioned in Duncan Stevens’ comment, not Shogun, which indeed features nothing of the sort.

- Lisa H.

July 11, 2016 at 2:29 am

Ah, sorry, I did misunderstand. I subscribe to the comments feed, so I often read them out of direct context.

- Duncan Stevens

July 11, 2016 at 2:04 pm

Imagine if a similar plot were part of a historical novel about medieval Jewish communities.

Then it would have set off a lot more alarms because it played to specific, tired anti-Semitic smears. The phyg in Thousand Autumns doesn’t reinforce any stereotype about Asian or Japanese people, at least not one I’d ever heard of. (And there are a lot of applicable stereotypes that the novel carefully avoids–the guy who looks like a white savior ends up not actually saving anyone, the apparently passive Asian female bails herself out of her exploitative situation, etc.) But I take your point about the strangeness of dropping a wholly invented idea into an otherwise carefully researched setting.

- matt w

July 12, 2016 at 3:15 am

Isn’t Sinister Oriental Cult a pernicious stereotype about Asians?

More to the point, Mitchell can only get away with this and retain his critical respectability because of the foreignness of Japan to his audience. If he tried to write a meticulously researched book about the history of Christianity whose plot hinged on that sort of thing, the congoscenti would laugh at it the way they laughed at The Da Vinci Code.

- Duncan Stevens

July 12, 2016 at 3:56 am

There are sinister cults the world over, many of them depicted in popular culture, so I’m going to go with “no.” Had Mitchell written a book about an evil exploitative cult in Texas, no one would have batted an eye.

I’m pretty sure people laugh at Dan Brown in large part because of his writing, and I think you may overstate the insistence on strict historical plausibility among literary critics. The Name of the Rose, for instance, has a fairly outlandish plot in a recognizable medieval Christian setting, but I don’t think critics scoff at it on that basis. (Yes, I know, it’s really all about semiotics, but still.)

- Petter Sjölund

July 9, 2016 at 2:09 am

It’s more than twenty years since I played it, but I actually remember the beginning of the game, while you’re still on your ship, as pretty good for its time. How does it hold up?

- Jimmy Maher

July 9, 2016 at 1:02 pm

The opening scene definitely is better than much of what follows. The game is more willing there to go after the spirit rather than the letter of the original story, using methods that work in an interactive context. Take, for instance, the Erasmus’s crew, whom Clavell in the novel establishes through lots of flashbacks, exposition, and dialog to be, one or two exceptions aside, a pretty craven, lazy, drunken, useless bunch. With far fewer words at his disposal, Lebling establishes the same thing by inserting a little mystery story of a puzzle involving Blackthorne’s last apple, which one of the crew has stolen. The way you wind up retrieving it does much to establish Blackthorne’s character as well as a two-fisted man of action, helping to set your expectations for what sort of actions the game is likely to consider appropriate for him. If there’d been more of that and less direct transcription of the novel’s events, Shogun would have been a much better game.

- Petter Sjölund

July 9, 2016 at 11:38 pm

Yeah, that’s about what I remembered. I my memory it also has this nice atmosphere of being trapped in this ship, starving and lost at sea, that has no counterpart in the rest of the game.
On another note, some of the things you criticize this game of, such as the player pantomiming her way through a re-creation of the book, might apply to the Hitchhiker’s Guide game as well. When you think about it, large parts of the latter game are about methodically clueing you towards doing some pretty illogical things. Perhaps the difference between a terrible game and a great one sometimes only is the amount of time and polish spent on it.

- Jimmy Maher

July 10, 2016 at 8:18 am

I don’t really see much comparison myself. While I suppose one could say that the first third to half of Hitchhiker’s does have you to some extent pantomiming your way through the book, that’s only in the broad strokes; it’s full of original puzzles and situations that work in the context of interactive fiction from the beginning. And then of course it diverges radically once you get to the Heart of Gold.

I wouldn’t even say that Shogun’s core problems have much to do with polish per se. Even at this late date and in this dispiriting atmosphere, Infocom’s text is still polished and copy-edited to a degree matched by no one else in the industry, and I never encountered anything that seemed like an outright bug. Shogun’s problems are down to something more fundamental than a lack of polishing.

- Petter Sjölund

July 10, 2016 at 10:49 am

Well, it’s some time since I played them both, but I think there are some similarities. Hitchhiker’s doesn’t follow the book very closely, but there is a similar pattern of short, loosely connected scenes that you “win” by finding the right outlandish command to type. Sebz rawbl cbrgel naq jenc gur gbjry nebhaq zl urnq gb gnfgr qnexarff naq gnxr ab grn. Of course this is only part of Hitchhiker’s, and it has some great puzzles and writing. But it might have been something like that Lebling was aiming at.

- matt w

July 11, 2016 at 10:37 am

I don’t think the last two you mentioned are even in the book, though.

- Bumvelcrow

July 9, 2016 at 6:21 am

Whilst I wouldn’t argue that it’s not a great game, I do have good memories of the early parts, perhaps due to the way the graphics enhance the already tension-filled atmosphere generated by the text. After that it drifted and I lost interest but it had enough of an impact that it left me with a permanent interest in Japanese culture and even tried to learn the language. I don’t think I can say that about any other game. Well, other than Trinity – I think that helped turn me into a Physicist!
I did read the book, after the game, but remember very little of it after the early culture shock. I do tend to keep a mental list of bad endings I can repeatedly complain about, and Shogun isn’t on it so it can’t have been that bad. Or perhaps I’d just tuned out by then and was glad when it was over.

- Brian Bagnall

July 10, 2016 at 4:42 pm

I have vague memories of seeing snippets of this miniseries when I was young and recall being horrified when a few crew-members were boiled alive. Then maybe 10 years ago in a fit of nostalgia revisiting miniseries like V and The Day After it got on my watch list. It was definitely good enough to hold my attention throughout the series, although Richard Chamberlain did seem a little miscast to me. Sean Connery certainly would have elevated this to new heights. I also ended up reading the book and being quite impressed with what he had created.

Game of Thrones seems to be hitting that same sweet spot for mass audiences that Shogun hit back then: a tapestry of characters spinning plots to rule the land, surprise deaths of established characters, lurid sex scenes and a world very alien from our own.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 14, 2016 at 8:31 am

One more, I think:

Mediagenic’s absolute mania for licensed games following the accession of Bruce Davis to the CEO’s chair

Shouldn’t this be “ascension”?

- Jimmy Maher

July 14, 2016 at 9:11 am

Either would work, but I like “accession” here. It’s usually used in relation to the coming of a king into his rightful power, and I think that kind of fits with the way Bruce Davis seemed to see himself and certainly the way that Infocom saw him. It’s a little cheeky, sure, but what the hell.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 14, 2016 at 3:54 pm

Fair enough. I didn’t know this usage of “accession”, thanks. :)

- Markus

July 18, 2016 at 11:08 am

Maybe tell Dorte that after reading this, I’m inspired to use “go pillow yourself” in conversation…

- Cliffy

October 7, 2016 at 7:24 pm

When I learned via my purchase of Lost Treasures v. 2 in ’94 or thereabouts that Infocom had done a Shōgun adaptation after I’d lost track of them in the late ’80’s (just like everyone else), I thought it made perfect sense. While Shōgun might not have been a literary masterwork, on the basis of the miniseries it had a pedigree alongside that of Roots and Thornbirds — perhaps this wasn’t the stuff that they were talking about in university English departments, but within the popular mainstream it had an air of erudition and sophistication that seemed to me exactly the attitude Infocom had cultivated during its mid-’80’s heyday.

Of course, had I read the book, perhaps I would have recognized that this was an illusion. But most of the potential audience hadn’t read it, either — they just knew that it had been considered an important work, and the subject of plenty of water-cooler conversation, not all that long ago.

It’s too bad the circumstances of the game’s creation were so confining. But I think the idea of it was one of the few things Davis got right with the handling of Infocom. (And the artwork is lovely.)

Journey
July 15, 2016

The parser is and has always been both the text adventure’s ace in the hole and its Achilles heel. Devotees will tell you, correctly in my opinion, that it offers possibilities for interaction — even, one might say, possibilities for interactive wonder — allowed by no other interface. Detractors will tell you, also correctly, that it’s too persnickety, too difficult to use, that in its opacity and inscrutability it violates every rule of modern interface design. Devotees will reply, yet again in my opinion correctly, that if you take away the parser you take away the magic. What can compare with typing some crazy command and seeing it work? What, the detractors reply, can frustrate more than figuring out what to do, not being able to get the parser to acknowledge your efforts, turning to a walkthrough, and finding out you were simply using the wrong verb or the wrong phrasing? And so we go, round and round and round. This waltz of point and counterpoint says as much about the text adventure’s decidedly limited mass appeal as it does about why some of us love the form so darn much.

For most of the text adventure’s lifespan people have been devising various ways to try to break the cycle, to capture at least some of the magic without any of the pain. Even Infocom, whose parser was legendary in its day, had a go in their final days at doing away with the gnarly, troublesome thing altogether, via a game called Journey.

The idea that became Journey can be dated to November 6, 1987, when a proposed “new project” emerged from an internal planning meeting. By that point, attitudes about Infocom’s future prospects had broken into two schools of thought. One view, still dominant inside Infocom’s own offices but viewed with increasing skepticism in the headquarters of their corporate masters Mediagenic,[1] held that the fundamental model of interaction that Infocom’s games had always utilized, that of reading text and typing commands in response, was still commercially viable in the broad strokes. What was needed was to make that model a bit more visually appealing and accessible, by adding pictures and other audiovisual pizazz to break up their walls of text and by making the parser smarter and friendlier. The other view held that Infocom needed to throw out all their old approaches — among them their parser — and tackle their new role as Mediagenic’s designated “master storytellers” with an entirely blank slate. Conservatives versus radicals, denialists versus realists — call the camps what you will, the lines were drawn.

True to the dominant internal opinion, Infocom put the majority of their resources into one last kick at the can for their parser-based games, putting three new illustrated but still parser-driven text adventures into development. They hedged their bets just a little, however, by making sure the new version 6 Z-Machine they had in development to power those games could support purely mouse-based point-and-click interaction as well the traditional keyboard-driven approach. And then they started this “new project” of theirs to see what the possibilities for non-parser-based adventuring might really be.

The meeting notes read that said new project should be “true to [the] corporate philosophy”; that it should “embody the concept of ‘interactive storytelling'”; that it should “employ a simple, intuitive user interface unlike the one used in our traditional IF games”; and that, while initially “intended for use on existing home computers,” it should be “readily adaptable to other interactive media, such as CD-I, DVI, Nintendo, etc.” Finally, the plan called for “minimal (or optional) use of text.” This last would fall by the wayside in light of Infocom’s limited resources and complete lack of experience working in anything other than text; instead they would settle for lots of pictures to accompany the text. Otherwise, though, the game Marc Blank wrote in response to this plan would hew quite closely to it.

Ironically, it was Blank who had been the mastermind behind the magnificent parser, first implemented as part of the original Zork at MIT, that had been so key to Infocom’s ascendancy during the first half of the 1980s. Now he would be working on the interface that might just become its replacement if the conservative camp should prove mistaken in their faith in the old ways. But then, Blank wasn’t much of a sentimentalist. Assuming he thought of it at all, the idea of sounding the death knell of the traditional Infocom game didn’t bother him one bit. On the contrary, this new project was a perfect fit for Blank, exactly the sort of medium-advancing technical challenge he loved. He insists today that throughout his work with Infocom game design and story were always secondary in his mind to the technology that enabled them. Thus virtually every one of the games with which he was most intimately involved, whether as the officially recognized Implementor or the self-styled “wizard behind the curtain” enabling the creativity of another, pushed Infocom’s technology forward in one way or another. That would be more true than ever of Journey, which Blank created as he had Border Zone from the West Coast, working as an independent contractor rather than an Infocom employee. Blank:

Journey was an experiment to find out whether you could play an interactive story without having to type. It was all about whether you could still have people feel they had the ability to do a lot of different things, but not force them to guess words or use a keyboard. A lot of people just don’t like that; they aren’t good at it. It’s a turn-off. For me, the idea was to just experiment with another style of evolving the story — a different interface, just to see where it would go.

Even more so conceptually than technically, this new interface of his was going to be a tricky business. A bunch of hard-branching links in the form of a computerized Choose Your Own Adventure book was likely to appeal to no one. At the same time, though, to simply write a traditional text adventure in which the parser was a menu-based labyrinth of verbs and nouns would be both technically impractical — there wouldn’t be enough space on the screen for such a thing for one thing, and even the new version 6 Z-Machine didn’t support scrolling menus — and unplayable in its sheer complication. Blank would need to thread the needle, staking a middle ground between the extreme granularity of Zork and the huge irreversible plot swings that accompany almost every branch in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. To a rather remarkable degree really, he succeeded in doing just that.

Blank’s first brilliant stroke was to make Journey, if not quite a full-fledged CRPG, at least a CRPG-like experience. You the player identify most closely with a single character named Tag, who also serves as the author of the past-tense “chronicle” of the adventure that you’re helping him to create. You’re responsible for managing several of his companions in adventure as well, however, each with his own strengths, weaknesses, and special abilities. Most notably, the wizard Praxix can cast spells, each of which requires a certain combination of reagents which you’ll need to collect over the course of your Journey. Many problems can be solved in multiple ways, using different spells or combinations of spells, the special abilities of one character or another, and/or your own native cleverness. While the scope of possibility in Journey is undeniably limited in comparison to a traditional Infocom game, in practice it feels broader than you might expect.

To understand a little better how that might be, let’s have a closer look at the interface, as shown in the screenshot above. You’ll notice that the menu at the bottom of the screen is divided into five columns. The first contains possibilities that apply to the entire party — usually involving movement — along with access to the “Game” menu of utility commands. The second column, which isn’t actually clickable, lists each character in the party; the party can include up to five people, who can come and go according to choices and circumstances. The third, fourth, and fifth columns contain “verbs” applying only to the individual party member whose row they inhabit; these also come and go as circumstances change. Many verbs will lead to a further menu or menus of “nouns.” For example, asking Praxix the wizard to “cast” leads first to a direct-object list of available spells, and then on to an indirect-object list of possible spell targets, as shown in the screenshot below. Clicking on the name of Bergon to the far right on that screen would complete a command equivalent to typing “cast elevation on Bergon” in a traditional Infocom game. The whole system is elegant and well thought-through. Limited though it may be in contrast to a parser, it nevertheless presents a vastly larger possibility space than a Choose Your Own Adventure story, not least because it has a world model behind it that’s not all that far removed from the one found in any other Infocom game.

Journey is, as you’ve doubtless gathered by now, a high-fantasy story, a quality that, combined with the CRPG-like flavor, delighted a beleaguered marketing department still searching desperately for a counter to the huge popularity of the Ultima, Bard’s Tale, and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons series. Looking for a way to distinguish it from Infocom’s more traditional “graphical interactive fiction,” marketing dubbed it a “role-play chronicle” — not exactly a phrase that trips off the tongue. Blank:

I wanted to call it ‘role-playing fiction.’ They came back with role-play chronicle, and I said, “What does that mean?” They said, “Well, it’s like a chronicle,” and I said, “Yeah, it sort of is because it’s told in the past tense.” So they just sort of invented a phrase. It’s not my favorite, but it’s passable, and I don’t think Journey will stand or fall on what category you put it in. There are a lot of games that are called this type or that, but what really matters is what people think of them.

Awkward though marketing’s name may have been, there is indeed some truth behind it. One of the more interesting aspects of the game is its commitment to the idea of being a chronicle — or, if you like, a novel — that you, through Tag, are creating as you play. If you choose to make a transcript of your adventure, you can opt to have it not include your explicit command choices if you like, just the text that appears in response. The end result can read surprisingly well — a little disjointed at times, yes, but far better than would, say, Zork in this format.

There is, granted, no denying the story’s derivative nature; this is a game that absolutely oozes Tolkien, a fact that Infocom’s marketing department, far from concealing or denying, trumpeted. Journey, runs the game’s official announcement in Infocom’s The Status Line newsletter, is “a classic narrative in the exciting tradition of Tolkien” that “plunges you into an uncharted world of dwarves, elves, nymphs, and wizards.” True to its inspiration, Tag, ultimately the hero of the story, is seemingly the meekest and weakest of a group of disparate companions who form a fellowship and set out on a lonely quest to save their land from an encroaching evil that threatens their civilization’s very existence. Sound familiar? Name a proper noun in The Fellowship of the Ring, and chances are it has an analogue in Journey.

For instance, in place of Tolkien’s magic rings Journey has magic stones as the key to defeating the Dread Lord, its version of Sauron. In this extract, Gandalf… I mean, the great wizard Astrix tells the party of the true nature of their quest.

"I have been following your progress with great interest," the Wizard said, stroking his stringy gray beard. "You are a very resourceful group, that is certain!"

His voice then became dark. "The question is: Have you mettle enough to make siege on the Dread Lord himself?" And then, smiling, the darkness fell from his voice, and he answered his own question, "We shall see, I suppose; we shall see."

Leading us to his hearth, he sat us in a semi-circle around the blazing fire and spoke. "There is a story I must tell, a story of Seven Stones. Created in a time lost to living memory, these Stones contained the very strength and essence of our world. Of the Seven, Four were entrusted to the races of men who could use them best: Elves, Dwarves, Nymphs, and Wizards.

"These are the Four: the Elf Stone, green as the forests of old, and the Dwarf Stone, brown as the caverns of Forn a-klamen; the Nymph Stone, blue as the deep waters of M'nera, and the Wizard Stone, red as the dark fire of Serdi.

"The four races are now sundered, and the Four have long been kept apart, but now, with the Dread Lord rearing his misshapen head in our lands, we must bring them together again. For with them, we can hope to find the Two, and then, finally, the One with whose help we can destroy all Evil.

"For it is told that having the Four, it is possible to find the Two; so, also, do the Two give witness to their master, the One that in elder days was called the Anvil!"

Yet somehow Journey is far less cringe-worthy than it ought to be. For a designer who stubbornly, almost passive-aggressively insists today that the technology “was more important than the story” to him, Blank delivered some pretty fine writing at times for Infocom. Journey is full of sturdy, unpretentious prose evoking a world that, overwhelmingly derivative though it is, really does manage to feel epic and interesting in a way too few other gaming fictions have matched in my experience. I was always interested to explore the world’s various corners, always happy and genuinely curious when the opportunity arose for Tag to learn a little more about it from one of the other characters. Coming from me, someone who generally finds the real world much more interesting than fantastical ones, that’s high praise.

Indeed, when I first began to play Journey I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the whole experience. Not expecting to think much of this oddball effort released in Infocom’s dying days, I’d put off playing it for a long, long time; Journey was the very last of the 35 canonical Infocom games that I actually played. Yet when I finally did so I found it a unique and very pleasant experience. It felt very much like what I presumed it to be attempting to be: a more easygoing, relaxed take on the adventure game, where I could feel free to just take in the scenery and enjoy the story instead of stressing too much over puzzles or worrying overmuch about logistics. The game’s own rhetoric, obviously trying to wean players of conventional interactive fiction into this new way of doing things, encourages just such a relaxed approach. “Try to play as much as possible without overusing Save,” says the manual. “There are no ‘dead ends’ in Journey; feel free to experiment and take chances. Every action you take will cause the story to move forward.” This idea of a text adventure with no dead ends encourages comparisons with the contemporary works of Lucasfilm Games in the graphic-adventure realm, who were working toward the same goal in response to the notoriously player-hostile designs of Sierra. Marc Blank’s contemporary interview comments make the comparison feel even more apt:

We’ve learned a lot about interactive storytelling, but it’s been sort of clunky and not directed. I thought it would be interesting to design a story in which you really couldn’t get stuck. The choices you have to make are more tied into the story than into the minutia of manipulating objects. That really led to the whole style of telling the story and the interface. All that came out of the desire to try something like that.

So, yes, Journey and I had a great relationship for quite a while. And then it all went off the rails.

The first sneaking suspicion that something is rotten at the core of Journey may come when it hits you with some puzzles mid-way in that suddenly demand you type in phrases at a command line. Not only a betrayal of the “no-typing” premise that Infocom had hoped would make Journey amenable to game consoles and standalone CD-ROM players, these puzzles aren’t even particularly worthy in their own right, requiring intuitive leaps that feel borderline unfair, especially in contrast to the consummate ease with which the rest of the game is played. But, alas, they’re far from the worst of Journey‘s sins.

For there inevitably comes a point when you realize that everything Infocom has been saying about their game and everything the game has been implying about itself is a lie. Far from being the more easy-going sort of text adventure that it’s purported to be, Journey is a minefield of the very dead ends it decries, a cruel betrayal of everything it supposedly stands for. It turns out that there is exactly one correct path through the dozens of significant choices you make in playing the game to completion. Make one wrong choice and it’s all over. Worse — far worse — more often than not you are given no clue about the irrecoverable blunder you’ve just made. You might play on for hours before being brought up short.

The worst offenders to all notions of fairness and fun cluster around the magic system and its reagents. Remember those puzzles I mentioned that can be solved in multiple ways? Well, that’s true enough in the short term, but in the long term failing to solve each one in the arbitrary right way — i.e., solving it by using a spell instead of your wits, or simply by using the wrong spell — leaves you high and dry later on, without the necessary reagents you need to get further. Playing Journey becomes an exercise in stepping again and again through the story you already know, clicking your way hurriedly through the same text you’ve already read ten times or more, making slight adjustments each time through so as to get past whatever dead end stymied you last time. This process is exactly as much fun as it sounds. In contrast to this exercise in aggravation, Shogun‘s summary halting with a “this scene is no longer winnable” message when you fail to do what the novel’s version of Blackthorne did suddenly doesn’t seem so bad.

How incredible to think that Journey and Shogun stemmed from Marc Blank and Dave Lebling, designers of the original Zork and Infocom’s two most veteran Implementors of all. These two of all people ought to have known better. Both games’ failings feel part and parcel of the general malaise infecting everything Infocom did or tried to do after 1987. Absolutely nothing that anyone did seemed to come out right anymore.

Like those of Shogun, Journey‘s 100-plus pictures are the work of artist Donald Langosy.

As bizarre as it is to see such frankly awful game design from a company like Infocom and an Implementor like Marc Blank, the disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality of Journey is still stranger. “Unlike other games you may have played, there are virtually no dead ends,” the manual promises. “Any action you take will advance the story toward one of its many endings.” I suppose there’s a germ of truthfulness here if you count a dead end only as being stranded in a walking-dead situation; the nature of Journey‘s interface means that you will always get a clear message that the jig is up once you’ve run out of options to move forward, sometimes even accompanied by a helpful hint about where you might have messed up way back when. Still, the assertion seems disingenuous at best. When people talk about multiple endings and multiple paths through an interactive story, this isn’t quite what they mean. Ditto Blank’s contemporary claim that there are “dozens” of “alternative endings,” and “very few places where you get killed.” Really, what’s the practical difference between a losing ending that involves death and one that leaves Tag and his friends defeated in their quest? The Dread Lord wins either way.

Today, none of the people left at Infocom during this final unpleasant period of the company’s existence are particularly eager to talk about those painful end times or the final batch of underwhelming games they produced. Thus I’ve never seen anyone even begin to address the fraught question of just what the hell they were thinking in trying to sell this sow’s ear of a game as a silk purse. Part of the disconnect may have stemmed from the physical distance between Marc Blank and the people at Infocom who wrote the manual and did the marketing; this distance prevented Blank from being as intimately involved in every aspect of his game’s presentation as had long been the norm for the in-house team of Imps. And part of the problem may be that the rhetoric around the game was never modified after the original vision for Journey became the cut-down reality necessitated by time pressure and the space limitations of even the latest version 6 Z-Machine. (While Journey‘s text feels quite expansive in comparison to the typical parser-based Infocom game, Blank was still limited to around 70,000 words in total; the perception of loquacity is doubtless aided by the fact that, Journey‘s scope of player possibility being so much more limited, a much larger percentage of that text can be deployed in service of the main channel of the narrative rather than tributaries that many or most players will never see.) Regardless of the reasons, Journey stands as the most blatant and shameless instance of false advertising in Infocom’s history. It’s really, really hard to square marketing’s claim of “no dead ends” with a game that not only includes dead ends but will end up being defined by them in any player’s memory. Infocom was usually better than this — but then, that’s a statement one finds oneself making too often when looking at their final, troubled run of games.

True to the Tolkien model to the last, Infocom planned to make Journey the first of a trilogy of games, the latter entries of which would likely have been written by other authors. Blank proposed starting on an untitled sort of narrative war game as his own next project, “a variant of traditional FRP [fantasy-role-playing] games in which the predominant activity is combat on the battlefield level, as opposed to the hand-to-hand level.” It would use the menu-driven Journey interface to “make a complex game simple to use and learn” and to “provide a narrative force to the unfolding of the war.” But events that followed shortly after the concurrent release and complete commercial failure of Journey and Shogun in March of 1989 put the kibosh on any further use of Journey‘s interface in any context.

And that’s a shame because its interface had huge potential to bridge the gap between the micromanagement entailed by a parser and the sweeping, unsatisfyingly arbitrary plot-branching of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. It’s only in the past decade or so that modern authors have returned to the middle ground first explored by Blank in Journey, constructing choice-based works that include a substantial degree of world modeling behind their text and a more sophisticated approach to interaction than a tangle of irrevocable hard branches. In the years since they began to do so, the quantity of choice-based works submitted to the annual Interactive Fiction Competition has come to rival or exceed those of more traditional parser-based games, and commercial developers like Inkle Studios have enjoyed some financial success with the model. While they provide a very different experience than a parser-based game, my own early engagement with Journey demonstrates how compelling games of this stripe can be on their own terms. And they’re certainly much more viable than traditional text adventures as popular propositions, being so much more accessible to the parser-loathing majority of players.

Unsatisfactory though it is as a game, Journey marks Infocom’s final mad flash of innovation — a flash of innovation so forward-thinking that it would take other developers working in the field of interactive narrative a good fifteen years to catch up to it. Perhaps, then, it’s not such a terrible final legacy after all for Marc Blank in his role as Infocom’s innovator-in-chief — a role he continued to play, as Journey so amply proves, right to the end.

(Sources: As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Some of it is also drawn from Jason’s “Infocom Cabinet” of vintage documents. Plus the May 1989 issue of Questbusters, and the very last issue of Infocom’s The Status Line newsletter, from Spring 1989.)

1. Mediagenic was known as Activision until mid-1988. To avoid confusion, I just stick with the name “Mediagenic” in this article. ↩

Comments
53 Responses

- iPadCary

July 15, 2016 at 12:15 pm

Loooooove “Journey”!
Can’t wait for the “Quarterstaff” piece!

- Jayle Enn

July 15, 2016 at 2:41 pm

My strongest memory of Journey, besides the honestly quite pretty artwork, was finally resorting to a walkthrough in order to successfully complete it. Even then, I was still one or two reagents short at the last critical point and lost. I never tried again.

It’s frustrating, because it really was an intriguing little world, and because so much of the detail seems (in retrospect at least) to be hidden within the game’s meandering failure branches.

- Jimmy Maher

July 15, 2016 at 3:06 pm

I could be wrong, but I don’t think there’s really much detail hidden in the failure branches. I believe that wrong choices almost always cause you to *miss* things rather than heading off down the wrong path entirely. So, if you make all the right choices, you should end up with a very complete “chronicle” of the whole.

- Jayle Enn

July 17, 2016 at 5:30 am

It’s very possible that I’m misremembering, too! My memories of the game aren’t at all recent, and my perception of its flaws have probably grown worse from there.

On a less negative note, looking at the UI now makes me think of Japanese console RPGs, both in layout and the process of selecting characters and actions. Maniac Mansion too, come to really think about it.

- Alexander Freeman

July 15, 2016 at 6:26 pm

I’ve always found it odd how hard so many people seem to think the parser is. LOOK, GET BALL, and PUT BALL ON TABLE capture the three basic syntaxes that are expected the vast majority of the time (i.e. verb, verb direct object, and verb direct object preposition indirect object). Even as an eight-year-old, I could figure this out. Sure, some games have a lot of “guess the verb” moments, but those are usually poorly tested and not so well designed games anyway. Infocom showed sufficient testing can make those moments a rarity.

- Sniffnoy

July 15, 2016 at 11:53 pm

One common problem I’ve had with parser-based games is offering things for trade. I don’t think I’ve ever played one that recognized any variant of “Trade ball to Bill in exchange for dart”. Instead they seem to rely on you just giving the ball to Bill, and just saying, oh, Bill recognizes that you’re trying to trade it for the dart, he’s going to give you the dart now. But you can understand why I would be reluctant to enter such a command! And it’s really not explicit at all. Parsers should be able to handle that, IMO.

(Not that point-and-click adventure games are any better on that front. But you’d expect parsers to handle it better.)

- Alexander Freeman

July 16, 2016 at 4:11 am

Hmm… interesting. One possibility would be to allow TRADE BALL WITH BILL FOR DART or TRADE BALL FOR DART WITH BILL. It could also even be done with current parsers:
>TRADE BALL FOR DART
With whom?
>BILL
Or
>TRADE WITH BILL
What do you want to trade with him?
>BALL
What do you want to trade that for?
>DART

Still, it couldn’t hurt to have the parser transform IN EXCHANGE FOR into FOR.

I have thought about it accepting an additional indirect object that would be used with the preposition WITH as in SCREW SCREW IN THREAD WITH SCREWDRIVER or TIE CART TO HORSE WITH ROPE. However, I have wondered if that’s worth enhancing the parser for seeing as it can already be told to ask what with.

- Sniffnoy

July 16, 2016 at 10:59 pm

Wait, they *don’t* already let you do that? Can’t you already e.g. “kill dragon with sword”?

…or is the problem there that that’s only one prepositional complement, and the parser just thinks, “oh, this thing is the indirect object / prepositional complement”, rather than, y’know, distinguishing by preposition? So you can “throw ball with sling” or “throw ball to Bill” but not “throw ball to Bill with sling”?

I think this might be a problem I’ve run into before, actually. “Tie cart to horse with rope” is pretty natural; how is one supposed to use rope if one can’t tie X to Y with it? I think I have failed to use rope in that way before.

- matt w

July 17, 2016 at 3:07 am

It isn’t necessarily that the parser fails to distinguish by prepositional complement–current parsers, at least, would be perfectly capable of recognizing SET PHASER ON TABLE and SET PHASER TO STUN as different actions. In Inform 7 it’s as simple as writing:
Understand “set [something] to [something]” as putting it on.
Understand “set [something] to [text]” as setting it to.
and in fact the latter of those commands is built in to the standard library.

The problem (in Inform at least) is that the parser isn’t set up to handle three nouns at once. This is surmountable, though, with some hacking. The other problem is that the player isn’t going to know that you need to use that syntax–either they’re a parser aficionado, who knows that commands take two nouns max, or they’re a parser non-aficionado, who is probably going to be flailing around before they get in a position to “Tie cart to horse with rope.”

In games I’ve played where you need to do something like that, I think you either have to type “Tie cart to horse” and the game will use the rope if you have it and refuse the command if you don’t, or you need to type “Tie rope to cart” and then “tie rope to horse.”

- Sniffnoy

July 19, 2016 at 1:34 am

either they’re a parser aficionado, who knows that commands take two nouns max, or they’re a parser non-aficionado, who is probably going to be flailing around before they get in a position to “Tie cart to horse with rope.”

I don’t think that dichotomy is accurate at all? I’ve played several IF games and I honestly never realized before now that commands take at most two nouns, whether as objects, indirect objects, or prepositional complements. It’s not too hard to see someone else play and get the gist of it — you enter commands that you want your character to do, and these generally have to be unambiguous and granular in nature (and, y’know, understandable by a computer). But nothing about that rules out “tie cart to horse with rope”. That’s something that you could reasonably expect to be an atomic action, and it’s not even a complicated sentence. There’s no reason that this shouldn’t be handleable except for the limitations of the particular parsers that have actually been written; implementing it doesn’t require solving an AI problem or anything.

- matt w

July 17, 2016 at 2:55 am

The thing about this sort of thing is that the player has to know somehow that a command like TRADE BALL FOR DART or TRADE BALL TO BILL FOR DART will work. (Or type it without knowing–but if you’re relying on a player typing syntaxes that they won’t know then you’re going to wind up with players typing a lot of commands the parser won’t understand.) At least people who’ve been brought up on parser games are pretty well habituated to GET THIS and X THAT and PUT THIS IN THAT and UNLOCK THAT WITH THIS and some of the other things, but even with that kind of background you have to be pretty good at hinting the verb and syntax you want to use if you want the player to come up with TRADE THIS FOR THAT.

(Though I’m also wondering how this is supposed to work from a puzzle design standpoint–how do I know that trading Bill the ball for the dart is a good idea? If it’s that Bill has a dart I want and I can recognize that he needs the ball, I guess I expect GIVE BALL TO BILL to produce the result I need to move things along, on the general principle that if there’s something you can do in a game it’ll accomplish something…. taking on board Jimmy’s caveat about the Magnetic Scrolls games. If you have a game where the puzzles are that you really need to figure out which things to trade for what things according to some system, then the game should be explaining the verb you need to use.)

I have found that the parser really is a problem to people who aren’t used to the parser in some way (in my case I had to start getting used to it by going through a few games consulting walkthroughs very often). I made a fairly puzzleless game (if you go long enough without encountering anything it gives you a sharp nudge as to what to do next) which I’m pretty sure didn’t give any problems to the parser people who played it, and gave it to my non-IF writing group with some reasonably detailed instructions about the kind of commands that work. None of them could play it at all. One of them started out by typing “look out the window,” when all my testers knew not to try anything with the window because it wasn’t in the room description; then just typed “hint” until there wasn’t anything left to do. The one who was most committed to taking it seriously did some stuff but wound up typing “the kettle boils” when it was necessary to wait a little bit for the kettle to boil. Even if that had been an imperative mode command like “wait for the kettle to boil,” can you imagine what a nightmare it would be to implement that perfectly reasonable thing to want to do?

So yeah, in my experience even if you tell people what the syntaxes are you can’t just expect them to figure everything out. We’re depending on more familiarity with the parser than we may think.

As for the last point, I think if you’re making the player type a two-noun command and then quizzing them for a third noun (which, again, is something that you’d have to hint if you want anyone to divine that they need to do it), they could reasonably ask why you didn’t just implement the three-noun command instead of putting them to the extra trouble. “Because it’s hard to implement in the Inform parser” wouldn’t be a good answer.

- Alexander Freeman

July 17, 2016 at 3:37 am

“…or is the problem there that that’s only one prepositional complement”
Well, yes, that’s why I said an ADDITIONAL indirect object.

“The one who was most committed to taking it seriously did some stuff but wound up typing ‘the kettle boils’ when it was necessary to wait a little bit for the kettle to boil.”
Huh, that’s funny. Didn’t your game say to enter COMMANDS?

“Even if that had been an imperative mode command like ‘wait for the kettle to boil,’ can you imagine what a nightmare it would be to implement that perfectly reasonable thing to want to do?
“So yeah, in my experience even if you tell people what the syntaxes are you can’t just expect them to figure everything out. We’re depending on more familiarity with the parser than we may think.”
Well, if you say so. I suppose you’d know from that experience. I just don’t see how someone could that would fit any of the syntaxes I’ve just mentioned.

“As for the last point, I think if you’re making the player type a two-noun command and then quizzing them for a third noun… they could reasonably ask why you didn’t just implement the three-noun command instead of putting them to the extra trouble. ‘Because it’s hard to implement in the Inform parser’ wouldn’t be a good answer.”
Yeah, good point.

- Alexander Freeman

July 17, 2016 at 5:39 am

You know, thinking about this some more has given me an idea. Why not follow the example set by modern user interface design? Possibly have a few options for someone to choose from.

One would be having a bunch fields where the command line is. The first box would labeled VERB, the second DIRECT OBJECT, the third PREPOSITION, and the fourth INDIRECT OBJECT. Allow for both an adjective and a noun in each OBJECT box as needed.

Another would be to have something like Journey’s interface, but there’d be an “Other” option so that you can enter something not listed, making it less like a CYOA.

Finally, maybe below the command line, you could have some floating text saying VERB when it’s blank, ADJECTIVE or NOUN right below where the next word would be, and so on. It would serve as a real-time syntax checker.

- Jimmy Maher

July 17, 2016 at 8:13 am

I think that using a parser successfully requires a certain frame of mind that programmers have learned out of necessity but that can be a huge struggle for others. Those others aren’t stupid; they just quite literally haven’t learned to think the right way. Of course, the parser can be learned, and by most people within a few hours. But it can be a hugely frustrating experience in the beginning, and a completely foreign one at that. Most people today have no experience whatsoever with *typing* a command to the computer. The point-and-click paradigm attained absolute domination many years ago.

So, what we have is a uniquely foreign, opaque, and frustrating interface that causes most modern players to bounce off long before it clicks. I don’t have any solution to offer for this. As I wrote at the beginning of this article, I think it’s just the nature of the beast, meaning parser-based interactive fiction will always be a tiny niche hobby. Which is fine really.

- matt w

July 17, 2016 at 4:45 pm

“Most people today have no experience whatsoever with *typing* a command to the computer.”

I feel like this isn’t absolutely true. Most people probably have typed things into Google at some point, and in some ways IF parser commands are more like Google queries (especially ones like “What happens if Britain leaves the EU?”) than command-line things like cd C:\games\infocom\ or whatever. But Google has a lot going on under the hood to try to get meaningful results out of any old thing you type in, and can get away with keyword matching because it doesn’t afford you the kind of control that you need for a parser game to not be totally frustrating. (I don’t expect to type “show me that picture where Steve Nash and a bunch of other basketball players look totally goofy in the middle of the game” and get what I want. Though if anyone knows where I can find that picture please advise.) And also Google has a hunormous variety of possible responses, whereas a parser can only do what you’ve programmed in–the problem with “wait until the kettle boils” wouldn’t so much be parsing the command as programming in that behavior, and all the other similar behavior someone might expect.

And in its way the parser doesn’t really call on the habits of the programmer, IMO. The point is that if you’re able to get into the frame of mind where you’re able to interact with the parser then it relies on the extremely powerful language centers of your brain. It’s much more natural and quicker for me to type “put tea in teapot” than it would be to accomplish the same thing using a menu interface. But it’s only natural in that way because I’m not tempted to go outside the syntax I know the parser accepts.

(Alexander, that’s part of the reason that I didn’t include COMMANDS in my game, the other parts being that it was something I had written in a very short time and also that my testers, being people who played parser games, never needed a list of commands. The point of the game, whose source you can see here, is in large part that you’re supposed to be able to interact with it pretty naturally–you see a loaf of bread, you see a bread knife, you type “CUT THE BREAD WITH THE KNIFE.” And if you’re not getting things done the game will prompt you with something like “You’ll have to fill the kettle up with water.” whereupon “FILL THE KETTLE UP WITH WATER” works–though there’s some fussing with the bread box at the beginning where this doesn’t work as smoothly as I’d like. But giving an explicit list of commands felt like it would disrupt this smooth interaction, or at least an interaction that’s smooth for people who are a little used to it.)

So the frame of mind that you need for the parser is really that of someone who can use a restricted set of language in a precise way to obtain specific effects. Which means it’s like programming… if you’re programming in Inform 7.

- Jimmy Maher

July 18, 2016 at 2:27 pm

It’s a complicated topic, and it’s easy to get yourself into a hopeless tangle of likenesses and metaphors, but I would personally say that a command to a parser-driven text adventure is really more similar to an MS-DOS or Unix command than a Google query. You are, after all, issuing an imperative statement telling someone — the computer or your avatar — to do something. And, whereas a Google query that includes at least one or two recognizable words will always return *something*, a text-adventure parser can respond only to an extremely small, circumscribed subset of vocabulary and grammar. This, again, makes it much more similar to a command line or a programming language. But at the same time, a problem may very well be that, because the language of the parser superficially appears to be conventional English (or some other human language), there is an expectation created that the program will understand much more than it actually can. (Inform 7, brilliant as it is in so many respects, also suffers from the same syndrome.) And things like Google may also contribute to the notion that you can essentially type *anything* and expect a response.

I think programmers have an easier time with parsers because the text-adventure command line is really a language or language subset of its own that, like most programming languages, borrows from English (Inform 7 is only an extreme example of this phenomenon). But it’s heavily, rigidly structured to not only to make it easier for the computer to interpret but also — and this point is usually missed — to remove all possibility of ambiguity, which it accomplishes partly by forcing the player/programmer to think in a ridiculously granular way, something programmers are used to doing but many others are not. One could take this comparison even further by equating objects with which one can interact in a text adventure with variables, which must be declared beforehand in many programming languages. Again, programmers innately grasp that you can’t start messing about with the windows or the walls in a text adventure if they haven’t been “declared” via a mention in the text. This thought process can I think be more or less hard for many non-programmers encountering it for the first time to grasp.

I would say the closest thing to a parser used on an everyday basis would be something like Siri rather than a Google search. And I do think it’s perfectly possible to make a much, much smarter and more responsive parser. But it would require a research effort which makes sense for a global search engine or a widely used mobile-phone interface, but just doesn’t for a text adventure.

- Alexander Freeman

July 17, 2016 at 5:40 pm

I think you misunderstood what I meant, Matt. What I meant is that I thought your game made it perfectly clear that one is supposed to enter commands at the command prompt, not a COMMANDS verb that lists all the different verbs recognized.

Anyhow, I think I may be on to something here with using modern features to make the parser more user friendly. Once I have it working, I think you all will see what exactly I had in mind. Maybe I just didn’t do a good enough job of describing it in that comment.

- matt w

July 18, 2016 at 4:11 am

Ah, I did misunderstand about commands–I thought you meant to enter “COMMANDS” (which I have seen in some games). The game itself didn’t say to type commands at the prompt, but I did say that in the e-mail I sent out to the non-IF players with the game… but either it’s too hard to read the manual, or (somewhat my pet theory) it’s just hard to break the habit of typing what seems natural. Though in this case maybe the problem wasn’t even the syntax, as that the “kettle boils” person was frustrated at having to wait at that point and the person who examined the window just didn’t know what the conventions were for what was implemented… dunno.

Your ideas sound intriguing but the text field one would likely, for me, run into a problem were entering commands wouldn’t be like just typing my thoughts in the relevant way–typing PUT (tab) BREAD (tab) IN (tab) TOASTER (enter) just isn’t like typing PUT BREAD IN TOASTER. As for the real-time syntax checker, you might want to check out the Inform 7 extension Interactive Parsing by Jon Ingold (found here, only compatible with older versions of Inform I think, but you can get older versions from the Inform website). It tries to do something like that… didn’t catch on for whatever reason, and I’m not sure the demo Jon made of it is available. Jon went on to found Inkle, of 80 Days and Sorcery!, so he’s left the parser behind himself.

- Alexander Freeman

July 18, 2016 at 5:22 am

Yeah, I have thought about how to enter commands into the fields. one way would be to use tab, but it could also use space to achieve the same thing. I’ll have to look into what Jon Ingold did, though.

- Sniffnoy

July 19, 2016 at 1:49 am

The thing about this sort of thing is that the player has to know somehow that a command like TRADE BALL FOR DART or TRADE BALL TO BILL FOR DART will work. (Or type it without knowing–but if you’re relying on a player typing syntaxes that they won’t know then you’re going to wind up with players typing a lot of commands the parser won’t understand.) At least people who’ve been brought up on parser games are pretty well habituated to GET THIS and X THAT and PUT THIS IN THAT and UNLOCK THAT WITH THIS and some of the other things, but even with that kind of background you have to be pretty good at hinting the verb and syntax you want to use if you want the player to come up with TRADE THIS FOR THAT.

As I said in my post above, I don’t think your dichotomy here is correct. And I think it’s a mistake to say, well, everyone’s gotten used to how things work with these particular technical limitations, so we can’t improve things or it would be too confusing to existing players. Like… that seems like a fairly minor problem by comparison. Maybe just, y’know, put in big letters on your game, “This game has an improved parser that can handle more complex sentences, so you might want to try some!” Maybe more detail than that.

I don’t really understand why it would supposedly be so hard to come up with “trade this for that”. A number of adventure games involve trading things; if you want to trade for something, why would you not just say so? It’s basically the most direct way. I mean, above I used the phrase “in exchange for”, which is a more natural way IMO, but it’s possible you can program that to work too as a special case. Rather than having to hint the verb and syntax, maybe you can just allow permissive verbs and syntaxes. This is what games already do quite a bit of, though with simpler syntaxes, admittedly.

(Though I’m also wondering how this is supposed to work from a puzzle design standpoint–how do I know that trading Bill the ball for the dart is a good idea? If it’s that Bill has a dart I want and I can recognize that he needs the ball, I guess I expect GIVE BALL TO BILL to produce the result I need to move things along, on the general principle that if there’s something you can do in a game it’ll accomplish something…. taking on board Jimmy’s caveat about the Magnetic Scrolls games. If you have a game where the puzzles are that you really need to figure out which things to trade for what things according to some system, then the game should be explaining the verb you need to use.)

I agree there is a puzzle design challenge here — though I think it’s less a matter of actual puzzle design, and more a matter of “puzzle interface design”. But what you’re doing here is essentially metagaming, and I don’t think the player should have to rely on metagaming to such an extent. It’s easy to expect the Magnetic Scrolls result instead if you don’t! But I agree there’s a potential problem here; if you allow the player to explicitly trade the ball for the dart, then it makes less sense for Bill to refuse your gift (so that you’re not stuck) if you want to just give him the ball, or to decline your offer if you try to trade two balls for the dart, or whatever.

- Sniffnoy

July 19, 2016 at 8:25 pm

Actually, I guess in games with more separation between the player and the character, this is just handled by having the character refuse to do such a thing. This can get a little frustrating if there’s no obvious reason for the character to refuse, but it’s no worse than having the game refuse. Unfortunately this solution doesn’t work as well with the standard second-person style, though I’ve seen it used there; it just reads kind of weirdly.

- Jimmy Maher

July 16, 2016 at 9:49 am

The worst offenders here are the Magnetic Scrolls games, which in the name of simulation will let you give anything to anyone. If the action isn’t necessary to the plot or a puzzle, the character will just take the object, and you have no way to ever get it back.

Modern games do at least offer undo. If you aren’t sure exactly what the parser will do with a command, you can just try it and see, then undo if it goes wrong.

- Alexander Freeman

July 20, 2016 at 1:14 am

“I’ve played several IF games and I honestly never realized before now that commands take at most two nouns, whether as objects, indirect objects, or prepositional complements. It’s not too hard to see someone else play and get the gist of it…”

Yeah, my memory of my very first experiences with adventure games is a little fuzzy, but I think my very first adventure game ever was a little known game called Castle Adventure, but that only had a simple two-word parser. But I was able to pick it up quite easily. My next three adventure games were Hugo’s House of Horrors, Zork 1, and some obscure game called Enchanted Castle. I think it was in that order. I think I might have read sample commands and got the gist of it after entering various different commands. HHH had a keyword search. I think Enchanted Castle had a two-word parser like Castle Adventure.

But, yeah, my experience was getting the gist of it from examples and maybe seeing other people type in commands. (It was a long time ago.) I just thought everyone would pick it up too. I didn’t think about how many nouns a command would accept until I decided to make my own parser modeled after Infocom’s.

- Felix

July 17, 2016 at 6:56 am

The problem with the parser is that people have different cognitive abilities, and they can miss instructions even while earnestly reading the manual — every book is full of little “blink and you miss it” bits that can easily prove important down the road. Sure, that’s what beta-testing (and beta-reading) are for… but testers are human too.

Besides, when you have an UI that implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) encourages people to experiment beyond what the manual says, is it any surprise that some players will try wacky stuff? Doubly so if they’re not completely familiar with the genre conventions… something a lot of us are only because we also tried authoring.

Look, I grew up with line-number BASIC. I’m a long-time Linux user. I love command lines. But in interactive fiction, the parser is by and large a lie, and after decades of experiments it should be obvious that’s a fundamental trait.

- Alexander Freeman

July 17, 2016 at 5:48 pm

“Besides, when you have an UI that implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) encourages people to experiment beyond what the manual says, is it any surprise that some players will try wacky stuff? Doubly so if they’re not completely familiar with the genre conventions…”

Well, that’s not necessarily a bad thing as long as there are no penalties for experimenting. That’s how one learns. Besides, I still like trying wacky things after having played adventure games for more than 25 years! ^_^

Still, you bring up a good point about how different people learn differently. I think a short, thoroughly tested game with the features I’ve suggested might serve as a good tutorial for how the whole thing works.

- M. Sean Molley

July 15, 2016 at 6:26 pm

Is there an easy way to play this? “Journey” and “Quarterstaff” are the only two Infocom-published titles that I have never gotten to play (or if I did, I don’t remember anything about them!)

- Jimmy Maher

July 15, 2016 at 7:34 pm

I don’t like to give out direct links to such things here, but it’s not hard to find by searching for something like “abandonware Infocom Journey.” The story file is playable in any modern Z-Machine interpreter that supports the .z6 format. It will be the largest single file in an MS-DOS (or any other) version of the game. If you’re using Windows Frotz and possibly some other interpreters, you’ll also need the graphics in a format the interpreter supports. These you can download from http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfocomXmediaXblorb.html. Make sure the .blb file has the same name as the story file and is in the same directory. Then just load the story file into your interpreter like any other Infocom (or Inform) game.

- Michael Davis

July 16, 2016 at 11:34 pm

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Journey_-_The_Quest_Begins_1988

- Michael Davis

July 16, 2016 at 11:36 pm

Err.. right after clicking ‘Post Comment’ I thought, erp, maybe I misinterpreted what you meant when you said “I don’t like to give out direct links to such things here”. I took that to mean sketchy abandonware or piracy sites, but maybe you just meant, like, any links at all, and if that’s the case, please delete my comment: I definitely didn’t mean to be mutinous or insubordinate!

- Jimmy Maher

July 17, 2016 at 8:04 am

archive.org is legitimate enough to be in order. I’m always forgetting that collection exists now…

- Michael Davis

July 24, 2016 at 6:13 pm

I have gotten a TON of mileage out of that collection. It was particularly helpful when gathering reference for ICBM :D

- Andrew Plotkin

July 15, 2016 at 6:31 pm

My memories of _Journey_ boil down to three things:

– Running out of a reagent. When I was planning _Hadean Lands_, I was thinking in equal measure of _Enchanter_ and _Journey_ — Infocom’s two models of resource-limitation puzzle. _Enchanter_ is a shining beacon of Doing It Right, and _Journey_, well, isn’t. But I was sure that _Journey_ had *something* worth exploring.

– The cod-Tolkien setting. I’m afraid I didn’t find it even as interesting as you did. It managed to feel more bland and boilerplate than the Zork milieu, which is a low bar to clear. (Quendor is literally nothing but cornball jokes and anachronisms held together with fantasy pastiche, but I remember wishing that _Journey_ had been set there.)

– And yet, one of those type-an-answer puzzles — the “Doors of Moria” puzzle — remains near the top of my favorite Infocom puzzles ever. Yes, it requires a leap of intuition. It’s a classic riddle; those require such leaps by definition. But it’s a *great* riddle, with an answer that is simple and obvious once you see it (or it’s explained), and it’s completely original to Infocom as far as I know.

(You could accuse me of liking that puzzle because I had the classic riddle-solving experience: I stared at it and sweated for hours, then gave up, went to take a shower, and the answer assembled itself in my head apparently by itself. This accusation would be accurate. You gotta treasure those moments when they happen.)

- Lisa H.

July 15, 2016 at 8:05 pm

I like the Quendor setting enough that I’ve sometimes wanted to ask for gift fanfic written there (though always gave it up as probably too obscure). At least you can say that it’s unusual and colorful; Journey’s is rather off-the-rack in comparison.

- S. John Ross

July 16, 2016 at 6:04 am

I love Quendor so much that there’s a faint squeaking noise in my head when I think of it.

- Lisa H.

July 16, 2016 at 3:37 am

It’s really, really hard to square marketing’s claim of “no dead ends” with a game that not only includes dead ends but will end up being defined by them in any player’s memory.

Ayup. It took me a long time to play through this enough to my satisfaction to put a walkthrough for it up on my website. One of the things that annoyed me the most about the limited reagents was not just that it was easy to run out of them, but that you began the game with only JUST enough of one, so that you would come up short of it not even through flailing around trying to solve puzzles, but by exploring all the menu options available to you at the start of the game! It seems excessively cruel to me that you should be punished plotwise for following a menu branch that otherwise just adds background color, especially since it might not become apparent until the absolute end.

- xxx

July 16, 2016 at 4:49 am

“It’s really, really hard to square marketing’s claim of “no dead ends” with a game that not only includes dead ends but will end up being defined by them in any player’s memory.”

Exactly! That’s the main thing which stands out to me about Journey in my memory: the constant fear that anything I did would lock me out of winning. I had so many damn saved games. Eventually gave up because that fear hanging over my every move and the constant repetition of the earlier parts of the game were about as fun as food poisoning, despite the interesting interface and pictures.

- S. John Ross

July 16, 2016 at 6:07 am

“…A bunch of hard-branching links in the form of a computerized Choose Your Own Adventure book was likely to appeal to no one….”

Speaking of: will you be writing about the Infocomics (or have you already and I missed it?)

- Jimmy Maher

July 16, 2016 at 9:45 am

I wrote about them in passing earlier, but no, no detailed reviews of the individual titles. You have to draw a line somewhere. ;)

- matt w

July 16, 2016 at 4:00 pm

The great wizard Asterix? Did you have to defeat the fearsome dragon Tintin?

- Jimmy Maher

July 16, 2016 at 4:45 pm

:) I had some snark to that effect in the article at one point, but wound up cutting it — mainly because Astrix isn’t quite the same as Asterix, and I could imagine a bunch of people correcting me for that, but trying to explain I knew that in the article would just make the whole thing too labored and unfunny.

- Alexander Freeman

July 16, 2016 at 5:41 pm

Is that from the Comic Asterix or the comic Tintin?

- matt w

July 17, 2016 at 3:14 am

Ah. In the article you do call him Asterix with the “e.” Also on the typo patrol, you mention “Dave Lebing” which I think should be “Lebling.”

(Alexander below–each character is from their respective comic–I went for a different comic for the dragon’s name because all the Asterix characters have names ending with -ix which would spoil the joke, unless I’m going for really obscure ones like Zebigbos or Tullius Detritus.)

- Jimmy Maher

July 17, 2016 at 8:03 am

Woop! Should have known I’d screw that up somehow.

- matt w

July 16, 2016 at 4:03 pm

From that passage one does suspect that there were originally Eight Stones, one of which was sundered. First one finds the Four, which leads one to the Two, and thence the One, and the One-Half, and the One-Quarter, and so on for infinite replay value.

OK, the capitalization of significant Nouns is a well-established enough trope that it can be Useful in setting the stage. I’ll stop snarking now.

- Bob Reeves

July 16, 2016 at 4:33 pm

Enjoyed it and solved it pretty quickly at the time, but I need a walkthrough now (and even following it faithfully, can still lack what I need to cast the last spell, I’ve discovered).

- Dave Gilbert

July 17, 2016 at 5:22 pm

Not only could you run out of reagent, but you could also get stuck if you didn’t write down what color residue appeared on Praxix’s fingers when he cast a spell. When Tag has to cast his own spell at the end of the game, he doesn’t know which reagent is which and has to guess based on their colors.

God this game is flawed for this reason alone. But also GOD did I love love love this game. I got lost in it. I replayed it several times to get to the proper ending, and I didn’t care.

Of course I was like 11 at the time. Perhaps I didn’t know better.

- Lisa H.

July 18, 2016 at 6:59 pm

Off topic: Jimmy, I’m a little confused how you were able to make this reply: http://www.filfre.net/2016/07/journey/#comment-248979 I don’t see any reply link on the comment of matt w’s you were replying to. I do see them on some other comments (is it a question of depth? max 5 levels?) and of course I’m able to leave an entirely new one, but… ?

- Jimmy Maher

July 19, 2016 at 8:12 am

Although WordPress supports comments nested up to 10 deep, my current settings limit them to nesting no more than 5 deep. Otherwise there just isn’t enough screen space, especially on mobile. The way WordPress accomplishes this restriction is simply by not offering a reply link after the 5th level. However, I reply to comments a little differently than you folks do. I normally receive an email, and if I wish to reply I click a link right there in the email which takes me to my administration panel to enter a reply.

So, in short, I can do it but you can’t. ;)

- Lisa H.

July 19, 2016 at 6:21 pm

Speaking of screen space, the central column seems awfully narrow on 1920×1080. Lots of plain brown background with the content filling les than half, maybe about half if I include the sidebar. I could be wrong but thought that was a fairly common monitor size these days? I don’t suppose WordPress supports dynamically serving different versions based on detecting the reader’s window size?

- Eric Lundquist

July 19, 2016 at 10:27 pm

On my screen, the web browser is 21″ wide, and the blog uses up 9.75″ of that, leaving the rest brown. The actual white text column is under 6.75″, or 1/3 of the field.

Thankfully, it uses the full screen on my phone.

- Jimmy Maher

July 20, 2016 at 7:28 am

You’re right that that’s a very common resolution, but most people find reading wide columns of text to be very uncomfortable. Thus most commercial sites and blogs, like this one, keep the text width limited to roughly that of a printed page even when browsing full-screen. Most of the sites I read regularly follow this practice; about the only exceptions, for what it’s worth, are Wikipedia and Planet IF.

I would venture to guess that most people running 1920×1080 on a desktop are like me in that they usually don’t browse with the browser window maximized. And those running that resolution on a laptop screen with much higher pixel density will usually employ a magnification factor to keep everything from being *really* small. Again, that’s my usage pattern anyway.

Not to say you’re doing it wrong, but… well, you may be doing it differently from many or most of us. ;)

- Ibrahim Gucukoglu

July 22, 2016 at 4:57 am

Hi Jim,.

Thanks as always for a concise and decisive look at this Infocom game, it brings me many happy memories as all your articles on Infocom do. I spent many happy hours trying to solve Journey, and it was the only game I didn’t end up using a walkthrough to get me past the final few hurdles. I agree with you re the unfair puzzle solving which forced you to look at your reagents pretty much every. Spell casting to make sure you hadn’t overused your allowances. You often had more of some reagents than you strictly needed while if I remember rightly, the water essence was one of the hardest to come by and for which you needed to solve the final puzzle where you need to cast a lightning spell yourself. Speaking of this puzzle, does the latest version of journey let you complete it as I could never do so. Whenever you mix the final bunch of reagents together, before you can cast them, the dread Lord always kills your dwarf and you end up with Ann in satisfying ending. Could you help me here are as I still have my last save game point somewhere on floppy disk. Thanks.

- Jimmy Maher

July 22, 2016 at 7:19 am

I’m afraid I gave up in frustration and sheer boredom myself before managing to see the winning screen, which makes Journey still the only Infocom game I’ve never actually won. But perhaps someone else can help.

Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur
July 22, 2016

And so at last, twelve years after a group of MIT hackers had started working on a game to best Crowther and Woods’s original Adventure, it all came down to Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur, Infocom’s 35th and final work of interactive fiction. Somewhat ironically, this era-ending game wasn’t written by one of Infocom’s own long-serving Imps, but rather by the relatively fresh and inexperienced Bob Bates and his company Challenge, Incorporated, for whom Arthur represented only their second game. On the other hand, though, Bates and Challenge did already have some experience with era-ending games. Their previous effort, Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels, had been the last text-only Infocom game to be published. As Bates’s buddy Steve Meretzky delights in saying, it’s lucky that Challenge would never get the chance to make a third game. What with them having already “single-handedly killed” the all-text Infocom game with Sherlock and then Infocom as a whole with Arthur, a third Challenge game “probably would have killed the entire computer-game industry.” We kid, Bob, we kid.

The story of Arthur‘s birth is the story of one of the few things to go according to plan through the chaos of Infocom’s final couple of years. When he’d first pitched the idea of Challenge becoming Infocom’s first outside developer back in 1986, Bates had sealed the deal with his plan for his first three games: a Sherlock Holmes game, a King Arthur game, and a Robin Hood game, in that order. Each was a universally recognizable character from fiction or myth who also had the advantage of being out of copyright. The games would amount to licensed works — always music to corporate parent Mediagenic’s[1] ears — which didn’t require that anyone actually, you know, negotiate or pay for a license. It seemed truly the best of both worlds. And indeed, after Bates finished the Sherlock Holmes game, to very good creative if somewhat more mixed commercial results, his original plan still seemed strong enough that he was allowed to proceed to phase two and do his King Arthur game.

He chose to make his game the superhero origin story, if you will, of the once and future king: his boyhood trials leading up to his pulling the sword Excalibur from the stone in which it’s been embedded, thereby proving himself the rightful king of England. That last act would, naturally, constitute the climax of the game. In confining himself to the very beginning of the story of King Arthur, Bates left open the possibility for sequels should the game be successful — another move calculated to warm hearts inside Mediagenic’s offices, whose emerging business model in the wake of the Bruce Davis takeover revolved largely around sequels and licenses.

From the perspective of Challenge, Arthur was created the same way as had been Sherlock, from their offices in suburban Maryland as an all-text game, using a cloned version of Infocom’s DEC-hosted development environment that ran on their own local DEC minicomputer. But after Challenge had delivered their game to Infocom this time around, it went through a lengthy post-production period in the latter’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, offices, during which it was moved to Infocom’s new Macintosh-hosted development environment, then married to graphics created by a team of artists. Due at least to some extent to the nature of its development process, Arthur can be seen as a less ambitious game than any of the three works of graphical interactive fiction that preceded it. Its pictures were used only as ultimately superfluous eye candy, static illustrations of each location without even the innovative scrolling page design of Shogun. A few niceties like an onscreen map and an in-game hint menu aside, this was graphical interactive fiction as companies like Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls had been doing it for years, the graphics plainly secondary to the very traditional text adventure at the game’s core.

Created by a team of several outside contractors, Arthur‘s pictures are perhaps best described as “workmanlike” in comparison to the lusher graphics of Shogun and especially Journey.

Far from faulting Arthur for its lack of ambition, many fans then as well as now saw the game’s traditionalism as something of a relief after the overambitious and/or commercially compromised games that had preceded it. Infocom knew very well how to make this sort of game, the very sort on which they’d built their reputation. Doubtless for that reason, Arthur acquits itself quite well in comparison to its immediate predecessors. It’s certainly far more playable than any of Infocom’s other muddled final efforts, lacking any of their various ruinous failings or, for that matter, any truly ruinous failings of its own.

That said, the critical verdict becomes less positive as soon as we widen the field of competition to include Infocom’s catalog as a whole. In comparison to many of the games Infocom had been making just a couple of years prior to Arthur, the latter has an awful lot of niggling failings, enough so that in the final judgment it qualifies at best only as one of their more middling efforts.

A certain cognitive dissonance is woven through every aspect of Arthur. In his detailed and thoughtful designer’s notes for the game, which are sadly hidden inside the hint menu where many conscientious players likely never realized they existed, Bates notes that “there is an inherent conflict built into writing a game about King Arthur. It is the conflict between history and legend — the way things were versus the way we wish they were.” Bates took the unusual course of “cleaving to the true Arthur,” the king of post-Roman Britain who may have reigned between 454 and 470, when the island was already sliding into the long Dark Ages. He modeled the town in which the game is set on the ancient Roman British settlement of Portchester, just northwest of Portsmouth, which by the time of the historical Arthur would likely have been a jumble of new dwellings made out of timber and thatch built in the shadow of the decaying stonework left behind by the Romans. A shabby environment fitting just this description, then, becomes the scene of the game. Bates invested considerable research into making the lovely Book of Hours included with the game as reflective of the real monastical divine office of the period as possible. And he even wrote some snippets of poetry in the Old English style, based on alliteration rather than rhyme. I must say that this approach strikes me as somewhat problematic on its face. It seems to me that very few people pick up an Arthurian adventure game dreaming of reenacting the life and times of a grubby Dark Ages warlord; they want crenelated castles and pomp and pageantry, jousts and chivalry and courtly love.

But far more problematically, having made his decision, Bates then failed to stick to it. For instance, he decided that jousting, first anachronistically imposed upon the real Arthur many centuries after his death, had to be in his own more historically conscientious version of the story “to make the game more enjoyable.” The central mechanic to much of the gameplay, that of being able to turn yourself into various animals, is lifted from a twentieth-century work, T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, as is the game’s characterization of Arthur as a put-upon boy. Other anachronisms have more to do with Monty Python than written literature, like the village idiot who sings about his “schizophrenia” and the kraken who says he “floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee.” I should say that I don’t object to such a pastiche on principle. Writers who play in the world of King Arthur have always, as Bates himself puts it, “projected then-current styles, fashions, and culture backwards across the centuries and fastened them to Arthur.” Far from being objectionable, this is the sign of a myth that truly lives, that has relevance down through the ages; it’s exactly what great writers from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Thomas Malory, T.H. White to Mary Stewart have always done. The myth of King Arthur will always be far more compelling than the historical reality, whatever it may be. What I object to is the way that Bates gums up the works by blending his psuedo-historical approach with the grander traditions of myth and fiction. The contrast between the Arthur of history and the Arthur of imagination makes the game feel like a community-theater production that spent all its money on a few good props — for instance, for the jousts — and can’t afford a proper stage. Far from feeling faithful to history, the shabby timber-and thatch environs of his would-be Portchester just feel low-rent.

A similar cognitive dissonance afflicts the game and puzzle design. In some ways, Arthur is very progressive, as feels appropriate for the very last Infocom text adventure, presumably the culmination of everything they’d learned. For the first time here, the hint menu is context-sensitive, opening up new categories of questions only after you encounter those puzzles for the first time. (It’s also integrated into the structure of the story in a very clever way, taking the form of Merlin’s future-scrying crystal ball.) The auto-map is useful if not quite as useful as Infocom’s marketing might have liked it to be, and for the first time here the new parser, rewritten from the ground up for this final run of graphical games, does sometimes evince a practical qualitative difference from the old. In these respects and others, Arthur represents the state of the art in text adventures as of 1989.

In other ways, however, Arthur is profoundly old-school, not to say regressive. There is, for instance, an unadulteratedly traditional maze in here, the first such seen in an Infocom game since Zork I‘s “maze of twisty little passages, all alike.” There is a trick to figure out at the beginning of the one in Arthur — the old drop ‘n’ plot isn’t possible, necessitating the finding of another method for distinguishing one room from another — but after that moment of inspiration you can look forward to the tedious perspiration of plotting out ten rooms and the hundred separate connections that bind them. How odd to think that the only Infocom games to include traditional mazes were their very first and their very last. And while we’re on the subject of Zork I, I should mention that there’s a thief character of sorts in Arthur who’s every bit as annoying as his shifty progenitor. When you first wander innocently into his domain, he steals all your stuff with no warning. (Thankfully, undo is among the game’s modern conveniences.) But perhaps the best illustration of Arthur‘s weird mixing of new- and old-school is the magic bag you find in Merlin’s cave. It can hold an infinite amount of stuff, thus relieving you of the object-juggling so endemic to so many early text adventures from Infocom and others. Unfortunately, though, the bag is stuck behind the domain of the aforementioned thief, who steals it as soon as you try to walk out with it. Thus this huge convenience is kept out of your hands for what may for many players — Arthur is quite nonlinear — amount to the bulk of the game. Progression and regression, all in one would-be handy bag of holding.

In marrying its puzzles to its plot, Arthur is once again best described as confused. Instead of a single score, Arthur has four separate tallies, measuring how “wise and chivalrous,” “strong and courageous” you’ve so far become. In common with a number of late Infocom games, there’s a slight CRPG element at play here: your scores actually affect your ability to perform certain actions. The goal, naturally, is to “gain the experience you need to claim the sword,” in the course of which you “must demonstrate them [your knightly virtues] for all to see.” So, when it comes down to the final climactic duel with King Lot, the villain of the game, what do you do? You distract him and sucker-punch him, that’s what. How’s that for chivalry?

Before wrapping up my litany of complaints, I do have to also mention a low-level bugginess that’s not awful by the standards of the industry at large but is quite surprising to find in an Infocom game. The bugs seem to largely fall into the category of glitches rather than showstoppers: if you immediately wear some armor you’ve just discovered instead of picking it up first and then wearing it, you don’t get the points you’re supposed to; another character who normally won’t follow you into a certain location will suddenly do so if you lead him in animal form, which allows you to bypass a puzzle; etc. Relatively minor as such glitches may appear on their face, Arthur‘s CRPG-like qualities make them potentially deadly nevertheless. Because your success at certain necessary actions is dependent on your score, the points you fail to earn thanks to the bugs could make victory impossible.

Scorpia, Computer Gaming World‘s influential adventure-game columnist, called Arthur nothing less than “Infocom’s most poorly produced game ever,” labeling the disk-swapping required by the Apple II version “simply outrageous”: “When you have to change disks because part of a paragraph is on one, and the rest on another, you know something is wrong with the design. This is also sometimes necessary within a single sentence.” These problems made the much-vaunted auto-map feature essentially unusable on the Apple II, requiring as that version did a disk swap almost every time you wanted to take a peek at the map. Granted, the Apple II was by this point the weak sister among the machines Infocom continued to support, the only remaining 8-bit in the stable — but still, it’s hard to imagine the Infocom of two or three years before allowing an experience as unpolished as this into the wild on any platform.

During Arthur‘s lengthy post-production period, Bates already turned his mind to his next project. It was here that that surprisingly durable original plan of his finally fell victim to the chaos and uncertainty surrounding Infocom in these final months. Still searching desperately for that magic bullet that would yield a hit, Infocom and Mediagenic decided they didn’t feel all that confident after all that the Robin Hood game would provide it. Bates delivered a number of alternative proposals, including a sequel to Leather Goddesses of Phobos and a game based on The Wizard of Oz — yet another licensed game that wouldn’t actually require a license thanks to an expired copyright. Most intriguingly, or at least amusingly, he proposed a mash-up of the two ideas, a Wizard of Oz with “more suggestive language, racier insinuations, and a sub-stratum of sex running throughout. We could substitute a whip for the striped socks and dress Dorothy in leather.” History doesn’t record what Mediagenic’s executives said to that transgressive idea.

In the end, Bates had his next project chosen for him. In a development they trumpeted in inter-office memoranda as a major coup, Mediagenic had secured the rights to The Abyss, the upcoming summer blockbuster from James Cameron of Terminator and Aliens fame. This time Bates drew the short straw for this latest Mediagenic-imposed project that no one at Infocom particularly wanted to do. He was provided with a top-secret signed and numbered copy of the shooting script, and dispatched to Gaffney, South Carolina, where filming for the underwater action-epic was taking place inside the reactor-containment vessel of a nuclear power plant which had been abandoned midway through its construction. After meeting briefly there with Cameron himself, he returned to Maryland to purchase an expensive set of Macintosh IIs through which to clone Infocom’s latest development system. (With Infocom’s DEC system being decommissioned and sent to the scrapyard at the end of 1988, he now didn’t have any other choice but to adapt Challenge’s own technology to the changing times.) The beginning of the Abyss game he started on his new machines, a bare stub of a thing with no graphics and little gameplay, would later escape into the wild; it’s been passed around among fans for many years.

But events which I’ll document in my next article would ensure that the interactive Abyss would never become more than a stub and that the money spent on all that new equipment would be wasted. Bob Bates’s Infocom legacy would be limited to just two games, the first a very satisfying play, the second a little less so. Lest we be tempted to judge him too harshly for Arthur‘s various infelicities, we should note again that the three most prolific Imps of all — Steve Meretzky, Dave Lebling, and Marc Blank — had all delivered designs that failed far more comprehensively in the months immediately preceding the release of Bates’s effort, Infocom as a whole’s last gasp, in June of 1989. By the time of its release, Arthur was already a lame duck; the Infocom we’ve come to know through the past four and a half years worth of articles on this blog was in the final stages of official dissolution. With its anticlimactic release having been more a product of institutional inertia than any real enthusiasm for the game on Mediagenic’s part, Arthur‘s sales barely registered.

So, it remains for us only to tell how the final curtain (shroud?) came to be drawn over the short, happy, inspiring, infuriating life of Infocom. And, perhaps more importantly, we should also take one final glance back, to ask ourselves what we know, what we’ve recently learned, and what will always remain in the realm of speculation when it comes to this most beloved, influential, and unique of 1980s game-makers. We’ll endeavor to do all that next time, when we’ll visit Infocom for the last time.

(Sources: As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Some of it is also drawn from Jason’s “Infocom Cabinet” of vintage documents. Plus the September 1989 issue of Computer Gaming World, and the very last issue of Infocom’s The Status Line newsletter, from Spring 1989. And my huge thanks go out to Bob Bates, who granted me an extended interview about his work with Infocom.)

1. Mediagenic was known as Activision until mid-1988. To avoid confusion, I just stick with the name “Mediagenic” in this article. ↩

Comments
42 Responses

- Andrew Plotkin

July 22, 2016 at 4:58 pm

I’m going to be a game-historical pedant and insist that Zork did *not* have a traditional maze. It added the surprise twist of the thief, who (statistically) foils your attempt to use the drop-and-plot approach — the “traditional” solution defined by Adventure.

(And Adventure had already set the tone by following its original maze with the surprise-twist “all different” maze.)

If Arthur’s maze had absolutely nothing outside the Adventure model — you imply that the thief doesn’t turn up in the maze — then yes, *that’s* “traditional*. And terribly lazy.

- Duncan Stevens

July 22, 2016 at 5:09 pm

The solution to the maze in Arthur is slightly different from drop-and-plot, though it amounts to the same thing. But yes, the thief character in Arthur is stationary and doesn’t venture into the maze.

- Duncan Stevens

July 22, 2016 at 5:18 pm

…actually, on reflection, there are two mazes. But one of them can’t be solved the traditional way at all, I believe.

- Jimmy Maher

July 22, 2016 at 7:25 pm

What I was going for was that you still have to solve Zork I’s maze by mapping it. The later “mazes” that showed up in Infocom games, excepting that in Arthur, all had some trick to figure out that allowed you to avoid mapping them.

- Peter Piers

September 6, 2016 at 2:23 pm

“Avoid mapping”? Surely, more like “mapping differently”, I’m thinking specifically of Spellbreaker. (you DID say “all”…)

- Peter Piers

September 7, 2016 at 3:13 pm

Not Spellbreaker, Sorcerer.

- Jason Dyer

July 23, 2016 at 3:16 pm

Adventure already had the pirate foiling object dropping in the all alike maze. On top of that, the all alike maze was too large for one’s inventory capacity.

The thief very much feels like a pirate knockoff (albeit better done).

The trick in the Arthur maze is actually very clever and satisfying to work out. Actually mapping the maze after was of course the usual dull.

- Rowan Lipkovits

July 22, 2016 at 5:14 pm

“take a peak at the map.” — unless the map is of a mountaintop, you probably meant “peek”.

- Jimmy Maher

July 22, 2016 at 7:22 pm

Thanks!

- Duncan Stevens

July 22, 2016 at 5:37 pm

As I recall, I found Arthur a mixed bag. There were some good puzzles, and some fairly bad ones–I’m thinking in particular of the hot/cold room puzzle in the cave, whose solution is sort of a random flight of whimsy, and the jousting puzzle, which isn’t really a puzzle at all.

As for the tone, I had read enough Arthurian literature, including the Mary Stewart series, to be unbothered by the grimy Dark Ages setting, and I actually found the Book of Hours, alliterative poetry, etc. sort of interesting; I had never encountered that style of verse before. I actually found Bates’s approach to Arthuriana *less* weird than T.H. White’s–the anachronisms aren’t nearly as wacky and flagrant–and I was certainly conditioned to expect a grab-bag approach to Arthur.

- Duncan Stevens

July 22, 2016 at 6:14 pm

Bates left open the possibility for sequels

Hmmm. One thing I did like about the game was the reference in the demon’s cave to the rest of the Arthur story, which was completely unnecessary to the game but served to complicate a plot that otherwise isn’t very interesting. In other words, it puts a different shade on your “winning” the game.

But maybe I should view it as a reference to planned-but-never-made sequels, though I’m hard-pressed to see how the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot triangle could have been made into IF.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 22, 2016 at 8:18 pm

though I’m hard-pressed to see how the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot triangle could have been made into IF.

Level 9 tried, as a matter of fact…

- Duncan Stevens

July 23, 2016 at 12:38 pm

Right, I’d forgotten that. Not a particularly successful attempt, it appears.

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2016 at 7:51 am

I wouldn’t say that Arthur had “planned but never made sequels.” Rather that the possibility of making them would be there if the game should prove a hit, which may seem a fine distinction but is I think an important one.

One other interesting bit of lore: the blank gravestone behind which you hide in the beginning of the game was intended to be Lancelot’s future grave, which according to legend he was shown when young.

- Duncan Stevens

July 23, 2016 at 12:37 pm

Fair enough. Not planned, exactly. But I still wonder (now) whether that part was included to give the game some perspective and weight, or just to hint at the possibility of sequels.

One design sin you don’t mention: hunger puzzles. Yes, a little more creative here because you have to satisfy your hunger when turned into an animal, but still, bleah. I’m trying to give Bates the benefit of the doubt by imagining that, in an actual Dark Ages setting, hunger might really be an issue for a boy wandering around on his own, but I’m not fully convincing myself.

- Lisa H.

July 22, 2016 at 9:33 pm

Bates invested invested considerable research

Is there an echo in here echo in here?

It seems to me that absolutely no one picks up an Arthurian adventure game dreaming of reenacting the life and times of a grubby Dark Ages warlord

A minority, quite possibly, but “absolutely no one” is a bit strong. There’s a lot of history nerds out there.

the game’s characterization of Arthur as a put-upon boy and Merlin as a befuddled, lovable old loon

I’m puzzled that you think Merlin comes off that way. He seemed more an aloof, mysterious mentor type to me. Certainly I don’t think he’s like in the Disney Sword in the Stone (though I haven’t actually read the book; I wouldn’t be surprised if Disney amped up the silliness).

The auto-map is useful if not quite as useful as Infocom’s marketing might have liked it to be

How do you mean? I tend to play with the map always up on the screen precisely because of its usefulness.

When you first wander innocently into his domain, he steals all your stuff, locking you out of victory through no fault of your own.

Does it? Stolen objects can turn up in the village idiot’s hands, where you can trade for them. Is it possible that the crucial object (the only one I can think of that if you were permanently deprived of it, you could not get the other object you need to actually solve the problem of this thief) never gets traded like that? (I’m not sure without looking at a map if not having other objects could prevent you from getting to the tower in the first place.)

Unfortunately, though, the bag is stuck behind the domain of the aforementioned thief, who steals it as soon as you try to walk out with it. Thus this huge convenience is kept out of your hands for what may for many players — Arthur is quite nonlinear — amount to the bulk of the game.

Hm, a fair amount of the game, I suppose, but if you apply yourself to solving the thief problem as soon as you can, you get more use out of the bag.

So, when it comes down to the final climactic duel with King Lot, the villain of the game, what do you do? You distract him and sucker-punch him, that’s what. How’s that for chivalry?

I think the idea there is to show mercy, not to kill if it’s not absolutely necessary.

a Wizard of Oz with “more suggestive language, racier insinuations, and a sub-stratum of sex running throughout. We could substitute a whip for the striped socks and dress Dorothy in leather.”

…wow. Just, wow.

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2016 at 8:08 am

Is there an echo in here echo in here?

Corrected. Thanks!

A minority, quite possibly, but “absolutely no one” is a bit strong. There’s a lot of history nerds out there.

Maybe you’re right. Softened that one a bit (and also fixed a grammar problem).

I’m puzzled that you think Merlin comes off that way. He seemed more an aloof, mysterious mentor type to me. Certainly I don’t think he’s like in the Disney Sword in the Stone (though I haven’t actually read the book; I wouldn’t be surprised if Disney amped up the silliness).

I’m in the opposite position, having never seen the movie. But I think you’re right. I was projecting. Will fix that momentarily.

How do you mean? I tend to play with the map always up on the screen precisely because of its usefulness.

I find it really hard to get a good overview of the geography as a whole using the auto-map because it’s divided into distinct regions, and you can’t move between them. That may be a personal problem, but it’s worth noting that the instant response of a modern interpreter does make the map far less frustrating than it would have been back in the day. Even on an Amiga, there would be a delay and usually disk access to draw the map each time. As for the Apple II… we’ve covered that one in the article. ;)

Does it? Stolen objects can turn up in the village idiot’s hands, where you can trade for them. Is it possible that the crucial object (the only one I can think of that if you were permanently deprived of it, you could not get the other object you need to actually solve the problem of this thief) never gets traded like that? (I’m not sure without looking at a map if not having other objects could prevent you from getting to the tower in the first place.)

But you can only trade one thing for another. Lose the wrong combination of things at the wrong time, and I’m pretty sure you’re screwed. Or, even if you’re not *literally* locked out of victory, the whole process becomes so excruciating that you might as well be. But I removed that statement nevertheless.

- Lisa H.

July 24, 2016 at 2:00 am

Re: Merlin, I suppose there is some goofiness in that the occasional joke lines at the bottom of the screen are meant to be his voice, like, in your head or something, aren’t they? I hadn’t remembered that when I wrote my comment, but I played through last night, and I noticed some doozies of silly jokes. Not out of character for Infocom itself, even in a game with overall serious tone, but if you imagine Merlin saying them… well.

I find it really hard to get a good overview of the geography as a whole using the auto-map because it’s divided into distinct regions, and you can’t move between them.

Ahh, yes. That annoys me as well – although at least this game’s geography is smaller than Zork Zero’s, where I found the lack of being able to get an overview to be rather a pain.

Lose the wrong combination of things at the wrong time, and I’m pretty sure you’re screwed. Or, even if you’re not *literally* locked out of victory, the whole process becomes so excruciating that you might as well be.

Fair enough.

- Nate

July 27, 2016 at 10:21 am

And that was how we got the ’90s computer gaming scene.

“Mediagenic presents an Activision production of an original Infocom game: American McGee’s Wizard of Oz: Madness Returns: Leather Goddesses of Phobos II”

- Jimmy Maher

July 27, 2016 at 10:54 am

Ah, I’d forgotten old American McGee. Never in the field of gaming history has one name been hyped so much for so little reason.

- Carl

July 22, 2016 at 10:37 pm

Typo alert: When you talk about the thematic pastiche, “principal” should be “principle”.

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2016 at 8:13 am

Thanks!

- Alexander Freeman

July 23, 2016 at 1:20 am

“Somewhat ironically, this era-ending game wasn’t written by one of Infocom’s own long-serving Imps, but rather by the relatively fresh and inexperienced Bob Bates…”
I’m not so sure if that qualifies as ironic. Aren’t eras supposed to end with someone passing the torch to the someone less experienced?

Anyhow, I can’t help noticing we’re in the year 1989. If you aren’t already going to do it, I think you should cover King’s Quest 4 before you do Quest for Glory because KQ4 was a major technological breakthrough, having been influenced by the cinematics and visuals of Japanese visual novels for Japanese PCs, and being the first game to use the MT-32 sound card.

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2016 at 8:18 am

I would say that eras begin that way, personally. There was no sense of a “passing of the torch” clinging to Infocom at the end. It was all just… over. We can perhaps view it that way if we choose today, but only with the benefit of our knowledge of Bates’s future career.

Yes, I do plan to write about King Quest IV’s technological significance before getting to Quest for Glory.

- Alexander Freeman

July 26, 2016 at 3:38 am

I’ve just thought of something. You might find this interesting:
https://archive.org/stream/Tenth_Anniversary_1990_Sierra-On_Line#page/n17/mode/2up

It gives some background on how Sierra was inspired to come up with its SCI engine. It was actually how I first found out about (having a physical copy of this catalog back in the day). Of course, you might already know everything mentioned in pages 34 to 37. ^_^

- Jimmy Maher

July 26, 2016 at 7:46 am

It seems my copy was missing those pages, which might very well have caused me to miss that anecdote altogether. So thanks for that!

- Alexander Freeman

July 26, 2016 at 11:40 pm

You’re welcome! YouTube also has lots of videos that contrast MT-32 with Sound Blaster and videos of the Japanese version of the Japanese games mentioned in those pages. You can also find videos for cinematic MSX games like Angelus and Jesus. I can see the resemblance to SCI.

- Pingback: Pixel Scroll 7/22/16 Rudyard Pixeling’s Just Scroll Stories | File 770

- Ben B.

July 23, 2016 at 4:32 am

At this moment of transition, gotta say thanks for illuminating the world of early computer gaming in general, and the history of IF in particular. My own experience in this era lay firmly in the realm of Sierra’s graphic adventures, so I had precisely zero experience with this whole facet of my favorite hobby’s early history until I ran into the Zork Anthology in the late 90s.

I’m interested in your opinion of the relative merits of the myriad of ways in which ludic narrative is presented to the modern gamer. Given your own work in the IF medium, it would make complete sense if your own preferences lay in that genre. But as someone who grew up with graphic adventures and then transitioned to FPSes and RPG hybrids like the System Shock, Bioshock, and Deus Ex franchises, I can’t wait to hear your assessment of the relative advantages/disadvantages that games like this have in comparison to the works you’ve looked at thus far. It’s been a fascinating read. Thanks again.

- Brian Bagnall

July 23, 2016 at 2:18 pm

In your wrap-up of Infocom, I’ll be curious to know what other directions the company considered. I never thought Infocom’s graphical adventure engine was radical or different enough to gain them much notice. One obvious direction was to follow other adventure game engines.

At the time, I would have been very interested to see Infocom’s take on SCUMM if they evolved it a few years. Especially if they revisited a few genres they had done in the past. Something like Suspect in SCUMM would make it easier to follow the suspects around (something that was always difficult with text) and the different party costumes and mansion locations would be fun in graphics. The Detective Game for the C64 was almost like Suspect done in SCUMM. As rote as this sounds, releasing SCUMM sequels or remakes of their most popular games would have opened up those adventures to an audience that was put off by the frustrations of a text only parser.

Zork’s style of adventuring seems suitable for engines like Dungeon Master or perhaps Alone in the Dark, though the latter is getting a bit advanced for the time. Anyway, I’m curious how far their discussions went near the end.

- Nate

July 23, 2016 at 8:53 pm

I think one of the main problems was they were too tied to their roots to truly build a graphical adventure. I remember “the best resolution is your imagination” ads at the time and didn’t find them convincing.

Lucasgames had no text adventure history to hold them back. I don’t think Infocom had the right team or abilities to make a break with their past and start over with the simplistic (but intuitive) model of graphical adventure.

It would have been fascinating if they did, though.

- Alexander Freeman

July 24, 2016 at 1:35 am

Perhaps, but then again maybe some of them wanted something more cerebral than typical graphical adventure game. I haven’t played much in the way of LucasArts games (liked Maniac Mansion, though), so maybe I’m being unfair, but they seem to suffer the same problem point-and-click adventure games in general suffer from: The interface limits the possibilities too much, thereby reducing the challenge too much.

Having said that, it seems that Infocom’s mystery games relied on a fairly small set of verbs all throughout, making them more amenable to something similar to the typical point-and-click interface. Unusual actions such as *SPOILER ALERT* svccjoh uif qfodjm po qbe pg qbqfs *END SPOILER* (change each letter to the previous letter in the alphabet to decrypt) could be done by some action that lets you manipulate items by rotating them so as to enable you to insert them into, rub them against, etc. something else. However, I’ve only played Deadline and The Witness. I don’t know if that’s true of Suspect.

It is finally worth pointing out that Brian Moriarty would eventually go on to work for LucasArts, however.

- Michael Davis

July 24, 2016 at 6:08 pm

Just in case anyone would like a tool to assist them in decoding that spoiler: http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/caesar.php

- iPadCary

July 25, 2016 at 6:43 pm

The masterpiece, in SO many ways, that is “Loom”
could have and SHOULD have been an Infocom game.

- Alexander Freeman

July 25, 2016 at 10:56 pm

Well, that IS one of the games Brian Moriarty wrote for LucasArts actually. Haven’t played it, though.

- Peter Piers

September 6, 2016 at 3:17 pm

I know Legend Entertainment is not Infocom, but it may be the best insight we have. The path from Eric The Unready to Mission Critical and Callahan’s Crosstime Salloon and The Blackstone Chronicles tells quite the story!

- ZUrlocker

July 23, 2016 at 9:13 pm

I know this is a minor point in the story but “callow executives” seems like a rather un-supported characterization. The Oz story pitch seems like a terrible idea at any rate.

- Jimmy Maher

July 24, 2016 at 9:55 am

I’d call it more a complete non sequitur than an unsupported characterization. But yeah, see your point. ;)

- David J

July 24, 2016 at 2:17 am

Quick correction: Cameron didn’t direct Rambo.

- Jimmy Maher

July 24, 2016 at 6:48 am

Okay, it seems he just helped write the screenplay. Thanks!

- iPadCary

July 24, 2016 at 2:34 pm

It’s this & “The Dion Crisis” that I’ve been waiting for
ever since I first started coming here. Well done, Jimmy!

- Matt Reichert

July 25, 2016 at 4:29 pm

That’s odd. I played the Apple II version back in the day and didn’t think there was excessive disk swapping. At least not any more than in Zork Zero, Journey, and Shogun. Then again I never used the auto map much so that may have been the main sticking point. I also had more patience for such things back in the day since I didn’t really know better.

One thing I’ll say for Arthur is that I felt the difficulty was extremely fair. I beat it as a 12 year old kid and only had to resort to hints twice, both in spots you mentioned (the maze and how to set up the ‘sucker punch’ at the end). Zork Zero and Journey were tougher but manageable, but I literally played Shogun from the built in hints because I never read the novel (still enjoyed it though).

Moving to California
July 29, 2016

The work week of May 1, 1989, started off much like any other inside the beleaguered latter-day Infocom. In the cavernous 18,000 square feet of their office space at 125 CambridgePark Drive — its sheer size was an ever-present reminder of more optimistic times, when Infocom had thought themselves poised to become the next Lotus — the shrunken staff of just 26 souls puttered through another Monday, pausing now and again to chat about the weekend just passed. The old days when CambridgePark would buzz during off-hours with parties and socializing and passionate programmers and testers burning the midnight oil were now a memory of the past. Changing life circumstances — the majority of the remaining staff were now married, many with small children — had done as much as the generalized malaise now afflicting the place to put an end to all that. CambridgePark now felt much like any other office, albeit a peculiarly empty one, and one over which hung an almost palpable sense of impending doom. Still, when the axe finally fell it came as a shock. It always does.

A memo went out early that week asking everyone to attend a meeting on Thursday, May 4, “to discuss the next generation of internal products.” More ominously, the memo said that the 3:00 P.M. meeting would “go as late as necessary.” And evidently management expected that to mean quite late, for they would be “ordering out for dinner.”

The axe fell over the course of that long afternoon and evening. Infocom would be “moving” to California, where it was to be reconstituted and re-imagined as a more closely coupled subsidiary of Mediagenic,[1] under a “general manager” named Rob Sears. Just 11 of the 26 current employees were offered positions at this new version of Infocom. Exactly whose name was and wasn’t on that list of job offers is neither necessary nor appropriate to discuss here. Suffice to say that those Mediagenic decided were desirable to retain often weren’t the pivotal creative voices you might expect, and that only 5 of the 11 accepted the offer anyway. Only one long-serving employee from Infocom’s glory days would end up making the move: Duncan Blanchard, a longstanding interpreter programmer and the last leader of the old Micro Group before it was assimilated into the Systems Group in 1987. For the other old-timers, it was all over. Another six weeks or so to finish a few final projects and tidy up the place, and that would be that.

Bob Bates, working on his licensed Abyss game from suburban Maryland, had planned to fly up to Cambridge for one of his regular design meetings on Monday, May 8. But Infocom’s new Mediagenic-installed head Joe Ybarra called him early in the week of May 1, saying he really needed him to come up this same week if at all possible. When Bates arrived on Friday, May 5, to a curiously subdued CambridgePark, he was ushered immediately into Ybarra’s office. Infocom was moving to California without most of its current employees, Ybarra informed him, and his Abyss project was being cancelled. Nor would Infocom be requiring Bates’s services again; his development contract was officially terminated as of today. When a shell-shocked Bates returned home on the red eye that same rainy night, he found that his roof was leaking buckets. It had turned into that sort of week for everyone.

Steve Meretzky had been scheduled to attend the Computer Game Developers’ Conference that very weekend in Sunnyvale, California. He was still allowed to fly out on Infocom’s dime, but replaced the company’s name on his badge with “Make Me an Offer!” It was at this event that word of the fate of Infocom, which everyone knew had long been troubled but which still remained one of the most respected names in computer games, was first spread within the industry.

News of Infocom’s fate first reached the world at large via an announcement in the May 22, 1989, issue of the Boston Globe Magazine. The understated headline has become oddly iconic among fans: “Computer-Games Firm Moving to California.” A “new consumer preference for games with graphics and sound,” went the workmanlike report, was responsible for Infocom’s travails, along with Nintendo and “the aging of Infocom’s traditional audience, composed of early computer users who spent evenings and weekends hunched over a terminal drawing maps in text-only games that took 20 to 50 hours to solve.”

When word reached the trade press, Mediagenic held tightly to the story that this was simply a move, not a shutdown. Rob Sears made the counter-intuitive claim that Mediagenic was doing what they were “not so much to close Infocom down as to ensure it survives.” “The Great Underground Empire, curiously enough, has not been shut down,” insisted Joe Ybarra. “What’s happened is we’re in the process of relocating it to the West Coast.” At the same time, though, Yabarra did have to quietly admit that none of the Imps who had built the Great Underground Empire would remain a part of it. He could only offer some unconvincingly vague suggestions that some of the former Imps might “do projects” at some point as outside contractors. Certainly anyone wedded to the idea of Infocom as a maker first and foremost of text adventures was given little reason for hope.

You’ll probably see a shift in direction that’s commensurate with which way the market is headed. If you look at all the successful products, they’re graphics- and sound-intensive. Products as a whole are pushing more toward role-playing than toward our classic adventure game. I think we’ll be building more hybrids that share elements of all these different genres. In particular, one of the areas I find most exciting is getting into more interactive graphics, the idea of doing things that are object-oriented… a cross between Manhole and the HyperCard environment and our traditional object-oriented ZIL environment.

(In case Ybarra’s comments don’t make it clear, know that “object-oriented” was one of the sexiest buzzwords of the period, to be applied to anything and everything possible.)

The personnel inside CambridgePark continued to perform their duties in desultory fashion during those final weeks following the meeting that informed them of their fate. There was still plenty to do; Infocom had still not delivered finalized versions of their four most recent works of graphical interactive fiction for MS-DOS, the most important platform in the industry. Yet there was, understandably, little enthusiasm for doing it. Employees spent a lot of time picking out free games from the collection around the office, bidding on the office furniture and computers, and indulging their black humor via vehicles like a lunchtime “slideshow history of Infocom” entitled “Cornerstone through Tombstone.” And then the last day came, and the lights inside CambridgePark were extinguished forever — or at least until the next corporate tenant arrived.

By the point of that final closure, a considerable amount of back-channel sniping by the people of the former Infocom had begun toward Mediagenic. Not coincidentally, Mediagenic’s own take on recent events also became less sanguine. Sources from Infocom claimed that Mediagenic had pulled the plug just as the money spigots were about to open, just before the all-important MS-DOS versions of their graphical interactive fictions finally hit the market; as it was, these versions would all be released by Mediagenic as un-promoted afterthoughts within weeks of the closure. Mediagenic, for whom Infocom’s slow progress on their MS-DOS interpreter had been a huge frustration and a significant factor in their decision to finally wash their hands of CambridgePark altogether, replied that “the consolidation might not have become necessary if the IBM SKUs could have been released initially.” Likewise, Joe Ybarra’s characterization of the fundamental failings of Infocom’s games grew more pointed: “We cannot continue, in the marketplace, living off products that take eight hours to play well and up to 200 hours to complete.”

The view of the decision of May 4, 1989, that prevails universally today, as representative of a definitive ending rather than a move or consolidation, was already taking hold. Mediagenic stopped giving even lip service to Infocom as an ongoing operation of its own in the spring of 1990, when Rob Sears left and the remaining handful of personnel who had worked under him were either let go or absorbed into the parent company. From now on, Infocom would be a mere label under which Mediagenic would release some of their more narrative-oriented games.

In the long run, the people who had made up the old Infocom would all be just fine. After all, they were one hell of an impressive group, with credentials and talents that made them eminently employable. For those stalwarts in positions of business or creative leadership, who had been forced to bear up under the ever more crushing burden of Infocom’s troubled finances since 1985, the final, sharply definitive ending to it all felt like something of a relief as soon as the shock and pain of the initial announcement had faded.

The majority of the old Infocom staff exited the games industry at the same time that they exited Infocom, never to return. The limited or nonexistent applicability of the skills of some of Infocom’s most essential employees to the games being made by other companies — like, for instance, those of editor, producer, and all-around unsung hero Jon Palace — says much about just how unique Infocom really was. For others, though, the decision to get out of games had more to do with their fatigue with such an eternally tormented and tormenting industry than it did with job opportunities or a lack thereof inside it. Put simply, there are easier ways to make a living than by making computer games, and masterful programmers like Tim Anderson, Dave Lebling, and Stu Galley reckoned they were ready for more ordinary jobs. They and many others like them went on to live happy lives, building good, enjoyable careers that needn’t consume them. But there were also some gluttons for punishment who hadn’t yet burnt out on games. Marc Blank, Steve Meretzky, Mike Berlyn, Brian Moriarty, Mike Dornbrook, and Bob Bates would all be stubborn and passionate enough to remain in the industry. We’ll thus be meeting at least some of them again in future articles.

Seen purely as a business proposition, Infocom had been a colossal, unadulterated failure. Whether as independent company or Mediagenic subsidiary, Infocom never enjoyed a single profitable year after 1983, and its final ledger shows it to be millions in the red over the course of its relatively brief lifetime. But very few of those who had worked there thought of Infocom as a failure in the aftermath of its death — not even those former employees whose jobs had entailed fretting about the endless cavalcade of quarterly and yearly losses.

For some former employees, including many who might have had little to no interest in the company’s actual products, Infocom remains forever in their memories just a really fun office to work in — indeed, the best they could ever imagine. Plenty of these people would be shocked to learn of the aura of awed respect and love that still surrounds the very name of Infocom in the minds of fans today; they never realized they were creating timeless games. Others, of course, including virtually everyone who played a major creative role in making the games, did realize, at least after the fact, that they had done something very special indeed. Some former employees accept the bad decisions and missed opportunities that so frustrate fans peaceably, as karma, fate, or just plain old learning experiences. Others, thankfully a minority, still curse the names of either or both Al Vezza and Bruce Davis, the two great villains of the story, and are intermittently tormented by thoughts of what might have been.

What might have been… it’s a fraught question, isn’t it? Yet it’s a question that we as humans, confronted with something as special and noble as Infocom that seems so self-evidently to have died too soon, can hardly resist asking. The historian in me knows to be very leery of setting off down that road. Still, just this once, coming as we are to the end of the most detailed story I’ve ever told on this blog, maybe we can indulge in a little bit of counter-factualizing.

It seems to me that the first and perhaps most important thing we need to do to come to grips with the might-have-beens that surround Infocom is to separate the company itself from the medium of the text adventure. Such a separation can be weirdly difficult to actually accomplish. Infocom didn’t create the text adventure, nor did the company’s end mark the medium’s end — far from it, as years of articles that are hopefully still to come right here on this site will underline — but the name of Infocom would always remain all but synonymous with the form. Jason Scott has told how, when he was making his Get Lamp documentary about the life and times of the text adventure, he was constantly asked by friends how his “Infocom movie” was coming. At a certain point, he just gave up on correcting them.

Given this close connection, it can be jarring to consider that few to none of the people working at Infocom, even among those who weren’t on Team Cornerstone, thought of their company as an exclusive maker of text adventures. The story of how Infocom first came to make text adventures almost accidentally — that of needing a product to bootstrap their operation, and pulling good old MIT Zork down off the shelf as the fastest way to make one — has of course been well-documented, here and in plenty of other places. But even after they had become identified as makers of the world’s most sophisticated text adventures, they were very reluctant to settle for that niche. A research project into cross-platform graphics was begun already in 1983, at the same time that they were running all those iconic “anti-graphics” advertisements; said advertisements were merely clever promotions, not the expression of an absolute corporate philosophy. In 1984, Mike Berlyn and Marc Blank poured considerable time and effort into another innovative research project that came to naught in the end, a multi-player MUD-like environment to be hosted by the online service CompuServe. The following year brought the multi-player computerized board game Fooblitzky, Infocom’s first graphical product and one of the oddest they ever released. In short, Infocom always had ambitions beyond the text adventure, but those ambitions were consistently crippled by the lack of money for game development that plagued the company beginning as early as 1983, when Cornerstone first began to suck all the oxygen out of the room.

The counter-factual scenario most likely to yield an Infocom that survives beyond the 1980s is, as fan wisdom has long attested, one in which they never start down the Cornerstone wormhole. Yet the same best-case scenario is also possessed of a trait that fans may be less eager to acknowledge: in it, the money not spent on Cornerstone isn’t spent on making ever more elaborate text adventures, but rather on embracing new genres, new paradigms of play. Infocom could quite likely have survived if they’d avoided Cornerstone and made smart business decisions, and the world of gaming would doubtless have been a better place for their tradition of literacy, thoughtfulness, and innovation. But unfortunately, those same smart business decisions would likely have to entail branching out from the text adventure early, and eventually moving on completely. Dave Lebling:

I think in terms of continuing to produce the kind of thing we had been producing — i.e., text adventures with lots of cool technology to make them more realistic, lots of plot value, etc. — we could have gone on forever. I’m less sure whether the market would have continued to buy those. We had big arguments about this even before the Mediagenic/Activision acquisition. If you’ve spent several thousand dollars for a computer with a color screen and a video card and you want to display lots of pretty pictures, are you going to settle for a text adventure?

In my opinion, that was sort of a minority taste, just like reading is somewhat of a minority taste. People would much rather look at pictures than read as a rule. There’s a subculture of people who love to read, who are passionate about reading, passionate about books, but it’s not the majority of the public. The same thing is true in computers. There are people who like pictures and action and so forth, and there are people who like reading. And again, they are a minority.

So, I don’t think Infocom could have continued to go on from strength to strength the way we seemed to have been doing initially; we would have plateaued out. I think we eventually would have had to branch out into other kinds of games ourselves. The advantage would have been that we would have decided what to do, rather than some other company.

For proof of Lebling’s assertions, we need only look to what happened in the broader computer-game industry of our own timeline during the mid- to late-1980s. In 1984, at the height of the bookware frenzy, at least a dozen publishers in the United States alone could lay claim to major initiatives in the realm of text adventures, a medium that, being in most people’s mind the ultimate anti-action game, seemed the perfect fit for post-Great Videogame Crash electronic entertainment. Every single one of those initiatives, excepting only the games Infocom released that year, disappointed to one degree or another. To imagine that a counter-factual Infocom — even one with the resources to improve their technology, to offer even bigger and better games than the ones we know, to include pictures and interface conveniences years before the Infocom of our own timeline — could have continued to buck the trend for very long seems a stretch. And indeed, many of Infocom’s financial travails, which began already in 1985 when a subtle but worrisome sales slowdown on the part of many of their games first became evident alongside the obvious disaster that was Cornerstone, had far more to do with the wider market for text adventures than it did with Cornerstone. Put another way: if their games business had continued to explode as it had in 1983 and 1984, Infocom could have weathered the storm of Cornerstone’s failure bruised but solvent. It was a perfect storm, a combination of their slackening games business and the fiasco that was Cornerstone, that cast them into Mediagenic’s arms in 1986.

So, to understand the reasons for Infocom’s collapse we need to ask why it was that the bookware boom, during which they were the shining example to be emulated by all those other publishers, so comprehensively failed to meet expectations. I think there are two reasons really, involving two D-words I tend to dwell on a lot around here: Demographics and Design.

Simply put, the games industry of the mid- to late-1980s wasn’t populated by enough readers to sustain a vibrant culture of commercial text adventures. The overwhelming computer-game demographic by 1985 was teenage boys, who have never been known as a terribly thoughtful group. The dominance enjoyed by text adventures during the earlier years of the decade owed much to the fact that computer gaming was a much more exclusive hobby during that period, practiced only by those with a restless bent of mind and the financial resources to invest thousands of dollars in an object as ultimately useless as an early microcomputer for the home. Mike Dornbrook and others involved with Infocom near the beginning have often mentioned their wonder at the sheer number of doctors and lawyers on their mailing lists. The demographics of gaming began to change with the arrival of the inexpensive Commodore 64 as a major market force in 1983. Within the next year or two, it remade the entire industry in its image — and most definitely not to the text adventure’s benefit.

At the same time that this demographic shift was underway, Infocom and the various bookware bandwagon jumpers were allowing themselves to become confused about the reasons for the text adventure’s ascendancy even among the relatively cerebral home-computer constituency of the early 1980s. Companies making text adventures in those early days can be divided into two groups: those like Sierra who were working in text because nothing else was practical at the time, and those like Infocom who saw the text adventure as a worthy new ludic and/or literary form unto itself. Sierra got away from text adventures just as soon as they could, and went on to become one of the biggest and most important game publishers of the 1990s. Infocom stuck with the form, and we know what happened to them. There is I think a lesson to be found therein. Infocom craved a sort of player who didn’t exist in the numbers they believed them to even in the early years, and who came to make up a smaller and smaller percentage of the gaming public as time went by. By 1987, some of Infocom’s experiments were aimed at a computer-game customer who was all but nonexistent: like a fan of New Yorker-style verbal wit in the case of Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It, or a romance-novel fan in the case of Plundered Hearts.

A tantalizing question must be whether a healthier Infocom could have created a market for such games among non-gaming, possibly non-computer-owning lovers of books and puzzles. Clearly their games did have appeal to some well outside of the typical computer-game demographic. Infocom during their halcyon days had enjoyed glowing write-ups in such places as the Boston Globe, the New York Times Review of Books, Discovery magazine, and even Rolling Stone. Still, the fact remained that their games threw up tremendous barriers to entry, beginning with the sheer cost of the equipment needed to run them and ending with the learning curve for interacting with them. While it’s tempting to imagine a world of interactive fiction existing entirely outside the rest of the games industry with its bash-and-crash take on existence — a world where literary sophisticates pick up a copy of the latest Infocom release from a kiosk in a trendy bookstore — it’s hard to imagine even a healthy Infocom creating such a milieu from scratch. It’s also doubtful, for that matter, whether most of their precious remaining base of customers really wanted to see them moving in that direction. The Infocom games that are most notable for their literary ambition, like A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity, were never among their biggest sellers. A substantial percentage of their customer base, as various Imps have wryly noted over the years, would have been quite happy if Infocom had churned out nothing but endless iterations on the original Zork. It was at least as much the Imps’ own creative restlessness as it was the need to serve the market that led them to dabble in so many different literary genres.

But what of those customers who were perfectly content with new iterations of Zork? Where did they disappear to as the years went by? After all, Infocom continued to indulge them with plenty of traditional games right up until the end, and plenty of other companies were equally willing to serve them. I think that it may be when we come to the Zorkian traditionalists that we especially have to consider that other D-word.

If you ask gaming old-timers about text adventures today, most will recall them as creaky, virtually unplayable things riddled with guess-the-verb issues and incomprehensible puzzles. And here’s the thing: such conventional wisdom really isn’t wrong. When I first began to write the history that this blog has become, I hoped I would be able to unearth a lot of hidden text-adventure gems from publishers other than Infocom to share with you. I did find some games that fit that description, but I also found that even the good games from other publishers stand as deviations from the norm of terrible design, sometimes fostered by an unusually dedicated development team, sometimes by the stars just seeming to align in the right way. It seems impossible to imagine that the bad design that was so endemic to the medium throughout the 1980s didn’t play a major role in turning many players away permanently. Infocom’s games were vastly better than those of their competitors, a fact which played a huge role in fostering the company’s small but legendarily loyal group of hardcore fans. Yet even Infocom’s games were hardly guaranteed to be completely free of design issues. Indeed, as Infocom’s personnel pool shrunk and the pressure from Mediagenic to release more games more quickly increased, design issues that they once seemed to have put behind them began to creep back into their games to a rather disconcerting degree. With almost all of the trade-magazine reviewers uninterested in really delving into issues of design, playability, and solubility, players had no real way of knowing which games they could trust and which they couldn’t. The graphic adventures that came to supersede text featured lots of terrible design choices in their own right, but they at least had the virtue of novelty, and that of serving as showcases for the graphics and sound of the latest home computers. (In the longer run, there’s a strong argument to be made that the graphic adventure would wind up shooting itself in the head via poor design by the end of the 1990s exactly as the text adventure had ten years before.)

But rather than unspooling further counter-factual speculations on how it all could have turned out differently, maybe we should ask ourselves another important question that’s less frequently discussed: that of whether an Infocom that survived and continued making text adventures of one sort or another would really have been the best thing for the still burgeoning art of interactive fiction. It’s hard not to remark the sense of creative exhaustion that imbues Infocom’s last gasp, their final four attempts at “graphical interactive fiction.” Much of that is doubtless down to the strain of their ever-worsening relationship with Bruce Davis and Mediagenic, and the long run of commercial disappointments that had prompted that strain. But is that all that was going on? Both Dave Lebling and Marc Blank have spoken of a sense of not really knowing what to do next with interactive fiction after having innovated so relentlessly for so long. Lebling:

I think the space of what can be done in text adventures has been well-explored by a variety of very creative people (by no means all of whom worked at Infocom). It would take, I fear, a qualitative leap in the development language or environment to expand that space. We never got very good at doing conversation, for example. There’s a long way to go before realistic conversations exist in games. We were okay but not spectacular at giving people more than one way to solve a problem. You need a more advanced input method to solve that one. People are just not that interested in typing to the game to simulate physical actions. A virtual-reality suit would solve that but they’re a long way off.

No one has yet solved the primary problem of adventure games, which is, what happens when the player doesn’t do what you expected? Once progress is made on that one, it might be fun to write an adventure game again.

And Blank:

To me, the problem was where it could go, whether we had reached some kind of practical limit in terms of writing a story that way. People used to always ask whether you could have a more powerful parser. Could you have a parser that understood different kinds of sentences? Questions, statements to other characters like “I’m hungry.” Better interaction than the very stilted kind of thing we did in the mysteries, or in Suspended where you could only say things like “go to this room” — where you’re basically just adding the name of a character and a comma at the beginning of a sentence, but everything else is the same.

The problem is that the more things you want to handle the more cases you have to handle, and it becomes very open-ended. You end up much more with the guess-the-word problem. If all of a sudden you can ask any question, but there are really only three questions that are important to the story, you’re either going to spend all this time coming up with answers that don’t mean anything or you’re going to have a lot of “I don’t know that,” which is frustrating. I always suspected it was a dead end. The nice thing about the command-oriented game is that you can come up with a pretty complete vocabulary and a pretty complete set of responses. As soon as it becomes more open-ended — if I can say, “I’m hungry” or “I like blue rubber balls” — how do you respond to that? It’s like Eliza. You get an answer, but it has nothing to do with what you asked, and at some point you realize it’s a fraud, that there’s no information there. What happens is that the worlds get bigger as you open up the vocabulary, but they get sparser. There’s less real information; it’s mostly noise just there to convince you of the world. I think that’s when it gets boring.

I worried about this a lot because people would always ask about the next step, the next thing we could do. It really wasn’t clear to me. Okay, you can make the writing better, and you can make puzzles that are more interesting. But as far as pushing toward a real interactive story — in a real story, you don’t just give everyone commands, right? — that was an issue. We worked on some of those issues for quite a while before we realized that we just weren’t getting anywhere. It was hard to know where to go with it, what was going to be the interesting part of it. Or were you turning it into a simulation, a world you can wander around in but not much happens? I always kind of hit a wall trying to move forward there.

So we said, okay, there are new [literary] genres. So then we had Amy doing Plundered Hearts, Jeff doing Nord and Bert, etc. We don’t know what the next step is technically, so instead we’re going to just kind of mess with the format. So we’ll do a satire and a pulp romance and a horror story. But there was a real issue of creative burnout. You’ve done all these things. Do you just keep doing them? Where does it go? Where does it lead? By the time Infocom closed down, I think it’s fair to say that it wasn’t obvious. I got the sense that some of the games were just an excuse to try something else: “I don’t know what to do, let’s try this.”

To some extent, Lebling and especially Blank fall victim here to their need, being technologists at heart, to always measure the progress of the medium of the text adventure in technological terms. No one declares the novel to be a dead form because the technology of printed text hasn’t advanced in hundreds of years. As many of my earlier articles attest, I see immense value in many of the literary experiments of Infocom’s later years that Blank is a bit too eager to dismiss.

I see evidence in Lebling and Blank’s comments of two creatively exhausted people rather than a creatively exhausted medium. I suspect that the group of people who made up Infocom, brilliant as they were, had taken the art of interactive fiction just about as far as they were personally able to by 1989. The innovations that would follow — and, contrary to both men’s statements above, they most definitely do exist — would largely come out of a very different culture, one free of the commercial pressures that had begun more and more to hamstring Infocom by the end. A work that is to be sold for $30 or more as a boxed computer game has to meet certain requirements, certain player expectations, that often worked at cross-purposes to the medium’s artistic evolution. Must a game require many hours to play? Must a game have puzzles? Can a game feel like a personal testament? Is an interactive-fiction game necessarily a game at all? To paraphrase that famous old Electronic Arts advertisement, can a work of interactive fiction make you cry? These were questions that Infocom — especially but not exclusively an Infocom under Mediagenic, laser-focused as the latter was on delivering conventional hit games — wasn’t in any position to further explore. The medium’s creative future would have to be left to the amateurs.

If we begin to see Infocom as, rather than a beautiful thing that was strangled far too soon, a beautiful thing that simply ran its course, we might just begin to upend the narrative of tragedy that surrounds the legendary company to this day. Among many fans of text adventures today, there’s still a marked tendency to look back on the heyday of Infocom and the commercial text adventure in general as the pivotal era in the medium’s history, a lost golden age that ended far too soon. That’s understandable on one level. This brief era marks the only period in history when it was realistically conceivable to make a living authoring text adventures, a career that plenty of hardcore fans would rate as their absolute first choice in careers out of all of them. We’ve thus seen the tragic version of the medium’s history repeated again and again for far longer than the alleged golden age actually lasted. Ironically, we tend to see it especially in those summations of interactive fiction and its history that try to reach beyond the insular community of present-day enthusiasts to serve as introductions for the uninitiated. Such articles almost always begin with Infocom, proceed to dwell at length on those glory days gone by, then mention the modern community — “but wait, interactive fiction isn’t dead!” — in a way that inevitably smacks of a lingering population of diehards. It seems rather a shabby way to frame the history of a living literary form, doesn’t it? Perhaps we can learn to do better.

In his 2007 PhD thesis on interactive fiction, Jeremy Douglass proposed recasting the commercial era as “an important anomaly, a brief big-business deviation from the otherwise constant association of the IF genre with individual authors each networked into a kind of literary salon culture.” This was what interactive fiction largely was before Infocom, and what it became again after them. Seeing the medium’s history in this way doesn’t mean minimizing the accomplishments of Infocom, whose 35-game canon deserves always to be regarded as the text adventure’s version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, the wellspring and constant source of inspiration for everything that followed. It does, however, mean recognizing that, in terms of great games that delight and amuse and tantalize and sometimes move their players, the text adventure was really just getting started even as Infocom died. Because this blog has long since begun to reach readers from well outside the interactive-fiction community from which it first sprang, I’m going to guess that some of you may have little experience with what came after Infocom. It’s for those readers among you especially that I plan to cover what came next with the same care I lavished on Infocom’s history. So, never fear. I plan to spend a lot more time praising the humble text adventure in the time to come, and I’m far from ready to bury it alongside Infocom.

(Sources: As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Some of it is also drawn from Jason’s “Infocom Cabinet” of vintage documents. Periodical sources include Computer Gaming World of September 1989; The Boston Globe Magazine of May 22 1989; Questbusters of July 1989; The Games Machine of October 1989, December 1989, and July 1990. See also Adventure Classic Gaming’s interview with Dave Lebling and Jeremy Douglass’s PhD thesis. And my huge thanks go out to Bob Bates, who granted me an extended interview about his work with Infocom.)

1. Mediagenic was known as Activision until mid-1988. To avoid confusion, I just stick with the name “Mediagenic” in this article. ↩

Comments
72 Responses

- Max Horn

July 29, 2016 at 4:45 pm

Typo: “would all would be”

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2016 at 10:08 pm

Thanks!

- Duncan Stevens

July 29, 2016 at 4:48 pm

35-game canon deserves always to be regarded as the text adventure’s version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

An interesting comparison! Certainly apt insofar as the set of works varies widely in quality and includes, along with some real masterpieces, several pieces that are generally acknowledged as not very good–and insofar as the *form* of the works in the canon has held sway, to a large extent, in later works.

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2016 at 9:35 pm

It’s a little interesting/amusing to note how close the works are in number as well: 39 plays generally believed to have been solely authored by Shakespeare versus 35 Infocom games. (Although perhaps we should regard the final four works of graphical interactive fiction the way we do the Fletcher collaborations — i.e., as compromised later works produced in the artist’s declining years.)

But one thing that really does repeatedly amaze me is how much of modern interactive fiction, right to the present day, echoes ideas first experimented with in one Infocom game or another. It really has proved an extraordinarily rich heritage.

- Jason Scott

July 29, 2016 at 5:46 pm

Hooray! It has been a pleasure to watch the extra material from GET LAMP have a new life in these many articles.

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2016 at 9:38 pm

My sincere thanks, Jason, for all you’ve done — sharing so much with me, lending your name and reputation to this blog before I’d found many readers, etc. I’m in your debt.

- David Cornelson

July 29, 2016 at 6:11 pm

Are you going to explore the history of TADS and Inform?

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2016 at 9:39 pm

In due course, yes. But first we have a little something called AGT…

- Alexander Freeman

July 30, 2016 at 2:00 am

Just out of curiosity, do you plan on covering Space Aliens Laughed at My Cardigan and Paul Panks?

- Jimmy Maher

July 30, 2016 at 7:19 am

Hadn’t really thought about either. Possibly they will come up in the form of community lore. Paul Panks’s is a sad, uncomfortable story that seems difficult to tell in a forum like this one without being exploitative.

- Jubal

July 30, 2016 at 9:58 am

Perhaps something like the infamous Stiffy Makane might be a better example of “the worst of amateur IF” than the late Mr. Panks, not least for the long-lasting influence it has had on the community.

For what it’s worth, I miss the poor mad bastard. He had a drive and a love for the form that few have ever approached.

- Alexander Freeman

July 30, 2016 at 8:39 pm

Yeah, I remember someone comparing him to Ed Wood, and I think that’s an apt comparison. Both were bad at what they did, but they also had relentless drive and tons of passion and were very prolific. Unfortunately, it would be hard to discuss Paul Panks now that you mention it.

- ZUrlocker

July 30, 2016 at 9:20 pm

Great post to end the infocom era. Very thoughtful. Personally, I think some expository on Paul Panks and others would be very worthwhile. He was not always successful, but he sure was prolific.

- Jubal

July 31, 2016 at 12:52 am

The Ed Wood comparison seems pretty fair, actually.

Panks also has the dubious distinction of having written the only amateur-era IF game ever to be discussed on Cracked.com.

- Andrew

July 29, 2016 at 7:48 pm

Oddly appropriate that you quote the EA tagline about IF making you cry – I wouldn’t quite say this article has done that for me, but it is moving to read and the extended analysis and almost “obituary” of Infocom was clearly a labour of love on your part.

I can almost picture you sitting at your PC, trying to type “And so in May 1989 they pretty much all got sacked. The End”, before realising that you couldn’t possibly end it so abruptly and, even if took you sitting up 72 hours straight to do it properly and finishing in a caffeine-induced haze then, dammit, that’s what you were going to have to do.

Does your last piece on Infocom feel like the end of an era to you?

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2016 at 9:48 pm

It certainly marks a major turning point, and I’m very much aware of that. Not to disappoint, though, but your picture of how this article came to be is a little more dramatic than the reality. My working habits are more classical than romantic, I’m afraid. Marriage and middle age tend to do that to you. ;)

I do also think that I share some of the sentiment of the Infocom old guard in mostly just being sort of glad it’s all over. The final era is pretty dispiriting, and I don’t particularly enjoying raking game after game over the coals, although I strained mightily to find ways to do that interesting, readable ways. But still, it was more in the case of those last four reviews that I was tempted to just do something like you describe — just write, “And the last four games all sucked,” and then write this article. This article, on the other hand, had been brewing somewhere in the back of my mind for literally years.

And then of course I am genuinely excited to get to what came after Infocom, which is a great story in itself. So that certainly helped ease the pain. ;)

- AguyinaRPG

July 29, 2016 at 8:16 pm

Very nice examination, Jim. I didn’t read every Infocom article up until this point, but I definitely wanted to read this one.

I think your take on Infocom’s relevance and ability to persist is one that I can follow. These guys were not just restricted to these co-called “archaic” style of games or styles such as Zork (I’m looking to talk to Dornbrook about his work at Looking Glass for example). The interactive fiction medium has many important lessons to glean from it. Certainly games like Plundered Hearts prove that much for their diversity in theme and approach. The very best of the genre taps into styles of interaction which are seldom seen in video games, merely for not having enough prominent examples to draw from.

However, I do agree with Lebling and Blank on the failure state of interaction. Chris Crawford obviously echoes this (while touting his own work, of course) and I do see it as a roadblock. Not necessarily because you *need* to have a conversation in these games, but because the world is constructed as if you do. The world isn’t so intelligently designed as to let the player understand why actions don’t work. It’s a concession and always has been.

I do also believe that the literary types in games do have a certain arrogance, though I don’t mean that in a mean way. They are dedicated towards bringing a certain level of sophistication to games, fighting tooth and nail to preserve what they believe to be a good story against what’s best for the game. Both Infocom and Sierra demonstrate this well, I think. I don’t think you can excuse the former just because the latter is far more obvious. Still, I respect both camps, and I hope that discussion of Infocom will continue to help game creators realize the different paths they can utilize in the realm of interactive experiences.

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2016 at 9:52 pm

Can you give some examples of Infocom “fighting to preserve what they believe to be a good story against what’s best for the game?” I ask because, while I can perhaps think of just a few, they’re all among the 13 Infocom games I would broadly categorize as design failures rather than the 22 successes. I certainly don’t see it as a commonplace pattern in their designs. Most of their failures failed for very different reasons.

- Jollo

July 30, 2016 at 7:21 pm

I believe he’s talking about their later, more cerebral thought experiments.

- Brian Bagnall

August 3, 2016 at 2:48 pm

You wouldn’t happen to have a list of the 22 successes and 13 failures would you?

- Jimmy Maher

August 3, 2016 at 3:06 pm

See the 22 Infocom games listed in my Hall of Fame. ;)

- Carl Read

July 30, 2016 at 12:28 am

I remember reading someone from Infocom saying once that “we probably have more computing power here than some third-world countries”. Which was probably true, but it may have also explained their lack of commercial savvy. In a world when home computers were mostly without floppy drives, (except for those owned by doctors and lawyers), they were only making multi-disk games.

I played a lot of cassette-based adventures before I touched an Infocom game, but didn’t find Infocom’s any more enjoyable. This is probably me though, in that I enjoy looking around a world more than solving puzzles.

One thought you possibly haven’t had regarding the limited take up of text adventures in those days, is that a lot of users could hardly type and probably hated doing so. We take it as a given now that people can type, but a lot of those buying C64s for games probably hadn’t touched a keyboard before getting them. This, now, shouldn’t be a problem.

- Jimmy Maher

July 30, 2016 at 7:29 am

I wouldn’t say that Infocom lacked commercial savvy. Their iconic marketing campaigns from 1983 and 1984 in particular ought to be studied in every business school in the land. Even Cornerstone was quite well-presented. What brought them down was far more complicated.

- Carl Read

July 31, 2016 at 12:57 am

But the arrogance inherent in that ‘third-world’ comment perhaps explains why they didn’t bother to work out how to get their games working on cassette-based machines. No amount of marketing could get them into that market, which as you know, was huge in the UK.

- AguyinaRPG

July 31, 2016 at 2:11 am

But really, how much software actually was a success from the US to the UK in this period? Very few publishers really tried to make that gap. Activision did it early on, but I can’t recall any big hits they had with that.

- Jimmy Maher

July 31, 2016 at 6:34 am

Ghostbusters was a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

- Carl Read

July 31, 2016 at 7:24 am

I don’t know for sure – that’s a job for a historian! ;)

(Remembers an early mention of infocom games in MicroComputer Printout – scans and puts on Web here…

http://oi66.tinypic.com/2cg0me1.jpg
http://oi67.tinypic.com/2vihuvb.jpg

) That’s from January 1983 and was someone’s idea of what should be included in their desert island disks. The Zork disks were for sale in the mag at £29.95 each (albeit Atari ones). For comparison, the Spectrum was selling for £125 at that point, the Commodore Vic20 for £170, its cassette drive for £44.95 and its disk drive for £396!

It’s hardly any wonder the UK games market was cassette based then. The US games were available, but if disk only, it’s obvious not many would sell.

- Jimmy Maher

July 31, 2016 at 6:45 am

I don’t see it as arrogance. Their games were totally dependent on the Z-Machine’s virtual-memory scheme; one might even say that that was at the heart of everything that made them so special. There just wasn’t any way to move them onto cassette without gutting them so badly as to cut out the heart of what made an Infocom game an Infocom game.

To advance a medium (any medium), developers sometimes have to leave some hardware behind. Infocom showed a willingness to do this throughout the company’s existence. In the beginning, when Zork I was first released, the American market was also still fairly cassette-centric. Infocom thus made a conscious choice from the beginning to forgo a big chunk of their potential market in favor of offering the remainder a much *better* experience. Later, of course, they did it again with the Interactive Fiction Plus games. Neither A Mind Forever Voyaging nor Trinity, perhaps the two most respected Infocom games today, would have been possible without this willingness.

Infocom had terrible distribution in Britain anyway until the Mediagenic acquisition — making their games available at last in Europe for a (somewhat) reasonable price was one of the few good turns Mediagenic did Infocom. And by that time disk drives were starting to become a little more common. Yes, you could perhaps argue that Infocom should have aggressively pushed into Europe earlier, but they were doing very well in the United States already, and were still a small company with little muscle to establish distribution in foreign markets. And then there was the cassette/disk-drive dichotomy between the markets…

Infocom *can* be justly accused of arrogance in some areas. But it’s really hard for me to see this as being among them. The “Third World” comment was almost certainly delivered with a wink and a nudge. Infocom loved to talk up the power of their PDP-10, which was a completely plebeian piece of hardware in the world they came from, for the benefit of the wide-eyed gaming journalists who came to visit them. Arrogance or just a bit of sly fun? You be the judge…

- Carl Read

July 31, 2016 at 9:01 am

I’ve just read your ‘ZIL and the Z-Machine’, so now know how they approached storage. (Sorry for my random-access approach to reading the site…) And I’m still not convinced the games couldn’t have been done on both disk and cassette without gutting them.

The virtual memory approach obviously wouldn’t work on tape, but adventures are made up of locations which are usually linked to other locations near to them. Groups of near locations could be loaded in as needed from tape, with rewinds hopefully kept to a minimum for the player. (Ahh – the good old days…:)

My guess is they just couldn’t be arsed to solve the problem, if they even considered it.

- Jimmy Maher

July 31, 2016 at 11:14 am

If you really are willing to be convinced, I would suggest you look a little more carefully at the Z-Machine architecture and consider such questions as how you would create a contiguous environment — objects dropped in one location stay there; doors stay open or closed; the thief continues about his business on the other side of the map; machines and gadgets stay in the state you left them; etc — using a bunch of static loads and what kind of end-user experience having to constantly wait for tape access as you, say, roam to and fro over the landscape of Zork would result in. A good place to start might be the Z-Machine Standards Document: http://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point1/index.html.

If not, fair enough. “They just couldn’t be arsed” does have the virtue of pithy simplicity. ;)

- Carl Read

August 1, 2016 at 7:59 am

To quote you from here: http://www.filfre.net/2012/01/zil-and-the-z-machine/

“The dynamic data — memory the virtual machine will write to as well as read — is always stored in the host computer’s RAM. The static data, however, is loaded in and out of RAM by the interpreter as needed in 1 K blocks known as pages.”

In other words, it’s just the static data that’s loaded from disk as the game is played, unlike what you’re trying to claim below. With some thought, it could’ve been made to work fine on disk as well as be usable from tape.

Infocom’s parser and the games themselves should be their claim to fame. The use of virtual memory to achieve it is neither here nor there.

- Jimmy Maher

August 1, 2016 at 10:41 am

I’m afraid you’re confusing dynamic and static data with dynamic and static loading of that data. In a disk-based game the static data — i.e., data that will not change in the course of play and thus doesn’t need always to be memory-resident — can be loaded dynamically under the control of the interpreter, swapped in and out in discrete 1 K chunks as needed. This is because a floppy-disk drive is a (relatively) fast dynamic-access storage device. A tape drive is a slow sequential storage device, which means the only practical way to use it as a sort of virtual memory is to divide the game into chunks that each effectively functions as an independent little adventure of its own. This was how, for example, Level 9 did it with their later three-part adventures.

Maybe a real-world example of the challenges would be helpful. Let’s take Zork I, the smallest story file Infocom ever released and thus presumably the most amendable to being converted to tape. Here’s its vital statistics, courtesy of the “infodump” analysis utility. (Note that this is the later, more fleshed-out version of Zork I rather than the one that ran in the 32 K TRS-80 with disk drive. This later release, requiring also a more fleshed-out interpreter, is the version that sold by far the most units. Using it strikes me as in keeping with our stipulation that we’re not allowed to “gut” the games to fit them onto tape. If you like, however, feel free to substitute the numbers from my ZIL and the Z-Machine article. I don’t think the core problems will change all that much.)

Story file is zork1.dat

**** Story file header ****

Z-code version: 3
Interpreter flags: Display score/moves
Release number: 88
Size of resident memory: 4e37
Start PC: 4f05
Dictionary address: 3b21
Object table address: 02b0
Global variables address: 2271
Size of dynamic memory: 2e53
Game flags: None
Serial number: 840726
Abbreviations address: 01f0
File size: 14b8c
Checksum: a129

This tells us that the total size of the story file is about 84 K (1db8c in hex) and the size of the resident memory — i.e., dynamic memory, or things that can change during play, and thus have always to be present in the computer’s RAM — is about 20 K (4e37 in hex).

Now, let’s consider some numbers in the case of a 48 K tape-based Sinclair Spectrum, which is the platform I’m going to presume you propose Infocom should have been targeting. The interpreter generally required about 16 K on the 8-bit machines. Then we need to devote another 20 K to the dynamic memory, putting us at 36 K. The Z-Machine requires a stack of at least 2 K, putting us at 38 K. I’m not familiar enough with the Spectrum to know how much additional memory is required by the screen and other utility functions, so in the spirit of putting the best possible face on things we’ll ignore the significant additional memory we’d lose there.

That still leaves us with just 10 K to use for the remaining 64 K of story file. Infocom’s development system wasn’t designed to sort static memory into chunks based on geography, but, again, let’s hand-wave that away, assuming they did a major ground-up rewrite to somehow give it this capability. It still means that Zork I would require 7 or at best 6 separate tape loads for the player to entirely traverse its geography. And Zork I is an extremely nonlinear game, meaning the player is constantly trekking hither and yon. I’m going to guess that, in addition to the frustrations of constantly rewinding and fast-forwarding the tape, the player of such a game would spend far more time waiting on all these loads than actually playing.

And, again, this is a best-case scenario with countless problems hand-waved away. The non-changing details of the objects the player can carry, for instance, are not stored in dynamic memory in the standard Infocom system, but they would have to be in a tape-based scenario like this one if you didn’t want to have to go to tape every time you examined an object in your inventory. The result would be a requirement for still further memory-resident code, and still less space left over for the rest of the game to be swapped in as needed from tape.

Later Infocom story files — even the non-Interactive Fiction Plus games — grew steadily in size to pin themselves right up against the theoretical maximum story-file size of 128 K. For this reason, Infocom dropped support for 48 K machines even with disk drives by 1985 or so. There just wasn’t enough space. I’m going to have to bow out now, but I really would encourage you have a look at the Z-Machines Standards Document if you’re interested in exploring this topic further.

- Carl Read

August 1, 2016 at 8:00 am

Umm – above! :)

- Keith Palmer

August 1, 2016 at 10:12 pm

All this discussion of “putting an Infocom game on cassette” has me thinking of Mini-Zork, boiled down from Zork I (just as Zork I was a segment of the “mainframe Zork”…) There was even a map somewhere in the “Infocom Cabinet” files that left me wondering if a similar process of condensing was being contemplated for Zork II. Of course, just because it was possible to fit a complete adventure game and the necessary interpreter into the Commodore 64’s memory space doesn’t mean this would have been an appealing idea to those who would have had to count every character…

- Alexander Freeman

August 2, 2016 at 4:17 am

All this has made me wonder how text adventure game that did what Wasteland did would have been received. That is, one that did something like putting all the descriptions of objects and rooms and some read herrings into the manual so as to make it small enough to fit on something like a tape.

- Jimmy Maher

August 2, 2016 at 6:41 am

Infocom came closest to that in Moonmist, which effectively moved most of the room descriptions into a brochure accompanying the game. Hard to say whether it was more motivated by the need to save space or copy protection, though. (But then the same could be said of Wasteland.) Personally, I found it very annoying. You interact with the text much more consistently and intimately in a text adventure.

- flowmotion

August 8, 2016 at 4:38 am

Just to back up what Jimmy is saying here is some more gross figure, found here. (regarding Commodore’s cassette system):

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=690223

> Well, if the transfer rate is 300 baud (which really meant “bits per second” even though “baud” is supposed to mean “signal state changes per second”)… 10 bits are used per byte, so a 30 minute “side” of a cassette would hold 30minutes * 60secs/min * 300bits/sec / 10bits/byte = 54 Kbytes.

Per a previous article, Zork I was 77K (about half the size of an Apple disk). So even if a feasible swap system was somehow built, it would take ~43 minutes to load the data into the system, under optimal conditions. As a practical matter, you would constantly be loading the cassette as you moved around the map.

I only had the briefest experience with cassette PCs and getting 4kb of STARTREK.BAS to load was a flakey and interminable experience. So, even if it was theoretically possible to get these games loading from a cassette, the user experience would be so horrible really nobody would want to do it.

- Keith Palmer

July 30, 2016 at 11:33 am

I knew about “11 of the 26 were asked to move; 5 of the 11 actually moved” and had seen “From Cornerstone to Tombstone” in the “Infocom Cabinet,” but hearing Infocom had to finish the MS-DOS interpreter for their final games even after being told the bad news adds that extra bit of poignancy.

In any case, as much as I can remember a bit from Get Lamp that makes me wonder if a thing or two might yet be said about “The Lost Treasures of Infocom” (although I can absolutely suppose the bundles were something a handful of new people at most worked on), this was a solid wrap-up. Lebling and Blank’s gloomy “how can these games ever respond to unanticipated input?” comments did at least leave me wondering if there could be something to them, but perhaps that just leaves me anticipating what you’ve got to say about the “noncommercial scene.” (There, perhaps, I have to face how I could always play more current interactive fiction than the limited amount I actually do.) Your speculation about just what had happened to the people who had bought Infocom’s first releases seems reasonable enough, although I can think back to Get Lamp again and a comment in it that, for all the self-depreciating rhetoric in the IF community about “the eclipse of literacy,” “reading off a computer screen” may be more comfortable for people now (through improved resolution and simple practice) than it was in the 1980s. (I suppose there I can also reflect on a short-lived Apple II magazine from the mid-1980s that included a column from Softalk’s Margot Tommervik; in the hangover after the 8-bit home computer boom of the early 1980s went bust, she built one column around speculation the “computer market” had already saturated at the size of the “people who read for pleasure” market.)

As for me, in 1989 I was still wondering if I’d ever see a hint about just how to hold “tea” and “no tea” at the same time and finish The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; seeking out other Infocom games at that time didn’t occur to me at all… although maybe the awareness that developed that I’d “missed out” (at least until “The Lost Treasures of Infocom”) might have played its own part in making Infocom stick in my head.

- Jimmy Maher

July 30, 2016 at 1:12 pm

The release of Lost Treasures definitely marks a watershed moment of its own. Widely regarded among the general public as just a maker of oddball, outdated games by the time they closed, Infocom’s stock rose precipitously in the early 1990s following the huge-selling Lost Treasures compilations, the text adventure’s last belated commercial hurrah. You’re right that that must be an important part of any Infocom history in its own right; it’s really the starting point of the modern view of the company.

- Felix

July 30, 2016 at 2:03 pm

Ironic how a thing several people wrote about this spring (myself included) was already so clearly seen and said by Marc Blank, who knows how long ago: that any parser-based text adventure is doomed to be 90% fluff, that has to be painstakingly handcrafted even though it does nothing to advance the story; that picking the important bits out of all the fluff can be as tedious for the player as it is for the author, even outside of puzzles; last but not least, that making the parser and world model smarter would only increase the proportion of irrelevant fluff from 90% to 99.9%. If anything, the post-commercial era has taught us that more sophistication wasn’t the answer. And it still took us all a lot of pain to reach that conclusion.

Either way, Infocom didn’t deserve Cornerstone; saddling them with that terrible idea was a lot like throwing a millstone to a drowning person instead of a life raft. As my mother taught me, “if you can’t help someone, at least leave them alone”. Good things might have come out of Infocom dying of natural causes rather than bean-counter boneheadedness, things we can only guess at now. And I’m sick of seeing this story repeating again and again. Three times just in my own career alone is plenty enough.

- Michael Davis

August 1, 2016 at 7:53 pm

Is that irony?

- flowmotion

August 3, 2016 at 3:52 am

Excellent point.

Perhaps Infocom’s few big hits were not solely due to the “14 year old boy” appeal, but that IF works best in simplified universes where there are only treasures to steal, trolls to stab, and buttons to push, and so on.

ASK CHARACTER ABOUT HIS WIFE is something you might be eager to read, but not something you ever personally like to do. The tropes worked as tropes.the “literariness” was perhaps unwanted.

- Felix

August 7, 2016 at 2:49 pm

@flowmotion: Indeed. Note how in Stanley Parable, interaction is also limited to moving around and pushing buttons…

- Ben Kidwell

July 30, 2016 at 7:13 pm

Amazing article. Very emotional to finally read this after so many years of reading your retelling of the story of Infocom, which was also the story of my childhood. You combine impeccable research with personal experience and love for the works and an empathetic human understanding of the protagonists. This blog changed my life by providing me with tremendous inspiration for my own creative projects. I’m excited to see your telling of the story of the rise of independent IF.

- Colin Djukic

July 31, 2016 at 7:03 am

I want to second that comment. Your articles are always wonderful, but this is a high mark. Thank you for what you’re doing, and I’d like to take a bow to Jason Scott as well, keep it up.

- Steven Marsh

July 30, 2016 at 8:02 pm

A fascinating coda to a fascinating company. Thank you for your efforts.

As an aside, this article is showing as having posted on July 23; I suspect that’s not the case (and it actually posted July 29, based on the first comments). Not sure how much that matters to you, but I thought I’d mention it!

- Jimmy Maher

July 30, 2016 at 8:15 pm

I accidentally hit publish on a draft some days ago, then quickly unpublished it again. It must have retained the original date. Changed it manually. Thanks!

- Alexander Freeman

July 30, 2016 at 8:46 pm

I came to more or less the same conclusion you did about Infocom. I seem to recall you even comparing what happened there to a summer romance. I still think if they’d played their cards right, Lurking Horror and Plundered Hearts wouldn’t have been compromised as much, and they would have made some games that were better than Zork Zero, Beyond Zork, and Shogun. They could have done a better job branching out to other types of games before finally leaving text adventure games behind for good in, say, 1990.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 31, 2016 at 10:08 am

Great post as always; both informative and emotional.

Like others have done (both yourself, and commenters above), it’s fun to speculate, to ask “what if” (there had been no Cornerstone, Infocom had been slightly better at business, and so on. I think they *might* have extended the commercial IF era for a few years (not many), and later innovations such as Magnetic Scrolls’ “Magnetic Windows” and Legend’s engine might have come from Infocom instead, and possibly even a few years earlier.

I also wonder if Infocom might have lived on doing point and click adventures — possibly more “mature” and innovative than those from Sierra and Lucasfilm –, if they had an engine of their own at least as good as AGI/SCI and SCUMM. But would the Imps have been interested in doing those kinds of games? In the “real timeline”, only one of them was (Brian Moriarty, with Loom)…

Of course, by 2000 or so, even point and click adventures probably couldn’t go on making any real money…

- Pedro Timóteo

July 31, 2016 at 10:20 am

I also wonder if Infocom couldn’t have had a *lot* of success doing graphical remakes of their classic games (think Softporn -> Leisure Suit Larry), in the late 80s and early 90s. They would already have better stories, better puzzles and a better design than most of what Sierra did… Who’d want Space Quest when they could have AGI(ish) Planetfall?

Again, I don’t know if the Imps would have enjoyed that, though.

- Alexander Freeman

August 1, 2016 at 12:36 am

Interesting points. I think a graphical remake without a parser would have lost too much. However, the graphics for Sierra’s AGI and SCI0 games took up so much memory that there wasn’t enough left for a parser as good as Infocom’s. CDs could have taken care of that problem, but they didn’t take off until after parser games left the market. I’m not sure why even point-and-click adventure games died commercially around 2000, though. They seem as though they’d cost a lot less to make than plenty of modern-day games.

- Lisa H.

August 1, 2016 at 1:35 am

Who’d want Space Quest when they could have AGI(ish) Planetfall?

I’d play them both. Although that might be easy for me to say given that I wasn’t playing SQ contemporary with its releases; like Planetfall I only came to it rather later.

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- Bernie

July 31, 2016 at 4:12 pm

My Two Cents ….

Joe Ybarra had a part of the truth : Manhole + HyperCard … but was wrong about people not wanting games that took “20 to 50 hours”.

The Infocom gang were onto something with their discovery of a “Zork-leaning” demographic hungry for more puzzles … but wrong on their pessimistic views about computer games and reading. And specially wrong believing that the game world had to be “hyper-interactive” in order for adventure games to have a future.

What i’m saying is that all these guys could have anticipated the future and acted accordingly if they had worked better together.

Myst , a very “zorkian” world full of puzzles (ditto for Infocom’s demographic insights) from the people who created The Manhole (ditto for Ybarra’s comment) using an engine very similar to HyperCard that was created on Mac II’s (ditto for Ybarra and the Imps) , went on to become the best selling computer game in history since its introduction in 1994. And it included loads of reading ! Gee, the back story was even based on magical books and writing !

There’s also The 7th Guest : not very Zork-like, but entirely puzzle-based , and with a horror theme “lurking” behind the brain teasers. It also sold a lot of copies and spawned a sequel.

The “what-if” question brought to mind a story I read in an old issue of RetroGamer Magazine : Ultimate Play The Game (which I think you have mentioned in Antiquarian also), one of the premier ZX Spectrum developers during the system’s golden years (83-87). Although their creations were in very different genres from Infocom’s, they shared the same “cult” status among their audience and that “otherness” distinguishing them form the rest of their peers in the eyes of the press. What makes the story of Ultimate’s founders, in my opinion, a success in contrast to Infocom’s is that they were able to see the demise of their chosen technology platform (early-to-mid 80’s 8-bit home computers) very early (’85-’86), when the ZX, C64 and their peers were at their peak, and acted accordingly. They took their “essence” as designers and applied it to the up-and-coming console medium by re-forming as the legendary Rare Ltd., of “Donkey Kong Country” fame. They even managed to swith genres and still make it big with their “Goldeneye 007” 1st person shooter.

The collapse of Infocom’s whole concept was not Conerstone’s or Mediagenic’s fault in the end, it was the Imps’ ! …. they weren’t flexible enough towards new technology as designers, and neither entrepreneurial enough to sell their stake at the right moment and regroup under a new banner. This surely would have benefitted adventure gaming in general during the 90’s.

Sorry for the long post ! Perhaps Jimmy can help me a little and reprhrase this using his unique powers of synthesis and insight , like he did with the material on this wonderful post !

- Jimmy Maher

July 31, 2016 at 5:12 pm

You do want to be careful drawing too many conclusions from the huge success of Myst. It was the first game to really show off the capabilities of the new generation of so-called “multimedia PCs”: CD-ROM, SVGA graphics, Soundblaster sound cards. Most people who bought it bought it as a showpiece, not a game they were all that serious about playing and completing. It was also packaged with many “multimedia kits,” which made up a big chunk of its sales. It must be one of the least *played* games in proportion to its sales in history.

Of course, back in the day plenty of people bought Zork as a showpiece of its own. And just as (I would argue) many publishers took the wrong lesson from the success of Zork, the success of Myst resulted in a flood of clones, none of which managed more than a tiny fraction of its sales.

- Lisa H.

August 1, 2016 at 1:37 am

My mother bought Myst; I don’t know if she ever played it much, but my main picture of it is of the box sitting dusty on the little side table next to her computer. Personally, I still haven’t ever played it!

- Bernie

August 5, 2016 at 3:12 pm

Thank you very much jimmy !

Maybe my perspective is not wide enough, since I was one of those few you mention that actually played Myst and finished it. It even inspired me to take up Zork again after many years.

Your comment has led me to refine my view a little bit : Myst was a very honest effort to bring traditional, zork-style, adventure-gaming to wider audience by taking advantage of the emerging Multimedia-PC technology platform. But it turned out they only managed to promote the technology itself, and were only preaching to the converts as far as adventure gaming is concerned. But they tried, and were sucessful in some twisted way apart from financially. This could’ve been Infocom’s Imps, and perhaps the kind of money generated by Myst would’ve given them enough space to create something truly wonderful.

Your comment about developers learning the wrong lesson from Zork and Myst also gave a new perspective on another genre you’ve discussed here : RPG’s. US and European developers might also have learned the wrong lesson from the “Gold Box” and Richard Garriott’s “canonical” Ultimas (V, VI and specially VII) going on to craft bigger and bigger geographies, increasingly complex world models and legions of NPC’s with detailed lives and homes of their own. This brought good profits during the 90’s and early 2000’s, perhaps thanks to a novelty factor and improving 3D graphics. But there was also Final Fantasy V, VI, VII and the whole Japanese / console phenomenon, the guys who learned the “right” lessons from Garriott : emphasize the ‘Role’ and ‘Game’ aspects and simplify the ‘Play’ with almost-linear progression and an intuitive battle interface. And don’t waste graphics power on more “realistic” knights and orcs, make it all very stilyzed and fluid, manga-style. Then, the Diablo series brought that all-important element of real-time hack-n-slash action. If you look at any best-selling RPG of the last 10 years, you’ll immediately recognize Final Fantasy’s and Diablo’s influence, but in the same historical time frame the closest thing you’ll find to a “modern-day Ultima” are, paradoxically, re-makes of Ultima V and VI painstakingly created on modern engines that provide scripting capabilities.

- whomever

August 5, 2016 at 4:39 pm

I’m not sure I buy the “all recent successful RPG Isn’t like Ultima”. What about the Elder Scrolls? They have been super successful and feel like pretty direct descendents to me.

- Sam Garret

August 1, 2016 at 12:06 am

Tiny, tiny typo I almost hesitate to mention as it’s so small:

“gaming public as time went by”.

Lovely article as always, and the talk of Myst in the comments makes me eager to read your take on Return to Zork, Nemesis, and Grand Inquisitor, all of which were interesting, but also, in some ways, horrible. Something to look forward to, I guess.

- Sam Garret

August 1, 2016 at 12:20 am

(Note to self: don’t indicate typos with greater than and less than signs or the extraneous letters they contain will get stripped because HTML. D’oh!)

- Sniffnoy

August 1, 2016 at 3:07 pm

Note, you can include the less than sign (<) by typing &lt;, and you can include the greater-than sign (>) by typing &gt;. (Assuming I’ve done this right…)

- Jimmy Maher

August 1, 2016 at 6:25 am

Always appreciated, even (especially?) when tiny. Thanks!

- Michael Davis

August 1, 2016 at 7:55 pm

Man, what a ride, huh? Thank you so much for this blog. I can’t imagine how many man-hours you pour into this project, but it is very, very appreciated :D

- Joe

August 2, 2016 at 2:28 pm

I enjoyed the article!

I do think your comments about Blank and Lebling come across as a bit dismissive, suggesting that their technical interests blindered their view of interactive fiction’s prospects.

They were professional game devs working in a commercial environment, and I suspect the quotes you included were (implicitly) about the prospects of commercial IF. Homebrew, freeware hobbyist projects are a whole different thing. As much as you or I might enjoy them, they are, market-wise, completely irrelevant!

Presumably Blank and Lebling were talking about measures needed to return IF to (at least modest) popularity, which almost by definition means a legitimate commerical market. I would argue that the current demand even for *free* IF would not register on any legitimate measure of game popularity by genre, and the demand for *paid* IF, even of high quality, would absolutely not register. There would need to be some sort of radical, literally game-changing paradigm shift in how IF is designed and interacted with to generate enough fans to make it register… which is exactly what Blank and Lebling were saying in those quotes.

The reality is, the IF community *is*, to a large extent, a small group of die-hards. There is no shame in that whatsoever! But that doesn’t mean Blank and Lebling’s comments were anything but spot-on.

- flowmotion

August 3, 2016 at 4:13 am

> Infocom never enjoyed a single profitable year after 1983

I have to say the picture of late-stage Infocom you have been painting here for a while has been quite depressing.

They churn out game-after-game, they get some semi-positive response in obscure publications, and the game goes on to sell in completely minuscule numbers. Who knows if this is some hardcore fanbase, or people buying something by mistake because of the cover art. Even now, only their biggest fans could even remember half this stuff. They take some advantage of their creative freedom in this situation, but for the most part they just go through the motions and just keep churning out game after game after poor-selling game.

Once I worked in a “great environment” at a job that was completely dead-end due to corporate politics. Everyone put in their 20-30 hours, there was a lot of drinking and sleeping with coworkers, it was a fun place to work. Whenever I run into someone from that job, they talk about how great it was. But we all knew (or should have known) that we were doomed. I realized that kind of job attracts a certain “fun person” which makes it a “fun job”. But success-oriented people don’t hang around and wait for the noose to be put around their neck.

If you told me in 1989 that Infocom was still around, I “would have been like no way”. I imagine a lot of these people felt the exact same way about their job.

- Oscillations

August 5, 2016 at 4:40 am

Post-Infocom IF just isn’t interesting and never will be. Even the Infocom story is way more interesting at this point than playing any of their games.

- NorkaBoid

August 16, 2016 at 4:00 pm

Oh, I don’t know. Certainly the Infocom story, as unfolded for us by Jimmy here, has been a great deal more fascinating than I, for one, had ever imagined. And it may seem impossible to top at this point.
But … when you consider that “post-Infocom” IF consists of a much more diverse body of works (dare I call them “games” collectively?) created by a much more diverse bunch of people over a much longer — and still expanding — period of time, why should we not expect the story of post-Infocom interactive fiction to be a couple orders of magnitude more interesting?
If the Lane Barrow interview is any indication of what’s still to come, we’re in for quite a ride!

- metzomagic

August 10, 2016 at 3:41 pm

Wow. I thought I knew the history of Infocom quite well, but it turns out that was only in the context of playing some of their more popular efforts, and from ‘randomly accessing’ some of your other articles about them. I had assumed that their demise was largely due to the popularity of IF waning because of the advent of graphics and sound.

So when I saw a reference to ‘Cornerstone’ in this article, I had not the slightest inkling of what you were talking about. Only when I did a site search for the term did I find your ‘Down From the Top’ article dated 3 April, 2014. And then I read it; and then I wept :-( They really, really, needed a separate business division for Cornerstone. End of story.

- Lee Jones

August 12, 2016 at 6:34 pm

This was quite a bittersweet read. Sad, at times, but somewhat hopeful.

I’ve been studying the world consumer electronics from the late 1970s through the 1980s, and I’ve noticed, on the whole… It seems like there was an over-abundant optimism, pervading the entire industry, that just all sort of… Crashed, for a variety of reasons, and left us with the closed, lifeless coporate environment we have today.

For some reason, Infocom reminds me greatly of Atari. Both companies experienced a rather similar rise and fall, and both had these grandiose ideals of changing the industry. Atari certainly started as simply a videogame company, but their ambitions grew exponentially to include a grand computer revolution, that never came to be.

The videogame/computer industry seems to be rife with grand ideals of changing the world, that are too ambitious, and run their course, before puttering out with a whimper.

- Nate

August 13, 2016 at 11:24 am

“I’ve been studying the world consumer electronics from the late 1970s through the 1980s, and I’ve noticed, on the whole… It seems like there was an over-abundant optimism, pervading the entire industry, that just all sort of… Crashed, for a variety of reasons, and left us with the closed, lifeless coporate environment we have today.”

As someone who was a kid in the 1980s, I agree. There was a strong strain of utopianism in the early microcomputer world. Read the early 1970s-80s magazines – Creative Computing and Byte particularly – and you can see there were very high expectations that ‘putting computers in the hands of the people’ would transform society, expand consciousness, and shift power back from governments and corporations. The Venn diagram of the early microcomputer people and the ‘West Coast technological hippie’ scene was nearly a circle. Stewart Brand and Timothy Leary. Steve Wozniak (Jobs not nearly as much, but Apple still gets a lot of mileage out of their ‘hippie cred’ despite being the most corporate of corporates).

The utopianism mostly died out by the mid 1980s, then kicked in again – briefly – in the 1990s with the Internet and ‘cyberculture’ and the whole mom-and-pop ISP era and Open Source. But Facebook and iPhones have now killed it again. Data transfer even for non-Americans is centralised in Seattle and San Francisco in hundred-billion-dollar tech unicorns, and we’ve all shrugged and accepted that GCHQ/NSA are reading everything. Our devices are increasingly less general-purpose, more locked down, requiring signing keys to publish software.

This new era of centralisation would have been unthinkable even in the 1990s – but was very much the expectation in the 1970s, the era of IBM mainframes and the Bell telephone monopoly, before the microcomputers.

It’s starting to feel like the 1980s-90s were a brief, weird optimistic anomaly. I hope maybe we can get another chance. But I think we’ll have to first have a popular sensibility that demands it. Another 1960s, or something like it.

- Lee Jones

August 24, 2016 at 1:51 am

Another question here to the OP, but since we’ve reached the end of Infocom’s tale, I’m somewhat curious why not a post about “Battletech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception” from 1988?

- Jimmy Maher

August 24, 2016 at 3:42 am

It was an Infocom game in name only, curated entirely by Mediagenic. The Cambridge team had nothing to do with it.

AGT
August 5, 2016

What with our love of specialization and our tendency to place societal value only on those activities that earn their doers money, the modern world is not terribly kind to the idea of amateurism. See, for example, the popular adjective “amateurish,” which has doubtless crept into a few of my own reviews of one misbegotten game or another over the years. Yet there was a time when amateurism had a more positive connotation, connected to its root in the Latin “amatorem”: “lover.” This view of amateurism celebrates the amateur as someone who does something not for material gain or social prestige, but purely for the love of it. It’s this view which lies behind the requirement that persisted for so many decades that only amateurs — pure of mind, intent, and spirit — could take part in the Olympic Games, a requirement so out of keeping with the currents of modern thought that we now find it difficult to even parse.

But really, truly, sometimes amateurism can bring out the best in us. Leaving to the sports bloggers the question of whether the Olympics lost something when they gave up on amateurism, I’ll say here today that the rise of the amateurs may just have been the best thing ever to happen to the text adventure. Interactive fiction had come just about as far as it could as a slave to the commercial marketplace by the time Infocom died in 1989. Free from the need to shoehorn in graphics, to artificially extend the length of the game, to avoid controversial topics and interesting formal experiments, the amateurs were now primed to take over. With this article, we’ll begin the deeply amateurish story of how that came to be — a story every bit as fascinating and inspiring as the history of Infocom that has consumed so much of my attention over the last four and a half years of blogging.

I mentioned already in my last article my fondness for Jeremy Douglass’s alternative take on interactive-fiction history, which replaces the tragic narrative of a lost commercial golden age with a more even-keeled thoroughgoing narrative of inspired amateurism, leaving the commercial era as an anomalous interstitial period within a longstanding non-commercial “literary salon culture.” Yet I’m not sure that even the anomalous commercial era was quite so anomalous as Douglass might lead us to believe, for the vast majority of people writing text adventures even during the 1980s weren’t trying to make a living at it. Right from the moment that Adventure inspired teams of institutional hackers in various places around the country and the world to try to make a better version of their own, the text adventure has been almost unique in the way it has inspired so many consumers to become producers of their favorite ludic genre. Indeed, that might just be the text adventure’s most inspiring aspect of all. And, far from being strictly a post-1980s phenomenon, it was as true during the alleged commercial era as it remains today.

We’ve seen already how enabling others to roll their own text adventures became something of a cottage industry of its own almost as soon as Scott Adams’s Adventureland, the first microcomputer-based game of its type, arrived on the TRS-80 in late 1978. In the May 1979 issue of SoftSide magazine, Lance Micklus published the BASIC code to his Dog Star Adventure, which would go on to become the sturdy framework for tens of thousands of similar games created in bedrooms, high-school computer labs, and home offices, most of which never traveled much further than the computer used to create them. There followed heaps more magazine listings of BASIC-based text adventures, many of them based on Micklus’s original, along with enough books on the crafting of them to fill a long library shelf.

At the same time, other more specialized text-adventure-creation systems also began to emerge. Only shortly after Dog Star Adventure appeared, Donald Brown began to distribute Eamon, a construction set for “adventure scenarios” that combined elements of text adventures and CRPGs in a way that strikes us as stranger today than it did players back in 1979, when genres were still in flux and the lines between the largely deterministic adventure game and the largely emergent CRPG had not yet been clearly demarcated. In 1982, Allan Moluf and Bruce Hanson released The Adventure System, an authoring system for new games that used the now well-documented Scott Adams format. (Such clever retro-fitting of new technologies onto old would become another thoroughgoing theme of interactive-fiction history, with perhaps the most notable example becoming Graham Nelson’s decision to make his new Inform compiler target the old Infocom Z-Machine in the early 1990s.) But the really big winner among the early text-adventure construction kits was an entry from across the pond: Graeme Yaendle’s The Quill, which almost from the instant of its late 1983 release became the basis for more than one out of every two text adventures released in Britain, thus helping the adventuring culture of Britain and the wider Europe become even more a culture of inspired amateurism than was that of the United States. (The Quill was briefly sold in the United States under the name AdventureWriter, but, being poorly marketed and distributed, never caught on.)

With Infocom being universally regarded as the gold standard in text adventures by 1983 even in Europe (where their games would remain pricey, disk-drive-requiring pieces of foreign exotica for some years yet), the ultimate dream for makers and users of systems like The Quill was a construction kit capable of making Infocom-quality games. That dream would, alas, go unrealized for quite some time. Even the Professional Adventure Writing System (PAWS), Yeandle’s 1986 follow-up to The Quill, had a long way to go to meet that standard. The first popular construction kit capable of fooling a player even momentarily into believing she was playing an Infocom game would rather be an American system called the Adventure Game Toolkit, or AGT, the first system of its kind to be widely used in the United States since Eamon. But before AGT there was the less auspiciously named Generic Adventure Game System, or GAGS, which never became all that popular and was capable of fooling absolutely no one. Nevertheless, any history of AGT must begin with GAGS.

The man behind GAGS was one Mark J. Welch, a go-getter who had started working as a freelance technology journalist just a year out of high school in 1976. By the mid-1980s, he was an editor and product reviewer for Byte, the most influential periodical in the computer industry. In his spare time, he tinkered with text adventures, first in BASIC, then in a Pascal-like language called Ada, finally in a new programming environment that was taking the industry by storm, Borland’s Turbo Pascal. He eventually made the leap that Scott Adams and so many professional adventure developers after him had already made, from writing each new game as a custom program on an ad hoc basis to developing a database-driven engine capable of playing many games. That engine became GAGS, which Welch first released in 1985 under the new software-distribution model of shareware; the system was free to copy or download, but happy users were encouraged to register their copy for $15. Welch would also sell the Turbo Pascal source code to those looking to hack the system a bit for themselves for $25, on the condition that they not distribute it further.

Working on business-focused MS-DOS machines with disk drives, relatively fast processors, 80 columns of text, and 256 K or more of memory, Welch was far less constrained than the likes of Graeme Yeandle had been in writing The Quill on a little Sinclair Spectrum. Yet, far from actively chasing the Holy Grail of an Infocom-like game, he kept his goals for GAGS deliberately modest. In a passage as commendable for its honesty as it is questionable in terms of marketing, Welch wrote bluntly in his manual’s introduction that GAGS “cannot be used to write an adventure game with as many complex features as Infocom’s. To do so would require developing a complete adventure-game programming language, as Infocom has done, and would require adventure-game writers to learn a very complex set of rules.” With Welch having thus explicitly rejected the idea of a true programming language for creating text adventures, working with GAGS, like working with The Quill, felt more like an exercise in data entry than it did an exercise in programming. Let’s briefly see how it worked.

A GAGS game is made up of three elements: “rooms,” “nouns,” and “creatures.” All are defined in a single text file, which is then passed to the compiler for transformation into an Infocom-style story file, playable via the GAGS interpreter. The examples that follow are taken from the most popular game ever made with GAGS, a Lewis Carroll pastiche with the appropriately Victorian long-winded title of The Adventures of Alice Who Went through the Looking Glass and Came Back Not Much Changed.[1] Let’s first look at a room definition.

ROOM 9
Denser Forest
East      35 - Dense Forest
Points 12
END_ROOM 9

ROOM_DESCR 9 -- Denser Forest
The forest is even denser here.  You think perhaps you should turn around and
go back to the garden.  Suddenly you realize the solution to a mathematics
problem that has been eluding you for days.
END_ROOM_DESCR 9

I trust that none of what you see here is terribly hard to divine. Room 9 is called “Denser Forest,” and is a dead end lying to the west of “Dense Forest.” The player receives 12 points upon entering this room for the first time. And after these details we have the text of the room’s description.

Just a couple of other optional details beyond what you see here can be provided in a room definition, defining potentially locked doors blocking departure and the keys that unlock them as well as whether the room is lit or unlit (it’s lit by default). GAGS also lets us end the game, in either victory or death, as soon as the player enters a given room; in fact, this is the only way to declare victory.

“Nouns,” meaning inanimate objects really, are a bit more complicated. Here we have an umbrella.

NOUN 204
UMBRELLA
OLD
There is an old umbrella here.
Weight    1
Size    1
Location  5 - Drawing Room
Points    0
Key       0
** Can't shoot
Num_Shots 0
Unpushable
Unreadable
Turnable
Unplayable
Unpullable
Off
Closable
Closed
Unlockable
Unlocked
Undrinkable
Inedible
Nonpoisonous
Unmovable
** Not_a_light
END_NOUN

NOUN_DESCR 204 -- UMBRELLA
The umbrella has obviously seen better days.  It is frayed around the edges,
the handle is warped, and it bulges unnaturally in several places.
END_NOUN_DESCR 204

TURN_DESCR 204 -- UMBRELLA
You spin the umbrella around a few times. Wasn't that fun?
END_TURN_DESCR 204

I should first of all note that nouns are numbered from 201, so this is actually only the fourth object defined in the game. We see here that “umbrella,” the one-word name of the noun, can be prefaced by the adjective “old,” which could potentially be very useful for parser disambiguation if there happen to be two umbrellas in the game. “There is an old umbrella here” is the message which will be appended to the description of a room that happens to contain the umbrella. It has a weight and a size of 1 for purposes of inventory juggling, and it begins the game in room 5, the “Drawing Room.” The umbrella awards the player no points for picking it up for the first time.

The parameters that come next neatly summarize virtually every possibility for object interaction in a GAGS game. A noun can be a key unlocking a certain door or another noun; this one is not. A noun can be shootable, possibly with limited ammunition. A noun can be pushable, readable, turnable, playable, or pullable, each verb leading to a simple textual description of the result; in this case, turning the umbrella yields, “You spin the umbrella around a few times. Wasn’t that fun?” A noun can be turned off or on, can be closable and if so either closed or open, can be lockable and if so either locked or unlocked, can be drinkable or edible and if one or the other can be poisonous. A noun can be moveable or unmoveable; in this case, somewhat oddly, the player can’t actually pick the umbrella up, which renders the weight and size parameters moot. Finally, a noun can be a light source.

Let’s look at one more noun.

NOUN 205
DAGGER
SMALL
There is a small dagger here.
Weight    1
Size    1
Location  204 - UMBRELLA
Key       0
Points    5
** Can't shoot
Num_Shots 0
Unpushable
Unreadable
Unturnable
Unplayable
Unpullable
Off
Unclosable
Open
Unlockable
Unlocked
Undrinkable
Inedible
Nonpoisonous
Movable
** Not_a_light
END_NOUN

NOUN_DESCR 205 -- DAGGER
The dagger is small but very sharp.
END_NOUN_DESCR 205

So, the dagger is a moveable object found inside the closed umbrella. This is the sort of thing that often passes for a puzzle in a GAGS game; note that the player is awarded 5 points just for picking the dagger up for the first time.

Let’s now have a look at a creature.

CREATURE 301
BANDERSNATCH
FROOBIOUS
There is a Froobious Bandersnatch here.
Location 9
Weapon   205
Threshhold 5
Time_Thresh 5
Hostile
END_CREATURE

CREATURE_DESCR 301
The Bandersnatch is snorting and drooling.  It seem to harbor no very
honorable intentions towards you.
END_CREATURE_DESCR 301

Creatures are numbered from 301, so our froobious bandersnatch is actually the first creature to be described. He lives in room 9, our aforedescribed Denser Forest. The parameters that follow “Location” serve to drive home the real main interest of the GAGS system: combat. In that respect, GAGS would seem to owe more philosophically to Eamon than it does to Infocom. Yet its combat is implemented in a rather peculiarly  unsatisfying way even in comparison to that less than ideal older system. Each hostile creature has a single noun — a key to a different sort of lock, one might say — that is capable of killing it instantly. All others are useless against it. In the case of the bandersnatch, then, said noun is the dagger. The “Threshold” parameter tells us that the player can make up to 5 unsuccessful attacks — presumably, using various objects to poke at it, hoping to find the right one — before the bandersnatch gets aggravated enough to kill her. The “Time_Thresh” of 5 tells us that the bandersnatch will kill the player anyway if she remains in his presence for 5 turns; in other words, no matter what the player does, if she doesn’t attack the bandersnatch with the dagger within 5 turns of arriving in the Denser Forest, she’s a goner. And “Hostile” of course tells us that the bandersnatch is, well, hostile; if he was “Friendly” instead, the “Threshold” and “Time_Thresh” would be meaningless.

With all possible verbs and interactions hard-coded into the engine, authors working with GAGS were largely restricted to the hoariest of hoary text-adventure chestnuts: locks and keys, light and darkness, the inevitable mazes. But most of all, games tended to develop (devolve?) into an exercise in finding the right thing to use to bash each monster in the player’s way. That’s certainly the case in the game we’ve just been looking at, which sees Alice cutting a bloody swathe through Wonderland, taking out jabberwocks and knaves with a violent aplomb that would make even the makers of the recent girl-powery films blush. Even a croquet ball gets coded up as a monster to be bashed with an “umbrolly” — a different umbrella from the inexplicably unmovable one we saw earlier — in a clumsy attempt to work around the limitations of GAGS.

Unsatisfactory though it was in so many ways as a piece of hard technology, GAGS did have a number of softer qualities going for it. Young though he still was, Mark Welch had been working for almost a decade already as a technical writer by the time he released GAGS. He knew how to describe how his system worked clearly and completely, and how to put his best foot forward generally when it came to every aspect of GAGS’s presentation. One might even say that his extensive documentation of GAGS marks the beginning of the tradition of literate, thoughtful writing about the art and technology of interactive fiction that remains a welcome aspect of the amateur community to this day.

Another move by Welch would prove if anything even more influential. Looking to encourage people to use his system, he decided to sponsor a contest for GAGS games, with a submission deadline of September 30, 1986. His justification for doing so rings in concert with the justifications for the hundreds of interactive-fiction contests that have been held since, not least the big one that began in 1995: to get people to actually finish and publish their games. “The main purpose of the contest was to encourage people to share the games they’d written using GAGS,” he says. “A lot of people had started games, spending quite a few hours on them, but stopped before they’d really finished them, or before they’d really made them playable.” Entrants were mailed on disk to Welch, who judged them personally, selecting Alice as the winner. (There is unfortunately no historical record of how many and which other games were submitted for judging.) The author of Alice, one Douglas Asherman, received $100 for his efforts and got to see his game distributed with GAGS from then on. Alice received a further boost when some enterprising hackers worked out how to make the GAGS interpreter output and input text over a modem connection. The game became a fixture among so-called “door games” — simple, text-based games hosted by computer bulletin-board services — for several years thereafter, thereby becoming available for play by many owners of the non-MS-DOS computers that still made up the vast majority of the home market going into the second half of the 1980s.

David Malmberg

It was shortly after Welch’s first and only GAGS contest that David Malmberg, the real hero of our story today, entered the scene. A business analyst by day at the San Francisco headquarters of Foremost-McKesson — a $4 billion corporation with fingers in such diverse pies as chemicals, liquor, food, and pharmaceuticals — Malmberg had long since become a microcomputer convert by night, having purchased his first Commodore PET well before the 1970s were history. He contributed regularly to the magazines, beginning with the very first issue of Compute!, the magazine destined to become home computing’s biggest, in the fall of 1979. With two small children at home, he developed a special interest in computers as teaching tools, particularly as tools for teaching programming. In 1982, he wrote and published through Human Engineered Software— a company he had been instrumental in funding as part of his day job — an application/toy for the Commodore VIC-20 called Turtle Graphics, a simple language for graphics programming aimed at children. Eventually ported to the Commodore 64 as well, Turtle Graphics wound up selling 80,000 copies in the heyday of the first home-computer boom. Meanwhile Malmberg also nurtured a strong interest in text adventures, publishing a few of his experiments in that direction as BASIC and PILOT type-in listings in the magazines.

Given his interest in text adventures and programming systems suitable for the non-expert, Malmberg was the perfect candidate to embrace and extend GAGS. As soon as he encountered Mark Welch’s simple adventure system, he mailed off for the source code and started studying it on his daily one-hour rail commute to and from work, teaching himself Turbo Pascal as he did so. He soon contacted Welch to inform him of the enhancements he had already begun to implement, looking to see if a partnership might be a possibility. But when he met Welch for lunch he found the latter interested not so much in partnering as in washing his hands of the whole endeavor. Welch, who had recently scaled back his work as a tech journalist to begin attending law school at Berkeley, was simply burnt-out on a system that, despite the contest and the relative popularity of Alice among BBS sysops and public-domain software traders, had never quite taken off as he had hoped. Malmberg promptly made him a very generous offer indeed: he would take the entire operation off his hands, assuming all responsibility for enhancing and supporting the system, but continue to pay Welch 50 percent of all the profits it generated. Welch, unsurprisingly, jumped at it. The sharply limited GAGS was about to become the much more useful AGT.

The core of Malmberg’s enhancements is a system of something he called “meta-commands,” which allow the author to make things happen that aren’t hard-coded into the system’s preconceptions. An AGT game which uses meta-commands has a new “command file” and a “message file” to go with the standard GAGS database definitions. The command file consists of a long string of entries to be checked against the player’s typed command. When matches are found, customized things of the author’s choosing can happen, possibly outputting custom text from the message file.

The examples that follow are drawn from the source code to A Dudley Dilemma, an early AGT game for which I’ll be providing more context soon. We’ll look at some of the code which implements Dudley‘s light source, a flashlight, in a much more sophisticated way than would have been possible in GAGS. Since A Dudley Dilemma is still very old-school in spirit, the implementation will include a dwindling battery, a complication that wouldn’t have been possible in GAGS.

In the standard database-definition file, we have two versions of the flashlight, representing it in its unlit and lit states. (While you read over the definitions that follow, do note the new ability to provide additional synonyms for nouns beyond a simple name and adjective — one of Malmberg’s various other modest but welcome enhancements to the core of the old GAGS system.)

NOUN 201
Flashlight
Black
There is a rechargeable flashlight here.
LOCATION 0
SIZE 9
NOUN_SYNONYMS Light Flash
END_NOUN

NOUN_DESCR 201
The flashlight is one of the rechargeable kind that never seems to work when
you need it.  It is off at the moment.
END_NOUN_DESCR

NOUN 202
Flashlight
Black
There is a rechargeable flashlight here.
LOCATION 0
IS_LIGHT
ON
SIZE 9
NOUN_SYNONYMS Light Flash
END_NOUN

NOUN_DESCR 202
The flashlight is one of the rechargeable kind that never seems to work when
you need it.  It is presently on.
END_NOUN_DESCR

Now, let’s turn to the command file.

COMMAND LIGHT FLASHLIGHT
Present 201
TurnFlagON 2
SwapLocations 201 202
PrintMessage 14
DoneWithTurn
END_COMMAND

Every turn, the game checks to see whether the player’s command matches “light flashlight,” or appropriate synonyms thereof, as it works its way down through the list of meta-commands. If so, a script written in a custom programming language of about 170 possible commands is run — exactly the “complete adventure-game programming language” that Welch had so explicitly disavowed in his original GAGS documentation. If we have a match, we first check to see if noun 201, the unlit flashlight, is “Present,” meaning it is in the current room or being carried or worn by the player. If it isn’t, the script is terminated right here, and the game proceeds on to test the player’s command against the remaining commands in the file. If it is, we continue with the script by turning flag 2 on. The flags, another of Malmberg’s additions, are 255 on/off switches that the author can use to keep track of whatever she wishes. In this case, flag 2 tracks the state of the flashlight.

The next command, “SwapLocation,” swaps the locations of the unlit flashlight, which is being carried by the player or at least in the room with her, with the lit flashlight, which is presumably in room 0, an inaccessible holding area for nouns and creatures not currently in play. Next we print message 14 from the custom-message file. It looks like this:

MESSAGE 14
You turn the $NOUN$ on.
END_MESSAGE

“$NOUN$” here is, as you may have gathered, a stand-in for the object of the player’s command, in this case the flashlight.

The final line of the script, “DoneWithTurn,” informs the game that we’ve successfully carried out the player’s command and that it should not continue working its way through the command file checking for further matches, as it would have done had we bailed on the first line of the script. Thus we can effectively prioritize certain reactions over others by placing them earlier in the command file.

So, we now have a flashlight that we can turn off and on, but we still need to figure out how to make its battery run down. In addition to the 255 flags at our disposal, we have 25 variables, each capable of storing an integer. We use variable 1 to represent the current charge of the flashlight; it starts at 100 and should decrement by 1 each turn that the flashlight is lit. Thus very early in the command file, we have this:

COMMAND ANY
FlagON 2
SubtractFromVariable 1 1
END_COMMAND

“COMMAND ANY” means that this script will fire every single turn, regardless of what command the player has entered. In the script that follows, we first check to see if flag 2, representing the state of the flashlight, is set. If it isn’t, meaning the flashlight is turned off, we bail, continuing with the later command entries. If it is, meaning the flashlight is turned on, we proceed to subtract 1 from variable 1. Note that there is no “DoneWithTurn” entry in this script, meaning processing of the command file will always continue whether we’ve actually done anything here or not.

The command definitions that immediately follow the one above give warnings to the player as the battery runs lower and the flashlight dims. I’ll leave decoding them as an exercise for you.

COMMAND ANY
FlagON 2
Present 202
VariableEquals 1 50
PrintMessage 10
END_COMMAND

MESSAGE 10
** The flashlight seems to be getting dimmer! **
END_MESSAGE

COMMAND ANY
FlagON 2
Present 202
VariableEquals 1 20
PrintMessage 11
END_COMMAND

MESSAGE 11
** The flashlight is definitely much dimmer now. **
END_MESSAGE

COMMAND ANY
FlagON 2
Present 202
VariableEquals 1 5
PrintMessage 12
END_COMMAND

MESSAGE 12
** The flashlight fades to a dull orange. **
END_MESSAGE

Finally, the flashlight may expire entirely:

COMMAND ANY
FlagON 2
VariableEquals 1 0
TurnFlagOFF 2
SwapLocations 202 233
Present 233
PrintMessage 13
END_COMMAND

MESSAGE 13
** The flashlight sputters and goes out! **
END_MESSAGE

Note that in this case we swap out the lit flashlight for yet another noun representing the same object, this time a dead version of the flashlight.

NOUN 233
Flashlight
Dead
There is a dead flashlight here.
LOCATION 0
SIZE 9
NOUN_SYNONYMS Light Flash
END_NOUN

I’d like to look at just one more aspect of Dudley‘s handling of light and darkness, one that illuminates (sorry!) yet one more of Malmberg’s critical additions to the GAGS template. For the first time with AGT, it became possible for the author to define her own new verbs to augment the modest suite of text-adventure staples that are built into the system. Malmberg gave custom verbs the counter-intuitive name of “dummy verbs,” presumably because they do nothing if the author doesn’t explicitly handle them in her game’s command file. A Dudley Dilemma uses 30 dummy verbs, of which we’ll look at just one: “charge,” also known as “recharge,” “plug,” and “insert.” For A Dudley Dilemma, being old-school but not completely heartless, does give the player a way to recharge her flashlight.

DUMMY_VERB16 CHARGE RECHARGE PLUG INSERT

In the original version of A Dudley Dilemma, the flashlight can be recharged from only one location, one which happens to be equipped with a handy electrical outlet.

ROOM 48
Round Room
NORTH 24
SOUTH 47
EAST 50
WEST 49
LIGHT 1
END_ROOM

ROOM_DESCR 48
This is a roughly circular room with exits to the north, south, east and west.
There are several old steam pipes and cracked conduits running through here,
and the fumes from one of them make you slightly dizzy.
There is an electrical outlet here.
END_ROOM_DESCR

I won’t belabor the implementation of charging unnecessarily, as the code is quite readable on its own. When the player types something like “recharge flashlight,” we first step through a series of possible failure states and their resulting messages, arriving eventually if none of them apply at actually topping off the flashlight and sending her on her way. Once again, I encourage you to take a few minutes to work your way through it if you’re at all interested in getting a feel for how AGT really worked in practice. And besides, if you’re like me you might just find this sort of thing fun.

COMMAND CHARGE LIGHT
IsCarrying 201
PrintMessage 81
DoneWithTurn
END_COMMAND

MESSAGE 81
The flashlight must be ON to be recharged.
END_MESSAGE

COMMAND CHARGE LIGHT
IsCarrying 202
VariableGT 1 20
PrintMessage 67
DoneWithTurn
END_COMMAND

MESSAGE 67
The flashlight doesn't need to be recharged (yet).
END_MESSAGE

COMMAND CHARGE LIGHT
NOT AtLocation 48
IsCarrying 233
OR
IsCarrying 202
VariableLT 1 20
PrintMessage 68
DoneWithTurn
END_COMMAND

MESSAGE 68
Guess you'd better find someplace to plug it in!
END_MESSAGE

COMMAND CHARGE LIGHT
AtLocation 48
IsCarrying 202
VariableLT 1 20
SetVariableTo 1 100
PrintMessage 66
DoneWithTurn
END_COMMAND

MESSAGE 66
You plug the flashlight in and recharge it.
END_MESSAGE

COMMAND CHARGE LIGHT
AtLocation 48
IsCarrying 233
SwapLocations 233 202
TurnFlagON 2
SetVariableTo 1 100
PrintMessage 66
DoneWithTurn
END_COMMAND

I hope these examples may begin to convey how ingenious Malmberg’s extensions to GAGS really were; they turned a system useful only for making the most simplistic of games into one of the most powerful systems for making amateur text adventures that had yet been seen.

But AGT had still more going for it beyond its technical affordances. Perhaps even more so than Mark Welch, David Malmberg had the skills to present his brainchild in the best possible light. He registered a little company, which he dubbed Softworks, to handle the system, and expanded Welch’s original documentation to fully explain all of his own new additions, replete with examples. Asked in an interview years after AGT’s heyday what aspects of the system he was proudest of, he placed “the quality of the documentation” on the same level as the meta-commands. Justifiably so: the instruction manual ballooned to 223 printed pages of friendly, readable prose, dwarfing in both quality and quantity the manuals included with most boxed commercial software. In fact, AGT became in a sense a physical product. Those who paid the $35 registration fee were shipped not only three disks full of the latest version of the compiler along with heaps of sample code and sample games but also the manual in spiral-bound hardcopy. All the effort spent in looking serious paid off in others choosing to take AGT seriously. In what can only be described as a major coup for Malmberg, AGT was given a full-fledged and generally very positive review in the February 1989 issue of the glossy newsstand magazine Computer Gaming World, an achievement of which very few other shareware products could boast.

Despite such welcome exposure, Malmberg quickly learned, as would many text-adventure fans who attempted to turn their loves into business propositions after him, that there just wasn’t a lot of money to be made in text-only adventure games. Able to encourage his users to register only by offering them the hardcopy documentation, telephone support, and, as he put it, “a warm glow from having supported at least one of the many shareware products you probably use” along with his own “eternal gratitude,” he would over the lifetime of AGT average only 100 or so copies “sold” per year — and even that income he of course had to split equally with his silent partner Mark Welch. At least an order of magnitude more people used unregistered copies to experiment with game design, and often to make and release complete games without ever bothering to pay the registration fee. Superficially professional though Malmberg’s presentation managed to be, AGT was always at heart a labor of love; it certainly never gave him cause to think of quitting his day job in favor of becoming a text-adventure mogul.

The people who made games with AGT, especially in the earliest years, were a far-flung, disconnected group by any standard, and doubly so in comparison to the close-knit Internet-based community that would follow them. I spoke to two former AGT authors in preparing this article and the next, and was surprised to learn that neither felt himself to be a part of any community at all really. With modems still fairly scarce and online services still fairly expensive in the late 1980s, Malmberg himself became the principal conduit binding many AGT users together, to whatever extent they were bound together at all. In 1988, shortly after releasing the first version of AGT, he made the hugely important decision to reconstitute Mark Welch’s one-off 1986 GAGS contest as an annual event. The rules were simple: all entrants had to have been made using AGT, had to have been first publicly released during the calendar year of the contest in question, and had to be posted to Softworks by December 31 of said year. Malmberg personally would, as he put it, “consider each game’s originality, cleverness, fiendishness, humor, raw cunning, and professionalism” to arrive at a winner.

The institution of the AGT contest as an ongoing annual tradition was a landmark event. Since 1989, the year when the 1988 batch of AGT games was judged, not a year has passed without a major annual contest dominating the interactive-fiction calendar. Until 1994, that contest would be Malmberg’s AGT competition, which would be held six times in all. Picking up neatly thereafter in 1995, it would be the Interactive Fiction Competition, which is closing in on its 22nd iteration as of this writing.

In due course, amateur interactive-fiction authors would begin to probe relentlessly at the boundaries of the medium, experimenting wildly and discovering many worthy (and a fair number of unworthy) new approaches to the art of the humble text adventure. In these early days, however, with Infocom dying, the text-adventure corpus was more in need of triage than surgery. Accordingly, early AGT authors didn’t concern themselves overmuch with new frontiers. They rather applied themselves diligently to simply, as a later interactive-fiction publication would put it, “helping to keep text adventures alive.”

In short, if the only way for them to have new text adventures was to make them themselves, then that’s exactly what they’d do. The AGT user base was overwhelmingly made up of diehard Infocom fans, drawn from that hardcore of a few tens of thousands who never abandoned the company as graphics got better and other, flashier genres stole the hearts of the vast majority of the computer-gaming public. Their numbers may not have been large enough to support a company like Infocom anymore, but there were more than enough of them to keep the flame burning via amateur creations in the Infocom tradition.

Given the circumstances of their creation, it’s not surprising to find that most early AGT games can be described to one degree or another as Infocom homages. Indeed, some of them are perhaps better described as Infocom pastiches, absolutely crammed full of echoes of the puzzles and environments their makers fairly worshiped. But this hardly invalidates them as experiences. Personally, having spent the last four and a half years intermittently immersed in the lore of Infocom in writing this blog, I feel myself all too much in tune with the mindset that led to the early AGT games.

And there is I think a unique quality to even many of the most slavish of the AGT Infocom homages that’s worth mentioning. To a much greater degree than the games of Infocom and other commercial publishers, AGT games feel like personal expressions of their creators. In later years, jokes and no small amount of scoffing would be attached to Everyone’s First Game, which inevitably begins in said everyperson’s bedroom and proceeds to play out in an environment interesting and meaningful to absolutely no one beyond the author’s friends and family. Yet the same tendency that spawns that phenomenon constitutes I think an important part of the text adventure’s ongoing fascination. In a ludic world obsessed with high-concept, world-saving, galaxy-spanning plots, text adventures can provide a window into the more modest but — for me, anyway — far more interesting lives of real people. If we agree with the folks who say that one of the most important functions of art is to provide a glimpse at how the proverbial other half lives, then that’s a noble quality indeed. When we look back today to the AGT games of decades ago, they take on an additional layer of interest as historical documents in their own right of the times and places that spawned them.

These are qualities that both of the early AGT games I’d like to introduce and recommend to you today evince in spades. Both are old-school puzzlefests in the Infocom tradition, but both were created by clever, interesting people who give us a chance to walk in the shoes they were wearing in the vanished United States of almost three decades ago.

The first game I’ll heartily recommend is the one we’ve been using as an example of AGT programming: A Dudley Dilemma, winner of the 1988 AGT Competition. Written by Lane Barrow, at the time a PhD candidate in literature at Harvard, it takes place in and around the very same university; the name of the game is a play on Harvard’s Dudley House for nonresident undergraduates. A Dudley Dilemma is a fine addition to the longstanding tradition of collegiate interactive fiction, its depiction of life at Harvard as loving and entertaining in its own way as were The Lurking Horror‘s homages to Harvard’s cross-town counterpart MIT — a university which, incidentally, also makes a cameo appearance in A Dudley Dilemma; it is, after all, just a short subway ride away.

The second game is Son of Stagefright, the winner of the 1989 AGT Competition (Malmberg was, in addition to his other qualities, a very good judge). It was written by Mike McCauley, an avid participant in another inspiring form of amateur creativity: community theater. The theater in which Son of Stagefright is set isn’t based directly on any one real place, being rather a conglomeration of various playhouses McCauley had known. But it’s a fascinating place to explore nevertheless, dripping with McCauley’s love for thespianism and his great good humor in all its many nooks and crannies.

Both of these games will seem a little rough around the edges in comparison to a more polished modern work created with a more polished modern programming language, but I do urge you to give them a fair chance. Being written in the tradition of Infocom means among other things that they are interested in challenging you but not in stymieing you entirely. Their puzzles are almost entirely fair and reasonable, and occasionally inspired. Son of Stagefright even offers a very clever embodied hint system that dribbles out nudges via a magic book you discover.

Both games will run in AGiliTy, a modern interpreter for AGT story files, or the one-size-fits-all interpreter Gargoyle; the latter would be my first recommendation. In either case, the file ending in “.D$$” is the one you want to open with the interpreter. There is, however, an important caveat in the case of A Dudley Dilemma: the original Competition-winning version of the game doesn’t play quite correctly in AGiliTy or Gargoyle, rendering it unwinnable. But never fear: I’ve been in touch with Lane Barrow, and he’s provided a newer version which we’ve tested and found to work perfectly in the modern interpreters. Along the way, he’s also cleaned up a few of the original game’s less felicitous old-school puzzles, and packaged the whole together with DOSBox to make it a one-click play for those running Windows who’d prefer to play it through the original AGT interpreter rather than AGiliTy or Gargoyle. If you do choose to play through DOSBox, you’ll get to enjoy some pictures of the scenes described; these aren’t essential by any means, but they do add a little something to the experience. Regardless of how you play, just please make sure to use this new “remastered” version if you wish to play A Dudley Dilemma for reasons of fun (as opposed to historical investigation) today. (I’ll be uploading this version to the IF Archive as well to assure that it’s preserved in perpetuity.)

I have something special planned for my next article which I hope will deepen still further your enjoyment of A Dudley Dilemma. But there’s no need to wait for that to get started. Just go ahead and play these games — either or both of them. They’re both worth it, fine testaments to the new era of creative empowerment spawned by AGT. In later years, when still better systems became available, many proponents of those newer systems would come to scoff at AGT for the many limitations that Malmberg couldn’t quite manage to overcome, and even at those authors who continued to stick with the system well beyond its real or perceived sell-by date. In its day, however, AGT represented a wonderful advance that empowered text-adventure fans to take the medium into their own keeping just in the nick of time, just as Infocom collapsed. Had AGT (or something equivalent to it) not come along when it did, the post-Infocom history of adventures in text would read very, very differently. AGT laid the groundwork for the decades of proud amateurism — amateurism in the very best sense — that were still to come. I look forward to continuing to explore its legacy in future articles.

(Sources: Computer Gaming World of February 1989 and May 1989; Commodore Power/Play of Fall 1982, Summer 1983, Fall 1983, Winter 1983, Spring 1984, June/July 1984, August/September 1984, and April/May 1985; Compute! of Fall 1979, March 1981, July 1981, and April 1982; Micro of April 1981, October 1981, September 1982, November 1982, and September 1983; Personal Computing of September 1982; The Games Machine of September 1982; Byte of February 1985; New York Times of March 18 1981 and January 10 1982; the various documentation included with the various versions of GAGS and AGT; Stephen Granade’s interview with David Malmberg; Mark Welch’s blog post about GAGS and AGT. Most of all, my thanks to Lane Barrow and Mike McCauley for corresponding with me about their fondly remembered time as AGT authors.)

1. I have tinkered here and there with this example game and the next to better illustrate my points. ↩

Comments
21 Responses

- Jason Dyer

August 5, 2016 at 12:39 pm

I’ve been looking forward to this series!

I agree A Dudley Dilemma is very solid and worth a play. Could you give a little more detail on the remaster?

- Jimmy Maher

August 5, 2016 at 1:13 pm

It just generally cleans up some things that players were more accepting of back in 1988 than they are today. Lane has added hints for a few puzzles that relied on outside knowledge, excised a couple of unforeshadowed sudden deaths, tried to make it a little harder to get the game in an unwinnable state, tried to make the parser a little more flexible here and there, etc. And, perhaps most importantly, it now works properly in modern interpreters.

If you’ve already played it recently, it may not be different enough to be worth playing again, but it will hopefully help to make this old neglected classic more accessible to modern audiences.

- DANoWAR

August 5, 2016 at 1:32 pm

I look forward to hearing about all those small amateur games I haven’t had the time to play yet…and maybe will never have. Onwards and Upwards!

- John Hitchens

August 5, 2016 at 1:35 pm

Great post! I was one of the ones who sent in the $35 and received the gorgeously clear manual. I only ever dabbled in the AGT, but did succeed in duplicating the first area of the SSI Gold Box Pools of Radiance by using the meta commands.

- David Youd

August 9, 2016 at 4:54 am

I also sent in the $35 (and I still have my AGT manual!). I made many partial games, but never a complete, polished offering.

- ZUrlocker

August 5, 2016 at 4:39 pm

Great story about GAGS and AGT. It’s hard to appreciate how little information and few tools there were for people who wanted to learn about writing Interactive Fiction back in the ’80s. Kudos for Welch and Malmberg for the work they did in publishing AGT as shareware, creating the annual contest etc.

I was working as a product manager on Turbo Pascal at Borland in the late ’80s / early ’90s and stumbled across AGT. I don’t recall if I payed the shareware registration fee (probably not) but I exchanged some email with Malmberg and he was very nice. It was a cool system, if a bit primitive compared to high-level programming languages.

I also explored David Betz’s Lisp-based system AdvSys which was written up in Byte magazine
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/articles/byte87_betz.html

But when Michael J Roberts published TADS that blew all the predecessors out of the water…

- Sean Barrett

August 5, 2016 at 9:31 pm

Given the 1987 setting, I was going to bring up AdvSys as well, which IIRC was a proper programming language and could definitely deliver Infocom-quality parsing.

However, I don’t think AdvSys got much uptake. Archived Baf’s Guide page lists 6 games for it. https://web.archive.org/web/20110807141942/http://wurb.com/if/platform/18

I’m fairly sure it could do Infocom-quality because it was the only adventure engine out there I pursued seriously at the time, and that was always one of my critera. The version I used was fairly limited in how big the game could be (due to the naive 64K limit DOS-era 8086 computers), and not knowing there was source code to the engine I ended up rewriting the engine from scratch when I hit the limits of it writing my 2nd ever adventure game. The rewrite was a success but I never finished the game, and that started me down a long path of doing adventure game engines which I never finished anything with. I didn’t release my first IF game until I switched to Inform in 2000.

- Jimmy Maher

August 6, 2016 at 8:04 am

I have no direct experience with AdvSys, but seem to remember it showing up on one of the Amiga Fish disks. I’ve added the adjective “popular” to my description of AGT as “the first construction set capable of fooling a player…”

- Jason Dyer

August 6, 2016 at 5:12 pm

I highly recommend The Sound of One Hand Clapping for AdvSys.

- ZUrlocker

August 6, 2016 at 6:25 pm

Lisp-based have a good following, but it’s always been a bit of a specialized thing. I think one of the things that both TADS and Inform did well was to use a more conventional C / Pascal language syntax while preserving the dynamic nature of Lisp.

- LoneCleric

August 12, 2016 at 5:00 am

“I didn’t release my first IF game until I switched to Inform in 2000.”

And quite a game it was, Buzzard. Assuming you talk about “Heroes”, anyway. It left me with a very favorable memory.

Also, wow, time flies.

- Felix

August 6, 2016 at 5:22 am

I was going to comment on the language. Clearly neither author had access to a compiler construction book at the time, or maybe they lacked the time and inclination to study the subject (it wasn’t so easy with learning back then). And in all honesty, even if they had, Turbo Pascal wasn’t exactly the best tool to write a compiler in either, with its fixed-length strings and record-based file access. Unsurprisingly, both GAGS and AGT ended up looking more like high-level assembly languages. Still an impressive achievement.

- Keith Palmer

August 5, 2016 at 10:45 pm

I suppose this is exactly the right post to follow “the end of Infocom.” In any case, I managed to go straight from the “written-in-BASIC, printed-in-the-magazines” adventures you briefly touched on to Inform (although to say much more about the second part of that could mean getting to “Curses,” which could take quite a while yet). Thinking about the first part of that, I can suppose an adventure game with something more than a “two-word parser” would have seemed “just like Infocom” at first glance to me. That, though, might be a different part of a package than an adventure-writing system.

- David Yates

August 6, 2016 at 1:04 pm

When I was in primary school, I found AGT on old shareware collection CD lying around the house. Being a young nerd interested in writing and making computer games who had recently failed to learn C++, I immediately took to it, even though it was at this point a nearly two decade old system. Having no internet access, I couldn’t have known about Inform 6 or any of the other newer systems available at the time.

The AGT manual definitely deserves the praise given here: it inspired and empowered me to write quite a bit of a game, with metacommands and everything. I must have read it cover-to-cover at least a couple of times.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t ever actually compile my work or any of the example games on my Windows XP PC (partially due to incompatibility, and partially due to lack of knowledge about commandline programs and file extensions). But that didn’t stop me from getting into writing the code, and I still look back on AGT fondly as my first attempts at programming/game development.

- Lisa H.

August 7, 2016 at 12:48 am

stranger today that it did players back in 1979

*than

He contributed regular to the magazines

Regularly?

A Dudley Dilemma uses 30 of dummy verbs

The “of” is misplaced, or else you need “of these”.

“consider each game’s originality, cleverness, fiendishness, humor, raw cunning, and professionalism”

Interesting that “fiendishness” is apparently considered a trait worthy of reward!

jokes and no small amount of scoffing would be attached to Everyone’s First Game, which inevitably begins in said everyperson’s bedroom and proceeds to play out in an environment interesting and meaningful to absolutely no one beyond the author’s friends and family.

In my case, not quite, although pretty close. I tried writing a game with AGT sometime in the mid to late 90s (nothing to do with IFComp). I never got beyond a dozen or so rooms and a few very simple object puzzles. My choice of niche-interest theme/setting was high school theater production, since I did that in high school, and yeah, it probably would only have been amusing in the slightest to a very few people, if indeed to anyone other than myself.

- Jimmy Maher

August 7, 2016 at 7:10 am

Thanks (as always) for the copy-editing!

- Sir Harrok

August 9, 2016 at 8:54 pm

I remember encountering the AGT manual on Compuserve in about 1991.

I recall being struck by how clear it was, and the clever way it solved problems — particularly the idea of swapping one item (a working flashlight, a locked door) for another (a dead flashlight, an unlocked door).

- Jacen

August 22, 2016 at 7:04 pm

” enabling others to roll their own text adventures became…”

I don’t quite follow the phrase ‘to roll’; it does make sense in context, but it gave me pause as a phrasing, slang, or colloquialism that I hadn’t heard before.

- Jimmy Maher

August 22, 2016 at 7:48 pm

It’s a colloquialism that refers back to “rolling your own” cigarettes out of tobacco (or other dried flora of your choice). Used like this, it just means making something for yourself, usually as a hobbyist or non-professional.

- Johannes Paulsen

August 26, 2016 at 6:04 pm

Every time I think of AGT, my mind immediately runs to “Mystery Science Theatre 3000 Presents: Matt Barringer’s DETECTIVE.”

http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=imopnqh4llwkvfne

I’m not a good person.

- Lisa H.

August 26, 2016 at 8:32 pm

Perhaps not, but that game is hilarious. I highly recommend it.

A Conversation with Lane Barrow
August 12, 2016

Although I seem to find myself talking to more and more people in researching this history I’m in the middle of, I don’t often publish the results as straight-up interviews. In fact, I’ve published just one interview in the entire history of this blog, and a very short one at that, done during the early days when I was still finding my way to some extent. I have a number of reasons for avoiding interviews, starting with the fallibility of all human memory and ending with the fact that I consider myself a writer, not a transcriber.

Still, almost any policy ought to have its reasoned exceptions, and this anti-interview policy of mine is itself no exception to that rule. Having just introduced you to AGT and the era of more personal text adventures it ushered in in my last article, it seems appropriate today to let one AGT author tell his own very personal story. So, I’d like to introduce you to Lane Barrow, author of A Dudley Dilemma, the winner of the first of David Malmberg’s eventual six annual AGT competitions. Unique (and uniquely interesting) though it is in so many ways, I trust that some of the more generalized overtones of Lane’s story apply to many of the others who found through AGT a way to make the switch from being text-adventure consumers to text-adventure creators.

If what follows should tempt you to give A Dudley Dilemma a play — something I highly recommend! — do be sure to go with the “remastered” version Lane has provided, which cleans up the design here and there and works properly with modern interpreters like AGiliTy and Gargoyle. You can download this definitive version from this very site or from the Interactive Fiction Archive.

Lane Barrow, 1988

Thank you so much for talking with me today! Maybe we could start with a bit of your personal background. I believe I read somewhere that you spent some time in the Air Force?

Yes, I was in the Air Force from 1966 to 1970 – two tours in Vietnam. When I rejoined civilian life, I lived in California for all of the 70’s, which was a perfect time to be there (a decade of great music and horrible clothing). I even had a brief encounter with members of the Manson family. Interesting story, but probably not relevant to what you’re looking for.

Sorry, but I can’t just let that one fly by. Please, tell!

It’s not as sinister as it sounds. When I first moved to LA after the Air Force, I hung out with a nascent rock band. We liked to party a lot, and one of the places we frequented belonged to a guy named T.J. and his on-again, off-again girlfriend Jo. I got along really well with T.J. For one thing, he was also a Vietnam vet turned hippy, plus he was creative and outgoing. Turns out he was also an ex-Manson family member. In fact, he was with Manson when Charlie shot some North Hollywood drug dealer. This didn’t sit well with T.J. so he basically left the family soon after.

Anyway, we went over to T.J.’s one night (this was sometime in the summer of 1970) and there were these four girls sitting around the living room with shaved heads and “X”s cut into their foreheads. Apparently these girls were still faithful to Manson and kept a vigil outside the county courthouse while his trial was in session . They had come to see if T.J. could put them up for the night. After a few minutes, T.J. whisked us into the kitchen and suggested that it wasn’t a good idea to party that night, so we left. I still remember the cold stares those girls gave us the whole time we were there. And they never said a single word. So that was my Manson family experience. As I said, living in LA in those days was never boring.

Okay, thanks! So, how did you go from being a Southern California hippie to a Harvard PhD candidate?

I knocked around LA for several years, and then settled in Santa Barbara, where I worked as a baker at Sunrise Bakery (a small co-op enterprise). At the same time, I attended Santa Barbara City College and then UCSB on the GI Bill. I majored in English Lit, and did well enough to get accepted to graduate school at Harvard, also in English.

I was 33 years old when I entered Harvard, so I was a little older than most of my classmates, although there were several other Vietnam vets in the English Dept at the time. I was single then, but I met my future wife there (we’re still together by the way), and her long luxurious hair was the reason I included the sentient hairball in the first part of A Dudley Dilemma.

Bear in mind that my life as a grad student was pretty uneventful compared to Vietnam and California, but that was OK with me. Of course, uneventful isn’t the same thing as stress-free. Grad school can be pretty intense. I actually had more anxiety dreams about the classroom than I ever did about combat. Go figure. Working on the Dudley game was a real stress-reliever for me. It introduced me to programming, which I still enjoy, mostly in Excel these days.

Long before you started to write A Dudley Dilemma, I understand that you discovered text adventures at Harvard?

Yes. In the early ’80s I discovered a couple of fun games on the mainframe while I was learning how to work with computers. These were, of course, Colossal Cave and Zork. If I remember correctly, Zork had just been released commercially, but I didn’t get my first PC until Leading Edge came on the scene in 1985, so the mainframe was my only access. At first, I played both games pretty much equally but Zork slowly took over as my favorite, largely because of its sense of humor.

Why did you come to buy that first PC? Were you intending to use it to play more games like Zork from the beginning?

I’m afraid I had a fairly utilitarian motive for buying my first PC. I was beginning my dissertation at the time, and using the mainframe was a nightmare. If you’ve ever worked with printer “dot commands”, you understand. So I bought a Leading Edge Model D for purely academic work. The computer games were just icing on the cake.

Since I never finished Zork on the mainframe, that was the first game I purchased. I still have the receipt for Zork I tucked into the box ($29.95 purchased on March 31, 1986). Zork II and Zork III were next.

After that, I went on an Infocom binge. I think I bought every title they had at the time, and would wait expectantly for their new releases. I still have many of those boxed sets, complete with tchotchkes. Needless to say, this slowed down my progress on my dissertation…

Did you have any particular favorites among the Infocom catalog?

I liked them all. I gravitated toward the sci-fi / fantasy titles, but I got a big kick out of Bureaucracy also.

Did you play any games from other publishers — whether text adventures or games in other genres — or were you strictly an Infocom guy?

Infocom was pretty much my only focus at first, but eventually I tried other games. However, I don’t remember any specific titles, so obviously they didn’t have the same impact on me as the Infocom offerings. For me, the biggest attraction of the AGT toolkit was its ability to create an Infocom-type game. I had plans to write a second AGT game, but never got around to it. By that time, I was wrapping up grad school and engaged in job-hunting.

I continue to enjoy computer games, post-Infocom, and prefer adventure games, with an emphasis on puzzle-solving. I don’t care much for platform games, or timed puzzles. As you know, that somewhat limits my choices these days, although the Portal games are fun.

How exactly did you become an early AGT adopter? Do you recall how you first learned about the system?

I don’t remember how I learned about AGT, but I was pretty active in various bulletin board chat rooms in those days, so it was probably via one of those. At any rate, I decided to try my hand at creating an Infocom-type game for Dudley House, where I was a resident tutor. I wanted to cram in as many recognizable people, events, places as possible, since the game was going to be on the computer in Dudley House Library. So, I ordered the AGT toolkit, and got to it. I found the language pretty easy to pick up, since it’s very logical. Plus, whenever I had a problem or question, I would email Dave Malmberg, and he would get back to me quickly. I believe I even spoke with him on the phone once or twice, but I might be mis-remembering that (growing old has its advantages, but memory isn’t one of them).

It took me several months to finish the original Dudley Dilemma, and when I put it on the library computer, it caused a bit of a conflict between students who wanted to play the game, and students who wanted to use the on-line card catalog. We even had a competition to see who could finish the game the fastest. I don’t recall the winner’s name, but she was a Junior English major.

I had a ball writing the game, and tried to capture the quirky feel that Infocom was so good at. I ripped off their ideas shamelessly. As you probably noticed, the WHISTLE-CLAP hedge maze sequence is straight out of Leather Goddesses of Phobos (Clap-Hop-Kweepa).

To what extent did you feel yourself to be a part of an AGT community?

If there was an AGT community in those days, I wasn’t aware of it. I did play a couple of other AGT games from time to time (I remember one that had a carnival setting) . If I recall, they were in the overall package that came with the toolkit, or maybe they came later, when Dave mailed out a compilation of AGT contest winners. I don’t remember the chronology all that distinctly.

So, we might even say that you felt yourself to be developing your game largely in a vacuum?

Yes. I really developed Dudley by the seat of my pants, through trial and error. There were times when I was trying to work out a tricky bit of coding that I found myself dreaming about flags and variables. As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to incorporate a lot of actual detail that Dudley students would recognize, so I would jot down notes on a particular incident or individual and then figure out how to code that into the game. Of course I added an exaggerated quality to everything to give it a more whimsical feel, but the vast majority of A Dudley Dilemma is based on reality.

Going back over those days has helped me remember how much fun I had creating the game in the first place. Or maybe nostalgia is a selective process that filters out the “bad.” I’m sure there were probably times when I wondered why I had gotten myself into this project, but obviously I stuck with it.

In general, Dudley is a quite fair game for its day, with few instances of guess-the-verb or read-the-author’s-mind puzzles. There are adventure games that seem designed to frustrate and defeat the player and those that prioritize fun, fair play, and solubility. A Dudley Dilemma is, within the limitations of its era and its technology, very much in the latter category for me. Do you have any comments to make on your general design approach or methodology?

I’m not sure I had a coherent design methodology beyond what I’ve already mentioned: making it accessible to the students of Dudley House. Pretty much all the people and places in the game have their counterparts in the Harvard of the day, and these would have been evident to my core audience. Of course, this dates the game in that respect, but I also tried to make the situations broad enough to have some shelf life, and to be enjoyable even if you didn’t get the “in jokes.” Beyond that, there was a certain random quality to my choices. One thing seemed to flow out of another, maybe just by association of ideas.

You refer to adventure games that frustrate or defeat the player. In the years since I wrote Dudley, I’ve encountered a few of those, and I felt like a bit of the enjoyment was leached out. For example, some of the puzzles in Schizm or The Witness (the recent Jonathan Blow game, not the Infocom title) would challenge Einstein. Infocom games never took that road, which is one of the reasons I like them to this day. They are infused with a focus on fun and entertainment, and that’s what I tried to do in Dudley. However, there IS one overall design element that I’d change if I were re-writing the game today: I would make it impossible to render the game un-winnable.

A few puzzles that might raise some eyebrows today are those relying on outside knowledge. I’m thinking particularly here of the Arabian Nights, Waste Land, and Kingston Trio puzzles. These sorts of “outside research” puzzles were not commonly found in Infocom games (other than puzzles that required information included in the feelies, of course). Any comments on these?

I think I must have been a little ambivalent about those even when I included them. In one of the Dudley re-writes, I added a couple of books in the opening room that, if read, gave the solutions to the Arabian Nights puzzle and to the Waste Land puzzle. I also gave a more detailed hint about the Kingston Trio puzzle, but I don’t recall where that is in the game. Maybe when you first encounter the Kingston Trio album in the giant cockroach maze.

Just a side note: Obviously, the MBTA references have a Boston connection, and since Dudley House was the administrative center for commuting students, a lot of them rode the “T” on a daily basis, so that’s why I added that component. As for the Waste Land bit, this is more obscure. The game opens in Apley Court, which is where T.S. Eliot lived when he was a graduate student at Harvard. Some scholars believe that he began early drafts of The Waste Land at that time, so I couldn’t resist slipping that in.

What audience did you envision playing the game? You said that it was often played on a computer in a library at Harvard. Were you therefore writing primarily for fellow Harvard students? In short, what did you envision doing with the game, as far as distribution, after it was completed, given that you didn’t really feel yourself to be a member of any broader AGT community?

My main audience for the game was always the students of Dudley House, which helped me keep a certain focus to the action. I wanted them to undergo the “shock of recognition” while playing. I didn’t really envision a wider audience, and entering the AGT contest was an afterthought. I was thrilled to win it, which inspired me to “improve” the game over several versions, with pictures, sounds, etc. In retrospect, the original plain vanilla version is still my favorite.

I believe I even thought about applying for a job at Infocom, which was just down the road in Cambridge. That fantasy lasted for about 5 minutes. My only excursions into game design since Dudley are creating some Community Test Chambers in Portal 2. Also fun, but a whole different experience than AGT.

I thought it might be fun — for me and hopefully for you as well as for our readers (especially those who have begun to play the game) — if we could really dig into some of those aspects of daily life at Harvard that inspired so much of Dudley. This is the sort of thing that can make interactive fiction so uniquely personal in contrast to other sorts of games, and that can make amateur efforts like many of the AGT games more interesting in some ways than the slicker, more impersonal games of Infocom. So, I thought we could perhaps play a little game of free association. I’m going to try to jog your memory with various elements of Dudley, and maybe you could respond with their real-life antecedents (if any). Perhaps together we can create a sort of Annotated Dudley Dilemma to go with the Annotated Lurking Horror — the latter was an unusually personal game by Infocom standards — that Janice Eisen and I created earlier. Indeed, it feels particularly appropriate given that The Lurking Horror took place at (a thinly fictionalized) MIT, while A Dudley Dilemma plays out at MIT’s cross-town counterpart Harvard. So…

The scruffy pigeon?

Every adventurer needs a sidekick, right? Of course if I were entirely faithful to that idea, I would have kept the bird nearby for the entire game. Actually, in a later rewrite, I had the pigeon come to the rescue when you face the punk in the mean streets of Cambridge.

The genesis of this character involves an incident in the English Department around Christmas of 1987. One of the senior professors, Barbara Lewalski, was in her office with an advisee, when a soot-covered bird fell into the (unlit) fireplace and started fluttering around the room. Professor Lewalski opened a window and tried to shoo it out to no avail. After a few minutes, the bird fluttered back up the chimney. To make sure the bird was gone, the professor (who was an ample woman) got down on hands and knees to look up the chimney. Right then another senior professor, William Alfred, walked by the office door and did a double-take. According to the advisee, he leaned into the office and said “I don’t believe Santa is due for another week”, and strolled off chuckling. Trust me, Mr. Alfred was one of the only people I ever met who actually chuckled. Obviously this story made the rounds pretty quickly. The original bird wasn’t a pigeon, but since pigeons flock all over Harvard Square and Yard, I had to go with what works. All the rooms in Apley court have fireplaces, which I had already planned to use for roof access. I wanted the player to see early on that the fireplace was also an exit point, so I hoped that the pigeon would help establish that. Once the bird was in the room, I couldn’t resist expanding its role a bit.

The silverfish?

In order to get from the opening site (Apley Court) to the next location (Lehman Hall), you enter the silverfish maze. The maze is actually based on a system of steam tunnels that connect a number of Harvard buildings. Historical note: back in 1968, Harvard security used the steam tunnels to whisk Alabama Governor George Wallace out of Sanders Theater past a large crowd of protesters. That incident was still pretty infamous when I wrote Dudley, so I had to use the steam tunnels somehow. The silverfish guardian evolved out of the large number of those disgusting insects that swarmed around the basement storage area of Apley Court. I just converted the thousands of little ones into one huge one.

The nude tutors on the roof?

Apley Court was originally a residence hall for students (remember T.S. Eliot), but by the time I was there, it only housed the resident tutors for Dudley House. It had a flat roof that was perfect for sunbathing, so we would occasionally sneak up there for that purpose. I say sneak, because technically the roof was off-limits for safety’s sake. To my knowledge, no nude sunbathing ever took place up there, since the building across the street was much taller and afforded an unobstructed view, but I took some poetic license just for comic effect.

The statue in the dining hall?

Ah, Delmar Leighton. He was the first Master of Dudley House and around the time I was writing the game, a large wooden statue of the man was placed in one corner of the dining hall, where it gazed out on the students. I don’t know if the statue was moved from some other location or whether it was commissioned at that time, but it was quite a presence when you were trying to eat. Here’s a picture so you can see what I mean. I concocted the “touch and be touched by all” quote as a gameplay hint, since there’s no such thing on the original.

Mike the guard?

Mike was a real security guard, and I’m really pissed at myself for forgetting his last name. It was something like Moretti or Frascetti. Sigh. Anyway, the real Mike was, if anything, even more diligent and proprietary about his building than my depiction of him. He was the mother hen of Lehman Hall, and I don’t mean that in a negative way. He was chatty and helpful and ever-vigilant. When I was designing the Lehman Hall section, it would have been sacrilege to omit Mike. It took me a while to figure out how to code in Mike’s eventual acceptance of you as a legit student, but using two different ID cards did the trick.

The crazy woman in Harvard Yard?

We called her “The Flapper.” She was rail-thin, about 60 years old or so, and dressed all in black head-to-toe (even in the summer). She mostly wandered around Harvard Square and just inside the gate beside Lehman Hall. She usually had a bag full of scavenged cans and other cast-off stuff, and she was always armed with a little square of folded newspaper that she would “flap” at you if you came too close. I don’t recall if she actually cursed at anyone, so obviously I took some liberties with that. This sequence was my first attempt at creating a random response to player interaction, so I had fun coming up with various curses. As for getting rid of her, I was concerned that the solution might be a bit obscure, (spoilers: highlight to read) but then I reasoned that most of us ignore strange street people anyway, so that part of the game really wrote itself.

Brother Blue in Harvard Yard?

Another real person. He was actually Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill, but his street moniker was Brother Blue, and he was a Boston institution (you can look him up in Wikipedia if you want more detail on his amazing life). When I was there, he would cruise around Harvard Square on roller skates and gather a crowd together so he could tell stories. He referred to himself as a “griot,” a kind of African poet and storyteller. His stories always had an inspirational point to them, but I didn’t think I could do justice to that aspect of his persona, so I made up my own little snippets. I wanted to create the impression of a complete story just by giving the ending. This is another random interaction, so the stories vary depending on the probabilities. I think there are maybe three or four different endings.

The hordes of lawyers?

Not much to say about this. I was looking for a way to “trap” the player with no obvious way out, so I could have done that in any number of ways. Since personal-injury lawyers are always a convenient target, I went for the obvious over-the-top joke. Harvard Law School is just down the walkway from the Science Center, so the internal geography worked out as well.

The professor explaining Hellenic warrior culture to a “class of large young men with no necks?”

Every university, even Harvard (gasp!) has its Easy A or “gut” classes. The class I’m referring to here was officially called Literature & Arts C-14: “The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization,” but was universally referred to as “Heroes for Zeros” because of the above-average concentration of jocks. It was taught by Professor Gregory Nagy, who is actually a world-renowned classical scholar. I think it must have come as a shock to many of the students that the class wasn’t as easy as reputation had it. But again, I was going for humor, and I needed a way to introduce a “zero” for later use in the game.

The GreenHouse Grill?

In reality, the Greenhouse Cafe in the Science Center. The Science Center is a massive building with computer rooms (in the 80’s anyway), offices, and classrooms, so having an in-house cafe was a real luxury. It gets the name from a glassed-in atrium section, and it’s a real resting-place, hang-out, meeting spot for students. I don’t recall that it plays a significant role in the game, so I probably included it just for local color and because I used to frequent it myself.

The aging, irate alumnus in the food line?

Well, I think I was channeling my future self when I came up with this guy. Scary! Anyway, the cafe in Dudley House was a tiny little area that served a lot of people every day. It was open to the public, so the students were only a part of the customer base. On any given day, the line at the cash register was clogged at lunch time and tempers would occasionally get frayed. The aging alum was based on a Dudley student’s parents who were visiting him. Things weren’t moving efficiently enough for the father, and he kept muttering about how much better it was when he was a student there. I was behind him in line, so I had to listen to him for many long minutes. That memory stuck with me, so I used it in the game. Trust me, I made the fictional alum a lot more pleasant than the real thing. Helen the cashier is also a real person, and dealt very patiently with the daily chaos.

Paul and Cynthia Hanson?

They were the Co-Masters of Dudley House. Maybe a little explanation is needed here. After their freshman year, the vast majority of Harvard students move into a residential “House” that creates a smaller space within the larger university. These houses have distinct characters, and students tend to form long-lasting loyalties to them. At the time of the game, Dudley House was the center for non-residential or commuter students. Like the residential houses, Dudley had a tutorial staff, dining facilities, lounges, a game room, a library, etc. The houses are overseen by Harvard faculty, often a married couple, called Masters who act “in loco parentis” for the students. House Masters are kind of omnipresent, so I coded them in a way similar to Mike. In other words, they pop up all the time until you figure out how to get rid of them. Talking to them provides a major hint which should be evident after you discover the conundrum dispenser. This machine is obviously based on a different kind of dispenser commonly found in men’s bathrooms of the day. Couldn’t resist the pun!

The Center for High-Energy Metaphysics and their potluck dinner?

Okay, I know I said that Dudley was a non-residential house, but there were a couple of exceptions. About a half-mile or so off campus, near Porter Square, were two old Cambridge Victorians that housed about 15-20 Dudley students between them. These were begun back in the 60’s as commune-type alternatives for students who weren’t attracted to the typical Harvard House experience. One of these houses had a sign at the entrance proclaiming that you were about to enter “The Center for High-Energy Metaphysics,” an obvious pun on experimental physics labs. As a Dudley tutor, I would visit from time to time for potluck dinners, which were largely vegetarian. Seems that the character of those houses hadn’t changed much from the 60’s. Of course, I added the “militant vegetarian” quality just for laughs.

An interesting bit of film trivia here: the Joe Pesci character in the 1994 film With Honors was based on a homeless man who crashed off and on for years at the High-Energy Center. One of the students who lived there at the time wrote the basis of the screenplay. But of course by the time it made it to theaters, the true story was completely unrecognizable.

The party animal?

This character was based on one of my fellow tutors, a mathematician named Yang Wang. Actually, there’s almost no resemblance between them except for the nickname. We used to call Yang a party animal because he so clearly wasn’t. But the location is correct, Yang’s apartment in Peabody Terrace near the Charles River.

The History of Boston Harbor by George Bush?

In the 1988 presidential election between George Bush Sr. and Michael Dukakis, the Bush team hammered Dukakis on how Boston Harbor had turned into a toxic sewage dump under his watch. Since another part of the game involves how polluted the Charles River had become, I threw this in both as a contemporary reference and as an echo of another part of the game. Bostonians used to revel in the bad reputation of the Charles. Maybe you remember the Standell’s song “Love That Dirty Water.” It was a staple between innings at Fenway Park.

The two secretaries, Mrs. J and Mrs. Handy?

These were two of the sweetest people on earth – Louise Janowicz and Margaret Handy. They ran Dudley House on a day-to-day basis and were truly loved by generations of students. Various Masters came and went, but Mrs. J and Mrs Handy kept the place from falling apart. They were the institutional memory and the beating heart of Dudley. There’s no way I could have written the game without including them. The bit of business involving the key to the bathroom is fact-based. Since Dudley House (Lehman Hall) abutted Harvard Square, there were occasions when our men’s room attracted a less than savory element. So in order to gain access, you had to get the key from a hook beside Mrs. J’s desk. And woe is you if you forgot to return it! As I once did.

The queer old dean?

That’s a reference to William Archibald Spooner, Dean of New College, Oxford, and famous for his unintentionally humorous mangling of the English language. As you probably know, the term “spoonerism” refers to him, and “queer old dean” was apparently a reference he once made about “dear old Queen” Victoria. I’ve been a closet fan of puns and spoonerism my whole life, so I had to figure out a way to include him in Dudley. It seemed to me that having his little problem extend beyond the verbal and into the “real” world would be a great way to play around with morphing some of the objects in the game. I confess that I was influenced by Infocom again here (Nord and Bert is full of spoonerisms).

John Marquand?

John Marquand was Senior Tutor at Dudley House during my time there. He was an institution at Dudley and really was a kind of Father Confessor to the undergrads. He was also a bottomless reservoir of knowledge about food and wine, so if you needed advice on a great restaurant, he was your guy. In the game, I actually have him give you a tip about Bartley’s Burgers (another Harvard institution). He is NOT John P. Marquand, the creator of the Mr. Moto detective novels, but they were related. I originally planned to work the Mr. Moto connection in somehow, but that one slipped through the cracks.

Thanks for all that! It really deepens and enriches the game’s “time capsule” quality all these years later.

It was mentioned at the time that A Dudley Dilemma won the competition that you planned to make another game, this one to be based on Charles Dickens, the subject of your dissertation. Whatever became of that idea?

It never really made it out of the concept stage, but my hope was to mingle characters from various novels together in a sort of “through the looking glass” romp. It seemed to me that having, for example, David Copperfield knock some sense into Pip would be satisfying. Or having Scrooge hire Uriah Heep instead of Bob Cratchet would act as a form of karmic justice. I made some notes at the time, but I have no idea where they are today.

Interesting. I’ve often toyed with an idea similar to this one. There’s a long tradition of time-travel text adventures that have you visiting different time periods, using things collected in one time in another to solve puzzles, etc. I’ve often thought to do something similar, but to have you visiting worlds out of literature — an idea partly inspired by Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books. Like you, though, I’ve never gotten around to it. The blog sucks up too much time and energy, I’m afraid.

I haven’t read the Fforde books, but I’ll check them out. By the way, if you’re not already familiar with them, you might look for a couple of stories from the 40’s by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, called The Incomplete Enchanter. These have been in and out of print for years, so I expect they’re available somewhere. The protagonist, Harold Shea, is able to enter parallel worlds based on literary works: Norse Edda in one story and Spenser’s Faerie Queene in another. Side note here: when I was studying for my PhD orals, I had to read The Faerie Queene, and I kept looking around the corners of that text for Harold. Sadly, he was nowhere to be found.

Ah, The Faerie Queene… “A gentle knight was pricking on the plain…”

I have a beautiful old Victorian edition that I love to take out and look at. I must confess that I’ve never gotten through the whole thing, though. There’s only so much allegory one man can take I reckon.

I didn’t mind Spenser, but Pilgrim’s Progress did me in. What is it Mrs. Malaprop says – “As headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile.”

Before we wrap up, maybe you could tell just briefly where life took you after the days of Harvard and A Dudley Dilemma.

After I completed Dudley, I dove back into teaching and working on my dissertation, which I never did complete (can’t blame Dudley for this, however). A year or so later, I moved to Connecticut and took a job in the UConn School of Business. My wife was in the English Department at UConn, so this actually allowed us to live under the same roof. In the world of academic marriages, having jobs at the same institution is pretty rare, so we jumped at the chance. I also reasoned that having one English professor in the family was enough, so the transition to business was fairly smooth. Besides, I used to sneak across the Charles to the cafe at the Harvard B-School (the food was really good there), so I must have had a premonition.

My work at the UConn B-School involved corporate consulting and teaching business writing to undergrads and MBA students. Just so we’re clear on this, I taught my students how to write clean English prose, without business jargon. Eventually, I served as MBA Director for 10 years. And yes, there was a certain Dickensian quality to the business school. I’ll leave the interpretation of that remark up to you! I retired from my full-time job in 2012, but I currently work part-time with a UConn program called the EBV (Entrepreneurial Bootcamp for Disabled Veterans). We hold workshops for vets who want to start their own businesses. My contribution is helping them create a business plan.

Thank you! And congratulations on making it to retirement after such an interesting and varied working life. I hope that this article and the “remastered” version of A Dudley Dilemma which we released last week will lead more people to play this very clever game and inadvertent time capsule of life at Harvard in the late 1980s.

Thanks, Jimmy. For my part, this entire exchange has been a real pleasure and has allowed me to relive an enjoyable past experience. Thanks again for putting the final version of the game out there. I thought about doing that myself over the years, but didn’t think there’d be an audience for it.

I continue to read and enjoy your blog, and I’ll probably go back and do it in chronological order to see how it develops over time. I’m sure you’ll be expanding it for many years to come. I hope we can keep in touch, and if I ever decide to follow up with the Dickens game (unlikely), I’ll let you know.

I hope so too! Take care!

Lane Barrow, 2016. He’s a man who likes to sleep with his hat on, which I suppose is better than dying with his boots on.

Comments
12 Responses

- Steve

August 12, 2016 at 5:54 pm

Very nice interview. A small note: The “T” is short for MBTA, not MTA (New York City’s transit system).

- Jimmy Maher

August 12, 2016 at 7:50 pm

Thanks! I’ve taken the liberty of correcting Lane’s reply for him, as I’m sure that was just an oversight.

- Bernie

August 12, 2016 at 7:15 pm

This was a great interview ! I think you should reconsider your rule. This reminds me of interviews in the magazines of old and certainly suits your blog’s themes very well.

One small correction: although I must confess i’m not a native english speaker, as a Chemical Engineer i’m sure that “solubility” sounds weird in this context (as though the games dissapear in water). Maybe “s-o-l-v-a-b-i-l-i-t-y” would be a better choice ? (please let me know).

- Jimmy Maher

August 12, 2016 at 8:02 pm

Either would work, but I generally go with “solubility” because it’s more accepted in standard English usage. That’s even more true of the antonym forms — “insolubility” versus “insolvability.” (Although in early articles I tended to use “solvability.” Live and learn… or, at least, live and make other arbitrary word choices.)

There is a somewhat odd connection between solubility in the chemical sense and *solvability* in the logical sense in Germanic languages. For example, “Lösung” in German is both the solution to a problem and, say, the stuff you soak your contact lenses in.

- Sniffnoy

August 13, 2016 at 3:41 am

The antonym for “solvability” would ordinarily be “unsolvability”, not “insolvability”. Those are the words we use in math, anyway!

- Jimmy Maher

August 13, 2016 at 7:43 am

Okay. But somehow “unsolvability” sounds even more awkward to my ears than “insolvability.” ;)

- Carl Read

August 14, 2016 at 12:01 am

I needed a second look at “solubility” too, which wouldn’t have happened if you’d used “solvability”, so I’d doubt it’s the more accepted English usage. Puzzles I see as things you solve, whereas stuff is soluble (in water, and such).

And interviews are good! When it’s made plain they’re not fact-checked history. Wouldn’t the historian in you not like to discover an interview with Shakespeare?

- Bernie

August 19, 2016 at 6:57 pm

Thanks Jimmy ! You’ve really cleared this up for me, as always.

I happen to know a bit of german myself, but wouldn’t have made that connection without your help.

Thanks again for this great blog and the time you spend on the answers.

- ZUrlocker

August 13, 2016 at 2:36 pm

Great interview! I really enjoyed the details. I hope you will do a few more.

- MrEntropy

August 15, 2016 at 5:35 pm

As far as reading suggestions go, I’d throw “Silverlock” by John Myers Myers in as well.

- Matt Workman

August 20, 2016 at 3:47 am

Please post more interviews. These clearly contain tales from people who are often overlooked.

Really enjoyed this.

- noone

August 20, 2016 at 10:39 am

Linux users may have the same problem I did playing the Dudley.zip. Agility silently fails to start the game (exit code 1). The solution is to rename all the files to lower case versions, then
$ agil dudley.d\$\$
works as expected.

IBM’s New Flavor
August 19, 2016

IBM’s greatest triumph was inextricably linked with what by 1986 was turning into their biggest problem. Following its introduction five years before, the IBM PC had remade the face of corporate computing in its image, legitimizing personal computing in the eyes of the Fortune 500 and all those smaller companies who dreamed of someday joining their ranks. The ecosystem that surrounded the IBM PC and its successors was now worth countless billions, the greatest story of American business success of them all to play out during Ronald Reagan’s storied Morning in America.

The problem, at least as IBM and many of their worried stockholders perceived it, was that they now seemed on the verge of losing control of the very standard they had created. A combination of the decisions that had allowed the original IBM PC to become a standard in the first place — its simple, workmanlike design that utilized only off-the-shelf components; the scrupulously thorough documentation of said design; the decision to outsource the machine’s operating system to Microsoft, a third party all too willing to license the same operating system to other parties as well — had led to a thriving market in so-called “clone” machines whose combined revenues now far exceeded IBM’s personal-computer sales. IBM believed that the clonesters were lifting billions out of their pockets every year, even as they saw their own sales, which had broken record after record in the first few years following the IBM PC’s launch, beginning to show signs of stagnation.

Compaq of Houston, Texas, the most aggressive and innovative of the clonesters, had first begun to collect for themselves a reputation to rival IBM’s own with their very first product back in 1983, a portable — or, perhaps better said, “luggable” — all-in-one IBM-compatible. The Compaq Portable had forced IBM for the first time to play catch-up with a personal-computing rival, rushing to market a luggable of their own. To make matters worse, the IBM version of portable computing had proved far less practical than the Compaq, as many a reviewer wasn’t shy about pointing out.

Now, in 1986, Compaq threatened to wrangle away from IBM the mantle of technological leadership via a machine that represented a more fundamental advance than a new form factor. After hearing that IBM didn’t have any immediate plans to release a machine built around the Intel 80386, a new 32-bit processor that was sending waves of excitement rippling through the industry, Compaq decided to push ahead with a 386-based machine of their own — right now, this very year. The public launch of the Compaq Deskpro 386 on September 9, 1986 — almost exactly five years after the debut of the original IBM PC — was another watershed moment, the first time one of the clonesters had released a machine more powerful than anything in IBM’s stable. Compaq’s CEO Rod Canion, never a shrinking violet under any circumstances, outdid himself at the launch, declaring the Deskpro 386 “the third generation of the personal-computer revolution” after the Apple II and the IBM PC, thus implicitly placing his own Compaq on a par with those two storied companies.

The clone market was getting so big that there seemed a danger that the clones wouldn’t be dismissed under that selfsame moniker much longer. People in the business world were beginning to replace the phrase “IBM clone” with phrases like “the MS-DOS standard” or “the Intel standard,” giving no credit to the company that had really created that standard. As was well attested by their checkered history of antitrust investigations and allegations of unfair competitive practices, IBM had never been known as a bastion of corporate generosity. It may not be exaggerating the case to say that they felt themselves to have a moral right to the PC standard they’d created, a right that encompassed not just an acknowledgement that said standard was still the IBM standard but also the ability to continue to steer every aspect of the further development of that standard. And by all rights the right should also encompass — and this was the sticking point that really irked — their fair share of all those billions that all those other companies were making from IBM’s standard.

In addition to furnishing what they saw as ample evidence of a need for them to reassert control of their industry, this period found IBM at another, more purely technical crossroads. The imminent move from 16-bit to 32-bit computing represented by the new 80386 would have to bring with it some elaborations on IBM’s tried-and-true architecture — elaborations that would undoubtedly define the face of mainstream business computing into the 1990s. IBM saw in those elaborations a way to remedy the ongoing problem of the clonesters as well. Unknown to everyone outside the company, they were about to initiate the so-called “bus wars,” a premeditated strike aimed directly at what they saw as parasites like Compaq.

The bus in this context referred not to a mode of public transportation but rather to the system of expansion slots that allowed the innermost core of an IBM-compatible computer — little more than the processor and memory — to communicate with just about everything else that made up a full-fledged PC: floppy and hard disk drives, monitors, modems, printers, ad infinitum, from the most generalized components found in just about every office to the most specialized for the most esoteric of tasks. The original IBM PC, built around a hybrid 8-bit and 16-bit chip called the Intel 8088, had used an 8-bit bus, meaning the electronic “channel” it used to talk to all these myriad devices was just 8 bits wide. In 1984, IBM had released the PC/AT, built around the newer fully 16-bit Intel 80286, and in that machine had expanded the original bus to support 16-bit devices while remaining backward compatible with the older 8-bit standard. The result retroactively came to be known as the Industry Standard Architecture, or ISA.

Now, with the 32-bit 80386 a reality, it was time to think about revisiting the bus again, to make it support 32-bit communications. To fail to do so would be to cripple the 386, forcing it to act like a 16-bit chip every time it wanted to communicate with a peripheral; impressive as they were in many ways, the Compaq Deskpro 386 and other early 386 clones saw their performance limited by exactly this problem. Most people expected IBM to do for the 386 what they had previously done for the 286, delivering a new bus which would support 32-bit peripherals but remain compatible with older 16-bit and even 8-bit devices. Instead they delivered something they called the Micro Channel Architecture, or MCA, a complete break with the past which supported only 32-bit peripherals.

So much controversy over something barely noticeable. The four Micro Channel slots sit at the left rear of this PS/2 Model 50. Many of the components that would have been housed in expansion cards in earlier IBM systems, such as the video card and hard-drive controller, were moved onto the motherboard with the PS/2 line.

MCA debuted as a key component in a new line of personal computers in April of 1987, the most ambitious such IBM had ever or would ever introduce. The Personal System/2 lineup — better known as the PS/2 — was envisioned as exactly the next generation in personal computing that an ebullient Rod Canion had perhaps overenthusiastically declared the Compaq Deskpro 386 to represent barely six months before. IBM was determined to once again remake the computer industry in their image — and to get it right this time, avoiding the perceived mistakes that had led to the rise of the clonesters. The PS/2 lineup did encompass lower-end machines using the old 16-bit PC/AT bus, but the real point of the effort lay with the higher-end models, IBM’s first to use the 80386 and their first to use the new MCA bus architecture to take advantage of all of the 32 bits of throughput offered by that chip. IBM offered various technical justifications for the failure of MCA to support their older bus standards, but they always rang false. As the more astute industry observers quickly realized, MCA had more to do with business and marketing than it did with technology in the abstract.

IBM was attempting a delicate trick with MCA. They wanted to be able to continue to reap the enormous benefits of the business-computing standard they had birthed, with its huge constellation of compatible software that by now even more so than IBM’s reputation made an MS-DOS machine the only kind to be seriously considered by the vast majority of corporate purchasing departments. At the same time, though, they wanted to cut off the oxygen to the clonesters who were also benefiting so conspicuously from that same universal acceptance, and to reassert their role as the ultimate authorities on the direction business computing would take in the future. They believed they could accomplish all of that, in the long term at least, by threading the needle of compatibility — keeping the 386-based PS/2 lineup software-compatible with the older machines while deliberately breaking the hardware compatibility so relied on by the clonesters. In doing so, they would take the hardware to a place the clonesters couldn’t follow, thus securing for themselves all those billions the clonesters had heretofore been stealing out of their pockets.

Unlike the original IBM bus architecture, MCA was locked up inside an ironclad cage of patents, making it legally uncloneable unless one could somehow negotiate a license to do so through IBM. The patents even extended to add-on cards and other peripherals that might be compatible with MCA, meaning that absolutely anyone who wanted to make a hardware add-on for an MCA machine would have to negotiate a license and pay for the privilege. The result should be not only a lucrative new revenue stream but also complete control of business computing’s further evolution. Yes, the clonesters would be able to survive for a few more years making machines using the older 16-bit bus architecture. In the longer term, however, as personal computing inevitably transitioned into a realm of 32 bits, they would survive purely at IBM’s whim, their fate predicated on IBM’s willingness to grant them a patent license for MCA and their own willingness to pay dearly for it.

The clonesters rightly and immediately saw MCA as nothing less than an existential threat, and were thrown into a tizzy trying to figure out how to respond to it. It was the ever-quotable Rod Canion who came up with the best line of attack, drawing an analogy between MCA and the recent soft-drink marketing disaster of New Coke. (What with Pepsi alumnus John Sculley in charge over at Apple, computers and soft drinks seemed to be running oddly in parallel during this era.) Clever, pithy, and blessedly non-technical, Canion’s comparison spread like wildfire through the business press, regurgitated ad nauseam by journalists who often had little to no idea what this MCA thing that it referenced actually was. IBM never quite managed to formulate a response that didn’t sound nefariously evasive.

With the “New Coke” meme setting the tone, just about everything about the PS/2 line turned into an unexpected uphill struggle for IBM. While plenty of early reviewers dutifully toed the line, doubtless mindful that if no one ever got fired for buying IBM no one was likely to get fired for giving them a positive review either, a surprising number of the reviews were distinctly lukewarm. The complaints started and often ended with the prices. Even the low-end 16-bit PS/2 models started at a suggested list price of $2295 without monitor, while the high-end models topped out at almost $7000. Insider reports had it that IBM was enjoying profit margins of 40 percent or more, leading to rampant speculation on what the cost of entry into business-friendly personal computing might become if they really should manage to stamp out the clonesters.

The high-end models in particular struck many as a pointless waste of money given that IBM didn’t have an operating system ready to take advantage of their capabilities. The machines were all still saddled with MS-DOS, clunky and archaic and barely worthy of the name “operating system” even in the terms of 1987. In one of the more striking examples of hardware running away from software in computing history, the higher-end models shipped with 1 MB of memory, but couldn’t actually use more than 640 K of it thanks to MS-DOS’s built-in limitations. IBM promised a new, next-generation operating system called OS/2 to unlock the real potential of these next-generation machines. But OS/2, a project they had once again chosen to turn over to Microsoft, was still an unknown number of months away, with the so-called “Presentation Manager” that would add to it a Macintosh-style GUI due yet further months after that.[1] And, as a final little bit of buyer discouragement, IBM planned to charge the people who had already spent many thousands on their PS/2 hardware another $800 or so for the privilege of using the eventual OS/2 to take advantage of it.

The PS/2 launch prompted constant comparisons with the original IBM PC launch of five and a half years before, and constantly came up wanting. IBM’s publicity campaign was lavish — as it ought to have been, given those profit margins — but unfocused and uninspired. Its centerpiece was a series of commercials involving much of the cast from M*A*S*H, playing their old sitcom characters inexplicably transported from the Korean War to a modern office. With M*A*S*H still a beloved cultural touchstone only a few years removed from its record-shattering final episode, the spots had plenty of sheer star power, but lacked even a modicum of the charm or creativity that had characterized the award-winning “Charlie Chaplin” advertisements for the original IBM PC.

Likewise, it was hard not to compare the unexpected spirit of openness that had suffused the 1981 IBM PC with the domination and control IBM so plainly intended to assert with the 1987 PS/2 launch. Apple’s iconic old “Big Brother” Macintosh advertisement, a soaring triumph of rhetoric over substance back in its day, would have fit much better to the PS/2 line than it had to the state of business computing back in 1984. Many chose to blame the change in tone on the loss of Don Estridge, the leader of the small team that had built the original IBM PC. An unusually charismatic personality and independent thinker for the famously conservative and bureaucratic IBM — enough so that he had been courted by Steve Jobs to fill the CEO role John Sculley ended up taking at Apple — Estridge had been killed in a plane crash in 1985. His stewardship over IBM’s microcomputer division had been succeeded by that of William Lowe, a much more traditional rank-and-file, buttoned-down IBM man. Whether due to this reason or some other, the shift in tone and direction from 1981 to 1987 was striking.

In the months following the PS/2 line’s release, the media narrative drifted from one of uncertain excitement to reports of the new machines’ disappointing reception in many quarters. IBM sold around 200,000 MCA-equipped PS/2s in the first six months, mostly to the biggest of big business; United Airlines alone, for example, bought 40,000 of them as part of a complete revamping of their reservations system. But far too many even within the Fortune 500 proved stubbornly, unexpectedly resistant to IBM’s unsubtle prodding to jump onto the PS/2 train. Many chose to invest in the clonesters’ cheaper 80386 offerings instead; the 16-bit bus used by those machines, while far from ideal from a purely technical standpoint, did at least have the advantage of compatibility with existing peripherals. Seventeen months after MCA’s debut, 66 percent of all business computers being sold each month were still using the old bus architecture, versus just 20 percent that used MCA. (The remainder was largely accounted for by the Macintosh.) Survey after survey reported IBM to be losing market share rather than gaining it since the arrival of the PS/2. By this point OS/2 and its “Presentation Manager” GUI were finally available, but, hampered by that high price tag, the new operating system’s uptake had also been limited at best.

And then, just when it seemed the news couldn’t get much worse for IBM, much of the industry went into unthinkable open revolt against their ongoing hegemony. On September 13, 1988, a group of the clonesters, driven as usual by Compaq and with the tacit support of Intel and Microsoft, announced the creation of a new 32-bit bus standard, to be called the Extended Industry Standard Architecture, or EISA. Unlike MCA, EISA would be compatible with older 16-bit and 8-bit peripherals. And it would manage to be so without performing notably worse than MCA, thus giving the lie to IBM’s claims that their decision to abandon bus compatibility had been motivated by technical rather than business concerns. The press promptly dubbed the budding consortium, which included virtually every manufacturer of IBM-compatible computers not named IBM, the “Gang of Nine” after the allegedly traitorous Gang of Four of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Machines using the new EISA bus entered production within a year.

This shot of an EISA card illustrates the unique two-layer connection devised by the Gang of Nine to extend the old ISA standard without requiring ridiculously long, unwieldy cards and sockets. The shorter pins correspond to the older 16-bit standard; the longer extend it to 32 bits.

In the end, EISA would prove of limited technical importance in the evolution of the Intel architecture. The new standard didn’t have much more luck than had MCA in establishing itself as the market’s default. Instead, by the time a 32-bit bus became a truly commonplace need among ordinary computer users, EISA and MCA alike were replaced by a still newer and better standard than either called the Peripheral Component Interconnect, or PCI. The bus wars of the late 1980s and very early 1990s can thus all too easily be seen as just another of the industry’s tempests in a teapot, an obscure squabble over technical esoterica of interest only to hardcore hackers.

Look a little harder at EISA, however, and we see a watershed moment in the history of the personal computer that dwarfs even the arrival of the Compaq Portable or the Deskpro 386. The Gang of Nine’s announcement brought with it a torrent of press coverage that for the first time openly questioned IBM’s continuing dominance of business-oriented computing. CNN’s Moneyline, the most-watched business report on cable television, dredged up Canion’s evergreen New Coke analogy yet again, going so far as to open its reports on the Gang of Nine’s announcement with a shot of soda bottles moving down a production line. IBM was “faced with overwhelming resistance to the flavor of ‘New Compute,'” declared the breathless report that followed; September 13, 1988, “was a day that left Big Blue looking black and blue.” An only slightly more sober Wall Street Journal article had it that the Gang of Nine “was joining forces in an audacious attempt to wrest away from IBM the power of setting the standard for how personal computers are designed, and they seem to have a chance of succeeding.” The article threw all its metaphors in a blender for the big conclusion: “For IBM, the Gang’s announcement yesterday is at best a dust storm of confusion, and, at worst, a dagger to the heart of its PC strategy.” When the Wall Street Journal threatens to turn against your big business, you know you have problems.

And, indeed, September 13, 1988, wound up representing everything the pundits and journalists said it might and more. Simply put, this was the instant that IBM finally and definitively lost control of the business-computing industry, the moment when the architecture they had created back in 1981 left the nest to go its own way. After this instant, no one would ever defer to IBM again. In January of 1989, Arlan Levitan, a columnist for the big consumer-computing magazine Compute! — like most such magazines, not particularly known for the boldness of its editorial stances — signaled the shifting conventional wisdom. His editors empowered him to launch a satirical broadside at IBM, the PS/2, MCA, and even all those who had bought into the hype, a group that very much included their own magazine.

During a Monday morning press breakfast hosted by IBM, over a thousand representatives of the computing press were shocked to hear newly hired Entry Systems Division president P.W. Herman declare that the firm’s PS/2 computer systems and its associated products were part of an elaborate psychological study undertaken at the behest of the National Institute of Mental Health. “I sure am glad the American people haven’t lost their sense of humor. It’s good to know that in these times everybody still appreciates a good joke.” According to Herman, the study was intended to quantify the limits of the operational parameters associated with Abraham Lincoln’s most famous aphorism. Said Herman, “I guess you really can’t fool all of the people all of the time. I’ll tell ya, though — the Micro Channel Architecture even had me going for a while.” All PS/2 owners will receive a letter signed by Herman and thanking them for their personal contribution toward furthering the present-day understanding of aberrant behavior. Corporate executives who committed their firms to IBM’s $800 OS/2 operating system will receive free remedial therapy in DOS reeducation centers. Those who took advantage of IBM’s trade-in policy, whereby users gave up their XTs or ATs for a PS/2, will receive their weight in PCjr computers. According to internal IBM sources, all costs associated with manufacturing and promoting PS/2s will cumulatively qualify as a tax-deductible research grant.

In terms of hardware if not software — Microsoft’s long, often damaging domination was just beginning in the latter realm — the industry was now a meritocracy, bound together only by a set of mutually if often only tacitly agreed-upon standards. That could only mean hard times for IBM, who were hardly used to competing on such a level playing field. In 1993, they posted a loss of a staggering $8 billion, the largest to that point in American business history, prompting a long, painful process of reinvention as a smaller, nimbler, dare I say it even humbler company. In 2004, in another watershed moment symbolic of many things, IBM stopped making PCs altogether, selling what was left of their personal-computer division to the Chinese computer manufacturer Lenovo in order to focus on consulting services.

The PS/2 story has rightfully gone down in business history as a classic tale of overweening arrogance that received its justified comeuppance. In attempting so aggressively to seize complete control of business computing — all of it — IBM pissed away the enviable dominance they already enjoyed. In attempting to build an empire that stood utterly alone and unchallenged, they burned the one they already had.

Yet there is another side to the PS/2 story that also deserves its due. Existing in those seemingly misbegotten machines alongside MCA and the cynicism it represented was a more positive, one might even say technically idealistic determination to advance the state of the art for this architecture that had long since become the mainstream face of computing, dwarfing in terms of the sheer money it generated any other platform.

And make no mistake: the world of the IBM compatibles was in sore need of advancement on multiple fronts. While machines like the Apple Macintosh and Commodore Amiga had opened whole new paradigms of computing — the former with its friendly GUI interface and crisp almost print-quality display, the latter with its multitasking operating system and implementation of the ideal of multimedia computing long before “multimedia” became a buzzword — the world of the clones had remained as bland as ever, a land of green or amber text-only displays, unpleasant beeps and squawks, and inscrutable command lines. For all the apparently proud users and sellers who took all this ugliness as a sign of serious businesslike intent, there were others who recognized that IBM and the clonesters had long since ceded the high ground of real, fundamental innovation in computing to rival platforms. Thankfully, some inside IBM were included in the latter group, and the results could be seen in the PS/2 machines.

Given how far the IBM-compatible world had fallen behind, it’s not surprising that many or most of the alleged innovations of the PS/2 were really a case of playing catch-up. For example, IBM finally produced their first-ever mouse for the line. They also switched over from the old, fragile 5.25-inch floppy-disk format to the newer, more robust and higher-capacity 3.5-inch format already being used by machines like the Macintosh and Amiga.

But undoubtedly the most welcome and significant of all the PS/2’s new technical developments were some desperately needed display improvements. The Video Graphics Array, or VGA, was included with the higher-end PS/2 models; lower-end models shipped with something called the Multi-Color Graphics Array (MCGA), with many but not quite all of the capabilities of VGA. After allowing their machines’ graphics capabilities to languish for years, IBM through VGA and to some extent MCGA finally brought them up to a level that compared very favorably with the Amiga. VGA and MCGA defined a palette of fully 262,144 colors, a huge leap over the 64 offered by the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA), IBM’s previous best display option for their mainstream machines. The Amiga, by contrast, offered just 4096 colors, although its blitter and other custom hardware still gave it some notable advantages in the realm of fast animation.

All of these new developments marked IBM’s last great gifts to the standard they had birthed — gifts destined to long outlive the PS/2 line itself. The mouse connection IBM developed, for instance, remained a standard well beyond the millennium, with so-called “PS/2” connectors remaining common jargon, used by younger tech-heads and system builders who likely had only the vaguest idea from whence the usage derived. The VGA standard proved even longer-lived. It still survives today as the lowest-common-denominator baseline for computer displays, while ports matching the specification defined by IBM all those years ago remain on the back of every monitor and television set.

Ironically given IBM’s laser focus on using the PS/2 line to secure their dominance of business computing, its technical innovations ultimately proved most important in making the architecture viable as a proposition for the home, paving the way for the Microsoft-dominated second home-computer revolution of the 1990s. With good graphics falling into place at last thanks to VGA and the raw power of the 32-bit 80386, only two barriers remained to making PC-compatible machines realistic rivals to the likes of the Amiga as compelling home computers: decent sound to replace those atrocious beeps and squawks, and a decent price.

The first problem wouldn’t be a problem at all for very much longer. The first gaming-focused sound cards began to reach the market within a year of the PS/2 line’s debut, and by 1989 Creative Music Systems and Ad Lib both offered popular cards at street prices of $200 or less.

But the prices of home-oriented systems incorporating all of the PS/2 line’s innovations — MCA excepted — would, alas, take a little longer to fall. As late as July of 1989, when the VGA standard was already more than two years old, Computer Gaming World ran an article titled “Is VGA Worth It?” that seriously questioned whether it was indeed worth the still very considerable expense — VGA boards still cost $500 or more — to so equip a machine, especially given how few games supported VGA at that point. Nor did the 80386 find an immediate place in homes. As the 1980s turned into the 1990s, the newer chip was still a piece of pricey exotica in terms of the average consumer’s budget; the vast majority of the Intel-based PCs that were in consumers’ homes were still built around the 80286 or even the venerable old 8088.

Still, in the long run prices could only fall in such a hyper-competitive market. Given Commodore’s lackadaisical attitude toward improving the Amiga and Apple’s almost complete neglect of the consumer market in their eagerness to force the Macintosh into the offices of corporate America, the emerging standard of a 32-bit Intel-based PC with VGA graphics and a sound card came to the fore effectively unopposed. With the Internet having yet to emerge as home computing’s killer app to end all killer apps, it was games that drove this shift. In 1989, an Amiga was still the ultimate gaming computer. By 1991, it was an afterthought for American game publishers, the market being absolutely dominated by what was now starting to be called the “Wintel” standard. While game consoles and mobile devices have come and gone by the handful over the years since, in the realm of desktop- and laptop-based personal computing the heirs of the original IBM PC remain the overwhelming standard to this day. How ironic that this decades-long dominance was ensured by the PS/2, simultaneously the downfall of IBM and the savior of the inadvertently standard architecture IBM created.

(Sources: the books Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM by Paul Carroll, Open: How Compaq Ended IBM’s PC Domination and Helped Invent Modern Computing by Rod Canion, and Hard Drive: Bill Gates and Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson; Byte of June 1987, July 1987, August 1987, and December 1987; Compute! of June 1988, January 1989, and March 1989; Computer Gaming World of July 1989 and September 1989; Wall Street Journal of September 14 1988; the episodes of The Computer Chronicles titled “Intel 386 — The Fast Lane,” “IBM Personal System/2,” and “Bus Wars.”)

1. The full story of OS/2 and the Presentation Manager and their relationship to Microsoft Windows and even Apple’s MacOS is a complex yet fascinating one, but also one best reserved for a future article where I can give it its proper due. ↩

Comments
20 Responses

- John

August 19, 2016 at 7:33 pm

I haven’t seen a TV with a DE-9 VGA connector on it like I remember VGA cards having.

Are you thinking SVGA with the DE-15 connector?

- Jimmy Maher

August 20, 2016 at 9:33 am

The 15-pin connector debuted with MCGA and VGA, not SVGA. There’s a pretty good shot of the PS/2 video connector in the July 1987 Byte: https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1987-07/1987_07_BYTE_12-08_LANs_IBM_PS2_Models_30_50_60_CAD_Software#page/n253/mode/2up.

- Casey Muratori

August 19, 2016 at 10:53 pm

Minor point for those interested: it’s a little misleading to discuss the relative total color counts of Amiga vs. VGA or MCGA because that wasn’t the primary thing that determined how good the graphics looked or what games could be played on them. Yes, the Amiga could select from 4096 colors, but in practice each individual pixel could only select from 32 colors (or 64 with some restrictions), whereas VGA and MCGA displays could select from 256 colors per pixel, so that was the more relevant figure for colors… but this wasn’t the most important part either.

The more important part was that VGA displays had the benefit of optionally allowing pixels to be wholly determined by individual bytes in memory, in contrast to the Amiga’s “bit-planar” architecture where each bit of a pixel’s color index was stored in a separate plane. While bit-planar displays are more flexible in that they offer more display mode options that use less memory (eg., you can have a 32-color display mode that actually only uses 5 bits per pixel, something obviously not possible with a byte-per-pixel layout), it made it all but impossible for CPUs at the time to actually render pixels efficiently.

This ended up being why Amigas, despite previously being much more powerful graphically due to built-in hardware for moving memory around, couldn’t deliver the kind of CPU-centric rendering that would come to characterize the PC’s 2.5D game revolution (Wolfenstein, Doom, etc.)

It was a very interesting transition and a notable relevance to the architectural decisions of the displays. Unfortunately, we’ll never know if Amiga would have countered in time with a similar architecture, since the plans of the original Amiga team to move the platform forward were scrapped by Commodore long before any of this happened :(

Cheers,
– Casey

- Jimmy Maher

August 20, 2016 at 9:50 am

As I’m sure you’re well aware, any comparison of whether VGA or Amiga graphics were “better” quickly gets very complicated, with even the finest of points seemingly having a counterpoint. One might, for instance, be tempted to say that the IBM architecture could display still images in better quality (perfect for business graphics), while the Amiga had the edge in animation (perfect for gaming and video production), and leave it at that. But then the Amiga actually was much better at displaying still photographs and other scanned images. Its HAM mode, for all its restrictions, was so suited to this particular task as almost to seem custom-designed for it. In this particular application, being able to display (almost) any of 4096 colors was far more useful than being restricted to 256 from a palette of 262,144. In the end, as happens so often in technology, the question of which was better comes down to what you’re really trying to do.

For anyone interested in digging deeper into this, I do just that in my book about the Amiga, including the death blow that Wolfenstein 3D and Doom represented to the Amiga as continuing viable rival to the Intel architecture as a game machine. In this article, though, I thought it better to stay out of those weeds — they being the virulent sort that can quickly eat an article whole — and just point out that VGA did at the very least put the IBM world and the Amiga world in the same conversation when it came to graphics quality.

One other wonderful thing about VGA that would make life vastly easier for countless artists and programmers over decades to come: it had *square* pixels. In other words, if you drew a box of 25 pixels by 25 pixels, you actually *got* a box, not a rectangle. Words can hardly express how wonderful this is to work with after living with an Amiga or another computer with funky oblong pixels.

- Lotus

August 20, 2016 at 5:18 pm

I think the simplest way to look at it is:

– The most common resolution for games on the Amiga was 320×200 pixels with 32 colors. Due to the Amiga’s custom chips, the games had smooth scrolling, animated sprites, digitial sound samples and pretty good MOD music.

– Once games on the PC used VGA and Soundblaster cards, they mostly used a resolution of 320×200 pixels with 256 colors, had digital sound samples and poor/mediocre/somewhat okay Adlib/MIDI music. The PC’s fast main CPU (386 & later 486) was far more capable of calculating 3D graphics (especially compared to the now old but most widespread Amiga model, the A500), so with PC games like Comanche, X-Wing, Ultima Underworld, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, the Amiga was left far behind.

- Whomever

August 21, 2016 at 1:48 am

Re music, let’s not forget the Roland MT-32, which a lot of games supported. Not super cheap but the sound lasted-Roland combo was epic. And lots of games supported it.

- Whomever

August 21, 2016 at 1:49 am

Argh! Sound blaster, not lasted. Damn you autocorrect.

- Pedro Timóteo

August 21, 2016 at 8:41 am

Actually, I’d say the most common resolution on the Amiga was, unfortunately, 320x200x16 colors, especially in UK-made games, since it was common to port Atari ST graphics (and often code) to the Amiga, to save on costs (much like how many Amstrad CPC games used Spectrum code and, often, ported Spectrum monochrome-ish graphics). American and German-made games were more likely to use 32 colors, as far as I remember.

Like others said, the advent of VGA / MCGA graphics, particularly the resolution of 320x200x256 colors, was when games started to look better on the PC than on any other system (and would do so for a while, with perhaps the SNES as its only competition). This was particularly noticeable in magazine screenshots (the PC ones started looking better than everything else), and also in the complaints of Amiga gamers: instead of “they’re selling us bad EGA PC ports that don’t take advantage of the Amiga’s superior graphics” (e.g. Sierra’s AGI and EGA SCI releases, Ultima up to 5, etc.), suddenly it was “these graphics look bad when dithered from 256 to 32 or 16 colors, the game has a bad frame rate, and switching between 15 disks is not fun.” :) (Sierra’s VGA games, Ultima 6, Wing Commander, and many more.)

It was also impressive how long the 320x200x256 mode lasted as the default / best mode for gaming. For instance, three generations of the Ultima series, all with different engines:

– Ultima 6 (1990)
– Ultima 7 (1992)
– Ultima 8 (1994)

- Gnoman

August 21, 2016 at 8:21 pm

The truly odd thing about that is that XGA -which was required to support 640x480x65536 or 1024x768x256 – was introduced in 1990 (technically even sooner with the IBM 8514 add-in board for the PS/2 released in 1987 – the first plug-in GPU ever as far as I can tell) and folded into the Super VGA umbrella standard.

While it took time for this to create significant market penetration, it is honestly surprising that it had so little support even 4 years after introduction.

- berg

August 27, 2016 at 5:23 am

> One other wonderful thing about VGA that would make life vastly easier for countless artists and programmers over decades to come: it had *square* pixels. In other words, if you drew a box of 25 pixels by 25 pixels, you actually *got* a box, not a rectangle.

That’s true for the 640×480 mode, but it only supported 16 colors—fine for office software but not great for games or art. The only “standard” mode with more colors was 320×200, meaning non-square pixels. The underdocumented 320×240 “mode X” was somewhat popular, and had square pixels with 256 colors… in a weird planar memory layout that made programming difficult.

- Jimmy Maher

August 27, 2016 at 7:41 am

Ah, you’re right of course. At least it would get there in time, when SVGA and 640X480 resolutions became typical in games!

- Edgar

August 20, 2016 at 1:22 am

I have 5.25 inch disks that still work, whereas all my 3.5 inchers are long dead…

Thanks for the article!

- Alexander Freeman

August 20, 2016 at 5:29 am

I’d say even though IBM was indeed arrogant, it still had good justification to be pissed off at all the people making IBM clones. After all, even though what they were doing was technically legal, it was still IBM that had done most of the work, but it was they who were reaping most of the benefits. Making all the computer parts but one (the chip) open-architecture was remarkably short-sighted of IBM, though.

- anonymous

August 20, 2016 at 6:53 am

You’ve got a “costed” where you should have ” cost.”

- Jimmy Maher

August 20, 2016 at 10:01 am

Thanks!

- Christopher Benz

August 21, 2016 at 3:29 am

Another great read – thanks!

I’m finding this blog utterly compelling whether you are taking a macro perspective on the 80’s IT industries or doing a close reading of ‘Wishbringer’. Remarkable the relationship between these seemingly diverse preoccupations seems natural in a way that I think is quite ahead of its time.

Looking forward to reading future instalments!

- FZ

August 26, 2016 at 4:48 am

Wow, this sure brought back memories. Great job, as always.

One overlooked, crucial fact about Amiga vs. VGA graphics: More often than not the Amiga output ended up on a CRT TV with scanlines, which meant that an identical 320×200, 32 color image looked much better than the comparatively blockier VGA monitor version.

- Jim

August 30, 2016 at 8:09 pm

Great memories – thank you!

One small point, the EISA card you have pictured is actually a VESA ISA card – used exclusively for video adaptors including the first accelerated 3D cards. The EISA adaptor was actually a very interesting bit of engineering that used a two level socket (the shallow part was pinned for ISA cards, and the deeper level (that ISA cards could not reach) had extra contacts. Example pictured:
http://philipstorr.id.au/pcbook/images/ex33e3.jpg

- Jimmy Maher

August 31, 2016 at 10:20 am

Thanks so much! I’ve replaced my image with yours, and changed the description appropriately.

- Melfina the Blue

October 1, 2016 at 10:20 am

Whee, the PS/2! The first computer I fell in love with (along with OS/2). Sadly, ours was retired in favor of an Aptiva with a CD-Rom drive (either the CD-Rom for the PS/2 was ridiculously expensive even with an employee discount or IBM didn’t have one).

Also, you’ve finally given me an idea as to why IBM offered long-time employees such a good retirement buyout in ’93. Always wondered why my mother (who’d been there for 35 years and was in Consulting Relations which apparently meant helping customers figure out what they wanted to buy) got such a good package.

Love the blog, I find all the history of this sort of thing really fascinating, especially since we’re now getting to an era I have some memories of.

Sierra Gets Creative
August 26, 2016

Coming out of Sierra On-Line’s 1984 near-death experience, Ken Williams made a prognostication from which he would never waver: that the real future of home as well as business computing lay with the open, widely cloned hardware architecture of IBM’s computers, running Microsoft’s operating systems. He therefore established and nurtured a close relationship with Radio Shack, whose Tandy 1000 was by far the most consumer-friendly of the mid-1980s clones, and settled down to wait for the winds of the industry as a whole to start to blow his way. But that wait turned into a much longer one than he had ever anticipated. As each new Christmas approached, Ken predicted that this one must be the one where the winds would change, only to witness another holiday season dominated by the cheap and colorful Commodore 64, leaving the MS-DOS machines as relative afterthoughts.

MS-DOS was, mind you, a slowly growing afterthought, one on which Sierra was able to feed surprisingly well. Their unique relationship with Radio Shack in particular made them the envy of other publishers, allowing them as it did to sell their games almost without competition in thousands of stores nationwide. That strategic advantage among others helped Sierra to grow from $4.7 million in gross sales in the fiscal year ending on March 31, 1986, to almost $7 million the following fiscal year.

This sales history from a Sierra prospectus illustrates just how dramatically the company’s customer base changed when Ken Williams made the decision to abandon what he dismissed as the “toy computers” to concentrate on the Apple II and especially the MS-DOS markets.

Still, such incrementalism was hardly a natural fit for Ken Williams’s personality; he was always an entrepreneur after the big gains. It was excruciating waiting for the 8-bit generation of machines to just die already. When IBM debuted their PS/2 line in 1987, Ken, seeing the new machines’ lovely MCGA and VGA graphics and user-friendly mouse support, felt a bit like Noah must have when the first drops of rain finally began to fall. Yes, the machines were ridiculously expensive as propositions for the home, but prior experience said that, given time, their technology would trickle down into more affordable price brackets. If nothing else, the PS/2 line was at long last a start.

Indeed, Ken was so encouraged by the PS/2 line that he decided to pull the trigger on a fraught decision faced by every growing young company: that of whether and when to go public. He decided that October of 1987 would be the right moment, just as Sierra’s lineup of new software for Christmas began to hit the streets. After a frenzy of preparation, all was ready — but then the very week the IPO was to take place opened with Black Monday, the largest single-day stock-market collapse since the mother of all stock-market collapses back in 1929. Sierra quietly abandoned their plans, to little notice from prospective investors who suddenly had much bigger fish to fry.

Sierra had gotten very lucky, and in more ways than one. Had Black Monday been, say, a Black Friday instead, their newly issued shares must inevitably have gotten caught in its undertow, with potentially disastrous results. But even absent those concerns, going public in 1987 was probably jumping the gun just a little, banking on an MS-DOS market that wasn’t quite there yet. This reality was abundantly demonstrated by that Christmas of 1987, the latest to defy Ken’s predictions by voting for the Commodore 64 over MS-DOS — although by this time Commodore’s evergreen was in turn being overshadowed by a new quantity from Japan called the Nintendo Entertainment System.

In fact, the Christmas of 1987 would prove the last of the 64’s strong American holiday seasons. The stars were aligning to make 1988 through 1990 the breakthrough years for both Sierra and the MS-DOS platform to which Ken was so obstinately determined to keep hitching his wagon. In the meantime, the fiscal year ending on March 31, 1988 was nothing to sneeze at in its own right: thanks largely to the new hit Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards and the perennially strong sales of all three extant King’s Quest games, gross sales topped $12 million, enough to satisfy even a greedy entrepreneur like Ken.

That year Sierra broke ground on a new office complex close to their old one in picturesque Oakhurst, California, “at the southern gate of Yosemite National Park,” as their press put it. The new building was made cheaply in comparison to the old one: 40,000 square feet of pre-fab metal that has been variously described as resembling either a warehouse or an aircraft hanger, both inside and out. It would prove a far less pleasant place to work than the lovely redwood building Sierra now abandoned, but that, it seemed, was the price of progress. (Ken claimed to have learned from a survey that his employees actually preferred a cheap building in the name of saving money in order to grow the company in more important ways, but there was considerable skepticism about the veracity of that claim among those selfsame employees.)

To accompany an IPO do-over they had tentatively planned for late in the year, Sierra would have some impressive new gaming technology as well as their impressive — or at least much bigger — new building to put on display. Back in 1986, Ken had made his first trip to Japan, where he’d been entranced by a domestic line of computers from NEC called the PC-9801 series. Although these machines were built around Intel processors and were capable of running MS-DOS, they weren’t hardware-compatible with the IBM standard, a situation that left them much more room for hardware innovation than that allowed to the American clonesters. In particular, the need to display the Japanese Kanji script had pushed their display technology far beyond that of their American counterparts. The top-of-the-line PC-9801VX, with 4096 colors, 1 MB of memory, and a 10 MHz 80286 processor, could rival the Commodore Amiga as a gaming computer. And, best of all, the Japanese accepted the NEC machines in this application; there was a thriving market in games for them. Ken saw in these Japanese machines a window on the future of the American MS-DOS machines, tangible proof of what he’d been saying already for so long about the potential of the IBM/Intel/Microsoft standard to become the dominant architecture in homes as well as businesses. Ken returned from Japan determined that Sierra must push their software forward to meet this coming hardware. Out of this epiphany was born the project to make the Sierra Creative Interpreter (SCI), the successor to the Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI) that had been used to build all of Sierra’s current lineup of adventure games.

On the surface, the specifications of the first version of SCI hardly overwhelm. The standard display resolution of the engine was doubled, from a rather horrid 160 X 200 to a more reasonable (for the era) 320 X 200, with better support being added for mice and more complex animation possibilities being baked in. Notably, the first version of SCI did not support the impressive but expensive new MCGA and VGA graphics standards; even the technically aggressive Ken Williams had to agree that it was just too soon to be worth the investment.

Under the hood, however, the changes were far more extensive than they might appear on the surface. Jeff Stephenson, Sierra’s longtime technology guru, had created AGI on IBM’s dime and IBM’s timetable, in order to implement the original King’s Quest on the ill-fated PCjr. It was a closed and thus a limited system, albeit one that had proved far more flexible and served Sierra far better and longer than anyone had anticipated at the time of its creation. Still, Stephenson envisioned SCI as something very different from its predecessor: a more open-ended, modular system that could grow alongside the hardware it targeted, supporting ever denser and more colorful displays, ever better sound, eventually entirely new technologies like CD-ROM. As indicated by its name, which dropped any specific mention of adventure games, SCI was intended to be a universal engine potentially applicable to many gaming genres. To facilitate such ambitions, Stephenson  completely rewrote the language used for programming the engine, going from a simplistically cryptic scripting language to a full-fledged modern programming language reminiscent of C++, incorporating all the latest thinking about object-oriented coding.

Forward-thinking though it was, SCI proved a hard sell to Sierra’s little cadre of game-makers, most of whom lacked the grounding in computer science enjoyed by Jeff Stephenson; they would have been perfectly happy to stick with their simple AGI scripts, thank you very much. But time would show Stephenson to have been correct in designing SCI for the future. The SCI engine, steadily evolving all the while, would last for the remainder of Sierra’s life as an independent company, the technological bedrock for dozens of games to come.

Sierra planned to release their first three SCI-based adventure games in time for Christmas 1988 and that planned-for second-chance IPO: King’s Quest IV, Leisure Suit Larry II, and Police Quest II, with Space Quest III to follow early in 1989. (This lineup says much about Ken Williams’s sequel-obsessed marketing strategy. As an annual report from the period puts it, “Sierra attempts to exploit and extend the effective market life of a successful product by creating sequels to that product and introducing them at planned intervals, thereby stimulating interest in both the sequels and the original product.”) Of this group, King’s Quest IV was always planned as the real showcase for Sierra’s evolving technology, the game for which they would really pull out all the stops — understandably so given that, despite some recent challenges from one (Leisure Suit) Larry Laffer, Roberta Williams’s series of family-friendly fairy-tale adventures remained the most popular games in the Sierra catalog. Indeed, King’s Quest IV marked the beginning of a new, more proactive stance on Sierra’s part when it came to turning the still largely bland beige world of the MS-DOS machines into the new standard for computer gaming. Simply put, with MS-DOS’s consumer uptake threatening to stall again in the wake of the high prices and poor reception of the PS/2 line, Sierra decided to get out and push.

King’s Quest IV‘s most notable shove to the industry’s backside began almost accidentally, with one of Ken’s crazy ideas. He’d decided he’d like to have a real, Hollywood-style soundtrack in this latest King’s Quest, something to emphasize Sierra’s increasingly cinematic approach to adventure gaming in general. Further, he’d love it if said soundtrack could be written by a real Hollywood composer. Never reluctant to liaison with Tinseltown — Sierra had eagerly jumped into relationships with the likes of Jim Henson and Disney during their first heyday years before — he pulled out his old Rolodex and started dialing agents. Most never bothered to return his calls, but at last one of them arranged a meeting with William Goldstein. A former Motown producer, a Grammy-nominated composer for a number of films, and an Emmy-nominated former musical director for the television series Fame, Goldstein also nurtured an interest in electronic music, having worked on several albums of same. He found the idea of writing music for a computer game immediately intriguing. He and Ken agreed that what they wanted for King’s Quest IV was not merely a few themes to loop in the background but a full-fledged musical score, arguably the first such ever to be written for a computer game. As Goldstein explained it to Ken, “the purpose of a score is to evoke emotion, not to be hummed. Sometimes the score consists only of some chord being held and slowly becoming louder in order to create a feeling of tenseness. In creating a score, the instrument(s) it is composed for can be as important as the score itself.”

And therein lay the rub. When Ken demonstrated for him the primitive bleeps and bloops an IBM clone’s speaker was capable of playing, Goldstein pronounced writing a score for that blunt instrument to be equivalent to trying to shoot flies with a shotgun. But then he had an idea. Thanks to his work in other forms of electronic music, Goldstein enjoyed a relationship with the Roland Corporation, a longstanding Japanese maker of synthesizers. Just recently, Roland had released a gadget called the MT-32, a nine-channel synthesizer that plugged into an ordinary IBM-compatible computer. Maybe, Goldstein mused, he could write his score for the MT-32.

At first blush, it seemed a very problematic proposal. The MT-32, which typically went for $550 or more, was hardly an everyday piece of kit; it was aimed at the professional or at least the very serious amateur musician, not at gamers. Yet Ken decided that, faced with a classic chicken-and-egg situation, he needed to do something to move the needle on the deplorable state of IBM-compatible sound hardware. A showpiece game, like King’s Quest IV might become, could show the market what it had been missing and generate demand that might lead to more affordable audio solutions. And so Ken set Goldstein to work on the MT-32.

At the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in June of 1988, Sierra gave a series of invitation-only audiences a sneak preview of King’s Quest IV in the form of a nearly ten-minute opening “movie” — people would soon be saying “cut scene” — enhanced by Goldstein’s score. Sierra legend has it that it moved at least one woman to tears. “I feel bad even saying it,” remarks Sierra’s marketing director (and Ken Williams’s little brother) John Williams, “but it was then that we knew we had a winner.”

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/kqiv.mp4

Such an extreme reaction may be difficult to fathom today; even in King Quest IV‘s own time, it’s hard to imagine Amiga owners used to, say, Cinemaware games being quite so awed as this one lady apparently was. But nevertheless, King’s Quest IV and its first real soundtrack score stands as a landmark moment in the evolution of computer games. The game did indeed do much to break the chicken-and-egg conundrum afflicting MS-DOS audio. Only shortly after Roland had released the MT-32, a Canadian company called Ad Lib had released a “Personal Computer Music System” of their own at a price of just $245. It left much to be desired in comparison to the MT-32, but it was certainly worlds better than a simple beeper; Sierra duly added Ad Lib support to King’s Quest IV and all the other SCI games before they shipped. And for Space Quest III, they enlisted the services of another sort of star composer: Bob Siebenberg, drummer of the rock band Supertramp. Thanks in large degree to Sierra’s own determined intervention, in this area at least their chosen platform was becoming steadily more desirable as a game machine.

But King’s Quest IV also advanced the state of the art of adventure gaming in other, less tech-centric ways. As evidenced by its prominent subtitle The Perils of Rosella, its protagonist is female. Hard as it may seem to believe today, when more adventure games than not seem to star women, this fact made King’s Quest IV almost unique in its day; Infocom’s commercially unsuccessful but artistically brilliant interactive romance novel Plundered Hearts is just about the only point of comparison that leaps to mind. Roberta confessed to no small trepidation over the choice at the time of King’s Quest IV‘s release: “I know it will be just fine with the women and girls who play the game, but how it will go over with some of the men, I don’t know.” She also admitted to some ambivalence about her choice in purely practical terms, stemming from differing expectations that are embedded so deeply in our culture that they’re often hard to spot at all until we’re confronted with them.

I have a lot of deaths in my games. My characters always die from falling or being thrown into a cauldron or something. And I always like to have them die in a funny way. It didn’t seem right; I don’t why. I guess it’s because she’s a girl, and you don’t think a girl should be treated that way. But I got used to that too, until there was one death I had to deal with last week that I was real uncomfortable with. Was it throwing her in the cauldron? I’m not sure, but it was some death that seemed particularly unfeminine, not right.

And girls die differently. I discovered lots of these things, like the way she falls, which has to be different from the way a guy falls. It’s been an experience. And I think that men will find it fun and different because it’s from a different point of view.

One could wish that Roberta’s ambivalence about killing her new female heroine at every possible juncture had led her to consider the wisdom of indulging in all that indiscriminate player-killing at all, but such was not to be. In the end, the most surprising thing about King Quest IV‘s female protagonist would be how little remarked upon it was by players. Sounding almost disappointed, Roberta a few months after the game’s release noted that “I personally have not heard much about it.” “I thought it would get a lot of attention,” she went on. “It has gotten some, but nothing really dramatic”; “very few” of the letters she received about the game had anything at all to say about the female heroine.

But then, that non-reaction could of course be taken as a sign of progress in itself. One of the worthiest aspects of Sierra’s determination to turn computer gaming into a truly mainstream form of entertainment was their conviction that doing so must entail reaching far beyond the typical teenage-boy videogame demographic. Doubtless thanks to the relative paucity of hardcore action games and military simulations in their catalog as well as to their having a woman as their star designer, Sierra was always well ahead of most of the rest of their industry when it came to the diversity of their customer base. At a time when female players of other publishers’ games seldom got out of the single digits in percentage terms, Sierra could boast that fully one in four of their players was a woman or a girl; of other 1980s computer-game publishers, only Infocom could boast remotely comparable numbers. In the case of Roberta’s King’s Quest games, the number of female players rose as high as 40 percent, while women and girls wrote more than half of Roberta’s voluminous fan mail.

Sierra’s strides seem all the more remarkable in comparison to the benighted attitudes held by many other publishers. Mediagenic’s Bruce Davis, for instance, busy as usual formulating the modern caricature of the soulless videogame executive, declared vehemently that women and girls were “not a viable market” for games because of “profound” psychological differences that would always lead them to “shun” games. (One wonders what he makes of the modern gaming scene, vast swathes of which are positively dominated by female players.) The role model that Roberta Williams in particular became for many girls interested in games and/or computers should never be overlooked or minimized. Even as of this writing, eighteen years after Roberta published her last adventure game, John Williams tells me how people of a certain age “go crazy” upon learning he’s her brother-in-law, how he still gets at least two requests per week to put people in touch with her for an autograph, how there was an odd surge for a while there of newborn girls named Rosella and Roberta.

All of this only makes it tougher to reckon with the fact that Roberta’s actual games were so consistently poor in terms of fundamental design. King’s Quest IV is a particular lowlight in her checkered career, boasting some unfair howlers as bad as anything found in her legendarily insoluble Time Zone. At one point, you have to work your way through a horrendous sequence of random-seeming actions to wind up visiting an island, something you can only do one time. On this island is a certain magic bridle you’re going to need later in the game. But, incomprehensibly, the game not only doesn’t ever hint that the bridle may be present on the island, it literally refuses to show it to you even once you arrive there. The only way to find it is to walk around the island step by step, typing “look” again and again while facing in different directions, until you discover those pixels that should by all rights have depicted the bridle but for some reason don’t. Throw in climbing sequences that send you plummeting to your death if you move one pixel too far in the wrong direction, a brutal time limit, and plenty of other potential dead ends almost as heartless as the one just described, and King’s Quest IV becomes as unfair, unfun, frustrating, and downright torturous as any adventure game I’ve ever seen. It’s so bad that, rather than being dismissable as merely a disappointing game, it seems like a fundamentally broken game, thereby raising a question of ethics. Did a player who had just paid $40 for the game not deserve a product that was in fact a soluble adventure game? Even the trade press of King’s Quest IV‘s day, when not glorying over the higher-resolution graphics and especially that incredible soundtrack, had to acknowledge that the actual game underneath it all had some problems. Scorpia, the respected voice of adventure gaming for Computer Gaming World, filled her article on the game with adjectives like “exasperating,” “irritating,” “tedious,” and “boring”, before concluding that “it’s a matter of personal taste” — about as close to an outright pan as most magazine reviewers dared get in those days.

Roberta Williams, an example of that rare species of adventure-game designers who don’t actually play adventure games, likely had little idea just how torturous an experience her games actually were. Taken as a whole, Roberta’s consistent failings as a designer seemingly must stem from that inability to place herself in her player’s shoes, and from her own seeming disinterest in improving upon her previous works in any terms but those of their surface bells and whistles. That said, however, King’s Quest IV‘s unusually extreme failings, even in terms of a Roberta Williams design, quite obviously stemmed from the frenzied circumstances of its creation as well.

I should note before detailing those circumstances that Sierra was finally by the time of King’s Quest IV beginning to change some of the processes that had spawned so many bad adventure games during the company’s earlier years. By 1988, they finally had the beginnings of a real quality-assurance process, dedicating three employees full-time to thrashing away at their games and other software. But, welcome as it was to see testing happening in any form, Sierra’s conception of same focused on the trees rather than the forest. The testers spent their time chasing outright bugs, glitches, and typos, but feedback on more holistic aspects of design wasn’t really part of their brief. In other words, they might spend a great deal of time ensuring that a given sudden death worked correctly without it ever even occurring to them to think about whether that sudden death really needed to be there at all.

In the case of King’s Quest IV, however, even that circumscribed testing process broke down due the pressure of external events. By the spring of 1988, Roberta had given her design for the game to the team of two artists and two programmers — all recent hires, more fruit of Sierra’s steady expansion — for implementation. Then, with IPO Attempt 2.0 now planned for October of that year and lots of other projects on the boil as well, nobody in management paid King’s Quest IV a whole lot more attention for quite some time, simply assuming that no news from its development team was good news and that it was coming along as expected. Al Lowe, who by the end of that summer had already finished designing and coding his Leisure Suit Larry sequel that was scheduled to ship shortly after King’s Quest IV, picks up the story from here:

King’s Quest IV was going to be the flagship product for the company when we went public. So, Ken and the money guys are busy going around the country, doing their dog-and-pony shows to Wall Street investors, saying, “This is a great company, you’re going to want to buy in, buy lots of stock. We’ve got this great product coming out that’s going to be the hit of the Christmas season.”

Finally, about the end of August, somebody said, “Has anybody looked at that game that’s supposed to be done in a month, that we’re supposed to ship in October? How’s it doing?” They went and looked at it, and the two programmers were lost. They had no clue. They had written a lot of code, but a lot of it was buggy, a lot of it didn’t take proper precautions. One of the big rules of programming is to never allow input at a time you don’t want it, but they had none of that. Everything was wide open. You could break it with a sneeze.

So, they called me and asked if I could come up that weekend — it was Labor Day weekend, Saturday — to look at the game. I did, and said, “Oh, my God, we’re in trouble.” I had a lot of stock options, and was hoping for a successful IPO myself. When I saw this, I said, “We’re in terrible shape. This isn’t going to make it.”

So, we devised a strategy over the weekend to bring every programmer in the company together on Labor Day Monday for a meeting. We said, “All hands are going to work on this title for the next month, and we’re going to finish this game in one month’s time because we’ve got to have it done by the end of September.” Do you remember the phrase from The Godfather, “We’ll go to the mattresses?” That’s what we did; we went to the mattresses. We all moved into the Sierra building. Everybody worked. They brought us food; they did our laundry; they got us hotel rooms. We basically just lived and ate and worked there, and when we needed to sleep we’d go to this hotel nearby. Then we’d get back up and do it again.

I took the lead on the project. I broke the game up into areas, and we assigned a programmer to each. As they finished their code, we had the whole company testing it. We’d distribute bug reports and talk about progress each morning. And by God, by the end of the month we had a game. It wasn’t perfect — it was a little buggy — but at least we had a game we could send out. And when we went public, it was a successful IPO.

Entertaining as this war story is, especially when told by a natural raconteur like Al Lowe, it could hardly result in anything but a bad adventure game. In a desperate flurry like this one, the first thing to fall by the wayside must be any real thoughtfulness about a game’s design or the player’s experience therein.

But despite its many design failings, King’s Quest IV did indeed deliver in spades as the discussion piece and IPO kick-starter it was intended to be. Sierra’s own promotional copy wasn’t shy about slathering on the purple prose in making the game’s case as a technical and aesthetic breakthrough. (In a first and only for Sierra, an AGI version of the game was also made for older systems, but it garnered little press interest and few sales in comparison to the “real” SCI version.)

King’s Quest IV sets a landmark in computer gaming with a new development system that transcends existing standards of computer graphics, sound, and animation. Powerfully dramatic, King’s Quest IV evokes emotion like no other computer game with unique combinations of lifelike animated personalities, beautiful landscapes, and soul-stirring music. Sierra has recreated the universe of King’s Quest to build a world that one moment will pull at your heartstrings, the next moment place terror in your heart.

Leveraging their best promotional asset, Sierra sent Roberta Williams, looking pretty, wholesome, and personable as ever, on a sort of “book tour” to software stores and media outlets across the country, signing autographs for long lines of fans everywhere she went. No one had attempted anything quite like this since the heyday of Trip Hawkins’s electronic artists/rock stars, and never as successfully as this. The proof was in the pudding: King’s Quest IV sold 100,000 copies in its first two weeks and received heaps of press coverage at a time when coverage of computer games in general was all but nonexistent in the Nintendo-obsessed mainstream media. Sales of the game may ultimately have reached as high as 500,000 copies. The IPO went off without a hitch this time on October 6, 1988: 1.4 million shares of common stock were issued at an opening price of $9 per share. Within a year, the stock would be flirting with a price of $20 per share.

In all their promotional efforts for King’s Quest IV and the rest of that first batch of SCI games, Sierra placed special emphasis on sound, the area where Ken Williams had chosen to try most aggressively to push the hardware forward. The relationship between Sierra and Roland grew so close that Thomas Beckmen, president of the latter company’s American division, joined Sierra’s board. But anyone from any of Roland’s rivals who feared that this relationship would lock them out needn’t have worried. Recognizing that even most purchasers of what they loved to describe as their “premium” products weren’t likely to splash out more than $500 on a high-end Roland synthesizer, Sierra pushed the cheaper Ad Lib alternative equally hard. In 1989, when a Singapore company called Creative Music Systems entered the fray with a cheaper knock-off of the Ad Lib design which they called the Game Blaster, Sierra took it to their bosom as well. (In the end, it was Creative who would be the big winners in the sound-card wars. Their Sound Blaster line, the successor to the Game Blaster, would become the ubiquitous standard for PC gaming through much of the 1990s.) Ken Williams went so far as to compare the latest Sierra games with the first “talkies” to invade the world of silent cinema. Given the sound that users of computers like the Amiga had been enjoying well before Sierra jumped on the bandwagon, this was perhaps a stretch, but it certainly made for good copy.

As part of their aggressive push to get sound cards into the machines of their customers, Sierra started selling the products of all three of the biggest rival makers of same directly through their own product catalogs.

Thanks to his own company’s efforts as much as those of anyone, Ken Williams was able to declare at the beginning of 1990 that during the previous year MS-DOS had become “the standard for entertainment software”; the cloudburst this latter-day Noah had been anticipating for so long had come at last. In a down year for the computer-game industry as a whole, which was suffering greatly under the Nintendo onslaught, MS-DOS and the Amiga had been the only platforms not to suffer a decline, with the former’s market share growing from 44 percent to 55 percent. Ken’s prediction that MS-DOS would go from being the majority platform to the absolutely dominant one as 1990 wore on would prove correct.

My guess is that as software publishers plan out their new year’s product schedules, versions of newer titles for machines which are in decline will either be shelved or delayed. Don’t be surprised if companies who traditionally have been strong Apple or Commodore publishers suddenly ship first on MS-DOS. Don’t be surprised if many new titles come out ONLY for MS-DOS next Christmas.

Ken’s emerging vision for Sierra saw his company as “part of the entertainment industry, not the computer industry.” An inevitable corollary to that vision, at least to Ken’s way of seeing things, was a focus on the “media” part of interactive media. In that spirit, he had hired in July of 1989 one Bill Davis, a director of more than 150 animated television commercials, for the newly created position of Sierra’s Creative Director. Davis introduced story-boarding and other new processes redolent of Hollywood, adding another largely welcome layer of systemization to Sierra’s traditionally laissez-faire approach to game development. But, tellingly, he had no experience working with games as games, and nothing much to say about the designs that lay underneath the surface of Sierra’s creations; these remained as hit-and-miss as ever.

The period between 1988 and 1998 or so — the heyday of MS-DOS gaming, before Windows 95/98 and its DirectX gaming layer changed the environment yet again — was one of enormous ferment in computer graphics and sound, when games could commercially thrive on surface sizzle alone. Ken Williams proved more adept at riding this wave than just about anyone else, hewing stolidly as ever to the ten-foot rule he’d formulated during his company’s earliest days: “If someone says WOW when they see the screen from ten feet away, you have them sold.” Sierra, like much of the rest of the industry, took all the wrong lessons from the many bad but pretty games that were so successful during this period, concluding that design could largely be left to take care of itself as long as a game looked exciting.

That Sierra games like King’s Quest IV did manage to be so successful despite their obvious underlying problems of design had much to do with the heady, unjaded times in which they were made — times in which a new piece of “bragware” for showing off one’s new hardware to best effect was worth a substantial price of admission quite apart from its value as a playable game. It also had something to do with Sierra’s masterful fan relations. The company projected an image as friendly and welcoming as their actual games were often unfriendly and obtuse. For instance, in another idea Ken nicked from Hollywood, by 1990 Sierra was offering free daily “studio tours” of their offices, complete with a slick pre-recorded “video welcome” from Roberta Williams herself, to any fan who happened to show up; for many a young fan, a visit to Sierra became the highlight of a family vacation to Yosemite. And of course the success of the King’s Quest games in particular had more than a little to do with the image of Roberta Williams, and the fact that the games were marketed almost as edutainment wares, drawing in a young, patient, and forgiving fan base who may not have fully comprehended that a King’s Quest was, at least theoretically, a game that could be won.

Still, these factors wouldn’t be enough to counter-balance fundamental issues of design forever. Well before the end of the 1990s, both Sierra and the adventure-gaming genre with which they would always be most identified would pay a steep price for too often making design an afterthought. Players, tired of being abused, bored with the lack of innovation in adventure-game design, and no longer quite so easy to wow with audiovisual flash alone, would begin to drift away; this trickle would became a flood which left the adventure genre commercially high and dry.

But all of that was still far in the future as of 1990. For now, Sierra was at the forefront of what they believed to an emerging new form of mass entertainment, not quite a game, not quite a movie. Gross sales had risen to $21.1 million for the fiscal year ending March 31, 1989, then $29.1 million the following fiscal year. In 1990, they expanded their reach through the acquisition of Dynamix, a six-year-old Oregon-based development house with a rather odd mix of military simulations — after all, Sierra did want men as well as women to continue buying their products — and audio-visually rich if interactively problematic “interactive movies” in their portfolio. Sierra’s years in the MS-DOS wilderness were over; now that same MS-DOS represented the mainstream, soon virtually the only stream of American computer gaming. Some very, very good years lay ahead in commercial terms. And, it must be said, by no means would all of Sierra’s games be failures in terms of design; some talented and motivated designers would soon be using the company’s SCI technology to make interactive magic. So, having given poor King’s Quest IV such a hard time today, next time I’ll be kinder to a couple of other Sierra games that I really don’t like.

Nope… I love them.

(Sources: Computer Gaming World of December 1988; Byte of September 1987; Sierra’s newsletters dated Spring 1988, Winter 1988, Spring 1989, Autumn 1989, Spring 1990, Summer 1990; Sierra’s 10th Anniversary promotional brochure; press releases and annual reports found in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play. Much of this article is also drawn from personal email correspondence with John Williams and Corey Cole. And, last but far from least, Ken Gagne also shared with me the full audio of an interview he conducted with Al Lowe for Juiced.GS magazine. My huge thanks to John, Corey, and Ken!)

Comments
55 Responses

- Felix

August 26, 2016 at 12:57 pm

Careful here: “stemmed as well from the frenzied circumstances of its creation as well”.

Otherwise, good work as usual!

- Jimmy Maher

August 26, 2016 at 9:04 pm

Thanks!

- Yeechang Lee

August 26, 2016 at 2:22 pm

Like any other computer gamer of the era I knew that Sierra had the earliest and by far the broadest support for sound cards, but I had no idea that the company had been so proactive! Thank you, Ken and Roberta, for single-handedly jump-starting the market; Ad Lib, Creative, Gravis, Roland, and their many imitators are in your debt.

- Jim Leonard

August 26, 2016 at 3:33 pm

I’m afraid there’s some revisionist sound card history in the article that I’m hoping you can research further and correct. AdLib didn’t market a card in response to the CES show; they were formed in 1986 and marketed the AdLib as a music composition card in 1987. The same year, Creative created the “Creative Music System” card, also marketed for music composition use. It wasn’t until 1988 when KQ4 was released that these cards were considered viable for gaming. It was a year after that that the C/MS card was rebranded “Game Blaster” and sold at Radio Shack for $99.

For more information about the CMS card, search for “All You Ever Wanted to Know about the Creative Music System” from the “Nerdly Pleasures” blog.

- Jimmy Maher

August 26, 2016 at 9:31 pm

The exact dates these various products hit the market are quite tough to pin down. I’ve seen earlier dates in various place on the net, but couldn’t actually find the products mentioned anywhere in the computing press at earlier dates using my standard research method with such questions: doing grep searches on the entirety of the archive.org magazine archive, plus various others I’ve picked up. First mentions of the Game Blaster I could find using that method were from 1989, not 1987 as stated by Wikipedia. I don’t dispute an earlier release date for the Creative Music System, but don’t believe it to have ever been much of a factor for games until the technology was repackaged as the Game Blaster — details I was willing to abstract away in the name of readability. The Ad Lib card first shows up in Byte I believe in the fall of 1987 (I’m traveling at the moment, and don’t have access to my archive) at a higher price point — and, as you say, marketed as a product for musicians rather than gamers. Again, some of this might be less a case of “revisionist history” than an attempt not to get too bogged down in the weeds.

I would feel a little better about the blog post you cite if it in turn cited the primary source(s) it’s drawing from. That said, I did soften one claim by changing a “doubtless” to a “perhaps.” If you still see something outright incorrect in the article as it now reads, do let me know. But we do seem to be in agreement on the release date of the Game Blaster, and I don’t actually claim that the Ad Lib card was released in 1988, just that it was first marketed at a lower, consumer (i.e., gamer) friendly price point that year. This latter is, however, the point I’m least sure about. Will have another look when I get home and update if necessary.

Thanks!

- Jimmy Maher

August 29, 2016 at 10:03 am

Okay, the September 1987 Byte has a full-page advertisement for the Ad Lib Personal Computer Music System, the first such I can find, at a price of just $245. So, I was indeed wrong there. Made some slight revisions to the article. Thanks again!

- Jim Leonard

August 30, 2016 at 5:31 am

I hope to stand up a sound card museum next year that will definitely record these dates and other information for that time in history, vetted by people with a vested interest in accuracy (which is not what I consider Wikipedia to be any longer). Thanks for your attention.

- Ben Galbraith

August 26, 2016 at 3:49 pm

I loved Sierra games as a kid. I had no idea they were unfair; at that age, they simply represented the way the world worked. Thought-provoking to read your perspective now and realize they could have been better.

- Bernie

August 26, 2016 at 4:03 pm

Well, another great article in the best Antiquarian tradition: authoritative, educational, entertaining but never failing to express your honest opinion.

I hope you’re planning to do a piece on arch-rival LucasArts : in my humble opinion they were the ones really advancing the state of the art at that time. SCUMM, even in 1988 and specially on the Amiga, made SCI feel primitive. And I also hope you compare Sierra’s “soundtracks” to Loom’s use of sound.

I know you’re just warming up with this one, but you could perhaps give me a little “advance insight” in this ?

- Jimmy Maher

August 26, 2016 at 9:37 pm

Yes, I plan to pick up the LucasArts story again soon; I assume you’re aware of my earlier three-part series that tells their story through Maniac Mansion. They were definitely thinking about design in a way that only a few at Sierra bothered to do. I expect Loom to get its own article, and to give all of their games from 1990 on — the point where they really came of age in my opinion — substantial coverage, although I can’t guarantee an individual article for each game.

- Bernie

August 29, 2016 at 10:26 pm

Thank you very much !

And yes, I read your Maniac Mansion postings with great interest since, although a LucasArts fan from the beginning (I was ayoung C64 user), I only became aware of how advanced their thinking and technique were from reading your articles. And one last thing : I vividly remember Maniac Mansion made my IBM-compatible-owning friends think the Sierra stuff was boring in comparison, even in 1988-89, with sound cards installed.

- Alexander Freeman

August 29, 2016 at 10:35 pm

Yeah, I don’t like how LucasArts championed the point-and-click interface, and I think they sometimes played it TOO safe with death, but I like everything else they championed.

- Jim Leonard

August 26, 2016 at 4:14 pm

I forgot to mention that one of the reasons Sierra partnered with Tandy is because the Tandy 1000 line of systems were PCjr clones — the 16-color graphics and 3-voice audio were the same, so Sierra already had support for them in their code due to their PCjr work paid for by IBM).

Sierra continued to be loyal (appreciative? sympathetic?) to IBM, adding support for the very expensive IBM Music Feature Card in KQ4 and subsequent titles. (The IMFC, for those who have never heard it, sounds better than AdLib but worse than an MT-32.)

Other than these corrections, this is yet another excellent article in your series. Glad to be a patron.

- Johannes Paulsen

August 26, 2016 at 6:00 pm

You know, the Leisure Suit Larry shout-out made me think: isn’t it funny that there hasn’t been another game series that appeals to, shall we say, “prurient” interests in the same way?

There were – what? – five or six LSL sequels. There was Leather Goddess of Phobos. There was the Spellcaster series…. Am I forgetting any others?

I mean, say what you want about certain scenes in, say, Mass Effect or Dragon Age…those were primarily (space opera / fantasy) adventure games that had *optional* romantic subplots.

I wonder why?

- Jimmy Maher

August 26, 2016 at 9:43 pm

There were a few others, which are best forgotten: the almost unbelievably blatant Leather Goddesses clone Sex Vixens from Space, the almost unbelievably blatant Leisure Suit Larry clone Les Manley, etc. It is an interesting question why this “genre” seems to have died off. Maybe something to do with the sophistication of modern graphics, which would threaten to turn any game that headed in that direction into something outright pornographic?

- Joshua Mandel

September 7, 2016 at 2:13 am

Don’t forget Steve “Leather Goddesses of Phobos” Meretzky’s later trilogy, the Spellcasting series.

- Rowan Lipkovits

August 27, 2016 at 1:55 am

isn’t it funny that there hasn’t been another game series that appeals to, shall we say, “prurient” interests in the same way?

Almost from the start of the Japanese computer industry (and right up to the present day), they have conducted brisk trade in “eroge” (erotic games), often in genres that require only a decent artist and minimal programming. For whatever reason (I’ve got my eyes set on Las Vegas), North American game development professionals saw the same list of ingredients and constraints and put all their erotic game-making efforts into strip poker simulations. (But fear not, since the emergence of the amateur IF community that ran alongside AGT / GAGS brought with it burgeoning crude AIF — adult interactive fiction — and the influential “xtrek” slashfic game.)

I imagine that for North American audiences, developers had to either decide to keep it tame and be allowed on store shelves, or go straight to the raunch and sell through back-of-magazine mail-order. This kind of thing contributed to the downfall of the Atari 2600 (Custer’s Revenge et al) so it may be that the business case for erotic games in NA was viewed as having been a failed experiment that was now concluded. I understand that when the CD-based multimedia home consoles launched (CDi, 3DO, etc) another valiant effort was put into launching the erotic interactive movie genre, but it also failed to take at that time; we can see ripples of that in such titles as Voyeur and Trilobyte’s TLC.

The French (naturally) had to try their hand at the erotic adventure game genre, but their results (eg. Emmanuelle) were such mixed successes at best that they travelled on to other genres.

- Lisa H.

August 26, 2016 at 8:33 pm

the need to display the Japanese Kanji alphabet

Is it an alphabet? I’d rather call it a script, myself.

- Jimmy Maher

August 26, 2016 at 9:46 pm

Indeed. Color me guilty of lazily copying Sierra’s own lazy nomenclature from their newsletter. Thanks!

- Keith Palmer

August 26, 2016 at 8:49 pm

I actually did play King’s Quest IV early in the 1990s. At that point my family was still grimly clinging to our Tandy Color Computer 3 (before the last Color Computer magazine, really a monthly newspaper at that end point, folded, my father got an article published in it where he led off alluding to how expensive anything else seemed by comparison), but my father would bring a Compaq sub-laptop home from work and we would install games on it in a way that would cause fits in any IT manager these days. However, I do have the distinct impression we had our hands on a walkthrough at just about the same time as the game disks… In any case, when we unbent on computer prices to the indulgent extent of buying a Macintosh LC II, our adventure tastes promptly turned to games other than Sierra’s.

- Steven Marsh

August 27, 2016 at 12:48 am

I have a much warmer spot in my heart for all the Sierra games than you do, and I think I’ve figured out why. I always played with the hint book in hand, usually following it religiously for the first playthrough.
.
As I’ve tried to figure out WHY this was enjoyable, I’ve likened it to using a travel guide. I wouldn’t feel guilty if I had my nose buried in a Frommer’s Guide during a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rome, and I think I used hint books in the same way, making sure I saw all the must-see sights and getting the most out of my (virtual) trip.
.
It probably doesn’t speak well of the Sierra games as games for this to be the case. However – given the continued sales of hint guides – I suspect there’s a large audience of folks who enjoy the “freedom” that comes from games (as opposed to other forms of entertainment) but want to complete the experience with as minimal fuss as possible (similar to movies, books, et al.).

- tfnw

August 27, 2016 at 6:24 pm

I feel the same way, if I am not moving forward in a game for more than a few minutes, I get extremely frustrated. When I play a game I tend to always use a walkthrough, first to get an idea of the general order to do things, so I am not trying to do something that is blocked until something other number of things are done, then to look for hints if I get stuck on something for an irritating amount of time.

- Brian

August 27, 2016 at 2:58 am

This sentence is ambiguous to me: “The new building was made cheaply in comparison to the old, 40,000 square feet of pre-fab metal that has been variously described as resembling either a warehouse or an aircraft hanger, both inside and out. ” Maybe a semi-colon after ‘old’ instead of the comma?

- Jimmy Maher

August 27, 2016 at 7:45 am

I have to say it reads fine to me. A semicolon would definitely not be correct; it should always connect two otherwise independent clauses. A dah would be the only other choice without rewriting the sentence entirely.

- Felix

August 27, 2016 at 8:40 am

I had to read that sentence several times myself. But Jimmy’s right, a semicolon wouldn’t work there. Maybe a colon? “The new building, in comparison to the old, was made cheaply: 40,000 square feet of pre-fab metal…”

- Steven Marsh

August 27, 2016 at 1:44 pm

The problem is “old, 40,000 square feet” bit; it reads like it WANTS to say, “the old, 40,000 square-foot building” (which isn’t right).
.
Were I editing, I’d probably move the confusing clause to the beginning of the sentence: “In comparison to the old building, the new one was 40,000 square feet of pre-fab metal that has been variously described as resembling either a warehouse or an aircraft hanger, both inside and out.”

- Jimmy Maher

August 27, 2016 at 3:49 pm

Okay. Made it “old one,” which I hope will work as well.

- Sniffnoy

August 27, 2016 at 5:04 pm

Still reads to me like the description is modifying the old one rather than the new one. I think that should probably be a colon there, though a dash would also work. I was going to suggest moving the mention of the old one earlier in the sentence, and that would help reduce ambiguity, but it still seems wrong to me with a comma rather than a colon or dash.

- Jimmy Maher

August 27, 2016 at 9:47 pm

Okay, we’ll try a colon. :)

- Sniffnoy

August 28, 2016 at 4:52 pm

That definitely seems clearer, thank you!

- Alexander Freeman

August 28, 2016 at 11:25 pm

I would have just written it as “The new building was made cheaply in comparison to the old one. It consisted of 40,000 square feet of pre-fab metal and has been variously described as resembling either a warehouse or an aircraft hanger, both inside and out.” My rule of thumb is that if you have to try that hard to make a complicated sentence easy to read, it’s time to break it down into two or more sentences.

- Alexander Freeman

August 27, 2016 at 6:48 am

“Throw in climbing sequences that send you plummeting to your death if you move one pixel too far in the wrong direction, a brutal time limit, and plenty of other potential dead ends almost as heartless as the one just described, and King’s Quest IV becomes as unfair, unfun, frustrating, and downright torturous as any adventure game I’ve ever seen. It’s so bad that, rather than being dismissable as merely a disappointing game, it seems like a fundamentally broken game, thereby raising a question of ethics. Did a player who had just paid $40 for the game not deserve a product that was in fact a soluble adventure game?”

Whoa! I feel as though I played a completely different game from you! There were some iffy parts like the bridle but certainly not insoluble! When I was on the island, I knew there HAD to be something important there. I did eventually find it as I remembered that sometimes where you look makes a difference if your character is near a large object or is facing into a different room. Still a questionable puzzle, though.
There were a few other parts I found questionable, such as the game being finicky about how you handle the unicorn, being really particular about which bone you need for some puzzle, and not making it so obvious you NEED to be swallowed by the whale. However, I was able to solve the entire game with only a hint or two. The only action sequences I found annoying were dealing with the troll and chasm in the cave and ESPECIALLY climbing the whale’s tongue (I’m surprised you didn’t make a bigger deal of that!).
However, I still enjoyed progressing through the game and seeing a stronger narrative than in earlier King’s Quest games. Maybe “it’s a matter of personal taste” or “courses or horses”.

- Jimmy Maher

August 27, 2016 at 4:19 pm

I’m tempted to say that this list of caveats rather makes my case for me. ;) But, as you say, to each his own.

- Alexander Freeman

August 28, 2016 at 11:29 pm

Maybe I’m less likely to be turned off by a glaring flaw or two if it has enough other things I like. Or maybe I’m just not affected by them as much. For instance, I seem to be bothered less by less than stellar parsers than most people are as I seem to be far better at guessing the verb usually.

- Captain Rufus

August 27, 2016 at 8:07 pm

I remember being incredibly jealous of Sierra games as they weren’t on the C64 at all. Outside of a few minutes on school DOS machines I didn’t have much experience with actually playing them. Then I got an Amiga in 92. I got KQ 4. I wasn’t jealous any more. I was lucky to have avoided these games.

- Brian Bagnall

August 29, 2016 at 2:19 am

Exactly my experience. I’d pore over the Sierra game boxes in Radio Shack wishing they would release them for the C64. Once I entered the world of DOS I started buying a few like Phantasmagoria and Gabriel Knight (both not bad actually). Sierra games always broke a number of adventure game design rules that just pissed me off to no end. I remember thinking I solved everything solvable but still the story didn’t progress any further and I was stuck wondering around aimlessly. Finally I entered an empty location where previously nothing had happened and then suddenly a cut scene triggered and I was allowed to progress. There was no logic to it and nothing indicating anything special would happen there. Grr…

- Alexander Freeman

August 29, 2016 at 3:22 am

Yeah, I know what you mean about random events. I guess I usually got lucky and didn’t experience that, but it is annoying when it does happen. I haven’t played much in the way of Phantasmagoria or Gabriel Knight, but I’ve heard almost nothing but bad things about the former and nothing but good things about the latter.

- Bernie

August 29, 2016 at 10:40 pm

Man ! I totally identify with you : I had a C64 until ’92 and by then had spent years literally being jealous of the Sierra stuff on my friends’ MS-DOS machines (although Maniac Mansion was always better, see my above comment). Then, like you describe, I got my first Amiga along with some Sierra games. I stopped being jealous (and buying Sierra) after just a few days. Then I got the enhanced version of Maniac Mansion (also available on MS-DOS), which I still ocassionally fire up (in WinUAE) to this day.

- Healy

August 28, 2016 at 12:46 am

“the cloudburst this latter-day Noah he been anticipating for so long had come at last”

The “he” should be “had” in this sentence.

Anyway, great article! Who knew soundcards could be so important?

- Jimmy Maher

August 28, 2016 at 7:50 am

Thanks!

- Scott Gage

August 29, 2016 at 5:44 am

If nothing else this article finally answered my question of what soundcard to pick when playing old DOS games.

I’d always pick Sound Blaster versions as that was what we had, never knew MT-32 was the way to go!

- Jimmy Maher

August 29, 2016 at 8:03 am

You may want to be a little careful with that policy. The Roland MT-32 was the king of MIDI — i.e., synthesized sound, which was all this first generation of sounds cards was capable of. (In that respect, the IBM compatibles were still lagging well behind the likes of the Amiga.) In time, the Sound Blaster and other cards got the ability to deal with digital sound — i.e., sampled sound. Some hardcore gamers actually had both a Roland and a Sound Blaster in their machines, using one for MIDI and one for digital sound; many games let you choose a separate target for each type of sound if you liked.

- Daniel

August 30, 2016 at 7:39 pm

Technically the Roland MT-32 uses a combination of sampled and synthesized sounds, unlike the Adlib, a pure (digital) synthesizer. That’s why the MT-32’s rendition of real instruments sounds so much better!

- Jimmy Maher

August 31, 2016 at 10:06 am

While your point is well taken, these digitized instrument “patches” on the MT-32 were pre-loaded into its ROM. In other words, it wasn’t possible to make new ones for new instruments — or to record and play back bits of speech or other real-world audio, something games would increasingly come to rely on as the 1990s wore on.

- Pedro Timóteo

August 31, 2016 at 8:47 am

For playing Sierra games today under emulation, with the best possible sound:

– AGI: use PCjr / Tandy sound (or, even better, play the Apple IIGS version if possible; it works under ScummVM if you can extract the files from the game’s disk images :) )

– EGA SCI: use MT-32 (under ScummVM you can have MT-32 + Sound Blaster digitized sounds, which wasn’t possible originally, in a couple of games such as Space Quest III)

– VGA SCI: use Sound Blaster for sounds, and MT-32 or General MIDI for music (very early games sound better with MT-32, late games sound better with GM; you can experiment with both. Again, I suggest ScummVM, though DOSBox also works: games finally allow the choice of two simultaneous sound cards in their setup utilities.)

- metzomagic

September 4, 2016 at 3:58 pm

The Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) is supported by DOSBox, and like the Roland MT-32, it too sounds better than a Sound Blaster emulation. Here’s a list of games that support the GUS, either natively (156 games) or with an emulator (267 more games):

http://www.gravisultrasound.com/files/documentation/GLIST.TXT

Disclaimer: I’ve only gotten it to work natively with DOSBox in a few games. One of them was Tex Murphy: Under a Killing Moon. I have no idea if it’s even feasible to get one of the emulators like MegaEM running alongside DOSBox.

- Tom Samplonius

August 29, 2016 at 9:13 pm

It is probably best to keep in mind an interview Roberta Williams had with Gamers Depot in 1999, where she commented on the decline of adventure games:

Back when I got started, which sounds like ancient history, back then the demographics of people who were into computer games, was totally different, in my opinion, then they are today. Back then, computers were more expensive, which made them more exclusive to people who were maybe at a certain income level, or education level. So the people that played computer games 15 years ago were that type of person. They probably didn’t watch television as much, and the instant gratification era hadn’t quite grown the way it has lately. I think in the last 5 or 6 years, the demographics have really changed, now this is my opinion, because computers are less expensive so more people can afford them. More “average” people now feel they should own one.

It seems very ironic that Ken Williams was supposedly looking at potential of the IBM PC clones as a new market in 1987. Then a few years later, Roberta was moaning about how the “average” people ruined the business for them.

- Jimmy Maher

August 30, 2016 at 7:45 am

Yes, I’ve always hated that interview’s implication that Sierra’s adventures games were just too “intellectual” for the “average” people who took over the market. To my mind, this is complete nonsense. Roberta Williams’s games in particular required only dogged persistence, not deep thought. One could rather argue that it was a sign of intelligence to say, “You know what, I’m tired of being abused,” and just stop playing them.

And yes, it is more than a little ironic to see Roberta lamenting the very mainstreaming of games Sierra had made it their veritable mission as a company to accomplish.

- Wally

August 31, 2016 at 7:56 pm

Roberta had a snobby side. Who knew?

- Alexander Freeman

September 1, 2016 at 3:15 am

To be fair, though, if you’re talking about adventure games in general, that talking point about why they became a smaller portion of the market as computers became more mainstream, she’s far from the only person who’s said something like that. In fact, you say something similar about Infocom’s games here:
http://www.filfre.net/2016/07/going-to-california/
“The dominance enjoyed by text adventures during the earlier years of the decade owed much to the fact that computer gaming was a much more exclusive hobby during that period, enjoyed only by those with a restless bent of mind and the financial resources to invest thousands of dollars in an object as ultimately useless as an early microcomputer for the home. Mike Dornbrook and others involved with Infocom near the beginning have often mentioned their wonder at the sheer number of doctors and lawyers on their mailing lists.”
Granted, that’s Infocom, not Sierra, but people have made similar claims about adventure game players in general.

The two prevailing narratives are that typical players were less interested in puzzle solving and the other is that players finally got tired of unfair or otherwise ill conceived features allegedly found commonly in adventure games. In fact, that’s basically what Old Man Murray says here:
http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/79.html

Game Spy makes a fairly similar but much more nuanced claim:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030407092750/http://www.gamespy.com/top10/march03/genres/index4.shtml

“The downfall of Sierra was a factor. They had a little success with FMV adventure games, but never did quite figure out how to do 3D (see King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, it’s not very good). ”
(I, for one, haven’t played King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, but their Phantasmagoria FMV games look sooo bad, especially the second one.)

Personally, I suspect the truth is some combination of the two. The early computer users probably had a more nerdy/intellectual bent, but it’s also true adventure games often had design flaws that would have turned off more casual players, and, in many ways, they actually got worse, or new ones were introduced in the ’90s.

- Jodo

August 30, 2016 at 4:15 am

I was a teenage kid during these years, so I was the target demo!

Loved the VHS specials about the soon to be released rosters. We were always clamboring for more screen shots and more hints. Death sequences were treasured content.

I made my own custom graphics 3.5″ floppy disk labels for ‘the official backups’ we actually played on.

Fun times!

- Pingback: Bookmarks for August 29th through August 30th : Extenuating Circumstances

- ZUrlocker

August 31, 2016 at 6:41 pm

Nice post! I was always intrigued by the Sierra games, but bought relatively few of them. It sounds like they were better at marketing than at design.

For those not totally discouraged, HumbleBundle has a Sierra bundle on sale
https://www.humblebundle.com/sierra-bundle

- Corey Cole

September 6, 2016 at 9:45 pm

It’s hard to say how much of the “unfair” nature of King’s Quest and other games were due to the design. The typical process at Sierra was to write a very sketchy design document and have the team fill out the details.

As you mentioned in the article, two new hires did the initial work on King’s Quest IV, then the rest was pushed out in a massive one-month crunch. (I actually remember it as going on for 2-3 months.) That’s a great environment for making a sloppy implementation of what might have been an adequate design.

If I recall correctly, the magical bridle was supposed to be invisible. That makes sense in the story, but doesn’t work well as a game mechanic unless the player character can detect invisibility. The game design could have made that work, but when programmers under time pressure are implementing it, anything can happen.

One major difference between the work habits (and company requirements) of Roberta Williams vs. Lori Cole was that Roberta worked mostly at home and spent relatively little time with her team. They had her sketches and design notes, but the team implemented most of the details that the notes didn’t cover.

Lori and I spent most of our time sitting in a cubicle area next to the programmers and artists. If something in the design confused them, they could ask Lori or me about it, and we would talk them through it. We also learned from our more experienced developers and incorporated their ideas into the games.

The quality and playability of a game depend on much more than the game design. Individual developer talents matter, and even more important is the synergy that develops between team members. When one person throws out a crazy idea, and others on the team pick it up and improve on it, some amazing game play can result. When communication is poor, it’s a lot harder for great features to make it into the game.

- Jimmy Maher

September 7, 2016 at 7:02 am

It sounds like we might have wandered into a slight semantic tangle here. I consider the act of design to encompass much more than the act of writing the initial design document. All of those “crazy ideas,” etc., are part of the finished *design*, as are things that programmers may have improvised on their own due to a sketchy design document and limited access to Roberta.

But I didn’t actually realize that Roberta was so removed from her development team. That does explain much…

So You Want to Be a Hero?
September 9, 2016

Lori Ann and Corey Cole

Rule #1 is “The Player Must have Fun.” It’s trivially easy for a game designer to “defeat” players. We have all the tools and all the power. The trick is to play on the same side as the players, to tell the story together, and to make them the stars.

That rule is probably the biggest differentiator that made our games special. We didn’t strive to make the toughest, hardest-to-solve puzzles. We focused on the characters, the stories, and making the player the star.

— Corey Cole

It feels thoroughly appropriate that Corey and Lori Ann Cole first met over a game of Dungeons & Dragons. The meeting in question took place at Westercon — the West Coast Science Fantasy Conference — in San Francisco in the summer of 1979. Corey was the Dungeon Master, leading a group of players through an original scenario of his own devising that he would later succeed in getting published as The Tower of Indomitable Circumstances. But on this occasion he found the pretty young woman who was sitting at his table even more interesting than Dungeons & Dragons. Undaunted by mere geography — Corey was programming computers for a living in Southern California while Lori taught school in Arizona — the two struck up a romantic relationship. Within a few years, they were married, settling eventually in San Jose.

They had much in common. As their mutual presence at a convention like Westercon will attest, both the current and the future Cole were lovers of science-fiction and fantasy literature and its frequent corollary, gaming, from well before their first meeting. Their earliest joint endeavor — besides, that is, the joint endeavor of romance — was The Spellbook, a newsletter for tabletop-RPG aficionados which they edited and self-published.

Corey also nurtured an abiding passion for computers that had long since turned into a career. After first learning to program in Fortran and COBOL while still in high school during the early 1970s, his subsequent experiences had constituted a veritable grand tour of some of the most significant developments of this formative decade of creative computing. He logged onto the ARPANET (predecessor of the modern Internet) from a terminal at his chosen alma mater, the University of California, Santa Barbara; played the original Adventure in the classic way, via a paper teletype machine; played games on the PLATO system, including the legendary proto-CRPGs Oubliette and DND that were hosted there. After graduating, he took a job with his father’s company, a manufacturer of computer terminals, traveling the country writing software for customers’ installations. By 1981, he had moved on to become a specialist in word-processing and typesetting software, all the while hacking code and playing games at home on his home-built CP/M computer and his Commodore PET.

When the Atari ST was introduced in 1985, offering an unprecedented amount of power for the price, Corey saw in it the potential to become the everyday computer of the future. He threw himself into this latest passion with abandon, becoming an active member of the influential Bay Area Atari Users Group, a contributor to the new ST magazine STart, and even the founder of a new company, Visionary Systems; the particular vision in question was that of translating his professional programming experience into desktop-publishing software for the ST.

Interestingly, Corey’s passion for computers and computer games was largely not shared by Lori. Like many dedicated players of tabletop RPGs, she always felt the computerized variety to be lacking in texture, story, and most of all freedom. She could enjoy games like Wizardry in bursts with friends, but ultimately found them far too constraining to sustain her interest. And she felt equally frustrated by the limitations of both the parser-driven text adventures of Infocom and the graphical adventures of Sierra. Her disinterest in the status quo of computer gaming would soon prove an ironic asset, prompting her to push her own and Corey’s games in a different and very worthwhile direction.

By early 1988, it was becoming clear that the Atari ST was doomed to remain a niche platform in North America, and thus that Corey’s plan to get rich selling desktop-publishing software for it wasn’t likely to pan out. Meanwhile his chronic asthma was making it increasingly difficult to live in the crowded urban environs of San Jose. The Coles were at one of life’s proverbial crossroads, unsure what to do next.

Then one day they got a call from Carolly Hauksdottir, an old friend from science-fiction fandom — she wrote and sang filk songs with them — who happened to be working now as an artist for Sierra On-Line down in the rural paradise of Oakhurst, California. It seemed she had just come out of a meeting with Sierra’s management in which Ken Williams had stated emphatically that they needed to get back into the CRPG market. Since their brief association with Richard Garriott, which had led to their releasing Ultima II and re-releasing Ultima I, Sierra’s presence in CRPGs had amounted to a single game called Wrath of Denethenor, a middling effort for the Apple II and Commodore 64 sold to them by an outside developer. As that meager record will attest, Ken had never heretofore made the genre much of a priority. But of late the market for CPRGs showed signs of exploding, as evidenced by the huge success of other publishers’ releases like The Bard’s Tale and Ultima IV.  To get themselves a piece of that action, Ken stated in his typical grandiose style that Sierra would need to hire “a published, award-winning, tournament-level Dungeon Master” and set him loose with their latest technology. Corey and Lori quickly reasoned that The Tower of Indomitable Circumstances had been published by the small tabletop publisher Judges Guild, as had their newsletter by themselves; that Corey had once won a tournament at Gen Con as a player; and that together they had once created and run a tournament scenario for a Doctor Who convention. Between the two of them, then, they were indeed “published, award-winning, tournament-level Dungeon Masters.” Right?

Well, perhaps they weren’t quite what Ken had in mind after all. When Corey called to offer their services, at any rate, he sounded decidedly skeptical. He was much more intrigued by another skill Corey mentioned in passing: his talent for programming the Atari ST. Sierra had exactly one programmer who knew anything about the ST, and was under the gun to get their new SCI engine ported over to that platform as quickly as possible. Ken wound up hiring Corey for this task, waving aside the initial reason for Corey’s call with the vague statement that “we’ll talk about game design later.”

What with Corey filling such an urgent need on another front, one can easily imagine Ken’s “later” never arriving at all. Corey, however, never stopped bringing up game design, and with it the talents of his wife that he thought would make her perfect for the role. While he thought that the SCI engine, despite its alleged universal applicability, could never be used to power a convincing hardcore CRPG of the Bard’s Tale/Ultima stripe, he did believe it could serve very well as the base for a hybrid game — part CRPG, part traditional Sierra adventure game. Such a hybrid would suit Lori just fine; her whole interest in the idea of designing computer games was “to bring storytelling and [the] interesting plot lines of books and tabletop role-playing into the hack-and-slash thrill of a computer game.” Given the technological constraints of the time, a hybrid actually seemed a far better vehicle for accomplishing that than a hardcore CRPG.

So, while Corey programmed in Sierra’s offices, Lori sat at home with their young son, sketching out a game. In fact, knowing that Sierra’s entire business model revolved around game series rather than one-offs, she sketched out a plan for four games, each taking place in a different milieu corresponding to one of the four points of the compass, one of the four seasons, and one of the four classical elements of Earth, Fire, Air, and Water. As was typical of CRPGs of this period, the player would be able to transfer the same character, evolving and growing in power all the while, into each successive game in the series.

With his established tabletop-RPG designer still not having turned up, Ken finally relented and brought Lori on to make her hybrid game. But the programmer with whom she was initially teamed was very religious, and refused to continue when he learned that the player would have the option of choosing a “thief” class. And so, after finishing up some of his porting projects, Corey joined her on what they were now calling called Hero’s Quest I: So You Want to Be a Hero. Painted in the broadest strokes, he became what he describes as the “left brain” to Lori’s “right brain” on the project, focusing on the details of systems and rules while Lori handled the broader aspects of plot and setting. Still, these generalized roles were by no means absolute. It was Corey, for instance, an incorrigible punster — so don’t incorrige him! — who contributed most of the horrid puns that abound throughout the finished game.

Less than hardcore though they envisioned their hybrid to be, Lori and Corey nevertheless wanted to do far more than simply graft a few statistics and a combat engine onto a typical Sierra adventure game. They would offer their player the choice of three classes, each with its own approach to solving problems: through combat and brute force in the case of the fighter, through spells in the case of the magic user, through finesse and trickery in the case of the thief. This meant that the Coles would in effect have to design Hero’s Quest three times, twining together an intricate tapestry of differing solutions to its problems. Considering this reality, one inevitably thinks of what Ron Gilbert said immediately after finishing Maniac Mansion, a game in which the player could select her own team of protagonists but one notably free of the additional complications engendered by Hero’s Quest‘s emergent CRPG mechanics: “I’m never doing that again!” The Coles, however, would not only do it again — in fact, four times more — but they would consistently do it well, succeeding at the tricky task of genre blending where designers as talented as Brian Moriarty had stumbled.

Instead of thinking in terms of “puzzles,” the Coles preferred to think in terms of “problems.” In Hero’s Quest, many of these problems can be treated like a traditional adventure-game puzzle and overcome using your own logic. But it’s often possible to power through the same problem using your character’s skills and abilities. This quality makes it blessedly difficult to get yourself well-and-truly, permanently stuck. Let’s say you need to get a fish from a fisherman in order to get past the bear who’s blocking your passage across a river. You might, in traditional adventure-game style, use another item you found somewhere to repair his leaky boat, thus causing him to give you a fish as a small token of his appreciation. But you might also, if your character’s intelligence score is high enough, be able to convince him to give you a fish through logical persuasion alone. Or you might bypass the whole question of the fish entirely if your character is strong and skilled enough to defeat the bear in combat. Moriarty’s Beyond Zork tries to accomplish a superficially similar blending of the hard-coded adventure game and the emergent CRPG, but does so far less flexibly, dividing its problems rather arbitrarily into those soluble by adventure-game means and those soluble by CRPG means. The result for the player is often confusion, as things that ought to work fail to do so simply because a problem fell into the wrong category. Hero’s Quest was the first to get the blending right.

Based on incremental skill and attribute improvements rather than employing the more monolithic level-based structure of Dungeons & Dragons, the core of the Hero’s Quest game system reached back to a system of tabletop rules the Coles had begun formulating years before setting to work on their first computer game. It has the advantage of offering nearly constant feedback, a nearly constant sense of progress even if you happen to be stuck on one of the more concrete problems in the game. Spend some time bashing monsters, and your character’s “weapons use” score along with his strength and agility will go up; practice throwing daggers on the game’s handy target range, and his “throwing” skill will increase a little with almost every toss. Although you choose a class for your character at the outset, there’s nothing preventing you from building up a magic user who’s also pretty handy with a sword, or a fighter who knows how to throw a spell or two. You’ll just have to sacrifice some points in the beginning to get a start in the non-core discipline, then keep on practicing.

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/HQ.mp4

If forced to choose one adjective to describe Hero’s Quest and the series it spawned as a whole, I would have to go with “generous” — not, as the regular readers among you can doubtless attest, an adjective I commonly apply to Sierra games in general. Hero’s Quest‘s generosity extends far beyond its lack of the sudden deaths, incomprehensible puzzles, hidden dead ends, and generalized player abuse that were so typical of Sierra designs. Departing from Sierra’s other series with their King Grahams, Rosellas, Roger Wilcos, and Larry Laffers, the Coles elected not to name or characterize their hero, preferring to let their players imagine and sculpt the character each of them wanted to play. Even within the framework of a given character class, alternate approaches and puzzle — er, problem — solutions abound, while the environment is fleshed-out to a degree unprecedented in a Sierra adventure game. Virtually every reasonable action, not to mention plenty of unreasonable ones, will give some sort of response, some acknowledgement of your cleverness, curiosity, or sense of humor. Almost any way you prefer to approach your role is viable. For instance, while it’s possible to leave behind a trail of monstrous carnage worthy of a Bard’s Tale game, it’s also possible to complete the entire game without taking a single life. The game is so responsive to your will that the few places where it does fall down a bit, such as in not allowing you to choose the sex of your character — resource constraints led the Coles to make the hero male-only — stand out more in contrast to how flexible the rest of this particular game is than they do in contrast to most other games of the period.

Hero’s Quest‘s message of positive empowerment feels particularly bracing in our current age antiheroes and murky morality.

Indeed, Hero’s Quest is such a design outlier from the other Sierra games of its era that I contacted the Coles with the explicit goal of coming to understand just how it could have come out so differently. Corey took me back all the way the mid-1970s, to one of his formative experiences as a computer programmer and game designer alike, when he wrote a simple player-versus-computer tic-tac-toe game for a time-shared system to which he had access. “Originally,” he says, “it played perfectly, always winning or drawing, and nobody played it for long. After I introduced random play errors by the computer, so that a lucky player could occasionally win, people got hooked on the game.” From this “ah-ha!” moment and a few others like it was born the Coles’ Rule #1 for game design: “The player must always have fun.” “We try to remember that rule,” says Corey, “every time we create a potentially frustrating puzzle.” The trick, as he describes it, is to make “the puzzles and challenges feel difficult, yet give the player a chance to succeed after reasonable effort.” Which leads us to Rule #2: “The player wants to win.” “We aren’t here to antagonize the players,” he says. “We work with them in a cooperative storytelling effort. If the player fails, everybody loses; we want to see everyone win.”

Although their professional credits in the realm of game design were all but nonexistent at the time they came to Sierra, the Coles were nevertheless used to thinking about games far more deeply than was the norm in Oakhurst. They were, for one thing, dedicated players of games, very much in tune with the experience of being a player, whether sitting behind a table or a computer. Ken Williams, by contrast, had no interest in tabletop games, and had sat down and played for himself exactly one computerized adventure game in his life (that game being, characteristically for Ken, the ribald original Softporn). While Roberta Williams had been inspired to create Mystery House by the original Adventure and some of the early Scott Adams games, her experience as a player never extended much beyond those primitive early text adventures; she was soon telling interviewers that she “didn’t have the time” to actually play games. Most of Sierra’s other design staff came to the role through the back door of being working artists, writers, or programmers, not through the obvious front door of loving games as a pursuit unto themselves. Corey states bluntly that “almost nobody there played [emphasis mine] games.” The isolation from the ordinary player’s experience that led to so many bad designs was actually encouraged by Ken Williams; he suggested that his staffers not look too much at what the competition was doing out of some misguided desire to preserve the “originality” of Sierra’s own games.

But the Coles were a little different than the majority of said staffers. Corey points out that they were both over thirty by the time they started at Sierra. They had, he notes, also “traveled a fair amount,” and “both the real-life experience and extensive tabletop-gaming experience gave [us] a more ‘mature’ attitude toward game development, especially that the designer is a partner to the player, not an antagonist to be overcome.” Given the wealth of experience with games and ideas about how games ought to be that they brought with them to Sierra, the Coles probably benefited as much from the laissez-faire approach to game-making engendered by Ken Williams as some of the others designers perhaps suffered from the same lack of direction. Certainly Ken’s personal guidance was only sporadic, and often inconsistent. Corey:

Once in a while, Ken Williams would wander through the development area — it might happen two or three times in a day, or more likely the visits might be three weeks apart. Everyone learned that it was essential to show Ken some really cool sequence or feature that he hadn’t seen before. You only showed him one such sequence because you needed to reserve two more in case he came back the same day.

Our first (and Sierra’s first) Producer, Guruka Singh Khalsa, taught us the “Ken Williams Rule” based on something Robert Heinlein wrote: “That which he tells you three times is true.” Ken constantly came up with half-baked ideas, some of them amazing, some terrible, and some impractical. If he said something once, you nodded in agreement. Twice, you sat up and listened. Anything he said three times was law and had to be done. While Ken mostly played a management role at Sierra, he also had some great creative ideas that really improved our games. Of course, it takes fifteen seconds to express an idea, and sometimes days or weeks to make it work. That’s why we ignored the half-baked, non-repeated suggestions.

The Coles had no affinity for any of Sierra’s extant games; they considered them “unfair and not much fun.” Yet the process of game development at Sierra was so unstructured that they had little sense of really reacting against them either.  As I mentioned earlier, Lori didn’t much care for any of the adventure games she had seen, from any company. She wouldn’t change her position until she played Lucasfilm Games’s The Secret of Monkey Island in 1990. After that experience, she became a great fan of the Lucasfilm adventures, enjoying them far more than the works of her fellow designers at Sierra. For now, though, rather than emulating existing computerized adventure or RPG games, the Coles strove to re-create the experience of sitting at a table with a great storytelling game master at its head.

Looking beyond issues of pure design, another sign of the Coles’ relatively broad experience in life and games can be seen in their choice of settings. Rather than settling for the generic “lazy Medieval” settings so typical of Dungeons & Dragons-derived computer games then and now, they planned their series as a hall of windows into some of the richest myths and legends of our own planet. The first game, which corresponded in Lori’s grand scheme for the series as a whole to the direction North, the season Spring, and the element Earth, is at first glance the most traditional of the series’s settings. This choice was very much a conscious one, planned to help the series attract an initial group of players and get some commercial traction; bullish as he was on series in general, Ken Williams wasn’t particularly noted for his patience with new ones that didn’t start pulling their own weight within a game or two. Look a little closer, though, and even the first game’s lush fantasy landscape, full of creatures that seem to have been lifted straight out of a Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, stands out as fairly unique. Inspired by an interest in German culture that had its roots in the year Corey had spent as a high-school exchange student in West Berlin back in 1971 and 1972, the Coles made their Medieval setting distinctly Germanic, as is highlighted by the name of the town around which the action centers: Spielburg. (Needless to say, the same name is also an example of the Coles’ love of puns and pop-culture in-joking.) Later games would roam still much further afield from the lazy-Medieval norm. The second, for instance, moves into an Arabian Nights milieu, while still later ones explore the myths and legends of Africa, Eastern Europe, and Greece. The Coles’ determination to inject a little world music into the cultural soundtracks of their mostly young players stands out as downright noble. Their series doubtless prompted more than a few blinkered teenage boys to begin to realize what a big old interesting world there really is out there.

Of course, neither the first Hero’s Quest nor any of the later ones in the series would be entirely faultless. Sierra suffered from the persistent delusion that their SCI engine was a truly universal hammer suitable for every sort of nail, leading them to incorporate action sequences into almost every one of their adventure games. These are almost invariably excruciating, afflicted with slow response times and imprecise, clumsy controls. Hero’s Quest, alas, isn’t an exception from this dubious norm. It has an action-oriented combat engine so unresponsive that no one I’ve ever talked to tries to do anything with it but just pound on the “attack” key until the monster is dead or it’s obviously time to run away. And then there are some move-exactly-right-or-you’re-dead sequences in the end game that are almost as frustrating as some of the ones found in Sierra’s other series. But still, far more important in the end are all the things Hero’s Quest does right, and more often than not in marked contrast to just about every other Sierra game of its era.

Hero’s Quest was slated into Sierra’s release schedule for Christmas 1989, part of a diverse lineup of holiday releases that also included the third Leisure Suit Larry game from the ever-prolific Al Lowe and something called The Colonel’s Bequest, a bit of a departure for Roberta Williams in the form of an Agatha Christie-style cozy murder mystery. With no new King’s Quest game on offer that year, Hero’s Quest, the only fantasy release among Sierra’s 1989 lineup, rather unexpectedly took up much of its slack. As pre-orders piled up to such an extent that Sierra projected needing to press 100,000 copies right off the bat just to meet the holiday demand, Corey struggled desperately with a sequence — the kobold cave, for those of you who have played the game already — that just wouldn’t come together. At last he brokered a deal to withhold only the disk that would contain that sequence from the duplicators. In a single feverish week, he rewrote it from scratch. The withheld disk was then duplicated in time to join the rest, and the game as a whole shipped on schedule, largely if not entirely bug-free. Even more impressively, it was, despite receiving absolutely no outside beta-testing — Sierra still had no way of seriously evaluating ordinary players’ reactions to a game before release — every bit as friendly, flexible, and soluble as the Coles had always envisioned it to be.

The game became the hit its pre-orders had indicated it would, its sales outpacing even the new Leisure Suit Larry and Roberta Williams’s new game by a comfortable margin that holiday season. The reviews were superlative; Questbusters‘s reviewer pronounced it “honestly the most fun I’ve had with any game in years,” and Computer Gaming World made it their “Adventure Game of the Year.” While it would be nice to attribute this success entirely to the public embracing its fine design sensibilities, which they had learned of via all the fine reviews, its sales numbers undoubtedly had much to do with its good fortune in being released during this year without a King’s Quest. Hero’s Quest was for many a harried parent and greedy child alike the closest analogue to Roberta Williams’s blockbuster series among the new releases on store shelves. The game sold over 130,000 copies in its first year on the market, about 200,000 copies in all in its original version, then another 100,000 copies when it was remade in 1992 using Sierra’s latest technology. Such numbers were, if not quite in the same tier as a King’s Quest, certainly nothing to sneeze at. In creative and commercial terms alike, the Coles’ series was off to a fine start.

At the instant of Hero’s Quest‘s release, Sierra was just embarking on a major transition in their approach to game-making. Ken Williams had decided it was time at last to make the huge leap from the EGA graphics standard, which could display just 16 colors onscreen from a palette of 64, to VGA, which could display 256 colors from a palette of 262,144. To help accomplish this transition, he had hired Bill Davis, a seasoned Hollywood animator, in the new role of Sierra’s “Creative Director” in July of 1989. Davis systematized Sierra’s heretofore laissez-faire approach to game development into a rigidly formulated Hollywood-style production pipeline. Under his scheme, the artists would now be isolated from the programmers and designers; inter-team communication would happen only through a bureaucratic paper trail.

The changes inevitably disrupted Sierra’s game-making operation, which of late had been churning out new adventure games at a rate of about half a dozen per year. Many of the company’s resources for 1990 were being poured into King’s Quest V, which was intended, as had been the norm for that series since the beginning, to be the big showpiece game demonstrating all the company’s latest goodies, including not only 256-color VGA graphics but also a new Lucasfilm Games-style point-and-click interface in lieu of the old text parser. King’s Quest V would of course be Sierra’s big title for Christmas. They had only two other adventure games on their schedule for 1990, both begun using the older technology and development methodology well before the end of 1989 and both planned for release in the first half of the new year. One, an Arthurian game by an established writer for television named Christy Marx, was called Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail (thus winning the prize of being the most strained application of Sierra’s cherished “Quest” moniker ever). The other, a foray into Tom Clancy-style techno-thriller territory by Police Quest designer Jim Walls, was called Code-Name: ICEMAN. Though they had every reason to believe that King’s Quest V would become another major hit, Sierra was decidedly uncertain about the prospects of these other two games. They felt they needed at least one more game in an established series if they hoped to maintain the commercial momentum they’d been building up in recent years. Yet it wasn’t clear where that game was to come from; one side effect of the transition to VGA graphics was that art took much longer to create, and games thus took longer to make. Lori and Corey were called into a meeting and given two options. One, which Lori at least remembers management being strongly in favor of, was to make the second game in their series using Sierra’s older EGA- and parser-driven technology, getting it out in time to become King’s Quest V‘s running mate for the Christmas of 1990. The other was to be moved in some capacity to the King’s Quest V project, with the opportunity to return to Hero’s Quest only at some uncertain future date. They chose — or were pushed into — the former.

Despite using the older technology, their second game was, at Davis’s insistence, created using the newer production methodology. This meant among other things that the artists, now isolated from the rest of the developers, had to create the background scenes on paper; their pictures were then scanned in for use in the game. I’d like to reserve the full details of Sierra’s dramatically changed production methodology for another article, where I can give them their proper due. Suffice for today to say that, while necessary in many respects for a VGA game, the new processes struck everyone as a strange way to create a game using the sharply limited EGA color palette. By far the most obvious difference they made was that everything seemed to take much longer. Lori Ann Cole:

We got the worst of both worlds. We got a new [development] system that had never been tried before, and all the bugs that went with that. And we were doing it under the old-school technology where the colors weren’t as good and all that. We were under a new administration with a different way of treating people. We got time clocks; we had to punch in a number to get into the office so that we would work the set number of hours. We had all of a sudden gone from this free-form company to an authoritarian one: “This is the hours you have to work. Programmers will work over here and artists will work over there, and only their bosses can talk to one another; you can’t talk to the artist that’s doing the art.”

Some of the Coles’ frustrations with the new regime came out in the game they were making. Have a close look at the name of Raseir, an oppressed city — sort of an Arabian Nights version of Nineteen Eighty-Four — where the climax of the game occurs.

Scheduled for a late September release, exactly one year after the release of the first Hero’s Quest, the second game shipped two months behind schedule, coming out far too close to Christmas to have a prayer of fully capitalizing on the holiday rush. And then when it did finally ship, it didn’t even ship as Hero’s Quest II.

In 1989, the same year that Sierra had released the first Hero’s Quest, the British division of the multi-national toys and games giant Milton Bradley had released HeroQuest, a sort of board-gameified version of Dungeons & Dragons. They managed to register their trademark on the name for Europe shortly before Sierra registered theirs for Europe and North America. After the board game turned into a big European success, Milton Bradley elected to bring it to North America the following year, whilst also entering into talks with some British developers about turning it into a computer game. Clearly something had to be done about the name conflict, and thanks to their having registered the trademark first Milton Bradley believed they had the upper hand. When the bigger company’s lawyers came calling, Sierra, unwilling to get entangled in an expensive lawsuit they probably couldn’t win anyway, signed a settlement that not only demanded they change the name of their series but also stated that they couldn’t even continue using the old name long enough to properly advertise that “Hero’s Quest has a new name!” Thus when Hero’s Quest and its nearly finished sequel were hastily rechristened Quest for Glory, the event was announced only via a single four-sentence press release.

So, a veritable perfect storm of circumstances had conspired to undermine the commercial prospects of the newly rechristened Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire. Sierra’s last parser-driven 16-color game, it was going head to head with the technological wonder that was King’s Quest V — another fantasy game to boot. Due to its late release, it lost the chance to pick up even many or most of the scraps King’s Quest V might have left it. And finally, the name change meant that the very idea of a Quest for Glory II struck most Sierra fans as a complete non sequitur; they had no idea what game it was allegedly a sequel to. Under the circumstances, it’s remarkable that Quest for Glory II performed as well as it did. It sold an estimated 110,000 to 120,000 copies — not quite the hit its predecessor had been, but not quite the flop one could so easily imagine the newer game becoming under the circumstances either. Sales were still strong enough that this eminently worthy series was allowed to continue.

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/QFGII.mp4

As a finished game, Quest for Glory II betrays relatively little sign of its difficult gestation, even if there are perhaps just a few more rough edges in comparison to its predecessor. The most common complaint is that the much more intricate and linear plot this time out can lead to a fair amount of time spent waiting for the next plot event to fire, with few concrete goals to achieve in the meantime. This syndrome can especially afflict those players who’ve elected to transfer in an established character from the first game, and thus have little need for the grinding with which newbies are likely to occupy themselves. At the same time, though, the new emphasis on plot isn’t entirely unwelcome in light of the almost complete lack of same in the first game, while the setting this time out of a desert land drawn from the Arabian Nights is even more interesting than was that of the previous game. The leisurely pace can make Quest for Glory II feel like a sort of vacation simulator, a relaxing computerized holiday spent chatting with the locals, sampling the cuisine, enjoying belly dances and poetry readings, and shopping in the bazaars. (Indeed, your first challenge in the game is one all too familiar to every tourist in a new land: converting the money you brought with you from Spielburg into the local currency.) I’ve actually heard Quest for Glory II described by a fair number of players as their favorite in the entire series. If push comes to shove, I’d probably have to say that I slightly prefer the first game, but I wouldn’t want to be without either of them. Certainly Quest for Glory II is about as fine a swan song for the era of parser-driven Sierra graphical adventures as one could possibly hope for.

The combat system used in the Quest for Glory games would change constantly from game to game. The one found in the second game is a little more responsive and playable than its predecessor.

Had more adventure-game designers at Sierra and elsewhere followed the Coles’ lead, the history of the genre might have been played out quite differently. As it is, though, we’ll have to be content with the games we do have. I’d hugely encourage any of you who haven’t played the Quest for Glory games to give them a shot — preferably in order, transferring the same character from game to game, just as the Coles ideally intended it. Thanks to our friends at GOG.com, they’re available for purchase today in a painless one-click install for modern systems. They remain as funny, likable, and, yes, generous as ever.

We’ll be returning to the Coles in due course to tell the rest of their series’s story. Next time, though, we’ll turn our attention to the Apple Macintosh, a platform we’ve been neglecting a bit of late, to see how it was faring as the 1990s were fast approaching.

(Sources: Questbusters of December 1989; Computer Gaming World of September 1990 and April 1991; Sierra’s newsletters dated Autumn 1989, Spring 1990, Summer 1991, Spring 1992, and Autumn 1992; Antic of August 1986; STart of Summer 1986; Dragon of October 1991; press releases and annual reports found in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play. Online sources include Matt Chats 173 and 174; Lori Ann Cole’s interview with Adventure Classic Gaming; Lori and Corey’s appearance on the Space Venture podcast; and various entries on the Coles’ own blog. But my biggest resource at all has been the Coles themselves, who took the time to patiently answer my many nit-picky questions at length. Thank you, Corey and Lori! And finally, courtesy of Corey and Lori, a little bonus for the truly dedicated among you who have read this far: some pages from an issue of their newsletter The Spell Book, including Corey’s take on “Fantasy Gaming Via Computer” circa summer 1982.)

Comments
46 Responses

- Jacen

September 9, 2016 at 4:10 pm

Love love love QfG games! I am super excited for their new one, which I actually backed on Kicksarter, a first for me.

typo time!: “that he would later succeeding in getting published as”

- Jimmy Maher

September 9, 2016 at 4:19 pm

Thanks!

- Joachim

September 9, 2016 at 4:20 pm

“In the course of a long and rich game-making career still to come, he would hold true to that promise.” … well, at least until he did The Cave. :)

- Jimmy Maher

September 9, 2016 at 4:49 pm

Ah, I haven’t played that one. Thanks!

- Sniffnoy

September 9, 2016 at 5:45 pm

Wait, what was this in reference to?

- Jimmy Maher

September 9, 2016 at 6:30 pm

I had said that Ron Gilbert learned his lesson from Maniac Mansion and never made another adventure game with unique selectable characters. Joachim pointed out that he in fact did just that 26 years after Maniac Mansion in The Cave. So now that claim is gone. ;)

- Sniffnoy

September 9, 2016 at 6:40 pm

I see, thanks!

- Joachim

September 9, 2016 at 7:41 pm

The first Quest for Glory is my favourite overall, partly due to the amazing atmosphere (the sound effects in the Amiga version are so lovely), and partly due to the freedom which gives you near total control over how the game proceeds. Playing it always feels like coming home for me.

Having said that, when I initially played QfG II, I preferred it over the original. I loved the conversation system in both games, but it was more fleshed out in the second. Not only that, but the other characters seemed to be so much more aware of me and what I did than what I was used to from other games.

I also loved how “physical” some of the puzzles were, especially the ones in WIT. The story events and how each day were a little different from the last (characters like Rakeesh moving around a little, Shema dancing, et.c.) made it feel a lot more alive.

But those story events also made it feel much less interesting on subsequent playthroughs, and there’s the waiting around-problem that the article mentions too. Plus, while the vast desert promised so much in the first playthrough, the next time you played you knew that there were just three (ok, kind of four) locations of any interest there.

So while it was great the first time around, the first game holds up much better in the long run. Still, both are wonderful games, and they IMO also are both examples of games which actually benefit from having a text parser as opposed to a graphical user interface.

- Joachim

September 9, 2016 at 7:42 pm

I also wanted to say that as usual, this was a wonderful read. I look forward to reading about the next games in the series as well. QfG 4 is almost as good as 1 in my view. :)

- Jimmy Maher

September 10, 2016 at 8:02 am

Yes, I can see how visiting Spielburg could feel like coming home. It’s a very “hyggelig” game, as they would say here in Denmark. (Not sure if that word has quite the same sense in Norwegian, but hopefully you get the spirit.)

I think the second game could have benefited enormously from a sort of “drama manager” like Infocom pioneered in Ballyhoo: i.e., fire each successive plot event when the player reaches a certain milestone rather than bind the whole to a rigid chronology. This would give the sense of being an active player in a constantly unfolding story, while also making it impossible to lose because you dawdled too much. But this latter fact, of course, would not be advertised to the player. She’d just be left feeling *awesome*, like she was managing everything just in the nick of time.

If I was remaking it, anyway, that’s what I’d try to do.

- Ben Vigeant

September 9, 2016 at 8:33 pm

Been looking forward to this one since you teased it last time. Quest For Glory 1’s VGA remake is a game I revisit at least once or twice every year. Something about the world of Spielburg pulls me in as much as it did when I was a kid playing it at release.

The remaining games I love too (4 jockeys back and forth with 1), but the relaxed world of 1 usually wins out. I agree with the sentiment that 2 is extremely impressive the first time through, but later play throughs running the clock is a little less interesting.

The fan made VGA remake of 2 is pretty well made too.

- Alexander Freeman

September 10, 2016 at 3:43 am

“Rule #1 is “The Player Must have Fun.” It’s trivially easy for a game designer to “defeat” players. We have all the tools and all the power. The trick is to play on the same side as the players, to tell the story together, and to make them the stars. That rule is probably the biggest differentiator that made our games special. We didn’t strive to make the toughest, hardest-to-solve puzzles. We focused on the characters, the stories, and making the player the star.”

Contrast that with these gems from Peter Killworth:
“The longer we can keep the player convinced he has the solution, the more frustrated he will be when he finds out that he does not have it (and the more he’ll appreciate his efforts when he finds the real solution).”

“A nice puzzle – can we frustrate the player further, when he solves it? Yes indeed.”

“Jumping over a drop always worries players, and worry is a key ingredient of Adventure games. But to lull the player into a false feeling of confidence let’s allow him to make the jump successfully. Only when jumping with the gladius (or pilum, come to that) will he miss his hold and fall into the abyss.”

“Finally, let’s make the plank break underneath the player just as he gets to the cavern, thus blocking his return. There will be another way out, even if we haven’t thought of it yet, but creating a little honest worry in the player’s mind never comes amiss!”

“Her disinterest in the status quo of computer gaming would soon prove an ironic asset, prompting her to push her own and Corey’s games in a different and very worthwhile direction.”
I actually think great innovations typically come from people like that because they aren’t accustomed to thinking like everyone else.

“Instead of thinking in terms of ‘puzzles,’ the Coles preferred to think in terms of ‘problems.’ In Hero’s Quest, many of these problems can be treated like a traditional adventure-game puzzle and overcome using your own logic. But it’s often possible to power through the same problem using your character’s skills and abilities. This quality makes it blessedly difficult to get yourself well-and-truly, permanently stuck. Let’s say you need to get a fish from a fisherman…”
You’ve just described one of my favorite things about the QFG series. Even though I like the early King’s Quest games, one thing I didn’t like was how rigid the approach was to some of the puzzles. If they’d had this feature, in KQ1, you could pick up rocks anywhere they’d probably be, not just by the river, and you could use the sling on the troll, the rat, and the dragon, not just the giant. In KQ4, any bone could be picked up and thrown to the dog, not just one in that one particular pile right by the entrance to the troll’s cave.

“Hero’s Quest, alas, isn’t an exception from this dubious norm… there are some move-exactly-right-or-you’re-dead sequences in the end game that are almost as frustrating as some of the ones found in Sierra’s other series.”
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. I don’t seem to recall any frustrating sequences like that.

Well, anyway, I think Hero’s Quest is my favorite game from Sierra. I think the later games, though, generally did a better job of giving each class a distinct experience. I also didn’t much care for the grinding although there isn’t that much of it thankfully. I’ve also found that if you give your character skills normally available only to some other class, that has the tendency to make him TOO powerful and takes away a lot of the fun. Other than those, my only criticism is that it isn’t clear how you’re supposed to defeat the weapons master. I thought you were supposed to hit him a certain number of times or something like that. As I later found out from a YouTube video, you’re supposed to beat him back so far he goes off the left side of the screen.

- Jimmy Maher

September 10, 2016 at 8:09 am

Wow! Ouch!

The sequences I’m thinking of are all clustered around the end game. I completed the game as a fighter. Perhaps the end game is a little different when playing as another class.

But anyway, this complaint shouldn’t put anyone off the game. They’re not *that* bad, and all the positive aspects far, far outweigh them.

- FilfreFan

September 10, 2016 at 5:12 pm

I recently played Kings Quest for the first time, and really enjoyed it. I agree that several very challenging sequences near the end were a departure from the more forgiving overall game. The Three Stooge sequences required very many reloads, and was only learned through repeated failure. Similarly, crossing the trapped boards and carpets didn’t offer any obvious means to succeed beyond trial and error. The most significant one, though, was the Yorick sequence just before the brigand leader’s room. It was pure Donkey Kong, with trapdoors, teleports, chasms, tumbling and rolling, pendulum hazards, rolling balls,and the like. I enjoyed them, but there is no doubt that these were a different gaming style from the much more forgiving portions of the game that had come before.

- Jimmy Maher

September 10, 2016 at 5:46 pm

I assume you mean you played *Hero’s* Quest. ;)

- FilfreFan

September 25, 2016 at 1:32 pm

Yes, that’s it. Funny slip of the tongue, especially since I’ve never played Kings Quest. That alliterative name does roll of the tongue nicely though, doesn’t it?

- Alexander Freeman

September 11, 2016 at 3:45 am

Hmmm… I don’t recall the Three Stooges part giving me that much trouble, but I do agree the trapped boards and carpets seemed like trial and error. I don’t recall the Yorick sequence being that tough as long as you go into sneak mode to get around. Well, at least it’s not as bad as the maze-like alien you have to get past in Space Quest 2 to get to the berry bush or the whale’s tongue in King’s Quest 4!

- Austin

September 10, 2016 at 6:50 pm

*spoilers*

The final 4 screens in the brigands den all play out the same regardless of class or skills with just one solution to each problem, same goes for the optional Baba Yaga quest line.

As much as I love HQ, it always struck me as though the ending were lifted from a different Sierra game, particularly when contrasted to the other set-piece sequences like the bear/kobold cave, which had multiple solutions.

- glorkvorn

September 15, 2016 at 6:05 am

For me, it was just the opposite- the end game was my favorite part! (Well, other than robbing houses as the thief…) It is hard, but it’s fair. All the things you need are right there in the room with you, and it all makes sense (in a cartoonish way, but that fits in the context of the game) once you figure out what’s going on. Admittedly it’s faster to die and figure it out by trial and error than to logic your way through it, but since you can save-and-reload any time you want, and you get a funny and unique death screen, dying never bothered me. Sometimes it even gives you a hint about what you should have done instead.

My main criticism of the game (and of all the QFG games) is that the RPG element isn’t used enough. There are a *few* puzzles with alternate solutions from building up your RPG stats, but the fast majority of the game is just a straight adventure game, with a few random monster fights thrown in with a gimpy combat system. And even when you *do* solve a puzzle “RPG style”, like by brute forcing the secret door open instead of finding the key, it feels like you’ve seriously missed something and the game punishes you accordingly by giving you less points.

That said, they did a brilliant job putting in multiple puzzle solutions, as well as creating a rich, interesting world that’s fun to just hang out in, so these are some of my favorite adventure games ever.

- Pedro Timóteo

September 10, 2016 at 4:21 pm

I couldn’t resist googling for those Peter Killworth quotes. :) They’re from a 1984 book called “How To Write Adventure Games for the BBC Microcomputer Model B and Acorn Electron”, and that googling also provided a PDF of the entire book. While Killworth was probably a fairer designer than Roberta Williams (or early Sierra in general), the latter could perhaps be excused by the fact that there were more “plotters” than actual designers. On the other hand, Killworth knew exactly what he was doing; he was just a sadist (though he probably didn’t see himself as such; he also appears to have enjoyed playing games exactly like his own…)

One other thing: while this is certainly true to an extent:

I actually think great innovations typically come from people like that because they aren’t accustomed to thinking like everyone else.

There’s also the danger of constantly having to reinvent the wheel, and/or make the same mistakes over and over. Jimmy has commented in the past on how weird it is for, say, Scott Adams, or Sierra under command of Ken Williams, to boast of never even looking at the competition: isn’t that a bit like a writer who never reads books, or a musician who never listens to music?

- Jimmy Maher

September 10, 2016 at 4:38 pm

I do think that knowing the creative field in which you’re working is kind of basic due diligence for any creator, as those previous passages of mine that you reference make clear. I never discussed this directly with the Coles, but I suspect that having Corey to act as a filter may have been hugely helpful for Lori. He *did* know and like computer games better than she did, and may have been able to translate her ideas into implementations that worked on the computer. Otherwise Quest for Glory could have ended up more like Wasteland and some of the other Interplay CRPGs of that era: overly literal translations from the tabletop to the computer.

- Rowan Lipkovits

September 10, 2016 at 4:01 am

Sierra’s presence in CRPGs had amounted to a single game

I was going to ask “what about their imports of Game Arts’ Sorcerian and Zeliard?” but it looks like HQ was 1989 and they were 1990, so … well played, antiquarian.

(Presumably, like the CRPG Addict, we aren’t including “Ultima: Escape from Mount Drash” here 8)

- David Yates

September 10, 2016 at 11:37 am

There are currently 3 days left on the HumbleBundle.com Sierra Bundle, which includes Steam versions of the entire Quest for Glory, Space Quest, Kings Quest and Police Quest serieses (also Gabriel Knight and a few other things), all for $15.

If you *just* want the QfG games, getting them from GOG would be cheaper, but the sheer number of games make the bundle a pretty good deal.

https://www.humblebundle.com/sierra-bundle

- Jimmy Maher

September 10, 2016 at 12:05 pm

That is a hell of a deal. All three Gabriel Knight games are included, as are Caesar III and IV and Arcanum. Plus for pure kitsch value Phantasmagoria I and II. Thanks for point it out!

- Rowan Lipkovits

September 11, 2016 at 2:27 am

Thanks to our friends at GOG.com, they’re available for purchase today in a painless one-click install for modern systems. They remain as funny, likable, and, yes, generous as ever.

I bought both bundles in vain hopes of being able to finally experience QFG5, but neither the GOG nor the Steam releases allow me to progress beyond display of the character customization screen. Has anyone else had this issue, and does anyone have any bright ideas as to how I might circumvent it?

- Pedro Timóteo

September 11, 2016 at 2:13 pm

I was going to suggest the usual steps: using Windows 98 compatibility mode (by browsing to the game’s installation directory and right-clicking on the executable), and/or reading the Steam forums for the game (to see if anyone was having similar problems, and to try any suggested fixes), but… it worked on my system (Steam version, just installed, laptop with Windows 10 and an NVIDIA 850M card) without having to do any of that.

What happens when you leave the character creation? Does it crash? Any particular error message?

- sho

September 10, 2016 at 8:23 pm

Finally I can showcase my niche expertise (although I have never heard of the person before), it just must be ‘Hauksdottir’ ;)

- Jimmy Maher

September 11, 2016 at 8:45 am

Right you are. Thanks!

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- Nicholas Levin

September 11, 2016 at 1:19 am

I do hope you cover The Colonel’s Bequest, because I do think very highly of that title, despite some SCI clunkiness in how easy it is to skip some of the most interesting conversations in the game.

I’d harp on its finer points, but I’d rather not spoil readers. :) Of all the games Roberta Williams had a hand in, that one’s my favorite, with an odd Win 95 game called Shivers being my second.

- Ternian

September 11, 2016 at 8:04 am

Roberta has less of a hand in that game than what Sierra led you to believe. ;)

- Jimmy Maher

September 11, 2016 at 8:41 am

I do think it’s probably the best of all Roberta’s games, and will try to at least acknowledge that in a future article, but I’m afraid I don’t plan to give it a feature article of its own. (I’m not really sure to what Ternian refers, but I haven’t done any real research on the game’s development either.)

- James

October 24, 2016 at 5:03 am

Roberta didn’t write TCB. It was outsourced and only adapted by Ken and Roberta. It all ended rather messy as well. Happy to help you out with the article if need be. I run the Facebook fangroup for the Laura Bow series. :)

- Kevin

September 11, 2016 at 3:38 am

Wonderful read! Thank you for this! I’m subscribed to your feed and look forward to more! BTW Odense is a lovely town – my wife and I spent a few days there about 5 years ago on our honeymoon.

- Ternian

September 11, 2016 at 8:07 am

Jimmy, I think you have taken a rather negative view on Ken in this period. The computer game market was about to crash in the eyes of the stock market. Consumers were turning away from games in droves, which no doubt reminded Ken of the near-death experience of Sierra in ’84. The pending doom took place before KQV was released. In effect, Ken would have been very worried on a drastic drop in revenue & investor impacts while still pumping money into ventures yet to show. No wonder he had people working under the pump to get KQV on the market.

- Jimmy Maher

September 11, 2016 at 8:31 am

I think you’re overstating the case a little here. It’s true that the computer-game industry in general went through a downturn in 1989, largely caused by the arrival of Nintendo, which pretty much annihilated the low-end — i.e., Commodore 64 — market. But Sierra had no real presence in the low-end market by that point, and their financials were excellent during this period. Their stock price more than doubled in the first year after their IPO, and revenues increased from $21 million to $29 million between 1989 and 1990 — developments that let them acquire Dynamix in early 1990. And the computer-game industry in general was on a modest upswing again by 1990. King’s Quest V was never a “save the company” project, rather a “let’s keep this good thing going” one.

But for that matter, I don’t think I’m particularly hard on Ken. I think he was a brilliant self-taught marketer and businessman who played a key role in molding larges swathes of the computer-game industry as we know it today. From his aggressive push to get sound cards into the hands of consumers to his determination to reach beyond the standard teenage-age boy videogame demographics with his games, he qualifies in my books as a visionary. Unfortunately, his failure to cultivate a culture at Sierra that thought seriously about issues of design was I believe also very damaging, both to his company and ultimately the genre of adventure gaming in general. But I’ve always tried to take pains not to let his failings obscure his huge achievements.

I don’t, by the way, particularly criticize Ken for pouring resources into King’s Quest V, which whatever else you can say about it is far less of a design disaster than the previous game in the series. The difficult circumstances that surrounded the second Quest for Glory weren’t really anyone’s fault, just the inevitable consequence of a company making a very necessary transition. I think the Coles as well, at least now that passions have cooled, see it the same way.

- Pete

September 13, 2016 at 1:55 pm

Ooh, I think KQV was even worse than IV in that way–most notoriously with the save-the-mouse puzzle. KQVI was when they finally cracked the code, possibly thanks to Jane Jensen. I hope you’ll give that one its own article when the time comes–it really was a big step forward.

- Jimmy Maher

September 13, 2016 at 2:17 pm

Ah, okay, maybe I’m mis-remembering. I’d seen a few reviews recently, including Scorpia’s in Computer Gaming World, that said it was very easy in comparison to its predecessors. But reviews in those days did tend to be all over the place…

- Alexander Freeman

September 13, 2016 at 9:05 pm

I definitely agree KQ5 was more broken than KQ4. It had unforeseeable ways to render the game unwinnable like the mouse situation and lots of ways to die. I have little good to say about it. I don’t understand why people like KQ6 so much, though.

- Jon G

September 14, 2016 at 4:18 am

I’d say KQV is generally much easier than IV, with one or two puzzles that are arguably less fair than IV’s worst. There are definitely plenty of places to get stuck but the smaller, more linear game world makes exhausting all the potential options more manageable.

- Alexander Freeman

September 14, 2016 at 4:36 pm

True, exhausting every possibility in KQ5 is indeed easier thanks to the limited number of things the point-and-click interface allows you to do. (In fact, that’s the ONLY way to solve some of the puzzles because of how little sense they make.) Because of that, it is easier, but it’s still FAR less fair.

- James

October 24, 2016 at 5:10 am

Sierra stocks took a major dive in the late 80’s as the market dropped EGA like a rock. The stockmarkets were stating doom n gloom. Corey Cole even recalls this era. Sierra’s main catalogue was EGA. QfG2 was their saviour during this period until KGV was out. If KQV flopped, Sierra would have gone under.

- Jimmy Maher

October 24, 2016 at 6:28 am

I’m sorry, but that’s just not correct, and repeating it without substantiation won’t make it so. It would be difficult for Sierra’s stocks to take a “major dive in the late 80s” considering they only went public in October of 1988. The share price in fact doubled before the end of the decade. Here is a more complete picture of Sierra’s (excellent) financials during this period, taken from their 1991 annual report.

- James

October 26, 2016 at 11:16 am

I slightly correct myself with time period (more 1990/91). Sierra stocks were in trouble of taking a massive dive.

Non-VGA titles took a drastic drop with retailers planning not to stock any titles that were non-VGA. Considering most of Sierra’s titles during this period were EGA, this was a major issue. Sierra was also investing in the Sierra Network and a lot of their finances were tied up in this venture. The outlook was “the overall industry is stuck in something of a rut.” They expected retailers to dump stock for the Xmas period at markdown prices and also expecting massive returns of products. This is very similar to the cartridge fiasco in 1983/4 period. This from a stock market report.

Ken definitely had a lot to worry about.

As Corey Cole explains:

“The article was very accurate. While Sierra switched to the parserless VGA version of SCI, it was clear that most games would miss Christmas. Management moved every artist and programmer except the Quest for Glory II team to King’s Quest V. Our team was left alone because we were the sacrificial lamb – The last Sierra game to use 16 color EGA while everything newer went to 256 color VGA.

The day King’s Quest V launched, the entire back-catalog of EGA games died. Prior to that, the back-catalog was responsible for over 50% of Sierra’s annual sales. After KQV, that number dropped to under 20%. The “half-life” of a new game – the time in which it would sell 50% of its lifetime units – dropped overnight from 18 months to 3 months.

Had we known then what we knew a year later, I might have fought to make QG2 a VGA game. But I doubt it would have helped – Sierra needed to ship something that Christmas, and we were the closest to complete when they made the decision. As it is, we weren’t ready until late November (that’s VERY late for the Christmas season). Initial sales were fine, then… that 3-month half-life thing kicked in.”

Lorelei Shannon:

“They called an all-hands meeting in the local movie theater (the only one on Oakhurst). Ken announced that due to tough times the company had to make some layoffs. Then we were all given envelopes. When you opened the envelope, you found out of you still had a job or not. Wheeeee!”

- Manu Alvarado

September 11, 2016 at 4:59 pm

Thank you for sharing this article, and the nuances that went into the design of one of my favorite game series of all time. It is downright refreshing to understand many of the things that happened behind the scenes, and finally why their name was abruptly changed.

Will stay tuned for the next article, and should you have more information on other Sierra classics, it would be great to read as well.

- iPadCary

September 14, 2016 at 9:26 pm

Ahhh, black & white Macintosh games coming up next!
Can’t wait!

Cracking Open the Mac
September 16, 2016

The biggest problem with the Macintosh hardware was pretty obvious, which was its limited expandability. But the problem wasn’t really technical as much as philosophical, which was that we wanted to eliminate the inevitable complexity that was a consequence of hardware expandability, both for the user and the developer, by having every Macintosh be identical. It was a valid point of view, even somewhat courageous, but not very practical, because things were still changing too fast in the computer industry for it to work, driven by the relentless tides of Moore’s Law.

— original Macintosh team-member Andy Hertzfeld

Jef Raskin and Steve Jobs didn’t agree on much, but they did agree on their loathing for expansion slots. The absence of slots was one of the bedrock attributes of Raskin’s original vision for the Macintosh, the most immediately obvious difference between it and Apple’s then-current flagship product, the Apple II. In contrast to Steve Wozniak’s beloved hacker plaything, Raskin’s computer for the people would be as effortless to set up and use as a stereo, a television, or a toaster.

When Jobs took over the Macintosh project — some, including Raskin himself, would say stole it — he changed just about every detail except this one. Yet some members of the tiny team he put together, fiercely loyal to their leader and his vision of a “computer for the rest of us” though they were, were beginning to question the wisdom of this aspect of the machine by the time the Macintosh came together in its final form. It was a little hard in January of 1984 not to question the wisdom of shipping an essentially unexpandable appliance with just 128 K of memory and a single floppy-disk drive for a price of $2495. At some level, it seemed, this just wasn’t how the computer market worked.

Jobs would reply that the whole point of the Macintosh was to change how computers worked, and with them the workings of the computer market. He wasn’t entirely without concrete arguments to back up his position. One had only to glance over at the IBM clone market — always Jobs’s first choice as the antonym to the Mac — to see how chaotic a totally open platform could be. Clone users were getting all too familiar with the IRQ and memory-address conflicts that could result from plugging two cards that were determined not to play nice together into the same machine, and software developers were getting used to chasing down obscure bugs that only popped up when their programs ran on certain combinations of hardware.

Viewed in the big picture, we could actually say that Jobs was prescient in his determination to stamp out that chaos, to make every Macintosh the same as every other, to make the platform in general a thoroughly known quantity for software developers. The norm in personal computing as most people know it — whether we’re talking phones, tablets, laptops, or increasingly even desktop computers — has long since become sealed boxes of one stripe or another. But there are some important factors that make said sealed boxes a better idea now than they were back then. For one thing, the pace of hardware and software development alike has slowed enough that a new computer can be viable just as it was purchased for ten years or more. For another, prices have come down enough that throwing a device away and starting over with a new one isn’t so cost-prohibitive as it once was. With personal computers still exotic, expensive machines in a constant state of flux at the time of the Mac’s introduction, the computer as a sealed appliance was a vastly more problematic proposition.

Determined to do everything possible to keep users out of the Mac’s innards, Apple used Torx screws for which screwdrivers weren’t commonly available to seal it, and even threatened users with electrocution should they persist in trying to open it. The contrast with the Apple II, whose top could be popped in seconds using nothing more than a pair of hands to reveal seven tempting expansion slots, could hardly have been more striking.

It was the early adopters who spotted the potential in that first slow, under-powered Macintosh, the people who believed Jobs’s promise that the machine’s success or failure would be determined by the number who bought it in its first hundred days on the market, who bore the brunt of Apple’s decision to seal it as tightly as Fort Knox. When Apple in September of 1984 released the so-called “Fat Mac” with 512 K of memory, the quantity that in the opinion of just about everyone — including most of those at Apple not named Steve Jobs — the machine should have shipped with in the first place, owners of the original model were offered the opportunity to bring their machines to their dealers and have them retro-fitted to the new specifications for $995. This “deal” sparked considerable outrage and even a letter-writing campaign that tried to shame Apple into bettering the terms of the upgrade. Disgruntled existing owners pointed out that their total costs for a 512 K Macintosh amounted to $3490, while a Fat Mac could be bought outright by a prospective new member of the Macintosh fold for $2795. “Apple should have bent over backward for the people who supported it in the beginning,” said one of the protest’s ringleaders. “I’m never going to feel the same about Apple again.” Apple, for better or for worse never a company that was terribly susceptible to such public shaming, sent their disgruntled customers a couple of free software packages and told them to suck it up.

The Macintosh Plus

Barely fifteen months later, when Apple released the Macintosh Plus with 1 MB of memory among other advancements, the merry-go-round spun again. This time the upgrade would cost owners of the earlier models over $1000, along with lots of downtime while their machines sat in queues at their dealers. With software developers rushing to take advantage of the increased memory of each successive model, dedicated users could hardly stand to regard each successive upgrade as optional. As things stood, then, they were effectively paying a service charge of about $1000 per year just to remain a part of the Macintosh community. Owning a Mac was like owning a car that had to go into the shop for a week for a complete engine overhaul once every year. Apple, then as now, was famous for the loyalty of their users, but this was stretching even that legendary goodwill to the breaking point.

For some time voices within Apple had been mumbling that this approach simply couldn’t continue if the Macintosh was to become a serious, long-lived computing platform; Apple simply had to open the Mac up, even if that entailed making it a little more like all those hated beige IBM clones. During the first months after the launch, Steve Jobs was able to stamp out these deviations from his dogma, but as sales stalled and his relationship with John Sculley, the CEO he’d hand-picked to run the company he’d co-founded, deteriorated, the grumblers grew steadily more persistent and empowered.

The architect of one of the more startling about-faces in Apple’s corporate history would be Jean-Louis Gassée, a high-strung marketing executive newly arrived in Silicon Valley from Apple’s French subsidiary. Gassée privately — very privately in the first months after his arrival, when Jobs’s word still was law — agreed with many on Apple’s staff that the only way to achieve the dream of making the Macintosh into a standard to rival or beat the Intel/IBM/Microsoft trifecta was to open the platform. Thus he quietly encouraged a number of engineers to submit proposals on what direction they would take the platform in if given free rein. He came to favor the ideas of Mike Dhuey and Brian Berkeley, two young engineers who envisioned a machine with slots as plentiful and easily accessible as those of the Apple II or an IBM clone. Their “Little Big Mac” would be based around the 32-bit Motorola 68020 chip rather than the 16-bit 68000 of the current models, and would also sport color — another Jobsian heresy.

In May of 1985, Jobs made the mistake of trying to recruit Gassée into a rather clumsy conspiracy he was formulating to oust Sculley, with whom he was now in almost constant conflict. Rather than jump aboard the coup train, Gassée promptly blew the whistle to Sculley, precipitating an open showdown between Jobs and Sculley in which, much to Jobs’s surprise, the entirety of Apple’s board backed Sculley. Stripped of his power and exiled to a small office in a remote corner of Apple’s Cupertino campus, Jobs would soon depart amid recriminations and lawsuits to found a new venture called NeXT.

Gassée’s betrayal of Jobs’s confidence may have had a semi-altruistic motivation. Convinced that the Mac needed to open up to survive, perhaps he concluded that that would only happen if Jobs was out of the picture. Then again, perhaps it came down to a motivation as base as personal jealously. With a penchant for leather and a love of inscrutable phraseology — “the Apple II smelled like infinity” is a typical phrase from his manifesto The Third Apple, “an invitation to voyage into a region of the mind where technology and poetry exist side by side, feeding each other” — Gassée seemed to self-consciously adopt the persona of a Gallic version of Jobs himself. But regardless, with Jobs now out of the picture Gassée was able to consolidate his own power base, taking over Jobs’s old role as leader of the Macintosh division. He went out and bought a personalized license plate for his sports car: “OPEN MAC.”

Coming some four months after Jobs’s final departure, the Mac Plus already included such signs of the changing times as a keyboard with arrow keys and a numeric keypad, anathema to Jobs’s old mouse-only orthodoxy. But much, much bigger changes were also well underway. Apple’s 1985 annual report, released in the spring of 1986, dropped a bombshell: a Mac with slots was on the way. Dhuey and Berkeley’s open Macintosh was now proceeding… well, openly.

The Macintosh II

When it debuted five months behind schedule in March of 1987, the Macintosh II was greeted as a stunning but welcome repudiation of much of what the Mac had supposedly stood for. In place of the compact all-in-one-case designs of the past, the new Mac was a big, chunky box full of empty space and empty slots — six of them altogether — with the monitor an item to be purchased separately and perched on top. Indeed, one could easily mistake the Mac II at a glance for a high-end IBM clone; its big, un-stylish case even included a cooling fan, an item that placed even higher than expansion slots and arrow keys on Steve Jobs’s old list of forbidden attributes.

Apple’s commitment to their new vision of a modular, open Macintosh was so complete that the Mac II didn’t include any on-board video at all; the buyer of the $6500 machine would still have to buy the video card of her choice separately. Apple’s own high-end video card offered display capabilities unprecedented in a personal computer: a palette of over 16 million colors, 256 of them displayable onscreen at any one time at resolutions as high as 640 X 480. And, in keeping with the philosophy behind the Mac II as a whole, the machine was ready and willing to accept a still more impressive graphics card just as soon as someone managed to make one. The Mac II actually represented colors internally using 48 bits, allowing some 281 trillion different shades. These idealized colors were then translated automatically into the closest approximations the actual display hardware could manage. This fidelity to the subtlest vagaries of color would make the Mac II the favorite of people working in many artistic and image-processing fields, especially when those aforementioned even better video cards began to hit the market in earnest. Even today no other platform can match the Mac in its persnickety attention to the details of accurate color reproduction.

Some of the Mac II’s capabilities truly were ahead of their time. Here we see a desktop extended across two monitors, each powered by its own video card.

The irony wasn’t lost on journalists or users when, just weeks after the Mac II’s debut, IBM debuted their new PS/2 line, marked by sleeker, slimmer cases and many features that would once have been placed on add-on-cards now integrated into the motherboards. While Apple was suddenly encouraging the sort of no-strings-attached hardware hacking on the Macintosh that had made their earlier Apple II so successful, IBM was trying to stamp that sort of thing out on their own heretofore open platform via their new Micro Channel Architecture, which demanded that anyone other than IBM who wanted to expand a PS/2 machine negotiate a license and pay for the privilege. “The original Mac’s lack of slots stunted its growth and forced Apple to expand the machine by offering new models,” wrote Byte. “With the Mac II, Apple — and, more importantly, third-party developers — can expand the machine radically without forcing you to buy a new computer. This is the design on which Apple plans to build its Macintosh empire.” It seemed like the whole world of personal computing was turning upside down, Apple turning into IBM and IBM turning into Apple.

The Macintosh SE

If so, however, Apple’s empire would be a very exclusive place. By the time you’d bought a monitor, video card, hard drive, keyboard — yes, even the keyboard was a separate item — and other needful accessories, a Mac II system could rise uncomfortably close to the $10,000 mark. Those who weren’t quite flush enough to splash out that much money could still enjoy a taste of the Mac’s new spirit of openness via the simultaneously released Mac SE, which cost $3699 for a hard-drive-equipped model. The SE was a 68000-based machine that looked much like its forefathers — built-in black-and-white monitor included — but did have a single expansion slot inside its case. The single slot was a little underwhelming in comparison to the Mac II, but it was better than nothing, even if Apple did still recommend that customers take their machines to their dealers if they wanted to actually install something in it. Apple’s not-terribly-helpful advice for those needing to employ more than one expansion card was to buy an “integrated” card that combined multiple functions. If you couldn’t find a card that happened to combine exactly the functions you needed, you were presumably just out of luck.

During the final years of the 1980s, Apple would continue to release new models of the Mac II and the Mac SE, now established as the two separate Macintosh flavors. These updates enhanced the machines with such welcome goodies as 68030 processors and more memory, but, thanks to the wonders of open architecture, didn’t immediately invalidate the models that had come before. The original Mac II, for instance, could be easily upgraded from the 68020 to the 68030 just by dropping a card into one of its slots.

The Steve Jobs-less Apple, now thoroughly under the control of the more sober and pragmatic John Sculley, toned down the old visionary rhetoric in favor of a more businesslike focus. Even the engineers dutifully toed the new corporate line, at least publicly, and didn’t hesitate to denigrate Apple’s erstwhile visionary-in-chief in the process. “Steve Jobs thought that he was right and didn’t care what the market wanted,” Mike Dhuey said in an interview to accompany the Mac II’s release. “It’s like he thought everyone wanted to buy a size-nine shoe. The Mac II is specifically a market-driven machine, rather than what we wanted for ourselves. My job is to take all the market needs and make the best computer. It’s sort of like musicians — if they make music only to satisfy their own needs, they lose their audience.” Apple, everyone was trying to convey, had grown up and left all that changing-the-world business behind along with Steve Jobs. They were now as sober and serious as IBM, their machines ready to take their places as direct competitors to those of Big Blue and the clonesters.

To a rather surprising degree, the world of business computing accepted Apple and the Mac’s new persona. Through 1986, the machines to which the Macintosh was most frequently compared were the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. In the wake of the Mac II and Mac SE, however, the Macintosh was elevated to a different plane. Now the omnipresent point of comparison was high-end IBM compatibles; the Amiga and ST, despite their architectural similarities, seldom even saw their existence acknowledged in relation to the Mac. There were some good reasons for this neglect beyond the obvious ones of pricing and parent-company rhetoric. For one, the Macintosh was always a far more polished experience for the end user than either of the other 68000-based machines. For another, Apple had enjoyed a far more positive reputation with corporate America than Commodore or Atari had even well before any of the three platforms in question had existed. Still, the nature of the latest magazine comparisons was a clear sign that Apple’s bid to move the Mac upscale was succeeding.

Whatever one thought of Apple’s new, more buttoned-down image, there was no denying that the market welcomed the open Macintosh with a matching set of open arms. Byte went so far as to call the Mac II “the most important product that Apple has released since the original Apple II,” thus elevating it to a landmark status greater even that that of the first Mac model. While history hasn’t been overly kind to that judgment, the fact remains that third-party software and hardware developers, who had heretofore been constipated by the frustrating limitations of the closed Macintosh architecture, burst out now in myriad glorious ways. “We can’t think of everything,” said an ebulliant Jean-Louis Gassée. “The charm of a flexible, open product is that people who know something you don’t know will take care of it. That’s what they’re doing in the marketplace.” The biannual Macworld shows gained a reputation as the most exciting events on the industry’s calendar, the beat to which every journalist lobbied to be assigned. The January 1988 show in San Francisco, the first to reflect the full impact of Apple’s philosophical about-face, had 20,000 attendees on its first day, and could have had a lot more than that had there been a way to pack them into the exhibit hall. Annual Macintosh sales more than tripled between 1986 and 1988, with cumulative sales hitting 2 million machines in the latter year. And already fully 200,000 of the Macs out there by that point were Mac IIs, an extraordinary number really given that machine’s high price. Granted, the Macintosh had hit the 2-million mark fully three years behind the pace Steve Jobs had foreseen shortly after the original machine’s introduction. But nevertheless, it did look like at least some of the more modest of his predictions were starting to come true at last.

An Apple Watch 27 years before its time? Just one example of the extraordinary innovation of the Macintosh market was the WristMac from Ex Machina, a “personal information manager” that could be synchronized with a Mac to take the place of your appointment calendar, to-do list, and Rolodex.

While the Macintosh was never going to seriously challenge the IBM standard on the desks of corporate America when it came to commonplace business tasks like word processing and accounting, it was becoming a fixture in design departments of many stripes, and the staple platform of entire niche industries — most notably, the publishing industry, thanks to the revolutionary combination of Aldus PageMaker (or one of the many other desktop-publishing packages that followed it) and an Apple LaserWriter printer (or one of the many other laser printers that followed it). By 1989, Apple could claim about 10 percent of the business-computing market, making them the third biggest player there after IBM and Compaq — and of course the only significant player there not running a Microsoft operating system. What with Apple’s premium prices and high profit margins, third place really wasn’t so bad, especially in comparison with the moribund state of the Macintosh of just a few years before.

Steve Jobs and John Sculley in happier times.

So, the Macintosh was flying pretty high as the curtain began to come down on the 1980s. It’s instructive and more than a little ironic to contrast the conventional wisdom that accompanied that success with the conventional wisdom of today. Despite the strong counterexample of Nintendo’s exploding walled garden over in the videogame-console space, the success the Macintosh had enjoyed since Apple’s decision to open up the platform was taken as incontrovertible proof that openness in terms of software and hardware alike was the only viable model for computing’s future. In today’s world of closed iOS and Android ecosystems and computing via disposable black boxes, such an assertion sounds highly naive.

But even more striking is the shift in the perception of Steve Jobs. In the late 1980s, he was loathed even by many strident Mac fans, whilst being regarded in the business and computer-industry press and, indeed, much of the popular press in general as a dilettante, a spoiled enfant terrible whose ill-informed meddling had very nearly sunk a billion-dollar corporation. John Sculley, by contrast, was lauded as exactly the responsible grown-up Apple had needed to scrub the company of Jobs’s starry-eyed hippie meanderings and lead them into their bright businesslike present. Today popular opinion on the two men has neatly reversed itself: Sculley is seen as the unimaginative corporate wonk who mismanaged Jobs’s brilliant vision, Jobs as the greatest — or at least the coolest — computing visionary of all time. In the end, of course, the truth must lie somewhere in the middle. Sculley’s strengths tended to be Jobs’s weaknesses, and vice versa. Apple would have been far better off had the two been able to find a way to continue to work together. But, in Jobs’s case especially, that would have required a fundamental shift in who these men were.

The loss among Apple’s management of that old Jobsian spirit of zealotry, overblown and impractical though it could sometimes be, was felt keenly by the Macintosh even during these years of considerable success. Only Jean-Louis Gassée was around to try to provide a splash of the old spirit of iconoclastic idealism, and everyone had to agree in the end that he made a rather second-rate Steve Jobs. When Sculley tried on the mantle of visionary — as when he named his fluffy corporate autobiography Odyssey and subtitled it “a journey of adventure, ideas, and the future” — it never quite seemed to fit him right. The diction was always off somehow, like he was playing a Silicon Valley version of Mad Libs. “This is an adventure of passion and romance, not just progress and profit,” he told the January 1988 Macworld attendees, apparently feeling able to wax a little more poetic than usual before this audience of true believers. “Together we set a course for the world which promises to elevate the self-esteem of the individual rather than a future of subservience to impersonal institutions.” (Apple detractors might note that elevating their notoriously smug users’ self-esteem did indeed sometimes seem to be what the company was best at.)

It was hard not to feel that the Mac had lost something. Jobs had lured Sculley from Pepsi because the latter was widely regarded as a genius of consumer marketing; the Pepsi Challenge, one of the most iconic campaigns in the long history of the cola wars, had been his brainchild. And yet, even before Jobs’s acrimonious departure, Sculley, bowing to pressure from Apple’s stockholders, had oriented the Macintosh almost entirely toward taking on the faceless legions of IBM and Compaq that dominated business computing. Consumer computing was largely left to take care of itself in the form of the 8-bit Apple II line, whose final model, the technically impressive but hugely overpriced IIGS, languished with virtually no promotion. Sculley, a little out of his depth in Silicon Valley, was just following the conventional wisdom that business computing was where the real money was. Businesspeople tended to be turned off by wild-eyed talk of changing the world; thus Apple’s new, more sober facade. And they were equally turned off by any whiff of fun or, God forbid, games; thus the old sense of whimsy that had been one of the original Mac’s most charming attributes seemed to leach away a little more with each successive model.

Those who pointed out that business computing had a net worth many times that of home computing weren’t wrong, but they were missing something important and at least in retrospect fairly obvious: namely, the fact that most of the companies who could make good use of computers had already bought them by now. The business-computing industry would doubtless continue to be profitable for many and even to grow steadily alongside the economy, but its days of untapped potential and explosive growth were behind it. Consumer computing, on the other hand, was still largely virgin territory. Millions of people were out there who had been frustrated by the limitations of the machines at the heart of the brief-lived first home-computer boom, but who were still willing to be intrigued by the next generation of computing technology, still willing to be sold on computers as an everyday lifestyle accessory. Give them a truly elegant, easy-to-use computer — like, say, the Macintosh — and who knew what might happen. This was the vision Jef Raskin had had in starting the ball rolling on the Mac back in 1979, the one that had still been present, if somewhat obscured even then by a high price, in the first released version of the machine with its “the computer for the rest of us” tagline. And this was the vision that Sculley betrayed after Jobs’s departure by keeping prices sky-high and ignoring the consumer market.

“We don’t want to castrate our computers to make them inexpensive,” said Jean-Louis Gassée. “We make Hondas, we don’t make Yugos.” Fair enough, but the Mac was priced closer to Mercedes than Honda territory. And it was common knowledge that Apple’s profit margins remained just about the fattest in the industry, thus raising the question of how much “castration” would really be necessary to make a more reasonably priced Mac. The situation reached almost surrealistic levels with the release of the Mac IIfx in March of 1990, an admittedly “wicked fast” addition to the product line but one that cost $9870 sans monitor or video card, thus replacing the metaphorical with the literal in Gassée’s favored comparison: a complete Mac IIfx system cost more than most actual brand-new Hondas. By now, the idea of the Mac as “the computer for the rest of us” seemed a bitter joke.

Apple was choosing to fight over scraps of the business market when an untapped land of milk and honey — the land of consumer computing — lay just over the horizon. Instead of the Macintosh, the IBM-compatible machines lurched over in fits and starts to fill that space, adopting in the process most of the Mac’s best ideas, even if they seldom managed to implement those ideas quite as elegantly. By the time Apple woke up to what was happening in the 1990s and rushed to fill the gap with a welter of more reasonably priced consumer-grade Macs, it was too late. Computing as most Americans knew it was exclusively a Wintel world, Macs incompatible, artsy-fartsy oddballs. All but locked out of the fastest-growing sectors of personal computing, the very sectors the Macintosh had been so perfectly poised to absolutely own, Apple was destined to have a very difficult 1990s. So difficult, in fact, that they would survive the decade’s many lows only by the skin of their teeth.

This cartoon by Tom Meyer, published in the San Francisco Chronicle, shows the emerging new popular consensus about Apple by the early 1990s: increasingly overpriced, bloated designs and increasingly clueless management.

Now that the 68000 Wars have faded into history and passions have cooled, we can see that the Macintosh was in some ways almost as ill-served by its parent company as was the Commodore Amiga by its. Apple’s management in the post-Jobs era, like Commodore’s, seemed in some fundamental way not to get the very creation they’d unleashed on the world. And so, as with the Amiga, it was left to the users of the Macintosh to take up the slack, to keep the vision thing in the equation. Thankfully, they did a hell of job with that. Something in the Mac’s DNA, something which Apple’s new sobriety could mask but never destroy, led it to remain a hotbed of inspiring innovations that had little to do with the nuts and bolts of running a day-to-day business. Sometimes seemingly in spite of Apple best efforts, the most committed Mac loyalists never forgot the Jobsian rhetoric that had greeted the platform’s introduction, continuing to see it as something far more compelling and beautiful than a tool for business. A 1988 survey by Macworld magazine revealed that 85 percent of their readers, the true Mac hardcore, kept their Macs at home, where they used them at least some of the time for pleasure rather than business.

So, the Mac world remained the first place to look if you wanted to see what the artists and the dreamers were getting up to with computers. We’ve already seen some examples of their work in earlier articles. In the course of the next few, we’ll see some more.

(Sources: Amazing Computing of February 1988, April 1988, May 1988, and August 1988; Info of July/August 1988; Byte of May 1986, June 1986, November 1986, April 1987, October 1987, and June 1990; InfoWorld of November 26 1984; Computer Chronicles television episodes entitled “The New Macs,” “Macintosh Business Software,” “Macworld Special 1988,” “Business Graphics Part 1,” “Macworld Boston 1988,” “Macworld San Francisco 1989,” and “Desktop Presentation Software Part 1”; the books West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer by Frank Rose, Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Computer Company by Owen W. Linzmayer, and Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything by Steven Levy; Andy Hertzfeld’s website Folklore.)

Comments
36 Responses

- Ken Brubaker

September 16, 2016 at 6:57 pm

There were actually 7 slots in the Apple II, not 6, with slot 7 having a few extra signals for video processing or something like that.

- Jerry

September 17, 2016 at 3:44 am

The Apple II and II+ had 8 slots, numbered 0 through 7. The Apple IIe and IIgs had only 7 compatible slots, 1 through 7. The IIe had an auxiliary slot and the IIgs had a memory-expansion slot, however.

- Jimmy Maher

September 17, 2016 at 7:46 am

I vacillated a bit between six and seven slots because of that video slot. I wasn’t sure if it was quite like the rest. But I changed it to seven now. Thanks!

- David Cornelson

September 16, 2016 at 7:54 pm

I was at a publishing company in Milwaukee in 1985 when the IT director invited everyone to come into the board room. Sitting at the end of a 20′ table was the first Macintosh. Everyone had fun with the “mouse” and it turned into a small cocktail party.

Afterwards, it landed on my desk where I started playing with it and just out of the blue thought of digitizing some of our standard artwork. That was a huge enlightenment for the IT director and over the years they adopted Macs for all of their markup.

My sister still works there. On Macs.

- Lisa H.

September 16, 2016 at 8:37 pm

For one thing, the pace of hardware and software development alike has slowed enough that a new computer can be viable just as it was purchased for ten years or more.

Ten years? Define “viable”.

I do have a seven-year-old laptop, but I doubt I will still be using it in another three years; it doesn’t run Windows 10 very well (despite Microsoft’s claims it is less resource-intensive than Windows 7) and getting a replacement battery or power supply has become a crapshoot since the manufacturer has moved on. My ancient Samsung flip-phone that is probably the oldest model Verizon will tolerate is viable in the sense that it can make and receive calls and plain text messages, but that’s about it (don’t bother trying to load a webpage on it!).

But at least I still use those things. If we will speak of Apple, then the iPad my husband won in a raffle in 2010 is viable in the sense that it will turn on, talk to the network, and run whatever is already installed on it. But since it cannot be upgraded past iOS 5, it’s been left in the dust, and even from the beginning it was kind of a pain even to read the web because its relatively small amount of RAM meant a lot of browser crashes. For practical purposes I don’t consider it viable anymore (and it was immediately displaced by the Kindle I got this past Christmas – I don’t think I’ve turned the iPad on since).

2 cents, YMMV, etc., etc.

even threatened users with electrocution should they persist in trying to open it.

I suppose if you manged to damage the inbuilt CRT…?

thanks to the revolutionary combination of Aldus PageMaker […] and an Apple LaserWriter printer

My high school newspaper’s setup, natch (although we did manual pasteup for the full size sheets).

the Mac IIx in March of 1990, an admittedly “wicked fast” addition to the product line but one that cost $9870 sans monitor or video card, thus replacing the metaphorical with the literal in Gassée’s favored comparison: a complete Mac IIx system

I think we had one of these in that newsroom. Wow.

I was about to make a general remark about how 1. I was there in the mid-90s so maybe it hadn’t been purchased for quite that price and 2. both the Steves went to that same high school and maybe that had something to do with it, but apparently Steve Wozniak made a gift in 1986 (see near the end of that section). I guess maybe they (we) had money still hanging around to buy a Mac IIx.

- Joachim

September 16, 2016 at 10:26 pm

I do suspect your seven year old computer would have been more viable today if it was a desktop computer. That was what the Mac was, and for the most part I would agree with Jimmy Maher that a ten year old desktop would be viable today (if it was a decent setup in the first place, and have not been used by the kind of person who ends up with viruses all the time). And it wouldn’t have any of the typical laptop battery issues, either.

- Darius Bacon

September 16, 2016 at 11:01 pm

I still use a 2007 MacBook Pro for some things. I’ll probably pass it on next year, but it runs modern Mac software and it’s not dramatically slower than my 2012 ThinkPad, which in turn is still in the same league as new machines. A 4-year-old computer was super outdated in the 80s and 90s.

- Jimmy Maher

September 17, 2016 at 6:44 am

I was thinking more of desktop systems when I made that comparison. I think a desktop purchased in 2006 would still be perfectly viable today as the proverbial “grandparents’ computer”: i.e., fine for browsing the web, doing email, writing the occasional document with Microsoft Office, etc.

The mobile world is more in flux, and thus closer to the situation of the 1980s, but I think even it shows signs of settling down. Many have blamed the slowing pace of really noticeable technical advancement for slowing sales of the iPhone. While some people will always want the latest and greatest, for many the improvements in the newest models just don’t justify upgrading. So, while few mobile devices purchased in 2006 are viable today, that may be much less true in 2026 of mobile devices purchased today. We shall see. Personally, I’m still quite happy with an iPad 2 from 2011 — although I literally never use it for anything other than playing music, so that may have something to do with it — and a Kindle PaperWhite from 2012. My phone is a new(ish) Samsung something or other (a fairly cheap-o model), which I bought under duress because my creaky old Samsung S2 from God knows when was dying. But then, I’m pretty much in the grumpy-old-man “a phone is just a phone to me” camp when it comes to mobiles. With my laptop, where I need to be able to do Real Work, I’m much more demanding. I absolutely love the Dell XPS 13 I bought last year, but I doubt I’ll keep it for too many years because of the battery issue if nothing else.

- Lisa H.

September 17, 2016 at 8:42 pm

I was thinking more of desktop systems when I made that comparison.

If you say so, but the preceding sentence did say “phones, tablets, laptops, or increasingly even desktop computers” – i.e., it sounds like the first three are the real examples under consideration.

- Gnoman

September 18, 2016 at 12:22 am

Far more questionable is the assertion that a “walled garden” exists in any major form in the desktop world. Counting all variants and versions as one OS for simplicity (All Windows versions are Windows, all Linux distros are Linux, etc), the most popular desktop OS is Windows, where Microsoft periodically tries to put a walled garden of some sort in (dismally failing each time) but you can still install any software that’s compatible with the system, and a significant (and increasing) portion of the market is FOSS.

The second most popular OS, Linux, is derived from a philosophy that walled gardens are morally reprehensible. You won’t find much support for one there.

The closest thing to a successful walled garden at the software level in the desktop market is Steam, which is just one (albeit a massively popular one) of many distribution channels.

On a hardware level, the massive variety of hardware configurations that exist today is no less, and very probably greater, than it was during the rise of the Mac. The main difference is that the rise of abstraction layers mean that it largely doesn’t matter precisely what hardware you have, as long as it meets minimum standards.

- Jimmy Maher

September 18, 2016 at 7:10 am

Yes, but where is it asserted that a walled garden exists in the desktop-computing world?

- Jimmy Maher

September 18, 2016 at 7:07 am

Well, that paragraph is discussing reasons for the modern “black-box phenomenon” holistically. As of 2016 those reasons are probably more a case of the factor we’ve been discussing in these comments — the slowing pace of hardware development — in the case of desktop and perhaps some laptop computers, and the other I mentioned — the relative inexpensiveness that makes it feel reasonable for many people to throw devices away after two or three years — in the case of most mobile devices. But, I do think we can expect to see even the mobile world settle into much longer product cycles in the coming years, barring another major, disruptive breakthrough like the iPhone and iPad (and arguably the Kindle).

- Gnoman

September 19, 2016 at 1:30 am

” Jobs was prescient in his determination to stamp out that chaos …The norm in personal computing as most people know it … even desktop computers — has long since become sealed boxes of one stripe or another. ”

How is it possible to take this as anything but saying that the desktop computer is becoming a “walled garden”? Maybe you didn’t mean to include a software walled garden of the sort that phones have, but on the hardware side you all-but-state that we have become the “Take your shit sandwich and be happy for it” market that Jobs envisioned all those years ago.

Desktops are largely immune to the “black box” phenomena, judging by the fact that prebuilt systems make up a very small portion of the desktop market and a far smaller portion of the personal (the vast majority of prebuilds are bought in bulk by companies) desktop market. Outside of businesses, the only people that buy prebuilds are those who don’t know any better or just want a basic internet device (a market that is plummeting to extinction in the face of the smartphone and tablet) on one hand or those that find it more economical to use one as a base for upgrading (which could hardly be considered to be a case of a “black box”) on the other.

A much bigger part of the market is in the “buy everything individual to get your system” as well as the “drop in a new video card and some RAM and you’ll be good for another three or four years” category – proving Wozniak and Gassée to be one hundred percent correct and consigning the vision of Jobs and Rankin to the ash heap of history.

- Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2016 at 5:30 am

It seems we may have our terms a little confused. The term “walled garden” as I’ve always heard it used, and as I use it here, applies strictly to software, referring to a curated software ecosystem under the control of a corporate entity. I believe it dates back to The Cathedral & The Bazaar by Eric Raymond, if you’d like to get a sense of the original usage and the argument from which it sprang.

If we do wish to discuss hardware: I would suggest first of all that the adverb “increasingly,” which you snipped, might have been better left in — i.e., this is a trend that I see, not a reached destination. But in my experience, very, very few people are still buying a case and a motherboard and all the rest and putting a computer together. I am, other hacker types are — and I assume we’ll continue to do so as long as it’s practical. But everyone else I know goes to a department store and just buys a finished computer, then usually never opens it even if opening it is possible. And increasingly ;) often it’s not possible: I’m seeing a lot more desktop models on the shelves as sealed as any tablet, sometimes for instance with the computer and monitor built into one slim case. And of course, as you say, many more people are electing not to buy desktops at all in favor of sealed mobile boxes of one stripe or another.

- Ian

September 17, 2016 at 1:14 pm

I’m still running a laptop from 2006, a IBM Thinkpad Z61p with a Core2 Duo T7600, 3GB RAM, 500GB SSD, ATi FireGL v5200 256MB with 1920 x 1200 15.4″ display, and a fingerprint scanner (Apple bought the rights to use this on their iPhone 5 I believe, although possibly just the software. I need to double check). It has USB 3.0 added in the ExpressCard/54 port. It can drive four screens with the right docking station, and that can even host a more recent desktop graphics card.

All this runs Windows 7 with absolute ease and it may even run 10 to a reasonable degree. Granted I do not do gaming on it, but apart from that it runs most uptodate software really well. I’m in no hurry to stop using this laptop, even though I have a more powerful desktop computer. However it all depends on what laptop brand and model you have, because there are other laptops in our family that are cheap Acer models, which on paper look the equal of the IBM Thinkpad, but in reality they cannot touch the performance and reliablility of the Thinkpad.

- Steve-O

September 16, 2016 at 10:50 pm

One small correction: “Macworld” is spelled with a lowercase “w” (in contrast to the legitimately camelCase “MacUser”). A minor thing, I know, but a definite pet peeve of my several friends who have worked there.

- Steve-O

September 16, 2016 at 10:53 pm

And now, a correction to my correction: The Swedish version of Macworld is, indeed, spelled “MacWorld” for some reason. That’s the only one, though.

- Jimmy Maher

September 17, 2016 at 6:53 am

Not at all. Thank you!

- Keith Palmer

September 16, 2016 at 11:10 pm

I have to admit that when I first heard you were working on an “Apple in the late 1980s” post, I got to wondering how I’d react to it, given how easy it seems for hindsight to provide “pride goeth before a fall” interpretations… but once I’d read it, as with your previous Macintosh post I thought “yes, that seems pretty fair.” Perhaps the comment about Apple at that point having a blind spot for “consumer computing” seemed more insightful to me than the seemingly familiar “they shoulda cut their prices” (or “they shoulda licensed the OS,” although that may not turn up quite as often these days). It might have even felt like something I’d been musing towards myself. It’s oddly tempting to wonder if that resulted from the Apple IIc not having sold well, although I know that as late as 1988 Apple released the “IIc Plus”, if into the void of promotion I’ve noticed period Apple II enthusiasts grew increasingly vehement about…

At a certain point I decided I wanted to take in a source biased towards the first years of the Macintosh and started buying old Macworld magazines. I’m not rushing through them (at the moment I’m most of the way through 1988, noticing the “Apple could cut its prices” comments every so often), but I did take some note earlier on of how some people and companies were “hacking the hardware” of the early Macintoshes to fit in internal hard drives hooked directly to the processor and memory expanded above 512 KB in “pre-Plus” models. Steven Levy’s column in the January 1987 issue sort of summarizes those efforts (which were, I suppose, more expensive and tricky than using expansion slots…)

This is a very small note of correction, but the infamously expensive Macintosh introduced in 1990 was the IIfx; the IIx showed up in 1988.

- Jimmy Maher

September 17, 2016 at 7:06 am

Correction made. Thanks!

I think it’s really hard to separate the idea of consumer computing from that of lower prices than those Apple was charging. I don’t think that Apple needed to cut their prices to, say, Commodore and Atari levels, nor that doing so would even have been desirable from a marketing standpoint. But I do think they could have done very well in the pricing niche they inhabit today: a little more expensive than the competition, thereby maintaining that legendary Apple mystique, but not totally out of reach for ordinary, non-computer-obsessed people. That was the niche occupied by the Apple II.

- FilfreFan

September 16, 2016 at 11:57 pm

“… their notoriously smug users’ self-esteem…”

Through economic circumstances, I had entered the Commodore ecosystem and progressed from the Vic 20 to the C64 to the 512K (expanded) Amiga 1000. Peter, a roommate and colleague in the 1985 or 1986 timeframe, seemed inexplicably delighted with his Mac and it’s relatively small black & white monitor. Proud as a peacock, he called me over to show me his wonderfully intuitive MacPaint. I agreed that it seemed pretty nice for a black & white paint package. “Try it! Use it!” he implored. Sitting down, I was possessed by an imp and began to deliberately misunderstand the functions of various icons. For example, I may have tried to use the selection tool to draw a shape rather than select an area, then acted confused and a little chagrined when it wouldn’t work. I continued in this vein with several “intuitive” icons, to an extreme that I was sure he would “cotton” to my prank, but instead he lit a slow fuse that built and built with each misunderstanding, leading to a powerful anger with my idiotic inability to “grok” the most intuitive computer interface on the planet.

Probably his investment dwarfed mine, and perhaps this contributed to his almost touching, but also off-putting, need for validation that his choices were far superior to mine. I think history has confirmed his bias, but you know, for our own reasons and based upon our own circumstances, we had each made choices that were appropriate to us.

Although totally unflattering, I admit that just recounting the story at this late date still yields a completely unseemly and gleeful delight at how easily this “… notoriously smug users’ self-esteem…” was punctured and his worldview threatened by nothing more than simple feigned ignorance.

Aside from that one moment in time, I’ve often acknowledged that I would prefer a Mac, if only I could afford one.

- Alexander Freeman

September 17, 2016 at 5:46 am

Having read about the Amiga 500 and the Mac I and II, it seems the former was superior in just about way every way, though. If I’d had my choice of computer back then and didn’t have to worry about it losing in the marketplace, it might have been a toss up between the Amiga or Atari ST or MAYBE the Commodore 128, but nothing would have been worthy of any serious consideration.

- Jimmy Maher

September 17, 2016 at 7:26 am

I wouldn’t say that. MacOS was a far more polished experience than the Amiga Workbench, for one thing, and the general build quality of the machine was better. The overall impression a Mac created was one of elegant solidity; an Amiga could feel like a very rickety structure indeed in comparison. This sense of security offered by the Mac extended to the parent company. Whatever mistakes Apple made, you could feel pretty certain they were committed to supporting the Mac in the long term, and that they would *be* around in the long term for that matter. Who knew with Commodore?

The Mac II’s design was still perhaps a little too minimalist, a fact that Byte magazine chided Apple for in their review:

The single biggest hardware problem is the CPU bottleneck. Other than the standard 68881 co-processor, a truly intelligent move on Apple’s part, there is very little distributed processing. Instead, the 68020 must draw each and every pixel on the graphics screen. A graphics co-processor that intercepts many (or most) of the QuickDraw calls could enhance performance tremendously, as could direct-memory-access circuitry for the disk drives.

This meant that a $1500 Amiga 500 system could outperform a $10,000 Mac II system for some types of fast animation. But there is more to a computer’s life than fast animation, and, as usual, the question of whether a Mac or Amiga was better should always be followed with another question: “Better at what” or “What do you actually want to do with your computer?”

For instance, the original Macs’ high-resolution (by the standards of the time) black-and-white screen was far better for desktop publishing than a flickering Amiga monitor. And the Mac II’s static color display capabilities were on the whole far superior, making it a better choice (if you could afford it) for most types of static image-processing. If you wanted primarily to play games or do desktop video, your best choice was probably the Amiga — as it was if your hacker’s heart just fell in love with this unique and fascinating machine.

- Keith Palmer

September 17, 2016 at 1:26 pm

There were some comments in the final issues of Creative Computing along the lines of “Commodore’s sophisticated Amiga and Jack Tramiel’s inexpensive Atari ST will threaten the Macintosh from two directions at once” (although not everyone was pleased by that thought; one columnist came up with a laundry list of improvements to be made before it was too late, including squeezing two floppy drives and a portrait-format full-page monitor into the compact case). One of the reasons I started buying Macworld magazines was to see what responses might have been made to that sentiment… although I’m afraid the only thing I seemed to pick up on was an editorial sort of shrugging “who really needs colour in a business environment? Colour printers aren’t good enough to reproduce it.” As you said, after a certain while the comparison just didn’t seem to come up any more (save in the occasional letter saying “I wish I could have afforded a Macintosh, but my Amiga 500 seems quite good anyway.”)

- Alexander Freeman

September 17, 2016 at 4:55 pm

Oh, hmmm… I didn’t know about the flickering problem on Amigas’ monitors. Well, it seems although Macs’ monitors were better for some things, Macs were basically primitive but elegant compared to Amigas.

I do agree lousy marketing and lack of support were the downfalls for the Amiga and Atari ST, though, which is why I said IF I didn’t have to worry about them losing in the marketplace. For all its bungling, Apple always seemed more committed to success than Commodore and Atari in late ’80s. I couldn’t agree more with your analysis of Jobs and Sculley.

Maybe one thing Commodore and Atari could have done better was to introduce a high-quality color printer somewhat early to their computers so as to make some headway into business and publishing. I’m sure it would have been very expensive, but I’m sure there would have been businesses willing to pay the cost.

- Jimmy Maher

September 17, 2016 at 6:29 pm

The smartest thing Commodore could possibly have done for the Amiga in my opinion would have been to push early and aggressively into CD-ROM. If ever there was a computer that was crying out to be paired with a CD-ROM drive, it was this one. As it was, they managed to look like me-too bandwagon jumpers when “multimedia computing” finally took off, despite the Amiga having been the first real multimedia computer. But we’ll get deeper into all that in future article(s). ;)

- Eric

September 17, 2016 at 5:20 am

When you talk about the $9900 Mac, you mean IIfx, not the 1988 Mac IIx.

- Eric

September 17, 2016 at 2:53 pm

You missed the second IIx/IIfx reference.

- Jimmy Maher

September 17, 2016 at 3:20 pm

Woops! Thanks!

- Ben L

September 18, 2016 at 5:12 am

I have to say- these articles just get better and better. A fantastic read.

- Veronica Connor

September 18, 2016 at 3:27 pm

The high voltage warning on the Mac actually had some merit. The anode on a CRT can pretty easily put a couple dozen kilovolts into you if you touch it in the wrong places. This charge can be stored for days after being shut off. The risk of permanent injury is fairly low, but like a tube television, it’s best not to go poking around if you don’t know what you’re doing. CRTs are not like radios or computers. They are actually a wee bit dangerous.

- William Hern

September 18, 2016 at 7:54 pm

Great piece Jimmy – well up to your usual high standard.

Raskin’s concept for the Mac was indeed very different to that of Jobs’. You can get a sense of just how different it was by looking at the Canon Cat, the machine that Raskin created after he left Apple. Released in 1987, it featured a text-based interface, with no GUI windowing system or mouse. Superficially a word processor system, it was actually capable of doing much more (thanks to the FORTH programming environment sitting just beneath the service) but few users ever tapped into this power. It’s an intriguing system nonetheless.

One item of minor trivia: as well as expansion slots, Jobs and Raskin also shared a dislike for on/off switches. Jobs insisted that the Mac didn’t have an on/off switch and the Canon Cat only gained one because of Canon engineers who thought that the absence of one in Raskin’s specification was an error.

- Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2016 at 6:00 am

Yes, power management was another (admittedly minor) area in which the Mac (and it seems the Canon Cat) were very ahead of their time. I was wasting time this weekend watching one of those “teens react” videos on YouTube; they were asking the kids to try to use Windows 95. The kids were all shocked at the “It’s now safe to turn off your computer” message after shutting down — shocked the computer couldn’t turn *itself* off.

But the Mac had had auto-power-off for quite some years by that point. I know the Mac II had it in 1987, not sure about earlier models offhand. I’d actually mentioned this in the article at one point, then cut it as one of those details that can kill readability. (Funny how many of those seem to turn up later in the comments. For instance, I also cut a few paragraphs of Amiga comparisons.)

- AguyinaRPG

September 20, 2016 at 2:28 pm

I’ve enjoyed how you’ve gone about explaining Apple and the intersection of Woz, Jobs, and Scully as it relates to the idea of computer vision. The company almost represents a “Yes, but maybe…” attitude through its persistent dead-ends and backtracking. Woz’s spirit of Apple resulted in the Apple IIGS which was a failure, the Mac was Jobs’ short term success, and Sculley’s willingness to change flip-flopped him back and forth.

I don’t think any book has really portrayed this struggle eloquently because they’re usually too busy praising Jobs and looking at Apple in a much more modern perspective. You’re absolutely right to say that limiting expansion was an awful idea, though Apple was smart to not be too liberal about it. Becoming another IBM clone company would have killed them in the long run. While I don’t much like Apple’s approach to the computer (and games) market now, it’s allowed them to survive and thrive amid the homogenized computer architectures of the world.

- Martin

October 28, 2016 at 1:04 am

As thing stood, then, they were effectively paying a….

things?

- Jimmy Maher

October 28, 2016 at 8:34 am

Thanks!

The Freedom to Associate
September 23, 2016

In 1854, an Austrian priest and physics teacher named Gregor Mendel sought and received permission from his abbot to plant a two-acre garden of pea plants on the grounds of the monastery at which he lived. Over the course of the next seven years, he bred together thousands upon thousands of the plants under carefully controlled circumstances, recording in a journal the appearance of every single offspring that resulted, as defined by seven characteristics: plant height, pod shape and color, seed shape and color, and flower position and color. In the end, he collected enough data to formulate the basis of the modern science of genetics, in the form of a theory of dominant and recessive traits passed down in pairs from generation to generation. He presented his paper on the subject, “Experiments on Plant Hybridization,” before the Natural History Society of Austria in 1865, and saw it published in a poorly circulated scientific journal the following year.

And then came… nothing. For various reasons — perhaps due partly to the paper’s unassuming title, perhaps due partly to the fact that Mendel was hardly a known figure in the world of biology, undoubtedly due largely to the poor circulation of the journal in which it was published — few noticed it at all, and those who did dismissed it seemingly without grasping its import. Most notably, Charles Darwin, whose On the Origin of Species had been published while Mendel was in the midst of his own experiments, seems never to have been aware of the paper at all, thereby missing this key gear in the mechanism of evolution. Mendel was promoted to abbot of his monastery shortly after the publication of his paper, and the increased responsibilities of his new post ended his career as a scientist. He died in 1884, remembered as a quiet man of religion who had for a time been a gentleman dabbler in the science of botany.

But then, at the turn of the century, the German botanist Carl Correns stumbled upon Mendel’s work while conducting his own investigations into floral genetics, becoming in the process the first to grasp its true significance. To his huge credit, he advanced Mendel’s name as the real originator of the set of theories which he, along with one or two other scientists working independently, was beginning to rediscover. Correns effectively shamed those other scientists as well into acknowledging that Mendel had figured it all out decades before any of them even came close. It was truly a selfless act; today the name of Carl Correns is unknown except in esoteric scientific circles, while Gregor Mendel’s has been done the ultimate honor of becoming an adjective (“Mendelian”) and a noun (“Mendelism”) locatable in any good dictionary.

Vannevar Bush

So, all’s well that ends well, right? Well, maybe, but maybe not. Some 30 years after the rediscovery of Mendel’s work, an American named Vannevar Bush, dean of MIT’s School of Engineering, came to see the 35 years that had passed between the publication of Mendel’s theory and the affirmation of its importance as a troubling symptom of the modern condition. Once upon a time, all knowledge had been regarded as of a piece, and it had been possible for a great mind to hold within itself huge swathes of this collective knowledge of humanity, everything informing everything else. Think of that classic example of a Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci, who was simultaneously a musician, a physicist, a mathematician, an anatomist, a botanist, a geologist, a cartographer, an alchemist, an astronomer, an engineer, and an inventor. Most of all, of course, he was a great visual artist, but he used everything else he was carrying around in that giant brain of his to create paintings and drawings as technically meticulous as they were artistically sublime.

By Bush’s time, however, the world had long since entered the Age of the Specialist. As the sheer quantity of information in every field exploded, those who wished to do worthwhile work in any given field — even those people gifted with giant brains — were increasingly being forced to dedicate their intellectual lives entirely to that field and only that field, just to keep up. The intellectual elite were in danger of becoming a race of mole people, closeted one-dimensionals fixated always on the details of their ever more specialized trades, never on the bigger picture. And even then, the amount of information surrounding them was so vast, and existing systems for indexing and keeping track of it all so feeble, that they could miss really important stuff within their own specialties; witness the way the biologists of the late nineteenth century had missed Gregor Mendel’s work, and the 35-years head start it had cost the new science of genetics. “Mendel’s work was lost,” Bush would later write, “because of the crudity with which information is transmitted between men.” How many other major scientific advances were lying lost in the flood of articles being published every year, a flood that had increased by an order of magnitude just since Mendel’s time? “In this are thoughts,” wrote Bush, “certainly not often as great as Mendel’s, but important to our progress. Many of them become lost; many others are repeated over and over.” “This sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all around us,” he believed, “as truly significant attainments become lost in the sea of the inconsequential.”

Bush’s musings were swept aside for a time by the rush of historical events. As the prospect of another world war loomed, he became President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s foremost advisor on matters involving science and engineering. During the war, he shepherded through countless major advances in the technologies of attack and defense, culminating in the most fearsome weapon the world had ever known: the atomic bomb. It was actually this last that caused Bush to return to the seemingly unrelated topic of information management, a problem he now saw in a more urgent light than ever. Clearly the world was entering a new era, one with far less tolerance for the human folly, born of so much context-less mole-person ideology, that had spawned the current war.

Practical man that he was, Bush decided there was nothing for it but to roll up his sleeves and make a concrete proposal describing how humanity could solve the needle-in-a-haystack problem of the modern information explosion. Doing so must entail grappling with something as fundamental as “how creative men think, and what can be done to help them think. It is a problem of how the great mass of material shall be handled so that the individual can draw from it what he needs — instantly, correctly, and with utter freedom.”

As revolutionary manifestos go, Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” is very unusual in terms of both the man that wrote it and the audience that read it. Bush was no Karl Marx, toiling away in discontented obscurity and poverty. On the contrary, he was a wealthy upper-class patrician who was, as a member of the White House inner circle, about as fabulously well-connected as it was possible for a man to be. His article appeared first in the July 1945 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, hardly a bastion of radical thought. Soon after, it was republished in somewhat abridged form by Life, the most popular magazine on the planet. Thereby did this visionary document reach literally millions of readers.

With the atomic bomb still a state secret, Bush couldn’t refer directly to his real reasons for wanting so urgently to write down his ideas now. Yet the dawning of the atomic age nevertheless haunts his article.

It is the physicists who have been thrown most violently off stride, who have left academic pursuits for the making of strange destructive gadgets, who have had to devise new methods for their unanticipated assignments. They have done their part on the devices that made it possible to turn back the enemy, have worked in combined effort with the physicists of our allies. They have felt within themselves the stir of achievement. They have been part of a great team. Now, as peace approaches, one asks where they will find objectives worthy of their best.

Seen in one light, Bush’s essay is similar to many of those that would follow from other Manhattan Project alumni during the uncertain interstitial period between the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. Bush was like many of his colleagues in feeling the need to advance a utopian agenda to counter the apocalyptic potential of the weapon they had wrought, in needing to see the ultimate evil that was the atomic bomb in almost paradoxical terms as a potential force for good that would finally shake the world awake.

Bush was true to his engineer’s heart, however, in basing his utopian vision on technology rather than politics. The world was drowning in information, making the act of information synthesis — intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary alike — ever more difficult.

The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.

Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and reenter on a new path.

The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve it, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.

Bush was not among the vanishingly small number of people who were working in the nascent field of digital computing in 1945. His “memex,” the invention he proposed to let an individual free-associate all of the information in her personal library, was more steampunk than cyberpunk, all whirring gears, snickering levers, and whooshing microfilm strips. But really, those things are just details; he got all of the important stuff right. I want to quote some more from “As We May Think,” and somewhat at length at that, because… well, because its vision of the future is just that important. This is how the memex should work:

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space appears the code word. Out of view, but also in the code space, is inserted a set of dots for photocell viewing; and on each item these dots by their positions designate the index number of the other item.

Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.

The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.

And his trails do not fade. Several years later, his talk with a friend turns to the queer ways in which a people resist innovations, even of vital interest. He has an example, in the fact that the outraged Europeans still failed to adopt the Turkish bow. In fact he has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will, stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail.

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.

Ted Nelson

There is no record of what all those millions of Atlantic Monthly and Life readers made of Bush’s ideas in 1945 — or for that matter if they made anything of them at all. In the decades that followed, however, the article became a touchstone of the burgeoning semi-underground world of creative computing. Among its discoverers was Ted Nelson, who is depending on whom you talk to either one of the greatest visionaries in the history of computing or one of the greatest crackpots — or, quite possibly, both. Born in 1937 to a Hollywood director and his actress wife, then raised by his wealthy and indulgent grandparents following the inevitable Hollywood divorce, Nelson’s life would largely be defined by, as Gary Wolf put it in his classic profile for Wired magazine, his “aversion to finishing.” As in, finishing anything at all, or just the concept of finishing in the abstract. Well into middle-age, he would be diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder, an alleged malady he came to celebrate as his “hummingbird mind.” This condition perhaps explains why he was so eager to find a way of forging permanent, retraceable associations among all the information floating around inside and outside his brain.

Nelson coined the terms “hypertext” and “hypermedia” at some point during the early 1960s, when he was a graduate student at Harvard. (Typically, he got a score of Incomplete in the course for which he invented them, not to mention an Incomplete on his PhD as a whole.) While they’re widely used all but interchangeably today, in Nelson’s original formulation the former term was reserved for purely textual works, the later for those incorporating others forms of media, like images and sound. But today we’ll just go with the modern flow, call them all hypertexts, and leave it at that. In his scheme, then, hypertexts were texts capable of being “zipped” together with other hypertexts, memex-like, wherever the reader or writer wished to preserve associations between them. He presented his new buzzwords to the world at a conference of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1965, to little impact. Nelson, possessed of a loudly declamatory style of discourse and all the rabble-rousing fervor of a street-corner anarchist, would never be taken all that seriously by the academic establishment.

Instead, it being the 1960s and all, he went underground, embracing computing’s burgeoning counterculture. His eventual testament, one of the few things he ever did manage to complete — after a fashion, at any rate — was a massive 1200-page tome called Computer Lib/Dream Machines, self-published in 1974, just in time for the heyday of the Altair and the Homebrew Computer Club, whose members embraced Nelson as something of a patron saint. As the name would indicate, Computer Lib/Dream Machines was actually two separate books, bound back to back. Theoretically, Computer Lib was the more grounded volume, full of practical advice about gaining access to and using computers, while Dream Machines was full of the really out-there ideas. In practice, though, they were often hard to distinguish. Indeed, it was hard to even find anything in the books, which were published as mimeographed facsimile copies filled with jotted marginalia and cartoons drafted in Nelson’s shaky hand, with no table of contents or page numbers and no discernible organizing principle beyond the stream of consciousness of Nelson’s hummingbird mind. (I trust that the irony of a book concerned with finding new organizing principles for information itself being such an impenetrable morass is too obvious to be worth belaboring further.) Nelson followed Computer Lib/Dream Machines with 1981’s Literary Machines, a text written in a similar style that dwelt, when it could be bothered, at even greater length on the idea of hypertext.

The most consistently central theme of Nelson’s books, to whatever extent one could be discerned, was an elaboration of the hypertext concept he called Xanadu, after the pleasure palace in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan.” The product of an opium-fueled hallucination, the 54-line poem is a mere fragment of a much longer work Coleridge had intended to write. Problem was, in the course of writing down the first part of his waking dream he was interrupted; by the time he returned to his desk he had simply forgotten the rest.

So, Nelson’s Xanadu was intended to preserve information that would otherwise be lost, which goal it would achieve through associative linking on a global scale. Beyond that, it was almost impossible to say precisely what Xanadu was or wasn’t. Certainly it sounds much like the World Wide Web to modern ears, but Nelson insists adamantly that the web is a mere bad implementation of the merest shadow of his full idea. Xanadu has been under allegedly active development since the late 1960s, making it the most long-lived single project in the history of computer programming, and by far history’s most legendary piece of vaporware. As of this writing, the sum total of all those years of work are a set of web pages written in Nelson’s inimitable declamatory style, littered with angry screeds against the World Wide Web, along with some online samples that either don’t work quite right or are simply too paradigm-shattering for my poor mind to grasp.

In my own years on this planet, I’ve come to reserve my greatest respect for people who finish things, a judgment which perhaps makes me less than the ideal critic of Ted Nelson’s work. Nevertheless, even I can recognize that Nelson deserves huge credit for transporting Bush’s ideas to their natural habitat of digital computers, for inventing the term “hypertext,” for defining an approach to links (or “zips”) in a digital space, and, last but far from least, for making the crucial leap from Vannevar Bush’s concept of the single-user memex machine to an interconnected global network of hyperlinks.

But of course ideas, of which both Bush and Nelson had so many, are not finished implementations. During the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, there were various efforts — in addition, that is, to the quixotic effort that was Xanadu — to wrestle at least some of the concepts put forward by these two visionaries into concrete existence. Yet it wouldn’t be until 1987 that a corporation with real financial resources and real commercial savvy would at last place a reasonably complete implementation of hypertext before the public. And it all started with a frustrated programmer looking for a project.

Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson

Had he never had anything to do with hypertext, Bill Atkinson’s place in the history of computing would still be assured. Coming to Apple Computer in 1978, when the company was only about eighteen months removed from that famous Cupertino garage, Atkinson was instrumental in convincing Steve Jobs to visit the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, thereby setting in motion the chain of events that would lead to the Macintosh. A brilliant programmer by anybody’s measure, he eventually wound up on the Lisa team. He wrote the routines to draw pixels onto the Lisa’s screen — routines on which, what with the Lisa being a fundamentally graphical machine whose every display was bitmapped, every other program depended. Jobs was so impressed by Atkinson’s work on what he named LisaGraf that he recruited him to port his routines over to the nascent Macintosh. Atkinson’s routines, now dubbed QuickDraw, would remain at the core of MacOS for the next fifteen years. But Atkinson’s contribution to the Mac went yet further: after QuickDraw, he proceeded to design and program MacPaint, one of the two applications included with the finished machine, and one that’s still justifiably regarded as a little marvel of intuitive user-interface design.

Atkinson’s work on the Mac was so essential to the machine’s success that shortly after its release he became just the fourth person to be named an Apple Fellow — an honor that carried with it, implicitly if not explicitly, a degree of autonomy for the recipient in the choosing of future projects. The first project that Atkinson chose for himself was something he called the Magic Slate, based on a gadget called the Dynabook that had been proposed years ago by Xerox PARC alum (and Atkinson’s fellow Apple Fellow) Alan Kay: a small, thin, inexpensive handheld computer controlled via a touch screen. It was, as anyone who has ever seen an iPhone or iPad will attest, a prescient project indeed, but also one that simply wasn’t realizable using mid-1980s computer technology. Having been convinced of this at last by his skeptical managers after some months of flailing,  Atkinson wondered if he might not be able to create the next best thing in the form of a sort of software version of the Magic Slate, running on the Macintosh desktop.

In a way, the Magic Slate had always had as much to do with the ideas of Bush and Nelson as it did with those of Kay. Atkinson had envisioned its interface as a network of “pages” which the user navigated among by tapping links therein — a hypertext in its own right. Now he transported the same concept to the Macintosh desktop, whilst making his metaphorical pages into metaphorical stacks of index cards. He called the end result, the product of many months of design and programming, “Wildcard.” Later, when the trademark “Wildcard” proved to be tied up by another company, it turned into “HyperCard” — a much better name anyway in my book.

By the time he had HyperCard in some sort of reasonably usable shape, Atkinson was all but convinced that he would have to either sell the thing to some outside software publisher or start his own company to market it. With Steve Jobs now long gone and with him much of the old Jobsian spirit of changing the world through better computing, Apple was heavily focused on turning the Macintosh into a practical business machine. The new, more sober mood in Cupertino — not to mention Apple’s more buttoned-down public image — would seem to indicate that they were hardly up for another wide-eyed “revolutionary” product. It was Alan Kay, still kicking around Cupertino puttering with this and that, who convinced Atkinson to give CEO John Sculley a chance before he took HyperCard elsewhere. Kay brokered a meeting between Sculley and Atkinson, in which the latter was able to personally demonstrate to the former what he’d been working on all these months. Much to Atkinson’s surprise, Sculley loved HyperCard. Apparently at least some of the old Jobsian fervor was still alive and well after all inside Apple’s executive suite.

At its most basic, a HyperCard stack to modern eyes resembles nothing so much as a PowerPoint presentation, albeit one which can be navigated non-linearly by tapping links on the slides themselves. Just as in PowerPoint, the HyperCard designer could drag and drop various forms of media onto a card. Taken even at this fairly superficial level, HyperCard was already a full-fledged hypertext-authoring (and hypertext-reading) tool — by no means the first specimen of its kind, but the first with the requisite combination of friendliness, practicality, and attractiveness to make it an appealing environment for the everyday computer user. One of Atkinson’s favorite early demo stacks had many cards with pictures of people wearing hats. If you clicked on a hat, you were sent to another card showing someone else wearing a hat. Ditto for other articles of fashion. It may sound banal, but this really was revolutionary, organization by association in action. Indeed, one might say that HyperCard was Vannevar Bush’s memex, fully realized at last.

But the system showed itself to have much, much more to offer when the author started to dig into HyperTalk, the included scripting language. All sorts of logic, simple or complex, could be accomplished by linking scripts to clicks on the surface of the cards. At this level, HyperCard became an almost magical tool for some types of game development, as we’ll see in future articles. It was also a natural fit for many other applications: information kiosks, interactive tutorials, educational software, expert systems, reference libraries, etc.

HyperCard in action

John Sculley himself premiered HyperCard at the August 1987 MacWorld show. Showing unusual largess in his determination to get HyperCard into the hands of as many people as possible as quickly as possible, he announced that henceforward all new Macs would ship with a free copy of the system, while existing owners could buy copies for their machines for just $49. He called HyperCard the most important product Apple had released during his tenure there. Considering that Sculley had also been present for the launch of the original Macintosh, this was certainly saying something. And yet he wasn’t clearly in the wrong either. As important as the Macintosh, the realization in practical commercial form of the computer-interface paradigms pioneered at Xerox PARC during the 1970s, has been to our digital lives of today, the concept of associative indexing — hyperlinking — has proved at least as significant. But then, the two do go together like strawberries and cream, the point-and-click paradigm providing the perfect way to intuitively navigate through a labyrinth of hyperlinks. It was no coincidence that an enjoyable implementation of hypertext appeared first on the Macintosh; the latter almost seemed a prerequisite for the former.

The full import of the concept of hypertext was far from easy to get across in advertising copy, but Apple gave it a surprisingly serious go, paying due homage to Vannevar Bush in the process.

In the wake of that MacWorld presentation, a towering tide of HyperCard hype rolled from one side of the computer industry to the other, out into the mainstream media, and then back again, over and over. Hypertext’s time had finally come. In 1985, it was an esoteric fringe concept known only to academics and a handful of hackers, being treated at real length and depth in print only in Ted Nelson’s own sprawling, well-nigh impenetrable tomes. Four years later, every bookstore in the land sported a shelf positively groaning with trendy paperbacks advertising hypertext this and hypertext that. By then the curmudgeons had also begun to come out in force, always a sure sign that an idea has truly reached critical mass. Presentations showed up in conference catalogs with snarky titles like “Hypertext: Will It Cook Me Breakfast Too?.”

The curmudgeons had plenty of rabid enthusiasm to push back against. HyperCard, even more so than the Macintosh itself, had a way of turning the most sober-minded computing veterans into starry-eyed fanatics. Jan Lewis, a long time business-computing analyst, declared that “HyperCard is going to revolutionize the way computing is done, and possibly the way human thought is done.” Throwing caution to the wind, she abandoned her post at InfoWorld to found HyperAge, the first magazine dedicated to the revolution. “There’s a tremendous demand,” she said. “If you look at the online services, the bulletin boards, the various ad hoc meetings, user groups — there is literally a HyperCulture developing, almost a cult.” To judge from her own impassioned statements, she should know. She recruited Ted Nelson himself — one of the HyperCard holy trinity of Bush, Nelson, and Atkinson — to write a monthly column.

HyperCard effectively amounted to an entirely new computing platform that just happened to run atop the older platform that was the Macintosh. As Lewis noted, user-created HyperCard stacks — this new platform’s word for “programs” or “software” — were soon being traded all over the telecommunications networks. The first commercial publisher to jump into the HyperCard game was, somewhat surprisingly, Mediagenic.[1] Bruce Davis, Mediagenic’s CEO, has hardly gone down into history as a paradigm of progressive thought in the realms of computer games and software in general, but he defied his modern reputation in this one area at least by pushing quickly and aggressively into “stackware.” One of the first examples of same that Mediagenic published was Focal Point, a collection of business and personal-productivity tools written by one Danny Goodman, who was soon to publish a massive bible called The Complete HyperCard Handbook, thus securing for himself the mantle of the new ecosystem’s go-to programming guru. Focal Point was a fine demonstration that just about any sort of software could be created by the sufficiently motivated HyperCard programmer. But it was another early Mediagenic release, City to City, that was more indicative of the system’s real potential. It was a travel guide to most major American cities — an effortlessly browsable and searchable guide to “the best food, lodgings, and other necessities” to be found in each of the metropolises in its database.

City to City

Other publishers — large, small, and just starting out — followed Mediagenic’s lead, releasing a bevy of fascinating products. The people behind The Whole Earth Catalog — themselves the inspiration for Ted Nelson’s efforts in self-publication — converted their current edition into a HyperCard stack filling a staggering 80 floppy disks. A tiny company called Voyager combined HyperCard with a laser-disc player — a very common combination among ambitious early HyperCard developers — to offer an interactive version of the National Gallery of Art which could be explored using such associative search terms as “Impressionist landscapes with boats.” Culture 1.0 let you explore its namesake through “3700 years of Western history — over 200 graphics, 2000 hypertext links, and 90 essays covering topics from the Black Plague to Impressionism,” all on just 7 floppy disks. Mission: The Moon, from the newly launched interactive arm of ABC News, gathered together details of every single Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo mission, including videos of each mission hosted on a companion laser disc. A professor of music converted his entire Music Appreciation 101 course into a stack. The American Heritage Dictionary appeared as stackware. And lots of what we might call “middlestackware” appeared to help budding programmers with their own creations: HyperComposer for writing music in HyperCard, Take One for adding animations to cards.

Just two factors were missing from HyperCard to allow hypertext to reach its full potential. One was a storage medium capable of holding lots of data, to allow for truly rich multimedia experiences, combining the lavish amounts of video, still pictures, music, sound, and of course text that the system clearly cried out for. Thankfully, that problem was about to be remedied via a new technology which we’ll be examining in my very next article.

The other problem was a little thornier, and would take a little longer to solve. For all its wonders, a HyperCard stack was still confined to the single Macintosh on which it ran; there was no provision for linking between stacks running on entirely separate computers. In other words, one might think of a HyperCard stack as equivalent to a single web site running locally off a single computer’s hard drive, without the ability to field external links alongside its internal links. Thus the really key component of Ted Nelson’s Xanadu dream, that of a networked hypertext environment potentially spanning the entire globe, remained unrealized. In 1990, Bill Nisen, the developer of a hypertext system called Guide that slightly predated HyperCard but wasn’t as practical or usable, stated the problem thus:

The one thing that is precluding the wide acceptance of hypertext and hypermedia is adequate broadcast mechanisms. We need to find ways in which we can broadcast the results of hypermedia authoring. We’re looking to in the future the ubiquitous availability of local-area networks and low-cost digital-transmission facilities. Once we can put the results of this authoring into the hands of more users, we’re going to see this industry really explode.

Already at the time Nisen made that statement, a British researcher named Tim Berners-Lee had started to experiment with something he called the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. The first real web site, the beginning of the World Wide Web, would go online in 1991. It would take a few more years even from that point, but a shared hypertextual space of a scope and scale the likes of which few could imagine was on the way. The world already had its memex in the form of HyperCard. Now — and although this equivalency would scandalize Ted Nelson — it was about to get its Xanadu.

Associative indexing permeates our lives so thoroughly today that, as with so many truly fundamental paradigm shifts, the full scope of the change it has wrought can be difficult to fully appreciate. A century ago, education was still largely an exercise in retention: names, dates, Latin verb cognates. Today’s educational institutions  — at least the more enlightened ones — recognize that it’s more important to teach their pupils how to think than it is to fill their heads with facts; facts, after all, are now cheap and easy to acquire when you need them. That such a revolution in the way we think about thought happened in just a couple of decades strikes me as incredible. That I happened to be present to witness it strikes me as amazing.

What I’ve witnessed has been a revolution in humanity’s relationship to information itself that’s every bit as significant as any political revolution in history. Some Singularity proponents will tell you that it marks the first step on the road to a vast worldwide consciousness. But even if you choose not to go that far, the ideas of Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson are still with you every time you bring up Google. We live in a world in which much of the sum total of human knowledge is available over an electronic connection found in almost every modern home. This is wondrous. Yet what’s still more wondrous is the way that we can find almost any obscure fact, passage, opinion, or idea we like from within that mass, thanks to selection by association. Mama, we’re all cyborgs now.

(Sources: the books Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and Insanely Great: The Life and Times of the Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy; Computer Lib/Dream Machines and Literary Machines by Ted Nelson; From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn; The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort; Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond by Jakob Nielsen; The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Also the June 1995 Wired magazine profile of Ted Nelson; Andy Hertzfeld’s website Folklore; and the Computer Chronicles television episodes entitled “HyperCard,” “MacWorld Special 1988,” “HyperCard Update,” and “Hypertext.”)

1. Mediagenic was known as Activision until mid-1988. To avoid confusion, I just stick with the name “Mediagenic” in this article. ↩

Comments
52 Responses

- Lisa H.

September 23, 2016 at 8:14 pm

it was about to gets its Xanadu.

Get.

Fascinating stuff! I’ll have to take a look at that Xanadu site later.

- Jimmy Maher

September 24, 2016 at 6:53 am

Thanks as always!

- Brian Holdsworth

September 23, 2016 at 8:43 pm

Hi Jimmy.

I enjoy all your articles, and this is one of your most interesting posts for me. Recalling the arrival of the Macintosh, HyperCard, and the World Wide Web all coming in such rapid succession, it really was like a sudden Dawn of a new Era. I was a university student through those few years, and it all seemed rather exciting at the time, but hardly the Dawn of something as big as we know it to be today.

Frankly, I was too distracted with programming and gaming on my Amiga at the time, that it was easy to dismiss HyperCard as something cool, but not really worth learning until there was a similar product for the Amiga. It didn’t even have color! Anyway, Commodore tried and failed to deliver on that with “Amiga Vision” – but instead just added to the long list of “graphical” programming environments that couldn’t quite pull it off. I guess the real successor was probably Director.

Thanks for reawakening me on this fascinating period of computing history!

Best,
Brian

- Jimmy Maher

September 24, 2016 at 6:52 am

HyperCard actually could do color. It’s just most of the Macs on which it ran couldn’t. ;)

I think a lot of people would say that there never really has been a true successor to HyperCard. It’s hugely missed by just about everyone who used it back in the day. It really was a magnificent system, combining enough power to create commercial-quality multimedia applications with an ease of use that would allow a complete beginner to create something she could be proud of in just a few hours. And it was just plain *fun* to boot. The world of computers is poorer for its loss.

- Alan Kay

September 24, 2016 at 1:15 pm

Actually, it couldn’t do color for almost all of its useful life

- Jimmy Maher

September 24, 2016 at 1:32 pm

Really? I didn’t know that. I never had access to a color Mac back when HyperCard was a major thing. Thanks!

- Sylvestrus

September 24, 2016 at 8:15 pm

HyperCard was natively black-and-white for its entire life. There were various third-party XCMDs that added limited color support, and Apple’s eventual color solution was to just ship a first-party XCMD with HyperCard 2.2. All of the normal HyperCard tools were still black-and-white, and you could enter a separate mode to paint color onto objects on the underlying black-and-white cards. Stacks using the color tools would have scripts inserted which ran each time the card changed, which painted the color on top after the HyperCard client got done with its own drawing.

True, native color support was supposed to ship in the never-released HyperCard 3.0.

- Brian Bagnall

September 25, 2016 at 1:44 pm

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay

- Jerry

September 26, 2016 at 4:35 am

The Apple IIgs version of Hypercard did color. But obviously, the IIgs being a sidelined platform, it didn’t have much of a dent in the world.

- Sol_HSA

September 24, 2016 at 3:38 pm

Macromedia director kind of? was a follow-up to hypercard, with it’s “lingo” language derived from hypercard, and then evolved up to a point where designers (who it was originally aimed for) found the language too complex to understand and developers (who it fell to eventually) hating it for it’s absurd syntax, and in the end it was replaced with a javascript derivative.

- FilfreFan

September 25, 2016 at 2:57 am

Thanks Jimmy — what a great article. As usual, it stirred a few memories.

Brian, it turns out that the Hypercard WAS released for the Amiga, retailing for about $300.00.

Once it became routine to use computer file systems to store and access role playing material, we wished for some kind of content-based file access system, although we had no idea that such a thing might already have a name. Our circle of friends sometimes discussed how this might be implemented, and imagined that this was a fairly obvious and widespread desire among computer users.

I had begun programming “embedded file launchers” in C, and was just getting bogged down in the complexity of pointers to functions when a new Amiga product came to my attention.

I don’t recall the magazine that reviewed Hypercard for the Amiga, nor do I remember any awareness of its Macintosh origins, but on reading the product review, I realized that this was what we had been looking for and what I had been struggling to create!

I immediately rushed out and bought it, and worked with it for a few weeks or a month, but ran into a number of very frustrating challenges. It had a good sized manual which documented the scripting language, but the manual was simply inaccurate. Here’s an example (not an actual example, but a notional example muted by the passage of time).

In C, if you want to understand how to print “Hello World,” you might find this example in your manual:

#include
main()
{
printf(“Hello World”);
}

A decent manual would also explain how to compile and run this snippet to magically render a cheery “Hello World” on your standard in/out device.

But what if your manual’s example omitted the quotes, or the semicolon, or the #include statement, or the parentheses? Although you typed in the examples EXACTLY as they appeared in the manual, what would you do when it bombed in compilation or execution? You might try to isolate the offending snippet and recompile it alone. If that failed, you’d probably look through other examples in the manual and try to guess what was missing. Then you’d begin the trial and error process to understand the failure. Was the string encapsulated improperly? Did it require quotes? Did it require parentheses? Was the manual’s example snippet improperly terminated? etc. Eventually through a variety of research and guessing, you’d get lucky and get that snippet to function. Then you’d move on to the next challenge.

This happened over and over.

Despite it’s absolutely amazing promise, that Amiga product was simply not ready for release. I went back and re-read that magazine review, and in retrospect it had subtly hinted that sometimes using it seemed like trying to guess how to rub the lamp to make the genie emerge. Somehow I’d missed the import of that one one sentence buried in a few pages of glowing review.

In the end, the guessing games were just too much, so a few days before the return interval had expired, I uninstalled it, packaged it all back up, and returned to the shop where I’d bought it. There I learned that opened software packages were not returnable. Fortunately for me, there was another customer standing at the check-out counter, ready to purchase a brand new Amiga Hypercard package! I explained the challenges I was facing and why I wouldn’t recommend it, but if he really, really wanted to buy it, I’d sell him mine for half the price — $150 vs the $300 it had cost me. He jumped on the opportunity! I never learned how it worked out for him, but imagine that, despite my full disclosure, ultimately each of us were out $150 bucks apiece.

This experience very typically and powerfully illustrates the challenges faced by Amiga adopters. Once we had expended our resources and hitched our cart to a horse, of course we wanted that horse to have a fairly decent run. The Amiga had so much promise, and although much of it’s potential was realized, ultimately, it’s long term potential was squandered. While the Hypercard experience was probably not a reflection on Commodore leadership and execution, it was very typical of the bumpy Amiga experience, ultimately culminating in the purchase of an IBM-compatible once the PC’s capabilities had so clearly bypassed those of the Amiga.

So, here I am, a grumpy old curmudgeon, still relieving disappointments that most had moved beyond back when the dinosaurs still ruled the Earth. For some of us, the echoes of history continue to resonate long past any relevance.

- Jimmy Maher

September 25, 2016 at 6:31 am

Interesting. Was the product you’re referring to perhaps UltraCard? It couldn’t have been *the* HyoerCard; Apple wasn’t in the habit of releasing software on rival platforms, much less ones whose very existence they refused to officially acknowledge. Nor would they have released a manual in such atrocious shape. But that sort of thing was unfortunately typical of the Amiga market, which was full of tiny companies without the money or wherewithal to polish their products.

- Brian Holdsworth

September 26, 2016 at 3:25 pm

I suspect the product for the Amiga in question was “Can-Do”.

- Brian Holdsworth

September 26, 2016 at 3:41 pm

“Can-Do” was put out by a German company called “Inovatronics”, which I can find no information about online. An old Amiga World ad from December, 1992 describes Can-Do 2.0 as “a revolutionary, interactive software authoring environment that lets you take advantage of the Amiga’s sophisticated architecture without any technical knowledge”.

“Amiga Vision” was a very polished package that actually shipped in box with the Amiga 3000, and possibly other models, at least for a time. According to the impressive, hard-bound, thick manual in front of me, Amiga Vision was developed for Commodore by IMSATT Corporation.

- Bernie

October 10, 2016 at 8:03 pm

Brian, I was an avid amiga user during 1990-1994 and got the OS 2.04 upgrade very early on. I agree with you that we are probably talking about “Can-Do” here, judging from FilfreFan’s description of the obtuse scripting involved, which Cand-Do was noted for. It “could do” almost anything, but the scripting was very confusing.

I used a lot of AmigaVision back then, and it was very solid and much easier than Can-Do. I don’t know if Can-Do was as powerful as HyperCard, but AmigaVision definitely wasn’t. AmigaVision was more of a precursor of modern PowerPoint, with its ability to call other programs from within a presentation. In those days, given how primitive PowerPoint and others still were, and how hard to use Can-Do was, this made AmigaVision seem like magic to Amiga and PC users, but it wasn’t in the same league as HyperCard.

- Keith Palmer

September 23, 2016 at 8:58 pm

I was somewhere between expecting and hoping your next “Macintosh in the late 1980s” post would deal with HyperCard, but this was somehow more impressive an introduction than I’d imagined. I managed to dabble in that program a bit myself when my father bought through work a Macintosh SE/30, a few years before his company standardized on Compaq; he could sometimes carry that “compact Mac” home. As I started learning about all the Infocom-and-otherwise adventure games I hadn’t managed to play and seemingly would never get the chance to, I began working on a sort of “Choose Your Own Adventure” stack where you could stumble into my impression of a wide variety of adventures. Looking back on it I would have to call it “cargo cult programming,” a crude imitation of the real thing as if to try and bring it back through sheer magic, and it only lasted until I really started learning what the term “combinatorial explosion” meant (afterwards, I just wrote some “fake transcripts”). When we also got a Macintosh LC II (not as fondly remembered by the Macintosh cognoscenti as the SE/30) for home, though, I did go through a good number of freeware stacks in the fading days of HyperCard. (A lot of “complete histories” do strike a tone somewhere between elegiac and vehement on how Apple never quite pushed to keep the program up at the cutting edge…)

- Baldur Björnsson

September 24, 2016 at 11:46 am

Aloha Jimmy!

Super amazing site, look forward every week for the new articles. As a man who grew up on BBC micro -> Sinclair Spectrum (first game “the Hobbit”) -> Atari ST (my all-time favorite machine) this is a treasure trove of obscure fun!

Small note: Rennassance should be Renaissance

Keep on trucking!
Blaldur.

- Jimmy Maher

September 24, 2016 at 12:33 pm

Thanks!

- Rob

September 24, 2016 at 12:47 pm

Jimmy, I have been reading your blog for years. However, you have somehow managed to condense my thoughts and feelings about being born at the cusp of pre- and post-Internet humanity into one single post. It is truly an amazing time to be alive. Thanks!

- Alan Kay

September 24, 2016 at 1:52 pm

Hi Jimmy

Very good account in almost all regards!

A few more details. Part of being an Apple Fellow was to be given a pre-approved budget large enough to fund a small group to do something, and Bill used his to create a 4-5 person group to work on “WildCard” over several years.

One of his realizations was that indexing should be completely automatic *and* that the author could also put in explicit hyperlinks. Another realization (that the Engelbartians also had realized and shown in the late 60s — you should have mentioned Doug Engelbart, he actually had more real impact by quite a bit than Ted Nelson) was that anything that is like “retrieval” results in a large number of hits that aren’t what you want. So you have to do retrieval very quickly and allow rejection for the next retrieval to be as fast as a human can move their fingers.

On the way to the WildCard designs, Bill had done a desktop utility for the Mac — called “Rolodex” that allowed typing free-form on a card, did automatic indexing, and was faster than the humans involved. This was my favorite Mac little app — it was essentially perfect. A real achievement in WildCard to HyperCard was to be able to get very close to the speed of Rolodex in a much more elaborate and useful system.

Thus HyperCard had the *two* things that are needed, not just the hyperlinking for browsing, but the automatically indexed searching that is absolutely necessary when you have a data base of more than 100 or so items (i.e. browsing mainly works when you have a sense of where you are going, and you need search as the larger covering mechanism).

When Apple Marketing rejected Bill’s entreaties to put out WildCard, he was going to quit Apple, and came to me — we had a kind of brotherly relationship. I went to John Sculley (who had become a friend as well as the CEO), explained HyperCard to him, and got him to let Bill demonstrate it. John saw right away what the marketing people couldn’t see, and decided to become the champion of HyperCard (via “papal fiats”). My observation was that Apple had gotten broken if the CEO had to override the rest of the company on a terrific product idea.

John asked for my advice, and my main one was to for him to require that HyperCard be made scriptable (WildCard was not, it was what became known as “level 4” and scripting became “level 5”).

John decided to go all out funding the packaging for HyperCard, and this involved many dozens of people — maybe as many as 100 — and at least 18 months work to not just polish what Bill and his team had done, but to create the scripting for it (a fabulous job by Dan Winkler and his team), and also to do the many supports for it, including the 30+ sample apps that showed how to make things, the wonderful “help stack” done by Carol Kaehler, commisioning the several “How To” books, and much more.

The decision to put it out as a free “value added” facility for the Mac was also brilliant. The combination of factors led to enormous adoption and literally millions of scripted stacks by every kind of end-user.

I was thrilled to see this system solve some of the most important end-user problems in a simplfied but hugely useful system that did some of the things that the ARPA/Parc research community had been working on for years (and that wound up causing the Mac).

However, Apple in a few years was no longer responding to John (or anyone). So the pleas of the former Xerox Parc people at Apple to e.g. put HyperCard on the Internet as a symmetric viewing and authoring medium fell on deaf ears (this was a significant bad turn, because the later WWW conception was long obsolete and quite wrong from the start). Another plea was for a complete redo that would add not just color, but to go to the next steps for objects and user defined objects, especially graphical ones. But: ditto.

Eventually, this marvelous system was allowed to languish and die.

It’s worth noting that there is nothing today as well done for general user authoring on the web or in “presentation systems” — in today’s technologies — so in many ways the entire computing milieu has taken a step (or more) backwards from the Hypercard of now almost 30 years ago.

- Jimmy Maher

September 24, 2016 at 2:37 pm

Thanks so much for this! I made a small edit to correctly describe how you were able to help Atkinson get HyperCard in front of Sculley.

I am aware of Doug Engelbart’s status as the “other” father of hypertext, but readability is a big priority for me as a writer, and it’s a little difficult to explain his contributions — important though they were — without getting farther down into the details of implementations than I really wanted to go. But certainly your comment can stand as a fine footnote to correct that omission, and as a springboard for those who want to delve still further. If it’s any consolation, I did try to give Engelbart his due in an earlier article on Xerox PARC: http://www.filfre.net/2013/01/xerox-parc/.

- Alan Kay

September 24, 2016 at 7:19 pm

Not to slight or diminish Ted Nelson in any way, but if there is to be only one mention of “computer fathers of hyperlinking” it has to be Doug Engelbart, not Ted (and I think even Ted would agree).

This is not just because of priority, but of scope. Engelbart’s whole vision was really large and important, and dealt with “what the human race needed” as well as what would be good for organizations, and then for individuals.

The sorry state we are in today with regard to the tiny amount of usefulness in the www is due to the disinclination of most computer people to (a) deal with big ideas, and (b) to learn about the really big and important ideas in our not so distant past.

- Bill Maya

September 24, 2016 at 2:03 pm

Excellent article (as always), though, like Mr. Kay, I kept waiting for the mention of Douglas Engelbart that never came.

- AguyinaRPG

September 24, 2016 at 4:08 pm

It’s funny that this comes up now because one of my teachers who worked at Apple on Quicktime just talked about Bill Atkinson’s role in the Lisa and Mac (as a programming concept). Given Apple’s huge roster, it’s difficult to know who to credit sometimes (hi Mr. Kay!).

I also now have some context as to when Hypercard came out because I keep getting confused in the timeline. That’s something I highly appreciate about your approach, Jimmy, you put things into perspective. Hypertext and GUIs seem so interlinked today, but it took a number of years for that real association. I’m looking forward to see how you’ll be relating these ideas to narrative experiences later down the line.

- Andrew Dalke

September 24, 2016 at 6:03 pm

I have been researching the early days of information retrieval. While I can’t speak of all the millions of Atlantic or Life readers, I can say that Bush’s Memex was well known by people in IR, and often cited.

R. A. Fairthorne in “Automatic Retrieval of Recorded Information”, The Computer Journal (1958), leads with “In 1945 Vannevar Bush wrote a much referred-to paper, “As We May Think”…”. The book “Punched Cards” (1951) says “The “Memex” of Vannevar Bush may be closer than is generally realized”, in such a way that it’s clear the readership will know of the paper. It also refers to Memex in a couple of other places.

The introduction to “Automatic indexing : a state-of-the-art report” by Mary Elizabeth Stevens (1965), has the line “By 1945, Bush had prophesied Memex”. Later it describes how “The interest aroused among some documentalists by the provocative idea of a “Memex” to record and display associations between ideas as proposed by Bush in 1945 led to specific attempts at Documentation, Inc. in the 1950’s to develop a device which would incorporate at least the associations between indexing terms assigned to documents and between documents with respect to their sharing of common indexing terms

Or, look at the growth of the word “memex” in Google n-grams: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=memex%2BMemex&year_start=1930&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2C%28memex%20%2B%20Memex%29%3B%2Cc0

I think it’s fair to say that some of the readers did pay attention to what Bush wrote, and made something of it.

- Alan Kay

September 24, 2016 at 6:27 pm

Yes, I agree. One of the factors that kept the mid-40s idea alive through the 50s was that the great sci-fi author Robert Heinlein used “memex” as a generic term in one of his stories, and many of his readers knew that they could often find something interesting if they took the trouble to go to the library to look up the term (that is how I found the Bush articles in the 50s: in the Queensborough Public Library).

Doug Engelbart had seen the article (I think the Life magazine version) while in the Navy in WWII around age 20, and this got him started thinking about these ideas.

And, once ARPA IPTO got started ca 1962 (the same time as Engelbart’s first proposal), there was enough general buzz around the East Coast to reach Bush — who had been an MIT professor before the war, and this is where he returned in the 60s — and wrote the essay “Memex Revisited” in 1965 (Google will find a pdf of this).

- Andrew Dalke

September 25, 2016 at 10:03 am

Do you recall which Heinlein story that was? Despite being an avid Heinlein reader, nothing comes to mind. In “The Puppet Masters” (1951), the protagonists, ‘Sam’ and ‘Mary’ visit the Library of Congress and use a catalogue to create selector cards, which are then passed to library staff. The staff use mechanical means to deliver “spools” to a room. The protagonists also use spools to record notes, which is the closest thing I saw to a memex.

However, I didn’t see the word “memex”, and I can’t tell if it’s specifically memex or some other aspect of using microfilm. Microfilm was a hot topic in the 1920s and 1930s. H. G. Wells promoted it in “World Brain” in the late 1930s. Heinlein uses microfilm as a document storage medium in the 1949 novella Gulf, without being coupled to a search mechanism. But there is no mention in Gulf or The Puppet Masters of leaving trails of information.

I don’t believe the memex ideas faded from the information retrieval field in the 1950s. For example, the title of Taube’s paper on coordinate indexing in American Documentation (1955), “Storage and retrieval of information by means of the association of ideas” is a direct homage to the “association of ideas” from “As We May Think”. It starts by quoting from that essay. (Taube founded Documentation, Inc., which I mentioned above.)

Garfield’s 1954 ACS Continuation Course, described at http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/papers/docorganizofsciinfoy1954.html , gives a good idea of what chemical documentation people were expected to know of the field at that time. This includes “Electronic Computers and Searching Machines: from Univac to Memex” and “Film searching machines” including Bush and Shaw’s Rapid Selector, and improvements like Samain’s Filmorex.

Garfield started ISI and founded the field of bibliometrics. In “Memex Revisited”, Bush elaborated on the Mendel story and describes how “for thirty years Mendel’s work was lost because of the crudity with which information is transmitted between men. This situation is not improving.” But it *was* improving even in the mid-1960s. ISI was collecting and digitizing that information. In 1970 Garfield expressed his belief that ISI’s Science Citation Index had solved that transmission problem, though psychological reasons could still have prevented its uptake in the late 1800s. See http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/V1p133y1962-73.pdf . I think his belief is correct.

My specific interest is in Calvin Mooers, who coined the term “information retrieval”, and who is featured in “Dream Machines” as the inventor of TRAC language. He proposed his DOKEN system in 1951, and argued that his superimposed coding method would make it 5,000x faster than the Microfilm Rapid Selector. In his archived papers there’s a letter where he declines to send a copy to Bush to because he considers Bush to be a competitor.

I believe his proposals for reactive typewriters – easy-to-use terminals for librarians and other ‘duffers’ – and TRAC were continuations of the scholar’s desk expressed by Bush. (Mooers doesn’t cite a direct influence from “As We May Think”. He would likely say he was thinking of similar ideas before 1945. I think that’s true. His father-in-law was Watson Davis, the documentation and microfilm advocate who founded the American Documentation Institute in the 1930s, and corresponded with Wells in 1937 about microfilm. Mooers started thinking about new library organization systems during the war. But the memex was a more concrete expression of those ideas than anything Mooers had thought of by 1945.)

To get reactive typewriters for library use, he needed lower-case letters and interoperable character sets on cheap hardware, which is why he joined the X3.2 committee to develop ASCII.

As another detail to show how things are connected, while Mooers invented the TRAC language, the teenage L Peter Deutsch implemented it.

Mooers would later complain about computer scientists of the 1960s “inventing” concepts that had been worked out in the 1940s and 1950s for punched card information systems. I can’t help but think that he would complain should someone tell him that the memex idea needed help staying alive in the 1950s, or that little came from Bush’s publication until the 1960s.

The influence of “As We May Think” on Engelbart is well known. My goal in pointing out these less illustrious people is to show that Engelbart and Nelson weren’t lone flames keeping Bush’s ideas alive, but that many people in IR knew of Bush’s ideas and were developing them further. One of those threads became hypertext, but there were many other threads under active development during the 1950s and 1960s.

- Alan Kay

September 26, 2016 at 12:02 pm

Good question about Heinlein. I don’t recall the story (or novel) that “memex” appeared in. And I don’t remember exactly how old I was — older than 12, younger than 17 — was when I lived in Queens and used that library.

And Calvin Mooers was quite a character, to say the least! With some worthy ideas, but hugely (what’s a better word than “paranoid”) about his IP.

- Andrew Dalke

September 26, 2016 at 2:42 pm

I would say Mooers was ferociously territorial combined with extremely high self-regard. He thought people, from IBM on down, would come to his door begging to use his ideas, which he developed independently using raw brain power. That’s why he applied for a patent on superimposed coding in the 1940s, but that lead to bad feelings from possible allies and customers, and a long and expensive patent opposition from McBee. It also took decades for the patent to be granted. That’s the backstory to the whole TRAC issue starting in the 1960s, which I’m sure you know about; our host might like to read a bit about it in the first issue of Dr. Dobb’s. Over and over again in his life, relationships soured when people started using ideas he developed first, and without his permission or paying him. The solution, he thought, was stronger IP so that independent people like him had a chance to make a living developing ideas.

(Apropos Heinlein, Mooers, was not only an avid SF reader in the 1950s, but a member of SF fandom.)

While I could go for hours, I’m now several steps removed from computer entertainment or this essay, so I’ll stop. :)

- Bernie

October 10, 2016 at 3:40 pm

This is really one of Jimmy’s best posts, and the overall quality of his work is evinced by motivating none other than Dr. Alan Kay to post several comments, to get involved in this discussion.

Since Jimmy has done all of us the great service of “attracting” someone of Dr. Kay’s stature within the industry, I’d like to take opportunity to ask for Dr. Kay’s opinion on the following idea :

* Can a sort of “continuum” be established starting with Dr. Bush’s proposals, built on by Dr. Engelbart in the 60’s , PARC in the 70’s , Apple in the 80’s , and reaching maturity with Google in the 90’s ?

* How can Seteve Jobs’ role be described , considering that he sponsored both Atkinson and Sculley ?

Infinite thanks to Jimmy and Dr. Kay for such an enriching discussion.

- Nate

September 25, 2016 at 1:42 am

Jimmy, excellent intro to Hypercard. It’s a testament to your quality that someone like Alan Kay would take the time to comment.

One thing (among many) that the Web lacks is the ability to annotate and build your own paths through pages. Sure, you can do bookmarks, but you can’t select text or an object on a web page, automatically see similar items pop up, and select one to add a bookmark. The Web is still mostly read-only.

The part about Xanadu I miss most is true micropayments. The credit card has emerged as a means of paying for small things, maybe $10 minimum, but the underlying fees make it unusable for smaller payments. If only I could turn on automatic Patreon for browsing, approving 1 cent per view or something wherever I browse.

Typo: “strikes me as a amazing”

- Nate

September 25, 2016 at 1:43 am

I meant “add a link”, not “add a bookmark”

- Jimmy Maher

September 25, 2016 at 6:26 am

Thanks!

It does strike me that we’ve imported a lot of old-media approaches, like advertising impressions, to the Web instead of devising new ones like micro-payments that could make it a more financially rewarding place for creators.

- Felix

September 28, 2016 at 5:51 am

We tried micropayments. People have been trying for decades now. They don’t work, for the same reason paying one cent at a tollbooth on every street corner, or else being barred from getting to the store, would be a terrible way to cover the maintenance costs for the pavement we walk on. You’re right that we’ve imported a lot of old-media approaches… to a medium more akin to the public domain. And it worked out about as well for society as the great enclosure movement of the 18th century.

As for making the web read-write, um, we have, ever since 1995. It’s called a wiki. And maybe it’s not the kind of pie-in-the-sky, elegant solution academics like to dream of. Neither is the web itself, for that matter. But they *work*. *Right now.* As they have for the past quarter century. They have utterly transformed society despite being these cobbled-together solutions, while the Xanadus of the world are still vaporware, and have been for twice as long. We have search engines. We have news aggregators. There are even services that let you collect links and article summaries into virtual magazines, for future reference. And to the degree tools are still lacking… well, we can always make more — something that would be impossible with a closed-source, monolithic system.

Welcome to the 21st century.

- Jimmy Maher

September 28, 2016 at 6:59 am

Very well said. The practical is often preferable to the ideal.

- Ben Galbraith

October 1, 2016 at 2:48 pm

Fwiw, the Brave browser has implemented micro payments this year using bitcoin.

- FilfreFan

September 25, 2016 at 1:52 pm

Well, that makes perfect sense. HyperBook maybe? It seems that some 25 year old memories simply cannot be relied upon :)

- Bret

September 25, 2016 at 7:10 pm

Thanks, Jimmy. Another book you might be interested is Belinda Barnet’s “Memory Machines”. It covers not only Engelbart’s and Nelson’s work, but also that of Andy van Dam (HES and FRESS), which is a story that doesn’t get told as much as it should. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0857280600

Also, Matthias Müller-Prove’s thesis “Vision and Reality of Hypertext and Graphical User Interfaces” provides brief but wide-ranging coverage of a dozen or so influential hypertext systems, and is a good starting point for further study.
http://mprove.de/diplom/

- Sam Garret

September 26, 2016 at 2:42 am

My Dad used to have a copy of Computer Lib/Dream Machines. I vaguely recall being fascinated by its cartoon covers and not understanding a damn thing in it at a very young age.

typo watch:

becoming an adjective (“Medelian”)

…should probably be “Mendelian”

- Jimmy Maher

September 26, 2016 at 7:37 am

Thanks!

- Jubal

September 27, 2016 at 11:40 pm

Having never used Hypercard, does anyone know how a modern system like TWINE compares to it?

- Jimmy Maher

September 28, 2016 at 7:06 am

Although I understand that both are described as “hypertext authoring tools,” the comparison strikes me as a bit apples and oranges. HyperCard was a full-fledged multimedia authoring environment as well, and as such was much, much bigger in scope, flexibility, and possibility. While it would be possible — perhaps not as easy, but possible — to implement a Twine game using HyperCard, I can’t imagine using Twine to recreate an ambitious HyperCard title like The Manhole (http://www.mobygames.com/game/manhole). Put another way, I can easily imagine someone writing Twine as an extension to run within HyperCard, if HyperCard was still an ongoing thing today.

- mrob

September 28, 2016 at 12:20 pm

“a researcher in Britain named Tim Berners-Lee had started to experiment with something he called the Hypertext Transfer Protocol”

Tim Berners-Lee is British, but he did his work on HTTP outside of Britain, at CERN on the French/Swiss border.

- Jimmy Maher

September 28, 2016 at 12:42 pm

For some reason, I wanted to believe that he was working remotely from Britain. Looking back, though, I have no idea why I thought that. Made a minor edit. Thanks!

- Dan

September 29, 2016 at 10:10 pm

“The product of an opium-fueled hallucination, the 54-line poem is a mere fragment of a much longer work Taylor had intended to write.”

Taylor should be Coleridge.

- Jimmy Maher

September 30, 2016 at 7:00 am

Thanks!

- Alexander Freeman

October 7, 2016 at 4:07 pm

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree…

Sorry, just had to make that reference. Well, actually, this whole Xanadu thing reminds me of something called Lotus Agenda:
http://homeoftheunderdogs.net/game.php?id=3807
Apparently, the best personal information manager ever made, it too uses associations to help you organize your data. Steep learning curve, though.

- Pingback: Links 11/10/2016: Torvalds’ ARM Rant, End of Production of Galaxy Note 7 | Techrights

- Johan

October 11, 2016 at 7:31 pm

Tiny spelling error: “Atikinson”

- Jimmy Maher

October 12, 2016 at 7:11 am

Thanks!

- ydy

October 27, 2016 at 4:37 pm

I think there might be a word missing near “same” in “One of the first examples of same that Mediagenic published was Focal Point”.

- Jimmy Maher

October 27, 2016 at 5:35 pm

No, that’s actually acceptable usage and as intended.

A Slow-Motion Revolution
September 30, 2016

A quick note on terminology before we get started: “CD-ROM” can be used to refer either to the use of CDs as a data-storage format for computers in general or to the Microsoft-sponsored specification for same. I’ll be using the term largely in the former sense in the introduction to this article, in the latter after something called “CD-I” enters the picture. I hope the point of transition won’t be too hard to identify, but my apologies if this leads to any confusion. Sometimes this language of ours is a very inexact thing.

In the first week of March 1986, much of the computer industry converged on Seattle for the first annual Microsoft CD-ROM Conference. Microsoft had anticipated about 500 to 600 attendees to the four-day event. Instead more than 1000 showed up, forcing the organizers to reject many of them at the door of a conference center that by law could only accommodate 800 people. Between the presentations on CD-ROM’s bright future, the attendees wandered through an exhibit hall showcasing the format’s capabilities. The hit of the hall was what was about to become the first CD-ROM product ever to be made available for sale to the public, consisting of the text of all 21 volumes of the Grolier Academic Encyclopedia, some 200 MB in all, on a single disc. It was to be published by KnowledgeSet, a spinoff of Digital Research. Digital’s founder Gary Kildall, apparently forgiving Bill Gates his earlier trespasses in snookering a vital IBM contract out from under his nose, gave the conference’s keynote address.

Kildall’s willingness to forgive and forget in light of the bright optical-storage future that stood before the computer industry seemed very much in harmony with the mood of the conference as a whole. Sentiments often verged on the utopian, with talk of a new “paperless society” abounding, a revolution to rival that of Gutenberg. “The compact disc represents a major discontinuity in the cost of producing and distributing information,” said one Ed Schmid of DEC. “You have to go back to the invention of movable type and the printing press to find something equivalent.” The enthusiasm was so intense and the good vibes among the participants — many of them, like Gates and Kildall, normally the bitterest of enemies — so marked that some came to call the conference “the computer industry’s Woodstock.” If the attendees couldn’t quite smell peace and love in the air, they certainly could smell potential and profit.

All the excitement came down to a single almost unbelievable number: the 650 MB of storage offered by every tiny, inexpensive-to-manufacture compact disc. It’s very, very difficult to fully convey in our current world of gigabytes and terabytes just how inconceivably huge a figure 650 MB actually was in 1986, a time when a 40 MB hard drive was a cavernous, how-can-I-ever-possibly-fill-this-thing luxury found on only the most high-end computers. For developers who had been used to making their projects fit onto floppy disks boasting less than 1 MB of space, the idea of CD-ROM sounded like winning the lottery several times over. You could put an entire 21-volume encyclopedia on one of the things, for Pete’s sake, and still have more than two-thirds of the space left over! Suddenly one of the most nail-biting constraints against which they had always labored would be… well, not so much eased as simply erased. After all, how could anything possibly fill 650 MB?

And just in case that wasn’t enough great news, there was also the fact that the CD was a read-only format. If the industry as a whole moved to CD-ROM as its format of choice, the whole piracy problem, which organizations like the Software Publishers Association ardently believed was costing it billions every year, would dry up and blow away like a dandelion in the fall. Small wonder that the mood at the conference sometimes approached evangelistic fervor. Microsoft, as swept away with it all as anyone, published a collection of the papers that were presented there under the very non-businesslike, non-Microsoft-like title of CD-ROM: The New Papyrus. The format just seemed to demand a touch of rhapsodic poetry.

But the rhapsody wasn’t destined to last very long. The promised land of a software industry built around the effectively unlimited storage capacity of the compact disc would prove infuriatingly difficult to reach; the process of doing so would stretch over the better part of a decade, by the end of which time the promised land wouldn’t seem quite so promising anymore. Throughout that stretch, CD-ROM was always coming in a year or two, always the next big thing right there on the horizon that never quite arrived. This situation, so antithetical to the usual propulsive pace of computer technology, was brought about partly by limitations of the format itself which were all too easy to overlook amid the optimism of that first conference, and partly by a unique combination of external factors that sometimes almost seemed to conspire, perfect-storm-like, to keep CD-ROM out of the hands of consumers.

The compact disc was developed as a format for music by a partnership of the Dutch electronics giant Philips and the Japanese Sony during the late 1970s. Unlike the earlier analog laser-disc format for the storage of video, itself a joint project of Philips and the American media conglomerate MCA, the CD stored information digitally, as long strings of ones and zeros to be passed through digital-to-analog converters and thus turned into rich stereo sound. Philips and Sony published the final specifications for the music CD in 1980, opening up to others who wished to license the technology what would become known as the “Red Book” standard after the color of the binder in which it was described. The first consumer-oriented CD players began to appear in Japan in 1982, in the rest of the world the following year. Confined at first to the high-end audiophile market, by the time of that first Microsoft CD-ROM Conference in 1986 the CD was already well on its way to overtaking the record album and, eventually, the cassette tape to become the most common format for music consumption all over the world.

There were good reasons for the CD’s soaring popularity. Not only did CDs sound better than at least all but the most expensive audiophile turntables, with a complete absence of hiss or surface noise, but, given that nothing actually touched the surface of a disc when it was being played, they could effectively last forever, no matter how many times you listened to them; “Perfect sound forever!” ran the tagline of an early CD advertising campaign. Then there was the way you could find any song you liked on a CD just by tapping a few buttons, as opposed to trying to drop a stylus on a record at just the right point or rewind and fast-forward a cassette to just the right spot. And then there was the way that CDs could be carried around and stored so much more easily than a record album, plus the way they could hold up to 75 minutes worth of music, enough to pack many double vinyl albums onto a single CD. Throw in the lack of a need to change sides to listen to a full album, and seldom has a new media format appeared that is so clearly better than the existing formats in almost all respects.

It didn’t take long for the computer industry to come to see the CD format, envisioned originally strictly as a music medium, as a natural one to extend to other types of data storage. Where the rubber met the road — or the laser met the platter — a CD player was just a mechanism for reading bits off the surface of the disc and sending them on to some other circuitry that knew what to do with them. This circuitry could just as easily be part of a computer as a stereo system.

Such a sanguine view was perhaps a bit overly reductionist. When one started really delving into the practicalities of the CD as a format for data storage, one found a number of limitations, almost all of them drawn directly from the technology’s original purpose as a music-delivery solution. For one thing, CD drives were only capable of reading data off a disc at a rate of 153.6 K per second, this figure being not coincidentally exactly the speed required to stream standard CD sound for real-time playback. Such a throughput was considered pretty good but hardly breathtaking by mid-1980s hard-disk standards; an average 10 MB hard drive of the period might have a transfer rate of about 96 K per second, although high-performance drives could triple or even quadruple that figure.

More problematic was a CD drive’s atrocious seek speed — i.e., the speed at which files could be located for reading on a disc. An average 10 MB hard disk of 1986 had a typical seek time of about 100 milliseconds, a worst-case-scenario maximum of about 200 — although, again, high-performance models could improve on those figures by a factor of four. A CD drive, by contrast, had a typical seek time of 500 milliseconds, a maximum of 1000  — one full second. The designers of the music CD hadn’t been particularly concerned by the issue, for a music-CD player would spend the vast majority of its time reading linear streams of sound data. On those occasions when the user did request a certain track found deeper on the disc, even a full second spent by the drive in seeking her favorite song would hardly be noticed unduly, especially in comparison to the pain of trying to find something on a cassette or a record album. For storage of computer data, however, the slow seek speed gave far more cause for concern.

The Laser Magnetic Storage LaserDrive is typical of the oddball formats that proliferated during the early years of optical data storage. It could hold 1 GB on each side of a double-sided disc. Unfortunately, each disc cost hundreds of dollars, the unit itself thousands.

Given these issues of performance, which promised only to get more marked in comparison to hard drives as the latter continued to get faster, one might well ask why the industry was so determined to adapt the music CD specifically to data storage rather than using Philips and Sony’s work as a springboard to another optical format with affordances more suitable to the role. In fact, any number of companies did choose the latter course, developing optical formats in various configurations and capacities, many even offering the ability to write to as well as read from the disc. (Such units were called “WORM” drives, for “Write Once Read Many”; data, in other words, could be written to their discs, but not erased or rewritten thereafter.) But, being manufactured in minuscule quantities as essentially bespoke items, all such efforts were doomed to be extremely expensive.

The CD, on the other hand, had the advantage of an existing infrastructure dedicated to stamping out the little silver discs and filling them with data. At the moment, that data consisted almost exclusively of encoded music, but the process of making the discs didn’t care a whit what the ones and zeros being burned into them actually represented. CD-ROM would allow the computer industry to piggy-back on an extant, mature technology that was already nearing ubiquity. That was a huge advantage when set against the cost of developing a new format from scratch and setting up a similar infrastructure to turn it out in bulk — not to mention the challenge of getting the chaotic, hyper-competitive computer industry to agree on another format in the first place. For all these reasons, there was surprisingly little debate on whether adapting the music CD to the purpose of data storage was really the best way to go. For better or for worse, the industry hitched its wagon to the CD; its infelicities as a general-purpose data-storage solution would just have to be worked around.

One of the first problems to be confronted was the issue of a logical file format for CD-ROM. The physical layout of the bits on a data CD was largely dictated by the design of the platters themselves and the machinery used to burn data into them. Yet none of that existing infrastructure had anything to say about how a filesystem appropriate for use with a computer should work within that physical layout. Microsoft, understanding that a certain degree of inter-operability was a valuable thing to have even among the otherwise rival platforms that might wind up embracing CD-ROM, pushed early for a standardized logical format. As a preliminary step on the road to that landmark first CD-ROM Conference, they brought together a more intimate group of eleven other industry leaders at the High Sierra Resort and Casino in Lake Tahoe in November of 1985 to hash out a specification. Among those present were Philips, Sony, Apple, and DEC; notably absent was IBM, a clear sign of Microsoft’s growing determination to step out of the shadow of Big Blue and start dictating the direction of the industry in their own right. The so-called “High Sierra” format would be officially published in finalized form in May of 1986.

In the run-up to the first Microsoft CD-ROM Conference, then, everything seemed to be coming together nicely. CD-ROM had its problems, but virtually everyone agreed that it was a tremendously exciting development. For their part, Microsoft, driven by a Bill Gates who was personally passionate about the format and keenly aware that his company, the purveyor of clunky old MS-DOS, needed for reasons of public relations if nothing else a cutting-edge project to rival any of Apple’s, had established themselves as the driving force behind the nascent optical revolution. And then, just five days before the conference was scheduled to convene — timing that struck very few as accidental — Philips injected a seething ball of chaos into the system via something called CD-I.

CD-I was a different, competing file format for CD data storage. But CD-I was also much, much more. Excited by the success the music CD had enjoyed, Philips, with the tacit support of Sony, had decided to adapt the format into the all-singing, all-dancing, all-around future of home entertainment in the abstract. Philips would be making a CD-I box for the home, based on a minimalist operating system called OS-9 running on a Motorola 68000 processor. But this would be no typical home computer; the user would be able to control CD-I entirely using a VCR-style remote control. CD-I was envisioned as the interactive television of the future, a platform for not only conventional videogames but also lifestyle products of every description, from interactive astronomy lessons to the ultimate in exercise tapes. Philips certainly wasn’t short of ideas:

Think of owning an encyclopedia which presents chosen topics in several different ways. Watching a short audio/video sequence to gain a general background to the topic. Then choosing a word or subject for more in-depth study. Jumping to another topic without losing your place — and returning again after studying the related topic to proceed further. Or watching a cartoon film, concert, or opera with the interactive capabilities of CD-I added. Displaying the score, libretto, or text onscreen in a choice of languages. Or removing one singer or instrument to be able to sing along with the music.

Just as they had with the music CD, Philips would license the specifications to whoever else wanted to make gadgets of their own capable of playing the CD-I discs. They declared confidently that there would be as many CD-I players in the world as phonographs within a few years of the format’s debut, that “in the long run” CD-I “could be every bit as big as the CD-audio market.”

Already at the Microsoft CD-ROM Conference, Phillips began aggressively courting developers in the existing computer-games industry to embrace CD-I. Plenty of them were more than happy to do so. Despite the optimism that dominated at the conference, it wasn’t clear how much priority Microsoft, who earned the vast majority of their money from business computing, would really give to more consumer-focused applications of CD-ROM like gaming. Philips, on the other hand, was a giant of consumer electronics. While they paid due lip service to applications of CD-I in areas like corporate training, it was always clear that it would be first and foremost a technology for the living room, one that comprehensively addressed what most believed was the biggest factor limiting the market for conventional computer games: that the machines that ran them were just too fiddly to operate. At the time that CD-I was first announced, the videogame console was almost universally regarded as a dead fad; the machine that would so dramatically reverse that conventional wisdom, the Nintendo Entertainment System, was still an oddball upstart being sold in selected markets only. Thus many game makers saw CD-I as their only viable route out of the back bedroom and into the living room — into the mainstream of home entertainment.

So, when Philips spoke, the game developers listened. Many publishers, including big powerhouses like Activision as well as smaller boutique houses like the 68000 specialists Aegis Development, committed to CD-I projects during 1986, receiving in return a copy of the closely guarded “Green Book” that detailed the inner workings of the system. There was no small pressure to get in on the action quickly, for Philips was promising to ship the first finished CD-I units in time for the Christmas of 1987. Trip Hawkins of Electronic Arts made CD-I a particular priority, forming a whole new in-house development division for the platform. He’d been waiting for a true next-generation mainstream game machine for years. At first, he’d thought the Commodore Amiga would be that machine, but Commodore’s clueless marketing and the Amiga’s high price were making such an outcome look less and less likely. So now he was looking to CD-I, which promised graphics and sound as good as those of the Amiga, along with the all but infinite storage of the unpirateable CD format, and all in a tidy, inexpensive package designed for the living room. What wasn’t to like? He imagined Silicon Valley becoming “the New Hollywood,” imagined a game like Electronic Arts’s hit Starflight remade as a CD-I experience.

You could actually do it just like a real movie. You could hire a costume designer from the movie business, and create special-effects costumes for the aliens. Then you’d videotape scenes with the aliens, and have somebody do a soundtrack for the voices and for the text that they speak in the game.

Then you’d digitize all of that. You could fill up all the space on the disc with animated aliens and interesting sounds. You would also have a universe that’s a lot more interesting to look at. You might have an out-of-the-cockpit view, like Star Trek, with planets that look like planets — rotating, with detailed zooms and that sort of thing.

Such a futuristic vision seemed thoroughly justifiable based on Philips’s CD-I hype, which promised a rich multimedia environment combining CD-quality stereo sound with full-motion video, all at a time when just displaying a photo-realistic still image captured from life on a computer screen was considered an amazing feat. (Among extant personal computers, only the Amiga could manage it.) When developers began to dive into the Green Book, however, they found the reality of CD-I often sharply at odds with the hype. For instance, if you decided to take advantage of the CD-quality audio, you had to tie up the CD drive entirely to stream it, meaning you couldn’t use it to fetch pictures or video or anything else for this supposed rich multimedia environment.

Video playback became an even bigger sore spot that echoed back to those fundamental limitations that had been baked into the CD when it was regarded only as a medium for music delivery. A transfer rate of barely 150 K per second just wasn’t much to work with in terms of streaming video. Developers found themselves stymied by an infuriating Catch-22. If you tried to work with an uncompressed or only modestly compressed video format, you simply couldn’t read it off the disk fast enough to display it in real-time. Yet if you tried to use more advanced compression techniques, it became so expensive in terms of computation to decompress the data that the CD-I unit’s 68000 CPU couldn’t keep up. The best you could manage was to play video snippets that only filled a quarter of the screen — not a limitation that felt overly compatible with the idea of CD-I as the future of home entertainment in the abstract. It meant that a game like the old laser-disc-driven arcade favorite Dragon’s Lair, the very sort of thing people tended to think of first when you mentioned optical storage in the context of entertainment, would be impossible with CD-I. The developers who had signed contracts with Philips and committed major resources to CD-I could only soldier on and hope the technology would continue to evolve.

By 1987, then, the CD as a computer format had been split into two camps. While the games industry had embraced CD-I, the powers that were in business computing had jumped aboard the less ambitious, Microsoft-sponsored standard of CD-ROM, which solved issues like the problematic video playback of CD-I by the simple expediency of not having anything at all to say about them. Perhaps the most impressive of the very early CD-ROM products was the Microsoft Bookshelf, which combined Roget’s Thesaurus, The American Heritage Dictionary, The Chicago Manual of Style, The World Almanac and Book of Facts, and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations alongside spelling and grammar checkers, a ZIP Code directory, and a collection of forms and form letters, all on a single disc — as fine a demonstration of the potential of the new format as could be imagined short of all that rich multimedia that Philips had promised. Microsoft proudly noted that Bookshelf was their largest single product ever in terms of the number of bits it contained and their smallest ever in physical size. Nevertheless, with most drives costing north of $1000 and products to use with them like Microsoft Bookshelf hundreds more, CD-ROM remained a pricey proposition found in vanishingly few homes — and for that matter not in all that many businesses either.

But at least actual products were available in CD-ROM format, which was more than could be said for CD-I. As 1986 turned into 1987, developers still hadn’t received any CD-I hardware at all, being forced to content themselves with printed specifications and examples of the system in action distributed on videotape by Philips. Particularly for a small company like Aegis, which had committed heavily to a game based on Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, for which they had recruited Jim Sachs of Defender of the Crown fame as illustrator, it was turning into a potentially dangerous situation.

The computer industry — even those parts of it now more committed to CD-I than CD-ROM — dutifully came together once again for the second Microsoft CD-ROM Conference in March of 1987. In contrast to the unusual Pacific Northwest sunshine of the previous conference, the weather this year seemed to match the more unsettled mood: three days of torrential downpour. It was a more skeptical and decidedly less Woodstock-like audience who filed into the auditorium one day for a presentation by no less unlikely a party than the venerable old American conglomerate General Electric. But in the course of that presentation, the old rapture came back in a hurry, culminating in a spontaneous standing ovation. What had so shocked and amazed the audience was the impossible made real: full-screen video running in real-time off a CD drive connected to what to all appearances was an ordinary IBM PC/AT computer. Digital Video Interactive, or DVI, had just made its dramatic debut.

DVI’s origins dated back to 1983, when engineer Larry Ryan of another old-school American company, RCA, had been working on ways to make the old analog laser-disc technology more interactive. Growing frustrated with the limitations he kept bumping against, he proposed to his bosses that RCA dump the laser disc from the equation entirely and embrace digital optical storage. They agreed, and a new project on those lines was begun in 1984. It was still ongoing two years later — just reaching the prototype stage, in fact — when General Electric acquired RCA.

DVI worked by throwing specialized hardware at the problem which Philips had been fruitlessly trying to solve via software alone. By using ultra-intensive compression techniques, it was possible to crunch video playing at a resolution of 256 X 240 — not an overwhelming resolution even by the standards of the day, but not that far below the practical resolution of a typical television set either — down to a size below 153.6 K per second of footage without losing too much quality. This fact was fairly well-known, not least to Philips. The bottleneck had always been the cost of decompressing the footage fast enough to get it onto the screen in real time. DVI attacked this problem via a hardware add-on that consisted principally of a pair of semi-autonomous custom chips designed just for the task of decompressing the video stream as quickly as possible. DVI effectively transformed the potential 75 minutes of sound that could be stored on a CD into 75 minutes of video.

Philosophically, the design bore similarities to the Amiga’s custom chips — similarities which became even more striking when you considered some of the other capabilities that came almost as accidental byproducts of the design. You could, for instance, overlay conventional graphics onto the streaming video by using the computer’s normal display circuitry in conjunction with DVI, just as you could use an Amiga to overlay titles and other graphics onto a “genlocked” feed from a VCR or other video source. But the difference with DVI was that it required no complicated external video source at all, just a CD in the computer’s CD drive. The potential for games was obvious.

In this demonstration of DVI’s potential, the user can explore an ancient Mayan archeological site that’s depicted using real-world video footage, while the icons used as controls are traditional computer graphics.

Still, DVI’s dramatic debut barely ended before the industry’s doubts began. It seemed clear enough that DVI was technically better than CD-I, at least in the hugely important area of video playback, but General Electric — hardly anyone’s idea of a nimble innovator — offered as yet no clear road map for the technology, no hint of what they really planned to do with it. Should game developers place their CD-I projects on hold to see if something better really was coming in the form of DVI, or should they charge full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes? Some did one, some did the other; some made halfhearted commitments to both technologies, some vacillated between them.

But worst of all was the effect that DVI had on Phillips. They were thrown into a spin by that presentation from which they never really recovered. Fearful of getting their clock cleaned in the marketplace by a General Electric product based on DVI, Phillips stopped CD-I in its tracks, demanding that a way be found to make it do full-screen video as well. From an original plan to ship the first finished CD-I units in time for Christmas 1987, the timetable slipped to promise the first prototypes for developers by January of 1988. Then that deadline also came and went, and all that developers had received were software emulators. Now the development prototypes were promised by summer 1988, finished units expected to ship in 1989. The delay notwithstanding, Philips still confidently predicted sales in “the tens of millions.” But then world domination was delayed again until 1990, then 1991.

Prototype CD-I units finally began reaching developers in early 1989, years behind schedule.

Wanting CD-I to offer the best of everything, the project chased its own tail for years, trying to address every actual or potential innovation from every actual or potential rival. The game publishers who had jumped aboard with such enthusiasm in the early days were wracked with doubt upon the announcement of each successive delay. Should they jump off the merry-go-round now and cut their losses, or should they stay the course in the hope that CD-I finally would turn into the revolutionary product Philips had been promising for so long? To this day, you merely have to mention CD-I to even the most mild-mannered old games-industry insider to be greeted with a torrent of invective. Philips’s merry-go-round cost the industry huge. Some smaller developers who had trusted Philips enough to bet their very survival on CD-I paid the ultimate price. Aegis, for example, went out of business in 1990 with CD-I still vaporware.

While CD-I chased its tail, General Electric, the unwitting instigators of all this chaos, tried to decide in their slow, bureaucratic way what to do with this DVI thing they’d inherited. Thus things were as unsettled as ever on the CD-I and DVI fronts when the third Microsoft CD-ROM Conference convened in March of 1988. The old plain-Jane CD-ROM format, however, seemed still to be advancing slowly but steadily. Certainly Microsoft appeared to be in fine fettle; harking back to the downpour that had greeted the previous year’s conference, they passed out oversized gold umbrellas to everyone — emblazoned, naturally, with the Microsoft logo in huge type. They could announce at their conference that the High Sierra logical format for CD-ROM had been accepted, with some modest modifications to support languages other than English, by the International Standards Organization as something that would henceforward be known as “ISO 9660.” (It remains the standard logical format for CD-ROM to this day.) Meanwhile Philips and Sony were about to begrudgingly codify the physical format for CD-ROM, extant already as a de facto standard for several years now, as the Yellow Book, latest addition to a library of binders that was turning into quite the rainbow. Apple, who had previously been resistant to CD-ROM, driven as it was by their arch-rival Microsoft, showed up with an official CD-ROM drive for a Macintosh or even an Apple II, albeit at a typically luxurious Apple price of $1200. Even IBM showed up for the conference this time, albeit with a single computer attached to a non-IBM CD-ROM drive and a carefully noncommittal official stance on all this optical evangelism.

As CD-ROM gathered momentum, the stories of DVI and CD-I alike were already beginning to peter out in anticlimax. After doing little with DVI for eighteen long months, General Electric finally sold it to Intel at the end of 1988, explaining that DVI just “didn’t mesh with [their] strategic plans.” Intel began shipping DVI setups to early adopters in 1989, but they cost a staggering $20,000 — a long, long way from a reasonable consumer price point. DVI continued to lurch along into the 1990s, but the price remained too high. Intel, possessed of no corporate tradition of marketing directly to consumers, often seemed little more motivated to turn DVI into a practical product than had been General Electric. Thus did the technology that had caused such a sensation and such disruption in 1987 gradually become yesterday’s news.

Ironically, we can lay the blame for the creeping irrelevancy of DVI directly at the feet of the work for which Intel was best known. As Gordon Moore — himself an Intel man — had predicted decades before, the overall throughput of Intel’s most powerful microprocessors continued to double every two years or so. This situation meant that the problem DVI addressed through all that specialized hardware — that of conventional general-purpose CPUs not having enough horsepower to decompress an ultra-compressed video stream fast enough — wasn’t long for this world. And meanwhile other engineers were attacking the problem from the other side, addressing the standard CD’s reading speed of just 153.6 K per second. They realized that by applying an integral multiplier to the timing of a CD drive’s circuitry, its reading (and seeking) speed could be increased correspondingly. Soon so-called “2X” drives began to appear, capable of reading data at well over 300 K per second, followed in time by “4X” drives, “8X” drives, and whatever unholy figure they’ve reached by today. These developments rendered all of the baroque circuitry of DVI pointless, a solution in search of a problem. Who needed all that complicated stuff?

CD-I’s end was even more protracted and ignominious. The absurd wait eventually got to be too much for even the most loyal CD-I developers. One by one, they dropped their projects. It marked a major tipping point when in 1989 Electronic Arts, the most enthusiastic of all the software publishers in the early days of CD-I, closed down the department they had formed to develop for the platform, writing off millions of dollars on the aborted venture. In another telling sign of the times, Greg Riker, the manager of that department, left Electronic Arts to work for Microsoft on CD-ROM.

When CD-I finally trickled onto store shelves just a few weeks shy of Christmas 1991, it was able to display full-screen video of a sort but only in 128 colors, and was accompanied by an underwhelming selection of slapdash games and lifestyle products, most funded by Philips themselves, that were a far cry from those halcyon expectations of 1986. CD-I sales disappointed — immediately, consistently, and comprehensively. Philips, nothing if not persistent, beat the dead horse for some seven years before giving up at last, having sold only 1 million units in total, many of them at fire-sale discounts.

In the end, the big benefactor of the endless CD-I/DVI standoff was CD-ROM, the simple, commonsense format that had made its public debut well before either of them. By 1993 or so, you didn’t need anything special to play video off a CD at equivalent or better quality to that which had been so amazing in 1987; an up-to-date CPU combined with a 2X CD-ROM drive would do the job just fine. The Microsoft standard had won out. Funny how often that happened in the 1980s and 1990s, isn’t it?

Bill Gates’s reputation as a master Machiavellian being what it is, I’ve heard it suggested that the chaos and indecision which followed the public debut of DVI had been consciously engineered by him — that he had convinced a clueless General Electric to give that 1987 demonstration and later convinced Intel to keep DVI at least ostensibly alive and thus paralyzing Philips long enough for everyday PC hardware and vanilla CD-ROM to win the day, all the while knowing full well that DVI would never amount to anything. That sounds a little far-fetched to this writer, but who knows? Philips’s decision to announce CD-I five days before Microsoft’s CD-ROM Conference had clearly been a direct shot across Bill Gates’s bow, and such challenges did tend not to end well for the challengee. Anything else is, and must likely always remain, mere speculation.

(Sources: Amazing Computing of May 1986; Byte of May 1986, October 1986, April 1987, January 1989, May 1989, and December 1990; Commodore Magazine of November 1988; 68 Micro Journal of August/September 1989; Compute! of February 1987 and June 1988; Macworld of April 1988; ACE of September 1989, March 1990, and April 1990; The One of October 1988 and November 1988; Sierra On-Line’s newsletter of Autumn 1989; PC Magazine of April 29 1986; the premiere issue of AmigaWorld; episodes of the Computer Chronicles television series entitled “Optical Storage Devices,” “CD-ROMs,” and “Optical Storage”; the book CD-ROM: The New Papyrus from the Microsoft Press. Finally, my huge thanks to William Volk, late of Aegis and Mediagenic, for sharing his memories and impressions of the CD wars with me in an interview.)

Comments
33 Responses

- Felix

September 30, 2016 at 4:45 pm

Another nice bit of history I didn’t know. Thank you!

For what it’s worth, CD-ROM speeds finally plateaued at 52x. They did try to make them faster — I caught that exact time at computer fairs, sometime around 1994 (?) — but disks were shattering inside these new drives with alarming regularity, so they quietly vanished off the market in just a few months. Wouldn’t surprise me to hear that DVDs don’t spin any faster either, but they store data at much higher densities, so it’s less of a problem.

- Nate

October 1, 2016 at 9:32 pm

DVD was an advance in pit density, led by much better laser tracking and error-correction algorithms than CD.

One thing I think is important to point out is that CD is the first microprocessor-controlled storage format. That is, you can’t build a CD player without putting a CPU in there somewhere to decode the table of contents, respond to user commands, etc. Sure, the DAC was pure hardware but the interactivity was only possible through software.

Other appliances in the early 80s that required a CPU were the VCR and microwave oven. Other appliances, like the TV, dishwasher or vacuum cleaner took much longer to get a CPU. The latter still frequently don’t have one today.

- Dax

November 16, 2016 at 1:54 pm

The microwave oven didn’t, and still doesn’t need a CPU. Most still have a simple egg-timer mechanism and a bunch of microswitches.

- Sniffnoy

September 30, 2016 at 6:03 pm

Editing comment:

Excited by the success the music CD had enjoyed, Philips, with the tacit but largely silent support of Sony, had decided to adapt the format into the all-singing, all-dancing, all-around future of home entertainment in the abstract.

“Tacit” means “silent”, so this reads really weird.

- Jimmy Maher

September 30, 2016 at 6:55 pm

Right you are. Thanks!

- Sniffnoy

September 30, 2016 at 9:04 pm

Thanks! I must point out now that the word “support” has now gone missing, though…

- Jimmy Maher

October 1, 2016 at 6:10 am

Sigh… show me not to try to edit articles on the couch. Thanks!

- Gnoman

October 1, 2016 at 5:37 am

Rather interesting. I’m quite familiar with the last days of CD-I, when Phillips became Nintendo’s second partner (Nintendo initially partnered with Sony, but decided the licensing agreements were too onerous and aborted project Play Station – Sony would take their work, combined with some practice making CD-I hardware, and release their standalone PlayStation (note the lack of a space) console that inflicted a blow that Nintendo has never recovered from) on the SNES-CD add-on that never wound up materializing, but had no idea that the genesis of the product started so far back.

- William Volk

October 10, 2016 at 12:52 pm

One reason that Nintendo dropped Sony and went to CD-I was the settlement of the Baer Magnavox Videogame Patent case. It’s also how Link ended up on CD-I. And it’s also why Activision nearly closed in 1990/1 and it gave Bobby Kotick the opportunity to come in and save the company.

- Lisa H.

October 1, 2016 at 6:25 am

the way they could hold up to 75 minutes worth of music, enough to pack many double vinyl albums onto a single CD.

I’m confused. What are you referring to as a “double album” here? A 33 1/3 RPM LP is a little less than 25 minutes per side, isn’t it?

followed in time by “4X” drives, “8X” drives, and whatever unholy figure they’ve reached by today.

LOL. I suppose you’ve seen the Mythbusters thing where they actually spin CDs fast enough that they shatter?

- Jimmy Maher

October 1, 2016 at 6:58 am

The capacity of a record album depends to some extent on the nature of the content. Bass-heavy stuff tends to cause the needle to jump out of the groove if you pack the grooves too closely. You could probably get a few minutes more than your 25 minutes on a side in the case of, say, spoken-word stuff, while the practical limit for music — especially certain kinds of music, like rap or disco — is a little less.

But when I wrote of “double albums,” I meant *specific* double albums, many of which don’t come close to filling two records to maximum capacity. London Calling by the Clash and Exile on Main Street by the Rollings Stones, for instance, both come in well under 70 minutes.

I hadn’t seen the Mythbusters thing, no. Will look for it. ;)

- Lisa H.

October 1, 2016 at 7:37 am

Ahhh, my grammar understanding fail, then. You meant that many individual double albums could fit onto a CD. I was reading it as many simultaneously, which was absurd (for standard CD audio format). Gotcha.

- Matt Weiner

October 3, 2016 at 11:13 am

You could probably get a few minutes more than your 25 minutes on a side in the case of, say, spoken-word stuff, while the practical limit for music — especially certain kinds of music, like rap or disco — is a little less.

This is far afield from the content of the post, but there are a reasonable number of LPs that go pretty far beyond 25 minutes a side. Miles Davis’s Get Up With It has three sides that are over half an hour each, for instance; that’s one of the more extreme cases but there are a lot more that are pretty jam-packed. I’ve never had any issues with the sound of Get Up With It or with the needle jumping out, but I’m far from an audiophile.

- Jimmy Maher

October 3, 2016 at 11:33 am

Volume also has an effect — make a record quieter and you can pack more on. You might want to see if you Miles Davis album is noticeably quieter than others in your collection…

- Matt Weiner

October 3, 2016 at 1:00 pm

That sounds like the sort of thing that would be fun to test, but I’m not sure my wife will be on board. (closed-eyes laugh emoticon goes here)

- Bernie

October 1, 2016 at 4:13 pm

This article really shows your mastery at combining and condensing mountains of information from numerous sources, and producing a thoroughly readable and etertaining result.

Many thanks for another classic article !

I would also like you to comment on the following thought that came to me while reading the article, specifically your comment on things repeating themselves in 1980’s and 90’s computing : don’t all those optical data standards and hardware hark back to the floppy disk market of 1982-85 ? , with all those different densities, encoding methods, wide performance variations and custom solutions, until the 3.5″ Sony double-density format and drive became a de-facto standard, with 5 1/4″ drives mostly a legacy/budget thing.

- Jimmy Maher

October 2, 2016 at 7:26 am

Even the 3.5-inch floppy disks were a confusion of formats for a long time. While I’m seeming to recall that the Atari ST used the same format as MS-DOS, Apple had their own for the Mac, as did Commodore for the Amiga. Actually, the Mac had multiple formats itself, having switched filesystems about the time of the Mac Plus’s release. At some point in the late 1980s, Apple, realizing the Mac was never going to replace MS-DOS in corporate America and therefore needed to inter-operate with it, began making machines that could read and write to MS-DOS disks as well. We can see this as the industry finally beginning to converge on a single floppy format.

I do think that CD-ROM was a rather wise and far-seeing attempt to head off a similar confusion of formats in optical storage. A standard was particularly valuable in the case of CD-ROM in that the sheer size of the things made the idea of combining, say, MS-DOS and Mac versions of a product onto one disc viable. And indeed, there would be a lot of these multi-platform CD-ROMs, especially in the early days. Any way that a company could reduce the number of SKUs they were manufacturing and warehousing was generally a good thing for the bottom line…

- Bernie

October 2, 2016 at 11:22 pm

Elightening , as always ! Thanks for the clarification !

Can’t wait until next week ! …….

- Nate

October 8, 2016 at 4:48 am

Even when the CD-ROM (High Sierra/ISO 9660) format was used for the underlying layer, Mac/Windows/Unix had different ways of extending the 8.3 file names that later had to be standardized (e.g. Rock Ridge extension). I think it took until the early 90s to get that right.

Still, I agree that High Sierra in 1986 was extremely forward-looking.

- Wyatt C

October 1, 2016 at 11:11 pm

As always, awesome read! Thank you for compiling and so readably supplying this cool old stuff.

a few typo catches:
– When one started really delving into the *practalities* of the CD
– *These development* rendered all of the baroque
– Bill Gates’s *bows* — it scans oddly for him to have multiple bows, but this may have been intentional, as he certainly had several efforts underway, more than one of which may have been affected by Philips’s move.

Thanks again!

- Jimmy Maher

October 2, 2016 at 7:16 am

The idiom can be written as either “bow” or “bows,” but on reflection I agree that the latter sounds a little odd when applied to just one guy. Thanks!

- Iván Díaz Álvarez

October 2, 2016 at 8:23 am

A very interesting article, I would only add that Phillips finally added DVI like functionality to CD-i in the form of the DVC (Digital Video Cartridge). This was a expansion module that you could install in most CD-i models and would later become integrated, with it you could actually play full screen video products, including a port of Dragon’s Lair. I also remember a short period in which MPEG decoder cards for PCs where a thing, being as expensive as a high end video card, this soon fade out as CPUs were able to decode MPEG content by themselves.

- AguyinaRPG

October 2, 2016 at 4:38 pm

“Seldom has a new media format appeared that is so clearly better than the existing formats in almost all respects.”

Get ready to have the audiophiles on your heels!

Multimedia, set-top boxes, and connectivity is something that really hasn’t been examined in depth from a computer games standpoint. People just assume that it kind of “happened”, but the CD-ROM coming to prominence was such a layered process that only really coincided with the IBM-PC clone wars. You portrayed the anti-climax of it all rather well.

I have been learning a lot more about SGI and Warner’s set-top box recently, and it seemed like every single one of these projects missed its window. CD-I, 3DO, Magic Carpet, the whole lot of them. Sure, they would have been beaten by the internet, but I think they could have at least created a market had they been more prescient on putting out the technology sooner. I don’t know if you’ll cover 3DO in any larger sense, but I do know a guy who was their during the product’s development if you’re interested.

- Jimmy Maher

October 2, 2016 at 6:59 pm

I put that “at least” in there as a sop to hipsters and their “warm-sounding” vinyl. ;) (I actually think the vinyl revival is kind of cool, but I’m under no illusion that the format is really better in any objective way than CD.)

I think the failure of the set-top boxes of the 1990s was partially a failure of marketing. None of these companies articulated very well what you were really supposed to *do* with them, other than “a little of everything.” They were desperately afraid of selling them as “just” videogame consoles, but failed to articulate a plausible alternate use that consumers could really grab hold of. Companies like Sega and Sony who sold CD-based boxes as game consoles did much better.

Phillips in particular had started on CD-I at a time when consoles were still regarded as a dead fad, and thus shied away from any hint of association with the likes of the Atari VCS. Later, they never updated their messaging to match the post-Nintendo reality.

I haven’t thought seriously yet about how deeply I want to delve into 3DO, but I’ll make a note of your offer in case I do go deep enough that an inside source would be a good thing to have. Thank you!

- Felix

October 3, 2016 at 7:34 am

I’m under no illusion that the format is really better in any objective way than CD.

Ah, but that’s the whole issue, don’t you see? Human beings are anything but objective. Moreover, we’ve evolved in an analog environment full of little imperfections that are never twice the same, so digital formats, with their ability to perfectly reproduce sound the same way every single time, strike us as artificial. Which they are. And increasing fidelity beyond the ability of the human ear to even perceive it can’t possibly help.

When audiophiles claim that vinyl sounds “better”, they don’t mean in any objective way. Of course not. The whole point is that it sounds subjectively better. Yes, once again, in yet another way, worse is better. We’d all do well to learn that lesson already.

- Matt Weiner

October 3, 2016 at 12:57 pm

I will say that, pulling out my CD collection after a while, the whole “effectively last forever” thing was oversold. A lot of my CDs have developed glitches. This is probably because of the way I store/handle them, but then again “perfect sound as long as you never take it out to play it” isn’t what we were promised.

And anyway, that’s probably irrelevant, as the CD is a dinosaur format too. Us dinosaurs like to say (or liked to say a few years ago) that young’uns today would never own an LP, not realizing that it’s CDs that they’ll never own now.

- Jayle Enn

October 2, 2016 at 9:29 pm

I can’t remember when I got my first CD-ROM; it came in a big Creative Labs ‘edutainment’ box, and the drive itself was suspended in a webwork of blue plastic film that made me think of transporting nitroglycerine. It came with the Grolier encyclopedia, and I found a copy of something called Myst a few months later, so that period is kind of a blur.

Not realizing how long it had been in development, I’d always wondered just what Philips was thinking when the CD-I went to market. It seemed like a slapdash also-ran with some really weird licenses and nothing else to recommend it.

- Tuna

October 4, 2016 at 7:30 pm

I joined the fray in 1991, when the first ‘affordable’ CD-ROM based entertainment system arrived in the form of the Fujitsu FM-Towns, soon to be followed by offerings from Sega and shortly after, the first Playstation consoles. At the time, the FM-Towns had an unusually sophisticated video card, that allowed hand-coded video decompressors to generate full-screen interactive video (so long as you didn’t mind a limited palette).

It was a time of some chaos, with many different technical routes being explored simultaneously – from unique graphics chips (in the Jaguar), to CD-ROM and early 3D-rendering techniques. Various companies were trying to set (or lock in) standards that they could own – often with the quality of the hardware coming secondary to the complexity of the licensing agreement.

Worse still, no-one really knew what games should be like. Suddenly, hand drawn 2D sprites looked crude, but there wasn’t an easy way to generate anything more sophisticated. Even when you did have the graphics, what would the game play be? Choose your own adventure style video? Quiz games? Some complicated tie-in to Hollywood (which was what everyone wanted to emulate)? There is a hidden story of the growth of the tools that allowed all this new content to be created and tested – when you could no-longer produce the game itself on the machine it was ultimately intended to run on.

- Cliffy

October 7, 2016 at 3:13 am

Oof, I imagine Jimmy will eventually get to that horrid period of full-motion video games in the mid-’90’s. We thought we wanted real actors, but we really, really didn’t.

- Peter Piers

November 12, 2016 at 3:32 pm

Hey, some of us still have a thing for FMV. :)

When done well. Which it often wasn’t. But hey, I have fond memories of both Phantasmagoria games (I understand most people don’t), Gabriel Knight 2, Shivers, Harvester, The Riddle of Master Lu, Temujin. Different sort of FMVs all, of course.

It wasn’t until decades later that I realised the amount of crap that had been churned out by FMV bandwagonners, like Angel Devoid or Dracula Unleashed. Maybe I was just lucky growing up, huh? Still, some gems like The Dark Side Of The Moon are worth experiencing. Others, like Conspiracy, are just so bad it’s not worth it.

It’s just plain *hard* to make good FMV. I’m sure it’s worth it, but I really can’t imagine anyone in the industry seriously wanting to work around its limitations nowadays – especially with its reputation. But good FMV *can* exist.

- Lee Jones

October 7, 2016 at 8:41 am

Phillips is also guilty of inflicting the world with two rather awful Zelda games.

Thanks, Phillips.

- William Volk

October 11, 2016 at 9:02 pm

Thanks Magnavox Baer Patent Case. That was a settlement with Nintendo.

- Allen Brunson

October 8, 2016 at 4:15 am

I was working as a computer networking technician when the CD-ROM was introduced. I can confirm that the capacity was, for that time, mind-blowingly huge. Whenever I would hear the total number of bytes you could store on one of them, it was completely outside my ability to reason about it, so I would forget it again. It was like if somebody said “eleventy jillion.”

The company I worked for sold Novell Netware networks to businesses. Since the drives were so expensive, one thing Netware could do for you was allow you to attach a CD-ROM drive to a server somewhere, which could be shared by all the computers in your office.

The Manhole
October 7, 2016

Because the CD-ROM version of The Manhole sold in relatively small numbers in comparison to the original floppy version, the late Russell Lieblich’s surprisingly varied original soundtrack is too seldom heard today. So, in the best tradition of multimedia computing (still a very new and sexy idea in the time about which I’m writing), feel free to listen while you read.

The Manhole

Were HyperCard “merely” the essential bridge between Ted Nelson’s Xanadu fantasy and the modern World Wide Web, it would stand as one of the most important pieces of software of the 1980s. But, improbably, HyperCard was even more than that. It’s easy to get so dazzled by its early implementation of hypertext that one loses track entirely of the other part of Bill Atkinson’s vision for the environment. True to the Macintosh, “the computer for the rest of us,” Atkinson designed HyperCard as a sort of computerized erector set for everyday users who might not care a whit about hypertext for its own sake. With HyperCard, he hoped, “a whole new body of people who have creative ideas but aren’t programmers will be able to express their ideas or expertise in certain subjects.”

He made good on that goal. An incredibly diverse group of people worked with HyperCard, a group in which traditional hackers were very much the minority. Danny Goodman, the man who became known as the world’s foremost authority on HyperCard programming, was actually a journalist whose earlier experiences with programming had been limited to a few dabblings in BASIC. In my earlier article about hypertext and HyperCard, I wrote how “a professor of music converted his entire Music Appreciation 101 course into a stack.” Well, readers, I meant that literally. He did it himself. Industry analyst and HyperCard zealot Jan Lewis:

You can do things with it [HyperCard] immediately. And you can do sexy things: graphics, animation, sound. You can do it without knowing how to program. You get immediate feedback; you can make a change and see or hear it immediately. And as you go up on the learning curve — let’s say you learn how to use HyperTalk [the bundled scripting language] — again, you can make changes easily and simply and get immediate feedback. It just feels good. It’s fun!

And yet HyperCard most definitely wasn’t a toy. People could and did make great, innovative, commercial-quality software using it. Nowhere is the power of HyperCard — a cultural as well as a technical power — illustrated more plainly than in the early careers of Rand and Robyn Miller.

Rand and Robyn had a very unusual upbringing. The first and third of the four sons of a wandering non-denominational preacher, they spent their childhoods moving wherever their father’s calling took him: from Dallas to Albuquerque, from Hawaii to Haiti to Spokane. They were a classic pairing of left brain and right brain. Rand had taken to computers from the instant he was introduced to them via a big time-shared system whilst still in junior high, and had made programming them into his career. By 1987, the year HyperCard dropped, he was to all appearances settled in life: 28 years old, married with children, living in a small town in East Texas, working for a bank as a programmer, and nurturing a love for the Apple Macintosh (he’d purchased his first Mac within days of the machine’s release back in 1984). He liked to read books on science. His brother Robyn, seven years his junior, was still trying to figure out what to do with his life. He was attending the University of Washington in somewhat desultory fashion as an alleged anthropology major, but devoted most of his energy to drawing pictures and playing the guitar. He liked to read adventure novels.

HyperCard struck Rand Miller, as it did so many, with all the force of a revelation. While he was an accomplished enough programmer to make a living at it, he wasn’t one who particularly enjoyed the detail work that went with the trade. “There are a lot of people who love digging down into the esoterics of compilers and C++, getting down and dirty with typed variables and all that stuff,” he says. “I wanted a quick return on investment. I just wanted to get things done.” HyperCard offered the chance to “get things done” dramatically faster and more easily than any programming environment he had ever seen. He became an immediate convert.

With two small girls of his own, Rand felt keenly the lack of quality children’s software for the Macintosh. He hit upon the idea of making a sort of interactive storybook using HyperCard, a very natural application for a hypertext tool. Lacking the artistic talent to make a go of the pictures, he thought of his little brother Robyn. The two men, so far apart in years and geography and living such different lives, weren’t really all that close. Nevertheless, Rand had a premonition that Robyn would be the perfect partner for his interactive storybook.

But Robyn, who had never owned a computer and had never had any interest in doing so, wasn’t immediately enticed by the idea of becoming a software developer. Getting him just to consider the idea took quite a number of letters and phone calls. At last, however, Robyn made his way down to the Macintosh his parents kept in the basement of the family home in Spokane and loaded up the copy of HyperCard his brother had sent him. There, like so many others, he was seduced by Bill Atkinson’s creation. He started playing around, just to see what he could make. What he made right away became something very different from the interactive storybook, complete with text and metaphorical pages, that Rand had envisioned. Robyn:

I started drawing this picture of a manhole — I don’t even know why. You clicked on it and the manhole cover would slide off. Then I made an animation of a vine growing out. The vine was huge, “Jack and the Beanstalk”-style. And then I didn’t want to turn the page. I wanted to be able to navigate up the vine, or go down into the manhole. I started creating a navigable world by using the very simple tools [of HyperCard]. I created this place.  I improvised my way through this world, creating one thing after another. Pretty soon I was creating little canals, and a forest with stars. I was inventing it as I went. And that’s how the world was born.

For his part, Rand had no problem accepting the change in approach:

Immediately you are enticed to explore instead of turning the page. Nobody sees a hole in the ground leading downward and a vine growing upward and in the distance a fire hydrant that says, “Touch me,” and wants to turn the page. You want to see what those things are. Instead of drawing the next page [when the player clicked a hotspot], he [Robyn] drew a picture that was closer — down in the manhole or above on the vine. It was kind of a stream of consciousness, but it became a place instead of a book. He started sending me these images, and I started connecting them, trying to make them work, make them interactive.

In this fashion, they built the world of The Manhole together: Robyn pulling its elements from the flotsam and jetsam of his consciousness and drawing them on the screen, Rand binding it all together into a contiguous place, and adding sound effects and voice snippets here and there. If they had tried to make a real game of the thing, with puzzles and goals, such a non-designed approach to design would likely have gone badly wrong in a hurry.

Luckily, puzzles and goals were never the point of The Manhole. It was intended always as just an endlessly interesting space to explore. As such, it would prove capable of captivating children and the proverbial young at heart for hours, full as it was of secrets and Easter eggs hidden in the craziest of places. One can play with The Manhole on and off for literally years, and still continue to stumble upon the occasional new thing. Interactions are often unexpected, and unexpectedly delightful. Hop in a rowboat to take a little ride and you might emerge in a rabbit’s teacup. Start watching a dragon’s television — Why does a dragon have a television? Who knows! — and you can teleport yourself into the image shown on the screen to emerge at the top of the world. Search long enough, and you might just discover a working piano you can actually play. The spirit of the thing is perhaps best conveyed by the five books you find inside the friendly rabbit’s home: Alice in Wonderland; The Wind in the Willows; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; Winnie the Pooh; and Metaphors of Intercultural Philosophy (“This book isn’t about anything!”). Like all of those books excepting, presumably, the last, The Manhole is pretty wonderful, a perfect blend of sweet cuteness and tart whimsy.

With no contacts whatsoever within the Macintosh software industry, the brothers decided to publish The Manhole themselves via a tiny advertisement in the back of Macworld magazine, taken out under the auspices of Prolog, a consulting company Rand had founded as a moonlighting venture some time before. They rented a tiny booth to show The Manhole publicly for the first time at the Hyper Expo in San Francisco in June of 1988. (Yes, HyperCard mania had gotten so intense that there were entire trade shows dedicated just to it.) There they were delighted to receive a visit from none other than HyperCard’s creator Bill Atkinson, with his daughter Laura in tow; not yet five years old, she had no trouble navigating through their little world. Incredibly, Robyn had never even heard the word “hypertext” prior to the show, had no idea about the decades of theory that underpinned the program he had used, savant-like, to create The Manhole. When he met a band of Ted Nelson’s disgruntled Xanadu disciples on the show floor, come to crash the HyperCard party, he had no idea what they were on about.

But the brothers’ most important Hyper Expo encounter was a meeting with Richard Lehrberg, Vice President for Product Development at Mediagenic,[1] who took a copy of The Manhole away with him for evaluation. Lehrberg showed it to William Volk, whom he had just hired away from the small Macintosh and Amiga publisher Aegis to become Mediagenic’s head of technology; he described it to Volk unenthusiastically as “this little HyperCard thing” done by “two guys in Texas.” Volk was much more impressed. He was immediately intrigued by one aspect of The Manhole in particular: the way that it used no buttons or conventional user-interface elements at all. Instead, the pictures themselves were the interface; you could just click where you would and see what happened. It was perhaps a product of Robyn Miller’s sheer naivetee as much anything else; seasoned computer people, so used to conventional interface paradigms, just didn’t think like that. But regardless of where it came from, Volk thought it was genius, a breaking down of a wall that had heretofore always separated the user from the virtual world. Volk:

The Miller brothers had come up with what I call the invisible interface. They had gotten rid of the idea of navigation buttons, which was what everyone was doing: go forward, go backward, turn right, turn left. They had made the scenes themselves the interface. You’re looking at a fire hydrant. You click on the fire hydrant; the fire hydrant sprays water. You click on the fire hydrant again; you zoom in to the fire hydrant, and there’s a little door on the fire hydrant. That was completely new.

Of course, other games did have you clicking “into” their world to make things happen; the point-and-click adventure genre was evolving rapidly during this period to replace the older parser-driven adventure games. But even games like Déjà Vu and Maniac Mansion, brilliantly innovative though they were, still surrounded their windows into their worlds with a clutter of “verb” buttons, legacies of the genre’s parser-driven roots. The Manhole, however, presented the player with nothing but its world. What with its defiantly non-Euclidean — not to say nonsensical — representation of space and its lack of goals and puzzles, The Manhole wasn’t a conventional adventure game by any stretch. Nevertheless, it pointed the way to what the genre would become, not least in the later works of the Miller brothers themselves.

Much of Volk’s working life for the next two years would be spent on The Manhole, by the end of which period he would quite possibly be more familiar with its many nooks and crannies than its own creators were. He became The Manhole‘s champion inside Mediagenic, convincing his colleagues to publish it, thereby bringing it to a far wider audience than the Miller brothers could ever have reached on their own. Released by Mediagenic under their Activision imprint, it became a hit by the modest standards of the Macintosh consumer-software market. Macworld magazine named The Manhole the winner of their “Wild Card” category in a feature article on the best HyperCard stacks, while the Software Publishers Association gave it an “Excellence in Software” award for “Best New Use of a Computer.”

Well aware that The Manhole was collecting a certain chic cachet to itself, Mediagenic/Activision didn’t hesitate to play that angle up in their advertising.

Had that been left to be that, The Manhole would remain historically interesting as both a delightful little curiosity of its era and as the starting point of the hugely significant game-development careers of the Miller brothers. Yet there’s more to the story.

William Volk, frustrated with the endless delays of CD-I and the state of paralysis the entire industry was in when it came to the idea of publishing entertainment software on CD, had been looking for some time for a way to break the logjam. It was Stewart Alsop, an influential tech journalist, who first suggested to Volk that the answer to his dilemma was already part of Mediagenic’s catalog — that The Manhole would be perfect for CD-ROM. Volk was just the person to see such a project through, having already experimented extensively with CD-ROM and CD-I  as part of Aegis as well as Mediagenic. With the permission of the Miller brothers, he recruited Russell Lieblich, Mediagenic’s longstanding guru in all things music- and sound-related, to compose and perform a soundtrack for The Manhole which would play from the CD as the player explored.

An important difference separates the way the music worked in the CD-ROM version of The Manhole from way it worked in virtually all computer games to appear before it. The occasional brief digitized snippet aside, music in computer games had always been generated on the computer, whether by sound chips like the Commodore 64’s famous SID or entire sound boards like the top-of-its-class Roland MT-32 (we shall endeavor to forget the horrid beeps and squawks that issued from the IBM PC and Apple II’s native sound hardware). But The Manhole‘s music, while having been originally generated entirely or almost entirely on computers in Lieblich’s studio, was then recorded onto CD for digital playback, just like a song on a music CD. This method, made possible only by evolving computer sound hardware and, most importantly, by the huge storage capacity of a CD-ROM, would in the years to come slowly become simply the way that computer-game music was done. Today many big-budget titles hire entire orchestras to record soundtracks as elaborate and ambitious as the ones found in big Hollywood feature films, whilst also including digitized recordings of voices, squealing tires, explosions, and all the inevitable rest. In fact, surprisingly little of the sound present in most modern games is synthesized sound, a situation that has long since relegated elaborate setups like the Roland MT-32 to the status of white elephants; just pipe your digitized recording through a digital-to-analog converter and be done with it already.

As the very first title to go all digitized all the time, The Manhole didn’t have a particularly easy time of it; getting the music to play without breaking up or stuttering as the player explored presented a huge challenge on the Macintosh, a machine whose minimalist design burdened the CPU with all of the work of sound generation. However, Volk and his colleagues got it going at last. Published in the spring of 1989, the CD-ROM version of The Manhole marked a major landmark in the history of computing, the first American game — or, at least, software toy (another big buzzword of the age, as it happens) — to be released on CD-ROM.[2] Volk, infuriated with Philips for the chaos and confusion CD-I’s endless delays had wrought in an industry he believed was crying out for the limitless vistas of optical storage, sent them a copy of The Manhole along with a curt note: “See! We did it! We’re tired of waiting!”

And they weren’t done yet. Having gotten The Manhole working on CD-ROM on the Macintosh, Volk and his colleagues at Mediagenic next tackled the daunting task of porting it to the most popular platform for consumer software, MS-DOS — a platform without HyperCard. To address this lack, Mediagenic developed a custom engine for CD-ROM titles on MS-DOS, dubbing it the Multimedia Applications Development Environment, or MADE.[3] Mediagenic’s in-house team of artists redrew Robyn Miller’s original black-and-white illustrations in color, and The Manhole on CD-ROM for MS-DOS shipped in 1990.

In my opinion, The Manhole lost some of its unique charm when it was colorized for MS-DOS. The VGA graphics, impressive in their day, look just a bit garish and overdone today in comparison to the classic pen-and-ink style of the original.

The Manhole, idiosyncratic piece of artsy children’s software that it was, could hardly have been expected to break the industry’s optical logjam all on its own. Its CD-ROM incarnation, for that matter, wasn’t all that hugely different from the floppy version. In the end, one has to acknowledge that The Manhole on CD-ROM was little more than the floppy version with a soundtrack playing in the background — a nice addition certainly, but perhaps not quite the transformative experience which all of the rhetoric surrounding CD-ROM’s potential might have led one to expect. It would take another few excruciating years for a CD-ROM drive to become a must-have accessory for everyday American computers. Yet every revolution has to start somewhere, and William Volk deserves his full measure of credit for doing what he could to push this one forward in the only way that could ultimately matter: by stepping up and delivering a real, tangible product at long last. As Steve Jobs used to say, “Real artists ship.”

The importance of The Manhole, existing as it does right there at the locus of so much that was new and important in computing in the late 1980s, can be read in so many ways that there’s always a danger of losing some of them in the shuffle. But it should never be forgotten whilst trying to sort through the tangle that this astonishingly creative little world was principally designed by someone who had barely touched a computer in his life before he sat down with HyperCard. That he wound up with something so fascinating is a huge tribute not just to Robyn Miller and his enabling brother Rand, but also to Bill Atkinson’s HyperCard itself. Apple has long since abandoned HyperCard, and we enjoy no precise equivalent to it today. Indeed, its vision of intuitive, non-pretentious, fun programming is one that we’re in danger of losing altogether. Being one who loves the computer most of all as the most exciting tool for creation ever invented, I can’t help but see that as a horrible shame.

The Miller brothers had, as most of you reading this probably know, a far longer future in front of them than HyperCard would get to enjoy. Already well before 1988 was through they had rechristened themselves Cyan Productions, a name that felt much more appropriate for a creative development house than the businesslike Prolog. As Cyan, they made two more pieces of children’s software, Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Makerei and Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Seudo. Both were once again made using HyperCard, and both were very much made in the spirit of The Manhole. And like The Manhole both were published on CD-ROM as well as floppy disk; the Miller brothers, having learned much from Mediagenic’s process of moving their first title to CD-ROM, handled the CD-ROM as well as the floppy versions themselves when it came to these later efforts. Opinions are somewhat divided on whether the two later Cyan children’s titles fully recapture the magic that has led so many adults and children alike over the years to spend so much time plumbing the depths of The Manhole. None, however, can argue with the significance of what came next, the Miller brothers’ graduation to games for adults — and, as it happens, another huge milestone in the slow-motion CD-ROM revolution. But that story, like so many others, is one that we’ll have to tell at another time.

(Sources: Amstrad Action of January 1990; Macworld of July 1988, October 1988, November 1988, March 1989, April 1989, and December 1989; Wired of August 1994 and October 1999; The New York Times of November 28 1989. Also the books Myst and Riven: The World of the D’ni by Mark J.P. Wolf and Prima’s Official Strategy Guide: Myst by Rick Barba and Rusel DeMaria, and the Computer Chronicles television episodes entitled “HyperCard,” “MacWorld Special 1988,” “HyperCard Update,” and “Hypertext.” Online sources include Robyn Miller’s Myst postmortem from the 2013 Game Developer’s Conference; Richard Moss’s Ludiphilia podcast; a blog post by Robyn Miller. Finally, my huge thanks to William Volk for sharing his memories and impressions with me in an interview and for sending me an original copy of The Manhole on CD-ROM for my research.

The Manhole: Masterpiece Edition, a remake supervised by the Miller brothers in 1994 which sports much-improved graphics and sound, is available for purchase on Steam.)

1. Activision was renamed Mediagenic at almost the very instant that Lehrberg first met the Miller brothers. When the name change was greeted with universal derision, Activision/Mediagenic CEO Bruce Davis quickly began backpedaling on his hasty decision. The Manhole, for instance, was released by Mediagenic under their “Activision” label — which was odd because under the new ordering said label was supposed to be reserved for games, and The Manhole was considered children’s software, not a traditional game. I just stick with the name “Mediagenic” in this article as the least confusing way to address a confusing situation. ↩

2. The first CD-based software to reach European consumers says worlds about the differences that persisted between American and European computing, and about the sheer can-do ingenuity that so often allowed British programmers in particular to squeeze every last ounce of potential out of hardware that was usually significantly inferior to that enjoyed by their American counterparts. Codemasters, a budget software house based in Warwickshire, came up with a very unique shovelware package for the 1989 Christmas season. They transferred thirty old games from cassette to a conventional audio CD, which they then sold along with a special cable to run the output from an ordinary music-CD player into a Sinclair or Amstrad home computer. “Here’s your CD-ROM,” they said. “Have a ball.” By all accounts, Codemasters’s self-proclaimed “CD revolution,” kind of hilarious and kind of brilliant, did quite well for them. When it came to doing more with less in computing, you never could beat the Brits. ↩

3. MADE’s scripting language was to some extent based on AdvSys, a language for amateur text-adventure creation that never quite took off like the contemporaneous AGT. ↩

Comments
14 Responses

- Brian Bagnall

October 7, 2016 at 1:50 pm

Love the soundtrack idea! That’s a great way to read the article.

- Felix

October 8, 2016 at 9:09 am

He was immediately intrigued by one aspect of The Manhole in particular: the way that it used no buttons or conventional user-interface elements at all. Instead, the pictures themselves were the interface; you could just click where you would and see what happened. It was perhaps a product of Robyn Miller’s sheer naivetee as much anything else; seasoned computer people, so used to conventional interface paradigms, just didn’t think like that.

In all fairness, most software absolutely requires affordances like push buttons. Hardware, too. My cousin has this monitor with no visible buttons. When you first see it, there’s apparently no way to turn it on. It takes someone to show you that a small area in the lower right is touch-sensitive. And I still fumble around for it every single time.

No thanks. Give me a big honking button any time. Even if it’s arguably ugly — and it doesn’t have to be. (That’s the designer’s job, to make sure functional and pretty aren’t mutually exclusive. And designers have been increasingly failing at their job in recent decades.)

For that matter, point-and-click adventure games, with their “inobtrusive” UI, were quickly found to suffer from a bad case of hunt-the-pixel. Which was solved by… making the hot spots stand out, even if that broke immersion. Because that’s always better than letting the player stumble in the dark.

If only parser-based IF had ever learned that lesson. But that’s another story.

- William Volk

October 10, 2016 at 12:54 pm

The Manhole didn’t resort to “pixel hunting” because that is, indeed, a really bad idea. You see this even today with “room escape” apps on the iPhone et. al.

The Manhole inspired the too-easy game, LGOP2 … but that did lead to The Return to Zork. In that game the visual interface was retained, but a reverse parser was employed to allow for complex puzzle interactions.

- Alexander Freeman

October 13, 2016 at 6:44 am

Fair point, but I think The Manhole was uniquely suited to not having something obtrusive like a button. Going by the description, it seems that made it seem more believable as a world.

- Brent

October 8, 2016 at 9:51 am

Fantastic article! I’ve been waiting for this one for a while since I have long been a huge fan of the Miller brothers’ work and I wanted to see what new insights you’d be able to dig up. I knew it was the first US game to ship on CD, but I had no clue how tied up in the politics of CD-ROM vs CD-I it was!

Is there anywhere I can pay to play the original black and white version? I agree with you that you lose a bit of the charm when you go to the colorized version, and all I can find is the Masterpiece edition.

- Jimmy Maher

October 8, 2016 at 10:38 am

The floppy version, which as noted in the article isn’t really all that different from the CD-ROM version, is available on the Macintosh Garden: http://macintoshgarden.org/games/the-manhole. Unfortunately, it’s beset by all of the usual complications dogging vintage Macintosh emulation: it’s archived in SIT format, the only archive format in the world that isn’t backward compatible with itself, meaning you get to do a fun dance just trying to find the right version of the program to uncompress it with. In this case, it’s made still more complicated by the fact that you first need to install HyperCard on the emulator — which is, you guessed it, also in SIT format.

I had hoped to create a more straightforward package bundling everything together in a painless way, similar to what I did for The Fool’s Errand. I wrote to Rand Miller asking permission to do this, but never heard back from him. So, it unfortunately is what it is, at least for now.

- Brent

October 8, 2016 at 10:54 am

Too bad since I have struggled with that sit file version for perhaps a few hours without any success. I’ll try again!

- Jimmy Maher

October 8, 2016 at 11:22 am

This is the best guide I’ve found to the whole ridiculous situation: http://blogsquirrel.blogspot.dk/2012/07/squirrels-guide-to-macintosh-emulation.html.

- Brent

October 8, 2016 at 11:49 am

Thanks! That was actually the last nudge I needed—I now have it running!

- Taras

October 9, 2016 at 6:51 am

The works of the Miller brothers are incredibly inspiring to me and Riven is my favorite game of all time, so I was thrilled to see you cover them at LAST. Even with something I think I know a lot about I’m bound to learn something new from your posts, and this time what struck me most was how improbable it all was, especially in light of their massive future success, to which the improbable success of The Manhole was just a prelude. The fact that Robyn had basically never sat down at a computer before and yet delivered this elegant, captivating vision of the worlds that computers could create (with the help of his brother, and hypercard, of course), that’s strange enough. What really struck me though was that Robyn and his brother were SEVEN years apart. I never knew that before, or never spared a thought for it, but this really put it into perspective for me. There’s an age gap between my sister and I that’s roughly as wide, and I can’t imagine going into business making computer games with her. We’re friendly and everything, but our worlds are just so far removed. If we had such diametrically opposed outlooks on the world and computers as the Millers seemed to, forget it. I always gave Robyn a lot of credit for the artistic success of Myst and Riven, and Rand maybe not enough. But now I’m thinking perhaps Rand’s the real genius, successfully reaching across that gap like he did. He WAS the producer on Riven, and you don’t make something that ambitious and perfect without somebody behind the scenes with an almost supernatural ability to make everything go just right.

- Pingback: Video Game Deep Cuts: Super Potato Esther Manhole - Arcade Bulletin

- ydy

October 12, 2016 at 7:31 pm

I found your website recently, and everything I’ve read on it has been fascinating. Thanks for putting so much work into these articles.

- Alexander Freeman

October 13, 2016 at 6:50 am

I second that. I wish I’d had more to say about your most recent articles, but this is about it. Well, that and how your previous article made me see what a golden opportunity Commodore squandered when the CD rolled around.

I’ve decided to donate again as a token of my appreciation for your articles!

- Jimmy Maher

October 13, 2016 at 9:55 am

Thank you!

Cinemaware’s Year in the Desert
October 14, 2016

The last year of the 1980s was also the last that the Commodore Amiga would enjoy as the ultimate American game machine. Even as the low-end computer-game market was being pummeled into virtual nonexistence by the Nintendo Entertainment System, leaving the Amiga with little room into which to expand downward, the heretofore business-centric world of MS-DOS was developing rapidly on the high end, with VGA graphics and sound cards becoming more and more common. The observant could already recognize that these developments, combined with Commodore’s lackadaisical attitude toward improving their own technology, must spell serious trouble for the Amiga in the long run.

But for now, for this one more year, things were still going pretty well. Amiga zealots celebrated loudly and proudly at the beginning of 1989 when news broke that the platform had pushed past the magic barrier of 1 million machines sold. As convinced as ever that world domination was just around the corner for their beloved “Amy,” they believed that number would have to lead to her being taken much more seriously by the big non-gaming software houses. While that, alas, would never happen, sales were just beginning to roll in many of the European markets that would sustain the Amiga well into the 1990s.

This last positive development fed directly into the bottom line of Cinemaware, the American software house that was the developer most closely identified with the Amiga to a large extent even in Europe. Cinemaware’s founder Bob Jacob wisely forged close ties with the exploding European Amiga market via a partnership with the British publisher Mirrorsoft. In this way he got Cinemaware’s games wide distribution and promotion throughout Europe, racking up sales across the pond under the Mirrorsoft imprint that often dramatically exceeded those Cinemaware was able to generate under their own label in North America. The same partnership led to another welcome revenue stream: the importation of European games into Cinemaware’s home country. Games like Speedball, by the rockstar British developers the Bitmap Brothers, didn’t have much in common with Cinemaware’s usual high-concept fare, but did feed the appetite of American youngsters who had recently found Amiga 500s under their Christmas trees for splashy, frenetic, often ultra-violent action.

Yet Cinemaware’s biggest claim to fame remained their homegrown interactive movies — which is not to say that everyone was a fan of their titular cinematic approach to game-making. A steady drumbeat of criticism, much of it far from unjustified, had accompanied the release of each new interactive movie since the days of Defender of the Crown. Take away all of the music and pretty pictures that surrounded their actual game play, went the standard line of attack, and these games were nothing but shallow if not outright broken exercises in strategy attached to wonky, uninteresting action mini-games. Cinemaware clearly took the criticism to heart despite the sales success they continued to enjoy. Indeed, the second half of the company’s rather brief history can to a large extent be read as a series of reactions to that inescapable negative drumbeat, a series of attempts to show that they could make good games as well as pretty ones.

At first, the new emphasis on depth led to decidedly mixed results. Conflating depth with difficulty in a manner akin to the way that so many adventure-game designers conflate difficulty with unfairness, Cinemaware gave the world Rocket Ranger as their second interactive movie of 1988. It had all the ingredients to be great, but was undone by balance issues exactly the opposite of those which had plagued the prototypical Cinemaware game, Defender of the Crown. In short, Rocket Ranger was just too hard, a classic game-design lesson in the dangers of overcompensation and the importance of extensive play-testing to get that elusive balance just right. With two more new interactive movies on the docket for 1989, players were left wondering whether this would the year when Cinemaware would finally get it right.

Certainly they showed no sign of backing away from their determination to bring more depth to their games. On the contrary, they pushed that envelope still harder with Lords of the Rising Sun, their first interactive movie of 1989. At first glance, it was a very typical Cinemaware confection, a Defender of the Crown set in feudal Japan. Built like that older game from the tropes and names of real history without bothering to be remotely rigorous about any of it, Lords of the Rising Sun is also another strategy game broken up by action-oriented minigames — the third time already, following Defender of the Crown and Rocket Ranger, that Cinemaware had employed this template. This time, however, a concerted effort was made to beef up the strategy game, not least by making it into a much more extended affair. Lords of the Rising Sun became just the second interactive movie to include a save-game feature, and in this case it was absolutely necessary; a full game could absorb many hours. It thus departed more markedly than anything the company had yet done from Bob Jacob’s original vision of fast-playing, non-taxing, ultra-accessible games. Indeed, with a thick manual and a surprising amount of strategic and tactical detail to keep track of, Lords of the Rising Sun can feel more like an SSI than a typical Cinemaware game once you look past its beautiful audiovisual presentation. Reaching for the skies if not punching above their weight, Cinemaware even elected to include the option of playing the game as an exercise in pure strategy, with the action sequences excised.

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/lords.mp4

But sadly, the strategy aspect is as inscrutable as a Zen koan. While Rocket Ranger presents with elegance and grace a simple strategy game that would be immensely entertaining if it wasn’t always kicking your ass, Lords of the Rising Sun is just baffling. You’re expected to move your armies over a map of Japan, recruiting allies where possible, fighting battles to subdue enemies where not. Yet it’s all but impossible to divine any real sense of the overall situation from the display. This would-be strategy game ends up feeling more random than anything else, as you watch your banners wander around seemingly of their own volition, bumping occasionally into other banners that may represent enemies or friends. It suffers mightily from a lack of clear status displays, making it really, really hard to keep track of who wants to do what to whom. If you have the mini-games turned on, the bird’s-eye view is broken up by arcade sequences that are at least as awkward as the strategy game. In the end, Lords of the Rising Sun is just no fun at all.

While it’s very pretty, Lords of the Rising Sun‘s animated, scrolling map is nicer to look at than it is a practical tool for strategizing.

Press and public alike were notably unkind to Lords of the Rising Sun. Claims like Bob Jacob’s that “there is more animation in Lords than has ever been done in any computer game” — a claim as unquantifiable as it was dubious, especially in itself in light of some of Sierra’s recent efforts — did nothing to shake Cinemaware’s reputation for being all sizzle, no steak. Ken St. Andre of Tunnels & Trolls and Wasteland fame, reviewing the game for Questbusters magazine, took Cinemaware to task on its every aspect, beginning with the excruciating picture on the box of a cowering maiden about to fall out of her kimono; he deemed it “an insult to women everywhere and to Japanese culture in particular.” (Such a criticism sounds particularly forceful coming from St. Andre; Wasteland with its herpes-infested prostitutes and all the rest is hardly a bastion of political correctness.) He concluded his review with a zinger so good I wish I’d thought of it: he called the game “a Japanese Noh play.”

Many other reviewers, while less boldly critical, seemed nonplussed by the whole experience — a very understandable reaction to the strategy game’s vagaries. Sales were disappointing in comparison to those of earlier interactive movies, and the game has gone down in history alongside the equally underwhelming S.D.I. as perhaps the least remembered of all the Cinemaware titles.

So, what with the game-play criticisms beginning to affect the bottom line, Cinemaware really needed to deliver something special for their second game of 1989. Thankfully, It Came from the Desert would prove to be the point where they finally got this interactive-movie thing right, delivering at long last a game as nice to play as it is to look at.

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/desert.mp4

It Came from the Desert was the first of the interactive movies not to grow from a seed of an idea planted by Bob Jacob himself. Its originator was rather David Riordan, a newcomer to the Cinemaware fold with an interesting career in entertainment already behind him. As a very young man, he’d made a go of it in rock music, enjoying his biggest success in 1970 with a song called “Green-Eyed Lady,” a #3 hit he co-wrote for the (briefly) popular psychedelic band Sugarloaf. A perennial on Boomer radio to this day, that song’s royalties doubtless went a long way toward letting him explore his other creative passions after his music career wound down. He worked in movies for a while, and then worked with MIT on a project exploring the interactive potential of laser discs. After that, he worked briefly for Lucasfilm Games during their heady early days with Peter Langston at the helm. And from there, he moved on to Atari, where he worked on laser-disc-driven stand-up arcade games until it became obvious that Dragon’s Lair and its spawn had been the flashiest of flashes in the pan.

David Riordan on the job at Cinemaware.

Riordan’s resume points to a clear interest in blending cinematic approaches with interactivity. It thus comes as little surprise that he was immediately entranced when he first saw Defender of the Crown one day at his brother-in-law’s house. It had, he says, “all the movie attributes and approaches that I had been trying to get George Lucas interested in” while still with Lucasfilm. He wrote to Cinemaware, sparking up a friendship with Bob Jacob which led him to join the company in 1988. Seeing in Riordan a man who very much shared his own vision for Cinemaware, Jacob relinquished a good deal of the creative control onto which he had heretofore held so tightly. Riordan was placed in charge of the company’s new “Interactive Entertainment Group,” which was envisioned as a production line for cranking out new interactive movies of far greater sophistication than those Cinemaware had made to date. These latest and greatest efforts were to be made available on a whole host of platforms, from their traditional bread and butter the Amiga to the much-vaunted CD-based platforms now in the offing from a number of hardware manufacturers. If all went well, It Came from the Desert would mark the beginning of a whole new era for Cinemaware.

Here we can see — just barely; sorry for this picture’s terrible fidelity — Cinemaware’s scripting tool MasterPlan.

Cinemaware spent months making the technology that would allow them to make It Came from the Desert. Riordan’s agenda can be best described as a desire to free game design from the tyranny of programmers. If this new medium was to advance sufficiently to tell really good, interesting interactive stories, he reasoned, its tools would have to become something that non-coding “real” writers could successfully grapple with. Continuing to advance Cinemaware’s movie metaphors, his team developed a game engine that could largely be “scripted” in point-and-click fashion in HyperCard rather than needing to be programmed in any conventional sense. Major changes to the structure of a game could be made without ever needing to write a line of code, simply by editing the master plan of the game in a HyperCard tool Cinemaware called, appropriately enough, MasterPlan. The development process leveraged the best attributes of a number of rival platforms: Amigas ran the peerless Deluxe Paint for the creation of art; Macs ran HyperCard for the high-level planning; fast IBM clones served as the plumbing of the operation, churning through compilations and compressions. It was by anyone’s standards an impressive collection of technology — so impressive that the British magazine ACE, after visiting a dozen or more studios on a sort of grand tour of the American games industry, declared Cinemaware’s development system the most advanced of them all. Cinemaware had come a long way from the days of Defender of the Crown, whose development process had consisted principally of locking programmer R.J. Mical into his office with a single Amiga and a bunch of art and music and not letting him out again until he had a game. “If we ever get a real computer movie,” ACE concluded, “this is where it’s going to come from.”

While it’s debatable whether It Came from the Desert quite rises to that standard, it certainly is Cinemaware’s most earnest and successful attempt at crafting a true interactive narrative since King of Chicago. The premise is right in their usual B-movie wheelhouse. Based loosely on the campy 1950s classic Them!, the game takes place in a small desert town with the charming appellation of Lizard Breath that’s beset by an alarming number of giant radioactive ants, product of a recent meteor strike. You play a geologist in town; “the most interesting rocks always end up in the least interesting places,” notes the introduction wryly. Beginning in your cabin, you can move about the town and its surroundings as you will, interacting with its colorful cast of inhabitants via simple multiple-choice dialogs and getting into scrapes of various sorts which lead to the expected Cinemaware action sequences. Your first priority is largely to convince the townies that they have a problem in the first place; this task you can accomplish by collecting enough evidence of the threat to finally gain the attention of the rather stupefyingly stupid mayor. Get that far, and you’ll be placed in charge of the town’s overall defense, at which point a strategic aspect joins the blend of action and adventure to create a heady brew indeed. Your ultimate goal, which you have just fifteen days in total to accomplish, is to find the ants’ main nest and kill the queen.

It Came from the Desert excels in all the ways that most of Cinemaware’s interactive movies excel. The graphics and sound were absolutely spectacular in their day, and still serve very well today; you can well-nigh taste the gritty desert winds. What makes it a standout in the Cinemaware catalog, however, is the unusual amount of attention that’s been paid to the design — to you the player’s experience. A heavily plot-driven game like this could and usually did go only one way in the 1980s. You probably know what I’m picturing: a long string of choke points requiring you to be in just the right place at just the right time to avoid being locked out of victory. Thankfully, It Came from the Desert steers well away from that approach. The plot is a dynamic thing rolling relentlessly onward, but your allies in the town are not entirely without agency of their own. If you fail to accomplish something, someone else might just help you out — perhaps not as quickly or efficiently as one might ideally wish, but at least you still feel you have a shot.

And even without the townies’ help, there are lots of ways to accomplish almost everything you need to. The environment as a whole is remarkably dynamic, far from the static set of puzzle pieces so typical of more traditional adventure games of this era and our own. There’s a lot going on under the hood in this one, far more than Cinemaware’s previous games would ever lead one to expect. Over the course of the fifteen days, the town’s inhabitants go from utterly unconcerned about the strange critters out there in the desert to full-on, backs-against-the-wall, fight-or-flight panic mode. By the end, when the ants are roaming at will through the rubble that once was Lizard Breath destroying anything and anyone in their path, the mood feels far more apocalyptic than that of any number of would-be “epic” games. One need only contrast the frantic mood at the end of the game with the dry, sarcastic tone of the beginning — appropriate to an academic stranded in a podunk town — to realize that one really does go on a narrative journey over the few hours it takes to play.

Which brings me to another remarkable thing: you can’t die in It Came from the Desert. If you lose at one of the action games, you wake up in the hospital, where you have the option of spending some precious time recuperating or trying to escape in shorter order via another mini-game. (No, I have no idea why a town the size of Lizard Breath should have a hospital.) In making sure that every individual challenge or decision doesn’t represent a zero-sum game, It Came from the Desert leaves room for the sort of improvisational derring-do that turns a play-through into a memorable, organic story. It’s not precisely that knowledge of past lives isn’t required; you’re almost certain to need several tries to finally save Lizard Breath. Yet each time you play you get to live a complete story, even if it is one that ends badly. Meanwhile you’re learning the lay of the land, learning to play more efficiently and getting steadily better at the action games, which are themselves unusually varied and satisfying by Cinemaware’s often dodgy standards. There are not just many ways to lose It Came from the Desert but also many paths to victory. Win or lose, your story in It Came from the Desert is your story; you get to own it. There’s a save-game feature, but I don’t recommend that you use it except as a bookmark when you really do need to do something else for a while. Otherwise just play along and let the chips fall where they may. At last, here we have a Cinemaware interactive movie that’s neither too easy nor too hard; this one is just right, challenging but not insurmountable.

It Came from the Desert evolves into a strategy game among other things, as you deploy the town’s forces to battle each new ant infestation while you continue the search for the main hive.

Widely and justifiably regarded among the old-school Amiga cognoscenti of today as Cinemaware’s finest hour, It Came from the Desert was clearly seen as something special within Cinemaware as well back in the day; one only has to glance at contemporary comments from those who worked on the game to sense their pride and excitement. There was a sense both inside and outside their offices that Cinemaware was finally beginning to crack a nut they’d been gnawing on for quite some time. Even Ken St. Andre was happy this time. “Cinemaware’s large creative team has managed to do a lot of things very well indeed in this game,” he wrote, “and as a result they have produced a game that looks great, sounds great, moves along at a rapid pace, is filled with off-the-wall humor without being dumb, and is occasionally both gripping and exciting.”

When It Came from the Desert proved a big commercial success, Cinemaware pulled together some ideas that had been left out of the original game due to space constraints, combined them with a plot involving the discovery of a second ant queen, and made it all into a sequel subtitled Ant-Heads!. Released at a relatively low price only as an add-on for the original game — thus foreshadowing a practice that would get more and more popular as the 1990s wore on — Ant-Heads! was essentially a new MasterPlan script that utilized the art and music assets from the original game, a fine demonstration of the power of Cinemaware’s new development system. It upped the difficulty a bit by straitening the time limit from fifteen days to ten, but otherwise played much like the original — which, considering how strong said original had been, suited most people just fine.

It Came from the Desert, along with the suite of tools used to create it, might very well have marked the start of exactly the new era of more sophisticated Cinemaware interactive movies that David Riordan had intended it to. As things shook out, however, it would have more to do with endings than beginnings. Cinemaware would manage just one more of these big productions before being undone by bad decisions, bad luck, and a changing marketplace. We’ll finish up with the story of their visionary if so often flawed games soon. In the meantime, by all means go play It Came from the Desert if time and motivation allow. I was frankly surprised at how well it still held up when I tackled it recently, and I think it just might surprise you as well.

(Sources: The One from April 1989, June 1989, and June 1990; ACE from April 1990; Commodore Magazine from November 1988; Questbusters from September 1989, February 1990, and May 1990; Matt Barton’s interview with Bob Jacob on Gamasutra.)

Comments
31 Responses

- Alex Smith

October 14, 2016 at 4:30 pm

I know mileage can vary on idioms and all, but did you perhaps mean to label Dragon’s Lair the “flashiest of flashes in the pan”? That would be more typical I think.

- Jimmy Maher

October 14, 2016 at 4:57 pm

Miss Malaprop’s got nothing on me sometimes. Thanks!

- Lisa H.

October 14, 2016 at 5:19 pm

Looks like he’s already fixed it, so I’m curious what it said before!

- Jimmy Maher

October 14, 2016 at 7:20 pm

“Splash” instead of “flash” in the pan…

- Captain Rufus

October 14, 2016 at 10:42 pm

To be fair compared to what Japanese computers had and have for content, teen boy attracting sideboob on Rising Sun is a microscopic level of offense.

This isn’t exactly a good thing mind you but in comparison to what Japan did and still does most of a breast exposed is far down the DUDE NO totem pole compared to all the vile disgusting crap Japanese computer games love to sell themselves on.

It makes a certain US presidential candidate look like a feminist in comparison. Which should be IMPOSSIBLE. And that’s just what I have heard of or seen reviewed/read outrage at.

There is always more and it is always worse.

Oddly enough St. Andre’s tabletop publisher to this day actually licensed their battle book Lost Worlds game to what is infamously known as Queen’s Blade. And imported some of the books to be sold on their web shop. It is mighty far from progressive too. Unless combat game books where anime women have what little clothing and armor they wear ripped off in full color detail is considered progressive. (I would say no. Not at all.)

- Jimmy Maher

October 15, 2016 at 6:38 am

Ken St. Andre suddenly deciding to take the stance he did on Lords of the Rising Sun did strike me as odd, especially given that he spent a fair amount of time slavering over the various female romantic prospects on offer in It Came from the Desert in his review of that game just a few months later. But it’s so rare to see anyone in the industry even acknowledging that these issues exist in this era that I’m always tempted to highlight it when I do see it.

- Captain Rufus

October 15, 2016 at 7:11 pm

Ive noted that Andre and the Flying Buffalo crew did take some less than positive things out of their older Tunnels and Trolls products when they did the semi recent new edition. Which was good.

- Alexander Freeman

October 15, 2016 at 10:42 pm

The cynic in me suspects St. Andre simply saw an opportunity to take the high ground against someone he was in competition with. It doesn’t sound as though he had much room to talk.

- Carl

October 14, 2016 at 11:20 pm

It Came From the Desert was the only game save Shadow of the Beast that actually impressed my Nintendo-loving friends. Along with Wings (my favorite Cinemaware game) It Came From the Desert raised the enjoyment level (at least for me as a teenager) by actually having fun action sequences. Wings (which I do hope you cover) kind of flipped the balance by making the action sequences the best part and the story kind of secondary.

I had no idea Cinemaware used Hypercard as a development tool. I played around a lot with Hypercard and made some truly dreadful adventure games of my own using it…

Way to jog some memories I haven’t accessed in a decade or more, Jimmy!

- Jimmy Maher

October 15, 2016 at 6:30 am

Wings is actually most interesting to me for the story. It’s just about the only simulator ever to define “realism” as making some sort of effort to show the real human toll of war, which I find rather noble and inspiring, even if the tragic parts are mixed up with plenty of “rah-rah!” chest-thumping as well. But the actual *game* part of it all strikes me as pretty rote, and wears out its welcome long before you’ve played all 200 missions or whatever it is.

But anyway… yes, will definitely be covering it quite soon. In fact, I have something kind of special planned for it.

- Carl

October 15, 2016 at 1:08 am

I was poking around youtube trying to find a longplay of It Came From the Desert and I came across this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-J6GMLtpq8&ab_channel=Roger!Pictures

Looks like (based on the facebook page) the film is currently shooting. I must admit the teaser is kind of weak but it is fascinating Cinemaware (or whatever entity owns the name) appears to be involved…

- Jubal

October 15, 2016 at 1:48 am

“Even as the low-end computer-game market was being pummeled into virtual nonexistence by the Nintendo Entertainment System, leaving the Amiga with little room into which to expand downward”

This is probably a significant factor in the Amiga’s success in Europe, actually – although the NES was around, console gaming never really took off here in Britain until the release of the SNES and Megadrive/Genesis, by which time the Amiga had had time to become THE home computer of choice.

- Jimmy Maher

October 15, 2016 at 6:25 am

Yes, it was a huge factor. The Amiga came to occupy a niche at the mid-level and (eventually) low-end in Europe that was completely dominated by consoles in North America. Had Nintendo not come along, American youngsters with Commodore 64s might have moved gradually to the Amiga 500, as many did in Europe. Instead they all got Nintendos, Segas, (a little later) PlayStations, etc. The only computer-gaming market left was the high-end MS-DOS machines.

- Jubal

October 16, 2016 at 10:26 am

I’m curious now as to just why the 8-bit consoles never had so much of an impact here as in the US. I’d never really thought about it before.

- Felix

October 17, 2016 at 6:18 am

@Jubal In Europe, 8-bit consoles had to compete with 8-bit computers that were both cheaper and more fun to play with, since you could also tinker — mostly ZX Spectrum clones (often unauthorized), which meant there was a single market for games. And games were sold on cassette tapes (no need for expensive disk drives!) that, owning to a lack of copyright protections in Eastern Europe before and after 1990, often came with up to 10 titles a side.

A Famicom, even a cheap South Asian clone, simply didn’t come close to competing on price. (The Master System was nearly unheard of.) And that was *after* the Iron Curtain fell, by which point everyone equated computing with the 8-bit micros that used to be the only option.

Of course, half of that didn’t really apply in Western Europe. Or did it?

- J Griffin

October 17, 2016 at 11:50 pm

Price was a major factor. The NES launched, in the UK at least, with what seemed like astronomical prices compared to what we were used to. You could spend about 1.99 to 10.99 on an 8-bit home computer game, or something like 39.99 for a NES cart (about 70-80 bucks in 1980s U.S dollars). It was simply priced far out of the range of most kids, and the rental backbone U.S gamers got to enjoy just didn’t exist yet. It really took until the 16-bits for rental to come in and allow the poorer kids to play, along with systems becoming ubiquitous enough for trading your couple of games between your friends to be a thing.

It’s worth noting Sega were always considerably better on pricing in europe, which is a big part of why the Master System was the only 8-bit console to get any foothold at all in the UK, albeit a fairly small one. Still quite expensive for the time though.

- Kaitain

October 17, 2016 at 9:57 pm

People in the UK had always (in the 80s) bought into the idea of computing being an enthusiast activity that encompassed gaming but also creativity and programming. This may have been spurred in part by the country being so hard-up in the late 70s and early 80s, and therefore unable to treat gaming as a purely consumer activity: it was simply too expensive to buy dedicated games machines, especially ones whose games came on cartridge. But I suspect there’s more to it than that…Britain has long had a kind of tinkerer’s culture spanning from make-do-and-mend to full-on invention. Sinclair played a part in this: cheap, cheerful machines where you needed to get your hands a bit dirty to get up and running, and where a lot of people’s first games were typed in from magazine listings.

So you can look at the Amiga’s success from the perspective of it filling a niche that was left by the country’s lack of interest in consoles. But you can also approach the analysis from the other end, and say that the Amiga ticked all the boxes for the enthusiast culture in the UK whereas consoles did not.

- Lisa H.

October 15, 2016 at 4:12 am

Widely and justifiably regarded among the old-school Amiga cognizanti

Cognoscenti?

- Jimmy Maher

October 15, 2016 at 6:19 am

YES! I looked forever for the correct spelling and couldn’t find it. Thanks!

- Michael Davis

October 15, 2016 at 6:29 pm

Boy, something must have been lost in the translation process when porting It Came From The Desert to MS-DOS, because I HATED that game. Granted, I was pretty young, so maybe my hand-eye coordination wasn’t where it needed to be, but all I remember is that the pistol never did ANYTHING to the ants, so I always ended up in the hospital after every encounter, and it was impossible to make it even a few seconds into the hospital escape mini-game, so I always had to stay the full duration in the hospital. So after just a few rounds of that, the ants more or less had control of the city and it was all over but the crying. All I ever did in that game was lose.

And that was when I was at an age where all my birthday money or all my Christmas money would barely buy one game, so I only got one or two new games a year, and I felt like I had been royally screwed with that purchase.

- Jimmy Maher

October 15, 2016 at 7:04 pm

The trick with the ants is to shoot their antenna. But yeah, sounds like something was off. Never played the MS-DOS version myself.

Ironically, the MS-DOS port was done by Level 9, the former British text-adventure makers, as one of their last projects before closing up shop.

- Pedro Timóteo

October 16, 2016 at 9:09 am

The DOS version is basically the Amiga version with EGA graphics, no digitized sounds, and Adlib or Roland MT-32 music / “sound”. The game is exactly the same (and load times are probably better – I didn’t play a lot of it), but the Amiga graphics and, especially, music make up a big part of the original’s atmosphere, and that is lost here.

- Pedro Timóteo

October 16, 2016 at 10:50 am

Correction: it *has* digitized sounds (both Sound Blaster and PC speaker, the latter being used if you choose Roland MT-32 music). I had assumed it hadn’t, because there’s no voiced intro.

The music is terrible, though, IMO, both with Adlib / Sound Blaster selected and with MT-32. It has none of the atmosphere from the Amiga, sounding more like “elevator music”, and either sound card could do a lot better.

- Michael Davis

October 16, 2016 at 1:35 pm

Well, in this video of a DOS play session, at the 8-minute mark you can see the first encounter with an ant, and see how either A. the game makes it impossible, or B. this player is just as bad as I was, because that’s exactly how I remember it: shooting wildly around, never coming close to hitting the antennas, and winding up in the hospital every damn time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE41rtQZofY

In this longplay video of the Amiga version, the player has that same encounter on the farm at the 3:30 mark, shoots off both antennas within the first couple attempted shots, and then successfully fends off the multiple-ant attack during the overhead camera section as well (something I also was never able to do in the DOS game): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTWd_eyAmgQ

So either the Amiga version was more forgiving, or the controls were more responsive, or, again, maybe I was just a crappy player, but I remember kicking myself for making it my one big game purchase that year. Also, to add insult to injury, the DOS game box had Amiga screenshots on the back (http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/it-came-from-the-desert/cover-art/gameCoverId,832/). If the EGA graphics I ended up with had been on the box I definitely wouldn’t have bought it :P

- Eric

October 17, 2016 at 11:56 am

Michael, you describe exactly what I remember my experience of the game was.
I’m pretty sure I ended up understanding that the antenna were the weak point, but still it was impossible to shoot them. On the video you point to, it seems clear that there is a delay between the moment the player pulls the trigger and the gun actually fires.

I also remember something about grenades that were pretty hard to aim at the ants.

Anyway, like you said: awful memories of an unplayable game.

- Alexander Freeman

October 15, 2016 at 10:44 pm

Come to think of it, I’d say Adrift is a better comparison to Hypercard than AdvSys is as far as interactive fiction systems go.

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- CdrJameson

October 18, 2016 at 11:12 pm

Having just had a go at this for the first time ever (Amiga version, Cinemaware colection) the knife fighting seems hilariously weird.

Apparently they’re fighting with some kind of toothpick or pencil, based on the damage it does with each hit. But that’s not too bad because you can seem to stab your opponent indefinitely by hitting up and fire at which point your main obstacle becomes hand cramp.

And despite having shot the antennae off a giant ant, grenaded half a dozen of the blighters and got more mucus, reports and plaster-casts than you can shake a stick at the mayor STILL doesn’t believe me. What’s a guy to do?

- Jimmy Maher

October 19, 2016 at 9:24 am

You need four unique pieces of evidence. Have you talked to the guy at the airport yet, and has he told you about his new tape recorder? I believe he usually gets it around day 5.

How Jordan Mechner Made a Different Sort of Interactive Movie (or, The Virtues of Restraint)
October 28, 2016

One can learn much about the state of computer gaming in any given period by looking to the metaphors its practitioners are embracing. In the early 1980s, when interfaces were entirely textual and graphics crude or nonexistent, text adventures like those of Infocom were heralded as the vanguard of a new interactive literature destined to augment or entirely supersede non-interactive books. That idea peaked with the mid-decade bookware boom, when just about every entertainment-software publisher (and a few traditional book publishers) were rushing to sign established authors and books to interactive projects. It then proceeded to collapse just as quickly under the weight of its own self-importance when the games proved less compelling and the public less interested than anticipated.

Prompted by new machines like the Commodore Amiga with their spectacular graphics and sound, the industry reacted to that failure by turning to the movies for media mentorship. This relationship would prove more long-lasting. By the end of the 1980s, companies like Cinemaware and Sierra were looking forward confidently to a blending of Hollywood and Silicon Valley that they believed might just replace the conventional non-interactive movie, not to mention computer games as people had known them to that point. Soon most of the major publishers would be conducting casting calls and hiring sound stages, trying literally to make games out of films. It was an approach fraught with problems — problems that were only slowly and grudgingly acknowledged by these would-be unifiers of Southern and Northern Californian entertainment. Before it ran its course, it spawned lots of really terrible games (and, it must be admitted, against all the odds the occasional good one as well).

Given the game industry’s growing fixation on the movies as the clock wound down on the 1980s, Jordan Mechner would seem the perfect man for the age. Struggling with the blessing or curse of an equally abiding love for both mediums, his professional life had already been marked by constant vacillation between movies and games. Inevitably, his love of film influenced him even when he was making games. But, perhaps because that love was so deep and genuine, he accomplished the blending in a more even-handed, organic way than would most of the multi-CD, multi-gigabyte interactive movies that would soon be cluttering store shelves. Mechner’s most famous game, by contrast, filled just two Apple II disk sides — less than 300 K in total. And yet the cinematic techniques it employs have far more in common with those found in the games of today than do those of its more literal-minded rivals.

As a boy growing up in the wealthy hamlet of Chappaqua, New York, Jordan Mechner dreamed of becoming “a writer, animator, or filmmaker.” But those ambitions got modified if not discarded when he discovered computers at his high school. Soon after, he got his hands on his own Apple II for the first time. Honing his chops as a programmer, he started contributing occasional columns on BASIC to Creative Computing magazine at the age of just 14. Yet fun as it was to be the magazine’s youngest contributor, his real reason for learning programming was always to make games. “Games were the only kind of software I knew,” he says. “They were the only kind that I enjoyed. At that time, I didn’t really see any use for a word processor or a spreadsheet.” He fell into the throes of what he describes as an “obsession” to get a game of his own published.

Initially, he did what lots of other game programmers were doing at the time: cloning the big standup-arcade hits for fun and (hopefully) profit. He made a letter-perfect copy of Atari’s Asteroids, changed the titular space rocks to bright bouncing balls in the interest of plausible deniability, and sent the resulting Deathbounce off to Brøderbund for consideration; what with Brøderbund having been largely built on the back of Apple Galaxian, an arcade clone which made no effort whatsoever to conceal its source material, the publisher seemed a very logical choice. But Doug Carlston was now trying to distance his company from such fare for reasons of reputation as well as his fear of Atari’s increasingly aggressive legal threats. Nice guy that he was, he called Mechner personally to explain why Deathbounce wasn’t for Brøderbund. He promised to send Mechner a free copy of Brøderbund’s latest hit, Choplifter, suggesting he think about whether he might be able to apply the programming chops he had demonstrated in Deathbounce to a more original game, as Choplifter‘s creator Dan Gorlin had done. Mechner remembers the conversation as well-nigh life-changing. He had been so immersed in the programming side of making games that the idea of doing an original design had never really occurred to him before: “I didn’t have to copy someone else’s arcade game. I was allowed to design my own!”

Carlston’s phone call came in May of 1982, when Mechner was finishing up his first year at Yale University; undecided about his major as he was so much else in his life at the time, he would eventually wind up with a Bachelors in psychology. We’re granted an unusually candid and personal glimpse into into his life between 1982 and 1993 thanks to his private journals, which he published (doubtless in a somewhat expurgated form) in 2012. The early years paint a picture of a bright, sensitive young man born into a certain privilege that carries with it the luxury of putting off adulthood for quite some time. He romanticizes chance encounters (“I saw a heartbreakingly beautiful young blonde out of the corner of my eye. She was wearing a blue down vest. As she passed, our eyes met. She smiled at me. As I went out I held the door for her; her fingers grazed mine. Then she was gone.”); frets frequently about cutting classes and generally not being the man he ought to be (“I think Ben is the only person who truly comprehends the depths of how little classwork I do.”); alternates between grand plans accompanied by frenzies of activity and indecision accompanied by long days of utter sloth (“Here’s what I do do: listen to music. Browse in record stores. Read newspapers, magazines, play computer games, stare out the windows. See a lot of movies.”); muses with all the self-obliviousness of youth on whether he would prefer “writing a bestselling novel or directing a blockbusting film,” as if attaining fame and fortune was as simple as deciding on one or the other.

At Yale, film, that other constant of his creative life, came to the fore. He joined every film society he stumbled upon, signed up for every film-studies course in the catalog, and set about “trying to see in four years every film ever made”; Akira Kurosawa’s classic adventure epic Seven Samurai (a major inspiration behind Star Wars among other things) emerged as his favorite of them all. He also discovered an unexpected affinity for silent cinema, which naturally led him to compare that earliest era of film with the current state of computer games, a medium that seemed in a similar state of promising creative infancy. All of this, combined with the example of Choplifter and the karate lessons he was sporadically attending, led to Karateka, the belated fruition of his obsession with getting a game published.

To a surprising degree given his youth and naivete, Mechner consciously designed Karateka as the proverbial Next Big Thing in action games after the first wave of simple quarter munchers, whose market he watched collapse over the two-plus years he spent intermittently working on it. Plenty of fighting games had appeared on the Apple II and other platforms before, some of them very playable; Mechner wasn’t sure he could really improve on their templates when it came to pure game play. What he could do, however, was give his game some of the feel and emotional resonance of cinema. Reasoning that computer games were technically on par with the first decade or two of film in terms of the storytelling tools at his disposal, he mimicked the great silent-film directors in building his story out of the broadest archetypal elements: an unnamed hero must assault a mountain fortress to rescue an abducted princess, fighting through wave after wave of enemies, culminating in a showdown with the villain himself. He energetically cross-cut the interactive fighting sequences with non-interactive scenes of the villain issuing orders to his minions while the princess looks around nervously in her cell — a suspense-building technique from cinema dating back to The Birth of a Nation. He mimicked the horizontal wipes Kurosawa used for transitions in Seven Samurai; mimicked the scrolling textual prologue from Star Wars. When the player lost or won, he printed “THE END” on the screen in lieu of “GAME OVER.” And, indeed, he made it possible, although certainly not easy, to win Karateka and carry the princess off into the sunset. The player was, in other words, playing for bigger stakes than a new high score.

The most technically innovative aspect of Karateka — suggested, like much in the game, by Mechner’s very supportive father — involved the actual people on the screen. To make his fighters move as realistically as possible, Mechner made use for the first time in a computer game of an old cartoon-animation technique known as rotoscoping. After shooting some film footage of his karate instructor in action, doing various kicks and punches, Mechner used an ancient Moviola editing machine that had somehow wound up in the basement of the family home to isolate and make prints out of every third frame. He imported the figure at the center of each print into his Apple II by tracing it on a contraption called the VersaWriter. Flipped through in sequence, the resulting sprites appeared to “move” in an unusually fluid and realistic fashion. “When I saw that sketchy little figure walk across the screen,” he wrote in his journal, “looking just like Dennis [his karate instructor], all I could say was ‘ALL RIGHT!’ It was a glorious moment.”

Doug Carlston, who clearly saw something special in this earnest kid, was gently encouraging and almost infinitely patient with him. When it looked like Mechner had come up with something potentially great at last, Carlston signed him to a contract and flew him out to California in the summer of 1984 to finish it up with the help of Brøderbund’s in-house staff. Released just a little too late to fully capitalize on the 1984 Christmas rush, Karateka started slowly but gradually turned into a hit, especially once the Commodore 64 port dropped in June of 1985. Once ported to Nintendo for the domestic Japanese market, it proceeded to sell many hundreds of thousand units, making Jordan Mechner a very flush young man indeed.

So, Mechner, about to somehow manage to graduate despite all the missed assignments and cut classes spent working on Karateka, seemed poised for a fruitful career making games. Yet he continued to vacillate between his twin obsessions. Even as his game, the most significant accomplishment of his young life and one of which anyone could justly be proud, had entered the homestretch, he had written how “I definitely want my next project to be film-related. Videogames have taken up enough of my time for now.” In the wake of his game’s release, the steady stream of royalties therefrom only made it easier to dabble in film.

Mechner spent much of the year after graduating from university back at home in Chappaqua working on his first screenplay. In between writing dialog and wracking himself with doubt over whether he really wanted to do another game at all, he occasionally turned his attention to the idea of a successor to Karateka. Already during that first summer after Yale, he and Gene Portwood, a Brøderbund executive, dreamed up a scenario for just such a beast: an Arabian Nights-inspired story involving an evil sultan, a kidnapped princess, and a young man — the player, naturally — who must rescue her. Karateka in Middle Eastern clothing though it may have been in terms of plot, that was hardly considered a drawback by Brøderbund, given the success of Mechner’s first game.

Seven frames of animation ready to be photocopied and digitized.

Determined to improve upon the rotoscoping of Karateka, Mechner came up with a plan to film a moving figure and use a digitizer to capture the frames into the computer, rather than tracing the figure using the VersaWriter. He spent $2500 on a high-end VCR and video camera that fall, knowing he would return them before his month’s grace period was out (“I feel so dishonest,” he wrote in his journal). The technique he had in the works may have been an improvement over what he had done for Karateka, but it was still very primitive and hugely labor-intensive. After shooting his video, he would play it back on the VCR, pausing it on each frame he wanted to capture. Then he would take a picture of the screen using an ordinary still camera and get the film developed. Next step was to trace the outline of the figure in the photograph using Magic Marker and fill him in using White-Out. Then he would Xerox the doctored photograph to get a black-and-white version with a very clear silhouette of the figure. Finally, he would digitize the photocopy to import it into his Apple II, and erase everything around the figure by hand on the computer to create a single frame of sprite animation. He would then get to go through this process a few hundred more times to get the prince’s full repertoire of movements down.

See https://www.youtube.com/embed/PH0cpppGuow

On October 20, 1985, Jordan Mechner did his first concrete work on the game that would become Prince of Persia, using his ill-gotten video camera to film his 16-year-old brother David running and jumping through a local parking lot. When he finally got around to buying a primitive black-and-white image digitizer for his trusty Apple II more than six months later, he quickly determined that the footage he’d shot was useless due to poor color separation. Nevertheless, he saw potential magic.

I still think this can work. The key is not to clean up the frames too much. The figure will be tiny and messy and look like crap… but I have faith that, when the frames are run in sequence at 15 fps, it’ll create an illusion of life that’s more amazing than anything that’s ever been seen on an Apple II screen. The little guy will be wiggling and jiggling like a Ralph Bakshi rotoscope job… but he’ll be alive. He’ll be this little shimmering beacon of life in the static Apple-graphics Persian world I’ll build for him to run around in.

For months after that burst of enthusiasm, however, he did little more with the game.

At last in September of 1986, having sent his screenplay off to Hollywood and thus with nothing more to do on that front but wait, Mechner moved out to San Rafael, California, close to Brøderbund’s offices, determined to start in earnest on Prince of Persia. He spent much time over the next few months refining his animation technique, until by Christmas everyone who saw the little running and jumping figure was “bowled over” by him. Yet after that progress again slowed to a crawl, as he struggled to motivate himself to turn his animation demos into an actual game.

And then, on May 4, 1987, came the phone call that would stop the little running prince in his tracks for the better part of a year. A real Hollywood agent called to tell him she “loved” his script for Birthstone, a Spielbergian supernatural comedy/thriller along the lines of Gremlins or The Goonies. Within days of her call, the script was optioned by Larry Turman, a major producer with films like The Graduate on his resume. For months Mechner fielded phone calls from a diverse cast of characters with a diverse cast of suggestions, did endless rewrites, and tried to play the Hollywood game, schmoozing and negotiating and trying not to appear to be the awkward, unworldly kid he still largely was. Only when Birthstone seemed permanently stuck in development hell — “Hollywood’s the only town where you can die of encouragement,” he says wryly, quoting Pauline Kael —  did he give up and turn his attention back to games. Mechner notes today that just getting as far as he did with his very first script was a huge achievement and a great start in itself. After all, he was, if not quite hobnobbing with the Hollywood elite, at least getting rejection letters from such people as Michael Apted, Michael Crichton, and Henry Winkler; such people were reading his script. But he had been spoiled by the success of Karateka. If he wrote another screenplay, there was no guarantee it would get even as far as his first had. If he finished Prince of Persia, on the other hand, he knew Brøderbund would publish it.

And so, in 1988, it was back to games, back to Prince of Persia. Inspired by “puzzly” 8-bit action games like Doug Smith’s Lode Runner and Ed Hobbs’s The Castles of Dr. Creep, his second game was shaping up to be more than just a game of combat. Instead his prince would have to make his way through area after area full of tricks, traps, and perilous drops. “What I wanted to do with Prince of Persia,” Mechner says, “was a game which would have that kind of logical, head-scratching, fast-action, Lode Runner-esque puzzles in a level-based game but also have a story and a character that was trying to accomplish a recognizable human goal, like save a princess. I was trying to merge those two things.” Ideally, the game would play like the iconic first ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which Indiana Jones runs and leaps and dodges and sometimes outwits rather than merely outruns a series of traps. For a long while, Mechner planned to make the hero entirely defenseless, as a sort of commentary on the needless ultra-violence found in so many other games. In the end, he didn’t go that far — the allure of sword-fighting, not to mention commercial considerations, proved too strong — but Prince of Persia was nevertheless shaping up to be a far more ambitious, multi-faceted work than Karateka, boasting much more than just improved running and jumping animations.

With just 128 K of memory to work with on the Apple II, Mechner was forced to make Prince of Persia a modular design, relying on a handful of elements which are repeatedly reused and recombined. Take, for instance, the case of the loose floorboards. The first time they appear, they’re a simple trap: you have to jump over a section of the floor to avoid falling into a pit. Later, they appear on the ceiling, as part of the floor above your own; caught in an apparent cul de sac, you have to jump up and bash the ceiling to open an escape route. Still later, they can be used strategically: to kill guards below you by dropping the floorboards on their heads, or to hold down a pressure plate below you that opens a door on the level on which you’re currently standing. It’s a fine example of a constraint in game design turning into a strength. “There’s a certain elegance to taking an element the player is already familiar with,” says Mechner, “and challenging him to think about it in a different way.”

See https://www.youtube.com/embed/0vG403uFdYc

On July 14, 1989, Mechner shot the final footage for Prince of Persia: the denouement, showing the prince — now played by the game’s project manager at Brøderbund, Brian Ehler — embracing the rescued princess — played by Tina LaDeau, the 18-year-old daughter of another Brøderbund employee, in her prom dress. (“Man, she is a fox,” Mechner wrote in his journal. “Brian couldn’t stop blushing when I had her embrace him.”)

The game shipped for the Apple II on October 6, 1989. And then, despite a very positive review in Computer Gaming World — Charles Ardai called it nothing less than “the Star Wars of its field,” music to the ears of a movie buff like Mechner — it proceeded to sell barely at all: perhaps 500 units a month. It was, everyone at Brøderbund agreed, at least a year too late to hope to sell significant numbers of a game like this on the Apple II, whose only remaining commercial strength was educational software, thanks to the sheer number of the things still installed in American schools. Mechner’s procrastination and vacillation had spoiled this version’s commercial prospects entirely.

Thankfully, the Apple II version wasn’t to be the only one. Brøderbund already had programmers and artists working on ports to MS-DOS and the Amiga, the last two truly viable computer-gaming platforms in North America. Mechner as well turned his attention to the versions for these more advanced machines as soon as the Apple II version was finished. And once again his father pitched in, composing a lovely score for the luxuriously sophisticated sound hardware now at the game’s disposal. “This is going to be the definitive version of Prince of Persia,” Mechner enthused over the MS-DOS version. “With VGA [graphics] and sound card, on a fast machine, it’ll blow the Apple away. It looks like a Disney film. It’s the most beautiful game I’ve ever seen.” Reworked though they were in almost all particulars, at the heart of the new versions lay the same digitized film footage that had made the 8-bit prince run and leap so fluidly.

And yet, after it shipped on April 19, 1990, the MS-DOS version also disappointed. Mechner chafed over his publisher’s disinterest in promoting the game; they seemed on the verge of writing it off, noting how the vastly superior MS-DOS version was being regarded as just another port of an old 8-bit game, and thus would likely never be given a fair shake by press or public. True as ever to the bifurcated pattern of his life, he decided to turn back to film. Having tried and failed to get into New York University film school, he resorted to working as a production assistant in movies by way of supporting himself and trying to drum up contacts in the film-making community of New York. Thus the first anniversary of Prince of Persia‘s original release on the Apple II found him schlepping crates around New York City. His career as a game developer seemed to be behind him, and truth be told his prospects as a filmmaker didn’t look a whole lot brighter.

The situation began to reverse itself only after the Amiga version was finished — programmed, as it happened, by Dan Gorlin, the very fellow whose Choplifter had first inspired Mechner to look at his own games differently. In Europe, the Amiga’s stronghold, Prince of Persia was free of the baggage which it carried in North America — few in Europe had much idea of what an Apple II even was — and doubtless benefited from a much deeper and richer tradition on European computers of action-adventures and platform puzzlers. It received ebullient reviews and turned into a big hit on European Amigas, and its reputation gradually leaked back across the pond to turn it at last into a hit in its homeland as well. Thus did Prince of Persia become a slow grower of an international sensation — a very unusual phenomenon in the hits-driven world of videogames, where shelf lives are usually short and retailer patience shorter. Soon came the console releases, along with releases for various other European and Japanese domestic computers, sending total sales soaring to over 2 million units.

By the beginning of 1992, Mechner was far removed from his plight of just eighteen months before. He was drowning in royalties, consulting intermittently with Brøderbund on a Prince of Persia 2 — it was understood that his days in the programming trenches were behind him — and living a globetrotting lifestyle, jaunting from Paris to San Rafael to Madrid to New York as whim and business took him. He was also planning his first film, a short documentary to be shot in Cuba, and already beginning to mull over what would turn into his most ambitious and fascinating game production of all, known at this point only as “the train game.”

Prince of Persia, which despite the merits of that eventual “train game” is and will likely always remain Mechner’s signature work, strikes me most of all as a triumph of presentation. The actual game play is punishingly difficult. Each of its twelve levels is essentially an elaborate puzzle that can only be worked out by dying many times when not getting trapped into one of way too many dead ends. Even once you think you have it all worked out, you still need to execute every step with perfect precision, no mean feat in itself. Messing up at any point in the process means starting that level over again from the beginning. And, because you only have one hour of real time to rescue the princess, every failure is extremely costly; a perfect playthrough, accomplished with absolute surety and no hesitations, takes about half an hour, leaving precious little margin for error. At least there is a “save” feature that will let you bookmark each level starting with the third, so you don’t have to replay the whole game every time you screw up — which, believe me, you will, hundreds if not thousands of times before you finally rescue the princess. Beating Prince of Persia fair and square is a project for a summer vacation of those long-gone adolescent days when responsibilities were few and distractions fewer. As a busy adult, I find it too repetitive and too reliant on rote patterns, as well as — let’s be honest here — just too demanding on my aging reflexes. In short, the effort-to-reward ratio strikes me as way out of whack. Of course, I’m sure that, given Prince of Persia‘s status as a beloved icon of gaming, many of you have a different opinion.

So, let’s turn back to something on which we can hopefully all agree: the brilliance of that aforementioned presentation, which brings to aesthetic maturity many of the techniques Mechner had first begun to experiment with in Karateka. Rather than using filmed footage as a tool for the achievement of fluid, lifelike motion, as Mechner did, games during the years immediately following Prince of Persia would be plastered with jarring chunks of poorly acted, poorly staged “full-motion video.” Such spectacles look far more dated today than the restrained minimalism of Prince of Persia. The industry as a whole would take years to wind up back at the place where Jordan Mechner had started: appropriating some of the language of cinema in the service of telling a story and building drama, without trying to turn games into literal interactive movies. Mechner:

Just as theater is its own thing — with its own conventions, things that it does well, things it does badly — so is film, and so [are] computer games. And there is a way to borrow from one medium to another, and in fact that’s what an all-new medium does when it’s first starting out. Film, when it was new, looked like someone set up a camera front and center and filmed a staged play. Then the things that are specific to film — like the moving camera, close-ups, reaction shots, dissolves — all these kinds of things became part of the language of cinema. It’s the same with computer games. To take a long film sequence and to play that on your TV screen is the bad way to make a game cinematic. The computer game is not a VCR. But if you can borrow from the knowledge that we all carry inside our heads of how cuts work, how reaction shots work, what a low angle means dramatically, what it means when the camera suddenly pulls back… We’ve got this whole collective unconscious of the vocabulary of film, and that’s a tremendously valuable tool to bring into computer gaming.

In a medium that has always struggled to tamp down its instinct toward aesthetic maximalism, Mechner’s games still stand out for their concern with balance and proportion. Mechner again:

Visuals are [a] component where it’s often tempting to compromise. You think, “Well, we could put a menu bar across here, we could put a number in the upper right-hand corner of the screen representing how many potions you’ve drunk,” or something. The easy solution is always to do something that as a side effect is going to make the game look ugly. So I took as one of the ground rules going in that the overall screen layout had to be pleasing, had to be strong and simple. So that somebody who was not playing the game but who walked into the room and saw someone else playing it would be struck by a pleasing composition and could stop to watch for a minute, thinking, “This looks good, this looks as if I’m watching a movie.” It really forces you as a designer to struggle to find the best solution for things like inventory. You can’t take the first solution that suggests itself, you have to try to solve it within the constraints you set yourself.

Mechner’s take on visual aesthetics can be seen as a subversion of Ken Williams’s old “ten-foot rule,” which, as you might remember, stated that every Sierra game ought to be visually arresting enough to make someone say “Wow!” when glimpsing it from ten feet away across a crowded shop. Mechner believed that game visuals ought to be more than just striking; they ought to be aesthetically good by the more refined standards of film and the other, even older visual arts. All that time Mechner spent obsessing over films and film-making, which could all could too easily be labeled a complete waste of time, actually allowed him to bring something unique to the table, something that made him different from virtually all of his many contemporaries in the interactive-movie business.

There are various ways to situate Jordan Mechner’s work in general and Prince of Persia in particular within the context of gaming history. It can be read as the last great swan song of the Apple II and, indeed, of the entire era of 8-bit computer gaming, at least in North America. It can be read as yet one more example of Brøderbund’s downright bizarre commercial Midas touch, which continued to yield a staggering number of hits from a decidedly modest roster of new releases (Brøderbund also released SimCity in 1989, thus spawning two of the most iconic franchises in gaming history within bare months of one another). It can be read as the precursor to countless cinematic action-adventures and platformers to come, many of whose designers would acknowledge it as a direct influence. In its elegant simplicity, it can even be read as a fascinating outlier from the high-concept complexity that would come to dominate American computer gaming in the very early 1990s. But the reading that makes me happiest is to simply say that Prince of Persia showed how less can be more. There’s no need to take my word for it; just have a look for yourself.

See https://www.youtube.com/embed/Xv20j8ChtRY

(Sources: Game Design Theory and Practice by Richard Rouse III; The Making of Karateka and The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner; Creative Computing of March 1979, September 1979, and May 1980; Next Generation of May 1998; Computer Gaming World of December 1989; Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia postmortem from the 2011 Game Developers Conference; “Jordan Mechner: The Man Who Would Be Prince” from Games™; the Jordan Mechner and Brøderbund archives at the Strong Museum of Play.)

Comments
38 Responses

- Pedro Timóteo

October 28, 2016 at 8:05 pm

(great as always, etc. etc.)

Funny that you mentioned Tomb Raider. I’ve always thought it was more inspired by an earlier Core Design game, Rick Dangerous. It’s in several ways a simpler game than Prince, seeing as there isn’t really a map to navigate and the way ahead is obvious, and it’s more cartoony and humorous, but it’s in many ways similar. Also from 1989, so it’s not like either game could have copied the other, I guess.

Rick Dangerous is a much more sadistic game than Prince of Persia, though. It’s infamous for its many unavoidable traps and trial and error gameplay.

- Jimmy Maher

October 29, 2016 at 8:14 am

I don’t know a lot about Tomb Raider and its other influences, but I do know that its creators said the core idea behind it was to make a 3D version of Prince of Persia.

- Peter Piers

November 13, 2016 at 9:37 pm

I’m not surprised. The first time I played it I kept thinking “This is just like a 3D Prince of Persia. With guns”. When the GameBoy Tomb Raider games appeared and they looked exactly like Prince of Persia, I was hardly surprised.

And that thing that Mechner goes on about the screen being as beautiful as possible, and not compromising with ugly GUIs? That is also one of the reasons I *looooved* Tomb Raider (and I really didn’t like action games!) and played it SO hard. It was like a movie. There was no clunky GUI getting in the way, reminding me it was a game.

Funnily enough, isn’t this also sort of true of IF? In IF, you are communicating with the game through the parser – but after long, the parser becomes a sort of invisible go-between. You are thinking what you want to do; you communicate it in such a natural way – typing english instrutions! – that you might quickly forget you’re using an input interface at all. You are translating your ideas into written form, in the most natural possible way. There is no GUI. There is nothing (well, barring bad implementation) to remind you that you’re just playing a game (except in the sense that there’s nothing to remind you that you’re reading a book, except when you turn the page; or nothing to remind you that you’re watching a film, except when your eyes wander off the screen).

BTW, this is why I resist the mouse so much in IF, and why I really love the parser, and think that recent efforts – like Detectiveland – are interesting, worthy, and ultimately beside the point. The parser communication between the player and the game is like an extension of the thought process – I communicate with the game in a very similar way that I’m communicating with you now! The mouse exposes the mechanics in an unappealing way.

Heh. I know that IF is not “film-like” enough for Mechner, but I wonder whether he might not have agreed, were he into IF.

- Jimmy Maher

November 13, 2016 at 9:44 pm

I certainly agree that it can be like that when it works. The problem is that it can be so frustrating when it doesn’t work, and the points of failure can be so different for different people. In other words, your aside “(barring bad implementation)” needs to cover an awful lot of ground…

- Peter Piers

November 13, 2016 at 9:47 pm

I’ll grant you that, but that’s also true of… well, pretty much everything. :) Including films and books, since we’re talking about them. Bad writing takes you out of a book like that. Bad movies are… well, MST3K fodder. Bad *anything* is comparable to bad implementation.

Whatever the medium, it’s just hard to make good stuff. Regardless, I wouldn’t look at the bad stuff as proof that the concept doesn’t work; rather, I allow that it’s difficult and point at the bits where it DOES work (Photophia and Spider And Web are the obvious, classic references here).

- Yeechang Lee

October 28, 2016 at 8:35 pm

After all these years of reading your blog posts, my first typo correcction! “San Rafael”, not “San Rafeal”.

- Jimmy Maher

October 29, 2016 at 8:10 am

Thanks!

- Alexander Freeman

October 30, 2016 at 5:11 pm

“typo correcction!”
Ah, the irony. ^_^

- AguyinaRPG

October 28, 2016 at 10:21 pm

I always enjoyed the description of both these games and Last Express as “kinematic” rather than cinematic. While there are certainly cinematic techniques at play, I think that’s lower on its importance than the attention to motion. While cinematic games have fallen under the (incredibly false) pretense of “photo-realism”, I think the differences between these techniques create sub-genres in and of themselves.

To be honest I don’t think Mechner has as big of a grasp of cinema as he lets on. His games have great atmospheres and evoke things like Errol Flynn effectively, but I’m not convinced he really understands how to use them to enhance a story. Most of it seems like padding, even with things like the running scenes in Karateka being central to that game’s tone. Look at the Last Express (as I presume you later will) and he has no idea what the camera is supposed to do, and it’s no longer about limitations.

Certainly it was important that film was his background and I will never knock him as a game designer, as he effectively portrayed his goals and stories in smart ways. I can hardly call him a great innovator on the cinematic front though. I think with PoP he just got lucky that it was so different.

- Felix

October 29, 2016 at 7:03 am

Of course he wasn’t an innovator in cinema. But if even Mechner’s limited knowledge of cinema was enough to bring a minor revolution in videogames… that right there is telling of just how insular this medium is, born as it was of ignorant kiddies playing D&D in their mothers’ basements while conspicuously knowing very little about the real world, or for that matter the very things they were playing at. (Fantasy armor on women, anyone?) And that’s the whole point.

- AguyinaRPG

October 31, 2016 at 1:23 pm

Well I disagree with you saying most game creators were ignorant. There are people coming from a lot of different backgrounds, especially in this late 80s period. I’ve never really seen the issue in being well-versed in games as long as, yes, you have some other knowledge as well. In the mid to late 90s there are some game creators (some of whom we’ll presumably see on this blog) whose games will benefit immensely from an understanding of this medium, and yes I am referring to their ludic story structures.

- Jimmy Maher

October 29, 2016 at 8:25 am

I doubt that Mechner had all that great a technical grasp of filmmaking, at least not at the time of Karateka and Prince of Persia. From what I understand, what education in film he got at Yale was more in film appreciation and criticism than filmmaking. So, while he was much more aware of the vocabulary of cinema than the average person, I don’t think he was ready to direct a Hollywood feature or anything. But, as Felix alludes, just this level of understanding, along with a genuine love for the older medium, set him far above most of the would-be interactive movie-makers of the era, who blundered in without a clue. (Although their games are *very* different, one might say that Cinemaware similarly benefited from having Bob Jacob, an aficionado of B-movies, at the helm. Problematic as they usually are as *games*, Cinemaware’s titles are more aesthetically sophisticated than most of the more elaborate CD-ROM productions that would follow them.)

I’ll have to reserve any comment on The Last Express for later, as it’s been a long, long time…

- Keith Palmer

October 28, 2016 at 10:51 pm

I have a recollection of Prince of Persia turning up on the office PC at my church, and getting to play the game a bit in the personal interregnum of waiting to see if my family would ever buy a more expensive computer than the Tandy Color Computer 3 we were sticking with at the beginning of the 1990s. It wasn’t until just a few years ago that I learned the game had started on the Apple II, which produces the same elegiac feeling as knowing SimCity had a Commodore 64 version (although there was a “fan port” of Prince of Persia to the Commodore 64 not that long ago…) I also know Prince of Persia was ported to the Macintosh with higher-resolution graphics and an outfit for the player character more like what MS-DOS players would recognize from Prince of Persia 2.

- LoneCleric

October 29, 2016 at 3:46 am

It’s “Tina LaDeau”, not “Tia”.

Furthermore:
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/pressdemocrat/obituary.aspx?pid=159167234
:-(

- Jimmy Maher

October 29, 2016 at 8:11 am

Thanks!

- Wade

October 29, 2016 at 12:32 pm

What bugged me about all the ports (even in the day) was that the Prince got a solid outline around him. And given the screen resolutions then, the outline was thick as a proportion of the whole figure. He had more details, was newly colourful and still well animated, but no longer magically fluid and rotoscopey.

A few years ago I asked Mechner what he thought of this idea, when he was in the process of serialising his diaries from that time and talking to online visitors about them. He agreed that he thought the animation looked best on the Apple II.

Re: the gameplay, I was surprised to see your assessment of it as punishingly difficult. It’s demanding, but was still a step towards a more accessibility difficulty level in action games at the time. The control is superb. It also builds your skills gradually, and it’s not a case of the last levels being ridiculous versus all that came before. It’s really well graded.

- Jimmy Maher

October 29, 2016 at 1:19 pm

It should be noted that this type of game isn’t *at all* the sort that I generally enjoy. It’s for that reason that I tried to state my objections more as personal than universal complaints — although I have seen some others levy similar charges (http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/princeofpersia/princeofpersia.htm), which makes me think I’m at least not totally alone. But I’m sure someone who really enjoys this sort of game is much better equipped to evaluate Prince of Persia within the context of its genre.

- xxx

November 1, 2016 at 6:44 am

The colour Macintosh port is a notable exception. The high-res graphics allowed for clearly outlined elements without the outlines being chunky. I remember it being, at the time, the _prettiest_ game I’d ever played, and I’d argue that it’s the most worthwhile version to try.

- Helm

October 29, 2016 at 4:02 pm

I love the first Prince and the other games in the genre that retroactively has been named the ‘cinematic platformer’. Speaking to the difficulty of execution of the game (and not level design) I think what hurts it most is the 15 frames per second frame rate.

Think about the Mario games. They run at a good frame rate and when you press the jump button, you jump on the pixel you’re on. Prince, instead is a game with a locked tile run that asks you to press the jump button either on THIS tile or the NEXT tile and the tiles aren’t small either. It ends up being quite troublesome when an already very binary choice of which tile to jump on is further segmented by taking player input only 15 times a second.

This leads to a lot of dead falls in prince or early jumps that end up as ledge grabs instead of continuous runs (which the level design later on punishes with timed elements). One eventually gets the ‘feel’ of the game, but it’s fairly certain that nobody would describe this as good game feel. It’s more coming to terms than enjoying.

Obviously due to the limitations of the original Apple II it would be impossible to ask the game to have 30 or (ideally) 60 frames of rotoscoped animation per second. So, elements of what made the game so visually stunning are interfering with it in terms of gameplay. Game design is very interconnected like that.

A solution would involve different level design choices or a meta-game elements like the one implemented on Sands of Time, where precision execution errors are ameliorated by rewinding the scenario.

All these thoughts aside, I’d like to say once again how much I appreciate your work with these articles.

- Nate

October 30, 2016 at 5:48 am

Nice work. Needs apostrophe: “stores shelves”

- Jimmy Maher

October 30, 2016 at 7:26 am

Thanks!

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- Jayle Enn

October 30, 2016 at 5:06 pm

I’ll need to share this with an old friend of mine; he bought a midrange Atari in the middle of grade eight, and Karateka was among the pile of undocumented hand-me-down games he got from friends. It became something of an obsession for both of us– it took him weeks to work past each enemy and obstacle, but the fidelity of the animation helped him work attack combos down to a science; decades before I knew what a speedrun was, he was going from cliffside to reunion scene in ten minutes or less.

I think Karateka was the first game I encountered that featured easter eggs. It was possible to fall back -down- the mountainside, complete with muffled thud some seconds later, and I recall that approaching Mariko without bowing first resulted in a particularly withering kick and an unsuccessful The End.

I never realized that the DOS version of Prince of Persia was a port! All I knew, seeing it in attract mode, was that it was eerily pretty and bloodily difficult. It reminded me of watching loops of Dark Castle on computer store Macs, both because of the fluidity of the animations, and how brutally unforgiving both were.

- Nate

October 30, 2016 at 5:51 pm

The trick was you had to approach her in walk mode, not fight mode. The rest was part of ending animation

- Jayle Enn

October 30, 2016 at 6:39 pm

Yeah, a bit like that guillotine archway trap you had to fake out.

My friend immediately took to bowing to Mariko before approaching, after that first bad ending. :)

- ZUrlocker

October 30, 2016 at 6:36 pm

I remember Karateka’s animation on the Apple ][ at the time it came out and it was truly impressive. It had a fluidity that you just didn’t see in other games. I found Mechner’s journals interesting. I look forward to reading an analysis of the Last Express.

- Alexander Freeman

October 31, 2016 at 5:58 am

And I remember seeing Prince of Persia for the first time in Egghead Software. I was amazed by realistic the animation was. That really got me thinking about how cartoon characters and video games move very differently from real people. I didn’t know about rotoscoping at the time, so I didn’t know how they did it. I finally got to play the whole game years later. It made a lasting impression on me like Alone in the Dark.

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- Oscillations

October 31, 2016 at 1:58 pm

That’s WOULD-be unifiers.

- Jimmy Maher

October 31, 2016 at 2:27 pm

Thanks!

- Matt Reichert

October 31, 2016 at 3:31 pm

Prince of Persia may have come out too late in the Apple II’s life to be a hit, but I got it back then and absolutely loved it. It was one of those games that made me feel like a had an infinitely more powerful computer like my friends with their Amiga’s and PC’s (I didn’t get my first PC until 1994 or so). I still play the Apple II version to this day because the other versions look too ‘shiny’. I prefer the simpler graphics on the Apple version.

- iPadCary

November 4, 2016 at 9:16 pm

Yet more Jimmy gold!
It’s articles like this that make me proud to be a Patreon supporter!
Incidentally, “Prince Of Persia” for iPad is FREE in the App Store here:
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/aemula-oldies-s/id490466764?mt=8

- Serge Welle

November 8, 2016 at 10:44 pm

Thank you, Jimmy. Great read as usual.

Would you be so kind to review another great game from Brøderbund, “The Dark Heart of Uukrul”?

Thank you.

- Jimmy Maher

November 9, 2016 at 10:23 am

It was on my shortlist for a while, but I’m afraid it didn’t ultimately make the cut. The CRPG Addict did cover it in great detail: http://crpgaddict.blogspot.dk/2012/10/game-76-dark-heart-of-uukrul-1989.html.

- NPC

November 11, 2016 at 10:29 pm

“Seven Samurai (a major inspiration behind Star Wars…”

I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I think you mean another film in which a general employs two clownish deserters to smuggle a princess through a war. It’s called The Hidden Fortress. Lucas mechanised the deserters and added a farm boy.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051808/

Seven Samurai was apparently inspired by westerns and so fittingly remade into The Magnificent Seven. The Sci-Fi version is Battle Beyond the Stars (also starring the just-deceased Robert Vaughn).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047478/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054047/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080421/

- Jimmy Maher

November 12, 2016 at 7:16 am

I’m not saying you’re wrong either, but both were major influences… ;)

- Peter Piers

November 13, 2016 at 9:28 pm

“Prince of of Persia, which despite the merits of that eventual “train game” is” (etc etc)

One “of” too many.

- Jimmy Maher

November 13, 2016 at 9:39 pm

Thanks!

The Prophet of Cyberspace
November 4, 2016

William Gibson was born on March 17, 1948, on the coast of South Carolina. An only child, he was just six years old when his father, a middle manager for a construction company, choked on his food and died while away on one of his many business trips. Mother and son moved back to the former’s childhood home, a small town in Virginia.

Life there was trying for the young boy. His mother, whom he describes today as “chronically anxious and depressive,” never quite seemed to get over the death of her husband, and never quite knew how to relate to her son. Gibson grew up “introverted” and “hyper-bookish,” “the original can’t-hit-the-baseball kid,” feeling perpetually isolated from the world around him. He found refuge, like so many similar personalities, in the shinier, simpler worlds of science fiction. He dreamed of growing up to inhabit those worlds full-time by becoming a science-fiction writer in his own right.

At age 15, desperate for a new start, Gibson convinced his mother to ship him off to a private school for boys in Arizona. It was by his account as bizarre a place as any of the environments that would later show up in his fiction.

It was like a dumping ground for chronically damaged adolescent boys. There were just some weird stories there, from all over the country. They ranged from a 17-year old, I think from Louisiana, who was like a total alcoholic, man, a terminal, end-of-the-stage guy who weighed about 300 pounds and could drink two quarts of vodka straight up and pretend he hadn’t drunk any to this incredibly great-looking, I mean, beautiful kid from San Francisco, who was crazy because from age 10 his parents had sent him to plastic surgeons because they didn’t like the way he looked.

Still, the clean desert air and the forced socialization of life at the school seemed to do him good. He began to come out his shell. Meanwhile the 1960s were starting to roll, and young William, again like so many of his peers, replaced science fiction with Beatles, Beats, and, most of all, William S. Burroughs, the writer who remains his personal literary hero to this day.

William Gibson on the road, 1967

As his senior year at the boy’s school was just beginning, Gibson’s mother died as abruptly as had his father. Left all alone in the world, he went a little crazy. He was implicated in a drug ring at his school — he still insists today that he was innocent — and kicked out just weeks away from graduation. With no one left to go home to, he hit the road like Burroughs and his other Beat heroes, hoping to discover enlightenment through hedonism; when required like all 18-year-olds to register for the draft, he listed as his primary ambition in life the sampling of every drug ever invented. He apparently made a pretty good stab at realizing that ambition, whilst tramping around North America and, a little later, Europe for years on end, working odd jobs in communes and head shops and taking each day as it came. By necessity, he learned the unwritten rules and hierarchies of power that govern life on the street, a hard-won wisdom that would later set him apart as a writer.

In 1972, he wound up married to a girl he’d met on his travels and living in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he still makes his home to this day. As determined as ever to avoid a conventional workaday life, he realized that, thanks to Canada’s generous student-aid program, he could actually earn more money by attending university than he could working some menial job. He therefore enrolled at the University of British Columbia as an English major. Much to his own surprise, the classes he took there and the people he met in them reawakened his childhood love of science fiction and the written word in general, and with them his desire to write. Gibson’s first short story was published in 1977 in a short-lived, obscure little journal occupying some uncertain ground between fanzine and professional magazine; he earned all of $27 from the venture. Juvenilia though it may be, “Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” a moody, plot-less bit of atmospherics about a jilted lover of the near future who relies on virtual-reality “ASP cassettes” to sleep, already bears his unique stylistic stamp. But after writing it he published nothing else for a long while, occupying himself instead with raising his first child and living the life of a househusband while his wife, now a teacher with a Master’s Degree in linguistics, supported the family. It seemed a writer needed to know so much, and he hardly knew where to start learning it all.

It was punk rock and its child post-punk that finally got him going in earnest. Bands like Wire and Joy Division, who proved you didn’t need to know how to play like Emerson, Lake, and Palmer to make daring, inspiring music, convinced him to apply the same lesson to his writing — to just get on with it. When he did, things happened with stunning quickness. His second story, a delightful romp called “The Gernsback Continuum,” was purchased by Terry Carr, a legendary science-fiction editor and taste-maker, for the 1981 edition of his long-running Universe series of paperback short-story anthologies. With that feather in his cap, Gibson began regularly selling stories to Omni, one of the most respected of the contemporary science-fiction magazines. The first story of his that Omni published, “Johnny Mnemonic,” became the manifesto of a whole new science-fiction sub-genre that had Gibson at its leading light. The small network of writers, critics, and fellow travelers sometimes called themselves “The Movement,” sometimes “The Mirrorshades Group.” But in the end, the world would come to know them as the cyberpunks.

If forced to name one thing that made cyberpunk different from what had come before, I wouldn’t point to any of the exotic computer technology or the murky noirish aesthetics. I’d rather point to eight words found in Gibson’s 1982 story “Burning Chrome”: “the street finds its own use for things.” Those words signaled a shift away from past science fiction’s antiseptic idealized futures toward more organic futures extrapolated from the dirty chaos of the contemporary street. William Gibson, a man who out of necessity had learned to read the street, was the ideal writer to become the movement’s standard bearer. While traditional science-fiction writers were interested in technology for its own sake, Gibson was interested in the effect of technology on people and societies.

Cyberpunk, this first science fiction of the street, was responding to a fundamental shift in the focus of technological development in the real world. The cutting-edge technology of previous decades had been deployed as large-scale, outwardly focused projects, often funded with public money: projects like the Hoover Dam, the Manhattan Project, and that ultimate expression of macro-technology the Apollo moon landing. Even our computers were things filling entire floors, to be programmed and maintained by a small army of lab-coated drones. Golden-age science fiction was right on-board with this emphasis on ever greater scope and scale, extrapolating grand voyages to the stars alongside huge infrastructure projects back home.

Not long after macro-technology enjoyed its greatest hurrah in the communal adventure that was Apollo, however, technology began to get personal. In the mid-1970s, the first personal computers began to appear. In 1979, in an event of almost equal significance, Sony introduced the Walkman, a cassette player the size of your hand, the first piece of lifestyle technology that you could carry around with you. The PC and the Walkman begat our iPhones and Fitbits of today. And if we believe what Gibson and the other cyberpunks were already saying in the early 1980s, those gadgets will in turn beget chip implants, nerve splices, body modifications, and artificial organs. The public has become personal; the outward-facing has become inward-facing; the macro spaces have become micro spaces. We now focus on making ever smaller gadgets, even as we’ve turned our attention away from the outer space beyond our planet in favor of drilling down ever further into the infinitesimal inner spaces of genes and cells, into the tiniest particles that form our universe. All of these trends first showed up in science fiction in the form of cyberpunk.

In marked contrast to the boldness of his stories’ content, Gibson was peculiarly cautious, even hesitant, when it came to the process of writing and of making a proper career out of the act. The fact that Neuromancer, Gibson’s seminal first novel, came into being when it did was entirely down to the intervention of Terry Carr, the same man who had kick-started Gibson’s career as a writer of short stories by publishing “The Gernsback Continuum.” When in 1983 he was put in charge of a new “Ace Specials” line of science-fiction paperbacks reserved exclusively for the first novels of up-and-coming writers, Carr immediately thought again of William Gibson. A great believer in Gibson’s talent and potential importance, he cajoled him into taking an advance and agreeing to write a novel; Gibson had considered himself still “four or five years away” from being ready to tackle such a daunting task. “It wasn’t that vast forces were silently urging me to write,” he says. “It’s just that Terry Carr had given me this money and I had to make up some kind of story. I didn’t have a clue, so I said, ‘Well, I’ll plagiarize myself and see what comes of it.'” And indeed, there isn’t that much in 1984’s Neuromancer that would have felt really new to anyone who had read all of the stories Gibson had written in the few years before it. As a distillation of all the ideas with which he’d been experimenting in one 271-page novel, however, it was hard to beat.

The plot is never the most important important aspect of a William Gibson novel, and this first one is no exception to that rule. Still, for the record…

Neuromancer takes places at some indeterminate time in the future, in a gritty society where the planet is polluted and capitalism has run amok, but the designer drugs and technological toys are great if you can pay for them. Our hero is Case, a former “console cowboy” who used to make his living inside the virtual reality, or “Matrix,” of a worldwide computer network, battling “ICE” (“Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics”) and pulling off heists for fun and profit. Unfortunately for him, an ex-employer with a grudge has recently fried those pieces of Case’s brain that interface with his console and let him inject himself into “cyberspace.” Left stuck permanently in “meat” space, as the novel opens he’s a borderline suicidal, down-and-out junkie. But soon he’s offered the chance to get his nervous system repaired and get back into the game by a mysterious fellow named Armitage, mastermind of a ragtag gang of outlaws who are investigating mysterious happenings on the Matrix. Eventually they’ll discover a rogue artificial intelligence behind it all — the titular Neuromancer.

Given that plot summary, we can no longer avoid addressing the thing for which William Gibson will always first and foremost be known, whatever his own wishes on the matter: he’s the man who invented the term “cyberspace,” as well as the verb “to surf” it and with them much of the attitudinal vector that accompanied the rise of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. It should be noted that both neologisms actually predate Neuromancer in Gibson’s work, dating back to 1982’s “Burning Chrome.” And it should most definitely be noted that he was hardly the first to stumble upon many of the ideas behind the attitude. We’ve already chronicled some of the developments in the realms of theory and practical experimentation that led to the World Wide Web. And in the realm of fiction, a mathematician and part-time science-fiction writer named Vernor Vinge had published True Names, a novella describing a worldwide networked virtual reality of its own, in 1981; its plot also bears some striking similarities to that of Gibson’s later Neuromancer. But Vinge was (and is) a much more prosaic writer than Gibson, hewing more to science fiction’s sturdy old school of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. He could propose the idea of a worldwide network and then proceed to work it out with much more technical rigorousness than Gibson could ever dream of mustering, but he couldn’t hope to make it anywhere near as sexy.

For many the most inexplicable thing about Gibson’s work is that he should ever have come up with all this cyberspace stuff in the first place. As he took a certain perverse delight in explaining to his wide-eyed early interviewers, in his real-world life Gibson was something of a Luddite even by the standards of the 1980s. He had, for instance, never owned or used a computer at the time he wrote his early stories and Neuromancer; he wrote of his sleek high-tech futures on a clunky mechanical typewriter dating from 1927. (Gibson immortalized it within Neuromancer itself by placing it in disassembled form on the desk of Julius Deane, an underworld kingpin Case visits early in the novel.) And I’ve seen no evidence that Gibson was aware of True Names prior to writing “Burning Chrome” and Neuromancer, much less the body of esoteric and (at the time) obscure academic literature on computer networking and hypertext.

Typically, Gibson first conceived the idea of the Matrix not from reading tech magazines and academic journals, as Vinge did in conceiving his own so-called “Other Plane,” but on the street, while gazing through the window of an arcade. Seeing the rapt stares of the players made him think they believed in “some kind of actual space behind the screen, someplace you can’t see but you know is there.” In Neuromancer, he describes the Matrix as the rush of a drug high, a sensation with which his youthful adventures in the counterculture had doubtless left him intimately familiar.

He closed his eyes.

Found the ridged face of the power stud.

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.

Please, he prayed, _now –_

A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.

_Now –_

Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding —

And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.

And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.

Much of the supposedly “futuristic” slang in Neuromancer is really “dope dealer’s slang” or “biker’s talk” Gibson had picked up on his travels. Aside from the pervasive role played by the street, he has always listed the most direct influences on Neuromancer as the cut-up novels of his literary hero William S. Burroughs, the noirish detective novels of Dashiell Hammett, and the deliciously dystopian nighttime neon metropolis of Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, which in its exploration of subjectivity, the nature of identity, and the influence of technology on same hit many of the same notes that became staples of Gibson’s work. That so much of the modern world seems to be shaped in Neuromancer‘s image says much about Gibson’s purely intuitive but nevertheless prescient genius — and also something about the way that science fiction can be not only a predictor but a shaper of the future, an idea I’ll return to shortly.

But before we move on to that subject and others we should take just a moment more to consider how unique Neuromancer, a bestseller that’s a triumph of style as much as anything else, really is in the annals of science fiction. In a genre still not overly known for striking or elegant prose, William Gibson is one of the few writers immediately recognizable after just a paragraph or two. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for air-tight world-building and careful plotting, Gibson is definitely not the place to find it. “You’ll notice in Neuromancer there’s obviously been a war,” he said in an interview, “but I don’t explain what caused it or even who was fighting it. I’ve never had the patience or the desire to work out the details of who’s doing what to whom, or exactly when something is taking place, or what’s become of the United States.”

I remember standing in a record store one day with a friend of mine who was quite a good guitar player when Jimi Hendrix’s famous Woodstock rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” came over the sound system. “All he does is make a bunch of noise to cover it up every time he flubs a note,” said my friend — albeit, as even he had to agree, kind of a dazzling noise. I sometimes think of that conversation when I read Neuromancer and Gibson’s other early works. There’s an ostentatious, look-at-me! quality to his prose, fueled by, as Gibson admitted, his “blind animal panic” at the prospect of “losing the reader’s attention.” Or, as critic Andrew M. Butler puts it more dryly: “This novel demonstrates great linguistic density, Gibson’s style perhaps blinding the reader to any shortcomings of the novel, and at times distancing us from the characters and what Gibson the author may feel about them.” The actual action of the story, meanwhile, Butler sums up not entirely unfairly as, “Case, the hapless protagonist, stumbles between crises, barely knowing what’s going on, at risk from a femme fatale and being made offers he cannot refuse from mysterious Mr. Bigs.” Again, you don’t read William Gibson for the plot.

Which of course only makes Neuromancer‘s warm reception by the normally plot-focused readers of science fiction all the more striking. But make no mistake: it was a massive critical and commercial success, winning the Hugo and Nebula Awards for its year and, as soon as word spread following its very low-key release, selling like crazy. Unanimously recognized as the science-fiction novel of 1984, it was being labeled the novel of the decade well before the 1980s were actually over; it was just that hard to imagine another book coming out that could compete with its influence. Gibson found himself in a situation somewhat akin to that of Douglas Adams during the same period, lauded by the science-fiction community but never quite feeling a part of it. “Everyone’s been so nice,” he said in the first blush of his success, “but I still feel very much out of place in the company of most science-fiction writers. It’s as though I don’t know what to do when I’m around them, so I’m usually very polite and keep my tie on. Science-fiction authors are often strange, ill-socialized people who have good minds but are still kids.” Politeness or no, descriptions like that weren’t likely to win him many new friends among them. And, indeed, there was a considerable backlash against him by more traditionalist writers and readers, couched in much the same rhetoric that had been deployed against science fiction’s New Wave of writers of twenty years before.

But if we wish to find reasons that so much of science-fiction fandom did embrace Neuromancer so enthusiastically, we can certainly find some that were very practical if not self-serving, and that had little to do with the literary stylings of William S. Burroughs or extrapolations on the social import of technological development. Simply put, Neuromancer was cool, and cool was something that many of the kids who read it decidedly lacked in their own lives. It’s no great revelation to say that kids who like science fiction were and are drawn in disproportionate numbers to computers. Prior to Neuromancer, such kids had few media heroes to look up to; computer hackers were almost uniformly depicted as socially inept nerds in Coke-bottle glasses and pocket protectors. But now along came Case, and with him a new model of the hacker as rock star, dazzling with his Mad Skillz on the Matrix by day and getting hot and heavy with his girlfriend Molly Millions, who seemed to have walked into the book out of an MTV music video, by night. For the young pirates and phreakers who made up the Scene, Neuromancer was the feast they’d never realized they were hungry for. Cyberpunk ideas, iconography, and vocabulary were quickly woven into the Scene’s social fabric.

Like much about Neuromancer‘s success, this way of reading it, which reduced it down to a stylish exercise in escapism, bothered Gibson. His book was, he insisted, not about how cool it was to be “hard and glossy” like Case and Molly, but about “what being hard and glossy does to you.” “My publishers keep telling me the adolescent market is where it’s at,” he said, “and that makes me pretty uncomfortable because I remember what my tastes ran to at that age.”

While Gibson may have been uncomfortable with the huge appetite for comic-book-style cyberpunk that followed Neuromancer‘s success, plenty of others weren’t reluctant to forgo any deeper literary aspirations in favor of piling the casual violence and casual sex atop the casual tech. As the violence got ever more extreme and the sex ever more lurid, cyberpunk risked turning into the most insufferable of clichés.

Sensation though cyberpunk was in the rather insular world of written science fiction, William Gibson and the sub-genre he had pioneered filtered only gradually into the world outside of that ghetto. The first cyberpunk character to take to the screen arguably was, in what feels a very appropriate gesture, a character who allegedly lived within a television: Max Headroom, a curious computerized talking head who became an odd sort of cultural icon for a few years there during the mid- to late-1980s. Invented for a 1985 low-budget British television movie called Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future, Max went on to host his own talk show on British television, to become an international spokesman for the ill-fated New Coke, and finally to star in an American dramatic series which managed to air 14 episodes on ABC during 1987 and 1988. While they lacked anything precisely equivalent to the Matrix, the movie and the dramatic series otherwise trafficked in themes, dystopic environments, and gritty technologies of the street not far removed at all from those of Neuromancer. The ambitions of Max’s creators were constantly curtailed by painfully obvious budgetary limitations as well as the pop-cultural baggage carried by the character himself; by the time of the 1987 television series he had become more associated with camp than serious science fiction. Nevertheless, the television series in particular makes for fascinating viewing for any student of cyberpunk history. (The series endeared itself to Commodore Amiga owners in another way: Amigas were used to create many of the visual effects used on the show, although not, as was occasionally reported, to render Max Headroom himself. He was actually played by an actor wearing a prosthetic mask, with various visual and auditory effects added in post-production to create the character’s trademark ticks.)

There are other examples of cyberpunk’s slowly growing influence to be found in the film and television of the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as the street-savvy, darkly humorous low-budget action flick Robocop. But William Gibson’s elevation to the status of Prophet of Cyberspace in the eyes of the mainstream really began in earnest with a magazine called Wired, launched in 1993 by an eclectic mix of journalists, entrepreneurs, and academics. Envisioned as a glossy lifestyle magazine for the hip and tech-conscious — the initial pitch labeled it “the Rolling Stone of technology” — Wired‘s aesthetics were to a large degree modeled on William Gibson. When they convinced him to contribute a rare non-fiction article (on Singapore, which he described as “Disneyland with the death penalty”) to the fourth issue, the editors were so excited that they stuck the author rather than the subject of the article on their magazine’s cover.

Well-funded and editorially polished in all the ways that traditional technology journals weren’t, Wired was perfectly situated to become mainstream journalism’s go-to resource for understanding the World Wide Web and the technology bubble expanding around it. It was largely through Wired that “cyberspace” and “surfing” became indelible parts of the vocabulary of the age, even as both neologisms felt a long, long way in spirit from the actual experience of using the World Wide Web in those early days, involving as it did mostly text-only pages delivered to the screen at a glacial pace. No matter. The vocabulary surrounding technology has always tended to be grounded in aspiration rather than reality, and perhaps that’s as it should be. By the latter 1990s, Gibson was being acknowledged by even such dowdy organs as The New York Times as the man who had predicted it all five years before the World Wide Web was so much as a gleam in the eye of Tim Berners-Lee.

To ask whether William Gibson deserves his popular status as a prophet is, I would suggest, a little pointless. Yes, Vernor Vinge may have better claim to the title in the realm of fiction, and certainly people like Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and even Bill Atkinson of Apple have huge claims on the raw ideas that turned into the World Wide Web. Even within the oeuvre of William Gibson himself, his predictions in other areas of personal technology and society — not least his anticipation of globalization and its discontents — strike me as actually more prescient than his rather vague vision of a global computerized Matrix.

Yet, whether we like it or not, journalism and popular history do tend to condense complexities down to single, easily graspable names, and in this case the beneficiary of that tendency is William Gibson. And it’s not as if he didn’t make a contribution. Whatever the rest did, Gibson was the guy who made the idea of a networked society — almost a networked consciousness — accessible, cool, and fun. In doing so, he turned the old idea of science fiction as prophecy on its head. Those kids who grew up reading Neuromancer became the adults who are building the technology of today. If, with the latest developments in virtual reality, we seem to be inching ever closer to a true worldwide Matrix, we can well ask ourselves who is the influenced and who is the influencer. Certainly Neuromancer‘s effect on our popular culture has been all but incalculable. The Matrix, the fifth highest-grossing film of 1999 and a mind-expanding pop-culture touchstone of its era, borrowed from Gibson to the extent of naming itself after his version of virtual reality. In our own time, it’s hard to imagine current too-cool-for-school television hits like Westworld, Mr. Robot, and Black Mirror existing without the example of Neuromancer (or, at least, without The Matrix and thus by extension Neuromancer). The old stereotype of the closeted computer nerd, if not quite banished to the closet from which it came, does now face strong competition indeed. Cyberpunk has largely faded away as a science-fiction sub-genre or even just a recognized point of view, not because the ideas behind it died but because they’ve become so darn commonplace.

You may have noticed that up to this point I’ve said nothing about the books William Gibson wrote after Neuromancer. That it’s been so easy to avoid doing so says much about his subsequent career, doomed as it is always to be overshadowed by his very first novel. For understandable reasons, the situation hasn’t always set well with Gibson himself. Already in 1992, he could only wryly reply, “Yeah, and they’ll never let me forget it,” when introduced as the man who invented cyberspace — this well before his mainstream fame as the inventor of the word had really even begun to take off. Writing a first book with the impact of Neuromancer is not an unalloyed blessing.

That said, one must also acknowledge that Gibson didn’t do his later career any favors in getting out from under Neuromancer‘s shadow. Evincing that peculiar professional caution that always sat behind his bold prose, he mined the same territory for years, releasing a series of books whose titles — Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light — seem as of a piece as their dystopic settings and their vaguely realized plots. It’s not that these books have nothing to say; it’s rather that almost everything they do say is already said by Neuromancer. His one major pre-millennial departure from form, 1990’s The Difference Engine, is an influential exercise in Victorian steampunk, but also a book whose genesis owed much to his good friend and fellow cyberpunk icon Bruce Sterling, with whom he collaborated on it.

Here’s the thing, though: as he wrote all those somewhat interchangeable novels through the late 1980s and 1990s, William Gibson was becoming a better writer. His big breakthrough came with 2003’s Pattern Recognition, in my opinion the best pure novel he’s ever written. Perhaps not coincidentally, Pattern Recognition also marks the moment when Gibson, who had been steadily inching closer to the present ever since Neuromancer, finally decided to set a story in our own contemporary world. His prose is as wonderful as ever, full of sentence after sentence I can only wish I’d come up with, yet now free of the look-at-me! ostentation of his early work. One of the best ways to appreciate how much subtler a writer Gibson has become is to look at his handling of his female characters. Molly Millions from Neuromancer was every teenage boy’s wet dream come to life. Cayce, the protagonist of Pattern Recognition — her name is a sly nod back to Neuromancer‘s Case — is, well, just a person. Her sexuality is part of her identity, as it is for that of all of us, but it’s just a part. A strong, capable, intelligent character, she’s not celebrated by the author for any of these qualities. Instead she’s allowed just to be. This strikes me as a wonderful sign of progress — for William Gibson, and perhaps for all of us.

Which isn’t to say that Gibson’s dystopias have turned into utopias. While his actual plots remain as underwhelming as ever, no working writer of today that I’m aware of captures so adroitly the sense of dislocation and isolation that has become such a staple of post-millennial life — paradoxically so in this world that’s more interconnected than ever. If some person from the future or the past asked you how we live now, you could do a lot worse than to simply hand her one of William Gibson’s recent novels.

Whether Gibson is still a science-fiction writer is up for debate and, like so many exercises in labeling, ultimately inconsequential. There remains a coterie of old fans unhappy with the new direction, who complain about every new novel he writes because it isn’t another Neuromancer. By way of compensation, Gibson has come to be widely accepted as a writer of note outside of science-fiction fandom — a writer of note, that is, for something more than being the inventor of cyberspace. That of course doesn’t mean he will ever write another book with the impact of Neuromancer, but Gibson, who never envisioned himself as anything more than a cult writer in the first place, seems to have come to terms at last with the inevitably of the phrases “author of Neuromancer” and “coiner of the term ‘cyberspace'” appearing in the first line of his eventual obituary. Asked in 2007 by The New York Times whether he was “sick of being known as the writer who coined the word ‘cyberspace,'” he said he thought he’d “miss it if it went away.” In the meantime, he has more novels to write. We may not be able to escape our yesterdays, but we always have our today.

(Sources: True Names by Vernor Vinge; Conversations with William Gibson, edited by Patrick A. Smith; Bruce Sterling and William Gibson’s introductions to the William Gibson short-story collection Burning Chrome; Bruce Sterling’s preface to the cyberpunk short-story anthology Mirrorshades; “Science Fiction from 1980 to the Present” by John Clute and “Postmodernism and Science Fiction” by Andrew M. Butler, both found in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction; Spin of April 1987; Los Angeles Times of September 12 1993; The New York Times of August 19 2007; William Gibson’s autobiography from his website; “William Gibson and the Summer of Love” from the Toronto Dream Project; and of course the short stories and novels of William Gibson.)

Comments
40 Responses

- TsuDhoNimh

November 4, 2016 at 4:46 pm

I love to start reading Neuromancer. Even though it is a short novel, I get tired of the plotlessness and cardboard characters about halfway through and end up setting it aside. It is very much a book I want to like, but I can never quite enjoy like I feel that I should.

Still, it does contain one of my favorite descriptions ever: “the sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.”

- Ken Rutsky

November 4, 2016 at 5:01 pm

> Still, it does contain one of my favorite descriptions ever: “the sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.”

These days it needs to have a footnote. Most people these days would think, “hmm, so it was a nice, clear blue? How nice!”

- Jonathan Badger

November 4, 2016 at 5:33 pm

Several more recent books have actually made essentially that joke! Also, of course the continued existence of payphones due to the lack of mobile phones in Neuromancer’s future.

- Jimmy Maher

November 4, 2016 at 5:39 pm

God, Connie Willis’s The Doomsday Book draw me *crazy* with that. These people have time travel as an everyday technology and not only can they not make a mobile phone, they can’t even make a *land line* network that doesn’t crap out as soon as someone looks at it sideways.

- Felix

November 4, 2016 at 7:35 pm

I’m suddenly reminded of the landline in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, that functioned perfectly when transported anywhere in time and space… except in 1980s England where it belonged. Clearly a widespread problem at the time, on both sides of the pond.

- Jimmy Maher

November 4, 2016 at 5:36 pm

Yes, very ironic that this high-tech future of the past now contains such a blatant anachronism as its very first sentence. And even crazier to think that an entire generation now has little to no idea what the “snow” of a dead channel used to look like. I imagine some Penguin Classic edition of Neuromancer 50 years from now laboriously trying to explain the sentence via a footnote and the reader being left utterly nonplussed… kind of the way I feel when I try to understand, say, the internal politics of the Church of England during Victorian times when I read Trollope.

- Lisa H.

November 4, 2016 at 6:21 pm

I dunno; I think pure RGB blue would still be an unsettling color for the sky! But I suppose it’s not the description he intended.

- Mark H

November 4, 2016 at 8:16 pm

I find it amusing that the other classic of cyberpunk uses an intentional anachronism in its name: Neil Stephenson’s Snowcrash, referring to a type of failure mode only possible on the Apple II, and already incomprehensible in 1993!

- xxx

November 6, 2016 at 7:39 pm

Not so; snow crashes were possible on other types of computers. You could see them on any environment where a program could write directly to VRAM. I had a Microsoft Basic program snow-crash a Mac Plus once. It wasn’t even a graphical program! The MS Basic interpreter was just so mind-blowingly buggy that it would sometimes get drunk and scribble all over the OS. Good times.

- Ken Rutsky

November 4, 2016 at 5:00 pm

A wonderful, unexpected article about one of my heroes. Thanks!

I know most people will be commenting on the meat of this article, but I appreciate your mention of his growth as a writer. Neuromancer, visionary and mind-blowing as it is, is not a very good novel-as-novel (I’m talking craft here, not influence, of course). Count Zero showed marked improvement, and Mona Lisa Overdrive was his first near-flawless piece of craft.

Agreed on Pattern Recognition as his best so far. I haven’t been able to get into the Peripheral yet; I’ve started it twice, but it’s not holding my interest. Spook Country was much the same; it took three tries to finish the Bigend trilogy.

Tho I do have to give a shout-out to All Tomorrow’s Parties. I love that book’s aggressively pared-down prose, its experimental feel, and the fact that the true, epoch-changing moment in that book is dealt with in such a prosaic manner, you’ve read ten pages before you perk up, page back, re-read the passage and exclaim, “Holy $#!+, that’s going to change EVERYTHING!”

- Jimmy Maher

November 4, 2016 at 5:32 pm

I like the Bigend trilogy a lot in general, but it is a definite case of diminishing returns. Zero History suffered from Gibson’s seemingly waking up halfway through, figuring he needed *some* sort of plot, and grafting on a clumsy thriller scenario that was really hard to care about it and ended up distracting from the more interesting parts of the book. Personally, I would have been happier just to continue hanging out with the characters, taking in the descriptions that make me see familiar sights through new eyes and new sensibilities, and marveling at Gibson’s way with words. I tend to read him like I do poetry: slowly, savoringly, and in very small chunks. Each chapter is like a little haiku.

- Poddy

November 5, 2016 at 7:34 pm

I also love “All Tomorrow’s Parties”! I kept thinking about it as I read this article, along with “Idoru”. I remember nothing about “Neuromancer”, despite reading it more than once. I thought I remembered it, but after googling just now I realize I have it all mixed up with Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” in my head. “Pattern Recognition” was another interesting one, and I share your experience of “Spook Country”.

10, 15 years ago, I used to tell my friends I was worried we were headed into a Gibson future. Now I -know- we are in a Gibson future. Which is a shame, because if we all got our pick I would have gone in for a Banks future.

- Michael Russo

November 7, 2016 at 4:59 pm

I read The Peripheral earlier this year, and while it did take a bit of time for me to “get” the world, it was worth it in the end for a glimpse of a unique but plausible world. And he really has made incredible strides in world-building since Neuromancer. I read that a long time ago because I felt I had to, and I guess I didn’t like it enough to continue with the next two, but given your (and others) endorsement of them I’m sure I will one day. Despite the fact that payphones still exist in this world, or maybe because of it, it’s interesting as a what-might-have-been of the future in the same way steampunk is (and The Difference Engine seems like a good thing to pick up too).

- Keith Palmer

November 4, 2016 at 6:14 pm

I’ve had my own problems getting lost part of the way through William Gibson’s novels, and haven’t read a lot of them (especially the recent ones) for that reason, although there are times I can suppose “any work of prose I struggle with has to have literary merit.” (The dangerous corollary of that is supposing that anything I can get through with ease must have been “beneath” me…) The most unusual insight I’ve ever managed about them was letting some unexpected bits of “the standard SF toolkit” in Neuromancer (it has “space colonies”) register on me on returning to it and thinking it might not be so out-and-out “dystopian” (in the sense of “specific warnings of hopeless inequality”) as I’d sort of supposed most cyberpunk to be before.

- Felix

November 4, 2016 at 7:30 pm

Oh, I dunno about that… the future of Blade Runner has extra-solar colonies, which in turn strongly implies FTL, given the timeline. Doesn’t make the setting any less of a crapsack…

- Felix

November 4, 2016 at 7:22 pm

If you want to learn more about the history of cyberpunk and its relationship to real-world technology/culture (the two have been hopelessly inextricable for over twenty years now, if not more), see if you can somehow get your hands on a copy of Art Wasn’t Quite Crime, by Florin Pîtea. The English is terrible, unless someone tightened it up in the mean time, but the author quite literally wrote his Ph.D. thesis on cyberpunk literature and is a damned fine storyteller himself.

That said, William Gibson’s relationship with Neuromancer seems to parallel Leonard Nimoy’s relationship with Spock. As for his writing skill… suffice to say the same Neuromancer sports the single most famous opening line in literature this side of “it was a dark and stormy night”. And if said opening line is now painfully dated, well, even that has been discussed to death and has enormous cultural significance. So, good for him.

- Martin

November 4, 2016 at 11:58 pm

I think the genius of the Neuomancer world was that Gibson created a place that was crappy for 99% of the population in spite of all technological trappings and then getting us to spend the next 30 years trying to make it all come true.

- Poddy

November 5, 2016 at 7:35 pm

Man, this is why upvoting exists.

- Brendan

November 5, 2016 at 12:51 am

Jimmy – on the off-chance you’re not aware of it, the story of the Max Headroom TV hack is a mesmerising rabbit hole to fall down. Start here, then link-hop your way to mindbending late-80s cyberpunk creepiness: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/headroom-hacker

- Jimmy Maher

November 5, 2016 at 8:57 am

Yes, I did fall down that rabbit hole once before, when I was researching my Amiga book, which has a lot more to say about Max Headroom. There’s something kind of creepy about Max anyway, and this hack really fed into that.

- Pete S

November 5, 2016 at 1:59 am

Outstanding piece.

I can remember reading William Gibson in the late 1980s as a teenager and being so excited by the vision of linked up computers and

Neuromancer’s plot has some things going for it. The AIs are not purely malevolent evil creatures bent on destroying mankind as they often are. Indeed, the AIs seeking their own aims and living with people is a interesting take on the issue.

The characters in Neuromancer might be cliched, quite a bit of the dialogue stilted but the overall plot is something that deserves some respect.

Perhaps one day there will be a TV series or a film that does it justice.

- Kerry

November 5, 2016 at 5:32 am

I assume “paperback story-story anthologies” should be “paperback short-story anthologies”

- Jimmy Maher

November 5, 2016 at 8:55 am

Thanks!

- Carl Read

November 5, 2016 at 7:05 am

“Juvenilia thought it may be” :)

I was into science fiction when young, but sort of lost interest when I got a computer. It’s better to live in the future than just read about it. But I heard the hype around Neuomancer when it came out, so bought the book to see what the fuss was about. It didn’t get me back into sci-fi, the real world of computers even then still being more exciting than the fictional.

This is the second mention of William Gibson that’s come to my notice this week…

https://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/792244454962765824

I could’ve been that owner!

- Jimmy Maher

November 5, 2016 at 8:55 am

Thanks!

- Brian Bagnall

November 6, 2016 at 4:21 pm

Gibson sounds like he’s making up his own reality: “…to this incredibly great-looking, I mean, beautiful kid from San Francisco, who was crazy because from age 10 his parents had sent him to plastic surgeons because they didn’t like the way he looked.”

Pretty sure unless someone is deformed, plastic surgeons won’t and can’t operate until age of consent. And also bone growth isn’t complete which makes it futile until the bones stop moving.

- xxx

November 6, 2016 at 9:11 pm

Well, (a) the kid may have been lying, since it sounds like it wasn’t exactly a school for well-adjusted individuals, (b) not all plastic surgery involves bone adjustment, and (c) California, man. It’s a bizarre place. I’d be willing to believe that parents crazy enough to want to sculpt their ten-year-old could find someone willing to do it, legal or not.

But in the end, does it matter if it’s true or not? It makes for a great detail in a colourful story. “Never trust the storyteller; only trust the story.”

- Brian Bagnall

November 7, 2016 at 1:46 am

Maybe I’m just jaded about the whole William Gibson phenomenon. Like a lot of books I read as a teen, it was because of a video game, in this case Neuromancer by Interplay. The game seemed to hint at this awesome world with interesting characters. Then I read the book and found it quite forgettable, other than a scene with some holographic sumo wrestlers (unless I’m confusing another book-it’s been at least 25 years). Probably as Jimmy points out because of the weakness of plot. There are people out there don’t mind the lack of a melody in music (ahem, Jazz), but me, I need a melody and I need a plot. At the time I thought I must have been missing something and kept going back to his books to try and see the genius everyone else saw, such as Johnny Mnemonic and Burning Chrome. I also read the Difference Engine due to the Babbage connection and again it seemed like such a lost opportunity, like what you thought would be in the book to make it great was just not there. My guess is that the lack of a movie adaptation for Neuromancer is because when you take those words and distill them down to characters, plot, actions and visuals there isn’t enough to hang a movie on. Anyway, I hope nobody takes these as fighting words, just relating my personal experience with his novels.

BTW Jimmy, could this be a prelude to an article about the video game?

- Jeremy Reimer

November 7, 2016 at 8:01 pm

I really hope that this is a prelude to an article about the Neuromancer video game, because that game was absolutely fantastic. It’s one of the few games that I play again every year or so. It took the world of Neuromancer and added elements of the BBS scene from the 1980s, which was a delicious combination.

Unlike Brian, however, I came to the novel first, and so I still have quite a bit of fondness for it. But Gibson’s latest work, The Peripheral, is absolutely fantastic.

- Alexander Freeman

November 7, 2016 at 1:44 am

I remember reading Neuromancer with my mom, but, for some reason, we didn’t get that far. I think some interruption happened. I plan on resuming it some day, though. I’ve also considered reading the Difference Engine because it just sounds interesting. I’ve never heard of Pattern Recognition, but I think I’ll read that too since you think it’s his best work.

On another note, are you going to be covering the computer game Neuromancer next?

- Jimmy Maher

November 7, 2016 at 8:42 am

I think any reading of Neuromancer with my mom (when she was still with us) would have come to a very uncomfortable crashing halt as soon as we got to the sex scene about 20 pages in. ;)

And yeah, I’d recommend that anyone interested in Gibson first read Neuromancer — not because I love it all that much but because its influence has just been *so* immense — and Pattern Recognition — because I *do* love this one, and because it marks the beginning of his second, more mature incarnation as a writer. Then, if you like either one, you can continue with the old and/or the new Gibson according to your druthers. As a matter of fact, I’d have to recommend that anyone interested in science-fiction literature in the abstract, in the development of computer technology, or simply in the history of pop culture over the last several decades read Neuromancer. It’s just *that* important.

And yeah, I have (what I think is) a very interesting and entertaining article coming up next that will cover the Neuromancer game among other things.

- Ken Rutsky

November 11, 2016 at 2:32 pm

If Neuromancer is a slog for you, you might like Burning Chrome better. The short stories are energetic and vivid; as a teen, they offered me a better “in” to Gibson’s style than Neuromancer did. “Johnny Mnemonic” is still a fantastic piece, as is the title story. “Dogfight” is still one of my favorite s-f shorts, dealing with video arcade culture.

- Jimmy Maher

November 11, 2016 at 3:09 pm

Very good point. “Burning Chrome” does 90 percent of what Neuromancer does in about 10 percent of the space, making it an ideal first — and perhaps only — read for someone more interested in understanding his influence than reading him for pleasure. If I was, say, teaching a course on the history science fiction and wanted the most easily digestible exemplar of cyberpunk, I’d definitely go with “Burning Chrome.” As I perhaps should have brought out more in the article, it’s also actually the more innovative work. “Cyberspace,” “surfing,” and a whole lot else dates from “Burning Chrome,” not Neuromancer. It’s largely due to certain cultural prejudices — short stories have been *really* hard sells in publishing for decades now — that the latter rather than the former became the Gibson work that took the world by storm.

- Scott Gage

November 7, 2016 at 2:24 am

Typo police:

Left stuck permanently in “meat” space, as the novels opens he’s a borderline suicidal, down-and-out junkie.

I love Neuromancer and I love this article – I should seek out more Gibson as the way you describe his work makes it sound so evocative to read. But first I should get my copy of Neuromancer out and give it more than a surface level read.

- Jimmy Maher

November 7, 2016 at 8:43 am

Thanks!

- Rowan Lipkovits

November 7, 2016 at 3:57 am

Growing up as a cyberpunk in Vancouver during the ’90s he unavoidably cast a large shadow over the emergent BBS and Internet scenes there (to the extent of my crossing paths with Gibson’s son regularly in my Kitsilano elementary school.)

If Gibson reappears in a future article (pertaining to eg. the Interplay Neuromancer game), might it be possible to toss a bone to his multimedia poem “Agrippa” and Christine Love’s visual novel “Digital: A Love Story”?

- Jimmy Maher

November 7, 2016 at 8:54 am

I’m afraid I won’t get to either Agrippa or Digital in these articles, although that doesn’t mean Agrippa won’t pop up in the near future. It just didn’t work to fit it in here, and I can’t see where it would fit any better in the next article I have coming. I ended up cutting thousands of words from this article; wrestling it into some sort of (hopefully) elegant and readable shape was the reason I had to skip a week a couple of weeks back. As a creative-writing teacher taught me many years ago to my everlasting benefit, good writing is often more defined by what you leave out than what you put in. Unfortunately, like many writers, I often have to come to the realization of what is essential and what is inessential the hard way, by writing it *all* down first and then starting to painfully “slay my little darlings,” as the same teacher liked to put it.

Perhaps we will get to Digital at some point in the distant future, if circumstances allow me to continue doing this that long. It would certainly be on any list of works to cover from 2010…

- Jayle Enn

November 7, 2016 at 3:24 pm

To me, Gibson has always been less about the characters for me than the technology and the textural details, like the vast fiber-optic reflector that creates Freeside’s long sun, Villa Straylight’s bizarre decor, or the history of the AIDS cure that emerges through Virtual Light. Riviera’s holographic caricatures near the end of Neuromancer, and his vividly reproduced memories seem, in retrospect, to illustrate that the characters are a means to showcase this strange imagery, rather than actors in and of themselves.

- xxx

November 7, 2016 at 4:28 pm

Exactly. One doesn’t generally read an early William Gibson novel for the plot or characters; one reads them for the setting, imagery, and command of the zeitgeist. For all that there are many legitimate criticisms to be levelled at Neuromancer, there was something positively entrancing about its less-is-more approach to setting. Every paragraph was jammed with those “textural details” which said something about the dark, unforgiving world of the book, usually as an implication or an aside, and the world ended up feeling more real than the characters.

- Bb rex

November 15, 2016 at 9:14 am

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_on_a_Wire

1973

Turning on, Booting up, and Jacking into Neuromancer
November 11, 2016

When a novel becomes notably successful, Hollywood generally comes calling to secure the film rights. Many an author naively assumes that the acquisition of films rights means an actual film will get made, and in fairly short order at that. And thus is many an author sorely disappointed. Almost every popular novelist who’s been around for a while has stories to tell about Hollywood’s unique form of development purgatory. The sad fact is that the cost of acquiring the rights to even the biggest bestseller is a drop in the bucket in comparison to the cost of making a film out of them. Indeed, the cost is so trivial in terms of Hollywood budgets that many studios are willing to splash out for rights to books they never seriously envision doing anything productive with at all, simply to keep them out of the hands of rivals and protect their own properties in similar genres.

One could well imagine the much-discussed but never-made movie of William Gibson’s landmark cyberpunk novel Neuromancer falling into this standard pattern. Instead, though, its story is far, far more bizarre than the norm — and in its weird way far more entertaining.

Our story begins not with the power brokers of Hollywood, but rather with two young men at the very bottom of the Tinseltown social hierarchy. Ashley Tyler and Jeffrey Kinart were a pair of surfer dudes and cabana boys who worked the swimming pool of the exclusive Beverly Hills Hotel. Serving moguls and stars every day, they decided that the things they observed their charges doing really didn’t seem all that difficult at all. With a little luck and a little drive, even a couple of service workers like them could probably become players. Despite having no money, no education in filmmaking, and no real inroads with the people who tipped them to deliver poolside drinks, they hatched a plan in early 1985 to make a sequel to their favorite film of all time, the previous year’s strange postmodern action comedy The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

The idea was highly problematic, not only for all of the reasons I’ve just listed but also because Buckaroo Banzai, while regarded as something of a cult classic today, had been a notorious flop in its own day, recouping barely a third of its production budget — hardly, in other words, likely sequel fodder. Nevertheless, Tyler and Kinart managed to recruit Earl Mac Rauch, the creator of the Buckaroo Banzai character and writer of the film’s screenplay, to join their little company-in-name-only, which they appropriately titled Cabana Boy Productions. As they made the rounds of the studios, the all-too-plainly clueless Tyler and Kinart didn’t manage to drum up much interest for their Buckaroo Banzai sequel, but the Hollywood establishment found their delusions of grandeur and surfer-boy personalities so intriguing that there was reportedly some talk of signing them to a deal — not to make a Buckaroo Banzai movie, but as the fodder for a television comedy, a sort of Beverly Hillbillies for the 1980s.

After some months, the cabana boys finally recognized that Buckaroo Banzai had little chance of getting resurrected, and moved on to wanting to make a movie out of the hottest novel in science fiction: William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Rauch’s own career wasn’t exactly going gangbusters; in addition to Buckaroo Banzai, he also had on his resume New York, New York, mob-movie maestro Martin Scorsese’s equally notorious attempt to make a classic Hollywood musical. Thus he agreed to stick with the pair, promising to write the screenplay if they could secure the rights to Neuromancer. In the meantime, they continued to schmooze the guests at the Beverly Hills Hotel, making their revised pitch to any of them who would listen. Against all the odds, they stumbled upon one guest who took them very seriously indeed.

As was all too easy to tell by taking a glance at her rictus smile, Deborah Rosenberg was the wife of a plastic surgeon. Her husband, Victor Rosenberg, had been in private practice in New York City since 1970, serving the rich, the famous, and the would-be rich and famous. He also enjoyed a profitable sideline as a writer and commentator on his field for the supermarket tabloids, the glossy beauty magazines, and the bored-housewife talk-show circuit, where he was a regular on programs like Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and Donahue. When business took him and his wife to Beverly Hills in late 1985, Deborah was left to loiter by the pool while her husband attended a medical convention. It was thus that she made the acquaintance of Tyler and Kinart.

Smelling money, the cabana boys talked up their plans to her with their usual gusto despite her having nothing to do with the film industry. Unaccountably, Deborah Rosenberg thought the idea of making Neuromancer with them a smashing one, and managed to convince her husband to put up seed capital for the endeavor. Tyler, in a scenario that raises the specter of professional couch-crasher Kato Kaelin, actually followed the Rosenbergs back to New York and moved into their mansion as a permanent house guest while he and Deborah continued to work on their plans. There would be much speculation around both Hollywood and New York in the months to come about exactly what sort of relationship Deborah and Ashley actually had, and whether her husband a) was aware of Deborah’s possible extramarital shenanigans and b) cared if he was.

While the irony of Gibson’s book full of cosmetic surgeries and body modifications of all descriptions being adapted by a plastic surgeon would have been particularly rich, Victor took little active role in the project, seeming to regard it (and possibly Ashley?) primarily as a way to keep his high-maintenance wife occupied. He did, however, help her to incorporate Cabana Boy Productions properly in January of 1986, and a few weeks later, having confirmed that Neuromancer rather surprisingly remained un-optioned, offered William Gibson $100,000 for all non-print-media rights to the novel. Gibson was by all indications almost as naive as Deborah and her cabana boys; in his late thirties though he was, he had never earned more than the most menial of wages before finishing the science-fiction novel of the decade eighteen months before. He jumped at the offer with no further negotiation whatsoever, mumbling something about using the unexpected windfall to remodel his kitchen. The film rights to the hottest science-fiction novel in recent memory were now in the hands of two California surfer dudes and a plastic surgeon’s trophy wife. And then, just to make the situation that much more surreal, Timothy Leary showed up.

I should briefly introduce Leary for those of you who may not be that familiar with the psychologist whom President Nixon once called “the most dangerous man in America.” At the age of 42 in 1963, the heretofore respectable Leary was fired from his professorship at Harvard, allegedly for skipping lectures but really for administering psychedelic drugs to students without proper authorization. Ousted by the establishment, he joined the nascent counterculture as an elder statesman and cool hippie uncle. Whilst battling unsuccessfully to keep LSD and similar drugs legal — by 1968, they would be outlawed nationwide despite his best efforts — Leary traveled the country delivering “lectures” that came complete with a live backing band, light shows, and more pseudo-mystical mumbo jumbo than could be found anywhere this side of a Scientology convention. In his encounters with the straight mainstream press, he strained to be as outrageous and confrontational as possible. One of his favorite sayings became one of the most enduring of the entire Age of Aquarius: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Persecuted relentlessly by the establishment as the Judas who had betrayed their trust, Leary was repeatedly arrested for drug possession. This, of course, only endeared him that much more to the counterculture, who regarded each successive bust as another instance of his personal martyrdom for their cause. The Moody Blues wrote an oh-so-sixties anthem about him called “Legend of a Mind” and made it the centerpiece of their 1968 album In Search of the Lost Chord; likewise, the Beatles song “Come Together” was begun as a campaign anthem for Leary’s farcical candidacy for governor of California.

In January of 1970, Leary, the last person in the world on whom any judge was likely to be lenient, was sentenced to ten years imprisonment by the state of California for the possession of two marijuana cigarettes. With the aid of the terrorist group the Weather Underground, he escaped from prison that September and fled overseas, first to Algeria, then to Switzerland, where, now totally out of his depth in the criminal underworld, he wound up being kept under house arrest as a sort of prize pet by a high-living international arms dealer. When he was recaptured by Swiss authorities and extradited back to the United States in 1972, it thus came as something of a relief for him. He continued to write books in prison, but otherwise kept a lower profile as the last embers of the counterculture burned themselves out. His sentence was commuted by California Governor Jerry Brown in 1976, and he was released.

Free at last, he was slightly at loose ends, being widely regarded as a creaky anachronism of a decade that already felt very long ago and far away; in the age of disco, cocaine was the wonderdrug rather than LSD. But in 1983, when he played Infocom’s Suspended, he discovered a new passion that would come to dominate the last 13 years of his life. He wrote to Mike Berlyn, the author of the game, to tell him that Suspended had “changed his life,” that he had been “completely overwhelmed by the way the characters split reality into six pieces.” He had, he said, “not thought much of computers before then,” but Suspended “had made computers a reality” for him. Later that year, he visited Infocom with an idea for, as one employee of the company remembers it, “a personality that would sit on top of the operating system, observe what you did, and modify what the computer would do and how it would present information based on your personal history, what you’d done on the computer.” If such an idea seems insanely ambitious in the context of early 1980s technology, it perhaps points to some of the issues that would tend to keep Leary, who wasn’t a programmer and had no real technical understanding of how computers worked, at the margins of the industry. Certainly his flamboyance and tendency to talk always in superlatives made him a difficult fit with the more low-key personality of Infocom. Another employee remembers Leary as being “too self-centered to make a good partner. He wanted his name and his ideas on something, but he didn’t want us to tell him how to do it.”

His overtures to Infocom having come to naught, Leary moved on, but he didn’t forget about computers. Far from it. As the waves of hype about home computers rolled across the nation, Leary saw in them much the same revolutionary potential he had once seen in peace, love, and LSD — and he also saw in them, one suspects, a new vehicle to bring himself, an inveterate lover of the spotlight, back to a certain cultural relevance. Computers, he declared were better than drugs: “the language of computers [gives] me the metaphor I was searching for twenty years ago.” He helpfully provided the media with a new go-to slogan to apply to his latest ideas, albeit one that would never quite catch on like the earlier had: “Turn on, boot up, jack in.” “Who controls the pictures on the screen controls the future,” he said, “and computers let people control their own screen.”

In that spirit, he formed a small software developer of his own, which he dubbed Futique. Futique’s one tangible product became something he called Mind Mirror, published by Electronic Arts in 1986. It stands to this day as the single strangest product Electronic Arts has ever released. Billed as “part tool, part game, and part philosopher on a disk,” Mind Mirror was mostly incomprehensible — a vastly less intuitive Alter Ego with all the campy fun of that game’s terrible writing and dubious psychological insights leached out in favor of charts, graphs, and rambling manifestos. Electronic Arts found that Leary’s cultural cachet with the average computer user wasn’t as great as they might have hoped; despite their plastering his name and picture all over the box, Mind Mirror resoundingly flopped.

It was in the midst of much of this activity that Leary encountered William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the oft-cited link between Gibson’s vision of an ecstatic virtual reality called the Matrix and his earlier drug experiences, Leary became an instant cyberpunk convert, embracing the new sub-genre with all of his characteristic enthusiasm. Gibson, he said, had written “the New Testament of the 21st century.” Having evidently decided that the surest route to profundity lay in placing the prefix “cyber-” in front of every possible word, he went on to describe Neuromancer as “an encyclopedic epic for the cyber-screen culture of the immediate future, and an inspiring cyber-theology for the Information Age.” He reached out to the man he had anointed as the cyber-prophet behind this new cyber-theology, sparking up an acquaintance if never quite a real friendship. It was likely through Gibson — the chain of events isn’t entirely clear — that Leary became acquainted with the unlikely management of Cabana Boy Productions and their plans for a Neuromancer film. He promptly jumped in with them.

Through happenstance and sheer determination, the cabana boys now had a real corporation with at least a modicum of real funding, the rights to a real bestselling novel, and a real professional screenwriter — and the real Timothy Leary, for whatever that was worth. They were almost starting to look like a credible operation — until, that is, one of them actually started to talk. Therein lay the rub.

Around the middle of 1986, Cabana Boy made a sizzle reel featuring most of their principal personalities to shop around the Hollywood studios. Even William Gibson along with his agent  and his publicist with Berkley Books were convinced to show up and offer a few pleasantries. Almost everyone comes across as hopelessly vacuous in this, the only actual footage Cabana Boy would ever manage to produce. If these were the best bits that were hand-selected to put Cabana Boy’s best foot forward, one shudders to think about what must have been left on the cutting-room floor.

See https://www.youtube.com/embed/kye37wiui2A

The Cabana Boy’s attempts to sell their proposed $20 million film to Hollywood were, according to one journalist, “a comedy of errors and naivete — but what they lack in experience they are making up for in showmanship.” Although they were still not taken all that seriously by anyone, their back story and their personalities were enough to secure brief write-ups in People and Us, and David Letterman, always on the lookout for endearing eccentrics to interview and/or make fun of on his late-night talk show, seriously considered having them on. “My bet,” concluded the journalist, “is that they’ll make a movie about Cabana Boy before Neuromancer ever gets off the ground.”

Shortly after the sizzle reel was made, Earl Mac Rauch split when he was offered the chance to work on a biopic about comedian John Belushi. No problem, said Deborah Rosenberg and Ashley Tyler, we’ll just write the Neuromancer script ourselves — this despite neither of them having ever written anything before, much less the screenplay to a proverbial “major motion picture.” At about the same time, Jeffrey Kinart had a falling-out with his old poolside partner — his absence from the promo video may be a sign of the troubles to come — and left as well. Tyler himself split at the end of 1987, marking the exit of the last actual cabana boy from Cabana Boy, even as Deborah Rosenberg remained no closer to a production contract than she had been at the beginning of the endeavor. On the other hand, she had acquired two entertainment lawyers, a producer, a production designer, a bevy of “financial consultants,” offices in three cities for indeterminate purposes, and millions of dollars in debt. Still undaunted, on August 4, 1988, she registered her completed script, a document it would likely be fascinating but also kind of horrifying to read, with the United States Copyright Office.

While all this was going on, Timothy Leary had become obsessed with what may very well have been his real motivation for associating himself with Cabana Boy in the first place: turning Neuromancer into a computer game, or, as he preferred to call it, a “mind play” or “performance book.” Cabana Boy had, you’ll remember, picked up all electronic-media rights to the novel in addition to the film rights. Envisioning a Neuromancer game developed for the revolutionary new Commodore Amiga by his own company Futique, the fabulously well-connected Leary assembled a typically star-studded cast of characters to help him make it. It included Keith Haring, a trendy up-and-coming visual artist; Helmut Newton, a world-famous fashion photographer; Devo, the New Wave rock group; and none other than William Gibson’s personal literary hero William S. Burroughs to adapt his protege’s work to the computer.

This image created for Timothy Leary’s “mind play” of Neuromancer features the artist Keith Haring, who was to have played the role of Case. Haring died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of just 31, but nevertheless left behind him a surprisingly rich legacy.

Leary sub-contracted the rights for a Neuromancer game from Cabana Boy, and was able to secure a tentative deal with Electronic Arts. But that fell through when Mind Mirror hit the market and bombed. Another tentative agreement, this time with Jim Levy’s artistically ambitious Activision, fell through when the much more practical-minded Bruce Davis took over control of that publisher in January of 1987. Neuromancer was a property that should have had huge draw with the computer-game demographic, but everyone, it seemed, was more than a little leery of Leary and his avant-garde aspirations. For some time, the game project didn’t make much more headway than the movie.

Neuromancer the game was saved by a very unusual friendship. While Leary was still associated with Electronic Arts, an unnamed someone at the publisher had introduced him to the head of one of their best development studios, Brian Fargo of Interplay, saying that he thought the two of them “will get along well.” “Timothy and his wife Barbara came down to my office, and sure enough we all hit it off great,” remembers Fargo. “Tim was fascinated by technology; he thought about it and talked about it all the time. So I was his go-to guy for questions about it.”

Being friends with the erstwhile most dangerous man in America was quite an eye-opening experience for the clean-cut former track star. Leary relished his stardom, somewhat faded though its luster may have been by the 1980s, and gloried in the access it gave him to the trendy jet-setting elite. Fargo remembers that Leary “would take me to all the hottest clubs in L.A. I got to go to the Playboy Mansion when I was 24 years old; I met O.J. and Nicole Simpson at his house, and Devo, and David Byrne from Talking Heads. It was a good time.”

His deals with Electronic Arts and Activision having fallen through, it was only natural for Leary to turn at last to his friend Brian Fargo to get his Neuromancer game made. Accepting the project, hot property though Neuromancer was among science-fiction fans, wasn’t without risk for Fargo. Interplay was a commercially-focused developer whose reputation rested largely on their Bard’s Tale series of traditional dungeon-crawling CRPGs; “mind plays” hadn’t exactly been in their bailiwick. Nor did they have a great deal of financial breathing room for artistic experimentation. Interplay, despite the huge success of the first Bard’s Tale game in particular, remained a small, fragile company that could ill-afford an expensive flop. In fact, they were about to embark on a major transition that would only amplify these concerns. Fargo, convinced that the main reason his company wasn’t making more money from The Bard’s Tale and their other games was the lousy 15 percent royalty they were getting from Electronic Arts — a deal which the latter company flatly refused to renegotiate — was moving more and more toward severing those ties and trying to go it alone as a publisher as well as a developer. Doing so would among other things mean giving up the possibility of making more Bard’s Tale games; that trademark would remain with Electronic Arts. Without that crutch to lean on, an independent Interplay would need to make all-new hits right out of the gate. And, as shown by the example of Mind Mirror, a Timothy Leary mind play wasn’t all that likely to become one.

Fargo must therefore have breathed a sign of relief when Leary, perhaps growing tired of this project he’d been flogging for quite some time, perhaps made more willing to trust Fargo’s instincts by the fact that he considered him a friend, said he would be happy to step back into a mere “consulting” role. He did, however, arrange for William Gibson to join Fargo at his house one day to throw out ideas. Gibson was amiable enough, but ultimately just not all that interested, as he tacitly admitted: “I was offered a lot more opportunity for input than I felt capable of acting on. One thing that quickly became apparent to me was that I hadn’t the foggiest notion of the way an interactive computer game had to be constructed, the various levels of architecture involved. It was fascinating, but I felt I’d best keep my nose out of it and let talented professionals go about the actual business of making the game.” So, Fargo and his team, which would come to include programmer Troy A. Miles, artist Charles H.H. Weidman III, and writers and designers Bruce Balfour and Mike Stackpole, were largely left alone to make their game. While none of them was a William Gibson, much less a William S. Burroughs, they did have a much better idea of what made for a fun, commercially viable computer game than did anyone on the dream team Leary had assembled.

Three fifths of the team that wound up making Interplay’s Neuromancer: Troy Miles, Charles H.H. Weidman III, and Bruce Balfour.

And one member of Leary’s old team did agree to stay with the project. Brian Fargo:

My phone rang one night at close to one o’clock in the morning. It was Timothy, and he was all excited that he had gotten Devo to do the soundtrack. I said, “That’s great.” But however I said it, he didn’t think I sounded enthused enough, so he started yelling at me that he had worked so hard on this, and he should get more excitement out of me. Of course, I literally had just woken up.

So, next time I saw him, I said, “Tim, you can’t do that. It’s not fair. You can’t wake me up out of a dead sleep and tell me I’m not excited enough.” He said, “Brian, this is why we’re friends. I really appreciate the fact that you can tell me that. And you’re right.”

In the end, Devo didn’t quite provide a full soundtrack, but rather a chiptunes version of “Some Things Never Change,” a track taken from their latest album Total Devo which plays over Neuromancer‘s splash screen.

The opening of the game. Case, now recast as a hapless loser, not much better than a space janitor, wakes up face-down in a plate of “synth-spaghetti.”

As an adaptation of the novel, Neuromancer the game can only be considered a dismal failure. Like the novel, the game’s story begins in a sprawling Japanese metropolis of the future called Chiba City, stars a down-on-his-luck console cowboy named Case, and comes to revolve around a rogue artificial intelligence named Neuromancer. Otherwise, though, the plot of the game has very little resemblance to that of the novel. Considered in any other light than the commercial, the license is completely pointless; this could easily have been a generic cyberpunk adventure.

The game’s tone departs if anything even further from its source material than does its plot. Out of a sense of obligation, it occasionally manages to shoehorn in a few lines of Gibson’s prose, but rather than even trying to capture the noirish moodiness of the novel the game aims for considerably lower-hanging fruit. In what was almost becoming a default setting for adventure games by the late 1980s, Case is now a semi-incompetent loser whom the game can feel free to make fun of, inhabiting a science-fiction-comedy universe which has much more to do with Douglas Adams — or, to move the fruit just that much lower, Planetfall or Space Quest — than William Gibson. This approach tended to show up so much in adventure games for very practical reasons: it removed most of the burden from the designers of trying to craft really coherent, believable narratives out of the very limited suite of puzzle and game-play mechanics at their disposal. Being able to play everything for absurdist laughs just made design so much easier. Cop-out though it kind of was, it must be admitted that some of the most beloved classics of the adventure-game genre use exactly this approach. Still, it does have the effect of making Neuromancer the game read almost like a satire of Neuromancer the novel, which can hardly be ideal, at least from the standpoint of the licenser.

And yet, when divorced of its source material and considered strictly as a computer game Neuromancer succeeds rather brilliantly. It plays on three levels, only the first of which is open to you in the beginning. Those earliest stages confine you to “meat space,”  where you walk around, talk with other characters, and solve simple puzzles. Once you manage to get your console back from the man to whom you pawned it, you’ll be able to enter the second level. Essentially a simulation of the online bulletin-board scene of the game’s own time, it has you logging onto various “databases,” where you can download new programs to run on your console, piece together clues and passwords, read forums and email, and hack banks and other entities. Only around the mid-way point of the game will you manage to get onto the Matrix proper, a true virtual-reality environment. Here you’ll have to engage in graphical combat with ever more potent forms of ICE (“Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics”) to penetrate ever more important databases.

Particularly at this stage, the game manifests a strong CRPG component; not only do you need to earn money to buy ever better consoles, software, and “skill chips” that conveniently slot right into Case’s brain, but as Case fights ICE on the Matrix his skills also improve with experience. It’s a heady brew, and a wonderfully varied and entertaining one. Despite the limitations of the Commodore 64, the platform on which it made its debut, Neuromancer is one of the most content-rich games of its era, with none of the endless random combats and assorted busywork that stretches the other contemporaneous CRPGs of Interplay and others to such interminable lengths. Neuromancer ends just about when you feel it ought to end, having provided that addictive CRPG rush of building up a character from a weakling to a powerhouse without ever having bored you in the process.

Reading messages from the Scene… err, from Neuromancer‘s version of the hacker underground.

One of the more eyebrow-raising aspects of Neuromancer is the obvious influence that the real underground world of the Scene had on its own online milieu. The lingo, the attitudes… all of it is drawn from pirate BBS culture, circa 1988. Ironically, it actually evokes the spirit of the Scene far better than it does anything from Gibson’s novel, serving in this respect as quite a lovely historical time capsule. At least some people at Interplay, it seems, were far more familiar with that illegal world than any upstanding citizen ought to have been. Neuromancer is merely one more chapter in the long shared history of legitimate software developers and pirates, who were always much more interconnected and even mutually dependent than the strident rhetoric of the Software Publishers Association might lead one to suspect. Richard Garriott’s Akalabeth was first discovered by his eventual publisher California Pacific via a pirated version someone brought into the office; Sid Meier ran one of the most prolific piracy rings in Baltimore before he became one of the most famous game designers in history… the anecdotes are endless. Just to blur the lines that much more, soon after Neuromancer some cracking groups would begin to go legitimate, becoming game makers in their own rights.

Like other Interplay games from this period, Neuromancer is also notable for how far it’s willing to push the barriers of content in what was still the games industry’s equivalent of pre-Hayes Code Hollywood. There’s an online sex board you can visit, a happy-ending massage parlor, a whore wandering the streets. Still, while it’s not exactly a comedic revelation, I find the writing in Neuromancer makes it a more likable game than, say, Wasteland with its somewhat juvenile transgression for transgression’s sake. Neuromancer walks right up to that line on one or two occasions, but never quite crosses it in this critic’s opinion.

That said, it’s not of course a perfect game. The interface, especially in the meat-space portions, is a little clunky; it looks like a typical point-and-click adventure game, but its actual control scheme is far more baroque, which can lead to some cognitive dissonance when you first start to play. But that sorts itself out once you get into the swing of things. Neuromancer is by far my favorite Interplay game of the 1980s, boldly original but also thoroughly playable — and, it should be noted, rigorously fair. Take careful notes and do your due diligence, and you can feel confident of being able to solve this one.

About to do battle with an artificial intelligence, the most fearsome of the foes you’ll encounter in the Matrix.

Neuromancer was released on the Commodore 64 and the Apple II in late 1988 as one of Interplay’s first two self-published games. The other, fortunately for Interplay but perhaps unfortunately for Neuromancer‘s commercial prospects, was an Amiga game called Battle Chess. Far less conceptually ambitious than Neuromancer, Battle Chess was nothing more or less than a rather everyday chess program, the like of which dozens could be found in the public domain, onto which Interplay had grafted “4 MB of animation” and “400 K of digitized sound” (yes, those figures were considered very impressive at the time). Specifically, when you moved a piece on the board, you got to watch it walk over to its new position, possibly killing other pieces in the process. And that was it, the entire gimmick. But, in those days when games were so frequently purchased as showpieces for one’s graphics and sound hardware, it was more than enough. Battle Chess became just the major hit Interplay needed to establish themselves as a publisher, but one that in the process sucked all of Neuromancer‘s oxygen right out of the room. Despite the strength of the license, the latter game went comparatively neglected by Interplay, still a very small company with very limited resources, in the rush to capitalize on the Battle Chess sensation. Neuromancer was ported to MS-DOS and the Apple IIGS in 1989 and to the Amiga in 1990 — in my opinion this last is the definitive version — but was never a big promotional priority and never sold in more than middling numbers. Early talk of a sequel, to have been based on William Gibson’s second novel Count Zero, remained only that. Neuromancer is all but forgotten today, one of the lost gems of its era.

I always make it a special point to highlight games I consider to be genuine classics, the ones that still hold up very well today, and that goes double if they aren’t generally well-remembered. Neuromancer fits into both categories. So, please, feel free to download the Amiga version from right here, pick up an Amiga emulator if you don’t have one already, and have at it. This one really is worth it, folks.

I’ll of course have much more to say about the newly self-sufficient Interplay in future articles. But as for the other players in today’s little drama:

Timothy Leary remained committed to using computers to “express the panoramas of your own brain” right up until he died in 1996, although without ever managing to bring any of his various projects, which increasingly hewed to Matrix-like three-dimensional virtual realities drawn from William Gibson, into anything more than the most experimental of forms.

William Gibson himself… well, I covered him in my last article, didn’t I?

Deborah Rosenberg soldiered on for quite some time alone with the cabana-boy-less Cabana Boy; per contractual stipulation, the Neuromancer game box says it’s “soon to be a major motion picture from Cabana Boy Productions.” And, indeed, she at last managed to sign an actual contract with Tri-Star Pictures on June 2, 1989, to further develop her screenplay, at which point Tri-Star would, “at its discretion,” “produce the movie.” But apparently Tri-Star took discretion to be the better part of valor in the end; nothing else was ever heard of the deal. Cabana Boy was officially dissolved on March 24, 1993. There followed years of litigation between the Rosenbergs and the Internal Revenue Service; it seems the former had illegally deducted all of the money they’d poured into the venture, more than $2 million all told, from their tax returns. (It’s largely thanks to the paper trail left behind by the tax-court case, which wasn’t finally settled until 2000, that we know as much about the details of Cabana Boy as we do.) Deborah Rosenberg has presumably gone back to being simply the wife of a plastic surgeon to the stars, whatever that entails, her producing and screenwriting aspirations nipped in the bud and tucked back away wherever it was they came from.

Since Cabana Boy’s collapse, Neuromancer has continued to kick around Hollywood without ever managing to get made. As of this writing, it appears to still be at least ostensibly a living project. Whether it really matters at this point, when most of the novel’s once-revolutionary ideas have become conventional wisdom, is a question for those still bearing the torch to debate.

Earl Mac Rauch did write the screenplay for Wired, the John Belushi biopic, but it attracted jeers and walk-outs at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, and was a critical and financial disaster. Having collected three strikes in the form of New York, New York, Buckaroo Banzai, and now Wired, Rauch was out. He vanished into obscurity, although I understand he has resurfaced in recent years to write some Buckaroo Banzai graphic novels.

And as for our two cabana boys, Ashley Tyler and Jeffrey Kinart… who knows? Perhaps they’re patrolling some pool somewhere to this day, regaling the guests with glories that were or glories that may, with a minor financial contribution, yet be.

(Sources: Computer Gaming World of September 1988; The Games Machine of October 1988; Aboriginal Science Fiction of October 1986; AmigaWorld of May 1988; Compute! of October 1991; The One of February 1989; Starlog of July 1984; Spin of April 1987. Online sources include the sordid details of the Cabana Boy tax case, from the United States Tax Court archive and an Alison Rhonemus’s blog post on some of the contents of Timothy Leary’s papers, which are now held at the New York Public Library. I also made use of the Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Finally, my huge thanks to Brian Fargo for taking time from his busy schedule to discuss his memories of Interplay’s early days with me.)

Comments
21 Responses

- iPadCary

November 11, 2016 at 4:19 pm

I like how the song sample of DEVO’s “Some Things Never Change”
sounds so much better on the Commodore64 than the Amiga! lol

And with so many PC Golden Age classics in the App Store,
I couldn’t think of a better candidate to join them than “Neuromancer”.

- Andrew Schultz

November 11, 2016 at 6:35 pm

Wow! I remember really liking the non-grind aspect of Neuromancer as well as the BBS’s, which I never got to explore in real life.

I played it and solved it as a teen, then replayed it as an adult, then I was totally shocked and confused by the book being utterly different. It’s good to know the whys and hows.

- Marcus Johnson

November 11, 2016 at 6:52 pm

“…a little leery of Leary…”

Couldn’t resist that one, huh? :)

- Michael Russo

November 11, 2016 at 8:01 pm

Battle Chess was a lot of fun though! When you took another piece they’d have some pretty interesting ways of killing each other. We all loved the knight vs knight tribute to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

- Bernie

November 11, 2016 at 10:39 pm

Maybe the way to make a ‘Gibsonian’ work is not to care to much about his universes and plots and concentrate on the ‘feel’ of his stories. Kind of the opposite of what Interplay did with ‘Neuromancer’.

There are several examples of failed ‘Gibsonian’ works, mainly ones that tried too hard to make the connection to Gibson plainly evident : Johnny Mnemonic , the most direct adaptation so far and so far distanced from the original that Gibson is pretty unrecognizable as the original author if you haven’t read the story and already know the characters ; The Matrix , an original story set in a kind of far-future Neuromancer universe with very direct references to Gibson but filled with standard-issue hollywood heroes, villains and ethics. Hackers , an attempt to bring Neuromancer’s characters to a more immediate future which ended up with silly, childlike fascimiles (sorry Angelina and John-Lee, I know you did your best).

I’ve recently been watching the serial ‘Mr. Robot’ and have come to consider it very ‘Gibsonian’ and not precisely because it’s about hackers and corporate power. The plot and universe are only remotely related to Gibson’s work , but the pacing, atmosphere and the way the characters are presented are deeply ‘Gibsonian’. I don’t whether Gibson himself had anything to do with it or has been acknowledged in the credits, but he should be proud of ‘Mr. Robot’.

- Bernie

November 11, 2016 at 10:40 pm

Sorry , typo : “too much” instead of “to much”

- Martin

November 11, 2016 at 11:24 pm

I think after films like TRON and The Lawnmower Man films were made, there wasn’t a need to make Neuromancer. What I wanted to see in Neuromancer were all those sexy vector wire-frame graphics in the infinity of cyber-space and jacked-in dudes doing battle with ICE. Maybe that wasn’t how Gibson viewed what it looked like to be in cyberspace but that was what we were expecting. And simply other films got there first.

OK TRON was made before Neuromancer was written but that’s not the point. For that matter, had Gibson seen TRON before he wrote Neuromancer and his earlier stuff?

- Nate

November 12, 2016 at 2:03 am

I don’t believe TRON could have been an influence: the first two short stories in the Sprawl universe, according to Wikipedia, were Johnny Mnemonic (May 1981) and Burning Chrome (July 1982). Of the two, Burning Chrome is the one that introduced the Matrix. It dropped the same month TRON did but was presented at a SF convention in ‘Autumn 1981’. If Wikipedia is correct.

- Jimmy Maher

November 12, 2016 at 7:20 am

I’ve never heard Gibson mention TRON as an influence.

- Jonathan Blask

November 12, 2016 at 1:01 am

Thanks! This was a favorite of mine back in the day and I’ve always wondered about the story behind “Cabana Boys Productions” (as mentioned in the manual). I, for one, thought it was cute the way the game put excerpts from the book in some rather unexpected places (I’m especially thinking of one of Armitage’s monologues).

Supposedly, one thing did not affect the other, but the more recent game “Digital: A Love Story” is a nice and concise version of some of Neuromancer’s (the game) best elements.

Also, I still remember the time Brian Fargo personally answered my “Neuromancer” fan mail those many years ago. What a cool guy!

- Matthias Neeracher

November 12, 2016 at 1:35 am

While “New York, New York” wasn’t financially successful, it’s a fairly well regarded movie nowadays, and it has given the world a Sinatra hit.

- Jimmy Maher

November 12, 2016 at 7:24 am

As with Buckaroo Banzai, its reputation has improved over the decades, but in the 1980s it was still regarded as a notorious flop, full stop. I’d say that even today it’s regarded more as an interesting failure than a truly great film. Nor is it all that hugely uncommon for a flop film to yield a hit soundtrack. Think, for instance, of Xanadu from around the same period.

- Joey

November 12, 2016 at 3:56 pm

Great story! I remember playing Battle Chess way back. I can’t be the only person reading this who now wants to play Mind Mirror.

- AguyinaRPG

November 12, 2016 at 4:20 pm

“That said, it’s not of course a perfect game.”

Ahh Jimmy, you managed to sneak in my most least liked sentence in all of writing!

It was a fun story and I do have to commend Gibson a bit for being wise enough to step back from the process, even though it seemed to be more from bewilderment than otherwise. If only licensed games had such a long window to come out before the movie, then we would have a chance to actually explore the ideas of the fiction better, as in Neuromancer.

- Jimmy Maher

November 12, 2016 at 7:11 pm

My personal least-liked critical cliches are “more [or less] than the sum of its parts” and “reach exceeds its grasp.”

- Brian Bagnall

November 14, 2016 at 3:40 pm

Thanks for uncovering the story about the chip tune by Devo (Leary sounds insufferable). Of course prior to that wonderful chip tune, the C64 version plays a sampled version of Some Things Never Change. Having never heard a Devo song other than “Whip It” at the time, and no Internet, I had no idea what the lyrics were saying and it sounded like “Tall girls never change. I saw the moon today, oh boy. Rargh rargh rargh.” Perhaps you agree:
https://youtu.be/1aKzGxWPOHs?t=1m4s
As a kid I was trying to ponder the meaning of that and figured it must have been some really deep abstract symbolism. Apparently they were going for “Some things never change. I saw the news today, oh boy. Hang your head.”

I’ve had a personal love of the hacking genre starting with Hacker that has continued up to this day with Darknet for the Gear VR. I even wrote a review for the grand-daddy of hacking games called System 15000 on Lemon64.com and every time I read the first sentence I ask myself why Lemon doesn’t allow reviewers to edit their work.

Since last week and some mulling over about why the novel Neuromancer didn’t work for me, my conclusion is that the hacking that came before it seemed much more intriguing. Tron and Wargames tread on similar territory but convey the spirit so much better. Yes, Tron seems a little silly in retrospect that a computer would “digitize” someone in the manner portrayed, but it’s still very entertaining.

I’m not sure what your BBS experience was in the eighties (and I would love to hear your thoughts in an article) but it seemed damned exciting to be a teen living through Internet-lite. Suddenly as a kid your world was expanded beyond your home, school and street out into other places and you could interact with these mysterious, sometimes funny, sometimes frightening people out there.

In retrospect, from what you say about William Gibson getting his vision of hacking from watching people at arcades and not even using a computer himself, it seems clear why his descriptions lack substance. So when this guy came along with his cyberpunk novel, it seemed like he was really missing a lot of what made the BBS and hacking scene so intriguing.

- Matt Reichert

November 14, 2016 at 8:09 pm

Neuromancer was also ported to the Apple II and IIe. The Apple II version looks like a watered down C64 port (although it plays well enough) and the Apple IIgs version is virtually identical to the Amiga version with arguably better sound.

- Jimmy Maher

November 15, 2016 at 9:05 am

Thanks! Made a slight update to the article.

- Forrest L Norvell

November 17, 2016 at 10:50 am

After that first article about Gibson, and given your penchant for exploring the boundaries interactive fiction, I thought for sure you were headed for a retelling of the strange and interesting story of Agrippa. It’s not a game, and it’s not a hypertext, but it’s not not e ither of those things, either. Talking about that would give you an opportunity to talk about not just Gibson, but also Mondo 2000, Wired, and both Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna, who were all circling around the hypertextual realm in the days before “cyber” completely lost all currency.

This article was great. I knew that Neuromancer had been made into a game, as well as some vague details about the movie’s development hell, but I didn’t know it turned out to be a good game.

- Jimmy Maher

November 17, 2016 at 10:54 am

I’ll keep it in mind. I do have plans to delve into some literary hypertexts like Afternoon: A Story, and this would fit quite well with that a little later in the blog’s chronology.

- Mathieu

November 23, 2016 at 12:31 pm

Great article, as always.

Just two small things that popped up in my mind:

* “Cabana Boys” is a name Gibson might have come up with himself;
* Check out “Wild Palms” if you like 90s virtual reality cyber-distopian sci-fi.