Jimmy Maher (maher@filfre.net)

The Digital Antiquarian
Volume 14: 1992
Comments Edition

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Contents

1. The Dynamic Interactive Narratives of Dynamix

1. Comments

2. The Incredible Machine

1. Comments

3. Another World

1. Comments

4. Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents

1. Comments

5. Doing Windows, Part 2: From Interface Manager to Windows

1. Comments

6. Doing Windows, Part 3: A Pair of Strike-Outs

1. Comments

7. Doing Windows, Part 4: The Rapprochement

1. Comments

8. Doing Windows, Part 5: A Second Try

1. Comments

9. Doing Windows, Part 6: Look and Feel

1. Comments

10. Doing Windows, Part 7: Third Time’s the Charm

1. Comments

11. Doing Windows, Part 8: The Outsiders

1. Comments

12. Doing Windows, Part 9: Windows Comes Home

1. Comments

13. The Games of Windows

1. Comments

14. Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)

1. Comments

15. Shades of Gray

1. Comments

16. The Gateway Games of Legend (Preceded by the Legend of Gateway)

1. Comments

17. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (or, Of Movies and Games and Whether the Twain Shall Meet)

1. Comments

18. Whither the Software Artist? (or, How Trip Hawkins Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Consoles)

1. Comments

19. The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes

1. Comments

20. The Sierra Discovery Adventures

1. Comments

21. Quest for Glory III and IV

1. Comments

22. Ten Great Adventure-Game Puzzles

1. Comments

23. The Designer’s Designer

1. Comments

24. Controlling the Spice, Part 1: Dune on Page and Screen

1. Comments

25. Controlling the Spice, Part 2: Cryo’s Dune

1. Comments

26. Controlling the Spice, Part 3: Westwood’s Dune

1. Comments

27. Star Control II

1. Comments

28. Life on the Grid

1. Comments

29. Life Off the Grid, Part 1: Making Ultima Underworld

1. Comments

30. Life Off the Grid, Part 2: Playing Ultima Underworld

1. Comments

31. Ultima VII

1. Comments

32. Scientology and the Fellowship

1. Comments

33. Darklands

1. Comments

34. Interplay Takes on Trek

1. Comments

The Dynamic Interactive Narratives of Dynamix
May 25, 2018

By 1990, the world of adventure games was coming to orient itself after the twin poles of Sierra Online and LucasFilm Games. The former made a lot of games, on diverse subjects and of diverse quality, emphasizing always whatever new audiovisual flash was made possible by the very latest computing technology. The latter, on the other hand, made far fewer and far less diverse but more careful games, fostering a true designer’s culture that emphasized polish over flash. In their attitudes toward player-character death and dead ends, toward puzzle design, toward graphics style, each company had a distinct personality, and adventure-game fans lined up, as they continue to do even today, as partisans of one or the other.

Yet in the vast territory between these two poles were many other developers experimenting with the potential of adventure games, and in many cases exploring approaches quite different from either of the two starring players. One of the more interesting of these supporting players was the Oregon-based Dynamix, who made five adventure or vaguely adventure-like games between 1988 and 1991 — as many adventure-like games, in fact, as LucasFilm Games themselves managed to publish during the same period. Despite this relative prolificacy, Dynamix was never widely recognized as an important purveyor of adventures; they enjoyed their greatest fame in the very different realm of 3D vehicular simulations. There are, as we’ll see, some pretty good reasons for that to be the case; for all their surprisingly earnest engagement with interactive narrative, none of the five games in question managed to rise to the level of a classic. Still, they all are, to a one, interesting at the very least, which is a track record few other dabblers in the field of adventure games can lay claim to.

Arcticfox, Dynamix’s breakout hit, arrived when Electronic Arts was still nursing the remnants of Trip Hawkins’s original dream of game developers as rock stars, leading to lots of strange photos like this one. This early incarnation of Dynamix consisted of (from left to right) Kevin Ryan, Jeff Tunnell, Damon Slye, and Richard Hicks.

Like a number of other early software developers, Dynamix was born on the floor of a computer shop. The shop in question was The Computer Tutor of Eugene, Oregon, owned and operated in the early 1980s by a young computer fanatic named Jeff Tunnell (the last name is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable, like “Raquel” — not like “tunnel”). He longed to get in on the creative end of software, but had never had the patience to progress much beyond BASIC as a programmer in his own right. Then came the day when one of his regular customers, a University of Oregon undergraduate named Damon Slye, showed him a really hot Apple II action game he was working on. Tunnell knew opportunity when he saw it.

Thus was born a potent partnership, one not at all removed from the similar partnership that had led to MicroProse Software on the other coast. Jeff Tunnell was the Wild Bill Stealey of this pairing: ambitious, outgoing, ready and willing to tackle the business side of software development. Damon Slye was the Sid Meier: quiet, a little shy, but one hell of a game programmer.

Tunnell and Slye established their company in 1983, at the tail end of the Ziploc-bag era of software publishing, under the dismayingly generic name of The Software Entertainment Company. They started selling the game that had sparked the company, which Slye had now named Stellar 7, through mail order. The first-person shoot-em-up put the player in charge of a tank lumbering across the wire-frame surface of an enemy-infested planet. It wasn’t the most original creation in the world, owing a lot to the popular Atari quarter-muncher Battlezone, but 3D games of this sort were unusual on the Apple II, and this one was executed with considerable aplomb. A few favorable press notices led to it being picked up by Penguin Software in 1984, which in turn led to Tunnell selling The Computer Tutor in order to concentrate on his new venture. (Unbeknownst to Tunnell and Slye at the time, Stellar 7 was purchased and adored by Tom Clancy, author of one of the most talked-about books of the year. “It is so unforgiving,” he would later say. “It is just like life. It’s just perfect to play when I’m exercising. I get on my exercycle, start pedaling, pick up the joystick, and I’m off…”)

But the life of a small software developer just as the American home-computer industry was entering its first slump wasn’t an easy one. Tunnell signed contracts wherever he could find them to keep his head above water: releasing Sword of Kadash, an adventure/CRPG/platformer hybrid masterminded by another kid from The Computer Tutor named Chris Cole; writing a children’s doodler called The Electronic Playground himself with a little help from Damon Slye; even working on a simple word processor for home users.

In fact, it was this last which led to the company’s big break. They had chosen to write that program in C, a language which wasn’t all that common on the first generation of 8-bit microcomputers but which was officially blessed as the best way to program a new 16-bit audiovisual powerhouse called the Commodore Amiga. Their familiarity with C gave Tunnell’s company, by now blessedly renamed Dynamix, an in with Electronic Arts, the Amiga’s foremost patron in the software world, who were looking for developers to create products for the machine while it was still in the prototype phase. Damon Slye thus got started programming Arcticfox on an Amiga that didn’t even have a functioning operating system, writing and compiling his code on an IBM PC and sending it over to the Amiga via cable for execution.

Conceptually, Arcticfox was another refinement on the Battlezone/Stellar 7 template, another tooling-around-and-shooting-things-in-a-tank game. As a demonstration of the Amiga’s capabilities, however, it was impressive, replacing its predecessors’ monochrome wire-frame graphics with full-color solids. Reaching store shelves in early 1986 as part of the first wave of Amiga games, Arcticfox was widely ported and went on to sell over 100,000 copies in all, establishing Dynamix’s identity as a purveyor of cutting-edge 3D graphics. In that spirit, the next few years would bring many more 3D blast-em games, with names like Skyfox II, F-14 Tomcat, Abrams Battle Tank, MechWarrior, Deathtrack, and A-10 Tank Killer.

Yet even in the midst of all these adrenaline-gushers, Jeff Tunnell was nursing a quiet interest in the intersection of narrative with interactivity, even as he knew that he didn’t want to make a traditional adventure game of either the text or the graphical stripe. Like many in his industry by the second half of the 1980s, he believed the parser was hopeless as a long-term sell to the mass market, while the brittle box of puzzles that was the typical graphic adventure did nothing for him either. He nursed a dream of placing the player in a real unfolding story, partially driving events but partially being driven by them, like in a movie. Of course, he was hardly alone at the time in talking about “interactive movies”; the term was already becoming all the rage. But Dynamix’s first effort in that direction certainly stood out from the pack — or would have, if fate had been kinder to it.

Jeff Tunnell still calls Project Firestart the most painful single development project he’s ever worked on over the course of more than three decades making games. Begun before Arcticfox was published, it wound up absorbing almost three years at a time when the average game was completed in not much more than three months. By any sane standard, it was just way too much game for the Commodore 64, the platform for which it was made. It casts the player as a “special agent” of the future named Jon Hawking, sent to investigate a spaceship called the Prometheus that had been doing controversial research into human genetic manipulation but has suddenly stopped communicating. You can probably guess where this going; I trust I won’t be spoiling too much to reveal that zombie-like mutants now roam the ship after having killed most of the crew. The influences behind the story Tunnell devised aren’t hard to spot — the original Alien movie being perhaps foremost among them — but it works well enough on its own terms.

In keeping with Tunnel’s commitment to doing something different with interactive narrative, Project Firestart doesn’t present itself in the guise of a traditional adventure game. Instead it’s an action-adventure, an approach that was generally more prevalent among British than American developers. You explore the ship’s rooms and corridors in real time, using a joystick to shoot or avoid the monsters who seem to be the only life remaining aboard the Prometheus. What makes it stand out, however, is the lengths Dynamix went to to make it into a real unfolding story with real stakes. As you explore, you come across computer terminals holding bits and pieces of what has happened here, and of what you need to do to stop the contagion aboard from spreading further. You have just two hours, calculated in real playing time, to gather up all of the logs you can for the benefit of future researchers, make contact with any survivors from the crew who might have managed to hole up somewhere, set the ship’s self-destruct mechanism, and escape. You’re personally expendable; if you exceed the time limit, warships that are standing by will destroy the Prometheus with you aboard.

Throughout the game, cinematic touches are used to build tension and drama. For example, when you step out of an elevator to the sight of your first dead body, a stab of music gushes forth and the “camera” cuts to a close-up of the grisly scene. Considering what a blunt instrument Commodore 64 graphics and sound are, the game does a rather masterful job of ratcheting up the dread, whilst managing to sneak in a plot twist or two that even people who have seen Alien won’t be able to anticipate. Ammunition is a scarce commodity, leaving you feeling increasingly hunted and desperate as the ship’s systems begin to fail and the mutants relentlessly hunt you down through the claustrophobic maze of corridors. And yet, tellingly, Project Firestart diverges from the British action-adventure tradition in not being all that hard of a game in the final reckoning. You can reasonably expect to win within your first handful of tries, if perhaps not with the most optimal ending. It’s clearly more interested in giving you a cinematic experience than it is in challenging you in purely ludic terms.

Project Firestart was finally released in 1988, fairly late in the day for the Commodore 64 in North America and just as Tunnell was terminating his publishing contract with Electronic Arts under less-than-entirely-amicable terms and signing a new deal with Mediagenic. It thus shipped as one of Dynamix’s last games for Electronic Arts, received virtually no promotion, and largely vanished without a trace; what attention it did get came mostly from Europe, where this style of game was more popular in general and where the Commodore 64 was still a strong seller. But in recent years it’s enjoyed a reevaluation in the gaming press as, as the AV Club puts it, “a forgotten ’80s gem” that “created the formula for video game horror.” It’s become fashionable to herald it as the great lost forefather of the survival-horror genre that’s more typically taken to have been spawned by the 1992 Infogrames classic Alone in the Dark.

Such articles doubtless have their hearts in the right place, but in truth they rather overstate Project Firestart’s claim to such a status at the same time that they rather understate its weaknesses. While the mood of dread the game manages to evoke with such primitive graphics and sound is indeed remarkable, it lacks any implementation of line of sight, and thus allows for no real stealth or hiding; the only thing to do if you meet some baddies you don’t want to fight is to run into the next room. If it must be said to foreshadow any future classic, my vote would go to Looking Glass Studio’s 1994 System Shock rather than Alone in the Dark; System Shock too sees you gasping with dread as you piece together bits of a sinister story from computer terminals, even as the monsters of said story hunt you down. But even on the basis of that comparison Project Firestart remains more of a formative work than a classic in its own right. Its controls are awkward; you can’t even move and shoot at the same time. And, rather than consisting of a contiguous free-scrolling world, its geography is, due to technical limitations, segmented into rooms which give the whole a choppy, disconnected feel, especially given that they must each be loaded in from the Commodore 64’s achingly slow disk drive.

Accessing a shipboard computer in Project Firestart.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given Project Firestart’s protracted and painful gestation followed by its underwhelming commercial performance, Dynamix themselves never returned to this style of game. Yet it provided the first concrete manifestation of Jeff Tunnell’s conception of game narrative as — appropriately enough given the name of his company — a dynamic thing which provokes the player as much as it is provoked by her. Future efforts would gradually hew closer, on a superficial level at least, to the form of more traditional adventure games without abandoning this central conceit.

That said, the next narrative-oriented Dynamix game would still be an oddball hybrid by anyone’s standard. By 1989, Dynamix, like an increasing number of American computer-game developers, had hitched their wagon firmly to MS-DOS, and thus David Wolf: Secret Agent appeared only on that platform. It was intended to be an interactive James Bond movie.

But intention is not always result. To accept Dynamix’s own description of David Wolf as an interactive movie is to be quite generous indeed. It’s actually a non-interactive story, presented as a series of still images with dialog overlaid, interspersed with a handful of vehicular action games that feel like fragments Dynamix just happened to have lying around the office: a hang-glider sequence, a jet-fighter sequence, a car chase, the old jumping-out-of-an-airplane-without-a-parachute-just-behind-a-villain-who-does-have-one gambit. If you succeed at these, you get to watch more static story; if you fail, that’s that. Or maybe not: in a telling statement as to what was really important in the game, Dynamix made it possible to bypass any minigame at which you failed with the click of a button and keep right on trucking with the story. In a perceptive review for Computer Gaming World magazine, Charles Ardai compared David Wolf to, of all things, the old arcade game Ms. Pac-Man. The latter featured animated “interludes” every few levels showing the evolving relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Pac-Man. These served, Ardai noted, as the icing on the cake, a little bonus to reward the player’s progress. But David Wolf inverted that equation: the static story scenes were now the cake. The game existed “just for the sheer joy of seeing digitized images on your PC.”

Our hero David Wolf starts salivating over the game’s lone female as soon as he sees her picture during his mission briefing, and he and the villains spend most of the game passing her back and forth like a choice piece of meat.

These days, of course, seeing pixelated 16-color digitizations on the screen prompts considerably less joy, and the rest of what’s here is so slight that one can only marvel at Dynamix’s verve in daring to slap a $50 suggested list price on the thing. The whole game is over within an hour or so, and a cheesy hour it is at that; it winds up being more Get Smart than James Bond, with dialog that even Ian Fleming would have thought twice about before committing to the page. (A sample: “Garth, I see your temper is still intact. Too bad I can’t say the same for your sense of loyalty.”) It’s difficult to tell to what extent the campiness is accidental and to what extent it’s intentional. Charles Ardai:

The viewer isn’t certain how to take the material. Is it a parody of James Bond (which is, by now, self-parodic), a straight comic adventure (imitation Bond as opposed to parody), or a serious thriller? It is hard to take the strictly formula plot seriously, but several of the scenes suggest that one is supposed to. I suspect that the screenwriters never quite decided which direction to take, and hoped to be able to do with a little of each. This can’t possibly work. You can’t both parody a genre and, at the same time, place yourself firmly within that genre because the resulting self-parody looks embarrassingly unwitting. Certainly you can’t do this and expect to be taken seriously. Airplane! couldn’t ask us to take seriously its disaster plot and Young Frankenstein didn’t try to make viewers cry over the monster’s plight, but this is what the designers of David Wolf seem to be doing.

Such wild vacillations in tone are typical of amateur writers who haven’t yet learned to control their wayward pens. They’re thus all too typical as well of the “programmer-written” era of games, before hiring real writers became standard industry practice. David Wolf wouldn’t be the last Dynamix game to suffer from the syndrome.

The cast of David Wolf manages the neat trick of coming off as terrible actors despite having only still images to work with. Here they’re trying to look shocked upon being surprised by villains pointing guns at them.

But for all its patent shallowness, David Wolf is an interesting piece of gaming history for at least a couple of reasons. Its use of digitized actors, albeit only in still images, presaged the dubious craze for so-called “full-motion-video” games that would dominate much of the industry for several years in the 1990s. (Tellingly, during its opening credits David Wolf elects to list its actors, drawn along with many of the props they used from the University of Oregon’s theatrical department, in lieu of the designers, programmers, and artists who actually built the game; they have to wait until the end scroll for recognition.) And, more specifically to the context of this article, David Wolf provides a further illustration of Jeff Tunnell’s vision of computer-game narratives that weren’t just boxes of puzzles.

Much of the reason David Wolf wound up being such a constrained experience was down to Dynamix being such a small developer with fairly scant resources. Tunnell was therefore thrilled when an arrangement with the potential to change that emerged.

At some point in late 1989, Ken Williams of Sierra paid Dynamix a visit. Flight simulations and war games of the sort in which Dynamix excelled were an exploding market (no pun intended!) at the time, one which would grow to account for 35.6 percent of computer-game sales by the second half of 1990, dwarfing the 26.2 percent that belonged to Sierra’s specialty of adventure games. Williams wanted a piece of that exploding market. He was initially interested only in licensing some of Dynamix’s technology as a leg-up. But he was impressed enough by what he saw there — especially by a World War I dog-fighting game that the indefatigable Damon Slye had in the works — that the discussion of technology licensing turned into a full-on acquisition pitch. For his part, Jeff Tunnell, recognizing that the games industry was becoming an ever more dangerous place for a small company trying to go it alone, listened with interest. On March 27, 1990, Sierra acquired Dynamix for $1.5 million.

In contrast to all too many such acquisitions, neither party would come to regret the deal. Even in the midst of a sudden, unexpected glut in World War I flight simulators, Damon Slye’s Red Baron stood out from the pack with a flight model that struck the perfect balance between realism and fun. (MicroProse had planned to use the same name for their own simulator, but were forced to go with the less felicitious Knights of the Sky when Dynamix beat them to the trademark office by two weeks.) Over the Christmas 1990 buying season, Red Baron became the biggest hit Dynamix had yet spawned, proving to Ken Williams right away that he had made the right choice in acquiring them.

Williams and Tunnell maintained a relationship of real cordiality and trust, and Dynamix was given a surprising amount of leeway to set their own agenda from offices that remained in Eugene, Oregon. Tunnell was even allowed to continue his experiments with narrative games, despite the fact that Sierra, who were churning out a new adventure game of their own every couple of months by this point, had hardly acquired Dynamix with an eye to publishing still more of them.

And so Dynamix’s first full-fledged adventure game, with real interactive environments, puzzles, and dialog menus, hit the market not long after the acquisition was finalized. Rise of the Dragon had actually been conceived by Jeff Tunnell before David Wolf was made, only to be shelved as too ambitious for the Dynamix of 1988. But the following year, with much of the technical foundation for a real adventure game already laid down by David Wolf, they had felt ready to give it a go.

Rise of the Dragon found Dynamix once again on well-trodden fictional territory, this time going for a Bladerunner/Neuromancer cyberpunk vibe; the game’s setting is the neon-lit Los Angeles of a dystopic future of perpetual night and luscious sleaze. You play a fellow stamped with the indelible name of Blade Hunter, a former cop who got himself kicked off the force by playing fast and loose with the rules. Now, he works as a private detective for whoever can pay him. When the game begins, he’s just been hired by the mayor to locate his drug-addicted daughter, who has been swallowed up by the city’s underworld. As a plot like that would indicate, this is a game that very much wants to be edgy. King’s Quest it isn’t.

There are a lot of ideas in Rise of the Dragon, some of which work better than others, but all of which reflect a real, earnest commitment to a more propulsive form of interactive narrative than was typical of the new parent company Sierra’s games. Jeff Tunnell:

Dynamix adventures have an ongoing story that will unfold even if the player does nothing. The player needs to interact with the game world to change the outcome of that story. For example, if the player does nothing but sit in the first room of Dragon, he will observe cinematic “meanwhile cutaways” depicting the story of drug lord Deng Hwang terrorizing the futuristic city of Los Angeles with tainted drug patches that cause violent mutations. So the player’s job is to interact with the world and change the outcome of the story to one that is more pleasing and heroic.

The entire game runs in real time, with characters coming and going around the city on realistic schedules. Dialog is at least as important as object-based puzzle-solving, and characters remember how you treat them to an impressive degree. This evolving web of relationships, combined with a non-linear structure and multiple solutions to most dilemmas, creates a possibility space far greater than the typical adventure game, all set inside a virtual world which feels far more alive.

The interface as well goes its own way. The game uses a first-person rather than third-person perspective, a rarity in graphic adventures of this period. And, at a time when both Sierra and Lucasfilm Games were still presenting players with menus of verbs to click on, Rise of the Dragon debuted a cleaner single-click system: right-clicking on an object will examine it, left-clicking will take whatever action is appropriate to that object. Among its other virtues, the interface frees up screen real estate to present the striking graphics to maximum effect. Instead of continuing to rely on live actors, Dynamix hired veteran comic-book illustrator Robert Caracol to draw most of the scenery with pen and ink for digitization. Combined with the jump from 16-color EGA to 256-color VGA graphics, the new approach results in art worthy of a glossy, stylized graphic novel. Computer Gaming World gave the game a well-deserved “Special Award for Artistic Achievement” in their “Games of the Year” awards for 1990.

Just to remind us of who made the game, a couple of action sequences do pop up, neither of them all that notably good or bad. But, once again, failing at one of them brings an option to skip it and continue with the story as if you’d succeeded. Indeed, the game as a whole evinces a forgiving nature that’s markedly at odds both with its hard-bitten setting and with those other adventure games being made by Dynamix’s parent company. It may be possible to lock yourself out of victory or run out of time to solve the mystery, but you’d almost have to be willfully trying to screw up in order to do so. That Dynamix was able to combine this level of forgivingness with so much flexibility in the narrative is remarkable.

If you really screw up, Rise of the Dragon is usually kind enough to tell you so.

But there are flies in the ointment that hold the game back from achieving classic status. Perhaps inevitably given the broad possibility space, it’s quite a short game on any given playthrough, and once the story is known the potential interest of subsequent playthroughs is, to say the least, limited. Of course, this isn’t so much of a problem today as it was back when the game was selling for $40 or more. Other drawbacks, however, remain as problematic as ever. The interface, while effortless to use in many situations, is weirdly obtuse in others. The inventory system in particular, featuring a paper-doll view of Blade Hunter and employing two separate windows in the form of a “main” and a “quick” inventory, is far too clever for its own good. I also find it really hard to understand where room exits are and how the environment fits together. And the writing is once again on the dodgy side; it’s never entirely clear whether Blade Hunter is supposed to be a real cool cat (like the protagonist of Neuromancer the novel) or a lovable (?) loser (like the protagonist of Neuromancer the game). Add to these issues an impossible-to-take-seriously plot that winds up revolving around an Oriental death cult, plus some portrayals of black and Chinese people that border on the outright offensive, and we’re a long way from even competent comic-book fiction.

Still, Rise of the Dragon in my opinion represents the best of Jeff Tunnell’s experiments with narrative games. If you’re interested in exploring this odd little cul-de-sac in adventure-gaming history, I recommend it as the place to start, as it offers by far the best mix of innovation and playability, becoming in the process the best all-around expression of just where Tunnell was trying to go with interactive narrative.

Heart of China, the early 1991 follow-up to Rise of the Dragon, superficially appears to be more of the same in a different setting. The same engine and interface are used, including a couple more action-based mini-games to play or skip, with the genre dance taking us this time to a 1930s pulp-adventure story in the spirit of Indiana Jones. The most initially obvious change is the return to a heavy reliance on digitized “actors.” Dynamix wound up employing some 85 separate people on the business end of their cameras in a production which overlapped with that of Rise of the Dragon, with its beginning phases stretching all the way back into 1989. Thankfully, the integration of real people with computer graphics comes off much better than it does in David Wolf, evincing much more care on the part of the team responsible. Heart of China thus manages to become one of the less embarrassing examples of a style of graphics that was all but predestined to look hopelessly cheesy about five minutes after hitting store shelves.

I’m not sure if this is Really Bad Writing that expects to be taken seriously or Really Bad Writing that’s trying (and failing) to be funny. I’m quite sure, however, that it’s Really Bad Writing of some sort.

When you look more closely at the game’s design, however, you see a far more constrained approach to interactive storytelling than that of its predecessor. You play a down on-his-luck ex-World War I flying ace named “Lucky” Jake Masters. (If there was one thing Dynamix knew how to do, it was to create stereotypically macho names.) He’s running a shady air-courier cum smuggling business out of Hong Kong when he’s enlisted by a wealthy “international business tycoon and profiteer” to rescue his daughter, who’s been kidnapped by a warlord deep inside the Chinese mainland. (If there was one thing Dynamix didn’t know how to do, it was to create plots that didn’t involve rescuing the daughters of powerful white men from evil Chinese people.) The story plays out in a manner much more typical of a plot-heavy adventure game — i.e., as a linear series of acts to be completed one by one — than does that of its predecessor. Jeff Tunnell’s commitment to his original vision for interactive narrative was obviously slipping in the face of resource constraints and a frustration, shared by some of his contemporaries who were also interested in more dynamic interactive storytelling, that gamers didn’t really appreciate the extra effort anyway. His changing point of view surfaces in a 1991 interview:

From a conceptual standpoint, multiple plot points are exciting. But when you get down to the implementation, they can make game development an absolute nightmare. Then, after all of the work to implement these multiple paths and endings, we’ve found that most gamers never even discover them.

When the design of Heart of China does allow for some modest branching, Dynamix handles it in rather hilariously passive-aggressive fashion: big red letters reading “plot branch” appear on the screen. Take that, lazy gamers!

That Lucky’s a real charmer, alright.

Heart of China bears all the signs of a project that was scaled back dramatically in the making, a game which wound up being far more constrained and linear than had been the original plan. Yet it’s not for this reason that I find it to be one of the more unlikable adventure games I’ve ever played. The writing is so ludicrously terrible that one wants to take the whole thing as a conscious B-movie homage of the sort Cinemaware loved to make. But darned if Dynamix didn’t appear to expect us to take it seriously. “It has more depth and sensibility than I’ve ever seen in a computer storytelling game,” said Tunnell. It’s as if he thought he had made Heart of Darkness when he’d really made Tarzan the Ape-Man. The ethnic stereotyping manages to make Rise of the Dragon look culturally sensitive, with every Chinese character communicating in the same singsong broken English. And as for Lucky Jake… well, he’s evidently supposed to be a charming rogue just waiting for Harrison Ford to step into the role, but hitting those notes requires far, far more writerly deftness than anyone at Dynamix could muster. Instead he just comes off as a raging asshole — the sort of guy who creeps out every woman he meets with his inappropriate comments; the sort of guy who warns his friend-with-benefits that she’s gained a pound or two and thus may soon no longer be worthy of his Terrible Swift Sword. For all these reasons and more, I can recommend Heart of China only to the truly dedicated student of adventure-game history.

The third and final point-and-click adventure game created by Jeff Tunnell and Dynamix is in some ways the most impressive of them all and in others the most disappointing, given that it turns into such a waste of potential. Tunnell took a new tack with The Adventures of Willy Beamish, deciding to create a light-hearted comedic adventure that would play like a Saturday-morning cartoon. Taking advantage of a lull in Hollywood’s cartoon-production factories, he hired a team of professional animators of the old-school cell-based stripe, veterans of such high-profile productions as The Little Mermaid, Jonny Quest, and The Simpsons, along with a husband-and-wife team of real, honest-to-God professional television writers to create a script. Dynamix’s offices came to look, as a Computer Gaming World preview put it, like a “studio in the golden age of animation,” with animators “etching frantically atop the light tables” while “pen-and-pencil images of character studies, backgrounds, and storyboard tests surround them on the office walls.” The team swelled to some fifty people before all was said and done, making Willy Beamish by far the most ambitious and expensive project Dynamix had ever tackled.

Willy Beamish looked amazing in its time, and still looks just fine today, especially given that its style of hand-drawn cell-based animation is so seldom seen in the post-Pixar era. Look at the amount of detail in this scene!

What Tunnell got for his money was, as noted, darned impressive at first glance. Many companies — not least Sierra with their latest King’s Quest — were making noises about bringing “interactive cartoons” to computer monitors, but Dynamix was arguably the first to really pull it off. Switching to a third-person perspective in keeping with the cartoon theme, every frame was fussed-over to a degree that actually exceeded the likes of The Simpsons, much less the typical Saturday-morning rush job. Tunnel would later express some frustration that the end result may have been too good; he suspected that many people were mentally switching gears and subconsciously seeing it the way they might a cartoon on their television screen, not fully registering that everything they were seeing was playing on their computer. Today, all of this is given a further layer of irony by the way that 3D-rendered computer animation has all but made the traditional cell-based approach to cartoon animation used by Willy Beamish into a dead art. How odd to think that a small army of pencil-wielding illustrators was once considered a sign of progress in computer animation!

The game’s story is a deliberately modest, personal one — which in an industry obsessed with world-shaking epics was a good thing. The young Willy Beamish, a sort of prepubescent version of Ferris Bueller, wants to compete for the Nintari Championship of videogaming, but he and his dubiously named pet frog Horny are at risk of being grounded thanks to a bad mark in his music-appreciation class. From this simple dilemma stems several days of comedic chaos, including a variety of other story beats that involve his whole family. The tapestry was woven together with considerable deftness by the writers, whose experience with prime-time sitcoms served them well. It’s always a fine line between a precocious, smart-Alecky little boy and a grating, bratty one, but The Adventures of Willy Beamish mostly stays on the right side of it. For once, in other words, a Dynamix game has writing to match its ambition.

Horny the Frog springs into action.

Unfortunately, the game finds a new way to go off the rails. Rise of the Dragon and Heart of China had combined smart design sensibilities with dodgy writing; Willy Beamish does just the opposite. Like Rise of the Dragon, it runs in real time; unlike Rise of the Dragon, you are given brutally little time to accomplish what you need to in each scene. The game winds up playing almost like a platformer; you have to repeat each scene again and again to learn what to do, then execute perfectly in order to progress. Worse, it’s possible to progress without doing everything correctly, only to be stranded somewhere down the line. The experience of playing Willy Beamish is simply infuriating, a catalog of all the design sins Dynamix adventure games had heretofore been notable for avoiding. I have to presume that all those animators and writers caused Dynamix to forget that they were making an interactive work. As was being proved all over the games industry at the time, that was all too easy to do amidst all the talk about a grand union of Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Sierra had been a little lukewarm on Dynamix’s previous adventure games, but they gave Willy Beamish a big promotional push for the Christmas 1991 buying season, even grabbing for it the Holy Grail of game promotion: a feature cover of Computer Gaming World. While I’m tempted to make a rude comment here about Dynamix finally making a game that embraced Sierra’s own design standards and them getting excited about that, the reality is of course that the game just looked too spectacular to do anything else. Sierra and Dynamix were rewarded with a solid hit that racked up numbers in the ballpark of one of the former’s more popular numbered adventure series. In 1993, Willy Beamish would even get a re-release as a full-fledged CD-ROM talkie, albeit with some of most annoying children’s voices ever recorded.

Willy Beamish has a “trouble meter” that hearkens back to Bureaucracy’s blood-pressure monitor, except this time it’s presumably measuring the blood pressure of the adults around you. If you let it get too high, you get shipped off to boarding school.

But it had been a hugely expensive product to create, and it’s questionable whether its sales, strong though they were, were actually strong enough to earn much real profit. At any rate, Jeff Tunnell, the primary driver behind Dynamix’s sideline in adventure games, suddenly decided he’d had enough shortly after Willy Beamish was finished. It seems that the experience of working with such a huge team had rubbed him the wrong way. He therefore resigned the presidency of Dynamix to set up a smaller company, Jeff Tunnell Productions, “to return to more hands-on work with individual products and to experiment in product genres that do not require the large design teams necessitated by [his] last three designs.” It was all done thoroughly amicably, and was really more of a role change than a resignation; Jeff Tunnell Productions would release their games through Dynamix (and, by extension, Sierra). But Tunnell would never make another adventure game. “After doing story-based games for a while,” he says today, “I realized it wasn’t something I wanted to continue to do. I think there is a place for story in games, but it’s…. hard.” Dynamix’s various experiments with interactive narrative, none of them entirely satisfying, apparently served to convince him that his talents were better utilized elsewhere. Ironically, he made that decision just as CD-ROM, a technology which would have gone a long way toward making his “interactive movies” more than just an aspiration, was about to break through into the mainstream at last.

Still, and for all that it would have been nice to see everything come together at least once for him, I don’t want to exaggerate the tragedy, especially given that the new Jeff Tunnell Productions would immediately turn out a bestseller and instant classic of a completely different type. (More on that in my next article!) If the legacy of Dynamix story games is a bit of a frustrating one, Tunnell’s vision of interactive narratives that are more than boxes of puzzles would eventually prove its worth across a multiplicity of genres. For this reason at the very least, the noble failures of Dynamix are worth remembering.

(Sources: Computer Gaming World of July 1988, December 1989, May 1990, February 1991, September 1991, October 1991, November 1991, March 1992, February 1994, and May 1994; Sierra’s news magazines of Summer 1990, Spring 1991, Summer 1991, Fall 1991, and June 1993; InfoWorld of March 5 1984; Apple Orchard of December 1983; Zzap! of July 1989; Questbusters of August 1991; Video Games and Computer Entertainment of May 1991; Dynamix’s hint books for Rise of the Dragon, Heart of China, and The Adventures of Willy Beamish; Matt Barton’s interviews with Jeff Tunnell in Matt Chat 199 and 200; press releases, annual reports, and other internal and external documents from the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play.

You can download emulator-ready Commodore 64 disk images of Project Firestart and a version of David Wolf: Secret Agent that’s all ready to go under DOSBox from right here. Rise of the Dragon, Heart of China, and The Adventures of Willy Beamish — and for that matter Red Baron — are all available for purchase on GOG.com.)

Comments
41 Responses

- Brian

May 25, 2018 at 4:59 pm

I was completely blank on these until you mentioned Willy Beemish…

At this point I was in high school and my computer games time was diminishing rapidly!

I really like your civ series!

- David Simon

May 25, 2018 at 5:42 pm

Wait, MechWarrior? That stands out a bit on that list of otherwise generic-looking sim games…

- Infinitron

May 25, 2018 at 5:58 pm

While I’m tempted to make a rude comment here about Dynamix finally making a game that embraced Sierra’s own design standards and them getting excited about that

Well, they got to make a sequel to an actual Sierra adventure game after that. Space Quest V also had much of that Dynamix interactive cartoon aesthetic.

- John Witte

May 26, 2018 at 1:48 am

Jimmy, I’ve played all of these Dynamix games before except for David Wolf. Of the four games I played Firestart is my favorite of the bunch. I suppose you’re right that it isn’t a classic, but I also think that it’s still a pretty good game that probably is the spiritual forebear to the System Shock games.

I know some of your complaints are directed at the slow load times due to the game being comprised of three floppy disk sides. A few years back someone made a version that is an EasyFlash cartridge that can be run on the VICE emulator.

Here’s the link if anyone is interested:

https://csdb.dk/release/?id=104387&show=summary

I do remember Willy Beamish having some really tricky puzzles and I remember being frustrated with the gameplay mechanics. It sure was pretty, but there were times when I pined for the SCUMM engine interface to play it.

I’ve never posted anything before, but I wanted to tell you that I enjoy your site and I appreciate your hard work at reporting on this history.

- xxx

May 26, 2018 at 3:17 am

Oh man, Rise of the Dragon. I remembered that game fondly, because I was into the whole dystopian cyberpunk aesthetic at the time and thought it seemed awfully adult and edgy compared to fare like King’s Quest. At the time I didn’t even notice how racist it was. But looking back from a modern perspective… yeah, it was pretty problematic.

As much as I respect Dynamix for the single-player games they made, my first association with the name will always be a rush of nostalgia for Tribes 2, one of the most genuinely fun multiplayer shooters I’ve ever played. Gone now, of course, shut down as soon as running the servers became no longer economically viable. The ephemerality of multiplayer games is going to be a real problem for you when you get into the 00s…

- Jimmy Maher

May 26, 2018 at 7:48 am

Yeah. I don’t whether I’ll personally get far enough for it to be a problem — and I do suspect that even if I do, this history will skew more and more toward small offline indie games, as I couldn’t bear to write lots of articles on stuff like Call of Duty XXVI — but certainly historians in general are going to have a really hard time recapturing a large (and growing) strand of gaming culture.

- BettaDays

May 26, 2018 at 3:39 pm

One more for the road, Willy Beamish also features a group of Japanese tourists with all the preictable stereotypes. I bought Willy Beamish and Day of the Tentacle at around the same time and it’s little wonder I went down the Lucas Arts path for most of my youthful adventure gaming. It’s a game that I found so frustrating since everything about it’s aesthetic and story signaled fun, but the experience fell far short.

- tedder

May 26, 2018 at 5:20 pm

I had to look up the terrible cdrom voices on Willy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d8xcy2Fteo

Yep.

- Lisa H.

May 26, 2018 at 8:34 pm

I remember loving Willy Beamish at the time, to the point where I would take pages out of the Sierra magazine and put them up on my bedroom walls. It was extremely shiny on our shiny new 486. But as you note, it’s a difficult game to actually play and I never got that far on my own; and of course hints or walkthroughs could not easily be had for free in the way they can be today.

- Carlton Little

May 27, 2018 at 6:38 pm

I think you share the same infectious “nostalgia” as I, for games of this period!

I would spend hours reading articles/reviews for Monkey Island 1 and 2; daydreaming if only I had the machine to run them, how amazing that would be! In a sense I have fond memories of both the games I was able to play, and the hyped games I was *not.*

Willy Beamish was another I was interested in. As it happens, though, I did actually own a copy of *Heart of China.* I’m sure my young mind understood very little of what went on in it, had no concept of good/bad writing then, but it was still an audiovisual feast.

- Alex Freeman

May 27, 2018 at 2:34 am

Project Firestart doesn’t present itself in the guise of a traditional adventure game. Instead it’s an action-adventure… You explore the ship’s rooms and corridors in real time, using a joystick to shoot or avoid the monsters who seem to be the only life remaining aboard the Prometheus.

What’s interesting is that King’s Quest was apparently originally supposed to be what we think of as action-adventure. That’s why a joystick was supported, and there were keys for jumping and ducking.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/kings-quest/reviews/reviewerId,6226/

The first thing we need to understand when attempting to analyze King’s Quest is its historical significance… It was, in fact, the first real adventure game where you navigated an on-screen character through the only kind of world that this perspective allowed to be called “three-dimensional” that time.

…The great achievement of King’s Quest was transferring common mechanics of adventure genres into a world ripe with hazards that suddenly became so much more real because they actually physically happened to our avatar. It’s one thing to type “N” or “W” and another to quickly run away from a maniacal ogre as he begins chasing you…

It is customary to mock Sierra for inserting too many death scenes in their games. In some games they really overdid this mechanic, and it started to feel cheap as adventure game development was advancing and designers found better means to convey danger and make their worlds more absorbing. But this hardly applies to the first King’s Quest, where this design philosophy was undeniably intentional and where constant danger added so much suspense to what was essentially a stroll through fairly repetitive outdoor areas.

If the legacy of Dynamix story games is a bit of a frustrating one, Tunnell’s vision of interactive narratives that are more than boxes of puzzles would eventually prove its worth across a multiplicity of genres. For this reason at the very least, the noble failures of Dynamix are worth remembering.

I take it you’re referring to The Incredible Machine.

- Joe Pranevich

May 27, 2018 at 3:38 am

I have a soft spot for Willy Beamish. It’s not a bad game and the time-based puzzles were right at home among the Sierra greats. Certainly, it was no worse than “Mission: Asteroid” or “King’s Quest III”, both of which had terrible dead-ending time puzzles. Of course, this was years later and they were supposed to know better!

I have been playing and reviewing adventure games for a few years now and this game has one of the few fist-pumping awesome scenes in any game that I have played. I hesitate to spoil it, but it involves an unlikely rescue by your trusty friend and his… rival, late in the game. There is much in the game that doesn’t work, but they knew how to script certain plot beats.

And sure, it’s SLIGHTLY racist, but the recurring sequences with the Japanese tourist family that all turn out to be ninjas? That was AWESOME.

- Alex Freeman

May 27, 2018 at 4:06 am

What exactly is so wrong with timing puzzles? Am I the only person who doesn’t have a problem with timed sequences in adventure games (within reasonable limits of course)?

- Joe Pranevich

May 27, 2018 at 6:35 pm

The modern ideal of an adventure game is one that you cannot ever be in a “walking dead” situation, where you missed a detail or didn’t do something on time. In contrast, most old adventures (going all the way back to Zork) used that as its bread-and-butter. Sierra was somewhat worse than others in some ways, but they didn’t do anything unusual.

Timing puzzles are the worst type because they take you out of the immersion since you have to play the same sequence over and over again to “solve” all the puzzles in the fastest way possible.

- Alex Freeman

May 28, 2018 at 12:56 am

Well, I do agree that forcing the player to play the same sequence over and over again to “solve” all the puzzles in the fastest way possible is annoying, but I’d argue that stems from a really stingy time limit for doing too many things. In some cases, having a time limit for a reasonably short sequence can build tension.

- Alex Freeman

May 27, 2018 at 4:14 am

Oh, I forgot to mention this in my other comment, but the reason hand-drawn animation is basically dead in animated movies is because 3d animation is much more cost effective if you can afford the staggering upfront costs for the equipment needed to make something like Pixar’s movies. You can, of course, make 3d models that look hand drawn, but if you animate them the way Pixar characters are animated, it just doesn’t look right. I suppose you could have animators making rough sketches or something like that for the different frames for the 3d models and have the models assume those positions, but that wouldn’t be as cost effective, and I don’t know if it’d really generate any more revenue. Interestingly, the people at Pixar have said they never intended to kill off traditional animation.

- Sniffnoy

May 27, 2018 at 4:24 pm

You can, of course, make 3d models that look hand drawn,

How often has this actually been done? The only instance I’m aware of is the recent Guilty Gear Xrd; what else is there?

- Alex Freeman

May 28, 2018 at 12:51 am

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is a good example.
Here’s an article on it:
http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/ghost_in_the_shell_stand_alone_complex

Here’s a YouTube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNY53tZ2geg

- Sniffnoy

May 28, 2018 at 5:54 pm

Huh, I had no idea, thanks!

- Jason

May 27, 2018 at 10:10 am

Did any of the advertisements for David Wolf depict 256-color graphics? I can specifically remember getting that game and being very unhappy about the 16-color graphics because I was expecting something better.

- Jimmy Maher

May 27, 2018 at 1:20 pm

I haven’t seen any indication that a VGA version was contemplated or advertised, although David Wolf certainly wouldn’t be the first game whose advertising rather oversold the actual experience. Although VGA first appeared in 1987 with the IBM PS/2 line, it took a surprisingly long time for it to reach commodity PC clones at a reasonable price. As of 1989 — the year of David Wolf — most game developers were still targeting EGA. That really began to change only in 1990.

- Jason

June 3, 2018 at 10:06 am

Thinking back, it’s likely that I got David Wolf in 1990. It would have almost certainly been after the acquisition by Sierra. The details are a bit hazy now since David Wolf was an awful game and not memorable otherwise. I looked into it some more, and I was able to find this:

https://archive.org/stream/008_sierra_news_magazine_volume_3_number_2_summer_1990#page/n39/mode/2up

On page 45, there are a couple of screenshots that either are VGA or were simply flattered by the quality of the printing. And then there’s the fact that the install routine had a VGA option that didn’t work. I also found the game’s registration card promising a VGA upgrade:

http://www.sierragamers.com/uploads/24082/The_Games/David_Wolf_Registration_Card.pdf

Here’s another interesting oddity. It’s a clipping from a magazine praising the game’s VGA graphics:

http://forum.paderetro.com/t4931-david-wolf-secret-agent-test-pc

There was a period in which my family bought just about everything that Sierra developed or published. Most of those games, I either liked or loved. David Wolf was one of the few that I found utterly rotten. Guess I’m still a little sore about it. ;-)

- Jimmy Maher

June 3, 2018 at 11:08 am

Hmm. The French review you link to isn’t the most… thoughtful piece of commentary, and the screenshots in it do match the EGA release. I’d guess they just got it wrong in the midst of all the other gushing.

It does seem from the rest of this, though, that a VGA version may have been envisioned. Jeff Tunnell has mentioned that David Wolf was one of the worst-selling things Dynamix ever released, so that presumably put the kibosh on that.

- Jim Leonard

June 6, 2018 at 9:56 pm

Jason, you’ve uncovered something I’ve always wondered about (I am likely DWSA’s only fan), that it most definitely was meant to be a 256-color game but was downgraded or dropped before the final release. That title screen, even accounting for magazine printing and/or halftone descreening during the scanning process, definitely shows colors that would not have resulted from the EGA 16-color title screen.

My guess as to why the 256-color version was dropped is probably due to cost: The game already shipped on 5 disks, and going with 256-color digitized images would have at least doubled that (frequency-domain compression such as JPEG didn’t exist in 1989). And the 256-color note on the registration card was probably to gauge demand vs. sales: If the game sold like gangbusters, they could justify sending more disks with 256-color art out to people and inserting into a second publishing run.

Stories like these strengthen the argument that these materials should be preserved after the game ships. If the original artwork and source were still around, a 256-color version would be somewhat trivial to produce. Fascinating!

- Jonathan Badger

May 27, 2018 at 10:51 am

And the writing is once again on the dodgy side; it’s never entirely clear whether Blade Hunter is supposed to be a real cool cat (like the protagonist of Neuromancer the novel) or a lovable (?) loser (like the protagonist of Neuromancer the game).

I’m not sure Case of the book is really a “real cool cat” — he is basically a washed up sad-sack alcoholic and drug addict very much like Dicaprio’s character in Inception, who as in that movie, is given a second chance because his skills are useful.

- Jimmy Maher

May 27, 2018 at 1:23 pm

Yes, but there’s a long history in pop culture — we might call it the Keith Richards syndrome — of portraying Case’s sort of dissolution as cool. Certainly plenty of teenage boys who read Neuromancer found him very attractive.

- Lt. Nitpicker

May 27, 2018 at 6:05 pm

Worth noting as well that some of the later Dynamix adventures (Rise of the Dragon and Willy Beamish) got Sega CD ports, and the Willy Beamish PC CD-ROM version was I think based on the Sega CD version, minus the awful load times.

- stepped pyramids

May 27, 2018 at 11:15 pm

The Sega CD port of Rise of the Dragon has some pretty decent voice acting talent, although it of course features a lot of really bad stereotypical Chinese accents. Unfortunately, the graphics suffered a lot in the transition and look dark, drab, and greenish.

- Brian Bagnall

May 30, 2018 at 5:10 pm

What a great surprise! I’m so glad you decided to cover Dynamix and Project Firestart. Jeff Tunnell and Damon Slye are my heroes for delivering this ambitious game on such a limited 8-bit platform. I actually wrote a good chunk about this topic for Commodore: The Amiga Years, how it started as an Amiga game before Trip Hawkins ordered developers back to the C64. Had to throw it out to make way for actual Commodore-related material in the end.

- Jimmy Maher

May 31, 2018 at 5:37 am

Interesting. I didn’t know it was started as an Amiga game.

- Michael

May 30, 2018 at 9:15 pm

It’s nice you told us how to pronounce “Tunnell” near the beginning of the article, but I never did figure out how to say “Dynamix.” I spent the whole article alternating between rhyming with “dynamics” and putting the emphasis on the last syllable to come out with something more like “dino-MIX.” Which is it?

- Alex Smith

May 31, 2018 at 2:57 am

Rhymes with dynamics.

- Lhexa

June 3, 2018 at 10:56 pm

I take issue with your opening statement. I say that, in 1990, Lucasfilm Games was still obscure, albeit well-known to connoisseurs. Rather, in that year adventure games were bracing against the impact of the NES, whose deliberately obfuscatory category of “adventure games” included such classics as The Legend of Zelda, Crystalis and Castlevania 2. In retrospect, it looks as though someone at Nintendo of America decided the American concept of “adventure game” was harmful and had to be eradicated. Growing up at the time, and subsisting on strategy guides (being too poor for most actual games), I was befuddled by the difference in definitions between console and computer.

- Jimmy Maher

June 4, 2018 at 8:09 am

I think it’s fair to expect readers to understand the term “adventure games” in the way it’s widely understood today, especially given this blog’s focus on computer rather than console games.

- Lhexa

June 8, 2018 at 11:23 am

It’s fair, but that’s not what you said. To quote:

“By 1990, the world of adventure games was coming to orient itself after the twin poles of Sierra Online and LucasFilm Games.”

Unless you think that the “world of adventure games” orients itself without any input from the people making actual adventure games, this statement is ahistorical and false.

The use of the passive voice conceals many sins.

- Lhexa

June 9, 2018 at 5:42 pm

That was too harsh, sorry. I’m an editor, and it shows. :P

- Pingback: The Digital Antiquarian: The Dynamic Interactive Narratives of Dynamix – *Teegla

- Ken Baer

July 5, 2018 at 3:00 am

I actually interviewed at Dynamix back in 1991, when my friend Bob Lindstrom worked there. Didn’t get it.

- M. Casey

October 12, 2018 at 3:06 am

Fond memories of Heart of China and Rise of the Dragon, but at the time I was too young to recognize how bad the writing was. If anything, you actually understate it, Jimmy! I went back to HoC a few years ago, and, wow. Terrible.

It’s a real shame, too, because at the time it was beautiful, a fine way to show off your VGA monitor. And the concept wasn’t terrible: sure, you might be playing a cut-rate Indiana Jones, but look at all the pulpy adventure! You even get to drive a tank! A real pity about the dialogue though.

Anyway, Dynamix was a fun studio. I only played a few of their games, but the one that sticks with me is Red Baron. I haven’t been able to try that in many, many years but at the time I considered it a masterpiece.

- Jimmy Maher

October 12, 2018 at 9:21 am

I neglected to go into this in the article, but Heart of China is really something of a second-generation Indiana Jones clone. Its more direct “inspiration” was pretty clearly High Road to China, a 1983 Tom Selleck film that was created to get in on the Raiders of the Lost Ark action. Just to make the connections game more fun, Selleck had actually been George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s first choice to play Indiana Jones, but when they couldn’t make it fit with the filming schedule for his television show Magnum P.I., they went with Harrison Ford instead. Poor Tom missed one hell of a gravy train with that one…

Anyway, what we’ve got here is an underwhelming clone of an underwhelming clone. Small wonder it’s so painful…

Red Baron was hugely loved in its day, but in my experience flight simulators, relying as they do almost by definition on the latest trendy graphics technology for most of their appeal, tend to age worse than just about any other genre. While you can still find plenty of devotees of vintage Lode Runner or Pirates! or Infocom these days, there aren’t too many still flying old versions of Gunship, F-15 Strike Eagle, Falcon, Flight Simulator, or Red Baron, despite games of that stripe being among the most popular of all in their own time. None of this says anything about the real talent and passion that must have gone into making a game like Red Baron; it’s just the nature of the beast.

- M. Casey

October 13, 2018 at 3:36 am

> I neglected to go into this in the article, but Heart of China is really something of a second-generation Indiana Jones clone. Its more direct “inspiration” was pretty clearly High Road to China, a 1983 Tom Selleck film that was created to get in on the Raiders of the Lost Ark action.

I had no idea. Interesting!

Yes, Red Baron and its ilk are likely dead, another sort of game that you had to be there at the time to really enjoy. (Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.)

The Incredible Machine
June 8, 2018

As we saw in my previous article, Jeff Tunnell walked away from Dynamix’s experiments with “interactive movies” feeling rather disillusioned by the whole concept. How ironic, then, that in at least one sense comparisons with Hollywood continued to ring true even after he thought he’d consigned such things to his past. When he stepped down from his post at the head of Dynamix in order to found Jeff Tunnell Productions and make smaller but more innovative games, he was making the sort of bargain with commercial realities that many a film director had made before him. In the world of movies, and now increasingly in that of games as well, smaller, cheaper projects were usually the only ones allowed to take major thematic, formal, and aesthetic risks. If Tunnell hoped to innovate, he had come to believe, he would have to return to the guerrilla model of game development that had held sway during the 1980s, deliberately rejecting the studio-production culture that was coming to dominate the industry of the 1990s. So, he recruited Kevin Ryan, a programmer who had worked at Dynamix almost from the beginning, and set up shop in the office next door with just a few other support personnel.

Tunnell knew exactly what small but innovative game he wanted to make first. It was, appropriately enough, an idea that dated back to those wild-and-free 1980s. In fact, he and Damon Slye had batted it around when first forming Dynamix all the way back in 1983. At that time, Electronic Art’s Pinball Construction Set, which gave you a box of (virtual) interchangeable parts to use in making playable pinball tables of your own, was taking the industry by storm, ushering in a brief heyday of similar computerized erector sets; Electronics Arts alone would soon be offering the likes of an Adventure Construction Set, a Music Construction Set, and a Racing Destruction Set. Tunnell and Slye’s idea was for a sort of machine construction set: a system for cobbling together functioning virtual mechanisms of many types out of interchangeable parts. But they never could sell the vaguely defined idea to a publisher, thus going to show that even the games industry of the 1980s maybe wasn’t quite so wild and free as nostalgia might suggest.[1]

Still, the machine-construction-set idea never left Tunnell, and, after founding Jeff Tunnell Productions in early 1992, he was convinced that now was finally the right time to see it through. At its heart, the game, which he would name The Incredible Machine, must be a physics simulator. Luckily, all those years Kevin Ryan had spent building all those vehicular simulators for Dynamix provided him with much of the coding expertise and even actual code that he would need to make it. Ryan had the basic engine working within a handful of months, whereupon Tunnell and anyone else who was interested could start pitching in to make the many puzzles that would be needed to turn a game engine into a game.

The look of the Mouse Trap board game…

…is echoed by the Incredible Machine computer game.

If Pinball Construction Set and those other early “creativity games” were one part of the influences that would result in The Incredible Machine, the others are equally easy to spot. One need only glance at a screenshot to be reminded of the old children’s board game cum toy Mouse Trap, a simplistic exercise in roll-and-move whose real appeal is the elaborate, Rube Goldberg-style mechanism that the players slowly assemble out of plastic parts in order to trap one another’s pieces — if, that is, the dodgy contraption, made out of plastic and rubber bands, doesn’t collapse on itself instead. But sadly, there’s only one way to put the mousetrap’s pieces together, making the board game’s appeal for any but the youngest children short-lived. The Incredible Machine, on the other hand, would offer the opportunity to build a nearly infinite number of virtual mousetraps.

In contrast to such venerable inspirations, the other game that clearly left its mark on The Incredible Machine was one of the hottest current hits in the industry at the time the latter was being made. Lemmings, the work of a small team out of Scotland called DMA Design, was huge in every corner of the world where computer games were played — a rarity during what was still a fairly fragmented era of gaming culture. A level-oriented puzzle game of ridiculous charm, Lemmings made almost anyone who saw it want it to pick up the mouse and start playing it, and yet managed to combine this casual accessibility with surprising depth and variety over the course of 120 levels that started out trivial and escalated to infuriating and beyond. Its strong influence can be seen in The Incredible Machine’s similar structure, consisting of 87 machines to build, beginning with some tutorial puzzles to gently introduce the concepts and parts and ending with some fiendishly complex problems indeed. For that matter, Lemmings’s commercial success, which proved that there was a real market for accessible games with a different aesthetic sensibility than the hardcore norm, did much to make Sierra, Dynamix’s new owner and publisher, enthusiastic about the project.

Like Lemmings, the heart of The Incredible Machine is its robust, hugely flexible engine. Yet that potential would have been for naught had not Tunnell, Ryan, and their other associates delivered a progression of intriguing puzzles that build upon one another in logical ways as you learn more and more about the engine’s possibilities. One might say that, if the wonderful engine is the heart of the game, the superb puzzle design is the soul of the experience — just as is the case, yet again, with Lemmings. In training you how to play interactively and then slowly ramping up the challenge, Lemmings and The Incredible Machine both embraced the accepted best practices of modern game design well before they had become such. They provide you the wonderful rush of feeling smart, over and over again as you master the ever more complex dilemmas they present to you.

To understand how The Incredible Machine actually works in practice, let’s have a look at a couple of its individual puzzles. We’ll begin with the very first of them, an admittedly trivial exercise for anyone with any experience in the game.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IM00.mp4

Each puzzle begins with three things: with a goal; with an incomplete machine already on the main board, consisting of some selection of immovable parts; and with some additional parts waiting off on the right side of the screen, to be dragged onto the board where we will. In this case, we need to send the basketball through the “hoop” — which is, given that there is no “net” graphic in the game’s minimalist visual toolkit, the vaguely hole-shaped arrangement of pieces below and to the right of where the basketball stands right now. Looking to the parts area at the far right, we see that we have three belts, three hamster wheels, and three ramp pieces to help us accomplish our goal. The score tallies at the bottom of the screen have something or other to do with time and number of puzzles already completed, but feel free to do like most players and ignore them; the joy of this game is in making machines that work, not in chalking up high scores. Click on the image above to see what happens when we start our fragment of a machine in its initial state.

Not much, right? The bowling ball that begins suspended in mid-air simply falls into the ether. Let’s begin to make something more interesting happen by putting a hamster cage below the falling ball. When the ball drops on top of it, the little fellow will get spooked and start to run.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IM01.mp4

His scurrying doesn’t accomplish anything as long as his wheel isn’t connected to any other parts. So, let’s stretch a belt from the hamster wheel to the conveyor belt just above and to its right.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IM02.mp4

Now we’re getting somewhere! If we put a second hamster wheel in the path of the second bowling ball, and connect it to the second conveyor belt, we can get the third bowling ball rolling.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IM03.mp4

And then, as you’ve probably surmised, the same trick can be used to send the basketball through the hoop.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IM04.mp4

Note that we never made use of the three ramp pieces at our disposal. This is not unusual. Because each puzzle really is a dynamic physics simulation rather than a problem with a hard-coded solution, many of them have multiple solutions, some of which may never have been thought of by the designers. In this quality as well The Incredible Machine is, yet once more, similar to Lemmings.

The game includes many more parts than we had available to us in the first puzzle; there are some 45 of them in all, far more than any single puzzle could ever use. Even the physical environment itself eventually becomes a variable, as the later puzzles begin to mess with gravity and atmospheric pressure.

We won’t look at anything that daunting today, but we should have a look at a somewhat more complicated puzzle from a little later in the game, one that will give us more of a hint of the engine’s real potential.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IM05.mp4

In tribute to Mouse Trap (and because your humble correspondent here just really likes cats), this one will be a literal game of cat and mouse, as shown above. We need to move Mort the Mouse from the top right corner of the screen to the vaguely basket-like enclosure at bottom left, and we’ll have to use Pokey the Cat to accomplish part of that goal. We have more parts to work with this time than will fit in the parts window to the right. (We can scroll through the pages of parts by clicking on the arrows just above.) So, in addition to the two belts, one gear, one electric motor, two electric fans, and one generator shown in the screenshot below, know that we also have three ramp pieces at our disposal.

Already with the starting setup, a baseball flips on a household power outlet, albeit one to which nothing is initially connected.

We can connect one of the fans to the power outlet to blow Mort toward the left. Unfortunately, he gets stuck on the scenery rather than falling all the way down to the next level.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IM06.mp4

So, we need to alter the mouse’s trajectory by using one of our ramp pieces; note that these, like many parts, can be flipped horizontally and stretched to suit our needs. Our first attempt at placing the ramp does cause Mort to fall down to the next level, and he then starts running away from Pokey toward the right, as we want. But he’s not fast enough to get to the end of the pipe on which he’s running before Pokey catches him. This is good for Pokey, but not so good for us — and, needless to say, least good of all for Mort. (At least the game politely spares us the carnage that ensues after he’s caught by making him simply disappear.)

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IM07.mp4

A little more experimentation and we find a placement of the ramp that works better.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IM08.mp4

Now we just have to move the mouse back to the left and into the basket. The most logical approach would seem to be to use the second fan to blow him there. Simple enough, right? Getting it running, however, will be a more complicated affair, considering that we don’t have a handy mains-power outlet already provided down here and that our fan’s cord won’t stretch anywhere near as far as we need it to in order to utilize the outlet above. So, we begin by instead plugging our electric motor into the second socket of the outlet we do have, and belting it up to the gear that’s already fixed in place.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IM09.mp4

So far, so good. Now we mesh the gear from our box of parts to the one that’s already on the board, and belt it up to our generator, which provides us with another handy power outlet right where we need it.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IM10.mp4

Now we place our second fan just right, and… voila! We’ve solved the puzzle with two ramp pieces to spare.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IM11.mp4

The experience of working through the stages of a solution, getting a little closer each time, is almost indescribably satisfying for anyone with the slightest hint of a tinkering spirit. The Incredible Machine wasn’t explicitly pitched as an educational product, but, like a lot of Sierra’s releases during this period, it nevertheless had something of an educational — or at least edutational — aura, what with its bright, friendly visual style and nonviolent premise (the occasional devoured mouse excepted!). There’s much to be learned from it — not least that even the most gnarly problems, in a computer game or in real life, can usually be tackled by breaking them down into a series of less daunting sub-problems. Later on, when the puzzles get really complex, one may question where to even start. The answer, of course, is just to put some parts on the board and connect some things together, to start seeing what’s possible and how things react with one another. Rolling up the old sleeves and trying things is better than sitting around paralyzed by a puzzle’s — or by life’s — complexity. For the pure tinkerers among us, meanwhile, the game offers a free-form mode where you can see what sort of outlandish contraption you can come up with, just for the heck of it. It thus manages to succeed as both a goal-oriented game in the mode of Lemmings and as a software toy in the mode of its 1980s inspirations.

As we’ve already seen, Jeff Tunnell Productions had been formed with the intention of making smaller, more formally innovative games than those typically created inside the main offices of Dynamix. It was tacitly understood that games of this stripe carried with them more risk and perhaps less top-end sales potential than the likes of Damon Slye’s big military flight simulators; these drawbacks would be compensated for only by their vastly lower production costs. It’s thus a little ironic to note that The Incredible Machine upon its release on December 1, 1992, became a major, immediate hit by the standard of any budget. Were it not for another of those aforementioned Damon Slye simulations, a big World War II-themed extravaganza called Aces of the Pacific that had been released just days before it, it would actually have become Dynamix’s single best-selling game to date. As it was, Aces of the Pacific sold a few more absolute units, but in terms of profitability there was no comparison; The Incredible Machine had cost peanuts to make by the standards of an industry obsessed with big, multimedia-rich games.

The size comparisons are indeed telling. Aces of the Pacific had shipped on three disks, while Tunnell’s previous project, the interactive cartoon The Adventures of Willy Beamish, had required six. The Incredible Machine, by contrast, fit comfortably on a single humble floppy, a rarity among games from Dynamix’s parent company Sierra especially, from whose boxes sometimes burst forth as many as a dozen disks, who looked forward with desperate urgency to the arrival of CD-ROMs and their 650 MB of storage. The Incredible Machine needed less than 1 MB of space in all, and its cost of production had been almost as out of proportion with the Sierra norm as its byte count. It thus didn’t take Dynamix long to ask Jeff Tunnell Productions to merge back into their main fold. With the profits The Incredible Machine was generating, it would be best to make sure its developers remained in the Dynamix/Sierra club.

There was much to learn from The Incredible Machine’s success for any student of the evolving games industry who bothered to pay attention. Along with Tetris and Lemmings before it, it provided the perfect template for “casual” gaming, a category the industry hadn’t yet bothered to label. It could be used as a five-minute palate-cleanser between tasks on the office computer as easily as it could become a weekend-filling obsession on the home computer. It was a low-investment game, quick and easy to get into and get out of, its premise and controls obvious from the merest glance at the screen, yet managed to conceal beneath its shallow surface oceans of depth. At the same time, though, that depth was of such a nature that you could set it aside for weeks or months when life got in the way, then pick it up and continue with the next puzzle as if nothing had happened. This sort of thing, much more so than elaborate interactive movies filmed with real actors on real sound stages —  or, for that matter, hardcore flight simulators that demanded hours and hours of practice just to rise to the level of competent — would prove to be the real future of digital games as mass-market entertainments. The founding ethos of the short-lived entity known as Jeff Tunnell Productions — to focus on small games that did one thing really, really well — could stand in for that of countless independent game studios working in the mobile and casual spaces today.

Still, it would be a long time before The Incredible Machine and games like it became more than occasional anomalies in an industry obsessed with cutting-edge technology and size, both in megabytes and in player time commitment. In the meantime, developers who did realize that not every gamer was thirsting to spend dozens of hours immersed in an interactive Star Wars movie or Lord of the Rings novel could do very well for themselves. The Incredible Machine was the sort of game that lent itself to almost infinite sequels once the core engine had been created. With the latter to hand, all that remained for Tunnell and company was to churn out more puzzles. Thus the next several years brought The Even More! Incredible Machine, a re-packaging of the original game with an additional 73 puzzles; Sid & Al’s Incredible Toons, which moved the gameplay into more forthrightly cartoon territory via its titular Tom & Jerry ripoffs; and The Incredible Machine 2 and The Incredible Toon Machine, which were just what they sounded like they would be. Being the very definition of “more of the same,” these aren’t the sort of games that lend themselves to extended criticism, but certainly players who had enjoyed the original game found plenty more to enjoy in the sequels. Along the way, the series proved quietly but significantly influential as more than just one of the pioneers of casual games in the abstract: it became the urtext of the entire genre of so-called “physics simulators.” There’s much of The Incredible Machine’s influence to be found in more than one facet of such a modern casual mega-hit as the Angry Birds franchise.

For his part, Jeff Tunnell took away from The Incredible Machine’s success the lesson that his beloved small games were more than commercially viable. He spent most of the balance of the 1990s working similar territory. In the process, he delivered two games that sold even better than The Incredible Machine franchise — in fact, they became the two best-selling games Dynamix would ever release. Trophy Bass and 3-D Ultra Pinball are far from the best-remembered or best-loved Dynamix-related titles among hardcore gamers today, but they sold and sold and sold to an audience that doesn’t tend to read blogs like this one. While neither is a brilliantly innovative design like The Incredible Machine, their huge success hammers home the valuable lesson, still too often forgotten, that many different kinds of people play many different kinds of games for many different reasons, and that none of these people, games, or reasons is a wrong one.

(Sources: Sierra’s InterAction news magazine of Fall 1992 and Winter 1992; Computer Gaming World of March 1992 and April 1993; Commodore Microcomputers of November/December 1986; Matt Barton’s interviews with Jeff Tunnell in Matt Chat 200 and 201; press releases, annual reports, and other internal and external documents from the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play.

All of the Incredible Machine games are available for purchase in one “mega pack” from GOG.com.)

1. That, anyway, is the story which both Jeff Tunnell and Kevin Ryan tell in interviews today, which also happened to be the only one told in an earlier version of this article. But this blog’s friend Jim Leonard has since pointed out the existence of a rather obscure children’s game from the heyday of computerized erector sets called Creative Contraptions, published by the brief-lived software division of Bantam Books and created by a team of developers who called themselves Looking Glass Software (no relation to the later, much more famous Looking Glass Studios). It’s a machine construction set in its own right, one which is strikingly similar to the game which is the main subject of this article, even including some of the very same component parts, although it is more limited in many ways than Tunnell and Ryan’s creation, with simpler mechanisms to build out of fewer parts and less flexible controls that are forced to rely on keystrokes rather than the much more intuitive affordances of the mouse. One must assume that Tunnell and Ryan either reinvented much of Creative Contraptions or expanded on a brilliant concept beautifully in the course of taking full advantage of the additional hardware at their disposal. If the latter, there’s certainly no shame in that. ↩

Comments
38 Responses

- AguyinaRPG

June 8, 2018 at 4:03 pm

This may have been the oldest game I actually played “in my day”. It was part of the third grade classroom along with one of the CD Oregon Trail’s. It really was a great introduction to understanding physical interactions, much better than the overly detailed simulations like Kerbal Space Program that we have today. Sometimes you just want to solve some definite problems in a short amount of time (even if my young brain couldn’t quite get past the halfway point).

I always have fond memories when thinking about the Incredible Machine and I think it has influenced my way of looking at puzzles. Definitely without some kind of introduction like this I wouldn’t have found Rube Goldberg machines (and ergo complicated mechanics) as interesting!

- Jim Leonard

June 8, 2018 at 7:08 pm

There’s a huge piece of the puzzle missing, and I think it might be because Tunnel has a selective memory and didn’t mention this in any interviews: The Incredible Machine is a concept-for-concept ripoff of Creative Contraptions that came out 7 years earlier: http://www.mobygames.com/game/creative-contraptions
I would love to know Tunnell’s answer to that.

In addition to injecting humor into the program (something only Sid and Al’s Toons would do), Creative Contraptions is notable for commanding the most out of IBM’s dreaded “CGA and PC speaker” as possible with the information known at the time — the graphics are quite serviceable, and the music presentation borders on delightful.

- Jimmy Maher

June 8, 2018 at 9:13 pm

Man, I hate it when this sort of thing happens. What can I say, folks, sometimes you have to see the sausages being made.

So, I’ve been looking at the Commodore 64 version of Creative Contraptions for the last hour or so, and you’re of course correct, the similarities are so striking that it’s almost impossible to believe it wasn’t an influence. I’d never heard of this game, for which I can only offer the defense that it appears to be very obscure indeed; I could only find one review of it grepping through my huge collection of vintage magazines and other documents.

Having looked at Creative Contraptions, I’m not quite ready to call Incredible Machine an outright rip-off — or, if so, only in the sense that great artists steal, yadda, yadda. There’s a hell of a lot of good design and programming in The Incredible Machine that makes it a joy to play, whereas Creative Contraptions just doesn’t have the hardware at its disposal to make a similar go of it. I wish Tunnell acknowledged the influence, as he would have nothing to be ashamed of and plenty to still be proud of; Lord knows there have been far less creative and effective expansions on concepts in the history of games. I hope it’s down to a failure of memory rather than a conscious decision.

(There is, incidentally, a teeny part of me that wonders if this Looking Glass Software that created Creative Contraptions — no, not *that* Looking Glass — might actually be Dynamix working under a pseudonym for some reason; I know they did dabble in educational as well as productivity software in the early days. It appears that this version of Looking Glass was only credited for this one game, which makes me even more suspicious. Unfortunately, I can’t find any credits for the individual developers behind it anywhere. And surely Tunnell would mention it if he had already had a go at The Incredible Machine in 1985. I mean, that’s surely not the sort of thing one forgets…)

Anyway, thanks so much for pointing this out. I’ve worked a new paragraph into the article. I’m exhausted right now, but will look at it again over the weekend, and may try to weave in some other edits for the sake of flow. For now, just wanted to give some form of credit where it’s due. You’re a mensch!

- Alex Smith

June 9, 2018 at 1:58 am

A few points from my interview with Kevin Ryan, though nothing that speaks directly to this influence issue. First, Dynamix definitely did not have anything to do with Creative Contraptions. According to Kevin, they fiddled around with a prototype for a little bit in the eighties, but really only got a couple of objects moving on the screen and could not figure out how to describe exactly what the “game” was, so EA was not interested in pursuing it further.

As for Incredible Machine, while Tunnell was the one who wanted to do a Goldberg machine style game, Ryan was the designer as well as the programmer. He did not cite any games as influences to me (though I was unaware of Creative Contraptions and did not ask about it specifically); he claims he went down to the library and looked at every book on Rube Goldberg devices he could and then created a design document based on his findings. The rest of the game was an iterative process as the engine was built, people came up with puzzle ideas, and then the objects were tweaked to better fit the puzzle ideas. The freeform building mode was a late addition when they realized that it would take almost no effort to clean up their puzzle editing tools to be usable by players.

- Jimmy Maher

June 9, 2018 at 8:07 am

Thanks for this! Made a few small edits to reflect Ryan’s creative as well as technical contribution.

- Brian Sniffen

June 9, 2018 at 12:09 pm

I came here hoping someone would remember Creative Contraptions. I had the Apple 2 version. Its physical disk was art: matched to the blue of the screen background, engraved with a Rube Goldberg machine.

- Jim Leonard

June 9, 2018 at 8:10 pm

Running the PC program data itself, the following notices are available:

Copyright 1985 Bantam Electronic Publishing
Developed by Looking Glass Software, Inc.

Examining the binary code and data, the following is visible:

Programmed by: Jessie Ragsdale

Jessie’s linkedin page (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessieragsdale/) lists
“Looking Glass Software, Jan 1984 – Jul 1986, Dallas, TX” and “Wrote educational game software”. So I think this definitively proves Dynamix had nothing to do with Creative Contraptions.

- Jimmy Maher

June 9, 2018 at 9:20 pm

Cool. Thanks!

- stepped pyramids

June 9, 2018 at 8:42 pm

Could you expand on those striking similarities? The Incredible Machine has always struck me as a pretty straightforward implementation of the concept “a game where you make Rube Goldberg machines”, and I don’t have much trouble seeing how two different teams working on that concept would produce very similar products.

I haven’t played Creative Contraptions myself, but from looking at screenshots it doesn’t look like it has any kind of physics element — it looks like you fill in missing parts of a pre-designed puzzle, and the game lets you know if you’re right or not. That would seem to make it more of a logic puzzler than a physics puzzler like TIM, and that’s a fundamental difference. A huge part of the enjoyment (and sometimes frustration) of TIM is the catastrophic ways a machine can fail, or the providential ways that an unintended solution can actually work.

As far as the visual similarities go, everything I’m seeing that’s common between the two — ropes, pulleys, buckets, animals, sports balls, gloves on springs, conveyor belts — is also present in Goldberg’s “inventions”. However, there’s one major difference between the two that is interesting. The Creative Contraptions devices appear to generally include a person you have to wake up, feed, etc. That’s a conceit borrowed directly from Goldberg, where all of the “inventions” were comically overwrought ways to solve very minor problems. That’s not a concept that’s really present in TIM, which just says “here’s a bunch of pieces, here’s a physics simulation, here’s a victory condition, go nuts”.

So unless I’m missing something, the games differ in some pretty fundamental ways, and the ways in which they’re similar are derived from a well-known common influence. It seems entirely plausible that the later game was created without any knowledge of the earlier. I’m curious to know what you’re seeing that convinces you that it’s “almost impossible”.

- Jimmy Maher

June 9, 2018 at 9:05 pm

Well, I’m not familiar with the Rube Goldberg source material other than by reputation, so it’s possible many of the similarities could indeed be derived from there. That said, some of the parts are *really* similar. For instance, both games have a hamster who starts running in his wheel when something makes contact with him, a seesaw, a cannon, a spring-loaded punching hand, a bucket on the end of a rope, a conveyor belt, etc. It all seems to stretch the boundaries of the proverbial great minds thinking alike. Again, though, if these pieces were present in Rube Goldberg, that’s certainly a potential explanation. Is there some source you can recommend showing a lot of Rube Goldberg machines? I’d be a very interested to make a comparison. If the parts which show up in both Creative Contraptions and The Incredible Machine also show up there, I’d be happy to say that they could be two completely independent creations. If not… well, I’d have to stand by my “almost impossible.”

You’re correct that physics aren’t simulated to anywhere near the same extent in Creative Contraptions. Nor are the machines themselves anywhere near as complex; all of them revolve entirely around a single pinball which drops onto the screen at the beginning. On the other hand, it does have a free-form mode, so it’s not purely a matter of hard-coded interactions.

- stepped pyramids

June 9, 2018 at 9:51 pm

I haven’t found a hamster in a wheel yet, but animals being provoked and powering machines with their movement is a very common element of Goldberg’s cartoons. Luckily, the estate has a website with a pretty comprehensive archive.

Here’s a squirrel in a wheel: https://www.rubegoldberg.com/artwork/painless-tooth-extraction/
And again: https://www.rubegoldberg.com/artwork/a-simple-way-to-locate-your-rubbers-on-a-rainy-day/

The free-form mode definitely sounds more similar. But overall I think pretty much every element of TIM can be explained as “Lemmings, except it’s a Rube Goldberg machine”; considering Creative Contraptions as a possible influence doesn’t really fill in any gaps or solve any mysteries.

For what it’s worth, I think the current phrasing in the footnote is much more defensible than the previous inserted paragraph. But I think you’ll find a lot of those striking similarities in the Goldberg cartoons, too. I’m happy to have learned about Creative Contraptions, though, and I think it definitely deserves to be mentioned in this piece.

- Gnoman

June 10, 2018 at 1:14 am

http://whoisrubegoldberg.com/image-gallery-licensing/ has a pretty extensive collection of Goldberg’s work.

The extending boxing glove appears in “Automatic Sheet Music Turner”, a basket on a string (plus a seesaw) appears in “Simple Device for Cutting Your Own Hair”, and conceptual similarities to the hamster wheel show up often. I suspect that stepped pyramids is correct, and the similarities are just “same source material.”

- Jimmy Maher

June 10, 2018 at 8:26 am

Fair enough. I think we’ll leave it as things stand with the footnoted attribution.

- Lisa H.

June 8, 2018 at 9:52 pm

There’s PC speaker music that “borders on delightful”? I call shenanigans.

- Jim Leonard

June 9, 2018 at 7:54 pm

Listen for yourself: https://youtu.be/TJrJRp3rFM4?t=10s
For 1985, you could hear a lot worse.

- Lisa H.

June 9, 2018 at 9:02 pm

Not a fan of the sounds around 0:20, but I suppose you’re right. (I was half hoping you were just going to Rickroll me ;) )

- Kevin Ryan

February 25, 2019 at 6:29 pm

Just saw this and, yeah, I never heard of the Creative Contraptions game. Moby Games shows it came out in 85 so that would have been 6 years before I started designing TIM. Jeff presented the concept to me, but he didn’t do the design except for feedback as dev went along. Lemmings did influence the design as far as gameplay progression went and also one part. The little guy Mel, is “Lem” spelled backward.

The first thing I did was go to the University of Oregon library and check out a bunch of Rube Goldberg books to get a better sense of his work. It wasn’t straightforward or obvious how to turn those sorts of cartoons into a puzzle like game. I remember puzzling over it for quite a while before thinking that maybe a physics simulation would work. And then adding in characters like the mouse, cat, etc to give the game personality. I should scan in my initial design sometime.

- Doug Orleans

June 8, 2018 at 8:13 pm

http://grammarist.com/spelling/chalk-up-vs-chock/

- Jimmy Maher

June 8, 2018 at 9:29 pm

Thanks!

- Peter Sovietov

June 8, 2018 at 9:00 pm

What a great article! By the way, Deflektor (1987) also has some similarity with TIM. Another source of inspiration?

- hcs

June 9, 2018 at 12:26 am

The Even More Incredible Machine is a favorite from my youth, it’s been the game I’ve tried most to emulate (unsuccessfully so far) in my own design efforts. Interesting to finally have some of the backstory, and the above comment about Creative Contraptions is an interesting footnote.

- Pete

June 9, 2018 at 2:41 am

I loved playing TIM as a kid! There’s a modern version available named “Contraption Maker” that my son spends hours playing, and it’s currently getting updates.

- Lhexa

June 10, 2018 at 1:20 am

I am very glad to see you do a close reading of one of the first joys of my childhood. I hope that you will take the following admonitions to be delivered in good faith.

You desperately need a good editor. The insights of your articles are couched within bad writing habits that would make even an academic cringe. What’s worse, your bad writing habits have already turned into bad intellectual habits, as witnessed by your abject failure in reading Civilization. I do not offer myself for the job, since I do scientific editing. However, now that the freelance economy has devastated the field of professional editing, good editors may be hired for cheap. With your privilege, you may easily find one.

- Joe Pranevich

June 10, 2018 at 5:22 am

I have been a reader on this blog for some time, and I simply do not get all of the criticisms on Mr. Maher’s style. It seems every last post of his has someone springing forward with some typo or correction to make.

Give the guy some peace! He’s doing a fantastic service for free. Let him get an editor when he puts this all in book form someday. Until then, it’s a great blog; let’s not criticize him too much when it is not perfect by some small measure.

- Jacen

June 10, 2018 at 8:00 am

Oh hey that’s me! Lol.

I think a good editor has three jobs; typo correction (and grammar butchering prevention), factual errors spotting, and reining in the writer’s worst impulses without changing their style or intent.

You can look at editing as a labor of love. This blog is something good and important, and I feel like the corrections improve it.

Editing isn’t about nitpicking or tearing down a work, it is about improving and honing something worthwhile.

After all, if we are finding typos and statements that convey an unintended meaning, we are certinally devoting time and energy to reading the texts. We are getting something from it that keeps bringing us back, over years and hundreds of articles. So, to me, light editing really is a service that I can provide to help, not to bother or criticize.

- Jimmy Maher

June 10, 2018 at 8:39 am

Absolutely. I won’t deny that I sigh sometimes when I publish a new article I’m proud of only to be hit with a pile of nitpicky corrections. But of course those nitpicks are important. I make every article as good as I can before I hit “publish,” but I can only do so much. You and other readers like you make everything I write here better. Every writer wants to be read, and I’m honored that so many read me so closely. Whether we’re talking typos or confusing sentences, errors of fact or leaps of logic that aren’t quite tenable, please keep doing what you do. I can’t guarantee I’ll agree with every point raised, but I can promise to think hard about every one that’s offered in good faith.

- Lhexa

June 10, 2018 at 11:08 am

That you sigh indicates that you take your readers for granted.

Seriously, if you can make international trips to visit Wonders of the World, you can spare $50-$100 per article for a good freelance editor. -_-

- Lhexa

June 10, 2018 at 11:07 am

Hi Jacen. That’s a good summary of the roles of an editor. Mr. Maher has helpful readers to provide the first job, but very few people qualified enough to do the second job, and the third requires professional help (unless you’re willing to be exploitative).

- Lhexa

June 10, 2018 at 11:04 am

Two things. First, when people point out typos, they’re being helpful. Second, he’s no longer doing it for free.

- Tom

June 14, 2018 at 2:10 am

Just out of curiosity, what was Mr. Maher’s “abject failure in reading Civilization“?

- Lhexa

June 16, 2018 at 1:07 am

Hi Tom. Sorry, I did not see your reply until now. Mr. Maher’s abject failure is turning a close reading of an influential video game into a set of bad essays about his philosophy of history… a philosophy which, it turns out, has nothing to do with original texts and everything to do with two or three books he read at a formative time in his life. For just a small sample of my aggravations during that reading (I even asked for Mr. Maher to delete one comment which was just too mean), check out entries seven through nine.

- Tom

June 16, 2018 at 5:26 am

I read them, and found them to be…insufficient evidence to claim that Mr. Maher failed abjectly. Civilization is a game about history and how it works–of course his views about how history works are going to influence how he thinks the game handled its subject matter. I say this as someone who’s been somewhat critical of said views and how he arrived at them, by the way.
As to the second half, I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “original texts,” unless your contention is that one is not supposed to have views on history unless one has a doctoral degree in the subject or has read the equivalent amount of books.

- Lhexa

June 17, 2018 at 6:03 am

Abjection is like that.

- guy s

June 29, 2018 at 4:13 am

Troll

- Mike Taylor

November 19, 2018 at 10:53 am

I am very glad to see your comment on one of my favourite blogs. I hope that you will take the following admonitions to be delivered in good faith.

You desperately need a good editor. The insights of your comments are couched within bad writing habits that would make even an academic cringe. What’s worse, your bad writing habits have already turned into bad intellectual habits, as witnessed by your abject failure in reading Jimmy’s articles about Civilization. I do not offer myself for the job, since I do scientific writing. However, now that the freelance economy has devastated the field of professional editing, good editors may be hired for cheap. With your privilege, you may easily go take a running jump.

- jemisa

June 10, 2018 at 4:56 am

Since you mention Angry Birds, Rovio bought a game called “Casey’s Contraptions” (that looks very inspired by TIM) and re-skinned it as “Amazing Alex”.
Unfortunately, the game was not really a success and was removed from the App Store.

Another Rovio game, “Bad piggies” , is also close to TIM in spirit.

- Tony

June 15, 2018 at 5:02 pm

I still have a working copy of The Incredible Machine running on my Windows 10 PC. My kids love playing it.

- Chris Floyd

July 23, 2018 at 6:40 am

Sorry I’m just now getting to reading and responding to this article. The Incredible Machine (the whole series) is, in my mind, an all-time classic and a real desert-island game. I’m writing to call attention to something that didn’t get talked about in the article–maybe because it really shines in the later incarnations: The music.

The soundtracks for the IM games featured tracks in many genres of music, played in quite high fidelity for their time, from what I recall. The variety was refreshing at the time, since most games played music that fit more narrow tone. I think Return of the Incredible Machine: Contraptions had an especially solid set of songs, including a country/bluegrass song with some goofy in-character commentary. “Music to make pork sausage by!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsfHiFTxDyQ&list=RDfhcMRtk3rYc&index=4

It looks like the composer for almost every Dynamix game was Christopher Stevens. Hats off to Mr. Stevens!

Another World
June 15, 2018

The French creative aesthetic has always been a bit different from that of English-speaking nations. In their paintings, films, even furniture, the French often discard the stodgy literalism that is so characteristic of Anglo art in favor of something more attenuated, where impression becomes more important than objective reality. A French art film doesn’t come off as a complete non sequitur to Anglo eyes in the way that, say, a Bollywood or Egyptian production can. Yet the effect it creates is in its way much more disorienting: it seems on the surface to be something recognizable and predictable, but suddenly zigs where we expect it to zag. In particular, it may show disconcertingly little interest in the logic of plot, that central concern of Anglo film. What affects what and why is of far less interest to a filmmaker like, say, François Truffaut than the emotional affect of the whole.

Crude though such stereotypes may be, when the French discovered computer games they did nothing to disprove them. For a long time, saying a game was French was a shorthand way for an Anglo to say that it was, well, kind of weird, off-kilter in a way that made it hard to judge whether the game or the player was at fault. Vintage French games weren’t always the most polished or balanced of designs, yet they must still be lauded today for their willingness to paint in emotional colors more variegated than the trite primary ones of fight or flight, laugh or cry. Such was certainly the case with Éric Chahi’s Another World.

France blazed its own trail through the earliest years of the digital revolution. Most people there caught their first glimpse of the digital future not through a home computer but through a remarkable online service called Minitel, a network of dumb terminals that was operated by the French postal and telephone service. Millions of people installed one of the free terminals in their home, making Minitel the most widely used online service in the world during the 1980s, dwarfing even the likes of CompuServe in the United States. Those in France who craved the capabilities of a full-fledged computer, meanwhile, largely rejected the Sinclair Spectrums and Commodore 64s that were sweeping the rest of Europe in favor of less universal lines like the Amstrad CPC and the Oric-1. Apple as well, all but unheard of across most of Europe, established an early beachhead in France, thanks to the efforts of a hard-charging and very Gallic general manager named Jean-Louis Gassée, who would later play a major role in shepherding the Macintosh to popularity in the United States.

In the second half of the 1980s, French hardware did begin to converge, albeit slowly, with that in use in the rest of Europe. The Commodore Amiga and Atari ST, the leading gaming computers in Europe as a whole, were embraced to at least some extent in France as well. By 1992, 250,000 Amigas were in French homes. This figure might not have compared very well to the 2.5 million of them in Britain and Germany by that point, but it was more than enough to fuel a thriving little Amiga game-development community that was already several years old. “Our games didn’t have the excellent gameplay of original English-language games,” remembers French game designer Philippe Ulrich, “but their aesthetics were superior, which spawned the term ‘The French Touch’ — later reused by musicians such as Daft Punk and Air.”

Many Amiga and ST owners had been introduced to the indelibly French perspective on games as early as 1988. That was the year of Captain Blood, which cast the player in the role of a clone doomed to die unless he could pool his vital essences with those of five other clones scattered across the galaxy — an existential quest for identity to replace the conquer-the-galaxy themes of most science-fiction games. If that alone wasn’t weird enough, the gameplay consisted mostly of talking to aliens using a strange constructed language of hieroglyphs devised by the game’s developers.

Such avoidance of in-game text, whether done as a practical method of easing the problems of localization or just out of the long-established French ambivalence toward translation from their mother tongue, would become a hallmark of the games that followed, as would a willingness to tackle subject matter that no one else would touch. The French didn’t so much reject traditional videogame themes and genres as filter them through their own sensibilities. Often, this meant reflecting American culture back upon itself in ways that could be both unsettling and illuminating. North & South, for instance, turned the Civil War, that greatest tragedy of American history, into a manic slapstick satire. For any American kid raised on a diet of exceptionalism and solemn patriotism, this was deeply, deeply strange stuff.

The creator of Another World, perhaps the ultimate example of the French Touch in games, was, as all of us must be, a product of his environment. Éric Chahi had turned ten the year that Star Wars dropped, marking the emergence of a transnational culture of blockbuster media, and he was no more immune to its charms than were other little boys all over the world. Yet he viewed that very American film through a very French lens. He liked the rhythm and the look of the thing — the way the camera panned across an endless vista of peaceful space down into a scene of battle at the beginning; the riff on Triumph of the Will that is the medal ceremony at the end — much more than he cared about the plot. His most famous work would evince this same rather non-Anglo sense of aesthetic priorities, playing with the trappings of American sci-fi pop culture but skewing them in a distinctly French way.

But first, there would be other games. From the moment Chahi discovered computers several years after Star Wars, he was smitten. “During school holidays, I didn’t see much of the sun,” he says. “Programming quickly became an obsession, and I spent around seventeen hours a day in front of a computer screen.” The nascent French games industry may have been rather insular, but that just made it if anything even more wide-open for a young man like himself than were those of other countries. Chahi was soon seeing the games he wrote — from platformers to text adventures — published on France’s oddball collection of viable 8-bit platforms. His trump card as a developer was a second talent that set him apart from the other hotshot bedroom coders: he was also a superb artist, whether working in pixels or in more traditional materials. Although none of his quickie 8-bit games became big hits, his industry connections did bring him to the attention of a new company called Delphine Software in 1988.

Delphine Software was about as stereotypically French a development house as can be imagined. It was a spinoff of Delphine Records, whose cash cow was the bizarrely popular easy-listening pianist Richard Clayderman, a sort of modern-day European Liberace who would come to sell 150 million records by 2006. Paul de Senneville, the owner of Delphine Records, was himself a composer and musician. Artist that he was, he gave his new software arm virtually complete freedom to make whatever games they felt like making. Their Paris offices looked like a hip recording studio; Chahi remembers “red carpet at the entrance, gold discs everywhere, and many eccentric contemporary art pieces.”

Future Wars

He had been hired by Delphine on the basis of his artistic rather than his programming talent, to illustrate a point-and-click adventure game with the grandiose title of Les Voyageurs du Temps: La Menace (“The Time Travelers: The Menace”), later to be released in English under the punchier name of Future Wars. Inspired by the Sierra graphic adventures of the time, it was nevertheless all French: absolutely beautiful to look at — Chahi’s illustrations were nothing short of mouth-watering — but more problematic to play, with a weird interface, weirder plot, and puzzles that were weirdest of all. As such, it stands today as a template for another decade and change of similarly baffling French graphic adventures to come, from companies like Coktel Vision as well as Delphine themselves.

But the important thing from Chahi’s perspective was that the game became a hit all across Europe upon its release in mid-1989, entirely on the basis of his stunning work as its illustrator. He had finally broken through. Yet anyone who expected him to capitalize on that breakthrough in the usual way, by settling into a nice, steady career as Delphine’s illustrator in residence, didn’t understand his artist’s temperament. He decided he wanted to make a big, ambitious game of his own all by himself — a true auteur’s statement. “I felt that I had something very personal to communicate,” he says, “and in order to bring my vision to others I had to develop the title on my own.” Like Marcel Proust holed up in his famous cork-lined Paris apartment, scribbling frantically away on In Search of Lost Time, Chahi would spend the next two years in his parents’ basement, working sixteen, seventeen, eighteen hours per day on Another World. He began with just two fixed ideas: he wanted to make a “cinematic” science-fiction game, and he wanted to do it using polygonal graphics.

Articles like this one throw around terms like “polygonal graphics” an awful lot, and their meanings may not always be clear to everyday readers. So, let’s begin by asking what separated the type of graphics Chahi now proposed to make from those he had been making before.

The pictures that Chahi had created for Future Wars were what is often referred to as pixel graphics. To make them, the artist loads a paint program, such as the Amiga’s beloved Deluxe Paint, and manipulates the actual onscreen pixels to create a background scene. Animation is accomplished using sprites: additional, smaller pictures that are overlaid onto the background scene and moved around as needed. On many computers of the 1980s, including the Amiga on which Chahi was working, sprites were implemented in hardware for efficiency’s sake. On other computers, such as the IBM PC and the Atari ST, they had to be conjured up, rather less efficiently, in software. Either way, though, the basic concept is the same.

The artist who works with polygonal graphics, on the other hand, doesn’t directly manipulate onscreen pixels. Instead she defines her “pictures” mathematically. She builds scenes out of geometric polygons of three sides or more, defined as three or more connected points, or sets of X, Y, and Z coordinates in abstract space. At run time, the computer renders all this data into an image on the monitor screen, mapping it onto physical pixels from the perspective of a “camera” that’s anchored at some point in space and pointed in a defined direction. Give a system like this one enough polygons to render, and it can create scenes of amazing complexity.

Still, it does seem like a roundabout way of approaching things, doesn’t it? Why, you may be wondering, would anyone choose to use polygonal graphics instead of just painting scenes with a conventional paint program? Well, the potential benefits are actually enormous. Polygonal graphics are a far more flexible, dynamic form of computer graphics. Whereas in the case of a pixel-art background you’re stuck with the perspective and distance the artist chose to illustrate, you can view a polygonal scene in all sorts of different ways simply by telling the computer where in space the “camera” is hanging. A polygonal scene, in other words, is more like a virtual space than a conventional illustration — a space you can move through, and that can in turn move around you, just by changing a few numbers. And it has the additional advantage that, being defined only as a collection of anchoring points for the polygons that make it up rather than needing to explicitly describe the color of every single pixel, it usually takes up much less disk space as well.

With that knowledge to hand, you might be tempted to reverse the question of the previous paragraph, and ask why anyone wouldn’t want to use polygonal graphics. In fact, polygonal graphics of one form or another had been in use on computers since the 1960s, and were hardly unheard of in the games industry of the 1980s. They were most commonly found in vehicular simulators like subLOGIC’s Flight Simulator, which needed to provide a constantly changing out-the-cockpit view of their worlds. More famously in Europe, Elite, one of the biggest games of the decade, also built its intense space battles out of polygons.

The fact is, though, that polygonal graphics have some significant disadvantages to go along with their advantages, and these were magnified by the limited hardware of the era. Rendering a scene out of polygons was mathematically intensive in comparison to the pixel-graphic-backgrounds-and-sprites approach, pushing an 8-bit or even 16-bit CPU (like the Motorola 68000 in the Amiga) hard. It was for this reason that early versions of Flight Simulator and Elite and many other polygonal games rendered their worlds only as wire-frame graphics; there just wasn’t enough horsepower to draw in solid surfaces and still maintain a decent frame rate.

And there were other drawbacks. The individual polygons from which scenes were formed were all flat surfaces; there was no concept of smooth curvature in the mathematics that underlay them.[1] But the natural world, of course, is made up of almost nothing but curves. The only way to compensate for this disparity was to use many small polygons, packed so closely together that their flat surfaces took on the appearance of curvature to the eye. Yet increasing the polygon count in this way increased the burden of rendering it all on the poor overtaxed CPUs of the day — a burden that quickly became untenable. In practice, then, polygonal graphics took on a distinctive angular, artificial appearance, whose sense of artificiality was only enhanced by the uniform blotches of color in which they were drawn.[2]

These illustrations show how an object can be made to appear rounded by making it out of a sufficient number of flat polygons. The problem is that each additional polygon which must be rendered taxes the processor that much more.

For all these reasons, polygonal graphics were mostly confined to the sort of first-person-perspective games, like those aforementioned vehicular simulators and some British action-adventures, which couldn’t avoid using them. But Chahi would buck the trend by using them for his own third-person-perspective game. Their unique affordances and limitations would stamp Another World just as much as its creator’s own personality, giving the game’s environments the haunting, angular vagueness of a dream landscape. The effect is further enhanced by Chahi’s use of a muted, almost pastel palette of just 16 colors and an evocative, minimalist score by Jean-François Freitas — the only part of the game that wasn’t created by Chahi himself. Although you’re constantly threatened with death — and, indeed, will die over and over in the course of puzzling your way through the game — it all operates on the level of impression rather than reality.

According to some theories of visual art, the line between merely duplicating reality and conveying impressions of reality is the one that separates the draftsman from the artist. If so, Another World’s visuals betray an aesthetic sophistication rarely seen in computer games of its era. While other games strained to portray violence with ever more realism, Another World went another way entirely, creating an affect that’s difficult to put into words — a quality which is itself another telltale sign of Art. Chahi:

Polygon techniques are great for animation, but the price you pay is the lack of detail. Because I couldn’t include much detail, I decided to work with the player’s imagination, creating suggestive content instead of being highly descriptive. That’s why, for example, the beast in the first scene is impressive even if it is only a big black shape. The visual style of Another World is really descended from the black-and-white comic-book style, where shape and volume are suggested in a very subtle way. By doing Another World, I learned a lot about suggestion. I learned that the medium is the player’s own imagination.

To make his suggestive rather than realistic graphics, Chahi spent much time first making tools, beginning with an editor written in a variant of BASIC. The editor’s output was then rendered in the game in assembly language for the sake of speed, with the logic of it all controlled using a custom script language of Chahi’s own devising. This approach would prove a godsend when it came time to port the game to platforms other than the Amiga; a would-be porter merely had to recreate the rendering engine on a new platform, making it capable of interpreting Chahi’s original polygonal-graphics data and scripts. Thus Another World was, in addition to being a game, actually a new cross-platform game engine as well, albeit one that would only be used for a single title.

Some of the graphics had their point of origin in the real world, having been captured using a long-established animation technique known as rotoscoping: tracing the outlines, frame by frame, of real people or objects filmed in motion, to form the basis of their animated equivalents. Regular readers of this blog may recall that Jordan Mechner used the same technique as far back as 1983 to create the characters in his cinematic karate game Karateka. Yet the differences between the two young developers’ approaches to the technique says much about the march of technology between 1983 and 1989.

Mechner shot his source footage on real film, then used a mechanical Moviola editing machine, a staple of conventional filmmakers for decades, to isolate and make prints of every third frame of the footage. He then traced these prints into his Apple II using an early drawing pad called a VersaWriter.

Chahi’s Amiga allowed a different approach. It had been developed during the brief heyday of laser-disc games in arcades. These often worked by overlaying interactive computer-generated graphics onto static video footage unspooling from the laser disc itself. Wishing to give their new computer the potential to play similar games in the home with the addition of an optional laser-disc player, the designers of the Amiga built into the machine’s graphics chips a way of overlaying the display onto other video; one color of the onscreen palette could be defined as transparent, allowing whatever video lay “below” it to peek through. The imagined laser-disc accessory would never appear due to issues of cost and practicality, but, in a classic example of an unanticipated technological side-effect, this capability combined with the Amiga’s excellent graphics in general made it a wonderful video-production workstation, able to blend digital titles and all sorts of special effects with the analog video sources that still dominated during the era. Indeed, the emerging field of “desktop video” became by far the Amiga’s most sustained and successful niche outside of games.

The same capability now simplified the process of rotoscoping dramatically for Chahi in comparison to what Mechner had been forced to do. He shot video footage of himself on an ordinary camcorder, then played it back on a VCR with single-frame stop capability. To the same television as the VCR was attached his Amiga. Chahi could thus trace the images directly from video into his Amiga, without having to fuss with prints at all.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/rotoscoping.mp4

It wasn’t until months into the development of Another World that a real game, and with it a story of sorts, began to emerge from this primordial soup of graphics technology. Chahi made a lengthy cut scene, rendered, like all of the ones that would follow, using the same graphics engine as the game’s interactive portions for the sake of aesthetic consistency. The entire scene, lasting some two and a half minutes, used just 70 K of disk space thanks to the magic of polygonal graphics. In it, the player’s avatar, a physicist named Lester Cheykin, shows up at his laboratory for a night of research, only to be sucked into his own experiment and literally plunged into another world; he emerges underwater, just a few meters above some vicious plant life eager to make a meal out of him. The player’s first task, then, is to hastily swim to the surface, and the game proper gets underway. The story that follows, such as it is, is one of more desperate escapes from the flora and fauna of this new world, including an intelligent race that don’t like Lester any more than their less intelligent counterparts. Importantly, neither the player nor Lester ever learns precisely where he is — another planet? another dimension? — or why the people that live there — we’ll just call them the “aliens” from now on for simplicity’s sake — want to kill him.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/opening.mp4

True to the spirit of the kid who found the look of Star Wars more interesting than the plot, the game is constructed with a filmmaker’s eye toward aesthetic composition rather than conventional narrative. After the opening cut scene, the whole game contains not one word devoted to dialog, exposition, or anything else until “The End” appears, excepting only grunts and muffled exclamations made in an alien language you can’t understand. All of Chahi’s efforts were poured into the visual set-pieces, which are consistently striking and surprising, often with multiple layers of action.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/battle.mp4

Chahi:

I wanted to create a truly immersive game in a very consistent, living universe with a movie feel. I never wanted to create an interactive movie itself. Instead I wanted to extract the essence of a movie — the rhythm and the drama — and place it into game form. To do this I decided to leave the screen free of the usual information aids like an energy bar, score counter, and other icons. Everything had to be in the universe, with no interruptions getting in the way.

Midway through the game, you encounter a friend, an alien who’s been imprisoned — for reasons that, needless to say, are never explained — by the same group who are out to get you. The two of you join forces, helping one another through the rest of the story. Your bond of friendship is masterfully conveyed without using words, relying on the same impressionistic visuals as everything else. The final scene, where the fellow Chahi came to call “Buddy” gently lifts an exhausted Lester onto the back of a strange winged creature and they fly away together, is one of the more transcendent in videogame history, a beautiful closing grace note that leaves you with a lump in your throat. Note the agonizingly slow pace of the snippet below, contrasted with the frenetic pace of the one above. When Chahi speaks about trying to capture the rhythm of a great movie, this is what he means.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/ending.mp4

For its creator, the ending had another special resonance. When implementing the final scene, two years after retiring into his parents’ basement, Chahi himself felt much like poor exhausted Lester, crawling toward the finish line.

But, you might ask, what has the player spent all of the time between the ominous opening cut scene and the transcendent final one actually doing? In some ways, that’s the least interesting aspect of Another World. The game is at bottom a platforming action-adventure, with a heavy emphasis on the action. Each scene is a challenge to be tackled in two phases: first, you have to figure out what Chahi wants you to do in order to get through its monsters, tricks, and traps; then, you have to execute it all with split-second precision. It’s not particularly easy. The idealized perfect player can make a perfect run through Another World, including watching all of the cut scenes, in half an hour. Imperfect real-world players, on the other hand, can expect to watch Lester die over and over as they slowly blunder their way through the game. At least you’re usually allowed to pick up pretty close to where you left off when Lester dies — because, trust me, he will die, and often.

When we begin to talk of influences and points of comparison for Another World inside the realm of games, one name inevitably leaps to mind first. I already mentioned Jordan Mechner in the context of his own work with rotoscoping, but that’s only the tip of an iceberg of similarities between Another World and his two famous games, Karateka and Prince of Persia. He was another young man with a cinematic eye, more interested in translating the “rhythm and drama” of film to an interactive medium than he was in making “interactive movies” in the sense that his industry at large tended to understand that term. Indeed, Chahi has named Karateka as perhaps the most important ludic influence on Another World, and if anything the parallels between the latter and Prince of Persia are even stronger: both were the virtually single-handed creations of their young auteurs; both largely eschew text in favor of visual storytelling; both clear their screen of score markers and other status indicators in the name of focusing on what’s really important; both are brutally difficult platformers; both can be, because of that brutal difficulty, almost more fun to watch someone else play than they are to play yourself, at least for those of us who aren’t connoisseurs of their try-and-try-again approach to game design.

Still, for all the similarities, nobody is ever likely to mistake Prince of Persia for Another World. Much of the difference must come down to — to engage in yet more crude national stereotyping — the fact that one game is indisputably American, the other very, very French. Mechner, who has vacillated between a career as a game-maker and a filmmaker throughout his life, wrote his movie scripts in the accessible, family-friendly tradition of Steven Spielberg, his favorite director, and brought the same sensibility to his games. But Chahi’s Another World has, as we’ve seen, the sensibility of an art film more so than a blockbuster. The two works together stand as a stark testimony to the way that things which are so superficially similar in art can actually be so dramatically different.

A mentally and physically drained Éric Chahi crawled the final few feet into Delphine’s offices to deliver the finished Another World in late 1991. His final task was to paint the cover art for the box, a last step in the cementing of the game as a deeply personal expression in what was already becoming known as a rather impersonal medium. It was released in Europe before the end of the year, whereupon it became a major, immediate hit for reasons that, truth be told, probably had little to do with its more emotionally resonant qualities: in a market that thrived on novelty, it looked like absolutely nothing else. That alone was enough to drive sales, but in time at least some of the young videogame freaks who purchased it found in it something they’d never bargained for: the ineffable magic of a close encounter with real Art. Memories of those feelings continue to make it a perennial today whenever people of a certain age draw up lists of their favorite games.

Delphine had an established relationship with Interplay as their American publisher. The latter were certainly intrigued by Chahi’s creation, but seemed a little nonplussed by its odd texture. They thus lobbied him for permission to replace its evocative silences, which were only occasionally broken up by Jean-François Freitas’s haunting score, with a more conventional thumping videogame soundtrack. Chahi was decidedly opposed, to the extent of sending Interplay’s offices an “infinite fax” repeating the same sentence again and again: “Keep the original music!” Thankfully, they finally agreed to do so, although conflicts with a long-running daytime soap opera which was also known as Another World did force them to change the name of the game in the United States to the more gung-ho-sounding Out of This World. But on the positive side, they put the game through the rigorous testing process the air-fairy artistes at Delphine couldn’t be bothered with, forcing Chahi to fix hundreds of major and minor bugs and unquestionably turning it into a far tighter, more polished experience.

I remember Out of this World’s 1992 arrival in the United States with unusual vividness. I was still an Amiga loyalist at the time, even as the platform’s star was all too obviously fading in my country. It will always remain imprinted on my memory as the last “showpiece” Amiga game I encountered, the last time I wanted to call others into the room and tell them to “look at this!” — the last of a long line of such showpieces that had begun with Defender of the Crown back in 1986. For me, then, it marked the end of an era in my life. Shortly thereafter, my once-beloved old Amiga got unceremoniously dumped into the closet, and I didn’t have much to do with computers at all for the next two or three years.

But Interplay, of course, wasn’t thinking of endings when the Amiga version of Out of this World was greeted with warm reviews in the few American magazines still covering Amiga games. Computer Gaming World called the now-iconic introductory cut scene “one of the most imaginative pieces of non-interactive storytelling ever associated with a computer game” — a description which might almost, come to think of it, be applied to the game as a whole, depending on how broad your definition of “interactive storytelling” is willing to be. Reviewers did note that the game was awfully short, however, prompting Interplay to cajole the exhausted Chahi into making one more scene for the much-anticipated MS-DOS port. This he duly did, diluting the concentrated experience that was the original version only moderately in the process.

The game was ported to many more platforms in the years that followed, including to consoles like the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, eventually even to iOS and Android in the form of a “20th Anniversary Edition.” Chahi estimates that it sold some 1 million copies in all during the 1990s alone. He made the mistake of authorizing Interplay to make a sequel called Heart of the Alien for the Sega CD game console in 1994, albeit with the typically artsy stipulation that it must be told from the point of view of Buddy. The results were so underwhelming that he regrets the decision to this day, and has resisted all further calls to make or authorize sequels. Instead he’s worked on other games over the years, but only intermittently, mixing his work in games with a range of other pursuits such as volcanology, photography, and painting. His ludography remains tiny — another trait, come to think of it, that he shares with Jordan Mechner — and he is still best known by far for Another World, which is perhaps just as well; it’s still his own personal favorite of his games. It remains today a touchstone for a certain school of indie game developers in particular, who continue to find inspiration in its artsy, affective simplicity.

In fact, Another World raises some interesting questions about the very nature of games. Is it possible for a game that’s actually not all that great at all in terms of mechanics and interactivity to nevertheless be a proverbial great game in some more holistic sense? The brilliant strategy-game designer Sid Meier has famously called a good game “a series of interesting decisions.” Another World resoundingly fails to meet this standard of ludic goodness. In it, you the player have virtually no real decisions to make at all; your task is rather to figure out the decisions which Éric Chahi has already made for Lester, and thereby to advance him to the next scene. Of course, the Sid Meier definition of gaming goodness can be used to criticize plenty of other games — even other entire game genres. Certainly most adventure games as well are largely exercises in figuring out the puzzle solutions the author has already set in place. Yet even they generally offer a modicum of flexibility, a certain scope for exploration in, if nothing else, the order in which you approach the puzzles. Another World, on the other hand, allows little more scope for exploration or improvisation than the famously straitjacketed Dragon’s Lair — which is, as it happens, another game Chahi has listed as an inspiration. Winning Dragon’s Lair entails nothing more nor less than making just the right pre-determined motions with the controller at just the right points in the course of watching a static video clip. In Another World, Lester is at least visibly responsive to your commands, but, again, anything but the exactly right commands, executed with perfect precision, just gets him killed and sends you back to the last checkpoint to try again.

So, for all that it’s lovely and moving to look at, does Another World really have any right to be a game at all? Might it not work better as an animated short? Or, to frame the question more positively, what is it about the interactivity of Another World that actually adds to the audiovisual experience? Éric Chahi, for his part, makes a case for his game using a very different criterion from that of Meier’s “interesting decisions”:

It’s true that Another World is difficult. When I played it a year ago, I discovered how frustrating it can be sometimes — and breathtaking at the same time. The trial-and-error doesn’t disturb me, though. Another World is a game of survival on a hostile world, and it really is about life and death. Death doesn’t mean the end of the game, but it is a part of the exploration, a part of the experience. That’s why the death sequences are so diversified. To solve many puzzles, I recognize that you have to die at least once, and this certainly isn’t the philosophy of today’s game design. It is a controversial point in Another World’s design because it truly serves the emotional side of things and the player’s attachment to the characters, but it sometimes has a detrimental effect on the gameplay. Because of this, Another World must be considered first as an intense emotional experience.

Personally, I’m skeptical of whether deliberately frustrating the player, even in the name of artistic affect, is ever a good design strategy, and I must confess that I remain in the camp of players who would rather watch Another World than try to struggle through it on their own. Yet there’s no question that Éric Chahi’s best-remembered game does indeed deserve to be remembered for its rare aesthetic sophistication, and for stimulating emotional responses that go way beyond the typical action-game palette of anger and fear. While there is certainly room for “interesting decisions” in games — and perhaps a few of them might not have gone amiss in Another World itself — games ought to be able to make us feel as well. This lesson of Another World is one every game designer can stand to profit from.

(Sources: the book Principles of Three-Dimension Animation: Modeling, Rendering, and Animating with 3D Computer Graphics by Michael O’Rourke; Computer Gaming World of August 1992; Game Developer of November 2011; Questbusters of June/July 1992; The One of October 1991 and October 1992; Zero of November 1991; Retro Gamer 24 and 158; Amiga Format 1992 annual; bonus materials included with the 20th Anniversary edition of Another World; an interview with Éric Chahi conducted for the film From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years; Chahi’s postmorten talk about the game at the 2011 Game Developers Conference; “How ‘French Touch’ Gave Early Videogames Art, Brains” from Wired; “The Eccentricities of Eric Chahi” from Eurogamer. The cut-scene and gameplay footage in the article is taken from a World of Longplays YouTube video.

Another World is available for purchase on GOG.com in a 20th Anniversary Edition with lots of bonus content.)

1. More modern polygonal-graphics implementations do make use of something called splines to allow for curvature, but these weren’t practical to implement using 1980s and early 1990s computers. ↩

2. Again, the state of the art in modern polygonal graphics is much different today in this area than it was in Another World’s time. Today textures are mapped on polygonal surfaces to create a more realistic appearance, and scenes are illuminated by light sources that produce realistic shadings and shadows across the whole. But all of this was hopelessly far beyond what Chahi or anyone else of Another World’s era could hope to implement in a game which needed to be interactive and to run at a reasonable speed. ↩

Comments
52 Responses

- Casey Nordell

June 15, 2018 at 5:41 pm

Thank you so much for writing about this game, Jimmy.

- Infinitron

June 15, 2018 at 6:25 pm

One thing that would be interesting to explore is to what degree Delphine’s Flashback was truly influenced by Another World. There’s a lot of myths about this.

- Helm

June 20, 2018 at 4:03 pm

I’ve thought about this a lot, also. It’s evident that Flashback shares more DNA with Prince of Persia, an american game, in terms of scope, ambition and intended gameplay. But its sci-fi aesthetic seems superficially related to that of Another World.

The themes of Flashback are a pastiche of 80s sci-fi and cyberpunk films, from Blade Runner to the Running Man, to Total Recall, etc. American media. The game started out as a Godfather licensed game, somehow. The story goes that they went ahead and made an engine demo and didn’t follow the Godfather’s storyline enough and U.S. Gold (I think it was the money in this situation) was so excited for their tech that they told them ‘just make this, whatever it is, we’ll fund it’. A Godfather game did come out in 1991 after all, published by U.S. Gold. You can kind of see where perhaps Flashback and this game started out from a similar base?

https://youtu.be/sRO_FggTjc8

I think Flashback isn’t really that Out of this World influenced, ultimately. It’s a French game and it has French idiosyncrasies but I think we shouldn’t overstate its Frenchiness, it’s a very american product. Perhaps it seems to me to be so also because I’m Greek. Perhaps it’s the Moebius / Jean Giraud concept art that really helps Flashback elevate its aesthetics from the comparably plebeian sub-sci-fi-b-movie storytelling in the game to something with more enduring style.

Out of this World has a much subtler touch with different priorities, as this amazing article makes the case for. Flashback is more blunt in its ambitions, more realistic but at the same time more committed to its gameplay conventions as abstract structure that can prop up different themes and levels with the same play. Out of this World just changes its gameplay for every set-piece, it doesn’t care about being a narrow game with a deep challenge that you’ll get so much better at just by playing it, it’s very expansive, broad, expressive, and therefore its essence-as-gameplay is more inchoate. Flashback is a very nitty-gritty video-ass video-game compared. Prince of Persia has its Jungian ego/shadow stuff and it’s so amazingly timed, but the meat of the game in the middle is pure puzzle-platforming and action. These two games share much more than Flashback and Another World.

A good way to understand Prince / Another World / Flashback is to consider how you take steps in these games. Compared between each other, and all of them compared to Mario’s physics which is the dominant paradigm for this sort of game to that point.

In Prince of Persia, you move ‘loosely’ upon a gridded, tiled still screen. It is only when you jump, or try to grab a vertical ledge, or are trying to interact with something on a tile in any case that the engine nudges you on centre of the tile you are near for the verb to go through. It seriously autocorrects you. A lot. Anyone that has played PoP gets a sense of this. But because the engine takes input at 15fps increments that means its going to eat a lot of inputs you pressed *now* but intended for when you’re over *the next tile*. The fuzzy granularity of its hybrid platforming solution means that until you get Prince of Persia Sixth Sense you will fall in a lot of pits or jump up to grab ledges that are too far away. It’s not a good feeling and that’s why a lot of people don’t enjoy playing PoP1 and 2.

(This problem could be solved if the game ran at a very high framerate and accepted overriding input)

So, Prince: a combination of per-pixel free platform game movement like Mario but no, actually, you’re on a grid and you either were on the right tile when you pressed up to do that precarious run-jump-ledge-grab, or you weren’t, but the game is going to help you where it can!

Another World: no grid at all. Not for the art, as its not tilesets, not for the character. He has very little inertia, but he does slide on a pixel level, freely. The game only has 2-3 challenging jumps and they’re resolved without checking ‘are you on the very last tile of this platform?’ but instead just by regular timing. The jump’s trajectory is fixed, but the game is not gridded.

Flashback: Nothing like Another World, it instead takes the idea of Prince of Persia and disambiguates this in a way that’s very special to what that game is. I am sure at some point in the offices of Delphine a conversation was had about the autocorrection in PoP and that it feels bad. The solution they game up was to not have a hybrid movement system at all. In a way Flashback is a more ‘grrr I am a hardcore videogame’ kind of thing. It says ‘no, we are on grid. Everything is on grid. Every tile is on a grid and the character is on a grid for every action. When you press a button, you will move exactly one tile over.’ This is very core to the formalist ambitions of Flashback because then the different levels and their gimmicks are just different tilesets, all operating under the exact same puzzle-platformer tile-snapped engine. You put in the same inputs for the same verbs exactly throughout Flashback.

Compare to a scene in Another World where you are caught by a native guard (you’re really the alien) and as you’re held by the collar, mid-air you’re supposed to input ‘kick guard in the nuts’ then run towards your gun on the ground, roll to pick it up, turn mid-roll towards the guard and zap him.

None of this fever dream of a sequence is supported by the gameplay of Another World up to that point. And Chahi is crazy and talented enough that he just went and did it. Play that sequence in Another World when you have the time. The keypresses you input are

action button = kick in nads
press left as you’re released = Lester runs towards his gun
press down when you’re near the gun = Lester automatically rolls to the ground to pick up the gun. You have never made him roll before in this way
press action button = you zap the guard before he recovers from the kick in the nads.

It’s insane that it works as well it does. The same scenario in Flashback would not be bespoke code, it would be here’s a tile with your gun on it, here’s you many tiles away, here’s two guards that will kill you unless you use all your game verbs and corresponding iframes to reach your gun, pick it up, equip it, shoot the guards. I don’t have to imagine this, as this sequence happens like that in Flashback on the prison level. They obviously looked at Another World’s ‘captured without a gun’ sequence and wanted to do their version of it. And their version uses the exact same engine tools that the rest of their game uses.

This dedication to the formalism of the engine makes Flashback a more ‘real’ experience. Another World is a more dreamlike impression, even though it’s hard as nails, every little bit of it is hard in its special way, without an overarching system. It’s a different approach to game design completely. Bespoke versus formalist.

Think of how difficult it is to add more levels to Another World in your mind, whereas Flashback can be easily expanded with more graphics and a few more gimmicks. I love the game, but it does show the signs of a completely different level of ambition and self-understanding as a videogame compared to Another World. The latter is kind of punk rock compared to the universal solution to movement that Flashback settled on.

These tensions are still alive in modern videogame culture. Flashback won a phyrric victory insofar that Prince of Persia won the historical lottery as the cinematic platformer UR-text. Play the first Tomb Raider. It works exactly like Prince of Persia 1 works (fuzzy per-pixel movement over a tile engine with grace code to nudge you in place if you were close enough) but in 3d. Most modern cinematic action games on modern consoles use these concepts and build on them liberally: giving you a gameplay structure that can support a lot of different locales, milieus and assets but plays in this loose way. Show you a nice setpiece, then you kind of blunder through with an ok jump from ledge to ledge and the game helps you cross the distance, yay you did a cool thing on screen. Autotarget for easier headshots, yay, you look so cool.

Flashback is similar but wouldn’t work like this in 3D and we know this because we got “Fade to Black”. That game failed because Flashback’s 2D controls over a gridded plane did not translate well with the compromises they made to make in 3D. Stiff, unresponsive, like you’re playing in a sci-fi action movie and you’re nursing a two day hangover.

- Peter Smith

June 22, 2018 at 1:07 pm

This is a great analysis!

- Ola Hansson

June 23, 2018 at 1:26 am

Very illuminating comment, thanks!

- Lisa H.

June 15, 2018 at 7:51 pm

That opening scene is really something. I’m into it. Certainly does the job of evoking tension. But if the video with all the gunfire is typical of the gameplay, I would be quitting in two seconds flat. I’d never manage it.

If it’s not too much of a spoiler, what’s happened to Lester’s legs in the last video? I assume some kind of serious injury (not just exhaustion, or they’d have animated a different crawl)?

- Jimmy Maher

June 15, 2018 at 8:08 pm

It’s not all shooting. You don’t even get a gun until nearly halfway through the game. But when it’s not shooting, it’s running and pinpoint jumping, which isn’t really any easier. While you could make an argument, as Chahi kind of does, about all of the death and repetition reinforcing your connection with Lester and his plight, yada yada, the actual gameplay remains the least interesting aspect of the game for me.

Lester takes a beating from one of the evil guys just before that scene, but it’s not clear what the exact nature of his injuries are. You can watch the whole thing from beginning to end at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTrQz3o_HiA, if you like. Only 25 minutes long. ;)

- Lisa H.

June 19, 2018 at 9:48 pm

Yeah, that doesn’t look like it would be my cuppa.

- Eriorg

June 15, 2018 at 9:53 pm

Thank you for this very interesting article!

In the late 1980s/early 1990s, I used to play games on the Amstrad CPC and I lived in France (I’m French and Swiss). Captain Blood was actually my favorite game. I played many French games and even more British ones (but very few American ones, because not that many were available on the Amstrad). But at the time, I never noticed that French games (or foreign games, for that matter) were weirder than the others, or even particulary different from them! It’s only much later, on the Internet, that I learned that non-French people often had that feeling, apparently.

So, if there are any French people here who used to play computer games in the 1980s/1990s, I’d like to ask them: did you feel that French games were different?

I also have a question for Jimmy: what do you mean exactly by “the long-established French ambivalence toward translation from their mother tongue”?

- Jimmy Maher

June 16, 2018 at 6:17 am

My impression is that a certain… shall we say, chauvinism still surrounds the French language among many native speakers. There’s a pretty good reason for that: it’s certainly the most lovely spoken language I’ve ever heard. If you can speak in a language like that, why would you want to use any other? And of course there may persist a certain sting at French having been displaced by English as the world’s language at some point in the nineteenth century. I think all this tends to create the grumbling reluctance to translate into English which I’ve read of in various places. It gets done, of course… just a little grudgingly. ;) Probably an older-generation thing anyway. When I was in Paris last year, I was surprised at how much more willing people — especially young people — were to speak English to this poor non-Francophone than they were the last time I was there, all the way back in 1998.

My, I am stereotyping today, aren’t I? ;)

- Bastien

June 16, 2018 at 7:39 am

Nice article, and great sensations watching those videos!

I’m french, I started playing video games with the Amstrad CPC 464 (Manic Miner, anyone?) and I continued with the Atari 520 ST, also with Captain Blood as one of my favorites (the J.-M. Jarre intro music was just too good.)

At the time, I was too young to wonder what country the game was born in and I didn’t notice anything different about french games.

Impressionism is born in France but I’m not sure it means that french artworks, including video games, are more likely to be influenced by this movement than, say, american artworks.

To me, it’s more like this: some french artists invent new styles, including this “cinematic” style in video games, then anything vaguely related to this style is aggregated into the “so french” stereotype, with its precise definition blurred. But this would lead to complex aesthetic discussions that I cannot start on a saturday morning, drinking coffee in the kitchen :)

- Jimmy Maher

June 16, 2018 at 8:37 am

An important factor here may be that the more derivative, less unique French games didn’t tend to get exported to English-speaking countries — because why would you want to really? They’re just average games that come with the additional burden of translation. The more aesthetically or thematically ambitious stuff, on the other hand, could be attractive for export because of its uniqueness. This could create a skewed view of French gaming culture for someone who views it only from the outside.

- Pedro Timóteo

June 16, 2018 at 10:00 am

I remember British ZX Spectrum magazines, especially Your Sinclair, constantly mentioning how weird French games were — even though they typically gave them good ratings. :)

I’d really have liked to read a full post by Jimmy about Captain Blood (still one of both the weirdest and most intriguing games I’ve ever seen, although the gameplay itself isn’t that great, IMO), but I guess we’re past that time, and the paragraph in this post is all we’ll get, right?

- Jimmy Maher

June 17, 2018 at 7:27 am

Yeah, I don’t think I’ll have much more to say about that one. I have a bias toward designers that do the hard, unexciting work of balancing their games for playability and solubility. Unfortunately, the French Touch could cut both ways.

- Jacen

June 16, 2018 at 4:40 am

“This illustrations shows how”

- Jimmy Maher

June 16, 2018 at 6:09 am

Thanks!

- Laundro

June 16, 2018 at 7:53 am

I was about 12 when I played Another World on my Amiga. It’s the only game that has ever made me cry… (The end scene did that).

- Mike Taylor

November 20, 2018 at 2:03 am

The ending of BioShock did it go me. Just lovely.

- don bright

June 16, 2018 at 5:39 pm

Thanks. As a kid i couldnt possibly have imagined what was going on behind this games creation. All i knew was there was something fascinating about it. Back before internet you really sat and experienced a game because there were so few distractions. The movements were so fluid.. Like nothing else. It was like magic. I dont remember finishing it until later in life though. Hard to translate that experience to modern times. Loving a game without being capable of finishing it. Without streaming or multiplayer. Without a score online forums to read about it. Thanks.

- Steven Marsh

June 16, 2018 at 6:28 pm

Interesting article! I think Another World is one of those games I’ve owned on at least three different platforms, and never gotten very far in any of them for obvious reasons.

“an extensional quest for identity” — Should that be “an existential quest…”?

- Jimmy Maher

June 16, 2018 at 10:26 pm

Indeed. Thanks!

- Peter Ferrie

June 16, 2018 at 7:24 pm

Thank you Jimmy for the wonderful article that brings back memories of one of my favourite games.
I’m in that age-range, of course.

French Touch is also the name of a recent demo-maker for the Apple II scene, producing some of the most interesting effects ever seen on the hardware (and exposing the enormous gaps in the fidelity of modern emulators).

- Alexander King

June 16, 2018 at 7:29 pm

Meanwhile Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness cast the player as a slave on an antebellum plantation trying to instigate a bloody revolt. For any American kid raised on a diet of exceptionalism and solemn patriotism, this was deeply, deeply strange stuff.

This stood out to me. Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness is a little bit odd to use to showcase ‘French strangeness’, since while it’s a French published game, it was made by Martinican designer Muriel Tramis. Which is also where the game takes place, so “slave on a French colonial plantation” might be more accurate than ‘antebellum’, which suggests the American south. It’s an atypical game even in the context of French games.

It also feels like a bit of a slight to call such a unique work from one of the few Afro-Caribbean women game designers “deeply, deeply strange stuff” (even from an American kid’s perspective). It appears contemporary reviews treated it with the respect and gravity you’d expect given the subject matter, not as some strange game. Phil Salvador over at the Obscuritory has a great piece about the game, and recently interviewed Muriel Tramis as well.

- Jimmy Maher

June 16, 2018 at 10:23 pm

No slight was intended nor, I would argue, implied, given that the “deep strangeness” is clearly seen from the perspective of teenage American gamers — not exactly the most sophisticated audience. That said, it’s perhaps not the best example to use in that paragraph about French games reflecting American culture back on itself, given that it deals with French colonial history. Was going on only memories of that one, which sometimes gets me into trouble. I’ve cut the mention. Thanks!

- Rowan Lipkovits

June 19, 2018 at 4:49 pm

The career of Muriel at Coktel might be well worthwhile as a post subject, the increasingly improbable sum of her game industry outsider identities (French, woman, Afro-Caribbean) culminating in someone making games it would never occur to anyone else to make — and the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of someone in that situation somehow receiving a green light to be funded in these uncharted explorations.

In addition to the Obscuritory interview, she also spoke at length with The Adventure Gamer a little while ago. It almost seems like she was 25 years ahead of her time.

- Jimmy Maher

June 20, 2018 at 8:17 am

My only reluctance stems from my opinion that most of her actual games just aren’t very well-designed at all. I’m afraid she thus justifies her reputation as “the Roberta Williams of France” a little bit too well. ;)

- Casey Muratori

June 17, 2018 at 8:43 am

I think perhaps “the individuals polygons” should be “individual” (not plural).

– Casey

- Jimmy Maher

June 17, 2018 at 9:06 am

Thanks!

- Poddy

June 17, 2018 at 11:06 pm

The only French game I can recall playing from more-or-less that era was called “Robinson’s Requiem”. In theory, it was a fantastically open-world game where your one goal, escape, takes you all over the planet and requires you to monitor and create food, health supplies, weapons and endless exciting resources. In practice, it was fantastically unforgiving and any choice in your pace, direction, or crafting could be what killed you. It still fascinates me, and it does have a lot of… atmosphere, although not nearly as much as “Another World”. Death was everywhere and terrifying, and an attractive woman beckoned you to safety in your dreams.

- Jimmy Maher

June 18, 2018 at 9:27 am

Yes, that’s a classic example of the French Touch in gaming: wonderfully original themes and gameplay concepts, brilliant aesthetics, all undone by an apparent unwillingness to put in the hard work required to turn it all into a genuinely great game. This wasn’t always the case — Dune is decent, Alone in the Dark is a true classic, and I’m sure there are other counterexamples — but it held true more often than one might wish.

- Gnoman

June 20, 2018 at 1:10 am

Since you mention it as a “true classic”, I’m curious. Do you plan to spend much time going down the “survival horror” rabbit hole that really gets started (despite some even earlier precursors you’ve mentioned recently) with Alone in the Dark? I realize that this isn’t exactly your territory (particularly since the sub-genre really got going with the console-exclusive (at least for the first game) Silent Hill and the primarily console Resident Evil games, and you’ve said before that consoles aren’t something you spent much time with), but I’ve always viewed this genre as one of the obvious evolutions of classic adventure games, and would be rather interested to hear your thoughts on the matter.

- Jimmy Maher

June 20, 2018 at 7:57 am

It’s a genre I find intrinsically interesting for the way it upends the typical power-fantasy narrative, but I confess that I’m not super-familiar with its history and progression. We’ll just have to start with Alone in the Dark and see how we go. ;)

- Chris D

June 18, 2018 at 1:16 pm

French games were definitely stereotyped as being unbelievably weird and kooky in the UK games press of the eighties and nineties, but in retrospect I’m not sure they were particularly stranger than British games of that era. Captain Blood, Purple Saturn Day, and (especially) Kult were very strange games, and any review or preview of a French game in a British mag was contractually obliged to stress how bonkers the game and its programmers were, but I’m not sure they were any weirder than, say, Jeff Minter’s output, or Fat Worm Blows a Sparky, or Deus Ex Machina, or Wiz Kid, or Knights of the Crystallion, or any number of other examples of borderline outsider art that came out of UK developers during the 8/16-bit period (with Knights of the Crystallion showing that American developers could be pretty flipping weird if they put the hours in). I guess that from a British perspective, British programmers were bonkers in an accessible, familiar way, whereas French programmers were bonkers in a weird, frightening way, in the same way that surly teenagers seem inexplicably threatening when they’re French exchange students.

I suspect that French games may have acquired a reputation for weirdness through poor translation, slightly more formal innovation, and a more liberal attitude to sex & nudity – on the latter point, look at the original box art for Ranxerox, or the way that the ‘disco dancing’ mini-game in B.A.T. originally involved you waggling the joystick to have sex (supposedly – I can’t find much evidence that this was actually the case, and I suspect it might just be an urban myth lent plausibility by the crazy Frenchman stereotype).

- Helm

June 20, 2018 at 4:18 pm

I’m Greek and born in 1984 and I played all these things as they came out and at the time I didn’t think French games in particular were weirder than those of other European devs. There was a difference between European titles, American titles and especially Japanese titles for younger me for sure, but the biggest difference in the west always was on whether the game was made by one or two people, or a full studio.

Greece was in the US sphere of influence during the cold war, but there was a strong Soviet cultural counterpoint to this, up to a point, and relative to what sort of family one grew up in. We would watch Robocop and the Seventh Seal next to each other and we would think all of this was cinema and he somehow had to reconcile them. It’s a very specific vantage.

I do think this over-emphasis on the French Touch is a half invention of the gaming press at the time. It’s perhaps because of French new wave cinema? Honestly if you look at Chambers of the Sci-Mutant Priestess and you say ‘that’s so weird’ then I look at Monty on the Run and I think that’s just as weird. The 8-bit scene in Europe and even moreso with the Amiga was all weird, but not because of Frenchiness but because these were games made by bedroom coders, real humans growing up in a strange world.

American games from bigger companies always made more sense, for what sense is worth.

- Joe

June 18, 2018 at 10:20 pm

Although you mention “Future Wars”, you did not mention the two adventure games that immediately followed from Delphine “Operation: Stealth” and “Cruise for a Corpse”. Neither of them are very good.

“Operation: Stealth” is about as stereotypical of a Sierra-style adventure as you could get, with its only redeeming quality that it was not a bad James Bond game in the countries that published it as that. (Elsewhere in the world, it was a more generic spy but the Bond influences are pretty clear.)

“Cruise for a Corpse” is a locked-room mystery about people gathered together for a family cruise only to be knocked off one-by-one. It has a good plot, but is absolutely terrible mainly due to the need to search every individual drawer, shelf, and location over and over and over again to advance the plot. You’ve searched the laundry bins individually thirty times before? Well, keep searching because something will appear in one at one point in the game and you never know when. (Repeat for just about every clue you find only appearing at the exact right moment.)

Although these games were Delphine games, I do not believe that Chahi had much if any influence on them. Which is perhaps more the shame.

- Helm

June 20, 2018 at 4:19 pm

Future Wars has absolutely terrible puzzles too.

- Lt. Nitpicker

June 20, 2018 at 4:22 pm

Heart of the Alien was developed by Interplay and was published by Virgin Interactive, not Sega, as stated by many places, including Chahi’s own website for Another World.

- Jimmy Maher

June 22, 2018 at 2:54 pm

Thanks!

- Olof Kindgren

June 21, 2018 at 11:00 am

I intended to write that you wrote draftsman instead of craftsman, but as I looked up the former word I’m not sure anymore. Seems to have plenty of different meanings :)

Anyway, very interesting article. I remember everyone was really impressed by Another world, even though I was more into Flashback myself, which I was convinced was basically a sequel until reading some of the comments on this article.

Also found the note about North & South, which I loved as a kid, interesting. It has always seemed like a very American game to me, particularly with the cartoon slapstick aesthetics. Had no idea it was French

- Eriorg

June 21, 2018 at 6:17 pm

To be more precise, North & South was a French adaptation of a Belgian comics series.

- Alex Freeman

June 22, 2018 at 5:36 am

And it has the additional advantage that, being defined only as a collection of anchoring points for the polygons that make it up rather than needing to explicitly describe the color of every single pixel, it usually takes up much less disk space as well.

But what about the textures that are put on the polygons? Those are typically bitmaps.

I never wanted to create an interactive movie itself. Instead I wanted to extract the essence of a movie — the rhythm and the drama — and place it into game form.

I’d say that quote does a good job of summing up why Another World succeeds much more from a narrative perspective than the full-motion video games that followed it did.

Speaking of which, this and your article on The Incredible Machine has made me wonder if the way forward with adventure games is to have the games be really short or consist of self-contained short arcs that can easily be completed in one sitting or be at least easy to resume if one can’t complete it in one sitting. That way it would combine the qualities of casual games like TIM and Lemmings with the narrative structure of Another World and Dragon’s Lair.

- Jimmy Maher

June 22, 2018 at 7:09 am

Textures weren’t yet used during this era. Just managing to fill the polygons with solid blocks of color, as opposed to leaving them as wireframes, counted as progress on many fronts. ;)

The direction you describe is in fact the direction that text adventures have largely gone. The influence of the IF Comp has led to a huge prevalence of snack-size games completeable in two hours or less. Bigger games have long since become the anomalies.

There are also a lot “casual adventure games” sold on portals like Big Fish. Unfortunately, they’re usually pretty rote, uninspired exercises — like most of the stuff on Big Fish, come to think of it. It’s a shame the casual market hasn’t done better by its players.

- Lt. Nitpicker

June 22, 2018 at 2:43 pm

It’s worth noting that while textures were very rare to see in real-time 3D, it was a common technique in non-real time uses around this time.

- Alex Freeman

June 22, 2018 at 3:55 pm

Well, I was thinking of adventure games (or adventure games arcs at least) even shorter than two hours. Such as something a typical player could complete in 20 minutes, and it would have only have no more than, say, five rooms, so keeping a mental map would be easy. Well, maybe when I’ve honed my craft a bit more, I’ll give it a try.

- Alan Twelve

June 23, 2018 at 10:00 pm

Nice piece, Jimmy, and you can certainly include me among those who’d rather watch this being played than actually play it – I’ve tried many times but can hardly even get started!

Some possible corrections:

“the emotional affect of the whole.”
“creating an affect that’s difficult to put into words”
“even in the name of artistic affect”

These should all read “effect,” and not “affect,” I think (affect being a verb and not a noun). I suspect this should too, but maybe not:

“artsy, affective simplicity.”

Also:

“using a very different criteria ”

Should either read as “using very different criteria,” or “using a very different criterion.”

- Jimmy Maher

June 24, 2018 at 8:56 am

“Affect” actually has a meaning of its own when used as a noun, so the usage was intentional.

But you got me on the last point. ;) Thanks!

- Alex Freeman

June 26, 2018 at 5:48 am

Come to think of it, though, since “affect” as a noun means, “specific emotional response”, wouldn’t “emotional affect” be redundant?

- Jimmy Maher

June 26, 2018 at 7:19 am

Literally, yes. But it’s not as common a word as “effect” and I wanted to emphasize the point I was making in using it.

- Mark Papadakis

June 24, 2018 at 7:41 pm

I too didn’t consider all those games developed in French as particularly weird, certainty no more weird than games produced elsewhere, as my fellow Greek suggested in an earlier comment. Most of those games tough have a distinctive French style, which mostly comes down to the aesthetics and visuals, but not necessarily only specific to that.

The French game that I enjoyed the most and still remember fondly to this day is Lankhor’s Maupiti Island. It’s very difficult to progress through the game but it looks and sounds fantastic ( and it is perhaps one of first games to make extensive use of the Amiga speech synthesis abilities ). The intro screen tune is also excellent. I highly recommend it.

- jalapeno_dude

June 25, 2018 at 9:20 pm

I couldn’t help but notice that the code entered on the keypad in the opening cutscene starts with 451–any idea on whether this had an influence on the famous use of 0451 in System Shock/Deus Ex/etc., and/or if it was a homage to Fahrenheit 451?

- David Boddie

July 3, 2018 at 3:38 pm

I happened upon this code review and overview of the technology behind the game: “Another World” Code Review. It links through to the Eric Chahi’s own site.

It’s interesting to see how graphical adventures embraced the technology of the virtual machine just as text adventures had before them, but that action games at the time were still (I’m guessing) built using more traditional techniques.

- Kenny

July 12, 2018 at 9:05 pm

I’ve always loved the look of this game but I don’t remember now where exactly I saw it first. Probably one of the console ports. I certainly never finished it back when it was new. I may have never really played it for more than a few minutes!

I did tho pick it up somewhat recently when I discovered an iOS (iPhone and iPad) port had been published. It’s still hard, and I ended-up looking-up the solution to one or two of the ‘puzzles’, but I think it might be a lot easier still on a device with a touch screen.

Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents
June 22, 2018

Has any successful piece of software ever deserved its success less than the benighted, unloved exercise in minimalism that was MS-DOS? The program that started its life as a stopgap under the name of “The Quick and Dirty Operating System” at a tiny, long-forgotten hardware maker called Seattle Computer Products remained a stopgap when it was purchased by Bill Gates of Microsoft and hastily licensed to IBM for their new personal computer. Archaic even when the IBM PC shipped in October of 1981, MS-DOS immediately sent half the software industry scurrying to come up with something better. Yet actually arriving at a viable replacement would absorb a decade’s worth of disappointment and disillusion, conflict and compromise — and even then the “replacement” would still have to be built on top of the quick-and-dirty operating system that just wouldn’t die.

This, then, is the story of that decade, and of how Microsoft at the end of it finally broke Windows into the mainstream.

When IBM belatedly turned their attention to the emerging microcomputer market in 1980, it was both a case of bold new approaches and business-as-usual. In the willingness they showed to work together with outside partners on the hardware and especially the software front, the IBM PC was a departure for them. In other ways, though, it was a continuation of a longstanding design philosophy.

With the introduction of the System/360 line of mainframes back in 1964, IBM had in many ways invented the notion of a computing platform: a nexus of computer models that could share hardware peripherals and that could all run the same software. To buy an IBM system thereafter wasn’t so much to buy a single computer as it was to buy into a rich computing ecosystem. Long before the saying went around corporate America that “no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft,” the same was said of IBM. When you contacted them, they sent a salesman or two out to discuss your needs, desires, and budget. Then, they tailored an installation to suit and set it up for you. You paid a bit more for an IBM, but you knew it was safe. System/360 models were available at prices ranging from $2500 per month to $115,000 per month, with the latter machine a thousand times more powerful than the former. Their systems were thus designed, as all their sales literature emphasized, to grow with you. When you needed more computer, you just contacted the mother ship again, and another dark-suited fellow came out to help you decide what your latest needs really were. With IBM, no sharp breaks ever came in the form of new models which were incompatible with the old, requiring you to remake from scratch all of the processes on which your business depended. Progress in terms of IBM computing was a gradual evolution, not a series of major, disruptive revolutions. Many a corporate purchasing manager loved them for the warm blanket of safety, security, and compatibility they provided. “Once a customer entered the circle of 360 users,” noted IBM’s president Thomas Watson Jr., “we knew we could keep him there a very long time.”

The same philosophy could be seen all over the IBM PC. Indeed, it would, as much as the IBM name itself, make the first general-purpose IBM microcomputer the accepted standard for business computing on the desktop, just as were their mainframe lines in the big corporate data centers. You could tell right away that the IBM PC was both built to last and built to grow along with you. Opening its big metal case revealed a long row of slots just waiting to be filled, thereby transforming it into exactly the computer you needed. You could buy an IBM PC with one or two floppy drives, or more, or none; with a color or a monochrome display card; with anywhere from 16 K to 256 K of RAM.

But the machine you configured at time of purchase was only the beginning. Both IBM and a thriving aftermarket industry would come to offer heaps more possibilities in the months and years that followed the release of the first IBM PC: hard drives, optical drives, better display cards, sound cards, ever larger RAM cards. And even when you finally did bite the bullet and buy a whole new machine with a faster processor, such as 1984’s PC/AT, said machine would still be able to run the same software as the old, just as its slots would still be able to accommodate hardware peripherals scavenged from the old.

Evolution rather than revolution. It worked out so well that the computer you have on your desk or in your carry-on bag today, whether you prefer Windows, OS X, or Linux, is a direct, lineal descendant of the microcomputer IBM released more than 35 years ago. Long after IBM themselves got out of the PC game, and long after sexier competitors like the Commodore Amiga and the first and second generation Apple Macintosh have fallen by the wayside, the beast they created shambles on. Its long life is not, as zealots of those other models don’t hesitate to point out, down to any intrinsic technical brilliance. It’s rather all down to the slow, steady virtues of openness, expandibility, and continuity. The timeline of what’s become known as the “Wintel” architecture in personal computing contains not a single sharp break with the past, only incremental change that’s been carefully managed — sometimes even technologically compromised in comparison to what it might have been — so as not to break compatibility from one generation to the next.

That, anyway, is the story of the IBM PC on the hardware side, and a remarkable story it is. On the software side, however, the tale is more complicated, thanks to the failure of IBM to remember the full lesson of their own System/360.

At first glance, the story of the IBM PC on the software side seems to be just another example of IBM straining to offer a machine that can be made to suit every potential customer, from the casual home user dabbling in games and BASIC to the most rarefied corporate purchaser using it to run mission-critical applications. Thus when IBM announced the computer, four official software operating paradigms were also announced. One could use the erstwhile quick-and-dirty operating system that was now known as MS-DOS;[1] one could use CP/M, the standard for much of pre-IBM business microcomputing, from which MS-DOS had borrowed rather, shall we say, extensively (remember the latter’s original name?); one could use an innovative cross-platform environment, developed by the University of California San Diego’s computer-science department, that was based around the programming language Pascal; or one could choose not to purchase any additional operating software at all, instead relying on the machine’s built-in ROM-hosted Microsoft BASIC environment, which wasn’t at all dissimilar from those the same company had already provided for many or most of the other microcomputers on the market.

In practice, though, this smorgasbord of possibilities only offered one remotely appetizing entree in the eyes of most users. The BASIC environment was really suited only to home users wanting to tinker with simple programs and save them on cassettes, a market IBM had imagined themselves entering with their first microcomputer but had in reality priced themselves out of. The UCSD Pascal system was ahead of its time with its focus on cross-platform interoperability, accomplished using a form of byte code that would later inspire the Java virtual machine, but it was also rather slow, resource-hungry, and, well, just kind of weird — and it was quite expensive as well. CP/M ought to have been poised for success on the new machine given its earlier dominance, but its parent company Digital Research was unconscionably late making it available for the IBM PC, taking until well after the machine’s October 1981 launch to get it ported from the Zilog Z-80 microprocessor to the Intel architecture of the IBM PC and its successor models — and when CP/M finally did appear it was, once again, expensive.

That left MS-DOS, which worked, was available, and was fairly cheap. As corporations rushed out to purchase the first safe business microcomputer at a pace even IBM had never anticipated, MS-DOS relegated the other three solutions to a footnote in computing history. Nobody’s favorite operating system, it was about to become the most popular one in the world.

The System/360 line that had made IBM the 800-pound gorilla of large-scale corporate data-processing had used an operating system developed in-house by them with an eye toward the future every bit as pronounced as that evinced by the same line’s hardware. The emerging IBM PC platform, on the other hand, had gotten only half of that equation down. MS-DOS was locked into the 1 MB address space of the Intel 8088, allowing any computer on which it ran just 640 K of RAM at the most. When newer Intel processors with larger address spaces began to appear in new IBM models as early as 1984, software and hardware makers and ordinary users alike would be forced to expend huge amounts of time and effort on ugly, inefficient hacks to get around the problem.

Infamous though the 640 K barrier would become, memory was just one of the problems that would dog MS-DOS programmers throughout the operating system’s lifetime. True to its post-quick-and-dirty moniker of the Microsoft Disk Operating System, most of its 27 function calls involved reading and writing to disks. Otherwise, it allowed programmers to read the keyboard and put text on the screen — and not much of anything else. If you wanted to show graphics or play sounds, or even just send something to the printer, the only way to do it was to manually manipulate the underlying hardware. Here the huge amount of flexibility and expandability that had been designed into the IBM PC’s hardware architecture became a programmer’s nightmare. Let’s say you wanted to put some graphics on the screen. Well, a given machine might have an MDA monochrome video card or a CGA color card, or, soon enough, a monochrome Hercules card or a color EGA card. You the programmer had to build into your program a way of figuring out which one of these your host had, and then had to write code for dealing with each possibility on its own terms.

An example of how truly ridiculous things could get is provided by WordPerfect, the most popular business word processor from the mid-1980s on. WordPerfect Corporation maintained an entire staff of programmers whose sole job function was to devour the technical specifications and command protocols of each new printer that hit the market and write drivers for it. Their output took the form of an ever-growing pile of disks that had to be stuffed into every WordPerfect box, even though only one of them would be of any use to any given buyer. Meanwhile another department had to deal with the constant calls from customers who had purchased a printer for which they couldn’t find a driver on their extant mountain of disks, situations that could be remedied in the era before widespread telecommunications only by shipping off yet more disks. It made for one hell of a way to run a software business; at times the word processor itself could almost feel like an afterthought for WordPerfect Printer Drivers, Inc.

But the most glaringly obvious drawback to MS-DOS stared you in the face every time you turned on the computer and were greeted with that blinking, cryptic “C:\>” prompt. Hackers might have loved the command line, but it was a nightmare for a secretary or an executive who saw the computer only as an appliance. MS-DOS contrived to make everything more difficult through its sheer primitive minimalism. Think of the way you work with your computer today. You’re used to having several applications open at once, used to being able to move between them and cut and paste bits and pieces from one to the other as needed. With MS-DOS, you couldn’t do any of this. You could run just one application at a time, which would completely fill the screen. To do something else, you had to shut down the application you were currently using and start another. And if what you were hoping to do was to use something you had made in the first application inside the second, you could almost always forget about it; every application had its own proprietary data formats, and MS-DOS didn’t provide any method of its own of moving data from one to another.

Of course, the drawbacks of MS-DOS spelled opportunity for those able to offer ways to get around them. Thus Lotus Corporation became one of the biggest software success stories of the 1980s by making Lotus 1-2-3, an unwieldy colossus that integrated a spreadsheet, a database manager, and a graph- and chart-maker into a single application. People loved the thing, bloated though it was, because all of its parts could at least talk to one another.

Other solutions to the countless shortcomings of MS-DOS, equally inelegant and partial, were rampant by the time Lotus 1-2-3 hit it big. Various companies published various types of hacks to let users keep multiple applications resident in memory, switching between them using special arcane key sequences. Various companies discussed pacts to make interoperable file formats for data transfer between applications, although few of them got very far. Various companies made a cottage industry out of selling pre-packaged printer drivers to other developers for use in their applications. People wrote MS-DOS startup scripts that brought up easy-to-choose-from menus of common applications on bootup, thereby insulating timid secretaries and executives alike from the terrifying vagueness of the command line. And everybody seemed to be working a different angle when it came to getting around the 640 K barrier.

All of these bespoke solutions constituted a patchwork quilt which the individual user or IT manager would have to stitch together for herself in order to arrive at anything like a comprehensive remedy for MS-DOS’s failings. But other developers had grander plans, and much of their work quickly coalesced around various forms of the graphical user interface. Initially, this fixation may sound surprising if not inexplicable. A GUI built using a mouse, menus, icons, and windows would seem to fix only one of MS-DOS’s problems, that being its legendary user-unfriendliness. What about all the rest of its issues?

As it happens, when we look closer at what a GUI-based operating environment does and how it does it, we find that it must or at least ought to carry with it solutions to MS-DOS’s other issues as well. A windowed environment ideally allows multiple applications to be open at one time, if not actually running simultaneously. Being able to copy and paste pieces from one of those open applications to another requires interoperable data formats. Running or loading multiple applications also means that one of them can’t be allowed to root around in the machine’s innards indiscriminately, lest it damage the work of the others; this, then, must mark the end of the line for bare-metal programming, shifting the onus onto the system software to provide a proper layer of high-level function calls insulating applications from a machine’s actual or potential hardware. And GUIs, given that they need to do all of the above and more, are notoriously memory-hungry, which obligated many of those who made such products in the 1980s to find some way around MS-DOS’s memory constraints. So, a GUI environment proves to be much, much more than just a cutesy way of issuing commands to the computer. Implementing one on an IBM PC or one of its descendants meant that the quick-and-dirty minimalism of MS-DOS had to be chucked forever.

Some casual histories of computing would have you believe that the entire software industry was rigidly fixated on the command line until Steve Jobs came along to show them a better way with the Apple Macintosh, whereupon they were dragged kicking and screaming into computing’s necessary future. Such histories generally do acknowledge that Jobs himself got the GUI religion after a visit to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in December of 1979, but what tends to get lost is the fact that he was hardly alone in viewing PARC’s user-interface innovations as the natural direction for computing to go in the more personal, friendlier era of high technology being ushered in by the microcomputer. Indeed, by 1981, two years before a GUI made its debut on an Apple product in the form of the Lisa, seemingly everyone was already talking about them, even if the acronym itself had yet to be invented. This is not meant to minimize the hugely important role Apple really would play in the evolution of the GUI; as we’ll see to a large extent in the course of this very series of articles, they did much original formative work that has made its way into the computer you’re probably using to read these words right now. It’s rather just to say that the complete picture of how the GUI made its way to the personal computer is, as tends to happen when you dig below the surface of any history, more variegated than a tidy narrative of “A caused B which caused C” allows for.

In that spirit, we can note that the project destined to create the MS-DOS world’s first GUI was begun at roughly the same time that a bored and disgruntled Steve Jobs over at Apple, having been booted off the Lisa project, seized control of something called the Macintosh, planned at the time as an inexpensive and user-friendly computer for the home. This other pioneering project in question, also started during the first quarter of 1981, was the work of a brief-lived titan of business software called VisiCorp.

VisiCorp had been founded by one Dan Fylstra under the name of Personal Software in 1978, at the very dawn of the microcomputer age, as one of the first full-service software publishers, trafficking mostly in games which were submitted to him by hobbyists. His company became known for their comparatively slick presentation in a milieu that was generally anything but; MicroChess, one of their first releases, was quite probably the first computer game ever to be packaged in a full-color box rather than a Ziploc baggie. But their course was changed dramatically the following year when a Harvard MBA student named Dan Bricklin contacted Fylstra with a proposal for a software tool that would let accountants and other businesspeople automate most of the laborious financial calculations they were accustomed to doing by hand. Fylstra was intrigued enough to lend the microcomputer-less Bricklin one of his own Apple IIs — whereupon, according to legend at least, the latter proceeded to invent the electronic spreadsheet over the course of a single weekend. He hired a more skilled programmer named Bob Frankston and formed a company called Software Arts to develop that rough prototype into a finished application, which Fylstra’s Personal Software published in October of 1979.

Up to that point, early microcomputers like the Apple II, Radio Shack TRS-80, and Commodore PET had been a hard sell as practical tools for business — even for their most seemingly obvious business application of all, that of word processing. Their screens could often only display 40 columns of big, blocky characters, often only in upper case — about as far away from the later GUI ideal of “what you see is what you get” as it was possible to go — while their user interfaces were arcane at best and their minuscule memories could only accommodate documents of a few pages in length. Most potential business users took one look at the situation, added on the steep price tag for it all, and turned back to their typewriters with a shrug.

VisiCalc, however, was different. It was so clearly, manifestly a better way to do accounting that every accountant Fylstra showed it to lit up like a child on Christmas morning, giggling with delight as she changed a number here or there and watched all of the other rows and columns update automagically. VisiCalc took off like nothing the young microcomputer industry had ever seen, landing tens of thousands of the strange little machines in corporate accounting departments. As the first tangible proof of what personal computing could mean to business, it prompted people to begin asking why IBM wasn’t a part of this new party, doing much to convince the latter to remedy that absence by making a microcomputer of their own. It’s thus no exaggeration to say that the entire industry of business-oriented personal computing was built on the proof of concept that was VisiCalc. It would sell 500,000 copies by January of 1983, an absolutely staggering figure for that time. Fylstra, seeing what was buttering his bread, eventually dropped all of the games and other hobbyist-oriented software from his catalog and reinvented Personal Software as VisiCorp, the first major publisher of personal-computer business applications.

But all was not quite as rosy as it seemed at the new VisiCorp. Almost from the moment of the name change, Dan Fylstra found his relationship with Dan Bricklin growing strained. The latter was suspicious of his publisher’s rebranding themselves in the image of his intellectual property, feeling they had been little more than the passive beneficiaries of his brilliant stroke. This point of view was by no means an entirely fair one. While it may have been true that Fylstra had been immensely lucky to get his hands on Bricklin’s once-in-a-lifetime innovation, he’d also made it possible by loaning Bricklin an Apple II in the first place, then done much to make VisiCalc palatable for corporate America through slick, professional packaging and marketing that projected exactly the right conservative, businesslike image, consciously eschewing the hippie ethos of the Homebrew Computer Club. Nevertheless, Bricklin, perhaps a bit drunk on all the praise of his genius, credited VisiCorp’s contribution to VisiCalc’s success but little. And so Fylstra, nervous about continuing to stake his entire company on Bricklin, set up an internal development team to create more products for the business market.

By the beginning of 1981, the IBM PC project which VisiCalc had done so much to prompt was in full swing, with the finished machine due to be released before the end of the year. Thanks to their status as publisher of the hottest application in business software, VisiCorp had been taken into IBM’s confidence, one of a select number of software developers and publishers given access to prototype hardware in order to have products ready to go on the day the new machine shipped. It seems that VisiCorp realized even at this early point how underwhelming the new machine’s various operating paradigms were likely to be, for even before they had actual IBM hardware to hand, they started mocking up the GUI environment that would become known as Visi On using Apple II and III machines. Already at this early date, it reflected a real, honest, fundamental attempt to craft a more workable model for personal computing than the nightmare that MS-DOS alone could be. William Coleman, the head of the development team, later stated in reference to the project’s founding goals that “we wanted users to be able to have multiple programs on the screen at one time, ease of learning and use, and simple transfer of data from one program to another.”

Visi On seemed to have huge potential. When VisiCorp demonstrated an early version, albeit far later than they had expected to be able to, at a trade show in December of 1982, Dan Fylstra remembers a rapturous reception, “competitors standing in front of [the] booth at the show, shaking their heads and wondering how the company had pulled the product off.” It was indeed an impressive coup; well before the Apple Macintosh or even Lisa had debuted, VisiCorp was showing off a full-fledged GUI environment running on hardware that had heretofore been considered suitable only for ugly old MS-DOS.

Still, actually bringing a GUI environment to market and making a success out of it was a much taller order than it might have first appeared. As even Apple would soon be learning to their chagrin, any such product trying to make a go of it within the increasingly MS-DOS-dominated culture of mainstream business computing ran headlong into a whole pile of problems which lacked clearly best solutions. Visi On, like almost all of the GUI products that would follow for the IBM hardware architecture, was built on top of MS-DOS, using the latter’s low-level function calls to manage disks and files. This meant that users could install it on their hard drive and pop between Visi On and vanilla MS-DOS as the need arose. But a much thornier question was that of running existing MS-DOS applications within the Visi On environment. Those which assumed they had full control of the system — which was practically all of them, because why wouldn’t they? — would flame out as soon as they tried to directly access some piece of hardware that was now controlled by Visi On, or tried to put something in some specific place inside what was now a shared pool of memory, or tried to do any number of other now-forbidden things. VisiCorp thus made the hard decision to not even try to get existing MS-DOS applications to run under Visi On. Software developers would have to make new, native applications for the system; Visi On would effectively be a new computing platform onto itself.

This decision was questionable in commercial if not technical terms, given how hard it must be to get a new platform accepted in an MS-DOS-dominated marketplace. But VisiCorp then proceeded to make the problem even worse. It would only be possible to program Visi On, they announced, after purchasing an expensive development kit and installing it on a $20,000 DEC PDP-11 minicomputer. They thus opted for an approach similar to one Apple was opting for with the Lisa: to allow that machine to be programmed only by yoking it up to a second Lisa. In thus betraying the original promise of the personal computer as an anything machine which ordinary users could program to do their will, both Visi On and the Lisa operating system arguably removed their hosting hardware from that category entirely, converting it into a closed electronic appliance more akin to a game console. Taxonomical debates aside, the barriers to entry even for one who wished merely to use Visi On to run store-bought applications were almost as steep: when this first MS-DOS-based GUI finally shipped on December 16, 1983, after a long series of postponements, it required a machine with 512 K of memory and a hard drive to run and cost more than $1000 to buy.

Visi On was, as the technology pundits like to say, “ahead of the hardware market.” In quite a number of ways it was actually far more ambitious than what would emerge a month or so after it as the Apple Macintosh. Multiple Visi On applications could be open at the same time (although they didn’t actually run concurrently), and a surprisingly sophisticated virtual-memory system was capable of swapping out pages to hard disk if software tried to allocate more memory than was physically available on the computer. Similar features wouldn’t reach MacOS until 1987’s System 5 and 1991’s System 7 respectively.

In the realm of usability, however, Visi On unquestionably fell down in comparison to Apple’s work. The user interfaces for the Lisa and the Macintosh made almost all the right choices right from the beginning, expanding upon the work done at Xerox PARC in all the right ways. Many of the choices made by VisiCorp, on the other hand, feel far more dubious today — and, one has to believe, not just out of the contempt bred by all those intervening decades of user interfaces modeled on Apple’s. Consider the task of moving and sizing windows on the screen, which was implemented so elegantly on the original Lisa and Macintosh that it’s been changed not at all in all the decades since. While Visi On too allows windows to be sized and placed where you will, and allows them to overlay one another — something by no means true of all of the MS-DOS GUI systems that would follow — doing so is a clumsy process involving picking options out of menus rather than simply dragging title bars or sizing widgets. In fact, Visi On uses no icons whatsoever. For anyone still enamored with the old saw that Apple just ripped off the Xerox PARC interface in its entirety and stuck it on the Lisa and Mac, Visi On, being much more slavishly based on the PARC model, provides an instructive demonstration of how far the likes of the Xerox Alto still was from the intuitive ease of Apple’s interface.

A Quick Tour of Visi On

With mice still exotic creatures, VisiCorp provided their own to work with Visi On. Many other early GUI-makers, Microsoft among them, would follow their lead.

Visi On looks like this upon booting up on an original IBM PC with 640 K of memory and a CGA video card, running in high-resolution monochrome mode at 640 X 200. “Services” is Visi On’s terminology for installed applications. The list of them which you see here, all provided by VisiCorp themselves, are the only ones that would ever exist, thanks to Visi On’s complete commercial failure.

We’ve started up a spreadsheet, a graphing application, and a word processor at the same time. These don’t actually run concurrently, as they would under a true multitasking operating system, but are visible onscreen in their separate windows, becoming active when we click them. (Something similar would not have been possible under MacOS prior to 1987.)

Although Visi On does sport windows that can be sized and placed anywhere and can overlap one another, arranging them is made extremely tedious by its lack of any concept of mouse-dragging; the mouse can only be used for single clicks. So, you have to click the “Frame” menu option and see its instructions through step by step. Note also the lack of pull-down menus, another of Apple’s expansions upon the work down at Xerox PARC. Menus here are just one-shot commands, akin to what a modern GUI user would call a button.

Fortunately, you can make a window full-screen with just a couple of clicks. Unfortunately, you then have to laboriously re-“Frame” it when you want to shrink it again; it doesn’t remember where it used to be.

The lack of a mouse-drag affordance makes the “Transfer” function — Visi On’s version of copy-and-paste — extremely tedious.

And, as with most things in Visi On, transferring data is also slow. Moving that little snippet of text from the word processor to the spreadsheet took about ten seconds.

On the plus side, Visi On sports a help system that’s crazily comprehensive for its time — much more so than the one that would ship with MacOS or, for that matter, Microsoft Windows for quite some years.

As if it didn’t have enough intrinsic problems working against it, extrinsic ones also contrived to undo Visi On in the marketplace. By the time it shipped, VisiCorp was a shadow of what they had so recently been. VisiCalc sales had collapsed over the past year, going from nearly 40,000 units in December of 1982 alone to fewer than 6000 units in December of 1983 in the face of competing products — most notably the burgeoning juggernaut Lotus 1-2-3 — and what VisiCorp described as Software Arts’s failure to provide “timely upgrades” amidst a relationship that was growing steadily more tense. With VisiCorp’s marketplace clout thus dissipating like air out of a balloon, it was hardly the ideal moment for them to ask for the sorts of commitments from users and developers required by Visi On.

The very first MS-DOS-based GUI struggled along with no uptake whatsoever for nine months or so; the only applications made for it were the word processor, spreadsheet, and graphing program VisiCorp made themselves. In September of 1984, with VisiCorp and Software Arts now embroiled in a court battle that would benefit only their competitors, the Visi On technology was sold to a veteran manufacturer of mainframes and supercomputers called Control Data Corporation, who proceeded to do very little if anything with it. VisiCorp went bankrupt soon after, while Lotus bought out Software Arts for a paltry $800,000, thus ending the most dramatic boom-and-bust tale of the early business-software industry. “VisiCorp’s auspicious climb and subsequent backslide,” wrote InfoWorld magazine, “will no doubt become a ‘how-not-to’ primer for software companies of the future.”

Visi On’s struggles may have been exacerbated by the sorry state of its parent company, but time would prove them to be by no means atypical of MS-DOS-based GUI systems in general.  Already in February of 1984, PC Magazine could point to at least four other GUIs of one sort or another in the works from other third-party developers: Concurrent CP/M with Windows by Digital Research, VisuALL by Trillian Computer Corporation, DesqView by Quarterdeck Office Systems, and WindowMaster by Structured Systems. All of these would make different choices in trying to balance the seemingly hopelessly competing priorities of reasonable speed and reasonable hardware requirements, compatibility with MS-DOS applications and compatibility with post-MS-DOS philosophies of computing. None would find the sweet spot. Neither they nor the still more GUI environments that followed them would be able to offer a combination of features, ease of use, and price that the market found compelling, so much so that by 1985 the whole field of MS-DOS GUIs was coming to be viewed with disdain by computer users who had been disappointed again and again. If you wanted a GUI, went the conventional wisdom, buy a Macintosh and live with the paltry software selection and the higher price. The mainstream of business computing, meanwhile, continued to truck along with creaky old MS-DOS, a shaky edifice made still more unstable by all of the hacks being grafted onto it to expand its memory model or to force it to load more than one application at a time. “Windowing and desktop environments are a solution looking for a problem,” said Robert Lefkowits, director of software services for Infocorp, in the fall of 1985. “Users aren’t really looking for any kind of windowing environment to solve problems. Users are not expressing a need or desire for it.”

The reason they weren’t, of course, was because they hadn’t yet seen a GUI in which the pleasure outweighed the pain. Entrenched as users were in the old way of doing things, accepting as they had become of all of MS-DOS’s discontents as simply the way computing was, it was up to software developers to show them why a GUI was something they had never known they couldn’t live without. Microsoft at least, the very people who had saddled their industry with the MS-DOS albatross, were smart enough to realize that mainstream business computing must be remade in the image of the much-scoffed-at Macintosh at some point. Further, they understood that it behooved them to do the remaking if they didn’t want to go the way of VisiCorp. By the time Lefkowits said his words, the long, winding tale of dogged perseverance in the face of failure and frustration that would become the story of Microsoft Windows had already been playing out for several years. One of these days, the GUI was going to make its breakthrough in one way or another, and it was going to do so with a Microsoft logo on its box — even if Bill Gates had to personally ram it down his customers’ throats.

(Sources: the books The Making of Microsoft: How Bill Gates and His Team Created the World’s Most Successful Software Company by Daniel Ichbiah and Susan L. Knepper and Computer Wars: The Fall of IBM and the Future of Global Technology by Charles H. Ferguson and Charles R. Morris; InfoWorld of October 31 1983, November 14 1983, April 2 1984, July 2 1984, and October 7 1985; Byte of June 1983, July 1983; PC Magazine of February 7 1984, and October 2 1984; the episode of the Computer Chronicles television program called “Integrated Software.” Finally, I owe a lot to Nathan Lineback for the histories, insights, comparisons, and images found at his wonderful online “GUI Gallery.”)

1. MS-DOS was known as PC-DOS when sold directly under license by IBM. Its functionality, however, was almost or entirely identical to the Microsoft-branded version. For simplicity’s sake, I will just refer to “MS-DOS” whenever speaking about either product — or, more commonly, both — in the course of this series of articles. ↩

Comments
58 Responses

- Tomber

June 22, 2018 at 4:05 pm

It is such a dense history, that I look forward to seeing which markers you find to be the significant ones.

I think it is important to note that IBM supposedly was so lax in operating system control on the IBM PC because they were still operating under a consent decree with the US government from a prior anti-trust action(or fearful of triggering another). That’s where many of the ‘dumb’ decisions came from.

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2018 at 9:19 am

The legal aspects of IBM’s situation is something I wish I’d given proper consideration to in my articles on the making of the IBM PC way back in the day. Unfortunately, these articles aren’t quite the right place to try to get into it now. That will probably have to wait for an updated version of those older articles — maybe for an eventual book about the history of the PC architecture? As it is, though, I’m acutely conscious that a significant piece of the story is being left untold. (A similar situation holds true with my article on the rise of the PC clones: man, I wish I’d given more consideration to the legal aspects of reverse-engineering the original IBM BIOS.)

As it is, though, yeah, this is a big topic, one’s that been really challenging to corral into a readable narrative. Apart from Visi On, whose pioneering status made it a story worth telling, I’ve tried to limit the principal players to Microsoft, IBM, and to some extent Apple in the interest of not missing the forest for the trees. The story of the shifting alliances among those three should make for good reading if I can pull it off. Wish me luck!

- Tomber

June 23, 2018 at 11:59 pm

Yes, people want a readable story and narrative, and history often isn’t so convenient. But you’ve already tackled worse. :)

Another potential strand is Intel, and the 386, which was really the first post-PC design. IBM didn’t adopt it very quickly, while Compaq did. While OS/2 1.x was a 286-targeted system, the 386 had virtual machine capabilities that were used by Compaq’s EMM386.EXE and Microsoft’s Windows/386 (and finally 3.0). These had a huge impact that ultimately led to Microsoft’s total control and IBM’s defeat. Was that in some sense planned? Most people don’t realize that Windows 3.0 (and probably /386) in 386 Enhanced Mode actually was a 32-bit operating system, very cleverly interwoven with the DOS real mode drivers and data structures(Exactly like 32-bit DOS extenders). Windows 95 gets the credit for being 32-bit, because it expanded it to the Windows API. Yet Windows 3.1 could already run some 32-bit apps with ‘Win32s,’ because it had always had a 32-bit kernel. And Windows extenders allowed the same years earlier, back to Windows 3.0.

The traditional story is that IBM stuck to the 286 because they wanted to protect their customers’ investment in the AT; perhaps an alternative is the 386 was recognized as a way to pull the rug out from under IBM, to the benefit of everybody else. And maybe IBM had seen that too, but bet the wrong way(again!). Once the 386 entered the scene, whoever commands ring 0 owns the computer. Microsoft was there repeatedly, and early.

- Ken Brubaker

June 22, 2018 at 4:19 pm

hacks being grated onto it

Should be grafted?

- Jimmy Maher

June 22, 2018 at 7:38 pm

Thanks!

- Alex Smith

June 22, 2018 at 4:29 pm

much more than just a cutsey was of issuing commands to the computer

way

- Jimmy Maher

June 22, 2018 at 7:39 pm

Thanks!

- stepped pyramids

June 22, 2018 at 4:39 pm

This is a good piece, but I think it somewhat overstates the degree to which PC hardware compatibility is a flaw in MS-DOS. Previous microcomputer platforms didn’t have that problem because they had fairly limited expansion options, and even on platforms where expansion ports were readily available (like the Apple II) your software had to be written specifically to use the hardware.

Apple’s solution to the same problem with the Macintosh was to create its own hardware ecosystem and protocols. This wasn’t really an option in the larger and less centralized PC market. And third party hardware support was as much of a headache for Macs as for PCs — “extension” was as scary a term for a Mac user as “TSR” was for a DOS user.

And I think Visi On and the other failed GUIs of the time demonstrate that the hardware just wasn’t ready for a more sophisticated operating system yet. It wasn’t until the 386 introduced protected mode that it was feasible to implement a “real” OS for the platform.

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2018 at 9:32 am

I’m having trouble parsing your statement that “PC hardware compatibility is a flaw in MS-DOS.” Not only is that not anything I wrote, but it just doesn’t make sense to me on even a basic semantic level.

My argument is that there was a mismatch on the IBM PC between a hardware architecture that clearly was designed to grow into a long-term future and an operating system that was not, as most infamously demonstrated by the 640 K barrier. That other popular platforms were not well-equipped to grow is immaterial to this argument except as the status quo illuminating the aspect of the IBM PC — its open hardware architecture that was amendable to almost infinite expansion — that made it so special, and would prove its one saving grace in a marketplace full of slicker, sexier machines.

I have no real quibble, on the other hand, with the statement that Intel hardware probably wasn’t fully ready for GUIs until the 80386 arrived. Indeed, this will become a bit of a running theme as we look at the early travails of Windows.

- stepped pyramids

June 24, 2018 at 4:16 am

it was already dawning on careful observers how much more difficult IBM had made everyone’s lives through their eagerness to just get an operating system — any operating system, even a quick-and-dirty one — onto their new microcomputer and get it out the door…
…memory was just one of the things that MS-DOS handled poorly — or, perhaps better said, failed to handle at all. True to its post-quick-and-dirty moniker of the Microsoft Disk Operating System…
If you wanted to show graphics or play sounds, or even just send something to the printer, the only way to do it was to manually manipulate the underlying hardware. Here the huge amount of flexibility and expandability that had been designed into the IBM PC’s hardware architecture became a programmer’s nightmare.

This comes off to me as at least strongly suggesting that the reason PCs had so many hardware compatibility issues is because IBM chose a “quick-and-dirty” operating system like MS-DOS. I’m simply arguing that there existed no alternative operating system — real or hypothetical — that would have handled hardware substantially better. I’m not disputing your overall point that MS-DOS had design flaws that hobbled the PC platform in the longer term, I just don’t think this particular issue is one you can pin on the OS.

- Jimmy Maher

June 24, 2018 at 8:44 am

Okay. It’s a reasonable argument, and I agree that there was no other operating system sitting around on the shelf which IBM/Microsoft could have scooped up and employed. I’m not so sure, however, about *hypothetical* operating systems. Visi On implemented virtual memory, multitasking, and device drivers on the original IBM PC hardware. It’s interesting to consider whether an operating system could have been devised that could have been updated fairly easily to use make use of the 80286’s protected mode; given the historically close relationship between IBM and Intel, the former likely knew that the 80286 was in the works at the time the IBM PC was being developed. Could an operating system have been devised that would have run in protected mode on an 80286 from the beginning, returning pointers to virtual addresses, while maintaining compatibility with existing applications? Food for thought anyway!

Of course, such a beast would have required more hardware than IBM, who dreamed at the beginning of making the IBM PC a fixture in homes as well as businesses, was willing to demand that their customers purchased. It also would have required an extra year or two to develop. IBM, concerned that they were missing out on the next big wave in computing, felt that they needed to get a product out there quickly. The hardware could indeed be put together quickly; the software side was much more problematic, but they felt they had to just make do and deal with the consequences later. Ergo, MS-DOS.

Note that my intention isn’t really to blame IBM (or Microsoft) or to preach about what they should have done. Computer engineering is always going to be a negotiation between the ideal approach and those practical necessities that are generally quantified in terms of money and time. If I state things a little forcefully here, that’s largely out of a desire to make sure my point doesn’t get lost by the general reader. I do handle these issues with a bit more nuance elsewhere, in my original history of the IBM PC and my article on the 640 K barrier. My real priority here is to hammer home just why everyone was in such a hurry to build something better on top of MS-DOS.

- stepped pyramids

June 26, 2018 at 2:27 pm

I appreciate your willingness to consider the feedback! The article is very good overall (as usual). I just think there’s a tendency in pop history of computing to view IBM/MS/the PC in a more cynical light while having a certain degree of rose-colored glasses for the underdogs (Mac/Amiga/etc.). Then again, I also think it’s valuable to express the genuine frustration computer users and programmers had with the PC at the time. I think the updates you’ve made to the article strike a good balance.

- Andy

June 22, 2018 at 5:12 pm

A few minor points of correction:
1) The PC/XT was in fact entirely identical to the original PC, with only the addition of the MFM hard drive controller and hard drive consuming the second floppy bay. It did not have a faster processor. The AT, however, did step up to a 6Mhz 80286.
2) The TRS-80 always had a 64-column display, not 40, but it’s a minor point at best. :-) Also, there were quite a variety of non-dot-matrix printers available. There were several popular daisy wheel models that at least produced typewriter quality output. To that point about the early 8-bit machines being a “hard sell,” I’d argue that it had much more to do with the fact that their 64K addressable limit virtually always meant that the user interfaces to their word processors and databases were necessarily even more arcane and bizarre than the applications of the MS-DOS era, and could handle only much smaller documents and data sets to boot. By the time you finished loading the program, you were lucky to have a few K left for the actual user data!

Also, not technically a “correction”, but the original monochrome IBM branded display adapter had no graphic capability whatsoever, other than character-based line graphics. This was the main selling point of the original Hercules adapter, which could actually do true dot-based graphics on the monochrome display in Lotus 1-2-3, in addition to being otherwise compatible with the original text mode. However, the uber-point is correct in that there were no operating system aids to dealing with those hardware capabilities or lack thereof.

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2018 at 9:46 am

Thanks for this! Made a few edits. For some reason, I’ve had it stuck in my head since forever that it was the PC/XT that introduced the “turbo-mode” 8 MHz 8088…

- whomever

June 23, 2018 at 3:49 pm

The XT didn’t introduce Turbo, but it did have 8 slots (vs 5) and dropped cassette support (because no one used it).

- tedder

June 22, 2018 at 5:16 pm

“incompatible with the old, requiring you to remake”
-> old, which would have required you to remake
(prevents someone from misreading the sentence fragment)

“just kind of weird — and it was quite expensive to boot”
-> remove “to boot”? some possible ambiguity on the meaning- especially without a comma

“having been booted off the Lisa project”
-> kicked off?

“hacks being grated onto it”
-> grafted

“in the fall of 1985”
-> Fall

ultimately this is a great breakdown of the disadvantages of switching costs and advantages of the ‘worse is better’ philosophy. Windows didn’t make much of a leap until it became more than a layer on top of DOS. Of course, starting with that is part of why OS/2 was late and Visi On failed. (personally, the first gui/graphical directory browser I used on dos was Norton Commander)

I keep wanting to go back and dabble with building a ‘modern 8080’ simply so I can write on top of those old DOS functions, using support chips like the ESP32 to support it. But at that point I could just virtualize the whole thing. IDK.

- Jimmy Maher

June 22, 2018 at 7:42 pm

Thanks, but I’m going to call writer’s discretion in this case on all except the penultimate point. ;)

- tedder

June 23, 2018 at 6:40 am

Of course! As you should.

- Brian

June 22, 2018 at 5:51 pm

I grew up with MS-DOS starting at Christmas in 1985… it’s fascinating that such an antiquated operating system lasted into the 90s for so many. The 640k barrier seemed as insurmountable as the speed of light in those days. Voodoo memory for Ultima VII was something else!

Another mystery solved as well… I’ve heard of VisiCalc, but never understood why they disappeared so quickly. In a way, there is a parallel with Infocom – spending tons of effort and dollars on a large unwieldy system that didn’t really do a great job.

Another revealing piece Jimmy!

- Jim Leonard

June 22, 2018 at 5:51 pm

It is unfortunate that the screenshots are limited to 600 pixels wide, when they contain 640 pixel columns. Is there any way they can be forced to display 640-wide? They have some visually unappealing scaling artifacts otherwise.

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2018 at 10:02 am

Can’t say I can see any artifacts. You must have a better eye than I. ;)

Unfortunately, I scaled the screenshots to suit the blog’s width before I uploaded them. I’d have to recreate them all from scratch, and I’d still have to stretch them vertically in order to fix the non-square-pixel issue and get the correct aspect ratio. (Not sure if this would introduce more artifacts of its own.)

For what it’s worth, there are a lot of other screenshots here: http://toastytech.com/guis/vision.html. These have the correct width and are scaled up vertically to 400 pixels. This means that the aspect ratio still isn’t quite right, but there shouldn’t be any artifacts, thanks to the vertical scaling by an integral factor. Pick your poison, I guess. ;)

Will try to preserve the original width on future screenshots. (Although not the ones in the next couple of articles, since they’re already completed and in place.)

- Lisa H.

June 22, 2018 at 8:12 pm

that blinking, cryptic “C>” prompt

C:\> ? Or did early versions not have the colon and backslash? (I think the first MS-DOS I saw was 3.x.)

This bit from MST3K is specifically about Mac vs. PC, but germane, I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixQE496Pcn8 (Or, there’s also this bit https://youtu.be/vmNZwJTp9nM?t=1h5m17s)

I’d never even heard of Visi On (man, do my 21st century sensibilities for such names want to remove that space) before this post. Complete commercial failure, indeed.

My dad was so attached to Lotus 1-2-3 that he nursed it way past its fall from grace. I forget when he finally gave up still trying to get whatever version he had to work under modern Windows, probably sometime in the 2000s – although I’m surprised to learn in my quick Google for dates that IBM didn’t actually end support for it until 2014 (!).

VisuALL by Trillian Computer Corporation

Hopefully it did not have Eddie’s personality.

the hacks being grated onto it

Like so much Parmesan cheese?

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2018 at 10:17 am

I believe is was just “C>” at the beginning, but I’m having trouble finding a definitive screenshot to be sure. Problem was that not many people had hard drives then, so “A>” was much more common than “C>”. That said, the statement in question wasn’t really confining itself to the earliest days, so the “C:\>” is probably the better choice anyway. Thanks!

There’s actually some question as to whether it should be “Visi On” or “VisiOn.” Some sources do have it as the latter. But most primary sources have the former, so that’s what I went with as well. It’s a terrible, overly cutesy name any way you cut it in my opinion.

Parents and their old software… oh, man. I struggled for years to find ways to let my dad keep using his WordPerfect 5.x for DOS. Our latest problem has come since he upgraded to Windows 10 and his trusty Outlook Express doesn’t work anymore. He doesn’t really understand *why* he can’t keep using what he’s always used, and I know he’s convinced that I’m just being stubborn in trying to force him to use all this new-fangled stuff. He’s at an age now where learning new things doesn’t come easily, and it kind of breaks my heart to subject him to this, but what can I do? Leave him with Windows XP and see how many viruses he can collect?

- Sniffnoy

June 23, 2018 at 7:36 pm

George R. R. Martin famously still does write in WordStar 4.0, having a separate DOS computer set up for this!

- Brian

June 24, 2018 at 7:33 pm

Hah! I remember forcing my mom to change to MS Word around 2003 when we simply couldn’t get Express Write to work on her newest computer. Express was originally bought for our Tandy 1000 around 1986…

After great reluctance she found out the MS Word was a 1000x improvement and hasn’t looked back.

- Lars

June 23, 2018 at 11:24 am

The prompt was configurable. The default was C>, but many people had “prompt $p$g” in their autoexec.bat, which gave the C:\> prompt.

- Nate

June 24, 2018 at 7:08 am

Aw man! I remember typing that far too many times. Ugh.

Also wasn’t it special that the ‘prompt’ command had its very own variable-substitution syntax which was completely unrelated to cmd.exe’s % notation for environment variables.

- Aula

June 23, 2018 at 11:33 am

*All* standalone versions of MS-DOS have a default prompt of A> or C> depending on whether you boot from a floppy or a hard drive; I don’t know if DOS 7 changed that. The earliest versions didn’t have directories, so there was no need to show anything except the drive letter. The versions that had directories were practically always started with an autoexec.bat containing at least “prompt $p$g” because 1) the presence of autoexec.bat prevents DOS from asking the user to enter date and time, and 2) showing the current path in the prompt is a virtual necessity.

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2018 at 11:45 am

Ah, okay. But “C:\>” is still the best reflection of MS-DOS as most people saw it, so we’ll stay with that. Thanks!

- Jacen

June 22, 2018 at 8:18 pm

The very first MS-DOS-based GUI struggled along with no uptake whatsoever for nine months or so;” updates?

ther of Apple’s expansions upon the work down at Xerox PARC. Menus here are just one-shot commands” done?

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2018 at 10:26 am

Thanks, but these are as intended.

- Andre

June 22, 2018 at 9:20 pm

I have to say it, I just can’t get enough of your non-gaming and more hardware/software culture oriented articles! Your history of the IBM PC was a truly interesting read back then and I’m excited the saga is now continued, in a way. Being socialized on the Amiga up into the early 2000s as a teen, I never had much to do with DOS (apart from trying to run old games later) and the early versions of Windows but both felt weirdly clumsy and somewhat cobbled together when I got exposed to them now and then. Looking forward to learn more about the backgrounds ;)

- Bernie

June 22, 2018 at 10:57 pm

Hi Jimmy. Great write-up as always. This new series looks very promising and i’m sure it’s going to become a favorite of your readers.

But I will dare to dissent with your position that MS-DOS remained “quick and dirty” throughout its history. While it’s true and generally accepted that versions 1.0 through 3.3 were very clunky and impractical to work with, later versions became pretty sophisticated. DOS 5.0 was pretty solid and offered most of the important features of modern operating systems, multi-tasking aside (it wasn’t a market priority then) : advanced memory management, real-mode capability, menu-based shell, etc … DOS 6.22 is what Windows would be built on, and would remain its backbone until Windows 95 came along. DOS 7 was the version developed with Windows 95 and wasn’t sold separately but could be booted up without the GUI layer and gave users a lot of control over the machine. The Windows 2000-XP-Vista-7-8-10 command prompt and shell is directly descended from DOS 7 and offers pretty much all of the functionality of Linux, the king of “GUI-independent OS’s”.

What I mean is that Microsoft pretty much evolved and modernized MS-DOS in tandem with Windows in order to arrive at the unified platform that was Windows 95 and later versions.

This was very different from what Apple did with the Finder and System (later called MacOS), which were designed from the beginning to exist without a “DOS-like” layer. Microsoft may have been dead set on imitating the Mac System’s “look and feel” (and even got sued for it) but their software engineering had more in common with the likes of AmigaDOS/Workbench and UNIX/Xwindow than with Apple’s architecture.

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2018 at 10:34 am

By the time we get to the MS-DOS 5.x era, we’re into the 1990s, and you’re absolutely right that it was being developed as much as the technological underpinning of Windows as an operating system in its own right. I’d argue, however, that it still had an awful lot of problems when taken as a standalone operating system, all of them a direct outgrowth of its “quick and dirty” origins. More on this when we get there…

- Casey Muratori

June 22, 2018 at 11:42 pm

I had trouble parsing “but for a secretary or an executive who saw the computer only as an appliance it was a nightmare”, and had to reread it. Maybe “but it was a nightmare for a secretary or an executive who saw the computer only as an appliance.”

?

– Casey

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2018 at 10:36 am

Sure. Thanks!

- Aula

June 23, 2018 at 11:41 am

“MGA monochrome video card”

That should be MDA (for Monochrome Display Adapter).

“moment moment”

In some contexts that duplication could be appropriate, since the word has different meanings, but this isn’t one of them.

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2018 at 11:47 am

Thanks!

- Aula

June 23, 2018 at 4:06 pm

“Unlike the hardware on which it was installed, MS-DOS had been created with no eye whatsoever to the long-term future. The most infamous sign of this was its hard-coded memory model, locked into the 1 MB address space of the Intel 8088, allowing any computer on which it ran just 640 K of RAM at the most.”

The memory model was hard-coded in hardware by choices made by IBM. What do you think MS-DOS could have done differently about it?

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2018 at 5:19 pm

A more modern, forward-thinking operating system would have taken memory-allocation tasks to itself, requiring applications to request the memory they wished to use from the operating system. Had MS-DOS done so, Microsoft could have released a new version to accompany the PC/AT, the first IBM hardware design to use memory above the 1 MB address-space barrier of the original IBM PC. There might have still been some issues with allocating huge chunks of memory, as the RAM pool would still be non-contiguous, but it would have been more akin to the Amiga’s fast/chip RAM split than the endless headache that the 640 K barrier remained for years to come.

If there’s an original sin on the hardware side of all this, it must be placed at the feet of Intel rather than IBM. It was the former who elected to place the 8088’s reset vector at the very top of its address space. Given that situation, IBM’s engineers didn’t have much choice but to employ the memory map they used.

- Aula

June 24, 2018 at 10:09 am

“A more modern, forward-thinking operating system would have taken memory-allocation tasks to itself, requiring applications to request the memory they wished to use from the operating system.”

Huh? MS-DOS *did* do exactly that. What does that even have to do with the 1 MB limit?

“Had MS-DOS done so, Microsoft could have released a new version to accompany the PC/AT, the first IBM hardware design to use memory above the 1 MB address-space barrier of the original IBM PC.”

Well yes, new applications written specifically to be run in protected mode under the new OS could have used memory beyond 1 MB. Legacy programs written for 8088/8086 would still have been limited to the 640 kB.

“There might have still been some issues with allocating huge chunks of memory, as the RAM pool would still be non-contiguous, but it would have been more akin to the Amiga’s fast/chip RAM split than the endless headache that the 640 K barrier remained for years to come.”

That comparison makes no sense to me. The 68000 had 24-bit addresses so the original Amiga had a lot of unused address space. In contrast, the 8088/8086 (and the compatible real-address mode on 286 and later) is limited to 20-bit addresses, just like the Z80 and 6510 are limited to 16-bit addresses.

“If there’s an original sin on the hardware side of all this, it must be placed at the feet of Intel rather than IBM.”

Did Intel somehow force IBM to choose the 8088 for the original PC? If not, then IBM is the only entity to blame for the choice of a processor with completely idiotic memory addressing.

- Jimmy Maher

June 24, 2018 at 11:20 am

“A more modern, forward-thinking operating system would have taken memory-allocation tasks to itself, requiring applications to request the memory they wished to use from the operating system.”

Huh? MS-DOS *did* do exactly that. What does that even have to do with the 1 MB limit?

Actually, MS-DOS 1 didn’t. There’s no concept of an application *requesting* a block of memory from the operating system which is returned in the form of a (real or virtual) pointer. Because MS-DOS was an operating system designed around the “triangle of ones” — single user, single task, single computer — it happily left memory wide open to applications to do whatever they wished with, wherever they wished.

I bring it up because an operating system which *did* expect its applications to request the memory they wished to use would have been able to apportion memory beyond the 1 MB barrier… if it could get around the real-mode/protected-mode divide, which is admittedly an open question.

“Had MS-DOS done so, Microsoft could have released a new version to accompany the PC/AT, the first IBM hardware design to use memory above the 1 MB address-space barrier of the original IBM PC.”

Well yes, new applications written specifically to be run in protected mode under the new OS could have used memory beyond 1 MB. Legacy programs written for 8088/8086 would still have been limited to the 640 kB.

I wonder a bit whether it might have been possible to create a “286 DOS” which ran in protected mode and maintained a degree of compatibility with well-behaved applications for an earlier version, if said earlier version had never allowed/expect software to bang away at the raw metal. See my comment to Stepped Pyramid, which covers a lot of this same territory.

“There might have still been some issues with allocating huge chunks of memory, as the RAM pool would still be non-contiguous, but it would have been more akin to the Amiga’s fast/chip RAM split than the endless headache that the 640 K barrier remained for years to come.”

That comparison makes no sense to me. The 68000 had 24-bit addresses so the original Amiga had a lot of unused address space. In contrast, the 8088/8086 (and the compatible real-address mode on 286 and later) is limited to 20-bit addresses, just like the Z80 and 6510 are limited to 16-bit addresses.

I just meant in the sense that there were two pools of memory on the Amiga, and you couldn’t — according to my recollection, anyway — span them with a single memory-allocation request — i.e., you couldn’t request more memory than was available in the form of chip OR fast memory, even there was enough free memory in the aggregate. I was thinking of the larger address spaces of the 80286 and chips in this context. Obviously, 1 MB was all she wrote on the 8088 without going through some truly heroic contortions.

“If there’s an original sin on the hardware side of all this, it must be placed at the feet of Intel rather than IBM.”

Did Intel somehow force IBM to choose the 8088 for the original PC? If not, then IBM is the only entity to blame for the choice of a processor with completely idiotic memory addressing.

I wouldn’t call it “completely idiotic,” just one unfortunate choice. But anyway, I was thinking more in terms of the IBM engineers who were told that “we’re going with the Intel processor, now find a way to make it work.” That said, there was some discussion about using the 68000, but it was still new and very expensive. I’m not sure there were a lot of other great alternatives. It would probably have saved everyone a lot of trouble if IBM had just waited for the 80286. ;)

All that said… you and Stepped Pyramid have convinced me that the article was a little… um… more judgmental than it needed to be on this subject. Perhaps this was just a technical problem with no really good solution. I made some edits that soften or excise the harshest language. Thanks!

- tedder

June 24, 2018 at 3:39 pm

I now want to read the canonical history of virtual memory and paged memory.

- Jimmy Maher

June 24, 2018 at 3:54 pm

That would be interesting to research… but I’m afraid it might strain my readers’ patience even more than all those Civilization articles. ;)

- tedder

June 24, 2018 at 7:15 pm

Yeah, I was careful to not say “you should write about” :) I already get much more than I pay for.

I love the Civ and hardware articles, more in my wheelhouse than IF. I’m weird like that.

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- Sam Garret

June 24, 2018 at 10:03 pm

minor typo:

much more than just a cutsey way of issuing commands to the computer

Someone already posted this sentence, but there’s a second error: cutsey is presumably cutesy

Just as a datapoint, I also initially misread ‘was quite expensive to boot’ – as its idiomatic and jargonistic meanings both fit. I wasn’t sure if you were being punny.

And finally – I’m surprised you didn’t put in a reminder or crosslink to https://www.filfre.net/2012/01/selling-zork/ as, I assume (with all danger there associated), it’s the same Personal Software that was Zork’s first publisher (if that’s the right term).

- Jimmy Maher

June 25, 2018 at 8:24 am

Thanks! I’m a little sheepish to say that I totally forgot about the Infocom connection. Edits made; “to boot” is no more. ;)

- cpt kangarooski

June 24, 2018 at 10:26 pm

Jimmy,
In several places you say that the Mac would not be able to show multiple applications at once until System 6 in 1988. I’m afraid you’re off by one — Multifinder shipped in 1987 as part of System Software 5.

But that’s the official release. Andy Hertzfeld had previously released Switcher, which Apple licensed and made widely available. It allowed for multitasking (and allowed the Clipboard, which always worked between applications, to be a lot more useful in that you didn’t need to quit and launch between programs) but it only showed one program at a time. Switcher had shown up in 1985.

Between Switcher and Multifinder, there was one other stab at it from the usual sources. This was Servant. It never got out of beta, but it served as a proof of concept for MultiFinder, and had come out in 1986.

And none of this was conceptually groundbreaking — the Lisa had operated like this for years.

- Jimmy Maher

June 25, 2018 at 8:12 am

Thanks! I do think it’s fair to judge these things in terms of the official operating system rather than add-ons to same, even if they come from Apple. So, we’ll settle on the System 5 reference point.

- Lt. Nitpicker

June 26, 2018 at 3:11 am

“…and even then the “replacement” would still have to be build on top of…”
I think you meant built.

Anyway, I’m excited to see where this series goes. Just a couple of comments.

Are you going to mention the “Gabe Newell choosing to sleep in his office in order to get Windows out on time (or at least get it to ship sooner)” anecdote? Given it’s become pretty well known, I think it’s worth mentioning.

Have you considered contacting Michal Necasek, the proprietor of the OS/2 Museum regarding his knowledge on the history of OS/2, Windows, and DOS (especially DOS 5)? I’m betting you’re using him as a source, but he has linked to your FTL (the company) article, so he would probably be willing to talk.

- Jimmy Maher

June 26, 2018 at 7:32 am

Thanks!

I hadn’t really thought about whether or not to use that anecdote yet. I can say, though, that I’m generally more interested in writing these articles from a somewhat strategic perspective than I am in giving a bunch of “crazy antics the programmers and engineers got up to” anecdotes. There’s a lot of that sort of thing already about. That’s fine, of course, but I think the bigger picture often gets lost in stories that spend too much time down in the trenches, as it were.

I don’t really feel like I’m hurting for sources as things are. In this sense these articles are very different from writing about a somewhat obscure game or company, where I really need to conduct personal interviews to have anything to write about. The challenge in this case is rather proving to be that of corralling one hell of a complicated already-extant data set into a readable narrative. I want to do a better job of explaining the tech than the pop-business journalists generally do, but don’t plan to get anywhere near as far down in the weeds as Mr. Necasek’s blog — which doesn’t mean that his work isn’t worthwhile, of course. It’s just a case of different writerly priorities. I’m hoping to hit a sweet spot between the business journalists who don’t know a bit from a byte and the fan blogs that love to talk about exactly how Programmer X developed Obscure Function Y in a flash of insight while eating an Hawaiian pizza after an 18-hour hacking bender.

- Rowan Lipkovits

June 26, 2018 at 8:45 pm

“It would only be possible to program Visi On, they announced, after purchasing an expensive development kit and installing it on a $20,000 DEC PDP-11 minicomputer.”

Now I’m wondering if emulation fiends have managed to eventually get any homebrew together for the Visi On software platform, make entries under it for demoparties etc?

- Rafael

June 27, 2018 at 3:09 am

Very informative article! Thanks for the insights!

- int19h

June 27, 2018 at 9:13 am

> Let’s say you wanted to put some graphics on the screen. Well, a given machine might have an MDA monochrome video card or a CGA color card, or, soon enough, a monochrome Hercules card or a color EGA card. You the programmer had to build into your program a way of figuring out which one of these your host had, and then had to write code for dealing with each possibility on its own terms.

BIOS actually provided some higher-level graphics primitives that were adapter-independent – INT 10h. You could change video modes based on standardized mode numbers, output text (even in graphic modes!), and draw pixels of various colors. It was pretty slow if you needed to draw e.g. a line pixel by pixel, but generally workable when animation was not required.

- plam

June 30, 2018 at 7:54 pm

As I recall, the write pixel call under INT 10h was unusably slow for EGA or better, and didn’t permit e.g. drawing lines except pixel-by-pixel, so even more slow. You basically had to provide your own graphics routines.

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Doing Windows, Part 2: From Interface Manager to Windows
June 29, 2018

Bill Gates was as aware as everyone else of the abundant deficiencies of his own company’s hastily procured operating system for the IBM PC. So, in September of 1981, before the PC had even shipped and just a handful of months after VisiCorp had started their own similar project, he initiated work at Microsoft on a remedy for MS-DOS’s shortcomings. Initially called the “Interface Manager,” it marks the start of a long, fraught tale of struggle and woe that would finally culminate in the operating system still found on hundreds of millions of computers today.

As the name would imply, the Interface Manager was envisioned first and foremost as a way to make computing easier for ordinary people, a graphical layer to sit atop MS-DOS and insulate them from the vagaries of the command line. As such, it was the logical follow-on to an even older project inside Microsoft with similar goals, another whose distant descendant is still ubiquitous today: Microsoft Multiplan, the forefather of Excel.

In those days, people who had worked at the already legendary Xerox Palo Alto Research Center were traded around the computer industry like the scarce and precious commodity they were, markers of status for anyone who could get their hands on one of them. Thus it could only be regarded as something of a coup when Charles Simonyi came to work for Microsoft on February 6, 1981, after almost a decade spent at PARC. There he had been responsible for a word processor known as Bravo, the very first in history to implement the “what you see is what you get” philosophy — meaning that the text you saw on the monitor screen looked exactly like what would be produced by the printer. When the 32-year-old Hungarian immigrant, debonair and refined, showed his secretary at PARC a snapshot of his soon-to-be boss Bill Gates, 25-going-on-15 and looking like he could really use a shower and a haircut, she nearly fell out of her chair laughing: “Charles, what are you doing? Here you are at the best research lab in the world!” What could he say? A rapidly changing industry could make for strange bedfellows. Simonyi became Microsoft’s First Director of Applications Development.

At Microsoft, he found the Multiplan project, an attempt to make a competitor to VisiCalc, already underway. He pushed hard to turn it into not just another spreadsheet but a different kind of spreadsheet, placing a premium on ease of use in a field of business software already becoming known for its crypticness. For him, ease of use meant augmenting the long lists of command keystrokes with a menu of possibilities that would always be at the user’s fingertips. Simonyi:

I like the obvious analogy of a restaurant. Let’s say I go to a French restaurant and I don’t speak the language. It’s a strange environment and I’m apprehensive. I’m afraid of making a fool of myself, so I’m kind of tense. Then a very imposing waiter comes over and starts addressing me in French. Suddenly, I’ve got clammy hands. What’s the way out?

The way out is that I get the menu and point at something on the menu. I cannot go wrong. I may not get what I want — I might end up with snails — but at least I won’t be embarrassed.

But imagine if you had a French restaurant without a menu. That would be terrible.

It’s the same thing with computer programs. You’ve got to have a menu. Menus are friendly because people know what their options are, and they can select an option just by pointing. They do not have to look for something that they will not be able to find, and they don’t have to type some command that might be wrong.

It’s true that Multiplan’s implementation of menus was a long way from what a modern GUI user might expect to see. For one thing, they were lined up at the bottom rather than the top of the screen. (It would take software makers a surprisingly long time to settle on the topside placement we know today, as evidenced by the menus we saw at the bottom of Visi On’s windows as well in my previous article.) More generally, much of what Simonyi had been able to implement in Bravo on the graphical terminals at Xerox PARC way back in the mid-1970s was impossible on an IBM PC running Multiplan in the early 1980s, thanks to the lack of a mouse and a restriction to text-only display modes. One could only do what one could with the tools to hand — and by that standard, it must be said, Microsoft Multiplan was a pretty good first effort.

Multiplan was released in 1982. Designed to run inside as little as 64 K of memory and ported to several platforms (including even the humble Commodore 64), it struggled to compete with Lotus 1-2-3, which was designed from the start for an IBM PC with at least 256 K. The Lotus product would come to monopolize the spreadsheet market to the tune of an 80-percent share and sales of 5 million copies by the end of the 1980s, while Multiplan would do… rather less well. Still, the general philosophy that would guide Microsoft’s future efforts was there. Their software would distinguish itself by being approachable for the average person. Sometimes this would yield great results, other times it would come off more as a condescending caricature of user-friendliness, but it’s the philosophy that still guides Microsoft’s consumer software to this day.

Here we see Microsoft Multiplan in action. Note the two rows of menus along the bottom of the screen; this counted as hugely user-friendly circa 1982.

Charles Simonyi left an even bigger mark upon Microsoft’s next important application. Like Multiplan, Multi-Tool Word attempted to compete with the leading application of its type primarily on the basis of ease of use. This time, however, the application type in question was the word processor, and the specific application in question was WordStar, a product which was so successful that its publisher, MicroPro International, had gross sales that exceeded Microsoft’s as late as 1983. Determined to recreate what he had wrought at Xerox PARC more exactly than had been possible with Multiplan, a project he had come into in the middle, Simonyi convinced Microsoft to make a mouse just for the new word processor. (“The mouse,” InfoWorld magazine had to explain, “is a pointing device that is designed to roll on the desktop next to the keyboard of a personal computer.”)

The very first Microsoft mouse, which retailed for $195 in 1983.

Debuting in May of 1983, in many ways Multi-Tool Word was the forerunner of the operating environment that would come to be known as Microsoft Windows, albeit in the form of one self-contained application. Certainly most of the touted advantages to a GUI environment were in place. It implemented windows, allowing multiple documents to be open simultaneously within them; it utilized the mouse if anything more elegantly than the full-blown GUI environment Visi On would upon its debut six months later; it could run in graphical mode, allowing it to display documents just as they would later appear on the printer; it did its best to duplicate the interface of Multiplan, on the assumption that a user shouldn’t be expected to relearn the most basic interface concepts every time she needs to use a new application; it had an undo command to let the user walk back her mistakes. Unfortunately, it was also, like most early GUI experiments, slow in comparison to more traditional software, and it lacked such essential features as a spell checker and a mailing-list manager. Like Multiplan, it would have a hard time breaking through in one of the most competitive segments of the business-software market, one which was dominated first by the more powerful WordStar and then by the still more power-user-friendly WordPerfect. But, once again, it gave a glimpse of the future of computing as Microsoft envisioned it.

Multi-Tool Word. Here someone is using the mouse to create a text style. Note the WYSIWYG text displayed above.

Even as these applications were being developed at Microsoft, work on the Interface Manager, the software designed to integrate all of their interface enhancements and more into a non-application-specific operating environment, was continuing at its own pace. As usual with such projects, the Interface Manager wound up encompassing far more than just a new interface. Among other requirements, Gates had stated that it had to introduce a system of drivers to insulate applications from the hardware, and that it had to expose a toolkit to application programmers that was far larger and richer than MS-DOS’s 27 bare-bones function calls. Such a toolkit would allow programmers to make diverse applications with a uniform look and feel, thus delivering on another of the GUI’s most welcome promises.

This is one of a series of screenshots, published in the December 1983 issue of Byte Magazine, which together may represent the oldest extant evidence of Microsoft Windows’s early appearance. Note in particular the menus at the bottom of the screen. Oddly, a much more mature version of Windows, with menus at the top of the individual windows, was demonstrated at the Comdex trade show which began on November 23, 1983. Despite the magazine’s cover date, one therefore has to assume that these screenshots are older — probably considerably older, given how dramatic the differences between the Windows demonstrated at Comdex and the one we see here really are.

In early 1983, Bill Gates and a few colleagues met with IBM to show them their Interface Manager in progress. They had expected a thrilled reception, expected IBM to immediately embrace it as the logical next stage in the two companies’ partnership. What they got was something much different. “They thought it was neat stuff,” recalls Gates’s right-hand man Steve Ballmer, “but they said, ‘We have this other thing we are pretty excited about.'” IBM, it seemed, must be working on an extension to MS-DOS of their own. This unsatisfying and, from Microsoft’s perspective, vaguely alarming meeting heralded the beginning of a new, far less trusting phase in the two companies’ relationship. The unlikely friendship between the young and freewheeling Microsoft and the middle-aged and staid IBM had spawned the IBM PC, a defining success for both companies. Now, though, it was entering a much more prickly phase.

IBM had been happy to treat this scruffy kid named Bill Gates almost as an equal partner as long as their first general-purpose microcomputer remained nothing more than a marketplace experiment. Now, though, with the IBM PC the first bullet item on their stock reports, the one exploding part of an otherwise fairly stagnant business, they were beginning to wonder what they had wrought when they signed that generous deal to merely license MS-DOS from Microsoft rather than buy it outright. Gates had already made it clear that he would happily license the same operating system to others; this, combined with the open architecture and easy-to-duplicate commodity hardware of the IBM PC itself, was allowing the first of what would soon be known as the “PC clones” to enter the market, undercutting IBM’s prices. IBM saw this development, for understandable reasons, as a potential existential threat to the one truly exciting part of their business, and they weren’t at all sure whose side Microsoft was really on. The two partners were bound together in a hopeless tangle of contracts and mutual dependencies that could quite possibly never be fully severed. Still, there wasn’t, thought IBM, any point in getting themselves yet more entangled. From here on, then, IBM and Microsoft’s relationship would live in an uncertain no man’s land somewhere between partners and competitors — a situation destined to have major implications for the quest to replace MS-DOS with something better.

IBM’s suspicions about Microsoft were probably at least partly justified — Bill Gates’s reputation as a shark whom you trusted at your peril was by no means unearned — but undoubtedly became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. Suddenly aware of the prospect of a showdown between their Interface Manager and whatever IBM was playing so close to the vest, Microsoft began reaching out to the emerging clone makers — to names like Compaq, Zenith, and Tandy — in a far more concerted way. If matters should indeed end in a showdown, these could be the bridges which would allow their system software rather than IBM’s to remain the standard in corporate America.

As if all this wasn’t creating concern enough inside Microsoft and IBM alike, there was also the question of what to make of the Apple Lisa, which had been announced in January of 1983 and would ship in June. The much-heralded first personal computer designed from the ground up for the GUI paradigm had a lot of problems when you looked below the surface. For one thing, it was far too expensive for even the everyday corporate market, what with its price tag of over $10,000. And it suffered from a bad case of over-ambition on the part of its software architects, who had decided to ask its 5 MHz Motorola 68000 processor to run a highly sophisticated operating system sporting virtual memory and cooperative multitasking. The inevitable result was that the thing was slow. A popular knock-knock joke inside the computer industry followed the “Who’s there?” with a fifteen-second pause before a “Lisa” finally came forth. If someone was going to pay over $10,000 for a personal computer, everyone agreed, she was justified in expecting it to run like a Ferrari rather than a Volkswagen bus.

The Lisa GUI, looking and working pretty much the way we still expect such things to look and work today.

When you looked beyond the pricing and performance problems, however, the Lisa was… well, the Lisa was amazing. Apple’s engineering team had figured this whole GUI thing out in a way that no one, not even the demigods at Xerox PARC, had managed to do before. The greatest testament to Apple’s genius today is just how normal the Lisa interface still looks, how easily one can imagine oneself just sitting down and getting to work using it. (Try saying that about any other unfamiliar operating system of this period!) All the stuff we expect is present, working as we expect it to: draggable windows with scroll bars on the side and sizing widgets attached to the corners; pull-down menus up there at the top of the screen; a desktop to function as the user’s immediate workspace; icons representing disks, files, and applications which can be dragged from place to place or even thrown in the trash can; drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste. Parts of all this had appeared before in other products, such as the Xerox Star, but never before had it all come together like this. After the Lisa, further refinements of the GUI would all be details; the really essential, really important pieces were all in place. It instantly made all of the industry’s many other GUI projects, including Microsoft’s, look hopelessly clunky.

Thanks not least to that $10,000 price tag, the Lisa itself was doomed to be a commercial failure. But Apple was promising a new machine for 1984, one which would be cheaper and would employ the same interface without the speed-sapping virtual memory and multitasking. For obvious reasons, the prospect of this next Apple computer, to be called the Macintosh, made plenty of people in the MS-DOS world, among them Bill Gates, very nervous.

One can view much of the history of the personal computer in the United States through the shifting profiles of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, those two personalities who will always be most identified with a whole era of technology in the public imagination. Just a few years hence from 1983, Jobs would be widely viewed as a has-been in his early thirties, a flighty hippie whom the adults who were now running Apple had wisely jettisoned; Gates, on the other hand, would be a darling of Wall Street well on the way to his reputation as the computer industry’s all-powerful Darth Vader. In 1983, however, the picture was very different. Jobs was still basking in the glory of having been one half — and by far the most charismatic half at that — of the pair of dreamers who had supposedly invented the personal computer in that famous Cupertino garage of theirs, while Gates was the obscure head of a rather faceless company whose importance was understood only by industry insiders. None could foresee the utter domination of virtually all personal computing that would soon be within Gates’s grasp. He was still balanced on the divide between his old way of doing business, as the head of an equal-opportunity purveyor of programming languages and other software to whoever cared to pay for them, and his new, as the supreme leader in the cause of one platform to rule them all under the banner of Microsoft.

This list of the top software companies of 1983 provides a fascinating snapshot of an industry in rapid transition. VisiCorp, which would easily have topped the list in any of the three previous years, has fallen back to number 5, already a spent force. Lotus, the spreadsheet-making rival responsible for their downfall, will take over the top spot in 1984 and remain there through 1986. The biggest company of all this year is the now-forgotten MicroPro, maker of WordStar, the most popular early word processor; they will be wiped out by WordPerfect, which doesn’t even make this list yet, within a year or two. Finally, note the number of home- and entertainment-software publishers which manage to sneak onto the bottom half of this list. In years to come, the business-software market will continue to explode so dramatically in contrast to a comparatively slow-growing home-computing software market as to make that a thing of the past.

So, Jobs still had the edge on Gates in lots of ways in 1983, and he wasn’t afraid to let him know. He expected Microsoft to support the Macintosh in the form of application software. Specifically, he expected them to provide a spreadsheet, a business-graphics application, and a database; they’d signed a contract to do so, and been provided with their first extremely crude prototype of the new machine in return, back in January of 1982. According to Mike Murray, the Mac’s first marketing manager, Jobs would call Gates up and hector him in a way that no one would have dared talk to the Bill Gates of just a few years later: “You get down here right now. I don’t care what your schedule says. I want you down here tomorrow morning at 8:30 and I want you to tell me exactly what you’re doing [for the Macintosh] at Microsoft.”

For his part, Gates was willing to play the role of Jobs’s good junior partner, just as he had played the same role so dutifully for IBM, but he never lost sight of the big picture. The fact was that when it came to business sense, the young Bill Gates was miles ahead of the young Steve Jobs. One can’t help but imagine him smiling to himself when Jobs lectured him on how he should forget about MS-DOS and the rest of the system-software business, how application software was where the money was really at. Gates knew something which Jobs had apparently yet to realize: if you control the operating system on people’s computers, you can potentially control everything.

Still, Jobs was aware enough of business realities to see an environment like the Interface Manager, available on commodity clone hardware much cheaper than the Macintosh, as a significant threat. He reminded Gates pointedly of language in the January 1982 contract between the two companies which prohibited Microsoft from using knowledge gained of the Macintosh in competing products for other platforms. Gates respectfully but firmly held his ground, not even precisely denying that insights gained from the Macintosh might find their way into the Interface Manager but rather saying that the “competing products” mentioned in the contract would naturally have to mean other spreadsheets, business-graphic applications, or databases — not full-fledged operating environments. Further, he pointed out, the restrictions only applied until January 1, 1984, or the first shipment of the Macintosh, whichever came first. By the time the Interface Manager was actually ready to sell, it would all be a moot point anyway.

It was at about this time that the Interface Manager became suddenly no longer the Interface Manager. The almost aggressively generic name of “Windows” was the brainchild of a new marketing manager named Rowland Hanson, who was just 31 years old when he came to Microsoft but had already left his stamp on such brands as Betty Crocker, Contadina, and Neutrogena. At his first interview with Bill Gates, the latter’s words immediately impressed him:

You know, the only difference between a dollar-an-ounce moisturizer and a forty-dollar-an-ounce moisturizer is in the consumer’s mind. There is no technical difference between moisturizers. We will technically be the best software. But if people don’t believe it or people don’t recognize it, it won’t matter. While we’re on the leading edge of technology, we also have to be creating the right perception about our products and our company, the right image.

Who would have thought that this schlubby-looking nerd understood so much about marketing? Having taken the interview on a lark, Hanson walked out of Gates’s office ready to help him create a new, slicker image for Microsoft. He knew nothing whatsoever about computers, but that didn’t matter. He hadn’t known anything about moisturizers either when he went to work for Neutrogena.

Hanson devised the approach to product branding that persists at Microsoft to this day. Each product’s name would be stripped down to its essence, creating the impression that it was the definitive — or the only — product of its type. The only ornamentation would be the Microsoft name, to make sure no one forgot who made it. Thus Multi-Tool Word, after just a few months on the market under that unwieldy name, now became simply Microsoft Word. If he had arrived just a little earlier, Hanson grumbled, he would have been able to make sure that Multiplan shipped as Microsoft Spreadsheet, and MS-DOS — the software that “tells the IBM PC how to think” in his new marketing line — would have had the first part of the abbreviation spelled out every single time: Microsoft DOS. Luckily, there was still time to save the next generation of Microsoft system software from the horrid name of Interface Manager. It should rather be known simply as Microsoft Windows. “It appeared there were going to be multiple systems like this on the market,” remembers Hanson. “Well, we wanted our name basically to define the generic.” Gates agreed, and one of the most enduring brands in the history of computing was born.

The Windows project had run hot and cold inside Microsoft over the past couple of years in the face of other pressing priorities. Now, though, Gates started pushing hard under the prompting of external developments. The Macintosh was scheduled to make its debut in January of 1984. Just as worryingly, VisiCorp planned to ship Visi On at last before 1983 was up, and had scheduled a big, much-anticipated unveiling of the final product for the Comdex business-computing trade show which would begin on November 23. Determined to avoid the impression that Microsoft was being left behind by the GUI arms race, and even more determined to steal VisiCorp’s thunder, Gates wanted a Windows unveiling before Comdex. To help accomplish that, he hired another refugee from Xerox named Scott MacGregor and put him in charge of the project’s technical architecture. At 26 years old, MacGregor was a little too young even by the early-blooming standards of hacker culture to have made a major contribution during the glory days of Xerox PARC, but he had done the next best thing: he had designed the windowing system for the Star office workstation, the only tangible commercial product Xerox themselves ever developed out of all the work done with mice and menus at PARC. Other Xerox veterans would soon join MacGregor on the Windows project, which spent the late summer and early autumn of 1983 in a mad scramble to upstage its various competitors.

On November 10, at a lavish event inside New York City’s posh Helmsley Palace Hotel, Microsoft officially announced Windows, saying it would be available for purchase by April of 1984 and that it would run on a computer without a hard drive and with as little as 192 K of memory — a stark contrast to Visi On’s minimum specification of a hard-drive-equipped 512 K machine. And, unlike under Visi On, all applications, even those not specifically written for Windows, would be able to run in the environment, at least after a fashion. “Misbehaved” programs, as Microsoft referred to what was actually the entirety of the MS-DOS application market at the time of the unveiling, could be started through Windows but would run in full-screen mode and not have access to its features; Windows would effectively shut down when the time came to run such an application, then start itself back up when the user exited. It wasn’t ideal, but it struck most people as an improvement on Visi On’s our-way-or-the-highway approach.

The dirty little secret hiding behind this very first demonstration of Windows was that the only actual Windows application that existed at the time was a little paint program Microsoft’s programmers had put together, along with a few applets like a calendar, a calculator, and an extremely basic text editor. Microsoft had, they claimed, “commitments” from such big players as Lotus, Ashton-Tate, and Peachtree to port their vanilla MS-DOS applications to Windows, but the reality was that none of these took the form of much more than a vague promise and a handshake.

The work Bill Gates had been doing to line up support from the emerging community of clone makers was in plainer evidence. Microsoft could announce that no fewer than 23 of their current MS-DOS licensees had signed up to ship Windows on their machines as well, including names like Compaq, Data General, Hewlett-Packard, Radio Shack/Tandy, Wang, and Zenith. The only important licensee absent from the list was the biggest of them all, IBM — a fact which the business and technology press could hardly fail to notice. Yet the plan was, as Gates didn’t hesitate to declare, to have Windows on 90 percent of all MS-DOS machines by the end of 1984. Where did that leave IBM? Among the trailing 10 percent?

As it happened, Microsoft was still trying to get IBM onboard the Windows train. The day after the big rollout, Gates flew from New York to Boca Raton, Florida, where the division of IBM responsible for their microcomputers was located, and made another pitch. Perhaps he believed that the good press stemming from the previous day’s festivities, which was to be found in the business and technology sections of this day’s newspapers all over the country, would sway them. If so, he was disappointed. Once again, IBM was noncommittal in all senses of the adjective, alluding vaguely to a potential similar product of their own. Then, a few days after Gates left them, IBM announced that they would distribute Visi On through their dealer network. This move was several steps short of anointing it the only or the official GUI of the IBM PC, but it was nevertheless a blessing of a certain type, and far more than IBM had yet agreed to do for Windows. It was becoming abundantly clear that IBM was, at the very least, hedging their bets.

A week later, the Comdex show opened in Las Vegas, with the finished Visi On on public display for the first time. Just a few booths down from that spectacle, Microsoft, still determined to undermine Visi On’s debut, showed Windows as well. Indeed, Windows was everywhere at Comdex; “You couldn’t take a leak in Vegas without seeing a Windows sticker,” remembers one Microsoft executive. Yet the actual product behind all the hype was presented only in the most circumscribed way. Microsoft employees ran through a carefully scripted spiel inside the Windows booth, making sure the public got nowhere close to the controls of the half-finished (at best) piece of software.

Still, Microsoft had some clear advantages to point out when it came to Windows, and point them out they did. For one, there was the aforementioned ability to run — or at least to start — non-Windows applications within the environment. For another, true multitasking would be possible under Windows, claimed Microsoft, not just the concurrently open applications of Visi On. And it would be possible, they said, to write Windows programs on the selfsame Windows computer on which they would run, in contrast to the $20,000 minicomputer one had to buy to develop for Visi On. This led Microsoft to refer to Windows as the open GUI, a system carrying forward the original promise of the personal computer as an anything tool for ordinary users.

In the nuts and bolts of their interfaces as well, the two systems presented contrasting approaches. The Visi On interface strongly resembled something that might have been seen at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, but Windows betrayed the undeniable influence of Apple’s recent work on the Lisa and, as would later become clear, the Macintosh — not hugely surprising, given that Microsoft had been able to follow the step-by-step evolution of the latter since January of 1982, thanks to their privileged position as contracted application developers for the new machine. Windows already seemed to operate a bit more intuitively than the rather awkward Visi On; Microsoft already understood, as their competitor so plainly did not, that a mouse could be used for things other than single clicks.

In other ways, though, Windows was less impressive than Visi On, not to mention the Lisa and Macintosh. And one of these ways was, ironically given the new product’s name, the windows themselves. They weren’t allowed to overlap one another — at all. In what Microsoft spun as the “automatic window layout” feature, sizing one window would cause all of the others to resize and reposition themselves in response. Nor could you freely drag windows around the screen like you could on the Lisa and Macintosh. “It’s the metaphor of the neat desktop,” said Steve Ballmer, spinning like mad. Neat or not, this wasn’t quite the way most people expected a window manager to work — and yet Microsoft would stick with it for a well-nigh absurdly long time to come.

A Quick Tour of Windows as Shown at the 1983 Comdex Show

None other than Dan Bricklin of VisiCalc fame visited the November 1983 Comdex show with a camcorder. The footage he took is a precious historical document, not least in showing Windows in action as it existed at the time of these first public demonstrations. Much must still be surmised thanks to the shaky camerawork and the fact that the public was kept at arm’s length from a far-from-complete piece of software, but we’re very lucky Bricklin and his camcorder were there that day. We learn from his footage that Windows had progressed hugely since the screenshot shown earlier in this article, showing the clear influence of Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh interfaces.

Windows apparently boots up to a blank screen with a row of (non-draggable) icons at the bottom, each representing an installed application.

Here a text editor, a clock applet, and a paint program have been opened. Unlike in Visi On and Apple’s GUIs, windows cannot overlap one another. On the other hand, note that the menu bar has been moved to the top of the window, where we expect it to be today. On the other other hand, it appears that the menu still provides single-click options only, not drop-down lists of choices. Note how cluttered the two-line text-editor menu at the top is.

At the bottom of each window (just to the left of the mouse pointer in the photograph) is a set of widgets. From left, these are: minimize the window; maximize the window (minimizing all of the others in the process, since windows are not allowed to overlap one another); automatically “tile” the window with the others that are open (it’s not entirely clear how this worked); initiate a resize operation; close the window. Despite the appearance of a resizing widget in this odd location, it does appear from other video evidence that it was already possible to size a window by dragging on its border. Whether one first had to click the resizing widget to initiate such an operation is, once again, unclear.

A scroll bar is in place, but it’s at the left rather than the right side of the window.

A few weeks after Comdex closed up shop, VisiCorp shipped Visi On, to cautiously positive press notices behind which lurked all of the concerns that would prove the product’s undoing: its high price; its high system requirements and slow performance even on a hot-rod machine; its lack of compatibility with vanilla MS-DOS applications; the huge hardware hurdle developers had to leap to make applications for the system. Bill Gates, in other words, needn’t worry himself overmuch on that front.

But a month after Visi On made its underwhelming debut, the Apple Macintosh made its overwhelming version of same in the form of that famous “1984” television advertisement, which aired to an audience of 96 million viewers during the third quarter of the Super Bowl. Two days later, when the new computer was introduced in a slightly more orderly way at De Anza College’s Flint Auditorium, Bill Gates was there to support his sometime friend, sometime rival Steve Jobs in the biggest moment of his busy life to date. Versions of Microsoft Multiplan and BASIC for the Macintosh, Gates could announce there, would be available from the day the new computer shipped.

The announcement of the Mac version of Microsoft BASIC at the ceremony marked one of the last gasps of the old Microsoft business model which dated back to the days of the Altair kit computer, when they would supply a BASIC as a matter of course for every new microcomputer to come down the pipe.[1] But more important than the BASIC or even the Mac Multiplan was the mere fact that Microsoft was there at all in Flint Auditorium, getting their piece of the action. Bill Gates was doing what he always did, seeking to control those parts of the industry which he could and exploit those parts which he couldn’t. He didn’t know whether the Macintosh was destined to take over business computing entirely, as some were claiming, or whether its flaws, all too easily overlooked under the auditorium’s bright lights, would undermine its prospects in the end. Certainly those flaws were legion when you dug below the surface, including but not limited to a price which was, if vastly less than that of the Lisa, still far more than a typical MS-DOS machine; the lack of a hard drive; the straitened memory of just 128 K; the lack of amenability to expansion, which only exacerbated the previous three flaws; the lack of multitasking or even the ability to open concurrent programs; and an interface which corporate America might read as too friendly, crossing past the friend zone into cutesy and unbusinesslike. But what Bill Gates did know, with every bit as much certainty as Steve Jobs, was that the GUI in the abstract was the future of computing.

In June of 1984, with Windows having missed its release target of two months previous but still hopefully listed in Microsoft’s catalog as “coming soon,” Gates and Steve Ballmer wrote an internal memo which described in explicit, unvarnished detail their future strategy of playing the Macintosh and Windows off against one another:

Microsoft believes in the mouse and graphics as invaluable to the man-machine interface. We will bet on that belief by focusing new development on the two new environments with the mouse and graphics: Macintosh and Windows.

This also makes sense from a marketing perspective. Our focus will be on the business user, a customer who can afford the extra hardware expense of a mouse and high-resolution screen, and who will pay premium prices for quality easy-to-use software.

Microsoft will not invest significant development resources in new Apple II, MSX, CP/M-80, or character-based IBM PC applications. We will finish development and do a few enhancements to existing products.

Over the foreseeable future, our plan is to implement products first for the Mac and then to port them to Windows. We are taking care in the design of the Windows user interface to make this as easy as possible.

In his more unguarded moments, Gates would refer to Windows as “Mac on the [IBM] PC.”

Just one worrisome unknown continued to nag at him: what role would IBM play in his GUI-driven world of the future?

(Sources: the books The Making of Microsoft: How Bill Gates and His Team Created the World’s Most Successful Software Company by Daniel Ichbiah and Susan L. Knepper, Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson, Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, and Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company by Owen W. Linzmayer; PC World of September 1983; InfoWorld of May 30 1983, November 21 1983, April 2 1984, October 21 1991, and November 20 1995; MacWorld of September 1991; Byte of December 1983. Finally, I owe a lot to Nathan Lineback for the histories, insights, comparisons, and images found at his wonderful online “GUI Gallery.”)

1. That said, it wasn’t quite the last gasp: Microsoft would also supply a BASIC for the Commodore Amiga, constituting the only piece of software they would ever develop for that machine, shortly after its release in 1985. ↩

Comments
28 Responses

- David Boddie

June 29, 2018 at 12:39 pm

First, the corrections:
“may represent the oldest extent evidence” (extant)
“Neutrogina” (Neutrogena)
“Bill Gate”

On spreadsheets:
“The Lotus product would come to monopolize the spreadsheet market to the tune of an 80-percent share and sales of 5 million copies by the end of the 1980s, while Multiplan would do… rather less well.”

I never used 1-2-3 but was exposed to As-Easy-As (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As-Easy-As) at university where it was used to introduce students to the concept of a spreadsheet.

Windows and branding:
““It appeared there were going to be multiple systems like this on the market,” remembers Hanson. “Well, we wanted our name basically to define the generic.” Gates agreed, and one of the most enduring brands in the history of computing was born.”

It’s interesting how some of the early decisions cast a very long shadow at Microsoft. Every time the company reinvents itself pundits are quick to claim that it’s not like the old Microsoft, but there’s still a core Microsoft that never really seems to change.

- Jimmy Maher

June 29, 2018 at 3:22 pm

Thanks! And yes, it surprised me when researching this piece how far back many of the markers of Peak Microsoft actually date.

- anonymous

June 29, 2018 at 1:07 pm

You’ve got a “wold” where I think you want a “would.” And a “Bill Gate” without an “s”. As for BASIC, which never had a real presence on the Mac, there’s a good Folklore article about what happened behind the scenes there (though most of that action would take place in ‘85).

- Jimmy Maher

June 29, 2018 at 3:23 pm

Thanks! The story of Microsoft BASIC on the Macintosh is an interesting one that might turn up again later…

- anonymous

June 29, 2018 at 7:00 pm

Yes, but Apple was developing their own version of BASIC for the Mac too, before MS twisted their arm.

- sam

June 29, 2018 at 3:08 pm

“extent evidence” should be “extant”

- whomever

June 29, 2018 at 5:59 pm

Tiny detail but in case anyone is interested: The photo of the MS Mouse there is black and white; the actual color scheme was cream with green buttons (which was Microsoft’s corporate color scheme at the time). Also, it was NOT serial (or at least didn’t plug into the serial port) but came with its own ISA card. I still have one sitting around somewhere. IMHO the weirdest UI thing about Word of that era was that it used “Transact” instead of “File” to get to the save/load menu, which sort of makes sense but was quite definitely not what anyone else would choose.

- Lisa H.

June 29, 2018 at 6:59 pm

Gates had stated that it had to be introduce a system of drivers

I think you want to drop the “be”.

Instead the biggest company of all is the now-forgotten MicroPro, maker of WordStar, the most popular early word processor; they will be wiped out by WordPerfect, which doesn’t even make this list yet, within a year or two.

I was still actively using WordStar in the mid-1990s, partly because at the time the computer I had the most ready access to, i.e. the one in my bedroom, was a hand-me-down XT clone that had only been pushed out of my dad’s room by a 486 in 1991. (According to Wikipedia WordStar’s last release was in 1999. I don’t think I ever used it in a Windows environment; by the time we used Windows, we used Word.)

Microsoft would stick with it for a well-nigh absurdly long time to come

Missed a period at the end of the sentence.

Windows apparently boots up to a blank screen with a row of (non-draggable) icons at the bottom, each representing an installed application.

A bit ugly in this case, but isn’t this the same principle behind macOS’s Dock?

when the new computer was introduced in a slightly more orderly way at De Anza College’s Flint Auditorium

*waves from her stomping grounds* They shot scenes recreating that for the 2015 film Jobs here, too.

- Jimmy Maher

June 29, 2018 at 9:27 pm

Thanks!

- Lisa H.

June 29, 2018 at 7:02 pm

Oh, whoops! Sorry, whomever, if that comment seems non sequitur to you – I had started a comment in reply to you, and then decided against it, but forgot to click the top-level reply link instead.

- Adam Sampson

June 30, 2018 at 12:39 pm

“Microsoft would also supply a BASIC for the Commodore Amiga, constituting the only piece of software they would ever develop for that machine, in time for its release in 1985.”

It wasn’t actually in time for its release – Workbench 1.0 came with ABasiC by MetaComCo (who’d also written AmigaDOS based on TRIPOS). Microsoft’s AmigaBASIC was only included from Workbench 1.1.

ABasiC stuck around for a long time in PD libraries – I remember playing a pretty decent Monopoly game written in it…

- Jimmy Maher

June 30, 2018 at 1:33 pm

Good catch. Forgot about ABasiC. Thanks!

- Gnoman

June 30, 2018 at 11:28 pm

Did you ever do an article on the different versions of BASIC? That sounds like it would be a pretty decent article or two, although it is probably far too late in the timeline to do one now.

- Jimmy Maher

July 1, 2018 at 9:38 am

I once did an article on the general importance of BASIC on the 8-bit machines way back in the earliest days of the blog: https://www.filfre.net/2011/05/in-defense-of-basic.

- Casey Muratori

July 2, 2018 at 7:33 am

I had trouble parsing “Some of those features of more advanced operating systems toward which a GUI seems so naturally to point were also a part of the new product’s brief from the beginning.”

– Casey

- Jimmy Maher

July 2, 2018 at 8:48 am

Thanks. Decided that sentence didn’t need to be there at all…

- Anonymous

July 3, 2018 at 8:24 pm

Thanks Jimmy, great article as usual. I hope further entries expand on Scott MacGregor’s role. I work at a company where he was, until recently, the CEO. He was not (to put it mildly) well respected by the engineers. The scuttlebutt is that he was replaced by Ballmer as the initial version of windows kept getting delayed. I would be very interested in learning what the real story is.

- Brian Bagnall

July 4, 2018 at 4:54 pm

Great article as always, Jimmy. Not sure what you consider relevant coverage of the Windows story, but if you are getting around to Windows 3.0, there’s an unpublicized story I found out from Brian Dougherty and Clive Smith of Berkeley Softworks. Apparently Bill Gates aggressively tried to acquire GeoWorks Ensemble for Microsoft while it was still in development but they turned him down. He gave them good warning too that he would have to destroy them. :) I never ended up using the interview material but if you want it, along with Brian and Clive’s contact info, I can email it to you.

BTW Separate topic, are you planning to cover the BBS scene? IMO it desperately needs that Digital Antiquarian touch.

- Jimmy Maher

July 5, 2018 at 7:09 am

I hadn’t heard that story. Sounds a little henky, given how deep Microsoft was into their own Windows by that time, although I of course have no reason to doubt your interviewee. My best guess would be that Gates probably wanted to buy it in order to bury it — although it’s a little hard to imagine him seeing it as any real threat — or, most likely, wanted the programming expertise behind it. Certainly no one from Microsoft has ever mentioned it as any significant part of their strategy.

I did write about The Scene (https://www.filfre.net/2016/01/a-pirates-life-for-me-part-2-the-scene/), and don’t know how much there is really left to say about BBSs in general. It’s a tough topic to research in a concrete way, given that so much of the culture disappeared into the ether when the machines that hosted it all were shut down for the last time.

- Ehren

July 6, 2018 at 7:51 pm

Hi Jummy. I’m really enjoying this series. Thanks so much for writing it!

“It’s true that Multiplan’s implementation of menus was still a long way from the intuitive ease of a good GUI. For one thing, they were lined up at the bottom rather than the top of the screen.”

I’m curious why you feel the top is any more intuitive than the bottom. The lack of submenus seems like a bigger ease of use issue.

- David Boddie

July 6, 2018 at 8:15 pm

I wonder if having the menus at the bottom would have actually been more intuitive for users in some pieces of software, given that they would be closer to the function keys and function keystrips that would describe the commands and menus.

- Jimmy Maher

July 6, 2018 at 8:47 pm

It feels vastly more natural for me to have them at the top, but this of course may largely be down to my being conditioned by decades of computer use to having them there. The question of how much the current GUI standard is really better than any possible alternatives and how much it’s just chance that things ended up as they are is perhaps debatable. At the very least, I’d say the alternatives we’ve settled aren’t *worse* than other possibilities.

- Ehren

July 6, 2018 at 9:19 pm

I agree about the current GUI standards. The critique of the bottom placement of the menus just felt a bit weak to me. To use an analogy:

“Smith’s golf game was still a long way from where it needed to be. For one thing, he was using red tees instead of blue.”

Anyway, this is just one reader’s reaction. I’m looking forward to next week’s entry.

- Jimmy Maher

July 7, 2018 at 7:40 am

Fair enough. Changed the wording a bit to state that the menu placement was just different, not necessarily worse. (That said, I do wonder if there’s any research out there into menu placement. But it’s the weekend, and I don’t have time to dig into it right now…)

Thanks!

- Lt. Nitpicker

July 9, 2018 at 3:18 pm

Here’s a source for some color images of the original Microsoft Mouse to replace the black and white images present in your article

- Jimmy Maher

July 11, 2018 at 8:27 am

Cool. Thanks!

- Andrea

October 7, 2018 at 3:35 pm

Typo: “just he had played the same role so dutifully for IBM”; I think it should be “just as he had …”.

Thanks for writing this, I was born in the ’90s and your articles have helped me put a few things in perspective as I have never been able to do before.

- Jimmy Maher

October 8, 2018 at 12:45 pm

Thanks!

Doing Windows, Part 3: A Pair of Strike-Outs
July 6, 2018

Come August of 1984, Microsoft Windows had missed its originally announced release date by four months and was still nowhere near ready to go. That month, IBM released the PC/AT, a new model of their personal computer based around the more powerful Intel 80286 processor. Amidst the hoopla over that event, they invited Microsoft and other prominent industry players to a sneak preview of something called TopView, and Bill Gates got an answer at last to the fraught question of why IBM had been so uninterested in his own company’s Windows operating environment.

TopView had much in common with Windows and the many other attempts around the industry, whether already on the market or still in the works, to build a more flexible and user-friendly operating environment upon the foundation of MS-DOS. Like Windows and so many of its peers, it would offer multitasking, along with a system of device drivers to isolate applications from the underlying hardware and a toolkit for application developers that would allow them to craft software with a consistent look and feel. Yet one difference made TopView stand out from the pack — and not necessarily in a good way. While it did allow the use of a mouse and offered windows of a sort, it ran in text rather than graphics mode. The end result was a long, long way from the Macintosh-inspired ideal of intuitiveness and attractiveness which Microsoft dreamed of reaching with their own GUI environment.

TopView at the interface level resembled something IBM might have produced for the mainframe market back in the day more than it did Windows and the other microcomputer GUI environments that were its ostensible competitors. Like IBM’s mainframe system software, it was a little stodgy, not terribly pretty, and not notably forgiving toward users who hadn’t done their homework, yet had a lot to offer underneath the hood to anyone who could accept its way of doing business. It was a tool that seemed designed to court power users and office IT administrators, even as its competitors advertised their ease of use to executives and secretaries.

Within its paradigm, though, TopView was a more impressive product than it’s generally given credit for being even today. It sported, for example, true preemptive multitasking[1] months before the arrival of the Commodore Amiga, the first personal computer to ship with such a feature right out of the box. Even ill-behaved vanilla MS-DOS applications could be coerced into multitasking under TopView. Indeed, while IBM hoped, like everyone else making extended operating environments, to tempt third-party programmers into making native applications just for them, they were willing to go to heroic lengths to get existing MS-DOS applications working inside TopView in the meantime. They provided special specifications files — known as “Program Information Files,” or PIFs — for virtually all popular MS-DOS software. These told TopView exactly how and when their subjects would try to access the computer’s hardware, whereupon TopView would step in to process those calls itself, transparently to the ill-behaved application. It was an admittedly brittle solution to a problem which seemed to have no unadulteratedly good ones; it required IBM to research the technical underpinnings of every major new piece of MS-DOS software that entered the market in order to keep up with an endless game of whack-a-mole that was exhausting just to think about. Still, it was presumably better than punting on the whole problem of MS-DOS compatibility, as Visi On had done. Whatever else one could say about IBM’s approach to extending MS-DOS, they thus had apparently learned at least a little something from the travails of their competitors. Even the decision to run in character mode sounds far more defensible when you consider that up to two-thirds of MS-DOS computers at the time of TopView’s release were equipped only with a monochrome screen capable of no other mode.

Unfortunately, TopView failed to overcome many of the other issues that dogged its competitors. Having been so self-consciously paired with the pricey PC/AT, it was still a bit out in front of the sweet spot of hardware requirements, requiring a 512 K machine to do much of anything at all. And it was still dogged by the 640 K barrier, that most troublesome of all aspects of MS-DOS’s primitiveness. With hacks to get around the barrier still in their relative infancy, TopView didn’t even try to support more memory, and this inevitably limited the appeal of its multitasking capability. With applications continuing to grow in complexity and continuing to gobble up ever more memory, it wouldn’t be long before 640 K wouldn’t be enough to run even two pieces of heavyweight business software at the same time, especially after one had factored in the overhead of the operating environment itself.

A Quick Tour of TopView

While it isn’t technically a graphical user interface, TopView shares many features with contemporaneous products like Visi On and Microsoft Windows. Here we’re choosing an application to launch from a list of those that are installed. The little bullet to the left of each name on the list is important; it indicates that we have enough memory free to run that particular application. With no more than 640 K available in this multitasking environment and no virtual-memory capability, memory usage is a constant concern.

Here we see TopView’s multitasking capabilities. We’re running the WordStar word processor and the dBase database, two of the most popular MS-DOS business applications, at the same time. Note the “windows” drawn purely out of text characters. Preemptive multitasking like TopView is doing here wouldn’t come to Microsoft Windows until Windows 95, and wouldn’t reach the Macintosh until OS X was released in 2001.

We bring up a TopView context window by hitting the third — yes, third — button on IBM’s official mouse. Here we can switch between tasks, adjust window sizes and positions (albeit somewhat awkwardly, given the limitations of pure text), and even cut and paste between many MS-DOS applications that never anticipated the need for such a function. No other operating environment would ever jump through more hoops to make MS-DOS applications work like they had been designed for a multitasking windowed paradigm from the start.

Some of those hoops are seen above. Users make MS-DOS applications run inside TopView by defining a range of parameters explaining just what the application in question tries to do and how it does it. Thankfully, pre-made definition files for a huge range of popular software shipped with the environment. Brittle as heck though this solution might be, you certainly can’t fault IBM’s determination. Microsoft would adopt TopView’s “Program Information File,” or PIF, for use in Windows as well. It would thereby become the one enduring technical legacy of TopView, persisting in Windows for years after the IBM product was discontinued in 1988.

One of the hidden innovations of TopView is its “Window Design Aid,” which lets programmers of native applications define their interface visually, then generates the appropriate code to create it. Such visually-oriented time-savers wouldn’t become commonplace programming aids for another decade at least. It all speaks to a product that’s more visionary than its reputation — and its complete lack of graphics — might suggest.

TopView shipped in March of 1985 — later than planned, but nowhere near as late as Microsoft Windows, which was now almost a full year behind schedule. It met a fractious reception. Some pundits called it the most important product to come out of IBM since the release of the original IBM PC, while others dismissed it as a bloated white elephant that hadn’t a prayer of winning mainstream acceptance — not even with the IBM logo on its box and a surprisingly cheap suggested list price of just $149. For many IBM watchers — not least those watching with concern inside Microsoft — TopView was most interesting not so much as a piece of technology as a sign of IBM’s strategic direction. “TopView is the subject of fevered whispers throughout the computer industry not because of what it does but because of what it means,” wrote PC Magazine. It had “sent shivers through the PC universe and generated watchfulness” and “possibly even paranoia. Many experts think, and some fear, that TopView is the first step in IBM’s lowering of the skirt over the PC — the beginning of a closed, proprietary operating system.”

Many did indeed see TopView as a sign that IBM was hoping to return to the old System/360 model of computing, seizing complete control of the personal-computing market by cutting Microsoft out of the system-software side. According to this point of view, the MS-DOS compatibility IBM had bent over backward to build into TopView needed last only as long as it took third-party developers to write native TopView applications. Once a critical mass of same had been built up, it shouldn’t be that difficult to decouple TopView from MS-DOS entirely, turning it into a complete, self-standing operating system in its own right. For Bill Gates, this was a true nightmare scenario, one that could mean the end of his business.

But such worries about a TopView-dominated future, to whatever extent he had them, proved unfounded. A power-user product with mostly hacker appeal in a market that revolved around the business user just trying to get her work done, TopView quickly fizzled into irrelevance, providing in the process an early warning sign to IBM, should they choose to heed it, that their omnipotence in the microcomputer market wasn’t as complete as it had been for so long in the mainframe market. IBM, a company that didn’t abandon products easily, wouldn’t officially discontinue TopView until 1988. By that time, though, the most common reaction to the news would be either “Geez, that old thing was still around?” or, more likely, “What’s TopView?”

Of course, all of this was the best possible news from Microsoft’s perspective. IBM still needed the MS-DOS they provided as much as ever — and, whatever else happened, TopView wasn’t going to be the as-yet-unreleased Windows’s undoing.

In the meantime, Bill Gates had Windows itself to worry about, and that was becoming more than enough to contend with. Beginning in February of 1984, when the planned Windows release date was given a modest push from April to May of that year, Microsoft announced delay after delay after delay. The constant postponements made the project an industry laughingstock. It became the most prominent target for a derisive new buzzword that had been coined by a software developer named Ann Winblad in 1983: “vaporware.”

Inside Microsoft, Windows’s reputation was little better. As 1984 wore on, the project seemed to be regressing rather than progressing, becoming a more and more ramshackle affair that ran more and more poorly. Microsoft’s own application developers kicked and screamed when asked to consider writing something for Windows; they all wanted to write for the sexy Macintosh.

Neil Konzen, a Microsoft programmer who had been working with the Macintosh since almost two years before that machine’s release, was asked to take a hard look at the state of Windows in mid-1984. He told Bill Gates that it was “a piece of crap,” “a total disaster.” Partially in response to that verdict, Gates pushed through a corporate reorganization, placing Steve Ballmer, his most trusted lieutenant, in charge of system software and thus of Windows. He reportedly told Ballmer to get Windows done or else find himself a job at another company. And in corporate America, of course, shit rolls downhill; Ballmer started burning through Windows project managers at a prodigious pace. The project acquired a reputation inside Microsoft as an assignment to be avoided at all costs, a place where promising careers went to die. Observers inside and outside the project’s orbit were all left with the same question: just what the hell was preventing all these smart people from just getting Windows done?

The fact was that Windows was by far the biggest thing Microsoft had ever attempted from the standpoint of software engineering, and it exposed the limitations of the development methodology that had gotten them this far. Ever since the days when Gates himself had cranked out their very first product, a version of BASIC to be distributed on paper tape for the Altair kit computer, Microsoft had functioned as a nested set of cults of personality, each project driven by if not belonging solely to a single smart hacker who called all the shots. For some time now, the cracks in this edifice had been peeking through; even when working on the original IBM PC, Gates was reportedly shocked and nonplussed at the more structured approach to project management that was the norm at IBM, a company that had already brought to fruition some of the most ambitious projects in the history of the computer industry. And IBM’s project managers felt the same way upon encountering Microsoft. “They were just a bunch of nerds, just kids,” remembers one. “They had no test suites, nothing.” Or, as another puts it:

They had a model where they just totally forgot about being efficient. That blew our minds. There we were watching all of these software tools that were supposed to work together being built by totally independent units, and nobody was talking to each other. They didn’t use any of each other’s code and they didn’t share anything.

With Windows, the freelancing approach to software development finally revealed itself to be clearly, undeniably untenable. Scott MacGregor, the recent arrival from Xerox who was Windows’s chief technical architect in 1984, remembers his frustration with this hugely successful young company — one on whose products many of the Fortune 500 elite of the business world were now dependent — that persisted in making important technical decisions on the basis of its employees’ individual whims:

I don’t think Bill understood the magnitude of doing a project such as Windows. All the projects Bill had ever worked on could be done in a week or a weekend by one or two different people. That’s a very different kind of project than one which takes multiple people more than a year to do.

I don’t think of Bill as having a lot of formal management skills, not in those days. He was kind of weak on managing people, so there was a certain kind of person who would do well in the environment. There were a lot of people at that time with no people skills whatsoever, people who were absolutely incompetent at managing people. It was the Peter Principle: very successful technical people would get promoted to management roles. You’d get thirty people reporting to one guy who was not on speaking terms with the rest of the group, which is inconceivable.

One has to suspect that MacGregor had one particular bête noir in mind when talking about his “certain kind of person.” In the eyes of MacGregor and many others inside Microsoft, Steve Ballmer combined most of Bill Gates’s bad qualities with none of his good ones. Like Gates, he had a management style that often relied on browbeating, but he lacked the technical chops to back it up. He was a yes man in a culture that didn’t suffer fools gladly, a would-be motivational speaker who too often failed to motivate, the kind of fellow who constantly talked at you rather with you. One telling anecdote has him visiting the beleaguered Windows team to deliver the sort of pep talk one might give to a football team at halftime, complete with shouts and fist pumps. He was greeted by… laughter. “You don’t believe in this?” Ballmer asked, more than a little taken aback. The team just stood there uncomfortably, uncertain how to respond to a man that MacGregor and many of the rest of them considered almost a buffoon, a “non-tech cheerleader.”

And yet MacGregor had problems of his own in herding the programmers who were expected to implement his grand technical vision. Many of them saw said vision as an overly slavish imitation of the Xerox Star office system, whose windowing system he had previously designed. He seemed willfully determined to ignore the further GUI innovations of the Macintosh, a machine with which much of Microsoft — not least among them Bill Gates — were deeply enamored. The most irritating aspect of his stubbornness was his insistence that Windows should employ only “tiled windows” that were always stretched the horizontal length of the screen and couldn’t overlay one another or be dragged about freely in the way of their equivalents on the Macintosh.

All of this created a great deal of discord inside the project, especially given that much of MacGregor’s own code allegedly didn’t work all that well. Eventually Gates and Ballmer brought in Neil Konzen to rework much of MacGregor’s code, usurping much of his authority in the process. As Windows began to slip through MacGregor’s fingers, it began to resemble the Macintosh more and more; Konzen was so intimately familiar with Apple’s dream machine that Steve Jobs had once personally tried to recruit him. According to Bob Belleville, another programmer on the Windows team, Konzen gave to Windows “the same internal structure” as the Macintosh operating system; “in fact, some of the same errors were carried across.” Unfortunately, the tiled-windows scheme was judged to be too deeply embedded by this point to change.

In October of 1984, Microsoft announced that Windows wouldn’t ship until June of 1985. Gates sent Ballmer on an “apology tour” of the technology press, prostrating himself before journalist after journalist. It didn’t seem to help much; the press continued to pile on with glee. Stewart Alsop II, the well-respected editor of InfoWorld magazine, wrote that “buyers probably believe the new delivery date for Windows with the same fervor that they believe in Santa Claus.” Then, he got downright nasty: “If you’ve got something to sell, deliver. Otherwise, see to the business of creating the product instead of hawking vaporware.”

If the technology press was annoyed with Microsoft’s constant delays and prevarications, the third parties who had decided or been pressured into supporting Windows were getting even more impatient. One by one, the clone makers who had agreed to ship Windows with their machines backed out of their deals. Third-party software developers, meanwhile, kept getting different versions of the same letter from Microsoft: “We’ve taken the wrong approach, so everything you’ve done you need to trash and start over.” They too started dropping one by one off the Windows bandwagon. The most painful defection of all was that of Lotus, who now reneged on their promise of a Windows version of Lotus 1-2-3. The latter was the most ubiquitous single software product in corporate America, excepting only MS-DOS, and Microsoft had believed that the Windows Lotus 1-2-3 would almost guarantee their new GUI environment’s success. The question now must be whether the lack of same would have the opposite effect.

In January of 1985, Steve Ballmer brought in Microsoft’s fifth Windows project manager: Tandy Trower, a three-year veteran with the company who had recently been managing Microsoft BASIC. Trower was keenly aware of Bill Gates’s displeasure at recent inroads being made into Microsoft’s traditional BASIC-using demographic by a new product called Turbo Pascal, from a new industry player called Borland. The Windows project’s reputation inside Microsoft was such that he initially assumed he was being set up to fail, thereby giving Gates an excuse to fire him. “Nobody wanted to touch Windows,” remembers Trower. “It was like the death project.”

Trower came in just as Scott MacGregor, the Xerox golden boy who had arrived amidst such high expectations a year and a half before, was leaving amidst the ongoing discord and frustration. Ballmer elected to replace MacGregor with… himself as Windows’s chief technical architect. Not only was he eminently unqualified for such a role, but he thus placed Trower in the awkward position of having the same person as both boss and underling.

As it happened, though, there wasn’t a lot of need for new technical architecting. In that respect at least, Trower’s brief was simple. There were to be no new technical or philosophical directions explored, no more debates over the merits of tiled versus overlapping windows or any of the rest. The decisions that had already been made would remain made, for better or for worse. Trower was just to get ‘er done, thereby stemming the deluge of mocking press and keeping Ballmer from having to go on any more humiliating apology tours. He did an admirable job, all things considered, of bringing some sort of coherent project-management methodology to a group of people who desperately needed one.

What could get all too easily lost amidst all the mockery and all very real faults with the Windows project as a functioning business unit was the sheer difficulty of the task of building a GUI environment without abandoning the legacy of MS-DOS. Unlike Apple, Microsoft didn’t enjoy the luxury of starting with a clean slate; they had to keep one foot in the past as well as one in the future. Nor did they enjoy their competitor’s advantage of controlling the hardware on which their GUI environment must run. The open architecture of the IBM PC, combined with a market for clones that was by now absolutely exploding, meant that Microsoft was forced to contend with a crazy quilt of different hardware configurations. All those different video cards, printers, and memory configurations that could go into an MS-DOS machine required Microsoft to provide drivers for them, while all of the popular existing MS-DOS applications had to at the very least be launchable from Windows. Apple, by contrast, had been able to build the GUI environment of their dreams with no need to compromise with what had come before, and had released exactly two Macintosh models to date — models with an architecture so closed that opening their cases required a special screwdriver only available to Authorized Apple Service Providers.

In the face of all the challenges, some thirty programmers under Trower “sweated blood trying to get this thing done,” as one of them later put it. It soon became clear that they weren’t going to make the June 1985 deadline (thus presumably disappointing those among Stewart Alsop’s readers who still believed in Santa Claus). Yet they did manage to move forward in far more orderly fashion than had been seen during all of the previous year. Microsoft was able to bring to the Comdex trade show in May of 1985 a version of Windows which looked far more complete and polished than anything they had shown before, and on June 28, 1985, a  feature-complete “Preview Edition” was sent to many of the outside developers who Microsoft hoped would write applications for the new environment. But the official first commercial release of Windows, known as Windows 1.01, didn’t ship until November of 1985, timed to coincide with that fall’s Comdex show.

In marked contrast to the inescapable presence Windows had been at its first Comdex of two years before, the premiere of an actual shipping version of Windows that November was a strangely subdued affair. But then, the spirit of the times as well was now radically different. In the view of many pundits, the bloom was rather off the rose for GUIs in general. Certainly the GUI-mania of the Fall 1983 Comdex and Apple’s “1984” advertisement now seemed like the distant past. IBM’s pseudo-GUI TopView had already failed, as had Visi On, while the various other GUI products on offer for MS-DOS machines were at best struggling for marketplace acceptance. Even the Macintosh had fallen on hard times, such that many were questioning its very survival. Steve Jobs, the GUI’s foremost evangelist, had been ignominiously booted from Apple the previous summer — rendered, as the conventional wisdom would have it, a has-been at age thirty. Was the GUI itself doomed to suffer the same fate? What, asked the conventional-wisdom spouters, was really so bad about MS-DOS’s blinking command prompt? It was good enough to let corporate America get work done, and that was the important thing. Surely it wouldn’t be Windows, an industry laughingstock for the better part of two years now, that turned all this GUI hostility back in the market’s face. Windows was launching into a headwind fit to sink the Queen Mary.

It was a Microsoft public-relations specialist named Pam Edstrom who devised the perfect way of subverting the skepticism and even ridicule that was bound to accompany the belated launch of the computer industry’s most infamous example of vaporware to date. She did so by stealing a well-worn page from the playbook of media-savvy politicians and celebrities who have found themselves embroiled in controversy. How do you stop people making fun of you? Why, you beat them to the punch by making fun of yourself first.

Edstrom invited everybody who was anybody in technology to a “Microsoft Roast” that Comdex. The columnist John C. Dvorak became master of ceremonies, doing a credible job with a comedic monologue to open the affair. (Sample joke about the prematurely bald Ballmer: “When Windows was first announced, Ballmer still had hair!”) Gates and Ballmer themselves then took the stage, where Stewart Alsop presented them with an InfoWorld “Golden Vaporware Award.” The two main men of Microsoft then launched into a comedy routine of their own that was only occasionally cringe-worthy, playing on their established reputations as the software industry’s enfant terrible and his toothy-but-not-overly-bright guard dog. Gates said that Ballmer had wanted to cut features: “He came up with this idea that we could rename this thing Microsoft Window; we would have shipped that a long time ago.” Ballmer told how Gates had ordered him to “ship this thing before the snow falls, or you’ll end your career here doing Windows!”; the joke here was that in Seattle, where the two lived and worked, snow almost never falls. Come the finale, they sang the “The Impossible Dream” together as a giant shopping cart containing the first 500 boxed copies of Windows rolled onto the stage amidst billows of dry ice.

All told, it was a rare display of self-deprecating humanity and showmanship from two people not much known for either. From a PR perspective, it was about the best lemonade Microsoft could possibly have made out of a lemon of a situation. The press was charmed enough to start writing about Windows in more cautiously positive terms than they had in a long, long time. “The future of integration [can] be perceived through Windows,” wrote PC World. Meanwhile Jim Seymour, another respected pundit, wrote a column for the next issue of PC Week that perfectly parroted the message Microsoft was trying to get across:

I am a Windows fan, not because of what it is today but what it almost certainly will become. I think developers who don’t build Windows compatibility into new products and new releases of successful products are crazy. The secret of Windows in its present state is how much it offers program developers. They don’t have to write screen drivers [or] printer drivers; they can offer their customers a kind of two-bit concurrency and data exchange.

The most telling aspect of even the most sympathetic early reviews is their future orientation; they emphasize always what Windows will become, not what it is. Because what Windows actually was in November of 1985 was something highly problematic if not utterly superfluous.

The litany of problems began with that same old GUI bugaboo: performance. Two years before, Bill Gates had promised an environment that would run on any IBM PC or clone with at least 192 K of memory. Technically speaking, Microsoft had come very close to meeting that target: Windows 1.01 would run even on the original IBM PC from 1981, as long as it had at least 256 K of memory. It didn’t even absolutely require a hard drive. But running and running well — or, perhaps better put, running usably — were two very different matters. Windows could run on a floppy-based system, noted PC Magazine dryly, “in the same sense that you can bail a swimming pool dry with a teaspoon.” To have a system that wasn’t so excruciatingly slow as to outweigh any possible benefit it might deliver, you really needed a hard drive, 640 K or more of memory, and an 80286 processor like that found in the IBM PC/AT. Even on a hot-rod machine like this, Windows was far from snappy. “Most people will say that any screen refresh that can be watched takes too long,” wrote PC Magazine. “Very little happens too quickly to see in Windows.” One of Microsoft’s own Windows programmers would later offer a still more candid assessment: even at this late date, he would say, “Windows was a pig,” the result of a project that had passed through too many hands and had too many square chunks of code hammered into too many round holes.

Subjectively, Windows felt like it had been designed and programmed by a group of people who had read a whole lot about the Macintosh but never actually seen or used one. “I use a Macintosh enough to know what a mouse-based point-and-click interface should feel like,” wrote John C. Dvorak after the goodwill engendered by the Microsoft Roast had faded. “Go play with a Mac and you’ll see what I mean. Windows is clunky by comparison. Very clunky.” This reputation for endemic clunkiness — for being a Chrysler minivan pitted against Apple’s fine-tuned Porsche of a GUI — would continue to dog Windows for decades to come. In this first release, it was driven home most of all by the weird and unsatisfying system of “tiled” windows.

All of which was a shame because in certain ways Windows was actually far more technically ambitious than the contemporary Macintosh. It offered a cooperative-multitasking system that, if not quite the preemptive multitasking of TopView or the new Commodore Amiga, was more than the single-tasking Mac could boast. And it also offered a virtual-memory scheme which let the user run more applications than would fit inside 640 K. Additional RAM beyond the 640 K barrier or a hard drive, if either or both were extant, could be used as a swap space when the user tried to open more applications than there was room for in conventional memory. Windows would then automatically copy data back and forth between main memory and the swap space as needed in order to keep things running. The user was thus freed from having to constantly worry about her memory usage, as she did in TopView — although performance problems quickly started to rear their head if she went too crazy. In that circumstance, “the thrashing as Windows alternately loads one application and then the other brings the machine to its knees,” wrote PC Magazine, describing another trait destined to remain a Windows totem for years to come.

A Quick Tour of Windows 1.01

Windows 1.01 boots into what it calls the “MS-DOS Executive,” which resembles one of the many popular aftermarket file managers of the MS-DOS era, such as Norton Commander. Applications are started from here by double-clicking on their actual .exe files. This version of Windows does nothing to insulate the users from the file-level contents of their hard drives; it has no icons representing installed applications and, indeed, no concept of installation at all. Using Windows 1.01 is thus akin to using Windows 10 if the Start Menu, Taskbar, Quick-Launch Toolbar, etc. didn’t exist, and all interactions happened at the level of File Explorer windows.

In a sense, the MS-DOS Executive is Windows. Closing it serves as the shutdown command.

Under Microsoft’s “tiled windows” approach, windows always fill the width of the screen but can be tiled vertically. They’re never allowed to overlap one another under any circumstances, and taken as a group will always fill the screen. One window, the MS-DOS Executive will always be open and thus filling the screen even if nothing else is running. There is no concept of a desktop “beneath” the windows.

Windows can be sized to suit in vertical terms by grabbing the widget at their top right and dragging. Here we’re making the MS-DOS Executive window larger. When we release the mouse button, the Clock window will automatically be made smaller in proportion to its companion’s growth. Remember, overlapping windows aren’t allowed, no matter how hard you try to trick the software…

…with one exception. Sub-windows opened by applications can be dragged freely around the screen and can overlay other windows. Go figure!

If we try to drag a window around by its title bar, an interesting philosophical distinction is revealed between Windows 1.01 and more recent versions. We wind up swapping the contents of one window with those of another. Applications, in other words, aren’t intrinsically bound to their windows, but can be moved among them. In the screenshot above, the disk icon is actually our mouse cursor, representing the MS-DOS Executive window’s contents, which we’re about to swap with the contents of what is currently the Clock window.

Windows 1.01 shipped with Write, a fairly impressive minimalist word processor — arguably the most impressive application ever made for the little-used operating environment.

In contrast to the weirdness of other aspects of Windows 1.01, working within an application like Write feels reassuringly familiar, what with its scroll bars and Macintosh-like pull-down menus. Interestingly, the latter use the click-and-hold approach of the Mac rather than the click-once approach of later versions of Windows.

Windows 1.01 doesn’t have a great way of getting around the 640 K barrier, but it does implement a virtual-memory scheme — no mean feat in itself on a processor without built-in memory protection — which uses any memory beyond 640 K as essentially a RAM disk — or, as Microsoft called it, a “Smart Drive.” In the absence of extra memory, or if it too is filled up, the hard disk becomes the swap area.

By the time Windows was ready, all of the clone makers whom Bill Gates had cajoled and threatened into shipping it with their computers had jumped off the bandwagon, telling him that it had simply taken him too long to deliver, and that the product which he had finally delivered was simply too slow on most hardware for them to foist it on their customers in good conscience. With that path to acceptance closed to them, Microsoft was forced to push Windows as a boxed add-on sold through retail channels, a first for them in the context of a piece of system software. In a measure of just how badly Gates wanted Windows to succeed, Microsoft elected to price it at only $99 — one-tenth of what VisiCorp had tried to ask for Visi On two years before — despite its huge development cost.

Unfortunately, the performance problems, the awkwardness of the tiled windows, and the almost complete lack of native Windows applications beyond those that shipped with the environment outweighed the low price; almost nobody bought the thing. Microsoft was trapped by the old chicken-or-the-egg conundrum that comes with the launch of any new computing platform — a problem that is solved only with difficulty in even the best circumstances. Buyers wanted to see Windows applications before they bought the operating environment, while software developers wanted to see a market full of eager buyers before they invested in the platform. The fact that Windows could run most vanilla MS-DOS applications with some degree or another of felicity only helped the software developers make the decision to stay away unless and until the market started screaming for Windows-native versions of their products. Thus, the MS-DOS compatibility Microsoft had built into Windows, which had been intended as a mere bridge to the Windows-native world of the future, proved something of a double-edged sword.

When you add up all of the hard realities, it comes as little surprise that Microsoft’s first GUI sparked a brief run of favorable press notices, a somewhat longer run of more skeptical commentary, and then disappeared without a trace. Already by the spring of 1986, it was a non-factor, appearing for all the world to be just one more gravestone in the GUI graveyard, likely to be remembered only as a pundit’s punch line. Bill Gates could comfort himself only with the fact that IBM’s own big system-software innovation had landed with a similar splat.

IBM and Microsoft had each tried to go it alone, had each tried to build something better upon the foundation of MS-DOS, and had each struck out swinging. What now? Perhaps the odd couple still needed one another, loathe though either was to admit it. In fact, by that spring of 1986 a gradual rapprochement had already been underway for a year, despite deep misgivings from both parties. TopView and Windows 1 had both been a bust, but neither company had gotten where they were by giving up easily. If they pooled their forces once again, who knew what they might achieve. After all, it had worked out pretty well the first time around.

(Sources: the books The Making of Microsoft: How Bill Gates and His Team Created the World’s Most Successful Software Company by Daniel Ichbiah and Susan L. Knepper, Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson, Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Computer Wars: The Fall of IBM and the Future of Global Technology by Charles H. Ferguson and Charles R. Morris, and Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company by Owen W. Linzmayer; PC Magazine of April 30 1985, February 25 1986, April 18 1987, and April 12 1988; Byte of February 1985, May 1988, and the special issue of Fall 1985; InfoWorld of May 7 1984 and November 19 1984; PC World of December 1985; Tandy Trower’s “The Secret Origins of Windows” on the Technologizer website. Finally, I owe a lot to Nathan Lineback for the histories, insights, comparisons, and images found at his wonderful online “GUI Gallery.”)

1. This is perhaps a good point to introduce a quick primer on multitasking techniques to those of you who may not be familiar with its vagaries. The first thing to understand is that multitasking during this period was fundamentally an illusion. The CPUs in the computers of this era were actually only capable of doing one task at a time. Multitasking was the art of switching the CPU’s attention between tasks quickly enough that several things seemed to be happening at once — that several applications seemed to be running at once. There are two basic approaches to creating this illusionary but hugely useful form of multitasking.

Cooperative multitasking — found in systems like the Apple Lisa, the Apple Macintosh between 1987’s System 5 and the introduction of OS X in 2001, and early versions of Microsoft Windows — is so named because it relies on the cooperation of the applications themselves. A well-behaved, well-programmed application is expected to periodically relinquish its control of the computer voluntarily to the operating system, which can then see if any of its own tasks need to be completed or any other applications have something to do. A cooperative-multitasking operating system is easier to program and less resource-intensive than the alternative, but its most important drawback is made clear to the user as soon as she tries to use an application that isn’t terribly well-behaved or well-programmed. In particular, an application that goes into an infinite loop of some sort — a very common sort of bug — will lock up the whole computer, bringing the whole operating system down with it.

Preemptive multitasking — found in the Commodore Amiga, Mac OS X, Unix and Linux, and later versions of Microsoft Windows — is so named because it gives the operating system the authority to wrest control from — to preempt — individual applications. Thus even a looping program can only slow down the system as a whole, not kill it entirely. For this reason, it’s by far the more desirable approach to multitasking, but also the more complicated to implement. ↩

Comments
32 Responses

- Aula

July 6, 2018 at 3:38 pm

“then generats the appropriate code”

Should be “generates”.

“who been working with the Macintosh since almost almost two years”

Missing a “had” but has double “almost”.

“shit roles downhill”

Should be “rolls”.

“with shouts and fist pumps”

Or more likely “bumps”.

“Jim Symour”

Are you sure it’s not “Seymour”?

- Jimmy Maher

July 6, 2018 at 7:27 pm

Thanks!

- Aula

July 7, 2018 at 10:40 am

You fixed the others, but “fist pumps” is still there.

- Jimmy Maher

July 7, 2018 at 1:32 pm

“Fist pump” was actually as intended: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fist_pump. ;)

- Brian

July 6, 2018 at 4:34 pm

Brings back memories… I actually wrote a batch file for our computer that automatically loaded up a menu option when our Tandy booted from the hard drive. It let you select a program to load automatically. Overall, it was pretty primitive. Later we had a commercial program that did the same thing in a somewhat more elegant package.

I also remember playing around with some early task-switching programs too… it’s hard to think that there was a time when you were basically locked into a single program! It was interesting, but you were limited in that your 640k had a chunk taken up by the program and then you had to estimate how much each program needed to run.

- Jimmy Maher

July 6, 2018 at 7:31 pm

That’s essentially what you had to do to run vanilla MS-DOS applications in TopView and early versions of Windows as well, using PIF files.

- Casey Muratori

July 6, 2018 at 6:57 pm

I had trouble parsing, “More so than it did Windows and the other microcomputer GUI environments that were its ostensible competitors”. I think maybe there is a typo in there?

– Casey

- Jimmy Maher

July 6, 2018 at 7:29 pm

Thanks!

- tedder

July 7, 2018 at 12:29 am

PIFs! Norton Commander! Text mode mouse! Wow. Memories.

Hope you are going to talk more about PIFs.

This is the first time I’ve seen anything before Windows 3.0, which was my first post- MSDOS GUI OS.

- Brian

July 7, 2018 at 3:28 pm

Dad decided we needed a mouse about 1988… it had 3 buttons and we finally gave up on it having any practical use for our old Tandy. It simply didn’t have the power to run any graphical programs that used a mouse, even retrofitted with a 10 Mhz 8086 processor.

I remember starting college and preferring to drop to the DOS prompt rather than use Windows 3.0+ due to being so familiar with it. Although, I was recently depressed when I tried to use DOS Box for the first time in 15 years and could barely recall the “dir” command!

Ditto here too… I don’t recall seeing Windows 1 or 2 ever! just retrospectives like this. I do remember seeing the early OS/2 computers in action at the workplace of one of my friend’s parents.

- tedder

July 8, 2018 at 2:15 am

I get stuck in DOS when / and `ls` don’t work.

- Keith Palmer

July 7, 2018 at 1:28 am

In the old computer magazines I’ve read, I’ve seen news items and column entries about the approach of Visi On and TopView, but not so much about their actual arrivals and swift aftermaths. The beginning of this series is therefore quite interesting for me.

(I don’t want this to come across as a “demand for revision,” but when I noticed you mentioning “the special screwdriver” needed to open a Macintosh case I did remember seeing case-opening tools, both extremely long Torx screwdrivers and prying irons mean to separate the front from the back, advertised in the back of old Macworld issues, along with articles about the hardware being hacked before the arrival of the Macintosh Plus to hook up internal hard drives and additional memory… So far as the rapprochement between IBM and Microsoft you mention at the end of this piece, though, I also remember a news item in the second-to-last issue of Creative Computing on that subject where Bill Gates made the barbed comment he’d expected Apple to have done “a good job” with the Macintosh.)

- Anonymous

July 7, 2018 at 7:18 am

Yes, long torx drivers were never hard to get once there was a demand for them, and you really don’t need a tool to crack the case open.

While people often laugh about this, there is an awfully good reason to make the Mac difficult to get into: the CRT and power supply guts are all completely exposed in there, and it’s quite easy to get a dangerous shock if you touch the wrong thing. Besides, there was no internal expansion for ages, so unless you were upgrading via swapping out the entire motherboard (and potentially the disk drive), there wasn’t any point in opening it. Some people soldered in parts for expansion, but it was rare and obviously the torx driver was no barrier for them.

It really wasn’t until the last compact Macs — the Color Classics in the early 90s — that the CRT was separately shielded, whereupon an easy to slide out motherboard was provided and regular screws were used.

- whomever

July 7, 2018 at 6:57 pm

My father beta tested Windows 1. On a XT clone with CGA. It was horrible, unusable.
Interesting to read all this, I’ve been learning stuff. Don’t forget when it gets to the time the Very Famous MS Ad for Windows 386 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noEHHB6rnMI)

- Tomber

July 7, 2018 at 11:49 pm

I went looking, and I can’t find anything that would let stand the claim that TopView is a pre-emptive multitasker on an 8088. It looks like it patched itself into the interrupt tables, but the numerous retreats it makes depending on what ways a program is not ‘well-behaved’ belies that it is pre-emptive in any way that wouldn’t also make that true for Win16 apps prior to NT. (I do not say Win95, because even that could be jammed up by a badly written Win16 app, while NT side-stepped that problem a couple years earlier.)

In my opinion, the references to TopView as a pre-emptive multitasker are from somebody with a different definition than what was used in the time-frame when the difference mattered. Or by a sales guy. If there is another perspective here, let it be heard.

- Jimmy Maher

July 9, 2018 at 7:37 am

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I wanted to look back over my sources, and didn’t have a chance to do that until this morning.

So, the most detailed examination of TopView which I’ve found in the contemporary literature is in the April 30 1985 PC Magazine. Its fairly detailed description of TopView multitasking certainly sounds more preemptive than cooperative to me:

TopView’s multitasking is accomplished by time-slicing. Barring any interrupts, a clock within TopView allocates the same amount of time to each program. Before going on to the next task, it stores all the interrupts that the program was using plus all of the processor registers. When TopView returns to the task, all of the original values are restored and it picks up where it left off. When a program uses a disk or otherwise can’t be interrupted, TopView holds off the rotation of tasks so that there is no chance for programs to mix data or get confused. Only the program in the foreground can accept characters from the keyboard, but all programs can take turns using the disk. Newly-written programs can take advantage of TopView instructions that identify a section of code as “critical” so that timing-sensitive or I/O-sensitive sections will run properly.

- Tomber

July 11, 2018 at 11:45 pm

It’s basically a glorified TSR. In 1985, these distinctions were pretty esoteric, and slick PR (from IBM, no less) would have produced the quoted text, which sounds accurate to me. What it doesn’t say is “pre-emptive.” Since there is no identified hardware support for tasks (and therefore enforced pre-emptive task switching) in real mode on x86, TopView can not be pre-emptive multitasking. It is relying on running code to be obeying standard conventions of interrupt handling (and intercepting interrupt calls to DOS/BIOS) to achieve co-operative multitasking. Any program that decides it is going to disable interrupts and/or circumvent the interrupt vector table would expose it. That’s why I say it is no more pre-emptive than Win16 apps on Win 3.x: It works great until an app has a bug or intentionally ruins the illusion.

Maybe they called it pre-emptive because there was nothing better in DOS land, maybe they didn’t know better, or maybe it is marketing deception. But five years later, in 1990, nobody would call that pre-emptive because there were tangible examples of actual 386 protected mode task switching.

- Jimmy Maher

July 12, 2018 at 7:55 am

TopView obviously wasn’t a terribly sophisticated form of preemptive multitasking even in comparison to something like AmigaOS — it has, for example, no apparent notion of priority — and perhaps a sufficiently determined task could indeed circumvent its controls entirely. Yet I’m not quite willing to call it non-preemptive for that reason, as it does largely satisfy the definition I provide in the article above. The 68000 as well lacked “identified hardware support for tasks” — if by that you mean features like an MMU — and yet AmigaOS is generally considered the first consumer-oriented PC operating system to support preemptive multitasking. And there other, even older examples of preemptive multitasking on CPUs without these features, such as Microsoft Xenix on the 8086/8088.

A TSR as I understand it generally wedges itself into the interrupt tables in order to run its own code. TopView, on the other hand, has a kernel managing not just itself but the tasks running under it. It would seem to me to be a categorically different thing.

It strikes me that you’re applying a different definition of preemptive multitasking from the one I’m using, as explained in a footnote to the article above. Your definition may very well have validity — possibly more validity than mine — in many computer-science contexts, but it’s a little hard for me to address or understand it because you haven’t explained clearly what said definition *is*. If you’d like to continue the discussion, it might be helpful to provide such a definition so I can clearly see where you’re coming from. Do you consider AmigaOS 1.x to be a preemptive-multitasking operating system?

- Tomber

July 12, 2018 at 5:02 pm

I’m not familiar enough with Amiga, but I would say it could be pre-emptive because the 68000 does have a hardware concept of privilege level for code. System, or user. That permits the operating system to keep app code from interfering in mechanisms that could implement pre-emptive multitasking. On x86, real mode does not have that. The 286 introduced task structures(in protected mode) that are implemented in hardware for doing similar enforcement. The MMU of the 386 was a great improvement and increased granularity of control, but it actually is not the key piece, although it is critical if you want to get pre-existing real-mode DOS apps to pre-emptively multitask. Protected-mode apps on the 286 simply weren’t allowed to do things that real-mode apps did all the time. You end up with OS/2 1.x.

TopView can be considered pre-emptive if you look at the ability of it to hook a timer interrupt, and therefore perform tasks switches during the handling of those interrupts independent of what the app is doing. TopView can be considered co-operative if you consider that any application can stop that from happening, and certain apps would have. There is no doubt that in 1985, the ability of it to window multiple DOS apps and see them all updating the screen at the same time would have been impressive. I do think you can call TopView the best that was possible on an 8088.

- Sniffnoy

July 8, 2018 at 8:17 am

Having never used any of these, I’m very confused about one thing. You mention that a number of these graphical operating systems were single-tasking. How does that work? I mean, single-tasking text-mode, that’s straightforward. Single-tasking GUI… that doesn’t make sense to me unless, like, each program takes up the entire screen. I don’t see how it makes sense with windows. How on earth does a single-tasking windowed environment work? What are the windows adding in such a case?

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2018 at 1:23 pm

The Macintosh worked that way until Multi-Finder became an official part of MacOS in 1987. An application can open multiple windows, which can be useful in many circumstances, but you can’t have multiple applications running at one time. I believe this is the source of the longstanding Mac convention, still seen in OS X today, of menus appear at the top of the screen rather than the top of individual windows. This is also the reason that Lotus could believe a product like Jazz — integrating a spreadsheet, a database manager, a word processor, and other stuff in one huge (not to say bloated) application — could have a lot of appeal on the Mac.

That said, there is almost always some concurrency going on even with a single-tasking GUI. Printer drivers, storage and memory management, input drivers, etc., run as background “tasks.” But only one *application* at a time is allowed.

- Sniffnoy

July 8, 2018 at 1:33 pm

Oh, I see; I didn’t consider multiple windows for the same program. Thanks!

- Veronica Connor

July 8, 2018 at 3:57 pm

There was an HCI reason for the menus being at the top of the screen. It makes them quicker to hit with the mouse, because the top edge gives you a backstop to hit with the pointer. This also helps people with more limited physical abilities to use the system. Being used to this, other systems (Windows, NeXTStep, etc) that place menus in floating areas feel fiddly and cumbersome.

- xxx

July 9, 2018 at 5:51 am

Veronica is correct about the top menu bar being a deliberate interface decision. Jef Raskin’s book The Humane Interface goes into more detail about the rationale for putting the Macintosh menu bar at the top, as I recall.

- anonymous

July 13, 2018 at 5:29 am

Yes, the thing to look for is Fitt’s Law. Bigger targets are easier to hit with the mouse, basically. Since the mouse cursor can’t go past the edge of the screen, edges are essentially infinitely big targets in one direction — you can just slam the cursor that way and never overshoot.

Likewise, corners are even bigger targets than edges, since they work in two directions and the mouse can be funneled toward the corners. Apple never much relied on that, though, other than that the Apple menu is in a corner and when the Applications menu came along, it was also in a corner.

And yet despite also originating on the Xerox Alto, most people ignored contextual menus until the 90s, even though they sometimes have the advantage of not needing to move the mouse at all to reach the menu.

- Laertes

July 10, 2018 at 6:05 pm

Reading the description of Windows 1.01 reminded me that there are several window managers for Unix/Linux that work that way: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager

- Jimmy Maher

July 11, 2018 at 8:24 am

These are probably also drawing from Xerox PARC. One of the Lisa and Macintosh’s major, oft-overlooked innovations was the free-dragging, overlapping window model.

- Ross

July 11, 2018 at 9:39 pm

Over the years I recall reading that overlapping windows were avoided in case Apple (or others) came knocking on Microsoft’s door with lawyers in tow. I wonder if that’s always been a myth?

- Jimmy Maher

July 12, 2018 at 7:43 am

No, I’ve seen no sign that that was a motivation. Microsoft was working very closely with Apple at the time, and Bill Gates and others weren’t shy about saying publicly during 1984 that Windows would be “the Mac on PC hardware” — statements they would later come to regret. Tiled windows were the norm at Xerox PARC, whose dogma insisted that they were neater and better even in the face of users expressing preferences for overlapping, free-draggable windows. Scott MacGregor brought that dogma with him to Microsoft.

Much more on the legal stuff to come…

- Iggy Drougge

November 23, 2018 at 10:46 pm

That certainly was the case for GEM; the initial release had freely moving windows, but that was disabled after Apple cautioned Digital Research. On the Atari ST, the original GEM (Mac-style) window handling was kept, but disappeared on the PC version.

- cliffton

July 24, 2018 at 8:16 pm

“Gates sent Ballmer out *ON* an “apology tour””

- Jimmy Maher

July 25, 2018 at 8:17 am

Thanks!

Doing Windows, Part 4: The Rapprochement
July 13, 2018

We’ve seen how the pundits had already started speculating like crazy long before the actual release of IBM’s TopView, imagining it to be the key to some Machiavellian master plan for seizing complete control of the personal-computer market. But said pundits were giving IBM a bit more credit than perhaps was due. The company nicknamed Big Blue was indeed a big, notoriously bureaucratic place, and that reality tended to interfere with their ability to carry out any scheme, Machiavellian or otherwise, with the single-minded focus of a smaller company. There doubtless were voices inside IBM who could imagine using TopView as a way of shoving Microsoft aside, and had the product been a roaring success those voices doubtless would have been amplified. Yet thanks to the sheer multiplicity of voices IBM contained, the organization always seemed to be pulling in multiple directions at once. Thus even before TopView hit the market and promptly fizzled, a serious debate was taking place inside IBM about the long-term future direction of their personal computers’ system software. This particular debate didn’t focus on extensions to MS-DOS — not even on an extension like TopView which might eventually be decoupled from the unimpressive operating system underneath it. The question at hand was rather what should be done about creating a truly holistic replacement for MS-DOS. The release of a new model of IBM personal computer in August of 1984 had given that question new urgency.

The PC/AT, the first really dramatic technical advance on the original IBM PC, used the new Intel 80286 processor in lieu of the older machine’s 8088. The 80286 could function in two modes. In “real” mode, grudgingly implemented by Intel’s engineers in the name of backward compatibility, it essentially was an 8088, with the important difference that it happened to run much faster. Otherwise, though, it shared most of the older chip’s limitations, most notably the ability to address only 1 MB of memory — the source, after the space reserved for system ROMs and other specialized functions was subtracted, of the original IBM PC’s limitation to 640 K of RAM. It was only in the 80286’s “protected” mode that the new chip’s full capabilities were revealed. In this mode, it could address up to 16 MB of memory, and implemented hardware memory protection ideal for the sort of modern multitasking operating system that MS-DOS so conspicuously was not.

The crux of IBM’s dilemma was that MS-DOS, being written for the 8088, could run on the 80286 only in real mode, leaving most of the new chip’s capabilities unused. Memory beyond 640 K could thus still be utilized only via inefficient and ugly hacks, even on a machine with a processor that, given a less clueless operating system, was ready and willing to address up to 16 MB. IBM therefore decided that sooner or later — and preferably sooner — MS-DOS simply had to go.

This much was obvious. What was less obvious was where this new-from-the-ground-up IBM operating system should come from. Over months of debate, IBM’s management broke down into three camps.

One camp advocated buying or licensing Unix, a tremendously sophisticated and flexible operating system born at AT&T’s Bell Labs. Unix was beloved by hackers everywhere, but remained under the thumb of AT&T, who licensed it to third parties with the wherewithal to pay for it. Ironically, Microsoft had had a Unix license for years, using it to create a product they called Xenix, by far the most widely used version of Unix on microcomputers during the early 1980s. Indeed, their version of Xenix for the 80286 had of late become the best way for ambitious users not willing to settle for MS-DOS to take full advantage of the PC/AT’s capabilities. Being an already extant operating system which Microsoft among others had been running on high-end microcomputers for years, a version of Unix for the business-microcomputing masses could presumably be put together fairly quickly, whether by Microsoft or by IBM themselves. Yet Unix, having been developed with bigger institutional computers in mind, was one heck of a complicated beast. IBM feared abandoning MS-DOS, with its user-unfriendliness born of primitiveness, only to run afoul of Unix’s user-unfriendliness born of its sheer sophistication. Further, Unix, having been developed for text-only computers, wasn’t much good for graphics — and thus not much good for GUIs.[1] The conventional wisdom held it to be an operating system better suited to system administrators and power users than secretaries and executives.

A second alternative was for IBM to make a new operating system completely in-house for their personal computers, just as they always had for their mainframes. They certainly had their share of programmers with experience in modern system software, along with various projects which might become the basis of a new microcomputer operating system. In particular, the debaters returned over and over again to one somewhat obscure model in their existing personal-computer lineup. Released in late 1983, the 3270 PC came equipped with a suite of additional hardware and software that let it act as a dumb terminal for a mainframe, while also running — simultaneously with multiple mainframe sessions, if the user wished — ordinary MS-DOS software. To accomplish that feat, IBM’s programmers had made a simple windowing environment that could run MS-DOS in one window, mainframe sessions in others. They had continued to develop the same software after the 3270 PC’s release, yielding a proto-operating system with the tentative name of Mermaid. The programmers who created Mermaid would claim in later years that it was far more impressive than either TopView or the first release of Microsoft Windows; “basically, in 1984 or so,” says one, “we had Windows 3.0.” But there was a big difference between Mermaid and even the latter, relatively advanced incarnation of Windows: rather than Mermaid running under MS-DOS, as did Windows, MS-DOS could run under Mermaid. MS-DOS ran, in other words, as just one of many potential tasks within the more advanced operating system, providing the backward compatibility with old software that was considered such a necessary bridge to any post-MS-DOS future. And then, on top all these advantages, Mermaid already came equipped with a workable GUI. It seemed like the most promising of beginnings.

By contrast, IBM’s third and last alternative for the long-term future initially seemed the most unappetizing by far: to go back to Microsoft, tell them they needed a new operating system to replace MS-DOS, and ask them to develop it with them, alongside their own programmers. There seemed little to recommend such an approach, given how unhappy IBM was already becoming over their dependency on Microsoft — not to mention the way the latter bore direct responsibility for the thriving and increasingly worrisome clone market, thanks to their willingness to license MS-DOS to anyone who asked for it. And yet, incredibly, this was the approach IBM would ultimately choose.

Why on earth would IBM choose such a path? One factor might have been the dismal failure of TopView, their first attempt at making and marketing a piece of microcomputer system software single-handedly, in the spring of 1985. Perhaps this really did unnerve them. Still, one has to suspect that there was more than a crisis of confidence behind IBM’s decision to go from actively distancing themselves from Microsoft to pulling the embrace yet tighter in a matter of months. In that light, it’s been reported that Bill Gates, getting wind of IBM’s possible plans to go it alone, threatened to jerk their existing MS-DOS license if they went ahead with work on a new operating system without him. Certainly IBM’s technical rank and file, who were quite confident in their own ability to create IBM’s operating system of the future and none too happy about Microsoft’s return to the scene, widely accepted this story at the time. “The bitterness was unbelievable,” remembers one. “People were really upset. Gates was raping IBM. It’s incomprehensible.”

Nevertheless, on August 22, 1985, Bill Gates and Bill Lowe, the latter being the president of IBM’s so-called “Entry Systems Division” that was responsible for their personal computers, signed a long-term “Joint Development Agreement” in which they promised to continue to support MS-DOS on IBM’s existing personal computers and to develop a new, better operating system for their future ones. All those who had feared that TopView represented the opening gambit in a bid by IBM to take complete control of the business-microcomputing market could breathe a sigh of relief. “We are committed to the open-architecture concept,” said Lowe, “and recognize the importance of this to our customers.” The new deal between the two companies was in fact far more ironclad and more equal than the one that had been signed before the release of the original IBM PC. “For Microsoft,” wrote the New York TImes’s business page that day, “the agreement elevates it from a mere supplier to IBM, with the risk that it could one day be cut off, into more of a partner.” True equal partner with the company that in the eyes of many still was computing in the abstract… Microsoft was moving up in the world.

The public was shown only the first page or two of the new agreement, full of vague reassurances and mission statements. Yet it went on for many more pages after that, getting deep into the weeds of an all-new operating system to be called CP-DOS. (Curiously, the exact meaning of the acronym has never surfaced to my knowledge. “Concurrent Processing” would be my best guess, given the project’s priorities.) CP-DOS was to incorporate all of the sophistication that was missing from MS-DOS, including preemptive multitasking, virtual memory, the ability to address up to 16 MB of physical memory, and a system of device drivers to insulate applications from the hardware and insulate application programmers from the need to manually code up support for every new printer or video card to hit the market. So far, so good.

But this latest stage of an unlikely partnership would prove a very different experience for Microsoft than developing the system software for the original IBM PC had been. Back in 1980 and 1981, IBM, pressured for time, had happily left the software side of things entirely to Microsoft. Now, they truly expected to develop CP-DOS as partners with them, expected not only to write the specifications for the new operating system themselves but to handle some of the coding themselves as well. Two radically different corporate cultures clashed from the start. IBM, accustomed to carrying out even the most mundane tasks in bureaucratic triplicate, was appalled at the lone-hacker model of software development that still largely held sway at Microsoft, while the latter’s programmers held their counterparts in contempt, judging them to be a bunch of useless drones who never had an original thought in their lives. “There were good people” at IBM, admits one former Microsoft employee. But then, “there were a lot of not-so-good people also. That’s not Microsoft’s model. Microsoft’s model is only good people. If you’re not good, you don’t stick around.” Neal Friedman, a programmer on the CP-DOS team at Microsoft:

The project was extremely frustrating for people at Microsoft and for people at IBM too. It was a clash of two companies at opposite ends of the spectrum. At IBM, things got done very formally. Nobody did anything on their own. You went high enough to find somebody who could make a decision. You couldn’t change things without getting approval from the joint design-review committee. It took weeks even to fix a tiny little bug, to get approval for anything.

IBM measured their programmers’ productivity in the number of lines of code they could write per day. As Bill Gates and plenty of other people from Microsoft tried to point out, this metric said nothing about the quality of the code they wrote. In fact, it provided an active incentive for programmers to write bloated, inefficient code. Gates compared the project to trying to build the world’s heaviest airplane.

A joke memo circulated inside Microsoft, telling the story of an IBM rowing team that had lost a race. IBM, as was their wont, appointed a “task force” to analyze the failure. The bureaucrats assigned thereto discovered that the IBM team had had eight people steering and one rowing, while the other team had had eight people rowing and one steering. Their recommendation? Why, the eight steerers should simply get the one rower to row harder, of course. Microsoft took to calling IBM’s software-development methodology the “masses-of-asses” approach.

But, as only gradually became apparent to Microsoft’s programmers, Bill Gates had ceded the final authority on what CP-DOS should be and how it should be implemented to those selfsame masses of asses. Scott MacGregor, the Windows project manager during 1984, shares an interesting observation that apparently still applied to the Gates of 1985 and 1986:

Bill sort of had two modes. For all the other [hardware manufacturers], he would be very confident and very self-assured, and feel very comfortable telling them what the right thing to do was. But when he worked with IBM, he was always much more reserved and quiet and humble. It was really funny because this was the only company he would be that way with. In meetings with IBM, this change in Bill was amazing.

In charming or coercing IBM into signing the Joint Development Agreement, Gates had been able to perpetuate the partnership which had served Microsoft so well, but the terms turned out to be perhaps not quite so equal as they first appeared: he had indeed given IBM final authority over the new operating system, as well as agreeing that the end result would belong to Big Blue, not (as with MS-DOS) to Microsoft. As work on CP-DOS began in earnest in early 1986, a series of technical squabbles erupted, all of which Microsoft was bound to lose.

One vexing debate was over the nature of the eventual CP-DOS user interface. Rather than combining the plumbing of the new operating system and the user interface into one inseparable whole, IBM wanted to separate the two. In itself, this was a perfectly defensible choice; successful examples of this approach abound in computing history, from Unix and Linux’s X Windows to the modern Macintosh’s OS X. And of course this was an approach which Microsoft and many others had already taken in building GUI environments to run on top of MS-DOS. So, fair enough. The real disagreements started only when IBM and Microsoft started to discuss exactly what form CP-DOS’s preferred user interface should take. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft wanted to adapt Windows, that project in which they had invested so much of their money and reputation for so little reward, to run on top of CP-DOS instead of MS-DOS. But IBM had other plans.

IBM informed Microsoft that the official CP-DOS user interface at launch time  was to be… wait for it… TopView. The sheer audacity of the demand was staggering. After developing TopView alone and in secret, cutting out their once and future partners, IBM now wanted Microsoft to port it to the new operating system the two companies were developing jointly. (Had they been privy to it, the pundits would doubtless have taken this demand as confirmation of their suspicion that at least some inside IBM had intended TopView to have an existence outside of its MS-DOS host all along.)

“TopView is hopeless,” pleaded Bill Gates. “Just let it die. A modern operating system needs a modern GUI to be taken seriously!” But IBM was having none of it. When they had released TopView, they had told their customers that it was here to stay, a fundamental part of the future of IBM personal computing. They couldn’t just abandon those people who had bought it; that would be contrary to the longstanding IBM ethic of being the safe choice in computing, the company you invested in when you needed stability and continuity above all else. “But almost nobody bought TopView in the first place!” howled Gates. “Why not just give them their money back if it’s that important to you?” IBM remained unmoved. “Do a good job with a CP-DOS TopView”, they said, “and we can talk some more about a CP-DOS Windows with our official blessing.”

Ever helpful, IBM referred Microsoft to six programmers in Berkeley, California, who called themselves Dynamical Systems Research, who had recently come to them with a portable re-implementation of TopView which was supposedly one-quarter the size and ran four to ten times faster. (That such efficiency gains over the original version were even possible confirmed every one of Microsoft’s prejudices against IBM’s programmers.) In June of 1986, Steve Ballmer duly bought a plane ticket for Berkeley, and two weeks later Microsoft bought Dynamical for $1.5 million. And then, a month after that event, IBM summoned Gates and Ballmer to their offices and told them that they had changed their minds; there would now be no need for a TopView interface in CP-DOS. IBM’s infuriating about-face seemingly meant that Microsoft had just thrown away $1.5 million. (Luckily for them, in the end they would get more than their money’s worth out of the programming expertise they purchased when they bought Dynamical, despite never doing anything with the alternative TopView technology; more on that in a future article.)

The one good aspect of this infuriating news was that IBM had at last decided that they and Microsoft should write a proper GUI for CP-DOS. Even this news wasn’t, however, as good as Microsoft could have wished: said GUI wasn’t to be Windows, but rather a new environment known as the Presentation Manager, which was in turn to be a guinea pig for a new bureaucratic monstrosity known as the Systems Application Architecture. SAA had been born of the way that IBM had diversified since the time when the big System/360 mainframes had been by far the most important part of their business. They still had those hulking monsters, but they had their personal computers now as well, along with plenty of machines in between the two extremes, such as the popular System/38 range of minicomputers. All of these machines had radically different operating systems and operating paradigms, such that one would never guess that they all came from the same company. This, IBM had decided, was a real problem in terms of technological efficiency and marketing alike, one which only SAA could remedy. They described the latter as “a set of software interfaces, conventions, and protocols — a framework for productively designing and developing applications with cross-system dependency.” Implemented across IBM’s whole range of computers, it would let programmers transition easily from one platform to another thanks to a consistent API, and the software produced with it would all have a consistent, distinctively “IBM” look and feel, conforming to a set-in-stone group of interface guidelines called Common User Access.

SAA and CUA might seem a visionary scheme from the vantage point of our own era of widespread interoperability among computing platforms. In 1986, however, the devil was very much in the details. The machines which SAA and CUA covered were so radically different in terms of technology and user expectations that a one-size-fits-all model couldn’t possibly be made to seem anything but hopelessly compromised on any single one of them. CUA in particular was a pedant’s wet dream, full of stuff like a requirement that every single dialog box had to have buttons which said “OK = Enter” and “ESC = Cancel,” instead of just “OK” and “Cancel.” “Surely we can expect people to figure that out without beating them over the head with it every single time!” begged Microsoft.

For a time, such pleas fell on deaf ears. Then, as more and more elements descended from IBM’s big computers proved clearly, obviously confusing in the personal-computing paradigm, Microsoft got permission to replace them with elements drawn from their own Windows. The thing just kept on getting messier and messier, a hopeless mishmash of two design philosophies. “In general, Windows and Presentation Manager are very similar,” noted one programmer. “They only differ in every single application detail.” The combination of superficial similarity with granular dissimilarity could only prove infuriating to users who went in with the reasonable expectation that one Microsoft-branded GUI ought to work pretty much the same as another.

Yet the bureaucratic boondoggle that was SAA and CUA wasn’t even the biggest bone of contention between IBM and Microsoft. That rather took the form of one of the most basic issues of all: what CPU the new operating system should target. Everyone agreed that the old 8088 should be left in the past along with the 640 K barrier it had spawned, but from there opinions diverged. IBM wanted to target the 80286, thus finally providing all those PC/ATs they had already sold with an operating system worthy of their hardware. Microsoft, on the other hand, wanted to skip the 80286 and target Intel’s very latest and greatest chip, the 80386.

The real source of the dispute was that same old wellspring of pain for anyone hoping to improve upon MS-DOS: the need to make sure that the new-and-improved operating system could run old MS-DOS software. Doing so, Bill Gates pointed out, would be far more complicated from the programmer’s perspective and far less satisfactory from the user’s perspective with the 80286 than it would with the 80386. To understand why, we need to look briefly at the historical and technical circumstances behind each of the chips.

It generally takes a new microprocessor some time to go from being available for purchase on its own to being integrated into a commercial computer. Thus the 80286, which first reached the mass market with the PC/AT in August of 1984, first reached Intel’s product catalog in February of 1982. It had largely been designed, in other words, before the computing ecosystem spawned by the IBM PC existed. Its designers had understood that compatibility with the 8088 might be a good thing to have to go along with the capabilities of the chip’s new protected mode, but had seen the two things as an either/or proposition. You would either boot the machine in real mode to run a legacy 8088-friendly operating system and its associated software, or you’d boot it in protected mode to run a more advanced operating system. Switching between the two modes required resetting the chip — a rather slow process that Intel had anticipated happening only when the whole machine in which it lived was rebooted. The usage scenario which Intel had most obviously never envisioned was the very one which IBM and Microsoft were now proposing for CP-DOS: an operating system that constantly switched on the fly between protected mode, which would be used for running the operating system itself and native applications written for it, and real mode, which would be used for running MS-DOS applications.

But the 80386, which entered Intel’s product catalog in September of 1985, was a very different beast, having had the chance to learn from the many Intel-based personal computers which had been sold by that time. Indeed, Intel had toured the industry before finalizing their plans for their latest chip, asking many of its movers and shakers — a group which prominently included Microsoft — what they wanted and needed from a third-generation CPU. The end result offered a 32-bit architecture to replace the 16 bits of the 80286, with the capacity to address up to 4 GB of memory in protected mode to replace the 16 MB address space of the older chip. But hidden underneath the obvious leap in performance were some more subtle features that were if anything even more welcome to programmers in Microsoft’s boat. For one thing, the new chip could be switched between real mode and protected mode quickly and easily, with no need for a reset. And for another, Intel added a third mode, a sort of compromise position in between real and protected mode that was perfect for addressing exactly the problems of MS-DOS compatibility with which CP-DOS was doomed to struggle. In the new “virtual” mode, the 80386 could fool software into believing it was running on an old 8088-based machine, including its own virtual 1 MB memory map, which the 80386 automatically translated into the real machine’s far more expansive memory map.

The power of the 80386 in comparison to the 8088 was such that a single physical 80386-based machine should be able to run a dozen or more virtual MS-DOS machines in parallel, should the need arise — all inside a more modern, sophisticated operating system like the planned CP-DOS. The 80386’s virtual mode really was perfect for Microsoft’s current needs — as it ought to have been, given that Microsoft themselves were largely responsible for its existence. It offered them a chance that doesn’t come along very often in software engineering: the chance to build a modern new operating system while maintaining seamless compatibility with the old one.

Some reports have it that Bill Gates, already aware that the 80386 was coming, had tried to convince IBM not to build the 80286-based PC/AT at all back in 1984, had told them they should just stay with the status quo until the 80386 was ready. But even in 1986, the 80386 according to IBM was just too far off in the future as a real force in personal computing to become the minimum requirement for CP-DOS. They anticipated taking a leisurely two-and-a-half years or so, as they had with the 80286, to package the 80386 into a new model. Said model thus likely wouldn’t appear until 1988, and its sales might not reach critical mass until a year or two after that. The 80386 was, IBM said, simply a bridge too far for an operating system they wanted to release by 1987. Besides, in light of the IBM Safeness Doctrine, they couldn’t just abandon those people who had already spent a lot of money on PC/ATs under the assumption that it was the IBM personal computer of the future.

“Screw the people with ATs,” was Gates’s undiplomatic response. “Let’s just make it for the 386, and they can upgrade.” He gnashed his teeth and raged, but IBM was implacable. Instead of being able to run multiple MS-DOS applications in parallel on CP-DOS, almost as if they had been designed for it from the start, Microsoft would be forced to fall back on using their new operating system as little more than a launcher for the old whenever the user wished to run an MS-DOS application. And it would, needless to say, be possible to run only one such application at a time. None of that really mattered, said IBM; once people saw how much better CP-DOS was, developers would port their MS-DOS applications over to it and the whole problem of compatibility would blow away like so much smoke. Bill Gates was far less sanguine that Microsoft and IBM could so easily kill their cockroach of an operating system. But in this as in all things, IBM’s decision was ultimately the law.

Here we see the CP-DOS (later OS/2 1.x) physical memory map. A single MS-DOS application can be loaded into the space below 1 MB — more specifically, into the box labeled “3.x” above. (MS-DOS 3 was the current version at the time that IBM and Microsoft were working on CP-DOS.) Because MS-DOS applications must run in the processor’s real mode, accessing physical rather than virtual memory addresses, only one application can be loaded into this space — and only this space! — at a time. Native CP-DOS applications live in the so-called “high memory” above the 1 MB boundary — more specifically, in the space labelled “protected-mode” in the diagram above. As many of these as the user wishes can be loaded at one time up there. Had IBM agreed to build CP-DOS for the 80386 rather than the 80286, it would have been possible to use that processor’s “virtual” mode to trick MS-DOS applications into believing they were running in real mode underneath the 640 K boundary, regardless of where they actually lived in memory. This would have allowed the user to run multiple MS-DOS applications alongside multiple native CP-DOS applications. In addition, an 80386 CP-DOS would have been able to address up to 4 GB of memory rather than being limited to 16 MB.

Microsoft’s frustration only grew when IBM’s stately timetable for the 80386 was jumped by the increasingly self-confident clone makers. In September of 1986, Compaq, the most successful and respected clone maker of all, shipped the DeskPro 386, the very first MS-DOS-compatible machine to use the chip. Before the end of the year, several other clone makers had announced 80386-based models of their own in response. It was a watershed moment in the slow transformation of business-oriented microcomputing from an ecosystem where IBM blazed the trails and a group of clone makers copied their innovations to one where many equal players all competed and innovated within an established standard for software and hardware which existed independently of all of them. A swaggering Compaq challenged IBM to match the DeskPro 386 within six months “or be supplanted as the market’s standard-setter.” Michael Swarely, Compaq’s marketing guru, was already re-framing the conversation in ways whose full import would only gradually become clear over the years to come:

We believe that an industry standard that has been established for software for the business marketplace is clearly in place. What we’ve done with the DeskPro 386 is innovate within that existing standard, as opposed to trying to go outside the standard and do something different. IBM may or may not enter the [80386] marketplace at some point in the future. The market will judge what IBM brings in the same way that it judges any other manufacturer’s new products. They have to live within the market’s realities. And the reality is that American business has made an enormous investment in an industry standard.

More than ever before, IBM was feeling real pressure from the clone makers. Their response would give the lie to all of their earlier talk of an open architecture and their commitment thereto.

IBM had already been planning a whole new range of machines for 1987, to be called the PS/2 line. Those plans had originally not included an 80386-based machine, but one was hastily added to the lineup now. Yet the appearance of that machine was only one of the ways in which the PS/2 line showed plainly that clone makers like Compaq were making IBM nervous with their talk of a “standard” that now had an existence independent from the company that had spawned it. IBM planned to introduce with the PS/2 line a new type of system bus for hardware add-ons, known as the Micro Channel Architecture. Whatever its technical merits, which could and soon would be hotly debated, MCA was clearly designed to cut the clone makers off at the knees. Breaking with precedent, IBM wrapped MCA up tight inside a legal labyrinth of patents, meaning that anyone wishing to make a PS/2 clone or even just an MCA-compatible expansion card would have to negotiate a license and pay for the privilege. If IBM got their way, the curiously idealistic open architecture of the original IBM PC would soon be no more.

In a testimony to how guarded the relationship between the two supposed fast partners really was, IBM didn’t even tell Microsoft about their plans for the PS/2 line until just a few months before the public announcement. Joint Development Agreement or no, the former now suspected the latter’s loyalty more strongly than ever — and for, it must be admitted, pretty good reason: a smiling Bill Gates had recently appeared alongside two executives from Compaq and their DeskPro 386 on the front page of InfoWorld. Clearly he was still playing both sides of the fence.

Now, Bill Gates got the news that CP-DOS was to be renamed OS/2, and would join PS/2 as the software half of a business-microcomputing future that would once again revolve entirely around IBM. For some time, he wasn’t even able to get a clear answer to the question of whether IBM intended to allow OS/2 to run at all on non-PS/2 hardware — whether they intended to abandon their old PC/AT customers after all, writing them off as collateral damage in their war against the clonesters and making MCA along with an 80286 a minimum requirement of OS/2.

On April 2, 1987, IBM officially announced the PS/2 hardware line and the OS/2 operating system, sending shock waves through their industry. Would this day mark the beginning of the end of the clone makers?

Any among that scrappy bunch who happened to be observing closely might have been reassured by some clear evidence that this was a far more jittery version of IBM than anyone had ever seen before, as exemplified by the splashy but rather chaotic rollout schedule for the new world order. Three PS/2 machines were to ship immediately: one of them based around an Intel 8086 chip very similar to the 8088 in the original IBM PC, the other two based around the 80286. But the 80386-based machine they were scrambling to get together in response to the Compaq DeskPro 386 — not that IBM phrased things in those terms! — wouldn’t come out until the summer. Meanwhile OS/2, which was still far from complete, likely wouldn’t appear until 1988. It was a far cry from the unified, confident rollout of the System/360 mainframe line more than two decades earlier, the seismic computing event IBM now seemed to be consciously trying to duplicate with their PS/2 line. As it was, the 80286- and 80386-based PS/2 machines would be left in the same boat as the older PC/AT for months to come, hobbled by that monument to inadequacy that was MS-DOS. And even once OS/2 did come out, the 80386-based PS/2 Model 80 would still remain somewhat crippled for the foreseeable future by IBM’s insistence that OS/2 run on the the 80286 as well.

The first copies of the newly rechristened OS/2 to leave IBM and Microsoft’s offices did so on May 29, 1987, when selected developers who had paid $3000 for the privilege saw a three-foot long, thirty-pound box labelled “OS/2 Software Development Kit,” containing nine disks and an astonishing 3100 pages worth of documentation, thump onto their porch two months before Microsoft had told them it would arrive. As such, it was the first Microsoft product ever to ship early; less positively, it was also the first time they had ever asked anyone to pay to be beta testers. Microsoft, it seemed, was feeling their oats as IBM’s equal partners.

The first retail release of OS/2 also beat its announced date, shipping in December of 1987 instead of the first quarter of 1988. Thankfully, IBM listened to Microsoft’s advice enough to quell the very worst of their instincts: they allowed OS/2 to run on any 80286-or-better machine, not restricting it to the PS/2 line. Yet, at least from the ordinary user’s perspective, OS/2 1.0 was a weirdly underwhelming experience after all the hype of the previous spring. The Presentation Manager, OS/2’s planned GUI, had fallen so far behind amidst all the bureaucratic squabbling that IBM had finally elected to ship the first version of their new operating system without it; this was the main reason they had been able to release the remaining pieces earlier than planned. In the absence of the Presentation Manager, what the user got was the plumbing of a sophisticated modern operating system coupled to a command-line interface that made it seem all but identical to hoary old MS-DOS. I’ve already described in earlier articles how a GUI fits naturally with advanced features like multitasking and inter-application data sharing. These and the many other non-surface improvements which MS-DOS so sorely needed were there in OS/2, hidden away, but in the absence of a GUI only the programmer or the true power user could make much use of them. The rest of the world was left to ask why they had just paid $200 for a slightly less compatible, slightly slower version of the MS-DOS that had come free with their computers. IBM themselves didn’t quite seem to know why they were releasing OS/2 now, in this state. “No one will really use OS/2 1.0,” said Bill Lowe. “I view it as a tool for large-account customers or software developers who want to begin writing OS/2 applications.” With a sales pitch like that, who could resist? Just about everybody, as it happened.

OS/2 1.1, the first version to include the Presentation Manager — i.e., the first real version of the operating system in the eyes of most people — didn’t ship until the rather astonishingly late date of October 31, 1988. After such a long wait, the press coverage was lukewarm and anticlimactic. The GUI worked well enough, wrote the reviewers, but the whole package was certainly memory-hungry; the minimum requirement for running OS/2 was 2.5 MB, the recommended amount 5 MB or more, both huge numbers for an everyday desktop computers circa 1988. Meanwhile a lack of drivers for even many of the most common printers and other peripherals rendered them useless. And OS/2 application software as well was largely nonexistent. The chicken-or-the-egg-conundrum had struck again. With so little software or driver support, no one was in a hurry to upgrade to OS/2, and with so little user uptake, developers weren’t in a hurry to deliver software for it. “The broad market will turn its back on OS/2,” predicted Jeffrey Tarter, expressing the emerging conventional wisdom in the widely read insider newsletter Softletter. Phillipe Kahn of Borland, an executive who was never at a loss for words, started a meme when he dubbed the new operating system “BS/2.” In the last two months of 1988, 4 percent of 80286 owners and 16 percent of 80386 owners took the OS/2 plunge. Yet even those middling figures gave a rosier view of OS/2’s prospects than was perhaps warranted. By 1990, OS/2 would still account for just 1 percent of the total installed base of personal-computer operating systems in the United States, while the unkillable MS-DOS still owned a 66-percent share.

A Quick Tour of the OS/2 1.1 Presentation Manager

Presentation Manager boots into its version of a start menu, listing its installed programs. This fact of course means that, unlike Windows 1, Presentation Manager does include the concept of installing applications rather than just working with them at the file level. That said, it still remains much more text-oriented than modern versions of Windows or contemporary versions of MacOS. Applications are presented in the menu as a textual list, unaccompanied by icons. Only minimized applications and certain always-running utilities appear as icons on the “desktop,” which is still not utilized as the general-purpose workspace we’re familiar with today.

Still, in many ways Presentation Manager 1.1 feels vastly more intuitive today than Windows 1. The “tiled windows” paradigm is blessedly gone. Windows can be dragged freely around the screen and can overlay one another, and niceties like the sizing widgets all work as we expect them to.

Applications can even open sub-windows that live within other windows. You can see one of these inside the file manager above.

One area where Presentation Manager is less like the Macintosh than Windows 1, but more like current versions of Microsoft Windows, is in its handling of menus. The one-click menu approach is used here, not the click-and-hold approach of the Mac.

Here we’ve opened a DOS box for running vanilla MS-DOS software. Only one such application can be run at a time, thanks to IBM’s insistence that OS/2 should run on the 80286 processor.

Presentation Manager includes a control panel for managing preferences that’s far slicker than the one included in Windows 1. Yet it shipped with a dearth of the useful little applets Microsoft included with Windows right from the beginning. There isn’t so much as a decent text editor here. Given that IBM would struggle mightily to get third-party developers to write applications for OS/2, such stinginess was… not good.

Amidst all of the hoopla over the introduction of the PS/2 and OS/2 back in the spring of 1987, Byte’s editor-in-chief Philip Lemmons had sounded a cautionary note to IBM that reads as prescient today:

With the introduction of the PS/2 machines, IBM has begun to compete in the personal-computer arena on the basis of technology. This development is welcome because the previous limitations of the de-facto IBM standard were painfully obvious, especially in systems software. The new PS/2 “standard” offers numerous improvements: the Micro Channel is a better bus than the PC and AT buses, and it provides a full standard for 32-bit buses. The VGA graphics standard improves on EGA. The IBM monitors for the PS/2 series take a new approach that will ultimately deliver superior performance at lower prices. IBM is using 3.5-inch floppy disks that offer more convenience, capacity, and reliability than 5.25-inch floppy disks. And OS/2, the new system software jointly developed by Microsoft and IBM, will offer advances such as true multitasking and a graphic user interface.

Yet a cloud hangs over all this outstanding new technology. Like other companies that have invested in the development of new technology, IBM is asserting proprietary rights in its work. When most companies do this in most product areas, we expect and accept it. When one company has a special role of setting the de-facto standard, however, the aggressive assertion of proprietary rights prevents the widespread adoption of the new standard and delays the broad distribution of new technology.

The personal-computer industry has waited for years for IBM to advance the standard, and now, depending on IBM’s moves, may be unable to participate in that advancement. If so, the rest of the industry and the broad population of computer users still need another standard for which to build and buy products — a standard at least as good as the one embodied in the PS/2 series.

Lemmons’s cautions were wise ones; his only mistake was in not stating his concerns even more forcefully. For the verdict of history is clear: PS/2 and OS/2 are the twin disasters which mark the end of the era of IBM’s total domination of business-oriented microcomputing. The PS/2 line brought with it a whole range of new hardware standards, some of which, like new mouse and keyboard ports and a new graphics standard known as VGA, would remain with us for decades to come. But these would mark the very last technical legacies of IBM’s role as the prime mover in mainstream microcomputing. Other parts of the PS/2 line, most notably the much-feared proprietary MCA bus, did more to point out the limits of IBM’s power than the opposite. Instead of dutifully going out of business or queuing up to buy licenses, third-party hardware makers simply ignored MCA. They would eventually form committees to negotiate new, open bus architectures of their own — just as Philip Lemmons predicts in the extract above.

OS/2 as well only served to separate IBM’s fate from that of the computing standard they had birthed. It arrived late and bloated, and went largely ignored by users who stuck with MS-DOS — an operating system that was now coming to be seen not as IBM’s system-software standard but as Microsoft’s. IBM’s bold bid to cement their grip on the computer industry only caused it to slip through their fingers.

All of which placed Microsoft in the decidedly strange position of becoming the prime beneficiary of the downfall of an operating system which they had done well over half the work of creating. Given the way that Bill Gates’s reputation as the computer industry’s foremost Machiavelli precedes him, some have claimed that he planned it all this way from the beginning. In their otherwise sober-minded book Computer Wars: The Fall of IBM and the Future of Global Technology, Charles H. Ferguson and Charles R. Morris indulge in some elaborate conspiracy theorizing that’s all too typical of the whole Gates-as-Evil-Genius genre. Gates made certain that his programmers wrote OS/2 in 80286 assembly language rather than a higher-level language, the authors claim, to make sure that IBM couldn’t easily adapt it to take advantage of the more advanced capabilities of chips like the 80386 after his long-planned split with them finally occurred. In the meantime, Microsoft could use the OS/2 project to experiment with operating-system design on IBM’s dime, paving the way for their own eventual MS-DOS replacement.

If Gates expected ultimately to break with IBM, he has every interest in ensuring OS/2’s failure. In that light, tying the project tightly to 286 assembler was a masterstroke. Microsoft would have acquired three years’ worth of experience writing an advanced, very sophisticated operating system at IBM’s elbow, applying all the latest development tools. After the divorce, IBM would still own OS/2. But since it was written in 286 assembler, it would be almost utterly useless.

In reality, the sheer amount of effort Microsoft put into making OS/2 work over a period of several years — far more effort than they put into their own Windows over much of this period — argues against such conspiracy-mongering. Bill Gates was unquestionably trying to keep one foot in IBM’s camp and one foot in the clone makers’, much to the frustration of both, who equally craved his undivided loyalty. But he had no crystal ball, and he wasn’t playing three-dimensional chess. He was just responding, rather masterfully, to events on the ground as they happened, and always — always — hedging all of his bets.

So, even as OS/2 was getting all the press, Windows remained a going concern, Gates’s foremost hedge against the possibility that the vaunted new operating system might indeed prove a failure and MS-DOS might remain the standard it had always been. “Microsoft has a religious approach to the graphical user interface,” said the GUI-skeptic Pete Peterson, vice president of WordPerfect Corporation, around this time. “If Microsoft could choose between improved earnings and growth and bringing the graphical user interface to the world, they’d choose the graphical user interface.” In his own way, Peterson was misreading Gates as badly here as the more overheated conspiracy theorists have tended to do. Gates was never one to sacrifice profits to any ideal. It was just that he saw the GUI itself — somebody’s GUI — as such an inevitability. And thus he was determined to ensure that the inevitability had a Microsoft logo on the box when it became an actuality. If the breakthrough product wasn’t to be the OS/2 Presentation Manager, it would just have to be Microsoft Windows.

(Sources: the books The Making of Microsoft: How Bill Gates and His Team Created the World’s Most Successful Software Company by Daniel Ichbiah and Susan L. Knepper, Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson, Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, and Computer Wars: The Fall of IBM and the Future of Global Technology by Charles H. Ferguson and Charles R. Morris; InfoWorld of October 7 1985, July 7 1986, August 12 1991, and October 21 1991; PC Magazine of November 12 1985, April 12 1988, December 27 1988, and September 12 1989; New York Times of August 22 1985; Byte of June 1987, September 1987, October 1987, April 1988, and the special issue of Fall 1987; the episode of the Computer Chronicles television program called “Intel 386 — The Fast Lane.” Finally, I owe a lot to Nathan Lineback for the histories, insights, comparisons, and images found at his wonderful online “GUI Gallery.”)

1. Admittedly, this was already beginning to change as IBM was having this debate: the X Window project was born at MIT in 1984. ↩

Comments
51 Responses

- Sniffnoy

July 13, 2018 at 4:07 pm

UA in particular was a pedant’s wet dream, full of stuff like a requirement that every single dialog box had to have buttons which said “OK = Enter” and “ESC = Cancel,” instead of just “OK” and “Cancel.”

Huh, those two aren’t parallel… is that really how they insisted on it?

- Jimmy Maher

July 13, 2018 at 4:17 pm

According to the book Gates, yes. Weird, right?

- Sniffnoy

July 14, 2018 at 4:30 pm

Yeah, indeed…

- Nate

July 15, 2018 at 12:45 am

I wonder if that’s perhaps a misreading: what the CUA standard actually required, if I remember correctly, was not so much the display text of “OK = Enter”, but that pressing Enter would always be the keyboard shortcut for a button marked OK, and that pressing Esc would always be the keyboard shortcut for a button marked Cancel.

Even if that specific text WAS required, it would have been for the very good reason that the user did not yet understand what keys might map to what GUI elements. It was mostly CUA that gave us the ‘standard’ Windows keys like Alt for Menu, Tab for select element, etc.

Remember, before CUA, it was NOT at all consistent what keys like ‘Esc’ and ‘Enter’ might do. Each application interpreted them differently.

Lotus 1-2-3 used ‘/’ as its menu key, Wordperfect 5 used Esc not as ‘back out of a menu’ but ‘repeat character’. Wordstar used Ctrl, etc. It was a nightmare.

CUA brought some sanity to it all and we shouldn’t forget that.

- Jimmy Maher

July 15, 2018 at 12:56 pm

CUA definitely had its heart in the right place, but I think you’re overselling its pioneering status a bit here. Well before CUA, Apple was placing huge emphasis on standardized user interfaces for the Lisa and Macintosh across applications, and Microsoft did the same from the time of Windows 1. Indeed, as I noted in the first article in this series, this sort of desperately-needed user-interface standardization was an important advantage of GUIs in general. Virtually every publisher who made a GUI environment published a standard style guide for applications to accompany it.

- Orion

July 16, 2018 at 3:45 pm

Screenshots of the 1987 CUA samples disk (at http://toastytech.com/guis/cua1987.html ), shows that they actually used “Enter” and “Esc=Cancel”. The original 1987 document seems to have been lost, but the 1989 revision is at http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr/BOOKS/f29bdg00/CONTENTS?SHELF=&DT=19921204095534 and doesn’t make mention of “OK = Enter” (see, e.g., Section 2.7.2, Figure 45, which shows a button simply labeled “OK”).

Maybe there was a draft version that had “OK = Enter”, though.

- Nate

July 17, 2018 at 10:28 am

Looking at that Toastytech page reminds me, yeah. The ‘KEY=Function’ display syntax was standard for showing what function keys were mapped to (including Esc and Enter). Specifically on the ‘Function key area’ bar, in these screenshots. And I think you can’t really argue that that was a bad thing; function keys were notoriously terrible if you didn’t know the bindings, and Key=Function on a dedicated function key screen line was a pretty good standard way of displaying it.

Note also the underlining for menu shortcut letters. That found its way to Windows all through Windows 3, and I think 95 too. I’m sure Windows 1 did have its own style guide, but I’m pretty darn sure taht *CUA was the source of the Windows style guidelines*, because Windows was built to be compliant with CUA.

Really, CUA was pretty impressive. It gave non-Windows MS-DOS applications a standard ‘Windows-like look and feel’. An IBM feel, yes, but that’s kind of the point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

“CUA not only covered DOS applications, but was also the basis for the Windows Consistent User Interface standard (CUI), as well as that for OS/2 applications ”

One thing that didn’t make it though is Shift-Del for cut and Shift-Ins for Paste; Ctrl-C and Ctrl-X came through instead.

But CUA never actually went away. If you’re running Windows, chances are you’re still using parts of it right now. Though with Windows 8 and 10, Microsoft is finally trashing the CUA guidelines; I’m not convinced that’s a good thing.

- Alex Smith

July 13, 2018 at 4:27 pm

“Unix was beloved by hackers everywhere, but had wound up in the hands of AT&T”

I guess I am not quite sure what this phrase is supposed to intimate. Unix was created at Bell Labs and was thus always a product of AT&T. Stating it “wound up” at AT&T implies it had been created elsewhere.

- Jimmy Maher

July 13, 2018 at 4:36 pm

True. Thanks!

- whomever

July 14, 2018 at 4:49 pm

The nuance is that Unix had gone from being open-ish and available to any Academic to the attempts by AT&T to take control, in fact the comparison between AT&T and Unix and IBM and the PC are quite parallel (and the corporate cultures between the two not so different, which may explain that). By this point it had become massively forked (The “Open” BSD Unix, from UC Berkeley, vs the “Closed” Sys V, both of which had a long list of differences). The complex history of Unix is something that Jimmy could write a bazillion posts about (Though it may be outside his remit, not being a home or game platform at the time). IBM BTW also started getting into Unix at this time but their Unix (AIX) was always…weird in a very IBM way. The old joke was “AIX is to Unix like if Martians learned English from old I Love Lucy episodes they saw broadcast”.

- Alex Smith

July 17, 2018 at 6:18 am

Well, AT&T did not suddenly realize that it liked being in control in the mid 1980s. The company licensed UNIX under extremely generous terms in the early days because it had entered into a consent decree with the United States government in 1956 in which it promised to restrict commercial activities to its national telephone system to avoid being broken up as a monopoly. Absent that consent decree, the operating system would have no doubt been fully commercialized immediately. A second consent decree entered into in 1982 and effective January 1, 1984, dismantled the old AT&T in favor of a series of regional companies and a much reduced AT&T that held onto the long distance, manufacturing, and R&D operations. This new entity was no longer bound by the 1956 decree and could therefore attempt to commercialize (and monopolize) UNIX without fear of government reprisal.

- tedder

July 13, 2018 at 5:40 pm

I always thought, obviously incorrectly, that CP-DOS had something to do with CP/M. I also didn’t know of the OS/2-PS/2 naming connection.

“Gates compared the project to trying to build the world’s heaviest airplane.”
.. roughly, measuring airplane development by weight. Worth noting (down here in the comments) that the greater Seattle area was home to Microsoft *and* Boeing.

I wish there were screenshots and pictures in here :/ I’d especially love to see the OS/2 SDK box and contents. I did find the documentation’s contents, though: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-library/os2-1-x-programming/

minor fodder for the copy editors’ department:

“useless drones who had never had an original thought”
-> “who never had an”; style/duplication fix

“hobbled by that monument to inadequateness that was MS-DOS”
monument to inadequacy?

- Jimmy Maher

July 13, 2018 at 5:46 pm

Thanks!

- Gnoman

July 13, 2018 at 9:45 pm

This article is particularly interesting given the current state of Windows. One of the more solid criticisms of Windows 8 and 10 is how badly they implemented the “universal operating system” paradigm. The Windows 8 desktop interface was widely bashed (with reason) as being far too heavily influenced by the mobile paradigm, and being noticeably worse to operate with traditional keyboard and mouse for various reasons. Microsoft fired back at these critics with their insistence that the default way to interface with Windows on all platforms should be as close to identical as possible, and that the only people who objected were those too set in their ways to recognize the obvious future.

The parallels to the IBM “Common User Access” notions are pretty obvious, I think.

- Jimmy Maher

July 14, 2018 at 10:46 am

That is indeed an interesting perspective that hadn’t occurred to me…

- whomever

July 14, 2018 at 4:57 pm

This is getting into the weeds but In fact, CUA was IBM wide (all products). I never much used OS/2 but very much ran into CUA in the context of AIX (which as I mentioned in another comment is technically a fine OS but…weird. Part of the weirdness was CUA, which felt…not Unixy. Maybe if I’d been a mainframe person I’d have taken to it (I guess it felt more natural on the mainframes and AS/400). Just as an example, the default for error messages in AIX is (was? Haven’t used it for years) to print a number with the message. This was so IBM could translate it into a lot of languages and even if they didn’t spend the money localizing to say, Basque, they could at least publish a book in basque that “1234 means xxx”. But to a Unix guy this just felt bureaucratic. The one thing I will say that shows that IBM wasn’t completely humorless was that the GUI tool for doing stuff on AIX (which was called SMIT, and there was stuff you could only do with it, versus just editing a file which is the Unix way and the way every other Unix was admired) had this animation of a running person when you did something. If the action succeeded, the person cheered, if it failed, it fell down. BTW the RS6000, IBM’s RISC Unix workstation, based on what later became Power and eventually was in every 2000 era Mac and every PS/3, so arguably a success, also used MCA. This was their second attempt, the first (the PC/RT) which actually has a huge fan club but didn’t sell well, was ISA based.

- Nate

July 15, 2018 at 12:51 am

> “1234 means xxx”. But to a Unix guy this just felt bureaucratic.

The funny thing is this is exactly what the very Unix-centric SMTP protocol of 1982 did, and which HTTP followed, by defining standard numeric ‘result codes’ followed by text strings. It became ‘the Internet way’, and the Internet generally meant ‘Unix machines’.

And Microsoft went on to use numeric error codes everywhere.

It turns out that giving all your result/error conditions standard numbers is very useful to avoid miscommunication and even hackers adopted it.

- Laertes

July 15, 2018 at 12:07 pm

@whomever Curious choice of language (I am basque).

- whomever

July 15, 2018 at 6:42 pm

Laertes: Off topic, but, I picked Basque because, no offense, it’s a weird language and almost no one speaks it, not to mention every second letter is an X. Even Hungarian is at least vaguely related to Finnish and Estonian and we sort of think we can guess where it came from, Basque is space alien. I say this as one who would easily pick San Sebastian/Donostia as one of the greatest food cities I’ve ever been (Seriously, I was lucky enough to eat at Arzak which was amazing).

Nate: You aren’t wrong, I’m not saying this was a rational response, it just was different from the way literally everyone else did it (you could also turn it off by setting you LC_LOCALE env variable if I remember). Also, there are a bunch of PDP-10 hackers about to yell at you for calling the early Internet protocols “Unix Centric”. The early Internet was if anything DEC centric. HTTP fair enough, which of course was developed on NeXT (which to this day has morphed into the most common computing platform in the world in the form of the iPhone).

- Laertes

July 16, 2018 at 6:19 pm

@whomever: none taken. In fact you are right. You may be interested in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1l9oDiSiEQ
Apologies for the off-topic.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 16, 2018 at 3:28 pm

Is that still a problem? Windows 8 did indeed want to look like a smartphone/tablet, but 8.1 changed the defaults back to the old taskbar-plus-icons-on-the-desktop paradigm, and I’ve never seen any touchscreen stuff in 10.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen people saying, or at least implying, things like “Windows has had a touchscreen interface since 8,” when in reality it was only a single release (8) which was soon replaced by (and could upgrade to, for free) 8.1. I sometimes suspect a lot of people claiming this hated 8 (understandable), went back to 7, and have since refused to upgrade…

- Nate

July 17, 2018 at 10:49 am

“I’ve never seen any touchscreen stuff in 10.”

You’ve been very lucky, then.

If you’ve ever accidentally double-clicked an image, rather than right-clicking, you’ll very likely bring up one of the hideous touchscreen-style apps for displaying images. The app framework formerly called “Metro”… is it still called “Modern”? Both are very bad names.

That’s the touchscreen stuff. It’s there.

- Ian Silvester

July 14, 2018 at 1:04 am

Thanks for this series. You’re adding real detail and nuance to a story I thought I knew, and those details make all the difference!

- Aula

July 14, 2018 at 12:09 pm

There’s at least one place where CP-DOS is spelled as “CP-DPS”.

One thing about MCA that isn’t mentioned (either here or in the earlier PS/2 article) is that the BIOS of any MCA motherboard had a list of supported extension cards. This was presumably meant to ensure that even in countries where MCA wasn’t legally under IBM’s patents, card manufacturers would still have to pay IBM. This also meant that users were always in danger of possibly having to upgrade their computer’s BIOS every time they installed a new card. And in the mid-80’s upgrading BIOS meant physically replacing the ROM chip (always a funny exercise even for those who know how to do it properly).

Since OS/2 separates the GUI from the rest of the operating system, it’s possible for native OS/2 programs to be non-graphical (they had to be in the first, GUI-less version). If such a program doesn’t use other OS/2-specific features, the same executable file can be run in protected mode under OS/2 *and* in real mode under MS-DOS. How this works is clever: every file in the New Executable format used by OS/2 (as well as Windows 2 and Windows 3.x) starts with an MS-DOS executable, which is ignored under OS/2 but run under MS-DOS. Normally it just prints something like “This program cannot be run in MS-DOS mode” and exits, but it can also be a more complicated MS-DOS program, like a very limited OS/2 emulator that is just barely capable of running one text-mode program. The Microsoft C Compiler for MS-DOS is an example of this kind of dual-mode program.

- Tomber

July 14, 2018 at 2:17 pm

I think the BIOS update issue was mostly addressed by use of updated floppy disks that added the required info into the stored config.

Protected-mode console apps that ran under DOS are related to the DOS Extender concept; the executable formats, APIs, and tools of Windows, OS/2, and NT were often borrowed.

- Jimmy Maher

July 14, 2018 at 3:06 pm

Thanks!

- Lars

July 15, 2018 at 2:30 am

Re the MCA BIOS thing – I’m not familiar with the details of MCA, but the reason might be something similar to the feature in PCI _AND_ USB which both require you to embed vendor and product codes in your hardware. Of course, getting a vendor code requires annual membership fees.

- flowmotion

July 14, 2018 at 3:10 pm

Great stuff. This will probably be the next article, but I remember reading the weekly trade tabloids like InfoWorld and the very loud PR war between IBM & MS which lead up to their “divorce”.

(Random google to give folks a window into that era: https://archive.org/details/Infoworld-1991-03-04 )

The enthusiast community was of course very viscerally against Microchannel and everything associated with it. And OS/2 received a negative reception partially because of that.

Also this an excuse to post one of my favorite computer book covers:

https://imgur.com/a/zCFrhrS

- whomever

July 14, 2018 at 5:10 pm

One thing that Jimmy Alludes to, but should be made clear: The PS/2 line were, bluntly, crap.
I mean, they were well engineered, but otherwise they were super overpriced, super slow, super proprietary, etc. Buying a PS/2 over a Compaq Desqpro would be a stupid choice to anyone who had their own money at stake (in fact the analogy to, say, the US and UK car industries in the 70s is instructive). They also weren’t even totally consistent within the line, for example the 25 and 30 were NOT VGA but MCGA (a subset that supported 320x200x256 colors). They even had an ISA PS/2, the PS/2E (released somewhat later than this article).

We are also starting to get to the era where if you wanted a computer, you wouldn’t even go to Compaq, you’d buy a copy of Computer Shopper and go to whatever dodgy fly by night Taiwanese people had the cheap ads at the back and assemble yourself.

The other thing that Jimmy may mention in a future article is that the gravy train was over for IBM about now, and they start losing shedloads of money about now, which given IBMs notorious internal politics must have made things complicated (The mainframe salespeople where notorious for basically saying, “well, buy one of competitors mainframes instead of one of our non-mainframes”).

- whomever

July 14, 2018 at 5:23 pm

Also, really getting in the weeds re footnote one, Aside from X there were a bunch of others; by this point there was an active market of Unix workstations which had GUIS. SUN (yes it’s an acronym, Stanford University Network) had Sunview, SGI had something I can’t remember, etc. There were also proprietary things like the Perq and the various Lisp Machines that had them, and of course Xerox had finally commercialized their stuff. But your broader point still stands as these were all $20k+ specialized systems that sold in the thousands and you’d never buy one for home unless you were stupid rich so they are totally irrelevant to this article. Also the joke of Unix/Linux on the Desktop is that it’s like Nuclear Fusion, always 10 years away.

- Jimmy Maher

July 14, 2018 at 6:05 pm

I’ve always heard that joke applied to strong AI…

- Laertes

July 15, 2018 at 12:16 pm

And yet here I am, reading this article on my desktop PC with Linux, and I have been using it since 2003. The only thing that is still in there is the intel processor. IBM, Microsoft… long gone.

I have shown to several techie and not techie people what a live USB loaded with linux (Manjaro is a great example) can do and, well, they all were amazed.

- hcs

July 14, 2018 at 8:04 pm

Very interesting coverage of the history, fascinating how much OS/2 presentation manager looked like the windows 3.1 I grew up on!

“Applications can even open “modal” windows, meaning windows that live within other windows”

Is this the correct usage of “modal”? I’m more familiar with it indicating that the child window takes over all interaction until it goes away, i.e. it introduces a “mode” of interaction (see Wikipedia “Modal Window”). It might be that they were called modal in OS/2, I guess?

- Jimmy Maher

July 14, 2018 at 9:56 pm

I thought that was the usage I recalled from my programming days, but it’s been a long time since I’ve done any GUI programming. You’re probably right. Thanks!

- Nate

July 15, 2018 at 12:52 am

Yeah, I don’t quite think ‘modal’ is the word; the standard Windows term for such nested windows would be ‘MDI’, for ‘Multiple Document Interface’.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface

- Xavier

July 15, 2018 at 7:52 am

Super interesting story, as always, but Windows takes a S only when it’s from Microsoft. The One from Unix is called X-Window, singular.

- Jimmy Maher

July 15, 2018 at 12:59 pm

Thanks!

- whomever

July 15, 2018 at 6:31 pm

That’s one of the pedant things. Yes, technically the name is “The X Window System”, but in practice almost everyone calls it X Windows…

- Casey Muratori

July 16, 2018 at 4:04 am

I had trouble with “that reality tended to interfere with their ability to see through any scheme, Machiavellian or otherwise, with the single-minded focus of a smaller company.” The phrase “see through” reads to me at first like definition 1 of “see through” (https://www.google.com/search?q=define+see+through&oq=define+see+through&aqs=chrome..69i57.3282j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8), as in “to detect the true nature of.” But then when I finish the sentence I realize you mean it as in the phrase “see it through”. Perhaps it could be changed to a less ambiguous verb, like “carry out”, “perpetrate”, “promulgate”?

Sorry to be such a nitpick but I always find your writing to be very smooth, so I feel like it’s worth pointing out the one or two places I stumble when reading your articles, in case it leads them to become even more luxuriously polished :)

– Casey

- Jimmy Maher

July 16, 2018 at 7:15 am

Sure. Thanks!

- Alex Freeman

July 16, 2018 at 6:07 am

Another great article, Jimmy! The more I read about Bill Gates’s early history, the more it seems he was miles ahead of everyone else. The obvious course of action for IBM would have been to have Windows as the optional GUI for OS/2 for the 386 and discontinue failed products and reimburse customers so as to ensure IBM’s reputation as the safe choice. Even though Gates was a shark you trusted at your own risk, I feel less contempt for him seeing as almost all the others were practically begging him to take advantage of them.

As a side note, I don’t know how much you’ve covered of Gary Kildall and CP/M, but you may find this video interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdj8gh9GPc4

- Tomber

July 16, 2018 at 11:36 pm

I think Bill Gates was a quick study in the 1970s. He learned about licensing to multiple OEMs, controlling a standard (Microsoft BASIC), differentiating it so that it couldn’t be easily replaced, etc. Microsoft supposedly used the motto “We set the standard.” in the 1970s. When it became apparent that IBM was not going to be able to dictate the direction of the PC marketplace, he was ready.

I don’t think IBMs mistake was not supporting Windows; the mistake was not producing it themselves, not being aggressive on the 386, and not following the piece-meal approach to migration(away from DOS) that the 386 made possible, and that Microsoft followed perfectly with DOS, EMM386, DPMI, and Windows. OS/2 1.x and the 286 may be the mistake that couldn’t be undone quick enough. OS/2 2.0 was their attempt, but it was too late. Microsoft had already “Set the standard.”

- Yuhong Bao

July 17, 2018 at 5:27 am

That OS/2 2.0 debacle is so bad it is one of my favorite topics BTW.

- matthew

July 19, 2018 at 8:52 am

A small complaint: the first use of the term “Presentation Manager” is in a quote far preceding its definition as “OS/2’s planned GUI.” The context is probably sufficient to guess its meaning but the surrounding discussion of SAA and CUA does make it seem as though maybe one of the those would be the proper name of OS/2’s GUI. In particular, the passage “… said GUI wasn’t to be Windows. CP-DOS was rather to become a guinea pig for a new bureaucratic monstrosity known as the Systems Application Architecture,” makes it sound as though SAA is the GUI and the GUI is SAA.

- Jimmy Maher

July 19, 2018 at 9:14 am

Good catch. I hope it reads more clearly now. Thanks!

- Erik Twice

July 20, 2018 at 11:12 am

These articles are great, thanks!

I was wondering, is there any book you would recommend on the subject, specially for someone looking at this from a gaming perspective? :)

- Jimmy Maher

July 20, 2018 at 12:44 pm

That’s a tough one. I would say that the definitive book on these subjects has yet to be written. I’m not really sure what a “gaming perspective” could even entail here; virtually every company mentioned in these articles showed — at least publicly — no interest whatsoever in gaming during this period. It was only after Windows 3.0 in 1990 that Microsoft began to turn back to consumer computing.

All I can say is to have a look at my sources at the bottom of the article. Hard Drive and Gates — especially the latter, which is still in print on paper and on Kindle — provide the most detail of the books I’ve found. Unfortunately, they both share similar faults. Both approach this as a breezy business story of the “written for executives on the go!” stripe, ignoring the greater cultural implications; both weave together a lot of threads in a somewhat random-feeling fashion; both are somewhat gossipy (the book Gates in particular evinces as much interest in whom Bill Gates is sleeping with at any given time as in how he’s running his company); neither book’s author seems to have much grasp of the actual technology. The technological developments are, as usual, probably best followed through magazines like Byte and modern Internet resources like Nathan Lineback’s GUI Gallery.

- cliffton

July 24, 2018 at 9:02 pm

“For some time, he *WOULDN’T* even be able to get a clear answer”
or
“For some time, he wasn’t even able to get a clear answer”

- Jimmy Maher

July 25, 2018 at 8:15 am

Thanks!

- Jake R

July 25, 2018 at 6:33 am

could breathe a sign of relief.

Should that be “sigh” ?

- Jimmy Maher

July 25, 2018 at 8:14 am

Indeed. Thanks!

Doing Windows, Part 5: A Second Try
July 20, 2018

The beginning of serious work on the operating system that would come to be known as OS/2 left Microsoft’s team of Windows developers on decidedly uncertain ground. As OS/2 ramped up, Windows ramped down in proportion, until by the middle of 1986 Tandy Trower had just a few programmers remaining on his team. What had once been Microsoft’s highest-priority project had now become a backwater. Many were asking what the point of Windows was in light of OS/2 and its new GUI, the Presentation Manager. Steve Ballmer, ironically the very same fellow who had played the role of Windows’s cheerleader-in-chief during 1984 and 1985, was now the most prominent of those voices inside Microsoft who couldn’t understand why Trower’s team continued to exist at all.

Windows survived only thanks to the deep-seated instinct of Bill Gates to never put all his eggs in one basket. Stewart Alsop II, editor-in-chief of InfoWorld magazine during this period:

I know from conversations with people at Microsoft in environments where they didn’t have to bullshit me that they almost killed Windows. It came down to Ballmer and Gates having it out. Ballmer wanted to kill Windows. Gates prevented him from doing it. Gates viewed it as a defensive strategy. Just look at Gates. Every time he does something, he tries to cover his bet. He tries to have more than one thing going at once. He didn’t want to commit everything to OS/2, just on the off chance it didn’t work. And in hindsight, he was right.

Gates’s determination to always have a backup plan showed its value around the beginning of 1987, when IBM informed Microsoft of their marketing plans for their new PS/2 hardware line as well as OS/2. Gates had, for very good reason, serious reservations about virtually every aspect of the plans which IBM now laid out for him, from the fortress of patents being constructed around the proprietary Micro Channel Architecture of the PS/2 hardware to an attitude toward the OS/2 software which seemed to assume that the new operating system would automatically supersede MS-DOS, just because of the IBM name. (How well had that worked out for TopView?) “About this time is when Microsoft really started to get hacked at IBM,” remembers Mark Mackaman, Microsoft’s OS/2 product manager at the time. IBM’s latest misguided plans, the cherry on top of all of Gates’s frustration with his inefficient and bureaucratic partners, finally became too much for him. Beginning to feel a strong premonition that the OS/2 train was going to run off the tracks alongside PS/2, he suddenly started to put some distance between IBM’s plans and Microsoft’s. After having all but ignored Windows for the past year, he started to talk about it in public again. And Tandy Trower found his tiny team’s star rising once again inside Microsoft, even as OS/2’s fell.

The first undeniable sign that a Windows rehabilitation had begun came in March of 1987, when Microsoft announced that they had sold 500,000 copies of the operating environment since its release in November of 1985. This number came as quite a surprise to technology journalists, whose own best guess would have pegged Windows’s sales at 10 percent of that figure at best. It soon emerged that Microsoft was counting all sorts of freebies and bundle deals as regular unit sales, and that even by their own most optimistic estimates no more than 100,000 copies of Windows had ever actually been installed. But no matter. For dedicated Microsoft watchers, their fanciful press release was most significant not for the numbers it trumpeted but as a sign that Windows was on again.

According to Paul and George Grayson, whose company Micrografix was among the few which embraced Windows 1, the public announcement of OS/2 and its Presentation Manager in April of 1987 actually lent Microsoft’s older GUI new momentum:

Everybody predicted when IBM announced OS/2 and PM [that] it was death for Windows developers. It was the exact opposite: sales doubled the next month. Everybody all of a sudden knew that graphical user interfaces were critical to the future of the PC, and they said, “How can I get one?”

You had better graphics, you had faster computers, you had kind of the acknowledgement that graphical user interfaces were in your future, you had the Macintosh being very successful. So you had this thing, this phenomenon called Mac envy, beginning to occur where people had PCs and they’d look at their DOS-based programs and say, “Boy, did I get ripped off.” And mice were becoming popular. People wanted a way to use mice. All these things just kind of happened at one moment in time, and it was like hitting the accelerator.

It did indeed seem that Opportunity was starting to knock — if Microsoft could deliver a version of Windows that was more compelling than the first. And Opportunity, of course, was one house guest whom Bill Gates seldom rejected. On October 6, 1987, Microsoft announced that Windows 2 would ship in not one but three forms within the next month or two. Vanilla Windows 2.03 would run on the same hardware as the previous version, while Windows/386 would be a special supercharged version made just for the 80386 CPU — a raised middle finger to IBM for refusing to let Microsoft make OS/2 an 80386-exclusive operating system.

But the most surprising new Windows product of all actually bore the name “Microsoft Excel” on the box. After struggling fruitlessly for the past two years to get people to write native applications for Windows, Microsoft had decided to flip that script by making a version of Windows that ran as part of an application. The new Excel spreadsheet would ship with what Microsoft called a “run-time” version of Windows 2, sufficient to run Excel and only Excel. When people tried Excel and liked it, they’d go out and buy a proper Windows in order to make all their computing work this way. That, anyway, was the theory.

Whether considered as Excel for Windows or Windows for Excel, Microsoft’s latest attempt to field a competitor to Lotus 1-2-3 already had an interesting history. It was in fact a latecomer to the world of MS-DOS, a port of a Macintosh product that had been very successful over the past two years.

After releasing a fairly workmanlike version of Multiplan for the Macintosh back in 1984, Microsoft had turned their attention to a more ambitious Mac spreadsheet that would be designed from scratch in order to take better advantage of the GUI. The wisdom of committing resources to such a move sparked considerable debate both inside and outside their offices, especially after Lotus announced plans of their own for a Macintosh product called Jazz.

Lotus 1-2-3 on MS-DOS was well on its way to becoming the most successful business application of the 1980s by combining a spreadsheet, a database, and a business-graphics application in one package. Now, Lotus Jazz proposed to add a word processor and telecommunications software to that collection on the Macintosh. Few gave Microsoft’s Excel much chance on the Mac against Lotus, the darling of the Fortune magazine set, a company which could seemingly do no wrong, a company which was arguably better known than Microsoft at the time and certainly more profitable. But when Jazz shipped on May 27, 1985, it was greeted with unexpectedly lukewarm reviews. It felt slow and painfully bloated, with an interface that felt more like a Baroque fugue than smooth jazz. For the first time since toppling VisiCalc from its throne as the queen of American business software, Lotus had left the competition an opening.

Excel for Mac shipped on September 30, 1985. In addition to feeling elegant, fast, and easy in contrast to the Lotus monstrosity, Microsoft’s latest spreadsheet was also much cheaper. It outdistanced its more heralded competitor in remarkably short order, quickly growing into a whale in the relatively small pond that was the Macintosh business-applications market. In December of 1985, Excel alone accounted for 36 percent of said market, compared to 9 percent for Jazz. By the beginning of 1987, 160,000 copies of Excel had been sold, compared to 10,000 copies of Jazz. And by the end of that same year, 255,000 copies of Excel had been sold — approximately one copy for every five Macs in active use.

Such numbers weren’t huge when set next to the cash cow that was MS-DOS, but Excel for the Macintosh was nevertheless a breakthrough product for Microsoft. Prior to it, system software had been their one and only forte; despite lots and lots of trying, their applications had always been to one degree or another also-rans, chasing but never catching market leaders like Lotus, VisiCorp, and WordPerfect. But the virgin territory of the Macintosh — ironically, the one business computer for which Microsoft didn’t make the system software — had changed all that. Microsoft’s programmers did a much better job of embracing the GUI paradigm than did their counterparts at companies like Lotus, resulting in software that truly felt like it was designed for the Macintosh from the start rather than ported over from another, more old-fashioned platform. Through not only Excel but also a Mac version of their Word word processor, Microsoft came to play a dominant role in the Mac applications market, with both products ranking among the top five best-selling Mac business applications more months than not during the latter 1980s. Now the challenge was to translate that success in the small export market that was the Macintosh to Microsoft’s sprawling home country, the land of MS-DOS.

On August 16, 1987, Microsoft received some encouraging news just as they were about to take up that challenge in earnest. For the first time ever, their total sales over the previous year amounted to enough to make them the biggest software company in the world, a title which they inherited from none other than Lotus, who had enjoyed it since 1984. The internal memo which Bill Gates wrote in response says everything about his future priorities. “[Lotus’s] big distinction of being the largest is being taken away,” he said, “before we have even begun to really compete with them.” The long-awaited version of Excel for PC compatibles would be launched with two important agendas in mind: to hit Lotus where it hurt, and to get Windows 2 — some form of Windows 2 — onto people’s computers.

Excel for Windows — or should we say Windows for Excel? — reached stores by the beginning of November 1987, to a press reception that verged on ecstatic. PC Magazine’s review was typical:

Microsoft Excel, the new spreadsheet from Microsoft Corp., could be one of those milestone programs that change the way we use computers. Not only does Excel have a real chance of giving 1-2-3 its most serious competition since Lotus Development Corp. introduced that program in 1982, it could finally give the graphics interface a respectable home in the starched-shirt world of DOS.

For people who cut their teeth on 1-2-3 and have never played with a Mac, Excel looks more like a video game than a serious spreadsheet. It comes with a run-time version of Microsoft Windows, so it has cheery colors, scroll bars, icons, and menu bars. But users will soon discover the beauty of Windows. Since it treats the whole screen as graphics, you can have different spreadsheets and charts in different parts of the screen and you can change nearly everything about the way anything looks.

Excel won PC Magazine’s award for “technical excellence” in 1987 — a year that notably included OS/2 among the field of competitors. The only thing to complain about was performance: like Windows itself, Excel ran like a dog on an 8088-based machine and sluggishly even on an 80286, requiring an 80386 to really unleash its potential.

Especially given the much greater demands Excel placed on its hardware, it would have to struggle long and hard to displace the well-entrenched Lotus 1-2-3, but it would manage to capture 12 percent of the MS-DOS spreadsheet market in its first year alone. In the process, the genius move of packaging Windows itself with by far the most exciting Windows application yet created finally caused significant numbers of people to actually start using Microsoft’s GUI, paving the road to its acceptance among even the most conservative of corporate users. Articles by starch-shirted Luddites asking what GUIs were really good for became noticeably less common in the wake of Excel, a product which answered that question pretty darn comprehensively.

Of course, Excel could never have enjoyed such success as the front edge of Microsoft’s GUI wedge had the version of Windows under which it ran not been much more impressive than the first one. Ironically, many of the most welcome improvements came courtesy of the people from the erstwhile Dynamical Systems Research, the company Microsoft had bought, at IBM’s behest, for their work on a TopView clone that could be incorporated into OS/2. After IBM gave up on that idea, most of the Dynamical folks wound up on the Windows team, where they did stellar work. Indeed, one of them, Nathan Myhrvold, would go on to became Microsoft’s chief software architect and still later head of research, more than justifying his little company’s $1.5 million purchase price all by himself. Take that, IBM!

From the user’s perspective, the most plainly obvious improvement in Windows 2 was the abandonment of Scott MacGregor’s pedantic old tiled-windows system and the embrace of a system of sizable, draggable, overlappable windows like those found on the Macintosh. For the gearheads, though, the real excitement lay in the improvements hidden under the hood of Windows/386, which made heavy use of the 80386’s “virtual” mode. Windows itself and its MS-DOS plumbing ran in one virtual machine, and each vanilla MS-DOS application the user spawned therefrom got another virtual machine of its own. This meant that as many MS-DOS applications and native Windows applications as one wished could now be run in parallel, under a multitasking model that was preemptive for the former and cooperative for the latter. The 640 K barrier still applied to each of the virtual machines and was thus still a headache, requiring the usual inefficient workarounds in the form of extended or expanded memory for applications that absolutely, positively had to have access to more memory. Still, having multiple 640 K virtual machines at one’s disposal was better than having just one.

Windows/386 was arguably the first version of Windows that wasn’t more trouble than it was worth for most users. If you had the hardware to run it, it was a very compelling product, even if the realities of the software market meant that you used it more frequently to multitask old-school MS-DOS applications than to run native Windows applications.

A Quick Tour of Windows/386 2.11

Microsoft themselves didn’t seem to entirely understand the relationship between Windows and OS/2’s Presentation Manager during the late 1980s. This version of Windows inexplicably has the “Presentation Manager” name as well on some of the disks. No wonder users were often confused as to which product was the real Microsoft GUI of the future. (Version 2.11 of Windows/386, the one we’re looking at here, was released some eighteen months after the initial 2.01 release, which I couldn’t ever manage to get running under emulation due to strange hard-drive errors. But the material differences between the two versions are relatively minor.)

Windows 2 remains less advanced than Presentation Manager in many ways, such as the ongoing lack of any concept of application installation. Without it, we’re still left to root around through the individual files on the hard disk in order to start applications.

Especially in the Windows/386 version, most of the really major improvement that came with Windows 2 are architectural enhancements that are hidden under the hood. There is, however, one glaring exception to that rule: the tiled windows are gone, replaced with a windowing system that works the way we still expect such things to work today. You can drag these windows, you can size them, and you can overlap them as you will.

The desktop concept is still lacking, but we’re making progress. Like in Windows 1, icons on the desktop only represent running applications that have been minimized. Unlike in Windows 1, these icons can now be dragged anywhere on the proto-desktop. From here, it would require only one more leap of logic to start using the icons to represent things other than running applications. Baby steps… baby steps.

Windows/386 removes some if by no means all of the sting from the 640 K barrier. Thanks to the 80386’s virtual mode, vanilla MS-DOS applications can now run in memory above the 640 K barrier, leaving the first 640 K free for Windows itself and native Windows applications. So few compelling examples of the latter existed during Windows/386’s heyday that the average user was likely to spend a lot more time running MS-DOS applications with it anyway. In this scenario, memory was ironically much less of problem than it would have been had the user attempted to run many native applications.

One of the less heralded of Microsoft’s genius marketing moves has been the use of Microsoft Excel as a sort of Trojan horse to get people using Windows. When installed on a machine without Windows, Excel also installs a “run-time” version of the operating environment sufficient only to run itself. Excel would, as Microsoft’s thinking went, get people used to a GUI and get them asking why they couldn’t use one for the other tasks they had to accomplish on the computer. “Why, as a matter of fact you can,” would go Microsoft’s answer. “You just need to buy this product called Windows.” Uptake wouldn’t be instant, but Excel did become quite successful as a standalone product, and did indeed do much to pave the way for the eventual near-universal acceptance of Windows 3.

Excel running under either a complete or a run-time version of Windows. When it appeared alongside Windows 2 in late 1987, it was by far the most sophisticated and compelling application yet made for the environment, giving the MS-DOS-using masses for the first time a proof of concept of what a GUI could mean in the real world.

Greatly improved though it was, Windows 2 didn’t blow the market away. Plenty of the same old problems remained, beginning and for many ending with the fact that seeing it at its best required a pricey 80386-based computer. In light of this, third-party software developers didn’t exactly stampede onto the Windows bandwagon. Still, having been provided with such a wonderful example in the form of Microsoft Excel of how compelling (and profitable) a Windows application done right could be, some of them did begin to commit some resources to Windows as well as vanilla MS-DOS. Throughout the life of Windows 2, Microsoft made a standard practice of giving their run-time version of it to outside application developers as well as their own, all in a bid to give people a taste of a GUI through the word processor, spreadsheet, or paint program they were going to buy anyway. To some extent at least, it worked. Some users turned that taste into a meal by buying boxed copies of Windows 2, and still more were intrigued enough to quit scoffing and start accepting that GUIs in general might truly be a better way to get their work done — if not now, then at some point in the future, when the hardware and the software had both gotten a little bit better.

By the spring of 1988, Windows was still at least an order of magnitude away from meeting the goal Bill Gates had once stated it would manage before the end of 1984: that of being installed on 90 percent of all MS-DOS computers. But, even if Windows 2 hadn’t blown anyone away, it was doing considerably better than Windows 1, and certainly seemed to have more momentum than OS/2’s as-yet-unreleased Presentation Manager. Granted, neither of these were terribly high bars to clear — and yet there was a dawning sense that Windows, six and a half years on from its birth as the humble Interface Manager, might just get the last laugh on the MS-DOS command line after all. Microsoft was already formulating plans for a Windows 3, which was coming to be seen both inside and outside the company as the pivotal version, the point where steadily improving hardware would combine with better software to break the GUI into the business-computing mainstream at long last. No, it wasn’t 1984 any more, but better late than never.

And then a new development threatened to pull the rug out from under all the progress that had been made. On March 17, 1988, Apple blindsided Microsoft by filing a lawsuit against them in federal court, alleging that the latter had stolen the former’s intellectual property by copying the “look and feel” of the Macintosh GUI. With the gauntlet thus thrown down, the stage was set for one of the most titanic legal battles in the history of the computer industry, one with the potential to fundamentally alter the very nature of the software business. At stake as well was the very existence of Windows just as it finally seemed to be getting somewhere. And as went Windows, Bill Gates was coming to believe once again, so went Microsoft. In order for both to survive, he would now have to win a two-front war: one in the marketplace, the other in the court system.

(Sources: the books The Making of Microsoft: How Bill Gates and His Team Created the World’s Most Successful Software Company by Daniel Ichbiah and Susan L. Knepper, Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson, Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Computer Wars: The Fall of IBM and the Future of Global Technology by Charles H. Ferguson and Charles R. Morris, and Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company by Owen W. Linzmayer; PC Magazine of November 10 1987, November 24 1987, December 22 1987, April 12 1988, and September 12 1989; Byte of May 1988 and July 1988; Tandy Trower’s “The Secret Origins of Windows” on the Technologizer website. Finally, I owe a lot to Nathan Lineback for the histories, insights, comparisons, and images found at his wonderful online “GUI Gallery.”)

Comments
42 Responses

- Sniffnoy

July 20, 2018 at 5:00 pm

I just have to wonder where the name “Microsoft Excel” came from. Doesn’t fit the whole deliberately-generic naming pattern.

- Jimmy Maher

July 20, 2018 at 5:22 pm

Yeah, I haven’t seen a source for that. My feeling is that Microsoft Spreadsheet would be… a little too generic? Microsoft Word worked, but Microsoft Spread certainly doesn’t sound very nice. Excel is a great name anyway, which somehow manages to convey the same spirit of almost generic simplicity.

- whomever

July 20, 2018 at 6:05 pm

Also they may have thought that “Microsoft Spreadsheet” could be confused with Multiplan?

- Pedro Timóteo

July 20, 2018 at 6:13 pm

I think the point is to be generic and “universal-sounding”, but *not* descriptive. So it’s Word, not Word Processor. It’s PowerPoint, not Presentation(s). Office, not Application Suite or something. Etc. etc..

- Steve McCrea

July 20, 2018 at 10:13 pm

I think Microsoft Sheet, Microsoft Cell, or Microsoft Data would have worked better.

“did became” -> “became” or “did become”

- Jimmy Maher

July 21, 2018 at 7:35 am

Thanks!

- flowmotion

July 21, 2018 at 2:39 pm

I’ve always assumed “Excel” was a play on “cell”, as a spreadsheet is grid of cells. The original icon was also a crossed XL.

- Steve McCrea

July 24, 2018 at 4:36 pm

Yes, seems obvious in retrospect!

- tedder

July 20, 2018 at 6:57 pm

So good. I didn’t know about the Excel/Windows trojan horse.

Ugh, Myhrvold. The king of the patent troll mountain.

- Pierre

July 21, 2018 at 1:27 am

Yeah. That was news to me too and I was around back then. At this time I was running GEM at work which worked way better than Windows 2. It took until Windows 3.1 and the release of Visio for me to fully commit to Windows. I was impressed with Windows 3.0 when it came out but it wasn’t enough for me to go all in.

- sam

July 20, 2018 at 10:03 pm

Typo: “yet created finally caused”

- Jimmy Maher

July 21, 2018 at 7:34 am

As intended, actually…

- Keith Palmer

July 21, 2018 at 12:53 am

I didn’t know about Excel being used to promote Windows 2, either. Reading Macworld magazines from the late 1980s, I recall noticing “we’d better keep our eyes open” comments bringing up Aldus Pagemaker for Windows… (I’m sure the next instalment in this series will force me to confront my own prejudices, which didn’t even form until years later.)

The cameo appearance here by Lotus Jazz, although intimated beforehand in some comments on previous entries, did catch my attention. Quite a while ago, I found in the third-to-last issue of Creative Computing an unimpressed review of Jazz; the reviewer John J. Anderson blamed the program’s limitations on the Macintosh 512K’s limitations and offered a laundry list of improvements (all apparently to be squeezed into the compact Macintosh case) to be made before the impending one-two punch of the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST put Apple out of business. I can only wonder what the magazine might have made of Microsoft Excel; a few months later, in the more congenial confines of Macworld, Steven Levy brought up some comments from Lotus to speculate the program just hadn’t been aimed at “power users,” with Excel his counterexample…

- Jimmy Maher

July 21, 2018 at 7:37 am

I think Jazz was just trying to do too much. Excel did one thing, and did it well. Jazz did many things, but badly.

- whomever

July 21, 2018 at 1:51 am

By the way, let’s not forget Microsoft’s brilliant marketing, including the most epic advertisement ever made (in the same way that the Star Wars Holiday Special was epic): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noEHHB6rnMI

- Casey Muratori

July 21, 2018 at 7:12 am

It might be worth clarifying that, unless I am misremembering, Windows 2 was _not_ a preemptive multitasking OS. It was only the DOS layer that allowed preemption – programs written for the GUI were still cooperative, I think?

Anyway the article is correct as written, to be sure, because it describes the DOS part as preemptive without explicitly mentioning the rest of the OS. But I just worried that it might be misleading to not be more specific about it!

Great article as always,
– Casey

- Jimmy Maher

July 21, 2018 at 7:55 am

Windows/386 actually did use a universal preemptive-multitasking model, for native Windows and vanilla MS-DOS applications alike. It ran exclusively in the 80386’s virtual mode, and every application, regardless of type, got its own preemptively-multitasked virtual machine. The big drawback to this approach was that every application was stuck inside its own 640 K pool of memory.

Later, Windows 3.0 would use DPMI to run native applications in protected mode, reserving virtual mode for MS-DOS applications. The advantage of this was that native Windows applications got a flat memory model, free of having to worry about the 640 K barrier. The drawback was that all of the native applications cooperatively rather than preemptively multitasked.

- flowmotion

July 21, 2018 at 2:29 pm

I used Excel 2/3 and Word 4/5 on 68000-based Macintosh SE and they were definitely “killer apps”. Very serendipitous that I made the right choice 25+ years ago, and have never had to relearn any of that.

> Microsoft themselves didn’t seem to entirely understand the relationship between Windows and OS/2’s Presentation Manager during the late 1980s.

Oh, they knew all too well. Ballmer was going around telling developers that Presentation Manager would be “protected mode Windows” and it would be “just a recompile” to ship a 32-bit app. IBM was not on board with that plan, to their later chagrin. Windows NT and Win32 shipped a year after OS/2 2.0, and once MS had a “roadmap”, PM was dead meat.

- Tomber

July 21, 2018 at 5:08 pm

Windows/386(and all derivatives) are pretty complicated to explain. Most of what you wrote is true — but not complete. It is not mere coincidence that the best book about it is called Unauthorized Windows 95 by Andrew Schulman. Speaking to /386 or 3.x, the multitasking of DOS apps could be called pre-emptive. Windows apps, not pre-emptive. All calls to DOS and BIOS were generally handled by switching the machine back to real-mode, letting the actual DOS and DOS drivers run, return the result, and then switch back to protected mode to hand the result over to the virtual machine that generated the call. Some calls could bounce around the modes a couple times. This is how Windows 3.1 eventually had ’32-bit Disk Access’ and ’32-bit File Access’, .386 virtual device drivers, and yet still worked perfectly on top of DOS device drivers for CD-ROM, SCSI, etc. Because of all this, crashes were still possible, and not that uncommon. One DOS was shared amongst all, while OS/2 2.x would have the ability to boot separate independent DOS for each instance.

The big catch is that although there was a 32-bit core kernel in operation, the task(VM) that people called ‘Windows’ was running in a single 16-bit protected mode. This similarity allowed a Windows 3.0 executable to run in real-mode, 286 standard(protected) mode, or 386 enhanced(protected) mode, because all the pointers were 16-bit(any experts pardon my looseness here).

Other books are Windows Internals (possibly also Windows 95 system programming secrets) by Matt Pietrek.

With regard to the 640k limit, DOS apps under Windows 3+ could access plenty of memory, using XMS, EMS, or direct DPMI calls if they used DOS extender technology. The remaining problem was how many device drivers you had to load, and whether there was enough 640k left to get Windows or your app running. Some apps would require actual 640K memory, and with many of them running or a memory leak, it could run out while Windows was running.

- Jimmy Maher

July 21, 2018 at 5:23 pm

This sounds more like a description of Windows 3.x than Windows/386. To my knowledge, the latter did not “switch the machine back to real-mode, letting the actual DOS and DOS drivers run, return the result, and then switch back to protected mode to hand the result over to the virtual machine that generated the call.” This sounds like a description of the DPMI DOS extender, which didn’t exist until Windows 3.0. Windows/386 is very much an odd duck in the Windows family…

- Tomber

July 21, 2018 at 6:08 pm

Windows/386 is an odd-duck because it did what DPMI does, before DPMI was formalized into a standard, which Windows 3 then implemented and served to apps. Windows/386 had no choice but to switch back to real-mode: The only way to avoid switching back to real-mode is to implement a 386 virtual device driver, and they simply didn’t exist for most peripherals at that point in time unless they were generic enough to be implemented in Windows/386. Everything else had to fall back to DOS, DOS drivers, or the BIOS, which meant the CPU could not be in protected mode at that time, in general. (I think in some cases, it was possible to stay in protected mode and reflect a DOS call into a special task(VM) that encased the underlying DOS, but if DOS then called the BIOS, you were going to real mode.)

As an illustration, the reason Windows 3.1x had the 32-bit disk/file access layers available is that Microsoft finally included a 386 virtual device driver for the typical hard disk controller of the time. That allowed the system to stay in protected mode for most hard disk accesses, for the first time. It also implemented a 386 disk cache, since real-mode SMARTDRV would no longer be in the mix.

- Jimmy Maher

July 21, 2018 at 6:45 pm

I hesitate to argue too much, as I haven’t seen the sources you reference, but there are a few things that continue to give me pause.

One is this post on the authoritative site OS/2 Museum: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/windows386-2-01/ .

The crucial difference between Windows/386 (all versions up to 2.11) and Windows 3.0 in Enhanced mode was that the latter ran Windows applications in protected mode, while in Windows/386, the Windows VM was just another real-mode DOS box. With a bit of exaggeration, it could be said that Windows/386 + DPMI = Enhanced mode Windows 3.0.

Another is the May 1988 Byte feature article on multitasking, which presents essentially the same description of Windows/386, describing it as preemptive multitasking all around.

And a third is a fairly lengthy account in the book Gates, in which programmer David Weise describes the ability to use protected mode in this way coming to him in the summer of 1988 — i.e., well after the release of Windows/386 — after seeing Murray Sargent’s Microsoft CodeView debugger, which made use of VCPI, Quarterdeck’s earlier implementation of the DOS-extender concept. It then goes on to describe the internal debate around the idea at Microsoft — was it stepping too much on the toes of OS/2? — before Gates said to “go ahead.”

My understanding had been that each virtual machine simply spawned its own copy of MS-DOS under Windows/386. It was such a minimal operating system that the overhead wouldn’t have been that great — certainly well under 100 K. I believe this was how OS/2 functioned.

But I’ll do my best to track down your sources and see what’s what. Thanks!

- Lisa H.

July 21, 2018 at 7:50 pm

Excel looks more like a video game than a serious spreadsheet.

…?!? What an odd thing to say.

- Jimmy Maher

July 21, 2018 at 10:03 pm

There was a weirdly… puritanical bent to mainstream business computing during the 1980s. Aesthetic ugliness was viewed as a marker of seriousness of intent, its opposite liable to prompt the dreaded label of “games machine.” The PC Magazine reviewer is actually being quite open-minded by the standard of his peers…

- VileR

August 8, 2018 at 9:52 am

I read that not really as an expectation of ‘ugliness’, but perhaps a comment on the visual impact of that over-saturated neon palette of 16 colors, which Windows 2 and its applications were using rather garishly (all those bright aqua and yellow highlights everywhere, etc.). Certainly not what people were accustomed to in business software, especially when people’s expectations of a GUI’s look-and-feel were still largely based on the Lisa/Macintosh style with its monochromatic ‘seriousness’.

- Alain

July 21, 2018 at 7:53 pm

Good old days.

I installed Windows/386 with Excel and Word for Windows 1.0, I still have the hardcover manual that came with that, with the first HP laser printers for a few brave souls and after the other users saw what could be done I could not keep up with the demand in the shop where I was working at that time.

- Tomber

July 21, 2018 at 8:00 pm

It may be that the ‘Windows’ task(VM) on /386 was running in real-mode(which is to say, protected-mode as a V86 task, like a DOS box, with memory being provided by an EMM386-style interface to the 386 kernel), but that doesn’t change that your Windows apps would have been co-operative between themselves. I happen to have the book Gates, and looking at those pages, I will deduce that what Weise was doing was converting the real-mode Windows code(GDI/USER/KERNEL, etc.) to run in what became Standard mode or 386 Enhanced mode(e.g., as a 16-bit protected mode task). There is always a risk of confusion of terms here, because what people call ‘Windows’ was really just a sub-task of a greater, unnamed, 386 kernel. This would be similar to taking relatively clean Turbo Pascal 6 code, and then recompiling it to run in 16-bit protected mode on Borland Pascal 7.0.

That reading explains pretty well why all he needed was a protected-mode debugger, and not what is called a ‘kernel’ debugger. The debugger he used was for apps, while a kernel debugger would be for an operating system kernel, which ‘Windows'(GDI/USER/KERNEL) was not.

As an aside, when Windows 3.x would hang badly, you could press Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and a blue text screen would appear with a couple unpleasant options. That screen was provided by the 386 kernel, and would call itself either IOS (the 386 kernel) or just Windows.

For the Byte reference, I wouldn’t disagree that it is pre-emptive for the DOS boxes, but not Windows apps. Win16 apps are not, by design, capable of pre-emptive multitasking unless you spawn separate Windows16 instances(like NT 3.1 could do, at cost of RAM and loss of sharing/IPC). That would hold until such time as any of them called something that required the machine to switch back to real-mode. Then, not pre-emptive. It is splitting hairs at that point, unless the stability is your focus.(again, like NT 3.1 or OS/2 2.x)

Also, don’t forget, 100K of extra overhead per DOS window is going to be huge in 1987. The whole machine probably only had 2MB, and OS/2 1.x’s memory requirements were a big problem during the DRAM shortage in that timeframe.

- Jimmy Maher

July 21, 2018 at 9:21 pm

Okay. Made some updates based on this. It’s still not crystal-clear to me how these additional virtual machines communicated with MS-DOS — for what it’s worth, Windows/386 was also criticized for being memory-hungry — so I’m going to punt on that question for now. I’m on the archive.org waiting list for the first book you suggested. Sigh…

Thanks!

- Tomber

July 21, 2018 at 11:05 pm

I just finished flipping through many pages of the books I mentioned previously. Although Windows/386 is not listed as conforming, for Windows 3.0 with 386 Enhanced Mode and higher, Schulman says on page 296: “Let me repeat that: Windows calls down to DOS in V86 mode. Please don’t dismiss this point as mere semantic hairsplitting or as the remark of a pedant.”

I suspect this would apply to Windows/386 as well. In that case, the CPU is not switching back and forth between real and protected modes, it is just patching up a few variables and then changing tasks(context switch). All the calls to DOS and BIOS are reflected into the special task(V86 VM) that encases DOS when Windows first loads. That leaves all your pre-emptive capabilities in place while DOS or BIOS handles those calls.

As to how the VMs are communicating with MS-DOS, that is arbitrated by the 386 kernel, frequently called VMM in the books. If there is a 386 virtual device driver for a particular function, then that reflection into MS-DOS can be skipped entirely, which avoids a frequently convoluted chain of task switches back and forth between the DOS task/VM and the 386 kernel.

Although I didn’t find anything on it yet in those books, it was probably 286 Standard Mode that required frequent switches back to real-mode, as the 286 has no V86 mode. On the 286, that was difficult, since it hadn’t been designed with the expectation that you’d ever return to real mode.

- Jimmy Maher

July 22, 2018 at 8:27 am

Okay. So, I guess my question would be, why do we need such a complicated DPMI specification at all, if we’re sticking MS-DOS inside an 80386 virtual machine and talking to it well enough to get work done? In this case, we don’t need to switch the processor into real mode to communicate with MS-DOS, which was supposedly the main point of DPMI. One scenario, especially relevant in the early days, was obviously to get Windows running on an 80286, which doesn’t have a virtual mode. Another, relevant in the Windows 3.11 era, was to get 32-bit applications running in a 16-bit operating system. Is there any other usage scenario? When Windows 3.0 runs a 16-bit Windows application on an 80386, is it not actually making any use of DPMI at all beyond the initial switch into protected mode? (We set up our virtual machine for MS-DOS, we switch into protected mode for running Windows, and we never need to switch into real mode again…) Was the main point of DPMI in the beginning actually to get Windows running in protected mode on an *80286*?

- Tomber

July 22, 2018 at 11:44 pm

Those are good questions. I have two 500-page books on it, Extending DOS 2nd Ed., and DOS and Windows Protected Mode.

The key thing to understand is that DPMI is just an API. A number of smart people figured out that all these things were possible, and then they started bumping into each other. There were many programs that wanted to put the machine in protected mode: EMM386, 386MAX, QEMM386, DOS Extenders (286 or 386), Windows, etc. But only one gets to be in full control at a time. It was obvious that a standard was needed, and DPMI is that standard. (An earlier attempt was VCPI) A program can detect if somebody is already In Charge, if so, ask them to do protected mode things that you can’t do if you’re a mere real-mode program in a V86 task.

There are 16-bit (286) DPMI servers, and 32-bit DPMI servers. There are 16 and 32-bit clients. A 16-bit client can run on a 32-bit server, oftentimes getting the transparent benefits(finer grained paging, more RAM, faster real/protected switches, etc).

A DOS Extended program usually comes with its own DPMI Server built-in, so that it can get going if the system is actually in real mode. But most times, the system is in V86 mode at a DOS prompt (because EMM386 puts it there to emulate EMM), or you are in Windows or OS/2 2.x. If there is already a DPMI server loaded (like Windows 3.0), then that DOS app will ask Windows 3.0 to switch the VM into protected mode. Some complicated stuff happens, and Windows will convert the task/VM from being in V86 mode, to a regular 16 or 32-bit protected mode task. The DOS app is suddenly out of the pond, and in the ocean, but is still just an app. DPMI also manages how interrupts get handled, often by switching back to real mode (actually, V86 mode), etc.

Windows 3 apps can directly call the DPMI server like a DOS app would, however, they are supposed to use the Windows API. In Windows 2, there is no DPMI, so an extended DOS app probably won’t run on Windows/386.

In your example of 16-bit Windows apps on 80386, VMM would have switched the machine into protected mode during Windows startup. There would already be a 16-bit task/VM launched that loads the GUI components and your example app. When the app needs memory, it calls the Windows API, and those GUI components(KERNEL.EXE, here) would probably make a DPMI call to VMM for some memory, the 32-bit components would allocate it, map it into the 16-bit task/VM, and return the call with the pointer/handle to the memory.

32-bit apps on Win 3.x are easy at the VMM level, because VMM was always 32-bit on an 80386. The complicated part would be translating the 32-bit API calls to the 16-bit components running in the 16-bit task/VM. But Win32S did exactly that until Win95 shipped.

It is easy to get a 286 running in protected mode; the hard part is getting it back to real mode if you are going to support the DOS layer. Windows 3.0 added this as Standard mode. I don’t think Win 2.x used protected mode at all on 286.

Going back to EMM386 above(which puts the machine in protected mode with DOS in a V86), when Windows would start it would get all the memory info from EMM386, and then have EMM386 hand over control so that Windows would be in charge for the Windows session. If you exited Windows, the process would be reversed.

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2018 at 7:46 am

Okay, thanks so much for your help with this. I think I’ve worked out where the line is between too much and insufficient depth for an article to come…

- Tomber

July 23, 2018 at 3:07 pm

One point that might be useful: This discussion of 16-bit and 32-bit is often referring to the memory layout. 16-bit is typically using segments/selectors up to 64K, like a 286. 32-bit is typically using the 32-bit flat memory model. This is a separate thing from using 32-bit instructions. If you wanted to make a 386-optimized ZIP algorithm that uses the wider registers, you can do that in real-mode or any mode. Even the distinction between 16-bit or 32-bit protected mode tasks is a construct: In Borland Pascal 7, a 16-bit DPMI client for 286es, you could call the 32-bit DPMI server (obviously not the built-in), allocate a 1MB chunk of RAM, and then manipulate it with hand-inserted assembly instructions. If you tried to use Pascal instructions to access it, it would fail past 64K, but the point is the CPU doesn’t make any distinction.

- Christopher Benz

July 24, 2018 at 2:04 pm

Jimmy, I’m finding this sequence of articles absolutely compelling, quite unexpectedly given I am neither a fan of Windows nor have I previously been all that interested in the history of its development. My assumption about Gates at the time was that he didn’t have an original bone in his body, that Windows was largely a rip of the Mac OS and that Gates’ key talent was playing corporate games (hedging his bets). Your chronicle here hasn’t shifted that point of view exactly but given it a more sophisticated context and like many, I’m much more sympathetic with the 2018 version of Gates. Following his journey in the 80’s and early 90’s with the various GUI’s in development in your writing, I now find myself strangely empathetic towards Gates predicament leading into the threat of a legal challenge from Apple at this stage in Windows development. I can see interesting arguments to made on both sides with respect to Apple’s claim of copyright infringement. No doubt without Xerox, the Mac OS wouldn’t exist, however, without the Mac, Windows wouldn’t be Windows. It’s… complicated. Either way, your histories here are extremely well told, and find a graceful balance between the technical and human stories. Look forward to more instalments.

- Alex Freeman

July 24, 2018 at 9:49 pm

Yeah, those are basically my sentiments too.

“Excel looks more like a video game than a serious spreadsheet.”
Fun fact: Before my parents got me any video games, I had to content myself with playing around with the cursor in my dad’s copy of Lotus 1-2-3.

- Jimmy Maher

July 25, 2018 at 8:30 am

Yes, Gates and his company were more complicated characters than many depictions might lead one to believe. They did plenty of dodgy things, especially during the height of their dominance in the 1990s, but weren’t without ideas or technical competence of their own. Gates’s certainty that the GUI was the necessary future of computing, and his determination to bring that to fruition in the face of setback after setback, counts as visionary in my book. And of course the amazing work he does today absolves him of all his earlier sins in my eyes. Even as a younger man, he refused to countenance the typical rich-guy antics, which he referred to derisively as “decadence.” There was much that was unpleasant about Gates at Microsoft — screaming tantrums, childish petulance, a naked *need* to win that could be thoroughly off-putting, etc. — but much that was admirable as well. I like to think that he’s grown fully into his better self in the years since. While I admire Steve Jobs’s achievements to an appropriate degree, I’ve come to admire Bill Gates as a person.

- Richard Wells

July 25, 2018 at 12:29 am

Excel was not the only method Microsoft used to get a runtime Windows to users. There was also Microsoft Pageview which had its own weird history. When Wordperfect added page preview and graphics insertion abilities, MS extracted the page preview and graphic handling portions of the under development Word for Windows to create Pageview. Pageview was shipped free with a Windows runtime to every user of MS Word 4 for DOS. MS accompanied Pageview with a cheap upgrade coupon for the full Windows paired with PC Paintbrush for Windows.

MS had a free download of test versions of File Manager and Program Manager for Windows 2.x which were very similar to the Windows 3 versions. Unfortunately, Windows 2’s memory limits meant that running them left very little memory for applications.

- Aula

July 25, 2018 at 9:27 am

I don’t get the point of “ran like a dog”. From the context, it’s apparently intended to mean “ran very slowly” but most dogs are actually pretty fast runners. Also “work like a dog” means “work really hard” so it seems to me that “like a dog” isn’t a simile you should use here.

- Jimmy Maher

July 25, 2018 at 9:50 am

It’s a long-established English idiom, even if it doesn’t make complete logical sense: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/235743/what-is-the-etymology-of-run-like-a-dog. Probably related to the tradition of equating “dog” with things of generally poor quality: a “dog’s breakfast,” “that car you bought is a real dog,” etc.

- Aula

July 25, 2018 at 6:57 pm

Sorry, but I still don’t see how “run like a dog” is supposed to imply slowness. If a horse runs like a dog, it is galloping, which is the fastest gait of horses. Galloping is undesirable in horse-related sports, because it suggests that the rider or jockey has lost control of the horse, but it’s not slow. The link you gave is all about a car running like a dog, which means that the car is old and/or unmaintained, but even that rarely means it’s slow. If the engine is so worn out that it can’t produce as much torque at high RPM as it’s supposed to, then that can lower the technical maximum speed of the car, but most cars can’t be legally driven at anywhere near their maximum speed anyway, so a car that runs like a dog can be unreliable, uncomfortable, and possibly even unsafe, but (again) not slow.

- Jimmy Maher

July 25, 2018 at 8:30 pm

Well, I’d suggest there’s a fine line between running slowly and running poorly in this case. ;) But, if you prefer: https://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/58/messages/1735.html.

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Doing Windows, Part 6: Look and Feel
July 27, 2018

From left, Dan Fylstra of VisiCorp, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and Gary Kildall of Digital Research in 1984. As usual, Gates looks rumpled, high-strung, and vaguely tortured, while Kildall looks polished, relaxed, and self-assured. (Which of these men would you rather chat with at a party?) Pictures like these perhaps reveal one of the key reasons that Gates consistently won against more naturally charismatic characters like Kildall: he personally needed to win in ways that they did not.

In the interest of clarity and concision, I’ve restricted this series of articles about non-Apple GUI environments to the efforts of Microsoft and IBM, making an exception to that rule only for VisiCorp’s Visi On, the very first product of its type. But, as I have managed to acknowledge in passing, those GUIs hardly constituted the sum total of the computer industry’s efforts in this direction. Among the more impressive and prominent of what we might label the alternative MS-DOS GUIs was a product from none other than Gary Kildall and Digital Research — yes, the very folks whom Bill Gates once so slyly fleeced out of a contract to provide the operating system for the first IBM PC.

To his immense credit, Kildall didn’t let the loss of that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity get him down for very long. Digital Research accepted the new MS-DOS-dominated order with remarkable alacrity, and set about making the best of things by publishing system software, such as the multitasking Concurrent DOS, which tried to do the delicate dance of improving on MS-DOS while maintaining compatibility. In the same spirit, they made a GUI of their own, called the “Graphics Environment Manager” — GEM.

After futzing around with various approaches, the GEM team found their muse on the day in early 1984 when team-member Darrell Miller took Apple’s new Macintosh home to show his wife: “Her eyes got big and round, and she hates computers. If the Macintosh gets that kind of reaction out of her, this is powerful.” Miller is blunt about what happened next: “We copied it exactly.” When they brought their MacOS clone to the Fall 1984 Comdex, Steve Jobs expressed nothing but approbation. “You did a great job!” he said. No one from Apple seemed the slightest bit concerned at this stage about the resemblance to the Macintosh, and GEM hit store shelves the following spring as by far the most elegant and usable MS-DOS GUI yet.

A few months later, though, Apple started singing a very different tune. In the summer of 1985, they sent a legal threat to Digital Research which included a detailed list of all the ways that they believed GEM infringed on their MacOS copyrights. Having neither the stomach nor the cash for an extended court battle and fearing a preliminary injunction which might force them to withdraw GEM from the market entirely, Digital Research caved without a fight. They signed an agreement to replace the current version of GEM with a new one by November 15, doing away with such distinctive and allegedly copyright-protected Macintosh attributes as “the trash-can icon, the disk icons, and the close-window button in the upper-left-hand corner of a window.” They also agreed to an “undisclosed monetary settlement,” and to “provide programming services to Apple at a reduced rate.”

Any chance GEM might have had to break through the crowded field of MS-DOS GUIs was undone by these events. Most of the third-party developers Digital Research so desperately needed were unnerved by the episode, abandoning any plans they might have hatched to make native GEM applications. And so GEM, despite being vastly more usable than the contemporaneous Microsoft Windows even in its somewhat bowdlerized post-agreement form, would go on to become just another also-ran in the GUI race.[1]

For the industry at large, the GEM smackdown was most significant as a sign of changing power structures inside Apple — changes which carried with them a new determination that others shouldn’t be allowed to rip off all of the Mac’s innovations. The former Pepsi marketing manager John Sculley was in the ascendant at Apple by the summer of 1985, Steve Jobs already being eased out the door. The former had been taught by the Cola Wars that a product’s secret formula was everything, and had to be protected at all costs. And the Macintosh’s secret formula was its beautiful interface; without it, it was just an overpriced chunk of workmanlike hardware — a bad joke when set next to a better, cheaper Motorola 68000-based computer like the new Commodore Amiga. The complaint against Digital Research was a warning shot to an industry that Sculley believed had gotten far too casual about throwing around phrases like “Mac-like.” “Apple is going after everybody,” warned one fearful software executive to the press. The relationship between Microsoft and Apple in particular was about to get a whole lot more complicated.

Said relationship had been a generally good one during the years when Steve Jobs was calling many of Apple’s shots. Jobs and Bill Gates, dramatically divergent in countless ways but equally ambitious, shared a certain esprit de corp born of having been a part of the microcomputer industry since before there was a microcomputer industry. Jobs genuinely appreciated his counterpart’s refusal to frame business computing as a zero-sum game between the Macintosh and the MS-DOS standard, even when provoked by agitprop like Apple’s famous “1984” Super Bowl advertisement. Instead Gates, contrary to his established popular reputation as the ultimate zero-sum business warrior, supported Apple’s efforts as well as IBM’s with real enthusiasm: signing up to produce Macintosh software two full years before the finished Mac was released, standing at Jobs’s side when Apple made major announcements, coming to trade shows conspicuously sporting a Macintosh tee-shirt. All indications are that the two truly liked and respected one another. For all that Apple and Microsoft through much of these two men’s long careers would be cast as the yin and yang of personal computing — two religions engaged in the most righteous of holy wars — they would have surprisingly few negative words to say about one another personally down through the years.

But when Steve Jobs decided or was forced to submit his resignation letter to Apple on September 17, 1985, trouble for Microsoft was bound to follow. John Sculley, the man now charged with cleaning up the mess Jobs had supposedly made of the Macintosh, enjoyed nothing like the same camaraderie with Bill Gates. He and his management team were openly suspicious of Microsoft, whose Windows was already circulating widely in beta form. Gates and others at Microsoft had gone on the record repeatedly saying they intended for Windows and the Macintosh to be sufficiently similar that they and other software developers would be able to port applications in short order between the two. Few prospects could have sounded less appealing to Sculley. Apple, whose products then as now enjoyed the highest profit margins in the industry thanks to their allure as computing’s hippest luxury brand, could see their whole business model undone by the appearance of cheap commodity clones that had been transformed by the addition of Windows into Mac-alikes. Of course, one look at Windows as it actually existed in 1985 could have disabused Sculley of the notion that it was likely to win any converts among people who had so much as glanced at MacOS. Still, he wasn’t happy about the idea of the Macintosh losing its status, now or in the future, as the only GUI environment that could serve as a true, comprehensive solution to all of one’s computing needs. So, within weeks of Jobs’s departure, feeling his oats after having so thoroughly cowed Digital Research, he threatened to sue Microsoft as well for copying the “look and feel” of the Macintosh in Windows.

He really ought to have thought things through a bit more before doing so. Threatening Bill Gates was always a dangerous game to play, and it was sheer folly when Gates had the upper hand, as he largely did now. Apple was at their lowest ebb of the 1980s when they tried to tell Microsoft that Windows would have to be cancelled or radically redesigned to excise any and all similarities to the Macintosh. Sales of the Mac had fallen to some 20,000 units per month, about one-fifth of Apple’s pre-launch projections for this point. The stream of early adopters with sufficient disposable income to afford the pricey gadget had ebbed away, and other potential buyers had started asking what you could really do with a Macintosh that justified paying two or three times as much for it as for an equivalent MS-DOS-based computer. Aldus PageMaker, the first desktop-publishing package for the Mac, had been released the previous summer, and would eventually go down in history as the product that, when combined with the Apple LaserWriter printer, saved the platform by providing a usage scenario that ugly old MS-DOS clearly, obviously couldn’t duplicate. But the desktop-publishing revolution would take time to show its full import. In the meantime, Apple was hard-pressed, and needed Microsoft — one of the few major publishers of business software actively supporting the Mac — far too badly to go around issuing threats to them.

Gates responded to Sculley’s threat with several of his own. If Sculley followed through with a lawsuit, Gates said, he’d stop all work at Microsoft on applications for the Macintosh and withdraw those that were already on store shelves, treating business computing henceforward as exactly the zero-sum game which he had never believed it to be in the past. This was a particularly potent threat in light of Microsoft’s new Excel spreadsheet, which had just been released to rave reviews and already looked likely to join PageMaker as the leading light among the second generation of Mac applications. In light of the machine’s marketplace travails, Apple was in no position to toss aside a sales driver like that one, the first piece of everyday Mac business software that was not just as good as but in many ways quite clearly better than equivalent offerings for MS-DOS. Yet Gates wouldn’t stop there. He would also, he said, refuse to renew Apple’s license to use Microsoft’s BASIC on their Apple II line of computers. This was a serious threat indeed, given that the aged Apple II line was the only thing keeping Apple as a whole afloat as the newer, sexier Macintosh foundered. Duly chastised, Apple backed down quickly — whereupon Gates, smelling blood in the water, pressed his advantage relentlessly, determined to see what else he could get out of finishing the fight Sculley had so foolishly begun.

One ongoing source of frustration between the two companies, dating back well into the days of Steve Jobs’s power and glory, was the version of BASIC for the Mac which Microsoft had made available for purchase on the day the machine first shipped. In the eyes of Apple and most of their customers, the mere fact of its existence on a platform that wasn’t replete with accessible programming environments was its only virtue. In practice, it didn’t work all that differently from Microsoft’s Apple II BASIC, offering almost no access to the very things which made the Macintosh the Macintosh, like menus, windows, and dialogs. A second release a year later had improved matters somewhat, but nowhere near enough in most people’s view. So, Apple had started work on a BASIC of their own, to be called simply MacBASIC, to supersede Microsoft’s. Microsoft BASIC for the Macintosh was hardly a major pillar of his company’s finances, but Bill Gates was nevertheless bothered inordinately by the prospect of it being cast aside. “Essentially, since Microsoft started their company with BASIC, they felt proprietary towards it,” speculates Andy Hertzfeld, one of the most important of the Macintosh software engineers. “They felt threatened by Apple’s BASIC, which was a considerably better implementation than theirs.” Gates said that Apple would have to kill their own version of BASIC and — just to add salt to the wound — sign over the name “MacBASIC” to Microsoft if they wished to retain the latter’s services as a Mac application developer and retain Microsoft BASIC on the Apple II.

And that wasn’t even the worst form taken by Gates’s escalation. Apple would also have to sign what amounted to a surrender document, granting Microsoft the right to create “derivative works of the visual displays generated by Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh graphic-user-interface programs.” The specific “derivative works” covered by the agreement were the user interfaces already found in Microsoft Windows for MS-DOS and five Microsoft applications for the Macintosh, including Word and Excel. The agreement provided Microsoft with nothing less than a “non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-transferable license to use those derivative works in present and future software programs, and to license them to and through third parties for use in their software programs.” In return, Microsoft would promise only to support Word and Excel on the Mac until October 1, 1986 — something they would certainly have done anyway. Gates was making another of those deviously brilliant tactical moves that were already establishing his reputation as the computer industry’s most infamous villain. Rather than denying that a “visual display” could fall under the domain of copyright, as many might have been tempted to do, he would rather affirm the possibility while getting Apple to grant Microsoft an explicit exception to being bound by it. Thus Apple — or, for that matter, Microsoft — could continue to sue MacOS’s — and potentially Windows’s — competitors out of existence while Windows trundled on unmolested.

Sculley called together his management team to discuss what to do about this Apple threat against Microsoft that had suddenly boomeranged into a Microsoft threat against Apple. Most at the meeting insisted that Gates had to be bluffing, that he would never cut off several extant revenue streams just to spite Apple and support this long-overdue Windows product of his which had been an industry laughingstock for so long. But Sculley wasn’t sure; he kept coming back to the fact that Microsoft could undoubtedly survive without Apple, but Apple might not be able to survive without Microsoft — at least not right now, given the Mac’s current travails. “I’m not ready to bloody the company,” he said, and signed the surrender document two days after Windows 1.01 first appeared in its boxed form at the Fall 1985 Comdex show’s Microsoft Roast. His tone toward Gates now verged on pleading: “What I’m really asking for, Bill, is a good relationship. I’m glad to give you the rights to this stuff.”

After the full scale of what John Sculley had given away to Bill Gates became clear, Apple fans started drawing pointed comparisons between Sculley and Neville Chamberlain. As it happened, Sculley’s version of “peace for our time” would last scarcely longer than Chamberlain’s. And as for Gates… well, plenty of Apple fans would indeed soon be calling him the Adolf Hitler of the computer industry in the midst of plenty of other overheated rhetoric.

Bill Gates wrote a jubilant email to eleven colleagues at Microsoft’s partner companies, saying that he had “received a release from Apple for any possible copyright, trade-secret, or patent issue relating to our products, including Windows.” The people at Apple were less jubilant. “Everyone was somewhat disgusted over [the agreement],” remembers Donn Denman, the chief programmer of Apple’s much superior but shitcanned MacBASIC. Sculley could only say to him and his colleagues that “it was the right decision for the company. It was a business decision.” They didn’t find him very convincing. The bad feelings engendered by the agreement would never entirely go away, and the relationship between Apple and Microsoft would never be quite the same again — not even when Excel became one of the prime drivers of something of a Macintosh Renaissance in the following year.

We jump forward now to March 17, 1988, by which time the industry had changed considerably. Microsoft was still entangled with IBM in the development of OS/2 and its Presentation Manager, but was also continuing to push Windows, which had come out in a substantially revised version 2 some six months earlier. The Macintosh, meanwhile, had carved out a reasonable niche for itself as a tool for publishers and creative professionals of various stripes, even as the larger world of business-focused personal computing continued to run on MS-DOS.

Sitting in his office that day, Bill Gates agreed to take a call from a prominent technology journalist, who asked him if he had a comment to make about the new lawsuit from Apple against Microsoft. “Lawsuit? What lawsuit?” Gates asked. He had just met with Sculley the day before to discuss Microsoft’s latest Mac applications. “He never mentioned it to me. Not one word,” said Gates to the reporter on the other end of the line.

Sculley, it seemed, had decided not to risk losing his nerve again. Apple had gone straight to filing their lawsuit in court, without giving Microsoft so much as a warning, much less a chance to negotiate a remedy.[2] It appeared that the latest version of Microsoft’s GUI environment for MS-DOS, which with its free-dragging and overlapping windows hewed much closer to the Macintosh than its predecessor, had both scared and enraged Sculley to such an extent that he had judged this declaration of war to be his only option. “Windows 2 is an unconscionable ripoff of MacOS,” claimed Apple. They demanded $50,000 per infringement per unit of Windows sold — adding up to a downright laughable total of $4.5 billion by their current best estimate — and the “impoundment and destruction” of all extant or future copies of Windows. Microsoft replied that Apple had signed over the rights to the Mac’s “visual displays” for use in Windows in 1985, and, even if they hadn’t, such things weren’t really copyrightable anyway.

So, who had the right of this thing? As one might expect, the answer to that question is far more nuanced than the arguments which either side would present in court. Writing years after the lawsuit had passed into history but repeating the arguments he had once made in court, Tandy Trower, the Windows project leader at Microsoft from 1985 to 1988, stated that “the allegation clearly had no merit as I had never intended to copy the Macintosh interface, was never given any directive to do that, and never directed my team to do that. The similarities between the two products were largely due to the fact that both Windows and Macintosh had common ancestors, that being many of the earlier windowing systems, such as those like Alto and Star that were created at Xerox PARC.” This is, to put it bluntly, nonsense. To deny the massive influence of the Macintosh on Windows is well-nigh absurd — although, I should be careful to say, I have no reason to believe that Trower makes his absurd argument out of anything but ignorance here. By the time he arrived on the Windows team, Apple’s implementation of the GUI had already been so thoroughly internalized by the industry in general that the huge strides it had made over the Xerox PARC model were being forgotten, and the profoundly incorrect and unfair meme that Apple had simply copied Xerox’s work and called it a day was already taking hold.

The people at Xerox PARC had indeed originated the idea of the GUI, but, as playing with a Xerox Alto emulator will quickly reveal, hadn’t been able to take it anywhere close to the Macintosh’s place of elegant, intuitive usability. By the time the Xerox GUI made its one appearance as a commercial product, in the form of the Xerox Star office system, it had actually regressed in at least one way even as it progressed in many others: overlapping windows, which had been possible in Xerox PARC’s Smalltalk environment, were not allowed on the Star. Tellingly, the aspect of Windows 1 which attracted the most derision back in the day, and which still makes it appear so hapless today, is a similar rigid system of tiled windows. (The presence of this retrograde-seeming element was largely thanks to Scott MacGregor, who arrived at Microsoft to guide the Windows project after having been one of the major architects of the Star.) Meanwhile, as I also noted in my little tour of Windows 1 in a previous article, many of those aspects of it which do manage to feel natural and intuitive today — such as the drop-down menus — are those that work more like the Macintosh than anything developed at Xerox PARC. In light of this reality, Microsoft’s GUI would only hew closer to the Mac model as time went on, for the incontrovertible reason that the Mac model was just better for getting real stuff done in the real world.

And there are plenty of other disconcerting points of similarity between early versions of MacOS and early versions of Windows. Right from the beginning, Windows 1 shipped with a suite of applets — a calculator, a “control panel” for system settings, a text editor that went by the name of “notepad,” etc. — that were strikingly similar to those included in MacOS. Further, if other members of the Windows team itself are to be believed, Microsoft’s Neil Konzen, a programmer intimately familiar with the Macintosh, duplicated some of MacOS’s internal structures so closely as to introduce some of the same bugs. In short, to believe that the Macintosh wasn’t the most important influence on the Windows user interface by far, given not only the similarities in the finished product but the knowledge that Microsoft had been working daily with the evolving Macintosh since January of 1982, is to actively deny reality out of either ignorance or some ulterior motive.

Which isn’t to say that Microsoft’s designers had no ideas of their own. In fact, some of those ideas are still in place in current versions of Windows. To take perhaps the most immediately obvious example, Windows then and now places its drop-down menus at the top of the windows themselves, while the Macintosh has a menu bar at the top of the screen which changes to reflect the currently selected window.[3] And Microsoft’s embrace of the two-button mouse, contrasted with Apple’s stubborn loyalty to the one-button version of same, has sparked constant debate for decades. Still, differing details like these should be seen as exactly that in light of all the larger-scale similarities.

And yet just acknowledging that Windows was, shall we say, strongly influenced by MacOS hardly got to the bottom of the 1988 case. There was still the matter of that November 1985 agreement, which Microsoft was now waving in the face of anyone in the legal or journalistic professions who would look at it. The bone of contention between the two companies here was whether the “visual displays” of Windows 2 as well as Windows 1 were covered by the agreement. Microsoft naturally contended that they were; Apple contended that the Windows 2 interface had changed so much in comparison to its predecessor — coming to resemble the Macintosh even more in the process — that it could no longer be considered one of the specific “derivative works” to which Apple had granted Microsoft a license.

We’ll return to the court’s view of this question shortly. For now, though, let’s give Apple the benefit of the doubt as we continue to explore the full ramifications of their charges against Microsoft. The fact was that if one accepted Apple’s contention that Windows 2 wasn’t covered by the agreement, the questions surrounding the case grew more rather than less momentous. Could and should one be able to copyright the “look and feel” of a user interface, as opposed to the actual code used to create it? In pressing their claim, Apple was relying on an amorphous, under-explicated area of copyright law known as “visual copyright.”

In terms of computer software, the question of the bounds of visual copyright had been most thoroughly explored in the context of videogames. Back in 1980, Midway, a major producer of standup-arcade games, had sued a much smaller company called Dirkschneider for producing a clone of their popular game Galaxian. The judge in that case ruled in favor of Midway, formulating a new legal standard called the “Ten-foot Rule”: “If a reasonable person could not, at ten feet, tell the difference between two competitive products, then there was cause to believe an infringement was occurring.” Atari, the biggest videogame producer of all, then proceeded to use this precedent to pressure dozens of companies into withdrawing their clones of Atari games — in arcades, on game consoles, and on computers — from the market.

Somewhat later, in 1985, Brøderbund Software sued Kyocera for bundling with their printers an application called Printmaster, a thinly veiled clone of Brøderbund’s own hugely popular Print Shop package for making signs, greeting cards, and banners. They won their case the following year, with Judge William H. Orrick stating that Brøderbund’s copyright did indeed cover “the overall appearance, structure, and sequence” of screens in their software, and that Kyocera had thus infringed on same. Brøderbund’s Gary Carlston called the ruling “historic”: “If we don’t have copyright protection for our products, then it is going to be significantly more difficult to maintain a competitive advantage.” Encouraged by this ruling, in 1987 a maker of telecommunications software called Digital Communications Associates sued a company called Softklone Corporation — their name certainly didn’t help their cause — for copying the status display of their terminal software, and won their case as well. The Ten-Foot Rule, it seemed, could be successfully applied to software other than games. Both of these cases were cited by Apple’s lawyers in their own suit against Microsoft.

Brøderbund’s Print Shop side-by-side with Kyocera’s Printmaster.

Yet the Ten-Foot Rule, at least when applied to general-purpose software rather than games, struck many as deeply problematic. One of the most important advantages of a GUI was the way it made diverse types of software from diverse developers work and look the same, thereby keeping the user from having to relearn how to do the same basic tasks over and over again. What sort of chaos would follow if people started suing each other willy-nilly over this much-needed uniformity? And what did the Ten-Foot Rule mean for the many GUI environments, on MS-DOS and other platforms, that looked so similar to one another and to MacOS? That, of course, was the real crux of the matter for Microsoft and Apple as they faced one another in court.

The debate over the Ten-Foot Rule  and its potential ramifications wasn’t actually a new one, having already been taken up in public by the software industry before Apple filed their lawsuit. Fully thirteen months before that momentous day, Larry Tesler, an Apple executive, clashed heatedly with Bill Gates over this very issue at a technology conference. Tesler insisted that there was no problem inherent in applying the Ten-Foot Rule to operating systems and operating environments: “When someone comes up with a very good and popular look and feel, as we’ve done with the Macintosh, then they can make that available by licensing [it] to other people.”

But Gates was having none of this:

There’s no control of look and feel. I don’t know anybody who has asserted that things like drop-down menus and dialog boxes and just those general form-type aspects are subject to this look-and-feel stuff. Certainly it’s our view that the consistency of the user interface has become a very spreading thing, and that it’s open, generic technology. All of these approaches — how you click on [menu] bars, and certainly all those user-interface techniques and windows — there’s absolutely no restriction in any way on how people use those.

He thus ironically argued against the very premise of the 1985 agreement between Apple and Microsoft — that Apple had created a “visual display” subject to copyright protection, to which they were now granting Microsoft a license for certain products. But then, Gates seldom let deeply-held philosophical beliefs interfere with his pursuit of short-term advantage. In this latest debate as well, Gates’s arguments were undoubtedly self-serving, but they were no less valid in this case for being so. The danger he could point to if this sort of thing should spread was that of every innovative new application seeking copyright protection not just for its code but for the very ideas that made it up. Because form — i.e., look and feel — ideally followed function in software engineering. What would have happened if VisiCorp had been able to copyright the look and feel of the first spreadsheet? (VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 looked pretty much identical from ten feet.) If WordStar had been able to copyright the look and feel of the word processor? If, to choose a truly absurd example, the first individual to devise a command-line interface back in the mists of time had been able to copyright that? It wasn’t at all clear where the lines could be drawn once the law started down this slippery slope. If Apple owned the set of ideas and approaches that everyone now thought of as the GUI in general, where did that leave the rest of the industry?

For this reason, Apple’s lawsuit, when it came, was greeted with deep concern even by many of those who weren’t particularly friendly with Microsoft. “Although Apple has a right to protect the results of its development and marketing efforts,” said the respected Silicon Valley pundit Larry Magid, “it should not try to thwart the obvious direction of the industry.” “If Apple is trying to push this as far as they appear to be trying to push it,” said Dan Bricklin of VisiCalc fame, “this is a sad day for the software industry in America.” More surprisingly, MacOS architect Andy Hertzfeld said that “in general, it’s a horrible thing. Apple could really end up hurting itself.” Most surprisingly of all, even Steve Jobs, now running a new company called NeXT, found Apple’s arguments as dangerous as they were unconvincing: “When we were developing the Macintosh, we kept in mind a famous quote of Picasso: ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’ What do I think of the suit? I personally don’t understand it. Can I copyright gravity? No.”

Interestingly, the lawyers pressing the lawsuit on Apple’s behalf didn’t ask for a preliminary injunction that would have forced Microsoft to withdraw Windows from the market. Some legal watchers interpreted this fact as a sign that they themselves weren’t certain about the real merits of their case, and hoped to win it as much through bluster as finely-honed legal arguments. Ditto Apple’s request that the eventual trial be decided by a jury of ordinary people who might be prone to weigh the case based on everyday standards of “fairness,” rather than by a judge who would be well-versed in the niceties of the law and the full ramifications of a verdict against Microsoft.

At this point, and especially given those ramifications, one feels compelled to ask just why Apple chose at this juncture to embark on such a lengthy, expensive, and fraught enterprise as a lawsuit against the company that remained the most important single provider of serious business software for the Macintosh, a platform whose cup still wasn’t exactly running over with such things. By way of an answer, we should consider that John Sculley was as proud a man as most people who rise to his elevated status in business tend to be. The belief, widespread both inside and outside of Apple, that he had let Bill Gates bully, outsmart, and finally rob him blind back in 1985 had to rankle him badly. In addition, Apple in general had long nursed a grievance, unproductive but understandable, against all the outsiders who had copied the interface they had worked so long and hard to perfect; thus those threatened lawsuits against Digital Research and Microsoft all the way back in 1985. A wiser leader might have told his employees to take their competitors’ imperfect copying as proof of Apple’s superiority, might have exhorted them to look toward their next big innovation rather than litigate their innovations of the past. But, at least on March 17, 1988, John Sculley wasn’t that wiser leader. Thus this lawsuit, dangerous not just to Apple and Microsoft but to their entire industry.

Bill Gates, for his part, remained more accustomed to bullying than being bullied. It had been spelled out for him right there in the court filing that a loss to Apple would almost certainly mean the end of Windows, the operating environment which was quite possibly the key to Microsoft’s future. Even widespread fear of such an event, he realized, could be devastating to Windows’s — and thus to Microsoft’s — prospects. So, he struck back fiercely so as to leave no doubt where he stood. Microsoft filed a counter-suit in April of 1988, accusing Apple of breaking the 1985 agreement and of filing their own lawsuit in bad faith, in the hope of creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt around Windows and thus “wrongfully inhibiting” its commercial future. Adding weight to their argument that the original lawsuit was a form of business competition by other means was the fact that Apple was being oddly selective in choosing whom to sue over the alleged copyright violations. Asked why they weren’t going after other products just as similar to MacOS as Windows, such as IBM’s forthcoming OS/2 Presentation Manager, Apple refused to comment.

The first skirmishes took place in the press rather than a courtroom: Sculley accusing Gates of having tricked him into signing the 1985 agreement, Gates saying a contract was a contract, and what sort of a chief executive let himself be tricked anyway? The exchanges just kept getting uglier from there. The technology journalists, naturally, loved every minute of it, while the software industry was thrown into a tizzy, wondering what this would mean for Windows just as it finally seemed to be gaining some traction. Phillipe Kahn, CEO of Borland, described the situation in colorful if non-politically-correct language: it was like “waking up and finding your partner might have AIDS.”

The court case marched forward much more slowly than the tabloid war of words. Gates stated in a sworn deposition that “from a user’s perspective, the visual displays which appear in Windows 2 are virtually identical to those which appear in Windows 1.” “This assertion,” Apple replied, “is contradicted by even the most casual observation of the two products.” On March 18, 1989, Judge William Schwarzer of the Federal District Court in San Francisco marked the one-year anniversary of the case by ruling against Microsoft on this issue, stating that only those attributes of Windows 2 which had also existed in Windows 1 were covered by the 1985 agreement. This meant most notably that the newer GUI’s system of overlapping windows stood outside the boundaries of that document, and thus that, as the judge put it, the 1985 agreement alone “was not a complete defense” for Microsoft. It did not, he ruled, give Microsoft the right “to develop future versions of Windows as it pleases. What Microsoft received was a license to use the visual displays in the named software products as they appeared to the user in November 1985. The displays [of Windows 1 and Windows 2] are fundamentally different.” Microsoft’s stock price promptly plummeted by 27 percent. It was an undeniable setback. “Microsoft’s major defense has been shot down,” crowed Apple’s attorneys.

“Major” was perhaps not the right choice of adjectives, but certainly Microsoft’s simplest possible form of defense had proved insufficient to bail them out. It seemed that total victory could be achieved now only by invalidating the whole notion of visual copyright which underlay both the 1985 agreement and Apple’s lawsuit based on its violation. That meant a long, tough slog at best. And with Windows 3 — the version that Microsoft was convinced would finally be the breakthrough version — getting closer and closer to release and looking more and more like the Macintosh all the while, the stakes were higher than ever.

The question of look and feel and visual copyright as applied to software had implications transcending even the fate of Windows or either company. If Apple’s suit succeeded, it would transform the software business overnight, making it extremely difficult to borrow or build on the ideas of others in the way that software had always done in the past. Bill Gates was an avid student of business history. As was his wont, he now looked back to compare his current plight with that of an earlier titan of industry. Back in 1903, just as the Ford Motor Company was getting off the ground, Henry Ford had been hit with a lawsuit from a group of inventors claiming to own a patent on the very concept of the automobile. He had battled them for years, vowing to fight on even after losing in open court in 1909: “There will be no let-up in the legal fight,” he declared on that dark day. At last, in 1911, he won the case on appeal — winning it not only for Ford Motor Company but for the future of the automobile industry as a field of open competition. His own legal war had similar stakes, Gates believed, and he and Microsoft intended to prosecute it in equally stalwart fashion — to win it not just for themselves but for the future of the software industry. This was necessary, he wrote in a memo, “to help set the boundaries of where copyrights should and should not be applied. We will prevail.”

(Sources: the books The Making of Microsoft: How Bill Gates and His Team Created the World’s Most Successful Software Company by Daniel Ichbiah and Susan L. Knepper, Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson, Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, and Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company by Owen W. Linzmayer; Wall Street Journal of September 25 1987; Creative Computing of May 1985; InfoWorld of October 7 1985 and October 20 1986; MacWorld of October 1993; New York Times of March 18 1988 and March 18 1989.)

1. Reworked to run under a 68000 architecture, GEM would enjoy some degree of sustained success in another realm: not as an MS-DOS-hosted GUI but as the GUI hosted in the Atari ST’s ROM. In this form, it would survive well into the 1990s. ↩

2. Apple sued Hewlett-Packard at the same time, for an application called NewWave which ran on top of Windows and provided many of the Mac-like features, such as icons representing programs and disks and a desktop workspace, which Windows 2 alone still lacked. But that lawsuit would always remain a sideshow in comparison to the main event to whose fate its own must inevitably be tied. So, in the interest of that aforementioned clarity and concision, we won’t concern ourselves with it here. ↩

3. Both Microsoft and Apple have collected reams of data which they claim prove that their approach is the best one. I do suspect, however, that the original impetus can be found in the fact that MacOS was originally a single-tasking operating system, meaning that only one menu bar would need to be available at any one time. Windows, on the other hand, was designed as a multitasking environment from the start. ↩

Comments
33 Responses

- Kaj Sotala

July 27, 2018 at 5:21 pm

> When they brought their MacOS clone to the Fall 1984 Comdex, Steve Jobs expressed nothing but appropriation

appreciation (for the appropriation)? :-)

Really enjoying this series (as usual)!

- Jimmy Maher

July 27, 2018 at 5:34 pm

Indeed. Thanks!

- Lisa H.

July 28, 2018 at 6:52 am

I thought maybe “approbation”.

- Jimmy Maher

July 28, 2018 at 7:09 am

That’s the word I was looking for! I was starting to think I’d made it up. Thanks!

- whomever

July 27, 2018 at 9:15 pm

Didn’t Ventura Publisher use GEM? I remember it was considered the major competitor on the PC to Pagemaker (which used Windows and I believe shipped with one of the mini-Windows runtimes you mentioned in the last article). So I guess it stayed around a little bit?

- Nate Edel

July 28, 2018 at 9:15 pm

Ventura Publisher used GEM; the version I used in high school (probably about 1989-1990? — before Windows had gotten popular) had it as a bundled runtime, and if there was a full GEM environment there, it was either hidden well enough that I didn’t find it, or I’ve since forgotten.

Wikipedia says there were other versions before the later Windows rewrites but the one I saw was definitely GEM. QuarkXPress was the other major competitor, but it was Mac-only for a lot longer.

- Keith Palmer

July 28, 2018 at 1:26 am

I knew most of the anecdotes springing from Scully’s first, less than successful sally against Windows, but they hadn’t quite been fit together like this (and I certainly didn’t know about Jobs’s positive reaction to GEM). In a somewhat partisan context, I once saw the legal action against GEM and other interfaces compared to the misuse of antibiotics, killing off the distraction of potential competitors to leave a hostile monoculture. This may not be worth a correction, but I did wonder about Apple’s “Macintosh BASIC” being considered a “response” to “Microsoft BASIC for the Macintosh.” I have seen previews of Apple’s implementation in books intended to launch with the computer, but have heard the programmer kept tinkering with his creation until Bill Gates could make an example of it.

From an armchair perspective, it’s easy enough to look back and start pontificating “they should have just kept building on their head start,” which only leaves me wondering about Apple’s apparent struggles in continuing to develop their system software. We’ve known since The Mythical Man-Month, at least, that “software is difficult,” and yet I ponder the application programmers at Apple being spun off into Claris and the efforts to enter a new market with the Newton…

Anyway, so far as industry reactions went the editor of the Tandy Color Computer magazine “The Rainbow” stepped away from boosting the “CoCo” for a month to make some smug dismissals of Apple as all but washed up as the lawsuit got under way. My father went ahead anyway a year and a half or so later and managed to buy a Macintosh SE/30 through work, when Apple’s computers still seemed aimed at wealthy businesses but Windows was still in the process of arriving; two years after that, we finally put our Color Computers to rest and bought a Macintosh LC II for home use. Looking back, we suppose that had something to do with there having been enhanced MacPaint and MacWrite clones for the “CoCo,” close to the extent of reproducing the “Chicago” system font for their menus… (I suppose there were advantages to the obscurity of our family computers.)

- Ian Schmidt

July 28, 2018 at 1:22 pm

It’s a bit unfair to call the Mac hardware “not terribly imaginative”. The machine was basically purpose-built to run the Lisa GUI faster and cheaper, which it did quite well. And Burrell Smith (a big fan of Steve Wozniak) included some very Woz-like flourishes like getting 4 channel audio for free by reusing the video display timing signals to drive audio DMA. Also, he made excellent use of an MOS/CSG 6522 Versatile Interface Adapter chip to fill a bunch of small roles in the hardware that otherwise would’ve required a small pile of extra chips. This resulted in Apple continuing to include at least one 6522 (or a licensed mask, later on) in every Mac until 2007, nearly 15 years after Commodore’s demise.

- Jimmy Maher

July 28, 2018 at 1:54 pm

Fair enough. That was perhaps laying it on a bit thick. Because it’s built in such a minimalist fashion using only off-the-shelf chips, it taxes the 68000 really heavily in comparison to the Amiga or even the Atari ST. This can make it really hard to, for instance, play sampled sounds without locking the interface. Definitely a case of hardware designed for a very specific purpose — that of running MacOS and basic office software. Try to do anything else with it, and it starts to show its limitations pretty quickly. Perhaps “specialized” is a better adjective than “unimaginative.”

- Aula

July 28, 2018 at 3:37 pm

“the Chamberlain’s”

I don’t think the “the” is necessary.

“He never mentioned it me.”

Missing a “to” (if it’s missing from the source you quoted, you should indicate that).

“Bill Gates, for this part”

“this” needs a t-remover.

- Jimmy Maher

July 28, 2018 at 5:51 pm

Thanks!

- Roi

July 28, 2018 at 10:44 pm

Your treatment of PARC here seems needlessly dismissive. Indeed you seem to contradict your own linked article, which not only describes at length how PARC had “discrete, draggable, overlapping windows” already in 1975, but actually shows screenshots with overlapping windows and icons.

The Alto hardware was in fact much less limited than the original Mac, which allowed it to be programmed in a high-level dynamic language. This in turn made iteration much less “tedious” than it would be for the Mac team writing 68000 assembly. Cf. the famous story of Dan Ingalls changing the scrolling and highlighting behavior on the fly in response to criticism by Jobs during his visit. And PARC was not operating under the tight deadlines of the Mac team, which allowed them to not just iterate a lot, but also rewrite the system from scratch several times.

In your linked article you also say that the Smalltalk system was “simple enough for a grade-school kid to use”, which was the result of PARC “putting … their user interface in front of ordinary people”, especially schoolchildren.

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2018 at 7:52 am

Ouch.

There’s a lot of confusion and misinformation out there on these issues. I obviously haven’t helped the situation by contradicting myself. So, I spent some time this morning with emulators, trying to figure out what’s really what.

It turns out that what I wrote about Smalltalk in that old article is partially correct, partially incorrect. It had overlapping windows, but not free-dragging ones. The idea of being able to just drag windows where you will and size them on the fly comes from Apple, and it really is a *hugely* important development. The Xerox Alto Smalltalk environment is visionary, no doubt about it, but no one would mistake it for a modern GUI. I could put MacOS 1 in front of just about anyone today and she would be able to get around in it without much problem. Not so Smalltalk.

What sometimes gets lost, I think, is a pretty dramatic philosophical split between Smalltalk and MacOS. Smalltalk emphasized *programming*, to the point that the environment could literally be re-programmed on the fly as you used it. It’s thus very much in keeping with the early ethos of personal computing, when all machines booted into BASIC and an ability to program was considered key for *everyone’s* future — when every high school was instituting classes in BASIC or Pascal. The Mac was kind of the first anti-programming computer, trying to hide the nuts and bolts and make everything easy and natural for the user — making the machine conform to a human rather than asking a human to conform to the machine. This was, of course, the way computing would go in the future. The loss of the idealistic, do-it-yourself spirit of early computing was sad, but computing had to get more pleasant and intuitive to become a staple in the lives of everyday people.

Anyway, I think where the confusion about the subject of overlapping windows really comes in — certainly this is what confused me — is when we get to the Xerox Star, which definitely *didn’t* support them. By this point, Xerox had decided they created clutter and confusion. (They were also notoriously hard to implement, which doubtless helped the decision.)

There’s a well-known story about Bill Atkinson “remembering” having seen overlapping windows on his one visit to Xerox PARC, then doggedly setting out to implement them on the Lisa and Macintosh, and succeeding. The punch line is that he was remembering incorrectly, that he was creating something which had never existed at Xerox PARC.

But is there any truth to this fun little story? Based on my morning’s research, Bill Atkinson quite probably *did* see overlapping windows on his visit to Xerox PARC, was remembering correctly when he see out to implement them on the Macintosh. But when the Xerox Star came out, and was widely received as the fruition of Xerox PARC’s already-legendary work, it lacked them, thus creating the myth that Xerox’s stuff had always lacked them.

That said, I have to emphasize again that, although Smalltalk did have overlapping windows, it lacked much else. Its windows cannot be freely dragged or sized on the fly. (I’ve just confirmed this on the Living Computer Museum’s ContrAlto simulator.)

As for your point on tone: again, point taken. I’ve made edits to this article to reflect what I’ve learned and to hopefully come off as less dismissive of Xerox PARC, and edited the old Xerox PARC article to remove the claim about “draggable” windows, which I can find no evidence actually existed there. That article in general could be a lot better. My only defense is that I wrote in the early days of the blog.

Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

July 29, 2018 at 1:18 pm

My understanding is that Bill Atkinson was not “misremembering” overlapping windows (those were there in Dmalltalk, as is evident by any demo of the system), but the automatic updating of the background windows as you moved the foreground one. The resizing and moving of windows in Smalltalk was modal, and did not refreshed the contents of windows automatically as you moved, but forced a full re-draw of the a window when it became active.

Mr. Atkinson’s innovation was the implementation of draggable windows using what he called “regions,” which allowed only the visible parts of all open windows to be refreshed without needing to redraw and composit the entire display on every single frame (which was impractical), or ignoring the non-active parts (which was what the Xerox implementation did).

The story then is that Mr. Atkinson thought he saw this effect in full at Xerox PARC and wracked his brain trying to implement it; when in fact, the Smalltalk team thought it such an intractable problem, that they didn’t try. It led to the “region” concept as the most important primitive of his QuickDraw framework.

You can see the difference obviously on any demonstration of both systems: the Smalltalk system looks downright primitive in the way it leaves background windows untouched (and even blank when uncovered) while in the background and forces a full window refresh when activated. In contrast, the Macintosh looks very elegant and modern with the entire background kept up to date as the active window is moved around, obscuring and uncovering portions of others.

dZ.

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2018 at 1:29 pm

That’s the apparently correct version of the story. But the other version, that Smalltalk couldn’t do overlapping windows at all, is passed around a lot as hacker lore. See, for example, the very first link that comes up if you Google “Xerox Alto overlapping windows”: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1320663&start=40.

- David Boddie

July 29, 2018 at 3:11 pm

See pages 5 and 6 of the Smalltalk-72 Instruction Manual from Bitsavers for instructions on how to move and resize windows.

I don’t know anything about the internals of the Mac’s window system but my recollection of using a Mac was that the operation of moving or resizing a window involved moving an outline of the window, not a solid region. If you look at the Internet Archive’s online Mac emulation you can see this with System 7. As an experiment, start the alarm clock and try moving other windows around to see if the clock updates while you do this.

- Jimmy Maher

July 30, 2018 at 5:27 am

What’s missing here is the sense of tangible physicality that comes with *dragging* the window with the mouse, which is a perfect complement to the skeuomorphic desktop metaphor of the Mac. Surprisingly, Xerox PARC apparently never came up with the idea of using the mouse in ways other than single clicks; click-and-drag and double-clicks were both original inventions of Apple, as far as I can determine.

Personally, I’m not super-concerned here about whether you’re pulling a wire-frame or a complete window around. The wire-frame approach was quite obviously used because pulling full windows around in this way was too much of a strain on the computer’s graphics system, and I think most users even at the time tacitly realized this and accepted it.

- hcs

August 4, 2018 at 4:18 am

The Gypsy editor, at least, used dragging to select text.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software)
That article suggests it was also used in Smalltalk-76.

- Jimmy Maher

August 4, 2018 at 7:39 am

Interesting. Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

July 29, 2018 at 6:21 pm

That must be a modern revisionist retelling meme. I actually haven’t heard that version. Go figure.

- Patrick Lam

July 29, 2018 at 2:38 am

Aha, got one. Khan -> Kahn

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2018 at 8:53 am

Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

July 29, 2018 at 6:17 pm

@David,

Take a look at actual demo videos of a classic Macintosh 128k from 1984: you can indeed move the window around with its full contents by dragging the menu bar. Resizing may have been with an outline, but moving was definitely with a solid region.

Moreover, Smalltalk not only does this differently, but it never updates the other windows at all until activated, causing a full redraw. If a previously obscured window is uncovered but left in the background, it would remain blank until activated and repainted. In contrast, the Macintosh would actually keep all windows updated by only updating the visible regions without ever requiring a full window repainting.

dZ.

- DZ-Jay

July 29, 2018 at 6:19 pm

Er… “Dragging the menu bar” should be the “title bar” or top border of the window.

- David Boddie

July 29, 2018 at 9:19 pm

Interesting. I wonder if there’s a configuration setting somewhere that toggles that. I found a couple of videos that show wireframe moving: here and here. I’d love to see some videos of classic Macs doing solid window moves if you have links. In the meantime I’ll have a play at the Internet Archive again to see what I can discover.

- Orion

July 30, 2018 at 3:32 pm

I don’t believe any version of the classic Mac OS natively supported showing window contents while dragging. See this video of Mac OS 9 on a PowerPC emulator ( https://youtu.be/x3ETvO69EGg?t=20 ) or this video of Mac OS 9.2.2 on a Power Mac G4 ( https://youtu.be/M9BasElGBsI?t=179 ). I vaguely recall that there may have been extensions that enabled this behavior but I’m not certain.

At any rate, if you look at videos of 68000-based Macs I think it’s clear that the draw speed is far too slow to support it.

- DZ-Jay

July 31, 2018 at 9:52 am

Ok, fair enough, that was my mistake. However, that’s not the point. The point is that all background windows were kept updated by repainting the occluded areas as they became visible. Xerox did not do that at all: they left everything as is, even leaving previously occluded windows unpainted until they became active, at which point it would re-paint and re-composit the entire window anew.

The Macintosh had QuickDraw “regions,” the Smalltalk system did not.

That’s the innovation from Bill Atkinson, and it is quite the big deal.

dZ.

- DZ-Jay

July 30, 2018 at 10:11 am

Hi, David,

I can’t seem to find the demo now. Perhaps I saw it wrong, but it distinctly looked like so,I’d window dragging. However I see in your links the window frame instead. I’ll keep looking just in case.

In any case, in those demos and many others, even with wire frames, you can see that the contents of background windows are kept visible by redrawing the occluded regions only as they become visible. /That/ is the magic that Bill Atkinson created out of thin air, which was deemed too hard or impractical by the Xerox team to do.

That’s the subject of the story that gets mischaracterized as “Xerox didn’t do overlapping windows, but Mac did.” It’s actually, “Xerox didn’t update overlapping windows when made visible as you. I’ve stuff around, but Mac did.”

dZ.

- DZ-Jay

July 30, 2018 at 10:15 am

Damn, I hate autocorrect,

* “But it distinctly looked like it was window dragging.”

* “Xerox didn’t update overlapping windows when made visible as you moved stuff around, but Mac did.”

- Peter Street

August 7, 2018 at 10:32 am

I am really enjoying this. Having lived through a lot of this and seen it happen through the computing press, it’s interesting to see a well-researched series of articles filling in all the background points that I missed at the time (Hey, I was still only in single-digits :D)

It’s a shame you’re not covering other windowed OS’s, as something like GEOS, while not being a major player, was considerably more functional in the mid-80’s than the equivalent Windows or Mac environments…

http://www.osnews.com/story/15223/GEOS-The-Graphical-Environment-Operating-System/

I recall having GEOWorks Ensemble (The full productivity environment, based upon GEOS) for my PC in ’91 on a 286 with 1MB of RAM… it was faster and more fully featured than the equivalent Windows 3.0 / 3.1, which barely even ran on the same hardware; while still supporting multitasking, etc. Sadly, it never got market traction to continue…

- Jimmy Maher

August 7, 2018 at 10:37 am

Brian Bagnall, who’s been writing a series of books on the history of Commodore, mentioned in a comment somewhere around here that Bill Gates actually considered buying Berkeley Softworks, the makers of GEOS, at one point.

- Peter Street

August 7, 2018 at 11:19 am

Oh wow, I never knew that. I wonder what would have happened had that come about? While my cynical side says that nothing would have changed, there’s a little optimistic side that values tightly-written, hand-optimised assembly language (I’m a programmer myself, though sadly very little assembly experience) and can imagine a, say, Windows 3.1 written in such…

- Pingback: Verity Stob on early GUI experiences « Quotulatiousness

Doing Windows, Part 7: Third Time’s the Charm
August 3, 2018

Microsoft entered the last year of the 1980s looking toward a new decade that seemed equally rife with opportunity and danger. On the one hand, profits were up, and Bill Gates and any number of his colleagues could retire as very rich men indeed even if it all ended tomorrow — not that that outcome looked likely. The company was coming to be seen as the standard setter of the personal-computer industry, more important even than an IBM that had been gravely weakened by the PS/2 debacle and the underwhelming reception of OS/2. Microsoft Windows, now once again viewed by Gates as the keystone of his company’s future after the disappointment that had been OS/2, stood to benefit greatly from Microsoft’s new clout. Windows 2 had gained some real traction, and the upcoming Windows 3 was being talked about with mounting expectation by an MS-DOS marketplace that finally seemed to be technologically and psychologically ready for a GUI environment.

The more worrisome aspects of the future, on the other hand, all swirled around the other two most important companies in American business computing. Through most of the decade now about to pass away, Microsoft had managed to maintain cordial if not always warm relationships with both IBM and Apple — until, that is, the latter declared war by filing a copyright-infringement lawsuit against Windows in 1988. The stakes of that lawsuit were far greater than any mere monetary settlement; they were rather the very right of Windows to continue to exist. It wasn’t at all clear what Microsoft could or would do next if they lost the case and with it Windows. Meanwhile their relationship with IBM was becoming almost equally strained. Disagreements about the technical design of OS/2, along with disputes over the best way to market it, had caused Microsoft to assume the posture of little more than subcontractors working on IBM’s operating system of the future at the same time that they pushed hard on their own Windows. OS/2 and Windows, those two grand bids for the future of mainstream business computing, seemingly had to come into conflict with one another at some point. What happened then? IBM’s reputation had unquestionably been tarnished by recent events, but at the end of the day they were still IBM, the legendary Big Blue, the most important and influential company in the history of computing to date. Was Microsoft ready to take on both Apple and IBM as full-fledged enemies?

So, the people working on Windows 3 had plenty of potential distractions to contend with as they tried to devise a GUI environment good enough to leap into the mainstream. “Just buckle down and make it as good as possible,” said Bill Gates, “and let our lawyers and business strategists deal with the distractions.” By all indications, the Windows people managed to do just that; there’s little indication that all of the external chaos had much effect on their work.

That said, when they did raise their heads from their keyboards, they could take note of encouraging signs that Microsoft might be able to navigate through their troubles with Apple and IBM. As I described in my previous article, on March 18, 1989, Judge William Schwarzer ruled that the 1985 agreement between the two companies applied only to those aspects of Windows 2 — and by inference of an eventual Windows 3 — which had also been a part of Windows 1. Thus the 1985 agreement wouldn’t be Microsoft’s ticket to a quick victory; it appeared that they would rather have to invalidate the very premise of “visual copyright” as applied by Apple in this case in order to win. On July 21, however, Microsoft got some more positive news when Judge Schwarzer made his ruling on exactly which features of Windows 2 weren’t covered by the old agreement. He threw out no less than 250 of Apple’s 260 instances of claimed infringement, vastly simplifying the case — and vastly reducing the amount of damages which Apple could plausibly ask for. The case remained a potential existential threat to Windows, but disposing of what Microsoft’s lawyers trumpeted was the “vast bulk” of it at one stroke did give some reason to take heart. Now, what remained of the case seemed destined to grind away quietly in the background for a long, long time to come — a Sword of Damocles perhaps, but one which Bill Gates at any rate was determined not to let affect the rest of his company’s strategy. If he could make Windows a hit — a fundamental piece of the world’s computing infrastructure — while the case was still grinding on, it would be very difficult indeed for any judge to order the nuclear remedy of banning Microsoft from continuing to sell it.

Microsoft’s strategy with regard to IBM was developing along a similarly classic Gatesian line. Inveterate bets-hedger that he was, Gates wasn’t willing to cut ties completely with IBM, just in case OS/2 and possibly even PS/2 turned around and some of Big Blue’s old clout returned. Instead he was careful to maintain at least a semblance of good relations, standing ready to jump off the Windows bandwagon and back onto OS/2, if it should prove necessary. He was helped immensely in this by the unlamented departure from IBM of Bill Lowe, architect of the disastrous PS/2 strategy, an executive with whom Gates by this point was barely on speaking terms. Replacing Lowe as head of IBM’s PC division was one Jim Cannavino, a much more tech-savvy executive who trusted Gates not in the slightest but got along with him much better one-on-one, and was willing to continue to work with him for the time being.

At the Fall 1989 Comdex, the two companies made a big show of coming together — the latest of the series of distancings and rapprochements that had always marked their relationship. They trotted out a new messaging strategy that had Windows as the partnership’s “low-end” GUI, OS/2’s Presentation Manager as the high-end GUI of the future, suitable at present only for machines with an 80386 processor and at least 4 MB of memory. (The former specification was ironic in light of all the bickering IBM and Microsoft had done in earlier years on the issue of supporting the 80286 in OS/2.) The press release stated that “Windows is not intended to be used as a server, nor will future releases contain advanced OS/2 features [some of which were only planned for future OS/2 releases at this point] such as distributed processing, the 32-bit flat memory model, threads, or long filenames.” The pair even went so far as to recommend that developers working on really big, ambitious applications for the longer-term future focus their efforts on OS/2. (“No advice,” InfoWorld magazine would wryly note eighteen months later, “could have been worse.”)

But Microsoft’s embrace of the plan seemed tentative at best even in the moment. It certainly didn’t help IBM’s comfort level when Steve Ballmer in an unguarded moment blurted out that “face it: in the future, everyone’s gonna run Windows.” Likewise, Bill Gates showed little personal enthusiasm for this idea of Windows as the cut-price, temporary alternative to OS/2 and the Presentation Manager. As usual, he was just trying to keep everyone placated while he worked out for himself what the future held. And as time went on, he seemed to find more and more to like about the idea of a Windows-centric future. Several months after the Comdex show, he got slightly drunk at a big industry dinner, and confessed to rather more than he might have intended. “Six months after Windows 3 ships,” he said, “it will have a greater market share than Presentation Manager will ever have — OS/2 applications won’t have a chance.” He further admitted to deliberately dragging his feet on updates to OS/2 in order to ensure that Windows 3.0 got all the attention in 1990.

He needn’t have worried too much on that front: press coverage of the next Windows was reaching a fever pitch, and evincing little of the skepticism that had accompanied Windows 1 and 2. Throughout 1989, rumors and even the occasional technical document leaked out of Microsoft — and not, one senses, by accident. Carefully timed grist for the rumor mill though it may have been, the news was certainly intriguing on its own merits. The press wrote that Tandy Trower, the manager who had done the oft-thankless job of bringing Windows 1 and 2 to fruition, had transferred off the team, but the team itself was growing like never before, and now being personally supervised once again by the ever-flexible Steve Ballmer, who had left Microsoft’s OS/2 camp and rejoined the Windows zealots. Ballmer had hired visual designer Susan Kare, known throughout the industry as the author of MacOS’s clean and crisp look, to apply some of the same magic to their own GUI.

But for those who understood Windows’s longstanding technical limitations, another piece of news was the most intriguing and exciting of all. Already before the end of 1989, Microsoft started talking openly about their plans to accomplish two things which had heretofore been considered mutually exclusive: to continue running Windows on top of hoary old MS-DOS, and yet to shatter the 640 K barrier once and for all.

It had all begun back in June of 1988, when Microsoft programmer David Weise, one of the former Dynamical Systems Research people who had proved such a boon to Windows, bumped into an old friend named Murray Sargent, a physics professor at the University of Arizona who happened to do occasional contract programming for Microsoft on the side. At the moment, he told Weise, he was working on adding new memory-management functionality to Microsoft’s CodeView debugger, using an emerging piece of software technology known as a “DOS extender,” which had been pioneered over the last couple of years by an innovative company in the system-software space called Quarterdeck Office Systems.

As I’ve had occasion to describe in multiple articles by now, the most crippling single disadvantage of MS-DOS had always been the its inability to directly access more than 640 K of memory, due to its origins on the Intel 8088 microprocessor, which had a sharply limited address space. Intel’s newer 80286 and 80386 processors could run MS-DOS only in their 8088-compatible “real” mode, where they too were limited to 640 K, rather than being able to use their “protected” mode to address up to 16 MB (in the case of the 80286) or 4 GB (in the case of the 80386). Because they ran on top of MS-DOS, most versions of Windows as well had been forced to run in real mode — the sole exception was Windows/386, which made extensive use of the 80386’s virtual mode to ease some but not all of the constant headache that was memory management in the world of MS-DOS. Indeed, when he asked himself what were the three biggest aggravations which working with Windows entailed, Weise had no doubt about the answer: “memory, memory, and memory.” But now, he thought that Sargent might just have found a solution through his tinkering with a DOS extender.

It turned out that the very primitiveness of MS-DOS could be something of a saving grace. Its functions mostly dealt only with the basics of file management. Almost all of the other functions that we think of as rightfully belonging to an operating system were handled either by an extended operating environment like Windows, or not handled at all — i.e., left to the programmer to deal with by banging directly on the hardware. Quarterdeck Office Systems had been the first to realize that it should be possible to run the computer most of the time in protected mode, if only some way could be found to down-shift into real mode when there was a need for MS-DOS, as when a file on disk needed to be read from or written to. This, then, was what a DOS extender facilitated. Its code was stashed into an unused corner of memory and hooked into the function calls that were used for communicating with MS-DOS. That done, the processor could be switched into protected mode for running whatever software you liked with unfettered access to memory beyond 640 K. When said software tried to talk to MS-DOS after that, the DOS extender trapped that function call and performed some trickery: it copied any data that MS-DOS might need to access in order to carry out the task into the memory space below 640 K, switched the CPU into real mode, and then reissued the function call to let MS-DOS act on that data. Once MS-DOS had done its work, the DOS extender switched the CPU back into protected mode, copied any necessary data back to where the protected-mode software expected it to be, and returned control to it.

One could argue that a DOS extender was just as much a hack as any of the other workarounds for the 640 K barrier; it certainly wasn’t as efficient as a more straightforward contiguous memory model, like that enjoyed by OS/2, would have been. It was particularly inefficient on the 80286, which unlike the 80386 had to perform a costly reset every time it was switched between protected and real mode and vice versa. But even so, it was clearly a better hack than any of the ones that had been devised to date. It finally let Intel’s more advanced processors run, most of the time anyway, as their designers had intended them to run. And from the programmer’s perspective it was, with only occasional exceptions, transparent; you just asked for the memory you needed and went about your business from there, and let the DOS extender worry about all the details going on behind the scenes. The technology was still in an imperfect state that summer of 1988, but if it could be perfected it would be a dream come true for programmers, the next best thing to a world completely free of MS-DOS and its limitations. And it might just be a dream come true for Windows as well, thought David Weise.

Quarterdeck may have pioneered the idea of the DOS extender, but their implementation was lacking in the view of Weise and his sometime colleague Murray Sargent. With Sargent’s help in the early stages, Weise implemented his own DOS extender and then his own protected-mode version of Windows which used it over three feverish months of nights and weekends. “We’re not gonna ask anybody, and then if we’re done and they shoot it down, they shoot it down,” he remembers thinking.

There are all these little gotchas throughout it, but basically you just work through the gotchas one at a time. You just close your eyes, and you just charge ahead. You don’t think of the problems, or you’re not gonna do it. It’s fun. Piece by piece, it’s coming. Okay, here come the keyboard drivers, here come the display drivers, here comes GDI — oh, look, here’s USER!

By the fall of of 1988, Weise had his secret project far enough along to present to Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and the rest of the Windows team. In addition to plenty of still-unresolved technical issues, the question of whether a protected-mode Windows would step too much on the toes of OS/2, an operating system whose allure over MS-DOS was partially that it could run in protected mode all the time, haunted the discussion. But Gates, exasperated beyond endurance by IBM, wasn’t much inclined to defer to them anymore. Never a boss known for back-patting, he told Weise simply, “Okay, let’s do it.”

Microsoft would eventually release their approach to the DOS extender as an open protocol called the “DOS Protected Mode Interface,” or DPMI. It would change the way MS-DOS-based computers were programmed forever, not only inside Windows but outside of it as well. The revolutionary non-Windows game Doom, for example, would have been impossible without the standalone DOS extender DOS/4GW, which implemented the DPMI specification and was hugely popular among game programmers in particular for years. So, DPMI became by far the most important single innovation of Windows 3.0. Ironically given that it debuted as part of an operating environment designed to hide the ongoing existence of MS-DOS from the user, it single-handedly made MS-DOS a going concern right through the decade of the 1990s, giving the Quick and Dirty Operating System That Refused to Die a lifespan absolutely no one would ever have dreamed for it back in 1981.

But the magic of DPMI wouldn’t initially apply to all Windows systems. Windows 3.0 could still run, theoretically at least, on even a lowly 8088-based PC compatible from the early 1980s — a computer whose processor didn’t have a protected mode to be switched into. For all that he had begged and cajoled IBM to make OS/2 an 80386-exclusive operating system, Bill Gates wasn’t willing to abandon less powerful machines for Microsoft’s latest operating environment. In addition to fueling conspiracy theories that Gates had engineered OS/2 to fail from the beginning, this data point did fit the brief-lived official line that OS/2 was for high-end machines, Windows for low-end machines. Yet the real reasons behind it were more subtle. Partially due to a global chip shortage that made all sorts of computers more expensive in the late 1980s and briefly threatened to derail the inexorable march of Moore’s Law, users hadn’t flocked to the 80386-based machines quite as quickly as Microsoft had anticipated when the OS/2 debate was raging back in 1986. The fattest part of the market’s bell curve circa 1989 was still the 80286 generation of computers, with a smattering of pace-setting 80386s and laggardly 8088s on either side of them. Microsoft thus ironically judged the 80386 to be exactly the bridge too far in 1989 that IBM had claimed it to be in 1986. Even before Windows 3.0 came out, the chip shortage was easing and Moore’s Law was getting back on track; Intel started producing their fourth-generation microprocessor, the 80486, in the last weeks of 1989.[1] For the time being, though, Windows was expected to support the full range of MS-DOS-based computers, reaching all the way back to the beginning.

And yet, as we’ve seen, DPMI was just too brilliant an innovation to give up in the name of maintaining compatibility with antiquated 8088-based machines. MS-DOS had for years been forcing owners of higher-end hardware to use their machines in a neutered fashion, and Microsoft wasn’t willing to continue that dubious tradition in the dawning era of Windows. So, they decided to ship three different versions of Windows in every box. When started on an 8088-class machine, or on any machine without memory beyond 640 K, Windows ran in “real mode.” When started on an 80286 with more than 640 K of memory, or on an 80386 with more than 640 K but less than 2 MB of memory, it ran in “standard mode.” And when started on an 80386 with at least 2 MB of memory, it ran in its ultimate incarnation: “386 enhanced mode.”

In both of the latter modes, Windows 3.0 could offer what had long been the Holy Grail for any MS-DOS-hosted GUI environment: an application could simply request as much memory as it needed, without having to worry about what physical addresses that memory included or whether it added up to more than 640 K.[2] No earlier GUI environment, from Microsoft or anyone else, had met this standard.

In the 386-enhanced mode, Windows 3.0 also incorporated elements of the earlier Windows/386 for running vanilla MS-DOS applications. Such applications ran in the 80386’s virtual mode; thus Windows 3.0 used all three operating modes of the 80386 in tandem, maximizing the potential of a chip whose specifications owed a lot to Microsoft’s own suggestions. When running on an 8088 or 80286, Windows still served as little more than a task launcher for MS-DOS applications, but on an 80386 with enough memory they multitasked as seamlessly as native Windows applications — or perhaps more so: vanilla MS-DOS applications running inside their virtual machines actually multitasked preemptively, while normal Windows applications only multitasked cooperatively. So, on an 80386 in particular, Windows 3.0 had a lot going for it even for someone who couldn’t care less about Susan Kare’s slick new icons. It was much, much more than just a pretty face.[3]

Which isn’t to say that the improved aesthetics weren’t hugely significant in their own right. While the full technical import of Windows 3.0’s new underpinnings would take some time to fully grasp, it was immediately obvious that it was slicker and far more usable than what had come before. Macintosh zealots would continue to scoff, at times with good reason, at the clunkier aspects of the environment, but it unquestionably came far closer than anything yet to that vision which Bill Gates had expressed in an unguarded moment back in 1984 — the vision of “the Mac on Intel hardware.”

A Quick Tour of Windows 3.0

Windows 3.0 really is a dramatic leap compared to what came before. The text-based “MS-DOS Executive” — just the name sounds clunky, doesn’t it? — has been replaced by the “Program Manager.” Applications are now installed, and are represented as icons; we’re no longer forced to scroll through long lists of filenames just to start our word processor. Indeed, the whole environment is much more attractive in general, having finally received some attention from real visual designers like Susan Kare of Macintosh fame.

One area that’s gotten a lot of attention from the standpoint of both usability and aesthetics is the Control Panel. Much of this part of Windows 3.0 is lifted directly from the OS/2 Presentation Manager — with just enough differences introduced to frustrate.

In one of the countless new customization and personalization options, we can now use images as our desktop background, .

The help system is extensive and comprehensive. Years before a web browser became a standard Windows component, Windows Help was a full-fledged hypertext reader, a maze of twisty little links complete with embedded images and sounds.

The icons on the desktop still represent only running applications that have been minimized. We would have to wait until Windows 95 for the desktop-as-general-purpose-workspace concept to reach fruition.

For all the aesthetic improvements, the most important leap made by Windows 3.0 is its shattering of the 640 K barrier. When run on an 80286 or 80386, it uses Microsoft’s new DPMI technology to run in those processors’ protected mode, leaving the user and (for the most part) the programmer with just one heap of memory to think about; no more “conventional” and “extended” and “expanded” memory to scratch your head over. It’s difficult to exaggerate what a miracle this felt like after all the years of struggle. Finally, the amount of memory you had in your machine was the amount of memory you had to run Windows and its applications — end of story.

In contrast to all of the improvements in the operating environment itself, the set of standard applets that shipped with Windows 3.0 is almost unchanged since the days of Windows 1.

The Program Manager, like the MS-DOS Executive before it, in a sense is Windows; we close it to exit the operating environment itself and return to the MS-DOS prompt.

A consensus emerged well ahead of Windows 3.0’s release that this was the GUI which corporate America could finally embrace — that the GUI’s time had come, and that this GUI was the one destined to become the standard. One overheated pundit declared that “this is probably the most anticipated product in the history of the world.” Microsoft did everything possible to stoke those fires of anticipation. Rather than aligning the launch with a Comdex show, they opted to put-on a glitzy Apple-style self-standing media event to mark the beginning of the Windows 3.0 era. In fact, one might even say that they rather outdid the famously showy Apple.

The big rollout took place on May 22, 1990, at New York’s Center City at Columbus Circle. A hundred third-party publishers showed up with Windows 3.0 applications, along with fifty hardware makers who were planning to ship it pre-installed on every machine they sold. Closed-circuit television feeds beamed the proceedings to big-screen theaters in half a dozen other cities in the United States, along with London, Paris, Madrid, Singapore, Stockholm, Milan, and Mexico City. Everywhere standing-room-only crowds clustered, made up of those privileged influence-wielders who could score a ticket to what Bill Gates himself described as “the most extravagant, extensive, and elaborate software introduction ever,” to the tune of a $3 million price tag. Microsoft had tried to go splashy from time to time before, but never had they indulged in anything like this. It was, Gates’s mother reckoned, the “happiest day of Bill’s life” to date.

The industry press was carried away on Microsoft’s river of hype, manifesting on their behalf a messianic complex that was as worthy of Apple as had been the big unveiling. “If you think technology has changed the world in the last few years, hold on to your seats,” wrote one pundit. Gates made the rounds of talk shows like Good Morning America, as Microsoft spent another $10 million on an initial advertising campaign and carpet-bombed the industry with 400,000 demonstration copies of Windows 3.0, sent to anyone who was or might conceivably become a technology taste-maker.

The combination of wall-to-wall hype and a truly compelling product was a winning one; this time, Microsoft wouldn’t have to fudge their Windows sales numbers. When they announced that they had sold 1 million boxed copies of Windows 3.0 in the first four months, each for $80, no one doubted them. “There is nothing that even compares or comes close to the success of this product,” said industry analyst Tim Bajarin. He went on to note in a more ominous vein that “Microsoft is on a path to continue dominating everything in desktop computing when it comes to software. No one can touch or even slow them down.”

Windows 3.0 inevitably won “Best Business Program” for 1990 from the Software Publishers Association, an organization that ran on the hype generated by its members. More persuasive were the endorsements from other sources. For example, after years of skepticism toward previous versions of Windows, the hardcore tech-heads at Byte magazine were effusive in their praise of this latest one, titling their first review thereof simply “Three’s the One.” “On both technical and strategic grounds,” they wrote, “Windows 3.0 succeeds brilliantly. After years of twists and turns, Microsoft has finally nailed this product. Try it. You’ll like it.” PC Computing put an even more grandiose spin on things, straining toward a scriptural note (on the Second Day, Microsoft created the MS-DOS GUI, and it was Good):

When the annals of the PC are written, May 22, 1990, will mark the first day of the second era of IBM-compatible PCs. On that day, Microsoft released Windows 3.0. And on that day, the IBM-compatible PC, a machine hobbled by an outmoded, character-based operating system and 1970s-style programs, was transformed into a computer that could soar in a decade of multitasking graphical operating environments and powerful new applications. Windows 3.0 gets right what its predecessors — Visi On, GEM, earlier versions of Windows, and OS/2 Presentation Manager — got wrong. It delivers adequate performance, it accommodates existing DOS applications, and it makes you believe that it belongs on a PC.

Windows 3.0 sold and sold and sold, like no piece of software had ever sold before, transforming in a matter of months the picture that sprang to most people’s minds when they thought of personal computing from a green screen with a blinking command prompt to a mouse pointer, icons, and windows — thus accomplishing the mainstream computing revolution that Apple had never been able to manage, despite the revolutionary rhetoric of their old “1984” advertisement. Windows became so ubiquitous so quickly that the difficult questions that had swirled around Microsoft prior to its launch — the question of Apple’s legal case and the question of Microsoft’s ongoing relationship with IBM and OS/2 — faded into the background noise, just as Bill Gates had hoped they would.

Sure, Apple zealots and others could continue to scoff, could note that Windows crashed all too easily, that too many things were still implemented clunkily in comparison to MacOS, that the inefficiencies that came with building on such a narrow foundation as MS-DOS meant that it craved far better hardware than it ought to in order to run decently. None of it mattered. All that mattered was that Windows 3.0 was a usable, good-enough GUI that ran on cheap commodity hardware, was free of the worst drawbacks that came with MS-DOS, and had plenty of software available for it — enough native software, in fact, to make its compatibility with vanilla MS-DOS software, once considered so vital for any GUI hoping to make a go of it, almost moot. The bet Bill Gates had first put down on something called the Interface Manager before the IBM PC even officially existed, which he had doubled down on again and again only to come up dry every time, had finally paid off on a scale even he hadn’t ever imagined. Microsoft would sell 2.75 million copies of Windows 3.0 by the end of 1990 — and then the surge really began. Sales hit 15 million copies by the end of 1991. And yet if anything such numbers underestimate its ubiquity at the end of its first eighteen months on the market. Thanks to widespread piracy which Microsoft did virtually nothing to prevent, estimates were that at least two copies of Windows had been installed for every one boxed copy that had been purchased. Windows was the new standard for mainstream personal computing in the United States and, increasingly, all over the world.

At the Comdex show in November of 1990, Bill Gates stepped onstage to announce that Windows 3.0 had already gotten so big that no general-purpose trade show could contain it. Instead Microsoft would inaugurate the Windows World Exposition Conference the following May. Then, after that and the other big announcements were all done, he lapsed into a bit of uncharacteristic (albeit carefully scripted) reminiscing. He remembered coming onstage at the Fall Comdex of seven years before to present the nascent first version of Windows, infamously promising that it would be available by April of 1984. Everyone at that show had talked about how relentlessly Microsoft laid on the Windows hype, how they had never seen anything quite like it. Yet, looking back, it all seemed so unbearably quaint now. Gates had spent all of an hour preparing his big speech to announce Windows 1.0, strolled onto a bare stage carrying his own slide projector, and had his father change the slides for him while he talked. Today, the presentation he had just completed had consisted of four big screens, each featuring people with whom he had “talked” in a carefully choreographed one-man show — all in keeping with the buzzword du jour of 1990, “multimedia.”

The times, they were indeed a-changing. An industry, a man, a piece of software, and, most of all, a company had grown up. Gates left no doubt that it was only the beginning, that he intended for Microsoft to reign supreme over the glorious digital future.

All these new technologies await us. Unless they are implemented in standard ways on standard platforms, any technical benefits will be wasted by the further splintering of the information base. Microsoft’s role is to move the current generation of PC software users, which is quickly approaching 60 million, to an exciting new era of improved desktop applications and truly portable PCs in a way that keeps users’ current applications, and their huge investment in them, intact. Microsoft is in a unique position to unify all those efforts.

Once upon a time, words like these could have been used only by IBM. But now Microsoft’s software, not IBM’s hardware, was to define the new “standard platform” — the new safe choice in personal computing. The PC clone was dead. Long live the Wintel standard.

(Sources: the books The Making of Microsoft: How Bill Gates and His Team Created the World’s Most Successful Software Company by Daniel Ichbiah and Susan L. Knepper, Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson, Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Computer Wars: The Fall of IBM and the Future of Global Technology by Charles H. Ferguson and Charles R. Morris, and Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company by Owen W. Linzmayer; New York Times of March 18 1989 and July 22 1989; PC Magazine of February 12 1991; Byte of June 1990 and January 1992; InfoWorld of May 20 1991; Computer Gaming World of June 1991. Finally, I owe a lot to Nathan Lineback for the histories, insights, comparisons, and images found at his wonderful online “GUI Gallery.”)

1. The 80486 was far more efficient than its predecessor, boasting roughly twice the throughput when clocked at the same speed. But, unlike the 80286 and 80386, it didn’t sport any new operating modes or fundamentally new capabilities, and thus didn’t demand any special consideration from software like Windows/386 and Windows 3.0 that was already utilizing the 80386 to its full potential. ↩

2. This wasn’t quite the “32-bit flat memory model” which Microsoft had explicitly promised Windows would never include in the joint statement with IBM. That referred to an addressing mode unique to the 80386 and its successors, which allowed them to access up to 4 GB of memory in a very flexible way. Having been written to support the 80286, Windows 3.0, even in 386 enhanced mode, was still limited to 16 MB of memory, and had to use a somewhat more cumbersome form of addressing known as a segmented memory model. Still, it was close enough that it arguably went against the spirit of the statement, something that wouldn’t be lost on IBM. ↩

3. Memory management on MS-DOS-based versions of Windows is an extremely complicated subject, one which alone has filled thick technical manuals. This article has presented by no means a complete picture, only the most cursory of overviews intended to convey the importance of Windows 3.0’s central innovation of DPMI. In addition to that innovation, though, Windows 3.0 and its successors employed plenty of other tricks, many of them making yet more clever use of the 80386’s virtual mode, Intel’s gift that kept on giving. For truly dedicated historians of a technical bent, I recommend a book such as Unauthorized Windows 95 by Andrew Schulman (which does cover memory management under earlier versions of Windows as well), Windows Internals by Matt Pietrek, and/or DOS and Windows Protected Mode by Al Williams. ↩

Comments
48 Responses

- Alex Smith

August 3, 2018 at 4:36 pm

wasn’t much inclined to differ to them anymore

defer

- Jimmy Maher

August 3, 2018 at 5:43 pm

Thanks!

- Ben L.

August 3, 2018 at 5:03 pm

Once again a brilliant article. Well done and keep up the good work!

- Sniffnoy

August 3, 2018 at 5:34 pm

When run on an 80286 or 80386, it uses Microsoft’s new DPMI technology to run in those processors’ protected mode, leaving the user and (for the most part) the programmer with just one heap of memory to think about; no more “conventional” and “extended” and “expanded” memory to scratch your head over.

So did this apply even to DOS programs that had been written to use high memory via one hack or another?

- Jimmy Maher

August 3, 2018 at 5:51 pm

No, a program had to be compiled with the appropriate libraries and coded from the start to use a DOS extender. The Watcom C compiler included everything you needed right in the box. For this reason, it became very popular among game developers, albeit late in the MS-DOS gaming era. id famously pioneered its use in Doom.

- Sniffnoy

August 3, 2018 at 10:45 pm

Oh, huh. So existing DOS applications didn’t get to go past 640K, but they did at least run with their own address spaces? I see. And I guess Tomber answered the obvious followup question, that Windows did know how to handle it if those existing programs tried to use XMS or EMS. Which gets me wondering if there were other custom hacks it didn’t know how to handle… given Microsoft’s famous dedication to backwards-compatibility at the time, I imagine they would have covered everything, but…

- Jimmy Maher

August 4, 2018 at 7:35 am

MS-DOS applications in 386 enhanced mode ran inside what amounted to a virtual 8088-based IBM PC with a 1 MB address space (640 K of which was available as easily accessible memory), thanks to the 80386’s virtual mode. If they tried to use extended or expanded memory, Windows had them covered by emulating the way those technologies worked under MS-DOS. I’m sure there were edge cases — there always are — but on the whole the system worked quite well. It was, needless to say, a non-trivial feat of software engineering.

- Sniffnoy

August 3, 2018 at 10:46 pm

(Odd, my reply here seems to have been caught by the spam filter?)

- Jimmy Maher

August 4, 2018 at 7:37 am

You used a different email address in your previous comment. A first comment from any given email address is always flagged for moderation.

- Sniffnoy

August 4, 2018 at 2:45 pm

I see, thanks!

- Tomber

August 3, 2018 at 7:51 pm

Just in case you were asking a different question from the one Jimmy answered, Windows 3 (at least in 386 enhanced mode) could deliver emulated extended (XMS) or enhanced (EMS) memory to a regular real-mode DOS app that knew how to use XMS or EMS.

- Rowan Lipkovits

August 3, 2018 at 5:38 pm

“wasn’t much inclined to differ to them anymore.”

Defer?

- tedder

August 3, 2018 at 6:41 pm

Some things I’d love to hear more about:

1: chip shortage- on all chips, on CPUs, ‘just’ on memory?
2: what “industry dinner” was Gates drunk at?
3: cooperative multitasking in Windows. How did it work, how did work poorly, etc.

- Jimmy Maher

August 4, 2018 at 7:21 am

1. Memory chips were the most obviously affected, but it seems that the problems did spread to other kinds of chips as well. In the book Gates, Microsoft insiders indicate that they do believe it to have had a significant effect on uptake of the 80386, by keeping those machines more expensive than they otherwise would have been. It may also have caused Intel to delay the rollout of the 80486.

2. This was after the Second Annual Computer Bowl, a clone of the College Bowl trivia competition. It took place in Boston in May of 1990, just days before the big Windows 3.0 rollout, and pitted prominent East Coast industry figures against their counterparts in the West. Hyper-competitive as always, Gates apparently studied hard for the event — he’s reported to have boarded the airplane with “an impressive stack of books” — and wound up being named Most Valuable Player after the West squeaked out a victory, 300 to 290. So, he was feeling pretty good about himself at the shindig afterward…

3. The multitasking system in Windows, as on the Macintosh, expected applications to be good citizens, to voluntarily relinquish control to the operating system periodically. They should do this in the obvious case where they were simply waiting for input, but also, and less obviously, should periodically pause and do so when involved in any sort of big, time-consuming calculation. Some applications were better at adhering to these guidelines than others. And of course an application that got stuck in an infinite loop could bring down the whole house of cards. The end result was that Windows as a whole only ran as well as the most badly written application that was currently running.

MS-DOS programs multitasked preemptively in 386 enhanced mode because they used the 80386’s virtual mode, which did a lot of the necessary work for the operating system. This sounds a little weird, but you can think of 386 enhanced mode as Windows and all of its native applications running as one preemptively-multitasked task, and each MS-DOS application running as another task. Effectively the only way to multitask MS-DOS software was preemptively because MS-DOS lacked the concept of a program going to sleep and telling the operating system, “Okay, wake me up when the user does something.” Instead software had to busy-wait: cycle through a loop again and again reading the keyboard buffer and the mouse, to see if anything had changed.

- Brandon

August 6, 2018 at 4:24 am

3. So then I have to wonder, if they had preemptive-multitasking implemented, why not use it on Windows applications as well? Did cooperative have less computational overhead in some way?

- Jimmy Maher

August 6, 2018 at 5:17 am

Preemptive multitasking of MS-DOS tasks relied heavily on the 80386’s virtual mode. That wasn’t practical for native Windows applications, one of whose primary advantages was to be able to break out of the 8088’s (and 80386 virtual mode’s) 1 MB address space, thanks to the magic of DPMI.

- Aula

August 7, 2018 at 2:43 pm

That can’t be right; after all, Linux running on an 80386 is perfectly capable of pre-emptive multitasking of protected mode applications without any memory restrictions. My guess is that Microsoft simply didn’t want the multitasking code to diverge too much between the different Windows modes.

- Tomber

August 6, 2018 at 9:24 pm

It is an interesting question; I think it reduces down to the original design of Windows. It was designed to run in very tight memory, it was designed for real mode, it was designed with a shared un-policed address space, and it wasn’t designed to support concurrency or to be re-entrant. That ties you down to a single thread of execution. The exceptions prove this out: NT could run each Win16 app in a separate ‘session’ but the apps then lost visibility to each other, and you paid a price in memory for each one you started.

The Win32 API corrected those problems.

- Patrick Lam

August 27, 2018 at 4:28 pm

To expand on Tomber’s point: the Windows API is event-driven, so Windows programs sit around and ask whether there is an event ready for them (e.g. “the user clicked on your window!”). Under such a system, cooperative multitasking is sort of defensible: you just declare that it shouldn’t take longer than X to handle an event. And you put all of the tasks in the same address space. (Early MacOS was like this too.) If you put different Windows programs in different address spaces, then sharing resources needs more virtualization. DOS programs aren’t in on the system event queue so of course you have to preemptively multitask them and you were up for virtualizing anyway.

- Tomber

August 3, 2018 at 7:46 pm

For those who remember, seeing that screen with the Free System Resources percentage will bring back the memories of the next infamous memory barrier in Windows world. What were system resources, and when did they stop being a problem?

Well, they weren’t a problem in NT. I think they became a reduced problem in Windows 95 or with Win32 apps in general. One thing they were: memory selectors. The HANDLE type in Win16 programming was usually just the memory selector to access a chunk of memory that had been allocated to a program. (Think segments). There could only be so many of these, and so it was possible to exhaust all of them before you ran out of memory. (Like running out of checks, but still having cash in the bank.) If apps tended to make many small allocations, these ‘resources’ would run down and Windows itself could crash.

And this problem did effect the 386 Enhanced Mode, because 16-bit compatibility required a HANDLE/selector be used for every 64kilobytes allocated, at minimum. At least at the end, I think there were a maximum of 8192, enough for 512MB, which I think was the max memory supported on Windows 9x. There were 8192, because selectors were 16-bit values, but only every 8th was a valid selector, possibly they used the other 3-bits for flags.

Perhaps someone else can fill in here or correct?

- Patrick Lam

August 27, 2018 at 4:38 pm

2 bits for privilege level, 1 bit for local vs global: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9113310/segment-selector-in-ia-32

So that leaves 2^12 = 4096 possible selectors in each of the local and global tables.

- Lisa H.

August 4, 2018 at 5:00 am

I wonder who made that chess background.

- Tomber

August 4, 2018 at 6:10 pm

Since this might be the ideal point in the series, I also wanted to mention floppy disk formatting, which was a popular example of how Windows 3.x/9x was still built on top of MS-DOS.

When you format a floppy disk on those systems, the entire GUI becomes laggy. Even the mouse cursor would jump around the screen. The popular comparison was OS/2 2.0, where this did not happen. Later on, Windows NT 3.1 also could format a floppy without stalling.

The reason for the stalling is that formatting a floppy was done, for compatibility reasons, by calling a BIOS routine. Because of potential timing sensitivities, Windows had to restore timers and interrupts to their usual MS-DOS quantities, even as Windows continued to run. OS/2 and NT made no pretense to being completely compatible with the 16-bit DOS/BIOS device layer, so they did not need to do this and can format a disk without disruption. Raymond Chen discussed this here, with all the details: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090102-00/?p=19623/

- Lt. Nitpicker

August 4, 2018 at 6:39 pm

I think it’s worth briefly mentioning that Microsoft temporarily put out an aggressive upgrade offer to owners of any (current) version of Windows, including the runtime versions that came with programs like Excel, to making demos of Windows and Microsoft’s own applications available. This is mentioned on a article from neozeed

- Derek Fawcus

August 4, 2018 at 8:10 pm

Matt Pietrek describes the free system resources in his books.

For 3.1 (and presumably earlier), it is the lowest value of several other percentages; those being the amount of free space in the USER DGROUP heap, the USER menu heap, the USER string heap, and the GDI DGROUP heap. Of those the heap with the smallest percentage free became the free system resources.

This was improved in win 95; over and above that the kludged the reported numbers by biasing them based upon resources free once Explorer and other programs have started.

As to the old “MSDOS Executive”, an updated version was provided with windows 3.0, just look for msdos.exe

- Nate

August 4, 2018 at 9:18 pm

“Gates wasn’t willing to cut bait completely with IBM”

I found this colloquial expression confusing. I’m familiar with the older meaning of “fish or cut bait”, which was a call to make a decision now.

I see the Wikipedia description has a section on the newer meaning, “act now or stand down”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_or_cut_bait#The_changing_meaning_of_%22cut_bait%22

However, I find “cut bait” as a standalone phrase a bit jarring, even if you intend the latter meaning of “stand down”.

Did you mean “cut ties” instead?

- Jimmy Maher

August 5, 2018 at 7:46 am

“Cut bait” when used as a standalone expression means to “abandon an activity or enterprise”: https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/cut+bait. However, the diction used in the article was perhaps slightly mangled, and I don’t see a great way of making it better. Went with the clearer, if more boring, “cut ties” instead. Thanks!

- Martin

August 5, 2018 at 12:31 am

How can you do a walkthrough of Windows 3.0 without mentioning Solitaite or Minesweeper?

- Jimmy Maher

August 5, 2018 at 7:46 am

I’m planning an article that will deal only with the games included with Windows. It’s for that reason that I’ve rather been avoiding the subject in these ones.

- Joe

August 5, 2018 at 1:09 am

One of the ironies of Windows, as we approach this era of digital history, is how much less accessible it seems to us now than before. As a guy that spends his evenings playing and writing about old video games, the transition to Windows in the early 90s fills me with dread. Because of the relatively simple APIs and system architecture, every DOS game and application ever made (as well as those for Apple II, Commodore, etc.) is easily emulatable.

Windows will change all that. I don’t have any way to play “well” original Windows 3.x or 95 software. Options like WINE exist, but are buggy. I have a Windows 98 VM that I have done some simple games in, but that’s quite a chore to get working (and updates to my emulator may not support it). The next period of digital history will be harder to study until and unless new tools are built that makes it easier to emulate early generations of Windows as well as they emulate early DOS systems.

- Gnoman

August 5, 2018 at 2:19 am

Those tools exist today. There is an emulator by the name of PCem that emulates period hardware quite well. Configured properly, and with a beefy enough host computer (always a problem with emulation), you can set it up as anything up to a late Pentium I MMX processor with a early 3D card.

- Jan

August 9, 2018 at 8:06 am

Seconding PCem here.

Fantastic software (if you have the host machine to support it), and probably the best in emulating actual original hardware. Which is something that either Dosbox or Virtual Machine applications do not do.

Running a Windows system in Dosbox is kind of hacky by comparison, because Dosbox is not an actual DOS environment. It works, but it creaks.

In DOS terms, PCem is also great for giving you for example the actual 8088 IBM PC experience. Or running an actual 386 system. More of a curiosity than actually practical – if running games is your primary goal, for the love of god stick with DOSBox unless you fancy hours of freeing that last kb of memory again – but still. It’s the real deal and I am glad it exists.

- Jimmy Maher

August 5, 2018 at 7:57 am

I find that VirtualBox works surprisingly well for me. Remarkably, Windows 3.x is even officially supported, indicating that perhaps someone at Oracle is sympathetic to the needs of digital historians. There’s a young man on YouTube who’s made a very good tutorial on getting a complete Windows 3.11 for Workgroups installation set up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n61RDzSk2E. I followed his instructions, and now have a virtual machine with 1024×768 graphics, sound, CD-ROM support, and even Internet access. I haven’t done much with it yet beyond Windows itself. The only problem I can anticipate might be speed; VirtualBox doesn’t give you any way to throttle the virtual machine. On the other hand, the event-oriented Windows programming approach may make that a non-issue.

All that said, we’re still firmly in the MS-DOS era for the most part when it comes to gaming. It will be another five years or so of historical time before non-casual game developers begin to abandon MS-DOS en masse in favor of Windows 95 and DirectX. So, DOSBox will still rule the day for a long time to come.

- Martin

August 5, 2018 at 1:25 pm

I created a DOS Box environment and installed a copy of Windows 3.1 in it. I did the same for Windows 95. OK you need copies of each out there but, hmmm, they are out there. The only thing I am looking for is a PDF printer program for Windows 95, if anyone knows one.

- Stefan Ring

August 6, 2018 at 2:58 pm

RedMon – http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/redmon/redmon17.htm

- Gnoman

August 5, 2018 at 9:25 pm

Speed is a problem with getting an accurate experience, and there’s also another problem. Well into the Windows 95 era, there were still cases of “you must program your software to work with this bit of hardware, because a generic driver won’t cut it”. This was a particular problem for early 3D cards, and I’m certain I remember running into a few other cases that I can’t remember right now.

That’s why I reccomend PCem. Because it emulates the underlying hardware, getting those specific bits of hardware is increasingly easy.

- Jason Lefkowitz

August 6, 2018 at 8:34 pm

I feel like the big hurdle here is that, while DOSBox includes an entire DOS-compatible environment out of the box, running Windows 3.x on VirtualBox (legally, anyway) requires separately tracking down both a copy of the Windows software and a valid license to use it. Microsoft hasn’t made the software freely available for download as far as I know, and they won’t sell you a license even if you manage to track down the software from (ahem) some other source. So whereas all you need to do to run DOS software is download DOSBox, for Windows you need to answer all these separate questions before you can even get started.

- Alex Freeman

August 6, 2018 at 8:02 pm

I still have trouble understanding why Windows 3.0 was so much more popular than Windows 2.0 when the latter was apparently much more stable. My family got Windows 3.1 in 1994, and I still remember to this day what a buggy mess it was. I also have trouble understanding why it was less stable than its predecessor.

- Gnoman

August 6, 2018 at 8:24 pm

Windows 3.0 was really unstable because it could run in three different modes (depending on your processor/memory configuration). This was a major kludge of a design, and resulted in a lot of half-baked ideas.

It was really popular because it could run in three different modes (depending on your processor/memory configuration). This was a big selling point because you could use it on a huge variety of systems, which greatly simplified learning and encouraged people with older hardware to take the plunge, since they’d be able to upgrade seamlessly.

Apart from that, 3.0 really was better than 2.x in every way except stability. It was a straight upgrade.

3.1 fixed the majority of the stability problems with Windows itself – most 3.1x crashes were the result of bad drivers or DOS programs not playing nice.

- Alex Freeman

August 7, 2018 at 6:10 pm

So did Microsoft ever fix those bad drivers? I remember Gates’s copy of Windows 95 crashing when he was giving a presentation.

- Gnoman

August 8, 2018 at 4:54 am

That wasn’t something Microsoft had much control over. The problem was from third-party manufacturers, who were often really sloppy with their code.

Eventually, Windows did fix the driver problem by requiring them to be authorized by Microsoft before Windows would allow the driver to install. This is why so many devices lost compatibility with later versions of Windows, as the manufacturers didn’t care enough (or didn’t exist enough) to go through the signing process.

- Alex Freeman

August 8, 2018 at 5:15 am

Oh, that explains it! I still remember Windows having stability problems until Windows XP, though.

- Tomber

August 13, 2018 at 3:47 pm

Stability increased rapidly around the Windows 2000/XP (so, 2000-2003) timeframe because of the automated crash reporting via Internet. The reports were sorted, and those which rose to the ‘top’ were referred to engineers, who then had hundreds of crash dumps to look at. If code was signed, MS could even refer it to the third party so that they could figure out what was wrong with their code.

The instability of Dos and Win3.x/9x was always centered around the integration problem: random hardware, random third party software, thrown into one box. When it crashed, the messenger was Windows, and so it took a lot of the blame. What changed was the Internet, NT, Microsoft tightening 3rd party standards, and developer education. Even on NT/XP, there was a final flurry of blue screen crashes when hyper-threading deployed with the Pentium 4, because of the number of hidden driver bugs that didn’t show up until there was actually more than one processor.

- JudgeDeadd

August 31, 2018 at 1:52 pm

@Tomber: Huh!! I can’t be the only one who always ignored Windows’s automated crash reporting, assuming that it was just false reassurance that only the most naive computer newbie would put faith in. It’s uplifting to hear that Microsoft employees actually did use these convoluted reports to improve the system.

- Jason Stevens

August 7, 2018 at 4:36 am

Shame it’s just an image, but the help system introduced in 3.0 sparked the wave of the coming multimedia wave, allowing for a web 1.0 offline experience with hyperlinked documents with embedded graphics, audio (wave and MIDI) and later on with video.

The multimedia version of 3.00 really gave the future direction of Windows at that point of not just a GUI API, but soon centralised APIs for all kinds of things that traditionally were up to the programmer. And it was so much easier to get people to install/update drivers for Windows and experience the boost on all their applications than doing this over and over for each.

Besides adopting the OS/2 1.2 look and feel from 1989, Windows 3.0 also brought us the separation of the UI from a file explorer to the introduction of the program manager along with the massive improvements to the File Manager. Not to mention a working print manager as well!

As mentioned, under the hood was nothing short of amazing. But that leaves a weird void created in this DPMI utopia

When it came to 32bit programs, Microsoft C 5.1 for Xenix and the yet to be released OS/2 2.0 (and under development OS/2 NT) was capable of generating 32bit code. However when it came to creating extended DOS applications Microsoft C was nowhere to be found. This opened the door to Zortech, Watcom and others but oddly Microsoft sat this round out. The most Windows 3.0 centric extender came from Watcom in the form of win386, a Windows extender, that operates in pretty much the same way as a DOS extender, but for Windows! This let you write large applications in full 33bits long before the arrival of Windows NT 3.1 and the later game changer, Win32s.

On the 16bit front, many 286 DOS Extenders relied on the OS/2 protected mode interfaces to create DPMI exe’s. Just as the barely mentioned “bind.exe” would allow certain well defined OS/2 apps to be bound with the “Family API” allowing them to run on both MS-DOS real mode and OS/2 protected mode. The extenders would take it one further and emulate many of the OS/2 APIs allowing the ap to run in protected mode.

Windows 3.0 also brought us Windows hosted compilers including QuickC for Windows, and the “COBOL of the 90’s”, Visual Basic.

- Jimmy Maher

August 7, 2018 at 9:10 am

That’s a great point about the help system. I hadn’t ever really thought about it in that way before. Added a bit to the article. Thanks!

- Tomber

August 7, 2018 at 6:27 pm

The Help system was important. I recall a program HC.EXE (Help Compiler) that turned properly marked RTF files into HLP files.

Windows 3 did lead to a blooming of development tools, as everybody tried to figure out how to move their established methods to the GUI of Windows. The Windows C API was a pretty big mountain to climb. Paul Allen’s Asymetrix Toolbook was a hypercard-like system. Whitewater Group’s Actor was a smalltalk-like system. Borland’s Turbo Pascal for Windows brought in their own object-oriented (OOP!) wrapper of the Windows API to try to reduce the learning curve. I think it ended up being used as a windowed-console tool, mostly. As games attempted to move, performance problems in GDI caused Microsoft to produce WinG, a forerunner of DirectX.

- DZ-Jay

August 9, 2018 at 9:57 am

My, how times have changed. This overly generous excitement over DOS and Windows technology and praise for their engineering qualifications is quite strange to me. They may have been “non-trivial feats of engineering” in their own way, as Jimmy put it, but let us not forget that they were hacks to work around specific limitations and bad design of the old MS-DOS heritage. So, it was incidental complexity added to address mostly self-inflicted issues.

They were implemented as part of a business strategy that valued maintaining backwards compatibility and market breadth at the expense of stability, usability, and future-proofing. (Some may claim that they included a measure of future-proofing, but it was only insofar as what could guarantee lock-in and market penetration, and we’re always tainted by the antiquated technology it tried to keep alive.)

For all the clever DPMI and protected mode hacks, let us not forget that DOS and Windows were a mess to actual users — they were arcane, difficult, buggy, unstable, ugly and intimidating. It crashed all the time, which impacted severely on productivity.

Every hack that persisted an old and outmoded interface or supported a past design decision of dubious quality, only served to delayed the implementation of newer and better technologies, sometimes at the expense of new market participants; and had a real impact on the march of progress of the computing industry.

It is why it took 3 versions of Windows to get to an actual workable one; why it took almost 10 years for Windows to get usability and user experience on par with the Macintosh; and why it took another several years for it to reach a proper level of stability in which people actually enjoyed, more than tolerated, using it.

dZ.

Doing Windows, Part 8: The Outsiders
August 10, 2018

Microsoft Windows 3.0’s conquest of the personal-computer marketplace was bad news for a huge swath of the industry. On the software side, companies like Lotus and WordPerfect, only recently so influential that it was difficult to imagine a world that didn’t include them, would never regain the clout they had enjoyed during the 1980s, and would gradually fade away entirely. On the hardware side, it was true that plenty of makers of commodity PC clones were happier to work with a Microsoft who believed a rising tide lifted all their boats than against an IBM that was continually trying to put them out of business. But what of Big Blue themselves, still the biggest hardware maker of all, who were accustomed to dictating the direction of the industry rather than being dictated to by any mere maker of software? And what, for that matter, of Apple? Both Apple and IBM found themselves in the unaccustomed position of being the outsiders in this new Windows era of computing. Each must come to terms with Microsoft’s newfound but overwhelming power, even as each remained determined not to give up the heritage of innovation that had gotten them this far.

Having chosen to declare war on Microsoft in 1988, Apple seemed to have a very difficult road indeed in front of them — and that was before Xerox unexpectedly reentered the picture. On December 14, 1989, the latter shocked everyone by filing a $150 million lawsuit of their own, accusing Apple of ripping off the user interface employed by the Xerox Star office system before Microsoft allegedly ripped the same thing off from Apple.

The many within the computer industry who had viewed the implications of Apple’s recent actions with such concern couldn’t help but see this latest development as the perfect comeuppance for their overweening position on “look and feel” and visual copyright. These people now piled on with glee. “Apple can’t have it both ways,” said John Shoch, a former Xerox PARC researcher, to the New York Times. “They can’t complain that Microsoft [Windows has] the look and feel of the Macintosh without acknowledging the Mac has the look and feel of the Star.” In his 1987 autobiography, John Sculley himself had written the awkward words that “the Mac, like the Lisa before it, was largely a conduit for technology” developed by Xerox. How exactly was it acceptable for Apple to become a conduit for Xerox’s technology but unacceptable for Microsoft to become a conduit for Apple’s? “Apple is running around persecuting Microsoft over things they borrowed from Xerox,” said one prominent Silicon Valley attorney. The Xerox lawsuit raised uncomfortable questions of the sort which Apple would have preferred not to deal with: questions about the nature of software as an evolutionary process — ideas building upon ideas — and what would happen to that process if everyone started suing everyone else every time somebody built a better mousetrap.

Still, before we join the contemporary commentators in their jubilation at seeing Apple hoisted with their own petard, we should consider the substance of this latest case in more detail. Doing so requires that we take a closer look at what Xerox had actually created back in the day, and take particularly careful note of which of those creations was named in their lawsuit.

Broadly speaking, Xerox created two different GUI environments in the course of their years of experimentation in this area. The first and most heralded of these was known as the Smalltalk environment, pioneered by the researcher Alan Kay in 1975 on a machine called the Xerox Alto, which had been designed at PARC and was built only in limited quantities, without ever being made available for sale through traditional commercial channels. This was the machine and the environment which Steve Jobs so famously saw on his pair of visits to PARC in December of 1979 — visits which directly inspired first the Apple Lisa and later the Macintosh.

The Smalltalk environment running on a Xerox Alto, a machine built at Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s but never commercially released. Many of the basic ideas of the GUI are here, but much remains to be developed and much is implemented only in a somewhat rudimentary way. For instance, while windows can overlap one another, windows that are obscured by other windows are never redrawn. In this way the PARC researchers neatly avoided one of the most notoriously difficult aspects of implementing a windowing system. When Apple programmer Bill Atkinson was part of the delegation who made that December 1979 visit to PARC, he thought he did see windows that continued to update even when partially obscured by other windows. He then proceeded to find a way to give the Lisa and Macintosh’s windowing engine this capability. Seldom has a misunderstanding had such a fortuitous result.

Xerox’s one belated attempt to parlay PARC’s work on the GUI into a real commercial product took the form of the Xerox Star, an integrated office-productivity system costing $16,500 per workstation upon its release in 1981. Neither Kay nor most of the other key minds behind the Alto and Smalltalk were involved in its development. Yet its GUI strikes modern eyes as far more refined than that of Smalltalk. Importantly, the metaphor of the desktop, and the soon-to-be ubiquitous idea of a skeuomorphic user interface built from stand-ins for real-world office equipment — a trash can, file folders, paper documents, etc. — were apparently the brainchildren of the product-focused Star team rather than the blue-sky researchers who worked at PARC during the 1970s.

The Xerox Star office system, which was released in 1981. This system looks much more familiar to our modern eyes than the Xerox Alto’s Smalltalk, sporting such GUI staples as menus, widgets, and icons. Yet it was still lacking in many areas compared to the GUIs that would follow. Windows were neither free-dragging nor overlapping, and its menus were one-shot commands, not drop-down lists. It most resembles VisiCorp’s Visi On among the GUIs we’ve looked at closely in this series of articles. Both products serve as a telling snapshot of the state of the art in GUIs just before Apple shook everything up with the Lisa and Macintosh.

The Star, which failed dismally due to its high price and Xerox’s lack of marketing acumen, is often reduced to little more than a footnote to the story of PARC, treated as a workmanlike translation of PARC’s grand ideas and technologies into a somewhat problematic product. Yet there’s actually an important philosophical difference between Smalltalk and the Star, born of the different engineering cultures that produced them. Smalltalk emphasized programming, to the point that the environment could literally be re-programmed on the fly as you used it. This was very much in keeping with the early ethos of home computing as well, when all machines booted into BASIC and an ability to program was considered key for every young person’s future — when every high school, it seemed, was instituting classes in BASIC or Pascal. The Star, on the other hand, was engineered to ensure that the non-technical office worker never needed to see a line of code; this machine conformed to the human rather than asking the human to conform to it. One might say that Smalltalk was intended to make the joy of computing — of using the computer as the ultimate anything machine — as accessible as possible, while the Star was intended to make you forget that you were using a computer at all.

While I certainly don’t wish to dismiss or minimize the visionary work down at PARC in the 1970s, I do believe that historians of early microcomputer GUIs have tended to somewhat over-emphasize the innovations of Smalltalk and the Alto while selling the Xerox Star’s influence rather short. Steve Jobs’s early visits to PARC are given much weight in the historical record, but it’s sometimes forgotten that anything Apple wished to copy from Smalltalk had to be done from memory; they had no regular access to the PARC technology after those visits. The Star, on the other hand, did ship as a commercial product some two years before the Lisa. Notably, the Star’s philosophy of hiding the “computery” aspects of computing from the user would turn out to be much more in line with the one that guided the Lisa and Macintosh than was Smalltalk’s approach of exposing its innards for all to see and modify. The Star was a closed black box, capable of running only the software provided for it by Xerox. Similarly, the Lisa couldn’t be programmed at all except by buying a second Lisa and chaining the two machines together, and even the Macintosh never had the reputation of being a hacker’s plaything in the way of the earlier, more hobbyist-oriented Apple II. The Lisa and Macintosh thus joined the Star in embracing a clear divide between coding professionals, who wrote the software, and end users, who bought it and used it to get stuff done. One could thus say that they resemble the Star much more than Smalltalk not only visually but philosophically.

Counter-intuitive though it is to the legend of the Macintosh being a direct descendant of the work Steve Jobs saw at PARC, Xerox sued Apple over the interface elements they had allegedly stolen from the Star rather than Smalltalk. In evaluating the merits of their claim today, I’m somewhat hamstrung by the fact that no working emulators of the original Star exist, forcing me to rely on screenshots, manuals, and contemporary articles about the system. Nevertheless, those sources are enough to identify an influence of the Star upon the Macintosh that’s every bit as clear-cut as that of the Macintosh upon Microsoft Windows. It strains the bounds of credibility to believe that the Mac team coincidentally developed a skeuomorphic interface using many of the very same metaphors — including the central metaphor of the desktop — without taking the example of the Star to heart. To this template they added much innovation, including such modern GUI staples as free-dragging and overlapping windows, drop-down menus, and draggable icons, along with staple mouse gestures like the hold-and-drag and the double-click. Nonetheless, the foundations of the Mac can be seen in the Star much more obviously than they can in Smalltalk. Crudely put, Apple copied the Star while adding a whole lot of original ideas to the mix, and then Microsoft copied Apple, adding somewhat fewer ideas of their own. The people rejoicing over the Xerox lawsuit, in other words, had this aspect of the story basically correct, even if they did have a tendency to confuse Smalltalk and the Star and misunderstand which of them Xerox was actually suing over.

MacOS started with the skeuomorphic desktop model of the Xerox Star and added it to such fundamental modern GUI concepts as pull-down menus, hold-and-drag, the double-click, and free-dragging, overlapping windows that update themselves even when partially occluded by others.

Of course, the Xerox lawsuit against Apple was legally suspect for all the same reasons as the Apple lawsuit against Microsoft. If anything, there were even more reasons to question the good faith of Xerox’s lawsuit than Apple’s. The source of Xerox’s sudden litigiousness was none other than Bill Lowe, the former IBM executive whose disastrous PS/2 brainchild had already made his attitude toward intellectual property all too clear. Lowe had made a soft landing at Xerox after leaving IBM, and was now telling the press about the “aggressive stand on copyright and patent issues” his new company would be taking from now on. It certainly sounded like he intended to weaponize the long string of innovations credited to Xerox PARC and the Star — using these ideas not to develop products, but to sue others who dared to do so. Lowe’s hoped-for endgame was weirdly similar to his misbegotten hopes for the PS/2’s Micro Channel Architecture: Xerox would eventually license the right to make GUIs and other products to companies like Apple and Microsoft, profiting off their innovations of the past without having to do much of anything in the here and now. This understandably struck many of the would-be licensees as a less than ideal outcome. That, at least, was something on which Apple, Microsoft, and just about everyone else in the computer industry could agree.

Apple’s legal team was left in one heck of an awkward fix. They would seemingly have to argue against Xerox’s broad interpretation of visual copyright while arguing for that same broad interpretation in their own lawsuit against Microsoft — and all in the same court in front of the same judge. Any victory against Xerox could lead to their own words being used against them to precipitate a loss against Microsoft, and vice versa.

It was therefore extremely fortunate for Apple that Judge Vaughn R. Walker struck down Xerox’s lawsuit almost before it had gotten started. At the time of their court filing, Xerox was already outside the statute of limitations for a copyright-infringement claim of the type that Apple had filed against Microsoft. They had thus been forced to make a claim of “unfair competition” instead — a claim which carried with it a much higher evidentiary standard. On March 24, 1990, Judge Walker tossed the Xerox lawsuit, saying it didn’t meet this standard and making the unhelpful observation to Xerox that it would have made a lot more sense as a copyright claim. Apple had dodged a bullet, and Bill Lowe would have to find some other way to make money for his new company.

With the Xerox sideshow thus dispensed with, Apple’s lawyers could turn their attention back to the main event, their case against Microsoft. The same Judge Walker who had decided in their favor against Xerox had taken over from Judge William Schwarzer in the other case as well. No longer needing to worry about protecting their flank from Xerox, Apple’s lawyers pushed for what they called “total concept” or “gestalt” look and feel as the metric for deciding whether Windows infringed upon MacOS. But on March 6, 1991, Judge Walker agreed with Microsoft’s contention that the case should be decided on a “function by function” basis instead. Microsoft began assembling reels of video demonstrating what they claimed to be pre-Macintosh examples of each one of the ten interface elements that were at issue in the case.

So, even as Windows 3.0 was conquering the world outside the courtroom, both sides remained entrenched in their positions inside it, and the case, already three years old, ground on and on through motion after counter-motion. “We’re going to trial,” insisted Edward B. Stead, Apple’s general counsel, but it wasn’t at all clear when that trial would take place. Part of the problem was the sheer pace of external events. As Windows 3.0 became the fastest-selling piece of commercial software the world had ever seen, the scale and scope of Apple’s grievances just kept growing to match. From the beginning, a key component of Microsoft’s strategy had been to gum up the works in court while Windows 3.0 became a fait accompli, the new standard in personal computing, too big for any court to dare attack. That strategy seemed to be working beautifully. Meanwhile Apple’s motions grew increasingly far-fetched, beginning to take on a distinct taint of desperation.

In May of 1991, for example, Apple’s lawyers surprised everyone with a new charge. Still looking for a way to expand the case beyond those aspects of Windows 2 and 3 which hadn’t existed in Windows 1, they now claimed that the 1985 agreement which had been so constantly troublesome to them in that respect was invalid. Microsoft had allegedly defrauded Apple by saying they wouldn’t make future versions of Windows any more similar to the Macintosh than the first was, and then going against their word. This new charge was a hopeful exercise at best, especially given that the agreement Apple claimed Microsoft had broken had been, if it ever existed, strictly a verbal one; absolutely no language to this effect was to be found in the text of the 1985 agreement. Microsoft’s lawyers, once they picked their jaws up off the floor, were left fairly spluttering with indignation. Attorney David T. McDonald labeled the argument “desperate” and “preposterous”: “We’re on the five-yard line, the goal is in sight, and Apple now shows up and says, ‘How about lacrosse instead of football?'” Thankfully, Judge Walker found Apple’s argument to be as ludicrous as McDonald did, thus sparing us all any more sports metaphors.

On April 14, 1992 — now more than four years on from Apple’s original court filing, in a computing climate transformed almost beyond recognition by the rise of Windows — Judge Walker ruled against Apple’s remaining contentions in devastating fashion. Much of the 1985 agreement was indeed invalid, he said, but not for the reason Apple had claimed. What Microsoft had licensed in that agreement were largely “generic ideas” that should never be susceptible to copyright protection in the first place. Apple was entitled to protect very specific visual elements of their displays, such as the actual icons they used, but they weren’t entitled to protect the notion of a screen with icons in the abstract, nor even that of icons representing specific real-world objects, such as a disk, a folder, or a trash can. Microsoft or anyone else could, in other words, make a GUI with a trash-can icon if they wished; they just couldn’t transplant Apple’s specific rendering of a trash can into their own work. Applying the notion of visual copyright any more broadly than this “would afford too much protection and yield too little competition,” said the judge. Apple’s slippery notion of look and feel, it appeared, was dead as a basis for copyright. After all the years of struggle and at least $10 million in attorney fees on both sides, Judge Walker ruled that Apple’s case was too weak to even present before a jury. “Through five years, there were many points where the case got continuously refined and focused and narrowed,” said a Microsoft spokesman. “Eventually, there was nothing left.”

Still, one can’t accuse Apple of giving up without a fight. They dragged the case out for almost three more years after this seemingly definitive defeat. When the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Judge Walker’s judgment in 1994, Apple tried to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court. That august body announced that they would not hear it on February 21, 1995, thus finally putting an end to the whole tortuous odyssey.

The same press which had been so consumed by the case circa 1988 barely noticed its later developments. The narrative of Microsoft’s utter dominance and Apple’s weakness had become so prevalent by the early 1990s that it had become difficult to imagine any outcome other than a Microsoft victory. Yet the case’s anticlimactic ending obscured how dangerous it had once been, not only for Microsoft but for the software industry as a whole. Whatever one thinks in general of the products and business practices of the opposing sides, a victory for Apple would have been a terrible result for the personal-computer industry. The court got this one right in striking all of Apple’s claims down so thoroughly — something that can’t always be said about collisions between technology and the law. Bill Gates could walk away knowing the long struggle had struck an important blow for an ongoing culture of innovation in the software industry. Indeed, like the victory of his hero Henry Ford over a group of automotive patent trolls eighty years before, his victory would benefit his whole industry along with his company — which isn’t to say, of course, that he would have fought the war purely for the sake of altruism.

John Sculley, for his part, was gone from Apple well before the misguided lawsuit he had fostered came to its final conclusion. He was ousted by his board of directors in 1993, after it became clear that Apple would post a loss of close to $200 million for the year. Yet his departure brought no relief to the problems of dwindling market share, dwindling focus, and, most worrisome of all, a dwindling sense of identity. Apple languished, embittered about the ideas Microsoft had “stolen” from them, while Windows conquered the world. One could certainly argue that they deserved a better fate on the basis of a Macintosh GUI that still felt far slicker and more intuitive than Microsoft’s, but the reality was that their own poor decisions, just as much as Microsoft’s ruthlessness, had led them to this sorry place. The mid-1990s saw them mired in the greatest crisis of confidence of their history, licensing the precious Macintosh technology to clone makers and seriously considering breaking themselves up into two companies to appease their angriest shareholder contingents. For several years to come, there would be a real question of whether any part of the company would survive to see the new millennium. Gone were the Jobsian dreams of changing the world through better computing; Apple was reduced to living on Microsoft’s scraps. Microsoft had won in the marketplace as thoroughly as they had in court.

But the full story of Apple’s 1990s travails is one to take up at another time. Now, we should turn to IBM, to see how they coped after the MS-DOS-based Windows, rather than the OS/2-based Presentation Manager, made the world safe for the GUI.

Throughout 1990, that year of wall-to-wall hype over Windows 3.0, Microsoft persisted in dampening expectations for OS/2 in a way that struck IBM as deliberate. The agreement that MS-DOS and Windows were for low-end computers, OS/2 and the Presentation Manager for high-end ones, seemed to have been forgotten by Microsoft as soon as Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer left the Fall 1989 Comdex at which it had been announced. Gates now said that it could take OS/2 another three or four years to inherit the throne from MS-DOS, and by that time it would probably be running Windows rather than Presentation Manager anyway. Ballmer said that OS/2 was really meant to compete with high-end client/server operating systems like Unix, not with desktop operating systems like MS-DOS. They both said that “there will be a DOS 5, 6, and 7, and a Windows 4 and 5.” Meanwhile IBM was predictably incensed by Windows 3.0’s use of protected mode and the associated shattering of the 640 K barrier; that sort of thing was supposed to have been the purview of the more advanced OS/2.

Back in late 1988, Microsoft had hired a system-software architect from DEC named David Cutler to oversee the development of OS/2 2.0. No shrinking violet, he promptly threw out virtually all of the existing OS/2 code, which he pronounced a bloated mess, and started over from scratch on an operating system that would fulfill Microsoft’s original vision for OS/2, being targeted at machines with an 80386 or better processor. The scope and ambition of this project, along with the fact that Microsoft wished to keep it entirely in-house, had turned into yet one more source of tension between the two companies; it could be years still before Cutler’s OS/2 2.0 was ready. There remained little semblance of any coordinated strategy between the two companies, in public or in private.

And yet, in September of 1990, IBM and Microsoft announced a new roadmap for OS/2’s future. The two companies together would finish up one more version of the first-generation OS/2 — OS/2 1.3, which was scheduled to ship the following month — and that would be the end of that lineage. Then IBM would develop an OS/2 2.0 alone — a project they hoped to have done in a year or so — while Cutler’s team at Microsoft continued with the complete rewrite that was now to be marketed as OS/2 3.0.

The announcement, whose substance amounted to a tacit acknowledgement that the two companies simply couldn’t work together anymore on the same project, caused heated commentary in the press. It seemed a convoluted way to evolve an operating system at best, and it was happening at the same time that Microsoft seemed to be charging ahead — and with massive commercial success at that — on MS-DOS and Windows as the long-term face of personal computing in the 1990s. InfoWorld wrote of a “deepening rift” between Microsoft and IBM, characterizing the latest agreement as IBM “seizing control of OS/2’s future.” “Although in effect IBM and Microsoft will say they won’t divorce ‘for the sake of the children,'” said an inside source to the magazine, “in fact they are already separated, and seeking new relationships.” Microsoft pushed back against the “divorce” meme only in the most tepid fashion. “You may not understand our marriage,” said Steve Ballmer, “but we’re not getting divorced.” (One might note that when a couple have to start telling friends that they aren’t getting a divorce, it usually isn’t a good sign about the state of their relationship…)

Charles Petzold, writing in PC Magazine, summed up the situation created by all the mixed messaging: “The key words in operating systems are confusion, uncertainty, anxiety, and doubt. Unfortunately, the two guiding lights of this industry — IBM and Microsoft — are part of the problem rather than part of the solution.” If anything, this view of IBM as an ongoing “guiding light” was rather charitable.  OS/2 was drowning in the Windows hype. “The success of Windows 3.0 has already caused OS/2 acceptance to go from dismal to cataclysmic,” wrote InfoWorld. “Analysts have now pushed back their estimates of when OS/2 will gain broad popularity to late this decade, with some predicting that the so-called next-generation operating system is all but dead.”

The final divorce of Microsoft from IBM came soon after to give the lie to all of the denials. In July of 1991, Microsoft announced that the erstwhile OS/2 3.0 was to become its own operating system, separate from both OS/2 and MS-DOS, called Windows NT. With this news, which barely made an impression in the press — it took up less than one quarter of page 87 of that week’s InfoWorld — a decade of cooperation came to an end. From now on, Microsoft and IBM would exist strictly as competitors in a marketplace where Microsoft enjoyed all the advantages. In the final divorce settlement, IBM gave up all rights to the upcoming Windows NT and agreed to pay a small royalty on all future sales of OS/2 (whatever those might amount to), while Microsoft paid a lump sum of around $30 million to be free and clear of their last obligations to the computing giant that had made them what they now were. They greeted this watershed moment with no sentimentality whatever. In a memo that leaked to the press, Bill Gates instead rejoiced that Microsoft was finally free of IBM’s “poor code, poor design, and other overhead.”

Even as the unlikely partnership’s decade of dominance was passing away, Microsoft’s decade of sole dominion was just beginning. The IBM PC and its clones had become the Wintel standard, and would require no further input from Big Blue, thank you very much. IBM’s share of the standard’s sales was already down to 17 percent, and would just keep on falling from there. “Microsoft is now driving the industry, not IBM,” wrote the newsletter Software Publishing by way of stating the obvious.

Which isn’t to say that IBM was going away. While Microsoft was celebrating their emancipation, IBM continued plodding forward with OS/2 2.0, which, like the aborted version 3.0 that was now to be known as Windows NT, ran only on an 80386 or better. They made a big deal of the work-in-progress at the Fall 1991 Comdex without managing to change the narrative around it one bit. The total bill for OS/2 was approaching an astonishing $1 billion, and they had very little to show for it. One Wall Street analyst pronounced OS/2 “the greatest disaster in IBM’s history. The reverberations will be felt throughout the decade.”

At the end of that year, IBM had to report — incredibly, for the very first time in their history — an annual loss. And it was no trivial loss either. The deficit was $2.8 billion, on revenues that had fallen 6.1 percent from the year before. The following year would be even worse, to the tune of a $5 billion loss. No company in the history of the world had ever lost this much money this quickly; by the last quarter of 1993, IBM would be losing $45 million every day. Microcomputers were continuing to replace the big mainframes and minicomputers that had once been the heart of IBM’s business. Now, though, fewer and fewer of those replacement machines were IBM personal computers; whole segments of their business were simply evaporating. The vague distrust IBM had evinced toward Microsoft for most of the 1980s now seemed amply justified, as all of their worst nightmares came true. IBM seemed old, bloated, and, worst of all, irrelevant next to the fresh-faced young Microsoft.

OS/2 2.0 started reaching consumers in May of 1992. It was a surprisingly impressive piece of work; perhaps the relationship with Microsoft had been as frustrating for IBM’s programmers as it had been for their counterparts. Certainly OS/2 2.0 was a far more sophisticated environment than Windows 3.0. Being designed to run only on 32-bit microprocessors like the 80386 and 80486, it utilized them to their maximum potential, which was much more than one could say for Windows, while also being much more stable than Microsoft’s notoriously crash-prone environment. In addition to native OS/2 software, it could run multiple MS-DOS applications at the same time with complete compatibility, and, in a new wrinkle added to the mix by IBM, could now run many Windows applications as well. IBM called it “a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows,” a claim which carried a considerable degree of truth. They pointedly cut its suggested list price of $140 to just $50 for Windows users looking to “upgrade.”

A Quick Tour of OS/2 2.0

Shipping on more than twenty 3.5-inch diskettes, OS/2 2.0 was by far more the most elaborate operating system yet made for its family of personal computers. When we boot it up for the first time, we’re given a lengthy interactive tutorial of a sort that was seldom seen in software of 1992 vintage.

The notion of a “Presentation Manager” GUI that’s separate from the core OS/2 operating system has been dropped; OS/2 is now simply OS/2, with a GUI as the standard, built-in interface. From the opening tutorial to the look of its desktop, the whole package reminds one of nothing of so much as the much later Windows 95. We have a full-fledged, functioning desktop workspace here, with icons representing folders and disks, and a “shredder” to replace the usual trash can.

After shipping earlier versions of OS/2 with no extra tools or applets whatsoever, IBM got wise this time around and included plenty of stuff to play with, like this neat little music editor.

Some aspects of the interface are a little strange. Dragging with the mouse is accomplished using the right button rather than the left — a fine example of OS/2’s superficial similarity and granular dissimilarity to Windows, which so many users who had to move back and forth between the environments found so frustrating.

Of course, MS-DOS is still around if you need it. Unlike in OS/2 1.x, here you can have as many MS-DOS windows and applications open as you like.

But, despite its many merits, OS/2 2.0 was a lost cause from the start, at least if one’s standard for success was Windows. Windows 3.1 rolled out of Microsoft at almost the same instant, and no amount of comparisons in techie magazines pointing out the alternative operating system’s superiority could have any impact on a mass market that was now thoroughly conditioned to accept Windows as the standard. Giant IBM’s operating system had become, as the New York Times put it, “an unlikely underdog.”

In truth, the contest was so lopsided by this point as to be laughable. Microsoft, who had long-established relationships with the erstwhile clone makers — now known as makers of hardware conforming to the Wintel standard — understood early, as IBM did only much too late, that the best and perhaps only way to get your system software widely accepted was to sell it pre-installed on the computers that ran it. Thus, by the time OS/2 2.0 shipped, Windows already came pre-installed on nine out of ten personal computers on the market, thanks to a smart and well-funded “original equipment manufacturer” sales team that was overseen personally by Steve Ballmer. And thus, simply by buying a new computer, one automatically became a Windows user. Running OS/2, on the other hand, required that the purchaser of one of these machines decide to go out and buy an alternative to the perfectly good Microsoft software already on her hard drive, and then go through all the trouble of installing and configuring it. Very few people had the requisite combination of motivation and technical skill for an exercise like that.

As a final indignity, IBM themselves had to bow to customer demand and offer MS-DOS and Windows as an optional alternative to OS/2 on their own machines. People wanted the system software that they used at the office, that their friends had, that could run all of the products on the shelves of their local computer store with 100-percent fidelity (with the exception of that oddball Mac stuff off in the corner, of course). Only the gearheads were going to buy OS/2 because it was a 32-bit instead of a 16-bit operating system or because it offered preemptive instead of cooperative multitasking, and they were a tiny slice of an exploding mass market in personal computing.

That said, OS/2 did have a better fate than many another alternative operating system during this period of Windows, Windows everywhere. It stayed around for years even in the face of that juggernaut, going through two more major revisions and many minor ones, the very last coming as late as December of 2001. It remained always a well-respected operating system that just couldn’t break through Microsoft’s choke hold on mainstream computing, having to content itself with certain niches — powering automatic teller machines was a big one for a long time — where its stability and robustness served it well.

So, IBM, and Apple as well, had indeed become the outsiders of personal computing. They would retain that dubious status for the balance of the decade of the 1990s, offering alternatives to the monoculture of Windows computing that appealed only to the tech-obsessed, the idealistic, or the just plain contrarian. Even as much of what I’ve related in this article was taking place, they were being forced into one another’s arms for the sake of sheer survival. But the story of that second unlikely IBM partnership — an awkward marriage of two corporate cultures even more dissimilar than those of Microsoft and IBM — must, like so much else, be told at another time. All that’s left to tell in this series is the story of how Windows, with the last of its great rivals bested, finished the job of conquering the world.

(Sources: the books The Making of Microsoft: How Bill Gates and His Team Created the World’s Most Successful Software Company by Daniel Ichbiah and Susan L. Knepper, Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson, Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Computer Wars: The Fall of IBM and the Future of Global Technology by Charles H. Ferguson and Charles R. Morris, and Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company by Owen W. Linzmayer; PC Week of September 24 1990 and January 15 1991; InfoWorld of September 17 1990, May 29 1991, July 29 1991, October 28 1991, and September 6 1993; New York Times of December 29 1989, March 24 1990, March 7 1991, May 24 1991, January 18 1992, August 8 1992, January 20 1993, April 19 1993, and June 2 1993; Seattle Times of June 2 1993. Finally, I owe a lot to Nathan Lineback for the histories, insights, comparisons, and images found at his wonderful online “GUI Gallery.”)

Comments
31 Responses

- James Schend

August 10, 2018 at 5:20 pm

Two quick comments:

1) You use Smalltalk in a lot of places where I think “the Xerox Alto” would be more appropriate– Smalltalk the programming language doesn’t have any GUI component of its own; it just happened to be the programming language that powered the Alto’s GUI. They were very closely tied-together, but saying that Xerox was suing Apple over Smalltalk would be like saying Apple was suing over PASCAL (the language used in much of Macintosh)… it emphasizes the wrong aspect.

2) You comment:

“When we boot it up for the first time, we’re given a lengthy interactive tutorial of a sort that just wasn’t seen in software of 1992 vintage.”

It might be worth taking a look at Apple’s interactive “getting started” tutorial (I don’t know if you’ve written about it in the previous Apple articles), which was quick long and complete and available long before 1992.

Thanks for the great work.

- Jimmy Maher

August 10, 2018 at 6:58 pm

1. It’s true that Smalltalk is a standalone programming language, but “Smalltalk environment” was also the name commonly given to the GUI environment devised by Alan Kay, which was itself written in the language. While other GUI applications could be run on the Alto, these were standalone applications rather than a full-fledged GUI environment — more akin to the Microsoft Excel that shipped with just enough of Windows to run it. The Smalltalk environment was the closest analogue on the Alto to the MacOS or Windows desktop environment, which is why I chose it as a point of comparison here. The Alto was only a piece of hardware at the end of the day…

2. I wasn’t aware of that. Softened the language a bit. ;) Thanks!

- whomever

August 11, 2018 at 12:20 am

I’m kind of with Jimmy on this. BTW, if anyone wants to get a feel for what the environment was like, Squeak is a modern Smalltalk environment that is pretty directly descended from it (including being developed by a number of the same people), and anyone can download ands it: https://squeak.org

- Aula

August 10, 2018 at 5:41 pm

“Microsoft had won the in the marketplace”

should be “won them”

- Jimmy Maher

August 10, 2018 at 6:59 pm

Thanks!

- Bill

August 10, 2018 at 9:45 pm

Hey man, i love your work! That being said, i just wanted to say,

I saw your articles on Hacker News, and i really went through your website, much like i did folklore.com which was written by Andy Hertzfeld, much like i have watched the Computer Chronicles reruns, and you really have some wonderful insights and fantastic things to say about the computer industry as it has developed. I love this! You love this! I can tell your love and passion by how you write!

If ever you are feeling that you scream into the dark, or that no one else is interested in the perspective that you have, this person, and by proxy i am sure many others, love what you do, love what you say, and are very appreciative of your perspective and wisdom.

That is all. Your biggest fanboy ever, who may or may not be important in the future of computing,

– Bill

- Martin

August 10, 2018 at 10:17 pm

it could run multiple MS-DOS applications at the same with …. I think you are missing “time” in that sentence.

Also what hardware ran the Xerox machines?

- Jimmy Maher

August 11, 2018 at 7:38 am

Thanks!

I’m not quite sure what you’re asking. The Alto which was used at PARC and the Star were both custom machines designed and built by Xerox. I believe their CPUs as well — neither was a microprocessor — were Xerox creations.

- Martin

August 11, 2018 at 12:37 pm

I guess that answers it. If Xerox had realized it, could they had been a rival for Intel too – from a computer hardware perspective?

- Anonymous

August 13, 2018 at 5:30 am

The Star used AMD cpus. The Alto didn’t have what we’d now think of as a conventional CPU, just a number of TTL chips wired together to function as a processor. It worked, and it’s very much of the old school (remember, microprocessors only started to come along in the 70s and they would not have impressed the PARC folks who did not have the background of hobbyists), but there’s a reason people don’t do that sort of thing much anymore, except for fun, if they’re weird.

On a related note, check out this 6502 made entirely out of discrete components. A macrochip, if you will: https://monster6502.com

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- Keith Palmer

August 11, 2018 at 12:56 am

I admit that’s an unusual-looking “Macintosh in 1984” screen shot for me; the GUI Gallery has some screen shots of pre-release systems using a somewhat different font than the familiar Chicago, but the font here looks more like one of the options available for a few years in the late 1990s for all that I recognize familiar elements in the Finder window. Otherwise, this piece has a certain flavour of “where I came in.” I’d long supposed too the escape option for certain Apple executives was to sell the company to a larger corporation rather than “breaking into two,” but perhaps there might be more said about that here later.

- arfy

August 11, 2018 at 1:58 am

Great work! I’ve been a long-time reader of this blog, so felt I’d finally set down a comment here. Are you a fan of the neverending story, by any chance? Having recently read the novel, I liked your illusions to that text in your narrative. “Like so much else, must be told at another time”. Nice one.

- Jimmy Maher

August 11, 2018 at 7:43 am

No, never read it, I’m afraid. ;) Just a byproduct of me trying to weave together a lot of threads in a coherent, readable way. I have read a lot of Victorian novels in my day, and one thing I’ve taken away from the overt authorial presence of writers like Dickens and Trollope is that it’s okay sometimes just to tell the reader explicitly what you’re doing. Also heads off a lot of “but what about X” comments…

- arb

August 11, 2018 at 2:04 am

Didn’t Xerox and Apple do a deal where Apple sold Xerox a bundle of stock in return to being able to look at and use some of the technologies Xerox was researching? My understanding is that this also contributed to Xerox’s case being thrown out – apart from the statute of limitations expiring, they explicitly allowed the exploitation of their technology.

- Jimmy Maher

August 11, 2018 at 7:57 am

Xerox wanted very badly to buy into Apple in the late 1970s, as they felt — correctly — that personal computers were set to explode. But Apple at that time was still a private company, and was reluctant to accept a new investor. Finally Apple agreed to allow Xerox to buy 100,000 shares when Xerox offered to let Steve Jobs and company spend some time at PARC. No agreements were made as to what Apple would or wouldn’t do with what they learned at PARC, but a clever lawyer could indeed argue that one was implied: i.e., why am I showing you this if I don’t expect you to use it for something?

That said, what Jobs saw at PARC was the Xerox Alto, primarily running the Smalltalk environment. Xerox actually sued Apple over the Xerox Star, which had a lot of innovations of its own that Apple adopted. Thus the whole question of an implicit agreement is in fact moot.

As an aside: I do believe that journalists and historians have a tendency to exaggerate how secret PARC’s technology actually was at the time, simply because it makes a better story. Lots and lots of people trooped through PARC throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, and the work that was going on there was widely discussed across the whole spectrum of computing. A visit to PARC was practically a rite of passage for students in nearby Stanford’s computer-science program. Thus the agreement between Apple and Xerox wasn’t some high-level trading of state secrets — more like a harmless sweetener thrown in by Xerox to close the deal.

- Anonymous

August 13, 2018 at 5:06 am

The pre-IPO deal between Apple and Xerox actually had another, at the time more important facet: At that time, Xerox had recently bought Shugart, which had been the source of the drive mechanisms Apple had been using for the Disk II floppy drives. Once the deal went through, Apple switched suppliers, on the belief that Shugart wouldn’t do anything since it would imperil Xerox’s investment.

As for the secrecy of the Alto, it wasn’t that secret, and a number of the machines were in use outside of PARC. Indeed, Jef Raskin at Apple was perfectly familiar with it and made sure that the Apple visitors knew exactly what they ought to be looking for and what they should ask about.

- Laertes

August 11, 2018 at 11:42 am

“Windows already came pre-installed on nine out of ten personal computers on the market”. That’s why I started to buy parts and then build my computers with them (although much later than the events told here), I didn’t want to pay for an OS I would not use. I still do it.

- Mike

August 11, 2018 at 5:39 pm

I was always surprised that the people at PARC intended Smalltalk as a children’s teaching language. Though eventually it did – kind of – Smalltalk became Squeak and Squeak underpinned the hugely succesful Scratch language that gave millions of kids a chance to build their own programs.

The other surprise is how little the Smalltalk and Squeak interfaces have evolved from their original implementations. I must admit that whilst I can use both languages, I’ve never found them as intuitive as their advocates claim.

- Wyatt

August 12, 2018 at 3:03 am

I think you have a mistaken ‘e’ on the end of ‘swath’ in the first sentence. :)

swathe -> wrap in several layers of fabric
swath -> a broad strip or area of something

- Jimmy Maher

August 12, 2018 at 7:53 am

Thanks!

- Banville

August 12, 2018 at 4:30 pm

“That august body announced that they would not hear it on February 21, 1995, thus finally putting an end to the whole torturous odyssey.”

Perhaps should be “tortuous” rather than “torturous”, which is a bit severe even for a lawsuit involving Apple and Microsoft.

- Jimmy Maher

August 12, 2018 at 5:28 pm

Indeed. Thanks!

- Ayo

August 12, 2018 at 9:17 pm

This is a stunningly amazing history of the rise of Windows.

It’s bringing back so many memories of the great industry battles that raged from the mid-80s through the 90s.

I still remember those PC Magazine covers.

Borland Delphi vs VB
Windows vs OS/2
Wordperfect vs Word
Lotus 123 vs Excel
FoxPro vs Access (I think…)
Netscape vs IE
AMD vs Intel vs PowerPC
RISC vs CISC
The rise of Dell

I miss those battles waged version by version, release by release.

The industry is mature and tame now by comparison. :(

Exciting times in the industry.

- Anonymous

August 13, 2018 at 5:18 am

Jimmy, a couple of things. First, that Mac screenshot isn’t very accurate. What you’ve got there is a screen shot of what purports to be a pre-release version of the Mac system software, but which may actually be a version modified some years later. The big giveaway is the weird typeface used in place of the Chicago typeface. You’d do better with a screenshot like this one from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_1#/media/File:Apple_Macintosh_Desktop.png

Second, while it’s sad that there don’t seem to be any Xerox Star emulators, there are a number of videos on YouTube demonstrating the UI that may be useful to you.

- Jimmy Maher

August 13, 2018 at 6:49 am

It’s strange. That purported early version includes some things that seem to mark it as genuine, like missing “shutdown” and “new folder” commands in the menus. Those sorts of things seem like they’d be hard to fake. On the other hand, it has other, more suspicious things, like a whole suite of desktop assistants that didn’t come installed with System 2. Anyway, I’ve replaced it with a screen of System 2 for safety’s sake. It’ll do. Thanks!

And yeah, I’ve seen the Computer History Museum presentation by some of the original Xerox Star designers on YouTube.

- Anonymous

August 13, 2018 at 1:02 pm

There are also some interesting demos that are contemporary with the introduction of the platform where they explain such novel concepts as cut and paste and what the mouse is.

- Michael

August 15, 2018 at 5:47 pm

“the Mac team coincidentally developed a skeumorphic interface using”

*skeuomorphic

(at least that’s how it’s spelled elsewhere in the article).

- Jimmy Maher

August 16, 2018 at 8:41 am

Thanks!

- Max

October 2, 2018 at 7:50 pm

Word doubled: “make make”

- Jimmy Maher

October 3, 2018 at 3:27 pm

Thanks!

Doing Windows, Part 9: Windows Comes Home
August 17, 2018

This series of articles so far has been a story of business-oriented personal computing. Corporate America had been running for decades on IBM before the IBM PC appeared, so it was only natural that the standard IBM introduced would be embraced as the way to get serious, businesslike things done on a personal computer. Yet long before IBM entered the picture, personal computing in general had been pioneered by hackers and hobbyists, many of whom nursed grander dreams than giving secretaries a better typewriter or giving accountants a better way to add up figures. These pioneers didn’t go away after 1981, but neither did they embrace the IBM PC, which most of them dismissed as technically unimaginative and aesthetically disastrous. Instead they spent the balance of the 1980s using computers like the Apple II, the Commodore 64, the Commodore Amiga, and the Atari ST to communicate with one another, to draw pictures, to make music, and of course to write and play lots and lots of games. Dwarfed already in terms of dollars and cents at mid-decade by the business-computing monster the IBM PC had birthed, this vibrant alternative computing ecosystem — sometimes called home computing, sometimes consumer computing — makes a far more interesting subject for the cultural historian of today than the world of IBM and Microsoft, with its boring green screens and boring corporate spokesmen running scared from the merest mention of digital creativity. It’s for this reason that, a few series like this one aside, I’ve spent the vast majority of my time on this blog talking about the cultures of creative computing rather than those of IBM and Microsoft.

Consumer computing did enjoy one brief boom in the 1980s. From roughly 1982 to 1984, a narrative took hold within the mainstream media and the offices of venture capitalists alike that full-fledged computers would replace the Atari VCS and other game consoles in American homes on a massive scale. After all, computers could play games just like the consoles, but they alone could also be used to educate the kids, write school reports and letters, balance the checkbook, and — that old favorite to which the pundits returned again and again — store the family recipes.

All too soon, though, the limitations of the cheap 8-bit computers that had fueled the boom struck home. As a consumer product, those early computer with their cryptic blinking command prompts were hopeless; at least with an Atari VCS you could just put a cartridge in the slot, turn it on, and play. There were very few practical applications for which they weren’t more trouble than they were worth. If you needed to write a school report, a standalone word-processing machine designed for that purpose alone was often a cheaper and better solution, and the family accounts and recipes were actually much easier to store on paper than in a slow, balky computer program. Certainly paper was the safer choice over a pile of fragile floppy disks.

So, what we might call the First Home Computer Revolution fizzled out, with most of the computers that had been purchased over its course making the slow march of shame from closet to attic to landfill. That minority who persisted with their new computers was made up of the same sorts of personalities who had had computers in their homes before the boom — for the one concrete thing the First Home Computer Revolution had achieved was to make home computers in general more affordable, and thus put them within the reach of more people who were inclined toward them anyway. People with sufficient patience continued to find home computers great for playing games that offered more depth than the games on the consoles, while others found them objects of wonder unto themselves, new oceans just waiting to have their technological depths plumbed by intrepid digital divers. It was mostly young people, who had free time on their hands, who were open to novelty, who were malleable enough to learn something new, and who were in love with escapist fictions of all stripes, who became the biggest home-computer users.

Their numbers grew at a modest pace every year, but the real money, it was now clear, was in business computing. Why try to sell computers piecemeal to teenagers when you could sell them in bulk to corporations? IBM, after having made one abortive stab at capturing home computing as well via the ill-fated PCjr, went where the money was, and all but a few other computer makers — most notable among these home-computer loyalists were Commodore, Atari, and Radio Shack — followed them there. The teenagers, for their part, responded to the business-computing majority’s contempt in kind, piling scorn onto the IBM PC’s ludicrously ugly CGA graphics and its speaker that could do little more than beep and fart at you, all while embracing their own more colorful platforms with typical adolescent zeal.

As the 1980s neared their end, however, the ugly old MS-DOS computer started down an unanticipated road of transformation. In 1987, as part of the misbegotten PS/2 line, IBM introduced a new graphics standard called VGA that, with up to 256 onscreen colors from a palette of more than 260,000, outdid all of the common home computers of the time. Soon after, enterprising third parties like Ad Lib and Creative Labs started making add-on sound cards for MS-DOS machines that could make real music and — just as important for game fanatics — real explosions. Many a home hacker woke up one morning to realize that the dreaded PC clone suddenly wasn’t looking all that bad. No, the technical architecture wasn’t beautiful, but it was robust and mature, and the pressure of having dozens of competitors manufacturing machines meeting the standard kept the bang-for-your-buck ratio very good. And if you — or your parents — did want to do any word processing or checkbook balancing, the software for doing so was excellent, honed by years of catering to the most demanding of corporate users. Ditto the programming tools that were nearer to a hacker’s heart; Borland’s Turbo Pascal alone was a thing of wonder, better than any other programming environment on any other personal computer.

Meanwhile 8-bit home computers like the Apple II and the Commodore 64 were getting decidedly long in the tooth, and the companies that made them were doing a peculiarly poor job of replacing them. The Apple Macintosh was so expensive as to be out of reach of most, and even the latest Apple II, known as the IIGS, was priced way too high for what it was; Apple, having joined the business-computing rat race, seemed vaguely embarrassed by the continuing existence of the Apple II, the platform that had made them. The Commodore Amiga 500 was perhaps a more promising contender to inherit the crown of the Commodore 64, but its parent company had mismanaged their brand almost beyond hope of redemption in the United States.

So, in 1988 and 1989 MS-DOS-based computing started coming home, thanks both to its own sturdy merits and a lack of compelling alternatives from the traditional makers of home computers. The process was helped along by Sierra Online, a major publisher of consumer software who had bet big and early on the MS-DOS standard conquering the home in the end, and were thus out in front of its progress now with a range of appealing games that took full advantage of the new graphics and sound cards. Other publishers, reeling before a Nintendo onslaught that was devastating the remnants of the 8-bit software market, soon followed their lead. By 1990, the vast majority of the American consumer-software industry had joined their counterparts in business software in embracing MS-DOS as their platform of first — often, of only — priority.

Bill Gates had always gone where the most money was. In years past, the money had been in business computing, and so Microsoft, after experimenting briefly with consumer software in the period just before the release of the IBM PC, had all but ignored the consumer market in favor of system software and applications targeted squarely at corporate America. Now, though, the times were changing, as home computers became powerful and cheap enough to truly go mainstream. The media was buzzing about the subject as they hadn’t for years; everywhere it was multimedia this, CD-ROM that. Services like Prodigy and America Online were putting a new, friendlier face on the computer as a tool for communicating and socializing, and game developers were buzzing about an emerging new form of mass-market entertainment, a merger of Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Gates wasn’t alone in smelling a Second Home Computer Revolution in the wind, one that would make the computer a permanent fixture of modern American home life in all the ways the first had failed to do so.

This, then, was the zeitgeist into which Microsoft Windows 3.0 made its splashy debut in May of 1990. It was perfectly positioned both to drive the Second Home Computer Revolution and to benefit from it. Small wonder that Microsoft undertook a dramatic branding overhaul this year, striving to project a cooler, more entertaining image — an image appropriate for a company which marketed not to other companies but to individual consumers. One might say that the Microsoft we still know today was born on May 22, 1990, when Bill Gates strode onto a stage — tellingly, not a stage at Comdex or some other stodgy business-oriented computing event — to introduce the world to Windows 3.0 over a backdrop of confetti cannons, thumping music, and huge projection screens.

The delirious sales of Windows 3.0 that followed were not — could not be, given their quantity — driven exclusively by sales to corporate America. The world of computing had turned topsy-turvy; consumer computing was where the real action was now. Even as they continued to own business-oriented personal computing, Microsoft suddenly dominated in the home as well, thanks to the capitulation without much of a fight of all of the potential rivals to MS-DOS and Windows. Countless copies of Windows 3.0 were sold by Microsoft directly to Joe Public to install on his existing home computer, through a toll-free hotline they set up for the purpose. (“Have your credit card ready and call!”) Even more importantly, as new computers entered American homes in mass quantities for the second time in history, they did so with Windows already on their hard drives, thanks to Microsoft’s longstanding deals with the companies that made them.

In April of 1992,  Windows 3.1 appeared, sporting as one of its most important new features a set of “multimedia extensions” — this meaning tools for recording and playing back sounds, for playing audio CDs, and, most of all, for running a new generation of CD-ROM-based software sporting digitized voices and music and video clips — which were plainly aimed at the home rather than the business user.  Although Windows 3.1 wasn’t as dramatic a leap forward as its predecessor had been, Microsoft nevertheless hyped it to the skies in the mass media, rolling out an $8 million television-advertising campaign among other promotional strategies that would have been unthinkable from the business-focused Microsoft of just a few years earlier. It sold even faster than had its predecessor.

A Quick Tour of Windows for Workgroups 3.1

Released in April of 1992, Windows 3.1 was the ultimate incarnation of Windows’s third generation. (A version 3.11 was released the following year, but it confined itself to bug fixes and modest performance tweaks, introducing no significant new features.) It dropped support for 8088-based machines, and with it the old “real mode” of operation; it now ran only in protected mode or 386 enhanced mode. It made welcome strides in terms of stability, even as it still left much to be desired on that front. And this Windows was the last to be sold as an add-on to an MS-DOS which had to be purchased separately. Consumer-grade incarnations of Windows would continue to be built on top of MS-DOS for the rest of the decade, but from Windows 95 on Microsoft would do a better job of hiding their humble foundation by packaging the whole software stack together as a single product.

Stuff like this is the reason Windows always took such a drubbing in comparison to other, slicker computing platforms. In truth, Microsoft was doing the best they could to support a bewildering variety of hardware, a problem with which vendors of turnkey systems like Apple didn’t have to contend. Still, it’s never a great look to have to tell your customers, “If this crashes your computer, don’t worry about it, just try again.” Much the same advice applied to daily life with Windows, noted the scoffers.

Microsoft was rather shockingly lax about validating Windows 3 installations. The product had no copy protection of any sort, meaning one person in a neighborhood could (and often did) purchase a copy and share it with every other house on the block. Others in the industry had a sneaking suspicion that Microsoft really didn’t mind that much if Windows was widely pirated among their non-business customers — that they’d rather people run pirated copies of Windows than a competing product. It was all about achieving the ubiquity which would open the door to all sorts of new profit potential through the sale of applications. And indeed, Windows 3 was pirated like crazy, but it also became thoroughly ubiquitous. As for the end to which Windows’s ubiquity was the means: by the time applications came to represent 25 percent of Microsoft’s unit sales, they already accounted for 51 percent of their revenue. Bill Gates always had an instinct for sniffing out where the money was.

Probably the most important single enhancements in Windows 3.1 was its TrueType fonts. The rudimentary bitmap fonts which shipped with older versions looked… not all that nice on the screen or on the page, reportedly due to Bill Gates’s adamant refusal to pay a royalty for fonts to an established foundry like Adobe, as Apple had always done. This decision led to a confusion of aftermarket fonts in competing formats. If you used some of these more stylish fonts in a document, you couldn’t share that document with anyone else unless she also had installed the same fonts. So, you could either share ugly documents or keep nice-looking ones to yourself. Some choice! Thankfully, TrueType came along to fix all that, giving Macintosh users at least one less thing to laugh at when it came to Windows.

The TrueType format was the result of an unusual cooperative project led by Microsoft and Apple — yes, even as they were battling one another in court. The system of glyphs and the underlying technology to render them were intended to break the stranglehold Adobe Systems enjoyed over high-end printing; Adobe charged a royalty of up to $100 per gadget that employed their own PostScript font system, and were widely seen in consequence as a retrograde force holding back the entire desktop-publishing and GUI ecosystem. TrueType would succeed splendidly in its monopoly-busting goal, to such an extent that it remains the standard for fonts on Microsoft Windows and Apple’s OS X to this day. Bill Gates, no stranger to vindictiveness, joked that “we made [the widely disliked Adobe head] John Warnock cry.”

The other big addition to Windows 3.1 was the “multimedia extensions.” These let you do things like record sounds using an attached microphone and play your audio CDs on your computer. That they were added to what used to be a very businesslike operating environment says much about how important home users had become to Microsoft’s strategy.

In a throwback to an earlier era of computing, MS-DOS still shipped with a copy of BASIC included, and Windows 3.1 automatically found it and configured it for easy access right out of the box — this even though home computing was now well beyond the point where most users would ever try to become programmers. Bill Gates’s sentimental attachment to BASIC, the language on which he built his company before the IBM PC came along, has often been remarked upon by his colleagues, especially since he wasn’t normally a man given to much sentimentality. It was the widespread perception of Borland’s Turbo Pascal as the logical successor to BASIC — the latest great programming tool for the masses — that drove the longstanding antipathy between Gates and Borland’s flamboyant leader, Philippe Kahn. Later, it was supposedly at Gates’s insistence that Microsoft’s Visual BASIC, a Pascal-killer which bore little resemblance to BASIC as most people knew it, nevertheless bore the name.

Windows for Workgroups — a separate, pricier version of the environment aimed at businesses — was distinguished by having built-in support for networking. This wasn’t, however, networking as we think of it today. It was rather intended to connect machines together only in a local office environment. No TCP/IP stack — the networking technology that powers the Internet — was included.

But you could get on the Internet with the right additional software. Here, just for fun, I’m trying to browse the web using Internet Explorer 5 from 1999, the last version made for Windows 3. Google is one of the few sites that work at all — albeit, as you can see, not very well.

All this success — this reality of a single company now controlling almost all personal computing, in the office and in the home — brought with it plenty of blowback. The metaphor of Microsoft as the Evil Empire, and of Bill Gates as the computer industry’s very own Darth Vader, began in earnest in these years of Windows 3’s dominance. Neither Gates nor his company had ever been beloved among their peers, having always preferred making money to making friends. Now, though, the naysayers came out in force. Bob Metcalfe, a Xerox PARC alum famous in hacker lore as the inventor of the Ethernet networking protocol, talked about Microsoft’s expanding “death grip” on innovation in the computer industry. Indeed, zombie imagery was prevalent among many of Microsoft’s rivals; Mitch Kapor of Lotus called the new Windows-driven industry “the kingdom of the dead”: “The revolution is over, and free-wheeling innovation in the software industry has ground to a halt.” Any number of anonymous commenters mused about doing Gates any number of forms of bodily harm. “It’s remarkable how widespread the negative feelings toward Microsoft are,” mused Stewart Alsop. “No one wants to work with Microsoft anymore,” said noted Gates-basher Phillipe Kahn of Borland. “We sure won’t. They don’t have any friends left.” Channeling such sentiments, Business Month magazine cropped his nerdy face onto a body-builder’s body and labeled him the “Silicon Bully” on its cover: “How long can Bill Gates kick sand in the face of the computer industry?”

Setting aside the jealousy that always follows great success, even setting aside for the moment the countless ways in which Microsoft really did play hardball with their competitors, something about Bill Gates rubbed many people the wrong way on a personal, visceral level. In keeping with their new, consumer-friendly image, Microsoft had hired consultants to fix up his wardrobe and work on his speaking style — not to mention to teach him the value of personal hygiene — and he could now get through a canned presentation ably enough. When it came to off-the-cuff interactions, though, he continued to strike many as insufferable. To judge him on the basis of his weedy physique and nasally speaking voice — the voice of the kid who always had to show how smart he was to the rest of the class — was perhaps unfair. But one certainly could find him guilty of a thoroughgoing lack of graciousness.

His team of PR coaches could have told him that, when asked who had contributed the most to the personal-computer revolution, he ought to politely decline to answer, or, even better, modestly reflect on the achievements of someone like his old friend Steve Jobs. But they weren’t in the room with him one day when that exact question was put to him by a smiling reporter, and so, after acknowledging that it really should be answered by “others less biased than me,” he proceeded to make the case for himself: “I will say that I started the first microcomputer-software company. I put BASIC in micros before 1980. I was influential in making the IBM PC a 16-bit machine. My DOS is in 50 million computers. I wrote software for the Mac.” I, I, I. Everything he said was true, at least if one presumed that “I” meant “Bill Gates and the others at Microsoft” in this context. Yet there was something unappetizing about this laundry list of achievements he could so easily rattle off, and about the almost pathological competitiveness it betrayed. We love to praise ambition in the abstract, but most of us find such naked ambition as that constantly displayed by Gates profoundly off-putting. The growing dislike for Microsoft in the computer industry and even in much of the technology press was fueled to a large extent by a personal aversion to their founder.

Which isn’t to say that there weren’t valid grounds for concern when it came to Microsoft’s complete dominance of personal-computer system software. Comparisons to the Standard Oil trust of the Gilded Age were in the air, so much so that by 1992 it was already becoming ironically useful for Microsoft to keep the Macintosh and OS/2 alive and allow them their paltry market share, just so the alleged monopolists could point to a couple of semi-viable competitors to Windows. It was clear that Microsoft’s ambitions didn’t end with controlling the operating system installed on the vast majority of computers in the country and, soon, the world. On the contrary, that was only a means to their real end. They were already using their status as the company that made Windows to cut deep into the application market, invading territory that had once belonged to the likes of Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. Now, those names were slowly being edged out by Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word. Microsoft wanted to own more or less all of the software on your computer. Any niche outside developers that remained in computing’s new order, it seemed, would do so at Microsoft’s sufferance. The established makers of big-ticket business applications would have been chilled if they had been privy to the words spoken by Mike Maples, Microsoft’s head of applications, to his own people: “If someone thinks we’re not after Lotus and after WordPerfect and after Borland, they’re confused. My job is to get a fair share of the software applications market, and to me that’s 100 percent.” This was always the problem with Microsoft. They didn’t want to compete in the markets they entered; they wanted to own them.

Microsoft’s control of Windows gave them all sorts of advantages over other application developers which may not have been immediately apparent to the non-technical public. Take, for instance, the esoteric-sounding technology of Object Linking and Embedding, or OLE, which debuted with Windows 3.0 and still exists in current versions. OLE allows applications to share all sorts of dynamic data between themselves. Thanks to it, a word-processor document can include charts and graphs from a spreadsheet, with the one updating itself automatically when the other gets updated. Microsoft built OLE support into new versions of Word and Excel that accompanied Windows 3.0’s release, but refused for many months to tell outside developers how to use it.  Thus Microsoft’s applications had hugely desirable capabilities which their competitors did not for a long, long time. Similar stories played out again and again, driving the competition to distraction while Bill Gates shrugged his shoulders and played innocent. “We bend over backwards to make sure we’re not getting special advantage,” he said, while Steve Ballmer talked about a “Chinese wall” between Microsoft’s application and system programmers — a wall which people who had actually worked there insisted simply didn’t exist.

On March 1, 1991, news broke that the Federal Trade Commission was investigating Microsoft for anti-trust violations and monopolistic practices. The investigators specifically point to that agreement with IBM that had been announced at the Fall 1989 Comdex, to target low-end computers with Microsoft’s Windows and high-end computers with the two companies’ joint operating system OS/2 — ironically, an “anti-competitive” initiative that Microsoft had never taken all that seriously. Once the FTC started digging, however, they found that there was plenty of other evidence to be turned up, from both the previous decade and this new one.

There was, for instance, little question that Microsoft had always leveraged their status as the maker of MS-DOS in every way they could. When Windows 3.0 came out, they helped to ensure its acceptance by telling hardware makers that the only way they would continue to be allowed to buy MS-DOS for pre-installation on their computers was to buy Windows and start pre-installing that too. Later, part of their strategy for muscling into the application market was to get Microsoft Works, a stripped-down version of the full Microsoft Office suite, pre-installed on computers as well. How many people were likely to go out and buy Lotus 1-2-3 or WordPerfect when they already had similar software on their computer? Of course, if they did need something more powerful, said the little card included with every computer, they could have the more advanced version of Microsoft Works for the cost of a nominal upgrade fee…

And there were other, far more nefarious stories to tell. There was, for instance, the tale of DR-DOS, a 1988 alternative to MS-DOS from Digital Research which was compatible with Microsoft’s operating system but offered a lot of welcome enhancements. Microsoft went after any clone maker who tried to offer DR-DOS pre-installed on their machines with both carrots (they would undercut Digital Research’s price to the point of basically giving MS-DOS away if necessary) and sticks (they would refuse to license them the upcoming, hotly anticipated Windows 3.0 if they persisted in their loyalty to Digital Research). Later, once the DR-DOS threat had been quelled, most of the features that had made it so desirable turned up in the next release of MS-DOS. Digital Research — a company which Bill Gates seemed to delight in tormenting — had once again been, in the industry’s latest parlance, “Microslimed.”

But Digital Research was neither the first nor the last such company. Microsoft, it was often claimed, had a habit of negotiating with smaller companies under false pretenses, learning what made their technology tick under the guise of due diligence, and then launching their own product based on what they had learned. In early 1990, Microsoft told Intuit, a maker of a hugely successful money-management package called Quicken, that they were interested in acquiring them. After several weeks of negotiations, including lots of discussions about how Quicken was programmed, how it was used in the wild, and what marketing strategies had been most effective, Microsoft abruptly broke off the talks, saying they “couldn’t find a way to make it work.” Before the end of 1990, they had announced Microsoft Money, their own money-management product.

More and more of these types of stories were being passed around. A startup who called themselves Go came to Microsoft with a pen-based computing interface. (The latter was all the rage at the time; Apple as well was working on something called the Newton, a sort of pen-based proto-iPad that, like all of the other initiatives in this direction, would turn into an expensive failure.) After spending weeks examining Go’s technology, Microsoft elected not to purchase it or sign them to a contract. But, just days later, they started an internal project to create a pen-based interface for Windows, headed by the engineer who had been in charge of “evaluating” Go’s technology. A meme was emerging, by no means entirely true but perhaps not entirely untrue either, of Microsoft as a company better at doing business than doing technology, who would prefer to copy the innovations of others than do the hard work of coming up with their own ideas.

In a way, though, this very quality was a source of strength for Microsoft, the reason that corporate clients flocked to them now like they once had to IBM; the mantra that “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” was fast being replaced in corporate America by “no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft.” “We don’t do innovative stuff, like completely new revolutionary stuff,” Bill Gates admitted in an unguarded moment. “One of the things we are really, really good at doing is seeing what stuff is out there and taking the right mix of good features from different products.” For businesses and, now, tens of millions of individual consumers, Microsoft really was the new IBM: they were safe. You bought a Windows machine not because it was the slickest or sexiest box on the block but because you knew it was going to be well-supported, knew there would be software on the shelves for it for a long time to come, knew that when you did decide to upgrade the transition would be a relatively painless one. You didn’t get that kind of security from any other platform. If Microsoft’s business practices were sometimes a little questionable, even if Windows crashed sometimes or kept on running inexplicably slower the longer you had it on your computer, well, you could live with that. Alan Boyd, an executive at Microsoft for a number of years:

Does Bill have a vision? No. Has he done it the right way? Yes. He’s done it by being conservative. I mean, Bill used to say to me that his job is to say no. That’s his job.

Which is why I can understand [that] he’s real sensitive about that. Is Bill innovative? Yes. Does he appear innovative? No. Bill personally is a lot more innovative than Microsoft ever could be, simply because his way of doing business is to do it very steadfastly and very conservatively. So that’s where there’s an internal clash in Bill: between his ability to innovate and his need to innovate. The need to innovate isn’t there because Microsoft is doing well. And innovation… you get a lot of arrows in your back. He lets things get out in the market and be tried first before he moves into them. And that’s valid. It’s like IBM.

Of course, the ethical problem with this approach to doing business was that it left no space for the little guys who actually had done the hard work of innovating the technologies which Microsoft then proceeded to co-opt. “Seeing what stuff is out there and taking it” — to use Gates’s own words against him — is a very good way indeed to make yourself hated.

During the 1990s, Windows was widely seen by the tech intelligentsia as the archetypal Microsoft product, an unimaginative, clunky amalgam of other people’s ideas. In his seminal (and frequently hilarious) 1999 essay “In the Beginning… Was the Command Line,” Neal Stephenson described operating systems in terms of vehicles. Windows 3 was a moped in this telling, “a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle [MS-DOS], enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.”

And yet if we wished to identify one Microsoft product that truly was visionary, we could do worse than boring old ramshackle Windows. Bill Gates first put his people to work on it, we should remember, before the original IBM PC and the first version of MS-DOS had even been released — so strongly did he believe even then, just as much as that more heralded visionary Steve Jobs, that the GUI was the future of computing. By the time Windows finally reached the market four years later, it had had occasion to borrow much from the Apple Macintosh, the platform with which it was doomed always to be unfavorably compared. But Windows 1 also included vital features of modern computing that the Mac did not, such as multitasking and virtual memory. No, it didn’t take a genius to realize that these must eventually make their way to personal computers; Microsoft had fine examples of them to look at from the more mature ecosystems of institutional computing, and thus could be said, once again, to have implemented and popularized but not innovated them.

Still, we should save some credit for the popularizers. Apple, building upon the work done at Xerox, perfected the concept of the GUI to such an extent in LisaOS and MacOS that one could say that all of the improvements made to it since have been mere details. But, entrenched in a business model that demanded high profit margins and proprietary hardware, they were doomed to produce luxury products rather than ubiquitous ones. This was the logical flaw at the heart of the much-discussed “1984” television advertisement and much of the rhetoric that continued to surround the Macintosh in the years that followed. If you want to change the world through better computing, you have to give the people a computer they can afford. Thanks to Apple’s unwillingness or inability to do that, it was Microsoft that brought the GUI to the world in their stead — in however imperfect a form.

The rewards for doing so were almost beyond belief. Microsoft’s revenues climbed by roughly 50 percent every year in the few years after the introduction of Windows 3.0, as the company stormed past Boeing to become the biggest corporation in the Pacific Northwest. Someone who had invested $1000 in Microsoft in 1986 would have seen her investment grow to $30,000 by 1991. By the same point, over 2000 employees or former employees had become millionaires. In 1992, Bill Gates was anointed by Forbes magazine the richest person in the world, a distinction he would enjoy for the next 25 years by most reckonings. The man who had been so excited when his company grew to be bigger than Lotus in 1987 now owned a company that was larger than the next five biggest software publishers combined. And as for Lotus alone? Well, Microsoft was now over four times their size. And the Decade of Microsoft had only just begun.

In 2000, the company’s high-water point, an astonishing 97 percent of all consumer computing devices would have some sort of Microsoft software installed on them. In the vast majority of cases, of course, said software would include Microsoft Windows. There would be all sorts of grounds for concern about this kind of dominance even had it not been enjoyed by a company with such a reputation for playing rough as Microsoft. (Or would a company that didn’t play rough ever have gotten to be so dominant in the first place?) In future articles, we’ll be forced to spend a lot more time dealing with Microsoft’s various scandals and controversies, along with reactions to them that took the form of legal challenges from the American government and the European Union and the rise of an alternative ideology of software called the open-source movement.

But, as we come to the end of this particular series of articles on the early days of Windows, we really should give Bill Gates some credit as well. Had he not kept doggedly on with Windows in the face of a business-computing culture that for years wanted nothing to do with it, his company could very easily have gone the way of VisiCorp, Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland, and, one might even say, IBM and Apple for a while: a star of one era of computing that was unable to adapt to the changing times. Instead, by never wavering in his belief that the GUI was computing’s future, Gates conquered the world. That he did so while still relying on the rickety foundation of MS-DOS is, yes, kind of appalling for anyone who values clean, beautiful computer engineering. Yet it also says much about his programmers’ creativity and skill, belying any notion of Microsoft as a place bereft of such qualities. Whatever else you can say about the sometimes shaky edifices that were Windows 3 and its next few generations of successors, the fact that they worked at all was something of a minor miracle.

Most of all, we should remember the huge role that Windows played in bringing computing home once again — and, this time, permanently. The third generation of Microsoft’s GUI arrived at the perfect time, just when the technology and the culture were ready for it. Once a laughingstock, Windows became for quite some time the only face of computing many people knew — in the office and in the home. Who could have dreamed it? Perhaps only one person: a not particularly dreamy man named Bill Gates.

(Sources: the books Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson, Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, and In the Beginning… Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson; Computer Power User of October 2004; InfoWorld of May 20 1991 and January 31 1994. Finally, I owe a lot to Nathan Lineback for the histories, insights, comparisons, and images found at his wonderful online “GUI Gallery.”)

Comments
32 Responses

- XtoF

August 17, 2018 at 5:15 pm

Concerning the 16 bit “home computers”, I’m quite sure they had a bigger share of the domestic market in Europe than in the USA.
When in middle shool, I was one of the very few to game on a PC. My friends all had Ataris and Amigas. They where constantly arguing about which machine was the best. I could not participate as they all agreed that a PC was a piece of junk ;)

But you’re right: Windows 3 was a turning point. PC at the times began to sport interesting “multimedia” capabilities, and my friend’s parents began to buy PCs. As the scary command line was not mandatory anymore, they could buy a *serious* computer for the whole family. Which in the end was mostly used by the kids to play games ;)

Anyway your posts are terrific and bring back a lot of great memories! There are loads of technically info, while still being easy to read! Kudos!

- Brian

August 17, 2018 at 7:31 pm

Exactly! I like to laugh and note that my childhood was one of computer deprivation since Santa brought us a TI 99/4A in 1982 when I was a second grader, and then a Tandy 1000A in 1985 when I was a fifth grader. I longed for an Apple II initially and then longed for good MS-DOS games afterward.

I had an Amiga 1000 later on in high school, but never had much equipment for it since my father had little use for it. On the other hand, our Tandy 1000 had about 40 expansions welded to it prior to him bringing in a 386SX of Tandy origin around 1991-2.

It was a treasure in my Tandy days to find a game that used the TGA adapter to spare me the horrors of the 4 color palettes offered by CGA!

- Alex Freeman

August 17, 2018 at 6:31 pm

Wow! I remember hating how anti-competitive Microsoft was, but it was even worse than I realized. What it did to Quicken and Go in particular I find loathsome.

I do remember learning how to program with something called Microsoft Gameshop, which used QBasic. I didn’t realize it at the time, but QBasic was a major advance over earlier dialects of Basic like GW-Basic, Atari 800 Basic, and Commodore Basic. It was actually like a primitive version of Visual Basic in terms of syntax. I think calling Visual Basic Basic actually harmed it in the long run since people see Basic as a toy language. Maybe with a different name and somewhat different syntax, we’d be using that today instead of C#. Not that C# is bad by any means. It’s a great language, but it has the same aspects I don’t like about C-style syntax such as all blocks ending with } regardless what kind of block they are.

Fun fact: At one point, C# and Visual Basic were practically the same language but with different syntax before Microsoft discontinued the latter.

- DZ-Jay

August 18, 2018 at 1:31 pm

Actually, some of us view Visual Basic, notwithstanding the name, as a toy language. ;)

dZ.

- Alex Freeman

August 17, 2018 at 8:30 pm

Oh, BTW, are you going to cover Gary Kildall any further? I have some information on him you might find interesting.

- Jimmy Maher

August 18, 2018 at 7:14 am

I don’t really plan on it at this point, but he might come up again. Feel free to send me an email sometime. That said, I’m definitely *not* interested in digging into his personal life or his manner of death.

- Alex Freeman

August 18, 2018 at 6:57 pm

Oh, well, it was about disagreements over what exactly happened on that fateful day for him and also how it affected him. I’m not sure if that counts as digging into his personal life, though.

- Jimmy Maher

August 18, 2018 at 8:46 pm

Thanks, but no, that’s not a subject I want to cover.

- DZ-Jay

August 18, 2018 at 1:01 pm

Just a quick correction, Jimmy: Windows 3.1 had multimedia and other features, then Windows 3.11 had built-in networking. The latter is the so-called “Windows For Workgroups”; the networking aspect being the “workgroupy” part. It also had additional stability enhancements, geared towards a business environment.

Thus, Windows 3.11 is different from Windows 3.1, and is the one most commonly remembered by the techies who lived through the mid-1990s and saw hype rise of the Internet. ;)

dZ.

- DZ-Jay

August 18, 2018 at 1:03 pm

WTF?? “Saw hype rise of the Internet” should be “saw the rise of the Internet.”

Stupid auto-correct. It changes the meaning somewhat! LOL!

- Jimmy Maher

August 18, 2018 at 1:09 pm

No, there was a definitely a version 3.1 and version 3.11 of *both* Windows and Windows for Workgroups: https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-3/31. Probably the best way to think of them is as the “Home” and “Professional” editions of their day.

- Yuhong Bao

August 19, 2018 at 2:22 am

Not quite the same. Windows 3.11 was an update for only a few files that was also downloadable. WfW 3.11 was much bigger.

- Derek Fawcus

August 18, 2018 at 1:16 pm

Actually, there were at least 4 common versions of Windows 3.1

Windows 3.1; Windows 3.11
Windows for Workgroups 3.1; Windows for Workgroups 3.11

I recall seeing disks for all 4 in our office at various times.

As to multimedia, it was available as Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions, but for OEMs only, and maybe only for a short period of time. I believe it was based upon the (bug fixed) Windows 3.0a

- DZ-Jay

August 18, 2018 at 1:37 pm

I see you are both right. I stand corrected. My memory is not as good as I remember. :)

dZ.

- Anonymous

August 18, 2018 at 2:45 pm

Regarding TrueType, it wasn’t really jointly-developed, it came out of Apple and was licensed to Microsoft to make it more popular and thus more of a way to break Adobe’s control over DTP. Microsoft’s part of the deal (aside from just having TrueType on their computers) was to develop TrueImage, a PostScript clone for printers. In typical fashion, though, Microsoft instead bought a half-baked clone from a third party, and were so late getting it into decent shape that by then Apple and Adobe had made up, and TrueImage was basically never used.

It was basically an enemy of my enemy gambit on Apple’s part, and luckily for them, didn’t harm them too much with regard to the DTP market.

- Jimmy Maher

August 18, 2018 at 3:59 pm

I’d rather not get too far into the weeds on this one, which was why I avoided using phrases like “jointly developed,” and instead spoke of an “unusual cooperative project” which can be seen to encompass both TrueType and TrueImage. The real project, at least as Bill Gates remembers it, was to break the Adobe stranglehold over computer typefaces, and in this it certainly succeeded.

- Aula

August 18, 2018 at 3:06 pm

Although it’s far too recent for this series of articles, I think it’s interesting that Microsoft’s attempt to bring Windows to mobile phones was a dismal and expensive failure. It’s ironic that on that market Apple is not only more successful than Microsoft, but also earning the same kind of criticism as Microsoft did on the OS front.

- Lt. Nitpicker

August 18, 2018 at 3:37 pm

In a throwback to an earlier era of computing, MS-DOS still shipped with a copy of good old Microsoft QBASIC included…

QBASIC wasn’t that old, being (comparatively) recently introduced in MS DOS 5 as a replacement for the older (related to the BASIC interpreter shipped with the IBM PC in ROM which was enhanced by BASICA) GWBASIC. It was based on the (older but still decent) QuickBasic, which was part of a line that originated as a response to Borland’s Turbo [X] languages, with QBASIC being stripped down to remove certain features like a compiler and linker. I know this is very pedantic, but it’s worth noting.

- Jimmy Maher

August 18, 2018 at 3:56 pm

Your name precedes you. ;) But point taken. Thanks!

- Tomber

August 18, 2018 at 5:20 pm

Here’s a useless fact: the EDIT command introduced in DOS 5 actually runs QBASIC. If you get rid of QBASIC, EDIT is broken.

Windows 3.1 added 32-bit disk access(I think!), which IIRC was mainly for improved swap file performance.

Windows 3.11 was a bug fix(available as a patch download), it was so rare that most people don’t realize it existed.

Windows 3.1 for Workgroups was Windows 3.1 with networking.

Windows 3.11 for Workgroups added 32-bit file access, which was a feature back-ported from Chicago/Windows 95. It was significant enough to get call-out in their marketing for that version, and many people chose to run it even if they had no network. It avoided the calls into DOS for many file operations. It also had a 32-bit TCP/IP stack, which I think was useful for network adapters. A separate 3rd party stack was usually used if you were on dialup, IIRC.

- Jimmy Maher

August 18, 2018 at 6:22 pm

Yeah, I’ve been shying away from discussions of 16-bit versus 32-bit code because I think that’s best addressed as part of the Windows 95 story.

- Yuhong Bao

August 19, 2018 at 5:02 am

Don’t forget the OS/2 2.0 debacle, including the MS OS/2 2.0 SDKs and some of the unethical attacks.

- Aula

August 19, 2018 at 12:24 pm

Yes, both EDIT.EXE and HELP.EXE just execute QBASIC.EXE with specific switches. It’s actually easy to understand Microsoft’s reasoning: they needed a full-screen editor to replace EDLIN, and they needed a help system, and they had both as part of their BASIC programming environment, so why not include the BASIC interpreter in MS-DOS? They even included some example programs; I distinctly remember the game where two gorillas throw bananas at each other.

- stepped pyramids

August 19, 2018 at 7:57 pm

Figuring out how to edit the gorilla game so I could cheat and beat my brother was the very first thing I remember doing related to programming. I think there’s a lot of people working as developers today who wouldn’t have gotten started if it wasn’t for QBasic being bundled with the OS for free.

- Sniffnoy

August 18, 2018 at 6:15 pm

Typospotting: “balky” -> “bulky”

- Jimmy Maher

August 18, 2018 at 6:23 pm

As intended, actually. “Balky” as in “balks at doing most things you ask it to do.”

- Sniffnoy

August 19, 2018 at 7:00 pm

Oh, huh. Wasn’t familiar with that word. Guess I should actually look things up before submitting corrections. Thanks!

- stepped pyramids

August 19, 2018 at 8:05 pm

Seeing the Sound Recorder program caused a huge rush of nostalgia for me (as does QBasic, but I’ve revisited that more recently via the fascinating QB64). To me and my friends, that was almost as entertaining as any computer game. The only thing that rivaled it was when Macs got text-to-speech. Both programs served the vital role of making words like “fart” come out of the computer, but I also remember recording little skits and the like.

Plus you could slow it down or speed it up, which was great. I remember the multimedia era of computing having a lot of fun little interactive toys that weren’t exactly games.

- Ibrahim Gucukoglu

August 23, 2018 at 4:46 am

Hi.

Does anyone remember a packaged extention of products for Windows 3.1/3.11 called Windows Sound System 2.0? This was something I received when I purchased a New Media Toast&Jam multimedia pc card which was a soundcard (WavJammer) and SCSI (Toast) adapter. Also, a couple of products I remember from the day being free downloads for Windows from Microsoft was Video for Windows which included the support necessary to play AVI files (Audio Video Information) and Win32S, an attempt to bring 32-bit architecture to Windows 3.1 packaged with a couple of example games. I have a set of Windows 3.11 workgroup disks somewhere as well as a complete copy of Office 4.3C professional, the last version of Office to run on the 16-bit platform. I used Windows 3.11 well into my college days, we’re talking end of the nineties as Microsoft was still supporting it even then, with updates to the Windows File Manager winfile.exe to support the year 2000. Happy days.

- Pingback: Jimmy Maher e o Windows | Retrocomputaria

- PJN

December 5, 2018 at 12:05 am

“So, what we might called the”

could be

“So, what we might call the”

- Jimmy Maher

December 5, 2018 at 9:37 am

Thanks!

The Games of Windows
August 24, 2018

There are two stories to be told about games on Microsoft Windows during the operating environment’s first ten years on the market. One of them is extremely short, the other a bit longer and far more interesting. We’ll dispense with the former first.

During the first half of the aforementioned decade — the era of Windows 1 and 2 — the big game publishers, like most of their peers making other kinds of software, never looked twice at Microsoft’s GUI. Why should they? Very few people were even using the thing.

Yet even after Windows 3.0 hit the scene in 1990 and makers of other kinds of software stampeded to embrace it, game publishers continued to turn up their noses. The Windows API made life easier in countless ways for makers of word processors, spreadsheets, and databases, allowing them to craft attractive applications with a uniform look and feel. But it certainly hadn’t been designed with games in mind; they were so far down on Microsoft’s list of priorities as to be nonexistent. Games were in fact the one kind of software in which uniformity wasn’t a positive thing; gamers craved diverse experiences. As a programmer, you couldn’t even force a Windows game to go full-screen. Instead you were stuck all the time inside the borders of the window in which it ran; this, needless to say, didn’t do much for immersion. It was true that Windows’s library for programming graphics, known as the Graphics Device Interface, or GDI, liberated programmers from the tyranny of the hardware — from needing to program separate modules to interact properly with every video standard in the notoriously diverse MS-DOS ecosystem. Unfortunately, though, GDI was slow; it was fine for business graphics, but unusable for most of the popular game genres.

For all these reasons, game developers, alone among makers of software, stuck obstinately with MS-DOS throughout the early 1990s, even as everything else in mainstream computing went all Windows, all the time. It wouldn’t be until after the first decade of Windows was over that game developers would finally embrace it, helped along both by a carrot (Microsoft was finally beginning to pay serious attention to their needs) and a stick (the ever-expanding diversity of hardware on the market was making the MS-DOS bare-metal approach to programming untenable).

End of story number one.

The second, more interesting story about games on Windows deals with different kinds of games from the ones the traditional game publishers were flogging to the demographic who were happy to self-identify as gamers. The people who came to play these different kinds of games couldn’t imagine describing themselves in those terms — and, indeed, would likely have been somewhat insulted if you had suggested it to them. Yet they too would soon be putting in millions upon millions of hours every year playing games, albeit more often in antiseptic adult offices than in odoriferous teenage bedrooms. Whatever; the fact was, they were still playing games. In fact, they were playing games enough to make Windows, that alleged game-unfriendly operating environment, quite probably the most successful gaming platform of the early 1990s in terms of sheer number of person-hours spent playing. And all the while the “hardcore” gamers barely even noticed this most profound democratization of computer gaming that the world had yet seen.

Microsoft Windows, like its inspiration the Apple Macintosh, used what’s known as a skeuomorphic interface — an interface built out of analogues to real-world objects, such as paper documents, a desktop,  and a trashcan — to present a friendlier face of computing to people who may have been uncomfortable with the blinking command prompt of yore. It thus comes as little surprise that most of the early Windows games were skeuomorphic as well, being computerized versions of non-threateningly old-fashioned card and board games. In this, they were something of a throwback to the earliest days of personal computing in general, when hobbyists passed around BASIC versions of these same hoary classics, whose simple designs constituted some of the only ones that could be made to fit into the minuscule memories of the first microcomputers. With Windows, it seemed, the old had become new again, as computer gaming started over to try to capture a whole new demographic.

The very first game ever programmed to run in Windows is appropriately prototypical. When Tandy Trower took over the fractious and directionless Windows project at Microsoft in January of 1985, he found that a handful of applets that weren’t, strictly speaking, a part of the operating environment itself had already been completed. These included a calculator, a rudimentary text editor, and a computerized version of a board game called Reversi.

Reversi is an abstract game for two players that looks a bit like checkers and plays like a faster-paced, simplified version of the Japanese classic Go. Its origins are somewhat murky, but it was first popularized as a commercial product in late Victorian England. In 1971, an enterprising Japanese businessman made a couple of minor changes to the rules of this game that had long been considered in the public domain, patented the result, and started selling it as Othello. Under this name, it enjoys modest worldwide popularity to this day. Under both of its names, it also became an early favorite on personal computers, where its simple rules and relatively constrained possibility space lent themselves well to the limitations of programming in BASIC on a 16 K computer; Byte magazine, the bible of early microcomputer hackers, published a type-in Othello as early as its October 1977 issue.

A member of the Windows team named Chris Peters had decided to write a new version of the game under its original (and non-trademarked) name of Reversi in 1984, largely as one of several experiments — proofs of concept, if you will — into Windows application programming. Tandy Trower then pushed to get some of his team’s experimental applets, among them Reversi, included with the first release of Windows in November of 1985:

When the Macintosh was announced, I noted that Apple bundled a small set of applications, which included a small word processor called MacWrite and a drawing application called MacPaint. In addition, Lotus and Borland had recently released DOS products called Metro and SideKick that consisted of a small suite of character-based applications that could be popped up with a keyboard combination while running other applications. Those packages included a simple text editor, a calculator, a calendar, and a business-card-like database. So I went to [Bill] Gates and [Steve] Ballmer with the recommendation that we bundle a similar set of applets with Windows, which would include refining the ones already in development, as well as a few more to match functions comparable to these other products.

Interestingly, MacOS did not include any full-fledged games among its suite of applets; the closest it came was a minimalist sliding-number puzzle that filled all of 600 bytes and a maze on the “Guided Tour of Macintosh” disk that was described as merely a tool for learning to use the mouse. Apple, whose Apple II was found in more schools and homes than businesses and who were therefore viewed with contempt by much of the conservative corporate computing establishment, ran scared from any association of their latest machine with games. But Microsoft, on whose operating system MS-DOS much of corporate America ran, must have felt they could get away with a little more frivolity.

Still, Windows Reversi didn’t ultimately have much impact on much of anyone. Reversi in general was a game more suited to the hacker mindset than the general public, lacking the immediate appeal of a more universally known design, while the execution of this particular version of Reversi was competent but no more. And then, of course, very few people bought Windows 1 in the first place.

For a long time thereafter, Microsoft gave little thought to making more games for Windows. Reversi stuck around unchanged in the only somewhat more successful Windows 2, and was earmarked to remain in Windows 3.0 as well. Beyond that, Microsoft had no major plans for Windows gaming. And then, in one of the stranger episodes in the whole history of gaming, they were handed the piece of software destined to become almost certainly the most popular computer game of all time, reckoned in terms of person-hours played: Windows Solitaire.

The idea of a single-player card game, perfect for passing the time on long coach or railway journeys, had first spread across Europe and then the world during the nineteenth century. The game of Solitaire — or Patience, as it is still more commonly known in Britain — is really a collection of many different games that all utilize a single deck of everyday playing cards. The overarching name is, however, often used interchangeably with the variant known as Klondike, by far the most popular form of Solitaire.

Klondike Solitaire, like the many other variants, has many qualities that make it attractive for computer adaptation on a platform that gives limited scope for programmer ambition. Depending on how one chooses to define such things, a “game” of Solitaire is arguably more of a puzzle than an actual game, and that’s a good thing in this context: the fact that this is a truly single-player endeavor means that the programmer doesn’t have to worry about artificial intelligence at all. In addition, the rules are simple, and playing cards are fairly trivial to represent using even the most primitive computer graphics. Unsurprisingly, then, Solitaire was another favorite among the earliest microcomputer game developers.

It was for all the same reasons that a university student named Wes Cherry, who worked at Microsoft as an intern during the summer of 1988, decided to make a version of Klondike Solitaire for Windows that was similar to one he had spent a lot of time playing on the Macintosh. (Yes, even when it came to the games written by Microsoft’s interns, Windows could never seem to escape the shadow of the Macintosh.) There was, according to Cherry himself, “nothing great” about the code of the game he wrote; it was no better nor worse than a thousand other computerized Solitaire games. After all, how much could you really do with Solitaire one way or the other? It either worked or it didn’t. Thankfully, Cherry’s did, and even came complete with a selection of cute little card backs, drawn by his girlfriend Leslie Kooy. Asked what was the hardest aspect of writing the game, he points today to the soon-to-be-iconic cascade of cards that accompanied victory: “I went through all kinds of hoops to get that final cascade as fast as possible.” (Here we have a fine example of why most game programmers held Windows in such contempt…) At the end of his summer internship, he put his Solitaire on a server full of games and other little experiments that Microsoft’s programmers had created while learning how Windows worked, and went back to university.

Months later, some unknown manager at Microsoft sifted through the same server and discovered Cherry’s Solitaire. It seems that Microsoft had belatedly started looking for a new game — something more interesting than Reversi — to include with the upcoming Windows 3.0, which they intended to pitch as hard to consumers as businesspeople. They now decided that Solitaire ought to be that game. So, they put it through a testing process, getting Cherry to fix the bugs they found from his dorm room in return for a new computer. Meanwhile Susan Kare, the famed designer of MacOS’s look who was now working for Microsoft, gave Leslie Kooy’s cards a bit more polishing.

And so, when Windows 3.0 shipped in May of 1990, Solitaire was included. According to Microsoft, its purpose was to teach people how to use a GUI in a fun way, but that explanation was always something of a red herring. The fact was that computing was changing, machines were entering homes in big numbers once again, and giving people a fun game to play as part of an otherwise serious operating environment was no longer anathema. Certainly huge numbers of people would find Solitaire more than compelling enough as an end unto itself.

The ubiquity that Windows Solitaire went on to achieve — and still maintains to a large extent to this day[1] — is as difficult to overstate as it is to quantify. Microsoft themselves soon announced it to be the “most used” Windows application of all, easily besting heavyweight businesslike contenders like Word, Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, and WordPerfect. The game became a staple of office life all over the world, to be hauled out during coffee breaks and down times, to be kept always lurking minimized in the background, much to the chagrin of officious middle managers. By 1994, a Washington Post article would ask, only half facetiously, if Windows Solitaire was sowing the seeds of “the collapse of American capitalism.”

“Yup, sure,” says Frank Burns, a principal in the region’s largest computer bulletin board, the MetaNet. “You used to see offices laid out with the back of the video monitor toward the wall. Now it’s the other way around, so the boss can’t see you playing Solitaire.”

“It’s swallowed entire companies,” says Dennis J. “Gomer” Pyles, president of Able Bodied Computers in The Plains, Virginia. “The water-treatment plant in Warrenton, I installed [Windows on] their systems, and the next time I saw the client, the first thing he said to me was, ‘I’ve got 2000 points in Solitaire.'”

Airplanes full of businessmen resemble not board meetings but video arcades. Large gray men in large gray suits — lugging laptops loaded with spreadsheets — are consumed by beating their Solitaire scores, flight attendants observe.

Some companies, such as Boeing, routinely remove Solitaire from the Windows package when it arrives, or, in some cases, demand that Microsoft not even ship the product with the game inside. Even PC Magazine banned game-playing during office hours. “Our editor wanted to lessen the dormitory feel of our offices. Advertisers would come in and the entire research department was playing Solitaire. It didn’t leave the best impression,” reported Tin Albano, a staff editor.

Such articles have continued to crop up from time to time in the business pages ever since — as, for instance, the time in 2006 when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg summarily terminated an employee for playing Solitaire on the job, creating a wave of press coverage both positive and negative. But the crackdowns have always been to no avail; it’s as hard to imagine the modern office without Microsoft Solitaire as it is to imagine it without Microsoft Office.

Which isn’t to say that the Solitaire phenomenon is limited to office life. My retired in-laws, who have quite possibly never played another computer game in either of their lives, both devote hours every week to Solitaire in their living room. A Finnish study from 2007 found it to be the favorite game of 36 percent of women and 13 percent of men; no other game came close to those numbers. Even more so than Tetris, that other great proto-casual game of the early 1990s, Solitaire is, to certain types of personality at any rate, endlessly appealing. Why should that be?

To begin to answer that question, we might turn to the game’s pre-digital past. Whitmore Jones’s Games of Patience for One or More Players, a compendium of many Solitaire variants, was first published in 1898. Its introduction is fascinating, presaging much of the modern discussion about Microsoft Solitaire and casual gaming in general.

In days gone by, before the world lived at the railway speed as it is doing now, the game of Patience was looked upon with somewhat contemptuous toleration, as a harmless but dull amusement for idle ladies, and was ironically described as “a roundabout method of sorting the cards”; but it has gradually won for itself a higher place. For now, when the work, and still more the worries, of life have so enormously increased and multiplied, the value of a pursuit interesting enough to absorb the attention without unduly exciting the brain, and so giving the mind a rest, as it were, a breathing space wherein to recruit its faculties, is becoming more and more recognised and appreciated.

In addition to illustrating how concerns about the pace of contemporary life and nostalgia for the good old days are an eternal part of the human psyche, this passage points to the heart of Solitaire’s appeal, whether played with real cards or on a computer: the way that it can “absorb the attention without unduly exciting the brain.” It’s the perfect game to play when killing time at the end of the workday, as a palate cleanser between one task and another, or, as in the case of my in-laws, as a semi-active accompaniment to the idle practice of watching the boob tube.

Yet Solitaire isn’t a strictly rote pursuit even for those with hundreds of hours of experience playing it; if it was, it would have far less appeal. Indeed, it isn’t even particularly fair. About 20 percent of shuffles will result in a game that isn’t winnable at all, and Wes Cherry’s original computer implementation at least does nothing to protect you from this harsh mathematical reality. Still, when you get stuck there’s always that “Deal” menu option waiting for you up there in the corner, a tempting chance to reshuffle the cards and try your hand at a new combination. So, while Solitaire is the very definition of a low-engagement game, it’s also a game that has no natural end point; somehow the “Deal” option looks equally tempting whether you’ve just won or just lost. After being sucked in by its comfortable similarity to an analog game of cards almost everyone of a certain age has played, people can and do proceed to keep playing it for a lifetime.

As in the case of Tetris, there’s room to debate whether spending so many hours upon such a repetitive activity as playing Solitaire is psychologically healthy. For my own part, I avoid it and similar “time waster” games as just that — a waste of time that doesn’t leave me feeling good about myself afterward. By way of another perspective, though, there is this touching comment that was once left by a Reddit user to Wes Cherry himself:

I just want to tell you that this is the only game I play. I have autism and don’t game due to not being able to cope with the sensory processing – but Solitaire is “my” game.

I have a window of it open all day, every day and the repetitive clicking is really soothing. It helps me calm down and mentally function like a regular person. It makes a huge difference in my quality of life. I’m so glad it exists. Never thought there would be anyone I could thank for this, but maybe I can thank you. *random Internet stranger hugs*

Cherry wrote Solitaire in Microsoft’s offices on company time, and thus it was always destined to be their intellectual property. He was never paid anything at all, beyond a free computer, for creating the most popular computer game in history. He says he’s fine with this. He’s long since left the computer industry, and now owns and operates a cider distillery on Vashon Island in Puget Sound.

The popularity of Solitaire convinced Microsoft, if they needed convincing, that simple games like this had a place — potentially a profitable place — in Windows. Between 1990 and 1992, they released four “Microsoft Entertainment Packs,” each of which contained seven little games of varying degrees of inspiration, largely cobbled together from more of the projects coded by their programmers in their spare time. These games were the polar opposite of the ones being sold by traditional game publishers, which were growing ever more ambitious, with increasingly elaborate storylines and increasing use of video and sound recorded from the real world. The games from Microsoft were instead cast in the mold of Cherry’s Solitaire: simple games that placed few demands on either their players or the everyday office computers Microsoft envisioned running them, as indicated by the blurbs on the boxes: “No more boring coffee breaks!”; “You’ll never get out of the office!” Bruce Ryan, the manager placed in charge of the Entertainment Packs, later summarized the target demographic as “loosely supervised businesspeople.”

The centerpiece of the first Entertainment Pack was a passable version of Tetris, created under license from Spectrum Holobyte, who owned the computer rights to the game. Wes Cherry, still working out of his dorm room, provided a clone of another older puzzle game called Pipe Dream to be the second Entertainment Pack’s standard bearer; he was even compensated this time, at least modestly. As these examples illustrate, the Entertainment Packs weren’t conceptually ambitious in the least, being largely content to provide workmanlike copies of established designs from both the analog and digital realms. Among the other games included were Solitaire variants other than Klondike, a clone of the Activision tile-matching hit Shanghai, a 3D Tic-tac-toe game, a golf game (for the ultimate clichéd business-executive experience), and even a version of John Horton Conway’s venerable study of cellular life cycles, better known as the game of Life. (One does have to wonder what bored office workers made of that).

Established journals of record like Computer Gaming World barely noticed the Entertainment Packs, but they sold more than half a million copies in two years, equaling or besting the numbers of the biggest hardcore hits of the era, such as the Wing Commander series. Yet even that impressive number rather understates the popularity of Microsoft’s time wasters. Given that they had no copy protection, and given that they would run on any computer capable of running Windows, the Entertainment Packs were by all reports pirated at a mind-boggling rate, passed around offices like cakes baked for the Christmas potluck.

For all their success, though, nothing on any of the Entertainment Packs came close to rivaling Wes Cherry’s original Solitaire game in terms of sheer number of person-hours played. The key factor here was that the Entertainment Packs were add-on products; getting access to these games required motivation and effort from the would-be player, along with — at least in the case of the stereotypical coffee-break player from Microsoft’s own promotional literature — an office environment easygoing enough that one could carry in software and install it on one’s work computer. Solitaire, on the other hand, came already included with every fresh Windows installation, so long as an office’s system administrators weren’t savvy and heartless enough to seek it out and delete it. The archetypal low-effort game, its popularity was enabled by the fact that it also took no effort whatsoever to gain access to it. You just sort of stumbled over it while trying to figure out this new Windows thing that the office geek had just installed on your faithful old computer, or when you saw your neighbor in the next cubicle playing and asked what the heck she was doing. Five minutes later, it had its hooks in you.

It was therefore significant when Microsoft added a new game — or rather an old one — to 1992’s Windows 3.1. Minesweeper had actually debuted as part of the first Entertainment Pack, where it had become a favorite of quite a number of players. Among them was none other than Bill Gates himself, who became so addicted that he finally deleted the game from his computer — only to start getting his fix on his colleagues’ machines. (This creates all sorts of interesting fuel for the imagination. How do you handle it when your boss, who also happens to be the richest man in the world, is hogging your computer to play Minesweeper?) Perhaps due to the CEO’s patronage, Minesweeper became part of Windows’s standard equipment in 1992, replacing the unloved Reversi.

Unlike Solitaire and most of the Entertainment Pack games, Minesweeper was an original design, written by staff programmers Robert Donner and Curt Johnson in their spare time. That said, it does owe something to the old board game Battleship, to very early computer games like Hunt the Wumpus, and in particular to a 1985 computer game called Relentless Logic. You click on squares in a grid to uncover their contents, which can be one of three things: nothing at all, indicating that neither this square nor any of its adjacent squares contain mines; a number, indicating that this square is clear but said number of its adjacent squares do contain mines; or — unlucky you! — an actual mine, which kills you, ending the game. Like Solitaire, Minesweeper straddles the line — if such a line exists — between game and puzzle, and it isn’t a terribly fair take on either: while the program does protect you to the extent that the first square you click will never contain a mine, it’s possible to get into a situation through no fault of your own where you can do nothing but play the odds on your next click. But, unlike Solitaire, Minesweeper does have more of the trappings of a conventional videogame, including a timer which encourages you to play quickly to achieve the maximum score.

Doubtless because of those more overt videogame trappings, Minesweeper never became quite the office fixture that Solitaire did. Those who did get sucked in by it, however, found it even more addictive, perhaps not least because it does demand a somewhat higher level of engagement. It too became an iconic part of life with Microsoft Windows, and must rank high on any list of most-played computer games of all time, if the data only existed to compile such a thing. After all, it did enjoy one major advantage over even Solitaire for office workers with uptight bosses: it ran in a much smaller window, and thus stood out far less on a crowded screen when peering eyes glanced into one’s cubicle.

Microsoft included a third game with Windows for Workgroups 3.1, a variant intended for a networked office environment. True to that theme, Hearts was a version of the evergreen card game which could be played against computer opponents, but which was most entertaining when played together by up to four real people, all on separate computers. Its popularity was somewhat limited by the fact that it came only with Windows for Workgroups, but, again, that adjective is relative. By any normal computer-gaming standard, Hearts was hugely popular indeed for quite some years, serving for many people as their introduction to the very concept of online gaming — a concept destined to remake much of the landscape of computer gaming in general in years to come. Certainly I can remember many a spirited Hearts tournament at my workplaces during the 1990s. The human, competitive element always made Hearts far more appealing to me than the other games I’ve discussed in this article.

But whatever your favorite happened to be, the games of Windows became a vital part of a process I’ve been documenting in fits and starts over the last year or two of writing this history: an expansion of the demographics that were playing games, accomplished not by making parents and office workers suddenly fall in love with the massive, time-consuming science-fiction or fantasy epics upon which most of the traditional computer-game industry remained fixated, but rather by meeting them where they lived. Instead of five-course meals, Microsoft provided ludic snacks suited to busy lives and limited attention spans. None of the games I’ve written about here are examples of genius game design in the abstract; their genius, to whatever extent it exists, is confined to worming their way into the psyche in a way that can turn them into compulsions. Yet, simply by being a part of the software that just about everybody, with the exception of a few Macintosh stalwarts, had on their computers in the 1990s, they got hundreds of millions of people playing computer games for the first time. The mainstream Ludic Revolution, encompassing the gamification of major swaths of daily life, began in earnest on Microsoft Windows.

(Sources: the book A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players by Jesper Juul; Byte of October 1977; Computer Gaming World of September 1992; Washington Post of March 9 1994; New York Times of February 10 2006; online articles at Technologizer, The Verge, B3TA, Reddit, Game Set Watch, Tech Radar, Business Insider, and Danny Glasser’s personal blog.)

1. The game got a complete rewrite for Windows Vista in 2006. Presumably any traces of Wes Cherry’s original code that might have been left were excised at that time. Beginning with Windows 8 in 2012, a standalone Klondike Solitaire game was no longer included as a standard part of every Windows installation — a break with more than twenty years of tradition. Perhaps due to the ensuing public outcry, the advertising-supported Microsoft Solitaire Collection did become a component of Windows 10 upon the latter’s release in 2015. ↩

Comments
40 Responses

- Gordon Tisher

August 24, 2018 at 5:09 pm

I remember playing Chris Crawford’s _Balance of Power_ on PC in the mid-to-late 80’s — it came with a runtime version of Windows 1. IIRC there was some marketing material that was hyping Windows along with it.

- Aula

August 24, 2018 at 5:18 pm

“Our editor wanted to lesson the dormitory feel…”

from the context, I think “to lessen” is what was intended.

Anyway, I used to be a Minesweeper addict. Not that I didn’t play Solitaire as well, but I didn’t find it anywhere near as compelling. Maybe the cheat code in Win 3.1 Minesweeper had some effect, although I also played a lot of the rewritten Win 9x Minesweeper which had different graphics and no cheat code (that I ever knew, anyway). Interestingly Win XP went back to the original Minesweeper (old graphics and same cheat code).

Windows 3 also had some shareware games. The most ambitious I can remember is Castle of the Winds, a Nethack clone with graphics.

- Jimmy Maher

August 24, 2018 at 6:20 pm

Thanks!

- Alex Smith

August 24, 2018 at 5:38 pm

I am not so sure the Minesweeper concept is quite so original, or at least I think there are some computer game analogs you overlook. There was a British game in 1983 called Mined-Out in which you have to forge a path to an exit while avoiding mines. As you enter a square, the game tells you how many mines are adjacent.

If we want to argue that an obscure British game that has a slightly different objective is probably not an influence (quite a valid argument!), you also have the 1985 DOS game Relentless Logic. Again, its a get from point A to point B game, but looking at it, I find it hard to imagine Donner and/or Johnson were not exposed to this game, though parallel evolution is certainly not impossible. Either way, they did create their own twist on the concept, so its not like they were ripping anyone off.

Mined-Out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqFWdqaoQPw

Relentless Logic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=78&v=zK90xuHlaYg

- Jimmy Maher

August 24, 2018 at 6:32 pm

I hadn’t seen Relentless Logic. Added to the litany of possibly influences. Thanks!

- Casey Muratori

August 24, 2018 at 5:51 pm

This is taxing my memory but I thought I would bring it up just in case: for Windows Vista, Oberon Games was contracted to replace all the card games with freshly made ones. I guess I never looked at an actual release of Vista’s games so I don’t know what shipped with it, but I was curious about your comment that Wes Cherry’s Solitaire was “rewritten for Windows 8”. Are you sure it was 8 and not Vista?

I can’t remember, so it may be that both the original and the new Oberon ones came with Vista, or something, and the original Solitaire wasn’t removed until much later. But I just wanted to make sure that timeline was right!

Thanks for another fantastic article,
– Casey

- Jimmy Maher

August 24, 2018 at 6:39 pm

The big switch that happened with Windows 8 was that the Klondike Solitaire game was no longer a standalone game for itself, and didn’t ship with Windows. It rather became a part of the downloadable Microsoft Solitaire Collection. But it does look like the version that shipped with Windows Vista and 7 was rewritten from the classic Solitaire, which must have last appeared in Windows XP. Will make an edit. Thanks!

- Tomber

August 24, 2018 at 8:15 pm

For some reason, I was surprised to see that Win 8 (and even worse on 10) had turned the Solitaire into an ‘App.’ I wasn’t the only one, as somebody figured out how to patch up and package the Vista/Win7 games into an installer that works on Win8/10 32 or 64. It’s about 171MB, and be careful whether it is clean. But the games do live on, even as MS drops them or corrupts them. (Really, the ‘apps’ are like going back to Windows 1)

- Yeechang Lee

August 24, 2018 at 6:22 pm

The Mac did ship in 1984 with a game: Puzzle.

- Jimmy Maher

August 24, 2018 at 6:51 pm

It’s perhaps somewhat debatable whether that qualifies as a “real” game even in comparison to something fairly basic like Reversi or Solitaire. But point taken and edit made. Thanks!

- Pierre

August 24, 2018 at 6:22 pm

What I remember of Solitaire was using it to pseudo benchmark graphics cards and their Windows acceleration power. I just had to win the game first. ;)

And I do remember encouraging my mother to play Solitaire to improve her mouse skills. It worked a little too well. At one point she was double clicking everything! She still plays it almost daily at the age of 80.

As always, this is a great article. Thank you.

- Sniffnoy

August 24, 2018 at 6:48 pm

Of course there was one game in the Entertainment Packs that definitely can’t be considered a small game, namely, the Windows port of Chip’s Challenge! Which is a whole story of its own, but one I assume you’re not going into here, that seeming a bit too tangential…

- Rowan Lipkovits

August 25, 2018 at 6:59 am

Note on Chip’s Challenge seconded – courtesy of Windows, perhaps Epyx’s biggest hit of all time?

- John Elliott

August 24, 2018 at 10:07 pm

Graphics Device Layer, or GDI

I think that should read “Graphics Device Interface”.

- Jimmy Maher

August 25, 2018 at 5:47 am

Indeed. Thanks!

- Keith Palmer

August 24, 2018 at 10:48 pm

After the way the previous article on Windows wrapped up, I admit to wondering a little about impressions of a follow-up on Solitaire; I’m glad to see this piece. Knowing about the ubiquity of the game, I was slightly intrigued to discover, in the April 1983 issue of Creative Computing, a software review by former expert blackjack player Ken Uston where he was dubious about computer solitaire in particular. At the same time, I’m willing to suppose the program he reviewed was limited by the Apple II’s colour graphics and may not have had the “tactile experience” resemblance he mentioned through using some more complicated control scheme than a mouse offered. I do know a solitaire game for the Macintosh was being advertised in the back of Macworld in 1984; Klondike and Canfield variants using its card graphics later wound up on shareware disks. What I didn’t know was that Windows Solitaire had been inspired by a Macintosh implementation, perhaps even the one I just mentioned…

- Jrd

August 25, 2018 at 5:43 am

> equally or besting the numbers

“equaling”?

- Jimmy Maher

August 25, 2018 at 5:48 am

Thanks!

- Brent Ellison

August 26, 2018 at 6:08 pm

I assume you didn’t cover SkiFree here because it will be exhaustively explored in an eight-part history/analysis series next month?

- Jimmy Maher

August 26, 2018 at 8:47 pm

Actually, because I’ve never heard of it before. ;)

- ryuugami

August 26, 2018 at 6:50 pm

> its original (and non-copyrighted) name of Reversi

Non-trademarked.

Well, technically, non-copyrighted as well… though that doesn’t impart any new information, as the name isn’t copyrightable in the first place :)

- Jimmy Maher

August 26, 2018 at 8:43 pm

Good catch. Thanks!

- Martin

August 26, 2018 at 8:48 pm

Talking about the two and you said a few rule changes, what are the rule changes?

- Jimmy Maher

August 27, 2018 at 5:30 am

At the opening of the game in Othello, the pieces are place in a standard pattern. In Reversi, they can be freely placed by the players where they will.

- Dave W.

August 28, 2018 at 9:21 pm

In that case, the Reversi implementations I’ve seen (including the Windows one) are using the Othello rules, since they all start from the standard pattern. Calling it Reversi keeps them out of trademark legal issues, though, and I doubt the starting position is novel enough to warrant IP protection, especially as it could arise naturally in a traditional game of Reversi.

- Michael

August 29, 2018 at 7:22 pm

Last paragraph: “encompassing the gameification of major swaths of daily life.”
I think that’s “gamification,” unless there’s an alternate spelling I don’t know about.

- Jimmy Maher

August 30, 2018 at 3:10 pm

Right you are. Thanks!

- Alex Freeman

August 30, 2018 at 9:24 pm

In addition to illustrating how concerns about the pace of contemporary life and nostalgia for the good old days are an eternal part of the human psyche, this passage…

I just love passages like that. I wonder if someone’s built up a repository of passages showing how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

- Nathan

August 30, 2018 at 10:35 pm

My family got our first PC (a dual-floppy clone running MS-DOS 2.11) in 1985. We replaced it at the end of 1995 with one running Windows 95, so I got a relatively late introduction to the mouse. I was basically only interested in continuing to run my DOS software (on a hard disk for the first time!) so I mostly just exited to “DOS mode” to maximize the RAM available to my programs. I was still running a shareware terminal emulator to connect to BBSes; I had no interest in using the Web. But Freecell and Minesweeper did eventually keep me in Windows long enough to learn how to use a mouse. If not for those games, I might still prefer bash over KDE.

- Harland

September 2, 2018 at 9:57 am

“concerns about the pace of contemporary life and nostalgia for the good old days are an eternal part of the human psyche”

These are not an eternal part of the human psyche. This only happens in times of great change. Moreover all such great changes are not for the better. In Lady Cadogan’s time, was it really an improvement for workers to be abused by heartless capitalists in dangerous factories? Today, we run faster and faster just to stay in the same place.

A more interesting issue to visit would be how Majiang, a game quite well-known in Asia, was bastardized to become a silly tile-matching game under Windows.

- Gnoman

September 3, 2018 at 2:17 am

Solitare Mahjong appears to have originated as a free software for PLATO systems back in 1981. The author claims that he based it on a Chinese children’s game using Mahjong tiles, but I don’t know if anybody’s ever tracked such a game down.

- joe

September 19, 2018 at 7:13 pm

I know it’s not windows specific, but no love for gorilla.bas?

- Serge

September 29, 2018 at 2:29 pm

Please, listen to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSO_T4Di940

The game you’ve mentioned has a wonderful MT-32 track.

Also, Zeliard, the favorite game of my youth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy4YoBa0yoo&t=257s

- David

October 1, 2018 at 5:31 am

I can definitively say that Curt built the initial OS/2 version of MineSweeper (that Robert then ported to Windows) based on the early Mac version called Mines.

We worked on the same floor at Microsoft and he stopped by one evening while I was playing the game after work (I still only had 8-bit systems at home). I showed it to him and he got inspired and went off and wrote his own version.

I got the game while in college via BITNET from a Mac software repository in those pre-internet days.

- Oliver

October 4, 2018 at 11:35 am

The versions of Lady Cadogan’s Illustrated Games of Patience I can find on the internet (Project Gutenberg, Google Books) do not have an introduction. What edition is your quote from ?

- Jimmy Maher

October 4, 2018 at 11:50 am

I’m afraid I mis-attributed the quote. Should have been Whitmore Jones’s Games of Patience for One or More Players, first published in 1898. Sorry about that!

- Jeff Hanna

October 28, 2018 at 10:56 am

Very late in the lifespan of Windows 3.1 / 3.11, around 1994 or so, Microsoft released a set of libraries, called WinG that fixed a problem with the Windows Graphics Device Interface to make it more usable by games. It led to some commercial games appearing on Windows 3.x – it was demonstrated with a version of Doom that ran just as fast as the MS-DOS version. WinG also facilitated the first version of Photoshop on Windows.

Air Warrior, by Kesmai, was ported to work with WinG. While it didn’t lead to a major increase in pilots on GEnie, it was one of the first, if not the very first, examples of a commercial 3D networked game running on WindowWinGs 3.x

WinG wasn’t around very long, as Windows 95, which was designed to support gaming, was released very soon after it came out.

- Jimmy Maher

October 28, 2018 at 6:31 pm

Yes, WinG is an interesting story. I do plan to fold some of it into the story of DirectX, when I get there…

- Richard Wells

November 15, 2018 at 1:58 pm

There is a minor mistake in the article. The Mac shipped with two games. One was the Puzzle accessory. The other was Amazing – a maze game on the Guided Tour of the Macintosh disk. Same goal of teaching how to move the mouse. Since some of the Mac developers had worked with UCSD Pascal, they may have been inspired by the maze game included in UCSD Pascal intended to teach cursor key movement.

- Jimmy Maher

November 16, 2018 at 4:01 pm

Thanks!

Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)
September 7, 2018

Is it the actor or the drama
Playing to the gallery?
Or is it but the character
Of any single member of the audience
That forms the plot
of each and every play?

— “Hanging in the Gallery” by Dave Cousins

I was introduced to the contrast between art as artifact and art as experience by an episode of Northern Exposure, a television show which meant a great deal to my younger self. In “Burning Down the House,” Chris in the Morning, the town of Cicely, Alaska’s deejay, has decided to fling a living cow through the air using a trebuchet. Why? To create a “pure moment.”

“I didn’t know what you are doing was art,” says Shelley, the town’s good-hearted bimbo. “I thought it had to be in a frame, or like Jesus and Mary and the saints in church.”

“You know, Shell,” answers Chris in his insufferable hipster way, “the human soul chooses to express itself in a profound profusion of ways, not just the plastic arts.”

“Plastic hearts?”

“Arts! Plastic arts! Like sculpture, painting, charcoal. Then there’s music and poetry and dance. Lots of people, Susan Sontag notwithstanding, include photography.”

“Slam dancing?”

“Insofar as it reflects the slam dancer’s inner conflict with society through the beat… yeah, sure, why not? You see, Shelley, what I’m dealing with is the aesthetics of the transitory. I’m creating tomorrow’s memories, and, as memories, my images are as immortal as art which is concrete.”

Certain established art forms — those we generally refer to as the performing arts — have this quality baked into them in an obvious way. Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones once made the seemingly arrogant pronouncement that his band was “the greatest rock-and-roll band in the world” — but later modified his statement by noting that “on any given night, it’s a different band that’s the greatest rock-and-roll band in the world.” It might be the Rolling Stones playing before an arena full of 20,000 fans one night, and a few sweaty teenagers playing for a cellar full of twelve the next. It has nothing to do with the technical skill of the musicians; music is not a skills competition. A band rather becomes the greatest rock-and-roll band in the world the moment when the music goes someplace that transcends notes and measures. This is what the ancient Greeks called the kairos moment: the moment when past and future and thought itself fall away and there are just the band, the audience, and the music.

But what of what Chris in the Morning calls the “plastic arts,” those oriented toward producing some physical (or at least digital) artifact that will remain in the world long after the artist has died? At first glance, the kairos moment might seem to have little relevance here. Look again, though. Art must always be an experience, in the sense that there is a viewer, a reader, or a player who must experience it. And the meaning it takes on for that person — or lack thereof — will always be profoundly colored by where she was, who she was, when she was at the time. You can, in other words, find your own transitory transcendence inside the pages of a book just as easily as you can in a concert hall.

The problem with the plastic arts is that it’s too easy to destroy the fragile beauty of that initial impression. It’s too easy to return to the text trying to recapture the transcendent moment, too easy to analyze it and obsess over it and thereby to trample it into oblivion.

But what if we could jettison the plastic permanence from one of the plastic arts, creating something that must live or die — like a rock band in full flight or Chris in the Morning’s flying cow — only as a transitory transcendence? What if we could write a poem which the reader couldn’t return to and fuss over and pin down like a butterfly in a display case? What if we could write a poem that the reader could literally only read one time, that would flow over her once and leave behind… what? As it happens, an unlikely trio of collaborators tried to do just that in 1992.

Very early that year, a rather strange project prospectus made the rounds of the publishing world. Its source was Kevin Begos, Jr., who was known, to whatever extent he was known at all, as a publisher of limited-edition art books for the New York City gallery set. This new project, however, was something else entirely, and not just because it involved the bestselling science-fiction author William Gibson, who was already ascending to a position in the mainstream literary pantheon as “the prophet of cyberspace.”

Kevin Begos Jr., publisher of museum-quality, limited edition books, has brought together artist Dennis Ashbaugh (known for his large paintings of computer viruses and his DNA “portraits”) and writer William Gibson (who coined the term cyberspace, then explored the concept in his award-winning books Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive) to produce a collaborative Artist’s Book.

In an age of artificial intelligence, recombinant genetics, and radical, technologically-driven cultural change, this “Book” will be as much a challenge as a possession, as much an enigma as a “story”.

The Text, encrypted on a computer disc along with a Virus Program written especially for the project, will mutate and destroy itself in the course of a single “reading”. The Collector/Reader may either choose to access the Text, thus setting in motion a process in which the Text becomes merely a Memory, or preserve the Text unread, in its “pure” state — an artifact existing exclusively in cyberspace.

Ashbaugh’s etchings, which allude to the potent allure and taboo of Genetic Manipulation, are both counterpoint and companion-piece to the Text. Printed on beautiful rag paper, their texture, odor, form, weight, and color are qualities unavailable to the Text in cyberspace. (The etchings themselves will undergo certain irreparable changes following their initial viewing.)

This Artist’s Book (which is not exactly a “book” at all) is cased in a wrought metal box, the Mechanism, which in itself becomes a crucial, integral element of the Text. This book-as-object raises unique questions about Art, Time, Memory, Possession—and the Politics of Information Control. It will be the first Digital Myth.

William Gibson had been friends with Dennis Ashbaugh for some time, ever since the latter had written him an admiring letter a few years after his landmark novel Neuromancer was published. The two men worked in different mediums, but they shared an interest in the transformations that digital technology and computer networking were having on society. They corresponded regularly, although they met only once in person.

Yet it was neither Gibson the literary nor Ashbaugh the visual artist who conceived their joint project’s central conceit; it was instead none other than the author of the prospectus above, publisher Kevin Begos, Jr., another friend of Ashbaugh. Ashbaugh, who like Begos was based in New York City, had been looking for a way to collaborate with Gibson, and came to his publisher friend looking for ideas that might be compelling enough to interest such a high-profile science-fiction writer, who lived all the way over in Vancouver, Canada, just about as far away as it was possible to get from New York City and still be in North America. “The idea kind of came out of the blue,” says Begos: “to do a book on a computer disk that destroys itself after you read it.” Gibson, Begos, thought, would be the perfect writer to which to pitch such a project, for he innately understood the kairos moment in art; his writing was thoroughly informed by the underground rhythms of the punk and new-wave music scenes. And, being an acknowledged fan of experimental literature like that written by his hero William S. Burroughs, he wasn’t any stranger to conceptual literary art of the sort which this idea of a self-destroying text constituted.

Even so, Begos says that it took him and Ashbaugh a good six to nine months to convince Gibson to join the project. Even after agreeing to participate, Gibson proved to be the most passive of the trio by far, providing the poem that was to destroy itself early on but then doing essentially nothing else after that. It’s thus ironic and perhaps a little unfair that the finished piece remains today associated almost exclusively with the name of William Gibson. If one person can be said to be the mastermind of the project as a whole, that person must be Kevin Begos, Jr., not William Gibson.

Begos, Ashbaugh, and Gibson decided to call their art project Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), adopting the name Gibson gave to his poem for the project as a whole. Still, there was, as the prospectus above describes, much more to it than the single self-immolating disk which contained the poem. We can think of the whole artwork as being split into two parts: a physical component, provided by Ashbaugh, and a digital component, provided by Gibson, with Begos left to tie them together. Both components were intended to be transitory in their own ways. (Their transcendence, of course, must be in the eye of the beholder.)

Begos said that he would make and sell just 455 copies of the complete work, ranging in price from $450 for the basic edition to $7500 for a “deluxe copy in a bronze case.” The name of William Gibson lent what would otherwise have been just a wacky avant-garde art project a great deal of credibility with the mainstream press. It was discussed far and wide in the spring and summer of 1992, finding its way into publications like People, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, and USA Today long before it existed as anything but a set of ideas inside the minds of its creators. A reporter for Details magazine repeated the description of a Platonic ideal of Agrippa that Begos relayed to him from his fond imagination:

‘Agrippa’ comes in a rough-hewn black box adorned with a blinking green light and an LCD readout that flickers with an endless stream of decoded DNA. The top opens like a laptop computer, revealing a hologram of a circuit board. Inside is a battered volume, the pages of which are antique rag-paper, bound and singed by hand.

Like a frame of unprocessed film, ‘Agrippa’ begins to mutate the minute it hits the light. Ashbaugh has printed etchings of DNA nucleotides, but then covered them with two separate sets of drawings: One, in ultraviolet ink, disappears when exposed to light for an hour; the other, in infrared ink, only becomes visible after an hour in the light. A paper cavity in the center of the book hides the diskette that contains Gibson’s fiction, digitally encoded for the Macintosh or the IBM.

[…]

The disk contained Gibson’s poem Agrippa: “The story scrolls on the screen at a preset pace. There is no way to slow it down, speed it up, copy it, or remove the encryption that ultimately causes it to disappear.” Once the text scrolled away, the disk got wiped, and that was that. All that would be left of Agrippa was the reader’s memory of it.

The three tricksters delighted over the many paradoxes of their self-destroying creation with punk-rock glee. Ashbaugh laughed about having to send two copies of it to the copyright office — because to register it for a copyright, you had to read it, but when you read it you destroyed it. Gibson imagined some musty academic of the future trying to pry the last copy out of the hands of a collector so he could read it — and thereby destroy it definitively for posterity. He described it as “a cruel joke on book collectors.”

As I’ve already noted, Ashbaugh’s physical side of the Agrippa project was destined to be overshadowed by Gibson’s digital side, to the extent that the former is barely remembered at all today. Part of the problem was the realities of working with physical materials, which conspired to undo much of the original vision for the physical book. The LCD readout and the circuit-board hologram fell by the wayside, as did Ashbaugh’s materializing and de-materializing pictures. (One collector has claimed that the illustrations “fade a bit” over time, but one does have to wonder whether even that is wishful thinking.)

But the biggest reason that one aspect of Agrippa so completely overshadowed the other was ironically the very thing that got the project noticed at all in so many mainstream publications: William Gibson’s fame in comparison to his unknown collaborators. People magazine didn’t even bother to mention that there was anything to Agrippa at all beyond the disk; “I know Ashbaugh was offended by that,” says Begos. Unfortunately obscured by this selective reporting was an intended juxtaposition of old and new forms of print, a commentary on evolving methods of information transmission. Begos was as old-school as publishers got, working with a manual printing press not very dissimilar from the one invented by Gutenberg; each physical edition of Agrippa was a handmade object d’art. Yet all most people cared about was the little disk hidden inside it.

So, even as the media buzzed with talk about the idea of a digital poem that could only be read once, Begos had a hell of a time selling actual, physical copies of the book. As of December of 1992, a few months after it went to press, Begos said he still had about 350 copies of it sitting around waiting for buyers. It seems unlikely that most of these were ever sold; they were quite likely destroyed in the end, simply because the demand wasn’t there. Begos relates a typical anecdote:

There was a writer from a newspaper in the New York area who was writing something on Agrippa. He was based out on Long Island and I was based in Manhattan. He sent a photographer to photograph the book one afternoon. And he’d done a phone interview with me, though I don’t remember if he called Gibson or not. He checked in with me after the photographer had come to make sure that it had gone alright, and I said yes. I said, “Well aren’t you coming by; don’t you want to see the book?” He said “No; you know, the traffic’s really bad; you know, I just don’t have time.” He published his story the next day, and there was nothing wrong with it, but I found that very odd. It probably would have taken him an hour to drive in, or he could have waited a few days. But some people, they almost seemed resistant to seeing the whole package.

It’s inevitable, given the focus of this site, that our interest too will largely be captured by the digital aspect of the work. Yet the physical artwork — especially the full-fledged $7500 edition — certainly is an interesting creation in its own right. Rather than looking sleek and modern, as one might expect from the package framing a digital text from the prophet of cyberpunk, it looks old — mysteriously, eerily old. “There’s a little bit of a dark side to the Gibson story and the whole mystery about it and the whole notion of a book that destroys itself, a text that destroys itself after you read it,” notes Begos. “So I thought that was fitting.” It smacks of ancient tomes full of forbidden knowledge, like H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, or the Egyptian Book of the Dead to which its parenthetical title seems to pay homage. Inside was to be found abstract imagery and, in lieu of conventional text, long strings of numbers and characters representing the gene sequence of the fruit fly. And then of course there was the disk, nestled into its little pocket at the back.

The deluxe edition of Agrippa is housed in this box, made out of fiberglass and paper and “distressed” by hand.

The book is inside a shroud and another case. Its title has been burned into it by hand.

The book’s 64 hand-cut pages combine long chunks of the fruit-fly genome alongside Daniel Ashbaugh’s images evocative of genetics — and occasional images, such as the pistol above, drawn from Gibson’s poem of “Agrippa.”

The last 20 pages have been glued together — as usual, by hand — and a pocket cut out of them to hold the disk.

But it was, as noted, the contents of the disk that really captured the public’s imagination, and that’s where we’ll turn our attention now.

William Gibson’s contribution to the project is an autobiographical poem of approximately 300 lines and 2000 words. The poem called “Agrippa” is named after something far more commonplace than its foreboding packaging might imply. “Agrippa” was actually the brand name of a type of photo album which was sold by Kodak in the early- and mid-twentieth century. Gibson’s poem begins as he has apparently just discovered such an artifact — “a Kodak album of time-burned black construction paper” — in some old attic or junk room. What follows is a meditation on family and memory, on the roots of things that made William Gibson the man he is now. There’s a snapshot of his grandfather’s Appalachian sawmill; there’s a pistol from some semi-forgotten war; there’s a picture of downtown Wheeling, West Virginia, 1917; there’s a magazine advertisement for a Rocket 88; there’s the all-night bus station in Wytheville, Virginia, where a young William Gibson used to go to buy cigarettes for his mother, and from which a slightly older one left for Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft and take up the life of an itinerant hippie.

Gibson is a fine writer, and “Agrippa” is a lovely, elegiac piece of work which stands on its own just fine as plain old text on the page when it’s divorced from all of its elaborate packaging and the work of conceptual art that was its original means of transmission. (Really, it does: go read it.) It was also the least science-fictional thing he had written to date — quite an irony in light of all of the discussion that swirled around it about publication in the age of cyberspace. But then, the ironies truly pile up in layers when it comes to this artistic project. It was ironically appropriate that William Gibson, a famously private person, should write something so deeply personal only in the form of a poem designed to disappear as soon as it had been read. And perhaps the supreme irony was this disappearing poem’s interest in the memories encoded by permanent artifacts like an old photo album, an old camera, or an old pistol. This interest in the way that everyday objects come to embody our collective memory would go on to become a recurring theme in Gibson’s later, more mature, less overtly cyberpunky novels. See, for example, the collector of early Sinclair microcomputers who plays a prominent role in 2003’s Pattern Recognition, in my opinion Gibson’s best single novel to date.

But of course it wasn’t as if the public’s interest in Agrippa was grounded in literary appreciation of Gibson’s poem, any more than it was in artistic appreciation of the physical artwork that surrounded it. All of that was rather beside the point of the mainstream narrative — and thus we still haven’t really engaged with the reason that Agrippa was getting write-ups in the likes of People magazine. Beyond the star value lent the project by William Gibson, all of the interest in Agrippa was spawned by this idea of a text — it could been have any text packaged in any old way, if we’re being brutally honest — that consumed itself as it was being read. This aspect of it seemed to have a deep resonance with things that were currently happening in society writ large, even if few could clarify precisely what those things were in a world perched on the precipice of the Internet Age. And, for all that the poem itself belied his reputation as a writer of science fiction, this aspect of Agrippa also resonated with the previous work of William Gibson, the mainstream media’s go-to spokesman for the (post)modern condition.

Enter, then, the fourth important contributor to Agrippa, a shadowy character who has chosen to remain anonymous to this day and whom we shall therefore call simply the Hacker. He apparently worked at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, a Boston consulting firm with a rich hacking heritage (Will Crowther of Adventure fame had worked there), and was a friend of Dennis Ashbaugh. Kevin Begos, Jr., contracted with him to write the code for Gibson’s magical disappearing poem. “Dealing with the hacker who did the program has been like dealing with a character from one of your books,” wrote Begos to Gibson in a letter.

The Hacker spent most of his time not coding the actual display of the text — a trivial exercise — but rather devising an encryption scheme to make it impenetrable to the inevitable army of hex-editor-wielding compatriots who would try to extract the text from the code surrounding it. “The encryption,” he wrote to Begos, “has a very interesting feature in that it is context-sensitive. The value, both character and numerical, of any given character is determined by the characters next to it, which from a crypto-analysis or code-breaking point of view is an utter nightmare.”

The Hacker also had to devise a protection scheme to prevent people from simply copying the disk, then running the program from the copy. He tried to add digitized images of some of Ashbaugh’s art to the display, which would have had a welcome unifying effect on an artistic statement that too often seemed to reflect the individual preoccupations of Begos, Ashbaugh, and Gibson rather than a coherent single vision. In the end, however, he gave that scheme up as technically unfeasible. Instead he settled for a few digitized sound effects and a single image of a Kodak Agrippa photo album, displayed as the title screen before the text of the poem began to scroll. Below you can see what he ended up creating, exactly as someone would have who was foolhardy enough to put the disk into her Macintosh back in 1992.

See https://www.youtube.com/embed/41kZovcyHrU

The denizens of cyberspace, many of whom regarded William Gibson more as a god than a prophet, were naturally intrigued by Agrippa from the start, not least thanks to the implicit challenge it presented to crack the protection and thus turn this artistic monument to impermanence into its opposite. The Hacker sent Begos samples of the debates raging on the pre-World Wide Web Internet already in April of 1992, months before the book’s publication.

“I just read about William Gibson’s new book Agrippa (The Book of the Dead),” wrote one netizen. “I understand it’s going to be published on disk, with a virus that prevents it from being printed out. What do people think of this idea?”

“I seem to recall reading that this stuff about the virus-loaded book was an April Fools joke started here on the Internet,” replied another. “But nobody’s stopped talk about it, and even Tom Maddox, who knows Gibson, seemed to confirm its existence. Will the person who posted the original message please confirm or confess? Was this an April Fools joke or not?”

The Tom Maddox in question, who was indeed personally acquainted with Gibson, replied that the disappearing text “was part of a limited-edition, expensive artwork that Gibson believes was totally subscribed before ‘publication.’ Someone will publish it in more accessible form, I believe (and it will be interesting to see what the cyberpunk audience makes of it — it’s an autobiographical poem, about ten pages long).”

“What a strange world we live in,” concluded another netizen. Indeed.

The others making Agrippa didn’t need the Hacker to tell them with what enthusiasm the denizens of cyberspace would attack his code, vying for the cred that would come with being the first to break it. John Perry Barlow, a technology activist and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Begos that unidentified “friends of his vow to buy and then run Agrippa through a Cray supercomputer to capture the code and crack the program.”

And yet for the first few months after the physical book’s release it remained uncracked. The thing was just so darn expensive, and the few museum curators and rare-books collectors who bought copies neither ran in the same circles as the hacking community nor were likely to entrust their precious disks to one of them.

Interest in the digital component of Agrippa remained high in the press, however, and, just as Tom Maddox had suspected all along, the collaborators eventually decided to give people unwilling to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on the physical edition a chance to read — and to hear — William Gibson’s poem through another ephemeral electronic medium. On December 9, 1992, the Americas Society of New York City hosted an event called “The Transmission,” in which the magician and comedian Penn Jillette read the text of the poem as it scrolled across a big screen, bookended by question-and-answer sessions with Kevin Begos, Jr., the only member of the artistic trio behind Agrippa to appear at the event. The proceedings were broadcast via a closed-circuit satellite hookup to, as the press release claimed, “a street-corner shopfront on the Lower East Side, the Michael Carlos Museum in Atlanta, the Kitchen in New York City, a sheep farm in the Australian Outback, and others.” Continuing with the juxtaposition of old and new that had always been such a big thematic part of the Agrippa project — if a largely unremarked one — the press release pitched the event as a return to the days when catching a live transmission of one form or another had been the only way to hear a story, an era that had been consigned to the past by the audio- and videocassette.

When did you last hear Hopalong Cassidy on his NBC radio program? When did you last read to your children around a campfire? Have you been sorry that your busy schedule prevented a visit to the elders’ mud hut in New Guinea, where legends of times past are recounted? Have you ever looked closely at your telephone cable to determine exactly how voices and images can come out of the tiny fibers?

Naturally, recording devices were strictly prohibited at the event. Agrippa was still intended to be an ephemeral kairos moment, just like the radio broadcasts of yore.

Of course, it had always been silly to imagine that all traces of the poem could truly be blotted from existence after it had been viewed and/or heard by a privileged few. After all, people reading it on their monitor screens at home could buy video cameras too. Far from denying this reality, Begos imagined an eventual underground trade in fuzzy Agrippa videotapes, much like the bootleg concert tapes traded among fans of Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead. Continuing with the example set by those artists, he imagined the bootleg trade being more likely to help than to hurt Agrippa’s cultural cachet. But it would never come to that — for, despite Begos’s halfhearted precautions, the Transmission itself was captured as it happened.

Begos had hired a trio of student entrepreneurs from New York University’s Interactive Television Program to run the technical means of transmission of the Transmission. They went by the fanciful names of “Templar, Rosehammer, and Pseudophred” — names that could have been found in the pages of a William Gibson novel, and that should therefore have set off warning bells in the head of one Kevin Begos, Jr. Sure enough, the trio slipped a videotape into the camera broadcasting the proceedings. The very next morning, the text of the poem appeared on an underground computer bulletin board called MindVox, preceded by the following introduction:

Hacked & Cracked by
-Templar-
Rosehammer & Pseudophred
Introduction by Templar

When I first heard about an electronic book by William Gibson… sealed in an ominous tome of genetic code which smudges to the touch… which is encrypted and automatically self-destructs after one reading… priced at $1,500… I knew that it was a challenge, or dare, that would not go unnoticed. As recent buzzing on the Internet shows, as well as many overt attempts to hack the file… and the transmission lines… it’s the latest golden fleece, if you will, of the hacking community.

I now present to you, with apologies to William Gibson, the full text of AGRIPPA. It, of course, does not include the wonderful etchings, and I highly recommend purchasing the original book (a cheaper version is now available for $500). Enjoy.

And I’m not telling you how I did it. Nyah.

As Matthew Kirschenbaum, the foremost scholar of Agrippa, points out, there’s a delicious parallel to be made with the opening lines of Gibson’s 1981 short story “Johnny Mnemonic,” the first fully realized piece of cyberpunk literature he or anyone else ever penned: “I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible.” Templar was happy to let people believe he had reverse-engineered the Hacker’s ingenious encryption, but in reality his “hack” had consisted only of a fortuitous job contract and a furtively loaded videotape. Whatever works, right? “A hacker always takes the path of least resistance,” said Templar years later. “And it is a lot easier to ‘hack’ a person than a machine.”

Here, then, is one more irony to add to the collection. Rather than John Parry Barlow’s Cray supercomputer, rather than some genius hacker Gibson would later imagine had “cracked the supposedly uncrackable code,” rather than the “international legion of computer hackers” which the journal Cyberreader later claimed had done the job, Agrippa was “cracked” by a cameraman who caught a lucky break. Within days, it was everywhere in cyberspace. Within a month, it was old news online.

Before Kirschenbaum uncovered the real story, it had indeed been assumed for years, even by the makers of Agrippa, that the Hacker’s encryption had been cracked, and that this had led to its widespread distribution on the Internet — led to this supposedly ephemeral text becoming as permanent as anything in our digital age. In reality, though, it appears that the Hacker’s protection wasn’t cracked at all until long after it mattered. In 2012, the University of Toronto sponsored a contest to crack the protection, which was won in fairly short order by one Robert Xiao. Without taking anything away from his achievement, it should be noted that he had access to resources — including emulators, disk images, and exponentially more sheer computing power — of which someone trying to crack the program on a real Macintosh in 1992 could hardly even have conceived. No protection is unbreakable, but the Hacker’s was certainly unbreakable enough for its purpose.

And so, with Xiao’s exhaustive analysis of the Hacker’s protection (“a very straightforward in-house ‘encryption’ algorithm that encodes data in 3-byte blocks”), the last bit of mystery surrounding Agrippa has been peeled away. How, we might ask at this juncture, does it hold up as a piece of art?

My own opinion is that, when divorced from its cultural reception and judged strictly as a self-standing artwork of the sort we might view in a museum, it doesn’t hold up all that well. This was a project pursued largely through correspondence by three artists who were all chasing somewhat different thematic goals, and it shows in the end result. It’s very hard to construct a coherent narrative of why all of these different elements are put together in this way. What do Ashbaugh’s DNA texts and paintings really have to do with Gibson’s meditation on family memory? (Begos made a noble attempt to answer that question at the Transmission, claiming that recordings of DNA strands would somehow become the future’s version of family snapshots — but if you’re buying that, I have some choice swampland to sell you.) And then, why is the whole thing packaged to look like H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon? Rather than a unified artistic statement, Agrippa is a hodgepodge of ideas that too often pull against one another.

But is it really fair to divorce Agrippa so completely from its cultural reception all those years ago? Or, to put it another way, is it fair to judge Agrippa the artwork based solely upon Agrippa the slightly underwhelming material object? Matthew Kirschenbaum says that “the practical failure to realize much of what was initially planned for Agrippa allowed the project to succeed by leaving in its place the purest form of virtual work — a meme rather than an artifact.” He goes on to note that Agrippa is “as much conceptual art as anything else.” I agree with him on both points, as I do with the online commenter from back in the day who called it “a piece of emergent performance art.” If art truly lives in our memory and our consciousness, then perhaps our opinion of Agrippa really should encompass the whole experience, including its transmission and its reception. Certainly this is the theory that underlies the whole notion of conceptual art —  whether the artwork in question involves flying cows or disappearing poems.

It’s ironic — yes, there’s that word again — to note that Agrippa was once seen as an ominous harbinger of the digital future in the way that it showed information, divorced from physical media, simply disappearing into the ether, when the reality of the digital age has led to exactly the opposite problem, with every action we take and every word we write online being compiled into a permanent record of who we supposedly are — a slate which we can never wipe clean. And this digital permanence has come to apply to the poem of “Agrippa” as well, which today is never more than a search query away. Gibson:

The whole thing really was an experiment to see just what would happen. That whole Agrippa project was completely based on “let’s do this. What will happen?” Something happens. “What’s going to happen next?”

It’s only a couple thousand words long, and dangerously like poetry. Another cool thing was getting a bunch of net-heads to sit around and read poetry. I sort of liked that.

Having it wind up in permanent form, sort of like a Chinese Wall in cyberspace… anybody who wants to can go and read it, if they take the trouble. Free copies to everyone. So that it became, really, at the last minute, the opposite of the really weird, elitist thing many people thought it was.

So, Agrippa really was as uncontrollable and unpredictable for its creators as it was for anyone else. Notably, nobody made any money whatsoever off it, despite all the publicity and excitement it generated. In fact, Begos calls it a “financial disaster” for his company; the fallout soon forced him to abandon publishing altogether.

“Gibson thinks of it [Agrippa] as becoming a memory, which he believes is more real than anything you can actually see,” said Begos in a contemporary interview. Agrippa did indeed become a collective kairos moment for an emerging digital culture, a memory that will remain with us for a long, long time to come. Chris in the Morning would be proud.

(Sources: the book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum; Starlog of September 1994; Details of June 1992; New York Times of November 18 1992. Most of all, The Agrippa Files of The University of California Santa Barbara, a huge archive of primary and secondary sources dealing with Agrippa, including the video of the original program in action on a vintage Macintosh.)

Comments
20 Responses

- Rowan Lipkovits

September 7, 2018 at 4:54 pm

Huzzah, I know that some of us have been waiting for you to engage Agrippa for at least two years 8)

- Rowan Lipkovits

September 7, 2018 at 6:23 pm

” the Egyptian Book of the Dead to which its parenthetical title pays explicit homage”

I’m curious if this has been explicitly stated by any of its creators? I always assumed it was tied to the TIBETAN Book of the Dead 8)

- Jimmy Maher

September 7, 2018 at 6:47 pm

I certainly thought I remembered reading a reference to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, but I can’t seem to find it now. Softened the claim, at least for the time being. ;) Thanks!

- Brian

September 7, 2018 at 7:47 pm

Wow… that is quite interesting! I had not heard of this project previously.

I

- David Boddie

September 7, 2018 at 8:26 pm

Just a quick typo/fix: “Electronic Freedom Foundation” -> “Electronic Frontier Foundation”

I wasn’t sure what to make of this week’s topic at the start of the article – I’m not too fond of the kind of artistic navel-gazing that produces limited edition runs of expensive objects – but the story sucked me in. By the end, I was thinking of how this kind of art might relate to ARGs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game) and whether those could be considered a kind of ephemeral performance art.

Perhaps a deeper question also lurks in this sentence, “Ashbaugh laughed about having to send two copies of it to the copyright office — because to register it for a copyright, you had to read it, but when you read it you destroyed it.”
The question being this: is something eligible for copyright if it cannot be copied? What would be the point, and what might that say about content wrapped up in other forms of DRM?

- Jimmy Maher

September 8, 2018 at 7:54 am

Thanks!

There is indeed a whole world of debates to be had about how these ideas relate to games and other interactive art forms. I think that the real heart of the long-established split between the narratologist and ludologist schools of academic game criticism may be in where they want to place the creative act: the former places it with the game’s author, the latter with its players. Can you have art without an audience? I don’t see why not!

- Ken Brubaker

September 10, 2018 at 2:39 pm

You can certainly have art with an intended audience of 1. If I painted something for my enjoyment only (and I certainly wouldn’t want anyone else to see something I could actually paint!), it’s still art.

- Jonathan Badger

September 7, 2018 at 9:03 pm

>“The encryption,” he wrote to Begos, “has a very interesting feature in that it is context->sensitive. The value, both character and numerical, of any given character is determined by the >characters next to it, which from a crypto-analysis or code-breaking point of view is an utter >nightmare.”

But this is literally how all encryption today (beyond the simple substitution ciphers like A=B, B=C) works. Even the Enigma machines of WWII used previous context.

- Jimmy Maher

September 8, 2018 at 7:47 am

Sure. That’s kind of why I included the quote; I found it amusing for the same reason. We have to remember that the Hacker is writing to the non-technical Kevin Begos, Jr., and I think I detect just a tad of condescension in his letters. I’m going to go with that explanation, anyway, rather than the alternative one that he really thinks he’s hit upon some major innovation in cryptography here. I reject the latter because his letters were printed on BBN letterhead, and they weren’t known for employing rank amateurs.

I’m certainly no expert on such matters, but the final verdict would seem to be that the Hacker’s encryption was neither trivial nor overwhelmingly difficult to break, being a solidly implemented variation on long-established cryptographic best practices, but not some masterpiece of devilish innovation. It likely held up as long as it did because, prior to the Transmission, very few people had access to the code, and those few that did didn’t dare attack it using the typical means of a debugger, given the code’s self-destructive nature. And afterward, the poem was already out there, so there wasn’t much motivation to try to crack it.

- Frédéric Grosshans

September 8, 2018 at 1:12 pm

For your readers interested in the technical aspects of the encryption, and how it was decrypted, the relevant details are available at http://www.crackingagrippa.net/ (which does not seem to be linked from your text).

The algorithm is clearly a home-made encryption algorithm, made by an amateur with many elementary cryptographic mistakes (even for 1992, or 1982, for that matter). That does not means he’s not a competent programmer, explaining his hiring by BBN. Very competent programmers thinking they are competent cryptographers and doing elementary cryptography mistakes are still quite common these days…

- Sniffnoy

September 7, 2018 at 10:21 pm

Proofreading note: At one point you have “Agrippa (The Book of the Dead)” rather than “Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)”. Well, at two points, but the second one is in quotes so for all I know it’s quoted correctly.

As for Agrippa itself — well, reading about it now, it just kind of seems like a missed opportunity. Attempting to make something deliberately ephemeral will generally fail these days, it’s true, but they could have done a much better, more interesting job of it, it seems to me.

(Note that even these days, things made ephemeral but without an emphasis on such — without putting a target on its head — don’t necessarily get archived; there are lost Satellaview games, for instance. Obviously lost ephemeral works are much less common these days, but they still happen.)

Like, to my mind the whole thing was doomed to failure by two factors:
1. It was just a simple, static poem, and
2. Everybody knew that.

And while this wasn’t a factor dooming it to failure, another way it was a missed opportunity was that
3. It just immediately erased itself rather than doing something more interesting like slowly eroding itself. (That might not be the right thing to do as that lets it be pieced together, but again, that’s still assuming we’re talking about a static poem rather than something more inherently dynamic — yes, ultimately it’s just static code underneath, but that only matters if people to think to image it, which they might not if you are misleading about it.)

If they really wanted to thwart collectors, then, first off, it shouldn’t have been a static poem but something dynamic that requires interaction. And, second off, they needed to in some way lie or mislead the public about it, or just break some assumption they’re holding (of course every showing of the same movie ends the same way, right?)

If you go around saying “It’ll erase itself after one read”, then people know to image the disk before running it in order to preserve it. So don’t say that. (Also, don’t do that, do something more interesting.) Say instead something about how it’s never the same twice (and then do something more interesting rather than just straight erasure). If people don’t anticipate that it does this by permanently altering the disk, they’ll run it first and only attempt to image it later, only to find that the version that they imaged is not pristine. Maybe mislead the public about what causes it to be different each time, suggesting that it varies based on the time of year or a random number generator or something — anything other than that it’s different because the disk is permanently altered.

Anyway, I don’t need to go on about this; I don’t have any good idea of just what a better-done version of this would consist of, but I think it could have been done much better, is the point.

- Jimmy Maher

September 8, 2018 at 7:38 am

Thanks for the correction!

Otherwise… I’m afraid you may be thinking more like an engineer than a conceptual artist. ;)

- Quinn Dunki

September 8, 2018 at 4:20 pm

What I love about Agrippa is that it ends up proving a central theme of Gibson’s early novels- that data cannot be killed. Once the transfer cost of information reaches (effectively) zero, it instantly gets transferred to everyone, and will always be transferred back to anyone who loses it. Thus, data remains immortal. Now take Agrippa, this thing explicitly engineered with multiple layers designed to ensure its self-destruction, and put data at the center of it. What has survived? The data, and nothing else. So while striving to create perfect ephemerality, the artists ended up proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that ephemerality is dead. In that sense, the title “Agrippa” is rather on the nose.

- DZ-Jay

September 9, 2018 at 1:18 pm

I think you are overstating the authors’ interest in the work’s self-destruction and actual ephemeral existence. Sure, that was the /concept/, but their own words betray their actual purpose: the concept of ephemeral art was just the vehicle to attract attention. They fully intended collectors to preserve their copies by the mere fear of losing it, which could be construed as part of the artistic statement.

They also fully expected hackers to crack it — if only ever in their own self-aggrandizing fantasies, assuming that their work would produce such fervent interest, that hackers would just flock to it.

In the end, it was just a weird, elitist and pretentious gimmick to sell an ego-bloating concept by at least one, or perhaps all three of the artists. They thought themselves too clever, and imagined the work more important than it actually was. It never had even half the impact they imagined, nor produced the interest that even contemporaries were claiming. It just went *poof*, and disappeared as quickly as it arrived.

dZ.

- DZ-Jay

September 9, 2018 at 1:24 pm

Had they truly wanted it to be ephemeral, they wouldn’t have made the self-destruction of the work the point of promotion — they would have let people purchase their copy and experience it, only for it to disappear right after. That would have put the focus on the work and make the statement on memory the impact on its audience.

Instead, their entire focus was on that single point, which (and they knew this as attested by their letters) almost guarantees at people would not try to open it lest they lose an expensive work, or to find ways to preserve it. It also serves as an attractive gimmick for what is essentially a collection of random abstract and conceptual performance works.

dZ.

- Ken Brubaker

September 10, 2018 at 2:36 pm

If they hadn’t told people that the work would self destruct, they would have had law suits all over them – when you buy something you expect it to have some sort of reasonable life span.

- DZ-Jay

September 12, 2018 at 9:58 am

Sure, but it was supposed to be performance art, which is usually replete with such risks. As it stands, it was just a marketing gimmick world took it as such.

dZ.

- MrEntropy

September 11, 2018 at 4:52 pm

I’m guessing there was code that prevented showing the text if the write protect tab was in the unprotected position?

- Lt. Nitpicker

September 11, 2018 at 9:31 pm

Kinda? This document seems to indicate that if a disk was writelocked, it wouldn’t run (probably crashing?).

- PJN

December 5, 2018 at 12:45 am

A month or so after this article was published, an artwork by the artist Banksy titled “Girl with Balloon” was sold at an auction in London. As the auction finished, the painting unexpectedly (for all but the artist) self-shredded to create a new artwork called “Love is in the Bin”.

While this isn’t a digital artwork, I think this is a timely and relevant event that relates to the content of this blog post; the idea of self-destructing art, the “kairos moment” that occurs (and in this case, transforming the original artwork into a new art piece based on that experience, potentially worth more than the original), and having all of it being recorded by technology for everyone to continue to experience.

What is interesting to me is the reaction of the buyer, who paid a large amount of money for a particular artwork, only to receive a different artwork (which is different to the Agrippa where they knew that they would end up with an artwork in a different format than the initial state), and apparently to be content with that (per some news articles).

A video by the artist (on Instagram) of the event is at:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BomXijJhArX/

Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_is_in_the_Bin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_with_Balloon#Shredding_at_auction (and a million other news articles available via Google search)

Shades of Gray
September 14, 2018

Ladies and gentlemen, come and see. This isn’t a country here but an epic failure factory, an excuse for a place, a weed lot, an abyss for tightrope walkers, blindman’s bluff for the sightless saddled with delusions of grandeur, proud mountains reduced to dust dumped in big helpings into the cruciform maws of sick children who crouch waiting in the hope of insane epiphanies, behaving badly and swamped besides, bogged down in their devil’s quagmires. Our history is a corset, a stifling cell, a great searing fire.

— Lyonel Trouillot

What’s to be done about Haiti?

Generations have asked that question about the first and most intractable poster child for postcolonial despair, the poorest country in North or South America now and seemingly forever, a place whose corruption and futility manages to make the oft-troubled countries around it look like models of good governance. Nowhere feels James Joyce’s description of history as “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” more apt. Indeed, Haiti stands as perhaps the ultimate counterargument to the idealistic theory of history as progress. Here history really is just one damned thing after another — differing slightly in the details, but always the same at bottom.

But why should it be this way? What has been so perplexing and infuriating about Haiti for so long is that there seems to be no real reason for its constant suffering. Long ago, when it was still a French colony, it was known as the “Pearl of the Caribbean,” and was not only beautiful but rich; at the time of the American Revolution, it was richer than any one of the thirteen British American colonies. Those few who bother to visit Haiti today still call it one of the most beautiful places of all in the beautiful region that is the Caribbean. Today the Dominican Republic, the nation with which Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola, is booming, the most popular tourist spot in the Caribbean, with the fastest-growing economy anywhere in North or South America. But Haiti, despite being blessed with all the same geographic advantages, languishes in poverty next door, seething with resentment over its condition. It’s as if the people of Haiti have been cursed by one of the voodoo gods to which some of them still pray to act out an eternal farce of chaos, despair, and senseless violence.

Some scenes from the life of Haiti…

…you are a proud Mandingue hunter in a hot West African land. But you’re not hunting. You’re being hunted — by slavers, both black and white. You run, and run, and run, until your lungs are near to bursting. But it’s no use. You’re captured and chained like an animal, and thrust into the dank hold of a sailing ship. Hundreds of your countrymen and women are here — hungry, thirsty, some beaten and maimed by your captors. All are terrified for themselves and their families, from whom they’ve been cruelly separated. Many die on the long voyage. But when it’s over, you wonder if perhaps they were the lucky ones…

The recorded history of the island of Hispaniola begins with the obliteration of the people who had always lived there. The Spanish conquistadors arrived on the island in the fifteenth century, bringing with them diseases against which the native population, known as the Taíno, had no resistance, along with a brutal regime of forced labor. Within two generations, the Taíno were no more. They left behind only a handful of words which entered the European vocabulary, like “hammock,” “hurricane,” “savanna,” “canoe,” “barbecue,” and “tobacco.” The Spanish, having lost their labor force, shrugged their shoulders and largely abandoned Hispaniola.

But in the ensuing centuries, Europeans developed a taste for sugar, which could be produced in large quantities only in the form of sugarcane, which in turn grew well only in tropical climates like those of the Caribbean. Thus the abandoned island of Hispaniola began to have value again. The French took possession of the western third of the island — the part known as Haiti today — with the Treaty of Ryswick, which ended the Nine Years War in 1697. France officially incorporated its new colony of Saint-Domingue on Hispaniola the same year.

Growing sugarcane demanded backbreaking labor under the hot tropical sun, work of a kind judged unsuitable for any white man. And so, with no more native population to enslave, the French began to import slaves from Africa. Their labor turned Saint-Domingue in a matter of a few decades from a backwater into one of the jewels of France’s overseas empire. In 1790, the year of the colony’s peak, 48,000 slaves were imported to join the 500,000 who were already there. It was necessary to import slaves in such huge numbers just to maintain the population in light of the appalling death toll of those working in the fields; little Saint-Domingue alone imported more slaves over the course of its history than the entirety of the eventual United States.

…you’re a slave, toiling ceaselessly in a Haitian cane field for your French masters. While they live bloated with wealth, you and your fellows know little but hardship and pain. Brandings, floggings, rape, and killing are everyday events. And for the slightest infraction, a man could be tortured to death by means limited only by his owners’ dark imaginations. What little comfort you find is in the company of other slaves, who, at great risk to themselves, try to keep the traditions of your lost homeland alive. And there is hope — some of your brothers could not be broken, and have fled to the hills to live free. These men, the Maroons, are said to be training as warriors, and planning for your people’s revenge. Tonight, you think, under cover of darkness, you will slip away to join them…

The white masters of Saint-Domingue, who constituted just 10 percent of the colony’s population, lived in terror of the other 90 percent, and this fear contributed to the brutality with which they punished the slightest sign of recalcitrance on the part of their slaves. Further augmenting their fears of the black Other was the slaves’ foreboding religion of voodoo: a blending of the animistic cults they had brought with them from tribal Africa with the more mystical elements of Catholicism — all charms and curses, potions and spells, trailing behind it persistent rumors of human sacrifice.

Even very early in the eighteenth century, some slaves managed to escape into the wilderness of Hispaniola, where they formed small communities that the white men found impossible to dislodge. Organized resistance, however, took a long time to develop.

Legend has it that the series of events which would result in an independent nation on the western third of Hispaniola began on the night of August 21, 1791, when a group of slave leaders secretly gathered at a hounfour — a voodoo temple — just outside the prosperous settlement of Cap‑Français. Word of the French Revolution had reached the slaves, and, with mainland France in chaos, the time seemed right to strike here in the hinterlands of empire. A priestess slit the throat of a sacrificial pig, and the head priest said that the look and taste of the pig’s blood indicated that Ogun and Ghede, the gods of war and death respectively, wanted the slaves to rise up. Together the leaders drank the blood under a sky that suddenly broke into storm, then sneaked back onto their individual plantations at dawn to foment revolution.

That, anyway, is the legend. There’s good reason to doubt whether the hounfour actually happened, but the revolution certainly did.

…you are in the middle of a bloody revolution. You are a Maroon, an ex-slave, fighting in the only successful slave revolt in history. You have only the most meager weapons, but you and your comrades are fighting for your very lives. There is death and destruction all around you. Once-great plantation houses lie in smouldering ruins. Corpses, black and white, litter the cane fields. Ghede walks among them, smiling and nodding at his rich harvest. He sees you and waves cheerfully…

The proudest period of Haiti’s history — the one occasion on which Haiti actually won something — began before a nation of that name existed, when the slaves of Saint-Domingue rose up against their masters, killing or driving them off their plantations. After the French were dispensed with, the ex-slaves continued to hold their ground against Spanish and English invaders who, concerned about what an example like this could mean for other colonies, tried to bring them to heel.

In 1798, a well-educated, wily former slave named Toussaint Louverture consolidated control of the now-former French colony. He spoke both to his own people and to outsiders using the language of the Enlightenment, drawing from the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, putting a whole new face on this bloody revolution that had supposedly been born at a voodoo houfour on a hot jungle night.

Toussaint Louverture was frequently called the black George Washington in light of the statesmanlike role he played for his people. He certainly looked the part. Would Haiti’s history have been better had he lived longer? We can only speculate.

…and you are battling Napoleon’s armies, Europe’s finest, sent to retake the jewel of the French empire. You have few resources, but you fight with extraordinary courage. Within two years, sixty thousand veteran French troops have died, and your land is yours again. The French belong to Ghede, who salutes you with a smirk…

Napoleon had now come to power in France, and was determined to reassert control over his country’s old empire even as he set about conquering a new one. In 1802, he sent an army to retake the colony of Saint-Domingue. Toussaint Louverture was tricked, captured, and shipped to France, where he soon died in a prison cell. But his comrades in arms, helped along by a fortuitous outbreak of yellow fever among the French forces and by a British naval blockade stemming from the wars back in Europe, defeated Napoleon’s finest definitively in November of 1803. The world had little choice but to recognize the former colony of Saint-Domingue as a predominately black independent nation-state, the first of its type.

With Louverture dead, however, there was no one to curb the vengeful instincts of the former slaves who had defeated the French after such a long, hard struggle. It was perfectly reasonable that the new nation would take for its name Haiti — the island of Hispaniola’s name in the now-dead Taíno language — rather than the French appellation of Saint-Domingue. Less reasonable were the words of independent Haiti’s first leader, and first in its long line of dictators, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who said that “we should use the skin of a white man as a parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen.” True to his words, he proceeded to carry out systematic genocide on the remaining white population of Haiti, destroying in the process all of the goodwill that had accrued to the new country among progressives and abolitionists in the wider world. His vengeance cost Haiti both much foreign investment that might otherwise have been coming its way and the valuable contribution the more educated remaining white population, by no means all of whom had been opposed to the former slaves’ cause, might have been able to make to its economy. A precedent had been established which holds to this day: of Haiti being its own worst enemy, over and over again.

…a hundred years of stagnation and instability flash by your eyes. As your nation’s economic health declines, your countrymen’s thirst for coups d’etat grows. Seventeen of twenty-four presidents are overthrown by guile or force of arms, and Ghede’s ghastly armies swell…

So, Haiti, having failed from the outset to live up to the role many had dreamed of casting it in as the first enlightened black republic, remained poor and inconsequential, mired in corruption and violence, as its story devolved from its one shining moment of glory into the cruel farce it remains to this day. The arguable lowlight of Haiti’s nineteenth century was the reign of one Faustin Soulouque, who had himself crowned Emperor Faustin I — emperor of what? — in 1849. American and European cartoonists had a field day with the pomp and circumstance of Faustin’s “court.” He was finally exiled to Jamaica in 1859, after he had tried and failed to invade the Dominican Republic (an emperor has to start somewhere, right?), extorted money from the few well-to-do members of Haitian society and defaulted on his country’s foreign debt in order to finance his palace, and finally gotten himself overthrown by a disgruntled army officer. Like the vast majority of Haiti’s leaders down through the years, he left his country in even worse shape than he found it.

Haiti’s Emperor Faustin I was a hit with the middle-brow reading public in the United States and Europe.

…you are a student, protesting the years-long American occupation of your country. They came, they said, to thwart Kaiser Wilhelm’s designs on the Caribbean, and to help the Haitian people. But their callous rule soon became morally and politically bankrupt. Chuckling, Ghede hands you a stone and you throw it. The uprising that will drive the invaders out has begun…

In 1915, Haiti was in the midst of one of its periodic paroxysms of violence. Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, the country’s sixth president in the last four years, had managed to hold the office for just five months when he was dragged out of the presidential palace into the street and torn limb from limb by a mob. The American ambassador to Haiti, feeling that the country had descended into a state of complete anarchy that could spread across the Caribbean, pleaded with President Woodrow Wilson to intervene. Fearing that Germany and its allies might exploit this chaos on the United States’s doorstep if and when his own country should enter the First World War on the opposing side, Wilson agreed. On July 28, 1915, a small force of American sailors occupied the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince almost without firing a shot — a far cry from Haiti’s proud struggle for independence against the French. Haiti was suddenly a colony again, although its new colonizers did promise that the occupation was temporary. It was to last just long enough to set the country on its feet and put a sound system of government in place.

When the Americans arrived in Haiti, they found its people’s lives not all that much different from the way they had lived at the time of Toussaint Louverture. Here we see the capital city of Port-au-Prince, the most “developed” place in the country.

The American occupation wound up lasting nineteen years, during which the occupiers did much practical good in Haiti. They paved more than a thousand miles of roadway; built bridges and railway lines and airports and canals; erected power stations and radio stations, schools and hospitals. Yet, infected with the racist attitudes toward their charges that were all too typical of the time, they failed at the less concrete tasks of instilling a respect for democracy and the rule of law. They preferred to make all the rules themselves by autocratic decree, giving actual Haitians only a token say in goings-on in their country. This prompted understandable anger and a sort of sullen, passive resistance among Haitians to all of the American efforts at reform, occasionally flaring up into vandalism and minor acts of terrorism. When the Americans, feeling unappreciated and generally hard-done-by, left Haiti in 1934, it didn’t take the country long to fall back into the old ways. Within four years President Sténo Vincent had declared himself dictator for life. But he was hardly the only waxing power in Haitian politics.

…a tall, ruggedly handsome black man with an engaging smile.

He is speaking to an assembled throng in a poverty-stricken city neighborhood. He tells moving stories about his experiences as a teacher, journalist, and civil servant. You admire both his skillful use of French and Creole, and his straightforward ideas about government. With eloquence and obvious sincerity, he speaks of freedom, justice and opportunity for all, regardless of class or color. His trenchant, biting criticisms of the establishment delight the crowd of longshoremen and laborers.

“Latin America and the Caribbean already have too many dictators,” he says. “It is time for a truly democratic government in Haiti.” The crowd roars out its approval…

The aspect of Haitian culture which had always baffled the Americans the most was the fact that this country whose population was 99.9 percent black was nevertheless riven by racism as pronounced as anywhere in the world. The traditional ruling class was the mulattoes: Haitians who could credit their lighter skin to white blood dating back to the old days of colonization, and/or to the fact that they and their ancestors hadn’t spent long years laboring in the sun. They made up perhaps 10 percent of the population, and spoke and governed in French. The rest of the population was made up of the noir Haitians: the darker-skinned people who constituted the working class. They spoke only the Haitian Creole dialect for the most part, and thus literally couldn’t understand most of what their country’s leaders said. In the past, it had been the mulattoes who killed one another to determine who ruled Haiti, while the noir Haitians just tried to stay out of the way.

In the 1940s, however, other leaders came forward to advance the cause of the “black” majority of the population; these leaders became known as the noiristes. Among the most prominent of them was Daniel Fignolé, a dark-skinned Haitian born, like most of his compatriots, into extreme poverty in 1913. Unlike most of them, he managed to educate himself by dint of sheer hard work, became political at the sight of the rampant injustice and corruption all around him, and came to be known as the “Moses of Port-au-Prince” for the fanatical loyalty he commanded among the stevedores, factory workers, and other unskilled laborers in and around the capital. Fignolé emphasized again and again that he was not a Marxist — an ideology that had been embraced by some of the mulattoes and was thus out of bounds for any good noiriste. Yet he did appropriate the Marxist language of proletariat and bourgeoisie, and left no doubt which side of that divide he was fighting for. For years, he remained an agitating force in Haitian politics without ever quite breaking through to real power. Then came the tumultuous year of 1957.

Daniel Fignolé, the great noiriste advocate for the working classes of Haiti.

…but you’re now a longshoreman in Port-au-Prince, and your beloved Daniel Fignolé has been ousted after just nineteen days as Provisional President. Rumors abound that he has been executed by Duvalier and his thugs. You’re taking part in a peaceful, if noisy, demonstration demanding his return. Suddenly, you’re facing government tanks and troops. Ghede rides on the lead tank, laughing and clapping his hands in delight. You shout your defiance and pitch a rock at the tank. The troops open fire, and machine-gun bullets rip through your chest…

One Paul Magloire, better known as Bon Papa, had been Haiti’s military dictator since 1950. The first few years of his reign had gone relatively well; his stridently anticommunist posturing won him some measure of support from the United States, and Haiti briefly even became a vacation destination to rival the Dominican Republic among sun-seeking American tourists. But when a devastating hurricane struck Hispaniola in 1954 and millions of dollars in international aid disappeared in inimitable Haitian fashion without ever reaching the country’s people, the mood among the elites inside the country who had been left out of that feeding frenzy began to turn against Bon Papa. On December 12, 1956, he resigned his office by the hasty expedient of jumping into an airplane and getting the hell out of Dodge before he came to share the fate of Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. The office of the presidency, a hot potato if ever there was one, then passed through three more pairs of hands in the next six months, while an election campaign to determine Haiti’s next permanent leader took place.

Of course, in Haiti election campaigns were fought with fists, clubs, knives, guns, bombs, and, most of all, rampant, pervasive corruption at every level. Still, in a rare sign of progress of a sort in Haitian politics, the two strongest candidates were both noiristes promising to empower the people rather than the mulatto elites. They were Daniel Fignolé and François Duvalier, the latter being a frequent comrade-in-arms of the former during the struggles of the last twenty years who had now become a rival; he was an unusually quiet, even diffident-seeming personality in terms of typical Haitian politics, so much so that many doubted his mental fortitude and intelligence alike. But Duvalier commanded enormous loyalty in the countryside, where he had worked for years as a doctor, often in tandem with American charitable organizations. Meanwhile Fignolé’s urban workers remained as committed to him as ever, and clashes between the supporters of the two former friends were frequent and often violent.

The workers around Port-au-Prince pledged absolute allegiance to Daniel Fignolé. He liked to call them his wuolo konmpresé — his “steamrollers,” always ready to take to the streets for a rally, a demonstration, or just a good old fight.

But then, on May 25, 1957, Duvalier unexpectedly threw his support behind a bid to make his rival the latest provisional president while the election ran its course, and Fignolé marched into the presidential palace surrounded by his cheering supporters. In a stirring speech on the palace steps, he promised a Haitian “New Deal” in the mold of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s American version.

The internal machinations of Haitian politics are almost impossible for an outsider to understand, but many insiders have since claimed that Duvalier, working in partnership with allies he had quietly made inside the military, had set Fignolé up for a fall, contriving to remove him from the business of day-to-day campaigning and thereby shore up his own support while making sure his presidency was always doomed to be a short one even by Haitian standards. At any rate, on the night of June 14, 1957 — just nineteen days after he had assumed the post — a group of army officers burst into Fignolé’s office, forced him to sign a resignation letter at gunpoint, and then tossed him into an airplane bound for the United States, exiling him on pain of death should he ever return to Haiti.

The deposing of Fignolé ignited another spasm of civil unrest among his supporters in Port-au-Prince, but their violence was met with even more violence by the military. There were reports of soldiers firing machine guns into the crowds of demonstrators. People were killed in the hundreds if not thousands in the capital, even as known agitators were rounded up en masse and thrown into prison, the offices of newspapers and magazines supporting Fignolé’s cause closed and ransacked. On September 22, 1957, it was announced that François Duvalier had been elected president by the people of Haiti.

Inside the American government, opinion was divided about the latest developments in Haiti. The CIA was convinced that, despite Fignolé’s worrisome leftward orientation, his promised socialist democracy was a better, more stable choice for the United States’s close neighbor than a military junta commanded by Duvalier. The agency thus concocted a scheme to topple Duvalier’s new government, which was to begin with the assassination of his foreign minister, Louis Raimone, on an upcoming visit to Mexico City to negotiate an arms deal. But the CIA’s plans accidentally fell into the hands of one Austin Garriot, an academic doing research for his latest book in Washington, D.C. Garriot passed the plans on to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, who protested strongly that any attempt to overthrow Duvalier would be counter to international law — and who emphasized as well that he had declared himself to be strongly pro-American and anti-Soviet. With the top ranks of the FBI threatening to expose the illegal assassination plot to other parts of the government if the scheme was continued, the CIA had no choice but to quietly abandon it. Duvalier remained in power, unmolested.

He had promised his supporters a bright future…

…before a shining white city atop a hill. A sign welcomes you to Duvalierville. As you walk through the busy streets, well-dressed, cheerful people greet you as they pass by. You are struck by the abundance of goods and services offered, and the cleanliness and order that prevails. Almost every wall is adorned with a huge poster of a frail, gray-haired black man wearing a dark suit and horn-rimmed glasses.

Under the figure are the words: “Je suis le drapeau Haitien, Uni et Indivisible. François Duvalier.”

Everyone you ask about the man says the same thing: “We all love Papa Doc. He’s our president for life now, and we pray that he will live forever.”

Instead the leader who became known as Papa Doc — this quiet country doctor — became another case study in the banality of evil. During his fourteen years in power, an estimated 60,000 people were executed upon his personal extra-judicial decree. The mulatto elite, who constituted the last remnants of Haiti’s educated class and thus could be a dangerous threat to his rule, were a particular target; purge after purge cut a bloody swath through their ranks. When Papa Doc died in 1971, his son Jean-Claude Duvalier — Baby Doc — took over for another fifteen years. The world became familiar with the term “Haitian boat people” as the Duvaliers’ desperate victims took to the sea in the most inadequate of crafts. For them, any shred of hope for a better life was worth grasping at, no matter what the risk.

…you find yourself at sea, in a ragged little boat. Every inch of space is crowded with humanity. They’re people you know and care about deeply. You have no food or water, but you have something more precious — hope. In your native Haiti, your life has become intolerable. The poverty, the fear, the sudden disappearances of so many people — all have driven you to undertake this desperate journey into the unknown.

A storm arises, and your small boat is battered by the waves and torn apart. One by one, your friends, your brothers, your children slip beneath the roiling water and are lost. You cling to a rotten board as long as you can, but you know that your dream of freedom is gone. “Damn you, Duvalier,” you scream as the water closes over your head…

And now I have to make a confession: not quite all of the story I’ve just told you is true. That part about the CIA deciding to intervene in Haitian politics, only to be foiled by the FBI? It never happened (as far as I know, anyway). That part, along with all of the quoted text above, is rather lifted from a fascinating and chronically underappreciated work of interactive fiction from 1992: Shades of Gray.

Shades of Gray was the product of a form of collaboration which would become commonplace in later years, but which was still unusual enough in 1992 that it was remarked in virtually every mention of the game: the seven people who came together to write it had never met one another in person, only online. The project began when a CompuServe member named Judith Pintar, who had just won the 1991 AGT Competition with her CompuServe send-up Cosmoserve, put out a call for collaborators to make a game for the next iteration of the Competition. Mark Baker, Steve Bauman, Belisana, Hercules, Mike Laskey, and Cindy Yans wound up joining her, each writing a vignette for the game. Pintar then wrote a central spine to bind all these pieces together. The end result was so much more ambitious than anything else made for that year’s AGT Competition that organizer David Malmberg created a “special group effort” category just for it — which, it being the only game in said category, it naturally won.

Yet Shades of Gray’s unusual ambition wasn’t confined to its size or number of coauthors. It’s also a game with some serious thematic heft.

The idea of using interactive fiction to make a serious literary statement was rather in abeyance in the early 1990s. Infocom had always placed a premium on good writing, and had veered at least a couple of times into thought-provoking social and historical commentary with A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity. But neither of those games had been huge sellers, and Infocom’s options had always been limited by the need to please a commercial audience who mostly just wanted more fun games like Zork from them, not deathless literary art. Following Infocom’s collapse, amateur creators working with development systems like AGT and TADS likewise confined almost all of their efforts to making games in the mold of Zork — unabashedly gamey games, with lots of puzzles to solve and an all-important score to accumulate.

On the surface, Shades of Gray may not seem a radical departure from that tradition; it too sports lots of puzzles and a score. Scratch below the surface, though, and you’ll find a text adventure with more weighty thoughts on its mind than any since 1986’s Trinity (a masterpiece of a game which, come to think of it, also has puzzles and a score, thus proving these elements are hardly incompatible with literary heft).

It took the group who made Shades of Gray much discussion to arrive at its central theme, which Judith Pintar describes as one of “moral ambiguity”: “We wanted to show that life and politics are nuanced.” You are cast in the role of Austin Garriot, a man whose soul has become unmoored from his material being for reasons that aren’t ever — and don’t really need to be — clearly explained. With the aid of a gypsy fortune teller and her Tarot deck, you explore the impulses and experiences that have made you who you are, presented in the form of interactive vignettes carved from the stuff of symbolism and memory and history. Moral ambiguity does indeed predominate through echoes of the ancient Athens of Antigone, the Spain of the Inquisition, the United States of the Civil War and the Joseph McCarthy era. In the most obvious attempt to present contrasting viewpoints, you visit Sherwood Forest twice, playing once as Robin Hood and once as the poor, put-upon Sheriff of Nottingham, who’s just trying to maintain the tax base and instill some law and order.

> examine chest
The chest is solidly made, carved from oak and bound together with strips
of iron. It contains the villagers' taxes -- money they paid so you could
defend them against the ruffians who inhabit the woods. Unfortunately, the
outlaws regularly attack the troops who bring the money to Nottingham, and
generally steal it all.

Because you can no longer pay your men-at-arms, no one but you remains to protect the local villagers. The gang is taking full advantage of this, attacking whole communities from their refuge in Sherwood Forest. You are alone, but you still have a duty to perform.

Especially in light of the contrasting Robin Hood vignettes, it would be all too easy for a reviewer like me to neatly summarize the message of Shades of Gray as something like “there are two sides to every story” or “walk a mile in my shoes before you condemn me.” And, to be sure, that message is needed more than ever today, not least by the more dogmatic members of our various political classes. Yet to claim that that’s all there is to Shades of Gray is, I think, to do it a disservice. Judith Pintar, we should remember, described its central theme as moral ambiguity, which is a more complex formulation than just a generalized plea for empathy. There are no easy answers in Shades of Gray — no answers at all really. It tells us that life is complicated, and moral right is not always as easy to determine as we might wish.

Certainly that statement applies to the longstanding question with which I opened this article: What to do about Haiti? In the end, it’s the history of that long-suffering country that comes to occupy center stage in Shades of Gray’s exploration of… well, shades of gray.

Haiti’s presence in the game is thanks to the contributor whose online handle was Belisana.[1] It’s an intriguingly esoteric choice of subject matter for a game written in this one’s time and place, especially given that none of the contributors, Belisana included, had any personal connection to Haiti. She rather began her voyage into Haitian history with a newspaper clipping, chanced upon in a library, from that chaotic year of 1957. She included a lightly fictionalized version of it in the game itself:

U.S. AID TO HAITI REDUCED TWO-THIRDS

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Oct. 8 — The United States government today shut down two-thirds of its economic aid to Haiti. The United States Embassy sources stressed that the action was not in reprisal against the reported fatal beating of a United States citizen last Sunday.

The death of Shibley Matalas was attributed by Col. Louis Raimone, Haitian Foreign Minister, to a heart attack. Three U.S. representatives viewed Mr. Matalas’ body. Embassy sources said they saw extensive bruises, sufficient to be fatal.

Through my own archival research, I’ve determined that in the game Belisana displaced the date of the actual incident by one week, from October 1 to October 8, and that she altered the names of the principals: Shibley Matalas was actually named Shibley Talamas, and Louis Raimone was Louis Roumain. The incident in question occurred after François Duvalier had been elected president of Haiti but three weeks before he officially assumed the office. The real wire report, as printed in the Long Beach Press Telegram, tells a story too classically Haitian not to share in full.

Yank in Haitian Jail Dies, U.S. Envoy Protests

Port-au-Prince, Haiti (AP) — Americans were warned to move cautiously in Haiti today after Ambassador Gerald Drew strongly protested the death of a U.S. citizen apparently beaten while under arrest. The death of Shibley Talamas, 30-year-old manager of a textile factory here, brought the United States into the turmoil which followed the presidential election Sept. 22 in the Caribbean Negro republic.

Drew protested Monday to Col. Louis Roumain, foreign minister of the ruling military junta. The ambassador later cautioned Americans to be careful and abide by the nation’s curfew.

Roumain had gone to the U.S. Embassy to present the government’s explanation of Talamas’ death, which occurred within eight hours of his arrest.

The ambassador said Roumain told him Talamas, son of U.S. citizens of Syrian extraction, was arrested early Sunday afternoon in connection with the shooting of four Haitian soldiers. The solders were killed by an armed band Sunday at Kenscoff, a mountain village 14 miles from this capital city.

Drew said Roumain “assured me that Talamas was not mistreated.”

While being questioned by police, Talamas tried to attack an officer and to reach a nearby machine gun, Roumain told Drew. He added that Talamas then was handcuffed and immediately died of a heart attack.

The embassy said three reliable sources reported Talamas was beaten sufficiently to kill him.

One of these sources said Talamas’ body bore severe bruises about the legs, chest, shoulders, and abdomen, and long incisions that might have been made in an autopsy.

A Haitian autopsy was said to have confirmed that Talamas died of a heart attack. The location of the body remained a mystery. It was not delivered immediately to relatives.

Talamas, 300-pound son of Mr. and Mrs. Antoine Talamas, first was detained in the suburb of Petionville. Released on his promise to report later to police, he surrendered to police at 2 p.m. Sunday in the presence of two U.S. vice-consuls. His wife, Frances Wilpula Talamas, formerly of Ashtabula, Ohio, gave birth to a child Sunday.

Police said they found a pistol and shotgun in Talamas’ business office. Friends said he had had them for years.

Before seeing Roumain Monday, Drew tried to protest to Brig. Gen. Antonio Kébreau, head of the military junta, but failed in the attempt. An aid told newsmen that Kébreau could not see them because he had a “tremendous headache.”

Drew issued a special advisory to personnel of the embassy and U.S. agencies and to about 400 other Americans in Haiti. He warned them to stay off the streets during the curfew — 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. — except for emergencies and official business.

Troops and police have blockaded roads and sometimes prevented Americans getting to and from their homes. Americans went to their homes long ahead of the curfew hour Monday night. Some expressed fear that Talamas’ death might touch off other incidents.

Calm generally prevailed in the country. Police continued to search for losing presidential candidate Louis Déjoie, missing since the election. His supporters have threatened violence and charged that the military junta rigged the election for Dr. François Duvalier, a landslide winner in unofficial returns.

Official election results will be announced next Tuesday. Duvalier is expected to assume the presidency Oct. 14.

The Onion, had it existed at the time, couldn’t have done a better job of satirizing the farcical spectacle of a Haitian election. And yet all this appeared in a legitimate news report, from the losing candidate who mysteriously disappeared to the prisoner who supposedly dropped dead of a heart attack as soon as his guards put the handcuffs on him — not to mention the supreme leader with a headache, which might just be my favorite detail of all. Again: what does one do with a place like this, a place so corrupt for so long that corruption has become inseparable from its national culture?

But Shades of Gray is merciless. In the penultimate turn, it demands that you answer that question — at least this one time, in a very specific circumstance. Still playing the role of the hapless academic Austin Garriot, you’ve found a briefcase with all the details of the CIA’s plot to kill the Haitian foreign minister and initiate a top-secret policy of regime change in the country. The CIA’s contracted assassin, the man who lost the briefcase in the first place, is a cold fish named Charles Calthrop. He’s working together with Michael Matalas, vengeance-seeking brother of the recently deceased Shibley Matalas (né Talamas), and David Thomas, the CIA’s bureau chief in Haiti; they all want you to return the briefcase to them and forget that you ever knew anything about it. But two FBI agents, named Smith and Wesson (ha, ha…), have gotten wind of the briefcase’s contents, and want you to give it to them instead so they can stop the conspiracy in its tracks.

So, you are indeed free to take the course of action I’ve already described: give the briefcase to the FBI, and thereby foil the plot and strike a blow for international law. This will cause the bloody late-twentieth-century history of Haiti that we know from our own timeline to play out unaltered, as Papa Doc consolidates his grip on the country unmolested by foreign interventions.

Evil in a bow tie: François Duvalier at the time of the 1957 election campaign. Who would have guessed that this unassuming character would become the worst single Haitian monster of the twentieth century?

Or you can choose not to turn over the briefcase, to let the CIA’s plot take its course. And what happens then? Well, this is how the game describes it…

Smith and Wesson were unable to provide any proof of the CIA’s involvement in Raimone’s killing, and they were censured by Hoover for the accusation.

The following Saturday, Colonel Louis Raimone died from a single rifle shot through the head as he disembarked from a plane in Mexico City. His assassin was never caught, nor was any foreign government ever implicated.

It was estimated that the shot that killed Raimone was fired from a distance of 450 yards, from a Lee Enfield .303 rifle. Very few professionals were capable of that accuracy over that distance; Charles Calthrop was one of the few, and the Lee Enfield was his preferred weapon.

Duvalier didn’t survive long as president. Without the riot equipment that Raimone had been sent to buy, he was unable to put down the waves of unrest that swept the country. The army switched its allegiance to the people, and he was overthrown in March 1958.

Duvalier lived out the rest of his life in exile in Paris, and died in 1964.

Daniel Fignolé returned to govern Haiti after Duvalier was ousted, and introduced an American-style democracy. He served three 5-year terms of office, and was one of Kennedy’s staunchest allies during the Cuban missile crisis. He is still alive today, an elder statesman of Caribbean politics.

His brother’s death having been avenged, Michel Matalas returned to his former job as a stockman in Philadelphia. He joined the army and died in Vietnam in 1968. His nephew, Shibley’s son Mattieu, still lives in Haiti.

David Thomas returned to Haiti in his role as vice-consul, and became head of the CIA’s Caribbean division. He provided much of the intelligence that allowed Kennedy to bluff the Russians during the Cuban missile crisis before returning to take up a senior post at Langley.

What we have here, then, is a question of ends versus means. In the universe of Shades of Gray, at least, carrying out an illegal assassination and interfering in another sovereign country’s domestic politics leads to a better outcome than the more straightforwardly ethical course of abiding by international law.

Ever since it exited World War II as the most powerful country in the world, the United States has been confronted with similar choices time and time again. It’s for this reason that Judith Pintar calls her and her colleagues’ game “a story about American history as much as it is about Haiti.” While its interference in Haiti on this particular occasion does appear to have been limited or nonexistent in our own timeline, we know that the CIA has a long history behind it of operations just like the one described in the game, most of which didn’t work out nearly so well for the countries affected. And we also know that such operations were carried out by people who really, truly believed that their ends did justify their means. What can we do with all of these contradictory facts? Shades of gray indeed.

Of course, Shades of Gray is a thought experiment, not a serious study in geopolitical outcomes. There’s very good reason to question whether the CIA, who saw Daniel Fignolé as a dangerously left-wing leader, would ever have allowed him to assume power once again; having already chosen to interfere in Haitian politics once, a second effort to keep Fignolé out of power would only have been that much easier to justify. (This, one might say, is the slippery slope of interventionism in general.) Even had he regained and subsequently maintained his grip on the presidency, there’s reason to question whether Fignolé would really have become the mechanism by which true democracy finally came to Haiti. The list of Haitian leaders who once seemed similarly promising, only to disappoint horribly, is long; it includes on it that arguably greatest Haitian monster of all, the mild-mannered country doctor named François Duvalier, alongside such more recent disappointments as Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Perhaps Haiti’s political problems really are cultural problems, and as such are not amenable to fixing by any one person. Or, as many a stymied would-be reformer has speculated over the years, perhaps there really is just something in the water down there, or a voodoo curse in effect, or… something.

So, Shades of Gray probably won’t help us solve the puzzle of Haiti. It does, however, provide rich food for thought on politics and ethics, on the currents of history and the winds of fate — and it’s a pretty good little text adventure too. Its greatest weakness is the AGT development system that was used to create it, whose flexibility is limited and whose parser leaves much to be desired. “Given a better parser and the removal of some of the more annoying puzzles,” writes veteran interactive-fiction reviewer Carl Muckenhoupt, “this one would easily rate five stars.” I don’t actually find the puzzles all that annoying, but do agree that the game requires a motivated player willing to forgive and sometimes to work around the flaws of its engine. Any player willing to do so, though, will be richly rewarded by this milestone in interactive-fiction history, the most important game in terms of the artistic evolution of the medium to appear between Infocom’s last great burst of formal experiments in 1987 and the appearance of Graham Nelson’s milestone game Curses! in 1993. Few games in all the years of text-adventure history have offered more food for thought than Shades of Gray — a game that refuses to provide incontrovertible answers to the questions it asks, and is all the better for it.

In today’s Haiti, meanwhile, governments change constantly, but nothing ever changes. The most recent election as of this writing saw major, unexplained discrepancies between journalists’ exit polling and the official results, accompanied by the usual spasms of violence in the streets. Devastating earthquakes and hurricanes in recent years have only added to the impression that Haiti labors under some unique curse. On the bright side, however, it has been nearly a decade and a half since the last coup d’etat, which is pretty good by Haitian standards. You’ve got to start somewhere, right?

(Sources: the books Red & Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change 1934-1957, Haiti: The Tumultuous History — From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation by Philippe Girard, and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History by Laurent Dubois; Life of June 3 1957; Long Beach Press Telegram of October 1 1957. My huge thanks go to Judith Pintar for indulging me with a long conversation about Shades of Gray and other topics. You can read more of our talk elsewhere on this site.

You can download Shades of Gray from the IF Archive. You can play it using the included original interpreter through DOSBox, or, more conveniently, with a modern AGT interpreter such as AGiliTY or — best of all in my opinion — the multi-format Gargoyle.)

1. I do know her real name, but don’t believe it has ever been published in connection with Shades of Gray, and therefore don’t feel comfortable “outing” her here. ↩

Comments
24 Responses

- David Boddie

September 14, 2018 at 5:50 pm

A thought provoking article, as usual.

A few minor corrections:

“The rest of the population was made up the noir Haitians” (of)

“It tells us that life is complicated, and moral right not always” (is)

“and as such are not amendable to fixing” (amenable)

- Jimmy Maher

September 14, 2018 at 8:36 pm

Thanks!

- Aula

September 14, 2018 at 5:54 pm

The surname of the real-life counterpart of the fictional Matalas is mostly given as Talamas, but there’s at least one occurrence of both Tamalas and Tabalas.

- Jimmy Maher

September 14, 2018 at 8:38 pm

Way to make a confusing detail even more confusing, Jimmy.

Thanks!

- Avatar of Virtue

September 14, 2018 at 7:39 pm

Hm…I character surnamed Garriot, in a game about ethics/morality that prominently features a fortne-teller.

I feel like that’s an allusion to something… ;)

- Michael Davis

September 24, 2018 at 5:12 pm

And with Lord British being a resident of Austin, no less…

- matt w

September 14, 2018 at 7:42 pm

When telling the story of how Haiti came to be burdened with poverty and debt, it’s worth noting that in 1825 France sent fourteen warships to demand 150 million francs in indemnification (later reduced to 90 million, but still the equivalent of billions of dollars in today’s money) to compensate French colonists for the property they had lost with Haiti’s independence–that property including the people who had been freed from slavery with the revolution. The French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher said of this, “Imposing an indemnity on the victorious slaves was equivalent to making them pay with money that which they had already paid with their blood.” The debt was not paid off until 1947 and was a crushing burden on Haiti for much of that time.

All that is to say that Haiti’s troubles need not simply be put down to something in the water. The colonial powers didn’t merely stand by, shaking their heads sadly and being discouraged from investing. They actively made things worse where they could.–Which makes the ending choice you’ve described sound even more naïve. As you yourself say, it’s not as though the CIA was in the habit of staging assassinations in order to install leftists, or as though there’s much record of their violent interventions producing lasting democracies, regardless of what was in the local water. (Maybe Panama is an exception.)

Well, as you say it’s as much about American history as it is about Haiti, and the game does sound interesting even if it’s not a treatise on geopolitics.

- Dave W.

September 14, 2018 at 7:54 pm

“the poorest country in South America” should be North America, right? South America is generally south of Panama. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_countries_by_population

- Jimmy Maher

September 14, 2018 at 8:41 pm

We’ll go with North *or* South America. Makes the point sound even better, and has the added virtue of being true. ;)

Thanks!

- Jason Dyer

September 15, 2018 at 1:43 am

This is one of those cases of the canon changing via forgetfulness. If you asked people in 1995 what the best games of the previous 5 years were, Shades of Gray would be very high on the list (with Curses and maybe T-Zero, The Sound of One Hand Clapping and/or The Legend Lives).

I’m guessing off that list the average IF player these days has only heard of Curses.

- matt w

September 15, 2018 at 2:21 am

Seems like portability is a big part of forgetfulness there. Shades of Gray is AGT and I don’t know how consistently it’s been playable, The Sound of One Hand Clapping is AdvSys and I’m not sure how to play that, T-Zero is homebrew and appears to be playable on archive.org but that’s quite recent, The Legend Lives! is TADS which has been supported pretty continuously (and I have heard of the Unnkuulia series in general)… and Curses was made in Inform, compiles to the z-machine which has had lots of interpreters in many formats over many years, and also its library messages have been the basis of the defaults in Inform ever since. So the one people remember is the one that people have continuously been able to play since it was released. And, I suppose, the one whose creator produced more games and stayed involved in the IF scene.

- Jimmy Maher

September 15, 2018 at 7:24 am

All of those were a factor, I think, plus in-grouping and technology. Curses was produced and first played by people who would go on to form the modern, Internet-based interactive-fiction community, and in fact has long been considered the urtext of that community; the other games were produced and first played by “outsiders.” Just as significantly, AGT hasn’t aged nearly as well as even the earliest versions of TADS and Inform; even a great AGT game, like Shades of Gray, seems a little creaky and archaic in comparison to Curses.

- Jason Dyer

September 16, 2018 at 4:50 am

Just in case you get a hankering, The Sound of One Hand Clapping plays fine with Gargoyle.

- Alex Freeman

September 19, 2018 at 4:30 pm

Well, don’t forget you can — and could for quite some time — play those games in DOSBox.

- Rowan Lipkovits

September 15, 2018 at 10:08 pm

“the game requires a motivated player willing to forgive and sometimes to work around the flaws of its engine”

Given game logic and text data, it makes one wonder how much work would be involved in bluntly converting worthwhile AGT games to Inform to help future-proof them.

(I’m sure such a proposal would be met with a truly deafening silence of volunteers 8)

- Jimmy Maher

September 17, 2018 at 8:36 am

AGT is more of a database-driven engine than a full-fledged virtual machine. Given this, it would theoretically be possible to write a tool to auto-convert AGT code to Inform 6 or 7 or TADS, similar to what Graham Nelson and others did with the old Phoenix mainframe games.

Where conversion gets a little dicey is when you consider going beyond that, adding the layers of implementation that modern players expect. This would require adding substantial amounts of original text to the game, which would inevitably change the personality of the work somewhat and raise questions about authorship. Is this kosher? I confess that I don’t really know where to draw the lines, but I’d certainly be careful about undertaking such a project without the explicit permission of the original author(s).

- plam

September 19, 2018 at 3:42 am

née is what we usually see since it’s for women who change their names and thus accorded female, but in this case it should be né since it’s a he.

- Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2018 at 5:48 am

Thanks!

- Alex Freeman

September 19, 2018 at 6:33 am

Regarding the Sheriff of Nottingham, I would like to point out that, in real life, King John didn’t impose heavy taxes on peasants. He imposed on nobles because they were the ones with wealth, and he had to do it because of the debt his predecessor King Richard racked up fighting in the Crusades.

Still, peasants weren’t entirely safe from taxes. Sheriffs were so notorious for abusing their power (if you think police in America abuse their power nowadays, it was FAR worse in the medieval Europe) it was decided to create a body of law officers who’d be independent from sheriffs. They were known as crowners.

However, they simply used apparently unnatural deaths as an excuse to seize wealth from commoners. Bringing the murderer to justice was secondary or even beside the point. As a result, peasants would often try to hide bodies they found so as to avoid financial disaster to their communities.

Although I can see what Shades of Gray was going for, the simple truth of the matter is that people who have power will almost always abuse it. It’s almost as if most people will do the right thing only if they’re forced to somehow.

- Heike

September 20, 2018 at 2:50 pm

The whites bought slaves from the coastal slave markets, the markets that were open to anyone who wanted to sail by. Black Africans raided villages and enslaved their brothers and sisters. This is a common misconception.

The U.S. Marines were in Haiti for nearly 30 years (from 1914), and the country still reverted to dictatorship and poverty when the marines left. This exposes a truth that many refuse to acknowledge. Fixing countries isn’t easy. The “civil society” that we in the West take for granted, cannot just be conjured up. The harmonious relationships that enable some democracies to work, are not a given. Those relationships often require a lot of bad habits to be changed. This is not easy. Just check a history book.

- matt w

September 21, 2018 at 10:24 pm

Heike, slavery did exist in Africa before the Atlantic slave trade, but the Atlantic slave trade led to an enormous expansion of slavery and was devastating to the continent–the population of sub-Saharan Africa fell because a large proportion of its population was taken away in slavery. The line that slavery was something that black Africans did to other Africans and that Europeans merely bought people who had already been enslaved is white supremacist propaganda.

As for the idea that the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1914 shows that “Fixing countries isn’t easy,” ha fucking ha at the idea that the Marines were trying to “fix” Haiti. (Jimmy was unfortunately credulous about this in his original post.) A contemporary observer wrote of the occupation, “Military camps have been built throughout the island. The property of natives has been taken for military use. Haitians carrying a gun were for a time shot on sight. Machine guns have been turned on crowds of unarmed natives, and United States marines have, by accounts which several of them gave me in casual conversation, not troubled to investigate how many were killed or wounded,” and the occupying forces reinstituted the corvée system of forced labor. So it’s not like the country “reverted” to dictatorship and poverty after the occupation; there wasn’t anything to revert from.

I would tell you to check an actual history book yourself–or even to look at the relevant Wikipedia articles and their footnotes–but you don’t seem like you’d accept what you read there, so I’ll tell you to take a long walk off a short pier with a backpack full of lead weights.

- Heike

September 25, 2018 at 1:59 pm

Fun fact: Only a small percentage of the slaves bought from the African coastal slave market towns went to America. We’ve been conditioned to simply blame white people, but Africans sold their own people into slavery for profit. Less than 5% of slaves were even brought to the US. The vast majority went to South America, mostly Brazil. Please consult this diagram. The more you know!

There were no raiding parties of Americans who went inland to attack villages. ‘Forgive us, because we sold them,’ says African ambassador on possible slave ship find

The moment was a profound one for Posset. Not only does he hail from Benin, once known as the Kingdom of Dahomey, where the Clotilda captives were first captured by fellow Africans and then sold to the Americans, but Posset is actually a descendant of the nation’s royal family. By the 1800s, the King of Dahomey was making about a quarter of a million dollars a year selling Africans to Europeans, Americans and Brazilians, according to historical records. To put that number in perspective, a quarter of a million dollars in 1860 would be worth roughly $50 million today. The prosperous kingdom was notorious as a hub of the slave trade, and home to the door of no return, through which millions of slaves, including perhaps the Clotilda captives, passed as they were transferred to slave ships for the middle passage.

Asked to explain the words he spoke over the wreck, Posset covered his eyes for a moment as he regained composure and stifled a sob.

“I am just begging them to forgive us, because we sold them. Our forefathers sold their brothers and sisters. I am not the person to talk to them. No! May their souls rest in peace, perfect peace. They should forgive us. They should,” Posset said, wiping tears from his cheeks. “Qualified people will come and talk to them in due time. I feel so sad.

“I am a prince of Dahomey,” Posset explained later. “It was my ancestors who did this. We have ancestors who came here to this country forced. Forcibly, they didn’t choose. I am not insulting those who came here who were forced to come, because they were forced. I am insulting those who sold them back home. No means, no money, no articles, no stuff can buy life, but we sold our people. Brothers sold brothers and sisters. Fathers sold kids and wife. I will never blame those who came here. I will always beg them for forgiveness.”

Posset said that even today, people in Benin do not like to sit beside a door when visiting friends.

“That was how you ended up sold. Your friend, your relative, he would already have sold you before he invited you over. He would sit you by the door so when they came at the appointed time, they opened the door and grabbed you. This was even how the heirs to the king would move ahead in line to the throne, selling off rivals,” Posset said.

The journal of William Foster, the captain of the Clotilda, provides a detailed historical document regarding the slaving operations in Dahomey at the time of his journey.

“Having agreeably transacted affairs with Prince, we went to the warehouse where they had in confinement four thousand captives in a state of nudity from which they gave me liberty to select one hundred and twenty-five as mine, offering to brand them for me, from which I peremptorily forbid. Commenced taking on cargo of negroes, successfully securing on board one hundred and ten.”

- Chris

March 16, 2019 at 4:12 pm

Your piece has inspired me to try playing this game, but I’m having trouble running it. Neither Gargoyle or AGiliTY seem to recognize any of the files within soggy.zip. Any suggestions?

- Jimmy Maher

March 16, 2019 at 4:32 pm

Hmm… should run fine in both. You want to load the file that ends in a .D$$ extension.

The Gateway Games of Legend (Preceded by the Legend of Gateway)
September 21, 2018

Frederik Pohl was still a regular speaker at science-fiction conventions in 2008.

Frederik Pohl, who died on September 2, 2013, at age 93, had one of the most multifaceted careers in the history of written science fiction. Almost uniquely, he played major roles in all three of the estates that constitute science fiction’s culture: the first estate of the creators, in which he wrote stories and novels over a span of many decades; the second estate of the publishers and other business interests, in which he served as a highly respected and influential agent, editor, and anthologist over a similar period of time; and the third estate of fandom, in which his was an important voice from the very dawn of the pulp era, and for which he never lost his enthusiasm, attending science-fiction conventions and casting his votes on fan committees right up to the end.

Growing up between the world wars in Brooklyn, New York, Pohl discovered the nascent literary genre of science fiction in 1930 at the age of 10, when he stumbled upon an issue of Science Wonder Stories. From that moment on, he spent his time at every opportunity with the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Princess of Mars and Doc Smith’s Lensmen — catnip for any red-blooded young boy with any sense of wonder at all. In comparison to other young science-fiction fanatics, however, Pohl stood out for his personableness, his ambition, his spirit of innovation, and his sheer commitment to the things he loved. He became a founding member of the Brooklyn Science Fiction League, one of the earliest instances of organized science-fiction fandom anywhere in the country, and by the ripe old age of 13 or so had become a prolific editor and publisher of fanzines, many of which enjoyed a total circulation reaching all the way into two figures.

The world of science fiction was indeed still a small one, but that had its advantages in terms of access, especially when one was fortunate enough to live in the pulp publishing capital that was New York City. The boundaries between science-fiction fan and the “profession” of science-fiction writer were porous, and by the latter half of the 1930s Pohl was hobnobbing with such luminaries as Isaac Asimov and Cyril Kornbluth in an informal club of like-minded souls who called themselves the Futurians. He stumbled into the job of acting as the Futurians’ literary agent, which entailed buying stamps and envelopes in bulk, mailing off his friends’ stories to every pulp publisher in the Big Apple, and collecting lots of rejection slips alongside the occasional letter of acceptance in the return post.

In 1939, a 19-year-old Frederik Pohl got himself an editor’s job at the pulp house Popular Publications by virtue of knocking on their door and asking for one. He was given responsibility for Astonishing and Super Science Stories, second-tier magazines that paid their writers a penny per word and trafficked in the stories that weren’t good enough for John W. Campbell’s Astounding, the class of the field. Most of the authors whose stories Pohl accepted are justifiably forgotten today, but he did get his hands every now and then on a sub-par offering from the likes of a Robert A. Heinlein or L. Sprague de Camp that Campbell had rejected; Pohl, alas, was in no position to be so choosy.

But then along came the Second World War to put everything on hold for a while. Pohl wound up joining the Army Air Force, and was rewarded with what he freely described as a “cushy” war experience, working as meteorologist for a B-24 squadron based in Italy. When he returned from Europe, he returned to publishing as well but, initially, not to science fiction. Now a married man with familial responsibilities, he worked for a few years as an advertising copywriter, then as an editor for the book adjuncts to the magazines Popular Science and Outdoor Life; this constitutes the only substantial period of his entire professional life spent outside science fiction.

Yet the pull of science fiction remained strong, and in the early 1950s Pohl resumed his old role of literary agent for his writer buddies, albeit now on a slightly more professional footing. The locus of science-fiction profits was moving from the pulps to paperback novels and short-story collections in book form; thus Pohl became an editor for Ballantine’s new line of science-fiction paperbacks. By this point, the name of Frederik Pohl, while still fairly obscure to most readers, was known to everyone inside the community of science-fiction writers. He really was on a first-name basis with everyone who was anyone in the field, from hard science fiction’s holy trinity of Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke to lyrical science fiction’s patron saint Ray Bradbury.

In 1960, a 41-year-old Pohl accepted what was destined to become his most influential behind-the-scenes role of all when he agreed to become editor of a troubled ten-year-old also-ran of a magazine called Galaxy Science Fiction. “The pay was miserable,” he would later remember. “The work was never-ending. It was the best job I ever had in my life.”

At that time, science fiction was on the precipice of a new era, as a more culturally, racially, sexually, and stylistically diverse generation of up-and-coming writers — the so-called “New Wave” — began to arrive on the scene with a new interest in prose quality and formal experimentation, alongside an interest in exploring the future in terms of human psychology rather than technology alone. Many or most of the old guard who had cut their teeth in the pulp era, whose politics tended to veer conservative in predictable middle-aged-white-male fashion, greeted this invasion of beatnik radicals with dismay and contempt. The card-carrying John Birch Society member John W. Campbell, who was still editing Astounding — or rather, as it had recently been renamed, Analog Science Fiction — was particularly vocal in his criticism of all this new-fangled nonsense.

Frederik Pohl, however, was different from most of his peers. He had always read widely outside the field of science fiction as well as inside it, and was as comfortable discussing the stylistic experiments of James Joyce and Marcel Proust as he was the clockwork plots of Doc Smith. And as for politics… well, he had spent four years as a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party — take that, John Campbell! — and even after disillusionment with the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin had put an end to that phase he had retained his leftward bent.

In short: Frederik Pohl welcomed the new arrivals and their new ideas with open arms, making Galaxy a haven for works at the cutting edge of modern science fiction, superseding Campbell’s increasingly musty-smelling Analog as the genre’s journal of record. He had to, as he later put it, “encourage, coax, and sometimes browbeat” his charges to get the very best work out of them, but together they changed the face of science fiction. Indeed, it was arguably helping other writers be their best selves that constituted this multifariously talented man’s most remarkable talent of all. Perhaps his most difficult yet rewarding writer was the famously irascible Harlan Ellison, who burst to prominence in the pages of Galaxy and If, its sister publication, with stories whose names were as scintillatingly trippy as their contents: “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World.” Such stories were painfully shaped over the course of a series of bloody rows between editor and writer. Most readers would agree that Ellison’s later fiction has never approached the quality of these early stories, churned out under the editorship of Frederik Pohl.

Burned out at last by the job of editing Galaxy, Pohl stepped down at the end of the 1960s, a decade that had transformed the culture of science fiction every bit as much as it had the larger American culture that surrounded it. In the following decade, however, he continued to push the boundaries as an editor for Bantam Books. It was entirely thanks to him that Bantam in 1975 published Samuel R. Delany’s experimental masterpiece or colossal con job — depending on the beholder — Dhalgren, nearly 900 pages of digressive, circular prose heavily influenced by James Joyce’s equally controversial Finnegans Wake. Whatever else you could say about it, science fiction had come a long way from the days of Science Wonder Stories and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

All of which is to say that Frederik Pohl would have made a major impact on the field of science fiction had he never written a word of his own. In actuality, though, he managed to combine all of the work I’ve described to this point with an ebbing and flowing output of original short stories and novels, beginning with, of all things, a rather awkwardly adolescent poem called “Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna,” which appeared in Amazing Stories in 1937. Through the ensuing decades, Pohl was regarded as a competent but second-tier writer, the kind who could craft a solid tale but seldom really dazzled. Yet he kept at it; if nothing else, continuing to work as a writer in his own right gave him a feeling for what the more high-profile writers he represented and edited were going through. In 1967, he even switched roles with his frenemy Harlan Ellison by contributing a story to the latter’s Dangerous Visions anthology, a collection of deliberately provocative stories — the sorts of things that could never, ever have gotten into print in earlier years — from New Age writers and adventurous members of the old guard; it went on to become what many critics consider the most important and influential science-fiction anthology of all time.

But even Pohl’s contribution there — “The Day After the Day After the Martians Came,” a parable about the eternal allure of racism and xenophobia that was well-taken then and now but far less provocative than many of the anthology’s other stories — didn’t really change perceptions of him as a fine editor with a sideline in writing rather than the opposite. That shift didn’t happen until a decade later, when the now 58-year-old Pohl published a novel called Gateway. Coming after the most important work of the vast majority of his pulpy peers was well behind them, Pohl’s 21st solely-authored or co-authored novel constitutes the most unlikely story of a late blooming in the history of science fiction.

Described in the broadest strokes, Gateway sounds like the sort of rollicking space opera which John W. Campbell would have loved to publish back in the heyday of Astounding. In our solar system’s distant past, when the primitive ancestors of humanity had yet to discover fire, an advanced star-faring race, later to be dubbed the Heechee by humans, visited, only to abandon their bases an unknown period of time later. As humans begin to explore and settle the solar system in our own near future, they discover a deserted Heechee space station in an elliptical orbit around our sun. They find that the station still contains bays full of hundreds of small spaceships, and discover the hard way that, at the press of a mysterious button, these spaceships sweep their occupants away on a non-negotiable faster-than-light journey to some other corner of the galaxy, then (hopefully) back to Earth at the press of another button; for this reason, they name the station Gateway, as in, “Gateway to the Stars.” Many of the destinations the spaceships visit are pointless; some, such as the interior of a black hole, are deadly. Sometimes, though, the spaceships travel to habitable planets and/or to planets containing other artifacts of Heechee technology, worth a pretty penny to scientists, engineers, and collectors back on Earth.

Earth itself is not in very good shape socially, culturally, or environmentally. Overpopulation and runaway capitalism have all but ruined the planet and created an underclass of have-nots who make up the vast majority of the population, working in unappetizing industries like “food shale mines.” The so-called Gateway Corporation, which has taken charge of the station, runs a lottery for people interested in climbing into a Heechee spaceship, pressing a button, and seeing where it takes them. Possibly they can end up rich; more likely, they might wind up dead, their bodies left to decay hundreds of light years from home. But, conditions being what they are among the teeming masses, there’s no shortage of volunteers ready and willing to take such a long shot. These intrepid — or, rather, desperate — explorers are known as the Gateway “prospectors.”

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/gateway.mp4

That, then, is the premise —  a premise offering a universe of possibility to any writer with an ounce of the old pulpy space-opera spirit. Who are (or were) the Heechee? Why did they disappear? Did they intend for humans to discover their technology and start using it to explore the galaxy, or is that just a happy (?) accident? Will the two races meet someday? Or, if you like, table all those Big Mysteries for some series finale off in the far distance. Just the premise of flying off to parts unknown in all these Heechee spaceships admits of an infinite variety of adventures. Gene Roddenberry may have once famously pitched Star Trek as “Wagon Train to the Stars,” but the starship Enterprise has got nothing on this idea.

Here’s the thing, though: having come up with this spectacular idea that the likes of a Doc Smith could have spent an entire career milking, Frederik Pohl perversely refused to turn it into the straightforward tales of interstellar adventure that it was crying out to become. Gateway engages with it instead only in the most subversively oblique fashion. Half of the novel consists of a series of therapy sessions involving a robot psychologist and a Gateway prospector named Robinette Broadhead who’s neither conventionally adventurous nor even terribly likable. Robinette is the only survivor — under somewhat suspicious circumstances — of a recent five-person prospecting expedition. He’s now rich, but he’s also a deeply damaged soul, just one of the many who inhabit Gateway, a rather squalid place beset by rampant drug abuse, a symptom of the literal dead-enders who inhabit it between prospecting voyages. We spend far more time exploring the origins and outcomes of Robinette’s various psycho-sexual hangups than we do gallivanting about the stars. It’s as if we wandered into a Star Trek movie and got an Ingmar Bergman film that just happens to be set in space instead. Gateway is a shameless bait-and-switch of a novel. Robinette Broadhead, I’m afraid, lost his sense of wonder a long time ago, and it seems that he took Frederik Pohl’s as well.

The best way to understand Gateway may be through the lens of the times in which it was written: this is very much a novel of the 1970s, that long, hazy morning after to the rambunctious 1960s. The counterculture of the earlier decade had focused on collective struggles for social justice, but the 1970s turned inward to focus on the self. Images of feminist activists like Betty Friedan shouting through bullhorns at rallies were replaced in the media landscape with the sitcom character Mary Tyler Moore, the career gal who really did have it all; rollicking songs of mass protest were replaced by the navel-gazing singer-songwriter movement; the term Me Generation was coined, and suddenly everyone seemed to be in therapy of one kind or another, trying to sort out their personal issues instead of trying to fix society writ large. Meanwhile a pair of global oil crises, acid rain, and the thick layer of smog that hovered continually over Hollywood — the very city of dreams itself — were driving home for the first time what a fragile place this planet of ours actually is. Oh, well… on the brighter side, if you were into that sort of thing, lots of people were having lots and lots of casual sex, still enjoying the libertine sexual mores of the 1960s before the specter of AIDS would rear its head and put an end to all that as well in the following decade.

It’s long been a truism among science-fiction critics that this genre which is ostensibly about our many possible futures usually has far more interesting things to say about the various presents that create it. And nowhere is said truism more true than in the case of Gateway. For better or for worse, all of the aspects of fashionable 1970s culture which I’ve just mentioned fairly leap off its pages: the therapy and accompanying obsessive self-examination, the warnings about ecology and environment, the sex. It was so in tune with its times that the taste-makers of science fiction, who so desperately wanted their favored literary genre to be relevant, able to hold its head up proudly alongside any other, rewarded the novel mightily. Gateway won pretty much everything it was possible for a science-fiction novel to win, including its year’s Hugo and Nebula, the most prestigious awards in the genre; it sold far better than anything else Frederik Pohl had ever written; it made Pohl, four decades on from publishing that first awkward adolescent poem in Amazing Stories, a truly hot author at last.

The modern critical opinion tends to be more mixed. In fact, Gateway stands today as one of the more polarizing science-fiction novels ever written. Plenty of readers find its betrayal of its brilliant space-operatic setup unforgivable, and/or find its unlikable, self-absorbed protagonist insufferable, and/or find its swinging-70s social mores and dated ideas about technology simply silly. I confess that I myself largely belong to this group, although more for the latter two reasons than the first. Other readers, though, continue to find something hugely compelling about the novel that’s never quite come through for me. And yet even some of this group might agree that some aspects of Gateway haven’t aged terribly well. With some of the best writers in the world now embracing or at least acknowledging science fiction as as valid a literary form as any other, the desperate need to prove the genre’s literary bona fides at every turn that marked the 1960s and 1970s no longer exists. Gateway today feels like it’s trying just a bit too hard.

In at least one sense, Gateway did turn into a case of business as usual for a popular genre novel: Frederik Pohl published three sequels plus a collection of Gateway short stories during the 1980s. These gradually peeled back the layers of mystery to reveal who the Heechee were, why they had once come to our solar system, and why they had left, using the same oblique approach that had so delighted and infuriated readers of the first book. None of the them had the same lightning-in-a-bottle quality as that first book, however, and Pohl’s reputation gradually declined back to join the mid-tier authors with which he had always been grouped prior to 1977. Perhaps in the long run that was simply where he belonged — a solid writer of readable, enjoyable fiction, but not one overly likely to shift any paradigms inside a reader’s psyche.

At any rate, such was the position Pohl found himself in in early 1991, when Legend Entertainment came calling with a plan to make a computer game out of Gateway.

As a tiny developer and publisher in a fast-growing, competitive industry, Legend was always doomed to lead a somewhat precarious existence. Nevertheless, the first months of 1991 saw them having managed to establish themselves fairly well as the only company still making boxed parser-driven adventure games — the natural heir to Infocom, co-founded by an ex-Infocom author named Bob Bates and publishing games written not only by him but also by Steve Meretzky, the most famous Infocom author of all. Spellcasting 101, the latter’s fantasy farce that had become Legend’s debut product the previous year, was selling quite well, and a sequel was already in the works, as was Timequest, a more serious-minded time-travel epic from Bates.

Taking stock of the situation, Legend realized that they needed to increase the number of games they cranked out in order to consolidate their position. Their problem was that they only had two game designers to call upon, both of whom had other distractions to deal with in addition to the work of designing new Legend adventure games: Bates was kept busy by the practical task of running the company, while Meretkzy was working from home as a freelancer, and as such was also doing other projects for other companies. A Legend “Presentation to Stockholders” dated May of 1991 makes the need clear: “We need to find new game authors,” it states under the category of “Product Issues.” Luckily, there was already someone to hand — in fact, someone who had played a big part in drawing up the very document in question — who very much wanted to design a game.

Mike Verdu had been Bates’s partner in Legend Entertainment from the very beginning. Although not yet out of his twenties, he was already an experienced entrepreneur who had founded, run, and then sold a successful business. He still held onto his day job with ASC, the computer-services firm with many Defense Department contracts which had acquired the aforementioned business, even as he was devoting his evenings and weekends to Legend. Verdu:

I was the business guy. I was the CFO, the COO, the guy who went and got money and made sure we didn’t run out of it, who figured out the production plans for the products, tried to get them done on time, figured out the milestone plans and the software-development plans. I was a product guy inasmuch as I was helping to hire programmers and putting them to work, but I wasn’t a game designer, and I wasn’t writing code or being the creative director on products. And I really wanted to do that.

So, there was this moment when I had to decide between continuing to work with ASC and doing Legend part time or doing Legend full time. I decided to do Legend full time. But as a condition of that, I said, “I’d like to be a part of the teams that are actually making the games.”

But I didn’t believe I had the chops to create a whole world and write a game from scratch. I was sort of looking for a world I could tell a story in. So I talked to Bob about licensing. I was incredibly passionate about Frederik Pohl’s novels. So we talked about Gateway, and Bob made the connection and negotiated the deal. It went so much smoother and easier than I thought it would. I was so excited!

The negotiations were doubtless sped along by the fact that the bloom was already somewhat off the rose when it came to Gateway. The novel’s sequels had been regarded by even many fans of the original as a classic case of diminishing returns, and the whole body of work, which so oozed that peculiar malaise of the 1970s, felt rather dated when set up next to hipper, slicker writers of the 1980s like William Gibson. Nobody, in short, was clamoring to license Gateway for much of anything by this point, so a deal wasn’t overly hard to strike.

Just like that, Mike Verdu had his world to design his game in, and Legend was about to embark on their first foray into a type of game that would come to fill much of their catalog in subsequent years: a literary license. For this first time out, they were fortunate enough to get the best kind of literary license, short of the vanishingly rare case of one where an active, passionate author is willing to serve as a true co-creator: the kind where the author doesn’t appear to be all that interested in or even aware of the project’s existence. Mike Verdu never met or even spoke to Frederik Pohl in the process of making what would turn out to be two games based on his novels. He got all the benefits of an established world to play in with none of the usual drawbacks of having to ask for approval on every little thing.

Yet the Gateway project didn’t remain Verdu’s baby alone for very long. Bates and Verdu, eager to expand their stable of game designers yet further, hit upon the idea of using it as a sort of training ground for other current Legend employees who, like Verdu, dreamed of breaking into a different side of the game-development business. Verdu agreed to divide his baby into three pieces, taking one for himself and giving the others to Glen Dahlgren, a Legend programmer, and to Michael Lindner, the company’s music-and-sound guru. All would work on their parts under the loose supervision of the experienced Bob Bates, who stood ready to gently steer them back on course if they started to stray. Verdu:

We learned how to write code. We learned the craft of interactive-fiction design from Bob, then we would huddle as a group and hash out the storylines and puzzles for our respective sections of the game, then try to tie them all together. That was one of the best times of my career, turning from a defense-industry executive into a game designer who could write code and bring a game to life. Magical… incredibly great!

You were writing, compiling, and testing in this constant iteration. You would write something, then you would see the results, then repeat. I think that was the most powerful flow state I’ve ever been in. Hours would just evaporate. I’d look up at four in the morning and there’d be nobody in the office: Good God, where did the last eight hours go? It was a wonderful creative process.

It was an unorthodox, perhaps even disjointed way to make a game, but the Legend Trade School for Game Design worked out beautifully. When it shipped in the summer of 1992, Gateway was by far the best thing Legend had done to that point: a big, generous, well-polished game, with lots to see and do, a nice balance between plot and free-form exploration, and meticulously fair puzzle design. It’s the adventure-game equivalent of a summer beach read, a page turner that just keeps rollicking along, ratcheting up the excitement all the while. It isn’t a hard game, but you wouldn’t want it to be; this is a game where you just want to enjoy the ride, not scratch your head for long periods of time over its puzzles. It even looks much better than the occasionally garish-looking Legend games which came before it, thanks to the company’s belated embrace of 256-color VGA graphics and their growing comfort working with multimedia elements.

You might already be sensing a certain incongruity between this description of Gateway the game and my earlier description of Gateway the novel. And, indeed, said incongruity is very much present. A conventional object-oriented adventure game is hardly the right medium for delving deep into questions of individual psychology. A player of a game needs a through line to follow, a set of concrete goals to achieve; this explains why adventure games share their name with adventure fiction rather than literary fiction. Do you remember how I described Gateway the novel as setting up a perfect space-opera premise, only to obscure it behind therapy sessions and a disjointed, piecemeal approach to its narrative? Well, Gateway the game becomes the very space opera that the novel seemed to promise us, only to jerk it away: a big galaxy-spanning romp that Doc Smith could indeed have been proud of. Mike Verdu, the designer most responsible for the overarching structure of the game, jettisoned Pohl’s sad-sack protagonist along with all of his other characters. He also dispensed with the foreground plot, such as it is, about personal guilt and responsibility that drives the novel. What he was left with was the glorious wide-frame premise behind it all.

The game begins with you, a lucky (?) lottery winner from the troubled Earth, arriving at Gateway Station to take up the job of prospector. In its first part, written by Mike Verdu, you acclimate to life on the station, complete your flight training, and go on your initial prospecting mission. In the second part, written by Michael Lindner, you tackle a collection of prospecting destinations in whatever order you prefer, visiting lots of alien environments and assembling clues about who the Heechee were and why they’ve disappeared. In part three, written by Glen Dahlgren, you have to avert a threat to Earth posed by another race of aliens known as the Assassins — that race being the reason, you’ve only just discovered to your horror, that the Heechee went into hiding in the first place. The plot as a whole is expansive and improbable and, yes, more than a little silly. In other words, it’s space opera at its best. There’s nothing wrong with a little pure escapism from time to time.

Gateway the game thus becomes, in my opinion anyway, an example of a phenomenon more common than one might expect in creative media: the adaptation that outdoes its source material. It doesn’t even try to carry the same literary or thematic weight that the novel rather awkwardly stumbles along under, but by way of compensation it’s a heck of a lot more fun. As an adaptation, it fails miserably if one’s criterion for success is capturing the unadulterated flavor and spirit of the source material. As a standalone adventure game, however, it’s a rollicking success.

Legend had signed a two-game deal with Frederik Pohl right from the start, and had always intended to develop a sequel to Gateway if its sales made that idea viable. And so, when the first Gateway sold a reasonable 35,000 units or so, Gateway II: Homeworld got the green light. Michael Lindner had taken on another project of his own by this point, so Mike Verdu and Glen Dahlgren divided the sequel between just the two of them, each taking two of the sequel’s four parts.

Reaching stores almost exactly one year after its predecessor, Gateway II became both the last parser-driven adventure Legend published and the last boxed game of that description from any publisher — a melancholy milestone for anyone who had grown up with Infocom and their peers during the previous decade. The text adventure would live on, but it would do so outside the conventional computer-game industry, in the form of games written by amateurs and moonlighters that were distributed digitally and usually given away rather than sold. Never again would anyone be able to make a living from text adventures.

As era enders go, though, Gateway II: Homeworld is pretty darn spectacular, with all the same strengths as its predecessor. In its climax, you finally meet the Heechee themselves on their hidden homeworld — thus the game’s subtitle — and save the Earth one final time while you’re at it. It’s striking to compare the driving plot of this game with the static collections of environments and puzzles that had been the text adventures of ten years before. The medium had come a long way from the days of Zork. This isn’t to say that Legend’s latter-day roller-coaster text adventures, sporting music, cut scenes, and heaps of illustrations, were intrinsically superior to the traditional approach — but they certainly were impressive in their degree of difference, and in how much fun they still are to play in their own way.

One thing that Zork and the Gateway games do share is the copious amounts of love and passion that went into making them. Unlike so many licensed games, the Gateway games were made for the right reasons, made by people who genuinely loved the universe of the novels and were passionate about bringing it to life in an interactive medium.

For Mike Verdu, Michael Lindner, and Glen Dahlgren, the Gateway games did indeed mark the beginning of new careers as game designers, at Legend and elsewhere. The story of Verdu, the business executive who became a game designer, is particularly compelling — almost as compelling, one might even say, as that of Frederik Pohl, the mid-tier author, agent, and editor who briefly became the hottest author in science fiction almost five decades after he decided to devote his life to his favorite literary genre, in whatever capacity it would have him. Both men’s stories remind us that, for the lucky among us at least, life is long, and as rich as we care to make it, and it’s a shame to spend it all doing just one thing.

Gateway and Gateway II: Homeworld in Pictures

Gateway employs Legend’s standard end-stage-commercial-text-adventure interface, with music and sound and graphics and several screen layouts to choose from, straining to satisfy everyone from the strongly typing-averse to the purists who still scoff at anything more elaborate than a simple stream of text and a blinking command prompt.

Mike Verdu wanted a license to give him an established world to play with. Having gotten his wish, he used it well. Gateway puts enormous effort into making its environment a rich, living place, building upon what is found in Frederik Pohl’s novels. Much of this has nothing to do with the puzzles or other gameplay elements; it’s there strictly to add to the experience as a piece of fiction. Thanks to an unlimited word count and heaps of new multimedia capabilities, it outdoes anything Infocom could ever have dreamed of doing in this respect.

We spend a big chunk of Gateway II in a strange alien spaceship — the classic “Big Dumb Object” science-fiction plot, reminding us not just of classic novels but of earlier text adventures like Infocom’s Starcross and Telarium’s adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama. In fact, there are some oddly specific echoes of the former game, such as a crystal rod and a sort of zoo of alien lifeforms to deal with. That said, you’ll never mistake one game for the other. Starcross is minimalist in spirit and presentation, a cerebral exercise in careful exploration and puzzle-solving, while Gateway II is just a big old fun-loving thrill ride, full of sound and color, that rarely slows down enough to let you take a breath. I love them both equally.

Many of the illustrations in Gateway II in particular really are lovely to look at, especially when one considers the paucity of resources at Legend’s disposal in comparison to bigger adventure developers like Sierra and LucasArts. There were obviously some fine artists employed by Legend, with a keen eye for doing more with less.

Some of the cut scenes in Gateway II are 3D-modeled. Such scenes were becoming more and more common in games by 1993, as computing hardware advanced and developers began to experiment with a groundbreaking product called 3D Studio. The 3D Revolution, which would change the look and to a large extent the very nature of games as the decade wore on, was already looming in the near distance.

The parser disappeared from Legend’s games not so much all at once as over a series of stages. By Gateway II, the last Legend game to be ostensibly parser-based, conversations and even some puzzles had become purely point-and-click affairs for the sake of convenience and variety. It already feels like you spend almost as much time mousing around as you do typing, even if you don’t choose to use the (cumbersome) onscreen menus of verbs and nouns to construct your commands for the parser. Having come this far, it was a fairly straightforward decision for Legend to drop the parser entirely in their next game. Thus do most eras end — not with a bang but with a barely recognized whimper. At least the parser went out on a high note…

(Sources: I find Frederik Pohl’s memoir The Way the Future Was, about his life spent in science fiction, more compelling than his actual fiction, as I do The Way the Future Blogs, an online journal which he maintained for the last five years or so of his life, filling it with precious reminiscences about his writing, his fellow authors, his nearly century-spanning personal life, and his almost equally lengthy professional career in publishing and fandom. I’m able to tell the Legend Entertainment side of this story in detail thanks entirely to Bob Bates and Mike Verdu, both of whom sat down for long interviews, the former of whom also shared some documents from those times.

Feel free to download the games Gateway and Gateway II, packaged to be as easy as possible to get running under DOSBox on your modern computer, from right here. As noted in the article proper, they’re great rides that are well worth your time, two of the standout gems of Legend’s impressive catalog.)

Comments
39 Responses

- Alex Smith

September 21, 2018 at 4:24 pm

” It’s as if we wandered into a Star Trek movie and got an Ingrid Bergman film that just happens to be set in space instead”

Ingmar I presume?

- Jimmy Maher

September 21, 2018 at 4:32 pm

Yep. :) Thanks!

- Pedro Timóteo

September 21, 2018 at 5:23 pm

Great stuff! Both parts (SF/Pohl and the games) were a joy to read.

thanks entirely to Bob Bates and Mike Verdu, both of him sat down for long interviews

I don’t think they’re a single person… :) Both of who(m)?

- Jimmy Maher

September 21, 2018 at 7:31 pm

Thanks!

- Aula

September 21, 2018 at 6:25 pm

“Pohl wound up joining the Air Force”

Technically, Pohl joined the Army. Admittedly he was in Army Air Forces which was practically independent of Army Ground Forces, but there was no such thing as “the Air Force” during WWII.

“everyone was was anyone”

should be “who was”

“a pair of global oil shortages”

I think “oil crises” would be better, since for most of the 1979 crisis at least there was no actual shortage in the strict sense of the word.

“better than than the”

One “than” would be enough.

- Jimmy Maher

September 21, 2018 at 7:34 pm

Thanks!

- Brian

September 21, 2018 at 6:27 pm

I enjoyed reading Gateway back in the 80s… but the sequels definitely dropped off with each iteration. Unfortunately, I was starting college by the time the computer version came out and I rarely played after that.

Definitely enjoyed this one and the last one on Shades of Gray! Part of computer history that I haven’t heard much of before.

- Energeian Planes

September 21, 2018 at 7:25 pm

Science fiction is often about the great void, lifeless. It is an induction(gateway) into the powerful delusion that leads to perdition. For the Mystery of Lawlessness is already working. Indeed, it often includes themes and names to that which it replaces. They even appear here. A working of error, an operation of Wandering, it literally is. Let the reader use discernment.

- Stephen Norris

September 21, 2018 at 11:18 pm

The cagéd whale knows nothing of the mighty deeps.

- David Boddie

September 21, 2018 at 8:05 pm

An interesting article! I should perhaps check out Gateway (the book). As a teenager I found Man Plus, The Coming of the Quantum Cats, and Homegoing all to be interesting in their own way. Pohl was, I think, an underrated writer, especially when compared to some of his more high-profile peers.

Some minor corrections not already caught by alert readers:

“in the form of games written by amateur and moonlighters”
“in the form of games written by amateurs and moonlighters” (amateurs)

“and it’s a shame to spent it all doing just one thing”
“and it’s a shame to spend it all doing just one thing” (spend)

Also, I found the start of this sentence a bit of a mouthful (mindful?):
“Coming after the best and most important work of the vast majority of his pulpy peers was well behind them”

- Jimmy Maher

September 22, 2018 at 6:36 am

Thanks!

- stepped pyramids

September 21, 2018 at 8:37 pm

Wonderful piece! I’ve never heard of these games and I feel like I need to play them immediately.

Typo: “Samuel R. Delaney’s… Dahlgren”

Should be “Delany” and “Dhalgren”.

- Jimmy Maher

September 22, 2018 at 6:37 am

Not to be confused with Glen Dahlgren, right? ;) Thanks!

- Martin

September 21, 2018 at 9:41 pm

So if both of them were interviewed, what was their views on the books? Did they think the same things about them as you did?

- Jimmy Maher

September 22, 2018 at 6:42 am

We talked much more about Legend in general and the games than the books. I’m afraid we spoke quite some time ago, before I’d gotten a chance to reread the books for myself. I didn’t know if my 25-year-old opinion of not liking them all that much would hold up — Lord knows, lots of my other opinions about books and movies and music have changed over the years. But turns out I did find them just as underwhelming as ever.

However, Mike Verdu called himself a huge fan, which I would assume means that he loved them in their entirety, and just chose to highlight those aspects in the games that would work in that format — a very wise decision, whatever one’s opinion of the oblique narrative approach of the books. As for Bob: he had never actually read any of the books at the time the games were being made.

In other words, opinions expressed in this article about the Gateway novels are strictly my own. ;)

- Bob Bates

September 21, 2018 at 9:47 pm

Great article as usual, Jimmy! I think it’s important to note the successes that these game designer/authors went on to. After the team effort on the first Gateway, Mike Verdu and Glen Dahgren paired up (as you have mentioned) to do Gateway II on their own. Then Michael Lindner went solo on Companions of Xanth, Glen was the sole lead on Death Gate and Mike wrote Mission Critical. Later, when Legend needed to move away from adventure games, Glen and Mike pioneered the company’s transition into games using the Unreal engine, and Glen wrote Wheel of Time and Mike was the original lead designer of Unreal2, which Glen took over when Mike left to rise to greater heights at EA and beyond. –Bob

- Sniffnoy

September 22, 2018 at 12:38 am

Frederik Pohl, however, was different from most of his peers. He had always read widely outside the field of science fiction as well as inside it, and was as comfortable discussing the stylistic experiments of James Joyce and Marcel Proust as he was the clockwork plots of Doc Smith. And as for politics… well, he had spent four years as a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party — take that, John Campbell! — and even after disillusionment with the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin had put an end to that phase he had retained his leftward bent.

I think you’re portraying it as substantially more unusual than it actually was. Campbell may have been a Bircher but my (admittely secondhand) understanding is that the New York science fiction scene was generally pretty liberal and/or leftist (yes these are not the same but for these purposes I think the grouping makes sense) with multiple Communists among them.

Anyway, glad to hear the Gateway games are nothing like the book. Hoo boy… I only even finished it out of morbid curiosity, and even then only because it was so short. Broadhead isn’t just unlikable, he’s outright despicable, and yet the “implied author” seems to always side with him. This isn’t just a matter of the fact that he’s narrating, he also just, like, gets no comeuppance for his wrongdoings, including ones that, going by what was stated early in the book, should’ve gotten him kicked off of Gateway. But even if Broadhead were merely cowardly and unlikable, the book is just boring (yes, especially the therapy sections). And the final twist that book is built around only makes sense due to a particular screwed-up part of the incentive structure for prospectors that in reality would (I hope) have been fixed the first time it led to a disaster, so the whole book is built around a piece of idiocy. I have to admit I’m still pretty baffled how this won both the Hugo and the Nebula…

- Jimmy Maher

September 22, 2018 at 7:03 am

I think the part of that passage which singles out Pohl as unusual is the last: “he had retained his leftward bent.” Authors of that scene had tended to drift steadily rightward in the postwar years — the classic example being Robert A. Heinlein, who was an avowed socialist in the early 1940s, a hardcore conservative/libertarian by the early 1960s. What’s the old joke? A conservative is a liberal with a house and an investment portfolio?

I think the reason that Gateway won the Huge and Nebula is all down to the context of the times. At a time when “socially relevant” science fiction was all the rage among the genre’s intelligentsia, Gateway pushed all the right buttons. All awards programs are subject to this phenomenon (yes, even the IF Comp). If I ever started an awards program — for anything! — I think I’d want to displace it in time by about ten years or so. Voting on the best book of ten years ago instead of this year would give a chance for passions to cool and for the works in question to be more carefully evaluated on their actual merits. Then again, maybe it would just lead to them being judged by the standards of the intellectual fashions of ten years later rather than their own times…

- Jonathan Badger

September 22, 2018 at 12:52 pm

I think you are ignoring how it is implied that Broadhead ends up living in regret and hating himself in the end though, attempting (and failing) to find solace in therapy. The book certainly isn’t suggesting him as a role model.

- Keith Palmer

September 22, 2018 at 1:27 am

While I’ve only heard of the Gateway games in a general way, I have read Gateway (and could probably agree with the “diminishing returns to the sequels” comment, even if I remember them offering flickers of hope for the future of their fictional world). I do still have a copy of that novel anyway, although I can see the point of a number of its criticisms here. As I went through the summary of Pohl’s career, though, I did get to thinking “what about The Space Merchants from the 1950s?” However, I do have to acknowledge that was a collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth, and can suppose Pohl was seen as the junior partner at the time.

- Jimmy Maher

September 22, 2018 at 7:10 am

Check Pohl’s blog for the backstory of The Space Merchants. Personally, I consider it entertaining, but not really a *major* work of science fiction.

- maj

September 22, 2018 at 4:15 am

I think I read Gateway novels and its sequels – not sure how many I did read – at the perfect age and the perfect time to appreciate them, as a teenager around 1990. The 1970s were ancient history, so the novels’ sexual mores and focus on therapy seemed different from my own experience and suitably sci-fi, while the Internet had not yet arrived to make the technology seem quaint. And I was the right age to appreciate some navel-gazing by an unlikeable, grimy protagonist.

So I really enjoyed the novels – I even slightly preferred the sequels to the original, as the idea of uploading your consciousness to a computer and the idea that life on Earth originated in some distant origin were still fresh (to me). I have to say the Mass Effect games’ plot had some very familiar elements, later on…

- Andy Baio

September 22, 2018 at 5:24 am

This was a particularly fascinating read for me because I coincidentally just played and finished Gateway for the first time a couple months ago, after stumbling on the box art while looking for old adventure games on eBay.

I was familiar with Legend, but somehow never heard about Gateway and its sequel before, and it sounded compelling.

I sought it out, was engrossed, and played through it over a couple days. I wondered about the backstory, and now I know. Now on to play the sequel!

Tip to anyone interested in playing it: the Roland MT-32 soundtrack is phenomenal, worlds above the default Soundblaster soundtrack. Seek it out if you can, DOSBox supports it, but you’ll have to be creative to find the MT-32 samples and get them working.

- Steve Lutz

September 24, 2018 at 7:55 pm

There’s an MT-32 emulator out there called Munt that will get the job done for you. It works quite well in my experience.

- Chip Hollingsworth

September 22, 2018 at 1:43 pm

Wouldn’t 1998’s Starship Titanic be the last (or at least a later) commercial parser-driven game?

- Jimmy Maher

September 22, 2018 at 2:07 pm

It only used a parser for conversations (ironically, exactly the scenario where the Gateway games *don’t* try to use a parser). As such, it’s a stretch to call it a “parser-based adventure game” in the abstract.

- Aula

September 22, 2018 at 3:42 pm

Some of the similarity between Starcross and Gateway 2 is explained by the fact that they are both heavily influenced by the second novel of the Gateway series, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, or more precisely the gigantic Heechee ship that is one of the most prominent locations in the book. Starcross definitely gets some specific ideas, like the color-coded corridors, the presence of various alien life forms, and the huge spider-like thing, directly from BtBEH.

- Roberto

September 22, 2018 at 4:09 pm

I’ve just finished playing through both games the same day this post was published. I’ve never read the source material, but I really enjoyed the story, music, graphics, world setting, and interface so what’s not to like? Well… the puzzles! They’re really easy, like pseudo-mazes very quickly solved even by brute force, basic manipulation of objects and the like. Many of them are very clearly hinted, and, worst of all, the score always increase for any thing you do which points to the solution. Hence, no red herrings at all (when you pick up a useful object you get, like, 5 points, when you pick the red herring you get nothing, so what’s the point to put it there in the first place? Mystery.) But I can see other Legend games, as “Eric the Unready”, are more or less the same for this score thing.
This, for me, is a rare case I enjoyed a game (because I actually enjoyed both games) despite the puzzles, not because of them, cause the plot is so good.

P.S.
I too have found out striking similarities with Stracross: besides what you wrote, there’s a spidery alien thing also in the artifact, and the red rod also ends up in a nest. And then, it turns to “Space Odissey” as an inspiration for the last few puzzle in the artifact part.

- Captain Kal

September 23, 2018 at 4:56 pm

Not a friend of IF, but I loved both games. Having read the books, prior to playing the games, it was fascinating seeing these worlds coming to life. I think a CD version of the first game exists!!

- tedder

September 23, 2018 at 8:14 pm

I might have missed it, but you talk about ‘unlimited space’. What medium was Gateway delivered on? CD? A single 3.5″ floppy?

I don’t think I ever played it, but that “bunk” in the first screenshot looks awfully familiar. I guess it has a Sierra look to it.

- Jimmy Maher

September 24, 2018 at 6:22 am

Both games were delivered on floppies — albeit far more than one floppy. They really are quite elaborate multimedia productions, especially Gateway II. The latter was also made available on CD-ROM, but strictly as a convenient alternative to juggling a dozen or more floppies. (Legend’s first true CD-ROM production, with voice acting, was Companions of Xanth, the game that came right after it.)

But I was referring not to all the audiovisual gilding but rather to the core text and code. In the case of most Infocom games, these were limited to 128 K combined (some later games boosted that figure to 256 K, and the final four graphic games could go to 512 K). This meant that Infocom’s designers had to sweat every word. Legend’s designers, by contrast, could just write as much as they wished. There were no theoretical limits on size in Legend’s engine, and, given how cheap text and code had become in terms of storage space by the standards of the early 1990s, no real practical ones either. Granted, this could be a mixed blessing; Steve Meretzky’s Spellcasting games in particular tend to beat their jokes into the ground, going on and on and on to no particular payoff. But the Gateway games really benefited from the freedom to describe their world at length.

- theraraavis

September 24, 2018 at 6:43 pm

Shouldn’t “The Day After the Martians Came” be “The Day After the Day the Martians Came”? Wikipedia cites it as such and books.google.com does the same although I do see other conflicting links.

- Jimmy Maher

September 25, 2018 at 10:00 am

Right you are. Thanks!

- Harland

September 25, 2018 at 1:49 pm

I thought Battlestar Galactica was “Wagon Train to the Stars.”

What was Pohl’s position on Sad Puppies? Was he a misogynist or a progressive?

- Tom

September 26, 2018 at 5:52 am

I suspect he didn’t really notice, seeing as he was only around during Sad Puppies 1, aka “Larry Correia, annoyed at the fact that part of the reason he didn’t get a Campbell was because of politics, decides to half-jokingly openly campaign for a Hugo.”

I suspect, however, that had he been aware of SP 2 and 3, he would have taken your position on the matter, seeing as a quick perusal of his blog indicates that he disliked anyone to the right of Barack Obama.

(Also, there were two Puppy factions. The Sads were not misogynistic. The Rabids…yeah.)

- Aula

September 27, 2018 at 7:54 am

Gene Roddenberry pitched Star Trek as “Wagon Train to the stars” to network executives (who almost certainly knew nothing about science fiction) so that they would have at least a vague idea what it was going to be like; it was never meant to be an accurate description to the intended audience.

The original BSG probably was pretty close to actually being “Wagon Train to the stars” but most likely wasn’t pitched that way. I think it may even have been quite literally pitched as “blatant Star Wars ripoff” because that’s how it was intended to attract viewers.

- thedopefish

September 26, 2018 at 4:41 pm

I remember picking up a collection of a dozen or so unremarkable CD-ROM games back in the early to mid 90s, which happened to include Gateway 2. I had a great time playing through it, and then sought out and played the original Gateway afterwards. I never really knew much about the novels or he rest of Pohl’s career, so I found this an interesting read. Thanks!

- Ben

October 10, 2018 at 5:40 am

Rodenberry => Roddenberry?

- Jimmy Maher

October 11, 2018 at 7:58 am

Thanks!

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (or, Of Movies and Games and Whether the Twain Shall Meet)
September 28, 2018

You ask why there are movements in movie history. Why all of a sudden there are great Japanese films, or great Italian films, or great Australian films, or whatever. And it’s usually because there are a number of people that cross-pollinated each other.

— Francis Ford Coppola

Over the course of the late 1970s and early 1980s, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg remade the very business of film-making for better or for worse, shifting its focus from message movies and character dramas to the special-effects-heavy, escapist blockbusters that still drive Hollywood’s profits to this day. These events, which we might call the rise of the culture of the blockbuster, have long since been enshrined into the canonical history of film, filed under the names of these two leading lights.

Yet no two personalities could possibly have brought about such a dramatic shift on their own. Orbiting around Lucas and Spielberg was an entire galaxy of less prominent talents whose professional lives were profoundly affected by their association with these two new faces of modern Hollywood. They were the fellow travelers who helped Lucas and Spielberg to change the movie industry, all without ever quite being aware that they were part of any particular movement at all. Among the group were names like John Milius, Walter Murch, Willard Huyck, Randall Kleiser, Matthew Robbins, and Hal Barwood. “I can’t speak for the others,” says Robbins, “but it was my impression that nobody had the foggiest idea that there was any ‘next wave’ coming. Nobody had set their sights — except perhaps for George [Lucas].”

Out of this group of slightly lesser but undeniably accomplished lights, Hal Barwood is our special person of interest for today. He first met George Lucas in the mid-1960s, when the two were students together in the University of Southern California’s film program. Lucas, who had only recently abandoned his original dream of driving race cars in favor of this new one of making movies, was shy almost to the point of complete inarticulateness, and was far more comfortable futzing over a Moviola editing machine than he was trying to cajole live actors into doing his bidding. Nevertheless, there was a drive to this awkward young man that gradually revealed itself over the course of a longer acquaintance, and Barwood — on the surface, a far more assertive, impressive personality — soon joined Lucas’s loose clique in the role of follower rather than leader. Flying in the face of a Hollywood culture which valued realistic character dramas above all else, Lucas, Barwood, and their pals loved science fiction and fantasy, didn’t consider escapism to be a dirty word, and found the visual aesthetics of film to be every bit as interesting as their actors’ performances.

The bond thus forged would remain strong for many years. When Lucas, through the intermediation of his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola, got the chance to direct an actual feature film, Barwood added the first professional film credit to his own CV by helping out with the special effects on what became THX-1138, a foreboding, low-budget work of dystopic science fiction that was released to little attention in 1971. When Lucas hit it big two years later with his very different second film, the warmly nostalgic coming-of-age story American Graffiti, he bought a big old ramshackle mansion in San Anselmo, California, with the first of the proceeds, and Barwood became one of several fellow travelers who joined him and his wife in this first headquarters of a nascent corporate entity called Lucasfilm.

George Lucas, standing at far right, discusses Star Wars with his sounding board in the mid-1970s. Steve Spielberg is wearing the orange cap, and Hal Barwood sits on the fence behind him.

Working together with his good friend Matthew Robbins, Barwood wrote a science-fiction script called Star Dancing during the same period. The two commissioned a former Boeing technical illustrator and CBS animator named Ralph McQuarrie to paint some concept art, thereby to help them pitch the project to the studios. In the end, though, Star Dancing never went anywhere — until Lucas, who was toying with ideas for a second, more crowd-pleasing science-fiction movie of his own, saw McQuarrie’s paintings and was greatly inspired by them, hiring him to develop the vision further for what would become Star Wars. McQuarrie’s concept art had much to do with the eventual green-lighting of Star Wars by 20th Century Fox, and he would continue to shape the look of that film and its two sequels over the long course of their production.

Barwood and Robbins, for their part, became two of the eight people entrusted to read the first draft of the film’s script. He and the others in that San Anselmo house then proceeded to slowly shape the Star Wars script we know today over the course of draft after draft.

Even as they helped Lucas with Star Wars, Barwood and Robbins were still trying to make it as screenwriters in their own right. They sold their first script, a chase caper called The Sugarland Express, to George Lucas’s up-and-coming pal Steven Spielberg, a more recently arrived member of the San Anselmo collective; he turned it into his feature-film directorial debut in 1974. More screenwriting followed, including an uncredited rewrite of the 1977 Spielberg blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the first film to benefit in a big way commercially from the new interest in science fiction ignited by Star Wars, which had been released about six months prior to it.

Yet the pair found screenwriting to be an inherently frustrating profession in an industry which regarded the director as a movie’s ultimate creative voice. “In writing, you’re always watching directors ruin your stuff,” says Barwood. “As a writer, you have a certain flavor, style, and emphasis in mind when you write the script, and you’re always shocked when the director comes back with something else. There’s a tendency to want to get your hands on the controls and do it yourself.” Accordingly, Matthew Robbins personally directed the duo’s 1978 comedy Corvette Summer, starring Mark Hamill — Luke Skywalker himself — in his first big post-Star Wars role. The film was a commercial success, even if the reviews weren’t great; it turned out that there was only so much you could do with Hamill, the very archetype of an actor who’s good in one role and one role only.

The duo’s next big project that was their most ambitious, time-consuming, and expensive undertaking yet. Dragonslayer was a fantasy epic based loosely on the legend of St. George and the dragon, and was once again directed by Robbins. The special effects were provided by George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic. In fact, Dragonslayer became the very first outside, non-Star Wars project the famous effects house took on. Being at least as challenging as anything in any of the Star Wars films, the Dragonslayer effects took them some eighteen months to complete.

Dragonslayer’s pedigree was such that it was widely heralded in the Hollywood trade press as a “surefire success” prior to its release. But it had the misfortune to arrive in theaters on June 26, 1981, two weeks after Lucas and Spielberg’s new blockbuster collaboration, Raiders of the Lost Ark. The latter film shared with Dragonslayer the distributor Paramount Pictures. “Paramount was quite satisfied to go through the summer with the money they were going to get from Raiders of the Lost Ark,” says Barwood, “and paid no attention to our movie. They just dropped it. They just forgot about it.” Dragonslayer flopped utterly, badly damaging the duo’s reputation inside Hollywood as purveyors of marketable cinema.

Barwood got his one and only chance to direct a feature film in 1985, when he took the reins of Warning Sign, yet another screenplay by himself and Robbins. In a telling sign of the damage Dragonslayer’s failure had done to their careers, this latest film, a fairly predictable thriller about a genetic-engineering project run amok, had a budget of about one-quarter what the duo had had to work with on their fantasy epic. It garnered mediocre reviews and box-office receipts, and no one seemed eager to entrust its first-time director with more movies. Barwood and Robbins, both frustrated by the directions their careers had taken since Corvette Summer, decided their long creative partnership had run its course.

George Lucas (far left) and some of his old compatriots at Skywalker Ranch in the mid-1980s. Matthew Robbins is third from left, Hal Barwood fourth from left.

So, Hal Barwood found himself at something of a loose end as the 1980s drew to a close. He was still friendly with George Lucas, if perhaps not quite the bosom buddy he once had been, and he still knew many of the most powerful people in the movie industry, starting with Steven Spielberg — who had gradually shown himself to be, even more so than Lucas, the personification of the new, blockbuster-oriented Hollywood, his prolific career cruising along with hit after hit. But, as Spielberg basked in his success, Barwood had parted ways with his partner and seen his directorial debut become a bust. He hadn’t had a hand in a real hit since 1978, and he hadn’t sold a script at all in quite some time. Just to rub salt into the wounds, his old compatriot Matthew Robbins managed to score another modest hit of his own at last just after the breakup, with the distinctly Spielbergian science-fiction comedy Batteries Not Included, which he directed and whose screenplay he had written with others.

Perhaps it was time for Hal Barwood to try something completely different. He had actually been mulling over his future in this cutthroat industry for some time already. During the promotional tour for Warning Sign, he had made a rather odd comment to Starlog magazine, accompanied by what his interviewer described as a “nervous laugh”: “If movies don’t pan out for me, I have a second career lurking around the corner in entertainment software, working on animated computer games, which I’m doing right now. They’re very sophisticated, animated adventure games.”

Barwood had in fact been fascinated by computers for a long time, ever since he had first encountered the hulking number-crunching monstrosities of the 1960s at university. In 1980, while hanging around the set of Dragonslayer, he had programmed his first game on a state-of-the-art HP-41C calculator as a way of passing the time between takes. Soon after, he joined the PC Revolution, buying an Apple II and starting to tinker. He worked for years on a CRPG for that machine in his spare time — worked for so long that it was still in progress when the Apple II games market began to collapse. Undaunted, he moved on to a Macintosh, where he programmed a storyboarding system for movie makers like himself in HyperCard, selling it as shareware under the name of StoryCard.

With all this experience behind him, it was natural for Barwood now to consider a future in games instead of movies — a future in an industry where the budgets were smaller, the competitors were fewer, and it was much easier to come up with an idea and actually see it through from beginning to end in something like its original form. All of this made quite a contrast to the industry where he had cut his teeth. “The movie business is very difficult for most of us,” he says. “We don’t usually get a majority of our projects to completion. Most of our dreams turn into screenplays, but they stall out at that stage.”

Given his long association with George Lucas, Barwood decided to talk to Lucasfilm Games. They were more than happy to have him, and could certainly relate to the reasons that brought him to their doorstep — for, like Barwood, they had had a somewhat complicated life of it to date in the long shadow cast by Lucas.

Before there was Lucasfilm Games, there was the Lucasfilm Computer Division, founded in 1979 to experiment with computer animation and digital effects, technologies with obvious applications for the making of special-effects-heavy films. Lucasfilm Games had been almost literally an afterthought, an outgrowth of the Computer Division that was formed in 1982, a time when George Lucas and Lucasfilm were flying high and throwing money about willy-nilly.

In those days, a hit computer game, one into which Lucasfilm Games had poured their hearts and souls, might be worth about as much to the parent company’s bottom line as a single Jawa action figure — such was the difference in scale between the computer-games industry of the early 1980s and the other markets where Lucasfilm was a player. George Lucas personally had absolutely no interest in or understanding of games, which didn’t do much for the games division’s profile inside his company. And, most frustrating of all for the young developers who came to work for The House That Star Wars Built, they weren’t allowed to make Star Wars games — nor, for that matter, even Indiana Jones games — thanks to Lucas having signed away those rights to others at the height of the Atari VCS fad. Noah Falstein, one of those young developers, would later characterize this situation as “the best thing that could have happened” to them, as it forced them to develop original fictions instead — leading, he believes, to better, more original games. At the time, however, it couldn’t help but frustrate that the only Lucasfilm properties the games division had access to were middling fare like Labyrinth.

Still, somebody inside Lucasfilm apparently believed in the low-profile division’s potential, for it survived the great bloodletting of the mid-1980s. In response to George Lucas’s expensive divorce settlement and the realization that, with the Star Wars trilogy now completed, there would be no more enormous guaranteed paydays in the future, the company’s executives, with Lucas’s tacit blessing, took an axe to many of their more uncertain or idealistic ventures at that time. Among the divisions that were sold off was the rest of the Computer Division that had indirectly spawned Lucasfilm Games; it would go on to worldwide fame and fortune under the name of Pixar. As for the games people: in 1986, they got to move into some of the vacant space all the downsizing had opened up at Skywalker Ranch, Lucasfilm’s sprawling summer camp cum corporate campus in Marin County, California.

The wall separating Lucasfilm Games from the parent company’s most desirable intellectual properties finally began to fall at the end of the 1980s, when the games people were given access to… no, not yet to Star Wars, but to the next best thing: Indiana Jones, George Lucas’s other great cinematic success story. Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first breakneck tale of the adventurous 1930s archaeologist, as conceived by Lucas and passed on to Steven Spielberg to direct, had become the highest-grossing film of 1981 by nearly a factor of two over its nearest competitor; as we’ve seen, it had trampled less fortunate rivals like poor Hal Barwood’s Dragonslayer into the dust during that year’s summer-blockbuster season. A 1984 sequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, had done nearly as well. Now a third and presumably final film, to be called Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, was in the offing. With the earlier licensing deals they had made for the property now expired, the parent company wanted their games division to make an adventure game out of it.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure[1] was designed by Noah Falstein, David Fox, and Ron Gilbert, all of whom had worked on previous Lucasfilm adventure games, and written using the division’s established SCUMM adventuring engine. This committee approach to the game’s design is typical of the workaday nature of the project as a whole. The designers were given a copy of the movie’s shooting script, and were expected not to deviate too much from it. Ron Gilbert, a comedy writer by disposition and talent, found the need to play it relatively straight particularly frustrating, but it seems safe to say that all of the designers’ creative instincts were somewhat hemmed in by the project’s fixed rules. The end result, while competently executed, hasn’t the same vim and vinegar as Maniac Mansion, the first SCUMM adventure, nor even Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, the rather less satisfying second SCUMM game.

The boxing scene which opens the game of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was a part of the film’s original script which was cut in the editing room. Scenes like these make the game almost of more interest to film historians than game historians, serving as a window into the movie as it was conceived by its screenwriter Jeffrey Boam.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the game arises from the fact that its designers were adapting from the shooting script rather than the finished movie, which they got to see in the Skywalker Ranch theater only when their own project was in the final stages of bug-swatting and polishing. They actually implemented parts of Jeffrey Boam’s script for the movie far more faithfully than Steven Spielberg wound up doing, including numerous scenes — like the boxing sequence at the very beginning of the game — that wound up being cut from the movie. Nevertheless, the game suffers from the fundamental problem of all such overly faithful adaptations from other media: if you’ve seen the movie — and it seemed safe to assume that just about everybody who played the game had seen the movie — what’s the point in walking through the same story again in game form? The designers went to considerable lengths to accommodate curious (or cantankerous) players who make different choices from those of Indiana Jones in the movie, turning their choices into viable alternative pathways rather than mere game overs. But there was only so much they could do in even that respect, given the constraints under which they labored.

Of course, licensed games exist first and foremost because licenses sell games, not because they lead to better ones. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade became the cinematic blockbuster of the year upon its release in May of 1989, and the game also did extremely well when it hit stores a few weeks later. Having taken this first step into the territory of Lucasfilm’s biggest franchises and been so amply rewarded for it, the people at the games division naturally wanted to keep the good times going. There were likely to be no more Indiana Jones movies; Harrison Ford, the series’s famously prickly star, was publicly declaring himself to be through with playing the character. But did that necessarily mean that there couldn’t be more Indiana Jones games? With the license now free and clear for their use, no one at Lucasfilm Games saw any reason to assume so.

It was at this juncture that Hal Barwood entered the picture, interested in trying a new career in games on for size. Just about any developer in the industry would have jumped at the chance to bring someone like him aboard. Talk of a merger of games with cinema to create a whole new genre of mass-media entertainment — the interactive movie, preferably published on CD-ROM complete with voice acting and perhaps even real-world video footage — dominated games-industry conferences and magazine editorials alike as the 1990s began. But for all their grandiose talk, the game developers clustered in Northern California were all too aware that they lacked the artistic respectability necessary to tempt most of those working with traditional film and video in the southern part of the state into working with them on interactive projects. Hal Barwood might have been no more than a mid-tier Hollywood player at best, but suffice to say that there wasn’t exactly a surfeit of other Hollywood veterans of any stripe who were willing to work on games.

In an online CompuServe conference involving many prominent adventure-game designers that was held on August 24, 1990, not long after Barwood’s arrival at Lucasfilm Games, Noah Falstein could hardly keep himself from openly taunting his competitors about what he had and they didn’t:

One way we’re trying to incorporate real stories into games is to use real storytellers. Next year, we have a game coming out by Hal Barwood, who’s been a successful screenwriter, director, and producer for years. His most well-known movies probably are the un-credited work he did on Close Encounters and Dragonslayer, which he co-wrote and produced. He’s also programmed his own Apple II games in 6502 assembly in his spare time. I’ve already learned a great deal about pacing, tension, character, and other “basic” techniques that come naturally — or seem to — to him. I highly recommend such collaborations to you all. I think we’ve got a game with a new level of story on the way.

Falstein was in a position to learn so much from Barwood because he had been assigned to work with him as his design partner on his first project — the idea being that Barwood would take care of all the “basic” cinematic techniques Falstein enthuses about above, while Falstein would keep the project on track and make sure it worked as a playable adventure game, with soluble puzzles and all the rest.

Ironically given what Raiders of the Lost Ark had done to Dragonslayer, Hal Barwood’s one big chance to become a truly major Hollywood player, the game in question was to be another Indiana Jones game — albeit one with an original story, not bound to any movie. The initial plan had been to sift through the pile of rejected scripts for the third Indiana Jones film and select a likely candidate from them for adaptation into a game. But it turned out that the scripts were all pretty bad, or at least not terribly suitable for interactive adaptation.

The Azores is one of the many exotic locations Indy visits in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, all of which are brought to life with aplomb by Lucasfilm Games’s accomplished art team.

So, Barwood and Falstein decided to invent their own story, and thus went looking for legends of lost civilizations that might be worthy of an intrepid archeologist who had already found the Lost Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail. “George [Lucas] has established a criterion for Indiana Jones adventures,” said Barwood, “and it’s basically that he should only find things that actually existed — or at least could have existed.” The fabled sunken island of Atlantis seemed the right mixture of myth and history. Barwood:

Our eyes fell upon Atlantis because not only is it an ancient myth known by almost everyone, but it also has wonderful credentials, in that it was first mentioned by Plato a couple thousand years ago. In addition to that, in the early part of this century, the idea was taken over by spiritualists and mystics, who attributed to the Atlanteans this fantastic technology, with airships flying 100 milers per hour, powered by vrill and firestone. When we found this out, we thought to ourselves, “Does this sound as interesting as the Holy Grail? Yes, it does.” Even though it’s a myth, the myth is grounded in a wonderful collection of lore.

The legend’s wide-ranging wellsprings would allow them to send Indy traipsing between exotic locations scattered over much of the world: New York City, Iceland, Guatemala, the Azores, Algiers, Monte Carlo, Crete, Santorini, finally ending up under the ocean at the site of Atlantis itself.

The game known as Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis hits all the notes familiar to anyone who has seen an Indiana Jones film. It seems that the mythical Atlanteans were quite a clever lot, having harnessed energies inconceivable to modern scientists. The Nazis have gotten wind of this, and are fast piecing together the clues that will let them find the undersea site of Atlantis, enter it, and take the technology for themselves, thereby to conquer the world. It’s a fine premise for a globetrotting story of thrills and spills — silly but no more silly than any of those that got made into movies. There’s even a female sparring partner/love interest for Indy, just like in the films. This time her name is Sophia, and she’s a former archaeologist who’s become a professional psychic, much to the scientific-minded Indy’s dismay. Let the battle of barbs begin!

Barwood’s first interactive script really is a good one, with deftly drawn plot beats and characters that, if not exactly deep, nobly fulfill their genre-story purposes as engines of action, tension, or comic relief. Other game writers of the early 1990s weren’t always or even usually all that adept at such basic techniques of fiction as “pacing, tension, and character.” To see how painful a game can be that wants to be like the Indiana Jones movies but lacks the writers to pull it off, one need look no further than Dynamix’s Heart of China, with its humor that lands with the most leaden of thuds, its hero who wants to be a charming rogue but misplaced his charm, and its dull supporting characters who are little more than crude ethnic stereotypes. When you play Fate of Atlantis, by contrast, you feel yourself to be in the hands of a writer who knows exactly what he’s doing.

The game is full of callbacks to the movies’ most famous catchphrases.

That said, the degree to which Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is truly cinematic can be and too often is overstated. Games are not movies — an obvious point that game developers of the early 1990s frequently lost sight of in their rush to make their interactive movies. Hal Barwood, the Hollywood veteran brought into Lucasfilm Games to apply his cinematic expertise, was ironically far more aware of this fact than were many other game designers who lacked his experience in the medium they were all so eager to ape. Speaking to the science-fiction writer and frequent games-industry commentator Orson Scott Card in 1990, Barwood made some telling observations:

“The companies making animated games keep talking as if games resembled movies,” he [Barwood] said. “But they don’t resemble movies all that much.”

He granted some resemblances, of course, especially with animated film. The dependence on artists; the trickle rate of production, where you’re producing the game or film at the rate of only minutes, or even seconds, of usable footage a day; and the dominant role of the editing process.

Still, though, when it comes to the art of composing a game, inventing it, he said, “What it really resembles is theater. Plays.”

Why? Because as with a play, you have only a few settings you can work with, and they can usually be viewed from only a single angle and at the same distance. You can’t do any meaningful work with closeups (to design and program genuine realistic facial expressions just isn’t worth the huge investment in time and disk space). It’s so hard to make actions clear that you must either rely on dialogue, like most plays, or show only the simplest, most obvious actions.

In movies, it’s just the opposite. You control the pace and rhythm of film by cutting and shifting the action from place to place. The camera never gazes at any one thing for long.

The computer games of this era which most clearly did understand the kinetic language of cinema — the language of a roving camera and a keen-eyed editor — weren’t any of the avowed interactive movies that were being presented in the form of plot- and dialog-heavy adventure games, but rather the comparatively minimalist action games Prince of Persia and Another World, both essentially one-man productions that employed few to no words. Both of these games were aesthetically masterful, but somewhat more problematic in terms of providing their players with interesting forms of interactivity, thus inadvertently illustrating some of the drawbacks of fetishizing movies as the ideal aesthetic model for games.

All the other people who thought they were making interactive movies were “filming” their productions the way only the very earliest movie directors had filmed, before a proper language of film had been created: through a single static “camera.” The end results were anything but cinematic in the way a fellow like Hal Barwood, steeped throughout his life in the language of film, understood that term. His long experience in film-making allowed him to see the essential fact that games were not movies. They might borrow the occasional technique from cinema, but games were a medium — or, perhaps better stated, a matrix of mediums, only one of which was the point-and-click adventure game — with their own unique sets of aesthetic affordances. Countless game developers seemed to be using the term “interactive movie” to designate any game that had a lot of story, but the qualities of being cinematic and being narrative-oriented were really orthogonal to one another.

As in the first Indiana Jones movie, a Nazi submarine features prominently in Fate of Atlantis.

In later years, Hal Barwood would describe a narrative-driven game as more akin to a vintage Russian novel than a movie, a “continuous experience in a fictional world”: something the player lives with over a period of days or weeks, working through it at her own pace, mulling it over even when she isn’t actively sitting in front of the computer. The control or lack thereof of pacing is a critical distinction: a game which leaves any reasonable scope of agency to its player must necessarily cede much or all of the control of pacing to her. And yet pacing is absolutely key to the final effect of any movie, so much so that the director may very well spend months in the editing room after all the shooting is done, trying to get the pacing just right. The game designer doesn’t have anything like the same measure of direct control over the player’s experience, and so must deliver a very different sort of fiction.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis works because it understands these differences in media. It plays with the settings, characters, and themes of the Indiana Jones movies to fine effect, but never forgets that it’s an adventure game. The driving mechanic of an adventure game — the solving of intellectual puzzles — is quite distinct from that which drives the movies, and the plot points must be adapted to match. Can you imagine the cinematic Indy sticking wads of chewing gum to the soles of his shoes so as to climb up a coal chute? Or using a bathroom plunger as a handy replacement for a missing control lever inside a Nazi submarine? Puzzles of this nature inevitably make Indy himself into a rather different sort of personality — one a little less cool and collected, a little more prone to be the butt of the joke rather than the source of it. It’s clear from the very opening scenes of Fate of Atlantis, an innovative interactive credits sequence in which poor Indy must endure pratfall after pratfall, that this isn’t quite the same character we thrilled to in the movies. Harrison Ford would have walked out if asked to play a series of scenes like these.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/atlantis.mp4

This phenomenon, which we might called the Guybrush Threepwoodization of the hero, is very common in adventure games adapted from other media, given that the point-and-click adventure game as a medium wants always to collapse back into comedy as its default setting. (See, for example, the Neuromancer game, which similarly turns the cool cat Case from its source novel into a put-upon loser, and winds up becoming a pretty great game in the process.) Barwood and Falstein as well decided that Indiana Jones must adapt to the adventure-game genre rather than the adventure-game genre adapting to Indiana Jones. This was most definitely the right approach to take, and is the overarching reason why this game succeeds when so many other interactive adaptations fail.

The one place where the otherwise traditionalist Fate of Atlantis clearly does try to do something new has nothing directly to do with its source material. It rather takes the form of three possible narrative through lines, depending on the player’s individual predilections. After playing through the introductory stages of the game, you’re given a choice between a “Team” path, where Indy and Sophia travel together and cooperate to solve problems; a “Wits” path, where Indy travels largely alone and solves problems using his noggin; and a “Fists” path, where Indy travels alone and solves some though by no means all of his problems using more, shall we say, active measures, which translate into little action-oriented minigames for the player. The last is seemingly the closest to the spirit of the films, but is, tellingly, almost universally agreed to be the least interesting way to play the game.

The Team path, like all of them, has its advantages and disadvantages. It’s great to have Sophia around to help out with things — until she falls down a pit and needs your help getting out.

Although the message would get a little muddled once the game reached stores — “three games in one!” was a tagline few marketers could resist — Barwood and Falstein’s primary motivation in making these separate paths wasn’t to create a more replayable game, but rather a more accessible one. Lucasfilm Games always placed great emphasis on giving their players a positive, non-frustrating experience. Different players would prefer to play in different ways, Barwood and Falstein reasoned, and their game should adapt to that. “Socially-oriented” players — possibly including the female players they were always hoping to reach — would enjoy the Team path with its constant banter and pronounced romantic tension between Indy and Sophia; the stereotypically hardcore, cerebral adventure gamers would enjoy the Wits path; those who just wanted to get through the story and check out all the exotic destinations could go for the Fists path.

Falstein liked to call Fate of Atlantis a “self-tuning game.” In this spirit, until very late in development the branching pathways were presented not as an explicit choice but rather as a more subtle in-game personality test. Early on, Indy needs to get into a theater even though he doesn’t have a ticket. There are three ways to accomplish this: talking his way past the guard at the door; puzzling his way through a maze of boxes to find a hidden fire-escape ladder; or simply sucker-punching the guard. Thus would the player’s predilections be determined. In the interest of transparency and as a sop to replayability, however, the personality test wound up being replaced by a simple menu for choosing your pathway.

The first substantial interactive scene in the game, taking place outside and inside a theater in New York City where Indy’s adventuring partner-to-be Sophia is giving a lecture, was intended to function as a personality test of sorts, determining whether the player was sent down the Team, Wits, or Fists path. In the end, though, its finding were softened to a mere recommendation preceding an explicit choice of paths which is offered to the player at its conclusion.

The idea of multiple pathways turned out not to be as compelling in practice as in theory. Most players did take it more as an invitation to play the game three times than an opportunity to play it once their way, and were disappointed to discover that the branching pathways encompass only about 60 percent of the game as a whole; the first 10 percent or so, as well as the lengthy climax, are the same no matter which pathway you choose. Nor are the Team and Wits pathways different enough from one another to give the game all that much of a different flavor; they both ultimately come down to solving a series of logic puzzles. The designers’ time would probably have been better spent making one pathway through the game that combined elements of the Team and Wits pathways. Lucasfilm Games never tried anything similar again. The branching pathways were an experiment, and in that sense at least they served their purpose.

A substantial but by no means enormous game, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis nevertheless spent some two years in development, a lengthy span of time indeed by the standards of the early 1990s, being at least three times as long as it had taken to make the Last Crusade game. The protracted development cycle wasn’t a symptom of acrimony, lack of focus, or disorganization, as such things so often tend to be. It was rather a byproduct of the three pathways and, most of all, of Lucasfilm Games’s steadfast commitment to getting everything right, prioritizing quality and polish over release dates in that way that always set them apart from the majority of their peers.

Shortly before the belated release of Fate of Atlantis in the summer of 1992, Lucasfilm Games became LucasArts. The slicker, less subservient appellation was a sign of their rising status within the hierarchy of their parent company, as their games sold in bigger quantities and became a substantial revenue stream in their own right, less and less dwarfed by the money that could be made in movies. Those changing circumstances would prove a not-unmixed blessing for them, forcing them to move out of the rustic environs of Skywalker Ranch and shed much of the personality of a quirky artists’ collective for that of a more hard-nosed media enterprise. On the other hand, at least they’d finally get to make Star Wars games…

But that’s an article for another day. I should conclude this one by noting that Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis[2] was greeted with superlative reviews and equally strong sales; even Steven Spielberg, who unlike his friend George Lucas was a big fan of games, played through it and reportedly enjoyed it very much. A year after the original floppy-disk-based release, LucasArts made a “talkie” version for CD-ROM. Getting Harrison Ford to play Indiana Jones was, as you might imagine, out of the question, but they found a credible soundalike, and handled the voice acting as a whole with their usual commitment to quality, recruiting professional voice talent in Hollywood and recording them in the state-of-the-art facilities of Skywalker Sound.

While hard sales numbers for LucasArts’s adventure games have never surfaced to my knowledge, Noah Falstein claims that Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis sold the most of all of them — a claim I can easily imagine to be correct, given its rapturous critical reception and the intrinsic appeal of its license. Today, it tends to be placed just half a step down from the most-loved of the LucasArts adventures, lacking perhaps some of the manic inspiration of the studio’s completely original creations. Nonetheless, it’s a fine, fine game, well worth playing through twice or thrice — at least its middle section, where the pathways diverge — to experience all it has to offer. This game adapted from a movie franchise, which succeeds by not trying to be a movie, marked a fine start for Hal Barwood’s new career.

(Sources: the books The Secret History of Star Wars by Michael Kaminski and Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution by Michael Rubin; LucasArts’s Adventurer magazine of Fall 1991, Spring 1992, and Spring 1993; Starlog of July 1981, September 1981, August 1982, May 1985, September 1985, November 1985, December 1985, and February 1988; Amiga Format of February 1992; Compute! of February 1991; Computer Gaming World of September 1992; CU Amiga of June 1992; Electronic Games of October 1992; MacWorld of June 1989; Next Generation of October 1998; PC Review of September 1992; PC Zone of January 2000; Questbusters of September 1992; Zero of August 1991 and March 1992. Online sources include Arcade Attack’s interviews with Noah Falstein and Hal Barwood; Noah Falstein’s Reddit AMA; MCV’s articles on “The Early Days of LucasArts”; Noah Falstein’s presentation on LucasArts at Øredev 2017.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is available for purchase on GOG.com.)

1. An Action Game was also published under the auspices of Lucasfilm Games, but its development was outsourced to a British house. ↩

2. Once again, there was also a Fate of Atlantis action game, made in Britain with a particular eye to the 8-bit machines in Europe which couldn’t run the adventure game. And once again, it garnered little attention in comparison to its big brother. ↩

Comments
31 Responses

- Alex Smith

September 28, 2018 at 4:40 pm

“he turned it into his directorial debut in 1974”

Technically that would be his feature film directorial debut. Spielberg had previously directed on several TV series and done a few TV movies of the week, most notably “The Duel.”

“Among Barwood’s most important suggestions was that Luke Skywalker should be introduced very early in the movie, and have his story inter-cut with that of the robots R2-D2 and C3PO; Lucas had originally planned to follow just the robots’ adventures on the planet Tatooine for the first half-hour or so of the film, until their first encounter with Luke”

So this statement appears to possibly be discussing two different things – moving up Luke’s introduction and inter-cutting his story with the droids – one of which may have happened and one of which ultimately did not.

While Lucas shot footage of Luke observing the opening space battle and interacting with his friends at Tosche Station, which is presumably the inter-cutting of Luke’s story that Barwood suggested, this footage was cut from the final release. As the movie stands, Luke’s story is not inter-cut with that of the droids, and he does not appear in the movie until the droids encounter him. Now Luke does appear in the film at around the 15 minute mark rather than the half hour mark, so this aspect of Barwood’s advice may have been taken.

- Jimmy Maher

September 28, 2018 at 7:29 pm

I thought I remembered Luke appearing earlier, wandering around messing with the moisture collectors or whatever it was. But it’s been years since I’ve seen the film. I may actually be confusing the film with the novelization, which I read several times as a kid. Thanks!

- Alex Smith

September 28, 2018 at 8:16 pm

Yes, that is in the novelization. It was also shot; he is working on the moisture collectors, notices the battle in the sky, and goes to tell his friends. None of that made the final cut, though you can see all this footage on YouTube now.

- AguyinaRPG

September 28, 2018 at 4:45 pm

“which had been released about nine months previous to it.”

Five months?

It took me a while to remember that Warren Spector had talked to Barwood. I kept having flashes of reminiscence up until the point you mentioned he was playing with a calculator on the set of Dragonslayer which suddenly popped it back into my head.

I have always liked the idea of games resembling plays more than movies, and it’s even more apt with the SCUMM engine games which are largely (but not exclusively) static. The “player” aspect guides the scene, working along to a “script” of events at various “stages” (please stop me!). It always fit more in my mind, but coming from the theater myself it probably would.

One thing about this game, though I’ve never played it, I love the color design. It’s quite eye-catching right from the off.

- Jimmy Maher

September 28, 2018 at 7:34 pm

We’ll call it six months. ;)

Revolution Software was one of the few others to make the theater connection while everyone else was chasing interactive movies. They went so far as to call their game engine Virtual Theatre.

- Dave W.

September 29, 2018 at 12:36 am

Sierra made the theater connection too (in 1989) with The Colonel’s Bequest, which opens with a theatrical introduction of the characters before it immerses you in the world of the game.

- tedder

September 28, 2018 at 5:04 pm

“Today, it tends to be placed just half a step down from the most-loved of the LucasArts adventures, lacking perhaps some of the manic inspiration of the studio’s completely original creations.”

What would those titles be?

- Jimmy Maher

September 28, 2018 at 7:40 pm

Mileages vary, but a list of the absolute cream of the LucasArts crop according to the popular consensus would probably have to include Maniac Mansion, Loom, Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max Hit the Road, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango. (Yes, the list is fairly long, but LucasArts was very, very good at what they did. In their consistent commitment to quality and good design, they’re the closest thing to a graphic-adventure equivalent to Infocom. The only places they fall a little short are quantity — their catalog is much smaller — and variety — excepting only Loom and to some extent Grim Fandango, all of their best games are cartoon comedies. When doing what they did best, though, they were incredible.)

- MrEntropy

September 28, 2018 at 5:23 pm

“[…]sequence in which poor Indy must endure pratfall after pratfall, that this isn’t quite the same character we thrilled to in the movies.”

This reminds me of a book on writing plots (or maybe characterization) I had a long time ago (I don’t remember the author or title). It used Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark as examples.

One of the things it pointed out was that Indy was a great character because he never actually succeeds, but he keeps on trying anyway. I hadn’t noticed it before, but as it went point by point where he set out to do something and ended up having success taken away from him I was thinking, “Oh yeah, that’s right.”

- Lisa H.

September 28, 2018 at 7:44 pm

Getting Harrison Ford to play Indiana Jones was, as you might imagine, out of the question, but they found a credible soundalike

Very credible, I thought. When my husband and I played through this game a few years ago we had to look it up to be sure it was not him!

- David Boddie

September 28, 2018 at 8:20 pm

“So, Barwood and Feinstein decided to invent their own story” (Falstein)

It always intrigued me that the fourth “episode” of the Indiana Jones films was a game rather than a film, so its interesting to read about its origins. I imagine that nobody at the time could have expected that the franchise would be revived later.

- matt w

September 28, 2018 at 9:57 pm

Hamill, the very archetype of an actor who’s good in one role and one role only.

Just popping down to the comments to say that that role is the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series. (OK, voice work isn’t quite the same thing.)

- Jimmy Maher

September 29, 2018 at 7:58 am

Some hardcore adventure-game fans would doubtless say that Mosely in the Gabriel Knight games was his definitive role. ;) How ironic that Hamill turned out to be a far better voice than film actor. (Hopefully no one will claim that his real Masterpiece Theatre moment was in Wing Commander III… but, what with some of the fans of that series I’ve met, I wouldn’t bet on it.)

- Frederik Olsen

October 8, 2018 at 2:17 pm

Personally, I thought his character work in The Last Jedi was Oscar-worthy. At first just a crotchety old hermit, he turns 40 years younger when the Force ghost of Master Yoda shows up, and goes to meet his end as a wizened samurai who has finally taken to heart that “there are alternatives to fighting.” The moments between him and Daisy Ridley were the best in the film.

It took a while for his film career to get there, sure, and some may disagree – finding old Luke too polarizing to fully enjoy. But to suggest he’s a bad actor is unfair, in my opinion.

- ShadowAngel

April 8, 2019 at 5:41 pm

Not just the animated series but the games as well. His work as Joker in Batman: Arkham Asylum was fabulous.
Voice wise he remains the best joker ever.

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- Ricky Derocher

September 29, 2018 at 2:35 am

“Zac McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders” – it should be “Zak” with a K not with a C.

Another great article!

https://www.mobygames.com/game/zak-mckracken-and-the-alien-mindbenders

- Jimmy Maher

September 29, 2018 at 7:59 am

Thanks!

- Anonymous

September 29, 2018 at 2:41 am

Jimmy,
You’ve got an India Jones in there at one point. I’d like to see it, all breaking into the British Museum to recover artifacts and all, but perhaps it’s not what you intended.

- Jimmy Maher

September 29, 2018 at 8:00 am

:) Thanks!

- Casey Muratori

September 29, 2018 at 6:31 am

Two possible bugs: “Jeffrey Boams”, “allowed him to see the essential fact that game were not movies”.

– Casey

- Jimmy Maher

September 29, 2018 at 8:02 am

The second was as intended, unless I’m still missing something. Thanks!

- Aula

September 29, 2018 at 1:38 pm

“game were” should be “games were” (unless *I’m* missing something).

There’s also “rather rather” at one point.

- Jimmy Maher

September 29, 2018 at 2:20 pm

Thanks!

- Jacen

September 29, 2018 at 2:58 pm

Marcia Lucas, ex wife of You Know Who Lucas, probably deserves a mention as part of the inner circle. She apparently did way more to edit Star Wars into a viable film than Lucas wants to credit .

Also, way to diss all the other (admittedly mostly not film) work poor Mark did!

- F

October 1, 2018 at 2:27 pm

When the 2008 Indy movie came out to a somewhat disastrous reception I half-joked they already had a killer script they should’ve used instead. Little did I know it was because it had an actual Hollywood guy behind it. A fascinating read (even more than the usual), keep up the excellent work.

- Alphonse

October 2, 2018 at 9:37 am

“Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade became the cinematic blockbuster of the year upon its release in May of 1989, beating out the combined proceeds of the first two films”

I don’t think that’s an accurate statement – while Last Crusade was certainly successful, and pulled in more than Temple of Doom, it would have had to almost double its haul in order to beat out the *combined* receipts of the first two films. Raiders remains the most successful film in the franchise, in inflation adjusted terms: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=indianajones.htm

- Jimmy Maher

October 2, 2018 at 10:18 am

I remember being surprised at that myself, as Raiders of the Lost Ark was all my friends talked about upon its release, while Lost Crusade was just another movie to my social circle. But I’d put that down to the difference between being 9 and being 17. Anyway, for the life of me I don’t know where I sourced it. Wikipedia, which is usually pretty accurate when it comes to this sort of thing, agrees with you.

So, nixed that parenthetical. Raiders is a better movie anyway; something about Sean Connery has always rubbed me the wrong way. ;) Thanks!

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- Rob

October 8, 2018 at 11:54 am

“The first substantial interactive scene in the game, taking placing outside and inside a theater in New York City”

Should be “taking place”

Fantastic article as usual Jimmy. In fact, the last several were exceptional. Thanks!

- Jimmy Maher

October 8, 2018 at 12:33 pm

Thanks!

Whither the Software Artist? (or, How Trip Hawkins Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Consoles)
October 5, 2018

One of the places we ran the “Can a computer make you cry?” [advertisement] was in Scientific American. Scientific American readers weren’t even playing videogames. Why the hell are you wasting any of this really expensive advertising? You’re competing with BMW for that ad.

— Trip Hawkins (EA Employee #1)

Consumers were looking for a brand signal for quality. They didn’t lionize the game makers as these creators to fawn over. They thought of the game makers almost as collaborators in their experience. So apostatizing didn’t make sense to the consumers.

— Bing Gordon (EA Employee #7)

In the ’80s that was an interesting experiment, that whole trying-to-make-them-into-rock-stars kind of thing. It was certainly a nice way to recruit top talent. But the reality is that computer programmers and artists and designers are not rock stars. It may have worked for the developers, but I don’t think it had any impact on consumers.

— Stewart Bonn (EA Employee #19)

One of the stories that gamers most love to tell each other is that of Electronic Arts’s fall from grace. If you’re sufficiently interested in gaming history to be reading this blog, you almost certainly know the story in the broad strokes: how Trip Hawkins founded EA in 1982 as a haven for “software artists” doing cutting-edge work; how he put said artists front and center in rock-star-like poses in a series of iconic advertisements, the most famous of which asked whether a computer could make you cry; how he wrote on the back of every stylish EA “album cover” not about EA as a company but as “a collection of electronic artists who share a common goal to fulfill the potential of personal computing”; and how all the idealism somehow dissipated to give us the EA of today, a shambling behemoth that crushes more clever competitors under its sheer weight as it churns out sequel after sequel, retread after retread. The exact point where EA became the personification of everything retrograde and corporate in gaming varies with the teller; perhaps the closest thing to a popular consensus is the rise of John Madden Football and EA Sports in the early 1990s, when the last vestiges of software artistry in the company’s advertisements were replaced by jocks shouting, “It’s in the game!” Regardless of the specifics, though, everyone agrees that It All Went Horribly Wrong at some point. The story of EA has become gamers’ version of a Biblical tragedy: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

Of course, as soon as one starts pulling out Bible quotes, it profits to ask whether one has gone too far. And, indeed, the story of EA is often over-dramatized and over-simplified. Questions of authenticity and creativity are always fraught; to imagine that anyone is really in the arts just for the art strikes me as hopelessly naive. The EA of the early 1980s wasn’t founded by artists but rather by businessmen, backed by venture capitalists with goals of their own that had little to do with “fulfilling the potential of personal computing.” Thus, when the software-artists angle turned out not to work so well, it didn’t take them long to pivot. This, then, is the history of that pivot, and how it led to the EA we know today.

Advertising is all about image making — about making others see you in the light in which you wish to be seen. Without realizing that they were doing anything of the sort, EA’s earliest marketers cemented an image into the historical imagination at the same time that they failed in their more practical task of crafting a message that resonated with the hoped-for customers of their own time. The very same early EA advertising campaign which speaks so eloquently to so many today actually missed the mark entirely in its own day, utterly failing to set the public imagination afire with this idea of programmers and game designers as rock stars. When Trip Hawkins sent Bill Budge — the programmer of his who most naturally resembled a rock star — on an autograph-signing tour of software stores and shopping malls, it didn’t lead to any outbreak of Budgomania. “Nobody would ever show up,” remembers Budge today, still wincing at the embarrassment of sitting behind a deserted autograph booth.

Nor were customers flocking into stores to buy the games EA’s rock stars had created. Sales remained far below initial projections during the eighteen months following EA’s official launch in June of 1983, and the company skated on the razor’s edge of bankruptcy on multiple occasions. While their first year yielded the substantial hits Pinball Construction Set, Archon, and One-on-One, 1984 could boast only one comparable success story, Seven Cities of Gold. Granted, four hits in two years was more than plenty of other publishers managed, but EA had been capitalized under the expectation that their games would open up whole new demographics for entertainment software. “The idea was to make games for 28-year-olds when everybody else was making games for 13-year-olds,” says Bing Gordon, Trip Hawkins’s old university roommate and right-hand man at EA. When those 28-year-olds failed to materialize, EA was left in the lurch.

For better or for worse, One-on-One is the spiritual forefather of the unstoppable EA Sports lineup of today.

The most important architect of EA’s post-launch retrenchment was arguably neither Trip Hawkins nor Bing Gordon, but rather Larry Probst, who left the free-falling Activision to join EA as vice president for sales in 1984. Probst, who had worked at the dry-goods giants Johnson & Johnson and Clorox before joining Activision, had no particular attachment to the idea of software artists. He rather looked at the business of selling games much as he had that of selling toilet paper and bleach. He asked himself how EA could best make money in the market that existed rather than some fanciful new one they hoped to create. Steve Peterson, a product manager at EA, remembers that others “would still talk about how we were trying to create new forms of entertainment and break new boundaries.” But Probst, and increasingly Trip Hawkins as well, had the less high-minded goal of “going public and being a billion-dollar company.”

Probst had the key insight that distribution, more so than software artists or perhaps even product quality in the abstract, was the key to success in an industry that, following a major downturn in home computing in general in 1984, was only continuing to get more competitive. EA therefore spurned the existing distribution channels, which were nearly monopolized by SoftSel, the great behind-the-scenes power in the software industry to which everyone else was kowtowing; SoftSel’s head, Robert Leff, was the most important person in software that no one outside the industry had ever heard of. Instead of using SoftSel, EA set up their own distribution network piece by painful piece, beginning by cold-calling the individual stores and offering cut-rate deals in order to tempt them into risking the wrath of Leff and ordering from another source.

Then, once a reasonable distribution network was in place, EA leveraged the hell out of it by setting up a program of so-called “Affiliated Labels” — other publishers who would pay EA instead of a conventional distributor like SoftSel to get their products onto store shelves. It was a well-nigh revolutionary idea in game publishing, attractive to smaller publishers because EA was ready and able to help out with a whole range of the logistical difficulties they were always facing, from packaging and disk duplication to advertising campaigns. For EA, meanwhile, the Affiliated Labels yielded huge financial rewards and placed them in the driver’s seat of much of the industry, with the power of life and death over many of their smaller ostensible competitors.

Unsurprisingly, Activision, the only other publisher with comparable distributional clout, soon copied the idea, setting up a similar program of their own. But even as they did so, EA, seemingly always one step ahead, was becoming the first American publisher to send games — both their own and those of others — directly to Europe without going through a European intermediary like Britain’s U.S. Gold label.

There was always something a bit contrived, in that indelible Silicon Valley way, about how EA chose to present themselves to the world. Here we have Bing Gordon, head of technology Greg Riker, and producer Joe Ybarra indulging in some of the creative play which, an accompanying article is at pains to tell us, was constantly going on around the office.

Larry Probst’s strategy of distribution über alles worked a treat, yielding explosive growth that more than made up for the company’s early struggles. In 1986, EA became the biggest computer-game publisher in the United States and the world, with annual revenues of $30 million. Their own games were doing well, but were assuming a very different character from the “simple, hot, and deep” ideal of the launch — a phrase Trip Hawkins had once loved to apply to games that were less stereotypically nerdy than the norm, that he imagined would be suitable for busy young adults with a finger on the pulse of hip pop culture. Now, having failed to attract that new demographic, EA adjusted their product line to appeal to those who were already buying computer games. A case in point was The Bard’s Tale, EA’s biggest hit of 1985, a hardcore CRPG that might take a hundred hours or more to complete — fodder for 13-year-olds with long summer vacations to fill rather than 28-year-olds with jobs and busy social calendars.

If “simple, hot, and deep” and programmers as rock stars had been two of the three pillars of EA’s launch philosophy, the last was the one written into Hawkins’s original mission statement as “stay with floppy-disk-based computers only.” Said statement had been written, we should remember, just as the first great videogame fad, fueled by the Atari VCS, was passing its peak and beginning the long plunge into what would go down in history as the Great Videogame Crash of 1983. At the time, it certainly wasn’t only the new EA who believed that the toy-like videogame consoles were the past, and that more sophisticated personal computers, running more sophisticated games, were the future. “I think that computer games are fundamentally different from videogames,” said Hawkins on the Computer Chronicles television show. “It becomes a question of program size, when you want to know how good a program can I have, how much can I do with it, and how long will it take before I’m bored with it.” This third pillar of EA’s strategy would take a bit longer to fall than the others, but fall it would.

The origins of EA’s loss of faith in the home computer in general as the ultimate winner of the interactive-entertainment platform wars can ironically be traced to their decision to wholeheartedly endorse one computer in particular. In October of 1984, Greg Riker, EA’s director of technology, got the chance to evaluate a prototype of Commodore’s upcoming Amiga. His verdict upon witnessing this first truly multimedia personal computer, with its superlative graphics and sound, was that this was the machine that could change everything, and that EA simply had to get involved with it as quickly as possible. He convinced Trip Hawkins of his point of view, and Hawkins managed to secure Amiga Prototype Number 12 for the company within weeks. In the months that followed, EA worked to advance the Amiga with if anything even more enthusiasm than Commodore themselves: developing libraries and programming frameworks which they shared with their outside developers; writing tools internally, including what would become the Amiga’s killer app, Deluxe Paint; documenting the Interchange File Format, a set of standard specifications for sharing pictures, sounds, animations, and music across applications. All of these things and more would remain a part of the Amiga platform’s basic software ecosystem throughout its existence.

When the Amiga finally started shipping late in 1985, EA actually made a far better public case for the machine than Commodore, taking out a splashy editorial-style advertisement just inside the cover of the premiere issue of the new AmigaWorld magazine. It showed the eight Amiga games EA would soon release and explained “why Electronic Arts is committed to the Amiga,” the latter headline appearing above a photograph of Trip Hawkins with his arm proprietorially draped over the Amiga on his desk.

Trip Hawkins with an Amiga

But it all turned into an immense disappointment. Initially, Commodore priced the Amiga wrong and marketed it worse, and even after they corrected some of their worst mistakes it perpetually under-performed in the American marketplace. For Hawkins and EA, the whole episode planted the first seeds of doubt as to whether home computers — which at the end of the day still were computers, requiring a degree of knowledge to operate and associated in the minds of most people more with work than pleasure — could really be the future of interactive entertainment as a mass-media enterprise. If a computer as magnificent as the Amiga couldn’t conquer the world, what would it take?

Perhaps it would take a piece of true consumer electronics, made by a company used to selling televisions and stereos to customers who expected to be able to just turn the things on and enjoy them — a company like, say, Philips, who were working on a new multimedia set-top box for the living room that they called CD-I. The name arose from the fact that it used the magical new technology of CD-ROM for storage, something EA had been begging Commodore to bring to the Amiga to no avail. EA embraced CD-I with the same enthusiasm they had recently shown for the Amiga, placing Greg Riker in personal charge of creating tools and techniques for programming it, working more as partners in CD-I’s development with Philips than as a mere third-party publisher.

Once again, however, it all came to nought. CD-I turned into one of the most notorious slow-motion fiascos in the history of the games industry, missing its originally planned release date in the fall of 1987 and then remaining vaporware for years on end. In early 1989, EA finally ran out of patience, mothballing all work on the platform unless and until it became a viable product; Greg Riker left the company to go work for Microsoft on their own CD-ROM research.

CD-I had cost EA a lot of money to no tangible result whatsoever, but it does reveal that the idea of gaming on something other than a conventional computer was no longer anathema to them. In fact, the year in which EA gave up on CD-I would prove the most pivotal of their entire history. We should therefore pause here to examine their position in 1989 in a bit more detail.

Despite the frustrating failure of the Amiga and CD-I to open a new golden age of interactive entertainment, EA wasn’t doing badly at all. Following years of steady growth, annual revenue had now reached $63 million, up 27 percent from 1988. EA was actively distributing about 100 titles under their own imprint, and 250 more under the imprint of the various Affiliated Labels, who had become absolutely key to their business model, accounting for some 45 percent of their total revenues. About 80 percent of their revenues still came from the United States, with 15 percent coming from Europe — where EA had set up a semi-independent subsidiary, the Langley, England-based EA Europe, in 1987 — and the remainder from the rest of the world. The company was extremely diversified. They were producing software for ten different computing platforms worldwide, had released 40 separate titles that had earned them at least $1 million each, and had no single title that accounted for more than 6 percent of their total revenues.

What we have here, then, is a very healthy business indeed, with multiple revenue streams and cash in the bank. The games they released were sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes mediocre; EA’s quality standards weren’t notably better or worse than the rest of their industry. “We tried to create a brand that fell somewhere between Honda and Mercedes,” admits Bing Gordon, “but a lot of the time we shipped Chevy.” Truth be told, even in the earliest days the rhetoric surrounding EA’s software artists had been a little overblown; many of the games their rock stars came up with were far less innovative than the advertising that accompanied them. The genius of Larry Probst had been to explicitly recognize that success or failure as a games publisher had as much to do with other factors as it did with the actual games you released.

For all their success, though, no one at EA was feeling particularly satisfied with their position. On the contrary: 1989 would go down in EA’s history as the year of “crisis.” As successful as they had become selling home-computer software, they remained big fish in a rather small pond, a situation out of keeping with the sense of overweening ambition that had been a part of the company’s DNA since its founding. In 1989, about 4 million computers were being used to play games on a regular or semi-regular basis in American homes, enough to fuel a computer-game industry worth an estimated $230 million per year. EA alone owned more than 25 percent of that market, more than any competitor. But there was another, related market in which they had no presence at all: that of the videogame consoles, which had returned from the dead to haunt them even as they were consolidating their position as the biggest force in computer games. The country was in the grip of Nintendo mania. About 22 million Nintendo Entertainment Systems were already in American homes — a figure accounting for 24 percent of all American households — and cartridge-based videogames were selling to the tune of $1.6 billion per year.

Unlike many of their peers, EA hadn’t yet suffered all that badly under the Nintendo onslaught, largely because they had already diversified away from the Commodore 64, the low-end 8-bit computer which had been the largest gaming platform in the world just a couple of years before, and which the NES was now in the process of annihilating. But still, the future of the computer-games industry in general felt suddenly in doubt in a way that it hadn’t since at least the great home-computer downturn of 1984. A sizable coalition inside EA, including Larry Probst and most of the board of directors, pushed Trip Hawkins hard to get EA’s games onto the consoles. Fearing a coup, he finally came around. “We had to go into the [console-based] videogame business, and that meant the world of mass-market,” Hawkins remembers. “There were millions of customers we were going to reach.”

But through which door should they make their entrance? Accustomed to running roughshod over his Affiliated Labels, Hawkins wasn’t excited about the prospect of entering Nintendo’s walled garden, where the shoe would be on the other foot, thanks to that company’s infamously draconian rules for its licensees. Nintendo’s standard contract demanded that they receive the first $12 from every game a licensee sold, required every game to go through an exhaustive review process before publication, and placed strict limits on how many games a licensee was allowed to publish per year and how many units they were allowed to manufacture of each one. For EA, accustomed to being the baddest hombre in the Wild West that was the computer-game marketplace, this was well-nigh intolerable. Bing Gordon insists even today that, thanks to all of the fees and restrictions, no one other than Nintendo was doing much more than breaking even on the NES during this, the period that would go down in history as the platform’s golden age.

So, EA decided instead to back a dark horse: the much more modern Sega Genesis, which hadn’t even been released yet in North America. It was built around the same 16-bit Motorola 68000 CPU found in computers like the Commodore Amiga and Apple Macintosh, with audiovisual capabilities not all that far removed from the likes of the Amiga. The Genesis would give designers and programmers who were used to the affordances of full-fledged computers a far less limiting platform than the NES to work with, and it offered the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a brand-new market, as opposed to the saturated NES platform. The only problem was that Sega’s licensing fees were comparable to those of Nintendo, even though they could only offer their licensees access to a much more uncertain pool of customers.

Determined to play hardball, Hawkins had a team of engineers reverse-engineer the Genesis, sufficient to let them write games for it with or without Sega’s official development kit. Then he met with Sega again, telling them that, if they refused to adjust their licensing terms, he would release games on the console without their blessing, forcing them to initiate an ugly court battle of the sort that was currently raging between Nintendo and Atari if they wished to bring him to heel. That, he was gambling, was expense and publicity of a sort which Sega simply couldn’t afford. And Sega evidently agreed with his assessment; they accepted a royalty rate half that being demanded by Nintendo. By this roundabout method, EA became the first major American publisher to support the new console, and from that point forward the two companies became, as Hawkins puts it, “good partners.”

EA initially invested $2.5 million in ten games for the Genesis, some of them original to the console, some ports of their more popular computer games. They started shipping the first of them in June of 1990, ten months after the Genesis itself had first gone on sale in the United States. This first slate of EA Genesis titles arrived in a marketplace that was still starving for quality games, just as Hawkins had envisioned it would be. Among them was the game destined to become the face of the new, mass-market-oriented EA: John Madden Football, a more action-oriented re-imagining of a 1988 computer game of the same name.

John Madden Football debuted as a rather cerebral, tactics-heavy computer game in 1988, just another in an EA tradition of famous-athlete-endorsed sports games stretching back to 1983’s (Dr. J and Larry Bird Go) One-on-One. No one in 1988 could have imagined what it would come to mean in the years to come for either its publisher or its spokesman/mascot, both of whom would ride it to iconic heights in American pop culture.

The Sega Genesis marked the third time EA had taken a leap of faith on a new platform. It was the first time, however, that their faith paid off. About 25 percent of the games EA sold in 1990 were for the Genesis. And when the console really started to take off in 1991, fueled not least by their own games, EA was there to reap the rewards. In that year, four of the ten best-selling Genesis games were published by EA. At the peak of their dominance, EA alone was publishing about 35 percent of all the games sold for the Genesis. Absent the boost their games gave it early on, it’s highly questionable whether the Genesis would have succeeded at all in the United States.

In the beginning, few of EA’s outside developers had been terribly excited about writing for the consoles. One of them remembers Hawkins “reading us the riot act” just to get them onboard. Indeed, Hawkins claims today that about 15 percent of EA’s internal employees were so unhappy with the new direction that they quit. Certainly his latest rhetoric could hardly have been more different from that of 1983:

I knew we had to let go of our attachment to machines that the public did not want to buy, and support the hardware that the public would embrace. I made this argument on the grounds of delivering customer satisfaction, and how quality is in the eye of the beholder. If the customer buys a Genesis, we want to give him the best we can for the machine he bought and not resent the consumer for not buying a $1000 computer.

By this point, Hawkins had finally bitten the bullet and done a deal with Nintendo, who, in the face of multiple government investigations and lawsuits over their business practices, were becoming somewhat more generous with both their competitors and licensees. When games like Skate or Die, a port of a Commodore 64 hit that just happened to be perfect for the Nintendo and Sega demographics as well, started to sell in serious numbers on the consoles, Hawkins’s developers’ aversion started to fade in the face of all that filthy lucre. Soon the developers of Skate or Die were happily plunging into a sequel which would be a console exclusive.

Even the much-dreaded oversight role played by Nintendo, in which they reviewed every game before allowing it to be published, proved less onerous than expected. When Will Harvey, the designer of an action-adventure called The Immortal, finally steeled himself to look at Nintendo’s critique thereof, he was happily surprised to find the list of “suggestions” to be very helpful on the whole, demonstrating real sensitivity to the effect he was trying to achieve. Even Bing Gordon, who had been highly skeptical of getting into bed with Nintendo, had to admit in the end that “the rating system is fair. On a scale from zero to a hundred, where zero meant the system was totally manipulated for Nintendo’s self-interest and a hundred meant that it was absolutely democratic, they’d probably get a ninety. I’ve seen a little bit of self-interest, but this is America, the land of self-interest.”

Although EA cut their Nintendo teeth on the NES, it was on the long-awaited follow-up console, 1991’s Super Nintendo, that they really began to thrive. That machine boasted capabilities similar to those of the Sega Genesis, meaning EA already had games ready to port over, along with developers with considerable expertise in writing for a more advanced species of console. Just in time for the Christmas of 1991, EA released a new version of John Madden Football — John Madden Football ’92 — simultaneously on the Super Nintendo and the Genesis. The sequel had been created, according to the recollections of several EA executives, against the advice of market researchers and retailers: “All you’re going to do is obsolete our old game.” But Trip Hawkins remembered how much, as a kid, he had loved the Strat-O-Matic Football board game, for which a new set of player and team cards was issued every year just before the beginning of football season, ensuring that you could always recreate in the board game the very same season you were watching every Sunday on television. So, he ignored the objections of the researchers and the retailers, and John Madden Football ’92 became an enormous hit, by far the biggest EA had yet enjoyed on any platform — thus inaugurating, for better or for worse, the tradition of annual versions of gaming’s most evergreen franchise. Like clockwork, we’ve gotten a new Madden every single year since, a span of time that numbers a quarter-century and change as of this writing.

All of this had a transformative effect on EA’s bottom line, bringing on their biggest growth spurt yet. Revenues increased from $78 million in 1990 to $113 million in 1991; then they jumped to $175 million in 1992, accompanied by a two-for-one stock split that was necessary to keep the share price, which had been at $10 just a few years before, from exceeding $50. In that year, six of the fifteen most popular console games, across all platforms, were published by EA. Their Sega Genesis games alone generated $77 million, 18 percent more than the entirety of the company’s product portfolio had managed in 1989. This was also the first year that EA’s console games in the aggregate outsold their offerings for computers. They were leaving no doubt now as to where their primary loyalty lay: “The 16-bit consoles are far better for games than PCs. The Genesis is a very sophisticated machine…” The disparity between the two sides of the company’s business would only continue to get more pronounced, as EA’s sales jumped by an extraordinary 70 percent — to $298 million — in 1993, a spurt fueled entirely by console-game sales.

But, despite all their success on the consoles, EA — and especially their founder, Trip Hawkins — continued to chafe under the restrictions of the walled-garden model of software distribution. Accordingly, Hawkins put together a group inside EA to research the potential for a CD-ROM-based multimedia set-top box of their own, one that would be used for more than just playing games — sort of a CD-I done right. “The Japanese videogame companies,” he said, “are too shortsighted to see where this is going.” In contrast to their walled gardens, his box would be as open as possible. Rather than a single new hardware product, it would be a set of hardware specifications and an operating system which manufacturers could license, which would hopefully result in a situation similar to the MS-DOS marketplace, where lots of companies competed and innovated within the bounds of an established standard. The marketplace for games and applications as well on the new machine would be far less restricted than the console norm, with a more laissez-faire attitude to content and a royalty fee of just $3 per unit sold.

In 1991, EA spun off the venture under the name of 3DO. Hawkins turned most of his day-to-day responsibilities at EA over to Larry Probst in order to take personal charge of his new baby, which took tangible form for the first time with the release of the Panasonic “Real 3DO Player” in late 1993. It and other implementations of the 3DO technology managed to sell 500,000 units worldwide — 200,000 of them in North America — by January of 1995. Yet those numbers were still a pittance next to those of the dedicated game consoles, and the story of 3DO became one of constant flirtations with success that never quite led to that elusive breakthrough moment. As 3DO struggled, Hawkins’s relations with his old company worsened. He believed they had gone back on promises to support his new venture wholeheartedly; “I didn’t feel like I was leaving EA, but it turned out that way,” he says today with lingering bitterness. The long, frustrating saga of 3DO wouldn’t finally straggle to a bankruptcy until 2003.

EA, meanwhile, was flying ever higher absent their founder. Under Larry Probst — always the most hard-nosed and sober-minded of the executive staff, the person most laser-focused on the actual business of selling videogames — EA cemented their reputation as the conservative, risk-averse giant of their industry. This new EA was seemingly the polar opposite of the company that had once asked with almost painful earnestness if a computer could make you cry. And yet, paradoxically, it was a place still inhabited by a surprising number of the people who had come up with that message. Most prominent among them was Bing Gordon, who notes cryptically today only that “people’s ideals get tested in the face of love or money.” Part of the problem — assuming one judges EA’s current less-than-boldly-innovative lineup of franchises to be a problem — may be a simple buildup of creative cruft that has resulted from being in business for so long. Every franchise that debuts in inspiration and innovation, then goes on to join John Madden Football on the list of EA perennials, sucks some of the bandwidth away that might otherwise have been devoted to the next big innovator.

In the summer of 1987, when EA was still straddling the line between their old personality and their new, Trip Hawkins wrote the following lines in their official newsletter — lines which evince the keenly felt tension between art and commerce that has become the defining aspect of EA’s corporate history for so many in the years since:

Unfortunately, simply being creative doesn’t always mean you’ll be wildly successful. Van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime. Lots of people would still rather go see Porky’s Revenge IV, ignoring well-produced movies like Amadeus or Chariots of Fire. As a result, film producers take fewer risks, and we get less variety, and pretty soon the Porky’s and Rambo clones are all you can find on a Friday night. Software developers have the same problem. (To this day, all of us M.U.L.E. fans wonder why the entire world hasn’t fallen in love with our favorite game.)

The only way to solve the problem is to do it together. On our end, we’ll keep innovating, researching, experimenting with new ways to use this new medium; on your end, you can support our efforts by taking an occasional risk, by buying something new and different… maybe Robot Rascals, or Make Your Own Murder Party.

You may be very pleasantly surprised — and you’ll help our software artists live to innovate another day.

Did EA go the direction they did because of gamers’ collective failure to support their most innovative, experimental work? Does it even matter if so? The more pragmatic among us might note that the EA of today is delivering games that millions upon millions of people clearly want to play, and where’s the harm in that?

Still, as we look upon this industry that has so steadfastly refused to grow up in so many ways, there remain always those pictures of EA’s first generation of software artists — pictures that, yes, are a little pretentious and a lot contrived, but that nevertheless beckon us to pursue higher ideals. They’ve taken on an identity of their own now, quite apart from the history of the company that once splashed them across the pages of glossy lifestyle magazines. Long may they continue to inspire.

(Sources: the book Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay and Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World by David Sheff; Harvard Business School’s case study “Electronic Arts in 1995”; ACE of April 1990; Amazing Computing of July 1992; Computer Gaming World of March 1988, October 1988, and June 1989; MicroTimes of April 1986; The One of November 1988; Electronic Arts’s newsletter Farther from Summer 1987; AmigaWorld premiere issue; materials relating to the Software Publishers Association included in the Brøderbund archive at the Strong Museum of Play; the episode of the Computer Chronicles television series entitled “Computer Games.” Online sources include “We See Farther — A History of Electronic Arts” at Gamasutra, “How Electronic Arts Lost Its Soul” at Polygon, and Funding Universe’s history of Electronic Arts.)

Comments
30 Responses

- Alex Smith

October 5, 2018 at 4:54 pm

A few points:

1. Bing Gordon was not employee #2, but rather employee #7. Rich Melmon, Dave Evans, Pat Marriott, Stephanie Barrett, and Jeff Burton were all there before him.

2. “1984 could boast only one comparable success story, Seven Cities of Gold.”

Not quite true. Ray Tobey’s Skyfox was also released in 1984 and ultimately sold over 300,000 units. The game is credited by several employees, including Bing, for helping save EA. Now, many of those sales came after it was converted to the C64 in 1985, but the Apple II version did sell well in 1984 according to the Billboard software charts.

3. I think this narrative skews Trip Hawkins views on the console industry a little bit and distorts how the company finally came to the market. As written, there is an implication that Trip was quick to back down from his original vision when faced with the success of Nintendo, but that does not really appear to be the case from the dozen or so interviews I have conducted with EA employees.

Trip was adamantly opposed to the console market due to the control exerted by the manufacturers, and he was not alone among upper management in his aversion to that market. Larry Probst was the one who really wanted in because of the potential profit. The compromise is that EA began licensing some of its games to Konami. When Skate or Die did about 1.2 million units on the NES, Hawkins was faced with a board revolt because of all the money EA was leaving on the table. Hawkins tried to stare down his board, and they threatened to fire him. Only then did he reluctantly move into the console market and develop the plan on how to win back a little bit of that control from Sega.

The above account is told in the book Game Over, and variations of it have been supported by many of my interviews with individuals like Bing Gordon, Stewart Bonn, Don Traeger, and Trip himself. Maybe Trip comes to the same decision on his own without board pressure, as he is a shrewd businessman and Larry was pushing hard, but as it played out he fought the move to console with all of his might until his choice was “enter the console business, or we will find someone who will.”

- Jimmy Maher

October 5, 2018 at 6:21 pm

1. Thanks!

2. Given the relative size of the Apple II versus Commodore 64 game markets, I think Skyfox is a success story best reserved for 1985. By 1984, a hit Commodore 64 games was selling several times as many copies as a hit Apple II game, and Skyfox is arguably a game better-suited to the more action-oriented Commodore 64 market anyway.

3. I actually looked at this question pretty hard. I’m a little skeptical of the account in Game Over, given that that book has some other inaccuracies and given the way the various accounts and timelines just don’t quite line up. I suspect that Hawkins’s resistance was stronger to publishing on Nintendo’s console than it was to publishing on consoles in general.

The biggest point of conflict is Hawkins’s claim, stated in his interview in Gamers at Work among other places, that EA’s IPO, which only earned about $10 million, was done specifically to secure funding to reverse-engineer the Sega Genesis, to develop and publish the first slate of games for that platform, and to have a war chest to hand in case EA wound up publishing there without Sega’s permission and had to try to win in court. Obviously, it can’t be the case that Hawkins both did the IPO to secure funding for the console market and was forced to enter the console market against his will by the new investors who came in with the IPO (the latter being the story Sheff tells). If, however, those investors were pushing him to get on the *NES* in addition to the Genesis, it all begins to make a lot more sense.

The other possibility, of course, is that Hawkins is simply mis-remembering or lying. But both strike me as out of character. I’m certainly willing to revisit the issue if you have more insights, but this is my point of view on it right now.

- Alex Smith

October 5, 2018 at 7:08 pm

It had been awhile since I read the Game Over account. I think the part in there about the new investors pushing consoles was an error on Sheff’s part. EA always had a strong and opinionated board and already had plenty of VC types on it before the IPO.

The part about the board forcing his hand though, that was confirmed to me by Trip in an interview. Don Traeger also told me how Trip really did not want to enter the console market. The sense I get is that Sega was the lesser of two evils in his mind.

- Jimmy Maher

October 5, 2018 at 8:10 pm

Okay, thanks. Added a couple of sentence to indicate that Hawkins was pressured when making the decision.

- Alex Freeman

October 5, 2018 at 7:57 pm

Questions of authenticity and creativity are always fraught; to imagine that anyone is really in the arts just for the art strikes me as hopelessly naive. The EA of the early 1980s wasn’t founded by artists but rather by businessmen, backed by venture capitalists with goals of their own that had little to do with “fulfilling the potential of personal computing.”

Well, that explains a lot.

The more pragmatic among us might note that the EA of today is delivering games that millions upon millions of people clearly want to play, and where’s the harm in that?

There’s nothing wrong with that; it’d just be nice if there’d been more room for other kinds of games to succeed. Of course, it could be argued that video games are more creative than ever before thanks to the Internet. The real problem now, though, is all the gems getting buried under the rubble.

- David Boddie

October 6, 2018 at 12:18 am

“CD-ROM-based multimedia setup box of their own” (set-top)

The idea of a videogames console as a multimedia appliance was ahead of its time – or perhaps of its time given that CDs had started to become the way to distribute games. I think this idea became much more of a realistic proposition for most people when consoles started to be able to play DVDs and later Blu-ray media.

I’m always intrigued by the CPU architectures used by the consoles from the fifth generation onwards. The cancelled follow-up to the 3DO was to use dual PowerPC 602 CPUs. Both Sony and Nintendo used PowerPC CPUs, but a few years later, so I wonder if the M2 would have been ahead of its time or the odd one out again.

- Jimmy Maher

October 6, 2018 at 8:14 am

Thanks!

I’d say the idea was definitely *of* its time. There were a lot of people convinced that a multimedia set-top box, capable of playing games but also of running useful informational applications and playing music and even movies, was the all-in-one future of living-room entertainment, destined to replace the specialized game consoles. The 3DO was hardly the only specimen of the breed; see also the CD-I and Commodore’s CDTV.

But what seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea just never happened; the public proved oddly resistant to the concept. DVD players eventually came along to take up some of this space, and videogame consoles soon acquired the ability to play DVD movies as well. So, I guess you could say the concept did come to fruition, only many years later than expected. Part of the problem in the early days was doubtless the fact that the various models of set-top box all lacked the ability to display video with reasonable fidelity, or to fit very much of it on a single CD.

- Chris D

October 6, 2018 at 9:43 am

I’d say part of the reason why the 3DO never took off was expense – it was much more expensive than the consoles it was competing with. I’ve seen it argued that the problem with 3DO’s approach whereby anyone could license and release their own console that met the 3DO standard was that it couldn’t be subsidised by game sales in the same way that Sony & Sega’s consoles could. Those companies could take the hit and sell the console at cost price (or at a slight loss), whereas Panasonic or Goldstar would have to make a profit on each unit.

I guess the other problem was the multimedia aspects were not up to scratch – video CDs were not really a significant improvement on VHS, at least not in the same way as DVD was. As soon as a relatively cheap console came along that also functioned as a very capable multimedia player (i.e. the Playstation 2) it was a huge success.

- Gnoman

October 6, 2018 at 9:50 pm

The big thing here, as mentioned in an earlier article, is that this is still the era where nobody really knew what to do with all the space a CD offered. Most just used the space for better music (nice, but hardly a game-changer), or else went down the horrible FMV pathline.

Even in the PS1 era, a ton of games only used a small portion of the disc for game data. They’d gotten to the point where a game wouldn’t fit on an affordable cartridge anymore, but the CD was still a vast empty void unless you were doing a lot of cutscenes.

- Bernie

October 6, 2018 at 2:12 pm

Hi Jimmy ! This piece has been a joy to read, as usual.

Keep up the excellent work.

Regarding Trip Hawkins’ concept of “software artists” , it probably just didn’t work quite the way he intended because he simply was pushing a little too hard. The music-industry analogy with the album packaging, professional photography and autograph signing was overdone.

The world of electronic gaming had already developed a more “natural” tendency to credit its most talented creators. Case in point : Richard Garriott was a celebrity much earlier than 1983 ; The founding of Activision by programmers seeking recognition (which they got).

There was also the british scene, where programmers were revered and got plenty of press coverage without any overt efforts from the publishers : Braben and Bell (Elite), Jeff Minter, the Stamper brothers.

This was happening even in parallel to Hawkins’ efforts, for example at EA rival Epyx, where people like Jon Freeman, Stephen Landrum and Michael Kosaka came to prominence even though Epyx didn’t even put their names on the packaging or the ads. Gee, they even ended up working for electronic arts.

I vividly remember getting a copy of Skate or Die! for my C64 because I saw the names of Stephen Landrum and Michael Kosaka on the loading screen, not because it came from EA. I was very fond of the work they did for Epyx on the Games series and other titles.

I wholly suscribe to your point that Hawkins’ promotional strategies for the creators were right in the long run, he just needn’t be so fanatical about it. Maybe he should take comfort that nowadays even the Japanese, namely Nintendo and Sega, acknowlege and revere their creative minds: the likes of Miyamoto, Suzuki and Kojima. I still remember the NES days when most games credited the programmers and artists with pseudonyms, or not at all. Maybe Sega was a little more progressive in this regard.

- Jimmy Maher

October 6, 2018 at 3:38 pm

Your points are well taken, but I would also argue that the *type* of fame Hawkins sought for his designers was not quite the same as that enjoyed by the examples you cite. While it’s certainly true that some developers had a fair measure of name recognition, it was (and still largely is) restricted to the insular culture of hardcore gamers. Trip Hawkins’s big idea was to make games and game developers artistically respectable — and *cool* — among the taste makers of hip culture in general. He didn’t just want to get them recognition. He really did want to make them celebrities — rock stars.

This type of fame, of course, still isn’t enjoyed by game developers even today. The games industry has always had a bit of jealousy and aspiration toward the glitzier, more star-driven cultures of movies and music. In that light, it’s not hard to understand why the rock-star advertisements still speak to so many gamers and game developers today. Those moody, oh-so-hip photographs make for a powerful wish-fulfillment fantasy. But if they continue to inspire people to do interesting work, as they quite clearly have done for many years now, more power to them.

- Sniffnoy

October 7, 2018 at 5:36 pm

Hideo Kojima probably comes closest, I’d say…

- Alex Freeman

October 7, 2018 at 7:34 pm

I’ve always found the whole “rock star” angle rather strange. I mean, you don’t hear about book authors wanting to be “rock stars”, and I’d say they’re much more like game designers than rock or movie stars are.

- whomever

October 8, 2018 at 2:49 am

(replaying to Alex Freeman): An interesting nuance around “rock star” is that it’s become a standard term for some combination of “really good” and “everyone says they are really good”; I’ve heard it use to describe people in fields as diverse as (very much NON games) computer programming and sailboat racing…

- Jimmy Maher

October 8, 2018 at 12:38 pm

One amusing irony in pop culture’s appropriation of the term is the fact that a lot of its modern ubiquity is doubtless thanks to Rockstar Games of Grand Theft Auto fame; the games industry’s rock-star envy has, it seems, come full-circle. But the supreme is the way that the world is full of “rock stars” at doing this or that, yet literal rock stars have all but disappeared from the pop-culture landscape; the only ones to really qualify for the label these days are aging legacy acts like U2, whose best years are quite clearly well behind them.

- Bernie

October 7, 2018 at 9:03 pm

Yes. Indeed. Thanks again jimmy.

I get your angle now. He was working towards mass-media appeal, not gaming-focused media coverage. He was thinking of People.com rather than IGN.com. Variety and New Yorker rather than CGW or Compute!.

- DZ-Jay

October 15, 2018 at 12:02 pm

The reason that sort of fame does not work for game designers and book authors is because it is unearned. Most likely this is due to personality traits.

You see, almost by definition, rock stars and movie actors are /showmen/, and thus are self-selected to express themselves in a larger-than-life manner, and to seek the limelight. The ones who succeed in getting our attention and grasping our fascination are the ones with an innate sense of self-assurance and charisma. Thus, they may be a product of coordinated marketing, but they can indeed play the part (and often relish in it), as it were.

Contrast this to the typical author or game designer, vocations for which charisma and self-assurance are not necessary — and indeed perhaps anathema. Many engineers and authors would rather sit in solitude and do their work, and collect the praises from a distance, rather than be out there calling attention to themselves. In fact, the praise and attention that they often seek is for their work, not for themselves.

Anyway, that’s my opinion, obviously not a hard and fast rule, for there are plenty of exceptions.

dZ.

- Bernie

October 6, 2018 at 2:14 pm

Sorry : 4th paragraph – “Electronic Arts” (with capitals) , not “electronic arts” (no disrespect intended)

- Bing gordon

October 6, 2018 at 9:10 pm

Don Traeger deserves a lot of credit for the insights about the console market.
Andy Berlin deserves credit for turning the founding team’s aspirations into a cohesive rallying cry; Rich Silverstein for making it visually arresting; and both for the entire record album design and creative strategy. And Jim Nitchall’s for reverse engineering the Genesis.
Trip’s founder’s vision and creative genius made everyone reach a bit higher.

- hcs

October 13, 2018 at 7:12 pm

Nits:
“get it on the ground floor”

I’ve usually seen CD-I written CD-i, particularly in recent retrospectives. But it looks like official sources use uppercase in print; I’ve only found Philips using lowercase in a logo, like this: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/large/76/5/product-107605.jpg

- Jimmy Maher

October 14, 2018 at 7:27 am

Thanks!

I looked at the capitalization issue when I first wrote about CD-I. It was, as far as I can see, universally referred to in all caps at least until its release.

- Casey Muratori

October 15, 2018 at 3:50 am

Just wanted to mention that the description of “Skate or Die” as a “Commodore 64 game” caught me a little off guard, because I had forgotten that the original arcade game was actually called “720”, and that EA had simply stolen the catch phrase for their skateboarding title. Once I looked it up, it made sense, but it might be worth putting in a parenthetical about 720 in the article to avoid similar confusion for people with failing memories such as my own :)

– Casey

- Jimmy Maher

October 15, 2018 at 10:11 am

Thanks, but in this case I’m going to leave it as-is. It’d be a little tough to explain that elegantly in a parenthetical, and I don’t want to go off on a tangent.

- Pedro Timóteo

October 15, 2018 at 4:54 pm

720º and Skate or Die are — other than the subject, of course — unrelated games (although, yes, the phrase “skate or die” comes from 720º originally). Or did you mean something else?

- Chris Rowley

November 4, 2018 at 8:17 am

Awesome article as always! I was there working retail when EA launched and got to talk to some of their devs later when I worked at IMSATT, the developers of the visual programming environment AmigaVision. This was when EA was so front-and-center with their creative tools as much as they were with the games but after the American market was obviously a lost cause. At the time we agreed Commodore did everything wrong, but that they probably never could have broken through the rising tide of the PC regardless.

I guess what drove me to comment for once was the realties of game publishing today being rooted in EA’s console shift. I understand the bottom-line, but economics offer a lot of options that are being left on the table. The console market offered a larger installed base, but home computer games could still turn a profit. Finding a budget that could be covered by a certain number of sales doesn’t seem to be an option in a swing-for-the-fences mentality that has distanced AAA today so far and eliminated a robust AA that died with the PS2/Xbox/GameCube-era. Is there a way to stem the hire-and-fire single-title crunch at publishers with deep pockets by servicing different price points? Is there any way to carve out a space for Trip’s initial vision within a publisher tilting solely at blockbusters today?

- Jimmy Maher

November 4, 2018 at 8:43 am

Many would claim that the indie market and digital distribution have led to a fulfillment of the original EA vision. Certainly there’s a lot more interesting work being done there today than in the risk-averse world of AAA. What I think has been lost is a measure of curation and quality control. When basically anyone can make and release a game — the standards you have to meet to get listed on Steam or the Apple store are pretty minimal at best — you get a lot of unplayable, unbalanced junk. Finding the gems in all this dross can be difficult.

- whomever

November 5, 2018 at 12:42 pm

There’s a lots of dross sure, but also lots of great stuff. Just to name 2 modern games that are completely indie (and both of which I happen to play): Cities Skylines, developed in Finland (and with a female lead!) was developed to be the SimCity that SHOULD have been after the disaster of Simcity 2013 (Which was ironically developed by….EA!) Kerbal Space Program is a super fun game that’s also a physics lesson (I have learned more about Orbital Mechanics than I did in any of my Physics classes) developed by a Brazilian with a passion for space living in Mexico city.

- Jimmy Maher

November 5, 2018 at 1:16 pm

Oh, sure. Whatever complaints you can make about the state of games today, it’s far healthier than the years immediately before the rise of digital distribution, when conservative publishers like EA threatened to strangle all innovation in the field. For all that I write a blog about the history of games, I’m not at all on the “old games were better” bandwagon. I have no doubt that there’s a wider variety of truly interesting games being made now than ever before.

I’ve heard a lot about both specific games you mention, especially Kerbal Space Program. Return of the Obra Dinn is another one that I’ve had a line of people telling me I need to play. Going to try to squeeze that one in when I go on holiday in a couple of weeks; as an adventure game, it’s a bit less of a potential open-ended time sink. ;)

- PJN

December 7, 2018 at 6:16 am

“with the sense of overweening ambition that been a part”

could be

“that had been”

- Jimmy Maher

December 7, 2018 at 8:14 am

Thanks!

The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes
October 12, 2018

In 1989, Trip Hawkins reluctantly decided to shift Electronic Arts’s strategic focus from home computers to videogame consoles, thereby to “reach millions of customers.” That decision was reaching fruition by 1992. For the first time that year, EA’s console games outsold those they published for personal computers. The whole image of the company was changing, leaving behind the last vestiges of the high-toned “software artists” era of old in favor of something less intellectual and more visceral — something aimed at the mass market rather than a quirky elite.

Still, corporate cultures don’t change overnight, and the EA of 1992 continued to release some computer games which were more in keeping with their image of the 1980s than that of this new decade. One of the most interesting and rewarding of these aberrations — call them the product of corporate inertia — was a game called The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, whose origin story doesn’t exactly lead one to expect a work of brilliance but which is in fact one of the finest, most faithful interpretations of the legendary detective in the deerstalker cap ever to make its way onto a monitor screen.

The initial impetus for Lost Files was provided by an EA producer named Christopher Erhardt. After studying film and psychology at university, Erhardt joined the games industry in 1987, when he came to Infocom to become the in-house producer for their latter-day lineup of graphical games from outside developers, such as Quarterstaff, BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception, and Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur. When Infocom was shuttered in 1989, he moved on to EA in the same role, helming a number of the early Sega Genesis games that did so much to establish the company’s new identity. His success on that front gave him a fair amount of pull, and so he pitched a pet idea of his: for a sort of computerized board game that would star Sherlock Holmes along with a rotating cast of suspects, crimes, and motives, similar to the old 221B Baker Street board game as well as a classic computer game from Accolade called Killed Until Dead. It turned out that EA’s management weren’t yet totally closed to the idea of computer games that were, as Erhardt would later put it, “unusual and not aimed at the mass market” — as long, that is, as they could be done fairly inexpensively.

Mythos Software. On the top row are James Ferguson, Elinor Mavor, and Scott Mavor. On the bottom row are John Dunn and David Wood.

In order to meet the latter condition, Erhardt enlisted a tiny Tempe, Arizona, company known as Mythos Software — not to be confused with the contemporaneous British strategy-games developer Mythos Games. This Mythos was being run by one James Ferguson, its fresh-out-of-university founder, from the basement of his parents’ house. He was trying to break into the wider world of software development that lay outside the bounds of the strictly local contracts he had fulfilled so far; his inexperience and eagerness ensured that Mythos would work cheap. And in addition to cut-rate pricing, Ferguson had another secret weapon to deploy: an artist named Scott Mavor who had a very special way with pixel graphics, a technique that EA’s in-house employees would later come to refer to as “the Mavor glow.” The highly motivated Mythos, working to Erhardt’s specifications, created a demo in less than two weeks that was impressive enough to win the project a tentative green light.

Eric Lindstrom and R.J. Berg.

Another EA employee, a technical writer named Eric Lindstrom, saw the demo and suggested turning what had been planned as a computerized board game into a more narratively ambitious point-and-click adventure game. When Erhardt proved receptive to the suggestion, Lindstrom put together the outline of a story, “The Mystery of the Serrated Scalpel.” He told Erhardt that he knew the perfect person to bring the story to life: one of his colleagues among EA’s manual writers, a passionate Sherlock Holmes aficionado — he claimed to have read Arthur Conan Doyle’s complete canon of Holmes stories “two or three times” — named R.J. Berg.

The project’s footing inside EA was constantly uncertain. Christopher Erhardt says he “felt like I was playing the Princess Bride, and the dread pirate Roberts was coming.  It was always, ‘Yep – we may cancel it.'” But in the end the team was allowed to complete their point-and-click mystery, despite it being so utterly out of step with EA’s current strategic focus, and it was quietly released in the fall of 1992.

I find the critical dialog that followed, both in the immediate wake of Lost Files’s release and many years later in Internet circles, to be unusually interesting. In particular, I’d like to quote at some length from Computer Gaming World’s original review, which was written by Charles Ardai, one of the boldest and most thoughtful — and most entertaining — game reviewers of the time; this I say even as I find myself disagreeing with his conclusions far more often than not. His review opens thus:

If there is any character who has appeared in more computer games than Nintendo’s plump little goldmine, Mario, it has to be Sherlock Holmes. There have been almost a dozen Holmes-inspired games over the years, one of the best being Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, which is currently available in two different CD-ROM editions from ICOM. Other valiant attempts have included Imagic’s Sherlock Holmes in Another Bow, in which Holmes took a sea voyage with Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Thomas Edison, and Houdini, among others; and Infocom’s deadly serious Sherlock: Riddle of the Crown Jewels.

The difference between Holmes and Mario games, however, is that new Mario games are always coming out because the old ones sold like gangbusters, while new Sherlock Holmes games come out in spite of the fact that their predecessors sold like space heaters in the Sahara. It is noteworthy that, until ICOM, no company had ever released more than one Sherlock Holmes game, while all the Mario games come from the same source. It is also worth noting that the Holmes curse is not limited to games: the last few Holmes movies, such as Without a Clue and Young Sherlock Holmes, were not exactly box-office blockbusters.

The paradox of Sherlock Holmes can be stated so: while not that many people actually like the original Sherlock Holmes stories, everyone seems to think that everyone else adores them. Like Tarzan and Hawkeye, Holmes is a literary icon, universally known and much-beloved as a character in the abstract — not, however, as part of any single work. Finding someone who has actually read and enjoyed the writing of Edgar Rice Burroughs, James Fenimore Cooper, or Arthur Conan Doyle requires the patience of Diogenes. Most people know the character from television and the movies, at best; at worst, from reviews of television shows and movies they never bothered to see.

So, why do new Holmes adaptations surface with such regularity? Because the character is already famous and the material is in the public domain (thereby mitigating the requisite licensing fees associated with famous characters of more recent vintage. Batman or Indiana Jones, for instance.) Another answer is that Sherlock Holmes is seen as bridging the gap between entertainment and literature. Game companies presumably hope to cash in on the recognition factor and have some of the character’s ponderous respectability rub off on their product. They also figure that they can’t go wrong basing their games on a body of work that has endured for almost a century.

Unfortunately for them, they are wrong. There are only so many copies of a game that one can sell to members of the Baker Street Irregulars (the world’s largest and best-known Sherlock Holmes fan club), and a vogue for Victoriana has never really caught on among the rest of the game-buying population. The result is that, while Holmes games have been good, bad, and indifferent, their success has been uniformly mediocre.

This delightfully cynical opening gambit is so elegantly put together that one almost hesitates to puncture its cogency with facts. Sadly, though, puncture we must. While there were certainly Sherlock Holmes games released prior to Lost Files that flopped, there’s no evidence to suggest that this was the fault of the famous detective with his name on the box, and plenty of evidence to the contrary: that his name could, under the right circumstances, deliver at least a modest sales boost. In addition to the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective CD-ROM productions, a counter-example to Ardai’s thesis that’s so huge even he has to acknowledge it — the first volume of that series sold over 1 million units — there’s also the Melbourne House text adventure Sherlock; that game, the hotly anticipated followup to the bestselling-text-adventure-of-all-time The Hobbit, likely sold well over 100,000 units in its own right in the much smaller market of the Europe of 1984. Even Infocom’s Riddle of the Crown Jewels, while by no means a smash hit, sold significantly better than usual for an Infocom game in the sunset of the company’s text-only era. (Nor would I describe that game as “deadly serious” — I could go with “respectful” at most — but that’s perhaps picking nits.)

Still, setting aside those inconvenient details, it’s worth considering this broader question of just why there have been so many Sherlock Holmes games over the years. Certainly the character doesn’t have the same immediate appeal with the traditional gaming demographic as heavyweight properties like Star Wars and Star Trek, Frodo Baggins and Indiana Jones — or, for that matter, the born-in-a-videogame Super Mario. The reason for Sherlock’s ubiquity in the face of his more limited appeal is, of course, crystal clear, as Ardai recognizes: he’s in the public domain, meaning anyone who wishes to can make a Sherlock Holmes game at any time without paying anyone.[1]

If you’re going to do Sherlock Holmes, you just have to get the fog right.

As such, Holmes occupies a nearly unique position in our culture. He’s one of the last great fictional icons, historically speaking, who’s so blessedly free of intellectual-property restrictions. Absolutely everyone, whether they’ve ever read a story or seen a film featuring him or not, knows him. The only characters with a remotely similar degree of recognizability who postdate him are Dracula, the Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan — and neither of the latter two at least presents writers with quite the same temptation to tell new story after story after story.

As is noted in Lost Files’s manual, Sherlock Holmes has become such an indelible part of our cultural memory that when we see him we experience a sort of vicarious nostalgia for a London none of us ever knew: “Gas lamps, the sound of horses’ hooves, steam locomotives, and romantic street cries. And then there is the atmosphere of that cozy room in Baker Street: Holmes in his armchair before a roaring coal fire, legs stretched out before him, listening with Dr. Watson to yet another bizarre story.” One might say that Sherlock Holmes gets the chronological balance just right, managing to feel both comfortably, nostalgically traditional and yet also relevant and relatable. In contrast to the Victorian scenery around him, his point of view as a character feels essentially modern, applicable to modern modes of storytelling. I’m not sure that any other fictional character combines this quality to quite the same extent with a freedom from copyright lawyers. These factors have fostered an entire creative subculture of Sherlockia which spans the landscape of modern media, dwarfing Arthur Conan Doyle’s canonical four novels and 56 short stories by multiple orders of magnitude.

The relative modernity of Sherlock Holmes is especially important in the context of interactive adaptations. The player of any narrative-driven game needs a frame of reference — needs to understand what’s expected of her in the role she’s expected to play. Thankfully, the divide between Sherlock Holmes and the likes of C.S.I. is a matter of technology rather than philosophy; Sherlock too solves crimes through rationality, combining physical evidence, eyewitness and suspect interviews, and logical deduction to reach a conclusion. Other legendary characters don’t share our modern mindset; it’s much more difficult for the player to step into the role of an ancient Greek hero who solves problems by sacrificing to the gods or an Arthurian knight who views every event as a crucible of personal honor. (Anyone doubtful of Sherlock Holmes’s efficacy in commercial computer games should have a look at the dire commercial history of Arthurian games.)

With so much material to make sense of, post-Doyle adventures of Sherlock Holmes get sorted on the basis of various criteria. One of these is revisionism versus faithfulness. While some adaptations go so far as to transport Sherlock and his cronies hook, line, and sinker into our own times, others make a virtue out of hewing steadfastly to the character and setting described by Arthur Conan Doyle. This spirit of Sherlockian fundamentalism, if you will, is just one more facet of our long cultural dialog around the detective, usually manifesting as a reactionary return to the roots when other recent interpretations are judged to have wandered too far afield.

No matter how much the Sherlockian fundamentalists kick and scream, however, the fact remains that the Sherlock Holmes of the popular imagination has long since become a pastiche of interpretations reflecting changing social mores and cultural priorities. That’s fair enough in itself — it’s much of the reason why Doyle’s timeless sleuth remains so timeless — but it does make it all too easy to lose sight of Holmes and Watson as originally conceived in the stories. Just to cite the most obvious example: Holmes’s famous deerstalker cap is never mentioned in the text of the tales, and only appeared on a few occasions in the illustrations that originally accompanied them. The deerstalker became such an iconic part of the character only after it was sported by the actor Basil Rathbone as an item of daily wear — an odd choice for the urban Holmes, given that it was, as the name would imply, a piece of hunting apparel normally worn by sporting gentlemen in the countryside — in a long series of films, beginning with The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1939.

Although Lost Files doesn’t go so far as to forgo the deerstalker — there are, after all, limits to these things — it does generally try to take its cue from the original stories rather than the patchwork of interpretations that followed them. Berg:

I definitely aimed for Holmesian authenticity. I’d like to think that, if he were alive, Doyle would like the game. After all, the characters of Holmes and Watson have been manipulated quite a bit by the various media they’ve appeared in, especially the films. For example, the Watson of Lost Files is definitely Doyle’s Watson, competent and intelligent, rather than the bumbling character portrayed in many of the movies. I also wanted to retain Holmes’s peculiar personality. He’s really not that likable a character; he’s arrogant, a misogynist, and extremely smug.

This spirit of authenticity extends to the game’s portrayal of Victorian London. There are, I’ve always thought, two tiers when it comes to realistic portrayals of real places in fiction. Authors on the second tier have done a whole lot of earnest research into their subject, and they’re very eager to show it all to you, filling your head with explicit descriptions of things which a person who actually lived in that setting would never think twice about, so ingrained are they in daily existence. Authors on the top tier, by contrast, have seemingly absorbed the setting through their pores, and write stories that effortlessly evoke it without beating you over the head with all the book research they did to reach this point of imaginative mastery.

Indeed, Sherlock. Leaving the cozy environs of 221B Baker Street.

Lost Files largely meets the latter bar as it sends you around to the jewelers and tobacconists, theaters and pubs, opulent mansions and squalid tenements of fin-de-siècle London. The details are there for when you need them or decide to go looking for them; just try mousing around the interior of 221B Baker Street. (“A typical sitting-room chair. The sheen of its wine-red velveteen covering shows that it is well-used. A dark purple silk dressing gown with a rolled collar is carelessly crumpled on the seat and the antimacassar requires changing.”) More impressive, though, is the way that the game just breathes its setting in that subtle way that can only be achieved by a writer with both a lighter touch and countless hours of immersion in the period at his command. For example Berg spent time reading Charles Dickens as well as Arthur Conan Doyle in order to capture the subtle rhythms of Victorian English in his conversations. This version of Holmes’s London isn’t the frozen-in-amber museum exhibit it sometimes comes off as in other works of Sherlockia. “We wanted a dirty game,” says Eric Lindstrom. “We wanted people to feel that people were burning coal, that they could see who was walking in the streets. Just as it was in London at the time.”

There is, however, one important exception to the game’s rule of faithfulness to the original stories: Lost Files presents a mystery that the reader can actually solve. In light of the place Holmes holds in our cultural memory as the ultimate detective, one of the great ironies of Doyle’s stories is that they really aren’t very good mysteries at all by the standard of later mystery fiction — a standard which holds a good mystery to be an implicit contest between writer and reader, in which the reader is presented with all the clues and challenged to solve the case before the writer’s detective does so. Doyle’s stories cheat egregiously by this standard, hiding vital evidence from the reader, and often positing a case’s solution on a chain of conjecture that’s nowhere near as ironclad as the great detective presents it to be. Eric Lindstrom:

The [original] stories do not work the way we are used to today. They are not whodunnits; whodunnits only became popular later. Readers have virtually no way of finding out who the culprit is. Sometimes the offender does not even appear in the plot. These are adventure stories narrated from the perspective of Dr. Watson.

For obvious reasons, Lost Files can’t get away with being faithful to this aspect of the Sherlock Holmes tradition. And so the mystery it presents is straight out of Arthur Conan Doyle — except that it plays fair. Notably, you play as Holmes himself, not, as in the original stories, as Watson. Thus you know what Holmes knows, and the game can’t pull the dirty trick on you, even if it wanted to, of hiding information until the big reveal at the end. Many other works of Sherlockia — even the otherwise traditionalist ones — adapt the same approach, responding to our post-nineteenth-century perception of what a good mystery story should be.

And make no mistake: “The Case of the Serrated Scalpel” is a very good mystery indeed. I hesitate to spoil your pleasure in it by saying too much, and so will only state that what begins as the apparently random murder of an actress in an alley behind the Regency Theatre — perhaps by Jack the Ripper, leaving Whitechapel and trying his hand in the posher environs of Mayfair? — keeps expanding in scope, encompassing more deaths and more and more Powerful People with Secrets to Keep. As I played, I was excited every time I made a breakthrough. Even better, I felt like a detective, to perhaps a greater extent than in any computer game I’ve ever played. Among games in general, I can only compare the feeling of solving this mystery to that of tackling some of the more satisfying cases in the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective tabletop game.

Part of the reason the mystery comes together so well is just down to good adventure-game design principles, of the sort which eluded so many other contemporary practitioners of the genre. Berg:

The idea was to produce a game that was different from existing adventures, which I frankly felt were often tedious. We wanted to eliminate the elements that tend to detract from the reality of the experience — things like having to die in order to learn some crucial information, constantly having to re-cover the same territory, and the tendency to simply pick up and use every object you encounter. We wanted to give players a deeper experience.

So, there are none of the dreaded adventure-game dead ends in Lost Files. More interestingly, the design does, as Berg alludes above, mostly eschew the typical use-unlikely-object-in-unlikely-place model of gameplay. Tellingly, the few places where it fails to do so are the weakest parts of the game.

As I’ve noted before, the classic approach to the adventure game, as a series of physical puzzles to solve, can be hugely entertaining, but it almost inevitably pushes a game toward comedy, often in spite of its designers’ best intentions. Most of us have played alleged interactive mysteries that leave you forever messing about with slider puzzles and trivial practical problems of the sort that any real detective would solve in five minutes, just by calling for backup. In Infocom’s Sherlock: Riddle of the Crown Jewels, for example, you learn that a stolen ruby is hidden in the eye of the statue of Lord Nelson on top of Nelson’s Column, and then get to spend the next little while trying to get a pigeon to fetch it for you instead of, you know, just telling Inspector Lestrade to send out a work crew. Lost Files does its level best to resist the siren call of the trivial puzzle, and, with only occasional exceptions, it succeeds. Thereby is the game freed to become one of the best interactive invocations of a classic mystery story ever. You spend your time collecting and examining physical evidence, interviewing suspects, and piecing together the crime’s logic, not solving arbitrary road-block puzzles. Lost Files is one of the few ostensibly serious adventure games of its era which manages to maintain the appropriate gravitas throughout, without any jarring breaks in tone.

This isn’t to say that it’s po-faced or entirely without humorous notes; the writing is a consistent delight, filled with incisive descriptions and flashes of dry wit, subtle in all the ways most computer-game writing is not. Consider, for example, this description of a fussy jeweler: “The proprietor is a stern-looking woman, cordial more through effort than personality. She frequently stares at the cleaning girl who tidies the floor, to make sure she is still hard at work.” Yes, this character is a type more than a personality — but how deftly is that type conveyed! In two sentences, we come to know this woman. I’d go so far as to call R.J. Berg’s prose on the whole better than that of the rather stolid Arthur Conan Doyle, who tended to bloviate on a bit too much in that all too typical Victorian style.

The fine writing lends the game a rare quality that seems doubly incongruous when one considers the time in which it was created, when multimedia was all the rage and everyone was rushing to embrace voice acting and “interactive movies.” Ditto the company which published it, who were pushing aggressively toward the forefront of the new mass-media-oriented approach to games. In spite of all that, darned if Lost Files doesn’t feel downright literary — thoughtful, measured, intelligent, a game to take in slowly over a cup of tea. Further enhancing the effect is its most unique single technical feature: everything you do in the game is meticulously recorded in an in-game journal kept by the indefatigable Dr. Watson. The journal will run into the hundreds of onscreen “pages” by the time you’re all done. It reads surprisingly well too; it’s not inconceivable to imagine printing it out — the handy option to print it or save it to a file is provided — and giving it to someone else to read with pleasure. That’s a high standard indeed, one which vanishingly few games could meet. But I think that The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes just about manages it.

Having given so much praise to Lindstrom and Berg’s design and writing, I have to give due credit as well to Mythos Software’s efforts to bring it all to life. The interface of Lost Files is thoroughly refined and pleasant to work with, a remarkable achievement considering that this was the first point-and-click graphic adventure to be made by everyone involved. An optional but extremely handy hotspot finder minimizes the burden of pixel hunting, and the interface is full of other thoughtful touches, like a default action that is attached to each object; this saves you more often than not from having to make two clicks to carry out an action.

Finally, praise must be given to Scott Mavor’s “Mavor glow” graphics as well. To minimize the jagged edges typical of pictures drawn in the fairly low resolution of 256-color VGA graphics, Mavor avoided sharp shifts in color from pixel to pixel. Instead he blended his edges together gradually, creating a lovely, painterly effect that does indeed almost seem to glow. Scott’s mother Elinor Mavor, who worked with him to finish up the art in the latter stages of the project:[2]

Working with just 256 colors, Scott showed me how he created graduating palettes of each one, which allowed him to do what he called “getting rid of the dots” in each scene. To further mute the pixels, he kept the colors on the darker side, which also enhanced the Victorian mood.

Weaving the illusion of continuous-tone artwork with all those little “dots” made us buggy-eyed after a long day’s work. One night, I woke up, went into the bathroom, turned on the light, and the world just pixilated in front of me. Scary imprints on my retinas had followed me away from the computer monitor, rendering my vision as a pointillistic painting à la George Seurat.

While the graphics of its contemporaries pop out at you with bright, bold colors, the palette of Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes smacks more of the “brown sauce” of the old masters — murky, mysterious, not initially jaw-dropping but totally in keeping with the mood of the script. As you, playing the diligent detective, begin to scan them carefully, the pictures reveal more and more details of the sort that are all too easy to overlook at a quick glance. It makes for an unusually mature aesthetic statement, and a look that can be mistaken for that of no other game.

Backstage at the opera.

Given all its strengths, I find it surprising that Lost Files has gotten more than its share of critical flak over the years. I have a theory as to why that should be, but before I get to that I’ll let one of the naysayers share his point of view. Even after admitting that the story is “a ripping yarn,” the graphics atmospheric, the period details correct, and the writing very good, Charles Ardai concludes his review thusly:

Don’t get me wrong: the dialogue is well-written, the choices are entertaining, and in most cases the actions the game requires the player to perform are very interesting. The story is good and the game is a pleasure to watch. Yet, that is what one does — watch.

This game wants, more than anything in the world, to be a Sherlock Holmes movie. Though it would be a very good one if it were, it is not. Therefore, it is deeply and resoundingly unsatisfying. The plot unfolds quite well, with plenty of twists, but the player has no more control over it than he would if he were reading a novel. The player is, at best, like an actor in a play. Unfortunately, said actor has not been given a copy of the script. He has to hit his marks and say his lines by figuring out the cues given by the other characters and reading his lines off the computer equivalent of cue cards.

If this is what one wants — a fine Sherlock Holmes pastiche played out on the computer screen, with the player nominally putting the lead character through his paces — fine. “The Case of the Serrated Scalpel” delivers all that one could hope for in that vein. If one wants a game — an interactive experience in which one’s decisions have an effect on what happens — this piece of software is likely to disappoint.

The excellent German podcast Stay Forever criticized the game along similar — albeit milder — lines in 2012. And in his mostly glowing 2018 review of the game for The Adventure Gamer joint-blogging project, Joe Pranevich as well noted a certain distancing effect, which he said made him feel not so much like he was playing Sherlock Holmes and solving a mystery as watching Sherlock do the solving. The mystery, he further notes — correctly — can for the most part be solved by brute force by the patient but obtuse player, simply by picking every single conversation option when talking to every single character and showing each of them every single object you’ve collected.

At the extreme, criticisms like these would seem to encroach on the territory staked out by the noted adventure-game-hater Chris Crawford, who insists that the entire genre is a lie because it cannot offer the player the ability to do anything she wants whenever she wants. I generally find such complaints to be a colossal bore, premised on a misunderstanding of what people who enjoy adventure games find most enjoyable about them in the first place. But I do find it intriguing that these sorts of complaints keep turning up so often in the case of this specific game, and that they’re sometimes voiced even by critics generally friendly to the genre. My theory is that the mystery of Lost Files may be just a little bit too good: it’s just enticing enough, and just satisfying enough to slowly uncover, that it falls into an uncanny valley between playing along as Sherlock Holmes and actually being Sherlock Holmes.

But of course, playing any form of interactive fiction must be an imaginative act on the part of the player, who must be willing to embrace the story being offered and look past the jagged edges of interactivity. Certainly Lost Files is no less interactive than most adventure games, and it offers rich rewards that few can match if you’re willing to not brute-force your way through it, to think about and really engage with its mystery. It truly is a game to luxuriate in and savor like a good novel. In that spirit, I have one final theory to offer you: I think this particular graphic adventure may be especially appealing to fans of textual interactive fiction. Given its care for the written word and the slow-build craftsmanship of its plotting, it reminds me more of a classic Infocom game than most of the other, flashier graphic adventures that jostled with it for space on store shelves in the early 1990s.

Which brings me in my usual roundabout fashion to the final surprising twist in this very surprising game’s history. After its release by a highly skeptical EA, its sales were underwhelming, just as everyone had been telling Christopher Erhardt they would be all along. But then, over a period of months and years, the game just kept on selling at the same slow but steady clip. It seemed that computer-owning Sherlock Holmes aficionados weren’t the types to rush out and buy games when they were hot. Yet said aficionados apparently did exist, and they apparently found the notion of a Sherlock Holmes adventure game intriguing when they finally got around to it. (Somehow this scenario fits in with every stereotype I carry around in my head about the typical Sherlock Holmes fan.) Lost Files’s sales eventually topped the magical 100,000-unit mark that separated a hit from an also-ran in the computer-games industry of the early- and mid-1990s.

It wasn’t a very good idea, but they did it anyway. R.J. Berg on a sound stage with an actress, filming for the 3DO version of Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes. Pictures like this were in all the games magazines of the 1990s. Somehow such pictures — not to mention the games that resulted from them — seem far more dated than Pong these days.

Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes may not have challenged the likes of John Madden Football in the sales sweepstakes, but it did make EA money, and some inside the company did notice. In 1994, they released a version for the 3DO multimedia console. For the sake of trendiness, this version added voice acting and inserted filmed footage of actors into the conversation scenes, replacing the lovely hand-drawn portraits in the original game and doing it no new aesthetic favors in the process. In 1996, with the original still selling tolerably well, most of the old team got back together for a belated sequel — The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Rose Tattoo — that no one would ever have dreamed they would be making a couple of years before.

But then, almost everything about the story of Lost Files is unlikely, from EA of all companies deciding to make it — or, perhaps better said, deciding to allow it to be made — to a bunch of first-time adventure developers managing to put everything together so much better than many established adventure-game specialists were doing at the time. And how incredibly lucky for everyone involved that such a Sherlock Holmes devotee as R.J. Berg should have been kicking around writing manuals for EA, just waiting for an opportunity like this one to show his chops. I’ve written about four Sherlock Holmes games now in the course of this long-running history of computer gaming — yet another measure of the character’s cultural ubiquity! — and this one nudges out Riddle of the Crown Jewels to become the best one yet. It just goes to show that, no matter how much one attempts to systematize the process, much of the art and craft of making games comes down to happy accidents.

(Sources: Compute! of April 1993 and June 1993; Computer Gaming World of February 1993; Questbusters of September 1988 and December 1992; Electronic Games of February 1993. Online sources include Elinor Mavor’s remembrances of the making Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, the comprehensive Game Nostalgia page on the game, the Stay Forever podcast episode devoted to the game, Joe Pranevich’s playthrough for The Adventure Gamer, the archived version of the old Mythos Software homepage, and Jason Scott’s “Infocom Cabinet” of vintage documents.

Feel free to download Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes from right here, in a format designed to be as easy as possible to get running under your platform’s version of DOSBox or using ScummVM.)

1. There have been occasional questions about the extent to which Sherlock Holmes and his supporting cast truly are outside all bounds of copyright, usually predicated on the fact that the final dozen stories were published in the 1920s, the beginning of the modern copyright era, and thus remain protected. R.J. Berg remembers giving “two copies of the game and a really trivial amount of money” to Arthur Conan Doyle’s aged granddaughter, just to head off any trouble on that front. When a sequel to Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes was published in 1996, no permission whatsoever was sought or demanded. ↩

2. Scott Mavor died of cancer in 2008 ↩

Comments
58 Responses

- Brent Ellison

October 12, 2018 at 4:59 pm

One relatively modern public domain “character” that is approaching Holmes’ notoriety these days is Cthulhu. In fact, there are probably more Lovecraft games than Holmes ones on Steam these days.

- Jonathan Badger

October 12, 2018 at 5:37 pm

And with Frogwares’ “Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened” there’s at at least one game that actually has both Holmes and Cthulhu!

- Jimmy Maher

October 12, 2018 at 7:53 pm

There’s actually some question as to whether Lovecraft’s work is in the public domain. Most of his stories were published after 1922. Others probably know more about this than me, but I believe that the Arkham House Press’s official position is still that they are the only rightful keepers of Lovecraft’s legacy, which was passed to them through August Derleth, Lovecraft’s young friend and, he claimed at least, his duly appointed literary heir. In practice, though, the paperwork is unclear at best and Arkham House isn’t big enough to make a real issue of it in court, so everything has been left in a muddle for decades.

Regardless, Cthulhu has a long way to go catch up to Sherlock Holmes. While Lovecraft has become an icon of certain segments of pop culture, lots and lots of people still have no idea who he is. My American father and my German in-laws all know Sherlock Holmes; I can guarantee you they have no idea about Lovecraft.

- Laertes

October 13, 2018 at 11:55 am

I think the copyright system is a big hurdle. Why should anyone be paid today for works whose author has been dead for decades? Sorry, earn your living everyday as most of us do.

Or why should the copyright owners stop anyone who wants to create something based in their work after so many years? The reason of course is money, and avoiding being put to shame if someone makes something better than you with your IP.

- Jimmy Maher

October 13, 2018 at 12:05 pm

I agree. The loss of a cultural commons that results from perpetual copyright is to the profound detriment of everyone.

- Julio Morales

November 12, 2018 at 2:56 pm

In Spain copyrights last for 80 years, and in Mexico it seems for 100. After that, they become public domain. However I’m pretty sure there must be an international consent about it!

- matt w

October 15, 2018 at 3:34 am

Why should anyone be paid today for works whose author has been dead for decades?

In the US at least, the answer appears to be that the term of copyright is always extended whenever the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons are about to enter the public domain.

- Elzair

October 16, 2018 at 3:48 am

Referring to Cthulhu as “he” is a little weird. “It” sounds better.

- Not Fenimore

October 12, 2018 at 4:59 pm

As a fellow James Cooper (see username), I have to note that either you or Ardai mispelled “Fenimore” in the review transcription. ;)

- Jimmy Maher

October 12, 2018 at 7:55 pm

Thanks!

- Infinitron

October 12, 2018 at 5:23 pm

But I do find it intriguing that these sorts of complaints keep turning up so often in the case of this specific game, and that they’re sometimes voiced even by critics generally friendly to the genre.

That’s not a huge mystery, is it? The illusion of agency and interactivity is easier to maintain when you’re dragging around items in a physical puzzle-based adventure game then when you’re clicking on lists of dialogue options.

Tellingly, the few places where it fails to do so are the weakest parts of the game.

Lost Files does its level best to resist the siren call of the trivial puzzle, and, with only occasional exceptions, it succeeds.

I’m curious to know what you thought these exceptions were.

- Jimmy Maher

October 12, 2018 at 8:00 pm

The whole business about the little boy and the gyroscope is the one that springs to mind…

- Infinitron

October 13, 2018 at 8:29 am

I remember being stuck for the longest time on what in retrospect sounds like a very simple puzzle – using a hook to pull the killer’s cufflink out of a barrel.

I think the problem is that the game was such smooth sailing most of the time that it didn’t train you to think that way.

Another interesting thing about the game is that there’s an entire investigative branch, including unique areas, that turns out to be a complete red herring. If I recall correctly, it dead-ends at a department store where a romantic admirer of the murder victim works. He had nothing to do with her death.

- Jimmy Maher

October 13, 2018 at 9:11 am

Yes, that’s definitely another one.

Such blind alleys as this are a staple of mystery novels and television, but not so much mystery games. It’s another way that Lost Files feels like the rare interactive mystery that’s faithful to the (literary) genre. The board game Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, which I still consider the gold standard for this sort of thing, is full of them as well.

- Jonathan Badger

October 12, 2018 at 5:27 pm

Finding someone who has actually read and enjoyed the writing of Edgar Rice Burroughs, James Fennimore Cooper, or Arthur Conan Doyle requires the patience of Diogenes. Most people know the character from television and the movies, at best

Really? While there is some truth to this for Fennimore Cooper (I found “Last of the Mohicans” to be nearly unreadable despite enjoying the Daniel Day-Lewis film, and even Mark Twain thought the same in the 19th century itself), it isn’t hard at all to read Conan Doyle or Burroughs — I went through a Sherlock Holmes phase in my teens myself.

- Jimmy Maher

October 12, 2018 at 8:01 pm

As I said, one almost hates to puncture it with facts… ;)

- Charles Ardai

December 5, 2018 at 8:02 am

What a terrific article! It’s a pleasure to be a part of it, in however small (and refuted) a fashion.

Looking back on what I wrote, I can’t think myself why I wrote that fans of Burroughs’ and Doyle’s writing were hard to find. Certainly people continue to read Doyle at a reasonable clip, and as a boy I read all three with pleasure. Sometimes when you’re writing on deadline and in love with the sound of your own typewriter, you write some profoundly stupid things.

That said, I continue to feel this game was a disappointment, and that’s coming from someone who enormously enjoyed Infocom text adventures. I’d rather play INFIDEL or PLANETFALL or SORCERER or THE WITNESS than this game any day. I’d have to replay it to remember exactly why, but I do remember, all these years later, just not having nearly as much pleasure pointing and clicking my way through this one.

I’m happy, though, that in the end it did well for its creators, in spite of the bludgeoning I gave it.

- Jimmy Maher

December 5, 2018 at 9:33 am

Thanks for this! As I said in the article, I always enjoy your pieces for Computer Gaming World when I revisit them in the course of my research, even as I suspect we have somewhat different tastes and priorities when it comes to games. I’m happy you’ve gone on to such a productive career in letters.

- anonymous

October 12, 2018 at 5:58 pm

> The only characters with a remotely similar degree of recognizability who postdate him are the Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan, and neither of them presents writers with quite the same temptation to tell new story after story after story.

Well… I wouldn’t say that the Wizard of Oz himself is a highly recognizable character, but everyone seems to know the Judy Garland movie at least, and the basic story. That having been said, there are a zillion Oz books, more than a few movies and tv adaptations, and if none of those have been tremendously successful besides the one from the 30s, the Wicked musical (based on a revisionist prequel book) has been huge. And is getting a movie next year.

Many of the books are out of copyright, and they’re not bad, though they tend to be weird. Give ‘em a shot.

- Kroc Camen

October 12, 2018 at 7:57 pm

Yes! Love this game! It was a real pleasant surprise, and it’s shocking that so few adventure games before or since have come as close to the perfect mystery-adventure design. Here’s my review April 2016 so you can see how it compares against your observations of the unusual critical history the game has.

—

A murder-mystery is pretty much perfect material for a point-and-click adventure, and Sherlock Holmes is the go-to character for the job — out of copyright, universally known and timelessly Victorian. Much crap has had the Sherlock Holmes name attached to it and still he has come out unscathed. This 1992 adventure game by Mythos succeeds by way of many great qualities.

The plot is good and becomes increasingly complex and engrossing. The writing is of high quality with an astonishing amount of period detail. There are many locations in the game and they open up to you at a quick pace, always providing something new to see.

The art style is a controversial point. Some reviewers have called it grainy and indistinct. The whole game is done in a 1930s art-poster style (which had become en-vogue during the ’90s); whilst I don’t have my CRT set up at the moment, I believe that the graininess and indistinct contrast would look fundamentally clearer and more evocative on the superior colour, deeper blacks and slight fuzziness of a CRT. Personally, I’m a fan of the art style and find it another aspect of the game to enjoy.

The games puzzles are not obtuse and the lack of combining inventory items thankfully removes a large headache of other adventure games (rubbing everything against everything else in the hope of progress). Such a requirement would make the game impossible because the game simply accumulates inventory like it was gold being handed out for free. Almost nothing you receive every goes away again, leaving you carrying around half of London in your pocket. It doesn’t prove to be a problem though as often the item you need to use will the be the one you most recently received, or if not, hopefully obvious enough.

I’d definitely recommend this game to any adventure game / Sherlock Holmes aficionados.

:: Highlights

* Excellent script and descriptions
* Lots of places to visit

:: Areas of Improvement

* Inventory bloat
* Only uses the chemical analysis / Baker Street Irregulars features once. These aspects could really have done with being featured more often throughout the game

- Oded

October 12, 2018 at 8:41 pm

Typo – “doesn’t go so far as the forgo the deerstalker” that first “the” should be a “to”?

- Jimmy Maher

October 13, 2018 at 7:45 am

Yes. Thanks!

- Ronan

October 12, 2018 at 9:07 pm

Here’s a game that should definitely be on GOG.

- David Boddie

October 12, 2018 at 9:27 pm

“The only characters with a remotely similar degree of recognizability who postdate him are the Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan, and neither of them presents writers with quite the same temptation to tell new story after story after story.”

And it can be a tricky situation when it comes to copyright and Peter Pan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_Wendy#Copyright_status

- Tom

October 12, 2018 at 9:56 pm

As a side note, Berg’s characterization of Holmes as “arrogant, a misogynist, and extremely smug” is in error in one regard–Holmes is not so much a misogynist as he is a misanthrope.
In that regard, one may hold Doyle responsible for the raft of characters who should honestly never be allowed in public but are too competent not to use that we see in today’s entertainment, few of which are executed as well as Holmes is.

- Pedro Timóteo

October 14, 2018 at 3:20 pm

The “Holmes is a jerk” characterization, while adopted by modern interpretations (Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, Elementary, and the two movies with Robert Downey Jr.), was, IMO, actually mostly restricted to the very early Holmes stories in the canon, especially A Study in Scarlet. That story’s Holmes, famously, is so obsessed with not “occupying” his brain with any information not related to detective work that he isn’t aware that the Earth goes around the Sun, and, when told about that, announces that he’ll do his best to forget it. Later stories, however, have Holmes quoting artists, philosophers, and so on. Doyle, most likely, intended to use Holmes for that story alone and was surprised by his popularity, so he had to “humanize” the character for him to work well in a series of short stories.

- Jimmy Maher

October 14, 2018 at 3:37 pm

This phenomenon — call it filing down a character’s sharp edges — is super common in serial fictions of all stripes. In the context of games, see how Leisure Suit Larry goes from being a skeezy outcast to being a lovable loser, downright cute in an “aw, there the little fellow goes again…” sort of way, over the course of that series.

- Gnoman

October 18, 2018 at 2:26 am

Even in A Study In Scarlet, Holmes wasn’t the arrogant donkey that he’s often played up as. There’s some sense of superiority there, but it is primarily directed at Scotland Yard rather than humanity as a whole – which makes a lot of sense. Holmes, particularly at this point in the canon, looks down on the police because their inept methods make a mockery of his Great Calling – he’s turned criminology into a science, while they’re just blundering about like idiots because they have no idea of his methods..

- Ross

October 12, 2018 at 10:30 pm

Also, there’s a command-line option to just play the darts minigame.

- Jeff Morris

October 13, 2018 at 2:16 am

I would to see a series of articles on Computer Gaming World, decade by decade.

- Jimmy Maher

October 13, 2018 at 7:50 am

It’s an interesting story, certainly. The magazine was founded by a former Baptist pastor, then edited for years by the son of another one. That alone makes it intriguing. Will take it under advisement, as they say. ;)

- Lisa H.

October 13, 2018 at 4:31 am

Holmes in his armchair before a roaring coal fire

Do coal fires “roar”?

- Mayhaym

October 14, 2018 at 10:10 pm

My thought exactly!

- Aula

October 13, 2018 at 11:14 am

“A dark purple silk dressing down”

Either someone wrote a letter of reprimand on a piece of silk, or that should be “dressing gown” instead.

- Jimmy Maher

October 13, 2018 at 12:03 pm

Thanks!

- Ibrahim Gucukoglu

October 13, 2018 at 2:29 pm

Has anyone discovered whether the lost files can be played on a modern Windows system? Still further, has anyone been made aware of whether it can be rendered playable with a screen reader as I’d like to get my teeth into this one. I’ve played through Sherlock, the Riddle of the Crown Jewels and 221B Baker Street which was ported to AGT as part of the masters edition, but have had limited success with other titles in the Sherlockian IF cannon, partly because many of them were written in proprietary formats which aren’t playable with modern IF interpretors, even if they will run on Windows. Thanks in advance for any input on this one.

- Kroc Camen

October 13, 2018 at 5:03 pm

The game can be played by SCUMMVM which works on a multitude of platforms and has options for enabling subtitles, but I couldn’t tell you if it exposes them in an accessible way.

- Martin

October 13, 2018 at 4:13 pm

So what about the sequel? Is it worth playing too?

- Jimmy Maher

October 13, 2018 at 5:19 pm

Haven’t played it yet…

- Carlton Little

October 13, 2018 at 6:06 pm

You don’t know what you’re missing!

It is a fantastic game, by and large. Will you cover it?

- Jimmy Maher

October 13, 2018 at 6:29 pm

Given its pedigree, I’m sure I will, assuming we get that far.

- Martin

October 17, 2018 at 7:23 pm

Of course we’ll get that far :)

- Sniffnoy

October 14, 2018 at 2:50 am

Some editing nitpicking:

These factors have fostered an entire creative subculture of Sherlockia which spans the landscape of modern media, dwarfing Arthur Conan Doyle’s canonical four novels and 56 short stories by countless orders of magnitude.

9 orders of magnitude is already a factor of a billion. However you’re measuring, countless orders of magnitude seems a bit much. “Multiple orders of magnitude” or “several orders of magnitude” would be enough to be a huge difference.

- Jimmy Maher

October 14, 2018 at 7:25 am

Thanks!

- Hallie Miles

October 14, 2018 at 1:34 pm

This game also works fine under SCUMMVM. Point it to the “holmes” directory, then make sure that you select “Creative Music System Emulator” or (if you have the ROMs) “MT-32” on the Audio tab.

- Pedro Timóteo

October 14, 2018 at 3:30 pm

ScummVM’s “Creative Music System Emulator”, for this game, actually seems to enable MT-32 music (at least on my ScummVM installation, with the MT-32 ROMs available). You probably meant “Adlib Emulator”, which is probably the best option if you don’t have the ROMs. (According to INSTALL.EXE, the game only supports Adlib/Soundblaster and MT-32 for music, plus Soundblaster and Tandy DAC for digitized sounds.)

- Alex Freeman

October 15, 2018 at 5:42 am

Joe Pranevich as well noted a certain distancing effect, which he said made him feel not so much like he was playing Sherlock Holmes and solving a mystery as watching Sherlock do the solving. The mystery, he further notes — correctly — can for the most part be solved by brute force by the patient but obtuse player, simply by picking every single conversation option when talking to every single character and showing each of them every single object you’ve collected.

That’s actually a common criticism of point-and-click adventure games in general and is why I prefer parser-driven ones.

- Ben P. Stein

October 17, 2018 at 1:27 am

Great post!

I noticed a very minor typo:

“ostensibly serious adventure game” —> games

- Jimmy Maher

October 17, 2018 at 6:22 am

Thanks!

- RavenWorks

October 23, 2018 at 12:18 am

For the record, when I use the provided copy of the game with dosbox in the manner described in the readme, I consistently get a freeze the moment the bottle is broken by the cat in the intro, with the DOSBox Status Window printing “Exit to err:r DMA segbound wrapping (read)”. This happens even in a clean install of DOSBox 0.74-2, on Windows 10.

Running it in ScummVM seems to be working fine, though!

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2018 at 8:29 am

Strange, but it looks like the problem isn’t unheard of: https://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?showID=83&letter=L. Setting “core” to dynamic in the config file might fix it, or as a last resort manually setting the process affinity to one core in the Task Manager after it starts running.

Or just use ScummVM, of course. ;) Noted that it works there in the article as well.

- Patai Gergely

March 30, 2019 at 8:24 am

Earlier versions of DosBox also work fine. I played with 0.73, for instance.

- Christopher Benz

December 27, 2018 at 11:10 am

I’m enjoying these articles as much as ever, thanks for producing such well written and researched accounts.

A tiny bit more nitpicking in the interests of perfection – you may want to revisit your observation that the deerstalker cap only appears once in Paget’s illustrations – from SP’s wikipedia page:

“Paget is also credited with giving the first deerstalker cap and Inverness cape to Holmes, details that were never mentioned in Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing. The cap and coat first appear in an illustration for “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” in 1891 and reappear in “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” in 1893. They also appear in a few illustrations from The Return of Sherlock Holmes. (The curved calabash pipe was added by the stage actor William Gillette.)”

- Christopher Benz

December 27, 2018 at 11:14 am

An example from Silver Blaze (it actually occurs in at least 4 illustrations in this story alone) – https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php?title=File:Illus-silv-paget-01.jpg

- Jimmy Maher

December 28, 2018 at 9:18 am

Thanks so much for this! Edit made. ;)

- Christopher Benz

January 7, 2019 at 10:48 am

Good edit. Your original point still stands that the cap wasn’t made iconic by the original texts. That was to come later as you have outlined.

- Gigantes

January 15, 2019 at 2:44 pm

I enjoyed the review and with some enthusiasm, decided to play the game through via browser emulator. I finished just a few moments ago. Note that I’ve read all of Doyle’s Holmes canon and particularly enjoyed the Jeremy Brett – BBC adaptations.

I agree with you that the game is nicely conceived and executed, although I do think there’s some real merit in the critiques you cited. The game seemed linear to the point that I was simply stumbling around in search of a predetermined solution. Other than spending a lot of time moving back and forth between locations and re-attempting conversations and inspections, there wasn’t a terribly dynamic feel to the game, nor to the puzzles. There were also plenty of minor points where the game could get arbitrarily hung up, with no further progress possible until the issue had been (sometimes accidentally) addressed. An example– at a certain point Toby the dog’s services are required, but seemingly the only way to unlock the location is to talk to Watson, who prompts Holmes about the possibility. Holmes of course never would have needed that kind of prompt IMO, and it was frustrating needing to stumble upon those kinds of ‘solutions’ as often I needed to. This kind of problem of course is common for the genre, but one wants some suitable compensation… some other area of the game to shine, or charm, or so forth.

I would guess the game was more impressive at the time on multiple levels, and I say that as an 8-bit enthusiast who tends to prefer simplicity in graphics and design. Maybe it just hasn’t aged particularly well. Maybe it’s just me. Certainly the graphics are lovely and the historical detail is impressive, but it feels to me like the adventure is rather needlessly prolonged, without much liveliness, adaptability, or richness of puzzles to make it as interesting as something like a LucasArt game from this same period, for example. I suspect this is a nice game and a fine effort in terms of Holmes entertainment, but more of a B-lister when it comes to this specific type of graphic adventure.

- Leo Velles

February 12, 2019 at 5:15 pm

Hi Jimmy, i find your blog through the adventure gamer, which i´m reading chronollogically. That will take a few months i guess, and now even more, because i will do the same with your blog, which is amazing, it´s a real encyclopedia. First time i get to your blog was from an the adventure gamer link from the hitchiker’s guide to the galaxy and read your Douglas Adams story with great delight, eventhough i knew nothing of him. That shows what a great writer you are. And now, eventhough i decided to read your blog in the proper order, i cheat and skipped just to read your fellings about this game, which is my favourite adventure game of all time. I become in love with adventure games since i played Maniac Mansion in a C64 back in 1988, that game is in my heart, but The Lost Files is superb in every way, the plot (kidnapping, murder, suicide, blackmail…) and the atmosphere, the graphics (i still find today the work whith the ligthing and shadows as a masterpierce). Anyway, i’m from Argentina and my english isn’t as good as i wish, at least for writing, but i want to tell you that you are making a hell of a good work and i will be reading every entry until i catch up.
Cheers!

The Sierra Discovery Adventures
October 19, 2018

Among the most rewarding hidden gems in Sierra’s voluminous catalog must be the games of the Discovery Series, the company’s brief-lived educational line of the early 1990s. Doubtless because of that dreaded educational label, these games are little-remembered today even by many hardcore Sierra fans, and, unlike most of the better-known Sierra games, have never been reissued in digital-download editions.

In my book, that’s a real shame. For reasons I’ve described at exhaustive length by now in other articles, I’m not a big fan of Sierra’s usual careless approach to adventure-game design, but the games of the Discovery Series stand out for their lack of such staple Sierra traits as dead ends, illogical puzzles, and instant deaths, despite the fact that they were designed and implemented by the very same people who were responsible for the “adult” adventure games. These design teams were, it seems, motivated to show children the mercy they couldn’t be bothered to bestow upon their adult players. While it’s true that even the Discovery games weren’t, as we’ll see, entirely free of regrettable design choices, these forgotten stepchildren ironically hold up far better today than most of their more popular siblings. For that reason, they’re well worth highlighting as part of this ongoing history.

I’ve already written about the Discovery Series’s two Dr. Brain games, creative and often deceptively challenging puzzle collections that can be enjoyed by adults as easily as by children. Today, then, I’d like to complete my coverage. Although some of the other Discovery games were aimed at younger children, and are thus outside the scope of our usual software interests, three others could almost have been sold as regular Sierra adventure games. So, I’ll use this article to look at this trio more closely — the first of which in particular is a true classic, in my opinion the best Sierra adventure of any stripe released during 1992.

Gano Haine

One of the ways in which Sierra stood out in a positive way from their peers was their willingness to employ women in the roles of writer and designer. At a time when almost no one else in the computer-games industry had any women in prominent creative roles, Sierra’s gender balance approached fifty-fifty at times.

Gano Haine, one of these female designers, was also a fine example of what we might call a second-generation adventure designer — someone who had seen the genre evolve from the perspective of a player in the 1980s, and was now ready to make her own mark on it in the 1990s. She took a roundabout route into the industry. A mother and junior-high teacher of fifteen years standing, hers was a prominent voice in the Gamers Forum on CompuServe in the latter 1980s. She wrote extensively there about the good and bad of each game she played. “I don’t think it’s something you do to yourself on purpose,” she said of her adventure-game addiction. “I soon realized that I needed to find a way to make it a profession or I’d starve.” Luckily, Sierra hired her, albeit initially only as an informal consultant. Soon, though, she moved to Oakhurst, California, to become a full-time Sierra game designer. That happened in 1991, just as the Discovery Series was being born.

Everyone among the designers, whether a wizened veteran or a fresh-faced recruit, was given an opportunity to pitch an idea for the new line. The stakes were high because those whose pitches were not accepted would quite probably wind up working in subservient roles on those projects which had been given the green light. Yet Haine was motivated by more than personal ambition when she offered up her idea. One teenage memory that had never left her came to the fore.

I worked a lot in children’s summer camps. There was a beach where we took the children every Wednesday, a beautiful beach, with rocks and glittering sand. I remember once we sat on the rocks and watched a whole school of porpoises jumping in the waves.

Anyway, the next season when we went there, the whole beach was covered with litter. As I walked down to the water with the kids, I looked down, and there was human sewage running across the sand and into the ocean. To see that beautiful place trashed was tremendously painful to me.

Thus was born EcoQuest: an adventure game meant to teach its young players about our precious, fragile natural heritage. After her idea was accepted, Haine was assigned Jane Jensen, a former Hewlett Packard programmer and frustrated novelist who had been hired at almost the same time as her, to work with her as co-designer. This meant that EcoQuest would not only have a female lead designer, but would become the first computer game in history that was the product of an all-female design team.

Thinking, as Sierra always encouraged their designers to do, in terms of an all-new game’s series potential, Haine and Jensen created a young protagonist named Adam. Adam’s father is an ecologist who spends his life traveling the globe dealing with various environment catastrophes, and his lonely son tags along, finding his friends among the animals living in the places they visit.

In light of the disturbing memory that had spawned the series, the first game had always been destined to take place in the ocean. Adam gets recruited by one of his anthropomorphic animal friends, a dolphin named Delphineus, to search for Cetus, the great sperm whale whom all of the other undersea creatures look to for guidance, but who’s now gone missing. (One guess which species of bipedal mammal is responsible…) The game was therefore given the subtitle of The Search for Cetus to join the EcoQuest series badge.

Sierra was by no means immune to the allure of the trendy, and certainly there was a whiff of just that to making this game at this time. The first international Earth Day had taken place on April 22, 1990, accompanied by a well-orchestrated media campaign that turned a spotlight — arguably a brighter spotlight than at any earlier moment in history — onto the many environmental catastrophes that were facing our planet even then. This new EcoQuest series was very much of a piece with Earth Day and the many other media initiatives it spawned. Still, the environmental message of EcoQuest isn’t just a gimmick; anthropomorphic sea creatures aside, it’s very much in scientific earnest. Haine and Jensen worked with the Marine Mammal Center of Sausalito, California, to get the science right, and Sierra even agreed to donate a portion of the profits to the same organization.

There’s a refreshing sweetness to the game that some might call naivete, an assumption that the most important single factor contributing to the pollution of our oceans is simple ignorance. For example, Adam meets a fishing boat at one point whose propeller lacks a protective cage to prevent it from injuring manatees and other ocean life. He devises a way of making such a cage and explains its importance to the fisherman, who’s horrified to learn the damage his naked propeller had been causing and more than happy to be given this solution. The only glaring exception to the rule of human ignorance rather than malice is the whaling ship that, it turns out, has harpooned poor Cetus.

The message of The Search for Cetus would thus seem to be that, while there are a few bad apples among us, most people want to keep our oceans as pristine as possible and want the enormous variety of species which live in them to be able to survive and thrive. Is this really so very naive? From my experience, at any rate, most people would react just the same as the fisherman in an isolated circumstance like his. It’s the political and financial interests that keep getting in the way, preventing large-scale change by inflaming passions that have little bearing on the practicalities at hand. Said interests are obviously outside the scope of this children’s adventure game, but the same game does serve as a reminder that many things in this world aren’t really so complicated in themselves; they’re complicated only because some among us insist on making them so, often for disingenuous purposes.

Yet The Search for Cetus is never as preachy as the paragraph I’ve just written. Jane Jensen would later go on to become one of the most famed adventure designers in history through her trilogy of supernatural mysteries starring the reluctant hero Gabriel Knight. The talent for characterization that would make those games so beloved is also present, at least in a nascent form, in The Search for Cetus. From an hysterical hermit crab to a French artiste of a blowfish, the personalities are all a lot of fun. “The characters’ voices and personalities are used to humanize their plight,” said Jensen, “giving a voice to the faceless victims of our carelessness.” Most critically, the characters all feel honestly cute or comic or both; The Search for Cetus never condescends to its audience. This is vitally important to the goal of getting the game’s environmental message across because children can smell adult condescension from a mile away, and it’s guaranteed to make them run screaming.

The techniques the game uses to educate in a natural-feeling interactive context are still worthy of study today. For example, a new verb is added to the standard Sierra control panel: “recycle.” This comes to function as a little hidden-object game-within-the-game, as you scan each screen for trash, getting a point for every piece that you recycle. Along the way, you’ll be astonished both by the sheer variety of junk that makes its way into our oceans and the damage it causes: plastic bags suffocate blowfish, organic waste causes algae to grow out of control, plastic six-pack rings entangle swordfish and dolphins, balloons get eaten by turtles, bleach poisons the water, tar and oil kills coral. In the non-linear middle section of the game, you solve a whole series of such problems for the ocean’s inhabitants, learning a great deal about them in the process. You even mark a major chemical spill for cleanup. The game refuses to throw up its hands at the scale of the damage humanity has done; its lesson is that, yes, the damage is immense, but we — and even you, working at the individual level — can do something about it. This may be the most important message of all to take away from The Search for Cetus.

The game isn’t hard by any means, but nor is it trivial. Jane Jensen:

Gano and I are both Sierra players, so when we started to design our first Sierra game, we designed a game that we would want to play. The puzzles in EcoQuest are traditional Sierra adventure-game puzzles, with an ecological and educational slant. You can’t die in the game, but other than that, it’s a real Sierra adventure. Because it is aimed at an older audience, the gameplay isn’t simplified like Mixed-Up Mother Goose or Fairy Tales. The puzzles are challenging, and lots of fun.

Thus the concessions to the children that were expected to become the primary audience take the form not of complete infantilization, but rather a lack of pointless deaths, a lack of unwinnable states, and a number of optional puzzles which score points but aren’t required to finish the game. Many outside Sierra’s rather insular circle of designers, of course, would call all of these things — especially the first two — simply good design, full stop.

Released in early 1992, The Search for Cetus did well enough that Sierra funded a CD-ROM version with voice acting to supplement the original floppy-based version about a year later. And they funded a further adventure of young Adam as well, which was also released in early 1993. In Lost Secret of the Rainforest, he and his father head for the Amazon, where they confront the bureaucrats, poachers, and clear-cutters that threaten another vital ecosystem’s existence.

With this second game in the series, Sierra clearly opted for not fixing what isn’t broken: all of the educational approaches and program features we remember from the original, from the anthropomorphic animals to the recycling icon, make a return. There’s even a clever new minigame this time around, involving an “ecorder,” a handheld scanner that identifies plants and animals and other things you encounter and provides a bit of information about them. So, in addition to hunting for toxic trash, you’re encouraged to try to find everything in the ecorder’s database as you explore the jungle.

Unfortunately, though, it just doesn’t all come together as well as it did the first time around. Jane Jensen didn’t work on Lost Secret, leaving the entirety of the game in the hands of Gano Haine, who lacked her talent for engaging characters and dialog. She obviously strove mightily, but the results too often come across as labored, unfunny, and/or leaden. (Haine did mention in an interview that, responding to complaints from some quarters that the text in Search for Cetus was too advanced for some children, she made a conscious attempt to simplify the writing in the sequel; this may also have contributed to the effect I’m describing.)

The puzzle design as well is unbalanced, being fairly straightforward until a scene in the middle which seems to have been beamed in from another game entirely. This scene, in which Adam has been captured by a group of poachers and needs to escape, all but requires a walkthrough to complete for players of any age, combining read-the-author’s mind puzzles with the necessity for fiddly, pinpoint-precise clicking and timing. And then, after you clear that hurdle, the game settles back down into the old routine, running on to the end in its old straightforward manner, as if it nothing out of the way had ever happened. It’s deeply strange, and all by itself makes Lost Secret difficult to recommend with anything like the same enthusiasm as its predecessor. It’s not really a bad game on the whole — especially if you go into it forewarned about its one truly bad sequence — but it’s not a great one either.

The poacher named Slaughter has a pink-river dolphin carcass hanging over his door, book stands made from exotic horns, a jaguar-skin rug on his floor, and a footstool made from an elephant’s foot. Laying it on just a bit thick, perhaps?

And on that somewhat disappointing note, the EcoQuest series ended. The science behind the two games still holds up, and the messages they impart about environmental stewardship are more vital than ever. From the modern perspective, the infelicities in the games’ depiction of environmental issues mostly come in their lack of attention to another threat that has become all too clear in the years since they were made: the impact global warming is having on both our oceans and our rain forests. This lack doesn’t, however, invalidate anything that EcoQuest does say about ecological issues. The second game in particular definitely has its flaws, but together the two stand as noble efforts to use the magic of interactivity as a means of engagement with pressing real-world issues — the sort of thing that the games industry, fixated as it always has been on escapist entertainment, hasn’t attempted as much as it perhaps ought to. “Environmental issues are very emotional,” acknowledges Gano Haine, “and you inevitably contact people who have very deep disagreements about those issues.” Yet the EcoQuest series dares to present, in a commonsense but scientifically rigorous way, the impact some of our worst practices are having on our planet, and dares to ask whether we all couldn’t just set politics aside and try to do that little bit more to make the situation better.

In that spirit, I have to note that some of the most inspiring aspects of the EcoQuest story are only tangentially related to the actual games. A proud moment for everyone involved with the series came when Sierra received a letter from a group of kids in faraway Finland, who had played The Search for Cetus and been motivated to organize a cleanup effort at a polluted lake in their neighborhood. Meanwhile the research that went into making the games caused the entire company of Sierra Online to begin taking issues of sustainability more seriously. They started printing everything from game boxes to pay stubs on recycled paper; started reusing their shipping pallets; started using recycled disks; started sorting their trash and sending it to the recycler. They also started investigating the use of water-based instead of chemical-based coatings for their boxes, soybean ink for printing, and fully biodegradable materials for packing. No, they didn’t hesitate to pat themselves on the back for all this in their newsletter (which, for the record, was also printed on recycled paper after EcoQuest) — but, what the hell, they’d earned it.

The words they wrote in their newsletter apply more than ever today: “It’s not always easy, but it’s worth it. Saving the planet isn’t a passing fad. It’s critical, for our own future and for the future of our children.” One can only hope that the games brought some others around to the same point of view — and may even continue to do so today, for those few who discover them moldering away in some archive or other.

Lorelei Shannon and Jane Jensen

Pepper’s Adventures in Time, the third and final adventure game released as part of the Discovery Series, was a very different proposition from EcoQuest. Its original proposer wasn’t one of Sierra’s regular designers, but rather Bill Davis, the veteran television and film animator who had been brought in at the end of the 1980s to systematize the company’s production processes to suit a new era of greater audiovisual fidelity and exploding budgets. His proposal was for a series called Twisty History, which would teach children about the subject by asking them to protect history as we know it from the depredations wrought by the evil inventor of a time machine. Because Davis wasn’t himself a designer, the first game in the planned series became something of a community effort, a collaboration that included Gano Haine and Jane Jensen as well as Lorelei Shannon and Josh Mandel. (That is, for those tracking gender equality in real time, three female designers and one male.)

Lockjaw has been captured by a spoiled brat of a Royalist!

The star of the series, as sketched by Bill Davis and filled in by the design team, is a girl named Pepper Pumpernickel, a spunky little thing who doesn’t take kindly to the opposite sex telling her what she can and can’t do. Her costar is Lockjaw, her pet dog. Davis:

We’d recently lost a dog to leukemia, had gone through an extended period of mourning, and had decided it was time to adopt. So my wife and son headed for our favorite adoption agency, the local animal shelter. They came home with a German shepherd/terrier mix. The terrier turned out to be Staffordshire terrier. For those in the dark, as we were, Staffordshire terrier is synonymous with “pit bull.” Anyway, she turned out to be a lovable little mutt with a bit of an attitude. Thirty pounds of attitude, to be precise. Well, as I was sitting at the drawing board designing characters for Twisty, she shoved her attitude up my behind and into the game proposal.

Lockjaw threatens at times to steal the game from Pepper — as, one senses, he was intended to. The player even gets to control him rather than Pepper from time to time, using his own unique set of doggie verbs, like a nose icon for sniffing, a paw icon for digging, and a mouth icon for eating — or biting. It’s clear that the designers really, really want you to be charmed by their fierce but lovable pooch, but for the most part he is indeed as cute as they want him to be, getting himself and Pepper into all kinds of trouble, only to save the day when the plot calls for it.

Ben Franklin’s doctrine of sober industriousness has been corrupted into hippie indolence. It’s up to Pepper to right the course of history as we know it.

Otherwise, the theme of this first — and, as it would turn out, only — game in the series is fairly predictable for a work of children’s history written in this one’s time and place. Pepper travels back to “Colonial” times, that semi-mythical pre-Revolutionary War period familiar to every American grade-school student, when Ben Franklin was flying his kite around, Thomas Paine was writing about the rights of the citizen, and the evil British were placing absurd levies on the colonists’ tea supply. (Perish the thought!)

While its cozily traditional depiction of such a well-worn era of history doesn’t feel as urgent or relevant as the environmental issues presented by EcoQuest, the game itself is a lot of fun. The script follows the time-tested cartoon strategy of mixing broad slapstick humor aimed at children with subtler jokes for any adults who might be playing along: referencing Monty Python, poking fun at the tedious professors we’ve all had to endure. Josh Mandel had worked as a standup comedian before coming to Sierra, and his instinct for the punchline combined with Jane Jensen’s talent for memorable characterization can’t help but charm.

The puzzle design too is pretty solid, with just a couple of places that could have used a bit more guidance for the player and/or a bit more practical thinking-through on the part of the designers. (Someone really should have told the designers that fresh tomatoes and ketchup aren’t remotely the same thing when it comes to making fake blood…) And, once again, the games does a good job of blending the educational elements organically into the whole. This time around, you have a “truth” icon you can use to find out what is cartoon invention and what is historically accurate; the same icon provides more background on the latter. You use what you have (hopefully) learned in this way to try to pass a quiz that’s presented at the end of each chapter, thus turning the study of history into a sort of scavenger hunt that’s more entertaining than one might expect, even for us jaded adults.

What had been planned as the beginning of the Twisty History series was re-badged as the one-off Pepper’s Adventures in Time just before its release in the spring of 1993. This development coincided with the end of the Discovery Series as a whole, only two years after it had begun. Sierra had just acquired a Seattle software house known as Bright Star Technology, who were henceforward to constitute their official educational division. Bright Star appropriated the character of Dr. Brain, but the rest of the budding collection of series and characters that constituted the Discovery lineup were quietly retired, and the designers who had made them returned to games meant strictly to entertain. And so passed into history one of the most refreshing groups of games ever released by Sierra.

(Sources: the book Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, and Hidden Objects by Anastasia Salter; Sierra’s newsletter InterAction of Spring 1992, Fall 1992, Winter 1992, and June 1993; Compute! of January 1993; Questbusters of March 1992; materials in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play. And my thanks go to Corey Cole, who took the time to answer some questions about this period of Sierra’s history from his perspective as a developer there.

Feel free to download EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus, EcoQuest: Lost Secret of the Rainforest, and Pepper’s Adventures in Time from this site, in a format that will make them as easy as possible to get running using your platform’s version of DOSBox or ScummVM.)

Comments
23 Responses

- Benjamin Vigeant

October 19, 2018 at 5:24 pm

I adored Eco Quest 1 but *especially* Pepper’s Adventures in Time.

Spoilers for Pepper’s follow:

At the end of the game – likely because this was intended to be a series – Pepper gets shot off to another period of time instead of going back home.

This disturbed the deeply anxious 11 year old me and lead to the only time I ever wrote a letter to a game company.

They responded with a print out of a walkthrough of the last section.

- Brian

October 19, 2018 at 5:46 pm

Do not fear… Pepper eventually linked up with the Doctor and he dropped him off in the TARDIS!

Enjoyed it as always Jimmy! There are so many little bits of computerized entertainment lore out there that I’ve just never heard of.

- Casey Nordell

October 19, 2018 at 6:22 pm

I’m a huge fan of Jane Jensen’s work (particularly on KQ6 and the Gabriel Knight series) and I knew she was involved with Eco, but it’s great to hear more about it and see her show up on this blog.

Jimmy, I sense you are not as big a fan of Sierra, but I’m really hoping you follow their story to the bitter end just as you did with Infocom.

- Jimmy Maher

October 19, 2018 at 6:58 pm

I’m sure we will, assuming always that the blog itself gets that far. It’s an important story, even if I find most of the actual games a little underwhelming. And anyway, something like Phantasmagoria is so ludicrously bad that it becomes sort of fascinating in a Plan 9 from Outer Space sort of way. ;)

- Martin

October 20, 2018 at 1:02 am

I’m sure we will, assuming always that the blog itself gets that far.

Of course it will :) …. says the guy who posted a similar message in the last post.

- Ross

October 20, 2018 at 1:45 am

I’m a weirdo and liked Phantasmagoria unironically long before I learned to like it ironically.

(Also, random personal fact, Sierra sent me a free copy Phantasmagoria 2 as a prize for coming up with a name for a character in a game they were developing (which I do not believe ever came out)

- Poddy

October 26, 2018 at 12:16 am

On Phantasmagoria: I only played it as an adult, after having heard about it ever since it came out. I cannot wrap my head around it. How does a marriage work where you just can’t knock on a door and say “Honey, I think I found a Satanic chapel through a secretpassageway in the library! Come see!” and naturally expect your husband to, I dunno, come see?

- Brent Ellison

October 20, 2018 at 6:31 am

Once again “assuming the blog gets that far”. Do we need to up our Patreon contributions to convince you to keep going? Because as far as I’m concerned this is one of the best things on the web and I’d be pretty sad if it didn’t get the chance to reach a natural conclusion around the turn of the millennium or so.

- Jimmy Maher

October 20, 2018 at 7:37 am

A better businessman would say, “Yes, up those pledges!” ;)

But no, I don’t have any plans for stopping; just making sure I don’t make any promises I won’t end up keeping, for whatever reason. The future is always in doubt to some extent.

- Aula

October 20, 2018 at 1:29 pm

Speaking of ludicrously bad games, I’m really hoping you’ll cover Legends of Valour at some point. I mean, it’s not often that you see a CRPG that manages to make killing monsters a complete waste of time…

- Jimmy Maher

October 20, 2018 at 2:32 pm

I don’t think you’ll get your wish in this case. But I’m sure the CRPG Addict will give it a good thrashing for you. ;) Looks like he’s in 1992 as well now.

- DZ-Jay

October 22, 2018 at 10:03 am

I like Phantasmagoria. *shrug*

I liked it back when it came out, and replayed a few times over the years. I really don’t understand the hate towards it. Yes, it’s cheesy how the protagonist finds herself making bad decisions, and the acting is really hammy, but not really worse than the typical horror movie or contemporary games of similar scope. The story itself is good.

In my opinion, it succeeds in its purpose of telling a chilling and sometimes horrific gothic story. *shrug*

dZ.

- Ross

October 23, 2018 at 1:48 am

I think FMV games in general are harshly judged because by their nature, they openly invite us to apply the standards of and conventions of film instead of contemporary adventure game, and on these measures, they fall short due to (a) having neither the talent nor the budget to compete with actual films, and (b) still adapting the conventions of contemporary adventure gaming, which, to the extent they ever worked at all, required the extra layer of abstraction that comes from being set in a world that is deeply unreal in the way of non-photorealistic art.

- Aula

October 20, 2018 at 1:22 pm

“can be enjoyed by adults as easily as children.”

Might be better to change that to “…as by children” to make it clear that you mean children enjoying the games instead of adults enjoying children.

“it’s lesson”

should be “its lesson”

“but nor”

should be “but neither”

“a lack of of unwinnable states”

shouldn’t repeat “of”

“one of the most refreshing groups of games”

should be “group”

- Jimmy Maher

October 20, 2018 at 2:29 pm

Thanks!

“But nor” is acceptable idiomatic English, albeit more common to British than American English. (Somewhere along the way my writing picked up a little bit of a British feel — maybe from reading too many Victorian novels at university.)

“Groups” is in fact correct, although the construction of that sentence makes it a little confusing. Imagine if we were just talking about “games” instead of “groups of games.” You wouldn’t want to say, “one of the most refreshing game.”

- Alex Freeman

October 21, 2018 at 6:15 am

Ah, yes, EcoQuest. I remember playing that game when I was 11. At first, I got stuck trying to get out of Adam’s room because I didn’t read the manual, which contained the combination to his door. I zipped right through it until I got stuck with the columns puzzle… until my family’s computer’s hard drive gave out, and I had to start all over.

As it turned out, some bug in the game made it unwinnable if you left the ruins before solving the puzzle. I then zipped through the rest of the game.

I remember playing a demo of Pepper’s Adventures in Time although I think you overlooked Quarky & Quaysoo’s Turbo Science, however.

Thus the concessions to the children that were expected to become the primary audience take the form not of complete infantilization, but rather a lack of pointless deaths, a lack of unwinnable states, and a number of optional puzzles which score points but aren’t required to finish the game. Many outside Sierra’s rather insular circle of designers, of course, would call all of these things — especially the first two — simply good design, full stop.

I really don’t think Sierra was any worse than most companies in regards to the first two. Hell, even Infocom was often bad when it came to unwinnable states, particularly Zork and HGTTG. Sierra’s decision to use the point-and-click interface was actually influenced by LucasArts.

Haine did mention in an interview that, responding to complaints from some quarters that the text in Search for Cetus was too advanced for some children, she made a conscious attempt to simplify the writing in the sequel; this may also have contributed to the effect I’m describing.

Really? Too advanced? I do remember encountering the words “superfluous” and “gregarious” for the first time, but I just thought those were names. I didn’t realize until later they were also adjectives in the English language, but that didn’t hinder my ability to uderstand the text.

From the modern perspective, the infelicities in the games’ depiction of environmental issues mostly come in their lack of attention to another threat that has become all too clear in the years since they were made: the impact global warming is having on both our oceans and our rain forests.

Indeed.
http://climatehawksvote.com/
https://www.314actionfund.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O34JM4Xdf3g&t=208s

- Rudy

October 21, 2018 at 9:05 pm

Great article as always. I do believe however that the person beside Jane on the first image is of Lorelei Shannon, who also worked on Twisty History (Pepper’s Adventures in Time), not of Gano Haine.

- Jimmy Maher

October 22, 2018 at 12:39 pm

Woops. Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

October 22, 2018 at 10:06 am

Jimmy,

You should really brush up on your classic cartoon logic: ketchup has always been made from fresh tomatoes and it’s always served as a reasonable facsimile of blood. One could say that acting for blood is the reason it forms part of cartoon lore at all. ;)

dZ.

- Kroc Camen

October 22, 2018 at 9:53 pm

The games work on ScummVM too; I don’t know why you don’t recommend that instead — it works on a multitude of platforms including numerous consoles as well often fixing game-breaking bugs.

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2018 at 8:33 am

I’m so familiar with DOSBox that I don’t tend to give much thought to alternatives. And then ScummVM’s compatibility with various games is a bit of a moving target. But I noted that ScummVM also works in the article.

- Dan

October 24, 2018 at 6:35 pm

I loved EcoQuest as a kid. I never played the sequel or Pepper’s Adventures though. I don’t recall ever seeing either of them in stores. Even though it was aimed at kids and death was impossible, I thought the writing for EcoQuest had a dark edge, and, at times, a real sense of danger.

I may be misremembering, but I thought I had heard that, like Hero’s Quest, the title of Twisty History had to be changed due to a trademark dispute.

Are you planning on covering Sierra’s big game of 1992, King’s Quest VI? I know you’re not really a fan of the series, but if you haven’t played it before, I think you might be pleasantly surprised. The writing is definitely improved over previous installments, and I think the overall design is better as well, with fewer dead ends and many puzzles with multiple solutions. Much of this I attribute to the influence of co-designer Jane Jensen. It even has reasonably good voice acting!

- Jimmy Maher

October 25, 2018 at 9:28 am

Every new King’s Quest was a huge event for Sierra as a business, and I’ll certainly be covering it in that context. Otherwise, though, it’s like most of these long-running Sierra series: I just don’t have anything all that compelling to say about it, despite the welcome uptick in the writing and design.

Quest for Glory III and IV
October 26, 2018

The VGA remake of Quest for Glory I. By this point, Sierra’s graphics exceeded the quality of most Saturday-morning cartoons, and weren’t far off the standard set by feature films, being held back more by the technical limitations of VGA graphics than those of the artists doing the drawing.

Quest for Glory, Lori Ann and Corey Cole’s much-loved series of adventure/CRPG hybrids, took a year off after its second installment, while each half of the couple designed an educational game for Sierra’s Discovery Series. After finishing her Discovery game Mixed-Up Fairy Tales, a less ambitious effort aimed at younger children than Corey’s The Castle of Dr. Brain, Lori headed a remake of the first Quest for Glory, using VGA graphics and a point-and-click interface in place of EGA and a parser. While opinions vary as to the remake’s overall worthiness — I’m personally fonder of the original version, as is Corey Cole — no one could deny that it looked beautiful in 256 colors. Sierra was, like many other media producers at the time, operating in a short-lived intermediate phase between analog and fully-digital production techniques, which gave the work a look unique to this very specific period. For example, most of the characters in the Quest for Glory I remake were first sculpted in clay by art director Arturo Sinclair, then digitized and imported into the game. One can only hope that contemporary gamers took the time to appreciate the earthy craftsmanship of his work. Sierra and much of their industry would soon fall down the full-motion video rabbit hole, and the 3D Revolution as well was just over the horizon, poised to offer all sorts of exciting new experiential possibilities but also to lose almost as much in the way of aesthetic values. It would, in other words, be a long time before games would look this good again.

Thankfully, the era of hand-drawn — or hand-sculpted — art at Sierra would last long enough to carry through the next two Quest for Glory games as well. Much else, though, would conspire against them, and in my opinion neither the third nor the fourth game is as strong as either of the first two. Today we’ll have a look at these later efforts’ strengths and failings and the circumstances that led to each.

Well before starting work on the very first Quest for Glory, Lori Ann Cole had sketched out a four-game plan for the series as a whole. It would see the player’s evolving hero visiting four different cultural regions of a fantasy world, all drawn from cultures of our own world, in adventures where the stakes would get steadily higher. The first two games had thus covered medieval Germany and the Arab world, and the last two were slated to go to the murky environs of Eastern Europe and the blazing sunshine of mythic Greece. In fact, Quest for Glory II ends with an advertisement of sorts for the “upcoming” Quest for Glory III: Shadows of Darkness, the Eastern European game. Yet almost as soon as the second game was out the door, the Coles started to have misgivings. To go with its milieu drawn from Romanian and Slavic folklore and the Gothic-horror tradition, Shadows of Darkness was to have a more unfriendly, foreboding approach to gameplay as well. The Coles planned to make “aloneness, suspicion, and paranoia,” as Corey puts it, the hallmarks of the game. They didn’t want to abandon that uncompromising vision, but neither were they sure that their players were ready for it.

Shortly before leaving Sierra to join Origin Systems, staff writer Ellen Guon suggested that the third game could easily be set in Africa instead, following up on an anecdote mentioned by one of the characters in passing in Quest for Glory II — thus extending the series’s arc from four to five games and postponing the “dark” entry until a little later. The Coles loved the idea, and Quest for Glory III: The Wages of War was born. Sure, making it did interfere with some of the thematic unities Lori had built into the series; its entries had been planned to correspond with the four classical elements of Earth, Fire, Air, and Water, as well as the four cardinal compass directions and the four seasons. But perhaps that was all a little too matchy-matchy anyway…

Other, less welcome changes were also in the offing: the new game’s gestation was immediately impacted by the removal of Corey Cole from most of the process. Corey had originally been hired by Sierra in a strictly technical role — specifically, for his expertise in programming the Atari ST and the Motorola 68000 CPU at its heart. His first assigned task had been to help port Sierra’s then-new SCI game engine to that platform, and he was still regarded around the office as the resident 68000 expert. Thus when Sierra head Ken Williams cooked up a scheme to bring their games to the Sega Genesis, a videogame console that with an optional CD-ROM accessory was also built around the 68000, it was to Corey that he turned. So, while Lori worked on Quest for Glory III alone, Corey struggled with what turned out to be an impossible task. The Genesis’s memory was woefully inadequate, and its graphics were limited to 64 colors from a palette of 512, as opposed to the 256 colors from a palette of 262,144 of the VGA graphics standard for which Sierra’s latest computer games were coded. Wiser heads finally prevailed and the whole endeavor was cancelled, freeing up Corey to reform his design partnership with Lori.

This happened, however, only in the final stages of Quest for Glory III’s development. Among fans today, this game is generally considered the weakest link in the series, and the absence of Corey Cole is often cited as a primary reason. I’ll return to the impact his absence may have had, but first I’d like to mention what the game undeniably does right: the setting.

It’s often forgotten that Egypt, that birthplace of so much of human civilization, is a part of Africa; this essential fact, though, Lori Ann Cole didn’t neglect. The western part of the game’s map, where you begin, feels like an outlying outpost of Egyptian culture, complete with the pyramids and other monumental architecture we know from our history books. As you travel eastward, the savanna turns into jungle, and the societies you meet there become reflections of tribal Africa. It’s all drawn — both metaphorically, through the writing, and literally, through the graphics — with considerable charm and skill. Sub-Saharan Africa in particular isn’t a region we see depicted very often in games, and still less often with this degree of sympathy. As I noted in my first article on the Quest for Glory series, there’s a travelogue quality that runs through its entirety, showing us our own world’s many great and varied cultures through the lens of these fantasy adventures. The third game, suffice to say, upholds that tradition admirably.

Also welcome is the theme of the game. In contrast to most computer games, this one has you trying to prevent a war rather than win one. The aforementioned Egyptian and tribal African cultures have have been set at odds by a combination of prejudices, misunderstandings, and — this being a fantasy game and all — the odd evil wizard. It’s up to you to play the peacemaker. “You start getting a better and better idea of just how senseless war is,” says Corey, “and how everybody loses by it.” Of course, there’s a certain cognitive dissonance about an allegedly anti-war game in which you spend so much of your time mowing down monsters by decidedly violent means, but props for effort.

In fact, any criticism of Quest for Glory should be tempered by the understanding that what the Coles did with this series was quite literally unprecedented, and, further, that no one else has ever tried to do anything quite like it since. While plenty of vintage CRPGs, dating all the way back to Wizardry, allowed you to move your characters from game to game, the Quest for Glory series is a far more complex take on a role-playing game than those simple monster bashers, with character attributes affecting far more aspects of the experience than combat alone — even extending into a moral dimension via a character’s “honor” attribute and the associated possibility to change to the prestige class of Paladin. It must have been tempting indeed to throw out the past and force players to start over with new characters each time the Coles started working on the next game in the series, but they doggedly stuck to their original vision of four — no, make that five — interlinked games that could all feature the very same custom hero, assuming the player was up to the task of buying and playing all of them.

But, fundamental to the Coles’ conception of their series though it was, this approach did have its drawbacks, which were starting to become clear by the time of Quest for Glory III. Corey Cole himself has admitted that “the play balance — both pacing and combat difficulty — and of course the freshness of the concept were strongest in Quest for Glory I.” Certainly that’s the entry in this hybrid series that works best as a CRPG, providing that addictive thrill of seeing your character slowly getting stronger, able to tackle monsters and challenges he couldn’t have dreamed of in the beginning. The later games are hampered by the well-known sense of diminishing returns that afflicts so many RPGs at higher levels; it’s much more fun in tabletop Dungeons & Dragons as well to advance from level 1 to level 8 than it is from level 8 to level 16. Even when you find that you need to spend time training in order to meet some arbitrary threshold — more on that momentarily — your character in the later Quest for Glory games never really feels like he’s going anywhere. The end result is to sharply reduce the importance of the most unique aspect of the series as it wears on. For this player anyway, that also reduces a big chunk of the series’s overall appeal. I haven’t tried it, but I suspect that these games may actually be more satisfying to play if you don’t import your old character into each new one, but rather start out fresh each time with a weaker hero and enjoy the thrill of building him up.

Sanford and Son make an appearance.

Quest for Glory III also disappoints in other ways.The first two games had been loaded with alternative solutions and approaches of all stripes, full of countless secrets and Easter eggs. Quest for Glory III is far less generous on all of these fronts. There just isn’t as much to do and discover outside the bounds of those things that are absolutely necessary to advance the plot. And one of the three possible character classes you can play, the Thief, has markedly fewer interesting things to do than the others even in the course of doing that much. The whole game feels less accommodating and rewarding — less amenable to your personal choices, one might say — than what came before. It plays, in other words, more like just another Sierra adventure game and less like the uniquely rich and flexible experience the first two games are.

This lack of design ambition can to some degree be attributed to the absence of Corey Cole for most of the design process. Corey was generally the “puzzle guy” in the partnership, dealing with all the questions of smaller-scale interactivity, while Lori was the “story gal,” responsible for the wide-angle plotting.  And indeed, when I asked Corey about his own impressions of the game in relation to its predecessors, he acknowledged that “certainly Quest for Glory III is lighter on puzzles, while having just as much story as Quest for Glory II.”

Yet Corey’s absence isn’t the only reason that the personality of the series began to morph with this third installment. The most obvious change between the second and third game — blindingly obvious to anyone who plays them back to back — is the move from a parser-based to a pure point-and-click interface. I trust that I don’t need to belabor how this could remove some of the scope for player creativity, and especially what it might mean for the many little secrets for which the first two games are so known. I’m no absolute parser purist — my opinion has always been that the best interface for any given game is entirely contextual, based upon the type of experience the designer is trying to create — but I can’t help but feel that Quest for Glory lost something when it dumped the parser.

One issue with Quest for Glory III that may actually be a subtle, inadvertent byproduct of the switch to point-and-click is a certain aimlessness that seems baked into the design. Too much of the story is predicated on unmotivated wandering over a map that’s not at all suited to more methodical exploration.

I hate the Quest for Glory III overland map with a passion. Unique locations aren’t signaled on it, but it’s nevertheless vital that you thoroughly explore it, meaning you’re forced to click on any formation that looks interesting in the hope that it’s more than decorative, a process which disappoints and frustrates more often than not. And while you’re wandering around in this random fashion, you’re constantly being attacked by uninteresting monsters and being forced to engage in tedious combat. Note that what you see above is only the first of several screens full of this sort of thing.

When I played Quest for Glory III, I eventually wound up in that dreaded place known to every adventure player: where you’ve exhausted all your leads and are left with no idea what the game expects from you next. This was, however, a feeling new to me in the course of playing this particular series. When I turned with great reluctance to a walkthrough — I’d solved the first two games entirely on my own — I learned that I was expected to train my skills up to a certain level in order shake the plot back into gear.

But how, you ask, can such problems be traced back to the loss of the parser? Well, Corey has mentioned how Lori — later, he and Lori — attempted to restore some of the sense of spontaneity and surprise that had perhaps been lost alongside the parser through the use of “events”: “Instead of each game scene having one specific thing that happens in it, our scenes change throughout the game. Sometimes the passage of time triggers a new event, and sometimes it’s the result of the ripple effect of player actions. It was supposed to feel organic.” When this approach works well, it works wonderfully well in providing a dynamic environment that seems to unfold spontaneously from the player’s perspective, just the way a good interactive story should. That’s the best-case scenario. The worst case is when you haven’t done whatever arbitrary action is needed to get a vital event to fire, and you’re left to wander around wondering what’s next. Finally, when you peek at a walkthrough, the mechanisms behind it all are revealed in the ugliest, most mimesis-annihilating way imaginable. I understand what Quest for Glory III wants to do, and I wholeheartedly approve. But there needed to be more work done to avoid dead spots — whether in the form of more possible triggers or just of more nudges to tell the player what the game expects from her — or, ideally, both.

Another odd Quest for Glory tradition was to give each game in the series a new combat system. Quest for Glory III tried to add a bit more strategy to the affair with buttons for “swing,” “dodge,” “thrust,” and “parry,” but in my experience at least simply mashing down the swing button works as well as anything else. Thus another Quest for Glory tradition: that of none of these multifarious combat systems ever being completely satisfying.

Still, whatever the game’s failings, few players or reviewers in its own time seemed to notice. Upon its release in September of 1992 — just four months after the Quest for Glory I remake — Quest for Glory III was greeted with solid sales and positive reviews, a reception which stands in contrast to its contemporary reputation as the weakest link in the series. With this affirmation of their efforts and with Corey now free of distractions, the Coles plunged right into the fourth game. Quest for Glory IV would prove the most ambitious and the most difficult entry in the series — and, in my opinion anyway, its greatest waste of potential.

The game officially known simply as Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness — Sierra inexplicably dropped the Roman numeral this time and this time only — is indeed often spoken of as the “dark” entry of the series, but that claim strikes me as, at most, relative. My skepticism begins with the unbelievably cheesy subtitle, which put my wife right off the game before she saw more than the title screen. (“Someone should tell those people that darkness doesn’t make shadows…”) Banal subtitles, perhaps (hopefully?) delivered with an implied wink and nudge, had become something of a series trademark by this point — Trial by Fire? The Wages of War? Cliché much? — but this was taking things to a whole other level.

Dr. Brain fans will presumably be pleased to meet his alter ego Dr. Cranium in Quest for Glory IV. (Frankie, for the record, is a female Frankenstein whose “assets” Dr. Cranium very much approves of.)

To speak more substantively (or at least less snarkily), the “dark” aspects of the game come to the fore intermittently at best. I’ve played games which I’ve found genuinely scary; this is not one of them. It certainly includes plenty of horror tropes, but it’s difficult to take any of it all that seriously. This is a game that features Dr. Brain channeling Dr. Frankenstein. It’s a game where you fight a killer rabbit lifted out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It’s a game where you win the final battle against the evil wizard by telling him the Ultimate Joke and taking advantage when he collapses into laughter. From the Boris Karloff imitator guarding the gates to the villain’s castle to Igor the hunchbacked gravedigger, this is strictly B-movie horror — or, perhaps better said, a parody of B-movie horror. It’s hard to imagine anyone losing sleep over this game.

In fact, I was so nonplussed by its popularly accepted “dark” label that I asked Corey what he thought about it, and was gratified to find that he at least partially agreed with me:

Maybe a better word would be “unforgiving.” A Quest for Glory III theme is friendship and the need to work together with others. In Quest for Glory IV, we turned that around 180 degrees. The player would start out on his own, mistrusted by everyone. Through the course of the game, he will gradually win people’s trust and once again have allies by the end. This is not an easy theme for players new to the series to handle.

Lori Ann Cole elaborated on the same idea in a contemporary interview:

You’ll be very much alone [in Quest for Glory IV]. In Trial by Fire, you had a lot of friends to help you. You always had a place to go back to to rest. You always had a place of safety until the very end of the game. Once you get into Shadows of Darkness, you’re not going to have any sanctuary. You won’t be able to trust anyone because nobody will trust you.

It’s true that a few subplots here strain toward a gravitas unlike anything else the Coles have ever attempted. In particular, the vampire named Katrina can be singled out as a villain who isn’t just Evil for the sake of it. She’s kidnapped a little girl from the village that is your center of operations, and one of your quests is to rescue her. In the course of doing so, you learn that the kidnapping was motivated by Katrina’s desperate, very human desire for family and companionship in her isolated castle. You end up killing her, of course, but her story is often praised — justifiably on the whole, if sometimes a bit too effusively — as a benchmark for intelligent characterization in games.

Structurally, Quest for Glory IV is most reminiscent of the first game in the series. You arrive in the village of Mordavia, part of a region that goes by the same name, which has been plagued of late by vampires, ghosts, mad scientists, and most of the other inhabitants of the Hammer Horror oeuvre. As you solve the villagers’ considerable collection of problems one by one, they go from being spit-in-your-food hostile to lauding you as the greatest hero in the land. In the best tradition of the series, and in contrast to some of the most commonly voiced complaints about Quest for Glory III, much of the game is nonlinear, and some of it is entirely optional.

The combat system in Quest for Glory IV owes a lot to the Street Fighter franchise of standup-arcade, console, and computer games, which were among the most popular of the era. Corey Cole considers it the best combat engine in the history of the series; opinions among fans are more divided. For those not interested in street-fighting their way through a Quest for Glory game, the Coles did make it possible for the first time to turn on an auto-combat mode.

Sadly, though, the game is nowhere near as playable as Quest for Glory I, II, or to some extent even III. This fault arises not from doing too little but rather from attempting to do too much. At the risk of being accused of psychoanalyzing its designers, I will note that the Coles had clearly been psyching themselves up to make this game for a long time — that, even as it was being pushed back to make room for Quest for Glory III, it had long since come to loom over their conception of the series as the Big Statement. Even when they were giving interviews to promote the finished Quest for Glory III, the conversation would keep drifting into their plans for the fourth game. “It will be a very intense game to design,” said Corey in one of those interviews, a comment that could be taken to reflect either excitement or trepidation — or, more likely, both. This was to be the place where the series departed from being easygoing light fantasy to become something more challenging, both thematically and in terms of its puzzles and other mechanics.

So, they just kept cramming more and more stuff into it. The setting doesn’t have the laser focus of the earlier games in the series, all of which portrayed fairly faithfully the myths and legends of a very specific real-world culture. Quest for Glory IV, despite including some monsters drawn from real Eastern European folklore, is more interested in Western pop culture’s idea of Transylvania than any real place — a land of shadows and creatures that go bump in the night and “I vant to bite yer neck.” Then, because the parade of Gothic-horror clichés apparently wasn’t enough, the Coles added H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos to the mix (or, as the manual calls him, “P.H. Craftlove”). The two make decidedly uneasy bedfellows. Gothic horror, as expressed best in Bram Stoker’s ultimate Gothic novel Dracula, takes place, explicitly or implicitly, in an essentially moral universe drawing heavily from Christianity, in which Good and Evil, God and the Devil, are real entities at war with one another, thus setting up the narratives of sin and redemption which predominate. Lovecraftian horror, on the other hand, posits an utterly uncaring, amoral universe, in which Good and Evil are meaningless concepts, mere ephemera of the deluded human imagination. To combine the two in one work of fiction is… problematic.

For all that one has to wonder whether any fans of this heretofore genial series were truly saying to themselves, “You know, what these games really need to be is harder,” the Coles’ determination to make this entry more difficult than its predecessors isn’t invalid in itself. In trying to make their harder game, however, they sometimes fall into the all too typical trap of making a game that’s not so much more difficult as less fair. The CRPG aspects are yet further de-emphasized in favor of more puzzles, some of which push the bounds of realistic solubility. And, for the first time in the series’s history, there are irrecoverable dead ends to wander into scattered across the design, along with other situations that seem like dead ends. The latter arise because the design once again relies heavily on “events” that the player triggers without being aware how she does so — and, once again, this isn’t a bad thing at all in theory, but in practice it’s too easy to get stuck in a cul de sac with no idea how to prod the plotting machinery into motion again.

Greatly exacerbating all of these issues — indeed, virtually indistinguishable from them, given that it’s often unclear which design infelicities are intentional and which are not — are all the bugs. Even today, when patch after patch has been applied, the game remains a terrifyingly unstable edifice. If your (emulated?) machine runs just a little bit too slow or too fast, it will crash at random points with a cryptic “Error 47” or “Error 52.” But far worse are the hidden bugs that can ruin your game while letting you play on for hours without realizing anything is wrong. The most well-known of these involves a vital letter that’s supposed to show up at your hotel, but that, for reasons that are still imperfectly understood even after all these years, sometimes fails to do so. If you’re unfortunate enough to have this happen to you, it will only be much, much later, when you can’t figure out what to do next and finally turn to a walkthrough, that you realize you have to all but start over from scratch.

In my experience, an adventure game must establish a bond of trust with its player to be enjoyable. My dominant emotion when playing Quest for Glory IV, however, was just the opposite. I mistrusted the design, and mistrusted the implementation of the design even more, asking myself at every turn whether I’d broken anything, whether this latest problem I was having was a legitimate puzzle or a bug. When you have to meta-game your way through a game, relying on FAQs and walkthrough to tiptoe around all its pitfalls, it’s awfully hard to engage with the story and atmosphere.

Still, I can be thankful that I first played Quest for Glory IV a quarter-century after its original release, after all those patches had already been applied. The game that shipped on December 31, 1993, was in a truly unconscionable, very probably unwinnable condition. This wasn’t, I should emphasize, the fault of the Coles, who would have given anything to have a few more months with their baby. But Sierra was having an ugly year financially, and decided that the game simply had to be released before the year was out for accounting reasons, come what may. If there was any justice in the world, they would have been rewarded with a class-action lawsuit for knowingly selling a product that was not just flawed but outright broken. To give you a taste of what gamers unwise enough to buy Quest for Glory IV in its original incarnation got to go through, I’d like to quote at some length from the review by Scorpia, Computer Gaming World magazine’s regular adventure columnist.

My difficulties began after the game was installed and it simply refused to run, period. A call to the Sierra tech line revealed that Shadows of Darkness, as released, was not compatible with the AMI BIOS (not exactly an obscure one). This was related to the special 32-bit protected mode under which the software operates. Fortunately, a patch was available, and I quickly got it online.

After the patch was applied, the game finally came up. Unfortunately, it came up silent. The 32-bit protected mode grabs all of upper memory for itself, so nothing can be loaded high, and a bare-bones DOS boot disk is necessary. This made it impossible to load in the Gravis Ultrasound Roland emulator, and I found that with the Sound Blaster emulator loaded low, the game again wouldn’t run. So, I had to play with no sound or music, which explains why there is no commentary on either.

I ran from a boot disk without sound, and for a while everything was fine. However, the further into the game, the slower it was in saving and restoring. Actual disk access was quite speedy, but waiting for the software to make up its mind to go to disk took a long time, often a minute or more. Some online folk complained of waiting three minutes or longer to restore a saved game. It was usually faster to quit the game, rerun it, and then restore a position. For saving, of course, you just had to wait it out.

Regardless of the frustrations, I got through the game [playing as] a Paladin and a Mage, and then moved on to the Thief. Three quarters of the way along, the game crashed in the swamp whenever I tried to open the Mad Monk’s tomb. This turned out to be a “random error” that might or might not show up. It hadn’t done so with the other two heroes, but this time it reared its ugly head.

Well, Sierra had a patch that fixed both this problem and the interminable waits for saves and restores (this patch, by the way, came out some time after the first one I had gotten). There was only one drawback: because of the extensive changes made to the files, my saved games were no good and I had to start over again from the beginning.

So, I started my Thief over. By day 11 in the game, all the quests had been finished, the five rituals collected, and it was just a matter of waiting for a certain note to appear in my room one morning (this note initiates the end of the game). On day 26, I was still waiting for it. Nothing could make it appear, even replaying from some earlier positions. Either the trigger for this event was not set, or somehow it was turned off. I had no way of knowing, and, with that in mind, I had no inclination to start from scratch again. This also happened to other players who were running characters other than Thieves, and we all eventually abandoned those games.

A way around the dead-end problem was worked out by Sierra. The key is spending enough nights in your room at the inn to hear several “voice dreams,” and, most importantly, hearing the weeping from the innkeeper’s room one midnight (you are awakened by this; don’t stay up waiting for it). These events must happen before you rescue Tanya.

Once those situations have occurred, it should be safe to rescue the girl. I tried this in my Thief game, and after spending two extra nights in my room, the problem was cleared up and I finished the game with the Thief. So, if you have been waiting around for that note, and it hasn’t shown, follow the above procedure and you should be able to continue on with the game.

Scorpia’s last two paragraphs in particular illustrate what I mean when I say that you can’t really hope to play Quest for Glory IV so much as meta-game your way through it with the aid of walkthroughs. She was extremely lucky to have been among the minority with online access at the time of the game’s release, and thus able to download patches and discuss the game’s multiple points of entrapment with other players. Most would only have been able to plead with Sierra’s support personnel and hope for a disk to arrive in the mail a week or two later.

What ought to have been the exciting climactic battle of Quest for Glory IV was so buggy in the original release that the game was literally impossible to complete. It’s remained one of the worst problem spots over the years since, requiring multiple FAQ consultations to tiptoe through all the potential problems. Have I mentioned how exhausting and disheartening it is to be forced to play this way?

Some months after the bug-ridden floppy-based release, Sierra published Quest for Glory IV on CD-ROM, in a version that tried to clean up the bugs and that added voice acting. It accomplished the former task imperfectly; as already noted, plenty of glitches still remain even in the version available for digital download today, not least among them the mystery of the never-appearing letter. The latter task, however, it accomplished superlatively. In a welcome departure from the atrocious voice acting found in their earliest CD-ROM products, Sierra put together a team of top-flight acting professionals, headed by the dulcet Shakespearian tones of John Rhys-Davies — a veteran character actor of many decades’ standing who’s best known today as Gimli the dwarf in Peter Jackson’s Lords of the Rings films — as the narrator and master of ceremonies. Rhys-Davies, who had apparently signed the contract in anticipation of a quick-and-easy payday, was shocked at the sheer volume of text he was expected to voice, and took to calling the game “the CD-ROM from hell” after spending days on end in the studio. But he persevered. Indeed, he and the other actors quite clearly had more than a little fun with it. The bickering inhabitants of the Mordavia Inn are a particular delight. These voice actors obviously take their roles with no seriousness whatsoever, preferring to wander off-script into broad semi-improvised impersonations of Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, and Rodney Dangerfield. Would you think less of me if I admitted that they’re my favorite part of the game?

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/qfg4.mp4

Of course, one could argue that Sierra’s decision to devote so many resources to this multimedia window dressing, while still leaving so many fundamental problems to fester in the core game, is a sad illustration of their misplaced priorities in this new age of CD-ROM-based gaming. The full story of just what the hell was going on inside Sierra at this point, leading to this imperfect and premature Quest for Glory IV as well as even worse disasters like their infamously half-finished 1994 release Outpost, is an important one that needs to be told, but one best reserved for a later article of its own.

For now, suffice to say that Quest for Glory IV was made to suffer for its failings, with a number of outright bad reviews in a gaming press that generally tended to publish very little of that sort of thing, and with far worse word of mouth among ordinary gamers. For a long time, its poor reception seemed to have stopped the series in its tracks, one game short of Lori Ann Cole’s long-planned climax. When a transformed Sierra, under new owners with new priorities, finally allowed that fifth and final game to be made years later, it would strike the series’s remaining fans as a minor miracle, even as the technology it employed was miles away from the trusty old SCI engine that had powered the series’s first four entries.

The critical consensuses on Quest for Glory III and IV have neatly changed places in the years since that last entry in the series was published. The third game was widely lauded back in the day, the fourth about as widely panned as the timid gaming press ever dared. But today, it’s the third game that is widely considered to be the series’s weakest link, while the fourth is frequently called the very best of them all. As someone who finds them both to be more or less flawed creations in comparison to what came before, I don’t really have a dog in this fight. Nevertheless, I do find this case of switched places intriguing. I think it says something about the way that so many play games — especially adventure games — today: with FAQ and walkthrough at the ready for the first sign of trouble. There’s of course nothing wrong with choosing to play this way; I’ve gone on record many times saying there is no universally right or wrong way to play any game, only those ways which are more or less fun for you. And certainly the fact that you can now buy the entire Quest for Glory series for less than $10 — much less when it goes on sale! — impacts the way players approach the games. No one worries too much about rushing through a game they’ve bought for pocket change, but might be much more inclined to play a game they’ve spent $50 on “honestly.” All of which is as it may be. I will only say that, as someone who does still hate turning to a walkthrough, the more typical modern way of playing sometimes dismays me because of the way it can — especially when combined with the ever-distorting fog of nostalgia — lead us to excuse or entirely overlook serious issues of design in vintage games.

But lest I be too harsh on these two middle — middling? — entries in this remarkable series of games, I should remember that they were produced in times of enormous technological change, in a business environment that was changing just as rapidly, and that those realities were often in conflict with their designers’ own best intentions. Corey Cole:

Lori has commented that we started at Sierra almost completely clueless, and had to figure out how to design a Sierra-style game “from scratch.” Then, armed with that knowledge, we confidently started work on the next game, only to have Sierra pull the rug out from under us. Each time the technology and management style changed, we had to rework many of the techniques we had developed to make our previous games.

They may be, in the opinion of this humble reviewer anyway, weaker than their predecessors, but neither Quest for Glory III nor IV is without its interest. If you’d like to see the progression of one of the most unique long-term projects in the history of gaming, by all means, have a look and decide for yourself.

(Sources: Questbusters of May 1992, September 1992, December 1992, September 1993, February 1994; Sierra’s InterAction magazine from Fall 1992, Summer 1993, and Holiday 1993; Computer Gaming World of January 1993 and April 1994; the readme file included with Sierra’s 1998 Quest for Glory Collection; documents and other materials included in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play. Most of all, my thanks go to Corey Cole for once again allowing me to pepper him with questions, even though he knew beforehand that my opinion of these two games wasn’t as overwhelmingly positive as it had been the last time around.

The entire Quest for Glory series is available for purchase as a package on GOG.com. And by all means check out the Coles’ welcome return to game design in the spirit of Quest for Glory, the recently released Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption. I don’t often get to play games that aren’t “on the syllabus,” as a friend of mine puts it, but I made time for this one, and I’m so glad I did. In my eyes, it’s the best thing the Coles have ever done.)

Comments
28 Responses

- Brent Ellison

October 26, 2018 at 4:23 pm

“Among fans today, this game is generally considered the weakest link in the series…”

Surely that would be QFG V?

I personally absolutely love III but I understand that’s a minority opinion when it comes to the first four games.

- Jimmy Maher

October 26, 2018 at 8:04 pm

It seems to me that Quest for Glory III actually tends to get more flack than Quest for Glory V. The most typical fan ordering is probably IV, I, II, V, III.

- Alex Freeman

October 26, 2018 at 5:13 pm

Greatly exacerbating all of these issues — indeed, virtually indistinguishable from them, given that it’s often unclear which design infelicities are intentional and which are not — are all the bugs.

Indeed, which is why I sometimes call the fourth game Quest for Glory: Shadows of Bugginess. Metal Jesus of YouTube fame used to work for Sierra, and he said that when the company went public, the quality of the products suffered because the overly strict deadlines they had to meet whether the game was ready or not.

I ordered the anthology (https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/quest-for-glory-anthology) directly from Sierra back in 1996 since it wasn’t available in stores. The CD version, which was the version included in the anthology, actually had additional patches applied to it, but it was still buggy. Thankfully, I never missed the letter you’re supposed to receive, and things never got bad enough for me to start meta-gaming (though walkthroughs were much harder to come by in the late ’90s anyway).

And, yeah, I remember being frustrated by the end because the bug you mentioned prevented me from running the game slowly enough for me react to Ad Avis. The result was doing the same sequence over and over (except with the thief since he has acrobatics).

However, I don’t understand why you think this game was less soluble than the first two. If anything, I thought the interface gave too much away since what you can do is often reduced to multiple choice.

I also don’t think you mentioned the writing (which I think is the strongest in the series) and character Katrina enough.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/03/19/gaming-made-me-quest-for-glory-iv/

As far as Katrina specifically goes, she’s the kind of character who could very easily be a straight-up villain… She’s a vampire mage who lives in a spooky castle, is plotting to blot out the sun… She’s self-centred, manipulative… Despite this, it’s hard not to like her, or feel sorry for her. Almost nobody remembers her in her monstrous form… They remember her as Katrina, the loneliest woman in Mordavia, who shows up outside its walled town every now and again for what she seems to consider dates, and whose fatal flaw is not realising the consequences of what she’s up to.

- Jimmy Maher

October 27, 2018 at 8:19 am

That article is what I was thinking of when I said she’s sometimes praised “a bit too effusively.” ;)

- Benjamin Vigeant

October 26, 2018 at 5:33 pm

I’m definitely with the overall critical consensus of QFG3/4, the huge mix of themes worked for me. It’s a shame that it was forced out the door before it was ready. Having replayed 1-4 recently, 1 was still my absolute favorite though. It’s completely solid all the way through.

Regarding Hero U, I need to give it a second shot. It didn’t really hook me- and the timed schedule stuff was reminiscent of QFG2’s timed events in my view. Perhaps a second play will change my mind.

- tedder

October 26, 2018 at 9:49 pm

> the desert turns into tundra and then jungle

Do you mean plains, not tundra?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tundra

- Joe Pranevich

October 27, 2018 at 4:15 am

Having replayed all four games in the last year or two, plus playing the fifth game for the first time, I am not sure I agree with your assessment of the series. Despite its bugs, I still love “Shadows of Darkness” and I was one of those early players that logged into the Sierra BBS to download patches. I don’t know why I forgave it, but for me SoD is the perfect Quest for Glory game, a darker reimagining of the first game that showed just how far the Coles had come in their design maturity and how far your character had come in the series.

My ranking, to the extent that anyone cares is 4, 2, 1, 3, 5. “Wages of War” taking the near-bottom slot is only because the other games are so good. I rather liked it as a vignette but it wasn’t quite large enough to really satisfy me as a full game.

I’m eager for your assessment of QfG5 eventually. It’s the most flawed game graphically and in story structure, while still serving as a crescendo for much of the rest of the series. I haven’t managed to beat it yet because I got bored in the middle of the trials. I used to hope that the people that did a remake of 2 would do a graphical “upgrade” of 5 to bring it inline with the other games in the series, but it does need a bit more than that.

And btw, I think you mean “savannah” instead of “tundra”. :)

- hero

October 27, 2018 at 6:01 am

QG3 was my first Quest for Glory game, and I LOVED it. I still go back and play it every other year or so. QG4 is probably my second favorite. I love 1 and 2, and 5 is great too, but I played those later.

Just want to put this perspective out there; I think “my first game” has a lot to do with it. And the Coles absolutely did not fail in QG 3&4. They captured me completely. Especially 3. I was in middle school and I debated asking Dad if he would help me build a wrestling bridge! Never got up the guts though.

3 was culturally different from the rest, but no less immersive. I was totally enchanted. I’ve always wanted to share with the Coles how eagerly I adopted their African fantasy into my own white, middle-class girlhood fantasies. I loved it, still do.

- Jimmy Maher

October 27, 2018 at 8:30 am

Corey Cole is very accessible, for what it’s worth. If you ever decided to share that with him, I’m sure he’d be happy to hear it and pass it on to Lori. ;)

- A

October 29, 2018 at 4:20 am

The Coles are both on twitter and respond pretty regularly

- Corey Cole

January 5, 2019 at 11:58 pm

Thanks, hero! I read your comment to Lori, so consider it “shared.” :-) I particularly appreciated Quest for Glory III as well. It’s the one game of the series I was able to play through without having worked on it, as I’d been off on the Sega Genesis CD project during development. I think Lori did a great job of crafting the story and game in a rarely-used setting.

I’m glad you didn’t build the wrestling bridge – “Don’t try this at home.” It would be pretty dangerous. Cool idea though!

@Jimmy: Our model for Quest for Glory IV was not “horror” – it was “comedy horror” inspired by Young Frankenstein and similar horror film parodies. We also loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV series more than the original film), but that came later.

The voice recording for the CD-ROM release gave Sierra time to fix many of the bugs. I think Kevin Ray spent almost as long working on the re-release as the team originally spent on the game development. Looking back, I’m amazed that any of the games went out in a playable form, given the under-one-year development time for each of the first four games. Only by game 4 had the design gotten so complex that releasing a clean game on a Sierra schedule was impossible.

- Anonymous

October 27, 2018 at 6:53 am

Not Sega Genesis he was working on Sega CD… yes it’s a Genesis attachment but there is important distinction.

Also there is no desert or tundra in the game… it’s savannah and jungle.

Third the game is not north to south it’s west to east… read the game’s script…

It’s not set in Egypt, Egypt is mentioned to be a land to the north. See manual and a few offhand references in the game… yes the country is influenced a bit by Egypt but it’s not Egypt… in fact both city of Tarna and Lost City are influenced by Egypt. However, the game is set entirely in East Fricana. Egypt as stated in manual is North Fricana.

- Jimmy Maher

October 27, 2018 at 8:28 am

Thanks!

- Corey Cole

January 6, 2019 at 12:00 am

Tarna is the Gloriana analogue to Kenya in East Africa. The Simbani language is based on Swahili.

- Lisa H.

October 27, 2018 at 8:42 am

As you travel southward, the desert turns into tundra and then jungle

Agree with others, pretty sure you want “savannah”. (dunno about the presence of desert.)

I suspect that these games may actually be more satisfying to play if you don’t import your old character into each new one, but rather start out fresh each time with a weaker hero and enjoy the thrill of building him up.

I’m a terrible wimp, I suppose, but I prefer starting out stronger. I find merely frustration, not thrill, in death after death trying to build up enough stats just to be able to walk around a game map.

less amendable to your personal choices

Amenable?

It’s a game where you win the final battle against the evil wizard by telling him the Ultimate Joke and taking advantage when he collapses into laughter.

A relative of Keapon Laffin? (I never got past the very beginning of QFG IV, partly because of the bugs, partly because I suspect my computer at the time wasn’t beefy enough, and partly because of the aforementioned frustration with repeated deaths in what should be minor monster battles – granted, an issue I have with all the QFG games.)

But today, it’s the third game that is widely considered to be the series’s weakest link, while the fourth is frequently called the very best of them all.

Yeah? I thought QFG 2 was the best-regarded. (no citations there, though; just my imperfect memory)

- Jimmy Maher

October 27, 2018 at 9:17 am

Thanks!

My own informal research would seem to indicate that Quest for Glory II is a bit polarizing. Some name it as their absolute favorite, some are frustrated by its fairly linear plotting and the need to wait around for each successive attack by the elementals on the city. Personally, I can see why that complaint is made, but I still enjoy it only slightly less than Quest for Glory I.

- Peter Malamud Smith

October 29, 2018 at 7:07 pm

I’m apparently in a very small minority putting 3 right below 2 in my series faves. Fantasy games that looked outside a Germanic setting were so unusual back then. I loved the cultural richness and thematic sophistication of QFG3.

I agree with your criticisms of 4–the silliness, though it was always there, felt like it took over, and clashed more with the intended tone. I also disliked the return to this small-feeling (and much more fantasy-boilerplate) setting, which felt provincial after the cosmopolitan, worldly games that preceded it. (I will say that I’m not sure I agree with you about the real-world groundings of the previous games–surely QFG2 pulls more from Arabian Nights/orientalist fantasy than from anything true to Middle Eastern cultures?) Looking back, I like a fair amount of it–the Tanya & Toby story, the haunting rusalka side quest, and the satisfaction of gradually winning over the villagers–but it’s all awfully lumpy. A shame after the polish of the previous entries.

- Jimmy Maher

October 29, 2018 at 7:39 pm

In saying they were faithful to those cultures, I meant to a large extent to their myths and legends. Quest for Glory I draws heavily from Germanic folklore and fairy tales, Quest for Glory II, as you say, from the Arabian Nights. (The Arabian Nights did originate in the Middle East, even if it became associated with the exotic Orient in Western eyes…) This is somewhat less true of the third game, admittedly, but it’s still grounded in a particular culture — or a pair of cultures — in a way that the pastiche-like fourth game isn’t. The latter feels more like a parody of its chosen milieu, something I wouldn’t say about any of the other games.

- Peter Malamud Smith

October 29, 2018 at 8:26 pm

Yes, I can see that, and (to echo your point), maybe if they’d leaned into things like the rusalka, the leshy, Baba Yaga, etc, and cut away the Lovecraft stuff, the game would’ve felt more focused.

- tomimt

October 30, 2018 at 7:24 pm

Personally, I find Shadows of Darkness to be the most playable of the series. I used to think it was a tie between it and the second game, but on a recent playthrough, I was very bugged by that when you know what to do in the second game, it has long intervals where you don’t have anything else to do but sleep so that you get to the events.

At first, when you play it the first time and don’t know the ropes, it feels like an ingeniously designed game, where a lot of things happen and you manage to save the day by a nick of time. But then you on other playthroughs, you are more aware of the time limits and can spread your doings so, that you have more than ample time to do everything and max up your character as well.

While that same issue is in Shadows of Darkness as well, I do feel it’s time consumption is much better handled. It just has much less leisure time in it.

The third one is an interesting title, but it is brought down its linearity. It never felt like a game that had a proper feel of exploration in it. It was, in contrast to the other games in the series, too busy railroading its story and while the story itself was nice, it felt like the game part was almost an afterthought in it.

- doctorcasino

October 31, 2018 at 5:37 pm

Great discussion of how the loss of player trust and having to use a walkthrough absolutely breaks the adventure game experience, making you see through the artifice to the sequence of flags and triggers. I’d add that in particular, playing *back* through a game, when stopped by a bug, really exacerbates this, because you’re just bashing through events in a hurry, trying to get caught up to where you were, missing all that in-between “thinking time” you did the first time around, trying this and that hunch out, etc. How badly QFGIV screws this up – and your description reminds me VERY much of how it felt to play this back in the day – only highlights how much the earlier games succeeded, since of course the whole *sales pitch* with this series is that you’ll want to play it at least three times. They really did make things JUST different enough for the three classes that you (almost) never felt like you’re on rails marching to the next checkpoint, and that you could look forward to solving familiar situations with fresh, live, mental struggle.

I agree with those who feel the balance got a little out of joint on III, if not miserably so. I wonder if there was pressure from above to reduce the number of unique-to-one-character scenes, as the production costs for backgrounds and animation went up?

- glorkvorn

October 31, 2018 at 10:11 pm

I played QFG4 as a very young child, so my impression is pretty different from yours. I don’t particularly remember the bugs- maybe I just got lucky, or maybe I just accepted that all computer games at that time were kind of buggy. I do remember feeling stuck and confused on what to do, but I had that same feeling with pretty much all the Sierra adventure games that I played. I think I accepted that these games were too hard for me to actually finish, and had fun just clicking around and exploring what I could.

The graphics and sound though was amazing. Hell I still think it’s amazing! Maybe the tech is obsolete now, but it still looks and sounds really cool. And as a kid, the atmosphere, especially the opening part, was seriously creepy. I’m not sure if it helped or hurt that most of the references went over my head- I had never seen any Lovecraft stuff before, for example, so that all seemed like an original creation. I think in retrospect the serious parts of the game hold up much more than the funny parts, but that’s just my opinion.

- Alex Freeman

November 1, 2018 at 12:55 am

If you think the graphics and sound were amazing, perhaps you’d be interested in this:
http://www.artofsierra.com/contribute/

- Reiko

November 4, 2018 at 5:08 am

Speaking of buggy, oh man, Outpost. I’m very interested to hear what your take is on that one when you get there. Outpost was one of my favorite games of my childhood (along with QfG I), but at times I got annoyed about all the unimplemented features, like satellites, which were advertised on the game box. What was up with that?

- stepped pyramids

November 9, 2018 at 5:02 am

Having encountered these games through a Let’s Play series before playing them myself, Wages of War really stood out to me as having the most interesting plot and setting of the five games. I think it also struck the best balance in terms of tone — it had the wry wit and background goofiness that I appreciate in Terry Pratchett’s better books, while still managing to tell a relatively serious story.

IV actually struck me as way goofier than the previous two games, and it didn’t help that I never found Katrina to be a particularly interesting character. I agree with the people who said it should have leaned heavier into the Russian folklore angle.

V has a lot of good content and ideas, but it suffers badly from being an early 3D era game.

- Fungaroo

November 20, 2018 at 1:15 am

This is a fascinating little time capsule of Sierra right as it started all falling down :
https://youtu.be/5hyAYjM8Ssg

- Sam

December 3, 2018 at 11:52 pm

I’ve been a fan of these games for so long that I can’t judge them with anything even approaching objectivity. But I can say with some confidence that I don’t remember encountering any game-breaking bugs back when I first played QFG4 in the mid-90s, and I completed it multiple times as the different classes. My brother and I pooled our pocket money to buy the game when it was first released, although we live in Australia, and maybe the version released here had already been patched. It wasn’t until later, when I needed to use DOSBox to play the game on more modern machines, that I encountered serious bugs.

I also think it’s worth noting that for a certain subset of gamers (myself included), a certain number of bugs and flaws can be easily overlooked (so long as they don’t utterly break the game) if the game’s other qualities are great. I’ve played through many games with bad gameplay just because I thought the story or the atmosphere was good. And I’ve quickly lost interest in games with great gameplay that otherwise lacked story or atmosphere, etc.

QFG4 had so much of that that (especially for a game from that era) that I couldn’t help but love it. To this day I still dither between calling it and QFG2 the best of the series.

- Alexander Harris

February 2, 2019 at 1:52 am

I came upon the Quest games extremely late by anyone’s standards, in my mid 20s circa 2010. Played the first Quest for Glory game first, not the VGA remake, then the VGA remake, then 2, 3, then skipped 4 because at the time I found the setting a little too “weird” considering the previous three game’s settings…5 was an afterthought solely because it was, at least to me, the blackest of sheep because of it’s jump to 3d.
For me, 2 was the epitome of a grand adventure. I absolutely loved it; all of it. I found it to be the most well-crafted in a script/story sense, and the characters and humor, much like the first game, had me laughing out loud, which is something I seldom do with most games I have played, which number in the hundreds…The quest games – sans 4 – are some of the only games I have played to completion, and that means a lot to me, generally because I have an extremely short attention span when it comes to video games, so for any to hold my interest enough to complete them means they kick supreme ass. I mean, there’s a massive amount of wonderful games out there, but it seemed like all the QFG games (again sans 4 because I have not played it to any degree to comment on it) were almost “catered” to my ideal fantasy setting. Which is weird because I generally only love AD&D licensed RPGs, which you can criticize me for freely.
The Quest worlds were so incredibly realized and detailed, I’m hard-pressed to think of any that surpass them in their respective settings, which is even more incredible since I would definitely call them ‘niche’ games in regards to their gameplay mechanics. Nothing quite like them, and I hold the memories of playing them dear.
Had no idea 4 was so well-regarded and thought of. I thought for sure 2 was the winner by a mile.
Anyway, it was really cool to read the article and especially everyone’s comments.
Cheers everyone. :)

Ten Great Adventure-Game Puzzles
November 2, 2018

This blog has become, among other things, an examination of good and bad game-design practices down through the years, particularly within the genre of adventure games. I’ve always tried to take the subject seriously, and have even dared to hope that some of these writings might be of practical use to someone — might help designers of the present or future make better games. But, for reasons that I hope everyone can understand, I’ve spent much more time illuminating negative than positive examples of puzzle design. The fact is, I don’t feel much compunction about spoiling bad puzzles. Spoiling the great puzzles, however, is something I’m always loath to do. I want my readers to have the thrill of tackling those for themselves.

Unfortunately, this leaves the situation rather unbalanced. If you’re a designer looking for tips from the games of the past, it certainly helps to have some positive as well as negative examples to look at. And even if you just read this blog to experience (or re-experience) these old games through the sensibility of your humble author here, you’re missing out if all you ever hear about are the puzzles that don’t work. So, when my reader and supporter Casey Muratori wrote to me to suggest an article that singles out some great puzzles for detailed explication and analysis, it sounded like a fine idea to me.

It’s not overly difficult to generalize what makes for fair or merely “good” puzzles. They should be reasonably soluble by any reasonably intelligent, careful player, without having to fall back on the tedium of brute-forcing them or the pointlessness of playing from a walkthrough. As such, the craft of making merely good or fair puzzles is largely subsumed in lists of what not to do — yes, yet more negative reinforcements! — such as Graham Nelson’s “Bill of Player’s Rights” or Ron Gilbert’s “Why Adventure Games Suck and What We Can Do About It.” It’s much more difficult, however, to explain what makes a brilliant, magical puzzle. In any creative discipline, rules will only get you so far; at some point, codification must make way for the ineffable. Still, we’ll do the best we can today, and see if we can’t tease some design lessons out of ten corking puzzles from adventure games of yore.

Needless to say, there will be spoilers galore in what follows, so if you haven’t played these games, and you think you might ever want to, you should absolutely do so before reading about them here. All ten games are found in my personal Hall of Fame and come with my highest recommendation. As that statement would indicate, I’ve restricted this list to games I’ve already written about, meaning that none of those found here were published after 1992. I’ve split the field evenly between parser-driven text adventures and point-and-click graphic adventures. If you readers enjoy and/or find this article useful, then perhaps it can become a semi-regular series going forward.

And now, with all that said, let’s accentuate the positive for once and relive some classic puzzles that have been delighting their players for decades.

1. Getting past the dragon in Adventure

By Will Crowther and Don Woods, public domain, 1977.

How it works: Deep within the bowels of Colossal Cave, “a huge green dragon bars the way!” Your objective, naturally, is to get past him to explore the area beyond. But how to get him out of the way? If you throw your axe at him, it “bounces harmlessly off the dragon’s thick scales.” If you unleash your fierce bird friend on him, who earlier cleared a similarly troublesome snake out of your way, “the little bird attacks the green dragon, and in an astounding flurry gets burnt to a cinder.” If you simply try to “attack dragon,” the game mocks you: “With what? Your bare hands?” You continue on in this way until, frustrated and thoroughly pissed off, you type, “Yes,” in response to that last rhetorical question. And guess what? It wasn’t a rhetorical question: “Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare hands! (Unbelievable, isn’t it?)”

Why it works: In many ways, this is the most dubious puzzle in this article. (I do know how to make an entrance, don’t I?) It seems safe to say that the vast majority of people who have “solved” it have done so by accident, which is not normally a sign of good puzzle design. Yet classic text adventures especially were largely about exploring the possibility space, seeing what responses you could elicit. The game asks you a question; why not answer it, just to see what it does?

This is an early example of a puzzle that could never have worked absent the parser — absent its approach to interactivity as a conversation between game and player. How could you possibly implement something like this using point and click? I’m afraid a dialog box with a “YES” and “NO” just wouldn’t work. In text, though, the puzzle rewards the player’s sense of whimsy — rewards the player, one might even say, for playing in the right spirit. Interactions like these are the reason some of us continue to love text adventures even in our modern era of photo-realistic graphics and surround sound.

Our puzzling design lesson: A puzzle need not be complicated to delight — need barely be a puzzle at all! — if it’s executed with wit and a certain joie de vivre.

2. Exploring the translucent maze in Enchanter

By Marc Blank and David Lebling, Infocom, 1983

How it works: As you’re exploring the castle of the mad wizard Krill, you come upon a maze of eight identical rooms in the basement. Each location is “a peculiar room, whose cream-colored walls are thin and translucent.” All of the rooms are empty, the whole area seemingly superfluous. How strange.

Elsewhere in the castle, you’ve discovered (or will discover) a few other interesting items. One is an old book containing “The Legend of the Unseen Terror”:

This legend, written in an ancient tongue, goes something like this: At one time a shapeless and formless manifestation of evil was disturbed from millennia of sleep. It was so powerful that it required the combined wisdom of the leading enchanters of that age to conquer it. The legend tells how the enchanters lured the Terror "to a recess deep within the earth" by placing there a powerful spell scroll. When it had reached the scroll, the enchanters trapped it there with a spell that encased it in the living rock. The Terror was so horrible that none would dare speak of it. A comment at the end of the narration indicates that the story is considered to be quite fanciful; no other chronicles of the age mention the Terror in any form.

And you’ve found a map, drawn in pencil. With a start, you realize that it corresponds exactly to the map you’ve drawn of the translucent maze, albeit with an additional, apparently inaccessible room located at point P:

B       J
!      / \
!     /   \
!    /     \
!   K       V
!          / \
!         /   \
!        /     \
R-------M       F
\     /
\   /
\ /
H       P

Finally, you’ve found a badly worn pencil, with a point and an eraser good for just two uses each.

And so you put the pieces together. The Terror and the “powerful spell scroll” mentioned in the book are encased in the “living rock” of the maze in room P. The pencil creates and removes interconnections between the rooms. You need to get to room P to recover the scroll, which you’ll need to defeat Krill. But you can’t allow the Terror to escape and join forces with Krill. A little experimentation — which also causes you to doom the world to endless darkness a few times, but there’s always the restore command, right? — reveals that the Terror moves one room per turn, just as you do. So, your objective must be to let him out of room P, but trap him in another part of the maze before he can get to room B and freedom. You need to give him a path to freedom to get him moving out of room P, then cut it off.

There are many possible solutions. One is to go to room H, then draw a line connecting P and F. Sensing a path to freedom, the Terror will move to room F, whereupon you erase the connection you just drew. As you do that, the Terror moves to room V, but you erase the line between V and M before he can go further, trapping him once again. Now, you have just enough pencil lead left to draw a line between H and P and recover the scroll.

Why it works: Solving this puzzle comes down to working out how a system functions, then exploiting it to do your bidding. (Small wonder so many hackers have found text adventures so appealing over the years!) First comes the great mental leap of connecting these four disparate elements which you’ve found scattered about: an empty maze, a book of legends, a map, and a pencil. Then, after that great “a-ha!” moment, you get the pleasure of working out the mechanics of the Terror’s movements and finally of putting together your plan and carrying it out. Once you understand how everything works, this final exercise is hardly a brain burner, but it’s nevertheless made much more enjoyable by the environment’s dynamism. You feel encouraged to sit down with your map and work out your unique approach, and the game responds as you expect it to.  This simulational aspect, if you will, stands in marked contrast to so many static adventure-game puzzles of the “use X on Y because the designer wants you to” variety.

It’s worth taking note as well of the technology required to implement something like this. It demands a parser capable of understanding a construction as complicated as “draw line from H to P,” a game engine capable of re-jiggering map connections and rewriting room descriptions on the fly, and even a measure of artificial intelligence, including a path-finding algorithm, for the Terror. Nobody other than Infocom could have implemented a puzzle of this dynamic complexity in 1983. I’ve often noted that the keystone of Infocom’s design genius was their subtly advanced technology in comparison to anyone else working in their field; this puzzle provides fine proof of what I mean by that.

Our puzzling design lesson: Technology isn’t everything in game design, but it isn’t nothing either; the tools you choose to work with have a direct impact on the types of puzzles you can attempt. A corollary to this statement is that the technology which goes into design affordances is often far more subtle than that which allows whiz-bang graphics and sound.

3. Getting the babel fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

By Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky, Infocom, 1984

How it works: You’ve escaped planet Earth just seconds before its destruction at the hands of a Vogon Constructor Fleet. You’re now in the hold of one of the Vogon ships:

Vogon Hold
This is a squalid room filled with grubby mattresses, unwashed cups, and unidentifiable bits of smelly alien underwear. A door lies to port, and an airlock lies to starboard.

There is a satchel here.

In the corner is a glass case with a switch and a keyboard.
It looks like the glass case contains:
an atomic vector plotter

Along one wall is a tall dispensing machine.

That dispensing machine contains babel fish, which, when inserted into your ear, will allow you to understand the many strange alien languages you’ll soon be encountering. Rather than belabor this famously extended puzzle point by point, I’ll just provide you with a transcript of the steps you need to go through to solve it. In real life, of course, you would spend much more time bumbling and fumbling than does our ideal player here.

>examine machine
The dispenser is tall, has a button at around eye-level, and says "Babel Fish" in large letters. Anything dispensed would probably come out the slot at around knee-level. It bears a small label which reads "Another fine product of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation."

>i
You have:
no tea
a thing your aunt gave you which you don't know what it is
a towel
It looks like your gown contains:
pocket fluff
The Hitchhiker's Guide
an electronic Sub-Etha signaling device
a loose pile of junk mail
a toothbrush
a flathead screwdriver

>push button
A single babel fish shoots out of the slot. It sails across the room and through a small hole in the wall, just under a metal hook.

>remove gown
Okay, you're no longer wearing your gown.

>hang gown on hook
The gown is now hanging from the hook, covering a tiny hole.

>push button
A single babel fish shoots out of the slot. It sails across the room and hits the dressing gown. The fish slides down the sleeve of the gown and falls to the floor, vanishing through the grating of a hitherto unnoticed drain.

>put towel on drain
The towel completely covers the drain.

>push button
A single babel fish shoots out of the slot. It sails across the room and hits the dressing gown. The fish slides down the sleeve of the gown and falls to the floor, landing on the towel. A split-second later, a tiny cleaning robot whizzes across the floor, grabs the fish, and continues its breakneck pace toward a tiny robot panel at the base of the wall. The robot zips through the panel, and is gone.

>cover panel with satchel
Okay, the satchel is lying on its side in front of the tiny robot panel.

>push button
A single babel fish shoots out of the slot. It sails across the room and hits the dressing gown. The fish slides down the sleeve of the gown and falls to the floor, landing on the towel. A split-second later, a tiny cleaning robot whizzes across the floor, grabs the fish, and continues its breakneck pace toward a tiny robot panel at the base of the wall. The robot plows into the satchel, sending the babel fish flying through the air in a graceful arc. A small upper-half-of-the-room cleaning robot flies into the room, catches the babel fish (which is all the flying junk it can find), and exits.

>put mail on satchel
Okay, the loose pile of junk mail is now sitting on the satchel.

>push button
A single babel fish shoots out of the slot. It sails across the room and hits the dressing gown. The fish slides down the sleeve of the gown and falls to the floor, landing on the towel. A split-second later, a tiny cleaning robot whizzes across the floor, grabs the fish, and continues its breakneck pace toward a tiny robot panel at the base of the wall. The robot plows into the satchel, sending the babel fish flying through the air in a graceful arc surrounded by a cloud of junk mail. Another robot flies in and begins madly collecting the cluttered plume of mail. The babel fish continues its flight, landing with a loud "squish" in your ear.

Why it works: This is easily the most famous text-adventure puzzle of all time, one whose reputation for difficulty was so extreme in the 1980s that Infocom took to selling tee-shirts emblazoned with “I got the babel fish!” In truth, though, its reputation is rather exaggerated. There are other puzzles in Hitchhiker’s which rely heavily — perhaps a little too heavily — on the ability to think with the skewed logic of Douglas Adams. This puzzle, however, really isn’t one of them. It’s certainly convoluted and time-consuming, but it’s also both logical in a non-skewed sense and thoroughly satisfying to work out step by step. From the standpoint of the modern player, its only really objectionable aspects are the facts that you can easily arrive at it without having everything you need to solve it, and that you have a limited amount of tries — i.e., a limited number of spare babel fish — at your disposal. But if you have made sure to pick up everything that isn’t nailed down in the early part of the game, and if you use the save system wisely, there’s no reason you can’t solve this on your own and have immense fun doing so. It’s simply a matter of saving at each stage and experimenting to find out how to progress further. The fact that it can be comfortably solved in stages makes it far less infuriating than it might otherwise be. You always feel like you’re making progress — coming closer, step by step, to the ultimate solution. There’s something of a life lesson here: most big problems can be solved by first breaking them down into smaller problems and solving those one at a time.

Importantly, this puzzle is also funny, fitting in perfectly with Douglas Adams’s comedic conception of a universe not out so much to swat you dead all at once as to slowly annoy you to death with a thousand little passive-aggressive cuts.

Our puzzling design lesson: Too many adventure-game designers think that making a comedy gives them a blank check to indulge in moon logic when it comes to their puzzles. The babel fish illustrates that a puzzle can be both funny and fair.

4. Using the T-removing machine in Leather Goddesses of Phobos

By Steve Meretzky, Infocom, 1986

How it works: While exploring this ribald science-fiction comedy, Infocom’s last big hit, you come upon a salesman who wants to trade you something for the “odd machine” he carries. When you finally find the item he’s looking for and take possession of the machine, he gives you only the most cryptic description of its function: “‘It’s a TEE remover,’ he explains. You ponder what it removes — tea stains, hall T-intersections — even TV star Mr. T crosses your mind, until you recall that it’s only 1936.”

Experimentation will eventually reveal that this “tee-remover” is actually a T-remover. If you put something inside it and turn it on, said something becomes itself minus all of the letter Ts in its name. You need to use the machine to solve one clever and rather hilarious puzzle, turning a jar of untangling cream into unangling cream, thereby to save poor King Mitre’s daughter from a tragic fate:

In the diseased version of the legend commonly transmitted on Earth, Mitre is called Midas. The King was granted his wish that everything he touched would turn to gold. His greed caught up with him when he transformed even his own daughter into gold.

King Mitre's wish was, in fact, that everything he touched would turn to forty-five degree angles. No one has ever explained this strange wish; the most likely hypothesis is a sexual fetish. In any case, the tale has a similar climax, with Mitre turning his own daughter into a forty-five degree angle.

This is pretty funny in itself, but the greatest fun offered by the T-remover is in all the other places you can use it: on a tray (“It looks a little like Ray whatsisname from second grade.”); on a rabbit (“A bearded rabbi wearing a prayer shawl leaps out of the machine, recites a Torah blessing, and dashes off in search of a minyan.”); a raft (“It sinks like a stone. I guess a raf doesn’t float nearly as well as a raft.”); a pair of cotton balls (“Let’s just say that some poor male raccoon is speaking in a particularly high-pitched voice.”).

Why it works: The T-removing machine is sometimes held up as another puzzle concept that couldn’t possibly work in any other medium than text. I’m not sure if that’s literally true — later in this very list we’ll see another funny wordplay-based puzzle that does work inside a graphic adventure — but it certainly is true that no responsible producer would agree to pay for all the work required to implement all those one-off, just-for-fun responses in graphics. In text, though, they’re just a matter of an additional sentence or two.

Adventure designer Bob Bates likes to point out that the vast majority of what the player attempts to do will always be wrong; that’s just the nature of the endeavor. When she does one of these wrong things, the designer needs to do as much as possible to entertain her. A later generation would dub this the “juicy” approach to game design: rewarding curiosity and creativity, even if none of it contributes directly to the prosaic task of finishing the game. Steve Meretzky had a great puzzle already with the T-remover, King Mitre, and the untangling/unangling cream. He could have left it at that by coming up with excuses for why you couldn’t put other things in the T-remover. Instead he stayed faithful to his invention and implemented many alternatives alongside the “correct” use of the machine.

Our puzzling design lesson: Don’t ignore the “else” in the “if, then, else” of an adventure game. It makes your game feel like a living world rather than an arbitrary collection of logic gates to be navigated, and shows that you respect your player’s creativity.

5. Escaping the pirate Lafond in Plundered Hearts

By Amy Briggs, Infocom, 1987

How it works: Would I be engaging in too much gender stereotyping if I noted that the puzzles in the only Infocom game to be written by a woman often deal in social intelligence rather than abstract logic? This is another fairly lengthy sequence, so it’s best if I once again just show you what happens if you do everything correctly.

"Welcome, ma petite." Lafond bows you in.

Lafond's Bedroom
Lafond's bedroom shows all the outpourings of his megalomania. Royal hues of
purple and gold weigh down the hangings on the bed and the eastward window, as if trying to smother the moonbeam shining in.

Lafond is leering, lip curled.

A lace-covered table crouches beside a wing-backed chair in one corner. Sitting on the table is a green goblet, a blue goblet and a flagon.

"Have some wine." Lafond pours wine into two glasses, giving a blue one to you. "Drink this down. We have a long night ahead of us." He drains his own.

>drink wine
You empty the blue goblet of wine.

"Good girl," he says, "Let's see more cooperation of this sort."

Suddenly, the door slams open. It is Jamison, coatless, sword bared, his shirt ripped. "Thank God I am not too late. Leave, darling, before I skewer this dog to his bedposts," he cries. The scar on his cheek gleams coldly.

With a yell, Crulley and the butler jump out of the darkness behind him. Nicholas struggles, but soon lies unconscious on the floor.

"Take him to the dungeon," Lafond says, setting down his glass. "You, butler, stay nearby. I do not wish to be disturbed again.

"Now that we are rid of that intrusion, cherie, I will change into something more comfortable. Pour me more wine." He crosses to the wardrobe removing his coat and vest, turned slightly away from you.

>pour wine into green goblet
You fill the green goblet with wine.

"In private, call me Jean, or whatever endearment you choose, once I have approved it." Lafond is looking into the wardrobe.

>squeeze bottle into green goblet
You squeeze three colorless drops into the green goblet. You sense Lafond
hesitate, then continue primping.

The butler enters, laying a silver tray of cold chicken on the table. "The kitchen wench has gone, your grace. I took the liberty of fetching these
myself." He bows and leaves the room.

"Sprinkle some spices on the fowl, ma petite," Lafond says, donning a long brocade robe, his back to you. "They are hot, but delicious."

>get spices
You take a pinch of spices between your thumb and forefinger.

"Tsk. The cook has gone too far. She shall be 'leaving us' tomorrow." Lafond adjusts the lace at his neck.

>put spices on chicken
You sprinkle some spices on a wing and nibble it. The peppery heat hits you like a wave, leaving you gasping, eyes watering.

Lafond strolls to the table smiling slyly. "But you haven't finished pouring the wine." He tops off both glasses. "Which glass was mine? I seem to have forgotten." He points at the green goblet and smiles in a way that does not grant you confidence. "Is this it?"

>no
You shake your head, teeth clenched.

"Ah yes, of course." Lafond obligingly takes the blue goblet.

He inhales deeply of the bouquet of his wine, then turns to you. "You must think me very naive to fall for such a trick. I saw you pour something into one of these glasses -- although I cannot smell it." He switches goblets, setting the blue goblet into your nerveless grasp and taking up the other, smiling evilly. "Now you will drink from the cup intended for me."

>drink from blue goblet
You empty the blue goblet of wine.

"Good girl," he says. Lafond takes the leather bottle and drops it out the window. "You shall not need this. You may suffer no headaches in my employ."

He lifts his glass to drink, but stops. "Your father, for all his idiotic meddling in other people's business, is not a fool. I doubt you are, either." He calls in the butler, ordering him to empty the green goblet. The man reports no odd taste and returns to his post.

>get spices
You take a pinch of spices between your thumb and forefinger.

Lafond draws near, whispering indecencies. He caresses your lily white neck, his fingers ice-cold despite the tropic heat.

>throw spices at lafond
You blow the spices off your fingertips, directly into Lafond's face. He
sneezes, his eyes watering from the heat of the peppers. Reaching blindly for some wine, he instead upsets the table, shattering a glass. Lafond stumbles cursing out of the room, in search of relief.

>s
You run out -- into the butler's barrel chest and leering grin. You return to the bedroom, the butler following. "The governor said you were not to leave this room."

>z
Time passes...

The butler seems to be having some problems stifling a yawn.

>z
Time passes...

The butler's eyes are getting heavier.

>z
Time passes...

The butler collapses, head back, snoring loudly.

>s
You creep over the prostrate butler.

Why it works: Plundered Hearts is an unusually driven text adventure, in which the plucky heroine you play is constantly forced to improvise her way around the dangers that come at her from every direction. In that spirit, one can almost imagine a player bluffing her way through this puzzle on the first try by thinking on her feet and using her social intuition. Most probably won’t, mark you, but it’s conceivable, and that’s what makes it such a good fit with the game that hosts it. This death-defying tale doesn’t have time to slow down for complicated mechanical puzzles. This puzzle, on the other hand, fits perfectly with the kind of high-wire adventure story — adventure story in the classic sense — which this game wants to be.

Our puzzling design lesson: Do-or-die choke point should be used sparingly, but can serve a plot-heavy game well as occasional, exciting punctuations. Just make sure that they feel inseparable from the narrative unfolding around the player — not, as is the case with so many adventure-game puzzles, like the arbitrary thing the player has to do so that the game will feed her the next bit of story.

6. Getting into Weird Ed’s room in Maniac Mansion

By Ron Gilbert, Lucasfilm Games, 1987

How it works: In Ron Gilbert’s first adventure game, you control not one but three characters, a trio of teenage stereotypes who enter the creepy mansion of Dr. Fred one hot summer night. Each has a unique skill set, and each can move about the grounds independently. Far from being just a gimmick, this has a huge effect on the nature of the game’s puzzles. Instead of confining yourself to one room at a time, as in most adventure games, your thinking has to span the environment; you must coordinate the actions of characters located far apart. Couple this with real-time gameplay and an unusually responsive and dynamic environment, and the whole game starts to feel wonderfully amenable to player creativity, full of emergent possibilities.

In this example of a Maniac Mansion puzzle, you need to search the bedroom of Weird Ed, the son of the mad scientist Fred and his bonkers wife Edna. If you enter while he’s in there, he’ll march you off to the house’s dungeon. Thus you have to find a way to get rid of him. In the sequence below, we’ve placed the kid named Dave in the room adjacent to Ed’s. Meanwhile Bernard is on the house’s front porch. (This being a comedy game, we won’t question how these two are actually communicating with each other.)

Dave is poised to spring into action in the room next to Weird Ed’s.

Bernard rings the doorbell.

Ed heads off to answer the door.

Dave makes his move as soon as Ed clears the area.

Dave searches Ed’s room.

But he has to hurry because Ed, after telling off Bernard, will return to his room.

Why it works: As graphics fidelity increases in an adventure game, the possibility space tends to decrease. Graphics are, after all, expensive to create, and beautiful high-resolution graphics all the more expensive. By the late 1990s, the twilight of the traditional adventure game as more than a niche interest among gamers, the graphics would be very beautiful indeed, but the interactivity would often be distressingly arbitrary, with little to no implementation of anything beyond the One True Path through the game.

Maniac Mansion, by contrast, makes a strong argument for the value of primitive graphics. This game that was originally designed for the 8-bit Commodore 64 uses its crude bobble-headed imagery in the service of the most flexible and player-responsive adventure design Lucasfilm Games would ever publish over a long and storied history in graphic adventures. Situations like the one shown above feel like just that — situations with flexible solutions — rather than set-piece puzzles. You might never have to do any of the above if you take a different approach. (You could, for instance, find a way to befriend Weird Ed instead of tricking him…) The whole environmental simulation — and a simulation really is what it feels like — is of remarkable complexity, especially considering the primitive hardware on which it was implemented.

Our puzzling design lesson: Try thinking holistically instead of in terms of set-piece roadblocks, and try thinking of your game world as a responsive simulated environment for the player to wander in instead of as a mere container for your puzzles and story. You might be surprised at what’s possible, and your players might even discover emergent solutions to their problems which you never thought of.

7. Getting the healer’s ring back in Hero’s Quest (later known as Quest for Glory I)

By Lori Ann and Corey Cole, Sierra, 1989

How it works: Hero’s Quest is another game which strains against the constrained norms in adventure-game design. Here you create and develop a character over the course of the game, CRPG-style. His statistics largely define what he can do, but your own choices define how those statistics develop. This symbiosis results in an experience which is truly yours. Virtually every puzzle in the game admits of multiple approaches, only some (or none) of which may be made possible by your character’s current abilities. The healer’s lost ring is a fine example of how this works in practice.

The bulletin board at the Guild of Adventurers tells you about the missing ring.

You go to inquire with the healer. Outside her hut is a tree, and on the tree is the nest of a sort of flying lizard.

Hmm, there’s another of these flying lizards inside.

I’ll reveal now that the ring is in the nest. But how to get at it? The answer will depend on the kind of character you’ve built up. If your “throwing” skill is sufficient, you can throw rocks at the nest to drive off the lizard and knock it off the tree. If your “magic” skill is sufficient and you’ve bought the “fetch” spell, you can cast it to bring the nest to you. Or, if your “climb” skill is sufficient, you can climb the tree. If you can’t yet manage any of this, you can continue to develop your character and come back later. Or not: the puzzle is completely optional. The healer rewards you only with six extra gold pieces and two healing potions, both of which you can earn through other means if necessary.

Why it works: This puzzle would be somewhat problematic if solving it was required to finish the game. Although several lateral nudges are provided that the ring is in the nest, it strikes me as dubious to absolutely demand that the player put all the pieces together — or, for that matter, to even demand that the player notice the nest, which is sitting there rather inconspicuously in the tree branch. Because solving the puzzle isn’t an absolute requirement, however, it becomes just another fun little thing to discover in a game that’s full of such generosity. Some players will notice the nest and become suspicious, and some won’t. Some players will find a way to see what’s in it, and some won’t. And those that do find a way will do so using disparate methods at different points in the game. Even more so than Maniac Mansion, Hero’s Quest gives you the flexibility to make your own story out of its raw materials. No two players will come away with quite the same memories.

This melding of CRPG mechanics with adventure-game elements is still an underexplored area in a genre which has tended to become less rather than more formally ambitious as it’s aged. (See also Origin’s brief-lived Worlds of Ultima series for an example of games which approach the question from the other direction — adding adventure-game elements to the CRPG rather than the other way around — with equally worthy results.) Anything adventures can do to break out of the static state-machine paradigm in favor of flexibility and dynamism is generally worth doing. It can be the difference between a dead museum exhibition and a living world.

Our puzzling design lesson: You can get away with pushing the boundaries of fairness in optional puzzles, which you can use to reward the hardcore without alienating your more casual players. (Also, go read Maniac Mansion’s design lesson one more time.)

8. Blunting the smith’s sword in Loom

By Brian Moriarty, Lucasfilm Games, 1990

How it works: Games like Hero’s Quest succeed by being generously expansive, while others, like Loom, succeed by boiling themselves down to a bare essence. To accompany its simple storyline, which has the rarefied sparseness of allegory, Loom eliminates most of what we expect out of an adventure game. Bobbin Threadbare, the hero of the piece, can carry exactly one object with him: a “distaff,” which he can use to “spin” a variety of magical “drafts” out of notes by tapping them out on an onscreen musical staff. Gameplay revolves almost entirely around discovering new drafts and using them to solve puzzles.

The ancestor of Loom’s drafts is the spell book the player added to in Infocom’s Enchanter series. There as well you cast spells to solve puzzles — and, in keeping with the “juicy” approach, also got to enjoy many amusing effects when you cast them in the wrong places. But, as we saw in our earlier explication of one of Enchanter’s puzzles, you can’t always rely on your spell book in that game. In Loom, on the other hand, your distaff and your Book of Patterns — i.e., drafts — is all you have. And yet there’s a lot you can do with them, as the following will illustrate.

Bobbin eavesdrops from the gallery as Bishop Mandible discusses his plan for world domination with one of his lackeys. His chief smith is just sharpening the last of the swords that will be required. Bobbin has a pattern for “sharpen.” That’s obviously not what we want to do here, but maybe he could cast it in reverse…

Unfortunately, he can’t spin drafts as long as the smith is beating away at the sword.

Luckily, the smith pauses from time to time to show off his handwork.

Why it works: Loom’s minimalist mechanics might seem to allow little scope for clever puzzle design. Yet, as this puzzle indicates, such isn’t the case at all. Indeed, there’s a certain interactive magic, found by no means only in adventures games, to the re-purposing of simple mechanics in clever new ways. Loom isn’t a difficult game, but it isn’t entirely trivial either. When the flash of inspiration comes that a draft might be cast backward, it’s as thrilling as the thrills that accompany any other puzzle on this list.

It’s also important to note the spirit of this puzzle, the way it’s of a piece with the mythic dignity of the game as a whole. One can’t help but be reminded of that famous passage from the Book of Isaiah: “And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

Our puzzling design lesson: Wonderful games can be and have been built around a single mechanic. If you’ve got a great one, don’t hesitate to milk it for all it’s worth. Also: puzzles can illuminate — or undermine — a game’s theme as well as any other of its aspects can.

9. Teaching the cannibals how to get a head in The Secret of Monkey Island

By Ron Gilbert, Lucasfilm Games, 1990

How it works: For many of us, the first Monkey Island game is the Platonic ideal of a comedic graphic adventure: consistently inventive, painstakingly fair, endlessly good-natured, and really, truly funny. Given this, I could have chosen to feature any of a dozen or more of its puzzles here. But what I’ve chosen — yes, even over the beloved insult sword-fighting — is something that still makes me smile every time I think about it today, a quarter-century after I first played this game. Just how does a young and ambitious, up-and-coming sort of cannibal get a head?

Hapless hero Guybrush Threepwood needs the human head that the friendly local cannibals are carrying around with them.

Wait! He’s been carrying a certain leaflet around for quite some time now.

What’s the saying? “If you teach a man to fish…”

Why it works: One might call this the graphic-adventure equivalent of the text-adventure puzzle that opened this list. More than that, though, this puzzle is pure Ron Gilbert at his best: dumb but smart, unpretentious and unaffected, effortlessly likable. When you look through your inventory, trying to figure out where you’re going to find a head on this accursed island, and come upon that useless old leaflet you’ve been toting around all this time, you can’t help but laugh out loud.

Our puzzling design lesson: A comedic adventure game should be, to state the obvious, funny. And the comedy should live as much in the puzzles as anywhere else.

10. Tracking down the pendant in The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes

By Eric Lindstrom and R.J. Berg, Electronic Arts, 1992

How it works: This interactive mystery, one of if not the finest game ever to feature Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary detective, is notable for its relative disinterest in the physical puzzles that are the typical adventure game’s stock in trade. Instead it has you collecting more abstract clues about means, motive, and opportunity, and piecing them together to reveal the complicated murder plot at the heart of the story.

It all begins when Holmes and Watson get called to the scene of the murder of an actress named Sarah Carroway: a dark alley just outside the Regency Theatre, where she was a star performer. Was it a mugging gone bad? Was it the work of Jack the Ripper? Or was it something else? A mysterious pendant becomes one of the keys to the case…

We first learn about Sarah Carroway’s odd pendent when we interview her understudy at the theater. It was a recent gift from Sarah’s sister, and she had always worn it since receiving it. Yet it’s missing from her body.

We find the workplace of Sarah’s sister Anna. She’s also in show biz, a singer at the Chancery Opera House. The woman who shared a box with Sarah during Anna’s performances confirms the understudy’s story about the pendant. More ominously, we learn that Anna too has disappeared.

We track down Anna’s solicitor and surrogate father-figure, a kindly old chap named Jacob Farthington. He tells us that Anna bore a child to one Lord Brumwell some years ago, but was forced to give him up to Brumwell without revealing his parentage. Now, she’s been trying to assert her rights as the boy’s mother.

More sleuthing and a little bit of sneaking leads us at last to Anna’s bedroom. There we find her diary. It states that she’s hired a detective following Sarah’s murder — not, regrettably, Sherlock Holmes — to find out what became of the pendant. It seems that it contained something unbelievably important. “A humble sheet of foolscap, depending on what’s written upon it, can be more precious than diamonds,” muses Holmes.

Yet more detecting on our part reveals that a rather dense blackguard named Blackwood pawned the pendant. Soon he confesses to Sarah’s murder: “I got overexcited. I sliced her to make her stop screaming.” He admits that he was hired to recover a letter by any means necessary by “an old gent, very high tone,” but he doesn’t know his name. (Lord Brumwell, perhaps?) It seems he killed the wrong Carroway — Anna rather than Sarah should have been his target — but blundered onto just the thing he was sent to recover anyway. But then, having no idea what the pendant contained, he pawned it to make a little extra dough out of the affair. Stupid is as stupid does…

So where is the pendant — and the proof of parentage it must have contained — now? We visit the pawn shop where Blackwood unloaded it. The owner tells us that it was bought by an “inquiry agent” named Moorehead. Wait… there’s a Moorehead & Gardner Detective Agency listed in the directory. This must be the detective Anna hired! Unfortunately, we are the second to ask about the purchaser of the pendant. The first was a bit of “rough trade” named Robert Hunt.

We’re too late. Hunt has already killed Gardner, and we find him just as he’s pushing Moorehead in front of a train. We manage to nick Hunt after the deed is done, but he refuses to say who hired him or why — not that we don’t have a pretty strong suspicion by this point.

Luckily for our case, neither Gardner nor Moorehead had the pendant on him at the time of his death. We find it at last in their safe. Inside the pendant, as we suspected, is definitive proof of the boy’s parentage. Now we must pay an urgent visit to Lord Brumwell. Is Anna still alive, or has she already met the same fate as her sister? Will Brumwell go peacefully? We’ll have to play further to find out…

Why it works: Even most allegedly “serious” interactive mysteries are weirdly bifurcated affairs. The game pretty much solves the mystery for you as you jump through a bunch of unrelated hoops in the form of arbitrary object-oriented puzzles that often aren’t all that far removed from the comedic likes of Monkey Island. Even some pretty good Sherlock Holmes games, like Infocom’s Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels, wind up falling into this trap partially or entirely. Yet The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes stands out for the way it really does ask you to think like a detective, making connections across its considerable length and breadth. While you could, I suppose, brute-force your way through even the multifaceted puzzle above by visiting all of the locations and showing everything to every suspect, it’s so much more satisfying to go back through Watson’s journal, to muse over what you’ve discovered so far, and to make these connections yourself. Lost Files refuses to take the easy way out, choosing instead to take your role as the great detective seriously. For that, it can only be applauded.

Our puzzling design lesson: Graham Nelson once indelibly described an adventure game as “a narrative at war with a crossword.” I would say in response that it really need not be that way. A game need not be a story with puzzles grafted on; the two can harmonize. If you’re making an interactive mystery, in other words, don’t force your player to fiddle with sliding blocks while the plot rolls along without any other sort of input from her; let your player actually, you know, solve a mystery.

(Once again, my thanks to Casey Muratori for suggesting this article. And thank you to Mike Taylor and Alex Freeman for suggesting some of the featured puzzles.)

Comments
45 Responses

- Aula

November 2, 2018 at 6:46 pm

“it’s only really objectionable aspects”

should be “its”

“But if have made sure”

should be “if you have”

“Lord Bromwell”

should be “Brumwell”

- Jimmy Maher

November 2, 2018 at 8:46 pm

Thanks!

- Joe Pranevich

November 2, 2018 at 7:11 pm

As you know, I have been playing through all of Infocom in order and so I am delighted to see not only that you agree with some of my favorite puzzles that I have seen so far, but also that I have new ones to look forward to… in LGOT and Plundered Hearts of all places! I would not have expected those games to have highlights of puzzle design.

Thinking back on ones that you didn’t mention, I remain extremely fond of the time machine puzzle in Zork III, for example. I also really like the moving room puzzle in the original mainframe Zork more than the one in Zork III because it was a closed puzzle in the original and there was no invisibility potion alternate solution. I could talk for far too long about how much I like Infocom puzzles when done well (and hate them when they are not).

One aspect that you didn’t get into but which I consider when judging puzzles is whether they are “open” or “closed”. These are my terms so please tell me if there are better ones. A “closed” puzzle is one where you know you have all of the tools at your disposal and you just need to puzzle it out, while an “open” puzzle usually involves you moving and object from place to place. You might have to explore the whole game before you can solve an open puzzle, but a closed one doesn’t make you feel like you might be missing a key ingredient. The Enchanter puzzle about is an open one (because you cannot solve it until you find the key item) while the HHG puzzle is mostly closed (because while you need to transport the mail from the house, you are close enough to the beginning of the game that there isn’t a wide puzzle-space to explore). The best puzzles straddle the line, but I am very fond of a closed puzzle done right and rather sick of fetch quests at this point.

(The most stupidly clever example of a “closed” puzzle is the beginning of Adventure International’s “Hulk” game for Marvel. You awaken as Bruce Banner and are trapped in a chair. You know there MUST be a way out, but you cannot see it and you couldn’t have missed an item anywhere. The solution is to type “bite me” or a similar construction to cause Banner to Hulk-out. The rest of the game isn’t quite that clever since it involves lots of item fetching, but the beginning still brings a smile to my face.)

- Jimmy Maher

November 2, 2018 at 8:58 pm

Yes, that plays a big role in terms of solubility. I tend to refer to it as the combinatorial-explosion factor, but your terminology works just as well. It’s one thing to solve a difficult puzzle when you know all of the pieces are to hand and it’s just a matter of working through it, another when you aren’t sure if you have what you need. In this context, I think of Graham Nelson’s two big puzzlefests Curses! and Jigsaw. The first is all but impossible to solve because there are dozens of puzzles spread out over a huge, open geography, and it’s really, really hard to figure out what to be working on at any given point. Jigsaw is at least as large a game, but is made up of a dozen or so self-contained vignettes. So, even though the puzzles are equally difficult, I find it much more soluble. It’s a good idea for designers making big games to look for ways to compartmentalize them.

While the 128 K restriction of the standard Z-Machine probably kept Infocom’s games freer than they otherwise might have been from this issue, Zork Zero is another notable offender.

Don’t let the fact that Leather Goddess is a raunchy comedy fool you, by the way. It’s an absolutely brilliant, tight adventure-game design, Steve Meretzky’s best ever in my opinion.

- Torbjörn Andersson

November 3, 2018 at 7:51 am

“As you know, I have been playing through all of Infocom in order and so I am delighted to see not only that you agree with some of my favorite puzzles that I have seen so far, but also that I have new ones to look forward to… in LGOT and Plundered Hearts of all places! I would not have expected those games to have highlights of puzzle design.”

While the game as a whole isn’t among my top Infocom games (though nowhere near the bottom either), and even though the justification for having to solve it at all was a bit weak, there’s a puzzle in The Lurking Horror involving an underground tunnel with a pack of rats at one end and a brick wall at the other that made me feel immensely clever when I finally figured it out.

- Jimmy Maher

November 3, 2018 at 8:32 am

You mean the puzzle involving the elevator and the chain? That’s a great one, definitely.

- Torbjörn Andersson

November 3, 2018 at 1:50 pm

“You mean the puzzle involving the elevator and the chain? That’s a great one, definitely.”

That’s the one.

- Lisa H.

November 2, 2018 at 8:22 pm

untangling cream — whatever that is

For hair, I always assumed. (Google it, or the similar “detangling cream”.) I suppose you don’t have long, curly, or afro-texture hair!

(This being a comedy game, we won’t question how these two are actually communicating with each other.)

Seems like they could plausibly have discussed the plan in advance. Dave only needs to be able to hear Ed leave the room. Bernard doesn’t actually have to say anything to him at the time.

(Of course, nowadays the answer is cell phones.)

BTW, “spinning drafts” (I was going to complain that you said “weave patterns”, but I see you used the other form in the picture caption) uses terminology of actual hand-spinning. A distaff is a tool to hold the wound mass of unspun fiber, and one hand “drafts” it off into the yarn being spun (draft here meaning the same as draft beer or a military draft – to draw off a portion of). The fact that this is considered a feminine occupation makes it an interesting design choice re: having a male protagonist.

- Jimmy Maher

November 2, 2018 at 9:09 pm

I did kind of mix my terminologies, didn’t I? Fixed it. Thanks!

- Steven Marsh

November 2, 2018 at 10:43 pm

Great list with great analysis.

I tried to think of some puzzles that stuck with me (in a good way), and I was surprised to realize how few actually did. (That is, most puzzles I remember because they were annoying.) I don’t know if that’s because it’s been years since I played most of these, but it’s still odd.

Still, this isn’t a list of “competing” puzzles, so much as ones that sprang to mind as I considered some puzzles I appreciated.

• Defeating the dragon in Zork II — This is one that seems relatively fair, by the standards of old-school Infocom. (You’ll probably be reloading a few times, but the logistics of it make sense.)

• Many from Timequest — I consider it one of my favorite adventure games, and I still love it. To pick two: The “philosophers of the ages” puzzle is one that I always found satisfying (from both a puzzle standpoint, a “move the plot forward” standpoint, and a way to make the time theme really hit home). I also (unlike our Humble Host) really enjoyed the “messages from Zeke” puzzle, which I felt was satisfying and played with the medium a bit more than other games.

• The hamster-sized sweater from Day of the Tentacle — It perfectly fit the cartoon universe they’d established. (Hmm . . . and I think I have a soft spot for games involving time travel.)

• The map “puzzle” from Spellcasting 101 — Again, I love puzzles that mess with the medium and subvert expectations.

And finally, it’s not a puzzle per se (since I believe you have no choice but to solve it eventually), but I have to give a special nod to “A Pirate I Was Meant to Be” from The Curse of Monkey Island . . . probably one of my most beloved adventure-game memories of all time. (If other players were anything like me, I think the true challenge of this puzzle was to not solve it as long as possible . . .)

- Duncan Stevens

November 3, 2018 at 12:55 am

Defeating the dragon in Zork II

This one actually never made sense to me. It’s not obvious that a dragon breathing fire on a glacier would cause the dragon to inhale water and drown.

- Jimmy Maher

November 3, 2018 at 8:26 am

Timequest has a lot of very good puzzles, but also a light sprinkling of less-good ones, enough that it didn’t make my personal Hall of Fame. I wanted to restrict this list to truly top-notch games.

I’m sure something from Day of the Tentacle will make the list if I ever do another one of these. I called Secret of Monkey Island the Platonic ideal of comedic graphic adventures here, but if anything Day of the Tentacle tops it. A brilliant, brilliant game in every respect, from individual puzzles to overall design structure, writing to aesthetic presentation.

- Jason

November 3, 2018 at 8:28 am

The song from CoMI was one of the only gags in a computer game that’s ever made me laugh out loud. Even for a Monkey Island game, I found the sequence completely unexpected and very, very funny.

- Reiko

November 4, 2018 at 5:27 am

Yes, I really liked those puzzles from Timequest too, but I agree that overall Timequest is a rather weaker game (especially its ending, argh…I had a lot to say about it after my Adventure Gamer playthrough).

- Duncan Stevens

November 3, 2018 at 1:08 am

Hmmm. I know this isn’t necessarily a Top 10 Ever, but the Plundered Hearts puzzle wouldn’t be particularly high on my list. It just wasn’t obvious to me that you could gather enough spice from the food to incapacitate him (and until just now, I didn’t realize THROW worked; BLOW made more sense, but it’s an uncommon IF verb), I spent attempt after attempt fiddling with those damn goblets, and I got tired of the “fate worse than death” every time I couldn’t figure it out. It’s not terrible, but it didn’t click for me.

Now, the Sorcerer coal mine puzzle and the Spellbreaker sand room puzzle, on the other hand…

- Jimmy Maher

November 3, 2018 at 8:31 am

The Plundered Hearts puzzle was appealing to me because of its more action-oriented, think-on-your-feet qualities. It’s a nicely *embodied* puzzle, where thinking like your character would in the moment leads to success. It shows that adventure-game puzzles need not be all cool exercises in abstract logic.

- Allan Holland

November 3, 2018 at 4:27 pm

I hope this article leads to (x where x > 4) adventure game puzzle design tropes: e.g., time travel puzzles like in Zork III or Sorcerer, agent puzzles like the rainbow turtle or the adventurer from Enchanter, mechanistic manipulation puzzles like the coal machine from Zork I or the microwave from Lurking Horror, vehicle puzzles like the Zork II balloon, etc. Your insights into each type vis a vis the ludic narrative would be good reading.

- JudgeDeadd

November 4, 2018 at 2:34 am

It’s for this reason that I quite enjoyed Last Express. The way the game is designed, it feels like you’re really in the middle of an adventure movie/novel, and the way to progress (especially in the beginning parts) is by doing what would come naturally to the hero of such a story, as opposed to untangling some abstract puzzle or having to MacGyver your way past contrived problems.

- Alex Freeman

November 8, 2018 at 6:32 am

Yes, in fact, what I really like about Plundered Hearts is how much it resembles a traditional story that keeps moving instead of having the protagonist wander back and forth across some “obstacle course” so to speak. It resembles interactive fiction much more than almost all of Infocom’s other games. The only one that’s somewhat comparable, I think, is Border Zone, but I see that as a failed experiment because it doesn’t really work in an all-text medium.

- Ken Gagne

November 3, 2018 at 6:19 pm

This would be a great GDC talk (or other similar event/venue).

- Gnoman

November 4, 2018 at 1:14 am

Having never played Leather Goddesses, I had no idea this puzzle existed. I encountered the letter-remover in the brilliant title Counterfeit Monkey, and never realized that that game was based around a gag from a much older one.

- John

November 7, 2018 at 12:57 am

Counterfeit Monkey is a gem for sure, and it expands out from the concept of the t-remover to a huge scope… as you might expect since the wordplay-gameplay spans the whole game! The “juicy” nature Jimmy mentions is maintained too; there’s a massive amount of words you can manipulate. The story and worldbuilding are excellent too.

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- Martin

November 4, 2018 at 11:04 am

I assumed that the dragon in Adventure was an oriental dragon because of where it was in the game. I think they were somewhat less agressive than a typical western dragon and generally more defeatable.

- Mike Taylor

November 4, 2018 at 6:35 pm

Many thanks for writing this, Jimmy (and for including the Enchanter maze) — you’re right that it’s nice to be able to read something wholly positive, all about what works well. I’ve never played any of the newer games in this list, but you’ve really got me wanting to try Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island in particular.

I’m slightly surprised that nothing from Spellbreaker made the list; but I suppose that the brilliance of that game is not so much in the individual puzzles as how it all fits together. Still, the very final move — placing the object in the tesseract — would have been fascinating to analyse for its narrative implications.

I agree with Steven Marsh that the Zork II dragon is glorious. One of the few puzzles where I laughed out loud when I found the solution and saw it working.

- Jimmy Maher

November 4, 2018 at 7:01 pm

Spellbreaker was indeed a hard game to forego, but I was trying to include a wide variety of puzzles types and games, and including two games from the same trilogy wasn’t really compatible with that. Maybe I’ll do something on holistic meta-puzzles in games someday. (In that spirit, I very nearly included the final puzzle of The Fool’s Errand in this list, but decided not to in the end because a) it’s not really an adventure game and b) it would be really hard to adequately describe.)

- DZ-Jay

November 5, 2018 at 10:59 am

It seems to me that all the “why it works” reasons for these puzzles are highly subjective. An argument could be made (and in fact you have done so in the past, with other examples of similar puzzles) that they are all bad puzzles for the very same reasons you praise them: obscurity, obtuseness, arbitrary moon-logic, unfair “learn-by-death-and-restore,” “read-the-mind-of-the-programmer,” etc.

Perhaps it’s because you enjoyed those games specifically, or they were your first encounter of that type of puzzle, or nostalgia, or whatever; but it seems that these are not so much exemplars of good design as mere “puzzles I really enjoyed”; and the reasons “why it works” are more rationalization after the fact.

The design lessons seem also rather generic, at least when compared to those promulgated by Graham and Gilbert in the past.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like some of those puzzles, but probably because I hold the games in high esteem already due to a positive experience, influenced by many factors, and not due to some objectively good puzzle design principle. ;)

I’m probably in the minority here for saying this, but I think it is important to be a bit more critical in our analysis of these games, if at the very least because their legendary and memorable posititions in the canon demands it.

dZ.

- Mike Taylor

November 5, 2018 at 11:40 am

Come on, DZ-Jay, it’s not as though Jimmy has ever held back from being critical in his analysis! That’s true not only of straight-up bad games, but also of acknowledge classics and even some of Jimmy’s personal favourites. Whatever’s going on here, it’s certainly not moon-eyed uncritical positivity. (Also, for what it’s worth, I can’t see any reason to disagree with any of the lessons drawn from these specific puzzles.)

- Ingix

November 5, 2018 at 2:00 pm

I think the point of DZ-Jay is that this is a highly personal list of “puzzles I enjoyed” from our esteemed blog author, but that it maybe isn’t a list of “objectively good puzzles”, whatever that may mean.

The “Plundered Hearts” example to me reads like a typical “read the author’s mind” solution (I have to say I didn’t play the game). It’s not that its a totally unrealistic, but going into this encounter there might have been a dozen directions that it could develop and many unforseeable things could have driven it in any other direction.

I assume that a person’s appreciation for a puzzle is also highly dependend on if they could solve it themselves. There is a “think outside the box” puzzle (dealing with the computer running the game) at the very end of a Simon the Sorcerer game (part 3, I think). After a long time, I ‘got it’ and it was immensely satisfying.

Many years later I played a Deponia game (part 2 I think) and it had a puzzle I couldn’t solve. After consulting the walkthrough, I was dismayed to see that it had a solution that broke the 4th wall and dealt with the program as running on a computer on a meta-level.

Both cases are rather similiar in their solution, but my personal memory of them is totally opposite. I’m not sure if either of them was good/bad design.

- Peter Ferrie

November 6, 2018 at 5:24 am

Great article, as always.
Plundered Hearts is the only one from the list that I haven’t played yet.
Is the second reference to the leather bottle a bug?

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2018 at 8:46 am

No, I think that was me. I was pulling from a couple of transcripts to try to get the perfect run-through. Fixed it. Thanks!

- Ross

November 6, 2018 at 11:22 pm

The puzzle from Loom reminds me quite a lot of one of the last puzzles in Death Gate. Found it deeply satisfying, though the fact that it’s the only time you have to interact with the UI that directly detracts somewhat.

( Spoilers for the curious: Fcryypnfgvat vf qbar ol qenjvat eharf va gur nve, juvpu lbh nffrzoyr va n fcrpvny zbqny HV. Ng bar cbvag va gur tnzr, lbh frr n ivfvba bs n jvmneq pbzzvggvat fhvpvqr ivn n frys-vzzbyngvba fcryy, sebz juvpu lbh yrnea gur fcryy, gubhtu vg frrzvatyl unf ab tbbq hfr. Arne gur raqtnzr, lbhe cngu vf oybpxrq ol n zveebe-pybar, jub zveebef lbhe rirel zbir, oybpxvat lbhe jnl, gubhtu bayl jbhaqvat lbh vs lbh qb gur fnzr gb uvz. Vs lbh gel gb pnfg n fcryy ba uvz, ur zveebef gung nf jryy, gubhtu vg unf ab rssrpg nf gur eharf ner jebat. Ohg sebz gur eharf lbh’ir pbyyrpgrq yrneavat bgure fcryyf, lbh’yy unir gur evtug barf gb nffrzoyr gur frys-vzzbyngvba fcryy ONPXJNEQF, juvpu lbh pna gura pnfg ol vachggvat gur eharf znahnyyl,pnhfvat lbhe qbccyrtnatre gb vapvarengr uvzfrys)

- Aula

November 7, 2018 at 7:15 pm

When I played Death Gate, I didn’t realize that I could cast spells by simply selecting them from the list of known spells. So, as I was very familiar with casting spells by tracing symbols, it was kinda obvious how to solve that particular puzzle.

- Ross

November 8, 2018 at 3:43 am

I was just thinking that the puzzle would be more satisfying if you’d gone through the game assembling spells manually, but the whole rest of the game would feel a lot more tedious for it.

Though I did spend the whole game trying to discover “hidden” spells by assembling runes manually – as I recall, the one you actually need to do is the only combination of runes you can assemble that isn’t a spell but actually makes a contiguous path.

- Aula

November 7, 2018 at 7:02 pm

As far as fourth-wall-breaking puzzles go, you can’t do much better (or worse, depending on your point of view) than System’s Twilight, where in the end you have to restart the system. To do this you must quit the *game* and run it again.

Anyway, one of my favorite puzzles of all time is at the end of Trilby’s Notes. You are captured and about to be sacrificed, and there’s nothing you can do to about it. That is, there’s nothing you can do to prevent your death (at this point you are almost dead anyway) but maybe you could avoid the sacrifice by dying prematurely, except that you can’t commit suicide by any ordinary method. However, since this is a parser-controlled game, you can just type “die”… which happens to work.

- Glorkvorn

November 7, 2018 at 10:05 pm

Is it fair to say that a lot of this has to do with finding the right level of difficulty for the puzzle? Too hard, and you just get stuck and frustrated, which is especially bad when it’s a puzzle that you *have* to finish before you can do anything else in the game. But if it’s too easy, it’s barely a puzzle at all. EG:

> Open door
The door is locked
> use key in door
*click
> Open door
You open the door

Not exactly thrilling stuff. But it just depends on the player, what they happen to think of, and especially how much experience they have with these games. For someone playing an adventure game for the very first time, using a key to unlock a door might be about the right level of difficulty.

I think the healer’s ring puzzle in the point-and-click version of Quest for Glory is pretty much like that- the ring is *very* obvious on the screen, and the solutions are straightforward. It pretty much just introduces you to the game system, and the idea that there might be more than one way of solving things.

- Alex Freeman

November 8, 2018 at 6:22 am

I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but Bob Bates has written a book simply titled Game Design. Chapter 6 deals with puzzle design. If you ever do another puzzle article, you could give real-game examples of the different types of puzzles he covers such as “excluded middle” puzzles.

- Szare Trilby

November 11, 2018 at 12:15 pm

Great write-up on some of the most iconic puzzles, I’ve greatly enjoyed reading and remembering those :)

Also, regarding Loom, there is another interesting solution to the “sword” puzzle. Instead of blunting it, you can twist it using the draft learned from the Tornado (DEFC). You can see it in this video here:
https://youtu.be/zQJVM-R3PxY?t=3477

- ag

November 19, 2018 at 12:08 pm

That’s what I always did! I didn’t even realize I could blunt it!

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- Johannes Paulsen

December 3, 2018 at 9:08 pm

The Hitchhiker babel fish puzzle is a well-remembered one…but great?

It struck me as a miserable one due to the time limit plus the fact that the game will allow you to proceed without solving it — in fact it will carry you along to the next scene if you don’t solve it fast enough.

Also — I seem to recall going back after the fact and trying it step by step and found that (on my version — C64 ) the game wouldn’t let me go through every single step one at a time and finish it. (E.g., hang gown on hook, press button. Put towel over drain, press button. And so on.)

A cruel puzzle, and one that was ridiculous for what was supposed to be a ‘Standard’ level game!

- Jimmy Maher

December 3, 2018 at 9:41 pm

As walking-dead scenarios go, this doesn’t strike me as so terribly cruel. It will be pretty obvious you’ve left something undone, and you’ll be blocked from getting any further at the very next scene.

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- Mike

March 1, 2019 at 7:54 pm

Another great one in SOMI is opening the cereal on The Sea Monkey. Took me forever to figure that out. You need do it to advance the store and they give you a hint with the bookmark.

- Mike

March 1, 2019 at 7:55 pm

story not store…

The Designer’s Designer
November 16, 2018

Dan Bunten delivers the keynote at the 1990 Game Developers Conference.

Dan Bunten and his little company Ozark Softscape could look back on a tremendous 1984 as that year came to an end. Seven Cities of Gold had been a huge success, Electronic Arts’s biggest game of the year, doing much to keep the struggling publisher out of bankruptcy court by selling well over 100,000 copies. Bunten himself had become one the most sought-after interviewees in the industry. Everyone who got the chance to speak with him seemed to agree that Seven Cities of Gold was only the beginning, that he was destined for even greater success.

As it turned out, though, 1984 would be the high-water mark for Bunten, at least in terms of that grubbiest but most implacable metric of success in games: quantity of units shifted. The years that followed would be frustrating as often as they would be inspiring, as Bunten pursued a vision that seemed at odds with every trend in the industry, all the while trying to thread the needle between artistic fulfillment and commercial considerations.

Heart of Africa

In the wake of Seven Cities of Gold’s success, EA badly wanted a follow-up with a similar theme, so much so that they offered Bunten a personal bonus of $5000 to make it Ozark’s next project. The result was Heart of Africa, a game which at first glance looks like precisely the sequel EA was asking for but that actually plays quite differently. Instead of exploring the Americas as Hernán Cortés during the 1600s, it has you exploring Africa as an intrepid Victorian adventurer (“Livingston, I presume?”). In keeping with the changed time and location, your goal isn’t to conquer the land for your country — Africa had, for better or for worse, already been thoroughly partitioned among the European nations by 1890, the year in which the game takes place — but simply to discover and to map. In the best tradition of Victorian adventure novels like King Solomon’s Mines, your ultimate goal is to find the tomb of a mythical Egyptian pharaoh. Bunten later admitted that the differences from Heart of Africa’s predecessor weren’t so much a product of original design intent as improvisation after he had bumbled into an historical context that just wouldn’t work as a more faithful sequel.

Indeed, Bunten in later years dismissed Heart of Africa, his most adventure-like game ever and his last ever that was single-player only, as nothing more than “a game done to please EA”: “I honestly didn’t want to do the project.” Its biggest problem hinges on the fact that its environment is randomly generated each time you start a new game, itself an attempt to remedy the most obvious failing of adventure games as a commercial proposition: their lack of replayability. Yet the random maps can never live up to what a hand-crafted map, designed for challenge and dramatic effect, might have been; the “story” in Heart of Africa is all too clearly just a bunch of shifting interchangeable parts. Bunten later acknowledged that “the attempt to make a replayable adventure game made for a shallow product (which seems true in every other case designers have tried it as well). I guess that if elements are such that they can be randomly shifted then they [aren’t] substantive enough to make for a compelling game. So, even though I don’t like linear games, they seem necessary to have the depth a good story needs.”

Heart of Africa did quite well for EA upon its release in 1985 — well enough, in fact, to become Bunten’s third most successful game of all time. Yet the whole experience left a bad taste in his mouth. He came away from the project determined to return to the guiding vision behind his first game for EA, the commercially unsuccessful but absolutely brilliant M.U.L.E.: a vision of computer games that people played together rather than alone. In the future, he would continue to compromise at times on the style and subject matter of his games in order to sell them to his publishers, but he would never again back away from his one great principle. All of his games henceforward would be multiplayer — first, foremost, and in one case exclusively. In fact, that one case would be his very next game.

Robot Rascals

The success of his previous two games having opened something of a window of opportunity with EA, Bunten charged ahead on what he would later describe as his single “most experimental game.” Robot Rascals is a multiplayer scavenger hunt in which two physical decks of cards are integral to the game. Each player controls a robot, and must use it to collect the four items shown on the cards in her hand and return with them to home base in order to win. The game lives on the razor’s edge of pure chaos, the product both of random events generated by the computer and of a second deck of cards — the “specials” — which among other things can force players to draw new item cards, trash their old cards, or trade cards among one another; thus everyone’s goals are shifting almost constantly. As always in a Dan Bunten game, there are lots of thoughtful features here, from ways to handicap the game for players of different ages or skill levels to three selectable levels of overall complexity. He designed it to be “a game that anyone could play” rather than one limited to “special-interest groups like role-playing people or history buffs.” It can be a lot of fun, even if it’s not quite on the level of M.U.L.E. (then again, what is, right?). But this latest bid to make computer games acceptable family entertainment wound up selling hardly at all upon its release in 1986, ending Bunten’s two-game commercial hot streak.

By this point in Bunten’s career, changes in his personal life were beginning to have a major impact on the games he made. In 1985, while still working on Heart of Africa, he had divorced his second wife and married his third, with all the painful complications such disruptions entail when one is leaving children behind with the former spouse. In 1986, he and his new wife moved from Little Rock, Arkansas, to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, so she could complete a PhD. This event marked the effective end of Ozark Softscape as anything but a euphemism for Dan Bunten himself and whatever programmers and artists he happened to contract work out to. The happy little communal house/office where Dan and Bill Bunten, Jim Rushing, and Alan Watson had created games, with a neighborhood full of eager testers constantly streaming through the living room, was no more; only Watson continued to work on Bunten’s games from Robot Rascals on, and then more as just another hired programmer than a valued design voice. Even after moving back to Little Rock in 1988, Bunten would never be able to recapture the communal alchemy of 1982 to 1985.

Coupled with these changes were other, still more ominous ones in Dan Bunten himself. Those who knew him during these years generally refer only vaguely to his “problems,” and this discretion of course does them credit; I too have no desire to psychoanalyze the man. What does seem clear, however, is that he was growing increasingly unhappy as time wore on. He became more demanding of his colleagues, difficult enough to work with that many of them decided it just wasn’t worth it, even as he became more erratic in his own habits, perhaps due to an alcohol intake that struck many as alarming.

Yet Bunten was nothing if not an enigmatic personality. At the same time that close friends were worrying about his moodiness and his drinking, he could show up someplace like The Computer Game Developers Conference and electrify the attendees with his energy and ideas. Certainly his eyes could still light up when he talked about the games he was making and wanted to make. The worrisome questions were how much longer he would be allowed to make those games in light of their often meager sales, and, even more pressingly, why his eyes didn’t seem to light up about much else in his life anymore.

Modem Wars

But, to return to the firmer ground of the actual games he was continuing to make: Modem Wars, his next one, marked the beginning of a new chapter in his tireless quest to get people playing computer games together. “We’ve failed at gathering people around the computer,” Bunten said before starting work on it. “We’re going to have to connect them out of the back by connecting their computers to each other.” He would make, in other words, a game played by two people on two separate computers, connected via modem.

Modem Wars was known as Sport of War until just prior to its release by EA in 1988, and in many ways that was a better title. Its premise is a new version of Bunten’s favorite sport of football, played not by individual athletes but by infantry, artillery, and even aircraft, if you can imagine such a thing. One might call it a mashup between two of his early designs for SSI: the strategic football simulator Computer Quarterback and the proto-real-time-strategy game Cytron Masters.

It’s the latter aspect that makes Modem Wars especially visionary. The game was nothing less than an online real-time-strategy death match years before the world had heard of such a thing. While a rudimentary artificial intelligence was provided for single-player play, it was made clear by the game’s very title that this was strictly a tool for learning to play rather than the real point of the endeavor. Daniel Hockman’s review of Modem Wars for Computer Gaming World ironically describes the qualities of online real-time strategy as a potential “problem” and “marketing weakness” — the very same qualities which a later generation would take as the genre’s main attractions:

A sizable number of gamers are not used to thinking in real-time situations. They can spend hours ordering tens of thousands of men into mortal combat, but they wimp out when they have to think under fire. They want to play chess instead of speed chess. They want to analyze instead of act. As the enemy drones zero in on their comcen, they throw up their hands in frustration when it’s knocked out before they can extract themselves from the maelstrom of fire that has engulfed them.

Whether because gamers really were daunted by this need to think on their feet or, more likely, because of the relative dearth of fast modems and stable online connections in 1988, Modem Wars became another crushing commercial disappointment for Bunten. EA declared themselves “hesitant” to keep pursuing this direction in the wake of the game’s failure. Rather than causing Bunten to turn away from multiplayer gaming, this loss of faith caused him to turn away from EA.

In the summer of 1989, MicroProse Software announced that they had signed a five-year agreement with Bunten, giving them first rights to all of the games he made during that period. The great hidden driver behind the agreement was MicroProse’s own star designer Sid Meier, who had never hidden his enormous admiration for Bunten’s work. Bunten doubtless hoped that a new, more supportive publisher would mark the beginning of a new, more commercially successful era in his career. And in the beginning at least, such optimism would, for once, prove well-founded.

Command H.Q.

Known at first simply as War!, then as War Room, and finally as Command H.Q., Bunten’s first game for MicroProse was aptly described by its designer as being akin to an abstract, casual board game of military strategy, like Risk or Axis & Allies. The big wrinkle was that this beer-and-pretzels game was to be played in real time rather than turns. But, perhaps in response to complaints about his previous game like those voiced by Daniel Hockman above, the pace is generally far less frenetic this time around. Not only can the player select an overall speed, but the program itself actually takes charge to speed up the action when not much is happening and slow it down when things heat up. Although a computer opponent is provided, the designer’s real focus was once more on modem-to-modem play.

But, whatever its designer’s preferences, MicroProse notably de-emphasized the multiplayer component in their advertising upon Command H.Q.’s release in 1990, and this, combined with a more credible artificial intelligence for the computer opponent, gave it more appeal to the traditional wargame crowd than Modem Wars had demonstrated. Ditto a fair measure of evangelizing done by Computer Gaming World, with whom Bunten had always had a warm relationship, having even authored a regular column there for a few years in the mid-1980s. The magazine’s lengthy review concluded by saying, “This is the game we’ve all been waiting for”; they went on to publish two more lengthy articles on Command H.Q. strategy, and made it their “Wargame of the Year” for 1990. For all these reasons, Command H.Q. sold considerably better than had Bunten’s last couple of games; one report places its total sales at around 75,000 units, enough to make it his second most successful game ever.

Global Conquest

With that to buoy his spirits, Bunten made big plans for his next game, Global Conquest. “Think of it as Command H.Q. meets Seven Cities of Gold meets M.U.L.E.,” he said. Drawing heavily from Command H.Q. in particular, as well as the old grand-strategy classic Empire, he aimed to make a globe-spanning strategy game where economics would be as important as military maneuvers. He put together a large and vocal group of play testers on CompuServe, and tried to incorporate as many of their suggestions as possible, via a huge options panel that allowed players to customize virtually every aspect of the game, from the rules themselves to the geography and topography of the planet they were fighting over, all the way down to the look of the icons representing the individual units. This time, up to four humans could play against one another in a variety of ways: they could all play together by taking turns on one computer, or they could each play on their own computer via a local-area network, or four players could share two computers that were connected via modem. The game was turn-based, but with an interesting twist designed to eliminate analysis paralysis: when the first player mashed the “next turn” button, everyone else had just twenty seconds to finish up their own turns before the execution phase began.

In later years, Dan Bunten himself had little good to say about what would turn out to be his last boxed game. In fact, he called it his absolute “worst game” of all the ones he had made. While play-testing in general is a wonderful thing, and every designer should do as much of it as possible, a designer also needs to keep his own vision for what kind of game he wants to make at the forefront. In the face of prominent-in-their-own-right, opinionated testers like Computer Gaming World’s longtime wargame scribe Alan Emrich, Bunten failed to do this, and wound up creating not so much a single coherent strategy game as a sort of strategy-game construction set that baffled more than it delighted. “This game was a hodgepodge rather than an integration,” he admitted several years later. “It was just the opposite of the KISS doctrine. It was a kitchen-sink design. It had everything. Build your own game by struggling through several options menus.” He acknowledged as well that the mounting unhappiness in his personal life, which had now led to a divorce from his third wife, was making it harder and harder to do good work.

Released in 1992, Global Conquest under-performed commercially as well. In addition to the game’s intrinsic failings, it didn’t help matters that MicroProse had just five months prior released Sid Meier’s Civilization, another exercise in turn-based grand strategy on a global scale, also heavily influenced by Empire, that managed to be far more thematically and texturally ambitious while remaining more focused and playable as a game — albeit without the multiplayer element that was so important to Bunten.

But of course, there’s more to a game than whether it’s played by one person or more than one, and it strikes me as reasonable to question whether Bunten was beginning to lose his way as a designer in other respects even as he stuck so obstinately to his multiplayer guns. Setting aside their individual strengths and failings, the final three boxed games of Bunten’s career, with their focus on “wars” and “command” and “conquest,” can feel a little disheartening when compared to what came before. Games like M.U.L.E., Robot Rascals, and to some extent even Seven Cities of Gold and Heart of Africa had a different, friendlier, more welcoming personality. This last, more militaristic trio feels like a compromise, the product of a Dan Bunten who said that, if he couldn’t bring multiplayer gaming to the masses, he would settle for the grognard crowd, indulging their love for guns and tanks and bombs. So be it. Now, though, he was about to give that same crowd the shock of their lives.

In November of 1992, just months after completing the supremely masculine wargame Global Conquest, Dan Bunten had sexual-reassignment surgery, becoming the woman Danielle “Dani” Bunten Berry. (For continuity’s sake, I’ll generally continue to refer to her by the shorthand of “Bunten” rather than “Berry” for the remainder of this article.) It’s not for us to speculate about the personal trauma that must have accompanied such a momentous decision. What we can and should take note of, however, is that it was an unbelievably brave decision. For all that we still have a long way to go today when it comes to giving transsexuals the rights and respect they deserve, the early 1990s were a far less enlightened time than even our own on this issue. And it wasn’t as if Bunten could take comfort in the anything-goes anonymity of a New York City or San Francisco.  Dan Bunten had lived, and as Dani Bunten now continued to live, in the intensely conservative small-town atmosphere of Little Rock, Arkansas. Many of those closest to her disowned her, including her mother and her ex-wives, making it heartbreakingly difficult for her to maintain a relationship with her children. She had remained in Little Rock all these years, at no small cost to her career prospects, largely because of these ties of blood, which she had believed to be indissoluble. This rejection, then, must have felt like the bitterest of betrayals.

Dan Bunten with his beverage of choice.

The games industry as well, with its big-breasted damsels in distress and its machine-gun-toting male heroes, wasn’t exactly notable for its enlightened attitudes toward sex and gender. Many of Bunten’s old friends and colleagues would see her for the first time after her surgery and convalescence at the Game Developers Conference scheduled for April of 1993, and they looked forward to that event with almost as much trepidation as Bunten herself must have felt. It was all just so very unexpected. To whatever extent they had carried around a mental image of a man who would choose to become a woman, Dan Bunten didn’t fit the profile at all. He had been the games’ industry own Ozark Mountains boy, a true son of the South, always ready with his “folksy mountain humor” (read, “dirty jokes”). His rangy frame stood six feet two inches tall. He loved nothing more than a rough-and-tumble game of back-lot football, unless it be beer and poker afterward. As his three ex-wives and three children attested, he had certainly seemed to like women, but no one had ever imagined that he liked them enough to want to be one. What were they supposed to say to him — er, to her — now?

They needn’t have worried. Dani Bunten handled her coming-out party with the same low-key grace and humor she would display for the rest of her life as a woman. She said that she had made the switch to do her part to redress the gender imbalance inside the industry, and to help improve the aesthetics of game designers to match the improving aesthetics of their games. The tension dissipated, and soon everyone got into the spirit of the thing. A straw poll named Dani Bunten the game designer most likely to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show. A designer named Gordon Walton had a typical experience: “I was put off when she made the change to become Dani, until the minute I spoke to her. It was clear to me she was much happier as Dani, and if anything an even more incredible person.” Another GDC regular remembered the “unhappy man” from the 1992 event, “sitting on the hallway floor drinking and smoking,” and contrasted him with the “happy woman” he now saw.

No one with any interest in the inner workings of those strangest of creatures, their fellow humans, could fail to be fascinated by Bunten’s dispatches from both sides of the gender divide. “Aren’t there things you’ve always wanted to know about women but were afraid to ask?” she said. “Well, now’s your chance!”

I had to learn a lot to actually “count” as a woman! I had to learn how to walk, speak, dress as a woman. Those little things which are necessary so that other people don’t [feel] alienated.There’s a little summary someone gave me to make clear what being a woman means: as a woman you have to sing when you speak, dance when you walk, and you have to open your heart… I know how stereotypical that sounds, but it is true! Speech for a man is something completely different: the melody of speech is fast, monotone, and decreases at the end of a sentence. Sometimes, this still happens to me, and people are always irritated. Female speech is a little bit like song – we have a lot more melody and different speech patterns. Walking is really a bit like dancing: slower and connected, with a lot of subtle movements. I enjoyed it at once.

She had few filters when talking about the nitty-gritty details:

One of the saddest changes I had to deal with after my operation was the fact that I couldn’t aim anymore when urinating. Boys — I have two little sons and a daughter — simply love to aim.

Bunten said that, in keeping with her new identity, she didn’t feel much desire to design any more wargames; this led to the end of her arrangement with MicroProse. By way of compensation, Electronic Arts that year released a nicely done “commemorative edition” of Seven Cities of Gold, complete with dramatically upgraded graphics and sound to suit the times. Bunten had little to nothing to do with the project, but it sold fairly well, and perhaps helped to remind her of her roots.

In the same spirit, Bunten’s first real project after her transformation became a new version of M.U.L.E. EA’s founder Trip Hawkins had always named that game as one of his all-time favorites, and had frequently stated how disappointed he was that it had never gotten the attention it deserved. Now, Hawkins had left his day-to-day management role at EA to run 3DO, a spin-off company peddling a multimedia set-top box for the living room. Hawkins thought M.U.L.E. would be perfect for the platform, and recruited Bunten to make it happen. It was a dream project; showing excellent taste, she still regarded M.U.L.E. as the best thing she had ever done. But the dream quickly began to sour.

3DO first requested that, instead of taking turns managing their properties on the map, players all be allowed to do so simultaneously. Bunten somewhat reluctantly agreed. And then:

As soon as I added the simultaneity, it instantly put into their heads, “Why can’t we shoot at each other?” And I said, “No guns.” And they said, “What about bombs? Can we drop a bomb in front of you? It won’t hurt you. It will be a cartoon thing, it will just slow you down.” And I said, “You don’t get it. It’s changing the whole notion of how this thing works!”

[3DO is] staking its future on the idea of a new generation of hardware and therefore, you’d assume, a new generation of software, but they said, “No, our market is still 18 to 35, male. We need something with action, something with intensity.” Chrome and sizzle. Ugh.

In the end, Bunten walked out, disappointed enough that she seriously considered getting out of games altogether, going so far as to apply for jobs as the industrial engineer Dan Bunten had once been before his first personal computer came along.

Instead she found a role with a new company called Mpath as a design and strategy consultant. The goal of that venture was to bring multiplayer gaming to the new frontier of the World Wide Web, and its founders included her fellow game designer Brian Moriarty, of Infocom and LucasArts fame. She also studied the elusive concept of “games for girls” in association with a think tank set up by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen; some of her proposals would later come to market as the products of Purple Moon, Brenda Laurel’s brief-lived but important publisher of games for girls aged 8 to 14.

Offers to do conventional boxed games as sole designer, however, weren’t forthcoming; how much that was down to lingering personal prejudices against her for her changed sex and how much to the fact that the games she wanted to make just weren’t considered commercially viable must always be open for debate. Refusing as usual to be a victim, Bunten said that her “priorities had shifted” since her change anyway: “I don’t identify myself with the job as strongly as before.” Deciding that, for her, heaven was other people after a life spent programming computers, she devoured anthropology texts and riffed on Karl Jung’s theories of a collective unconscious. “Literature, anthropology, and even dance,” she noted, “have a good deal more to teach designers about human drives and abilities than the technologists of either end of California, who know silicon and celluloid but not much else.” So, she bided her time as a designer, waiting for a more inclusive ludic future to arrive. At the 1997 GDC, she described a prescient vision of “small creative shops” freed from the inherent conservatism of the “distribution trap” by the magic of the Internet.

That future would indeed come to pass — but, sadly, not in time for Dani Bunten Berry to see it. Shortly after delivering that speech, she went to see her doctor about a persistent cough, whereupon she was diagnosed with an advanced case of lung cancer. In one of those cruel ironies which always seem to dog the lives of us poor mortals, she had finally kicked a lifelong habit of heavy smoking just a few months before.

She appeared in public for the last time in May of 1998. The occasion was, once again, the Game Developers Conference, where she had always shone so. She struggled audibly for breath as she gave the last presentation of her life, entitled “Do Online Games Still Suck?,” but her passion carried her through. At the end of the conference, at a special ceremony held aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach Harbor, she was presented with the first ever GDC Lifetime Achievement Award. The master of ceremonies for that evening was her friend and colleague Brian Moriarty, who knew, like everyone else in attendance, that the end was near. He closed his heartfelt tribute thus:

It is no exaggeration to characterize tonight’s honoree as the world’s foremost authority on multiplayer computer games. Nobody has worked harder to demonstrate how technology can be used to realize one of the noblest of human endeavors: bringing people together. Historians of electronic gaming will find in these eleven boxes the prototypes of the defining art form of the 21st century.

As one of those historians, I can only heartily concur with his assessment.

It would be nice to say that Dani Bunten passed peacefully to her rest. But, as anyone with any experience with lung cancer will recognize, that just isn’t how the disease works. Throughout her life, she had done nothing the easy way, and her death — ugly, painful, and slow — was no exception. On the brighter side, she did reconcile to some extent with her mother and other family members and friends who had rejected her. The end came on July 3, 1998. Rather incredibly in light of the prodigious, multifaceted life she had lived, she was just 49 years old.

It’s a life which resists pigeonholing or sloganeering. Bunten herself explicitly rejected the role of transgender advocate, inside or outside of the games industry. Near the end of her life, she expressed regret for her decision to change her physical sex, saying she could have found ways to live in a more gender-fluid way without taking such a drastic step. Whether this was a reasoned evaluation or a product of the pain and trauma of terminal illness must remain, like so much else about her, an enigma.

What is clear, however, is that Bunten, through the grace and humor with which she handled her transition and through her refusal to go away and hide thereafter as some might have wished, taught others in the games industry who were struggling with similar issues of identity that a new gender need not mean a decisive break with every aspect of one’s past — that a prior life in games could continue to be a life in games even with a different pronoun attached. She did this in a quieter way than the speechifying some might have wished for from her, but, nevertheless, do it she did. Jessica Mulligan, who transitioned from male to female a few years after her, remembers meeting Bunten shortly before her own sexual-reassignment surgery, hoping to hear some “profound words on The Transition”: “While I was looking for spiritual guidance, she was telling me where to shop for shoes. Talk about keeping someone honest! Every change in our personal lives is profound to us. You still have to pay attention to the nuts and bolts or the change is meaningless.”

Danielle Bunten Berry does her makeup.

For some, of course — even for some with generally good intentions — Danielle Bunten Berry’s transgenderism will always be the defining aspect of her life, her career in games a mere footnote to that other part of her story. But that’s not how she would have wanted it. She regarded her games as her greatest legacy after her children, and would doubtless want to be remembered as a game designer above all else.

Back in 1989, after Modem Wars had failed in the marketplace, Electronic Arts decided that the lack of “a network of people to play” was a big reason for its failure. The great what-if question pertaining to Bunten’s career is what she might have done in partnership with an online network like CompuServe, which could have provided stable connectivity along with an eager group of players and all the matchmaking and social intrigue anyone could ask for. She finally began to explore this direction late in her life, through her work with Mpath. But what might have happened if she had made the right connections — forgive the pun! — earlier? We can only speculate.

As it is, though, it’s true that, in terms of units shifted and profits generated, there have been far more impressive careers. She suffered the curse of any pioneer who gets too far out in front of the culture. All of her eleven games combined probably sold no more than 400,000 copies at the outside, a figure some prominent designers’ new games can easily better on their first week today. Certainly her commercial disappointments far outnumber her successes. But then, sales aren’t the only metric by which to measure success.

Dani Bunten, one might say, is the designer’s designer. Greg Costikyan once told what happened when he offered to introduce Warren Spector — one of those designers who can sell more games in a week than Bunten did in a lifetime — to her back in the day: “He regretfully refused; he had loved M.U.L.E. so much he was afraid he wouldn’t know what to say. He would sound like a blithering fanboy and be embarrassed.” Chris Crawford calls the same title simply “the best computer-game design of all time.” Brenda Laurel dedicated Purple Moon’s output to Bunten. Sid Meier was so taken with Seven Cities of Gold that Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, and Civilization, his trilogy of masterpieces, can all be described as extensions in one way or another of what Bunten first wrought. And Seven Cities of Gold was only Meier’s second favorite Bunten game: he loved M.U.L.E. so much that he was afraid to even try to improve on it.

Ironically, the very multiplayer affordances that Bunten so steadfastly refused to give up on, much to the detriment of her income, continue to make it difficult for her games to be seen at their best today. M.U.L.E. can be played as its designer really intended it only on an Atari 8-bit computer — real or emulated — with four vintage joysticks plugged in and four players holding onto them in a single living room; that is, needless to say, not a trivial thing to arrange in this day and age. Likewise, the need to have the exceedingly rare physical cards to hand has made it impossible for most people to even try out Robot Rascals today. (It took me months to track down a pricey German edition on eBay.) And Bunten’s final run of boxed games, reliant on ancient modem hookups as they are, are even more difficult to play with others today than they were in their own time.

Dani Bunten didn’t have an easy life, internally or externally. She remained always an enigma — the life of the party who goes home alone, the proverbial stranger among her best friends. One person who knew her after she became a woman claimed she still had a “shadowed, slightly haunted look, even when she was smiling.” Given the complicated emotions that are still stirred up in so many of us by transgenderism, that may have been projection. On the other hand, though, it may have been perception. Even Bunten’s childhood had been haunted by the specter of familial discord and possibly abuse, to such an extent that she refused to talk much about it. But she did once tell Greg Costikyan that she grew up loving games mainly because it was only when playing them that her family wasn’t “totally dysfunctional.”

I think that for Dani Bunten games were most of all a means of communication, a way of punching through that bubble of ego and identity that isolates all of us to one degree or another, and that perhaps isolated her more so than most. Thus her guiding vision became, as Sid Meier puts it, “the family gathered around the computer.” After all, it’s a small step to go from communicating to connecting, from connecting to loving. She openly stated that she had made Robot Rascals for her own family most of all: “They’ve never played my games. I think they found them too esoteric or complex. I wanted something that I could enjoy with them, that they’d all be able to relate to.” The tragedy for her — perhaps a key to the essential sadness many felt at Bunten’s core, whether she was living as a man or a woman — is that reality never quite lived up to that Norman Rockwell dream of the happy family gathered around a computer; her daughter, the duly appointed caretaker of her legacy, still calls M.U.L.E. “boring and tedious” today. But the dream remains, and her games have given those of us privileged to discover them great joy and comfort in the midst of lives that have admittedly — hopefully! — been far easier than that of their creator. And so I’ll close, in predictable but unavoidable fashion, with Danielle Bunten Berry’s most famous quote — a quote predictable precisely because it so perfectly sums up her career: “No one on their death bed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer!'” Words to live by, my fellow gamers. Words to live by.

Danielle Bunten Berry, 1949-1998.

(Sources: Compute! of March 1989, December 1989, April 1990, January 1992, and December 1993; Questbusters of May 1986; Commodore Power Play of June/July 1986; Commodore Magazine of July 1987, October 1988, and June 1989; Ahoy! of March 1987; Computer Gaming World of January/February 1987, May 1988, February 1989, February 1990, December 1990, February 1991, March 1991, May 1991, April 1992, June 1992, August 1992, June 1993, August 1993, July 1994, September 1995, and October 1998; Family Computing of January 1987; Compute!’s Gazette of August 1989; The One of April 1991; Game Players PC Entertainment of September 1992; Game Developer of February/March 1995, July 1998, September 1998, and October 1998; Electronic Arts’s newsletter Farther of Winter 1986; Power Play of January 1995; Arkansas Times of February 8 2012. Online sources include the archived contents of the old World of Mule site, the archived contents of a Danielle Bunten Berry tribute site, the Salon article “Get Behind the M.U.L.E.”, and Bunten’s interview at Halcyon Days.)

Comments
32 Responses

- Jeff Hanna

November 16, 2018 at 8:01 pm

Slight correction:
“…Gordon Walkton of Kesmai Studios,…” – Gordon’s last name is Walton, no ‘k’. Also, Gordon wasn’t with Kesmai in 1993. He joined after I started in 1995. I’d guess it wasn’t until late 1996 or early 1997 that Gordon came on board.

- Jimmy Maher

November 16, 2018 at 9:02 pm

Thanks!

- tedder

November 16, 2018 at 9:10 pm

1:1 modem play had a few other big downsides: you were fully constrained to each other’s schedule, and you’re also taking exclusive use not only of your computer (probably shared with your family) but also the phone line! Doubly so for your mate at the other end of the copper.

I like getting the personal side of history like this. Thanks, Jimmy.

- Carl Read

November 17, 2018 at 4:15 am

I liked M.U.L.E. back in the day, but only played it alone and so I guess I only skimmed its potential.

But also back in the day, when Trivial Pursuit was all the rage, I got one of the computer versions. On mentioning this to an older brother, he seemed interested in playing it, until he twigged it was a computer version, and then he stopped being interested. So one of reasons for multiplayer computer games being slow to catch on may have been the computer itself. There was a lot of prejudice against computers then, partly because of the fear of where they were leading, I guess. (A fear now partly born out.) But mostly I think because of what was required to understand how they worked. They weren’t an easy consumer device like a TV or radio where getting a good reception was the only real problem you might face. Computers were hard, and it was also hard to see what use they might be in the home. Most adults had no use for them.

- Ben L

November 17, 2018 at 5:24 am

M.U.L.E. was and is one of my favorite games and I got to experience it as you said it was meant to be played on an Atari 400.

Thank you for an insightful and sensitive portrait of the designer.

- Casey Muratori

November 17, 2018 at 8:53 am

This is an amazing article that stands out even in a blog filled with amazing articles, a real masterpiece. Bravo, Mr. Maher!

I was actually there for her 1997 GDC lecture, and I remember her saying the signature quote live on stage. I was only a couple years out of high school, and I was so excited to see her speak because I had loved MULE and Heart of Africa as a child (they were the only two of her games I had played).

Since I did not know her personally, I didn’t know about the possible connection between her dysfunctional childhood and her quest to make games that bring people together. I suppose we’ll never know, but as I read through the article, I have to admit it brought a tear to my eye.

Thank you again for this wonderful biography.

Best wishes,
– Casey

- Jason

November 17, 2018 at 10:11 am

“The game lives on the razor’s edge of pure chaos, the product both of random events generated by the computer and of a second deck of cards — the “specials” — which among other things can force players to draw new item cards, trash their old cards, or trade cards among one another; thus everyone’s goals are shifting almost constantly.”

Wow. This sounds an awful lot like Fluxx, which I’m pretty sure was wildly successful as card games go.

A terrific article as always. I have only ever played a bit of M.U.L.E. in an NES emulator. Kind of sad to see that it was changed in ways the designer hadn’t wanted and that experiencing the game in its proper form is probably not something that’ll ever be practical for me.

- Mark D

November 17, 2018 at 9:08 pm

you can always check out archive.org that will let you play the original MULE on a decent atari emulator. I’ve introduced my kids, ages 6-11, to it and it stands up even in an enivironment of 100-miles-per-hour, ad-laden, dark-patterns tablet apps.

- Jimmy Maher

November 18, 2018 at 3:47 am

In my experience, the biggest barrier is actually the need for four vintage joysticks with the necessary adapters to work over a USB connection. It’s possible to manage it, but it requires a lot of effort to secure this aged and/or ultra-specialized hardware, and it’s not particularly cheap. Still, it’s well worth it. M.U.L.E. has given us hours and hours of pleasure, not back in the day but in very recent years. None of the various remakes and ports plays quite as well as the Atari 8-bit original. It’s pure magic — a strong candidate for my favorite game ever.

- Pedro Timóteo

November 20, 2018 at 10:53 pm

Can’t normal USB gamepads (including Xbox/PS4 ones) be used? I haven’t confirmed it specifically with 8-bit Atari emulators, but emulators in general (C64, Spectrum, arcade, etc.) typically allow gamepads to work as joysticks.

- Jimmy Maher

November 21, 2018 at 8:15 pm

Yes, probably, but the feel isn’t quite right, I think. But then, I’m something of a M.U.L.E. purist. ;)

- Jimmy Maher

November 18, 2018 at 3:48 am

I actually thought of that very same comparison, but wound up cutting it from the article. ;)

- Lt. Nitpicker

November 17, 2018 at 11:20 pm

A Nintendo version of M.U.L.E was released by Mindscape (It was released a bit before EA started directly publishing NES games), although it’s unclear if Ozark developed it. It has some differences from the earlier computer versions, although it supports 4 players.

- Jimmy Maher

November 18, 2018 at 3:40 am

I didn’t realize the Nintendo version had in fact been released. Thanks!

- M. Casey

November 18, 2018 at 5:54 am

I was a little too young for Bunten’s heyday, but actually played quite a bit of hotseat Global Conquest back in the day. That the only thing I can really remember about it was putting roller skates on battleships to make them go on land probably isn’t a good sign.

On the other hand, very fond memories of M.U.L.E. on the NES, even though we didn’t have the thing that let you have four players. It was always fun to see the sorts of cycles games would go through: there was almost always a Smithore boom and bust, but only one; intermittent food and energy shortages if people were playing aggressively enough; and then an end-game rush into the Crystite market.

If you got sick of the cutthroat way to play, you could always try co-op and see how high a score you can get for the colony. That was tricky because the AI was still playing cutthroat.

Now I’m curious how the NES version differed from the Atari. Kinda surprised the planet wasn’t Odnetnin.

- doctorcasino

November 19, 2018 at 3:09 pm

“For continuity’s sake, I’ll generally continue to refer to her by the shorthand of “Bunten” rather than “Berry” for the remainder of this article.”

FWIW, this kind of usage is considered “deadnaming;” for many in the trans community, it is received as a disrespectful or even hostile refusal to recognize someone’s trans identity – the equivalent of refusing to honor pronoun usage. I don’t get the impression this is what you mean to do at all, so I’m just giving the heads up. What may seem to you like an interest in writerly consistency may strike someone else as prioritizing that consistency over the possible brush with the trauma of erasure.

That said, I’m not familiar at all with Berry’s life and views; if she made it clear that she welcomed usage of this kind, that might be useful information for readers to help them contextualize this choice on your part.

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2018 at 3:36 pm

One big reason for continuing to refer to her as “Bunten” is because I simply don’t know precisely when she adapted the (additional) surname of “Berry” — it was some time considerably after her transition, as at the time of the 1993 GDC she was universally referred to as “Danielle Bunten,” full stop — or what the reasoning behind it was. Certainly she was never married after her transition, which eliminates the most typical reason for adopting a new surname. Obviously, if anyone knows more about this, I’d love to hear it.

The verb “to dead-name” as I understand it is generally used when someone continues to refer to a transgendered subject by the first name of her previous gender. So, I’m not sure if this *quite* falls into that category. As far as Danielle Bunten Berry herself: she had no problem with people referring to her as “he” when discussing her earlier life. She said she felt like a new person after her transition, and the male Dan Bunten really did seem like someone else entirely. Other transgendered individuals do of course have other points of view.

- vera

November 19, 2018 at 7:42 pm

Deadnaming is not limited to a person’s given name. If your goal was consistency, the most respectful thing to do would have been to refer to Danielle Berry as Danielle Berry throughout the article. Further, the way you have characterized her transition plays into decades-old tropes that cast this moment in someone’s life as a big “reveal” or “scoop” by initially purposefully misgendering them in order to surprise the reader with what is presented as a shocking twist. The subtext of this is the assertation that trans people’s identities are deceptive. Trans people do not “become” their gender overnight, as a direct result of any surgery, or any other single event, and nor is it a choice. This is a reductive misunderstanding of transitioning. Describing her physical frame and interests as being stereotypically masculine for the purpose of underlining just how *not* feminine she is supposed to have been is a backhanded compliment with no possible positive interpretation. Praising trans people as “brave”, in particular, comes across as, at best, patronizing (imagine saying this to a person of color). All of these things have the effect of otherizing the subject of the article by separating them from the reader in both expectation and experience. Despite what Danielle Berry may have said over twenty years ago, times have changed, and I struggle to imagine a living trans woman in 2018 who would be satisfied with this sort of portrayal. Might I suggest brushing up on the transgender section of the GLAAD Media Reference Guide if you are interested in writing about trans people in a culturally contemporary manner.

- Dylan

November 20, 2018 at 12:56 am

Jimmy has already written – extensively – on why he doesn’t refer to her as “Danielle Berry” throughout the entire article. I’d suggest brushing up on the previous linked post (on MULE) and the extensive discussion in the comments there.

The general framework and norms of how to name people when they change their names & genders has certainly solidified in the last decade, but there are certain things those norms don’t account for, and biographical histories is one of them. They are great norms for standard, day-to-day usage, but when applied to historical, contemporaneous writing, will cause confusion at best and historical revision at worst (since to avoid confusion you’d have to go and start changing other peolpe’s quotes, at which point you’re violating basic journalistic ethics).

There is a lot of complexity here and definitely room for argument, but the idea that it’s a settled issue and one would do what Jimmy is doing out of ignorance is neither fair nor sound.

- Ken Moff

November 19, 2018 at 8:20 pm

I’m glad the MULE trademark reverted to Bunten’s children. They put out a great version of it for Android.

- Ken Rutsky

November 20, 2018 at 9:38 pm

Great article.

My family would play M.U.L.E. tons on our C-64 way back when…now I’m not sure, but I could’ve sworn we had four people playing: two on joysticks and two on keyboard? My memory could very well be faulty, though.

For a couple years, gaming did bring my family into the same room. We’d gather around to play Atari VCS games, then later on the Commodore in addition to M.U.L.E. we’d have competitive games of Telengard going (that took so long to boot; we’d start loading it – on cassette! – before dinner, when we were done and my parents had their coffee and cigarettes, we’d go downstairs and the game would just be starting up, haha). Summer Games was a favorite, too, but I think my parents had stopped playing games so much with us at that point.

I really miss those evenings gaming with the whole family. For a brief time, though, we sort of lived out Dani Bunten-Berry’s vision.

- Jimmy

November 21, 2018 at 10:59 am

I had M.U.L.E. on C64 back in the day but couldn’t figure it out. Something to do with directing robots? It would be nice if someone posted a video of people playing it, so we could see what these old timers liked so much.

- Hoagie

November 21, 2018 at 9:33 pm

Great article !
One sad thing is that while she got high respect in the USA, she was hardly known in Europe. The only country where interviews (and obituaries, sadly) of her could be found is Germany – quite logical, the C64 was huge there and they loved econominc management games, so M.U.L.E was certainly more popular there than anywhere in Europe.
I spotted a few more articles about her (tab “Revue de presse”) :
https://www.abandonware-france.org/personnalites/bunten-berry-danielle-2723/

- Hoagie

December 4, 2018 at 10:20 pm

BTW, where did you find Electronic Arts’ newsletter “Farther” ? There’s only one issue on Internet Archive, I would love to read those.

- Jimmy Maher

December 5, 2018 at 10:14 am

The issue I referenced here is the one and only issue available at archive.org. ;)

- Gordon Cameron

November 28, 2018 at 9:17 pm

>reality never quite lived up to that Norman Rockwell dream of the happy family gathered around a computer

Thank you for this wonderful article.

For me, reality lived up exactly to that dream. My three brothers and I had many a happy session playing M.U.L.E. gathered around a Commodore 64. (Two joysticks, swapped as needed, plus keyboard controls for the auctions.) They are among my very best gaming experiences. We all would have admired Bunten based on the rest of her catalogue, but because of M.U.L.E. we revere her.

I must admit with some shame that it was a pirated copy! But at least we bought boxed copies of Seven Cities of Gold, Heart of Africa, and Robot Rascals.

- typolice

December 9, 2018 at 12:05 am

As always, with appreciation:
“commercial disappoints” – disappointments?

- Jimmy Maher

December 10, 2018 at 8:47 am

Thanks!

- PJN

December 19, 2018 at 12:11 am

It seems in the context of the the quote at the end: “predictable but unavoidable fashion, with Danielle Bunten Berry’s most famous quote — a quote predicable”, that “predicable” is meant to be “predictable”?

- Jimmy Maher

December 19, 2018 at 11:24 am

Indeed. Thanks!

- K. Garlow

December 20, 2018 at 11:50 am

Minor typo: “than” should be “then” – “…randomly shifted than they…”

http://ozarksoftscape.com/the-game-collection.html

- Jimmy Maher

December 20, 2018 at 12:00 pm

Thanks!

Controlling the Spice, Part 1: Dune on Page and Screen
November 23, 2018

Frank Herbert in 1982.

In 1965, two works changed the face of genre publishing forever. Ace Books that year came out with an unauthorized paperback edition of an obscure decade-old fantasy trilogy called The Lord of the Rings, written by a pipe-smoking old Oxford don named J.R.R. Tolkien, and promptly sold hundreds of thousands of copies of it. And the very same year, Chilton Books, a house better known for its line of auto-repair manuals than for its fiction, became the publisher of last resort for Frank Herbert’s epic science-fiction novel Dune. While Dune’s raw sales weren’t initially quite so impressive as those of The Lord of the Rings, it was recognized immediately by science-fiction connoisseurs as the major work it was, winning its year’s Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel (the latter award alongside Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal).

It may be that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can to a large extent judge the importance of The Lord of the Rings and Dune by their thickness. Genre novels had traditionally been slim things, coming in at well under 300 pocket-sized mass-market-paperback pages. These two novels, by contrast, were big, sprawling works. The writing on their pages as well was heavier than the typical pulpy tale of adventure. Tolkien’s and Herbert’s novels felt utterly disconnected from trends or commercial considerations, redolent of myth and legend — sometimes, as plenty of critics haven’t hesitated to point out over the years, rather ponderously so. At a stroke, they changed readers’ and publishers’ perception of what a fantasy or science-fiction novel could be, and the world of genre publishing has never looked back.

In the years since 1965, almost as much has been written of Dune as The Lord of the Rings. Still, it’s new to us. And so, given that it suddenly became a very important name in computer games circa 1992, we should take the time now to look at what it is and where it came from.

At the time of Dune’s publication, Frank Herbert was a 45-year-old newspaperman who had been dabbling in science fiction — his previous output had included one short novel and a couple of dozen short stories — since the early 1950s. He had first been inspired to write Dune by, appropriately enough, sand dunes. Eight years before the novel’s eventual publication, the San Francisco Examiner, the newspaper for which he wrote, sent him to Florence, Oregon, to write about government efforts to control the troublesomely shifting sand dunes just outside of town. It didn’t sound like the most exciting topic in the world, and, indeed, he never managed to turn it into an acceptable article. Yet he found the dunes themselves weirdly fascinating:

I had far too much for an article and far too much for a short story. So I didn’t know really what I had—but I had an enormous amount of data and avenues shooting off at all angles to get more… I finally saw that I had something enormously interesting going for me about the ecology of deserts, and it was, for a science-fiction writer anyway, an easy step from that to think: what if I had an entire planet that was desert?

The other great spark that led to Dune wasn’t a physical environment, nor for that matter a physical anything. It was a fascination with the messiah complex that has been with us through all of human history, even though it has seldom, Herbert believed, led us to much good. Somehow this theme just seemed to fit with a desert landscape; think of the Biblical Moses and the Exodus.

I had this theory that superheroes were disastrous for humans, that even if you postulated an infallible hero, the things this hero set in motion fell eventually into the hands of fallible mortals. What better way to destroy a civilization, society, or race than to set people into the wild oscillations which follow their turning over their judgment and decision-making faculties to a superhero?

Herbert worked on the novel off and on for years. Much of his time was spent in pure world-building — or, perhaps better said in this case, galaxy-building — creating a whole far-future history of humanity among the stars that would inform and enrich any specific stories he chose to set there; in this sense once again, his work is comparable to that of J.R.R. Tolkien, that most legendary of all builders of fantastic worlds. But his actual story mostly took place on the desert planet Arrakis, also known as Dune, the source of an invaluable “spice” known as melange, which confers upon humans improved health, longer life, and even paranormal prescience, while also allowing some of them to “fold space,” thus becoming the key to interstellar travel. As the novel’s most popular and apt marketing tagline would put it, “He who controls the spice controls the universe!” The spice has made this inhospitable world, where water is so scarce that people kill one another over the merest trickle of the stuff, whose deserts are roamed by gigantic carnivorous sandworms, the most valuable piece of real estate in the galaxy.

The novel centers on a war between two great trading houses, House Atreides and House Harkonnen, for control of the planet. The politics involved, not to mention the many military and espionage stratagems they employ against one another, are far too complex to describe here, but suffice to say that Herbert’s messiah figure emerges in the form of the young Paul Atreides, who wins over the nomadic Fremen who have long lived on Arrakis and leads them to victory against the ruthless Harkonnen.

Dune draws heavily from any number of terrestrial sources — from the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, from the more mystical end of Zen Buddhism, from the history of the Ottoman Empire and the myths and cultures of the Arab world. Nevertheless, the whole novel has an almost aggressively off-putting otherness about it. Herbert writes like a native of his novel’s time and place would, throwing strange jargon around with abandon and doing little to clarify the big-picture politics of the galaxy. And he shows no interest whatsoever in explaining that foremost obsession of so many other science-fiction writers, the technology and hardware that underpin his story. Like helicopters and diving suits to a writer of novels set in our own time and place, “ornithopters” and “stillsuits,” not to mention interstellar space travel, simply are to Dune’s narrator. Meanwhile some of the bedrock philosophical concepts that presumably — hopefully! — unite most of Dune’s readership — such ideas as fundamental human rights and democracy — don’t seem to exist at all in Herbert’s universe.

This wind of Otherness blowing through its pages makes Dune a famously difficult book to get started with. Those first 50 or 60 pages seem determined to slough off as many readers as possible. Unless you’re much smarter than I am, you’ll need to read Dune at least twice to come to anything like a full understanding of it. All of this has made it an extremely polarizing novel. Some readers love it with a passion; some, like yours truly here, find it easier to admire than to love; some, probably the majority, wind up shrugging their shoulders and walking away.

In light of this, and in light of the way that it broke every contemporary convention of genre fiction, beginning but by no means ending with its length, it’s not surprising that Frank Herbert found Dune to be a hard sell to publishers. The tropes were familiar enough in the abstract — a galaxy-spanning empire, interstellar war, a plucky young hero — but the novel, what with its lofty, affectedly formal prose, just didn’t read like science fiction was supposed to. Whilst allowing what amounted to a rough draft of the novel to appear in the magazine Analog Science Fiction in intermittent installments between December 1963 and May 1965, Herbert struggled to find an outlet for it in book form. The manuscript was finally accepted by Chilton only after being rejected by over twenty other publishers.

Dune in the first Chilton edition.

Those other publishers would all come to regret their decision. Dune took some time to gain traction with readers outside science fiction’s intelligentsia; Herbert didn’t make enough money from his fiction to quit his day job until 1969. But the oil embargoes of the 1970s gave this novel that was marked by such Otherness an odd sort of social immediacy, winning it many readers outside the still fairly insular community of written science fiction, making it a trendy book to have read or at least to say you had read. For many, it now read almost like a parable; it wasn’t hard to draw parallels between Arrakis’s spice and our own planet’s oil, nor between the Fremen of Arrakis and the cultures native to our own planet’s great oil-rich deserts. As critic Gwyneth Jones puts it, Dune is, among other things, a depiction of “scarcity, and the kind of human culture that scarcity produces.” It was embraced by many in the environmentalist movement, who read it it as a cautionary tale perfect for an era in which we earthbound humans were being forced to confront the reality that our planet’s resources are not infinite.

So, Dune eventually sold a staggering 12 million copies, becoming by most accounts the best-selling work of genre science fiction in history. And so we arrive at one final parallel to The Lord of the Rings: that of a book that was anything but an easy read in the conventional sense nevertheless selling in quantities to rival any beach-and-airport time-waster ever written. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose was famously described at the height of its 1980s popularity as a book that everyone owned and almost no one had ever managed to get all the way through. Dune may very well be the closest equivalent in genre fiction.

Herbert wrote five sequels to Dune, none of which are as commonly read or as highly regarded among critics as the first novel.[1] One might say, however, that the second and third novels at least — Dune Messiah (1969) and Children of Dune (1976) — are actually necessary to appreciate Herbert’s original conception of the work in its entirety. He had always conceived of Dune as an epic tragedy in the Shakespearean sense, but reading the first book alone can obscure this fact. That book is, as the science-fiction scholar Damien Broderick puts it, typical pulp science fiction in at least one sense: it satisfies “an adolescent craving for an imaginary world in which heroes triumph by a preternatural blend of bravery, genius, and sci.” It’s only in the second and third books that Paul Atreides, the messiah figure, begins to fail, thus illustrating how a messiah can, as Herbert says, “destroy a civilization, society, or race.” That said, it would be the first novel alone with which almost all media adaptations would concern themselves, so it will also monopolize our attention in these articles.

Dune’s success was such that it inevitably attracted the interest of the film industry. In 1972, the British producer Arthur P. Jacobs, the man behind the hugely successful Planet of the Apes films, acquired the rights to the series, but he had the misfortune to die the following year, before his plans had gotten beyond the storyboarding phase.

Yet Dune’s trendiness only continued to grow, and interest in turning it into a film remained high among people who wouldn’t have been caught dead with any other science-fiction novel. In 1974, the rights passed from Jacob’s estate to Alejandro Jodorowsky, a transgressive Chilean director who claimed to once have raped one of his actresses in the name of his Art. Manifesting an alarming obsession with the act, he now planned to do the same to Frank Herbert:

It was my Dune. When you make a picture, you must not respect the novel. It’s like you get married, no? You go with the wife, white, the woman is white. You take the woman, if you respect the woman, you will never have child. You need to open the costume and to… to rape the bride. And then you will have your picture. I was raping Frank Herbert, raping, like this! But with love, with love.

The would-be rape victim could only look on in disbelief: “He had so many personal, emotional axes to grind. I used to kid him, ‘Well, I know what your problem is, Alejandro. There is no way to horsewhip the pope in this story.'”

Jodorowsky planned to fill the cast and crew of the film, which would bear an estimated price tag of no less than $15 million, with flotsam washed up from the more dissipated end of the celebrity pool: Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, Charlotte Rampling, Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, Alain Delon. But, even in this heyday of Porno Chic, no one was willing to entrust such an erratic personality with such a budget, and the project fizzled out after Jodorwsky had blown through $2 million on scripts, concept art, and the drugs that were needed to fuel it all.

In the meantime, the possibilities for cinematic science fiction were being remade by a little film called Star Wars. Indeed, said film bears the clear stamp of Dune, especially in its first act, which takes place on a desert planet where water is the most precious commodity of all. And certainly the general dirty, lived-in look of Star Wars, so distinct from the antiseptic futures of most science fiction, owes much to Dune.

In the wake of Star Wars, Dino De Laurentiis, one of the great impresarios of post-war Italian cinema, acquired the rights to Dune from Jodorowsky’s would-be backers. He secured a tentative agreement with Ridley Scott, who was just finishing his breakthrough film Alien, to direct the picture. Rudy Wurlitzer, screenwriter of the classic western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, wrote three drafts of a script, but the financing necessary to begin production proved hard to secure. Thus in 1981 the cinematic rights to Dune, which Herbert had sold away for a span of nine years to Arthur P. Jacobs back in 1972, finally reverted to the author after their extended but fruitless world tour.

Yet De Laurentiis remained passionate about his Dune film — so much so that he immediately entered into negotiation with Herbert to reacquire the rights. Having watched various filmmakers come close to doing unspeakable things to his creation over the previous decade — even Wurlitzer’s recent script reportedly added an incest plot line involving Paul Atreides and his mother — Herbert insisted that he must at least be given the role of “advisor” to any future film. De Laurentiis agreed to this.

He was so eager to make a deal because Dune had suddenly looked to be back on, for real this time, just as the rights were expiring. His daughter, Raffaella De Laurentiis, had taken on the Dune film as something of a passion project of her own. She was riding high with a brand of blockbuster-oriented, action-heavy fare that was quite different from the films of her father’s generation. She was already in the midst of producing Conan the Barbarian, starring a buff if nearly inarticulate former bodybuilding champion named Arnold Schwarzenegger; it would become a major hit, launching Schwarzenegger’s career as Hollywood’s go-to action hero over the next couple of decades. But the Dune project would be a different sort of beast, a sort of synthesis of father and daughter’s priorities: a big-budget film with an art-film sensibility. For Ridley Scott had by this time moved on to other projects, and Dino and Raffaella De Laurentiis had a surprising new candidate in mind to direct their Dune.

David Lynch and Frank Herbert. Interviewers were constantly surprised at how normal Lynch looked and acted in person, in contrast to his bizarre films. Starlog magazine, for example, wrote of his “sculptured hair [and] jutting boyish features,” saying he was “extremely polite and well-mannered, the antithesis of enigma. Not a hint of phobic neurosis or deep-seated sexual maladjustment.”

David Lynch was already a beloved director of the art-film circuit, although his output to date had consisted of just two low-budget black-and-white movies: Eraserhead (1977), a surrealistic riot of a horror film, and The Elephant Man (1980), a mournful tragedy of prejudice and isolation. He would seem to stand about as far removed from the family-friendly fare of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s new Hollywood as it was possible to get. And yet that mainstream of filmmakers saw something — something having to do with his talent for striking, kinetic visuals — in the 36-year-old director. In fact, Lucas actually asked him whether he would be interested in directing the third Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi, whereupon Lynch rather peremptorily turned the offer down, saying he wasn’t interested in making sequels to other people’s films. But when Dino De Laurentiis approached him about Dune he was more receptive. Lynch:

Dino’s office called me and asked if I had ever read Dune. I thought they said “June.” I never read either one of ’em! But once I got the book, it’s like when you hear a new word. And I started hearing it more often. Then, I began finding out that friends of mine had already read it and freaked out over it. It took me a long time to read. Actually, my wife forced me to read it. I wasn’t that keen on it at first, especially the first 60 pages. But the more I read, the more I liked. Because Dune has so many things that I like, I said, “This is a book that can be made into a film.”

Lynch joined screenwriters Eric Bergen and Christopher De Vore for a week at Frank Herbert’s country farmhouse, where they hammered out a script which ran to a hopelessly overlong 200 pages. As the locale would indicate, Herbert was involved in the creative process, but kept a certain distance from the details: “This is a translation job. I wouldn’t presume to be the person who should translate Dune from English to French; my French is execrable. It’s the same with a movie; you go to the person who speaks ‘movie.'”

The script was rewritten again and again in the months that followed, the later drafts by Lynch alone. (He would be given sole credit as the screenwriter of the finished film.) In the process, it slimmed down to a still-ambitious 135 pages. And with that, and with the De Laurentiis father and daughter having lined up a positively astronomical amount of financing from Universal Pictures, who were desperate for a big science-fiction franchise of their own to rival 20th Century Fox’s Star Wars and Paramount’s Star Trek, a real Dune film finally got well and truly underway.

Raffaella De Laurentiis and Frank Herbert with the actors Kyle MacLachlan and Francesca Annis on the set of Dune, 1983.

Rehearsals and pre-production began in the Sonora Desert outside of Mexico City in October of 1982; actual shooting started the following March, and dragged on over many more months. In the lead role of Paul Atreides, Lynch had cast a 25-year-old Shakespearean-trained stage actor named Kyle MacLachlan, who had never acted before a camera in his life. Nor, at six feet tall and 155 pounds, was he built much like an action hero. But he was trained in martial arts, and he gave it his all over a long and difficult shoot.

Joining him were a number of recognizable character actors, such as the intimidating Swede Max von Sydow, cast in the role of the Fremen leader Kynes, and the villain specialist Kenneth McMillan, all but buried under 200 pounds of fake silicone flesh as the disgustingly evil — or evilly disgusting — Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Patrick Stewart, later to become famous in the role of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played Paul’s martial mentor Gurney Halleck. In a bit of stunt casting, Sting of the rock band the Police, deemed “biggest band in the world” by any number of contemporary critics, took the role of one of the supporting cast of villains — a role which would, naturally, be blown out of all proportion by the movie’s promoters. To a person, everyone involved with the shoot remembers it as being uncomfortable at best. “I was taxed on almost every level as a human being,” says MacLachlan. “Mexico City is not one of the most pleasant spots in the world to be.” The one thing they all mention is the food poisoning; almost everyone among cast and crew got it at one time or another, and some lived with it for the entirety of the months on end they spent in Mexico.

Universal Pictures had given David Lynch, this young director who was used to shooting on a shoestring budget, an effective blank check in the hope that it would yield the next George Lucas and/or the next Star Wars. Lynch didn’t hesitate to spend their money, building some eighty separate sets and shooting hundreds of hours of footage. Even in Mexico, where the peso was cheap, it added up. Universal would later claim an official budget of $40 million, but rumblings inside Hollywood had it that the real total was more like $50 million. Either figure was more than immense enough to secure Dune the title of most expensive Universal film ever. (For comparison’s sake, consider that the contemporary big-budget blockbusters Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom cost approximately $40 million and $30 million respectively.)

The shoot had been difficult enough in itself, but the film first began to show the telltale signs of a doomed production only in the editing phase, as Lynch tried to corral his reams of footage into a finished product. He clashed repeatedly with Raffaella De Laurentiis and Universal, both of whom made it clear that they expected a relatively “clean,” PG-rated film with a coherent narrative through line for their money. Such qualities weren’t, of course, what David Lynch was known for. But the director had failed to secure final-cut rights to the film, and he was repeatedly overridden. Finally, he all but removed himself from the process altogether, and Raffaella De Laurentiis herself cobbled together much of the finished film, going so far as to shoot her own last-minute bridging scenes whilst layering clumsy voice-overs and internal monologues over the top, all in a (failed) effort to make the labyrinthine plot comprehensible to a casual audience. Meanwhile Universal continued to spew forth a fountain of hype about “Star Wars for adults” and “the end of the pulp era of science-fiction movies,” whilst continuing to plaster Sting, looking fetching in his black leather, across their “Coming Attractions” posters and trailers as if he was the star. Dune was set for a fall.

And, indeed, the finished product, which arrived in theaters in December of 1984, provided a rare opportunity for every corner of movie fandom and criticism to unite in hatred. The professional critics, most of whom had never read the book, found the film, even with all the additional expository voice-overs, as incomprehensible as Raffaella De Laurentiis had always feared they would. Fans of the novel had the opposite problem, bemoaning the plot simplification and the liberties taken with the story, complaining about the way that all of the thematic texture had been lost in favor of Lynchian weirdness for weirdness’s sake. And the all-important general audience, for their part, stayed away in droves, making Dune one of the more notorious flops in cinematic history. Just like that, Universal Pictures’s dream of a Star Wars franchise of their own went up in smoke.

Whatever else you can say about it, David Lynch’s Dune is often visually striking.

Seen today, free of the hype and the resultant backlash, the film isn’t as bad as many remember it; many of its scenes are striking in that inimitable Lynchian way. But it doesn’t hang together at all as a holistic experience, and its best parts are often those that have the least to do with its source material. Many over the years have suspected that there’s a good film hidden somewhere in all that footage Lynch shot, if it could only be freed from the strictures of the two-hour running time demanded by Universal; Lynch’s own first rough cut, they point out, was reportedly at least twice that long. Yet various attempts to rejigger the material — including a 1988 version for television that ballooned the running time to more than three hours — haven’t yielded results that feel all that much more holistically satisfying than the original theatrical cut. The film remains what it was from the first, a strange hybrid stranded in a no-man’s land between an art film and a conventional blockbuster, not really working as either. At bottom, the film reflects a hopeless mismatch between its director and its source material. What happens when you ask a brilliant director with very little interest in plot to film a novel famous for its intricate plot? You get a movie like David Lynch’s Dune. Perhaps the kindest thing one can say about it is that it is, unlike so many of Hollywood’s other more misbegotten projects, an interesting failure.

Lynch disowned the film almost immediately. He’s generally refused to talk about it at all in interviews since 1984, beyond dismissing it as a “sell-out” on his part. The one positive aspect of the film which even he will admit to is that it brought Kyle MacLachlan to his attention. The latter starred in Lynch’s next film as well, the low-budget psychological-horror picture Blue Velvet (1986), which rehabilitated its director’s critical reputation at a stroke at the same time that it marked the definitive end of his brief flirtation with mainstream sensibilities. MacLachlan would go on to find his most iconic role as the weirdly impassive FBI agent Dale Cooper in Lynch’s supremely weird television series Twin Peaks.

The Dino de Laurentiis Corporation had invested everything they had and then some in their Dune film. They went bankrupt in the aftermath of its failure — but, in typical corporate fashion, a phoenix known as the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group soon emerged from the ashes. Just to show there were no hard feelings, one of the reincarnated production company’s first films was David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

Surprisingly in light of the many readers who complained so vociferously about the liberties the Dune film took with his novel, Frank Herbert himself never disowned it, speaking of it quite warmly right up until his death. But sadly, that event came much earlier than anyone had reckoned it would: he died in 1986 at age 65, the victim of a sudden blood clot in his lung that struck just after he had undergone surgery for prostate cancer.

Dune did come to television screens in 2000, in a rather workmanlike miniseries adaptation that was more comprehensible and far more faithful to the novel than Lynch’s film, but which lacked the budget, the acting talent, or the directorial flair to rival its predecessor as an artistic statement. Today, almost half a century after Arthur P. Jacobs first began to inquire about the film rights, the definitive cinematic Dune has yet to be made.

There is, however, one other sort of screen on which Dune has undeniably left a profound mark: not the movie or even the television screen, but the monitor screen. It’s in that direction that we’ll turn our attention next time.

(Sources: the books The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn and Frank Herbert by Timothy O’Reilly; Starlog of January 1983, May 1984, October 1984, November 1984, December 1984, February 1985, and June 1986; Enter of December 1984; the online articles “Jodorowsky’s Dune Didn’t Get Made for a Reason… and We Should All Be Grateful For That” and “David Lynch’s Dune is What You Get When You Build a Science Fictional World With No Interest in Science Fiction” by Emily Asher-Perrin.)

1. As for the flood of more recent Dune novels, written by Frank Herbert’s son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, previously a prolific author of X-Files and Star Wars novels and other low-hanging fruit of the literary landscape: stay far, far away. ↩

Comments
40 Responses

- Lars

November 23, 2018 at 4:31 pm

Prostate, not prostrate.

- Sniffnoy

November 23, 2018 at 6:54 pm

Also in typospotting: you have “flare” for “flair” near the end.

- Jimmy Maher

November 24, 2018 at 4:50 am

Thanks!

- Jimmy Maher

November 24, 2018 at 4:49 am

Thanks!

- Mike Rubin

November 23, 2018 at 5:17 pm

Thanks so much for taking this one on! My sharpest memory of the Dune movie, when it came out in theaters, is that it was the first and only film I’ve seen where the theater actually handed out a paper “glossary” with the names and descriptions of the houses, planets, and characters in the movie, since people who hadn’t read the book were hopelessly lost in its complexity.

- Brian

November 27, 2018 at 11:57 am

That’s funny, my first thought was “Oh yeah, I remember them handing out an explanation sheet!”

I enjoyed the movie but was already a sci fi nerd. I did read the books shortly thereafter, although I found them progressively unrewarding and ponderous.

- Sp1ce b0b

November 23, 2018 at 5:21 pm

Great read and insights about the movie production! Can’t wait for part 2.
LOTR and Dune (an sequels) surely impressed me a tad when I read them as a teenager.
Dan Simmons’ Hyperion is right there as well, and no director dared to adapt it yet.

- Ivan Toshkov

November 24, 2018 at 10:18 am

You just named some of my favorite books! Can you suggest something else as well?

For my part, I also like The Name of the Rose, but I love Foucault Pendulum! I think it’s easily the most polarizing book of the bunch. Very few of my friends managed to read it at all, and just one enjoyed it almost as much as me.

Dune was first translated and published in Bulgaria 1987 and 1988. The book was split in two, and fortunately for me, I started reading it when the second one was also published. Besides the fact that I had the whole story, the dictionary was available in each tome, so I could more easily use it.

- Oliver

November 26, 2018 at 1:08 pm

Since Jimmy talks here about games, there is great game based on “The name of the Rose” for Spectrum, Amstrad and MSX, “La abadia del crimen” (The abbey of crime), a very famous Spanish title where you roam around an abbey in truly isometric glory. Sadly they didn’t get the rights for the book but the plot is the same
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Abad%C3%ADa_del_Crimen

- Pedro Timóteo

November 27, 2018 at 10:03 am

There’s a free(!) remake on Steam, which looks pretty good (just search for “The Abbey of Crime Extensum”), though perhaps a bit more “cartoony” than the original (on the CPC and Spectrum), which I always thought felt pretty oppressive.

- Venya058

November 23, 2018 at 7:18 pm

Footnote 1 is on point.

I admit to enjoying Lord of the Rings immensely as a a film series, and only appreciating it as a series of books, which I found pretty tedious. (This is reversed for The Hobbit.)

I found the first three Dune books utterly engrossing. I’d only read the first until university, and then a roommate’s friend lent me the rest of the series, one at a time. Maliciously, it turned out. I adored the first three, slogged through the next two, and felt some real hope that we were heading toward resolution at the end of book 6. I brought it back and asked for the next one. “Oh, there aren’t any more. Dude died.” My alleged friend had been waiting for weeks to spring that on me.

- Captain Kal

November 23, 2018 at 7:32 pm

When I first watched in cinemas, I could not make head or tails out of it. I was expecting, and I dragged my friends with me, expecting to watch something like “Star Wars”. I was devastated, not to mention that my friends blamed me, for them wasting their hard earned pocket money. The music was fantastic though.

It became one of my favourites movies many years later. And I think you will find the following clip hilarious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb_LO7gJo-4

- Benjamin Vigeant

November 23, 2018 at 8:03 pm

Perhaps because of my affinity for Lynch, I can’t bring it to myself to hate or even really dislike his Dune. It’s gorgeous and weird, and I love Kyle MacLaughlin in it.

I think he was able to do Blue Velvet entirely because of Dune – it was his reward for doing the studio “blockbuster”. He also has maintained final cut on everything since, which is why he walked off the third season of Twin Peaks for a short bit.

- Keith Palmer

November 24, 2018 at 2:33 am

I’m just at the age where my first awareness of Dune came from a “storybook adaptation” of the movie (which, along with comic book adaptations and novelizations, was how I first experienced most of the totemic films of the 1980s…) A few years later, as I was going into high school, I started reading Herbert’s actual novels, if to wind up with that unfortunate sense of “diminishing returns” you alluded to (and feeling more or less lost as to what was happening in the last book or so). I have, though, read the first novel several times, the last time fairly recently. However, I still have to admit to my own uneasiness at the missing “bedrock philosophical concepts” you mentioned, although they can seem unfortunately scarce to me in a great deal of “interstellar science fiction…”

- anonymous

November 24, 2018 at 4:01 am

Where you have “in the name his Art,” you’ve left out an “of.”

For my part, I loved the movie, but it’s weird as hell and I would never recommend it to anyone.

- Jimmy Maher

November 24, 2018 at 4:56 am

Thanks!

- Christian Studer

November 24, 2018 at 7:10 am

Ah, thanks for the article!

But now I have to go and read the book again… :-/

- Christian Studer

November 24, 2018 at 2:28 pm

Oh no, I jus realized that I don’t own a physical copy of Dune.

Anybody can recommend a fancy edition? (Not the Folio Society one, that’s too fancy…)

- Laertes

November 24, 2018 at 12:59 pm

It is Raffaella, not Raffealla. Great article as usual. I love Dune, I have read it several times both in spanish when my english was very limited and in english. And I played countless hours Dune II.

- Jimmy Maher

November 25, 2018 at 2:44 am

Thanks!

- Greg Carter

November 24, 2018 at 6:39 pm

Thanks for a fascinating article! Like many diehard Dune fans (I just finished the Audible audiobook version, and have read it on paper many times over the years), I was disappointed in the Lynch film. It was interesting to read about how it came to be the mess that it was.

As you say, “…the definitive cinematic Dune has yet to be made.”

That may be about to change! I’m pretty excited about Denis Villeneuve’s version, which is expected to get started early next year.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/07/denis-villeneuve-is-remaking-dune-and-thats-a-good-thing/

- David Cornelson

November 24, 2018 at 8:05 pm

Dune was/is one of my top five favorite books of all time. I loved it the second I picked it up, embraced its complexity, politics, religion, and nuance.

Few people were more excited to sit for the Lynch movie.

I walked out steaming mad. The result was a simplistic caracture of the novel with a huge plot point replaced with a throat weapon.

There’s a new Dune in the works. One can only hope he gets it right.

I second the comment on the non-Frank Dune sequels. They are horrible and shouldn’t even be used to hold a door open.

- Martin

November 24, 2018 at 11:21 pm

I’ve read all six of the originals long ago but not any of the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson efforts. There seems to be quite a number of them, so something must be going right with them. So what’s the consensus on what’s wrong with them? Is it the writing, the plotting or what exactly?

- Alex Smith

November 25, 2018 at 12:20 am

Yes.

- Eric

November 25, 2018 at 5:04 am

I’m not sure how best to describe what exactly is wrong with the Brian Herbert books – others here can probably answer that better than I can. But I can attest all the same that every single one of the non-Frank books I’ve tried to read (and I tried reading at least 5 of them) has been utterly excruciating to get through. I wanted badly to find something to like about these books because I am so fascinated and intrigued by the Dune universe, but it’s like Herbert and Anderson were given this amazing universe to work with on a silver platter and they took that platter and ran over it with a steamroller, stabbed it with a pick axe and then chucked what was left into an incinerator. Yes, they really are that bad.

- whomever

November 25, 2018 at 4:10 pm

Great Article Jimmy! Really interesting, I hadn’t known any of the complicated backstory of the film, and count me as one of the people who actually like it, though I totally get it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. (I think it’s at least hit “cult classic” at this point). Patrick Stewart was already at least somewhat known as a Shakespearian actor and of course had played Sejanus in “I, Claudius” (which probably has the best single British cast in any TV before or afterwards).

Your article already goes into this, but Dune has really aged well in the context of today, with Spice being a metaphor for oil, ecology, a whole pile of other themes that or sort of recent (there’s even some hints the Fremen are descendants of Bedouin given their mention of the Hajj). A Lot of Sci-Fi from that era can’t say the same. And as I’m sure you are going to get to, it’s influence on gaming is epic.

- whomever

November 25, 2018 at 4:10 pm

Of interest to this Blog, Frank Herbert also apparently wrote some books on home computers, such as https://www.amazon.com/Without-Youre-Nothing-Essential-Computers/dp/0671412876. This is especially ironic as a major part of the Dune backstory is the Butlarian Jihad, which basically banned computers. I’ve never run into a copy (could order on Amazon I supposed). I’ve also been curious about the picture. I suspect that’s an artists’s interpretation of a computer as it’s no model I recognize, but I’d be curious if it was a real machine.
[Apologies if this is published twice, I seem to be having issues]

- Jimmy Maher

November 25, 2018 at 4:40 pm

I only know of one Frank Herbert book on computers, the one you link to. I’d actually written several paragraphs about this topic, but wound up cutting them; there was just nowhere to fit them elegantly into this or any of the subsequent articles.

The book is from a time when a number of prominent science-fiction writers were evangelizing for home computers, but it’s definitely the weirdest specimen of its breed I’ve ever seen. It reads as if Herbert had read the manuals for several home computers, but never actually used one. And, appropriately from an author who banned computers from his own science-fiction universe for impinging on a domain that ought to be reserved for humans alone, it treats computers more as personal and societal enemies to be subdued than tools to be harnessed. In all this, it perhaps reveals more about its author than it does its ostensible subject matter.

- Saint Podkayne

November 26, 2018 at 3:29 pm

“Jodorowsky’s Dune” is a documentary absolutely worth watching. I’ve watched other documentaries about Jodorowsky, and nobody else managed to do one where Jodorowsky isn’t not only the star of the show, but also the one dictating the emotional conclusions. “Jodorowsky’s Dune” shows us exactly how charming he is, how his own messiah complex operates, lets his family speak, provides us with a narrative thread Jodorowsky himself couldn’t disapprove of… and then makes it clear we’ve just been taken in by a cult leader, same as anybody. The fact that it’s truly interesting to hear about this movie that never got made just wraps it up perfectly. It’s a truly funny yet creepy film.

- Jason

November 27, 2018 at 9:32 am

“He had always conceived of Dune as an epic tragedy in the Shakespearean sense…”

Now I understand why my wife can’t seem to get through Dune Messiah after loving the first novel. “I know something terrible is going to happen,” she says, “and I don’t want to read it.”

She says she’s thinking about skipping to the third book. I guess I’ll tell her to skip them all. :)

As for me, my only experience with Dune is that great, great Adlib soundtrack which I’m sure will merit a mention next week!

- Gideon Marcus

November 27, 2018 at 4:20 pm

How very timely! I just finished part 1 of Dune Planet, which came out in Analog this month (55 years ago).

It’s interesting but not very well crafted.

- AguyinaRPG

November 28, 2018 at 12:05 am

I never read Dune, but being in the circles that I am, it’s shadow really cannot be escaped. Each of the major sci-fi franchises has a sort of core tenant of human experience inherit to them. Star Wars is about conflict, Star Trek is about exploration, and Dune is about resources. That makes for most of a 4X game!

I do like to joke to people that the film is the greatest ever made just to see their reaction. Personally I like it as a disconnected series of fantastic film-making moments. Never even bothered to really figure out what it was about. There’s nothing wrong in my mind for disassociating the coherent and finding the pieces memorable by themselves. Total stoner movie though.

I do hope you will be covering the Cryo game in some detail rather than just skipping to Dune II. That one is a really great artistic piece in itself. A real forgotten treasure from the early 90s Adventure era.

I would suggest you ring up Alex or I because he obtained a French book which has the Cryo side of the story about the licensing which is very different from how the Westwood people tell it. Either way, I’m looking forward to you tracing the influences and extrapolating the meaning behind their portrayals of the Dune universe.

- Carl

November 29, 2018 at 10:25 pm

Nice article, Jimmy. I only read Dune a few years ago and it felt to me at least that it hasn’t aged all that well. All the Islamic and Arabic references must have felt quite exotic in the 1960s and 1970s but most westerners are much more knowledgeable about Muslim culture now. Also, I found the casual homophobia and the fetishization of Baron Harkonnen’s girth a bit off-putting (but remember this is me reading the book from a 2010-ish sensibility).

Also, small correction. When you’re talking about Harkonnen’s costume, “all but buried under 200 pounds of fake silicon flesh as the disgustingly evil “, it should be silicone, not silicon.

- Jimmy Maher

November 30, 2018 at 9:24 am

Thanks!

And yeah, I can see and to some extent agree with your point of view. As I said, it’s a book I can respect, but not one I can manage to love.

- Roberto

November 30, 2018 at 4:32 pm

Hi. “De Laurentis”, with just one I (There are no double vocals in any Italian word, actually).

- Jimmy Maher

November 30, 2018 at 11:42 pm

It looked strange to me as well, but that’s definitely the spelling, at least in the English-speaking world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dino_De_Laurentiis.

- Roberto

December 4, 2018 at 8:14 pm

Yes, you’re right! I’ve seen his name hundreds of times on screen, yet I was convinced it was Laurentis! So, actually Italian proper names can have double vocals, I didn’t know this. Sorry for wasting your time!

- Doug Orleans

December 4, 2018 at 6:53 pm

Perhaps worth a footnote is the Dune board game, created by the guys who made Cosmic Encounter and published by Avalon Hill in 1979 (with a reissue in 1984 to tie in with the movie). It’s a well-regarded strategy game: https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/121/dune

- Pingback: Herbert’s Dune in a pair of 1992 games #VintageComputing #Dune #Gaming #MSDOS « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!

- Tom

December 22, 2018 at 12:29 am

When the movie came out, I was in college and had read the 3 books twice. God Emperor of Dune came out after a gap. There was even a preview of it in Playboy along with an interview with Herbert.

That, along with the rest in the series, was all about the consequences and undoing its effects on humans.

As a fan, I’ve read all the Anderson ones (Vermillion Hells!). The 1st trilogy were crap. I though the others were ok and fleshed out some of the backstory the lead up to the books. I was surprised at how bad those 3 were. I’ve read other books by Brian Herbert and liked them well enough.

Controlling the Spice, Part 2: Cryo’s Dune
November 30, 2018

Philippe Ulrich

To hear him tell the story at any rate, Philippe Ulrich had always been destined to make a computer game out of Dune. On July 21, 1980, he was a starving young musician living in an attic closet in Paris without heat or electricity, having just been dropped by his tiny record label after his first album had stiffed. Threading his way through the tourists packing the Champs-Élysées that scorching summer day, he saw an odd little gadget called a Sinclair ZX80 in the window of an electronics shop. The name of the shop? Dune. His destiny was calling.

But a busy decade still lay between Ulrich and his Dune game. For now, he fell in love at first sight with the first personal computer he had ever seen. His only goal became to scrape together enough money to buy it. Through means fair or foul, he did so, and within a year he had sold his first game, a BASIC implementation of the board game Othello, to Sinclair’s French distributor. He soon partnered up with one Emmanuel Viau, a medical student eager to drop out of university and pursue his real love of programming games. The two pumped out arcade clones and educational drills to raise cash, and officially incorporated their own little software studio, ERE Informatique, on April 28, 1983.

Rémi Herbulot

ERE moved up from the ranks of regional developers and arcade-clone-makers to score their first big international hit thanks to one Rémi Herbulot, a financial controller at the automotive supplier Valeo who had learned BASIC to save his company money on accounting software, only to get himself hopelessly hooked on the drug that was programming to personalities like his. Without ever having seen the American Bill Budge’s landmark Pinball Construction Set, Herbulot wrote a program along the same lines: one that let you build your own pinball table from a box of interchangeable parts and then play and share it with your friends. As soon as Herbolut showed his pinball game to Ulrich, he knew that it had far more potential than anything ERE had made so far, and didn’t waste any time hiring the creator and publishing his creation. Upon its release in 1985, Macadam Bumper topped sales charts in both France and Britain, selling almost 100,000 copies in all. It was even picked up by the American publisher Accolade, who released it as Pinball Wizard and saw it get as high as number 5 on the American charts despite the competition from Pinball Construction Set. Just like that, ERE Informatique had made it onto the international stage. For a second act, Rémi Herbulot soon provided the action-adventure Crafton & Xunk — released as Get Dexter! in some places — and it too became a hit across Europe.

Yet none of the free spirits who made up ERE Informatique was much of a businessman — least of all Philippe Ulrich — and the little collective lived constantly on the ragged edge of insolvency. Hoping to secure the funding needed to make more ambitious games to suit the new 16-bit computers entering the market, Ulrich and Viau sold their company to the Lyon-based Infogrames, the largest games publisher in France, in June of 1987. The plan was for ERE to continue making their games, still under their old company name, while Infogrames quietly took care of the accounting and the publishing.

For the past year already, much of ERE’s energy had been absorbed by Captain Blood, a game designed by Ulrich himself and a newer arrival named Didier Bouchon, a student of biology, interior design, film, and painting whom Ulrich liked to describe as his company’s very own “mad scientist.” And, indeed, Captain Blood was something of a Frankenstein’s monster of a game, combining a fractal-based space-flight simulator with a conversation engine that had you talking with the aliens you met in an invented symbolic language. With its Giger-inspired tangles of onscreen organics and technology and a color palette dominated by neon blues and deep purples, it was all extremely strange stuff, looking and playing more like a conceptual-art installation than a videogame. Not least strange was the plot, which cast the player as a programmer who got sucked into an alternate dimension inside his computer, then saw his identity fractured into six by a “hyperspace accident.” Now he must scour the galaxy to find and destroy his clones and reconstitute his full identity. In a major publicity coup, Ulrich managed to convince the famous composer and keyboardist Jean-Michel Jarre to license to ERE the piece of music that became the game’s main theme. Such a collaboration matched perfectly with the company’s public persona, which depicted their games not so much as commercial entertainments as an emerging artistic movement, in line with, as Ulrich liked to say, Impressionism, Dadaism, or surrealism: “Why should it not be the same with software?”

Captain Blood

Released for the Atari ST in France just in time for the Christmas of 1987, Captain Blood certainly was, whatever else you could say about it, a bold artistic gambit. The French gaming magazine SVM talked it up if anything even more than Ulrich himself, declaring it “a masterpiece,” “the most beautiful game in the world,” the herald of a new generation of games “where narrative sense and programming talent are at the service of a new art.” This sort of stilted grandiosity — sounding, at least when translated into English, a bit like some of the symbolic dialogs you had with the aliens in Captain Blood — would become one of the international hallmarks of a French gaming culture that was just beginning to break out beyond the country’s borders. Captain Blood became the first poster child for what Philippe Ulrich himself would later dub “the French Touch”: “Our games didn’t have the excellent gameplay of original English-language games, but graphically, their aesthetics were superior.”

It took some time to realize that, underneath its undeniable haunting beauty, Captain Blood wasn’t really much of a game. Playing it meant flying around to random planets, going through the same tedious flight-simulator bits again and again, and then — if you were lucky and the planet you’d arrived at wasn’t entirely empty — having baffling conversations with all too loquacious aliens, never knowing what was just gibberish for the sake of it and what was some sort of vital clue. As Ulrich’s own words above would indicate, he and some other French developers really did seem to believe that making beautiful and conceptually original games like Captain Blood should absolve them from the hard work of testing, tweaking, and balancing them. And perhaps he had a point, at least momentarily. What with owners of slick new 16-bit machines like the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga eager to see them put through their audiovisual paces, gameplay really could fall by the wayside with few obvious consequences. Captain Blood sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide despite its faults. For ERE Informatique, it felt like a validation of their new direction.

So, on June 12, 1988, they announced the formation of a new sub-label for artsy games like Captain Blood in an elaborate “happening” at the storied Maison de la Radio in Paris. The master of ceremonies was none other than Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Chilean filmmaker who had spent $2 million in an abortive attempt to make a Dune movie back in the 1970s. The name of the sub-label, Exxos, was derived from the Greek prefix meaning “outward.” The conceit had it that Exxos was literally the god in the machines at ERE Informatique, the real mastermind of all their games. After Jodorowsky’s introduction, Ulrich stepped up to say his piece:

Ladies and gentlemen, the decision was not easy, but still, we have agreed to reveal to you the secret of our dynamism and creativity, which makes ERE Informatique a success. If there are sensitive people in the room, I ask them to be strong. They have nothing to fear if their vibrations are positive; the telluric forces will save them.

My friends, the inspiration does not fall from the sky, genius is not by chance. The inspiration and genius which designed Macadam Bumper is not the fabulous Rémi Herbulot. The inspiration and genius which led to Captain Blood is not the unquenchable Didier Bouchon nor your servant here.

It is Him! He who has lived hidden in our offices for months. He who comes from outside the Universe. He that we reveal today to the world, because the hour has come. I name Exxos. I ask you to say after me a few magic words to remind Him of His homeland: ata ata hoglo hulu, ata ata hoglo hulu…

A group chant followed, more worthy of an occult ceremony than a business presentation.

Some months later, Rémi Herbulot’s Purple Saturn Day became the first big game to premiere on the Exxos label. It was a sort of avant-garde take on the Epyx Games sports series, if you can imagine such a thing. “O Exxos, you who showed us the path to the global success of Captain Blood, you who inspired those fabulous colorful swirls of spacetime!” prayed Philippe Ulrich before a bemused crowd of ordinary trade-show attendees. “Today it is the turn of Rémi Herbulot and Purple Saturn Day. Exxos, thank you!”

The shtick got old quickly. When ERE promoted the next Exxos game, a poorly designed point-and-click adventure called Kult, by dismembering a life-sized latex alien in the name of their god and distributing the pieces to assembled journalists, you could almost see the collective shrug that followed even in the French gaming press. Neither Purple Saturn Day nor Kult (the latter of which was published under the name of Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Priestess in North America) sold in anything like the numbers of Captain Blood.

Meanwhile Infogrames, ERE’s parent company, had gotten into serious financial trouble through over-expansion and over-investment. After a near-acquisition by the American publisher Epyx fell through at the last minute, Infogrames stopped paying the bills at ERE Informatique. Thanks no doubt to such ruthless cost-cutting, Infogrames would escape by the skin of their teeth, and in time would recover sufficient to become one of the biggest games publishers in the world. ERE, however, was finished. Philippe Ulrich and his little band of followers had been cast adrift along with their god. But never fear; their second act would prove almost as surprising as their first. For Ulrich and company were about to meet Dune.

Given the enormous popularity of the novel, one might have expected a Dune computer game long before this point. Yet, thanks to the high-profile but failed Dune film, the rights had been in limbo for the past five years.

As we saw in my previous article, the Dino De Laurentiis Corporation licensed the media rights to Dune — which included game rights — from Frank Herbert in 1982. About six months prior to the film’s release in December of 1984, they made a deal with Parker Brothers — best known as the maker of such evergreen family board games as Monopoly, Clue, and Risk — for a Dune videogame. But said game never materialized; the failure of the film, coupled with a troubled American home-computer marketplace and an all but annihilated post-Great Videogame Crash console marketplace, apparently made them think better of the idea. The Dino De Laurentiis Corporation went bankrupt in 1985, and Frank Herbert died the following year. Despite the inevitable flurry of litigation which followed these events, no one seemed to be quite sure for a long time just where the game rights now resided. The person who would at last break this logjam at decade’s end was a dapper 47-year-old Briton named Martin Alper.

Martin Alper with a display rack of cheap games. These were to be found in all sorts of unlikely places in Britain, from corner shops to booksellers, during Mastertronic’s heyday.

Alper had gotten his start in software in 1983, when, already an established businessman and entrepreneur, he had invested in a tape-duplication facility. At this time, British computer games were distributed almost exclusively on cassette tapes. “I asked the guy how much it cost to duplicate a tape,” Alper later remembered. “He said about 30p. Then I asked him how much they sold the games for. About eight or nine pounds. I couldn’t understand the massive difference.” In his confusion he detected the scent of Opportunity. The result would be Mastertronic, the most internationally successful budget label of the 1980s.

Alper and two others launched Mastertronic in April of 1984 with several games priced at £1.99, about half the lowest price point typical in Britain at the time. The figure was no accident: a survey had revealed that £2 was the average amount of weekly pocket money given to boys of twelve years old or so by British parents. Thus, while the typical kid might have to save up for several weeks to buy a game from the competition, he could buy a new one every single weekend from Mastertronic if he was sufficiently dedicated. And dedicated the kids of Britain proved to be, to the tune of 130,000 Mastertronic games shipped in the first month.

The established powers in the British games industry, however, were less enthusiastic. Claiming that selling games at such prices would set everyone on the road to ruin, distributors flatly refused to handle Mastertronic’s products. Unfazed, Alper and his partners simply went around them, setting up their own distribution pipeline with the likes of the bookstore chain W.H. Smith and even supermarkets and convenience stores, who were advised to place the freestanding pillars of Mastertronic games, with “£1.99!” emblazoned in big digits across the top, right where parents and children passed by on their way to the cash register with their groceries. “The problem with the conventional retail outlets,” said Alper, “is [that] they don’t encourage the impulse purchase. Supermarkets are much better at that.”

Mastertronic’s simple action games weren’t great, but for the most part they weren’t as horrible as the rest of the industry liked to claim either. If they lacked the staying power of many of their higher-priced rivals, that could be rationalized away in light of the fact that a kid could buy a new one every week or two. And Alper proved hugely talented at tempting his target demographic in all sorts of ways that didn’t depend directly on the quality of the games themselves. One of Mastertronic’s biggest early hits was a knock-off of Michael Jackson’s extended “Thriller” video, renamed to Chiller. (Predictably enough, they were hauled into court by Jackson’s management company and wound up having to pay a settlement, but they still came out well-ahead financially.) Another game, Clumsy Colin Action Biker, starred the mascot from a popular brand of crisps, and was advertised right on the packages of said junk food. (“They showed us how they were made. It’s revolting. You know those little plastic chips you get in packing materials? They’re exactly the same, with added flavoring.”)

It was all pretty lowbrow stuff — about as far as you could get from the high-toned pretensions of ERE Informatique across the English Channel — but Mastertronic’s games-as-commodies business model proved very successful. Within eighteen months of their launch, Mastertronic alone owned 20 percent of the British computer-games market, was expanding aggressively across the rest of Europe, and had become the first British software house to launch a successful line in the United States. In fact, Martin Alper had already moved to California, the better to steer operations there.

But Mastertronic’s glory days of huge profits off cheap games were brief-lived. Just like Infogrames in France, they tried to do too much too soon. Losing sight of their core competencies, they funded a line of coin-operated arcade games that went nowhere and acquired the prestigious but troubled British/Australian publisher Melbourne House for way too much money. At the same time, the army of lone-wolf bedroom coders who provided their games proved ill-equipped to take full advantage of the newer 16-bit machines that began to capture many gamers’ hearts and wallets as the 1980s wore on. Already by 1987, Mastertronic’s bottom line had turned from black to red.

Meanwhile Virgin Games, one of the smaller subsidiaries of Richard Branson’s globe-spanning media empire, had been quietly releasing games in Britain since 1982. Now, though, Branson was eager to get into the games market in a more concentrated way. Mastertronic, possessed of excellent worldwide distribution and proven marketing savvy despite their current financial difficulties, seemed a great way to do that. In early 1988, Virgin bought Mastertronic.

Initially, the new subsidiary took the name of Virgin Mastertronic and simply continued on with business as usual. But as Martin Alper looked upon a changing industry, he saw those more powerful 16-bit platforms continuing to take over from the simple 8-bit machines that had fueled Mastertronic’s success, and he saw older demographics with more disposable income beginning to take an interest in more sophisticated, upmarket computer games. In short, he felt that he had already hit a ceiling with his cheap little games; what had been so right for 1984 was no longer such a great fit for 1988. And so Alper, a man of enormous charisma and energy, maneuvered himself into the leading role at Virgin Games proper, overseeing its worldwide operations from California, the entertainment capital of the world. After having fallen into exactly the decline Alper had foreseen, Virgin Mastertronic would be sold off in 1991 to the Japanese console maker Sega, with whom they had a longstanding distribution agreement.

Alper loved Dune, connecting with its mythical — mystical? — qualities on a deep-seated level: “It presents a parallel with Christianity or Judaism, including the idea of the messiah who comes to save a strange planet. Dune begs questions about other civilizations that could exist: will they have the same beliefs, worship the same supernatural beings?” He had always dreamed of publishing a Dune computer game, but had known it just wasn’t practical on a Mastertronic budget. Now, though, with the more prestigious name and deeper pockets of Virgin behind him, he started pursuing the license in earnest. Beginning in 1988, he worked through a long, fraught process of first identifying the proper holder of the media rights — as far as could be determined from all of the previous litigation and bankruptcies, they seemed to have reverted to Universal Pictures, the distributor of the film — and then of prying them away for Virgin. Alper saw a Dune game as announcing Virgin’s — and his own — arrival on the scene as a major industry player in an artistic as well as commercial sense, making games far removed from the budgetware of the Mastertronic years.

Even as Alper was trying to secure the Dune rights, Philippe Ulrich and his friends were trying to free themselves from their entanglements with Infogrames and continue making games elsewhere. They found a welcome supporter in Jean-Martial Lefranc, the head of Virgin Loisirs, Virgin Games’s French arm. Manifesting a touch of Gallic pride, he wanted to set up a homegrown studio, made up of French developers creating ambitious and innovative games which would be distributed all over the world under the Virgin label. And certainly no one could accuse Ulrich and friends of lacking either ambition or a spirit of innovation. Lefranc helped to negotiate a concrete exit agreement between the former ERE Informatique and Infogrames, and thereafter signed them up to become the basis of a new Virgin Loisirs subsidiary.

Ulrich and company named their new studio Cryo Interactive, a play on cryogenic chambers and the computer-assisted dreams people would presumably have in them in the future. They announced their existence with all the grandiosity the world had come to expect from this bunch, saying that their purpose would be to “open the way to the next generation of software designers, artists, programmers, and so on,” who would “create expanding horizons for our imagination in tomorrow’s fascinating technology world.” “Infinite travel, magic, beauty, technology, adventure, and mystery” were in the offing.

In August of 1989, Rémi Herbulot flew to California to have a more prosaic conversation with Martin Alper about potential Cryo projects that might be suitable for the international market. Alper told him then that he was trying to secure the rights to make a Dune game, a project for which he saw Cryo as the perfect development team, without elaborating as to why. “But,” he said, “there’s seems to be little chance of actually getting the rights.”

Herbulot wasn’t sure what to make of the whole exchange, but when he told his colleagues about it back in Paris, Ulrich, who loved the novel unconditionally, was convinced that the project had been ordained by fate. Not only had he bought his first computer in a shop called Dune, but the hotel in Las Vegas where they had all stayed during the last Winter Consumer Electronics Show had had the same name. And then there was his friendship with Alejandro Jodorowsky, the would-be Dune film director of yore. What another might have seen as a series of tangential coincidences, Ulrich saw as the mysterious workings of destiny. It was “obvious,” he said, that Cryo would end up making Dune into a computer game — and, indeed, he was proven correct. Three weeks after Herbulot’s return from California, Ulrich got a call at home from Jean-Martial Lefranc. Martin Alper had managed to secure the Dune license after all, said Virgin Loisir’s chief executive, and he wanted Cryo to start thinking immediately about what kind of game they could make out of it. Ulrich remembers running out of his apartment building and doing several laps around the block, feeling like he was levitating.

But his ecstasy would be short lived. Virgin assigned as Dune’s producer David Bishop, a veteran British games journalist, designer, and executive. The language barrier and the distance separating London from Paris were just the beginning of the difficulties that ensued. In the eyes of his French charges, Bishop seemed to view himself as Dune’s appointed designer, Cryo as the mere technical team assigned to implement his vision. Given the artistic aspirations of people like Philippe Urlich and Rémi Herbulot, who so forthrightly described themselves as the vanguard of nothing less than a new artistic movement, this was bound to cause problems. Meanwhile Bishop, for his part, was convinced that Cryo was being deliberately obtuse and oh so inscrutably Gallic just to mess with him. The cross-Channel working relationship started out strained and just kept getting more so.

Following what was, for better or for worse, becoming an accepted industry practice, Virgin told Cryo that they had to storyboard the game on paper and get that approved before they could even begin to implement anything on a computer. Cryo worked this way for months on end, abandoning their computers for pencil and paper.

Adapting a story as complex as that of Dune to another medium must be, as David Lynch among others had already learned, a daunting endeavor under any circumstances. “We reread the book several times, got hold of everything we could find on the subject, and watched the movie over and over again,” says Philippe Ulrich. “Whenever we came across somebody who had read the book, we asked them what had impressed them most and what their strongest memories were.” The centerpiece of the book and the movie, the struggle for control of Arrakis between House Atreides and House Harkonnen, must obviously be the centerpiece of the game as well. Yet Cryo didn’t want to lose all of the other textures of the story. How could they best capture the spirit of Dune? To boil it all down to yet another game of military strategy in an industry already flooded with such things didn’t seem right, but neither did a point-and-click adventure game. After much struggle, they decided to do both — to combine a strategic view of the battle for Arrakis with the embodied, first-person role of Paul Atreides.

David Bishop hated it. All of it. “The interface is too complex,” he said. “A mix of adventure and strategy is not desirable.” Others in Virgin’s British and American offices also piled on. Cryo’s design lacked “unity,” they said; it would require “fifty disks” to hold it; it had “too many cinematic sequences, at the risk of boring the player”; the time required to develop it would “exceed the average lifespan of a programmer.” One particular question was raised endlessly, if understandably in light of Cryo’s history: would this be a game that mainstream American gamers would want to play, or would it be all, well, French? And yes, it was a valid enough concern on the face of it. But equally valid was the counterpoint raised by Ulrich: if you didn’t want a French Dune, why did you hire arguably the most French of all French studios to make it? Or did Bishop feel that that decision had been a mistake? Certainly Cryo had long since begun to suspect that his real goal was to kill the project by any means necessary.

Matters came to a head in the summer of 1990. In what may very well still stand as an industry record, Dune had now been officially “in production” for almost a year without a single line of code getting written. Virgin invited the whole of Cryo to join them at their offices in London to try to hash the whole thing out. The meeting was marked by bursts of bickering over trivialities, interspersed with long, sullen silences. At last, Philippe Ulrich stood up to make a final impassioned speech. He said that Cryo was trying their level best to make a game that evoked all of the major themes of a book they loved (never mind for the moment that the license Virgin had acquired could more accurately be described as a license to the movie). The transformation of boy to messiah was in there; the all-importance of the spice was in there; even the ecological themes were in there. David Bishop just snorted in response; Virgin wanted a commercial computer game that was fun to play, he groused, not a work of fine literary art. Nothing got resolved.

Or perhaps in a way it did. On September 19, 1990, Cryo got a fax from London: “We do not believe that the Dune proposal is strong enough to publish under the Virgin Games label. Consequently, we do not wish that more work be undertaken on this title.”

And then, at this fraught juncture, a rather extraordinary thing happened. Ulrich went directly to Jean-Martial Lefranc of Virgin Loisirs to plead his case one final time, whereupon Lefranc told him to just go ahead and make his Dune his way — to forget about storyboards and David Bishop and all the rest of it. Virgin Loisirs was doing pretty well at the moment; he’d find some money in some hidden corner of his budget to keep the lights on at Cryo. If they made the Dune game a great one, he was sure he could smooth it all over with his superiors after the fact, when he had a fait accompli in the form of an amazing game that just had to be published already in his hands. And so Ulrich took a second lap or two around the block and then buckled down to work.

For some six months, Cryo beavered away at their Dune in secrecy. Then, suddenly, the jig was up. Lefranc — who, as his actions in relation to Dune would indicate, didn’t have an overly high opinion of Virgin Games’s international management — left to join the movie-making arm of the Virgin empire. His replacement, Christian Brécheteau, was a complete unknown quantity for Cryo. At about the same time, a routine global audit of the empire’s books sent word back to London about a significant sum being paid to Cryo every month for reasons that were obscure at best. Brécheteau called Ulrich: “Take the first plane to London and make your own case. I can’t do anything for you.”

As it happened, Martin Alper was in London at that time. If Ulrich hoped for a sympathetic reception from that quarter, however, he was disappointed. After pointedly leaving him to cool his heels in a barren waiting room most of the day, Alper and other executives, including Cryo’s arch-nemesis David Bishop, invited Ulrich in. The mood was decidedly chilly as he set up his presentation. “This is not a game!” scoffed Alper almost immediately, as soon as he saw the first, heavily scripted scenes. Yet as Ulrich demonstrated further he could sense the mood — even the mood of Bishop — slowly changing to one of grudging interest. Alper even pronounced some of what he saw “remarkable.”

Ulrich was ushered out of the room while the jury considered his fate. When he was called back in, Alper pronounced their judgment: “You have five weeks to send me something more polished. If that doesn’t please me, I never want to hear about it again, and you can consider yourself fired.” A more formal statement of his position was faxed to Paris the next day:

Our opinion of the game has not changed. The graphics and aesthetic  presentation are impressive, but the overall design is still too confusing, especially if one takes into account the tastes of the American public. We are willing to support your work until July 15 [1991], by which date we expect to receive a playable version of the game in England and the United States. If the earlier concerns expressed by David Bishop prove unfounded, we will be happy to support your efforts to realize the finished game. However, we wish to point out that it will not under any circumstances be possible to transfer the Dune license to another publisher, and that no game of Frank Herbert’s novel will be published without our consent.[1]

Cryo bit their tongues and made the changes Virgin requested — changes designed to make the game more streamlined, more understandable, and more playable. On July 15, they packaged up what they had and sent it off. Three days later, they got a call from a junior executive in Virgin’s California office. His tone was completely different from that of the fax of five and a half weeks earlier: “What you have done is fantastic. Productivity has collapsed around here because people are all playing your game!”

Cryo originally planned to use this picture of Sting in their Dune game, but the rock star refused permission to use his likeness.

So, Feyd-Rautha, Sting’s character in the movie, had to get some plastic surgery for the game.

Work continued on the game for another nine months or so. Relations between Cryo and Virgin remained strained at times over that period, but cancellation was never again on the cards. At Virgin’s insistence, Cryo spent considerable time making the game look more like the movie, rather than their possibly idiosyncratic image of the book. Most of the characters, with the exception of only a few whose actors refused permission to have their likenesses reproduced — Sting and Patrick Stewart were among them — were redrawn to match the film. The media-savvy Martin Alper was well aware that Kyle MacLachlan, the star of the film, was currently starring in David Lynch’s much-talked-about television series Twin Peaks. He made sure that MacLachlan graced the front of the box as Paul Atriedes.

The game of Dune’s cover art was a still from the movie.

Cryo’s Dune finally shipped worldwide in May of 1992, to positive reviews and healthy sales; one report claims that it sold 20,000 copies in its first week in the United States alone, a very impressive performance for the time. It did if anything even better in Europe; Cryo had been smart enough to develop and release it simultaneously for MS-DOS, the overwhelmingly dominant computer-game platform in North America, and for the Commodore Amiga, the almost-as-popular computer-gaming platform of choice in much of Europe. The game was successful enough that Virgin funded expanded MS-DOS and Sega Genesis CD-based versions, which appeared in 1993, complete with voice acting and additional animation sequences.

And what can we say about Cryo’s Dune today? I will admit that I didn’t have high hopes coming in. As must be all too clear by now, I’m not generally a fan of this so-called French Touch in games. While I love beauty as much as the next person and love to be moved by games, I do insist that a game work first and foremost as a game. This isn’t a standard that Philippe Ulrich’s teams tended to meet very often, before or after they made Dune. The combination of Ulrich’s love of weirdness with the famously weird filmmaker David Lynch would seem a toxic brew indeed, one that could only result in a profoundly awful game. Inscrutability can work at times in the non-interactive medium of movies; in games, where the player needs to have some idea what’s expected from her, not so much.

But, rather amazingly, Cryo’s Dune defies any knee-jerk prejudices that might be engendered by knowledge of Philippe Ulrich’s earlier or later output. While it’s every bit as unique a design concept as you might expect given its place of origin, in this case the concept works. For all that they spent the better part of three years at one another’s throats more often than not, Dune nevertheless wound up being a true meeting in the middle between the passionate digital artistes of Cryo and the more practical craftsmen in Virgin’s Anglosphere offices. For once, an exemplar of the French Touch has a depth worthy of its striking surface. Dune plays like a dispatch from an alternate reality in which Cryo cared as much about making good games in a design sense as they did about making beautiful and meaningful ones in an aesthetic and thematic sense — thus proving, should anyone have doubted it, that these things need not be mutually exclusive.

The game leads you by the nose a bit at the beginning, but it later opens up. The early stages function very well as a tutorial for the strategy game. Thanks to this fact and the simple, intuitive interface, the Dune player has little need for the manual.

You play the game of Dune as Paul Atreides, just arrived on Arrakis with his father and mother and the rest of House Atreides. From his embodied perspective, you fly around the planet in your ornithopter, recruiting the various Fremen clans to your cause, then directing them to mine the precious spice, to train in military maneuvers, to spy on House Harkonnen, and eventually to go to war against them. As you’re doing so, another form of plot engine is also ticking along, unfolding the experiences which transform the boy Paul Atriedes physically and spiritually into his new planet’s messiah. This “adventurey” side of the game is extremely assertive at first, to the point of leading you by the nose through the strategy side: go here and do this; now go there and do that. In time, however, it eases up and your goals become more abstract, giving much more scope for you to manage the war your way.

The fusion isn’t always perfect; it is possible to break the adventure side of the game if you obstinately pursue your own agenda in the strategy side. But it’s certainly one of the most interesting and successful hybrid designs I’ve ever seen. As the character you play is transformed by his experiences, so is the strategy game you’re playing; as Paul’s psychic powers grow, you no longer have to hop around the planet as much in your physical form, but can communicate with your followers over long distances using extra-sensory perception. Eventually your powers will expand enough to let you ride the fearsome sandworms into the final series of battles against the Harkonnen.

Dune is a strategy game inside an embodied adventure game.

Cryo’s Dune provides other ludic adaptations from non-interactive media with a worthy benchmark to strive for; it doesn’t always fuss overly much about the details of its source material, but it really does do a superb job of capturing its spirit. As an impassioned Philippe Ulrich noted at that pivotal meeting in London, there’s no theme in the book that isn’t echoed, however faintly, in the game. Even the ecological element of the book that made it such a favorite of the environmental movement is remembered, as you reclaim mined-out desert lands to begin a “greening” of Arrakis later in the game. Ditto that wind of utter alienness that blows through the book and, now, the game. This game looks and feels and, perhaps most of all, sounds like no other; its synthesized soundtrack has passed into gaming legend as one of the very best of its breed, so good that Cryo actually released it as a standalone audio CD.

An in-game encyclopedia is available for newcomers, but in truth it’s hardly needed. The game conveys everything you really need to know almost subliminally as you play.

The game manages to be so evocative of its source material while remaining as enjoyable for those who haven’t read the novel or seen the film as those who have. It does a great job of getting newcomers up to speed, even as its dynamic, emergent strategy element ensures that it never becomes a dull exercise in walking through a plot those who have read the book already know. Its interface is an intuitive breeze, and the difficulty as well is perfectly pitched for what the game wants to be, being difficult enough to keep you on your toes but reasonable enough that you have a good chance of winning on your first try; after all, who wants to play through a story-oriented game like this twice? I love to see innovative approaches to gameplay that defy the strict boundaries of genre, and love it even more when said approaches work as well as they do here. This game still has plenty to teach the designers of today.

The big picture…

Sadly, though, Cryo’s Dune, despite its considerable commercial success, has gone down in history as something of a curiosity rather than a harbinger of design trends to come, a one-off that had little influence on the games that came later — not even the later games that came out of Cryo, which quite uniformly failed to approach the design standard set here. Cryo would survive for the balance of the 1990s, churning out what veteran games journalist John Walker calls, in his succinct and hilarous summing up of their legacy, “always awful but ever so sincere productions.” They would become known for, as Walker puts it, “deadpan adventure games set in wholly ludicrous reinterpretations of out-of-copyright works of literature, in which nothing made sense, and all puzzles were unfathomable guesswork.” The biggest mystery surrounding them is just how the hell they managed to stay in business for a full decade. Just who was buying all these terrible games that all of the magazines ripped to shreds and no one you talked to would ever admit to even playing, much less enjoying?

Nor did anyone else emerge to take up the torch of games that were designed to match the themes, plots, and settings of their fictions rather than to slot into some arbitrary box of ludic genre. Instead, the lines of genre would only continue to harden as time went on. Interesting hybrids like Cryo’s Dune became a more and more difficult sell to publishers, for dismaying if understandable reasons: said publishers were continuing to look on as their customers segregated themselves into discrete pools, each of whom only played a certain kind of game to the exclusive of all others. And so Cryo’s Dune passed into history, just one more briefly popular, now obscure gem ripe for rediscovery…

But wait, you might be saying: I claimed at the end of the first article in this series that Dune left a “profound mark” on gaming. Well, as it happens, that is true of Dune in general — but not true of this particular Dune game. Those months during which Cryo and Virgin Loisirs took their Dune underground — months during which the rest of Virgin Games had no idea what their French arm was doing — had yet more ramifications than those I’ve already described. For, during the time when he believed the Cryo Dune to be dead, Martin Alper launched a new project to make another, very different sort of Dune game, using developers much closer to his home base in California. This other Dune would be far less inspiring than Cryo’s as an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel or even of David Lynch’s film, but its influence on the world of gaming in general would be far more pronounced.

(Sources: the book La Saga des Jeux Vidéo by Daniel Ichbiah; Home Computer of June 1984; CU Amiga of July 1991 and June 1992; Amiga Format of March 1990; Computer and Video Games of August 1985, November 1985, and April 1986; New Computer Express of February 3 1990; Amstrad Action of March 1986 and April 1986; Retro Gamer 90; The One of May 1991 and June 1992; Game Players PC Entertainment Vol. 5 No. 5; PC Review of June 1992; Aktueller Software Markt of August 1994; Home Computing Weekly of May 8 1984, July 17 1984, and September 18 1984; Popular Computing Weekly of July 19 1984; Sinclair User of January 1986; The Games Machine of October 1987; Your Computer of January 1986. Online sources include “I Kind of Miss Dreadful Adventure Developer Cryo” by John Walker on Rock Paper Shotgun and “How ‘French Touch’ Gave Early Videogames Art, Brains” by Chris Baker on Wired. Note that some of the direct quotations in this article are translated into English from the French.

Feel free to download Cryo Interactive’s Dune from right here, packaged so as to make it as easy as possible to get running using your platform’s version of DOSBox.)

1. Virgin’s concern here was likely related to the fact that they had technically purchased the rights to the Dune movie. The question of whether separate rights to the novel existed and could be licensed had never really been resolved. They wanted to head off the nightmare scenario of Cryo/Virgin Loisirs truly going rogue by acquiring the novel rights and releasing the game under that license through another publisher. ↩

Comments
32 Responses

- Joachim

November 30, 2018 at 3:42 pm

Great stuff as usual, though the name is The Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Priestess, not Sci-Fi. :)

- Jimmy Maher

November 30, 2018 at 11:36 pm

Thanks!

- Brian

November 30, 2018 at 4:15 pm

Part of me just wants to ask why French video games have such outrageous accents…

Interesting history, I have Jodorowsky’s documentary on the list of things to watch. It will be interesting to see if the next take gets made and works. 80s Dune was trippy but problematic. Sci Fi made a better of it than expected, but the budgets and filming were just limited.

- Lisa H.

November 30, 2018 at 8:59 pm

Part of me just wants to ask why French video games have such outrageous accents…

XD

- Pedro Timóteo

November 30, 2018 at 5:04 pm

Ah, you ended up writing a little about Captain Blood after all. Nice. :)

About Dune, I loved this game back then, and it’s still enjoyable, though, as the article suggests, a bit too easy (there are ways to die, but as long as you have a recent save they’re easy to avoid next time, and I don’t think it’s actually possible to lose to the Harkonnen unless you’re trying to do so. Just keep mining enough spice to satisfy the Emperor, and you should be OK), and one that no one will probably want to play more than once a year.

Another commenter, on the previous post, had already mentioned the soundtrack, which is indeed brilliant, whether on Adlib, MT-32, Amiga or audio CD (as “Dune: Spice Opera”). All of these are on YouTube (though for the Amiga version I only found a longplay, not the music separately). I got the audio CD as a bonus with the CD-ROM version back in the day, and have listened to it year after year (though these days I don’t actually want to mess with physical CDs :) ).

“And certainly no could accuse Ulrich” <- no one

Also, I'm pretty sure the music in Captain Blood wasn't actually composed for the game. It's "Ethnicolor", from the 1984 album Zoolook, starting from about 6:50.

- Jimmy Maher

November 30, 2018 at 11:48 pm

Thanks!

- Jason

December 2, 2018 at 9:39 am

I suggest this version of the soundtrack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUfGyfbzl9k

The Dune soundtrack might be the best work ever created for the AdLib card. Dune was also one of only a few games to offer specific support for the AdLib Gold. I absolutely adore this soundtrack, and I have yet to actually play the game.

- cobbpg

November 30, 2018 at 6:36 pm

One game that came out a few years later and is very similar in spirit is Reunion. Just like Dune, it weaves together an adventure with a strategy game, even if the former aspect is a lot less pronounced in comparison. Still, I always wondered if it was a direct influence.

- Iván Díaz Álvarez

November 30, 2018 at 11:28 pm

Excellent article, I am very appreciative of the Exxos games even knowing they have their faults, I don’t think a game has be good on all fronts to be interesting or memorable. One little nitpick: Chamber of the Sci-Fi Mutant Priestess was the American name of the game, in Europe is better know as Kult: the temple of Flying Saucers.

- Jimmy Maher

December 1, 2018 at 12:04 am

Thanks!

While a game certainly doesn’t need to do all things equally well, in my opinion it does need to meet a baseline standard of playability and solubility. Anything else is like publishing a book where some of the pages are stuck together or a record which skips; people paid a lot of money for your game in good faith, and you need to not betray that trust, which means providing them with a balanced design that fundamentally *works*, even if it isn’t brilliant. Obviously, though, some people are more forgiving, which is fair enough. Not everyone is looking for the same thing in a game.

- Frédéric Grosshans

November 30, 2018 at 11:33 pm

Nitpicking from a Parisian : There is probably a confusion when you write a happening occurred at “Maison de la Radio on the Champs-Élysées”. The Maison de la Radio is quite far from the Champs Élysées (and has been so since the 1960s at least)

- Jimmy Maher

December 1, 2018 at 12:05 am

Must have been confusing the old with the new. Thanks!

- barbarian_bros

December 1, 2018 at 1:22 am

Here a 1989 video of a press presentation. Emmanuel Viau, Philippe Ulrich, Rémi Herbulot and Didier Bouchon use a hammer to sacrifice an Amstrad CPC 664 computer (used during development) to the Exxos alien and distribute the pieces to assembled journalists.

https://youtu.be/U8zpZh8UMT4.

- Nate

December 1, 2018 at 5:26 am

commodies — commodities?

I always wondered why there were two of these games coming out at the same time. Looking forward to the rest of these articles.

- Jimmy Maher

December 1, 2018 at 9:25 am

Thanks!

- Nate

December 1, 2018 at 9:49 am

Oh yay, Cryo’s Dune! This game was I think the very first one I ever played on a shiny new MULTIMEDIA PC (with CD-ROM and Sound Blaster) around 1992, and it left a very deep impression on me.

I have always been very sad that it was the boring Dune 2 RTS that changed the face of gaming and not this intriguing and serious attempt to marry Lucasarts style adventure with flight-sim with battle strategy into one interactive movie.

I think Dune plus Wing Commander: Privateer plus Half-Life 2 are kind of my all-time game happy place. Several points where we almost got a holodeck, then turned away again. Maybe we’d pushed the boundaries of the illusion of gaming as interactive cinema just a bit too far; there simply wasn’t anything there beyond racking up points.

But the feel of Dune, that music, flying over the desert…. so lonely, so strange, so beautiful…

- Nate

December 2, 2018 at 5:47 am

Darn, I seem to have broken the game already. I’m on about day 14 and Jessica keeps asking me to walk out into the desert alone and wait for morning, which I do, and… absolutely nothing happens.

- Jimmy Maher

December 2, 2018 at 10:29 am

Make sure you’re going five or so screens deep into the desert.

- Nate

December 3, 2018 at 4:39 am

Ah, thanks. I think that triggered it, but I’ve still managed to get multiple major game events just ‘stuck’ and refuse to progress on multiple playthroughs with this version.

For example: I completely missed the first attack and message from the Harkonnens on one play; on another, Jessica refuses to tell me about Stilgar, just gets stuck on her ‘you have to manage’ message.

The version I’ve played before was the CD version – did it maybe fix a few bugs which this one still has? I actually much prefer the old ornithopter travel graphics to the CD version travelling video, but it just feels much more brittle.

- Jimmy Maher

December 3, 2018 at 6:03 am

Strange. The version on the site here is the one I played without problems. I found it was possible to break it in some of the ways you describe, but I was deliberately trying to do so by obstinately going against the grain of the adventure plot in the strategy game, just out of a sort of professional curiosity. I don’t have much experience with the CD-ROM version beyond a quick look. (In my opinion as perhaps in yours, the original, cleaner floppy-based version has aged much better.)

- Ivan Toshkov

December 1, 2018 at 8:39 pm

Great article as usual. I still remember those stunning sunrises and sunsets. Alas, most of my friends didn’t like the game very much.

A small typo here: “the centerpiece of the game as -a- well”?

- Jimmy Maher

December 1, 2018 at 9:35 pm

Thanks!

- TT

December 2, 2018 at 3:51 am

Heh, I worked for Dreamcatcher here in Toronto when we acquired Cryo and liaised with that office quite often.

I was also there when we shut down Cryo for good and then got bought by JoWood, I actually lasted through all of the layoffs until the writing was on the wall and I moved jobs, they never stopped paying me until JoWood subsequentlyt went under a few months later.

Ahhh, the stories I could tell about that disaster – from the heights of Painkiller to the depths of Yoga Wii …and whole bunch of other wrong turns and shooting yourself in the foot scenarios.

- Laertes

December 2, 2018 at 12:11 pm

In Europe the cover didn’t feature Mr. MacLachlan, in fact I think it is the first time I’ve seen that cover.

- CdrJameson

December 3, 2018 at 10:42 pm

Clumsy Colin’s KP Skips are only really tiny prawn crackers. I’d have thought they were too brittle to make decent packing material.

Wotsits however genuinely are just packaging material covered in cheese powder, which might have been what he was thinking of.

Clumsy Colin wasn’t a bad tie-in with Mastertronic, because you could find both crisps and Mastertronic games by the till at a local newsagent or petrol station.

- Vladimir Kazanov

December 4, 2018 at 4:13 pm

Hm.

Maybe I should replay Cryo games again but as a teenager I absolutely loved both games from the studio I had: Dune and Lost Eden. I don’t think much of these games as in ludology, but as adventures and *worlds* and experiences they were truly amazing. I loved this artistic French touch you dislike so much.

I think I went through Lost Eden on the same day I got it (present for my 13th birthday). It’s relatively short (5-8 hours in total maybe) but stunning visuals and the unusual story stood out back then (mid 90s). It sort of became my personal adventure game icon.

- Hoagie

December 4, 2018 at 10:40 pm

Great summary of this Ere Informatique/Exxos/Cryo era. Three comments :
– If you want to understand the spirit of Exxos software, just read the seminal comics magazine Métal Hurlant (Heavy Metal in the US). You can feel the influence of Moebius and Druillet in these games. Actually, Captain Blood and Crash Garrett were initially sold under the label “Metal Hurlant Logiciel” (Heavy Metal Software), just before the name Exxos was found. I don’t know how they got the right to use this name, because the magazine ceased its publication in 1987.
– If you wonder how Cryo lasted so long, their 1996 game Versailles as a huge popular success in France, comparable to Myst in the USA, and launched a trend of historical/literary-inspired 3D adventure games. They were despised by hardcore gamers, yet sold very well.
– After I originally read this story in Daniel Ichbiah’s book, I wondered how two British guys, especially one who made his fortune with cheap, substandard action games, could claim to understand the American PC gaming market and think it expected “fun games”. American games were more adult and richer than British games, graphic adventures worked well, the mix of strategy and adventure in Dune had already been successfully experienced in Cinemaware games (in a more action-oriented way) and its cut-scenes were reminiscent of Wing Commander. There was undeniably a market for this game in the USA.

- Jimmy Maher

December 5, 2018 at 10:00 am

The comparison of Dune to the games of Cinemaware is an apt one. In fact, I originally made it in this article, but wound up cutting it as a little more digressive than I wanted to get. Like Cinemware, Cryo started with a fictional premise and then asked what gameplay they could craft to best realize it, rather than taking the more typical route of molding their fiction to their desired gameplay. While both approaches can yield a great (or less than great) game, I’ve always been intrigued by the road less taken of starting with the fiction. Sid Meier is another notable practitioner of this approach, although people seldom think about this aspect of his work because he doesn’t craft what most think of as “narrative-oriented” games.

Still, I can very much understand Martin Alper and (especially) David Bishop’s concerns about Cryo’s ability to turn Dune into a *playable* game, given earlier games like Captain Blood. Beyond just the fundamental principle of wanting to do good work for its own sake, there was reason to believe that the market would be far less accepting of that sort of style-over-substance game in the early 1990s than it had been in the late 1980s. The mistake on Bishop’s part was turning what he doubtless imagined to be a justifiably short lease into a straitjacket, paralyzing the development team and the project. At some point, you have to place some faith in the horse you’ve chosen or else find another horse (which, come to think of it, is what Virgin tried to do).

Having said that, I do think you might be underrating Martin Alper in particular just a bit here. One could say that his huge success in budgetware, and then his decision to jump off that bandwagon in the nick of time, shows a real instinct for picking up on winds of change in the games industry. Certainly he enjoyed considerable success with Virgin — success that I think was down to more than just dumb luck. I don’t think he was hostile to Cryo in the way that Bishop was; he had after all hand-picked them to make a Dune game before he’d even managed to secure the license. But he was far removed from a development process going on on the other side of an awfully big continent and an even bigger ocean, hearing only what was reported back to him from London. His annoyance with Cryo (and Virgin Loisirs) when they suddenly popped back up with the Dune game he thought had been killed is understandable, given that he had invested money into another Dune game by that point which looked extremely promising.

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- hop

December 24, 2018 at 9:47 pm

great article as always!

typo, i think: „While I love beauty as much [of] the next person“ should be „as“?

- Jimmy Maher

December 25, 2018 at 8:48 am

Thanks!

- Chris Billows

February 25, 2019 at 1:37 pm

Dune was a game I played only because of a completionist impulse to see what Dune II’s predecessor was all about. I played it with expectations of a poorer RTS since I paid no attention to its developer history at that time. I was so amazed by it that it is easily one of my favourite games still, alongside Dune II. Dune as a fictional series and now as a game series hit all of the marks for me.

Not unlike the The Lord of the Rings books and animated movie then inspired Mike Singleton to create his tribute games The Lords of Midnight and its successor Doomdark’s Revenge. Both Cryo’s Dune and Singleton’s TLoM combined adventure game elements with strategy game elements. Both took the time to craft an interface that explained how a single avatar could control diverse groups of Lords and Chiefs. Both inspired by amazing fictional literature.

Controlling the Spice, Part 3: Westwood’s Dune
December 7, 2018

Brett Sperry and Louis Castle

Louis Castle first became friends with Brett Sperry in 1982, when the two were barely out of high school. Castle was selling Apple computers at the time at a little store in his native Las Vegas, and Sperry asked him to print out a file for him. “I owned a printer, so I invited him over,” remembers Castle, “and he looked at some animation and programming I was working on.”

They found they had a lot in common. They were both Apple II fanatics, both talented programmers, and both go-getters accustomed to going above and beyond what was expected of them. Through Castle’s contacts at the store — the home-computer industry was quite a small place back then — they found work as contract programmers, porters who moved software from one platform to another. It wasn’t the most glamorous job in the industry, but, at a time when the PC marketplace was fragmented into close to a dozen incompatible platforms, it was certainly a vital one. Sperry and Castle eventually came to specialize in the non-trivial feat of moving slick action games such as Dragonfire and Impossible Mission from the Commodore 64 to the far less audiovisually capable Apple II without sacrificing all of their original appeal.

In March of 1985, they decided to give up working as independent contractors and form a real company, which they named Westwood Associates. The “Westwood” came from the trendy neighborhood of Los Angeles, around the UCLA campus, where they liked to hang out when they drove down from Las Vegas of a weekend. “We chose Westwood as the company name,” says Castle, “to capture some of the feeling of youthful energy and Hollywood business.” The “Associates,” meanwhile, was nicely non-specific, meaning they could easily pivot into other kinds of software development if the games work should dry up for some reason. (The company would become known as Westwood Studios in 1992, by which time it would be pretty clear that no such pivot would be necessary.)

The story of Westwood’s very first project is something of a harbinger of their future. Epyx hired them to port the hoary old classic Temple of Apshai to the sexy new Apple Macintosh, and Sperry and Castle got a bit carried away. They converted the game from a cerebral turn-based CRPG to a frenetic real-time action-adventure, only to be greeted with howls of protest from their employers. “Epyx felt,” remembers Castle with no small sense of irony, “that gamers would not want to make complicated tactical and strategic decisions under pressure.” More sensibly, Epyx noted that Westwood had delivered not so much a port as a different game entirely, one they couldn’t possibly sell as representing the same experience as the original. So, they had to begrudgingly switch it back to turn-based.

This blind alley really does have much to tell us about Westwood’s personality. Asked many years later what common thread binds together their dizzily eclectic catalog of games, Louis Castle hit upon real-time gameplay as the one reasonable answer. This love of immediacy would translate, as we’ll soon see, into the invention of a whole new genre known as real-time strategy, which would become one of the most popular of them all by the end of the 1990s.

But first, there were more games to be ported. Having cut their teeth making Commodore 64 games work within the constraints of the Apple II, they now found themselves moving them in the other direction: “up-porting” Commodore 64 hits like Super Cycle and California Games to the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. Up-porting was in its way as difficult as down-porting; owners of those more expensive 16-bit machines expected their capabilities to be used to good effect, even by games that had originated on more humble platforms, and complained loudly at straight, vanilla ports that still looked like they were running on an 8-bit computer. Westwood became one of the best in the industry at a very tricky task, not so much porting their source games in any conventional sense as remaking them, with dramatically enhanced graphics and sound. They acquired a reputation for technical excellence, particularly when it came to their compression systems, which allowed them to pack their impressive audiovisuals into very little space and stream them in quickly from disk. And they made good use of the fact that the Atari ST and Amiga were both built around the same Motorola 68000 CPU by developing a library for the Amiga which translated calls to the ST’s operating system into their Amiga equivalents on the fly; thus they could program a game for the ST and get the same code running on the Amiga with very few changes. If you wanted an 8-to-16-bit port done efficiently and well, you knew you could count on Westwood.

Although they worked with quite a number of publishers, Westwood cultivated a particularly close relationship with SSI, a publisher of hardcore wargames who badly needed whatever pizazz Sperry and Castle’s flashier aesthetic could provide. When SSI wanted to convince TSR to give them the hugely coveted Dungeons & Dragons license in 1987, they hired Westwood to create some of the graphics demos for their presentation. The pitch worked; staid little SSI shocked the industry by snatching the license right out from under the noses of heavier hitters like Electronic Arts. Westwood remained SSI’s most trusted partner thereafter. They ported the  “Gold Box” line of Dungeons & Dragons CRPGs to the Atari ST and Amiga with their usual flair, adding mouse support and improving the graphics, resulting in what many fans consider to be the best versions of all.

Unfortunately, Westwood’s technical excellence wasn’t always paired with equally good design sense when they occasionally got a chance to make an original game of their own. Early efforts like Mars Saga, Mines of Titan, Questron II, and BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception all have a lot of ideas that aren’t fully worked through and never quite gel, along with third acts that fairly reek of, “We’re out of time and money, and now we just have to get ‘er done.” Ditto the first two original games they did for SSI under the Dungeons & Dragons license: the odd California Games/Gold Box mashup Hillsfar and the even odder dragon flight simulator Dragon Strike.

Still, Brett Sperry and Louis Castle were two very ambitious young men, and neither was willing to settle for the anonymous life of a strict porting house. Nor did such a life make good business sense: with the North American market at least slowly coalescing around MS-DOS machines, it looked like porting houses might soon have no reason to exist. The big chance came when Sperry and Castle convinced SSI to let them make a full-fledged Dungeons & Dragons CRPG of their own — albeit one that would be very different from the slow-paced, turn-based Gold Box line. Westwood’s take on the concept would run in — you guessed it — real time, borrowing much from FTL’s Dungeon Master, one of the biggest sensations of the late 1980s on the Atari ST and Amiga. The result was Eye of the Beholder.

At the time of the game’s release in February of 1991, FTL had yet to publish an MS-DOS port of Dungeon Master. Eye of the Beholder was thus the first real-time dungeon crawl worth its salt to become available on North America’s computer-gaming platform of choice, and this fact, combined with the Dungeons & Dragons logo on the box, yielded sales of 130,000 copies in the United States alone — a sales figure far greater than that of any previous original Westwood game, greater even than all but the first two of SSI’s flagship Gold Box line. The era of Westwood as primarily a porting house had passed.

Over at Virgin Games, the indefatigable Martin Alper, still looking to make a splash in the American market, liked what he saw in Westwood, this hot American developer who clearly knew how to make the sorts of games Americans wanted to buy. And yet they were also long-established experts at getting the most out of the Amiga, Europe’s biggest gaming computer; Westwood would do their own port of Eye of the Beholder to the Amiga, in which form it would sell in considerable numbers in Europe as well. Such a skill set made the little Las Vegas studio immensely attractive to this executive of Virgin, a company of truly global reach and vision.

Alper knew as soon as he saw Eye of the Beholder that he wanted to make Westwood a permanent part of the Virgin empire, but, not wanting to spook his target, he approached them initially only to ask them to develop a game for him. As far as Alper or anyone else outside Virgin’s French subsidiary knew at this point, the Cryo Dune game was dead. But Alper hadn’t gone to all the trouble of securing the license not to use it. In April of 1991 — just one month before the departure of Jean-Martial Lefranc from Virgin Loisirs, combined with a routine audit, would bring the French Dune conspiracy to light — Alper signed Westwood to make a Dune game of their own. It wasn’t hard to convince them to take it on; it turned out that Dune was Brett Sperry’s favorite novel of all time.

Even better, Westwood, perhaps influenced by their association with the turn-based wargame mavens at SSI, had already been playing around with ideas for a real-time (of course!) game of military conflict. “It was an intellectual puzzle for me,” says Sperry. “How can we take this really small wargame category, bring in some fresh ideas, and make it a fun game that more gamers can play?” The theme was originally to be fantasy. But, says Louis Castle, “when Virgin offered up the Dune license, that sealed our fate and pulled us away from a fantasy theme.”

Several months later, after Martin Alper reluctantly concluded that Cryo’s Dune had already cost too much money and had too much potential of its own to cancel, he found himself with quite a situation on his hands. Westwood’s Dune hadn’t been in development anywhere near as long as Cryo’s, but he was already loving what he had seen of it, and was equally unwilling to cancel that project. In an industry where the average game frankly wasn’t very good at all, having two potentially great ones might not seem like much of a problem. For Virgin’s marketers, however, it was a nightmare. Their solution, which pleased neither Cryo nor Westwood much at all, was to bill the latter’s game as a sequel to the former’s, naming it Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty.

Westwood especially had good reason to feel disgruntled. They were understandably concerned that saddling their fresh, innovative new game with the label of sequel would cause it to be overlooked. The fact was, the sequel billing made no sense whatsoever, no matter how you looked at it. While both games were, in whole or in part, strategy games that ran in real time, their personalities were otherwise about as different as it was possible for two games to be. By no means could one imagine a fan of Cryo’s plot-heavy, literary take on Dune automatically embracing Westwood’s action-heavy, militaristic effort. Nor did the one game follow on from the other in the sense of plot chronology; both games depict the very same events from the novel, albeit with radically different sensibilities.

The press too was shocked to learn that a sequel to Cryo’s Dune was due to be released the very same year as its predecessor. “This has got to be a new world record for the fastest ever followup,” wrote the British gaming magazine The One a few weeks after the first Dune’s release. “Unlike the more adventure-based original, Dune II is expected to be more of a managerial experience comparable to (if anything) the likes of SimCity, as the two warring houses of Atreides and Harkonnen attempt to mine as much spice as possible and blow each other up at the same time.”

The Westwood Studios team who made Dune II. On the front row are Ren Olsen and Dwight Okahara; on the middle row are Judith Peterson, Joe Bostic, Donna Bundy, and Aaron Powell; on the back row are Lisa Ballan and Scott Bowen. Of this group, Bostic and Powell were the game’s official designers, and thus probably deserve the most credit for inventing the genre of real-time strategy. Westwood’s co-founder Brett Sperry also played a critical — perhaps the critical — conceptual role.

It was, on the whole, about as good a description of Dune II as any that appeared in print at the time. Not only was the new game dramatically different from its predecessor, but it wasn’t quite like anything at all which anyone had ever seen before, and coming to grips with it wasn’t easy. Legend has it that Brett Sperry started describing Dune II in shorthand as “real-time strategy” very early on, thus providing a new genre with its name. If so, though, Virgin’s marketers didn’t get the memo. They would struggle mightily to describe the game, and what they ended up with took unwieldiness to new heights: a “strategy-based resource-management simulation with a heavy real-time combat element.” Whew! “Real-time strategy” does have a better ring to it, doesn’t it?

These issues of early taxonomy, if you will, are made intensely interesting by Dune II’s acknowledged status as the real-time-strategy urtext. That is to say that gaming histories generally claim, correctly on the whole in my opinion, that it was the first real-time strategy game ever.

Yet we do need to be careful with our semantics here. There were actually hundreds of computerized strategy games prior to Dune II which happened to be played in real time, not least among them Cryo’s Dune. The neologism of “real-time strategy” (“RTS”) — like, say, those of “interactive fiction” or even “CRPG” — has a specific meaning separate from the meanings of the individual words which comprise it. It has come to denote a very specific type of game — a game that, yes, runs in real time, but also one where players start with a largely blank slate, gather resources, and use them to build a variety of structures. These structures can in turn build military units who can carry out simple orders of the “attack there” or “defend this” stripe autonomously. The whole game plays on an accelerated time scale which yields bursts if not sustained plateaus of activity as frantic as any action game. This combination of qualities is what Westwood invented, not the abstract notion of a strategy game played in real time rather than turns.

Of course, all inventions stand on the shoulders of those that came before, and RTS is no exception. It can be challenging to trace the bits and pieces which would gel together to become Dune II only because there are so darn many of them.

Utopia

The earliest strategy game to replace turns with real time may have been Utopia, an abstract two-player game of global conquest designed and programmed by Don Daglow for the Intellivision console in 1982. The same year, Dan Bunten’s[1] science-fiction-themed Cytron Masters and Chris Crawford’s Roman-themed Legionnaires became the first computer-based strategy games to discard the comfortable round of turns for something more stressful and exciting. Two years later, Brøderbund’s very successful Ancient Art of War exposed the approach to more players than ever before.

In 1989, journalists started talking about a new category of “god game” in the wake of Will Wright’s SimCity and Peter Molyneux’s Populous. The name derived from the way that these games cast you as a god able to control your people only indirectly, by altering their city’s infrastructure in SimCity or manipulating the terrain around them in Populous. This control was accomplished in real time. While, as we’ve seen, this in itself was hardly a new development, the other innovations of these landmark games were as important to the eventual RTS genre as real time itself. No player can possibly micromanage an army of dozens of units in real time — at least not if the clock is set to run at anything more than a snail’s pace. For the RTS genre as we’ve come to know it to function, units must have a degree of autonomous artificial intelligence, must be able to carry out fairly abstract orders and react to events on the ground in the course of doing so. SimCity and Populous demonstrated for the first time how this could work.

By 1990, then, god games had arrived at a place that already bore many similarities to the RTS games of today. The main things still lacking were resource collecting and building. And even these things had to some extent already been done in non-god games: a 1987 British obscurity called Nether Earth demanded that you build robots in your factory before sending them out against your enemy, although there was no way of building new structures beyond your starting factory. Indeed, even the multiplayer death matches that would come to dominate so much of the RTS genre a generation later had already been pioneered before 1990, perhaps most notably in Dan Bunten’s 1988 game Modem Wars.

Herzog Zwei

But the game most often cited as an example of a true RTS in form and spirit prior to Dune II, if such a thing is claimed to exist at all, is one called Herzog Zwei, created by the Japanese developer Technosoft and first published for the Sega Genesis console in Japan in 1989. And yet Herzog Zwei’s status as an alternative RTS urtext is, at the very least, debatable.

Players each start the game with a single main base, and an additional nine initially neutral “outposts” are scattered over the map. Players “purchase” units in the form of Transformers-like flying robots, which they then use to try to conquer outposts; controlling more of them yields more revenue, meaning one can buy more units more quickly. Units aren’t completely out of the player’s direct control, as in the case of SimCity and Populous, but are ordered about in a rather general way: stand and fight here, patrol this radius, retreat to this position or outpost. The details are then left to the unit-level artificial intelligence. For this reason alone, perhaps, Herzog Zwei subjectively feels more like an RTS than any game before it. But on the other hand, much that would come to mark the genre is still missing: resource collection is still abstracted away entirely, while there’s only one type of unit available to build, and no structures. In my opinion, Herzog Zwei is best seen as another of the RTS genre’s building blocks rather than an urtext.

The question of whether and to what extent Herzog Zwei influenced Dune II is a difficult one to answer with complete assurance. Brett Sperry and Louis Castle have claimed not to even have been aware of the Japanese game’s existence prior to making theirs. In fact, out of all of the widely acknowledged proto-RTS games I’ve just mentioned, they cite only Populous as a major influence. Their other three stated inspirations make for a rather counter-intuitive trio on the face of it: the 1984 Apple II game Rescue Raiders, a sort of Choplifter mated to a strategic wargame; the 1989 NEC TurboGrafx-16 game Military Madness, an abstract turn-based strategy game; and, later in the development process, Sid Meier’s 1991 masterpiece Civilization (in particular, the tech tree therein).

Muddying these waters, however, is an anecdote from Stephen Clarke-Willson, an executive in Virgin’s American offices during the early 1990s. He says that “everyone at the office was playing Herzog Zwei” circa April of 1991: “I was given the task of figuring out what to do with the Dune license since I’d read the book a number of times. I thought from a gaming point of view the real stress was the battle to control the spice, and that a resource-strategy game would be good.” Clarke-Willson further claims that from the outset “Westwood agreed to make a resource-strategy game based on Dune, and agreed to look at Herzog Zwei for design ideas.” Sperry and Castle, by contrast, describe a far more open-ended agreement that called for them simply to make something interesting out of the license, allowing the specifics of their eventual Dune to arise organically from the work they had already started on their fantasy-themed real-time wargame.

For what it’s worth, neither Sperry nor Castle has a reputation for dishonesty. Quite the opposite, in fact: Westwood throughout its life stood out as a bastion of responsibility and stability in an industry not much known for either. So, whatever the true facts may be, we’re better off ascribing these contradictory testimonies to the vagaries of memories than to disingenuousness. Certainly, regardless of the exact influences that went into it, Dune II has an excellent claim to the title of first RTS in the modern neologism’s sense. This really was the place where everything came together and a new genre was born.

In the novel of Dune, the spice is the key to everything. In the Westwood game, even in the absence of almost everything else that makes the novel memorable, the same thing is true. The spice was, notes Louis Castle, “very adaptable to this harvest, grow, build for war, attack gambit. That’s really how [Dune II] came about.” Thus was set up the gameplay loop that still defines the RTS genre to this day — all stemming from a novel published in 1965.

The overarching structure of Dune II is also far more typical of the games of today than those of its peers in the early 1990s. You play a “campaign” consisting of nine scenarios, linked by snippets of narrative, that grow progressively more difficult. There are three of these campaigns to choose from, depicting the war for Arrakis from the standpoint of House Atreides, House Harkonnen, and House Ordos — the last being a cartel of smugglers who don’t appear in the novel at all, having been invented for a non-canonical 1984 source book known as The Dune Encyclopedia. In addition to a different narrative, each faction has a slightly different slate of structures and units at its command.

There’s the suggestion of a more high-level strategic layer joining the scenarios together: between scenarios, the game lets you choose your next target for attack by clicking on a territory on a Risk-like map of the planet. Nothing you do here can change the fixed sequence of scenario goals and opposing enemy forces the game presents, but it does change the terrain on which the subsequent scenario takes place, thus adding a bit more replayability for the true completionists.

You begin a scenario with a single construction yard, a handful of pre-built units, and a sharply limited initial store of spice, that precious resource from which everything else stems. Fog of war is implemented; in the beginning, you can see only the territory that immediately surrounds your starting encampment. You’ll thus want to send out scouts immediately, to find deposits of spice ripe for harvesting and to learn where the enemy is.

While your scouts go about their business, you’ll want to get an economy of sorts rolling back at home. The construction yard with which you begin can build any structure available in a given scenario, although it’s advisable to first build a “concrete slab” to serve as its foundation atop the shifting sands of Arrakis. The first real structure you’re likely to build is a “wind trap” to provide power to those that follow. Then you’ll want a “spice refinery,” which comes complete with a unit known as a “harvester,” able to collect spice from the surrounding territory and return it to the refinery to become the stuff of subsequent building efforts. Next you’ll probably want an “outpost,” which not only lets you see much farther into the territory around your base without having to deploy units there but is a prerequisite for building any new units at all. After your outpost is in place, building each type of unit requires its own kind of structure, from a “barracks” for light infantry (read: cannon fodder) to a “high tech factory” for the ultimate weapon of airpower. Naturally, more powerful units are more expensive, both in terms of the spice required to build the structures that produce them and that required to build the units themselves afterward.

Your real goal, of course, is to attack and overwhelm the enemy — or, in some later scenarios, enemies — before he or they have the chance to do the same to you. There’s a balancing act here that one could describe as the central dilemma of the game. Just how long do you concentrate on building up your infrastructure and military before you throw your units into battle? Wait too long and the enemy could get overwhelmingly powerful before you cut him down to size; attack too soon and you could be defeated and left exposed to counterattack, having squandered the units you now need for defense. The amount of spice on the map is another stress point. The spice deposits are finite; once they’re gone, they’re gone, and it’s up to whatever units are left to battle it out. Do you stake your claim to that juicy spice deposit just over the horizon right now? Or do you try to eliminate that nearby enemy base first?

If you’ve played any more recent RTS games at all, all of this will sound thoroughly familiar. And, more so than anything else I could write here, it’s this sense of familiarity, clinging as it does to almost every aspect of Dune II, which crystallizes the game’s influence and importance. The only substantial piece of the RTS puzzle that’s entirely missing here is the multiplayer death match; this game is single-player only, lacking the element that for many is the most appealing of all about the RTS genre. Otherwise, though, the difference between this and more modern RTS games is in the details rather than the fundamentals. This anointed first example of an RTS is a remarkably complete example of the breed. All the pieces are here, and all the pieces fit together as we’ve come to expect them to.

So much for hindsight. As for foresight…

Upon its release in the fall of 1992, Dune II was greeted, like its predecessor from Cryo, with positive reviews, but with none of the fanfare one might expect for a game destined to go down in history as such a revolutionary genre-spawner. Computer Gaming World called it merely “a gratifying experience,” while The One was at least a bit more effusive, with the reviewer pronouncing it “one of the most absorbing games I’ve come across.” Yet everyone regarded it as just another fun game at bottom; no one had an inkling that it would in time birth a veritable new gaming subculture. It sold well enough to justify its development, but — very probably thanks in part to its billing as a sequel to a game with a completely different personality, which had itself only been on the market a few months — it never threatened Eye of the Beholder for the crown of Westwood’s biggest hit to date.

Nor did it prompt an immediate flood of games in the same mold, whether from Westwood or anyone else. The next notable example of the budding genre, Blizzard’s Warcraft, wouldn’t appear until late 1994. That title would be roundly mocked by the gaming intelligentsia for its similarities to Dune II — Computer Gaming World would call it “a perfect bit of creative larceny” — but it would sell much, much better, well and truly setting the flame to the RTS torch. To many Warcraft fans, Westwood would seem like the bandwagon jumpers when they belatedly returned to the genre they had invented with 1995’s Command & Conquer.

By the time that happened, Westwood would be a very different place. Just as they were finishing up Dune II, Louis Castle got a call from Richard Branson himself. “Hello, Louis, this is Richard. I’d like to buy your company.”

“I didn’t know it was for sale,” replied Castle.

“In my experience, everything is for sale!”

And, indeed, notwithstanding their unhappiness about Dune II’s sequel billing, Brett Sperry and Louis Castle sold out to Virgin, with the understanding that their new parent company would stay out of their hair and let them make the games they wanted to make, holding them accountable only on the basis of the sales they generated. Unlike so many merger-and-acquisition horror stories, Westwood would have a wonderful relationship with Virgin and Martin Alper, who provided the investment they needed to thrive in the emerging new era of CD-ROM-based, multimedia-heavy gaming. We’ll doubtless be meeting Sperry, Castle, and Alper again in future articles.

Looked upon from the perspective of today, the two Dune games of 1992 make for an endlessly intriguing pairing, almost like an experiment in psychology or sociology. Not only did two development teams set out to make a game based on the same subject matter, but they each wound up with a strategy game running in real time. And yet the two games could hardly be more different.

In terms of historical importance, there’s no contest between the two Dunes. While Cryo’s Dune had no discernible impact on the course of gaming writ large, Westwood’s is one of the most influential games of the 1990s. A direct line can be traced from it to games played by tens if not hundreds of millions of people all over the world today. “He who controls the spice, controls the universe,” ran the blurb on the front cover of millions of Dune paperbacks and movie posters. Replace “spice” with the resource of any given game’s choice, and the same could be stated as the guiding tenet of the gaming genre Dune birthed.

And yet I’m going to make the perhaps-surprising claim that the less-heralded first Dune is the more enjoyable of the two to play today. Its fusion of narrative and strategy still feels bracing and unique. I’ve never seen another game which plays quite like this one, and I’ve never seen another ludic adaptation that does a better job of capturing the essential themes and moods of its inspiration.

Dune II, by contrast, can hardly be judged under that criterion at all, given that it’s just not much interested in capturing any of the subtleties of Herbert’s novel; it’s content to stop at “he who controls the spice controls the universe.” Judged on its own terms, meanwhile, strictly as a game rather than an adaptation, it’s become the ironic victim of its own immense influence. I noted earlier that all of the pieces of the RTS genre, with the exception only of the multiplayer death match, came together here for the first time, that later games would be left to worry only about the details. Yet it should also be understood that those details are important. The ability to give orders to groups of units; the ability to give more complex orders to units; ways to get around the map more quickly and easily; higher-resolution screens able to show more of the map at one time; a bigger variety of unit types, with greater variance between opposing factions; more varied and interesting scenarios and terrains; user-selectable difficulty levels (Dune II often seems to be stuck on “Brutal”)… later games would do all of this, and so much more besides. Again, these things do matter. Playing Dune II today is like playing your favorite RTS game stripped down to its most basic foundation. For a historian or a student of game design, that’s kind of fascinating. For someone who just wants to play a fun game, it’s harder to justify.

Still, none of this should detract from the creativity and sheer technical chops that went into realizing Dune II in its own time. Most gaming genres require some iteration to work out the kinks and hone the experience. The RTS genre in particular has been so honed by such a plethora of titles, all working within such a sharply demarcated set of genre markers, that Dune II is bound to seem like a blunt instrument indeed when we revisit it today.

So, there you have it: two disparate Dune games, both inspired and worthy, but in dramatically different ways. Dune as evocative storytelling experience or Dune as straightforward interactive ultra-violence? Take your pick. The choice seems appropriate for a novel that’s been pulled back and forth along much the same axis ever since its first publication in 1965. Does it have a claim to the mantle of High Literature or is it “just” an example of a well-crafted genre novel? Take your pick. The same tension shows itself in the troubled history of Dune as movie, in the way it could attract both filmmakers who pursued — or at least believed themselves to be pursuing — a higher artistic calling, like Alejandro Jodorowsky, and purveyors of the massiest of mass-market entertainments, like Arthur P. Jacobs. Dune as art film or Dune as blockbuster? Take your pick — but please, choose one or the other. Dino and Raffaella De Laurentiis, the first people to get an actual Dune film made, tried to split the difference, making it through a mainstream Hollywood studio with a blockbuster-sized budget, but putting all those resources in the hands of a director of art films. As we’ve seen, the result of that collision of sensibilities was unsatisfying to patrons of multiplexes and art-house theaters alike.

In that light, perhaps it really was for the best that Virgin wound up accidentally releasing two Dune games. Cryo’s Dune locked down the artsier side of Dune’s split media personality, while Westwood’s was just good fun, satisfying the timeless urge of gamers to blow stuff up in entertaining ways. Thanks to a colossal bureaucratic cock-up at Virgin, there is, one might say, a Dune game for every Dune reader. Which one really is “better” is an impossible question to answer in the end. I’ve stated my opinion, but I have no doubt that plenty of you readers could make an equally compelling case in the other direction. So, vive la différence! With all due apologies to Frank Herbert, variety is the real spice of life.

(Sources: Computer Gaming World of April 1993, August 1993, and January 1995; Game Developer of June 2001; The One of October 1992, January 1993, and July 1993; Retro Gamer 90; Westwood Studios’s customer newsletter dated Fall 1992. Online sources include Louis Castle’s interview for Soren Johnson’s Designer Notes podcast, “Retro Throwback: Dune 2“ by Cole Machin on CGM, “Build, gather, brawl, repeat: The history of real-time strategy games” by Richard Moss on Ars Technica, “A New Dawn: Westwood Studios 15th Anniversary” by Geoff Keighly with Amer Ajami on GameSpot, and “The Origin of Realtime Strategy Games on the PC” by Stephen Clarke Willson on his blog Random Blts.

Feel free to download Dune II from right here, packaged so as to make it as easy as possible to get running using your chosen platform’s version of DOSBox.)

1. Dan Bunten died in 1998 as the woman Danielle Bunten Berry. 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
40 Responses

- Alex Smith

December 7, 2018 at 6:11 pm

Two minor notes:

One important influence you do not mention is Civilization, from which Sperry and Bostic borrowed the tech tree concept for its unit progression. The entire RTS concept of building more advanced structures to acquire more advanced units is the equivalent of researching new tech in Civilization. Both Sperry and Bostic have acknowledged this influence.

Another fun fact about the obscure Rescue Raiders: In The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 3, the designer of the original Herzog stated that game was inspired by Rescue Raiders. So even though Herzog Zwei probably exerted little to no influence on Dune II, the games do share at least one common ancestor.

- Jimmy Maher

December 7, 2018 at 9:13 pm

My instinct would be to question the Civilization influence just a bit given the timing. Civilization came out in very last days of 1991, by which point Dune II would have been over halfway through its development cycle. It seems awfully late in the day to have discovered a new game and incorporated its innovations into their design in a significant way. Nor does Dune II actually feature what I would call a Civilization-style tech tree in anything but the broadest strokes; not sure I can agree that its building system is really the equivalent of same. I do wonder just a bit if Sperry and Castle might have been conflating Dune II with some of their later RTS efforts.

- Alex Smith

December 7, 2018 at 10:29 pm

So, to go into more detail, the timing does work. Sperry told Edge that for a time they only had about four unit types and battles were fairly boring. Then when he saw the Civilization production model he hit on the idea of increasingly capable units becoming available over time. Neither one claims that they were putting in a tech tree per se so much as being inspired by the concept of more varied and powerful units becoming available as the game progresses. I don’t think the Edge article or the one that quotes Bostic on Civ are online anymore, but I can send them if you need them

- Jimmy Maher

December 7, 2018 at 11:02 pm

No worries. Thanks for the clarification!

- Sniffnoy

December 7, 2018 at 7:42 pm

Typo spotting: You have “flare” for “flair” early on.

- Jimmy Maher

December 7, 2018 at 9:07 pm

Sigh. I did that in my last article too and gave myself a stern admonition to remember it for next time. My only defense is that by the time I received the last typo correction I’d already written this article. We’ll see if it takes next time.

Anyway, thanks!

- Brian

December 7, 2018 at 8:52 pm

Oddly enough… I backed into a purchase of the Ancient Art of War after I bought Wizardry I only to find out that it would not run on our Tandy.

We played the heck out of that game for years. You could build your own scenarios and the computer cheated enough to make it quite difficult to win a game!

- whomever

December 8, 2018 at 4:23 pm

I loved the Ancient Art Of War. The scenario editor was great. One of those games with a simple set of rules and units but unlimited potential.

- Ethan Johnson

December 7, 2018 at 9:54 pm

One correction to note in here, Utopia was probably 1982 not 1981. All materials I’ve found place it in mid 1982.

I think Dune II does well in judgement with other RTS because it’s got a nice variety too it. It’s very systemic, much in contrast to say the Starcraft campaigns, so it’s a unique feeling that does it favors even if it’s less responsive than you’d want it to be. I can get why you like the other one better just being the type of player you are, but I think it’s still fairly playable and enjoyable.

I look forward to you eventually covering Blade Runner, as you no doubt allude in your tease. A long ways out, but I certainly want to know your opinion on that whole mythos.

- Jimmy Maher

December 7, 2018 at 10:01 pm

Thanks! Made the mistake of relying on the copyright date.

- DZ-Jay

January 15, 2019 at 5:35 pm

Survey says … 1982. Direct from the horse’s mouth:
https://intellivision-productions-inc.myshopify.com/pages/games

Why yes, collecting and programming for the Intellivision is my hobby. Staying blocky after all these years. :)

dZ.

- Alberto

December 7, 2018 at 10:47 pm

Thanks for another great article! As your history progresses and your articles begin to deal with the games of my youth, I somewhat get a strange feeling comparing the tormented stories behind their production, full of misunderstandings, petty people, strikes of chance, with the happy memories of myself as kid playing such beautiful works.

While I liked Dune II, I share the regret of yours and of other readers about the lack of any spiritual successor to Cryo’s Dune. It is amazing that, even in the era of indie productions and Kickstarter projectes, no one ever tried to combine the graphical adventure and the strategy genre again.

I am aware that, to respect the unwritten rules of this blog, I should end my comment by pointing out a typo in the article. I beg your understanding for this omission – English is not my mother tongue…

- Rowan Lipkovits

December 7, 2018 at 11:05 pm

“House Ordos — the last being a cartel of smugglers who don’t appear in the novel at all, having been invented by Westwood to add another dimension to the game.”

The tiniest of nits to pick — all the materials that went into Westwood’s bringing-to-life of House Ordos (the name, the coat of arms, if not both simultaneously 8) could be found in the fabulous not-Herbert-written forevermore-to-be-out-of-print Dune Encyclopedia.

- Jimmy Maher

December 8, 2018 at 8:42 am

I didn’t know that. Thanks!

- sam

December 8, 2018 at 12:37 am

“mantel of High Literature” should have “mantle”.

- Jimmy Maher

December 8, 2018 at 7:37 am

Thanks!

- POg

December 8, 2018 at 12:53 am

Your best article, amongst a lot of great articles.

Simply brillant, in a global historical scope and in your personal take on the games.

I have learnt a lot about my childhood tonight, thank you.

My personal note : I am a french guy, I met twice Philippe Ulrich. He is totally crazy (and entertaining).

- Tom

December 8, 2018 at 3:58 am

“Does it have a claim to the mantel of High Literature or is it “just” an example of a well-crafted genre novel?”

Why not both?

Seriously, if you look at most of the classics that people who aren’t English majors have actually read, they all got their start as what would have been thought of as “well-crafted genre (fill-in-the-blank).” The Iliad and The Odyssey were tales told by bards who wanted to be fed. William Shakespeare wanted to get paid and to keep royal favor. I could go on, but you get the point.

- Jimmy Maher

December 8, 2018 at 7:48 am

Oh, I agree. I’ve often used the Shakespeare example myself. Another good one is Charles Dickens, who was the most popular author of his day. In fact, authors turning out self-conscious “literary fiction” — usually from within the comforting confines of a university’s Creative Writing department — to an audience of self-conscious readers of it is very much a modern phenomenon. This insular culture of writers and readers hasn’t generally been to the work’s benefit, I think.

That said, novels *are* pigeonholed by our cultural elites, and it was that subjective positioning that I was addressing with that comment. Where does Dune get placed on the cultural landscape, and why? It’s an interesting question in itself.

- Matthew W

December 8, 2018 at 9:37 am

Fantastic article, as usual. Another example of an early real-time strategy game is Imagine’s Stonkers, for the ZX Spectrum in 1983.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonkers

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.php?cat=96&id=0004913

I never managed to complete it because it kept crashing.

- Jimmy Maher

December 8, 2018 at 3:36 pm

Yeah, I briefly considered that one, but it seemed unfair to include it with other formative games that were less, well, half-assed. ;)

- Chris Rowley

December 10, 2018 at 2:49 am

As always thanks for a great article!

I’m always surprised when Utopia comes up as a reference with little examination. I understand it’s two-player requirement makes it tough for some to investigate but as a day-one gamer (as in I played Pong in 1974 lol) when I first stuck Utopia into my Intellivision it was truly revolutionary, like much of the hardware and software of the most innovative console of the first console war.

I’d played plenty of strategy board games since the mid-‘70s and then Avalon Hill and SSI first on my school’s TRS-80 Model I Level II and later Apple ][, but they followed that turn-based backbone necessary for chits-on-a-board underpinnings. Utopia took many of the concepts and spun them in a very different way.

Utopia was actually developed in 1981 as per the Blue Sky Rangers (keepers of the Intellivision flame) though I obviously didn’t get my grubby mitts on it until retail in 1982. Though there are rounds they are more arbitrary time breaks to fit its scoring system. Resource gathering, unit building, external environmental and other obstacles, it has all the ingredients of RTS and god-game foundations. As a single-screen couch co-op/competition it can be a screaming good time even now despite its hardware limitations.

As with many Intellivision games emulation can be tough given it’s full use of the controller, but it’s definitely worth checking out if you want to see early implementation of many of these concepts!

- Jimmy Maher

December 10, 2018 at 8:46 am

So, I finally did some proper primary-source research into Utopia’s release date. It seems it made its public debut at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January of 1982, and was available for purchase very soon thereafter.

- Ethan Johnson

December 12, 2018 at 6:49 am

Source on that? I hadn’t seen anything about it at CES before.

- Jimmy Maher

December 12, 2018 at 8:09 am

Computer and Video Games, March 1982, page 66-67.

- DZ-Jay

January 15, 2019 at 5:39 pm

It was released on July, 1982.
https://intellivision-productions-inc.myshopify.com/pages/games

- Erico Monteiro

December 11, 2018 at 3:21 am

I wonder if Bullfrog’s Powermonger made part of the influence for dune 2.

- Hoagie

December 12, 2018 at 1:44 pm

Great article. I add two comments:

– In an interview in the German magazine PC Joker (May 1993), someone of the Westwood team (Bostic or Powell, I don’t remember) clearly claimed that Herzog Zwei and Civilization were the two main influences of Dune II. And it’s not the only Western wargame influenced by a Japanese game: Battle Isle was inspired by Nectaris, and Panzer General by Daisenryaku.

– I completely agree with the part about the meaning of RTS and the inclusion of Utopia, Cytron Masters and Populous. You may also have a look at French game Dominium, released at the same time than Dune II: it’s a mix of real-time and hex-based maps, with features absent from Dune II (maps generated at each game, units finely configurable, 2-player mode with null-modem cable).

- Alex Smith

December 12, 2018 at 7:38 pm

That’s a good catch! To provide more info, the magazine interviewed three people, including Aaron Powell, who was the director of Dune II. Here is the quote from Aaron translated into English:

“My favorite games are Ultima Underworld, Wing Commander, everything related to Virtual Reality and Populous. And of course Herzog Zwei on the Mega Drive, which has also influenced us greatly in Dune II.”

- Victor Gijsbers

December 14, 2018 at 12:55 pm

Alas, when you write “a whole new genre known as real-time strategy, one of the most popular of them all today” you sounds like a voice from the past! It was one of the big genres of the 1990’s and early 2000’s, but is quite marginal today.

- Jimmy Maher

December 14, 2018 at 1:51 pm

I think it still qualifies. It’s still pretty popular among the hardcore set — which, admittedly, no longer comprises the majority of gamers — and is a staple of e-sports leagues. And it’s actually more popular than ever in Asia. (Google “Korea and Starcraft” sometime.)

- Victor Gijsbers

December 15, 2018 at 10:51 am

I’m well aware of the Starcraft e-sports scene, having spent perhaps too much time watching watching videos of players competing in global or indeed Korean tournaments. :-) But I hardly think e-sports can be used as an argument for the health or popularity of the RTS genre. Here’s a useful resource:

https://www.esportsearnings.com/history/2018/games

As you can see, Starcraft II was the 10th most lucrative e-sports games in 2018, having steadily fallen downwards since its first place in 2011. Perhaps more relevantly, one has to wait a very long time for another RTS game to appear in the ranking. It’s at place 27, and amazingly it is Starcraft: Brood War. Then we have Warcraft III at place 37. The breakdown of genres among the first 40 games here is, if a quick count is correct, like this:

FPS – 17
Sports – 6
MOBA – 5 (three of which are in the top 10)
Beat ‘m up – 5
CCG – 3
RTS – 3
MMORPG – 1

But even that gives a too rosy view of the role of RTS here, since the three RTS games in the top 40 are from 2010, 2002 and 1998. (They’re also all from the same company.) Compare that to the other games in the list and you’ll see what’s going on. DOTA 2 is from 2013; CS:GO from 2012; Fortnite from 2017; League of Legends from 2009; PUB from 2017; Overwatch from 2015; HotS from 2015; Hearthstone from 2014; and so on. If we list these 40 games in terms of age, the RTS are among the very oldest.

Now e-sports is just one facet of gaming, and there might be zounds of great single player RTSs coming out… but if so, I’m not aware of it.

- Jimmy Maher

December 15, 2018 at 11:53 am

Fair enough. Knowing nothing about e-sports beyond the occasional article on Ars Technica or (the Danish) TV2, I’m ill-equipped to argue. ;) Made a little edit. Thanks!

- Sniffnoy

December 15, 2018 at 6:24 pm

Sorry, not a substantial comment, just a terminology nitpick, but, you mean fighting games, not beat-’em-ups. These are (at least at this point, and we’re not talking about any really early ones here) different enough to be worth keeping distinct.

- Pingback: Lazy Reading for 2018/12/16 – DragonFly BSD Digest

- Casey Muratori

December 16, 2018 at 8:01 pm

Possible typo: “drove down from Las Vegas of a weekend”. Probably meant to say “for the” or “for a long” or something?

– Casey

- Jimmy Maher

December 16, 2018 at 8:45 pm

No, that’s actually an admittedly idiomatic but not incorrect way of saying it.

- Gordon Cameron

December 28, 2018 at 8:08 pm

Hi,

I believe Mars Saga and Mines of Titan are the same game, albeit on different platforms.

- Jimmy Maher

December 28, 2018 at 8:35 pm

Yes and no. Mines of Titan for MS-DOS borrowed very heavily from the earlier 8-bit Mars Saga, but there were some significant differences as well. Most obviously, one takes place on Mars, the other on Titan. ;)

- Gordon Cameron

January 2, 2019 at 6:52 am

My understanding was the Titan/Mars thing was a simple reskin, but if as you say there are significant other differences, then I retract my correction.

Star Control II
December 21, 2018

In this vaguely disturbing picture of Toys for Bob from 1994, Paul Reiche is at center and Fred Ford to the left. Ken Ford, who joined shortly after Star Control II was completed, is to the right.

There must have been something in the games industry’s water circa 1992 when it came to the subject of sequels. Instead of adhering to the traditional guidelines — more of the same, perhaps a little bigger — the sequels of that year had a habit of departing radically from their predecessors in form and spirit. For example, we’ve recently seen how Virgin Games released a Dune II from Westwood Studios that had absolutely nothing to do with the same year’s Dune I, from Cryo Interactive. But just as pronounced is the case of Accolade’s Star Control II, a sequel which came from the same creative team as Star Control I, yet which was so much more involved and ambitious as to relegate most of what its predecessor had to offer to the status of a mere minigame within its larger whole. In doing so, it made gaming history. While Star Control I is remembered today as little more than a footnote to its more illustrious successor, Star Control II remains as passionately loved as any game from its decade, a game which still turns up regularly on lists of the very best games ever made.

Like those of many other people, Paul Reiche III’s life was irrevocably altered by his first encounter with Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s. “I was in high school,” he remembers, “and went into chemistry class, and there was this dude with glasses who had these strange fantasy illustrations in front of him in these booklets. It was sort of a Napoleon Dynamite moment. Am I repulsed or attracted to this? I went with attracted to it.”

In those days, when the entire published corpus of Dungeons & Dragons consisted of three slim, sketchy booklets, being a player all but demanded that one become a creator — a sort of co-designer, if you will — as well. Reiche and his friends around Berkeley, California, went yet one step further, becoming one of a considerable number of such folks who decided to self-publish their creative efforts. Their most popular product, typed out by Reiche’s mother on a Selectric typewriter and copied at Kinko’s, was a book of new spells called The Necromican.

That venture eventually crashed and burned when it ran afoul of that bane of all semi-amateur businesses, the Internal Revenue Service. It did, however, help to secure for Reiche what seemed the ultimate dream job to a young nerd like him: working for TSR itself, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He contributed to various products there, but soon grew disillusioned by the way that his own miserable pay contrasted with the rampant waste and mismanagement around him, which even a starry-eyed teenage RPG fanatic like him couldn’t fail to notice. The end came when he spoke up in a meeting to question the purchase of a Porsche as an executive’s company car. That got him “unemployed pretty dang fast,” he says.

So, he wound up back home, attending the University of California, Berkeley, as a geology major. But by now, it was the 1980s, and home computers — and computer games — were making their presence felt among the same sorts of people who tended to play Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, Reiche had been friends for some time already with one of the most prominent designers in the new field: Jon Freeman of Automated Simulations, designer of Temple of Apshai, the most sophisticated of the very early proto-CRPGs. Reiche got his first digital-game credit by designing The Keys of Acheron, an “expansion pack” for Temple of Apshai’s sequel Hellfire Warrior, for Freeman and Automated. Not long after, Freeman had a falling-out with his partner and left Automated to form Free Fall Associates with his wife, programmer Anne Westfall. He soon asked Reiche to join them. It wasn’t a hard decision to make: compared to the tabletop industry, Reiche remembers, “there was about ten times the money in computer games and one-tenth the number of people.”

Freeman, Westfall, and Reiche made a big splash very quickly, when they were signed as one of the first group of “electronic artists” to join a new publisher known as Electronic Arts. Free Fall could count not one but two titles among EA’s debut portfolio in 1983: Archon, a chess-like game where the pieces fought it out with one another, arcade-style, under the players’ control; and Murder on the Zinderneuf, an innovative if not entirely satisfying procedurally-generated murder-mystery game. While the latter proved to be a slight commercial disappointment, the former more than made up for it by becoming a big hit, prompting the trio to make a somewhat less successful sequel in 1984.

After that, Reiche parted ways with Free Fall to become a sort of cleanup hitter of a designer for EA, working on whatever projects they felt needed some additional design input. With Evan and Nicky Robinson, he put together Mail Order Monsters, an evolution of an old Automated Simulations game of monster-movie mayhem, and World Tour Golf, an allegedly straight golf simulation to which the ever-whimsical Reiche couldn’t resist adding a real live dinosaur as the mother of all hazards on one of the courses. Betwixt and between these big projects, he also lent a helping hand to other games: helping to shape the editor in Adventure Construction Set, making some additional levels for Ultimate Wizard.

Another of these short-term consulting gigs took him to a little outfit called Binary Systems, whose Starflight, an insanely expansive game of interstellar adventure, had been in production for a couple of years already and showed no sign of being finished anytime soon. This meeting would, almost as much as his first encounter with Dungeons & Dragons, shape the future course of Reiche’s career, but its full import wouldn’t become clear until years later. For now, he spent two weeks immersed in the problems and promise of arguably the most ambitious computer game yet proposed, a unique game in EA’s portfolio in that it was being developed exclusively for the usually business-oriented MS-DOS platform rather than a more typical — and in many ways more limited — gaming computer. He bonded particularly with Starflight’s scenario designer, an endlessly clever writer and artist named Greg Johnson, who was happily filling his galaxy with memorable and often hilarious aliens to meet, greet, and sometimes beat in battle.

Reiche’s assigned task was to help the Starflight team develop a workable conversation model for interacting with all these aliens. Still, he was thoroughly intrigued with all aspects of the project, so much so that he had to be fairly dragged away kicking and screaming by EA’s management when his allotted tenure with Binary Systems had expired. Even then, he kept tabs on the game right up until its release in 1986, and was as pleased as anyone when it became an industry landmark, a proof of what could be accomplished when designers and programmers had a bigger, more powerful computer at their disposal — and a proof that owners of said computers would actually buy games for them if they were compelling enough. In these respects, Starflight served as nothing less than a harbinger of computer gaming’s future. At the same, though, it was so far out in front of said future that it would stand virtually alone for some years to come. Even its sequel, released in 1989, somehow failed to recapture the grandeur of its predecessor, despite running in the same engine and having been created by largely the same team (including Greg Johnson, and with Paul Reiche once again helping out as a special advisor).

Well before Starflight II’s release, Reiche left EA. He was tired of working on other people’s ideas, ready to take full control of his own creative output for the first time since his independent tabletop work as a teenager a decade before. With a friend named Fred Ford, who was the excellent programmer Reiche most definitely wasn’t, he formed a tiny studio — more of a partnership, really — called Toys for Bob. The unusual name came courtesy of Reiche’s wife, a poet who knew the value of words. She said, correctly, that it couldn’t help but raise the sort of interesting questions that would make people want to look closer — like, for instance, the question of just who Bob was. When it was posed to him, Reiche liked to say that everyone who worked on a Toys for Bob game should have his own Bob in mind, serving as an ideal audience of one to be surprised and delighted.

Reiche and Ford planned to keep their company deliberately tiny, signing only short-term contracts with outsiders to do the work that they couldn’t manage on their own. “We’re just people getting a job done,” Reiche said. “There are no politics between [us]. Once you start having art departments and music departments and this department and that department, the organization gets a life of its own.” They would manage to maintain this approach for a long time to come, in defiance of all the winds of change blowing through the industry; as late as 1994, Toys for Bob would permanently employ only three people.

Yet Reiche and Ford balanced this small-is-beautiful philosophy with a determination to avoid the insularity that could all too easily result. They made it a policy to show Toys for Bob’s designs-in-progress to many others throughout their evolution, and to allow the contractors they hired to work on them the chance to make their own substantive creative inputs. For the first few years, Toys for Bob actually shared their offices with another little collective who called themselves Johnson-Voorsanger Productions. They included in their ranks Greg Johnson of Starflight fame and one Robert Leyland, whom Reiche had first met when he did the programming for Murder on the Zinderneuf — Anne Westfall had had her hands full with Archon — back in the Free Fall days. Toys for Bob and Johnson-Voorsanger, these two supposedly separate entities, cross-pollinated one another to such an extent that they might almost be better viewed as one. When the latter’s first game, the cult-classic Sega Genesis action-adventure ToeJam & Earl, was released in 1991, Reiche and Ford made the credits for “Invaluable Aid.” And the influence which Leyland and particularly Johnson would have on Toys for Bob’s games would be if anything even more pronounced.

Toys for Bob’s first game, which they developed for the publisher Accolade, was called Star Control. With it, Reiche looked all the way back to the very dawn of digital gaming — to the original Spacewar!, the canonical first full-fledged videogame ever, developed on a DEC PDP-1 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology circa 1962. In Star Control as in Spacewar!, two players — ideally, two humans, but potentially one human and one computer player, or even two computer players if the “Cyborg Mode” is turned on — fight it out in an environment that simulates proper Newtonian physics, meaning objects in motion stay in motion until a counter-thrust is applied. Players also have to contend with the gravity wells of the planets around them — these in place of the single star which affects the players’ ships in Spacewar! — as they try to blow one another up. But Star Control adds to this formula a wide variety of ships with markedly differing weaponry, defensive systems, sizes, and maneuvering characteristics. In best rock-paper-scissors fashion, certain units have massive advantages over others and vice versa, meaning that a big part of the challenge is that of maneuvering the right units into battle against the enemy’s. As in real wars, most of the battles are won or lost before the shooting ever begins, being decided by the asymmetries of the forces the players manage to bring to bear against one another. Reiche:

It was important to us that each alien ship was highly differentiated. What it means is, unlike, say, Street Fighter, where your characters are supposedly balanced with one another, our ships weren’t balanced at all, one on one. One could be very weak, and one could be very strong, but the idea was, your fleet of ships, your selection of ships in total, was as strong as someone else’s, and then it came down to which match-up did you find. One game reviewer called it, “Rock, Scissors, Vapor,” which I thought was a great expression.

Of course, even the worst match-ups leave a sliver of hope that a brilliant, valorous performance on the field of battle can yet save the day.

You can play Star Control in “Melee” mode as a straight-up free-for-all. Each player gets seven unique ships from the fourteen in the game, from which she gets to choose one for each battle. First player to destroy all of her opponent’s ships wins. But real strategy — that is to say, strategy beyond the logic of rock-paper-scissors match-ups — comes into play only with the full game, which takes the form of a collection of scenarios where each player must deploy her fleet over a galactic map. In the more complex scenarios, controlling more star systems means more resources at one’s disposal, which can be used to build more and better ships at a player’s home starbase; this part of the game draws heavily from the beloved old Atari 8-bit classic Star Raiders. A scenario editor is also included for players who get bored with the nine scenarios that come with the game.

Star Control strains nobly to accommodate many different play styles and preferences. Just as it’s possible to turn on Cyborg Mode in the strategy game and let the computer do the fighting, it’s also possible to turn on “Psytron Mode” and let the computer do the strategy while you concentrate on blowing stuff up.

Star Control in action. The red ship is the infamous Syreen Penetrator.

Yet the aspect of Star Control that most players seem to remember best has nothing to do with any of these efforts to be all things to all players. At some point in the development process, Reiche and Ford realized they needed a context for all this interstellar violence. They came up with an “Alliance of Free Stars” — which included Earthlings among its numbers — fighting a war against the evil “Ur-Quan Hierarchy.” Each group of allies/thralls conveniently consists of seven species, each with their own unique model of spaceship. Not being inclined to take any of this too seriously, Toys for Bob let their whimsy run wild in creating all these aliens, enlisting Greg Johnson — the creator of the similarly winsome and hilarious aliens who inhabit the galaxy of Starflight — to add his input as well. The rogue’s gallery of misfits, reprobates, and genetic oddities that resulted can’t help but make you smile, even if they are more fleshed-out in the manual rather than on the screen.

Reiche on the origins of the Illwrath, a race of arachnid fundamentalists who “receive spiritual endorsement in the accomplishment of vicious surprise attacks”:

The name “Illwrath” comes from an envelope I saw at the post office, which was being sent to a Ms. McIlwrath in Glasgow, Scotland. I didn’t see the “Mc” at first, and I swear, my first thought was that they must be sending that envelope to an alien. I am sure that somewhere there is a nice little Scottish lady laughing and saying, “Oh, those crazy Americans! Here’s one now calling me an evil, giant, religiously-intolerant space spider — ha, ha, ha, how cute!” Hmm… on second thought, if I am ever found beaten with bagpipes or poisoned with haggis, please contact the authorities.

Around the office, Fred Ford liked to say that the Illwrath had become so darn evil by first becoming too darn righteous, wrapping right around the righteousness scale and yielding results akin to all those old computer games which suddenly started showing negative statistics if you built up your numbers too far. (Personally, I favor this idea greatly, and, indeed, even believe it might serve as an explanation for certain forces in current American politics.)

Reiche on the Mmrnmhrm, an “almost interesting robot race” who “fear vowels almost as much as they do a Dreadnought closing in at full bore”:

When I first named the Mmrnmhrm, they actually had a pronounceable name, with vowels and everything. Then, in a sketch for the captain’s window illustration, I forgot to give them a mouth. Later, someone saw the sketch and asked me how they talked, so I clamped my lips shut and said something like, “Mrrk nsss,” thereby instituting a taboo on vowels in anything related to the race. Though the Mmrnmhrm ended up looking more like Daleks than Humans, the name stuck.

Reiche on the Syreen, a group of “humanoid females” who embody — knowingly, one likes to believe — every cliché about troglodyte gamers and the fairer sex, right down to their bulbous breasts that look like they’re filled with sand (their origin story also involves the San Francisco earthquake of 1989):

It was an afternoon late last October in San Francisco when Fred Ford, Greg Johnson, and I sat around a monitor trying to name the latest ship design for our new game. The space vessel on the computer screen looked like a copper-plated cross between Tin Tin’s Destination Moon rocketship and a ribbed condom. Needless to say, we felt compelled to christen this ship carefully, with due consideration for our customers’ sensibilities as well as our artistic integrity. “How about the Syreen Penetrator?” Fred suggested without hesitation. Instantly, the ground did truly rise up and smite us! WHAM-rumble-rumble-WHAM! We were thrown around our office like the bridge crew of the starship Enterprise when under fire by the Klingons. I dimly remember standing in a doorframe, watching the room flex like a cheap cardboard box and shouting, “Maybe that’s not such a great name!” and “Gee, do you think San Francisco’s still standing?” Of course, once the earth stopped moving, we blithely ignored the dire portent, and the Syreen’s ship name, “The Penetrator,” was graven in code.

Since then, we haven’t had a single problem. I mean, everyone has a disk crash two nights before a program is final, right? And hey, accidents happen. Brake pads just don’t last forever! My limp is really not that bad, and Greg is almost speaking normally these days.

Star Control was released in 1990 to cautiously positive reviews and reasonable sales. For all its good humor, it proved a rather polarizing experience. The crazily fast-paced action game at its heart was something that about one-third of players seemed to take to and love, while the rest found it totally baffling, being left blinking and wondering what had just happened as the pieces of their exploded ship drifted off the screen about five seconds after a fight had begun. For these people, Star Control was a hard sell: the strategic game just wasn’t deep enough to stand on its own for long, and, while the aliens described in the manual were certainly entertaining, this was a computer game, not a Douglas Adams book.

Still, the game did sufficiently well that Accolade was willing to fund a sequel. And it was at this juncture that, as I noted at the beginning of this article, Reiche and Ford and their associates went kind of nuts. They threw out the less-than-entrancing strategy part of the first game, kept the action part and all those wonderful aliens, and stuck it all into a grand adventure in interstellar space that owed an awful lot to Starflight — more, one might even say, than it owed to Star Control I.

As in Starflight, you roam the galaxy in Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters to avert an apocalyptic threat, collecting precious resources and even more precious clues from the planets you land on, negotiating with the many aliens you meet and sometimes, when negotiations break down, blowing them away. The only substantial aspect of the older game that’s missing from its spiritual successor is the need to manage a bridge crew who come complete with CRPG-style statistics. Otherwise, Star Control II does everything Starflight does and more. The minigame of resource collection on planets’ surfaces, dodging earthquakes and lightning strikes and hostile lifeforms, is back, but now it’s faster paced, with a whole range of upgrades you can add to your landing craft in order to visit more dangerous planets. Ditto space combat, which is now of the arcade style from Star Control I — if, that is, you don’t have Cyborg Mode turned on, which is truly a godsend, the only thing that makes the game playable for many of us. You still need to upgrade your ship as you go along to fight bigger and badder enemies and range faster and farther across space, but now you also can collect a whole fleet of support ships to accompany you on your travels (thus preserving the rock-paper-scissors aspect of Star Control I). I’m not sure that any of these elements could quite carry a game alone, but together they’re dynamite. Much as I hate to employ a tired reviewer’s cliché like “more than the sum of its parts,” this game makes it all but unavoidable.

And yet the single most memorable part of the experience for many or most of us remains all those wonderful aliens, who have been imported from Star Control I and, even better, moved from the pages of the manual into the game proper. Arguably the most indelible of them all, the one group of aliens that absolutely no one ever seems to forget, are the Spathi, a race of “panicked mollusks” who have elevated self-preservation into a religious creed. Like most of their peers, they were present in the first Star Control but really come into their own here, being oddly lovable despite starting the game on the side of the evil Ur-Quan. The Spathi owe more than a little something to the Spemin, Starflight’s requisite species of cowardly aliens, but are based at least as much, Reiche admits a little sheepishly, on his own aversion to physical danger. Their idea of the perfect life was taken almost verbatim from a conversation about same that Reiche and Ford once had over Chinese food at the office. Here, then, is Reiche and the Spathi’s version of the American Dream:

I knew that someday I would be vastly rich, wealthy enough to afford a large, well-fortified mansion. Surrounding my mansion would be vast tracts of land, through which I could slide at any time I wished! Of course, one can never be too sure that there aren’t monsters hiding just behind the next bush, so I would plant trees to climb at regular, easy-to-reach intervals. And being a Spathi of the world, I would know that some monsters climb trees, though often not well, so I would have my servants place in each tree a basket of perfect stones. Not too heavy, not too light — just the right size for throwing at monsters.

“Running and away and throwing rocks,” explains Reiche, “extrapolated in all ways, has been one of my life strategies.”

The Shofixti, who breed like rabbits. Put the one remaining female in the galaxy together with the one remaining male, wait a couple of years… and poof, you have an army of fuzzy little warmongers on your side. They fight with the same enthusiasm they have for… no, we won’t go there.

My personal favorite aliens, however, are the bird-like Pkunk, a peaceful, benevolent, deeply philosophical race whose ships are nevertheless fueled by the insults they spew at their enemies during battle. They are, of course, merely endeavoring to make sure that their morality doesn’t wrap back around to zero and turn them evil like the Illwrath. “Never be too good,” says Reiche. “Insults, pinching people when they aren’t looking… that’ll keep you safe.”

In light of the aliens Greg Johnson had already created for Starflight, not to mention the similarities between Starflight’s Spemin and Star Control’s Spathi, there’s been an occasional tendency to perhaps over-credit his contribution — valuable though it certainly was — to Toys for Bob’s own space epic. Yet one listen to Reiche and Ford in interviews should immediately disabuse anyone of the notion that the brilliantly original and funny aliens in Star Control II are there entirely thanks to Johnson. After listening to Reiche in particular for a few minutes, it really is blindingly obvious that this is the sense of humor behind the Spathi and so many others. Indeed, anyone who has played the game can get a sense of this just from reading some of his quotes in this very article.

There’s a rich vein of story and humor running through even the most practical aspects of Star Control II, as in this report from a planet’s surface. The two complement one another rather than clashing, perhaps because Toys for Bob is clever enough to understand that less is sometimes more. Who are the Liebermann triplets? Who knows? But the line makes you laugh, and that’s the important thing. When a different development team took the reins to make a Star Control III, Reiche’s first piece of advice to them was, “For God’s sake, don’t try to explain everything.” Many a lore-obsessed modern game could afford to take the same advice to heart.

Long after every other aspect of the game has faded from memory, its great good humor, embodied in all those crazy aliens, will remain. It may be about averting a deadly serious intergalactic apocalypse, but, for all that, Star Control II is as warm and fuzzy a space opera as you’ll ever see.

Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t go in for plot. In fact, the sequel’s plot is as elaborate as its predecessor’s was thin; the backstory alone takes up some twenty pages in the manual. The war which was depicted in Star Control I, it turns out, didn’t go so well for the good guys; the sequel begins with you entering our solar system in command of the last combat-worthy craft among a shattered and defeated Alliance of Free Stars. The Ur-Quan soon get wind of your ship’s existence and the last spark of defiance against their rule that it represents, and send a battlefleet toward Earth to snuff it out. And so the race is on to rebuild the Alliance and assemble a fleet of your own before the Ur-Quan arrive. How you do so is entirely up to you. Suffice to say that Earth’s old allies are out there. It’s up to you to find the aliens and convince them to join you in whatever sequence seems best, while finding the resources you need to fuel and upgrade your spaceship and juggling a whole lot of other problems at the same time. This game is as nonlinear as they come.

Star Control II takes itself seriously in the places where it’s important to do so, but never too seriously. Anyone bored with the self-consciously “dark” fictions that so often dominate in our current era of media will find much to appreciate here.

When asked to define what makes a good game, Paul Reiche once said that it “has to have a fun core, which is a one-sentence description of why it’s fun.” Ironically, Star Control II is an abject failure by this standard, pulling in so many directions as to defy any such holistic description. It’s a strategy game of ship and resource management; it’s an action game of ship-versus-ship combat; it’s an adventure game of puzzle-solving and clue-tracking. Few cross-genre games have ever been quite so cross-genre as this one. It really shouldn’t work, but, for the most part anyway, it does. If you’re a person whose ideal game lets you do many completely different things at every session, this might just be your dream game. It really is an experience of enormous richness and variety, truly a game like no other. Small wonder that it’s attracted a cult of players who will happily declare it to be nothing less than the best game ever made.

For my part, I have a few too many reservations to go quite that far. Before I get to them, though, I’d like to let Reiche speak one more time. Close to the time of Star Control II’s release, he outlined his four guiding principles of game design. Star Control II conforms much better to these metrics than it does to that of the “one-sentence description.”

First, [games should be] fun, with no excuses about how the game simulates the agony and dreariness of the real world (as though this was somehow good for you). Second, they [should] be challenging over a long period of time, preferably with a few ability “plateaus” that let me feel in control for a period of time, then blow me out of the water. Third, they [should] be attractive. I am a sucker for a nice illustration or a funky riff. Finally, I want my games to be conceptually interesting and thought-provoking, so one can discuss the game with an adult and not feel silly.

It’s in the intersection between Reiche’s first and second principles that I have my quibbles with Star Control II. It’s a rather complicated, difficult game by design, which is fair enough as long as it’s complex and difficult in a fun way. Some of its difficulty, however, really doesn’t strike me as being all that much fun at all. Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while know that I place enormous weight on fairness and solubility when it comes to the games I review, and don’t tend to cut much slack to those that can only be enjoyed and/or solved with a walkthrough or FAQ to hand. On this front, Star Control II is a bit problematic, due largely to one questionable design choice.

Star Control II, you see, has a deadline. You have about five years before Earth is wiped out by the Ur-Quan (more precisely, by the eviller of the two factions of the Ur-Quan, but we won’t get into that here). Fans will tell you, by no means entirely without justification, that this is an essential part of the game. One of the great attractions of Star Control II is its dynamic universe which just keeps evolving, with or without your intervention: alien spaceships travel around the galaxy just like yours is doing, alien races conquer others and are themselves conquered, etc.

All of this is undoubtedly impressive from a game of any vintage, let alone one as old and technologically limited as this one. And the feeling of inhabiting such a dynamic universe is undoubtedly bracing for anyone used to the more static norm, where things only happen when you push them to happen. Yet it also has its drawbacks, the most unfortunate of which is the crushing sense of futility that comes after putting dozens of hours into the game only to lose it irrevocably. The try-and-try-again approach can work in small, focused games that don’t take long to play and replay, such as the early mysteries of Infocom. In a sprawling epic like this, however… well, does anyone really want to put those dozens of hours in all over again, clicking through page after page of the same text?

Star Control II’s interface felt like something of a throwback even in its own time. By 1992, computer games had almost universally moved to the mouse-driven point-and-click model. Yet this game relies entirely on multiple-choice menus, activated by the cursor keys and/or a joystick. Toys for Bob was clearly designing with possible console ports in mind. (Star Control was ported to the Sega Genesis, but, as it happened, Star Control II would never get the same honor, perhaps because its sales didn’t quite justify the expense and/or because its complexity was judged unsuited to the console market.) Still, for all that it’s a little odd, the interface is well thought-through, and you get used to it quickly.

There’s an undeniable tension between this rich galaxy, full of unusual sights and entertaining aliens to discover, and the need to stay relentlessly on-mission if you hope to win in the end. I submit that the failure to address this tension is, at bottom, a failure of game design. There’s much that could have been done. One solution might have been to tie the evolving galaxy to the player’s progress through the plot rather than the wall clock, a technique pioneered in Infocom’s Ballyhoo back in 1986 and used in countless narrative-oriented games since. It can convey the impression of rising danger and a skin-of-the-teeth victory every time without ever having to send the player back to square one. In the end, the player doesn’t care whether the exhilarating experience she’s just had is the result of a meticulous simulation coincidentally falling into place just so, or of a carefully manipulated sleight of hand. She just remembers the subjective experience.

But if such a step is judged too radical — too counter to the design ethos of the game — other remedies could have been employed. To name the most obvious, the time limit could have been made more generous; Starflight as well has a theoretical time limit, but few ever come close to reaching it. Or the question of time could have been left to the player — seldom a bad strategy in game design — by letting her choose from a generous, moderate, and challenging time limit before starting the game. (This approach was used to good effect by the CRPG The Magic Candle among plenty of other titles over the years.)

Instead of remedying the situation, however, Reiche and his associates seemed actively determined to make it worse with some of their other choices. To have any hope of finishing the game in time, you need to gain access to a new method of getting around the galaxy, known as “quasi-space,” as quickly as possible. Yet the method of learning about quasi-space is one of the more obscure puzzles in the game, mentioned only in passing by a couple of the aliens you meet, all too easy to overlook entirely. Without access to quasi-space, Star Control II soon starts to feel like a fundamentally broken, unbalanced game. You trundle around the galaxy in your truck of a spaceship, taking months to reach your destinations and months more to return to Earth, burning up all of the minerals you can mine just to feed your engines. And then your time runs out and you lose, never having figured out what you did wrong. This is not, needless to say, a very friendly way to design a game. Had a few clues early on shouted, “You need to get into quasi-space and you may be able to do so here!” just a little more loudly, I may not have felt the need to write any of the last several paragraphs.

I won’t belabor the point any more, lest the mob of Star Control II zealots I can sense lurking in the background, sharpening their pitchforks, should pounce. I’ll say only that this game is, for all its multifaceted brilliance, also a product of its time — a time when games were often hard in time-extending but not terribly satisfying ways, when serious discussions about what constituted fair and unfair treatment of the player were only just beginning to be had in some quarters of the industry.

Searching a planet’s surface for minerals, lifeforms, and clues. Anyone who has played Starflight will feel right at home with this part of the game in particular.

Certainly, whatever our opinion of the time limit and the game’s overall fairness, we have to recognize what a labor of love Star Control II was for Paul Reiche, Fred Ford, and everyone who helped bring it to fruition, from Greg Johnson and Robert Leyland to all of the other writers and artists and testers who lent it their talents. Unsurprisingly given its ambition, the project went way beyond the year or so Accolade had budgeted for it. When their publisher put their foot down and said no more money would be forthcoming, Reiche and Ford reached deep into their own pockets to carry it through the final six months.

As the project was being wrapped up, Reiche realized he still had no music, and only about $1500 left for acquiring some. His solution was classic Toys for Bob: he ran an online contest for catchy tunes, with prizes of $25, $50, and $100 — in addition to the opportunity to hear one’s music in (hopefully) a hit game, of course. The so-called “tracker” scene in Europe stepped up with music created on Commodore Amigas, a platform for which the game itself would never be released. “These guys in Europe [had] just built all these ricky-tink programs to play samples out,” says Reiche. “They just kept feeding samples, really amazing soundtracks, out into the net just for kicks. I can’t imagine any of these people were any older than twenty. It makes me feel like I’m part of a bigger place.”

Upon its release on November 30, 1992 — coincidentally, the very same day as Dune II, its companion in mislabeled sequels — Star Control II was greeted with excellent reviews, whose enthusiasm was blunted only by the game’s sheer unclassifiability. Questbusters called it “as funny a parody of science-fiction role-playing as it is a well-designed and fun-to-play RPG,” and named it “Best RPG of the Year” despite it not really being a CRPG at all by most people’s definitions. Computer Gaming World placed it on “this reviewer’s top-ten list of all time” as “one of the most enjoyable games to review all year,” and awarded it “Adventure Game of the Year” alongside Legend Entertainment’s far more traditional adventure Eric the Unready.

Sales too were solid, if not so enormous as Star Control II’s staying power in gamers’ collective memory might suggest. Like Dune II, it was probably hurt by being billed as a sequel to a game likely to appeal most to an entirely different type of player, as it was by the seeming indifference of Accolade. In the eyes of Toys for Bob, the developer/publisher relationship was summed up by the sticker the latter started putting on the box after Star Control II had collected its awards: “Best Sports Game of 1992.” Accolade was putting almost all of their energy into sports games during this period, didn’t have stickers handy for anything else, and just couldn’t be bothered to print up some new ones.

Still, the game did well enough that Toys for Bob, after having been acquired by a new CD-ROM specialist of a publisher called Crystal Dynamics, ported it to the 3DO console in 1994. This version added some eight hours of spoken dialog, but cut a considerable amount of content that the voice-acting budget wouldn’t cover. Later, a third Star Control would get made — albeit not by Toys for Bob but by Legend Entertainment, through a series of intellectual-property convolutions we won’t go into in this article.

Toys for Bob themselves have continued to exist right up to the present day, a long run indeed in games-industry terms, albeit without ever managing to return to the Star Control universe. They’re no longer a two-man operation, but do still have Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford in control.

To this day, Star Control II remains as unique an experience as it was in 1992. You’ve never played a game quite like this one, no matter how many other games you’ve played in your time. Don’t even try to categorize it. Just play it, and see what’s possible when a talented design team throws out all the rules. But before you do, let me share just one piece of advice: when an alien mentions something about a strange stellar formation near the Chandrasekhar constellation, pay attention! Trust me, it will save you from a world of pain…

(Sources: Compute!’s Gazette of November 1984; Compute! of January 1992 and January 1993; Computer Gaming World of November 1990, December 1990, March 1993, and August 1993; InterActivity of November/December 1994; Questbusters of January 1993; Electronic Gaming Monthly of May 1991; Sega Visions of June 1992; Retro Gamer 14 and 15. Online sources include Ars Technica’s video interview with Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford; Matt Barton’s interviews with the same pair in Matt Chat 95, 96, and 97; Grognardia’s interview with Reiche; The Escapist’s interview with Reiche; GameSpot’s interview with Reiche.

There’s a rather depressing pitched legal dispute swirling around the Star Control intellectual property at the moment, which has apparently led to Star Control I and II being pulled from digital-download stores. Your best option to experience Star Control II is thus probably The Ur-Quan Masters, a loving open-source re-creation based on Toys for Bob’s 3DO source code. Or go hunt down the original on some shadowy corner of the interwebs. I won’t say anything if you don’t.)

Comments
48 Responses

- Infinitron

December 21, 2018 at 5:39 pm

Quasi-space, not quad-space.

- Jimmy Maher

December 21, 2018 at 6:16 pm

Thanks!

- JudgeDeadd

December 21, 2018 at 5:41 pm

“The Yehat, who breed like rabbits”
That’s actually the Shofixti.

- Jimmy Maher

December 21, 2018 at 6:16 pm

Thanks!

- Christopher Floyd

December 21, 2018 at 7:33 pm

When I was reading your piece on Cryo’s Dune, I started trying to piece together when (and if!) you might get to Star Control II. I made the connection because they’re both odd story-strategy games–although SC2 is another step or two further in ambition. I call it a “kitchen sink” game, for as many genres as it encompasses.

It’s also my favorite game of all time, and I think one that’s still very enjoyable today if you can get over the need to take your own notes. And maybe occasionally peek at a map that tells you where some interesting content is, since you probably don’t have the time and patience for all that free-form open-world exploration we relished (?) in 1992.

Thanks for yet another deep-trawling article.

- Pedro Timóteo

December 21, 2018 at 8:04 pm

I’ve always found the time limit pretty generous; I believe my brother and I (playing on separate computers but sharing our discoveries with each other) were able to finish the game from a “descendant” save of our initial game (re-loading when dying, or when screwing up the game in some way — keeping several saves to prevent that –, but never restarting it from the beginning). Also, there are in-game ways to increase it (basically getting other races to interfere in the Ur-Quan civil war so that the Kohr-Ah take a year or two longer to win).

You also mention Cyborg Mode, which (unless you’re bad at action games or don’t enjoy them at all, and there’s nothing wrong in either case, of course) is a far from optimal way to play the game, as there are tricks that can be used to overcome the AI. Most people go for a Spathi ship, which can beat virtually any computer-controlled opponent in the game as long as you have a lot of patience… which I don’t, so I typically focus on upgrading the flagship until it can kill almost any enemy in 2-3 shots. You can also get a lot of extra resources by not “solving” the problem with the probes for a long while, since they provide a lot when destroyed. And getting tech upgrades from the Melnorme quickly is essential.

By the way, this and Ultima 7 are probably my favorite PC games of all time. Funny how both are from the same year…

- Jimmy Maher

December 21, 2018 at 8:19 pm

I think a big problem with the action game today is that you really need a joystick to play it properly, which seems to be an increasingly rare peripheral among PC gamers. I do have one, but I was playing Star Control II on my laptop when I was traveling, so I wound up just using the Cyborg Mode for the most part.

- Andrew

December 21, 2018 at 10:37 pm

I must have played this game to completion over a dozen times, and spent hundreds of hours playing Super Melee. All on the keyboard. In fact Super Melee would have had two people hunched over one keyboard, locked in conflict. The precision required for some strategies (hiding between Ur-Quan Dreadnought firing arcs, for example) seemed to suit the keyboard.

With respect to the time limit – the game was quite artfully designed here – in that there was a fairly long sequence of events you needed to complete to get access to the device you needed to accelerate the fusion of Chenjesu and Mmrnmhrm, but if the clock had run down and the Kohr-Ah had started their pogrom, you could wait for them to annigliate (damn) the Mycon, and then just nip down to their planet, snag the Sun Device, and then leg it to Procyon to do the necessary. This was how I managed to complete the game the first time I played it, and I can still remember the panic and tension as I rushed around the galaxy, trying to get to the Sa Matra before the Kohr Ah reached Earth.

I think there were other items that were defended by unbeatable fleets of ships that you could acquire this way, if you’d failed to get them the “correct” way.

- Pedro Timóteo

December 22, 2018 at 11:48 am

Oh, yes, keyboard all the way. :)

Maybe it’s because I grew up with the ZX Spectrum, where every single game supported the keyboard (unlike, say, the C64 or the Amiga, where almost every game required a joystick), but, to me, if a game’s controls are digital, then the best way to play it is still using a keyboard — typically my right hand for directions, and the left one for any fire buttons. It took me literally years, back in the late 90s (PS1) and early 2000s (GameCube) to get used to a controller, especially analog ones (just going in a straight line can still be tough, sometimes…), and, to this day, if playing something in an emulator, I prefer to use keys.

The “the bad guys solve all the puzzles for you at the end of the game to give you one last chance” bit is something I only found out about years later, when reading forums. AFAIK it’s pretty unique to SC2 — at least I can’t think of any other example.

- Jimmy Maher

December 22, 2018 at 1:09 pm

Hmm… I was reading some old discussion threads about the game, as you do, before writing this article, and a fair number of people were saying the difference between and keyboard and joystick was like night and day. Obviously mileages vary more than expected.

As for me, I knew it wasn’t the sort of thing I’d enjoy or ever be very good at pretty much the moment I saw it, so I didn’t sweat using Cyborg Mode too much. Third-person action games with fiddly controls just aren’t my forte — but I recognize that to be a criticism of me, what with my sausage fingers and middle-aged reflexes, rather than the game.

- Lisa H.

December 22, 2018 at 11:05 pm

My friends and I played Super Melee for hours without a joystick, using the four-hands-on-a-keyboard method. (I’ve never owned a PC joystick, actually.) It is not my typical kind of game but I don’t find it that hard in general; as noted, some kinds of ships have strong advantages over others. Within the story mode of the game, though, with a few exceptions I agree with Pedro that beefing up your flagship as much as possible is a quicker strategy and that a Spathi ship is a general good choice otherwise. (Whenever I replay SC2 I have a kind of superstition about making sure that Fwiffo, specifically, makes it all the way from Pluto to the endgame with me.)

- Andrew

December 24, 2018 at 1:48 pm

Fwiffo is the best. I never let him die either :)

- M. Casey

December 25, 2018 at 2:14 am

Fwiffo is the Dogmeat of SC2. Even as he becomes hopelessly outclassed, it’s still tempting to keep him on as a mascot. :)

- David Scotton

December 21, 2018 at 8:19 pm

I agree with your comments on time limits generally, but I never had a problem with the time limit in this game. My biggest complaint about the game is something you didn’t really mention: the resource gathering aspect of the game is just not fun – it’s basically exactly the kind of agony that you quote Reiche as saying games should avoid. The first time I played I exploited the shuttle-sale wraparound bug to avoid having to collect resource (after reading the wraparound-related quotes about the Ilwrath in this article I wonder if that bug was there intentionally). Anyway, aside from that it’s a great game.

- Nate

December 22, 2018 at 9:39 am

I have to agree: I started playing The Ur-Quan Masters, took about two attempts at resource mining with the shuttle and went ‘okay, it’s one of THOSE games’ and ran far, far away. I haven’t regretted it. The story might be great but if I have to do that planet mining minigame all the time? No thanks. Life’s far too short for that.

I guess people really do want very different things from their games. I’m at the point in my life where ‘repeat random mazey stuff looking for random loot’ is not one of them.

- sam

December 21, 2018 at 9:22 pm

“Ur-Quan Heirarchy” should presumably have ‘hierarchy’, or a (sic).

- Jimmy Maher

December 22, 2018 at 5:54 am

Thanks!

- Martin

December 22, 2018 at 12:50 am

So Chandrasekhar, as in the Indian physicist Nobel laureate. Sure why wouldn’t I go there?

- Margaret Trauth

December 22, 2018 at 1:35 am

“Reiche and Ford planned to keep their company deliberately tiny, signing only short-term contracts with outsiders to do the work that they couldn’t manage on their own.”

Things change. Oh how things change. The credits for the Toys For Bob remake of the Spyro trilogy go on for about twenty minutes.

And Reiche and Ford are nowhere to be seen in them.

- The Eidolon

December 22, 2018 at 3:08 am

The Liebermann triplets appear to have lost an N in the caption.

Also, fun fact, another famous TSR alum, Erol Otus, did some of the art for the aliens in the manual for Star Control 1.

- Jimmy Maher

December 22, 2018 at 5:53 am

Thanks!

Erol Otus actually has a long history with Paul Reiche III. He was one of the first people the latter played Dungeons & Dragons with and worked with him on the early self-published tabletop stuff. Their professional paths have crossed repeatedly in the decades since.

- Chmmr

December 22, 2018 at 9:56 am

God bless the DOS version’s lander bug loop-hole allowing unlimited RUs!

- whomever

December 22, 2018 at 10:19 am

Random aside, but since this is I believe the first time “Archon” is mentioned, I actually do think it was one of the best games of its era. I played it extensively with my friend on his Atari 800XL and it really does stand up there in the multi-player fun category with the likes of M.U.L.E.

- Jimmy Maher

December 22, 2018 at 11:24 am

I actually wrote a whole article about it almost six years ago (how time flies!): https://www.filfre.net/2013/02/free-fall-part-1-archon. It’s a very good design, but marred somewhat in my opinion by a tendency to devolve into a passive stalemate toward the endgame.

- Will O'Neill

December 22, 2018 at 2:29 pm

This was a fantastic read on the greatest game ever made. Thank you!

- Laertes

December 22, 2018 at 10:22 pm

Is the open source remake also a cut version as the 3DO one?

- Jimmy Maher

December 22, 2018 at 11:16 pm

I’m not actually sure whether all of the cut content has been added back in by now or not. I’ve heard that at least for a time a vital clue was missing from the remake, making the game effectively unwinnable without recourse to outside knowledge; no idea whether that’s been fixed. Even if I hadn’t felt obligated to play the original for the sake of the history angle, I’d be a little reluctant to trust the remake without further research. If your style of play is to use a lot of FAQs and so on, of course, this may be less of a concern.

But maybe someone who knows more about the remake will chime in with firmer information.

- Pedro Timóteo

December 23, 2018 at 10:25 am

About the remake, I’m assuming the missing clue is the Mycon telling you where their homeworld is (*) (since you later in the game need to go there for a reason — and it’s *not* the same location as their Juffo-Wup “special place”). Now, I think I remember reading that that had been fixed in the past decade, but a bit of googling couldn’t find it — only forum threads from 2003-2005 asking for help.

Since I haven’t played UQM in a while, and I always find it a joy to do so, I’ll try to do so in the next couple of days, and will share here if that bug has since been fixed.

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2018 at 10:45 am

Awesome! Thank you!

- Laertes

December 23, 2018 at 11:49 am

Thanks Pedro & JImmy,

I am not going to play it myself, at least not in the short term, even if I installed it long time ago, it was just curiosiy.

- Pedro Timóteo

December 24, 2018 at 10:02 am

Just checked (basically by starting a new game, doing the initial bits in the solar system, buying a lot of fuel, and going straight to the Mycon area), and, yes, the very first Mycon you meet tells you the location of their homeworld. So apparently it was fixed (which probably included recording the missing line with a similar-sounding voice).

That screenshot is from the HD version of UQM, by the way (the “regular” UQM uses the original 3DO graphics).

- CdrJameson

December 22, 2018 at 10:33 pm

Starflight/SC II clearly had an influence on the design of Mass Effect (dropping onto planet for resource collection – which they also dropped because it was tedious) but it’s odd to compare such a relatively recent SFRPG and see that it’s so tiny and constrained in scope and freedom in comparison to these much older ones. By ME III they had some ship-scale movement between systems, but it was still pretty trivial.
It’s not like the structure of these games is even difficult to replicate, or that it was unique – the Megatraveller games had similarly non-linear movement between planets – it’s just curious that it hasn’t been really used much since.

- Jimmy Maher

December 22, 2018 at 11:22 pm

Yes, it’s hard to understand why this whole line turned out to be something of an evolutionary dead end. Odd that we get about a dozen ambitious new 4X space games every year, and nothing that takes a more embodied approach to the whole grandeur-of-the-cosmos thing. The only remotely kindred spirit that’s been released recently is No Man’s Sky, and that turned into a big disappointment for just about everyone, thanks largely to an over-reliance on procedurally-generated content (a bane of a lot of modern games, it seems).

- Bluddy

December 26, 2018 at 9:55 pm

This is a great point, in that SC2 was the epitome of taking procedural generation and then dropping a full-scale plot onto it. If only someone could do that again, instead of creating a mass of procedural content nobody cares about.

- Gnoman

December 29, 2018 at 4:38 am

I’d argue that Stellaris takes some pretty big leaps back toward this sort of model, even if it isn’t quite there.

- Pingback: Lazy Reading for 2018/12/23 – DragonFly BSD Digest

- Pedro Timóteo

December 24, 2018 at 10:20 am

Just found a typo: “to Toy’s for Bob’s own space epic”
Toy’s -> Toys

- Jimmy Maher

December 24, 2018 at 11:11 am

Thanks so much… on both counts. ;) Good to know the problem was fixed.

- M. Casey

December 25, 2018 at 3:00 am

Oh, this was one of my favorite games of the era. I remember trading a copy of Legends of Valour (which was fine in theory, awful in execution) for it on USENET. One of the best trades of my life; I still have the floppies around somewhere.

Anyway, a few thoughts:

1. The time limit, as others had mentioned, was pretty generous all told. I lost the first time through but later found out it wasn’t by much.

2. The grind of RU gathering wasn’t at all bad at the time–particularly since you should be upgrading your landers once you figured out how trading with the Melnorme worked–but it sure is a dated mechanic today.

3. As you read more science fiction you’re able to see how liberally Reiche & Ford borrowed from other works, but man, the story’s so fun I can’t hold it against them. Loved the story of how the Kohr-Ah developed and how the Ur-Quan dealt with the Dnyarri problem.

4. After a few playthroughs you figure out a preferred early game strategy… for me it was eschewing combat early, using Alliance mascot Fwiffo to take out the unavoidable Slylandro or Ur-Quan encounter, and getting the Orz to join up for *parties* as soon as possible because in the hands of an able commander they’re extremely strong and versatile. Eventually, of course, the mothership becomes your best ship.

5. To be honest I can’t imagine handing off combat duties to the AI, but I get that it’s not your thing.

6. Your essay about Covert Action has some interesting contrasts here: why did Covert Action, another collection of minigames by a brilliant designer, fail when Star Control II is a masterpiece? I’d say it was a matter of story but I’m curious what you might think.

7. As always, great article Jimmy.

- Jimmy Maher

December 25, 2018 at 8:57 am

There are such big differences between Covert Action and Star Control II, even outside their fiction — one is scenario-based, the other a single all-encompassing quest — that I’d hesitate to compare them too closely. But I’d have to stick to my thesis that Covert Action failed primarily because its procedurally-generated stories just weren’t interesting or compelling enough to make you care about them. Whatever else you can say about it, Star Control II certainly doesn’t have this problem. There’s an interesting discussion in Reiche and Ford’s video on Ars Technica, linked to in the sources above. It seems Reiche originally wanted to make a procedurally-generated, realistic galaxy, but the end result was boring, so they threw it out and made a less realistic but much more fun hand-crafted galaxy. If not quite the same thing as the question of hand-crafted versus procedurally-generated story, this is definitely on the same wavelength. (Ironically, the procedurally-generated galaxy fell afoul of one of Sid Meier’s rules for game design, which says it should be the *player*, not the designer or the programmer exploring this or that interesting system, who has the fun. It’s *amazing* how many games this rule applies to.)

- Gordon R Cameron

December 27, 2018 at 11:23 pm

>In the end, the player doesn’t care whether the exhilarating experience she’s just had is the result of a meticulous simulation coincidentally falling into place just so, or of a carefully manipulated sleight of hand. She just remembers the subjective experience.

As Luke Skywalker would say, *I* care!

Star Control II fell into my brief non-gaming window when I was in college with nothing but an old Amiga 500. Consequently I have much fonder memories of its predecessor. I’ve tried once or twice to give II a proper playthrough. It hasn’t stuck, yet, but I’ll get to it in time, probably.

- Ross

January 2, 2019 at 11:45 pm

I never played Star Control II, but I did play and really enjoy ‘Protostar’, which I’d heard was similar. Went to look it up today and… Lo and behold, Protostar was originally conceived as a third Starflight game.

- Jaakko Markus Seppälä

January 3, 2019 at 11:57 am

Thank you for writing about the best game of all time, Jimmy! This really made my Christmas.

Reading your article got me thinking what it was that made Star Control II so captivating for me as a kid, and to a considerable extent, even today. Obviously the memorable aliens, the kick-ass music, the very playable space battle subgame and a perfect balance between wacky humor and a serious storyline…

However, I think that the biggest thing for me was how the game made you feel you weren’t just playing a game. It made you feel you were in another universe, full of secrets that lay waiting to be discovered! It had a lot to do with the fact that you had to – or were given the freedom to – fly everywhere.

Some gamers might find such approach tedious. I loved it. How disappointed I was to play Star Control 3 some years later: it junked that illusion of freedom by limiting your movements to insta-teleporting between star systems with a mouse-click. Even worse was the sucky minimap used for moving within the star systems. Never seen a more efficient way to reduce the majesty of interplanetary exploration in deep space to something akin to dragging icons on a four-color proto-Windows desktop in safe mode.

To top it all off, SC3 cheats by hiding some systems from the starmap, making them wholly inaccessible until the player completes certain plot points. In SC2, some places were basically inaccessible before you found necessary objects or clues for dealing with the obstacles, yes. But you could still stumble across those places on your own, you could still _find_ them. That makes one heck of a difference when it comes to how the game universe feels.

All this “streamlining” in SC3 may have been made in the name of playability. For me, it just made the game feel “gamey”. To be fair, SC3 sported a metric ton of other flaws as well, but this one was the definite immersion-breaker for me.

I guess I’ve always been sucker for the open-universe approach. Another game that fascinated the heck out of me back then was Mercenary: Escape from Targ, and its insanely more difficult sibling, The Second City. I sank countless hours into them even if, at the age of eight, I couldn’t understand half of what was going on or what I should have been doing…

It’s strange how few games after that have managed to evoke the same sense of sandbox wonder.

- Jaakko Markus Seppälä

January 3, 2019 at 12:22 pm

Can’t resist a modest plug here:

We created the Ur-Quan Masters HD (a.k.a. a high-definition version of SC2) together with Damon Czanik and a heap of other hardcore fans some years ago. I was the lead programmer in the project.

The game turned out pretty neat-looking! In addition to polishing the graphics we fixed a bunch of bugs left in the original SC2 and introduced a good number of new features :) So, if you want to try something more modern than the old 320×240 resolution, go grab your copy at at http://sourceforge.net/projects/urquanmastershd. There are Windows, OS X and Linux versions available.

Even better, Matt Bentley has spearheaded a project called Ur-Quan Masters HD Remix, also available at Sourceforge. The remix version corrects even more bugs, some of which we missed and some that we somehow introduced into the code (oops!). The remix version seems to be available only for Windows though: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ur-quan-masters-hd-remix

- Captain Kal

January 4, 2019 at 9:12 pm

Many thanks, Jaakko, for you and your team!!! The HD version is great!!

- Lisa H.

January 8, 2019 at 7:46 pm

I always wondered what was the difference between HD and HD Remix!

- DZ-Jay

January 17, 2019 at 6:02 pm

About the timed events, you shouldn’t really fault them for that. At the time, it was not really clear that an actual simulation of the world, running in real time, was a bad thing for adventure or role-playing games. This was a similar problem to what text-adventure developers faced when originally trying to convert literature to so-called “interactive fiction” (Infocom included), while keeping all the trappings of a plot arc and predictable character development in place.

It was so prevalent back then, that even design luminaries like Ron Gilbert fell for the illusory “real time simulation” chimera when he first implemented Maniac Mansion in 1987. He has since then mentioned the timed events in that game as a regrettable flaw that detracts from an otherwise enjoyable adventure.

He obviously learned from that mistake, but it wasn’t until much later that he would reflect on it as an actual design principle anti-pattern, so critical, that he included it specifically on his treatise on Why Adventure Games Suck, as its own section titled, “Real time is bad drama.”

I saw that after bashing the designers over this point you conceded that the game was a product of its time, but I still feel that the bashing was unwarranted. Yes, it’s fine (and perhaps necessary) to point out that things have changed and that we know better now, but your comments on the topic seem a little drastic. Is it really such a critical “failure in design” if it was actually de rigueur to do so at the time?

Anyway, by your description, it does sound like an net resting game, and I will probably try it out. :)

dZ.

- DZ-Jay

January 17, 2019 at 6:13 pm

“An net resting game” should be, of course, “an interesting game. Damn, you, Siri!!!

dZ.

Life on the Grid
January 4, 2019

I’ve long been interested in the process by which new games turn into new gaming genres or sub-genres.

Most game designers know from the beginning that they will be working within the boundaries of an existing genre, whether due to their own predilections or to instructions handed down from above. A minority are brave and free enough to try something formally different from the norm, but few to none even of them, it seems safe to say, deliberately set out to create a new genre. Yet if the game they make turns into a success, it may be taken as the beginning of just that, even as — and this to me is the really fascinating part — design choices which were actually technological compromises with the Platonic ideal in the designer’s mind are taken as essential, positive parts of the final product.

A classic example of this process is a genre that’s near and dear to my heart: the text adventure. Neither of the creators of the original text adventure — they being Will Crowther and Don Woods — strikes me as a particularly literary sort. I suspect that, if they’d had the technology available to them to do it, they’d have happily made their game into a photorealistic 3D-rendered world to be explored using virtual-reality glasses. As it happened, though, all they had was a text-only screen and a keyboard connected to a time-shared DEC PDP-10. So, they made do, describing the environment in text and accepting input in the form of commands entered at the keyboard.

If we look at what happened over the ten to fifteen years following Adventure’s arrival in 1977, we see a clear divide between practitioners of the form. Companies like Sierra saw the text-only format as exactly the technological compromise Crowther and Woods may also have seen, and ran away from it as quickly as possible. Others, however — most notably Infocom — embraced text, finding in it an expansive possibility space all its own, even running advertisements touting their lack of graphics as a virtue. The heirs to this legacy still maintain a small but vibrant ludic subculture to this day.

But it’s another, almost equally interesting example of this process that’s the real subject of our interest today: the case of the real-time grid-based dungeon crawler. After the release of Sir-Tech’s turn-based dungeon crawl Wizardry in 1981, it wasn’t hard to imagine what the ideal next step would be: a smooth-scrolling first-person 3D environment running in real time. Yet that was a tall order indeed for the hardware of the time — even for the next generation of 16-bit hardware that began to arrive in the mid-1980s, as exemplified by the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga. So, when a tiny developer known as FTL decided the time had come to advance the state of the art over Wizardry, they compromised by going to real time but holding onto a discrete grid of locations inside the dungeon of Dungeon Master.

Gamers of today have come to refer to dungeon crawls on a grid as “blobbers,” which is as good a term as any. (The term arises from the way that these games typically “blob” together a party of four or six characters, moving them in lockstep and giving the player a single first-person — first-people? — view of the world.) The Dungeon Master lineage, then, are “real-time blobbers.”

By whatever name, this intermediate step between Wizardry and the free-scrolling ideal came equipped with its own unique set of gameplay affordances. Retaining the grid allowed you to do things that you simply couldn’t otherwise. For one thing, it allowed a game to combine the exciting immediacy of real time with what remains for some of us one of the foremost pleasures of the earlier, Wizardry style of dungeon crawl: the weirdly satisfying process of making your own maps — of slowly filling in the blank spaces on your graph paper, bringing order and understanding to what used to be the chaotic unknown.

This advertisement for the popular turn-based dungeon crawl Might and Magic makes abundantly clear how essential map-making was to the experience of these games. “Even more cartography than the bestselling fantasy game!” What a sales pitch…

But even if you weren’t among the apparent minority who enjoyed that sort of thing, the grid had its advantages, the most significant of which is implied by the very name of “blobber.” It was easy and natural in these games to control a whole party of characters moving in lockstep from square to square, thus retaining another of the foremost pleasures of turn-based games like Wizardry: that of building up not just a single character but a balanced team of them. In a free-scrolling, free-moving game, with its much more precise sense of embodied positioning, such a conceit would have been impossible to maintain. And much of the emergent interactivity of Dungeon Master’s environment would also have been impossible without the grid. Many of us still recall the eureka moment when we realized that we could kill monsters by luring them into a gate square and pushing a button to bash them on the heads with the thing as it tried to descend, over and over again. Without the neat order of the grid, where a gate occupying a square fills all of that square as it descends, there could have been no eureka.

So, within a couple of years of Dungeon Master’s release in 1987, the real-time blobber was establishing itself in a positive way, as its own own sub-genre with its own personality, rather than the unsatisfactory compromise it may first have seemed. Today, I’d like to do a quick survey of this popular if fairly brief-lived style of game. We can’t hope to cover all of the real-time blobbers, but we can hit the most interesting highlights.

Bloodwych running in its unique two-player mode.

Most of the games that followed Dungeon Master rely on one or two gimmicks to separate themselves from their illustrious ancestor, while keeping almost everything else the same. Certainly this rule applied to the first big title of the post-Dungeon Master blobber generation, 1989’s Bloodwych. It copies from FTL’s game not only the real-time approach but also its innovative rune-based magic system, and even the conceit of the player selecting her party from a diverse group of heroes who have been frozen in amber. By way of completing the facsimile, Bloodwych eventually got a much more difficult expansion disk, similar to Dungeon Master’s famously difficult Chaos Strikes Back.

The unique gimmick here is the possibility for two players to play together on the same machine, either cooperatively or competitively, as they choose. A second innovation of sorts is the fact that, in addition to the usual Amiga and Atari ST versions, Bloodwych was also made for the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, and Sinclair Spectrum, much more limited 8-bit computers which still owned a substantial chunk of the European market in 1989.

Bloodwych was the work of a two-man team, one handling the programming, the other the graphics. The programmer, one Anthony Taglioni, tells an origin story that’s exactly what you’d expect it to be:

Dungeon Master appeared on the ST and what a product it was! Three weeks later we’d played it to death, even taking just a party of short people. My own record is twelve hours with just two characters. I was talking with Mirrorsoft at the time and suggested that I could do a DM conversion for them on the C64. They ummed and arred a lot and Pete [the artist] carried on drawing screens until they finally said, “Yes!” and I said, “No! We’ve got a better design and it’ll be two-player-simultaneous.” They said, “Okay, but we want ST and Amiga as well.”

The two-player mode really is remarkable, especially considering that it works even on the lowly 8-bit systems. The screen is split horizontally, and both parties can roam about the dungeon freely in real time, even fighting one another if the players in control wish it. “An option allowing two players to connect via modem could only have boosted the game’s popularity,” noted Wizardry’s designer Andrew Greenberg in 1992, in a review of the belated Stateside MS-DOS release. But playing Bloodwych in-person with a friend had to be if anything even more fun.

Unfortunately, the game has little beyond its two-player mode and wider platform availability to recommend it over Dungeon Master. Ironically, many of its problems are down to the need to accommodate the two-player mode. In single-player mode, the display fills barely half of the available screen real estate, meaning that everything is smaller and harder to manipulate than in Dungeon Master. The dungeon design as well, while not being as punishing as some later entries in this field, is nowhere near as clever or creative as that of Dungeon Master, lacking the older game’s gradual, elegant progression in difficulty and complexity. As would soon become all too typical of the sub-genre, Bloodwych offered more levels — some forty of them in all, in contrast to Dungeon Master’s twelve — in lieu of better ones.

So, played today, Bloodwych doesn’t really have a lot to offer. It was doubtless a more attractive proposition in its own time, when games were expensive and length was taken by many cash-strapped teenage gamers as a virtue unto itself. And of course the multiplayer mode was its wild card; it almost couldn’t help but be fun, at least in the short term. By capitalizing on that unique attribute and the fact that it was the first game out there able to satiate eager fans of Dungeon Master looking for more, Bloodwych did quite well for its publisher.

Captive has the familiar “paper doll” interface of Dungeon Master, but you’re controlling robots here. The five screens along the top will eventually be used for various kinds of telemetry and surveillance as you acquire new capabilities.

The sub-genre’s biggest hit of 1990 — albeit once again only in Europe — evinced more creativity in many respects than Bloodwych, even if its primary claim to fame once again came down to sheer length. Moving the action from a fantasy world into outer space, Captive is a mashup of Dungeon Master and Infocom’s Suspended, if you can imagine such a thing. As a prisoner accused of a crime he didn’t commit, you must free yourself from your cell using four robots which you control remotely. Unsurprisingly, the high-tech complexes they’ll need to explore bear many similarities to a fantasy dungeon.

The programmer, artist, and designer behind Captive was a lone-wolf Briton named Tony Crowther, who had cranked out almost thirty simple games for 8-bit computers before starting on this one, his first for the Amiga and Atari ST. Crowther created the entire game all by himself in about fourteen months, an impressive achievement by any standard.

More so even than for its setting and premise, Captive stands out for its reliance on procedurally-generated “dungeons.” In other words, it doesn’t even try to compete with Dungeon Master’s masterful level design, but rather goes a different way completely. Each level is generated by the computer on the fly from a single seed number in about three seconds, meaning there’s no need to store any of the levels on disk. After completing the game the first time, the player is given the option of doing it all over again with a new and presumably more difficult set of complexes to explore. This can continue virtually indefinitely; the level generator can produce 65,535 unique levels in all. That should be enough, announced a proud Crowther, to keep someone playing his game for fifty years by his reckoning: “I wanted to create a role-playing game you wouldn’t get bored of — a game that never ends, so you can feasibly play it for years and years.”

Procedural generation tended to be particularly appealing to European developers like Tony Crowther, who worked in smaller groups with tighter budgets than their American counterparts, and whose target platforms generally lacked the hard drives that had become commonplace on American MS-DOS machines by 1990. Yet it’s never been a technique which I find very appealing as anything but a preliminary template generator for a human designer. In Captive as in most games that rely entirely on procedural generation, the process yields an endless progression of soulless levels which all too obviously lack the human touch of those found in a game like Dungeon Master. In our modern era, when brilliant games abound and can often be had for a song, there’s little reason to favor a game with near-infinite amounts of mediocre content over a shorter but more concentrated experience. In Captive’s day, of course, the situation was very different, making it just one more example of an old game that was, for one reason or another, far more appealing in its own day than it is in ours.

This is the screen you’ll see most in Knightmare.

Tony Crowther followed up Captive some eighteen months later with Knightmare, a game based on a children’s reality show of sorts which ran on Britain’s ITV network from 1987 until 1994. The source material is actually far more interesting than this boxed-computer-game derivative. In an early nod toward embodied virtual reality, a team of four children were immersed in a computer-generated dungeon and tasked with finding their way out. It’s an intriguing cultural artifact of Britain’s early fascination with computers and the games they played, well worth a gander on YouTube.

The computer game of Knightmare, however, is less intriguing. Using the Captive engine, but featuring hand-crafted rather than procedurally-generated content this time around, it actually hews far closer to the Dungeon Master template than its predecessor. Indeed, like so many of its peers, it slavishly copies almost every aspect of its inspiration without managing to be quite as good — much less better — at any of it. This lineage has always had a reputation for difficulty, but Knightmare pushes that to the ragged edge, in terms of both its ridiculously convoluted environmental puzzles and the overpowered monsters you constantly face. Even the laddish staff of Amiga Format magazine, hardly a bastion of thoughtful design analyses, acknowledged that it “teeters on unplayably tough.” And even the modern blogger known as the CRPG Addict, whose name ought to say it all about his skill with these types of games, “questions whether it’s possible to win it without hints.”

Solo productions like this one, created in a vacuum, with little to no play-testing except by a designer who’s intimately familiar with every aspect of his game’s systems, often wound up getting the difficulty balance markedly wrong. Yet Knightmare is an extreme case even by the standards of that breed. If Dungeon Master is an extended explication of the benefits of careful level design, complete with lots of iterative feedback from real players, this game is a cautionary tale about the opposite extreme. While it was apparently successful in its day, there’s no reason for anyone who isn’t a masochist to revisit it in ours.

Eye of the Beholder’s dependence on Dungeon Master is, as the CRPG Addict puts it, “so stark that you wonder why there weren’t lawsuits involved.” What it does bring new to the table is a whole lot more story and lore. Multi-page story dumps like this one practically contain more text than the entirety of Dungeon Master.

None of the three games I’ve just described was available in North America prior to 1992. Dungeon Master, having been created by an American developer, was for sale there, but only for the Amiga, Atari ST, and Apple IIGS, computers whose installed base in the country had never been overly large and whose star there dwindled rapidly after 1989. Thus the style of gameplay that Dungeon Master had introduced was either completely unknown or, at best, only vaguely known by most American gamers — this even as real-time blobbers had become a veritable gaming craze in Europe. But there was no reason to believe that American gamers wouldn’t take to them with the same enthusiasm as their European counterparts if they were only given the chance. There was simply a shortage of supply — and this, as any good capitalist knows, spells Opportunity.

The studio which finally walked through this open door is one I recently profiled in some detail: Westwood Associates. With a long background in real-time games already behind them, they were well-positioned to bring the real-time dungeon crawl to the American masses. Even better, thanks to a long-established relationship with the publisher SSI, they got the opportunity to do so under the biggest license in CRPGs, that of Dungeons & Dragons itself. With its larger development team and American-sized budget for art and sound, everything about Eye of the Beholder screamed hit, and upon its release in March of 1991 — more than half a year before Knightmare, actually — it didn’t disappoint.

It really is an impressive outing in many ways, the first example of its sub-genre that I can honestly imagine someone preferring to Dungeon Master. Granted, Westwood’s game lacks Dungeon Master’s elegance: the turn-based Dungeons & Dragons rules are rather awkwardly kludged into real time; the environments still aren’t as organically interactive (amazingly, none of the heirs to Dungeon Master would ever quite live up to its example in this area); the controls can be a bit clumsy; the level design is nowhere near as fiendishly creative. But on the other hand, the level design isn’t pointlessly hard either, and the game is, literally and figuratively, a more colorful experience. In addition to the better graphics and sound, there’s far more story, steeped in the lore of the popular Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms campaign setting. Personally, I still prefer Dungeon Master’s minimalist aesthetic, as I do its cleaner rules set and superior level design. But then, I have no personal investment in the Forgotten Realms (or, for that matter, in elaborate fantasy world-building in general). Your mileage may vary.

Whatever my or your opinion of it today, Eye of the Beholder hit American gamers like a revelation back in the day, and Europe too got to join the fun via a Westwood-developed Amiga port which shipped there within a few months of the MS-DOS original’s American debut. It topped sales charts in both places, becoming the first game of its type to actually outsell Dungeon Master. In fact, it became almost certainly the best-selling single example of a real-time blobber ever; between North America and Europe, total sales likely reached 250,000 copies or more, huge numbers at a time when 100,000 copies was the line that marked a major hit.

Following the success of Eye of the Beholder, the dam well and truly burst in the United States. Before the end of 1991, Westwood had cranked out an Eye of the Beholder II, which is larger and somewhat more difficult than its predecessor, but otherwise shares the same strengths and weaknesses. In 1993, their publisher SSI took over to make an Eye of the Beholder III in-house; it’s generally less well-thought-of than the first two games. Meanwhile Bloodwych and Captive got MS-DOS ports and arrived Stateside. Even FTL, whose attitude toward making new products can most generously be described as “relaxed,” finally managed to complete and release their long-rumored MS-DOS port of Dungeon Master — whereupon its dated graphics were, predictably if a little unfairly, compared unfavorably with the more spectacular audiovisuals of Eye of the Beholder in the American gaming press.

Black Crypt’s auto-map.

Another, somewhat more obscure title from this peak of the real-time blobber’s popularity was early 1992’s Black Crypt, the very first game from the American studio Raven Software, who would go on to a long and productive life. (As of this writing, they’re still active, having spent the last eight years or so making new entries in the Call of Duty franchise.) Although created by an American developer and published by the American Electronic Arts, one has to assume that Black Crypt was aimed primarily at European players, as it was made available only for the Amiga. Even in Europe, however, it failed to garner much attention in an increasingly saturated market; it looked a little better than Dungeon Master but not as good as Eye of the Beholder, and otherwise failed to stand out from the pack in terms of level design, interface, or mechanics.

With, that is, one exception. For the first time, Black Crypt added an auto-map to the formula. Unfortunately, it was needlessly painful to access, being available only through a mana-draining wizard’s spell. Soon, though, Westwood would take up and perfect Raven’s innovation, as the real-time blobber entered the final phase of its existence as a gaming staple.

Black Crypt may have been the first real-time blobber with an auto-map, but Lands of Lore perfected the concept. Like every other aspect of the game, the auto-map here looks pretty spectacular.

Released in late 1993, Westwood’s Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos was an attempt to drag the now long-established real-time-blobber format into the multimedia age, while also transforming it into a more streamlined and accessible experience. It comes very, very close to realizing its ambitions, but is let down a bit by some poor design choices as it wears on.

Having gone their separate ways from SSI and from the strictures of the Dungeons & Dragons license, Westwood got to enjoy at last the same freedom which had spawned the easy elegance of Dungeon Master; they were free to, as Westwood’s Louis Castle would later put it, create cleaner rules that “worked within the context of a digital environment,” making extensive use of higher-math functions that could never have been implemented in a tabletop game. These designers, however, took their newfound freedom in a very different direction from the hardcore logistical and tactical challenge that was FTL’s game. “We’re trying to make our games more accessible to everybody,” said Westwood’s Brett Sperry at the time, “and we feel that the game consoles offer a clue as to where we should go in terms of interface. You don’t really have to read a manual for a lot of games, the entertainment and enjoyment is immediate.”

Lands of Lore places you in control of just two or three characters at a time, who come in and out of your party as the fairly linear story line dictates. The magic system is similarly condensed down to just seven spells. In place of the tactical maneuvering and environmental exploitation that marks combat within the more interactive dungeons of Dungeon Master is a simple but satisfying rock-paper-scissors approach: monsters are more or less vulnerable to different sorts of attacks, requiring you adjust your spells and equipment accordingly. And, most tellingly of all, an auto-map is always at your fingertips, even automatically annotating hidden switches and secret doors you might have overlooked in the first-person view.

Whether all of this results in a game that’s better than Dungeon Master is very much — if you’ll excuse the pun! — in the eye of the beholder. The auto-map alone changes the personality of the game almost enough to make it feel like the beginning of a different sub-genre entirely. Yet Lands of Lore has an undeniable charm all its own as a less taxing, more light-hearted sort of fantasy romp.

One thing at least is certain: at the time of its release, Lands of Lore was by far the most attractive blobber the world had yet seen. Abandoning the stilted medieval conceits of most CRPGs, its atmosphere is more fairy tale than Tolkien, full of bright cartoon-like tableaux rendered by veteran Hanna-Barbera and Disney animators. The music and voice acting in the CD-ROM version are superb, with none other than Patrick Stewart of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame acting as narrator.

Sadly, though, the charm does begin to evaporate somewhat as the game wears on. There’s an infamous one-level difficulty spike in the mid-game that’s all but guaranteed to run off the very newbies and casual players Westwood was trying to attract. Worse, the last 25 percent or so is clearly unfinished, a tedious slog through empty corridors with nothing of interest beyond hordes of overpowered monsters. When you get near the end and the game suddenly takes away the auto-map you’ve been relying on, you’re left wondering how the designers could have so completely lost all sense of the game they started out making. More so than any of the other games I’ve written about today, Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos, despite enjoying considerable commercial success which would lead to two sequels, feels like a missed opportunity.

Real-time blobbers would continue to appear for a couple more years after Lands of Lore. The last remotely notable examples are two 1995 releases: FTL’s ridiculously belated and rather unimaginative Dungeon Master II, which was widely and justifiably panned by reviewers; and Interplay’s years-in-the-making Stonekeep, which briefly dazzled some reviewers with such extraneous bells and whistles as an introductory cinematic that by at least one employee’s account cost ten times as much as the underwhelming game behind it. (If any other anecdote more cogently illustrates the sheer madness of the industry’s drunk-on-CD-ROM “interactive movie” period, I don’t know what it is.) Needless to say, neither game outdoes the original Dungeon Master where it counts.

At this point, then, we have to confront the place where the example I used in opening this article — that of interactive fiction and its urtext of Adventure — begins to break down when applied to the real-time blobber. Adventure, whatever its own merits, really was the launching pad for a whole universe of possibilities involving parsers and text. But the real-time blobber never did manage to transcend its own urtext, as is illustrated by the long shadow the latter has cast over this very article. None of the real-time blobbers that came after Dungeon Master was clearly better than it; arguably, none was ever quite as good. Why should this be?

Any answer to that question must, first of all, pay due homage to just how fully-realized Dungeon Master was as a game system, as well as to how tight its level designs were. It presented everyone who tried to follow it with one heck of a high bar to clear. Beyond that obvious fact, though, we must also consider the nature of the comparison with the text adventure, which at the end of the day is something of an apples-and-oranges proposition. The real-time blobber is a more strictly demarcated category than the text adventure; this is why we tend to talk about real-time blobbers as a sub-genre and text adventures as a genre. Perhaps there’s only so much you can do with wandering through grid-based dungeons, making maps, solving mechanical puzzles, and killing monsters. And perhaps Dungeon Master had already done it all about as well as it could be done, making everything that came after superfluous to all but the fanatics and the completists.

And why, you ask, had game developers largely stopped even trying to better Dungeon Master by the middle of the 1990s?[1] As it happens, there’s no mystery whatsoever about why the real-time blobber — or, for that matter, the blobber in general — disappeared from the marketplace. Even as the format was at its absolute peak of popularity in 1992, with Westwood’s Eye of the Beholder games selling like crazy and everything else rushing onto the bandwagon, an unassuming little outfit known as Blue Sky Productions gave notice to anyone who might have been paying attention that the blobber’s days were already numbered. This they did by taking a dungeon crawl off the grid. After that escalation in the gaming arms race, there was nothing for it but to finish whatever games in the old style were still in production and find a way to start making games in the new. Next time, then, we’ll turn our attention to the great leap forward that was Ultima Underworld.

(Sources: Computer Gaming World of April 1987, February 1991, June 1991, February 1992, March 1992, April 1992, November 1992, August 1993, November 1993, October 1994, October 1995, and February 1996; Amiga Format of December 1989, February 1992, March 1992, and May 1992; Questbusters of May 1991, March 1992, and December 1993; SynTax 22; The One of October 1990, August 1991, February 1992, October 1992, and February 1994. Online sources include Louis Castle’s interview for Soren Johnson’s Designer Notes podcast and Matt Barton’s interview with Peter Oliphant. Devotees of this sub-genre should also check out The CRPG Addict’s much more detailed takes on Bloodwych, Captive, Knightmare, Eye of the Beholder, Eye of the Beholder II, and Black Crypt.

The most playable of the games I’ve written about today, the Eye of the Beholder series and Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos, are available for purchase on GOG.com.)

1. If one takes the really long view, they didn’t, at least not forever. In 2012, as part of the general retro-revival that has resurrected any number of dead sub-genres over the past decade, a studio known as Almost Human released Legend of Grimrock, the first significant commercial game of this type to be seen in many years. It got positive reviews, and sold well enough to spawn a sequel in 2014. I’m afraid I haven’t played either of them, and so can’t speak to the question of whether either or both of them finally managed the elusive trick of outdoing Dungeon Master. ↩

Comments
47 Responses

- Infinitron

January 4, 2019 at 5:33 pm

The British gaming press, who had quite the gift for slangy nomenclature, had already dubbed turn-based dungeon crawlers in the Wizardry mold “blobbers.”

Interesting. What’s the earliest reference you’ve found to that term?

- Jimmy Maher

January 5, 2019 at 11:57 am

Man, was I sure I’d seen that term thrown around with abandon in the British gaming magazines. (Doesn’t it just *sound* like their sort of slangy Britishism?) But it appears I was mistaken. I did a full grep through my archive, and it’s just not there. The CRPG Addict says in his glossary of terms that it “allegedly” originated in the early 2000s on a site called The RPG Codex.

So, edits made. Thanks for the catch!

- dsparil

January 5, 2019 at 2:22 pm

There’s actually a fairly recent thread on RPG Codex that tries to get to the bottom of it as that early 2000s estimate is wrong. I was a regular visitor to RPG Codex in the early to mid 2000s—wow have things changed even if the layout is the same—and only remembered these types of games being called “blob with arms and legs” games. Feb. 19 2008 is the first time it shows up there while also using the “blob with arms and legs” term.

Recent thread: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/the-official-origin-of-the-term-blobber.123306/

Earliest thread (first post towards the end): https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/recommend-me-a-wizardry-ripoff.22919/

- Infinitron

January 5, 2019 at 3:21 pm

That’s what I thought!

- AY

January 5, 2019 at 6:11 pm

Infinitron is himself a staff member of said Codex; the place features your articles semi-regularly.

- Alex Smith

January 4, 2019 at 5:46 pm

“noted Wizardry‘s designer Allen Greenberg in 1992”

Andrew

- Jimmy Maher

January 4, 2019 at 7:01 pm

Thanks!

- Ben P. Stein

January 4, 2019 at 7:17 pm

Also, in the same sentence,, “Stateside” should probably be lowercase.

- Jimmy Maher

January 4, 2019 at 8:02 pm

Thanks, but either way is actually acceptable…

- victor

January 4, 2019 at 7:16 pm

Western game developers may have given up on grid-based dungeon crawls, but Atlus’ “Etrian Odyssey” series is still going strong in Japan — and fairly popular over here in the US as well. The Shin Megami Tensei series will also still go back to its grid-based roots every now and then, as they did recently with the evocative and thought provoking re-release of “Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey”. A lot of this interest, though, may be due to the popularity of Nintendo’s dual-screened DS and 3DS handhelds in Japan, as the bottom, touch-enabled screen is perfect for drawing and updating maps, which is a big part of the draw with a game like this.

- Nifft

January 6, 2019 at 8:30 am

But they are not “real-time. They are more akin to the Wizardy games.

- A. Freed

January 4, 2019 at 9:37 pm

None of the three games I’ve just described was available in North America prior to 1992. Dungeon Master, having been created by an American developer, was for sale there, but only for the Amiga and Atari ST, computers whose installed base in the country had never been overly large and whose star there dwindled rapidly after 1989.

A minor correction: Dungeon Master was also available for the Apple IIGS, a computer which also didn’t have a lot of success! Still, it was what I played the game on, some time before the release of Eye of the Beholder. (It looks like most sources give the IIGS release date as ’89, which sounds right but which I can’t confirm.)

I think the fact that no one’s ever really surpassed Dungeon Master is absolutely fascinating, and says something important about the limits of the form. Perhaps it’s a type of game that looks more open than it is–as if we assume that, because it’s an RPG, it ought to allow infinite variations instead of simply being a beautiful, intricate device like Tetris. (It’s worth noting, too, that pretty much no one ever tried to add anything huge to the format. Maybe Dungeon Master with branching conversations and survival crafting would raise up the type, but that’s not what we ever get.)

Grimrock II is the one game I’d argue might beat Dungeon Master in its class, but even there it would only be by a smidge. The original is great fun; the sequel is pretty astounding, but it still feels firmly in the DM mold.

- Malcolm

January 4, 2019 at 10:45 pm

I agree regarding Grimrock II, it definitely surpasses Dungeon Master. Grimrock II is much larger than DM with a lot more variety and tons of puzzles, some of which I found to be quite hard.

The first Grimrock was much closer to DM, more of modern update with prettier graphics. I enjoyed playing and finishing both Grimrock games. I wish they would do a Grimrock III but it seems the developers have given up on the series. I think the sequel didn’t sell anywhere near as well as the developers expected.

- Jimmy Maher

January 5, 2019 at 11:59 am

Thanks. Apple IIGS version duly noted. ;)

- Poddy

January 7, 2019 at 2:22 pm

Thirding Grimrock II. It’s already unusual enough for a sequel to outdo the original, but I would argue that it also outdoes DM, on grounds of sheer fascinating atmosphere.

- Petr

January 8, 2019 at 3:35 pm

IMHO Grimrock II is an excellent “blobber”, probably surpassing the first DM.

But I would like to give a bit more appreciation to Dungeon Master II. With all its problems, the creators tried quite hard to innovate within a DM formula. The underlying systems is sometimes quite sophisticated. For example – the enviroment. In DM2 it is even more intractive than in the first one, player can push and pull objects like tables etc. They also tried to innovate AI of monsters and tried to achieve more interesting enemy behavior. They partly succeded – wolves really do behave differently than Axemen or bats. Other innovation was the ability to summon and command your own magical minions. … So they tried to do interesting things, but unfortunately they are not visible at first glance. And the overall balance of the game is worse than in first DM.

- Jindul

February 24, 2019 at 1:45 am

The problem with Grimrock 2, which I would agree could possibly surpass DM in terms of environment and atmosphere, is the leveling and magic systems which are just boring and unmemorable. The fact that later developers almost never used DM’s straightforward but brilliant and fun leveling is also puzzling.

I am also quite surprised with DM2 being generally unappreciated. It actually shows a lot of invention compared to other games of the type while closely sticking to first title’s formula and the atmosphere is unique. It’s just that the game is too short, maybe half of the original.

- Kroc Camen

January 4, 2019 at 11:59 pm

Do not forget the Eye of the Beholder demake on the C64:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVWhB_u3PeFPjLJywyDTcOA/videos This is one of the best looking games ever made for the C64!

- Ross

January 5, 2019 at 12:47 am

I question how authentic a home game of Knightmare could be unless they found a way to simulate the utter inability of british schoolboys to give an instruction without ending it with “, right?” Easily two thirds of those episodes ended with someone misunderstanding the instruction, “Now take a step to the left, right?”

- Jimmy Maher

January 5, 2019 at 12:09 pm

:)

- Brian

January 5, 2019 at 1:33 am

Nice to have two of my favorite blogs intersect! Chet over at CRPG Addict is currently playing Black Crypt for those interested.

- Scurra

January 5, 2019 at 1:16 pm

The sheer impressiveness of Dungeon Master and the consequent inadvertent bar-setting (and equally inadvertent limitations) that it created reminds me in many ways of the Collectable Card Game genre: the problem was that what was effectively the first one, Magic: the Gathering, also set the bar so high that nobody could hope to realistically equal it, let alone pass it. Which is partly why M:tG is still around whilst almost everything else has fallen by the wayside regardless of their individual qualities (sure, there have been “better” games, but nothing that has proven anything like as flexible. Which is probably true of Dungeon Master too.)

- Doug Orleans

January 6, 2019 at 3:38 am

Same with Dominion and deck-building games, IMO.

- ryuugami

January 5, 2019 at 1:41 pm

> full of bright cartoon-like tableaux rendered by veteran Hanna-Barbara and Disney animators

Do you mean Hanna-Barbera, the animation studio?

- Jimmy Maher

January 5, 2019 at 2:30 pm

Indeed. Thanks!

- David Boddie

January 5, 2019 at 2:01 pm

A minor typo: “Amtrad” -> “Amstrad”

- Jimmy Maher

January 5, 2019 at 2:31 pm

Thanks!

- Elzair

January 5, 2019 at 5:56 pm

You forgot to mention the Ishar series (I think they count). What did you think of those?

- Jimmy Maher

January 5, 2019 at 6:59 pm

Sorry, I wasn’t familiar with those.

- Jindul

February 24, 2019 at 1:50 am

They are real-time, but I am not sure they feature environmental puzzles.

- Ronan

January 5, 2019 at 8:29 pm

If I understood correctly, you stated in your article that “Black Crypt” was the first “Blobber” to include an auto-map feature.

But what about “Might&Magic III – Isles of Terra” which was released a year earlier?

- Jimmy Maher

January 5, 2019 at 8:57 pm

That was turn-based. This article is about the real-time variety.

- Ronan

January 5, 2019 at 9:30 pm

Thank you for the explanation. My bad.

- Lisa H.

January 5, 2019 at 9:18 pm

Is The Summoning in this “blobber” genre?

- Jimmy Maher

January 5, 2019 at 9:54 pm

I’m not very familiar with it, but it’s apparently single-character. So, no. ;)

- VK

January 6, 2019 at 10:45 am

Event Horizon/Dreamforge’s games are an interesting case. Their first titles, DarkSpyre and The Summoning, were single-character and top-down, but adopted much of DM approach to level design with its focus on real-time systemic puzzles. Then, after a short stint producing free-scrolling DnD blobbers with Ravenloft and Menzoberrazan, they returned to that formula with Anvil of Dawn – first-person, grid-based and very DM-style in design, but still with a single character. I would say that despite the perspective and number of characters, these games are very much in the DM lineage.

- Alberto

January 5, 2019 at 10:05 pm

A couple of typos: “vaccuum” (a “c” too much), “One thing thing”.

Thanks for your work! I like retrogaming the games of my childhood, but your blog let me (re)discover interactive fiction and brought me to try out some classic works of that genre. Blobbers are probably too far away from my taste, but this retrospective look on the field was nonetheless a very pleasant read.

- Jimmy Maher

January 6, 2019 at 9:00 am

Thanks!

- offalynne

January 8, 2019 at 3:56 am

There are certainly entries here and there in the genre well after the initial titles mentioned, and well before Grimrock. Id’s mobile Wolfenstein and Doom RPGs make an easy example.

As Grimrock flagged a revival, it seems disingenuous to call the genre dead; see The Keep, Might and Magic X Legacy, Severed, Vaporum, etc.

“Blobber” if I’m not mistaken is mostly a pejorative reaction to the flattening of turn based RPG combat away from the strategic positioning and spatial tactical combat of range rules and DnD miniatures to a “blob” of party members and enemies that exchange attacks. By this merit Gold Box games are not blobbers, where Wizardry is. A roguelike is not a blobber, where a traditional JRPG is. I suppose by this definition the DM-likes are real-time blobbers. A comparable contemporary term closer to your usage (beyond that particular forum) is Gridder: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/gridder

- GeoX

January 20, 2019 at 9:00 pm

Boy, I played the hell out of all those mobile Id rpgs. They’re not real-time, though, is the thing.

- Petr

January 8, 2019 at 1:53 pm

There were a few other real time blobbers in the first half of nineties: Abandoned Places 1 and 2, Ishar 1-3 were probably the bigget apart from the titles mentioned in the article. … In my country Dungeon Master 2 was super hyped before release because the editors of the largest czech gaming magazine loved the first DM and praised the second game rather uncritically. They gave it I think a score of 10 out 10 after release. But I think that to most readers it was evident that the game suffered from long development and was really dated.

- stepped pyramids

January 8, 2019 at 10:56 pm

Westwood also made a D&D game for the Sega Genesis that had an Ultima-like top-down overworld with first-person dungeons. Combat encounters in the overworld were turn-based, but encounters in the dungeons were real-time. An interesting combination that I don’t think was ever used for any other game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons:_Warriors_of_the_Eternal_Sun

Looking forward to Ultima Underworld!

- Captain Rufus

January 13, 2019 at 10:48 pm

I would say the two Grimrock games are the only completely good real time blobbers. Dungeon Master has weird mechanics and an odd character system, the AdnD ones are trying to put a turn based system into a real time engine which hasn’t ever really worked right ever, and the UK games are as rough and unfinished as so many games of that region were. (Many are charming but the regional output of that era is largely bashed by any non EU/UK retro gamers and the machines they were on.)

I prefer turn based RPGs with built in mappers though. Even if it seems like mostly Japan shows any love to that subgenre. Heck, they have jpn exclusive Phantasie and DM sequels we never got! (Plus more pre Bradley style Wizardry games than you can shake a stick at.)

- Patrick

January 25, 2019 at 8:15 pm

Great article! I was lucky enough to have a IIGS and stumble across Dungeon Master at the perfect time (early teens, endless summers). I spent so many hours digging through it. I still keep the Hint Book on hand whenever I need a random idea for a tabletop RPG session. I loved the Easter Egg on the title screen that let you into the Dragon level.

As for Legend of Grimrock and LoG2, you should definitely play them! They are absolutely inspired by Dungeon Master and are fantastic gaming experiences. I think LoG2 the best entry into the entire blobber genre.

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- Andrew Pam

February 11, 2019 at 5:01 am

Another more recent entry in this genre: Starcrawlers (2017).

- Jack Everitt

February 13, 2019 at 2:23 am

Besides the Legend of Grimrock, the mobile series The Quest I feel is in this same category.

Life Off the Grid, Part 1: Making Ultima Underworld
January 18, 2019

The 1980s was the era of the specialist in game development, when many of the most successful studios did just one or two things, but did them very, very well. For Infocom, that meant text adventures; for Sierra, graphic adventures; for MicroProse, military simulations; for SSI, strategic wargames and Dungeons & Dragons; for Epyx, joystick-twiddling sports and action games; for Origin, Ultima. When such specialists stepped outside of their comfort zones, the results were occasionally a triumph, but more often merely served to reemphasize their core competencies.

The most respected studios of the 1990s, however, tended toward more eclecticism. Developers like Dynamix and Westwood may have had their roots in the previous decade, but they really came into their own in this one, and did so with games of very diverse types. Westwood, for example, was happily making CRPGs, graphic adventures, real-time-strategy games, and Monopoly, for Pete’s sake, all virtually at the same time. Even the holdover specialists from the 1980s — those who were still standing — aggressively tried to diversify in the 1990s: Sierra moved into strategy games, MicroProse into CRPGs and graphic adventures, Origin into Wing Commander.

Still, if we look harder at many 1990s developers, we can find themes that bind together their output. In the case of Dynamix, we might posit that to be an interest in dynamic simulation, even when working in traditionally static genres like the graphic adventure. In that of Westwood, we can identify an even more pronounced interest in bringing the excitement of real time to traditionally turn-based genres like the CRPG and the wargame. And in the case of the studio we’ll be meeting for the first time today — Looking Glass Technologies, arguably the most respected and beloved 1990s studio of all — the binding thread is crystal clear. From beginning to end, they used the flexibility of 3D graphics to bring virtual environments to life in unprecedentedly immersive ways. Whether making a CRPG or a flight simulator, a first-person shooter or a first-person sneaker, this was their constant.

3D graphics were, one might say, baked right into Looking Glass’s DNA. Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner, its two eventual founders, met one another in 1978 in a computer-science course at Wesleyan University, where Neurath was studying environmental science, Lerner physics. For the course’s final project, they teamed up to make a 3D space game rendered in ASCII text. They got a B-minus on it only because their professor considered games to be beneath his course’s dignity.

After university, the two New England boys remained friends as they started their professional careers. When the home-computer craze got rolling in earnest, each bought an Apple II. They started experimenting, together and apart, on games much like the one they had written for that computer-science class, only implemented in real bitmap graphics, with a real joystick as a controller. These efforts culminated in a joint game known as Deep Space: Operation Copernicus, which they sold in 1985 to the publisher Sir-Tech, purveyors of the Wizardry CRPG series. Sir-Tech didn’t seem to know quite what to do with Neurath and Lerner’s very different sort of game, and it never escaped Wizardry’s long shadow. Nevertheless, the experience of making a game and getting paid for it — however modestly — lit a fire in both partners. Each went off to pursue his own agenda, but they remained in touch, keeping one another updated on their progress and often sharing code and technical tricks.

Initially, it was Ned Lerner who made the most determined effort to become a real commercial game developer. He formed a little company called Lerner Research, and started gathering like-minded souls around him. As fixated as ever on 3D graphics, he decided that an at least semi-realistic flight simulator would be a good application for the technology. The leading product of that type on the market, subLOGIC’s generically titled Flight Simulator, he considered akin to a “textbook lesson”; he envisioned a flight simulator of his own that would be more accessible and fun. He hired an aerodynamic engineer to design a flight model for his game, which would focus on high-performance military aircraft like the legendary SR-71 Blackbird rather than the little Cessna that was forever tooling around from airport to airport in subLOGIC’s simulator. In fact, his game would let you fly any of fourteen different airplanes, in contrast to its rival’s one, and would concentrate on goal-oriented activities — “Flight Instruction,” “Test Flight,” “Formation Flying,” or “Airplane Racing” — instead of just expecting you to choose a starting airport and do whatever tickled your fancy.

Chuck Yeager and Ned Lerner discuss the vagaries of aerodynamics.

Electronic Arts, who lacked a competitive flight simulator and were eager to get in on one of the industry’s fastest-growing segments, signed on as publisher. Unlike Sir-Tech, they knew the appeal of snazzy packaging and celebrity endorsements. They convinced Chuck Yeager to put his name on the product. This was quite the coup; Yeager, a World War II fighter ace and the first man to break the sound barrier, was by far the most famous pilot in the country, after having been brought to indelible life by the actor Sam Shepard in the recent hit movie The Right Stuff. It was a decidedly nervous group of nerds and businessmen who met this aerospace legend for the first time in March of 1987. Lerner:

As we were sitting there in the office, listening to the rain outside, Rich Hilleman, associate producer at EA, was first to spot the Blazer entering the parking lot (license plate “BELL X1”). A few minutes later, we heard the unmistakable West Virginia drawl outside the door, as pure and easygoing as the man on TV who sells spark plugs with a shotgun. For a brief second, I remembered the opening scene of Patton where George C. Scott steps forward, dressed to the teeth in full military regalia. The door suddenly opened, and there he was: wearing cowboy boots, blue jeans, and a polo shirt under his racing-style jacket. General Yeager had a trim figure, and his face was tan, well-weathered, as if he had spent a lot of time outdoors. The general stepped forward, shaking hands with the members of the group, but I sensed a certain degree of reservation in his actions.

To get past this awkward beginning, we loaded in the current version of Advanced Flight Trainer. I flew the simulator for a while, then offered to let General Yeager take over. “I never fooled with these things,” he said. “That’s because, you know, the damned things are so…” — he searched for the word — “…insignificant. If you want to really scorch something, hell, you can program the X-31 in there, the aerospace plane. Now, see, you got some kid who can say, ‘Man, this thing is smoking along at mach 25.'”

The ice had finally been broken, and we all began contributing to the conversation. After discussing the subjects of liquid-oxygen fuel and the current type of aircraft that are touching the edge of space, the day was practically over. “This thing’s pretty dang realistic,” he told us. “You’ve got a lot of goodies in there.”

Released about six months later with much publicity, Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer became by far EA’s biggest hit of the year, and one of their biggest of the whole decade. With that push to get them off and running, Lerner Research continued their work on the frontiers of 3D graphics, giving EA a substantially revised version 2.0 of their flagship game in 1989.

Even as Ned Lerner was hobnobbing with famous test pilots, Paul Neurath was making his own inroads with the games industry. Shortly after finishing Deep Space, he had heard that Origin Systems of Ultima fame was located in New Hampshire, not all that far from him at all. On a lark, he drove down one day to introduce himself and take the temperature of the place. He hit it off immediately with Richard Garriott and the rest of the crew there. While he never became a full-fledged employee, he did become a regular around the Origin offices, contributing play-testing, design ideas, and occasional bits of code to their games on a contract basis.

In early 1987, Richard Garriott, who loathed New England with every fiber of his being, packed up and moved back to Austin, Texas, with most of Origin’s technical and creative staff. He left behind his older brother and business manager Robert, along with the latter’s support staff of accountants, secretaries, and marketers. A few developers who for one reason or another didn’t want to make the move also stayed behind. Neurath was among this group.

At about this same time, Neurath got the green light to make a game all his own for Origin. Space Rogue began as another 3D space shooter — another Deep Space, enhanced with some of the latest graphics technology from his friends at Lerner Research. To this template Neurath grafted a trading economy, a customizable spaceship, and a real plot. The player was even able to exit her spaceship and wander around the space stations she visited, talking to others and taking on quests. There was a surprising amount of ambition in this fusion of Deep Space, Elite, and Ultima, especially considering that Neurath designed, wrote, and programmed it all almost single-handedly from New Hampshire while most of his friends at Origin pursued other projects down in Austin. Although its disparate parts don’t ever gel quite well enough to make it a true classic, it’s remarkable that it works as well as it does.

Space Rogue sold in moderate numbers upon its release in 1989. More importantly in terms of gaming history, Chris Roberts of Origin spent a lot of time with it. Its melding of a space shooter with an adventure-game-like plot became one of the inspirations behind Wing Commander, the first Origin game to fully escape the shadow of Ultima — and, indeed, the beginning of one of the blockbuster franchises of the 1990s.

Space Rogue’s hilarious cover art, with its artfully pouting male model who looks better suited to a Harlequin-romance cover. Paul Neurath remembers Origin’s marketing department asking him about his packaging preferences for his game. He said he would prefer a “non-representational” cover picture. Naturally, the marketers delivered about the most representational thing imaginable.

By the time of Space Rogue’s release, Paul Neurath was a lonelier game developer than ever. In January of 1989, the last remnants of Origin’s New Hampshire operation had moved to Austin, leaving Neurath stranded in what Richard Garriott liked to call “the frozen wastes of New England.” For him, this was a crossroads of life if ever there was one. Did he want to continue to make games, and, if so, how? Sure, he could probably move down to Austin and get a job with Origin, but, truth be told, he had no more desire to live in Texas than Garriott had to live in New England. But how else could he stay in games?

At last, Neurath decided to take a page from Ned Lerner’s book. He would put together his own little company and try to establish it as an independent studio; after all, it had worked out pretty well for Ned so far. He registered his company under the name of Blue Sky Productions.

Neurath had always loved the CRPG genre, ever since Wizardry had become one of the first games he bought for his new Apple II. That love had once led him to publish Deep Space through Sir-Tech, and sent him out to Origin’s New Hampshire offices for that fateful visit. Now, he dreamed of taking the first-person dungeon crawl beyond the turn-based Wizardry, even beyond the real-time but still grid-based Dungeon Master, the state of the art in the genre as the 1980s expired. On a visit to Lerner Research, he saw the technology that he believed would make the genre’s next step possible — the foundation, one might even say, for everything he and his fabled studio Looking Glass would do in the 1990s. What he saw was the first 3D texture mapper that was suitable for use in an ordinary computer game.

3D graphics were hardly unknown on personal computers of the 1980s, as can be seen not least through the early careers of Ned Lerner and Paul Neurath. Yet, being enormously taxing to implement in the context of an interactive game, they demanded a lot of aesthetic compromise. Some early 3D games, such as Elite and the first versions of subLogic’s Flight Simulator, didn’t draw in the surfaces of their polygons at all, settling for wire frames. With the arrival of more powerful 16-bit computers in the mid-1980s, filled surfaces became more common in 3D games, but each side of a polygon was drawn in a single color. Combine this fact with the low polygon count that was still necessitated by the hardware of the time — resulting in big, fairly crude polygons — and you had a recipe for blotchy landscapes made up of garishly clashing primary colors.

A few clever developers were able to turn the limitations of 3D graphics into an aesthetic statement in its own right. But most of those who used them — among them makers of flight simulators and space shooters, such as Lerner and Neurath — suffered with their limitations because there just wasn’t any practical alternative for the sorts of games they were making. For an out-the-cockpit view from an airplane, the aesthetic compromises necessitated by going 3D were just about acceptable, given the way the distant landscape below tends to blur into hazy abstractions of color even in real life. But for a more personal, embodied experience, such as a first-person dungeon crawl, real-time 3D graphics were just too crude, too ugly. You couldn’t render the grain of a wooden door or the patina of a stone wall as one uniform splotch of color and expect to get away with it — not with the way that gamers’ audiovisual expectations were increasing every year.

A screenshot from Dungeon Master, the state of the art in dungeon crawls at the end of the 1980s. Notice how the walls, floor, and ceiling are textured. This was possible because movement in Dungeon Master was still based on a grid, giving the computer plenty of time to draw each view. A free-scrolling, truly 3D version would have had to replace all those lovely textures with great uniform slabs of gray. The result, needless to say, would not have been pretty.

None of these problems were unknown to academic computer-graphics researchers; they’d been wrestling with them since well before the first personal computer hit the market. And they’d long since come up with a solution: texture mapping. The texture in question takes the form of an ordinary image file, which might be drawn by hand or digitized from a real-world photograph. A texture suitable for a wooden door, for example, could be an extreme closeup of any slab of wood. The texture is “glued” onto a polygon’s face in lieu of a solid color. Just like that, you suddenly have doors that look like real doors, slimy dungeon walls that look like real slimy dungeon walls.

The problem with texture mapping from the perspective of game development was the same one that haunted the whole field of 3D graphics: the problem of performance. Simple though the basic concept is, a lot of tricky math comes into play when one introduces textures; figuring out how they should wrap and fit together with one another over so many irregular polygonal surfaces is much more complicated than the lay observer might initially believe. At a time when just managing to paint the sides of your polygons in solid colors while maintaining a respectable frame rate was a real achievement, texture mapping was hopeless. Maybe it could be used in another decade or so, said the conventional wisdom, when Moore’s Law put a supercomputer on every desk.

But one recent arrival at Lerner Research wasn’t so sure that texture mapping was impossible using extant PC hardware. Chris Green had considerable experience with interactive 3D graphics, having spent several years at subLogic working on products like Flight Simulator and Jet. He arrived at Lerner Research knowing that texture mapping couldn’t be done on the likes of an 8-bit Apple II, the computer on which Neurath and Lerner among so many others had gotten their start. On the latest 16- and 32-bit MS-DOS hardware, however… he suspected that, with the right compromises, he could make it work there.

There was doubtless much efficient code in the texture mapper Green created, but it was indeed an unabashed compromise that made it feasible to attempt at all. The vertices of the polygons in a 3D graphics system are defined with an X, a Y, and a Z coordinate; it’s this last, of course, that makes such a system a 3D system at all. And it’s also the Z coordinate that is the source of all of the complications relating to 3D graphics in general. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of texture mapping. To do it correctly, textures have to be scaled and transformed to account for their position in relation to the viewing location, as largely defined by their Z coordinate. But Green didn’t bother to do texture mapping correctly; he effectively threw away the Z coordinate and glued his textures onto their polygons as if they were in a 2D space. This technique would come to be known inside the industry as “affine texture mapping.” It yielded an enormous increase in rendering speed, balanced by a degree of distortion that was almost unnoticeable in some situations, very noticeable indeed in others. Still, an imperfect texture mapper, Green decided, was better than no texture mapper at all.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/UW.mp4

The video clip above, from the finished game of Ultima Underworld, shows some of the spatial distortion that results from affine texture mapping, especially when viewing things from a very short distance. Moving through the game’s virtual space can look and feel a bit like moving through real space after having drunk one beer too many. Nonetheless, the environment is far more realistic, attractive, and immersive than any first-person 3D environment to appear in any game before this one.

Ned Lerner had recently signed a contract with EA to make a driving game bearing the name of Car and Driver magazine. Knowing the technology’s limitations, he planned to use Chris Green’s texture mapper in a somewhat constrained fashion therein, to draw onto the faces of billboards and the like. Yet he wasn’t averse to sharing it with Paul Neurath, who as soon as he saw it wanted to use it to take the next step beyond Dungeon Master.

To do so, however, he’d need more programmers, not to mention artists and all the rest; if there was one thing the two years or so he had spent making Space Rogue had taught him, it was that the days of the one-man development team were just about over. Luckily, a friend of his had a nephew who had a friend who was, as Neurath would be the first to admit, a far better programmer than he would ever be.

Doug Church was an MIT undergraduate who had let himself get so consumed by the fun going on inside the university’s computer labs that it had all but derailed his official education. He and his buddies spent hours every day hacking on games and playing them. Their favorite was a 3D tank game called Xtank, written by one of their number, a fellow student named Terry Donahue. They tinkered with its code endlessly, producing variations that departed radically from the original concept, such as a Frisbee simulator. When not coding or playing, they talked about what kinds of games they would like to make, if only they had infinite amounts of money and time and no hardware limitations whatsoever. They envisioned all sorts of little simulated worlds, rendered, naturally, in photo-realistic 3D graphics. Thus when Neurath introduced himself to Church in early 1990 and asked if he’d like to work on a free-scrolling, texture-mapped 3D dungeon crawl running in real time, he dropped his classes and rushed to get in on the chance. (Terry Donahue would doubtless have been another strong candidate to become lead programmer on the project, but he felt another calling; he would go on to become a priest.)

Neurath also found himself an artist, a fellow named Doug Wike who had worked on various projects for Origin in New Hampshire before those offices had been shuttered. Together the three men put together a crude non-interactive demo in a matter of weeks, showing the “player” moving up a texture-mapped dungeon corridor and bumping into a monster at the end of it. At the beginning of June, they took the demo to the Summer Consumer Electronics Show, where, behind all of the public-facing hype, many of the games industry’s most important deals got made.

As Neurath tells the story, the response from publishers was far from overwhelming. The demo was undeniably crude, and most were highly skeptical whether this unproven new company could get from it to a real, interactive game. It turned out that the only publisher willing to give the project any serious consideration at all was none other than Neurath’s old friends from Origin.

That Neurath hadn’t taken his idea to Origin straight away was down to his awareness of a couple of strategic decisions that had recently been made there, part of a whole collection of changes that were being made to greet the new decade’s challenges. Origin had, first of all, decided to stop giving contracts to outside developers, taking all development in-house so as to have complete control over the products they released. And secondly, they had decided, for the time being anyway, to make all of their output fit into one of two big franchises, Ultima and Wing Commander. Both of these decisions would seem to exclude Blue Sky’s proposed dungeon crawler, which they were calling simply Underworld, from becoming an Origin product. Nor did it help that a sexy public demonstration of the first Wing Commander game[1] had become the hit of the show, making it difficult for Origin to focus on anything else; they could practically smell the money they were about to make from their new franchise.

Luckily, Blue Sky and Underworld found a champion at Origin even amidst all the distractions. Warren Spector was a relatively recent arrival at the company, but Neurath knew him pretty well; as his very first task for Origin, Spector had spent about a month expanding and polishing the text in Space Rogue just before its release. Now, looking at Underworld, he was sure he saw not just a game with real commercial potential but a technologically and aesthetically important one. “I was blown away,” he says today. “I remember thinking as I watched that demo that the world had just changed.” Spector convinced his colleagues to take a chance, to violate their rule of in-house development and sign a contract with Blue Sky, giving them a modest advance of $30,000. If the game worked out, they might be in on the ground floor of something major. It might also be something they could brand with the Ultima name, make into the beginning of a whole new sub-series in the franchise — a revival of the first-person (albeit turn-based) dungeons that had been in every Ultima through Ultima V. And if it didn’t work out, the $30,000 they’d lose on the flier was far from a fortune. The deal was done.

With that mission accomplished, Neurath’s little team returned to the office space he’d rented for them in New Hampshire. They spent almost a year there trying to understand the new set of technical affordances which Chris Green’s texture mapper had put at their disposal. They didn’t invent anything fundamentally new in terms of 3D graphics technology during that time. Like the texture mapper which spawned the project, everything they put into Underworld could be found in any number of books and journals at the MIT library, many of them dating well back into the 1970s and even 1960s. It was just a matter of adapting it all to the MS-DOS architecture. As it happened, the hardware they had to work with was about equal to the cutting-edge research workstations of ten years ago, so the old journal articles they pored over actually made a pretty good fit to it.

They kept coming back to the theme of embodiment, what Neurath called “a feeling of presence beyond what other games give you.” None of the earlier dungeon crawlers — not even those in the Dungeon Master tradition that ran in real time — had been able to deliver this. They could be exciting, stressful, even terrifying, but they never gave you the feeling of being physically embodied in their environments. It was the difference between reading a book or watching a movie and really being someplace.

It went without saying that Underworld must place you in control of just one character rather than the usual party of them. You needed to be able to sense the position of “your” body and limbs in the virtual space. Neurath:

We wanted to get a feeling that you were really in this dungeon. What would you expect to do in a dungeon? You might need to jump across a narrow chasm. You might expect to batter down a wooden door. You might expect to look up if there was a precipice above you. All these sorts of physical activities. And we tried to achieve, at least to a reasonable degree, that kind of freedom of motion and freedom of action. That really extended the R&D stage. It was about nine months, even a year, before we had all the underlying technology in place that allowed us to visualize this fantasy universe in a manner that we felt was appropriate and would work well and would allow the player the freedom to maneuver around and perform different kinds of actions.

Over the course of this time, Neurath hired only one more programmer, one Jonathan “J.D.” Arnold, who had previously worked on Infocom’s Z-Machine technology in that company’s twilight years. But finally, in the late spring of 1991, with the basic interface and the basic technical architecture all in place, Neurath decided it was time to hire some more people and make a real game out of it all. Doug Church immediately thought of his old friends back at MIT, and Neurath had no objections to recruiting from that pool; they were smart and passionate and, just as importantly, they were all happy to work for peanuts. Given the time of year it was, Church’s old buddies were all either graduating or finishing up their semester of coursework, leaving them free to come to Blue Sky.

None of these people had ever worked on a commercial computer game before. In fact, most of them hadn’t even played any commercial computer games recently, having been ensconced for the last several years inside the ivory tower of MIT, where the nature of gaming was markedly different, being a culture of creation rather than strictly one of consumption. And yet, far from being a disadvantage, the team’s sheer naivete proved to be the opposite, making them oblivious to the conventional wisdom about what was possible. Doug Church:

I had actually played Space Rogue because one of my friends had a Mac, but the clusters [at MIT] were all Unix boxes so I ran X-Trek and NetHack and things, but I hadn’t played a PC game in five years or something. So we just said, “Let’s do a really cool dungeon game in 3D, let’s go.” It’s interesting because a lot of people talk about how we were doing such a Dungeon Master game, but as far as I know none of us had ever played Dungeon Master. We didn’t have any idea we were doing anything that wasn’t just obvious in some sense because we had no context and the last time any of us had played a [commercial] game was back when we were fourteen. We played games in college, but they were very different; you’re playing networked X-Trek or something, it doesn’t feel like a home-computer game.

At first, the new arrivals all crowded into the New Hampshire office Neurath was renting. But most of them were actually living together in a rambling old three-story house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it struck them as silly to make the drive out to New Hampshire every day. They soon convinced Neurath to let them work on the game from home. From dawn until night, seven days a week, they ate, drank, slept, and breathed Underworld there.

At a time when most studios had begun to systematize the process of game development, dividing their employees into rigid tiers of specialists — programmers, artists, designers, writers — Blue Sky made a virtue of their complete lack of formal organization. It was an org-chart-wielding middle manager’s nightmare; just about everybody wound up doing a little bit of everything. There was nothing like a designer giving instructions to a technical team. Instead, Blue Sky’s method of working was more akin to the way that things got done among the hackers at MIT — a crowd of equals pulling together (and occasionally pulling apart) to work toward a common goal. Anyone could contribute absolutely anywhere, knowing his ideas would be judged only on their intrinsic worth.

When it became clear that it was time to start making the actual dungeon the Underworld player would have to explore, the team divided up this design work in the most democratic manner imaginable: everybody made one level, then they were all combined together to make the eight-level final dungeon. Dan Schmidt, who had officially been hired for the role of “AI programmer,” agreed to take on the mantle of “writer,” which really meant coordinating with everyone to merge the levels into a seamless whole.

For most of the time the game was in development, Origin’s role and overall interest — or, rather, lack thereof — was a consistent sore spot. It often seemed to Blue Sky that the folks in Austin had entirely forgotten their existence way off in the frozen wastes of New England. This was good in the sense that they got to make exactly the game they wanted to make, but it didn’t do much for their confidence that a committed publisher would be ready and eager to market it properly when they were done. Warren Spector was busy with Wing Commander and, later, with an Ultima spinoff called Martian Dreams, so Origin initially assigned Jeff Johannigman to Blue Sky in the role of producer. Communication with him was nothing short of terrible. After going two full months without hearing a peep from him, Neurath tried to call him down in Austin, only to be told that he had left the company. A second producer was finally selected, but he wasn’t much more engaged. Blue Sky believed they were making a great, groundbreaking game, but it seemed that Origin really couldn’t care less.

In many ways, Underworld was at odds with the prevailing trends inside Origin, not to mention in much of the games industry at large. Following the huge success of the first Wing Commander, Origin was banking heavily on cinematic games with big, set-piece storylines. The company’s org chart reflected the new impetus, with film-making terminology — producer, director, screenwriter — shoehorned in absolutely everywhere. Blue Sky, on the other hand, was making something very different, an immersive, emergent, non-linear experience without cut scenes or chapter breaks. Yes, there was a plot of sorts — the player got cast into a dungeon to rescue a princess or die trying — along with puzzles to be solved, quests to be fulfilled, and other characters to be spoken to, but it was all driven by the player, not by any relentlessly unspooling Hollywood-style script. Origin, it seemed, wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, wasn’t quite sure where it fit. And certainly it’s easy enough, given Blue Sky’s unorthodox working methods, to understand why so many at Origin were skeptical of their ability to deliver a finished game at all.

The danger of Blue Sky’s approach was that they would keep iterating endlessly as they kept having better and better ideas. This tendency among hackers to never be able to finish something and walk away from it had already derailed more than one promising games studio — not least among them FTL, the makers of the storied Dungeon Master, who had yet to release a proper followup after some four years. (Dungeon Master II wouldn’t finally arrive until 1995.) The need to finish games on a timetable was, one might say, the reason that industry executives had begun to impose the very organizational structures that Blue Sky was now so happily eschewing. Doug Church remembers creating “four movement systems and three combat systems because we’d just write something: ‘Oh, this seems cool, go for it.'” Would they just continue chasing whatever shiny objects struck their fancy until the money ran out? That wouldn’t take much longer, given that Paul Neurath was largely financing the whole effort out of his pocket, with some help from his ever-loyal friend Ned Lerner, whose success with his Chuck Yeager flight simulators had left him with a bit of money to spare.

Thus they were all fortunate that Warren Spector, their once and future savior, suddenly returned on the scene late in 1991. Virtually alone among his colleagues down in Austin, Spector had been watching Blue Sky’s progress with intense interest. Now, having finished up Martian Dreams, he got himself assigned as Underworld’s third producer. He had considerable clout inside the bigger company; as soon as he started to press the issue there, things started to happen on Origin’s side to reassure Blue Sky that their game would in fact be released if they could only deliver it.

Indeed, after almost eighteen months of uncertainty on the question, Origin finally made it official that, yes, Underworld would be released as an Ultima game. As usual, the star would be the Avatar, who was becoming quite a busy fellow between this game, the mainline Ultima games, and the recent pair of Worlds of Ultima spinoffs. The dungeon in question, meanwhile, would be none other than the Stygian Abyss, where the Avatar had found the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom at the end of Ultima IV. Underworld’s backstory would need to be bent and hammered enough to make this possible.

Blue Sky soon discovered that becoming an official Ultima game, while great for marketing purposes and for their own sense of legitimacy, was something of a double-edged sword. Origin demanded that they go back through all the text in the game to insert Ultima’s trademark (and flagrantly misused) “thees” and “thous,” provoking much annoyance and mockery. And Origin themselves made a cinematic introduction for the game in Austin, featuring Richard Garriott, one of the industry’s worst voice actors of all time — and that, friends, is really saying something — in the leading role, bizarrely mispronouncing the word “Stygian.” It seems no one at Origin, much less at Blue Sky, dared to correct Lord British’s diction… (The British magazine PC Review’s eventual reaction to the finished product is one for the ages: “I had to listen to it two or three times before I fully grasped what was going on because for the first couple of times I was falling about laughing at the badly dubbed Dick Van Dyke cockney accents that all these lovable Americans think we sound like. You know: ‘Awlright, Guv’noor, oop the happle un stairs!'”)

While Origin made the dodgy intro in Texas, Warren Spector got everybody in New England focused on the goal of a finished, shipped game. Doug Church:

Not only was he [Spector] great creatively to help us put finishing touches on it and clean it up and make it real, but he also knew how to finish projects and keep us motivated and on track. He had that ability to say, “Guys, guys, you’re focused in totally the wrong place.” He had that ability to help me and the rest of the guys reset, from the big-picture view of someone who has done it before and was really creative, but who also understood getting games done. It was a huge, huge win.

It’s very easy in hacker-driven game development to wind up with a sophisticated simulation that’s lots of fun for the programmers to create but less fun to actually play. Spector was there to head off this tendency as well at Blue Sky, as when he pared down an absurdly complex combat system to something simple and intuitive, or when he convinced the boys not to damage the player’s character every time he accidentally bumped into a wall. That, said Spector, “doesn’t sound like fun to me” as a player — and it was the player’s fun, he gently taught Blue Sky, that had to be the final arbitrator.

At Spector’s behest, Neurath rented a second office near Boston — officially known as the “Finish Underworld Now” office — and insisted that everyone leave the house and come in to work there every day during the last two months of the project. The more businesslike atmosphere helped them all focus on getting to the end result, as did Spector himself, who spent pretty much all of those last two months in the office with the team.

Spector did much to make Blue Sky feel like a valued part of the Origin family, but the relationship still remained rocky at times — especially when the former learned that the latter intended to release Ultima Underworld just two weeks before Ultima VII, the long-awaited next title in the franchise’s main series. It seemed all but certain that their game would get buried under the hype for Ultima VII, would be utterly forgotten by Origin’s marketers. Certainly marketing’s initial feedback hadn’t been encouraging. They were, they said, having trouble figuring out how to advertise Ultima Underworld. Its graphics were spectacular when seen in motion, but in still screenshots they didn’t look like much at all compared to a Wing Commander II or an Ultima VII. Blue Sky seethed with frustration, certain this was just an excuse for an anemic, disinterested advertising campaign.

In Origin’s defense, the problem their marketers pointed to was a real one. And it wasn’t really clear what they could have done about the release-date issue either. The original plan had been, as they didn’t hesitate to remind Blue Sky, to release Ultima Underworld in time for the Christmas of 1991, but the protracted development had put paid to that idea. Now, Blue Sky themselves needed Ultima Underworld to come out as quickly as possible because they needed the royalties in order to survive; for them, delaying it was simply impossible. Meanwhile Origin, who had cash-flow concerns of their own, certainly wasn’t going to delay Ultima VII, quite possibly the most expensive computer game ever made to that point, for a mere spinoff title. The situation was what it was.

The balloons fly as Doug Church, Paul Neurath, and Warren Spector celebrate Ultima Underworld’s release.

Whatever was to happen in terms of sales, Blue Sky’s young hackers did get the satisfaction in late March of 1992 of seeing their game as a boxed product on store shelves, something more than one of them has described as a downright surreal experience. Dan Schmidt:

We were a bunch of kids straight out of school. This was the first professional project we’d ever done. We felt lucky that anyone would see it at all. We’d go into a games store and see our game there on the shelf. Someone would walk up to it, and we’d want to say, “No! No! You don’t want to buy that! We just hacked that together. It’s not, like, a real game.”

In the beginning, sales went about as expected. A snapshot from Origin’s in-house newsletter dated July 31, 1992, shows 71,000 copies of Ultima VII shipped, just 41,000 copies of Ultima Underworld. But, thanks to ecstatic reviews and strong word of mouth — Origin may have struggled to see how groundbreaking the game really was, but gamers got it immediately — Ultima Underworld kept on selling, getting stronger every month. “It was the first game that ever gave me a sense of actually being in a real place,” wrote one buyer in a letter to Origin, clear evidence that Blue Sky had absolutely nailed their original design goal. Soon industry scuttlebutt had it outselling Ultima VII by two to one. Paul Neurath claims that Ultima Underworld eventually sold more than half a million copies worldwide, an extraordinary figure for the time, and considerably more than Ultima VII or, indeed, any previous Ultima had managed.

Shortly after Ultima Underworld’s release, Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner finally did the obvious: they merged their two companies. They had recently discovered that another, slightly older company was already operating under the name of “Blue Sky Software,” making educational products. So, they named the merged entity Looking Glass Technologies. Their first release under the name would be Ultima Underworld II.

Two months after the first Ultima Underworld appeared, a tiny company out of Dallas, Texas, who called themselves id Software released Wolfenstein 3D, another first-person game set in a 3D environment. Their game, however, had none of the complexity of Ultima Underworld, with its quests and puzzles and magic spells and its character to develop and even feed. In id’s game, you ran through the environment and killed things — period.

For the remainder of the 1990s, 3D games would exist on a continuum between the cool, high-concept innovation of Looking Glass and the hot, visceral action of id, who were interested in innovation in the area of their graphics technology but somewhat less so in terms of their basic gameplay template. id would win the argument in terms of sales, but Looking Glass would make some of the most fascinating and forward-looking games of the decade. “We were thinking, ‘Why don’t we just run around and shoot?’” says Austin Grossman, another early Looking Glass employee. “But we were interested in simulation and depth. We were driven by this holy grail of simulated worlds, by that enabled choice and creativity of the player.”

We’ll be following the two companies’ artistic dialog for a long time to come as we continue with this history. First, though, we need to give Ultima Underworld a closer look, from the perspective of the player this time, to understand why it’s not just an example of groundbreaking technology but a superb example of pure game design as well.

(Sources: the books Game Design: Theory & Practice 2nd edition by Richard Rouse III, Ultima VII and Underworld: More Avatar Adventures by Caroline Spector, Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic by Brad King and John Borland, and Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation: Modeling, Rendering, and Animating with 3D Computer Graphics by Michael O’Rourke; Questbusters of February 1992 and September 1992; PC Review of June 1992; Game Developer of April/May 1995, June/July 1995, August/September 1995, December 1995/January 1996, and April/May 1996; Commodore Magazine of January 1988; Origin’s internal newsletter Point of Origin from January 17 1992, March 27 1992, May 8 1992, August 28 1992, and December 18 1992. Online sources include “Ahead of Its Time: A History of Looking Glass” on Polygon, an interview with Paul Neurath and Doug Church on the old Ultima Online site, Gambit Game Lab’s interviews with Paul Neurath and Dan Schmidt, and Matt Barton’s interview with Paul Neurath. My thanks to Dan Schmidt and Ned Lerner for making the time to talk with me personally about their careers.

Ultima Underworld and its sequel can be purchased from GOG.com.)

1. Wing Commander was actually still known as Wingleader at this time. ↩

Comments
33 Responses

- Ethan Johnson

January 18, 2019 at 5:30 pm

I’ve been talking to Ned Lerner and he remembers a lot of the early stuff differently than Paul did (at least in that one interview you used). Ned recalls he first met Paul in the science fiction club as Wesleyan which eventually turned into their D&D campaigns together. They did take computer science together, but Ned doesn’t recall anything about them submitting a 3D program. I believe he said they may have shown their teacher the stuff they were working on, but not as coursework.

For creating the original prototype of Deep Space they had a sort of partnership in place as they hashed out the work on it. Eventually they just didn’t have any money, so that’s why Ned moved to California. I’m not entirely clear on this, but Deep Space came out in 1987 while Ned was already at EA, yet he recalls making the deal with Sir-Tech while still on the East Coast. So the game literally just sat around for a long time while Paul worked on the ports.

Ned came to EA because he was originally asked to do a port of Skyfox. However, he had refined his 3D system and asked to make an original game. What I found interesting is that Lerner Research was not even a ‘real company’ in how we would think of it. It was basically a bunch of contractors across the country that contributed parts which Ned would coordinate getting assembled. He was working literally out of his bedroom.

This is mentioned somewhere in print, but Ned was actually a financial contributor to Blue Sky Productions from the beginning. He and Paul were always looking out for each other and Lerner Research played a role in getting the technology working for UU beyond just the initial Chris Green engine stuff. When Looking Glass finally formed, it was on the back of a million dollars of Chuck Yaeger royalties, and that was essentially their entire investment until Intermetrics bought them.

I have talked with Jeff Johannigman as well and he was the one that got the contract signed for UU. Then he left right afterwards. Really Origin is the one to blame for being uncommunicative. It’s not like he ignored them and then slipped out the back door.

The name Looking Glass, in Ned’s memory, was about this role-playing stuff. Peering into another world through the computer screen. The Alice story was a minimal (but present) influence. The combination was basically about capacity. They needed to be a bigger company to take on more development projects because niche developers were becoming a thing of the past. Plus, both Paul and Ned wanted to be a publisher eventually. Flight Unlimited was supposed to be the start of establishing a Looking Glass publishing division (according to Steve Pearsall). That of course never happened because Flight Unlimited was a flash in the pan.

As you can probably tell, Looking Glass is a story I’m incredibly interested in. I’ve only had a little contact with Dan Schmidt and Chris Green from the original UU team so I don’t know a lot about that development. To your comments about the work environment though, I wouldn’t say it was totally atypical of the independents in the industry at the time. Origin was an extreme example of departmentalization. The thing that Looking Glass lacked was hierarchy, not organization. They would submit things formally in meetings, they worked to schedules, and they made sure their work got done before going off on their crazy experiments. All the best and worst of game development was there, System Shock and Thief II being particularly infamous crunches.

I am a little disappointed you didn’t talk much about the world-building aspect of UU, which is still pretty impressive today. The NPC behaviors are barebones, but the factionalism and use of relationships are quite nice. I don’t know if that’s for part 2 of you’re going to be talking about other games, vague title of this section and all. Of course with System Shock it’s even more impressive, and there’s a lot more info about the development of that game out there.

- Jimmy Maher

January 19, 2019 at 7:04 am

For what it’s worth, Ned Lerner told me that he doesn’t remember exactly where and when he met Paul Neurath, only that it was at university. Neurath seems to have a very distinct recollection, so I went with that.

- Tim Kaiser

January 18, 2019 at 6:20 pm

I always felt that Ultima Underworld was a proper Ultima game, despite the fact that the Ultima lore and story were tacked on relatively late in development. I have heard some people disagree that the magic system, dwarves, and other retcons make them feel like it’s not Ultima-like at all but it nailed Origin’s aspect of “We create worlds” and had the virtues, the “thees and thous” and is definitely one of the crown jewels of the Ultima legacy (and much better than the sequel which explicitly had Lord British, the Guardian and other familiar Ultima characters and settings in it).

- Tim Kaiser

January 18, 2019 at 6:25 pm

On the contrary, the fact that in Ultima Underworld II, your companions were there but couldn’t join you, Lord British’s castle had been transformed into a dark and cavernous dungeon and other incongruities made it feel like THAT was the title that had the Ultima name tacked onto it. In UU1, you had a new world to explore in this new 3D manner, but in UU2 you were purported to be in the familiar land of Britannia but with a bunch of new limitations and odd design choices that didn’t mesh with the previous games.

- Dan Schmidt

January 18, 2019 at 7:26 pm

I agree that the Ultima-lore heavy opening region of UW2 was a bit of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. In a way, UW1 was so clearly a separate world (though inspired by previous Ultima games) that the paper-thin nods to Britannia etc. don’t invite a lot of scrutiny for fidelity.

Also keep in mind that the Ultima games we grew up playing were II through IV, which had a much more wild-west “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach to world-building (IV was probably the beginning of a move away from that to a more consistent world with fixed lore). So to us that was part of what defined an Ultima game, and in that sense Underworld was very Ultima.

- Bmp

January 18, 2019 at 10:58 pm

“A screenshot from Dungeon Master, the state of the art in dungeon crawls at the end of the 1980s. Notice how the walls, floor, and ceiling are textured. This was possible because movement in Dungeon Master was still based on a grid, giving the computer plenty of time to draw each view. A free-scrolling, truly 3D version would have had to replace all those lovely textures with great uniform slabs of gray.”

Dungeon Master (and the other grid-based games from your last article) rendered the “3D” viewport by simply drawing pre-made images for the walls, the floor and the ceiling. These images were pre-made for all necessary angles and distances. For DM, you can see them here:

http://greatstone.free.fr/dm/db_data/dm_amiga_36_caps/graphics.dat/graphics.dat.html

For example, image 0096 is a left wall corner, and image 0101 is the same corner, one tile further away. Since the program doesn’t even have to scale down the size of the wall images when they are placed further away, this should mean that the images can be “blitted” (copied) wholesale from memory to the screen buffer.

So these grid-based games (or at least the early ones) didn’t do any texture mapping at all. That’s how they achieved a high frame rate on old computers like the Atari ST and Amiga.

Is this what you meant with that paragraph? I think that at least the sentence, “based on a grid, giving the computer plenty of time to draw each view”, is misleading – after all, the frame rate of DM on an Amiga is quite high when you are moving as fast as you can (even more when using a single character wearing the Boots of Speed), probably higher than most (or all?) flat-shaded 3D games of the time.

“we need to give Ultima Underworld a closer look, from the perspective of the player this time, to understand why it’s not just an example of groundbreaking technology but a superb example of pure game design as well.”

It’s crazy just how high Ultima Underworld climbed and how long it arguably stayed at the top for this specific spin on the RPG genre. Looking forward to your next article!

- Jimmy Maher

January 19, 2019 at 7:02 am

I don’t really consider it misleading, just a simplification. I’d rather not get into the weeds of technical implementation in this case. The main message here is “Dungeon Master is grid-based, so it could do a nicely textured(-looking) dungeon.” Even in your example of a character with Boots of Speed, the game is obviously benefiting hugely from only having to render each discrete grid location, not all of the in-between stages, as it were.

- mafon2

April 17, 2019 at 2:54 pm

Great article and all, I started to read and couldn’t stop, before the end, very captivating. But this part is SUPER misleading — there’s no any texture mapping there, it’s like saying that there’s texture mapping in painting. I got totally wrong impressions about DM engine.

- Raul

January 19, 2019 at 2:50 pm

Fantastic little peek at the creation of Looking Glass, Ultima Underworld and the birth of the FP genre… too bad some of those young daring creators of yore decided to tarnish the Underworld and LG legacy with Underworld Ascendant, I cannot believe it even now

- Brian Bagnall

January 20, 2019 at 5:33 pm

Underworld Ascendant might not be as bad as the reviews claim. The guys at Funhaus played it as one of the worst games of 2018 and ended up liking it a fair bit:
https://youtu.be/mZ4XIBBhVsQ?t=465

- Anonymous

January 19, 2019 at 2:52 pm

As I recall, the house was on Harvard Street in Cambridge. This is a very urban area, and saying “in the Boston suburbs” doesn’t really do it justice. I don’t recall that mentions of Cambridge were ever a problem in referring to Infocom, and they were located much closer to the suburbs once they got out of Quincy Market in Boston proper.

(For non locals, this is a bit like calling Brooklyn a suburb of New York, had the two cities never consolidated into one in 1898)

- Dan Schmidt

January 19, 2019 at 5:10 pm

The house was on Rindge Avenue.

- Warren Spector

January 22, 2019 at 1:40 pm

I remember the first time I visited that house on Rindge and immediately felt like the dumbest guy in the room. (Before anyone asks, it felt great – you always want to work with people better and smarter than you are!) The UU team was amazing, still one of the best I’ve worked with. And for a bunch of guys right out of school it was quite remarkable.

- Jonathan "J.D." Arnold

January 28, 2019 at 1:56 pm

I picked them up on my drive up from Weymouth (on the South Shore) to Salem NH. We did that for about a year, until I left in the Spring of 1991 – 3 or 4 of us crammed into a Suzuki Sprint! That was the real impetus, I’m sure, for opening the Cambridge “office”! :)

- Jimmy Maher

January 19, 2019 at 9:49 pm

Cambridge it is…

- Aula

January 19, 2019 at 3:55 pm

Is “tactilly” supposed to mean “tactically” or “tactilely” (both kinda make sense in the context) or something else altogether?

- Jimmy Maher

January 19, 2019 at 8:20 pm

Probably better without that word. ;) Thanks!

- 7iebs

January 19, 2019 at 10:00 pm

As a 14-year-old Ultima fan in 1991, I remember being supremely excited for the arrival of Ultima 7. I even tore out all the previews for it from my various computer gaming magazines and collected them into a single portfolio of nerdy anticipation. And yet…

There was this other game Origin was advertising, this Ultima Underworld, that seemed to have come out of nowhere and existed just beyond the horizon of my understanding. Portrayed as more of a “dungeon simulation” than a mere game (a description reviewers would employ as both a description and a yardstick after launch), it left me curious yet confused. There was a strange line of screenshots that purported to show the smooth, real-time movement yet were kind of ugly and odd. I had no frame of reference, steeped as I was in classic dungeon crawlers, to understand what they were trying to tell me. . I just didn’t get it.

Then one morning I had one of those powerful, almost lucid early morning dreams in which I was playing a computer game. And I was IN a 3D dungeon that moved smoothly from one spot to the next, through tunnels that curved and went up and down, instead of on an entirely flat, square grid. In my dream, I knew I was playing this Underworld game. So apparently my subconscious had gone to town solving that particular problem. I started saving up for it right away.

The actual game, amazing as it was, naturally couldn’t match my dream. Yet it is certainly my urtext for all that has come since in 3D RPGs and even AAA action/adventure games. In the long run, I played Ultima 7 and loved it, and I loved Serpent Isle even more, but I’ve never felt a reason to revisit either apart from nostalgia. Underworld 1 & 2, on the other hand, I’ve continued to play through every few years.

Thanks for the article and the memories, Jimmy. I’m looking forward to the next instalment.

p.s. pretty stoked about your new blog too!

- Captain Kal

January 20, 2019 at 5:45 pm

“A free-scrolling, truly 3D version would have had to replace all those lovely textures with great uniform slabs of gray. The result, needless to say, would not have been pretty”.

In fact they did just that, with Corporation (https://www.mobygames.com/game/corporation), although its a shooter not a RPG. They used filled polygon for the corridors, and bitmaps for everything else. The arcade centric Amiga Magazines of the time, didn’t knew what to make of it, obviously!!!!

Space Rogue was ahead of its time. I prefer it to Elite, actually. Not only docking was easier, but getting out of the ship and converse with people, was mind blowing at the time. And it plays surprisingly well nowadays, with a gamepad!! Not to mention it can still be found in digital stores (thanks to DosBox magic), without the paper space ships alas!!!

- Warren Spector

January 22, 2019 at 1:42 pm

What a great article. It captures my memories of the early days of Blue Sky and the creation of Underworld really well. In fact, there are things described that I’d forgotten about and even some I never knew. Great job. Can’t wait for part 2.

- iPadCary

February 8, 2019 at 6:48 pm

Just so’s ya know, Mr. Spector: there’re those, like myself, who wish you legendary pioneers would throw your considerable weight behind a VR project …. Just sayin’, is all. []^ )

- Nate

January 22, 2019 at 6:55 pm

# shows 71,000 copies of Ultima VII shipped, just 41,000 copies of Ultima Underworld.

Is this missing something like “but just”? Reads oddly otherwise.

Nice article!

- Jimmy Maher

January 23, 2019 at 1:56 pm

Thanks, but actually as intended.

- LAK

January 22, 2019 at 7:55 pm

Extra words here:

sent him to out to Origin’s New Hampshire office

- Jimmy Maher

January 23, 2019 at 1:56 pm

Thanks!

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- Greg

January 30, 2019 at 12:14 pm

Another great article, though it brings back other memories of my time of still relying on my poor old c64 in ’92. I have the (at the time) joy of finishing Ultima VI for C64 and seeing in the gaming magazines all of these wonderful new Ultima games coming out for the PC. I still bought the PC games even though I couldn’t play them. And in their boxes they waited until finally, in mid 1994, I got a second hand PC, and by creating my own boot disk, cutting everything I could out in the autoexec.bat and config files, play these glorious games at a snails pace. Good times, and pretty much forgotten until I read your articles. Thanks again for the effort you put in. It is much appreciated.

- Kruthers

February 2, 2019 at 6:21 pm

Missing a word in: “on games much like the one they written”

- Jimmy Maher

February 3, 2019 at 9:22 am

Thanks!

- iPadCary

February 8, 2019 at 6:42 pm

AWE. SOME.

- Joe Garrity - Origin Museum

February 16, 2019 at 10:37 am

Fantastic article–You really captured the feel of the industry at the peak of the Golden Age of Game Development!

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Life Off the Grid, Part 2: Playing Ultima Underworld
February 1, 2019

I rarely play or even see current games; the demands of this historical project of mine simply don’t allow for it. Thankfully, though, being a virtual time traveler does have its advantages. Just when I’m starting to feel a little sorry for myself, having heard about some cool new release I just don’t have time for, I get to experience a game like Ultima Underworld the way a player from its own time would have seen it, and suddenly living in my bubble is worth it.

It really is difficult to convey to non-time travelers just how amazing Ultima Underworld was back in March of 1992. To be able to move freely through a realistically rendered 3D space; to be able to walk up and down inclines, to jump over or into chasms, even to swim in underground streams… no one had ever seen anything like it before. At a stroke, it transformed the hoary old CRPG formula from a cerebral exercise in systems and numbers into an organic, embodied virtual reality. In time, it would prove itself to have been the starting point of a 3D Revolution in gaming writ large, one that would transform the hobby almost beyond recognition by the end of the 1990s. We live now in a gaming future very different from the merger of Silicon Valley and Hollywood which was foreseen by the conventional wisdom of 1992. Today, embodied first-person productions, focusing on emergent experience at least as much as scripted content, dominate across a huge swathe of the gaming landscape. And the urtext of this 3D Future through which we are living is Ultima Underworld.

Given what an enormous technological leap it represented in its day, it feels almost unfair to expect too much more than that out of Ultima Underworld as a game. After all, Blue Sky Productions was working here with a whole new set of affordances, trying to figure out how to put them together in a compelling way. It seems perfectly reasonable to expect that the craftspeople of game design, at Blue Sky and elsewhere, would need a few iterations to start turning all this great new technology into great games.

But it’s in fact here that Ultima Underworld astounds perhaps most of all. This very first example of a free-scrolling 3D dungeon crawl is an absolute corker of a game design; indeed, it’s arguably never been comprehensively bettered within its chosen sub-genre. In almost every one of the many places where they were faced with a whole array of unprecedented design choices, Blue Sky chose the right one. Ultima Underworld is a game, in other words, of far more than mere historical interest. It remains well worth learning to overlook the occasional graphical infelicities of its fairly primitive 3D engine in order to enjoy the wonderful experience that still awaits underneath them.

Needless to say, this isn’t quite the norm among such radically pioneering games. Yet it is a trait which Ultima Underworld shares with the two great earlier pioneers in the art of the dungeon crawl, Wizardry and Dungeon Master. Those games too emerged so immaculately conceived that the imitators which followed them could find little to improve upon beyond their audiovisuals. Just what is it about this particular style of game that yields such success right out of the gate? Your guess is as good as mine.

Regardless, we really should take the time to look at Ultima Underworld’s gameplay still more closely than we have up to this point. So, today, I’d like to take you on a little tour of the most groundbreaking game of 1992.

Ultima Underworld puts its most conventional foot forward first. After the conventionally horrid introductory movie, it asks us to create a character, choosing from the usual collection of classes, abilities, and skills. The only thing here that might bring a raised eyebrow to the jaded CRPG player is the demand that we specify our character’s handedness — the first clear indication that this is going to be a much different, more embodied experience than the norm.

As soon as we begin the game proper, however, all bets are off. This looks and feels like no CRPG before it. The grid has disappeared from its dungeon; we can move smoothly and freely in real time, just as if we were really inside its world.

Which isn’t to say that Blue Sky didn’t have to make compromises to bring this free-scrolling 3D environment to life using 1992-vintage hardware. I already discussed one of the compromises in my previous article: the use of affine texture mapping rather than a more rigorous algorithm. This allows the game to render its graphics much faster than it would otherwise be able to, at the expense of a slight wonkiness that afflicts the rendering engine in some situations much more than in others. The second compromise is even more obvious: the actual first-person view fills less than half of the total screen real estate. Simply put, fewer pixels to render means that the rendering can happen that much faster.

Wolfenstein 3D

Of course, virtually every game ever made is at bottom a collection of compromises with the ideal in a designer’s head. Blue Sky made these two specific ones because they weren’t willing to compromise in other areas. Two months after Ultima Underworld was released, id Software released Wolfenstein 3D, the other great 3D pioneer of 1992. It features a first-person view that fills much more of the screen than that of Ultima Underworld, and with a considerably faster frame rate on identical hardware to boot. But its world is far less interactive. Its levels are all just that — entirely flat — and it won’t even let you look up or down. These were compromises which Blue Sky wasn’t willing to make. A commitment to verisimilitudinous simulation is the dominant theme of Ultima Underworld’s design. It would go on to become the attribute that, more than any other, distinguishes the games of their later incarnation, Looking Glass Technologies, from the “just run and shoot” approach of id.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/UW1.mp4

In light of the ubiquity of first-person 3D games in the decades since Ultima Underworld, it’s worth examining Blue Sky’s approach to controlling such a game, formulated well before any norms for same had been set in stone. Unlike what followed it, Ultima Underworld’s preferred approach uses the mouse for everything; this was very much in line with the conventional wisdom of its era, which privileged the relatively new and friendly affordance of the mouse over the keyboard to such an extent that most games used the latter, if they used it at all, only for optional shortcuts. Thus in Ultima Underworld, you move around the world by moving the mouse into the view area and clicking as the cursor changes shape to indicate the direction of travel or rotation.

Blue Sky’s control scheme is a little different from what we may be used to, but it’s not necessarily worse. In fact, the use of the mouse in lieu of the more typical “WASD” keyboard controls for movement has at least one rather lovely advantage: moving the mouse pointer further in a given direction causes you to move faster. The WASD setup, in which each key can only be on or off at any given time, allows for no such sliding scale of movement speed, forcing clumsier solutions like another binary toggle on the keyboard for “run.”

If you just can’t deal with Ultima Underworld’s preferred movement scheme, however, there are alternatives — always a sign of a careful, thought-through design. You can click directly on the little gray movement buttons down there below the view window. Or, in what was something of a last-minute addition, you can actually using the keyboard in a way very similar to what you may be used to from more recent games. Here, though, the WASD scheme is replaced with SADX, with the “W” key serving as the run toggle. The difference drives some modern players crazy, but it really needn’t do so. Try to get used to moving using only the mouse; you might be surprised at how well it works. (It’s worth noting as well that even id wouldn’t arrive at the WASD standard for quite some time after Ultima Underworld and Wolfenstein 3D. As late as 1993’s Doom, they would still be mapping the arrow keys to movement by default.)

While left-clicking in the view window lets you move around, right-clicking allows you to manipulate the environment. The vertical row of icons to the left of the view window lets you choose a verb: “talk,” “take,” “examine,” “fight,” or “use,” with the topmost icon leading to the utility menu. If no icon is explicitly selected at a given point, the game intuits a default action when we right-click something in the environment. The end of the short video snippet above shows how elegantly this works in practice. We notice a message scrawled on the wall, and simply right-click it to do the most reasonable thing: to read it.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/UW3.mp4

The video above gives a further taste of the interface in action. Note the ability, so conspicuously absent in id’s contemporaneous games, to look up and down as we move through the world and interact with it. This is accomplished via an exception to the mouse-centric approach. It’s only a little awkward: the “3” key shifts the view upward, “2” centers it vertically, and “1” shifts it downward. It would be at least a couple of years after Ultima Underworld’s release before any other 3D engine would offer this capability.

This video also illustrates the game’s “paper doll” interface in action, as we pick up objects from the environment and move them into our inventory. The paper doll itself wasn’t new to Ultima Underworld; it had been pioneered by Dungeon Master and long since picked up by the main-line Ultima engines among others. This implementation of it, however, does Dungeon Master one better by living entirely on the main gameplay screen. Indeed, the game has no other screens, with just one exception which we’ll get to momentarily; its commitment to a mode-less interface is even more complete than was Dungeon Master’s. This, one might even say, is the hidden benefit of that constrained view window. Everything that surrounds it is necessary; the view window might be small, but there is no wasted space anywhere else on the screen. Even what might seem, judging only from the videos above, to be small areas with no purpose actually aren’t, as further playing will reveal. The gray area to the left of the compass will tell us what magical status effects are active; the shelf to the right of the compass is where we will build spells using runes; the crystal at far left, just below the icon bar, shows our current attack strength, and is thus vital for combat. The fact that you aren’t constantly moving between screens does much to enhance the all-pervasive sense that you are there in the dungeon.

Equally important for this effect is a general disinterest in using numbers to represent the current status of your character — or, perhaps better said in light of the game’s commitment to embodiment, your status. While numbers do appear in places — especially if you go looking for them — they’re nowhere near as prevalent as they are in most contemporaneous CRPGs. Your health and mana levels, for instance, are represented graphically by the red and blue vials on the bottom right of the screen — this being another part of the screen you might have initially assumed to be decoration, but which is actually vital.

Later in the video above, we fire up a torch, shedding some welcome light on our surroundings and showing off the game’s advanced lighting model. At the risk of beating a dead horse, I must say, yet again, that no other game of Ultima Underworld’s era or for some time thereafter could match the latter.

Finally, we see something of the game’s physics model in action, as we toss a (useless) skull against the wall. Such kinetic, tactile responsiveness is a far cry from most CRPGs, even as the strength of your character’s throw is indeed affected by his statistics. Dungeon Master, that critical way station beyond Wizardry and Ultima Underworld, pioneered some of this more kinetic approach, but the free-scrolling environment here allows the game to use it that much more effectively.

In addition to the torch, we found in that first sack the game’s auto-map. Even as its presence as a physical object in the world emphasizes the game’s ongoing commitment to embodiment, this is actually the only place where the game’s commitment to its mode-less interface falters — but what a spectacular exception it is! I’ve cheated a bit with the screenshot above, choosing a point from much deeper in the game in order to show the auto-map in its full glory. It’s a feature that simply has to be here; the rest of the game, remarkable as it is, would fall apart without it. Cartography — making your own maps on reams of graph paper — had been a standard part of the dungeon-crawl experience prior to Ultima Underworld. Even real-time dungeon crawls like Dungeon Master had left mapping to the player. By removing the discrete grid, however, Ultima Underworld made this style of mapping, if not utterly impossible, at least far too difficult to be any fun even for the dedicated graph-paper-and-pencil crowd. An auto-map was as fundamental to its design as anything in the game.

But if an auto-map of some sort was essential, it certainly wasn’t necessary for its implementation to be this absurdly fantastic. Dan Schmidt, one of the Ultima Underworld developers, has said on several occasions that he considers the seemingly plebeian affordance of the auto-map to be the most impressive single thing in a game that’s bursting at the seams with unprecedented features. There are days when I find myself agreeing.

Whilst ditching the need for graph paper and pencil, Ultima Underworld preserves the foremost pleasure of CRPG cartography: that of seeing all of the blank spaces on your map filled in, enjoying the gradual transformation of the chaotic unknown into the orderly known. The map of each level is lovely to look at as it takes shape. You want to visit every nook and cranny on each one of the levels just to make it as pristine and complete as possible. You’ll even swim the length of the underground streams and lakes, if that’s what it takes to get them completely documented on parchment.

And there’s one final thing the auto-map does which few games — few games ever, mind you — can match: you can make your own notes on the thing, wherever and whenever you want to. Did you notice all of the text on the map above? I did that, not the game. Needless to say, the programming needed to accommodate this — which, incidentally, had already been completed by Doug Church and J.D. Arnold before the rest of the Blue Sky programming team even arrived — couldn’t have been easy. In terms of both design and implementation, Ultima Underworld’s auto-map really is nothing short of spectacular.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/UW8.mp4

In the video above, we move down the corridor from the game’s starting point. Notice again how we can move slower or faster merely by shifting the position of the mouse within the view window.

We find our first door at the end of the corridor. This door can be opened by a pull chain just beside it, but we rather perversely elect to close it again and then bash it open. Our ability to do so serves as a further illustration of Blue Sky’s commitment to simulation and emergence. The main-line Ultima games as well have doors of variable strength, but, as any dedicated player of those games quickly realizes, Origin Systems had a tendency to cheat in order to fill the needs of a plot that got steadily more complex from installment to installment: many doors — the plot-important doors — are indestructible. You need the correct key to open them, whose acquisition ensures that certain bits of plot are seen before other bits. (As Ron Gilbert once put it, heavily narrative-focused game design ultimately all tends to come down to locks and keys of a literal or metaphorical stripe.)

But Blue Sky, who don’t have the same sort of eleborate pre-crafted plot full of important story beats to worry about, never cheats. Any given door may indeed have a key which you can find, but, if you haven’t found the key, it is at least theoretically possible to pick its lock, to open it using a magic spell, or to simply bash it down. Mind you, doing the last may not do your weapon any favors; keen sword blades were not made to chop through wood. Here we have yet another example of the game’s focus on simulation, albeit one that may feel somewhat less welcome in practical terms than it does in the abstract when your poor misused sword breaks at an inopportune moment — like, say, in the midst of a desperate combat.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/UW9.mp4

The game’s magic system is marked by the same sense of embodied physicality as everything else. Before you can cast spells at all, you’ll need to find a rune bag helpfully left behind by one of the dungeon’s unfortunate earlier explorers. For a long time to come, you’ll be collecting runes to put in it. You combine these runes into “recipes” — most of which are found in the manual — in order to cast spells. In the video above, we place two recently discovered runes into our rune bag and then cast a light spell which can serve as a handy replacement for a torch. (Note that it takes a couple of tries to successfully cast the spell, a sign of our character’s inexperience.) All character classes can use magic to a greater or lesser degree. Even an otherwise “pure” fighter will probably find simple spells that obviate the need to cart around torches or food to be very useful indeed. Thanks to magic, there’s no time limit on the game in the form of depleting resources; by the time you’ve scarfed up all the food in the dungeon, you’ll have long since mastered the “create food” spell.

The rune-based magic system is another aspect of Ultima Underworld that smacks of Dungeon Master (as is, for that matter, the flexible character-development system in which any character can learn to do anything with enough time and effort). But the Blue Sky team has denied looking closely to the older game for inspiration, and we have no reason to doubt their word. So, we’ll have to chalk the similarities up to nothing more than the proverbial great minds thinking alike. If anything, Ultima Underworld’s magic system is even more elegant than its predecessor’s. Because you’re collecting physical runes, rather than mere spell recipes in the form of scrolls as in Dungeon Master, the sense that everything that matters to the game is an embodied thing in the world is that much more pronounced here.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/UW10.mp4

It should come as no surprise by this point that Ultima Underworld’s combat system is built along the same lines of embodied physicality. That is to say, you physically swing (or shoot, or throw) your weapon against monsters that are embodied in the same space as you. The video above gives a taste of this, in the form of a battle against a giant rat guarding some choice booty. (Ultima Underworld may be a breathtakingly original design, but some things in the world of CRPGs are timeless. Meeting giant rats as your first opponents is among these.)

Later battles will see you using the environment in all sorts of creative ways: shooting down upon monsters from ledges, blasting them with magic and then running away to recharge your batteries behind a closed door. You can also try to sneak past monsters you’d rather not fight, using not only your character’s innate stealth ability but your own skill at maneuvering through light and shadow. In fact, a sufficiently dedicated pacifist could finish Ultima Underworld while doing surprisingly little killing at all. One of the advantages of the simulation-first approach is that it really does let you play the game your way — possibly even in ways that the game’s designers never thought of.

But Ultima Underworld isn’t all emergent simulation. It does have a plot of sorts, albeit one that you can approach in your own way, at your own speed, and in your own order. You learn soon after arriving in the dungeon that you need to assemble a collection of magic objects. Doing so will occupy your attention for the bulk of the game.

This scavenger-hunt structure may be less innovative than most of the game, but it’s executed with considerable verve. Each level has its own personality and its own inhabitants, living in what feel like credible communities. Importantly, you don’t — or shouldn’t, anyway — indiscriminately slaughter your way through the levels. You need to talk to others, an element that’s notably missing from Wizardry and Dungeon Master. The dungeon’s inhabitants actually remember your treatment of them. An early example of the game’s relationship model, if you will, is provided on the very first level. Two tribes of goblins who hate one another live there in an uneasy symbiosis. Will you ally yourself with one or the other? Or will you try to thread the needle between friend and foe with both, or for that matter go to war with both? The choice is up to you. But choose carefully, for such choices in this game have consequences which you will be living with for a long time to come.

Regular readers of this blog are doubtless aware that I place a high premium on fairness and solubility in games. I’ve gone on record many times saying that a game which is realistically soluble only through a walkthrough cannot by definition be a good game, no matter what other things it does well. In this context, everything would seem to be working against Ultima Underworld. A bunch of MIT whiz kids, all freelancing without recourse to any central design authority, working in an insular environment without recourse to outside play testers… it doesn’t give one much hope for fair puzzles.

Yet, here as in so many other places, Ultima Underworld defies my prejudices and expectations alike. There are perhaps two or three places where the clues could stand to be a little more explicit — certainly no one should feel ashamed to peek at a walkthrough when playing — but there are no egregious howlers here. Take careful notes, take your time, and follow up diligently on all of the clues, and there’s no reason that you can’t solve this one for yourself. Sure, by modern standards it’s an absurdly difficult game. There is no quest log to keep everything neat and tidy for you, and, as a byproduct of its ethos of respecting and empowering its player at every turn, the game will happily let you toss essential quest items into a river, never to be seen again, without saying a word about it. At the same time, though, the utter lack of guardrails can be bracing. If you solve this one, you’ve really accomplished something. And, unlike so many of the games I’ve complained about on this blog, Ultima Underworld never feels like it’s trying to screw you over. It just won’t prevent you from doing so if you decide to screw yourself over.

Only occasionally does the commitment to simulation get in the way of friendly, fair design. To wit: after talking to a character once, trying to elicit the same information again often results only in some variation on “I already told you that!” Dan Schmidt, who was responsible for pulling all of the dialog together, told me that he believed at the time that this was only fair, another way of committing to verisimilitude in all things. Nowadays, I (and he) are more likely to categorize it under that heading of design failures known as “the designer being a jerk just because he can.” Given what a masterpiece Ultima Underworld is on the whole, it’s almost comforting to know that Blue Sky still had a few things to learn about good design.

On the other hand, I really love the way the design uses the game’s virtual space. There are a considerable number of quests and puzzles that span multiple levels in the dungeon, forcing you to retrace your steps and revisit “finished” levels. Another of Ultima Underworld’s more unique design decisions in comparison with the dungeon-crawl tradition, this does much to give the game a holistic feel, making its dungeon feel like a living place rather than just a series of levels to be solved one after another.

The puzzles themselves are as mode-less as the basic interface. None of them pull you out of the game’s world: no riddles, no mini-games. Instead they work brilliantly within it. There are some wonderfully rewarding puzzles here, such that I hate to spoil them by saying too much about them. Following up on the clues you’re given, you’ll do things that seem like they couldn’t possibly work — surely the game engine can’t be that granularly responsive! — and be shocked and delighted when they actually do. In one fine example, you’ll have to literally learn a new language — okay, a limited subset of it anyway — via clues scattered around the environment. Sometimes challenging and often complex but never unfair, the puzzles will richly reward the effort you put into them.

Perhaps the best example of how the puzzles of Ultima Underworld are integrated into its environment is Garamon, a mysterious personage who often visits your dreams when you sleep. He at first seems like nothing more than a contrived adventure-game clue dispenser, but you gradually realize that he is a real — albeit deceased! — character in the story of the Abyss, and that he has something very personal he wants you to do for him: to give his body a proper burial so he can find peace. When you discover a certain empty tomb, and connect it with the figure from your dreams, the flash of insight is downright moving.

I could go on with yet more praise for Ultima Underworld — praise for, by way of example, its marvelous context-sensitive music, provided by the prolific game composers George “The Fat Man” Sanger and Dave Govett (also the composers of the Wing Commander score among many, many others). Yet I hesitate to cause what may already seem like an overly effusive review to read still more so. I can only hope that my reputation as a critic not overly prone to hyperbole will precede me here when I say that this game truly is a sublime achievement.

Ultima Underworld II

I have less — and far less that is positive — to say about the second and final Ultima Underworld game, which bears the subtitle Labyrinth of Worlds. In contrast to its groundbreaking predecessor, it’s a fairly typical sequel, offering as its only mechanical or technical innovation a somewhat larger view window on the 3D environment. Otherwise, it’s more of the same, only much bigger, and not executed quite as well.

The new entity that was known as Looking Glass Technologies — the product of the merger between Blue Sky Productions and Lerner Research — became a much more integral part of the Origin Systems family after the first Ultima Underworld’s release and commercial success. The result was a plot for the new game that was also better integrated into the Ultima timeline, falling between the two games made by Origin themselves with their own Ultima VII engine in terms of both plot and release chronology. The new interest in set-piece plotting and Ultima lore does the sequel few favors; it rather straitjackets the sense of free-form exploration and discovery that marks the original. Instead of being confined to a single contiguous environment, Ultima Underworld II sends you hopscotching back and forth through its titular “labyrinth of worlds.” The approach feels scattershot, and the game is far less soluble than its predecessor — yet another proof of a theorem which the games industry could never seem to grasp: that a bigger game is not necessarily a better game.

The sequel was created from start to finish in less than nine months, nearly killing the team responsible for it. Origin and Looking Glass’s desire to get a second game out the door is understandable on the face of it; they had a hit on their hands, and wanted to strike while the iron was hot. This they certainly did, but the sequel reportedly sold less than half as many copies as its predecessor — although it should also be noted that even those numbers were enough to qualify it as a major hit by contemporary standards. Still, Paul Neurath, the head of Blue Sky and co-head of Looking Glass, has expressed regret that he didn’t give his people permission and time to make something more formally ambitious. In the future, Looking Glass would generally avoid these sorts of quickie sequels.

While the second game is probably best reserved for the CRPG hardcore and those who just can’t get enough of the experience provided by the first one, the original Ultima Underworld is a must-play. Without a doubt one of the very best CRPGs ever made, it’s even more important for the example it set for gaming in general, showing what heights of flexibility and player-responsiveness could be scaled through the emerging medium of 3D graphics. The pity is that more developers — even many of those who eventually went 3D — didn’t heed the entirety of its example. Countless later games would improve on Ultima Underworld’s sometimes wonky visuals by throwing out its simplistic affine texture mapping in favor of better techniques, and by blowing up its view window to fill the whole screen. Very few of them, however, would demonstrate the same commitment to what Blue Sky/Looking Glass saw as the real potential of 3D graphics: that of simulating an intuitively emergent world and placing you, the player, inside it. Whether judged in terms of historical importance or by the more basic metric of how much fun it still is to play, Ultima Underworld is and will always remain seminal.

(Ultima Underworld I and II can be purchased from GOG.com.)

Comments
36 Responses

- Joshua Barrett

February 1, 2019 at 5:32 pm

It’s sort of interesting to see the origin points for id and Looking Glass’s philosophies. One is… definitely a much stronger start than the other: Wolf3D is a game that I don’t think holds up well to modern sensibilities, and certainly not as well as its older brother. id was built on tech and it took some time for them to get to a point where their level design talent was really able to shine. LGS never had *that* problem, at least, although System Shock for one certainly could have used a better control scheme for what it was—that is a game that demands quick responses, and sometimes it feels like the control scheme is a more dangerous enemy than SHODAN.

But the cycle cost for all those extra features was real. SS and Underworld had a much higher base system requirement than even Doom, to my recollection.

- Gnoman

February 2, 2019 at 4:30 am

DooM required a 386 with 4MB RAM (minimum) or a 486 with 4MB (recommended). Ultima Underworld required a 386SX with 2MB (minimum), or a 486 (recommended).

In other words, the system requirements were almost identical, which makes sense – in terms of hardware demand, the different focuses of the games were pretty offsetting.

- whomever

February 2, 2019 at 2:40 pm

Yeah, and Doom did move somewhat smoother than UU; not to criticize UU but it was doing different tradeoffs. I spent a huge amount of time playing UU but almost none on Doom (but honestly I’m not the target audience, I don’t like FPS)

- Joshua Barrett

February 19, 2019 at 9:04 pm

UU was competing with Wolf, not Doom. Doom was contemporary with System Shock.

- Steve McCrea

February 1, 2019 at 6:11 pm

scavanger-hunt scructure -> scavenger hunt structure

Nice write up for one of my all-time favourite games!

- Jimmy Maher

February 1, 2019 at 7:29 pm

Thanks!

- Steve McCrea

February 1, 2019 at 8:24 pm

You missed the second typo there – scructure -> structure :)

- Jimmy Maher

February 2, 2019 at 8:26 am

Woops! I was fixing those in the car. (No, not behind the wheel.) Thanks!

- Lars

February 1, 2019 at 6:19 pm

verisimilitudious -> verisimilitudinous

- Jimmy Maher

February 1, 2019 at 7:30 pm

Thanks!

- Jaron

February 1, 2019 at 8:27 pm

Check out Rust by Facepunch Studios!

- Keith Palmer

February 2, 2019 at 1:44 am

My knowledge “at the time” of computerized role-playing games was definitely limited, and looking at Ultima Underworld now I want to say I better understand where the interface complications in the Macintosh-only game Pathways Into Darkness (an early game from Bungie Software) came from, although its own 3D engine wasn’t much more advanced than Wolfenstein 3D’s.

- Martin

February 2, 2019 at 2:30 pm

Are you going to cover Pathways and Marathon? The “travel through the levels to discover backstory” approach seems an important addition to the basic 3D / first person game.

- Jimmy Maher

February 2, 2019 at 4:24 pm

Perhaps in passing, but not in detail, no. Sorry!

- xxx

February 2, 2019 at 5:47 pm

I must admit that I’m sorry to hear that. It’s not a terrible thing to skip Pathways into Darkness, which was kind of a wonky game by an inexperienced studio. It shows its age very badly today. But Marathon was actually a rather significant game at the time because it was one of the earliest — and, I’d argue, the most successful — attempt to marry storytelling and first-person shooter gameplay. It had the same sort of “get into a flow state while running around and shooting things” gameplay as Doom, but had a (for the time) remarkable emphasis on story, giving you reams of text throughout the game which contextualized your actions and complemented the moody, atmospheric environment. It would make a good counterpoint to the discussion around Doom, since it was considered at the time “the thinking man’s Doom,” something more than the popular stereotype of mindless run-and-gun gameplay that attached itself to FPS games. Being released only on the Macintosh didn’t do it any favours, though.

The sequels were also interesting. Marathon 2 was a better game than the original in both gameplay and story, while the third one (Marathon Infinity) was divisive; more ambitious, but also much weirder and tonally different. All of them still hold up very well today.

- Joshua Barrett

February 19, 2019 at 9:28 pm

I would dispute that.

Marathon does have an excellent story, and a strong high-concept. But as an FPS? It’s simply not very fun to play through nowadays: the controls are actually sorta bad (although alephone could be to blame for that), for one, but the problem goes deeper than that. Marathon is an FPS, and as GAMES (not as narratives), FPSes live and die on two key elements: Level design and enemy design. Marathon is weak in all three respects.

Levels are a slog. They’re a maze from the start and often the architecture feels impossible to differentiate. It’s easy to get lost. And the typical response is “oh, that’s just how FPSes were back then.” No, it’s not. Doom, Duke… all the classics had distinct, memorable designs in their levels. Marathon didn’t, not really.

And the enemy design. Quick test: how many distinct designs do you come across in the first five levels of Doom? Well, there’s the zombie, the sergeant, the imp, the pinky, the invisible pinky… that is five distinct enemies off the bat. In Marathon? I can’t tell you what color each Phor is, I can’t tell you the difference in how they behave. And that’s ALL you’re fighting 90 percent of the time early on.

So yeah. Marathon is a great story wrapped in a mediocre game. I can’t recommend a game when reading its dialogue would give you the best of the experience.

But hey, it’s free, and you’re not me. So I invite everyone to judge for themselves.

- anonymous

February 3, 2019 at 8:09 am

You’ve got several references to ‘solubility’ or variants thereof as a quality you look for in games. I doubt you mean their ability to dissolve in a medium. Perhaps ‘solvability’ is what you meant?

- xxx

February 3, 2019 at 8:20 am

Nope, that’s a perfectly cromulent usage of “soluble”.

2. Susceptible of being solved; as, a soluble algebraic problem; susceptible of being disentangled, unraveled, or explained; as, the mystery is perhaps soluble. “More soluble is this knot.” –Tennyson. [1913 Webster]

- Jimmy Maher

February 3, 2019 at 9:21 am

Yes, the usage is perhaps a little archaic, but not incorrect. I prefer it to solvability, myself, which I find kind of an ugly word.

These two linguistic roots have an interesting linkage. The word “solution” in quite a number of European languages can mean both a liquid solution and a solution to a problem. And at one time, “solvable” meant what “solvable” means today in English. Kind of like “disinterested” and “uninterested” — the meaning has kept going back and forth.

- Joe

February 3, 2019 at 7:11 pm

I keep wanting to like this game more than I do, but I expect at some level it’s because I can’t deal well with the control scheme. I simply do not have a computer that has a physical mouse with multiple buttons anymore, at least not anywhere that I sit at for hours on end to play games. I do all of my “adventure” gaming on the couch with a Mac laptop. I’ve even become quite good with the various contriol-keys to simulate second buttons! But this game requires a level of agility with multiple mouse buttons and movements that I cannot capture on my poor laptop. If I were playing on a more historically accurate system, I may feel quite different.

And btw, I really feel for you about living in the past. On the bright side, my wife is very happy that my video game bills have gone way down these past couple of years…

- Jimmy Maher

February 4, 2019 at 12:40 pm

Yes, some vintage games — perhaps most notably point-and-click graphic adventures — play surprisingly well on the couch with a laptop and trackpad. Others somewhat less so. I play a lot of the latter type on the television through our media-center PC. It helps that my wife likes to play with sometimes, although she has even less patience than I do for poor design and bad writing. (But then, the games we play together are just idle entertainment for her, not part of an ongoing research project, as they are for me.)

- Bmp

February 3, 2019 at 8:02 pm

It’s quite hard to list all of Ultima Underworld’s accomplishments, they’re just so many. I’ve only recently become a fan of this game, and now I wish there were more games like it.

The sense of exploration is just great. Large, interconnected levels with lots of little thematic areas. A great automap where you can write your own notes. Writing down clues, experimenting with the magic runes. Fun NPC conversations that are neither too wordy nor bogged down with Lore.

The biggest flaw, IMO, is that combat is quite easy and you don’t have to employ all the tactical possibilities that the game offers. The CRPGAddict came to the same conclusion here: http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2018/03/ultima-underworld-won.html

Regarding the grid, to be precise, Ultima Underworld still uses a grid – a tilemap – for its levels, but the walls can be angled at 45 degrees in addition to the usual 90 degree angles (as can be seen from the automap), and the floors can be sloped. This level format is still a far cry from the far more versatile level format of Doom. Regrettably, Looking Glass kept their tilemap-based level format even for System Shock and Terra Nova, when it was quite outdated.

“You can also try to sneak past monsters you’d rather not fight, using not only your character’s innate stealth ability but your own skill at maneuvering through light and shadow. In fact, a sufficiently dedicated pacifist could finish Ultima Underworld while doing surprisingly little killing at all.”

I think it’s not really possible to sneak past most enemies undetected. At least I couldn’t make it work, and I couldn’t discern any effect of light and shadow either – even when not using any light source, the enemies notice you. It seems to be possible in only a few situations, for example with the Fire Elementals when using the Invisibility spell. This feature doesn’t seem to have quite worked out as the developers intended. You can usually simply run past any enemies, though, since you’re so much faster than them.

“the sequel reportedly sold less than half as many copies as its predecessor”

I wonder what the reason for that was. It seems that it was extremely well received in magazine reviews, and while I agree with your criticism that it feels less coherent due to the separate levels/worlds, I can’t imagine that this was a cause for the lower commercial success.

- Jimmy Maher

February 4, 2019 at 12:51 pm

While there is a grid underlying the technology — I believe I heard somewhere that the designers even drew out the dungeon levels on graph paper in the beginning — movement is completely free from the player’s perspective. Didn’t want to get too far down in the weeds there. ;)

Ultima Underworld II’s commercial performance was actually fairly typical for a quick sequel to a hit game. The same scenario played out for everything from Ultima Underworld’s near contemporary Eye of the Beholder to the original Zork trilogy from the dawn of the 1980s. A competently executed more-of-the-same-style sequel has an all but guaranteed sales floor, which explains why risk-averse publishers were always so eager to bring them out. Yet the same publishers took perhaps less note of the fact that the same sequel also comes with something of a sales ceiling. Faced with two extremely similar experiences, most gamers will, sensibly enough, opt for number one before number two. And a substantial portion of those that do — even those that really loved the first game — will just never get around to buying the second one.

That’s probably the biggest factor. That said, I also think a bit of Ultima fatigue was beginning to set in by 1993, thanks to Origin’s flooding the market with product sporting the name. (Some of this Ultima ennui can perhaps be seen even in the case of Ultima VII, whose critical and commercial reception was nowhere near as uniformly positive in 1992 as the game’s towering modern reputation might lead one to believe. There was, after all, a reason Origin decided to totally remake the formula with Ultima VIII…)

- Bmp

February 4, 2019 at 3:45 pm

“Ultima Underworld II’s commercial performance was actually fairly typical for a quick sequel to a hit game.” “Faced with two extremely similar experiences, most gamers will, sensibly enough, opt for number one before number two. And a substantial portion of those that do — even those that really loved the first game — will just never get around to buying the second one.”

That’s a very good point. But on the other hand, there are games where this didn’t happen, such as Doom 1 & Doom 2, Quake 1 & Quake 2, and series like Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed. It doesn’t seem to me that UU2 is less developed relative to UU1 than one game from these series is relative to its predecessor.

If we disregard the hindsight we gain from today’s knowledge about UU2’s sales, developing UU2 as a quick sequel might have been worth the try. It might have been one of those gold mines where the players will buy yearly sequels. It just turned out that it wasn’t.

These are just some vague ideas, but I’m under the impression that Looking Glass games, as great as they are, do not quite instill a hunger for more content like real “evergreen” games do, for lack of a better description. (Except maybe Thief 1 & 2.) In context of today’s situation where Immersive Sims reportedly have somewhat middling sales prospects, maybe this is one aspect that needs to be improved somehow.

- Jimmy Maher

February 4, 2019 at 4:04 pm

We do want to be a little careful here. Ultima Underworld II likely sold over 200,000 copies, at a time when a hit was a game that sold 100,000 copies. It wasn’t just “worth a try”; it actually did make a lot of money, especially considering the short development cycle using mostly existing technology. Its numbers pale only in comparison to the first game.

- Bmp

February 4, 2019 at 7:44 pm

My wording was misleading – I meant to say that if the choice was between a close sequel with less than one year of development time and a more ambitious sequel with a far longer dev time, then I think choosing the close sequel wasn’t a wrong decision per se, as there are examples where close sequels were more successful than the original game.

With hindsight, a more ambitious sequel might have been more successful, and we might have gotten Ultima Underworld 3 and further sequels.

Thief II, with 6 months more dev time than UU2 (going by release dates), seems to have been commercially successful to a roughly similar degree as Thief 1 if I’m interpreting Wikipedia correctly. (But the royalties came too late to save Looking Glass). It also seems rather like a close sequel to me, but of course these definitions are very fuzzy.

- Paul

February 4, 2019 at 9:05 am

First comment after long time of reading. Sorry it’s going to be critical of your arguments… so first off, thanks for an amazing writeup on two of my all-time favorites, both of which I played multiple times and both of which still hold up well today IMO!

I don’t agree that Underworld 2 did nothing but expand the view window and streamline the interface a bit. In my opinion it clearly shows the competence and confidence the designers had gained by this point, and the ways they put their engine to use in order to convey a plethora of new experiences. The game feels much more involved to me, much more refined in the way that it lets you experience a greater story your own way (while the “plot” in UW1 feels much more like an afterthought to me).

Granted, it also relies less on emergent gameplay, but it manages to provide an ongoing and developing plot while also leaving you a lot of freedom to explore. UW2’s use of flags for many different parts of the plot is excellent, and you rarely feel constrained in what you can do, or at a loss for what you should be doing, even while the game certainly doesn’t do any handholding.

But in other regards, too, the game treads new ground:
– I particularly like how the level design developed – although, granted, some of the worlds you visit during your travels are somewhat limited in that regard (Prison Tower being the most egregious example – you visit your first alternate world, and it is cramped, uniform, linear and extremely simple… bad choice there). But otherwise, there are many shortcuts to be unlocked, many areas to keep in mind for later when you’re more powerful, many new puzzles and navigational hazards to be solved (or sidestepped, as the case may be).

– The combat is harder and consequently feels more rewarding and more like an important part of the game. Buffing and debuffing spells actually have a place in the game now, and better equipment as well as higher combat skill values are felt more. It’s still possible to sidestep or outrun many or most enemies, which is a good thing of course.

– The leveling cap (or at least the learning point cap) was done away with, which is IMO very important in a game featuring many useful skills (most of which could not be maxed out in the predecessor with its low leveling cap).

– There are many more useful (or fun, such as the bouncing boots) magic items, and a slightly stronger focus on stuff to actually do with your money.

– The lack of magical flight aside from a few potions makes it less easy to simply skip interesting stuff.

More than anything else, however, I applaud the designers’ efforts to actually create a labyrinth of worlds, in which every world you visit has a unique sense of place, a unique aesthetic, and a unique atmosphere. In this, the designers have integrated dialogue into their game more (Prison Tower would be boring level design-wise, but through the dialogue, it stands out at least a little bit better), but it goes beyond only that: most worlds have notably different sub-goals, and notably different difficulties preventing you from reaching them.
Some offer even more than that. For instance, Pits of Carnage at first glance seems like it’s mostly about defeating guys in imaginatively realized elemental-themed arenas, and then killing the pitboss to get his magic goodie… but then you realize that hidden in the hard-as-nails maze beyond the actual fighting pits, there dwell several plot-critical NPCs!
The atmosphere varies a lot, as well: in the Ice Caves you are an archeologist in a hostile, but fun environment with ice skating and lever puzzles, leading to the discovery of a lost civilization; Scintillus breathes loneliness and futility as you take the test to graduate from an academy that no longer exists; Killorn Keep is dangerous through intrigue and wickedness at court; Talorus is whacky as hell, but follows its own consistent inner logic; I could go on.

No, I really, really could. UW2 is one of the best games ever made, and while it may stand on the shoulder of the giant that was its predecessor, it does manage to see further.

- Steven Marsh

February 5, 2019 at 7:36 pm

You ask, “What is it about this particular style of game that yields such success right out of the gate?”

My guess is that design decisions on these games are often of the sort “should [X] be 10 or 20?” or “Should this element be on the screen or in a sub-menu?” And by prototyping and actually playing the game, developers are able to see what’s fun and works very quickly, and able to make essential adjustments. (With these sorts of games, I bet you can usually tell if a design element is “fun” within a handful of minutes by trying it . . . and trying a different track or variable could be equally fast.)

Compare this with adventure games, where the need to work in parallel on design decisions, art assets, and storylines often combine in ways that are devilishly difficult to disentwine. If the developers determined Deadline would’ve been better-suited for a plot-based timeline (like Ballyhoo) instead of a clock-based one, or Maniac Mansion‘s creators had decided that a Use/Look interface was better than the 12-command menu, it would’ve been prohibitively difficult/expensive to fix that.

At least, that’s my best guess . . . :-)

- Chet Bolingbroke

February 8, 2019 at 5:22 am

This pair of articles are some of the best game-related writing I’ve ever seen. Thank you as always for the unparalleled depth that you offer.

- Pog

February 8, 2019 at 10:54 pm

You should play the last Zelda. Just this game. You will be happy.

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- Corey Cole

February 13, 2019 at 11:08 pm

Great article on one of my favorite 1990’s games! I’m surprised that Wolfenstein 3D came out after UU – I remember discussions with Lori about how wonderful it would be to use an FPS engine to make a role-playing game. Then when UU came out, we were delighted how well they made that idea work.

In fact, a couple of years later, maybe about the time we were talking to Brenda Sinclair about having us make a Wizardry game, I corresponded with Paul Neurath about possibly licensing the UU engine to make a new RPG. Paul warned me against it, saying that the source code was nasty – spaghetti code held together with string and chewing gum, so to speak. Regardless of what it might have taken to get the game to work, the wonder is that of the dancing bear – It did work, and it worked well enough to make players feel they were there in those caves. As you say, they made an amazing number of correct decisions in such a complex project!

We certainly wanted more UU-like games to play with new settings and stories, but I was disappointed with UU2. I thought at the time that it was probably an Uncanny Valley situation. By using known characters from Ultima such as Iolo and Dupre in such an immersive environment, I expected them to *be* those characters. Instead I found that they each had only a few lines of pat dialogue, in some cases at odds with their characters in previous Ultima games. It broke the immersion instead of adding to it.

- Lt. Nitpicker

February 17, 2019 at 6:04 pm

(It’s worth noting as well that even id wouldn’t arrive at the WASD standard for quite some time after Ultima Underworld and Wolfenstein 3D. As late as 1993’s Doom, they would still be mapping the arrow keys to movement by default.)

Worth noting that id was still setting arrow keys for movement by default in 1997’s Quake II, although it shipped with a optional thresh.cfg file, thresh being the nickname of the player who popularized the scheme.

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- Jonathan "J.D." Arnold

March 25, 2019 at 1:53 pm

There’s a reason the levels all have their own personality – we all got to design a level! IIRC, my level is actually the one you pictured – level 3, with the river going through it. Definitely one of the best parts of working on UU.

Ultima VII
February 15, 2019

From the time that Richard and Robert Garriott first founded Origin Systems in order to publish Ultima III, the completion of one Ultima game was followed almost immediately by the beginning of work on the next. Ultima VI in early 1990 was no exception; there was time only for a wrap party and a couple of weeks of decompression before work started on Ultima VII. The latter project continued even as separate teams made the two rather delightful Worlds of Ultima spinoffs using the old Ultima VI engine, and even as another Origin game called Wing Commander sold far more copies than any previous Ultima, spawning an extremely lucrative new franchise that for the first time ever made Origin into something other than The House That Ultima Built.

But whatever the source, money was always welcome. The new rival for the affections of Origin’s fans and investors gave Richard Garriott more of it to play with than ever before, and his ambitions for his latest Ultima were elevated to match. One of the series’s core ethos had always been that of continual technological improvement. Garriott had long considered it a point of pride to never use the same engine twice (a position he had budged from only reluctantly when he allowed the Worlds of Ultima spinoffs to be made). Thus it came as no surprise that he wanted to push things forward yet again with Ultima VII. Even in light of the series’s tradition, however, this was soon shaping up to be an unusually ambitious installment — indeed, by far the most ambitious technological leap that the series had made to date.

As I noted in my article on that game, the Ultima VI engine was, at least when seen retrospectively, a not entirely comfortable halfway point between the old “alphabet soup” keyboard-based interface of the first five games and a new approach which fully embraced the mouse and other modern computing affordances. Traces of the old were still to be found scattered everywhere amidst the new, and using the interface effectively meant constantly switching between keyboard-centric and mouse-centric paradigms for different tasks. Ultima VII would end such equivocation, shedding all traces of the interfaces of yore.

These screenshots from a Computer Gaming World preview of the game provide an interesting snapshot of Ultima VII in a formative state. The graphics are less refined than the final version, but the pop-up interface and the graphical containment model — more on that fraught subject later — are in place.

For the first time since Richard Garriott had discovered the magic of tile graphics in his dorm room at the University of Texas, the world of this latest Ultima was not to be built using that technique; Origin opted instead for a free-scrolling world shown from an overhead perspective, canted just slightly to convey the impression of depth. Gone along with the discrete tiles were the discrete turns of the previous Ultima games, replaced by true real-time gameplay. The world model included height — 16 possible levels of it! — as well as the other dimensions; characters could climb stairs to other floors in a building or walk up a hillside outdoors while remaining in the same contiguous space. In a move that must strike anyone familiar with the games of today as almost eerily prescient, Origin excised any trace of static onscreen interface elements. Instead the entire screen was given over to a glorious view of Britannia, with the interface popping up over this backdrop as needed. The whole production was designed with the mouse in mind first and foremost. Do you want your character to pick up a sword? Click on him to bring up his paper-doll inventory display, then drag the sword with the mouse right out of the world and into his hand. All of the things that the Ultima VI engine seemed like it ought to be able to do, but which proved far more awkward than anticipated, the Ultima VII engine did elegantly and effortlessly.

Looking for a way to reduce onscreen clutter and to show as much of the world of Britannia as possible at one time, Origin realized they could pop up interface elements only when needed. This innovation, seldom seen before, has become ubiquitous in the games — and, indeed, in the software in general — of today.

Origin had now fully embraced a Hollywood-style approach to game production, marked by specialists working within strictly defined roles, and the team which built Ultima VII reflected this. Even the artists were specialized. Glen Johnson, a former comic-book illustrator, was responsible for the characters and monsters as they appeared in the world. Michael Priest was the resident portrait artist, responsible for the closeups of faces that appeared whenever the player talked to someone. The most specialized artistic role of all belonged to Bob Cook, a landscape artist hired to keep the multi-level environment coherent and proportional.

Of course, there were plenty of programmers as well, and they had their work cut out for them. Bringing Garriott’s latest Ultima to life would require pushing the latest hardware right to the edge and, in some situations, beyond it. Perhaps the best example of the programmers’ determination to find a way at all costs is their Voodoo memory manager. Frustrated with MS-DOS’s 640 K memory barrier and unhappy with all of the solutions for getting around it, the programming team rolled up their sleeves and coded a solution of their own from scratch. It would force virtually everyone who played the game at its release to boot their machines from a custom floppy, and would give later users even more headaches; in fact, it would render the game unplayable on many post-early-1990s machines, until the advent of software emulation layers like DOSBox. Yet it was the only way the programming team could make the game work at all in 1992.

As usual for an Ultima, the story and structure of play evolved only slowly, after the strengths and limitations of the technology that would need to enable them were becoming clear. Richard Garriott began with one overriding determination: he wanted a real bad guy this time, not just someone who was misguided or misunderstood: “We wanted a bad guy who was really evil, truly, truly evil.” He envisioned an antagonist for the Avatar cut from the classic cloth of novelistic and cinematic villains, one who could stick around for at least the next few games. Thus was born the disembodied spirit of evil known as the Guardian, who would indeed proceed to dog the Avatar’s footsteps all the way through Ultima IX. One might be tempted to view this seeming return to a black-versus-white conception of morality as a step back for the series thematically. But, as Garriott was apparently aware, the moral plot twists of the previous two games risked becoming a cliché in themselves if perpetuated indefinitely.

Then too, while Ultima VII would present a story carrying less obvious thematic baggage than the last games, that story would be executed far more capably than any of those others. For, as the most welcome byproduct of the new focus on specialization, Origin finally hired a real writing team.

Raymond Benson and Richard Garriott take the stage together for an Austin theatrical fundraiser with a Valentines Day theme. Benson played his “love theme” from Ultima VII while Garriott recited “The Song of Solomon” — with tongue planted firmly in cheek, of course.

The new head writer, destined to make a profound impact on the game, was an intriguingly multi-talented fellow named Raymond Benson. Born in 1955, he was a native of Origin’s hometown of Austin, Texas, but had spent the last decade or so in New York City, writing, directing, and composing music for stage productions. As a sort of sideline, he’d also dabbled in games, writing an adventure for the James Bond 007 tabletop RPG and writing three text-adventure adaptations of popular novels during the brief mid-1980s heyday of bookware: The Mist, A View to a Kill, and Goldfinger. Now, he and his wife had recently started a family, and were tired of their cramped Manhattan flat and the cutthroat New York theater scene. When they saw an advertisement from Origin in an Austin newspaper, seeking “artists, musicians, and programmers,” Benson decided to apply. He was hired to be none of those things — although he would contribute some of his original music to Ultima VII — but rather to be a writer.

When he crossed paths with the rest of Origin Systems, Benson was both coming from and going to very different places than the majority of the staff there, and his year-long sojourn with them proved just a little uncomfortable. Benson:

It was like working in the boys’ dormitory. I was older than most of the employees, who were 95 percent male. In fact, I believe less than ten out of fifty or sixty employees were over thirty, and I was one of them. So, I kind of felt like the old fart a lot of times. Most of the employees were young single guys, and it didn’t matter to them if they stayed at the office all night, had barbecues at midnight, and slept in a sleeping bag until noon. Because I had a family, I needed to keep fairly regular 8-to-5 hours, which is pretty impossible at a games company.

A snapshot of the cultural gulf between Benson and the average Origin employee is provided by an article in the company’s in-house newsletter entitled “What Influences Us?” Amidst lists of “favorite fantasy/science fiction films” and “favorite action/adventure films,” Benson chooses his “ten favorite novels,” unspooling an eclectic list that ranges from Dracula to The Catcher in the Rye, Lucky Jim to Maia — no J.R.R. Tolkien or Robert Heinlein in sight!

Some of the references in Ultima VII feel like they just had to have come directly from the slightly older, more culturally sophisticated diversified mind of Raymond Benson. Here, for instance, is a riff on Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin’s landmark work of first-person journalism about racial prejudice in the United States.

It’s precisely because of his different background and interests that Benson’s contribution to Ultima VII became so important. Most of the writing in the game was actually dialog, and deft characterization through dialog was something his theatrical background had left him well-prepared to tackle. Working with and gently coaching a team consisting of four other, less experienced writers, he turned Richard Garriott’s vague story outline, about the evil Guardian and his attempt to seize control of Britannia through a seemingly benign religious movement known as the Fellowship, into the best-written Ultima ever. The indelible Ultima tradition of flagrantly misused “thees” and “thous” aside, the writing in Ultima VII never grates, and frequently sparkles. Few games since the heyday of Infocom could equal it. Considering that Ultima VII alone has quite possibly as much text as every Infocom game combined, that’s a major achievement.

The huge contributions made by Raymond Benson and the rest of the writing team — not to mention so many other artists, programmers, and environment designers — do raise the philosophical question of how much Ultima VII can still be considered a Richard Garriott game, full stop. From the time that his brother Robert convinced him that he simply couldn’t create Ultima V all by himself, as he had all of his games up to that point, Richard’s involvement with the nitty-gritty details of their development had become steadily less. By the early 1990s, we can perhaps already begin to see some signs of the checkered post-Origin career in game development that awaited him — the career of a basically good-natured guy with heaps of money, an awful lot of extracurricular interests, and a resultant short attention span. He was happy to throw out Big Ideas to set the direction of development, and he clearly still relished demonstrating Origin’s latest products and playing Lord British, but his days of fussing too much over the details were, it seems, already behind him by the time of Ultima VII. Given a choice between sitting down to make a computer game or throwing one of his signature birthday bashes or Halloween spook houses — or, for that matter, merely playing the wealthy young gentleman-about-town in Austin high society more generally — one suspects that Garriott would opt for one of the latter every time.

Which isn’t to say that his softer skill set wasn’t welcome in a company in transition, in which tensions between the creative staff and management were starting to become noticeable. For the people on the front line actually making Ultima VII, working ridiculous hours under intense pressure for shockingly little pay, Garriott’s talents meant much indeed. He would swoop in from time to time to have lunch catered in from one of Austin’s most expensive restaurants. Or he would tell everyone to take the afternoon off because they were all going out to the park to eat barbecue and toss Frisbees around. And of course they were always all invited to those big parties he loved to throw.

Still, the tensions remained, and shouldn’t be overlooked. Lurking around the edges of management’s attitude toward their employees was the knowledge that Origin was the only significant game developer in Austin, a fast-growing, prosperous city with a lot of eager young talent. Indeed, prior to the rise of id Software up in Dallas, they had no real rival in all of Texas. Brian Martin, a scripter on Ultima VII, remembers being told that “people were standing in line for our jobs, and if we didn’t like the way things were, we could just leave.” Artist Glen Johnson had lived in Austin at the time Origin hired him to work in their New Hampshire office, only to move him back to Austin once again when that office was closed; he liked to joke that the company had spent more money on his plane fare during his first year than on his salary.

The yin to Richard Garriott’s yang inside Origin was Dallas Snell, the company’s hard-driving production manager, who was definitely not the touchy-feely type. An Origin employee named Sheri Graner Ray recounts her first encounter with him:

My interviews at Origin Systems culminated with an interview with Dallas Snell. He didn’t turn away from his computer, but sort of waved a hand in the general direction of a chair. I hesitantly took a seat. Dallas continued to type for what seemed to me to be two or three hours. Finally, he stopped, swung around in his desk chair, leaned forward, put one hand on his knee and the other on his hip, narrowed his eyes at me, and said, “You’re here for me to decide if I LIKE you.” I was TERRIFIED. Well, I guess he did, cuz I got the job, but I spent the next year ducking and avoiding him, as I figured if he ever decided he DIDN’T like me, I was in trouble!

Snell’s talk could make Origin’s games sound like something dismayingly close to sausages rolling down a production line. He was most proud of Wing Commander and Savage Empire, he said, because “these projects were done in twelve calendar months or less, as compared to the twenty-to-thirty-month time frame that previous projects were developed in!” Martian Dreams filled six megabytes on disk, yet was done in “seven calendar months!!! Totally unprecedented!!” Wing Commander II filled 15 megabytes, yet “the entire project will have been developed in eight calendar months!!!” He concluded that “no one, absolutely no one, has done what we have, or what we are yet still capable of!!! Not Lucasfilm, not Sierra, not MicroProse, not Electronic Arts, not anyone!” The unspoken question was, at what cost to Origin’s staff?

It would be unfair to label Origin Systems, much less Dallas Snell alone, the inventor of the games industry’s crunch-time culture and its unattractive byproduct and enabler, the reliance on an endless churn of cheap young labor willing to let themselves be exploited for the privilege of making games. Certainly similar situations were beginning to arise at other major studios in the early 1990s. And it’s also true that the employees of Origin and those other studios were hardly the first ones to work long hours for little pay making games. Yet there was, I think, a qualitative difference at play. The games of the 1980s had mostly been made by very small teams with little hierarchy, where everyone could play a big creative role and feel a degree of creative ownership of the end product. By the early 1990s, though, the teams were growing in size; over the course of 1991 alone, Origin’s total technical and creative staff grew from 40 to 120 people. Thus companies like Origin were instituting — necessarily, given the number of people involved — more rigid tiers of roles and specialties. In time, this would lead to the cliché of the young 3D modeller working 100-hour weeks making trees, with no idea of where they would go in the finished game and no way to even find out, much less influence the creative direction of the final product in any more holistic sense. For such cogs in the machine, getting to actually make games (!) would prove rather less magical than expected.

Origin was still a long way from that point, but I fancy that the roots of the oft-dehumanizing culture of modern AAA game production can be seen here. Management’s occasional attempts to address the issue also ring eerily familiar. In the midst of Ultima VII, Dallas Snell announced that “the 24-hour work cycle has outlived its productivity”: “All employees are required to start the day by 10:00 AM and call it a day by midnight. The lounge is being returned to its former glory (as a lounge, that is, without beds).” Needless to say, the initiative didn’t last, conflicting as it did with the pressing financial need to get the game done and on the market.

Simply put, Ultima VII was expensive — undoubtedly the most expensive game Origin had ever made, and one of the most expensive computer game anyone had yet made. Just after its release, Richard Garriott claimed that it had cost $1 million. Of course, the number is comically low by modern standards, even when adjusted for inflation — but this was a time when a major hit might only sell 100,000 units rather than the 10 million or so of today.

Origin had first planned to release Ultima VII in time for the Christmas of 1991, an impossibly optimistic time frame (impossibly optimistic time frames being another trait which the Origin of the early 1990s shares with many game studios of today). When it became clear that no amount of crunch would allow the team to meet that deadline, the pressure to get it out as soon as possible after Christmas only increased. Looking over their accounts at year’s end, Origin realized that 90 percent of their revenue in 1991 had come through the Wing Commander franchise; had Wing Commander II not become as huge a hit as the first installment, they would have been bankrupt. This subsidizing of Ultima with Wing Commander was an uncomfortable place to be, and not just for the impact it might have had on Lord British’s (alter) ego. It meant that, with no major Wing Commander releases due in 1992, an under-performing Ultima VII could take down the whole company. Many at Origin were surprisingly clear-eyed about the dangers which beset them. Mike McShaffry, a programmer and unusually diligent student of the company’s financial situation among the rank and file — unsurprisingly, he would later become an entrepreneur himself — expressed his concern: “The road ahead for us is a bumpy one. Many companies do not survive the ‘boom town’ growth phase that we have just experienced.”

Thus when Ultima VII: The Black Gate — the subtitle was an unusually important one, given that Origin had already authorized a confusingly titled Ultima VII Part Two using the same game engine — shipped on April 16, 1992, the whole company’s future was riding on it.

Classic games, it seems to me, can be plotted on a continuum between two archetypes. At one pole are the games which do everything right — those whose designers, faced with a multitude of small and large choices, have made the right choice every time. Ultima Underworld, the spinoff game which Origin released just two weeks before Ultima VII, is one of these.

The other archetypal classic game is much rarer: the game whose designers have made a lot of really problematic choices, to the point that certain parts of it may be flat-out broken, but which nevertheless charms and delights due to some ineffable spirit that overshadows everything else. Ultima VII is the finest example of this type that I can think of. Its list of trouble spots is longer than that of many genuinely bad games, and yet its special qualities are so special that I can only recommend that you play it.

Inventory management in Ultima VII. It’s really, really hard to find anything, especially in the dark. Of course, I could fire up a torch… but wait! My torches are buried somewhere under all that mess in my pack.

Any list of that which is confusing, infuriating, or just plain boring in Ultima VII must start with the inventory-management system. The drag-and-drop approach to same is brilliant in conception, but profoundly flawed in execution. You need to cart a lot of stuff around in this game — not just weapons and armor and quest items and money and loot, but also dozens of pieces of food to keep your insatiable characters fed on their journeys and dozens or hundreds of magic reagents to let you cast spells. All of this is lumped together in your characters’ packs as an indeterminate splodge of overlapping icons. Unless you formulate a detailed scheme of exactly what should go where and stick to it with the rigidity of a pedant, you’ll sometimes find it impossible to figure out what you actually have and where it is on your characters’ persons. When that happens, you’ll have to resort to finding a clear spot of ground and laying out the contents of each pack on it one by one, looking for that special little whatsit.

Keys belong to their own unique circle of Inventory Hell. Just a few pixels big, they have a particular tendency to get hopelessly lost at the bottom of your pack along with those leftover leeks you picked up for some reason in the bar last night. Further, keys are distinguished only by their style and color — the game does nothing so friendly as tell you what door a given key opens, even after you’ve successfully used it — and there are a lot of them. So, you never feel quite confident when you can’t open a door that you haven’t just overlooked the key somewhere in the swirling chaos vortex that is your inventory. If you really love packing your suitcase before a big trip, you might enjoy Ultima VII’s inventory management. Otherwise, you’ll find it to be a nightmare.

The combat system is almost as bad. Clearly Origin, to put it as kindly as possible, struggled to adapt combat to the real-time paradigm. While you can assemble a party of up to eight people, you can only directly control the Avatar himself in combat, and that only under a fairly generous definition of “control.” You click a button telling your people to start fighting, whereupon everyone, friend and foe alike, converges upon the same pixel as occasional words — “Aargh!,” “To arms!,” “Vultures will pick thy bones!” — float out of the scrum. The effect is a bit like those old Warner Bros. cartoons where Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner disappear into a cloud of arms and legs until one of them pops out victorious a few seconds later.

The one way to change this dynamic also happens to be the worst possible thing you can do: equipping your characters with ranged weapons. This will cause them to open fire indiscriminately in the vague direction of the aforementioned pixel of convergence, happily riddling any foes and friends alike who happen to be in the way full of arrows. In light of this, one can only be happy that the Avatar is the only one allowed to use magic; the thought of this lot of nincompoops armed with fireballs and magic missiles is downright terrifying. Theoretically, it’s possible to control combat to some degree by choosing from several abstract strategies for each character, and to directly intervene with the Avatar by clicking specific targets, but in practice none of it makes much difference. By the time some of your characters start deciding to throw down all their weapons and hide in a corner for no apparent reason, you just shrug and accept it; it’s as explicable as anything else here.

You’ll learn to dread your party’s constant mewling for food, not least because it forces you to engage with the dreadful inventory system. (No, they can’t feed themselves. You have to hand-feed each one of them like a little birdie.)

Thankfully, nothing else in the game is quite as bad as these two aspects, but there are other niggling annoyances. The need to manually feed your characters is prominent among them. There’s no challenge to collecting food, given that there are lots of infallible means of collecting money to buy it. The real problem is that those means are all so tedious. (I spent literally hours when I played the game marching back and forth from one end of the town of Britain to the other, buying meat cheap and selling it expensive, all so as to buy yet more meat to feed my hungry lot.) The need for food serves only to extend the length of a game that doesn’t need to be extended, and to do it in the most boring way possible.

But then, this sort of thing had always been par for the course with any Ultima, a series that always tended to leaven its inspired elements with a solid helping of tedium. And then too, Ultima had always been a little wonky when it came to its mechanics; Richard Garriott ceded that ground to Wizardry back in the days of Ultima I, and never really tried to regain it. Still, it’s amazing how poorly Ultima VII, a game frequently praised as one of the best CRPGs ever made, does as a CRPG, at least as most people thought of the genre circa 1992. Because there’s no interest or pleasure in combat, there’s no thrill to leveling up or collecting new weapons and armor. You have little opportunity to shape your characters’ development in any way, and those sops to character management that are present, such as the food system, merely annoy. Dungeons — many or most of them optional — are scattered around, but they’re fairly small while still managing to be confusing; the free-scrolling movement makes them almost impossible to map accurately on paper, yet the game lacks an auto-map. If you see a CRPG as a game in the most traditional sense of the word — as an intricate system of rules to learn and to manipulate to your advantage — you’ll hate, hate, hate Ultima VII for its careless mechanics. One might say that it’s at its worst when it actively tries to be a CRPG, at its best when it’s content to be a sort of Britannian walking simulator.

And yet I don’t dislike the game as much as all of the above might imply. In fact, Ultima VII is my third favorite game to bear the Ultima name, behind only Martian Dreams and the first Ultima Underworld. The reason comes down to how compelling the aforementioned walking simulator actually manages to be.

I’ve never cared much one way or the other about Britannia as a setting, but darned if Ultima VII doesn’t shed a whole new light on the place. At its best, playing this game is… pleasant, a word not used much in regard to ludic aesthetics, but one that perhaps ought to crop up more frequently. The graphics are colorful, the music lovely, the company you keep more often than not charming. It’s disarmingly engaging just to wander around and talk to people.

Underneath the pleasantness, not so much undercutting it as giving it more texture, is a note of melancholy. This adventure in Britannia takes place many years after the Avatar’s previous ones, and the old companions in adventure who make up his party are as enthusiastic as ever, but also a little grayer, a little more stooped. Meanwhile other old friends (and enemies) from the previous games are forever waiting in the wings for one last cameo. If a Britannia scoffer like me can feel a certain poignancy, it must be that much more pronounced for those who are more invested in the setting. Today, the valedictory feel to Ultima VII is that much more affecting because we know for sure that this is indeed the end of the line for the classic incarnation of Britannia. The single-player series wouldn’t return there until Ultima IX, and that unloved game would alter the place’s personality almost beyond recognition. Ah, well… it’s hard to imagine a lovelier, more affectionate sendoff for old-school Britannia than the one it gets here.

The writing team loves to flirt with the fourth wall. Fortunately, they never quite take it to the point of undermining the rest of the fiction.

Yet even as the game pays loving tribute to the Britannia of yore, there’s an aesthetic sophistication about it that belies the series’s teenage-dungeonmaster roots. It starts with the box, which, apart from the title, is a foreboding solid black. The very simplicity screams major statement, like the Beatles’ White Album or Prince’s Black Album. Certainly it’s a long way from the heaving bosoms and fire-breathing dragons of the typical CRPG cover art.

When you start the game, you’re first greeted with a title screen that evokes the iconic opening sequence to Ultima IV, all bright spring colors and music that smacks of Vivaldi. But then, in the first of many toyings with the fourth wall, the scene dissolves into static, to be replaced by the figure of the Guardian speaking directly to you.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/intro-1.mp4

As you wander through Britannia in the game proper, the Guardian will continue to speak to you from time to time — the only voice acting in the game. His ominous presence is constantly jarring you when you least expect it.

The video snippet below of a play within the play, as it were, that you encounter early in the game illustrates some more of the depth and nuance of Ultima VII’s writing. (Needless to say, this scene in particular owes much to Raymond Benson’s theatrical background.)

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/U7.mp4

This sequence offers a rather extraordinary layer cake of meanings, making it the equal of a sophisticated stage or film production. We have the deliberately, banally bad play put on by the Fellowship actors, with its “moon, June, spoon” rhymes. Yet peeking through the banality, making it feel sinister rather than just inept, is a hint of cult-like menace. Meanwhile the asides of our companions tell us not only that the writers know the play is bad, but that said companions are smart enough to recognize it as well. We have Iolo’s witty near-breaking of the fourth wall with his comment about “visual effects.” And then we have Spark’s final verdict on the passion play, delivered as only a teenager can: “This is terrible!” (For some reason, that line makes me laugh every time.) No other game of 1992, with the possible exception only of the text adventure Shades of Gray, wove so many variegated threads of understanding into its writing. Nor is the scene above singular. The writing frequently displays the same wit and sophistication as what you see above. This is writing by and for adults.

The description of Ultima VII’s writing as more adult than the norm also applies in the way in which the videogame industry typically uses that adjective. There’s a great extended riff on the old myths of unicorns and virgins. The conversation with a horny unicorn devolves into speculation about whether the Avatar himself is, shall we say, fit to ride the beast…

For all of the cutting-edge programming that went into the game, it really is the writing that does the bulk of the heavy lifting in Ultima VII. And it’s here that this early million-dollar computer game stands out most from the many big-budget productions that would follow it. Origin poured a huge percentage of that budget not into graphics or sound but into content in its purest form. If not the broadest world yet created for a computer at the time of the game’s release, this incarnation of Britannia must be the deepest and most varied. Nothing here is rote; every character has a personality, every character has something all her own to say. The sheer scale of the project which Raymond Benson’s team tackled — this game definitely has more words in it than any computer game before it — is well-nigh flabbergasting.

Further, the writers have more on their minds than escapist fantasy. They use the setting of Britannia to ponder the allure of religious cults, the social divide between rich and poor, and even the representation of women in fantasy art, along with tax policy, environmental issues, and racism. The game is never preachy about such matters, but seamlessly works its little nuggets for thought into the high-fantasy setting. Ultima VII may lack the overriding moral message that had defined its three predecessors, but that doesn’t mean it has nothing to say. Indeed, given the newfound nuance and depth of the writing, the series suddenly has more to say here than ever before.

Because of how much else there is to see and do, the main plot about the Guardian sometimes threatens to get forgotten entirely. But it’s enjoyable enough as such things go, even if its main purpose often does seem to be simply to give you a reason to wander around talking to people. In the second half of the game, the plot picks up steam, and there are a fair number of traditional CRPG-style quests to complete. (There are also more personal “quests” among the populaces of the towns you visit, but they’re largely optional and hardly earth-shattering. They are, however, often disarmingly sweet-natured: getting the shy lovelorn fellow together with the girl he worships from afar… that sort of thing.) The game as a whole is very soluble as long as you take notes when you’re given important information; there’s no trace of a quest log here.

While a vocal minority of Ultima fandom decries this seventh installment for the perfectly justifiable reasons I mentioned earlier in this article, the majority laud it as — forgive the inevitable pun! — the ultimate incarnation of what Richard Garriott began working toward in the late 1970s. Even with all of its annoying aspects, it’s undoubtedly the most accessible Ultima for the modern player, what with its fairly intuitive mouse-driven interface, its reasonably attractive graphics and sound, and its relatively straightforward and fair main quest. Meanwhile its nuanced writing and general aesthetic sophistication are unrivaled by any earlier game in the series. If it’s not the most historically important of the main-line Ultima games — that honor must still go to the thematically groundbreaking Ultima IV — it’s undoubtedly the one most likely to be enjoyed by a player today.

Indeed, it’s been called the blueprint for many of the most popular epic CRPGs of today — games where you also spend much of your time just walking around and talking to a host of more or less interesting characters. That influence can easily be overstated, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to the claim. No other CRPG in 1992, or for some time thereafter, played quite like this one, and Ultima VII really does have at least as much in common with the CRPGs of today as it does with its contemporaries. On the whole, then, its hallowed modern reputation is well-earned.

Richard Garriott (far left) and the rest of the Ultima VII team toast the game’s release at Britannia Manor, the former’s Austin mansion.

Its reception in 1992, on the other hand, was far more mixed than that reputation might suggest. Questbusters magazine, deploying an unusually erudite literary comparison of the type of which Raymond Benson might have approved, called it “the Finnegans Wake of computer gaming — a flawed masterpiece,” referring to its lumpy mixture of the compelling and the tedious. Computer Gaming World’s longtime adventure reviewer Scorpia had little good at all to say about it. Perhaps in response to her negativity, the same magazine ran a second, much more positive review from Charles Ardai in the next issue. Nevertheless, he began by summing up the sense of ennui that was starting to surround the whole series for many gamers: “Many who were delighted when Ultima VI was released can’t be bothered to boot up Ultima VII, as though it goes without saying that the seventh of anything can’t possibly be any good. The market suddenly seems saturated; weary gamers, sure that they have played enough Ultima to last a lifetime, eye the new Ultima with suspicion that it is just More Of The Same.” Even at the end of his own positive review, written with the self-stated goal of debunking that judgment, Ardai deployed a counter-intuitive closing sentiment: “After seven Ultimas, it might be time for Lord British to turn his sights elsewhere.”

Not helping the game’s reception were all of the technical problems. It’s all too easy to forget today just how expensive it was to be a computer gamer in the early 1990s, when the rapid advancement of technology meant that you had to buy a whole new computer every couple of years — or less! — just to be able to play the latest releases. More so even that its contemporaries, Ultima VII pushed the state of the art in hardware to its limit, meaning that anyone lagging even slightly behind the bleeding edge got to enjoy constant disk access, intermittent freezes of seconds at a time, and the occasional outright crash.

And then there were the bugs, which were colorful and plentiful. Chunks of the scenery seemed to randomly disappear — including the walls around the starting town of Trinsic, thus bypassing the manual-lookup scheme Origin had implemented for copy protection. A plot-critical murder scene in another town simply never appeared for some players. Even worse, a door in the very last dungeon refused to open for some; Origin resorted to asking those affected to send their save file on floppy disk to their offices, to be manually edited in order to correct the problem and sent back to them. But by far the most insidious bug — one from which even the current edition of the game on digital-download services may not be entirely free — were the keys that disappeared from player’s inventories for no apparent reason. Given what a nightmare keeping track of keys was already, this felt like the perfect capstone to a tower of terribleness. (One can imagine the calls to Origin’s customer support: “Now, did you take all of the stuff out of all of your packs and sort it out carefully on the ground to make sure your key is really missing? What about those weeks-old leeks down there at the bottom of your pack? Did you look under them?”) Gamers had good cause to be annoyed at a product so obviously released before its time, especially in light of its astronomical $80 suggested retail price.

A Computer Gaming World readers’ poll published in the March 1993 issue — i.e., exactly one year after Ultima VII’s release — saw it ranked as the respondents’ 30th favorite current game, not exactly a spectacular showing for such a major title. Wing Commander II, by way of comparison, was still in position six, Ultima Underworld — which was now outselling Ultima VII by a considerable margin — in a tie for third. It would be incorrect to call Ultima VII a flop, or to imply that it wasn’t thoroughly enjoyed by many of those who played it back in the day. But for Origin the facts remained when all was said and done that it had sold less well than either of the aforementioned two games after costing at least twice as much to make. These hard facts contributed to the feeling inside the company that, if it wasn’t time to follow Charles Ardai’s advice and let sleeping Ultimas lie for a while, it was time to change up the gameplay formula in a major way. After all, Ultima Underworld had done just that, and look how well that had worked out.

But that discussion, of course, belongs to history. In our own times, Ultima VII remains an inspiring if occasionally infuriating experience well worth having, even if you don’t normally play CRPGs or couldn’t care less about the lore of Britannia. I can only encourage all of you who haven’t played it before to remedy that while you wait for my next (and last) article about the game, which will look more closely at the Fellowship, a Britannian cult with an obvious Earthly analogue.

(Sources: the book Ultima: The Avatar Adventures by Rusel DeMaria and Caroline Spector; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin dated August 7 1991, October 25 1991, December 20 1991, February 14 1992, February 28 1992, March 13 1992, April 20 1992, and May 22 1992; Questbusters of July 1991 and August 1992; Computer Gaming World of April 1991, October 1991, August 1992, September 1992, and March 1993; Compute! of January 1992; online sources include The Ultima Codex interviews with Raymond Benson and Brian Martin, a vintage Usenet interview with Richard Garriott, and Sheri Graner Ray’s recollections of her time at Origin on her blog.

Ultima VII: The Black Gate is available for purchase on GOG.com. You may wish to play it using Exult instead of the original executable. The former is a free re-implementation of the Ultima VII engine which fixes some of its worst annoyances and is friendly with modern computers.)

Comments
60 Responses

- Casey Nordell

February 15, 2019 at 5:10 pm

By this time we had reached peak Ultima. As you note, we have the “best written Ultima ever” in U7 and the “most playable Ultima ever” in UW. These were good times and I remember them well. Thanks so much for writing this and the Underworld articles.

- Slashing Dragon

February 15, 2019 at 8:22 pm

Awesome article. Thank you!

To me, this started the downfall of the Ultima series, where the push to break technology boundaries finally led to a loosely designed game with varying quality of subsystems that were not very well integrated, a fancy walking simulator but a game which made it really hard to have fun with.

- Steve

February 15, 2019 at 8:42 pm

“Given a choice between sitting down to make a computer game or throwing one of his signature birthday bashes or Halloween spook houses — or, for that matter, merely playing the wealthy young gentleman-about-town in Austin high society more generally — one suspects that Garriott would opt for one of the latter every time.”

A very prophetic statement about Richard Garriott because one of the main criticisms of his current Ultima-like project, Shroud of the Avatar, is that he has little to no involvement with the game itself and instead spends most of his time enjoying his celebrity status.

- jacen

February 15, 2019 at 8:43 pm

“Yet peaking through the banality”

Peeking? Ugh, English, why you so hard

- Jimmy Maher

February 15, 2019 at 9:00 pm

Sigh. That’s a mistake I make constantly. Thanks!

- typolice

February 16, 2019 at 4:32 am

One more: “meat to feet my hungry lot”

- Jimmy Maher

February 16, 2019 at 7:14 am

Thanks!

- Ricky Derocher

February 15, 2019 at 8:55 pm

“…and quite possibly the most expensive computer game anyone had yet made. Just after its release, Richard Garriott claimed that it had cost $1 million to make, the first time to my knowledge that that milestone figure was associated with any game”.

Space Quest IV was released in March 1991 – and “the game cost over US$1,000,000 to produce”.

- Jimmy Maher

February 15, 2019 at 9:01 pm

My knowledge appears to be incomplete. ;) Do you have a source on that quote?

- Ricky Derocher

February 15, 2019 at 9:50 pm

I know that I saw the tidbit in other places before, but after Googling for a bit, I can’t find a source other that the Wikipedia article for Space Quest IV.

Anyways, Sierra’s King’s Quest V (released in 1990) cost over a million to produce. According to the King’s Quest Collection Series manual – “It was Sierra’s first million-dollar-plus production effort”.

http://www.sierrahelp.com/Documents/Manuals/Kings_Quest_-_Collection_Series_-_Manual.pdf

SQ IV probably broke the million mark as well, since it was developed around the same time and Sierra was starting to up their graphics to VGA, etc. Sorry, that I can’t find a more definite source than Wikipedia. :-(

- Jimmy Maher

February 15, 2019 at 10:30 pm

I had thought King’s Quest V came close, but came in around $800,000. But the issue is murky enough that I excised the claim from the article. Thanks!

- whomever

February 15, 2019 at 9:12 pm

You mention music, but I want to just emphasize that IMHO this was probably the game that really justified the MT-32. IMHO Dana Glover did a great job (for the time at least) and especially the use of thematic elements. I still remember the fellowship theme to this day.

Also you mention this but the “this is like no other Ultima” bit really does work; the slightly dark edge, the feeling that something has gone wrong with Britannia (which to be fair U5 also did but this was in may ways darker), the Guardian as this mysterious figure…18 year old me absolutely loved this game. And of course the open world you can just wander about and find the tiny details (the crashed Kilrathi ship!) and ignore the plot completely.

That said I guess I was lucky not to run into the bugs, because I did hear about them. Was this the beginning of Origin’s rather strong mid-90s reputation for rather, ah, lax QA I wonder? Also agreed that this (Ok, Serpent’s Isle) is the end of Ultima; much like Highlander sequels it’s better to ignore anything that came after, Though I actually would be curious to read an article about just WHY Ultima VIII was such a disaster, including the bugs, terrible story line, and really everything else.

- Jimmy Maher

February 15, 2019 at 10:37 pm

Yeah, that should make for an interesting research project, and hopefully an interesting article!

- stepped pyramids

February 16, 2019 at 7:30 pm

Serpent’s Isle is interesting in that it takes both the virtues and flaws of Black Gate and amplifies them. It has better writing and a more interesting plot, but it’s even buggier and clearly suffered badly from budget and time constraints, resulting in an extremely plot-light third act that is mostly a bunch of busywork. It’s still my favorite game in the series, closely followed by Martian Dreams.

SI is also pretty notable for being one of the earlier signs of western RPGs favoring tighter plotting and character development over nonlinearity. You could remake it in RPG Maker and it’d almost play better as a JRPG.

- Jimmy Maher

February 17, 2019 at 12:00 pm

Will have a lot more to say about Serpent Isle in my article on that game proper, but I can’t agree that the writing is better. While not *bad* for the genre, it’s much less textured and much more reliant on epic-fantasy cliches. On the other hand, Serpent Isle is arguably a more varied and interesting *game*, giving you a lot more to actively do — at least until it slowly begins to go off the rails about the time you make it to the Frozen North.

- Infinitron

February 17, 2019 at 6:07 pm

The crucial thing about Serpent Isle is that everything you said about Black Gate being a valedictory tribute is even more true with regard to Serpent Isle. The game is a lovely piece of fan service. Somebody who doesn’t care much about the series’ lore wouldn’t get as much out of it, of course.

- stepped pyramids

February 17, 2019 at 6:17 pm

There’s just a lot about the texture in Black Gate that doesn’t really work for me. It kind of annoys me, for instance, that they managed to find the time to put an absolutely endless Laurel and Hardy homage into the game but not to add any new dialogue for Lord British as you unravel the plot. LB is so passive and useless in VII that he’s almost a villain. (Even pre-Batlin, it sure seems like he’s let Britannia fall into decline.)

Black Gate also has a lot of variability between areas in terms of quality of dialogue. Paws and Serpent’s Hold almost don’t feel like they’re from the same game. If the rest of the game had a tone consistent with Paws I’d hold the writing in much higher regard. But nah, let’s have the Avatar crack the mystery of the naked people in the bee cave.

That said, there’s a lot of stuff I do really enjoy about Black Gate’s writing. Batlin is fantastic. The gargoyles are good and tragic. Owen the legendary shipwright is a fun little subquest. The mage madness and the cube dialogue is a great example of dialogue updating with plot (in contrast to British). It’s not bad — it’s really quite good — but it’s overstuffed and wordy enough that I start finding myself asking “what exactly are they expecting me to get out of this conversation?”

- Jimmy Maher

February 17, 2019 at 6:33 pm

Reasonable points all. I agree that the Laurel and Hardy thing is nowhere near as funny as somebody on the writing team thinks it is. As one of the funniest writers ever once put it, “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

State-tracking is another area where Ultima VII leaves something to be desired, and which I was initially tempted to complain about in the article. Combined with the fact that it’s sometimes hard to know which situations in the towns you can actually affect and which you cannot, it can spawn considerable confusion when the dialog doesn’t update to reflect your actions. I suppose I’m willing to cut the game some slack here, as in so many others areas, because a) I know how all too well really, really hard this sort of thing is to implement and b) no one had ever tried to do anything quite like Ultima VII before.

The dialog in Serpent Isle, however, does generally do a better job of reflecting the current state of the game — perhaps because there’s somewhat less of it for each character.

- Bmp

February 15, 2019 at 10:42 pm

As usual, a fine article!

It feels like Ultima VII is somewhere between an RPG and an Adventure game. A couple of situations took advantage of the world simulation, such as following the mayor of Britain after nightfall to uncover his secret tryst. You can interact with all the items in the world, not just a few of them. If I remember correctly, there were a couple of puzzles that could be solved in an intuitive and “systemic” way, utilising the engine’s simulation. Very different from the puzzles in classic LucasArts Adventures where you pick up all of the items and combine them in preposterous ways (“use rubber chicken on hook”).

If you imagine Ultima VII with all the combat removed (the player character is weak or prefers to sneak), and with more puzzles that can be solved in multiple intuitive systemic/simulationist ways, plus some dialog puzzles and choices and consequences, wouldn’t you arrive at a new genre, the Systemic Explorative Open World Adventure game?

Are there any games like that?

- Joshua

February 16, 2019 at 1:25 am

The upcoming Disco Elysium!

- Chris Floyd

February 16, 2019 at 2:48 am

I would argue that’s what Martian Dreams and Savage Empire are! Open world adventure games powered by an RPG engine that all but ignore character progression and minimize combat.

- Bmp

February 16, 2019 at 9:05 am

I played Martian Dreams and thought it was similar to Ultima VII in this respect. The player is sent on a lot of fetch quests while the puzzles are few and rather simple, which is normal for RPGs. It still has one foot on the RPG side.

What I envision is something different, a game where combat and a couple of other RPG trappings have been completely removed and where puzzles take center stage, like in true Adventure games, but are to be solved by utilising the game’s simulation engine.

- Pedro Timóteo

February 16, 2019 at 10:42 am

Trespasser?

(you didn’t mention that it had to be *good*…)

- Bmp

February 16, 2019 at 12:38 pm

:) Trespasser was interesting. I only played the demo, and I remember some challenges that had to be solved by using the (wonky) physics systems.

Now physics systems do provide natural, intuitive, systemic solutions to problems, yes. But if the designers want to provide a large amount of different puzzles, they soon have to set up unrealistic contraptions (see Half-Life 2).

What the Antiquarian didn’t expand upon is that Ultima VII has a world that is simulated to an unsurpassed amount of detail. Not only can the player interact with all the items in the world, the NPCs do that too when they follow their daily schedules. For example, the street lamps in the cities are lit one by one by a lantern lighter NPC doing his rounds. Are there any other games at all that do something like this? (Aside from Dwarf Fortress, which probably also simulates the chance of the dwarf’s beard catching fire in the process.)

These simulation aspects are the ones that I think can be exploited for systemic adventure game puzzles. After all, isn’t it a large part of a detective’s work to be at the right place at the right time, to witness people interacting with items and other persons?

(These simulation details in Ultima VII are not central to the game experience, so I don’t mind that it’s not a larger part of the article. The mention of trading meat at different prices shows one aspect of the simulation detail. While these details are not central to the game, I think they lend a lot of credibility to the game’s world, which I miss in games like Baldur’s Gate.)

- Jimmy Maher

February 16, 2019 at 2:59 pm

I have a bit of a contrary view on Ultima VII’s much-vaunted “simulated world.” In fact, I cut a fairly long discourse on the subject from the article, after having decided that it already has enough negativity toward a game I actually really like. I don’t think it goes that much further in this area than Ultima VI, and a lot of it strikes me as development time that could have been better spent elsewhere, given the problems with inventory management and combat. Baking bread — to choose the most oft-cited example — is neat, but what’s it really good for? It’s far too tedious a process to actually be used as a regular source of food.

Further, I find that the degree of world simulation is quite inconsistent. The things you can do tend to raise my expectations, only to be disappointed at the many things — most things, really — that you *can’t* do. I remember, for instance, struggling for quite some time in the blacksmith’s shop in Trinsic, trying to figure out how to use the forge and all of those sword blanks to make new weapons for my party.

Ironically, the Ultima that went the farthest in the world-simulation/crafting department was one of the least heralded: Savage Island, which let you do things like make your own rifles out of saltpaper, bamboo, and rocks. Now, *that* was useful! ;)

- Martin

February 18, 2019 at 1:24 am

Saltpeter?

- Andrew

March 24, 2019 at 7:43 am

My god how long I spent trying to make weapons in Trinsic.

“What am I doing wrong?!”
“Maybe 10 pumps of the bellows instead of 8”
“Maybe I didn’t leave it in the coals long enough.”
“Do I need to hold the hammer and tongs?”
“Alright maybe 20 pumps of the bellows.”
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.

- Terilem Dragon

February 16, 2019 at 10:41 am

Another excellent article! Each one is an event and I’m looking forward to the deep dive into the Fellowship.

Just a small note: “Michael Pierce” is a misnomer in the October ’91 CGW; they meant Micael Priest, who was a prominent poster artist in the Austin music scene before joining Origin. Sadly, he passed away just last September.

- Jimmy Maher

February 16, 2019 at 3:05 pm

Thanks so much for the correction!

- Rikkles

February 16, 2019 at 1:37 pm

At the time I’d played every single Ultima since U2 at time of its release. My favorite was and still is U5, because U7’s tech simply tried to outpace itself and hurt an otherwise brilliant story and environment.
Maybe also it’s because after having fought tooth and nail against all the problems so well described in the article that, in the last dungeon of the game, so close to victory, I was thwarted by that big black closed metal panel.

The fact that I still remember it 26 years later is something worthy of a psych thesis

- Allan Holland

March 14, 2019 at 9:46 am

The fact that you remember the trauma of a game experience speaks to the immense cultural and interpersonal influences games had become by 1992. It makes you a member of this tribe for whom some perspective(s) of life were influenced or shaped by computer gaming. I confess I never solved the last riddle of Ultima 4, to my private soul-scorching shame. Couldn’t kill L’Kbreth at the end of Wizardry 3 either.

- Infinitron

February 16, 2019 at 3:59 pm

“Further, the writers have more on their minds than escapist fantasy. They use the setting of Britannia to ponder the allure of religious cults, the social divide between rich and poor, and even the representation of women in fantasy art, along with tax policy, environmental issues, and racism. ”

You could probably write a pretty interesting article just about Ultima VII’s politics. The era of politics it represents, how it differs from ours.

- Narsham

February 16, 2019 at 5:59 pm

I am amazed to learn that, as I was reading this article, I am STILL mad at Ultima VII. It came out at about the time that I was going to college, and I went from disliking how it was wasting my time to active hatred of a sort no other game has managed to provoke. I think the presence of the Internet and its varied resources are part of the explanation: when U7 came out, magazines were your best information source and you couldn’t look up all the discussions of game-breaking bugs and “features” that build frustration. I loved the other Ultimas and had versions of them for three different computer systems, so U7 was a first-day purchase for me.

After purchasing and installing, I had to spend nearly an hour tinkering with my config.sys and autoexec.bat to get the game to run; U7 was my only game that had its own boot-menu item. After initial start-up and adjustment to the mouse/visual structures of the game (I loved keyboard shortcuts and am not very visual as a person), I got into the starting mystery of the game and was closing in on that phenomenon where you want to get back to playing whenever you aren’t, when I hit a stopping point in solving the murder. I’d worked out all the details, but could figure out what I needed to do to trip the next step in the quest; the game wouldn’t give me any dialogue options to demonstrate that I’d worked through things. Without access to online help, I decided that I had to run down the murderer to advance the smaller quest, not know that that was part of a larger quest. So I stocked up on food, bought missile weapons for my companions (as, since U3, missile weapons were your best choice, and they were basically mandatory if you used the U6 AI), and hit the road.

Cue my companions starving despite having food. In their packs. This was not just busywork, it was busywork that involved that damn inventory management. I started getting angry at this point. What was next, having outhouses in the game and making your companions explode if you didn’t have them go potty every few days?

Then cue a random combat encounter. I can’t control my companions, who nearly kill me, and as I’m clicking around trying to attack the screen keeps flashing blood-red, making things even more chaotic. I always loved the tactical side of RPGs. This was an insult.

The last straw was coming across a small dungeon. I figured I might not be strong enough to explore a dungeon yet, so I saved before proceeding. The first room had some obvious floor traps; concerned about the pathing, I carefully clicked “tile” by “tile” into the room. I think I’d passed the second trap successfully when my companions, who were dancing circles around me in real time, triggered every single trap in the room, killing us all.

That wasn’t the last straw. The last straw was the Guardian taunting me for the total party kill. The game killed me thanks to its own limitations, and then insulted me for getting killed.

And I haven’t touched U7 since.

- Narsham

February 16, 2019 at 6:00 pm

” I’d worked out all the details, but could figure out what I needed to do to trip the next step in the quest…” should be “could NOT.”

- Jimmy Maher

February 16, 2019 at 6:08 pm

Interesting. The game shouldn’t have allowed you to leave the starting town without solving the murder. I wonder if you got hit by the “disappearing town walls” bug.

- Jeremy Reimer

February 16, 2019 at 6:44 pm

I have a somewhat more positive impression of Ultima 7. To me it represented a living, breathing world that subsequent RPGs, even with their sumptuous 3D graphics, have failed to reach.

The “baking bread” example is the most oft-cited one, but I never spent any time baking bread. What I loved to do more was to go into towns and watch the NPCs as they went about their daily lives. They didn’t just stand behind a shop counter all day. They would wake up in the morning, open up the shutters, walk around admiring or cursing the weather, then go to their day job. After work was over they would head to the inn, sit at the table and order food. The barmaid would take the order and place actual in-game food items on their plate.

I found that if you used the mouse to move this food from one plate to another, the NPCs would immediately stand up, yell at you for stealing, walk around a bit, then eventually sit back down at the NEW PLACE SETTING where you had put their food. Then they would continue to eat. If you did this too much they might even get mad enough to attack you.

None of this was necessary for the game. But it made Britannia seem like a real PLACE, rather than just a bunch of static NPCs to click on and get fetch quests from.

Yes, it was annoying that you couldn’t forge swords at the forge from the blacksmith’s blanks. But if you took a bunch of crates from all over town and stacked them up outside the blacksmith’s house in Trinsic in a solid staircase-like fashion, you could climb up to the roof and find (and loot) a secret room full of magical armor. Only enough to equip your main character, but a nice boost at the beginning of the game. Not to mention the amazing sidequest to find the magical “Hoe of Destruction!”

Yes, the combat was janky, the inventory management frustrating, and the bugs terrifying. But the story, the writing, and the world building were incredible. Ultima VII is easily in my top five best games of all time.

- Mike Taylor

February 18, 2019 at 12:56 pm

“Yes, the combat was janky, the inventory management frustrating, and the bugs terrifying. But …”

Let me stop you there :-)

- Aula

February 16, 2019 at 7:00 pm

“not so much undercutting it is as giving it more texture”

that “is” shouldn’t be there

“is that much affecting because”

should be “that much more affecting”

“This sequences offers”

should be singular “sequence”

“or for some thereafter”

some what thereafter? time? years?

- Jimmy Maher

February 16, 2019 at 7:48 pm

Thanks!

- stepped pyramids

February 16, 2019 at 7:37 pm

Dallas Snell, like many other Origin employees, got a somewhat plot-relevant cameo in the game. Although many of the other cameos are not exactly flattering (Benson wrote himself in as a hyper-egotistical playwright), Snell’s cameo could easily be read to have some implications about his management style.

http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/De_Snel

Funny to compare this to Warren Spector’s extremely flattering appearance in Martian Dreams.

- Jrd

February 16, 2019 at 8:11 pm

Pretty sure U7 does track a “karma” level, and your companions can leave (and I think even attack?) you if it drops too low from stealing or what have you. Also, I seem to remember that the food thing can be largely mitigated by using a “create food” spell that it is super cheap both in terms of casting cost and reagents, so there’s a simple opt-out of that tedium.

- Jimmy Maher

February 17, 2019 at 11:51 am

Does it really track petty theft of food sitting out in the open? I know it keeps track of whether you actively break into people’s chests and the like, or, God forbid, starting running around killing random people, but I didn’t think it cared about more piddly crimes.

The create food spell is kind of annoying in that it often only creates a piece of fruit or the like that won’t keep your people satisfied very long at all. And you still have to collect reagents for it, even if it is cheap in that respect, and cast it over and over, then feed the resulting food manually to everyone. Still pretty tedious in my experience. ;)

- stepped pyramids

February 17, 2019 at 5:59 pm

Ultima VII doesn’t have karma, but companions might get angry if they witness you committing a crime. And petty theft absolutely counts. I remember once I got Iolo to quit in a huff because I stuffed some grapes down his throat.

- Jimmy Maher

February 17, 2019 at 6:26 pm

Okay. Excised that bit about the lack of consequences. Thanks!

- Pedro Quaresma

February 19, 2019 at 3:06 pm

On the other hand, the engine lets you steal without consequences if you know what you’re doing.

1) Drag an item into your inventory? Theft
2) Open your inventory first (pausing the game) and then drag an item into it? Nobody notices

- Jonathan Badger

February 17, 2019 at 1:54 am

“Ultima VII is my third favorite game to bear the Ultima name, behind only Martian Dreams and the first Ultima Underworld.”

Well, well. I remember that in the discussion of Ultima VI that I and others encouraged you to check out Martian Dreams which you hadn’t played at the time. I’m glad that not only did you eventually do so, but that it managed to become one of your top three Ultimas!

- Jimmy Maher

February 17, 2019 at 12:56 pm

Indeed. Thanks again for that!

- NotTseramed

February 17, 2019 at 1:56 am

The CRPG Book Project’s Ultima VII review has a nice quote from Raymond Benson:

“In many ways, The Black Gate was one of the very first SIMS! That was the genius behind the engine that was created by Richard [Garriott] and Ken Demarest (lead programmer) and his team. That was the idea – to create a world you could run around in and live in. The other writers and I took great care to make each individual NPC a whole person, as much as we could.”

The developers certainly succeeded in creating a living world as Ultima VII and Serpent Isle are the most immersive games I’ve ever played.

- Infinitron

February 17, 2019 at 1:18 pm

That’s actually a quote from Kenneth Kully’s interview with Benson: https://ultimacodex.com/interviews/we-wanted-the-game-to-last-forever-an-interview-with-raymond-benson/

- Adamantyr

February 17, 2019 at 7:17 pm

An excellent article! I’ve found all your Ultima articles to be very informative and far less biased. (Thinking Shay Addams Book of Ultima which largely portrays Garriott as a perfect visionary.)

I first saw Ultima VII on a friend’s PC, and was completely fascinated with it. I think you nailed it that it’s more a simulation than anything, which is why it’s so popular even today. As a game, well… Combat’s a mess, inventory management a pain, and the fact that some items in game are “temporary” and others are “permanent” is likely a big cause of the bugs people encountered.

For example, there is typically a group of bandits that spawn right outside of west Britain, on the road to Yew and Skara Brae. I once got a chest off one of them and I took it back to the castle and used it to store some stuff in my private room. Guess what happened? The chest disappeared. I learned my lesson from that, which is only use containers that pre-existed in the world. I get why it happened of course; there’ s finite item count in the game and they had to do something to “clean up” items.

On the subject of the first $1 million game, Chris Crawford claims (or lays the blame) on Wing Commander for changing the industry for the worse. (Source is an interview with Richard Rouse III, published in Game Design: Theory & Practice)

- Paul

February 18, 2019 at 1:52 pm

I’m extremel surprised that one word doesn’t even show up on the page, nor in the comments, that I would very much have expected to do so: sandbox.

U7 was the first real sandbox CRPG, anticipating much of what makes modern CRPGs the experience they are. Maybe you could call U6 the first, but U7 really took it to the next level. In every town there’s something to do that’s not about the main quest in any way, from basic things like finding a lost locket to having the most esteemed artist/inventor/engineer commit suicide for being a buffoon with good PR! There’s just so much stuff to discover while wandering around, pirate caves, hermits, the infamous nudists in Bee Cave… want to play Knight’s Bridge at Nystul’s for a while? Or maybe go on a dragonslaying spree in Destard? Get a good laugh out of “X marks the spot” treasure? Loot the mighty Hoe of Destruction from a Cove farmer’s shed? What about piecing together the insidious plot to murder Lord British involving a powerful terrorist cell operating out of Despise? It’s all there, all fully realized, all lovingly crafted and placed on the map by hand, no Radiant algorithms or similar shite involved.

THAT’s what made me return to U7 after my first (and second…) playthrough!

- Kai

February 18, 2019 at 7:41 pm

That’s the article I’ve been waiting for since the day I discovered The Digital Antiquarian. Naturally, I need to savour the moment for a while before actually reading it.

Suffice to say that U7 was the first Ultima I played (pretty much the first DOS game, too, given I was heavily invested into the Amiga at that time), and in my view it was the best. It still beats most modern RPGs by leagues (my latest playthrough was 2 years ago), but then perhaps I look for different things in a game than most. Anyway, I’ll need to reserve some time for reading and commenting in depth.

- Kai

February 19, 2019 at 7:49 pm

Great article, as always, and one that does the subject justice.

Though as with some other people here, I never really perceived any of the apparent “flaws” as something inherently bad, even when playing the game for the first time. For one, I had not bought it at release, but in form of The Complete Ultima VII, so I had a mostly bug free version running on hardware more than up to the task. Also, having had no former experience with Ultima (I knew it from hearsay, only), I did not have any specific expectations, but I found a game world that was oozing with the history accumulated over the course of the six previous installments. Neither combat, food nor inventory bothered me much (honestly, the Avatar’s backpack was likely more tidy than my room at any given time). Nowadays, I still enjoy the (lack of tedious) combat, and Exult is a godsend with the keyring and the ‘F’ key. (As for acquiring food, partaking at the free dinner served at the palace usually keeps everyone fed for the day)

The thing is, Ultima VII did really deliver a virtual world that is largely unrivaled by any game that came since. Be it the world itself, the NPCs, the interactivity; I find it hard to name other games that shine in all those aspects (TES III delivered in terms of world-building, unlike its successors, but fell flat in other regards. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is getting close, but after all those years, shouldn’t we finally have something that surpasses Ultima VII?)

For me, this only leaves one conclusion: if Ultima VII is to sandbox games what Dungeon Master is to realtime blobbers, what you said about DM must apply here as well: “None of the real-time blobbers that came after Dungeon Master was clearly better than it; arguably, none was ever quite as good.” As for the why: who knows? Maybe because “Origin poured a huge percentage of [the] budget not into graphics or sound but into content in its purest form”. And that really shows!

- Peter W

February 20, 2019 at 11:58 pm

Is there any other game that has a manual written from the point of view of by the bad guy?

- Stephen

February 23, 2019 at 12:29 pm

Great article as always. I particularly appreciated the view of the Dallas Snell side of things… the edict to “call it a day by midnight” says so much.

On that note, I was hoping you might cast some light on the apparently satirical references to Electronic Arts which appear in the game (mostly the Tetrahedron / Sphere / Cube Generators). I could never tell whether they were good-humoured joshing or a sign of bitterness at Origin’s new (?) owner (not sure when it was actually acquired?).

Tiny technical quibble: can you say more about what makes the game “unplayable on many post-early-1990s machines”? Am not aware of anything… e.g. I do play Ultima VII fairly often on a c.1999 PC and it’d surprise me if later ones wouldn’t work too. (Of course you do need to slow fast machines down… there is a frame limiter but it has the limit set too high.)

- Jimmy Maher

February 23, 2019 at 2:05 pm

The references to Electronic Arts are a legacy of Origin’s time as one of EA affiliated labels, which did not end well. Lots more detail here: https://www.filfre.net/2016/02/the-road-to-v/. I did plan to mention them, but was holding out for the article about EA’s acquisition of Origin in 1993. For now, suffice to say that the references are more bitter than good-natured, although Origin would soon have cause to spin them the other way. They come across as thoroughly petty today. Definitely not one of Richard Garriott’s better moments… I’m pretty sure he was behind them.

I admit to not having much personal experience with the subject, but my understanding is that the Voodoo memory manager turned into a huge problem for playing Ultima VII on later PCs. I believe it’s hopelessly incompatible with even MS-DOS-based versions of Windows, and, because it doesn’t play nice with EMS *or* XMS, pretty much requires a floppy boot disk to run under vanilla MS-DOS. I’ve further heard that it won’t run on many later PCs at all due to assumptions it makes about the memory map which don’t always hold true.

- Ethan Johnson

March 2, 2019 at 4:22 pm

Denis Loubet confirmed to me that the EA homage was both intentional and mean-spirited in it’s depiction. They weren’t acquired yet, but they had a breakdown which Jimmy talked about, which seems to primarily been about a personal betrayal that the Garriotts perceived.

- Matt

February 23, 2019 at 3:44 pm

I think Ultima VII was the first game to include a genuinely funny bug.

1. Enemies were coded to drop their possessions as they ran away from you.
2. Cows had slabs of beef in their possession, so you could kill them for food.

Hit a cow, and it flees… dropping chunks of itself along the way.

The visual is funny, the effect is benign, and you understand exactly how this mistake occurred (no flag for un-droppable inventory items).

- stepped pyramids

February 23, 2019 at 11:41 pm

You can use Pickpocket in Ultima VI to steal meat out of animals, too. And Serpent Isle adds the Vibrate spell, which can knock normally undroppable items (like spell weapons) out of NPCs. Funny stuff!

- Pingback: Lazy Reading for 2019/02/24 – DragonFly BSD Digest

Scientology and the Fellowship
March 1, 2019

The people who believe in the Guardian, the masses who believe in him, are completely good people who are completely duped. And so this cult religion is building, in belief of the Guardian and the Guardian’s ends. The lowest level members of the Fellowship, which is this organization that believes in the Guardian, don’t hear him. The Guardian doesn’t even speak to them.

Do you remember the Time article about Scientology where the lowest level is the self-help group? And it isn’t until you’ve gotten into Scientology for a while that you are told that in fact your body is inhabited by Thetans that have been lying dormant in your body for 75 million years, and they got there when the evil ruler Zog kicked them off their planet Nimpto. I’m serious. This is Scientology. But you don’t find this out until you’re into Scientology.

— Richard Garriot, 1992

L. Ron Hubbard and John W. Campbell

Of all the things to come out of the golden age of pulp science fiction, the strange pseudo-religious cult of Scientology has been among the least welcome.

The man who would found the cult was a charismatic fabulist named L. Ron Hubbard. After dropping out of university at age 21 in 1932, he resolved to make his living by doing what he most enjoyed: telling tall tales. Luckily, he lived in New York City, the heart of the pulp-publishing industry.

Hubbard proved unusually prolific even by the standards of the pulps, churning out multiple stories every week. He wrote in any genre that paid, from westerns to mysteries, but he showed a particular affinity for science fiction. Although his prose was dubious, his stories had a gonzo over-the-top energy about them that soon made his name a significant draw on magazine covers. One might say that Hubbard was the pulpiest of pulp writers. While authors like Isaac Asimov, Jack Williamson, and Ray Bradbury sometimes defied the lurid blurbs and cover art that accompanied their work to present stories of surprising thoughtfulness and texture, an L. Ron Hubbard story was exactly what it appeared to be on the surface: all flashing ray guns, whizzing spaceships, and heaving female bosoms. And that sort of thing, of course, was exactly what so many of the eager adolescent boys who bought the pulps were looking for.

The beginning of the Second World War marked the end of the first heyday of the pulps, as most of their writers were inducted into one form or another of military service. Hubbard parlayed a peacetime reserve commission into a regular officer’s posting in the Navy, but his wartime record proved a decidedly inglorious one. He was given the command of a submarine chaser in 1943, only to be relieved of that duty within a month for using a populated island off the coast of Mexico for gunnery practice. He never came close to meeting the enemy in any of his postings, which saw him mostly sitting behind desks in port-side offices.

After the war, he made his way to Hollywood, where he became involved for some time with a semi-serious cult that embraced Thelema, Aleister Crowley’s egoistic and hedonistic take on mysticism. Here he learned hypnotism; indeed, the group became something of a training ground for his future as a cult leader. He moved back to New York City after a year or so and resumed writing for the pulp market, which was now enjoying a postwar second wind. But he already had grander schemes in mind.

In the December 1949 issue of Astounding, the most prestigious science-fiction magazine in the business, the already legendary editor John W. Campbell made the first mention in print of Dianetics, Hubbard’s new “science of the mind.” “This is not a hoax,” he wrote. “Its power is almost unbelievable.” Campbell hardly had a reputation for gullibility, and his willingness to take every word that fell from Hubbard’s lips on this subject as gospel truth became a source of considerable wonder among his stable of more skeptical writers. Nevertheless, believe in Dianetics he did, turning his magazine into a soapbox for Hubbard’s vaguely Freud-like — but, as Hubbard would be the first to point out, not Freudian — theories about an “analytical mind” and a “reactive mind,” the latter being the subconscious product of often unremembered traumas that constantly undermined one’s attempts to be one’s best self. The only way to become a “Clear” — i.e., free of the reactive mind’s toxic influence — was to undergo a series of “audits” aimed at locating and rooting out the hidden traumas, or “engrams,” as Hubbard called them.

Hubbard would teach ordinary people to become auditors, and together they would become the vanguard of a new, Clear society free of most current worldly woes. Every medical problem from near-sightedness to cancer, Hubbard claimed, could be cured by purging the reactive mind that was their wellspring. Ditto societal problems. What were wars, after all, but products of the mass reactive-mind psychosis?

Published in book form in May of 1950, Dianetics was roundly condemned from the start by professional psychologists, who saw it, reasonably enough, as unmoored to any shred of real scientific evidence and potentially dangerous to the mental health of its more vulnerable practitioners. This rejection spawned in Hubbard a lifelong hatred of traditional psychology; he would pass the sentiment on to the cult he would found, among whom it remains a fundamental tenet to this day.

Nonetheless, Dianetics enjoyed a substantial degree of mainstream attention and even acceptance for a few years. For war veterans in particular, dealing with an overtaxed Veterans Administration that still had little understanding of post-traumatic-stress disorders, its promise of a quick fix for their pain was very appealing indeed. Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health climbed high on the bestseller lists, and Hubbard, suddenly making more money than he had ever seen in his life, busied himself with making still more of it, by setting up a nationwide network of Dianetic Research Foundations peddling auditing sessions for neophytes and auditing courses for those who wished to make the leap from patient to therapist. In terms of sheer numbers of people actively engaging with his ideas, the early 1950s was by far the most successful period of Hubbard’s life.

But it wasn’t to last. As it became clear that Dianetics wasn’t actually allowing people to throw away their eyeglasses, much less curing cancer, the wave of earnest interest collapsed as quickly as it had built, to be replaced by scorn and ridicule. The research foundations went bankrupt one by one. Meanwhile John W. Campbell’s magazine never recovered from its editor’s tryst with pseudo-science. It gradually lost its status as science fiction’s most prestigious journal, declining into near irrelevance for the next generation of up-and-coming writers and readers.

With his Dianetics empire crumbling around him, Hubbard sent a telegram to his remaining loyalists announcing “important new material.” And with that material, at a stroke, he turned the pseudo-science of Dianetics into the pseudo-religion of Scientology. Spinning a yarn that he might once have sold to the pulps, he told of a race of immortal beings, existing outside the bounds of space and time, known as the Thetans. (The similarity of the name to Crowley’s Thelema was perhaps telling.) The Thetans had created the universe on a lark, only to get themselves trapped within it. Now, they constituted the souls of human beings, but had forgotten their true nature. But never fear: Hubbard could help a person unlock her inner Thetan, thereby attaining superpowers the likes of which immortality was only the beginning. The first official chapter of his Church of Scientology was founded on February 18, 1954.

Whereas Dianetics had aimed to clear the whole world as quickly as possible, Scientology was for a small group of chosen ones able to recognize its spiritual potency. The true believers lumped everyone else in the world — especially those who had been exposed to Scientology and had chosen to reject it — under the contemptuous category of “wog.” In other words — to put it into terms a cynic can understand — Hubbard had switched from extracting a little bit of money from each of many people to extracting a whole lot of money from each of relatively few people. Early Scientology courses were cheap or even free, but progressing down the “Bridge to Total Freedom” required paying more and more for each successive step. Soon the most dedicated members were giving virtually everything they earned to the church. And it never ended; there was always a further, even more expensive level of enlightenment to be achieved, courtesy of a founder who could always dash one off whenever it was needed. His training with the pulps, it seemed, was still paying dividends.

The full story of the Church of Scientology is as complicated as it is bizarre, encompassing pitched battles with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, and many a foreign government, along with a culture of secrecy and paranoia that only got more pronounced from year to year. The church’s history intersects with that of late-20th-century history more generally in often surprising, usually sinister ways. For example, Charles Manson flirted with Scientology while in prison, and later applied some of the techniques of control and manipulation he had learned from it when he started The Family, his own murderous cult of personality.

Perhaps the strangest period of Scientology was that spanning from 1966 to 1975, during which Hubbard, still nursing unrequited dreams of naval heroism, sailed a “fleet” of dilapidated ships, crewed by enthusiastic and comely if dangerously unskilled young followers, all over the world. Much of the current church’s symbology and iconography, such as the “Sea Org” which serves as a sort of elite honor guard for its most precious people and secrets, still dates from this period, as does a policy of harsh paramilitary discipline. For Scientology, claimed Hubbard, was now at war with an outside world bent on destroying it. Journalists and psychologists were its greatest enemies of all, to be shown no mercy whatsoever.

Scientology could and did ruin the lives of its critics. The classic cautionary tale became that of the investigative journalist Paulette Cooper, who in 1971 published an extremely critical history of L. Ron Hubbard and his church under the title of The Scandal of Scientology. She was subjected to a years-long campaign of abuse, taking the form of some twenty separate lawsuits, along with constant harassing phone calls and even break-ins to her apartment. Scientologists wrote her phone number on bathroom walls (“For a good time, call…”), passed out fliers in her neighborhood peddling her alleged services as a prostitute, and sent bomb threats to their own church in her name; these they then referred to the FBI, leaving Cooper to battle criminal charges with a sentence of up to fifteen years in prison. “For months, my anxiety was so terrible I could taste it in my throat,” Cooper says. “I could barely write, and my bills, especially legal ones, kept mounting. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep.”

L. Ron Hubbard himself withdrew even further from public view when his declining health forced him to return to land in 1975. There was great concern within the church that he might soon be arrested on charges of fraud and tax evasion — indeed, this had been one of Hubbard’s ostensible motivations for taking to the sea in the first place — but there was also a degree of embarrassment that the pot-bellied old man was anything but a poster child for the perfect physical fitness and eternal youth he had so long promised his followers. He thus spent the last few years of his life in complete isolation at secret locations. Fading both physically and mentally, he was now being controlled by the church’s senior leadership rather than vice versa.

He died — or, as the church put it, “moved forward to his next level of research” — on January 27, 1986. By that time, a mad struggle for control of the organization he had founded had been underway for years, and had largely been won already by one David Miscavige, who was still just 25 years old at the time of Hubbard’s death. He consolidated his power in the aftermath, and remains in charge to this day of an organization that is more insular and secretive than ever.

Miscavige’s most far-reaching innovation, which he began to implement even well before Hubbard’s death, was the so-called “celebrity strategy.” Eager to attract prominent people with enviable lifestyles for promotional purposes, Miscavige opened a special “Celebrity Centre” in Hollywood. It boasted, as the journalist Janet Reitman describes it, “39 hotel rooms, several theaters and performance spaces, a screening room, an upscale French restaurant, a casual bistro and coffee bar, tennis courts, and an exercise room and spa.”

The profession of actor may appear glamorous from the outside, but it can be almost unbelievably brutal from the inside, even for those who have achieved a degree of success. In this respect, the profession defies direct comparison to almost any other. An actor must face constant, detailed, explicit critiques of her appearance, her voice, her way of holding herself and moving — in short, of her very being. Thus Scientology found in Hollywood a receptive audience for the doctrines of personal empowerment and self-belief that it had always used to lure new members into the fold. The movie stars John Travolta and Tom Cruise became the most visible celebrity faces of Scientology, but it spread its tendrils throughout the entertainment industry, snaring countless other names both recognizable and obscure — for in Hollywood, today’s obscurity may be tomorrow’s marquee name, as Miscavige understood very well. Better, then, to sign them all up.

Since the publication of Paulette Cooper’s book in 1971, most journalists, well aware of the pain said book had brought upon its author, had chosen to keep their distance from the church. But finally, in its issue dated May 6, 1991, Time magazine ran the first lengthy exposé of Scientology in a generation, under the byline of one very brave reporter named Richard Behar. The hook for his piece was the tragic story of Noah Lottick, a “normal, happy” 24-year-old who had given all of his money to the church in the span of seven months, then committed suicide by jumping from a tenth-story window. “We thought Scientology was something like Dale Carnegie,” said the young man’s grieving father. “I now believe it’s a school for psychopaths. Their so-called therapies are manipulations. They take the best and the brightest people and destroy them.”

Other affecting personal tragedies were sprinkled amidst the article’s accusations of financial malpractice, eavesdropping, and harassment, all products of what Behar labelled “a thriving cult of greed and power,” worthy of comparison to the Mafia. Like so many cults, the Scientologists showed a marked tendency to prey upon the most vulnerable:

Harriet Baker learned the hard way about Scientology’s business of selling religion. When Baker, 73, lost her husband to cancer, a Scientologist turned up at her Los Angeles home peddling a $1300 auditing package to cure her grief. Some $15,000 later, the Scientologists discovered that her house was debt free. They arranged a $45,000 mortgage, which they pressured her to tap for more auditing until Baker’s children helped their mother snap out of her daze. Last June, Baker demanded a $27,000 refund for unused services, prompting two cult members to show up at her door unannounced to interrogate her. Baker never got the money and, financially strapped, was forced to sell her house in September.

Predictably, the Church of Scientology sued Time for libel. It would take almost ten years for the magazine to win a final legal victory, on the basis that everything reported in the story was substantially accurate.

The timing of this article is highly significant for our purposes: it was read by Richard Garriott, who had recently decided that Ultima VII should have a “real bad guy” as the antagonist for the first time since Ultima III. “Richard came up with the initial idea,” remembers Raymond Benson, the game’s head writer, “but I’m pretty sure I came up with everything the Fellowship did, as well as their various tenets and beliefs.”

Of all the many and varied threads taken up by Ultima VII, that of the Fellowship is the most thoroughgoing. This isn’t surprising on the face of it, given how important the Fellowship is to the game’s overarching plot. What is surprising, however, is how subtle and even wise — not words I use often in connection with CRPGs, believe me! — the game’s depiction of the cult really is. Taken as a whole, the Fellowship’s practices demonstrate a canny understanding of how non-stupid people can be convinced to believe in really stupid things, and how they can be convinced — or coerced — to dedicate their lives to them. Indeed, although the direct inspiration for the Fellowship is Scientology, the understanding of cultish behavior which Ultima VII demonstrates applies equally to many of them. “It wasn’t just Scientology we were knocking,” says Benson, “but all kinds of religious cults.”

Separated at birth? L. Ron Hubbard…

..and Batlin.

The Guardian, the disembodied spirit of evil who’s the prime motivator behind the Fellowship, prefers to hide behind the scenes. The cult’s ostensible founder and public face is instead an unprepossessing fellow named Batlin, who carefully cultivates an everyman persona. In the Book of the Fellowship included with the game — quite possibly the only game manual ever to be written from the point of view of the eventual villain — he speaks of his “humble hope that these words may be for thee a dawning, or at least, a type of awakening.” He is a “traveller” just like you are, who has stumbled upon a form of enlightenment, and he “would very much appreciate sharing the rewards with you.”

This is the modern face of the cult leader, couched in a superficial aura of approachability. Hubbard too dressed casually and encouraged those around him to call him “Ron.” Yet it is indeed a facade; the leader is in fact not an everyman. The affectation of humility is an act, meant to demonstrate the leader’s superior character. He may be a fellow traveler, but the fact remains that he became enlightened while the rest of the world did not; he is, by definition, special, as any cultist who takes his affectation of humility too seriously and challenges his edicts in any way will quickly learn. The Fellowship, like Scientology, is as hierarchical an organization as ever existed.

Still, the impression of casual normality conveyed by the leader is essential to the recruitment process. No one consciously signs up for a cult; people are captured by an innocuous pitch for self-improvement that seems to offer considerable rewards for little investment of time, energy, or money. It’s only after the recruit is inside that the balance begins to subtly shift and the cult begins to demand more and more of all three.

Scientology has studied the recruitment process long and hard, adopting approaches that lean more on theories of marketing than religion. The first pitch says nothing about Thetans; it restricts itself to the relatively more grounded psuedo-science of Dianetics, described as a self-help program that helps one to live a more effective life. The corporate banality of it all smacks of nothing so much as a dodgy vacation-timeshare pitch. In her book on Scientology, Janet Reitman describes her own first encounter with the church in New York City:

At various times during the year, clusters of attractive young men and women are posted on street corners, where they offer free “stress tests” or hand out fliers. Ranging in age from the late teens to the early twenties, they are dressed as conservatively as young bank executives.

On a hot July morning several years ago, I was approached by one of these clear-eyed young men. “Hi!” he said, with a smile. “Do you have a minute?” He introduced himself as Emmett. “We’re showing a film down the street,” he said, casually pulling a glossy, postcard-sized flier from the stack he held in his hand. “It’s about Dianetics — ever heard of it?”

I was escorted to a small screening room to watch the free introductory film. After the film, a woman came into the screening room and told me that she’d like me to fill out a questionnaire. She began her pitch gently. Laurie delivered a soft sell for Scientology’s “introductory package”: a four-hour seminar and twelve hours of Dianetics auditing, a form of consuling that cost $50. “You don’t have to do it,” Laurie said. “It’s just something I get the feeling might help you.” She patted my arm.

That initial request for $50 will grow in a remarkably short time to hundreds, then thousands of dollars, all absolutely required for one to reach the coveted status of Clear and commune with one’s inner Thetan.

The Fellowship recruitment process works much the same way. Every town you visit in Britannia has a Fellowship Hall — or, as it is known in the cult’s corporatese, a “Recreational Facility and Learning Center.” (One of the prime innovations of Scientology, and apparently of the Fellowship as well, was to turn religion into a corporate franchise operation.) While the towns themselves are diverse, every Fellowship Hall looks the same, right down to the Book of the Fellowship standing in a place of honor just inside each of their doorways. (“Books by L. Ron Hubbard lined the walls,” notes Reitman of her Scientology recruitment experience, “as did black-and-white photos of the man.”)

The people hanging about the Fellowship Halls all casually bring up the “Triad of Inner Strength”: “Strive For Unity,” “Trust Thy Brother,” “Worthiness Precedes Reward.” These three principles hardly represent major advances in moral philosophy; they simply say that people should work together whenever possible, should trust in the basic goodness of their fellow humans, and should do good work for the satisfaction of the work itself, understanding that external rewards will come of themselves in due course. The Triad of Inner Strength, in other words, is something most of us learned in grade school.

And yet, banally harmless though it sounds at first blush, the Triad of Inner Strength can all too easily be twisted into something less than benign, as Richard Garriott noted in an interview with Caroline Spector from around the time of Ultima VII’s release:

And so the Fellowship is this cult religion that is founded upon three principles. The first is Unity. To work for a better world, we all need to work together. If we work together, we’ll be better. This is your “go out and evangelize and convert them to our beliefs” syndrome.

The next thing after Unity is Worthiness. You should always strive to be worthy of that which you wish to receive. Always try to deserve that which you wish to receive. Which is another way of saying, you get what you deserve. Which means, as far as the Guardian is concerned, if you’ve been bad, he kills you. You obviously got what you deserved.

The third principle is called Trust. If you and I are going to work together in the same organization, like me and my brother Robert, we have to trust each other. If I constantly think that Robert’s going to stab me in the back, I won’t get any work done. We’d be constantly checking on each other, making sure that what we’re telling each other is the truth. So, you have to trust the other members of the Fellowship. If I tell you to carry this box from here to there, don’t ask me what’s in it. Just trust me.

Spector: Trust has a condition on it, though. The condition is that you do whatever I tell you to do without question.

Trust! Just trust me!

Spector: That’s really not trust.

I didn’t say it was really trust. I said that’s the word they use.

In practice, then, the Triad of Inner Strength leaves the members of the Fellowship ripe for all sorts of psychological manipulation. “Strive for Unity” and “Trust Thy Brother” militate against critical thinking among the membership, while “Worthiness Precedes Reward” can be used to justify all sorts of acts which the membership would otherwise view as heinous.

The recruitment pitch of both Scientology and the Fellowship culminates in a much-vaunted but borderline nonsensical personality test. The Scientology version poses questions like “Do you often sing or whistle for the fun of it?” and “Do you sometimes feel that your age is against you (too young or too old)?” The Fellowship’s questions are at least a bit more elaborate, and actually do offer some food for thought in themselves. In fact, they might remind you of some of the questions posed by a certain gypsy fortune teller at the beginning of Ultima IV.

Thou art feeling depressed right now. Is it more likely because – A: Thou hast disappointed a friend, or B: A friend has disappointed thee?

At a festive gathering thou dost tell a humorous anecdote, and thou dost tell it very well, creating much amusement. Didst thou tell this comedic story because A: thou didst enjoy the response that thou didst receive from thine audience, or B: because thou didst want to please thy friends?

Thou art in a boat with thy betrothed and thy mother. The boat capsizes. In the choppy waters thou canst only save thyself and one other person. Who dost thou save from drowning, A: thy betrothed, or B: thy mother?

(Freud would have had a field day with that last one.)

Whatever answers you give, on either cult’s test, the end result is always the same: you have much potential, but you need the counseling that only Scientology or the Fellowship can provide. (“Thou art a person of strong character, Avatar, but one who is troubled by deep personal problems that prevent thee from achieving thy true potential for greatness.”)

As you wander Britannia talking to Fellowship members — whatever else you can say about Batlin’s cult, it’s achieved a degree of market penetration of which Scientology can only dream — they all parrot the same lines when speaking of the organization. At first, you might be tempted to chalk this up to laziness on the part of the writing team. But later, as you come to see that laziness simply isn’t a part of Ultima VII’s writerly personality, you realize that it’s been done with purposeful intent, to illustrate the subtle process of brainwashing that occurs once one begins to open oneself to a cult. And as this realization dawns, the parroting that started out as merely annoying begins to take on a sinister quality.

Indeed, the control of language constitutes an important part of a cult’s overall control of its members. Scientology has developed a veritable English dialect all its own, a strange mixture of tech speak, corporate speak, and messianic grandiosity. The word “love” is replaced by “affinity”; the verb “to audit” now means “to listen and compute.” Hubbard’s own writings — Scientology’s version of holy scripture — is the church’s “technology” or “tech.” More ominously, a “suppressive person” is someone who speaks critically of the church, thereby suppressing the truth of Hubbard’s wisdom in herself and in those around her; these people, Scientology’s version of heretics, are fair game for any sort of punishment. One former member and current suppressive person describes Scientology’s manipulation of language thusly:

It’s very, very subtle stuff, changing words and giving them a whole different meaning. It creates an artificial reality. What happens is, this new linguistic system undermines your ability to even monitor your own thoughts because nothing means what it used to mean. I couldn’t believe that I could get taken over like that. I was the most independent-minded idiot that ever walked the planet. But that’s what happened.

The Fellowship too manipulates language for its own ends, preferring convoluted purple prose to directness in such linguistic pillars as the Triad of Inner Strength. The core of the group’s philosophy is “sanguine cognition.” This is just another way of saying “cheerful knowledge,” Batlin helpfully tells us, which rather begs the question why he doesn’t instruct his followers to simply say the latter. The answer is that clear language illuminates its subject, whereas a cult’s mission is always to obscure the sheer banality of its teachings.

The languages of Scientology and the Fellowship alike are meant to highlight their status as modern belief systems suitable for the modern world. This is important, for any argument for the absolute truth of a religion or life philosophy must carry with it the implied corollary that all other current religions and life philosophies are false, or at least of lesser utility. Batlin has this to say about the system of virtues that arrived in Britannia at the time of Ultima IV, more than 200 years ago in the series’s internal chronology:

As one who has followed the Eight Virtues, I know whereof I speak when I say that it is impossible to perfectly live up to them. Even the Avatar was unable to do so continuously and consistently. Can anyone say that they have been honest every moment of their lives? Can anyone say that they are always compassionate, valorous, just, sacrificing, honorable, humble, or spiritual at all times? The philosophy of the Eight Virtues does little more than emphasize our own personal deficiencies. I have met many adherents to the ways of the Virtues who are racked with guilt over what they perceive to be their spiritual failures, for that is what the Virtues are based upon. Having been shown our weaknesses, now is the time to strengthen them. The philosophy of The Fellowship has been created to eradicate the failures from one’s life. It is a philosophy based upon success and it enhances everything that has come before it.

It’s right here that Ultima VII levels its most subtle but perhaps most important critique of Scientology and similar movements in our own world. A religion, some wag once said, is another person’s cult, and vice versa. I would push back against that notion to the extent that the great religions of the world, regardless of their claim to objective truth, engage with the full scope of the human condition, including its fundamentally tragic nature. Religion engages with failure and weakness at least as much as it does with success and strength; it engages with pain and loss, with aging and death — because, as another wag once said, none of us gets out of this life alive.

So, a true religion grasps that it cannot deny the tragic realities of life, replacing them with some shallow notion of “success,” as if the ineffable mysteries of life were just a series of bullet points on a CV. As Sophocles and Shakespeare understood, much of life is pain, and true spiritual enlightenment is the ability to laugh in spite of that pain, not to deny its existence. True enlightenment requires one to get outside of one’s self. Scientology and the Fellowship, on the other hand, are egotism masquerading as spirituality. What can I get out of this? It’s in this way, it seems to me, that they’re most depressingly modern of all.

And yet moral judgments, as the Ultima series did such a good job of teaching us over the years, are seldom absolute. Me-focused self-help programs doubtless do some people a great deal of good, as do Scientology and the Fellowship. For decades now, Scientology has run addiction-treatment programs that have changed at least some lives. The Fellowship too runs homeless shelters and treats serpent-venom addicts (serpent venom being Britannia’s version of cocaine).

Assuming we believe in the notion of people as sovereign individuals, we must give them permission to believe strange things if they wish to do so. And, assuming we believe in the right of free speech, we must give them permission as well to try to convince others of their beliefs — even to try to convince others to join their group and behave as they do. Where do the boundaries lie? Efforts to outlaw Scientology in some countries of our own world have struck many as overreaching. But, likewise, the organization’s ongoing tax-exempt status in other countries strikes many as a travesty in its own right.

Of course, there are limits to the parallels between Scientology and the Fellowship. At the end of the day, the fact remains that Ultima VII is a work of genre fiction. Our ingrained media literacy assures that, from the time when we first meet the Fellowship just minutes after starting the game, we know that they can’t possibly be up to anything good. Indeed, it’s almost a comfort to learn that the Fellowship is being directed by a spirit of manifestly bad intent. That’s the sort of thing we know how to deal with as players of CRPGs. By contrast, very few people in our real world — not even cult leaders — believe themselves to be evil. Evil here is far more subtle, and often occurs in spite of — or sometimes because of — our best intentions. Those who pull the levers of Scientology are not the Guardian — not disembodied spirits of evil cackling over their nefarious plans — but ordinary humans who, I would guess, honestly feel in their heart of hearts that they’re doing good.

Still, if it’s comfort we Scientology skeptics are looking for, we can find some in the fact that the church is by all indications a shadow today of what it was at the time of Ultima VII’s release. It’s always been damnably difficult to collect hard numbers about the church’s membership at any point in its history, due to its consistent determination to exaggerate its size and influence. Yet, tellingly, even the exaggerations are much smaller today than they were two or three decades ago. Scientology today may have as few as 50,000 active members worldwide, down from a peak of perhaps 500,000 at the time of the Time magazine article. Even its stranglehold on Hollywood has been noticably weakened, with many of its superstar converts having quietly backed away. Much of the veil of secrecy around the organization has been pierced, and Scientology’s penchant for retaliation against its critics doesn’t have the same silencing effect it once did. Today, tell-all memoirs about “my life in Scientology,” of wildly varying degrees of veracity and luridness, have became a veritable cottage industry in publishing. Their authors have found a form of safety in numbers; when Scientology has so many critics, it’s hard for it to go after each one of them with the old gusto, especially given its current straitened membership rolls.

I suspect that Scientology will die out entirely in another generation or three. For all but the people whose lives it has ruined (or saved) and those close to said people, it will go down in history as just another kooky cult, another proof of the eternal human penchant to believe weird things and to cede control of their lives to others in the name of those beliefs. Even as Scientology slowly dies, however, other cult-like belief systems promising love, wealth, and happiness — for a small price — will continue to arise. So, there will never be a shortage of real-world analogues for the Fellowship. Sadly, Ultima VII’s claim to thematic relevance is never likely to be in doubt.

(Sources: the books Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion by Janet Reitman, The Scandal of Scientology by Paulette Cooper, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, and Ultima: The Avatar Adventures by Rusel DeMaria and Caroline Spector; Time of May 6 1991. Online sources include The Ultima Codex interview with Raymond Benson, the comprehensive anti-Scientology resource Operation Clambake, and Frederick Pohl’s memories of Hubbard on The Way the Future Blogs. I owe a special thank you to Hoki-Aamrel, whose “The Fellowship and the Church of Scientology Compared” served as my spirit guide for researching this article. And my thanks go as well to Peter W., who pointed out in a comment to my previous article that The Book of the Fellowship may be the only game manual ever written from the point of view of the villain.)

Comments
62 Responses

- Lt. Nitpicker

March 1, 2019 at 5:32 pm

eager adolescents boys

Did you mean adolescent there?

- Jimmy Maher

March 1, 2019 at 9:11 pm

Yes. Thanks!

- Alex Freeman

March 1, 2019 at 6:01 pm

He thus spent the last few years of his life in complete isolation at secret locations, apparently being controlled by more than he continued to control the church’s senior leadership.

That might be easier to read if you had it as “He thus spent the last few years of his life in complete isolation at secret locations, apparently being controlled more by the church’s senior leadership than vice versa.”

for in Hollywood, today’s obscurity may be tommorow’s marque name

“tomorrow”

irregardless of their claim to objective truth

“regardless”

- Jimmy Maher

March 1, 2019 at 9:16 pm

Thanks! (I’d prefer to leave the first sentence alone.)

And yes, this is the last I have to say on Ultima VII.

- Alex Freeman

March 1, 2019 at 9:24 pm

In that case, I’d like to draw people’s attention to Exult:
https://github.com/exult

It addresses many of the problems with playing Ultima 7.

- Sniffnoy

March 2, 2019 at 6:28 pm

Also in that sentence, there’s “marque” in place of “marquee”.

- Jimmy Maher

March 2, 2019 at 8:10 pm

Thanks!

- Alex Freeman

March 1, 2019 at 6:09 pm

Come to think of it, the Republican Party is a lot like Scientology. It uses carefully crafted messages to get non-stupid people to believe stupid things. Its members use harassment and character attacks to silence its critics. It even creates an artificial reality for its members (though it uses “alternative facts” to create an “alternative reality”). If it gets enough power, it can even end up ruining places and institutions like Kansas and its educational system. That can even ruin people’s lives in some extreme cases.

Is this your final article on Ultima VII BTW?

- Jacen

March 2, 2019 at 5:50 pm

Don’t forget about demonizing vulnerable populations and minorities so they can whip their members into vastly overinflated panic voting

- Tom

March 10, 2019 at 12:19 am

You do realize that I could replace “Republican” with “Democrat” and “Kansas” with “California” and it would make just as much sense, right?

- Alex Freeman

March 15, 2019 at 8:27 pm

Wrong.

- Corey Cole

April 4, 2019 at 11:04 pm

No, Tom. That’s a false equivalence. Democrats and the Democratic Party make lots of mistakes, but they do not willfully spread lies and require their adherents to accept them as truth. They promote science, research, and facts.

As for California being ruined, that’s totally laughable. We have an economy so strong that, if California were a country, it would be in the top ten largest economies in the world. (I’ve read fifth, but I haven’t researched it myself.) There are problems in California as there are in every large state and country, but they are problems caused by great success, not statewide bankruptcy.

However, trying to sneeringly pin a buzzword rap on a person or state is exactly the sort of misinformation practiced by current Republicans, Fox News, and Trump. When Democrats make similar accusations, they provide links to facts and often quote the sources directly. It’s a completely different thing from the baldfaced lies and personal attacks coming from the “Right.” Don’t promote false equivalence.

- whomever

March 1, 2019 at 7:12 pm

Heh. You know it literally was only reading this that I got the entire Scientology/Fellowship comparison, but it makes a LOT of sense. (I’d kind of pegged them as a random Cult, of which there are a bunch)

- whomever

March 1, 2019 at 7:14 pm

Also I have a horrible feeling that the normal super civilized comments section of this blog (marred only but the occasional nutjob who objects to something about your extremely reasonably and balanced discussion of the development of nuclear weapons) is about to get…hot. The Scientologists don’t take stuff like this lying down :-(

- Infinitron

March 1, 2019 at 7:41 pm

*looks above* It might not be Scientologists.

- Jimmy Maher

March 1, 2019 at 9:18 pm

We’ll see. I kind of suspect they have more urgent problems to deal with than being criticized on one obscure technology-history site, given the number Scientology tell-alls currently available for sale on Amazon. That’s what I’m hoping, anyway. ;)

- Infinitron

March 1, 2019 at 7:36 pm

It’s worth noting the appearance of the Fellowship in Serpent Isle – a small group that travelled there with Batlin and are camped out (IIRC) south of the city of Fawn.

In the context of that strange land of corrupt city-states, they suddenly appear benign – fellow Britannians eager to do good.

- stepped pyramids

March 2, 2019 at 3:47 am

I’ve always assumed that Batlin intentionally sent low-ranking members with no understanding of the Fellowship’s true goals, for two reasons: first, because he knew that they might not survive; second, because if he sent one of his lieutenants they might end up betraying him. No honor among cult leaders, after all.

- Tim Kaiser

March 1, 2019 at 8:24 pm

“For decades now, Scientology’s addiction-treatment programs have been recognized, sometimes reluctantly, as among the most effective in the world.”

Are you talking about Narconon, their drug rehabilitation programs? They have not been recognized as the most effective in the world.

According to wikipedia, there is no independent data that shows that narconon is better than other programs and there have been multiple deaths reported of people in narconon facilities.

Narconon is just another part of the scientology scam. I hope you will do some research into this and correct or remove that line.

- Jimmy Maher

March 1, 2019 at 9:27 pm

Hmm… Janet Reitman’s book, which is highly critical of Scientology overall, singles out the addiction-treatment program as one place where they have done some good. But I was probably overstating the case. I’ve changed that paragraph. Thanks!

- David Bullock

March 1, 2019 at 10:31 pm

Janet’s book is WAY out of date, and was written at a time when there was little knowledge of how Narconon actually operates. Narconon has been long exposed as abusing the system and providing no value. Like a lot of CoS efforts, it benefits from not playing up it’s connection to CoS, and aggressive sustained marketing messaging touting success, without actually achieving it.

- Nate

March 1, 2019 at 11:59 pm

There’s a whole another interesting connection between Scientology and the birth of Remote Viewing – the ‘STAR GATE’ and related programs at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s, the ones with Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff.

Some of the highest-rated psychics that were involved in this program were OT-level Scientologists. Ingo Swann and Pat Price, for instance. I think Puthoff himself was also, briefly, in the organization. For a group that was a few years later to be at war with the US government, they sure had some high-level access to secrets.

A lot of the weirdness around Scientology, including its deep paranoia about secrecy, perhaps makes *slightly* more sense when you consider that one of its goals may have been to reliably produce psi functioning in an intelligence/paramilitary styled organisation, but that they also really didn’t know how to do that other than just trying to run people through sets of exercises borrowed from other groups. Also that Scientology was only one of many groups with similar aims (est, Silva Mind Control, etc) that overlapped with the science fiction, military and sales-motivational-speaking communities. Lots and lots of self-hypnosis cults, there in the underbrush of post-WW2 America. Hubbard was just the one who made the most money.

- Keith Palmer

March 2, 2019 at 1:52 am

Remembering the other hobbyhorses I’ve heard John W. Campbell tried to ride (to Mars and beyond) in Astounding Science Fiction after he’d stopped covering Dianetics in the 1950s meant I needed a moment to convince myself “Campbell hardly had a reputation for gullibility” wasn’t an error. I’ve read enough science fiction from the 1940s, though, to suppose in that decade the seeds of the decade following were then mostly “getting in on the ground floor of J.B. Rhine and extra-sensory perception” and “talking up Alfred Korzybski and General Semantics.”

- Corey S Cole

April 4, 2019 at 11:08 pm

A. E. van Vogt actively promoted General Semantics in some of his works including The World of Null-A. I think Korzybski was also an influence on Ayn Rand and her novel Atlas Shrugged. That all made a great deal of sense to me as an impressionable 20-year-old, but I now recognize that those approaches were too simplistic.

- stepped pyramids

March 2, 2019 at 4:00 am

One of the things I thought was clever about the Fellowship is that they’re ideologically amorphous (in the first game that really bothers to try to be reflective about the ideology of Britannia). Nanna credits the Fellowship with teaching her the evils of the class system, while Feridwyn and Brita talk about poverty being a result of poor character. (I just want to say that the Tobias and Garritt quest is one of the most satisfying of any game I’ve played, even though it kind of makes me want to do some very unvirtuous things to Garritt’s parents.)

The Fellowship seems to adjust its approach to tease out whatever makes its members feel resentful and bitter toward the world, whether it’s economic injustice (Nanna), racial oppression (the gargoyles), teen angst (Sasha), or just not being recognized as the great artist you know you are (Owen).

I appreciate that Ultima Underworld II follows up on the stories of some Fellowship members from Black Gate. I have some quibbles with it as a game, but it’s neat as a story sequel. I think it’s a shame that the Ultima series started falling apart just as they’d started to get a grip on building a coherent world with interconnections between games.

- Jimmy Maher

March 2, 2019 at 7:36 am

Yes, Garritt is a miserable little brat, isn’t he?

- Nate

March 2, 2019 at 9:40 am

Cults are often more about the systems of control they use rather than the actual beliefs they hold.

You try to draw a distinction from true religion based on motivation of personal gain, but I don’t think that holds more generally. The attributes of strong hierarchy, exclusive ownership of truth, and isolation from family/friends are exhibited by offshoots of mainstream religions too. The International Churches of Christ was one group I got involved with that had these characteristics but largely stuck to mainstream Christian doctrine. Fortunately I figured it out quickly and left.

—

Extra “by” in:

“apparently being controlled by more than he continued to control the church’s senior leadership.”

Should be “may”:

“Scientology today many have as few as 50,000 active members worldwide”

This is a ponderous opening clause and hard to parse:

“Still, if it’s comfort which those of us who don’t believe Scientology on balance is a force for good are looking for”

- Jimmy Maher

March 2, 2019 at 11:15 am

Thanks! The first was as intended, but this sentence appears to be a real stumbling block for readers, so we’ll try something else. ;)

A better way to frame the distinction might be to make it between religion in the abstract and the practice of religion. A religion like Christianity is practiced in many different ways, some as shallow and self-serving as Scientology — I’m looking at you, happy-clappy megachurches — some beautiful and profound.

On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine Scientology as a system of belief absent the *cult* of Scientology. The two are effectively one and the same. I think this description is true of cults in general. As you say, the systems of control in a “religion” like Scientology are far more important than the actual beliefs, the supposed point of it all.

- Scurra

March 2, 2019 at 12:10 pm

There’s also the business of keeping secrets. Cults tend to be highly opaque, with their “truths” only being granted to those who rise highly in the ranks; Religions tend to be fairly open about their Holy Books, giving access to all who wish to learn.
Come to think of it, that’s another difference – Religions are able to wildly disagree internally about what the Holy Books “mean” (sometimes with disastrous consequences); Cults will not allow dissent from the single truth, even as that truth may be changed by the ‘leader’.
As noted, that doesn’t mean there can’t be Cults within Religions, of course…

But yeah, Scientology is a fabulous model for anyone wanting to implement a Cult in a game (I’ve used it in several RPGs in the past and it’s always fun seeing players figuring out the inconsistencies.)

- Laertes

March 2, 2019 at 1:01 pm

I am not so sure. For example it was forbidden to translate the bible, and many religious people have not read their own book and are surprised (or directly deny that they belong to it) when you show them the gruesome bits.

- Ilmari

March 2, 2019 at 8:34 pm

I guess you mean Middle Ages and catholic church? If this Wikipedia article with a good set of references (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations_in_the_Middle_Ages) is a reliable source, this might be mostly a myth – a) there seems to have been no consistent policy against Bible translations, and b) in cases where individual translations were banned, it was more because these translations were considered faulty and heretical. Illiteracy and rarity of books in general were probably the major reasons for people not reading Bible in Middle Ages.

- Laertes

March 2, 2019 at 9:42 pm

@ilmari, in the second part of my statement I was referring to the present times. The first one yes, mostly catholic church in middle ages. But I think there is also a belief the Koran can only be truly read in Arabic.

- Jimmy Maher

March 3, 2019 at 7:48 am

The last is a perfectly reasonably belief which is frequently advanced about many works of literature. Plenty of people have learned ancient Greek just to read Homer, or Italian to read Dante. None of this — much less Christians who *choose* not to read the Bible — has much to do with the idea of *forbidden* knowledge. Most devout Muslim sects actually encourage their members to learn Arabic specifically in order to *read the Prophet’s words for themselves*.

- Laertes

March 3, 2019 at 12:43 pm

Yes, I also try to read always in the original language whenever I can in the few languages I know but I don’t think the reasons are the same. Something about not altering God’s words in the holy books as oposed to the literary value of books in general.

- Ilmari

March 3, 2019 at 6:39 pm

@Laertes It’s not just about literary value, but authenticity – if I want to see what Isaac Newton really said, when discussing theory of gravity, I should read his Latin original and not English translations, since translation often involves choices and interpretation (what did they mean by this word with multiple possible meanings etc.?). (In case of works as old as Bible there’s the added complexity that we have no “first authentic” version, but in the best case a variety of manuscripts with variant readings, since copying writings by hand is very prone to mistakes.)

I would be more concerned when religious groups use certain translations and don’t take into account the possible mistakes in these translations. In Christian tradition there’s a good example of such a stubborn adherence. There’s a passage in Isaiah, which according to first Greek translation speaks of virgin having a baby and which early Christians regarded as a prophecy concerning Jesus, although Jews kept on insisting that the original Hebrew spoke simply of a young woman – Church Fathers went so far as to suggest that Jews had forged their own writings, because they couldn’t just admit that perhaps they had understood this passage wrongly.

- Avian Overlord

March 3, 2019 at 4:52 am

Funnily enough there are splinter Scientologist groups that decry the main church’s practices and try to practice Scientology independently. And, well, if you take how the church responds to critics imagine how they feel about heretics. Or as they call them, “squirrels.”

As for fictional references to Scientology, I suspect this is one of those “time travel” perspective things, because as far as I’m concerned, making your fictional cult obviously based on Scientology has just been done so much it’s become a dull cliche at this point.

- Nate

March 3, 2019 at 11:25 pm

I’m sure religion will come up frequently on your analog blog. :-)

Every religion is made up of humans, so all the traits you describe will show up within some group of adherents in every religion, given enough time. There was a “secret knowledge” sect of Christianity early on (the Gnostics) and self-serving in terms of selling indulgences later on in the Middle Ages. There was an incident referred to by Paul of someone going around claiming to be able to heal people even though the nascent Christian church didn’t know this person.

I’d say that every cult borrows from some preceding religion in the same way movie plots tend to share the same hero arcs. As you say, some cults appear with the mythology and system of control at the same time but others evolve as an offshoot that isn’t that far different from the original religion, but with a focus on centralized control and isolation of their members.

There’s a fine line between simple zealotry (e.g. movements that call a religion to reconsider its path) and a full-blown cult, and I think the main distinction comes down to virulence.

- Ross

March 2, 2019 at 2:58 pm

The phrase “Scientology today many have as few as 50,000 active members worldwide” reminds me of how the Debian installer back around the turn of the turn of the century used to include in its splash screen “Used by perhaps as many as 1000 people worldwide!”

- Elzair

March 2, 2019 at 2:03 pm

I am not sure Campbell was as non-gullible as you say. In the essay Starship Stormtroopers http://web.archive.org/web/20021224193414/http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/moorcock.html Michael Moorcock claims that, in addition to supporting Dianetics, he also supported “a perpetual motion machine known as the ‘Dean Drive’, a series of plans to ensure that the highways weren’t ‘abused’, and dozens of other half-baked notions, all in the context of cold-war thinking. He also, when faced with the Watts riots of the mid-sixties, seriously proposed and went on to proposing that there were ‘natural’ slaves who were unhappy if freed.”

- Jimmy Maher

March 2, 2019 at 2:16 pm

I’m certainly not an expert on his history, but my understanding is that all of this is post-Dianetics. He became more and more reactionary as he aged.

- Elzair

March 2, 2019 at 8:12 pm

Ah! That explains it. Thanks for the clarification.

- Aula

March 2, 2019 at 2:09 pm

“While the town themselves”

should be “towns”

“doubtless do do some people”

no need to repeat “do”

“Online sources include online sources include”

again, no need to repeat

“Frederick Phol’s memories of Hubbard”

should be “Pohl”

- Jimmy Maher

March 2, 2019 at 2:13 pm

Thanks!

- Adamantyr

March 2, 2019 at 5:55 pm

My favorite part in the game is when you retrieve the Cube and then you can go around to all the Fellowship leaders over the world and more often than not, the cube will force them to reveal the truth. They’re all despicable people who know exactly what they’re doing too. The only one you can’t do this to is Batlin, who teleports away the moment he sees you with it.

I enjoyed the Fellowship as the adversary of the game… It’s unfortunate that most modern CRPG’s have regressed back to simplistic over-the-top cinematic villains instead of the truly scary and evil things. Cults are always poorly done too; what every fantasy trope writer seems to forget is that cults are made up of people who still have every day lives.

- Lisa H.

March 2, 2019 at 10:28 pm

Thelema, Aleister Crowley’s egoistic and hedonistic take on spiritualism.

Maybe you meant “spirituality”? (Although I would have said magic, mysticism, esotericism, or something along those lines.) Spiritualism is something else.

known as the Thetans. (The similarity of the name to Crowley’s Thelema was perhaps telling.)

Ehhhh. “Thelema” means “will”. Other than that the first letter of the word “thelema” is theta, I find this dubious. I would sooner have connected it to the way that alien or extradimensional beings in sci-fi (not to mention conspiracy theories) are often named after our names for certain stars – Beta this, Theta that, Delta what-have-you.

- Jimmy Maher

March 3, 2019 at 7:40 am

Yes, poor choice of words on my part. Thanks!

To your other point, I’m not sure etymologies and the like are super-relevant here. My strong impression is that Hubbard just wanted a word that *sounded cool*. It doesn’t strike me as a big stretch that Hubbard would have grabbed onto a word vaguely similar to the cult he had been a part of a few years before when dashing off his new religion. Nor, for that matter, does your own guess about the name’s origin, or a combination of the two…

- Pingback: Lazy Reading for 2019/03/03 – DragonFly BSD Digest

- Carl

March 4, 2019 at 2:45 am

Jimmy, you missed an opportunity to touch on the fascinating fact that the leader of the Crowley-esque (although Crowley himself didn’t take it seriously) cult that L. Ron Hubbard was associated with in Pasadena was run by Jack Parsons, an early proponent of liquid-fueled rockets, and one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet Corporation.

In letters from Crowley it is clear he considered Hubbard to be a grifter and a putz. This is a pretty accurate assessment I would say.

- Jimmy Maher

March 4, 2019 at 9:23 am

Interesting, given that Crowley himself was a noted grifter, constantly asking acquaintances whether they could spare a fiver. ;)

I didn’t want this to turn into a multi-article series, and so needed to keep the Scientology history at a summary level. Janet Reitman’s book spends a fair amount of time on Hubbard’s year in Hollywood. I highly recommend it to readers wishing to know more.

- Max

March 4, 2019 at 9:36 am

Aaaaaand 27 years later Garriott himself is in charge of the Shroud of the Avatar, a buggy crappy MMO where people have bought virtual property for thousands of real US dollars apiece and continue to write glowing reviews on the Steam page and protect it on the forums. Not to mention the broken promises to the Kickstarter backers and shady money-raising ventures. How the mighty have fallen, eh? I wonder if you’ll write an article about that piece of work when the chronology comes.

- Jimmy Maher

March 4, 2019 at 10:01 am

I do find Garriott to be a fascinating character, although I tend to take a more jaundiced view of even his early career than most Ultima fans. (I’m not sure I could call him a great game designer even at his peak — more a great game conceptualizer.) Certainly his career since Ultima VII has been a classic cautionary tale in the dangers of believing your own hype, and of wanting to be recognized for doing great creative work without being willing to put in the time and effort that great work requires.

That said, I don’t think he’s a bad guy, just a rather undisciplined one who tends to get led in unfortunate directions by his more hands-on partners. There’s an interesting contrast to be drawn with Warren Spector, whose own post-Ultima career turned into everything Richard Garriott’s didn’t.

- Max

March 5, 2019 at 8:00 am

To be frank, all RPGs of that era feel somewhat amateurish just because the industry has not matured yet. Amateur art, amateur music, amateur plots and scripts, and, worst of all, amateur development practices were a staple back then.The fans who grew up on this and accepted itare okay with the many flaws but if you’re looking from a modern perspective, a lot of it does not hold up unless you make a significant effort.

I agree with you on Spector, he always seemed much more focused and pragmatic, in my opinion. Imagine Deus Ex not having that last half-year of polish or the philosophical NPC dialogues, probably would’ve been a trainwreck instead of GOTY.

- Brian Bagnall

March 11, 2019 at 3:44 pm

Have you played the Epic Mickey games? Those were a huge step backward from his previous games.

- Jimmy Maher

March 11, 2019 at 4:02 pm

No, I haven’t.

- Corey Cole

April 4, 2019 at 11:36 pm

Max and other commenters: Be careful to what degree you “flip the bozo bit” on Richard Garriott and other game authors. I see a modern tendency to declare everything as either perfect and amazing or as complete shit, with most work relegated to the latter category.

In fact, modern games (and even those of the late 1990’s) have teams of dozens to hundreds of developers. There is only so much influence any single individual – even the creator, director, or lead designer – has on a game. They are all compromises, and they all have flaws.

Jimmy has pointed out a number of problems with “my” games Quest for Glory III and Quest for Glory IV, and they’re valid concerns. Yet others lavish praise on either or both as some of the most amazing games ever written. The truth lies somewhere in between, and the ridiculously short production cycles of those games obviously prevented too much polish.

But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Shroud of the Avatar may be flawed – I expect it is – but it’s probably a pretty sincere attempt at making a better MMO. It just didn’t have the time, budget, or perhaps insight required to get all the way there.

I have fans of “my” latest game, Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, who claim it’s the best game they ever played. I also have critics – including one who was one of our biggest dollar backers in the Kickstarter – who claim it’s absolute shit with no redeeming qualities. Once again, the truth is somewhere in between. We’re generally getting 80% ratings, which are good but not spectacular; I tend to think they’re about right.

Since very few games make any money these days, it’s hard to justify pouring too many millions of dollars into a game budget attempting to get absolutely everything right. I’m pretty sure that even those that do – Star Citizen and (to a lesser degree) Broken Age come to mind – are/will be flawed.

Once again, enjoy the parts of the game you enjoy. Accept the imperfections as parts of necessarily imperfect processes of creative work.

- Lisa H.

April 5, 2019 at 2:32 am

I also have critics – including one who was one of our biggest dollar backers in the Kickstarter – who claim it’s absolute shit with no redeeming qualities.

Sounds like someone didn’t get exactly what they fantasized about for their money.

- Dan

March 4, 2019 at 6:21 pm

“straitened membership roles”

Should be “rolls.”

- Jimmy Maher

March 4, 2019 at 7:41 pm

Thanks!

- Operating Pedant

March 29, 2019 at 2:51 pm

Where are you getting this stuff that Hubbard learned hypnotism via Crowley’s OTO group? That’s just nonsense. Cite your sources and what exactly you’re talking about.

- Jimmy Maher

March 29, 2019 at 2:57 pm

Mmm… sources are cited at the bottom of the article. It begins with the word “Sources” in boldface. ;)

- metzomagic

April 3, 2019 at 10:43 pm

I’ve been following the antics of Scientology for as long as I can remember, probably for the last 20 years or so. This is a really good amateur (but not in the least amateurish) exposé of them, written in earnest by an ex-Scientologist:

http://www.apologeticsindex.org/A%20Piece%20of%20Blue%20Sky.pdf

Countless lives have been ruined by this cult. L. Ron’s most infamous quote is probably this:

“You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.”

Hats off to Jimmy for another great article that blends gaming with reality.

- Corey Cole

April 4, 2019 at 11:19 pm

I read somewhere (more than once) that Scientology came about from a bet – or at least a challenge – between L. Ron Hubbard and two or three other science fiction writers. The story was that Robert Heinlein proposed that religions have a protected status in the U.S. that could lead to a fake religion getting a lot of money and power. Heinlein later used this idea in several of his stories and novels including If This Goes On and Stranger In A Strange Land.

Searching for that, I came across this debunking of the “bet” story, but support for the discussion that might have led to Hubbard creating his own religion: https://everything2.com/title/The+Heinlein+-+Hubbard+Wager+Myth

My brother got caught up in Dianetics for a while. He took one of their free audits/assessments, then got talked into taking several fairly expensive courses (I think he mentioned $500 for one). When he eventually backed out, he got a lot of pressure to continue. Of course, that’s difficult to distinguish from well-meaning people trying to help a friend who is making a mistake (by leaving).

I did the audit thing once in between rounds of a chess tournament in Hollywood. I was singularly unimpressed by their “technology” (the E-Meter or an earlier version of it). It looked like a basic Ohm meter (to measure skin resistance). I declined to do anything more with them.

Darklands
March 22, 2019

Darklands may well have been the most original single CRPG of the 1990s, but its box art was planted firmly in the tacky CRPG tradition. I’m not sure that anyone in Medieval Germany really looked much like these two…

Throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s, the genres of the adventure game and the CRPG tended to blend together, in magazine columns as well as in the minds of ordinary gamers. I thus considered it an early point of order for this history project to attempt to identify the precise differences between the genres. Rather than addressing typical surface attributes — a CRPG, many a gamer has said over the years, is an adventure game where you also have to kill monsters — I tried to peek under the hood and identify what really makes the two genres tick. At bottom, I decided, the difference was one of design philosophy. The adventure game focuses on set-piece, handcrafted puzzles and other unique interactions, simulating the world that houses them only to the degree that is absolutely necessary. (This latter is especially true of the point-and-click graphic adventures that came to dominate the field after the 1980s; indeed, throughout gaming history, the trend in adventure games has been to become less rather than more ambitious in terms of simulation.) The CRPG, meanwhile, goes in much more for simulation, to a large degree replacing set-piece behaviors with systems of rules which give scope for truly emergent experiences that were never hard-coded into the design.

Another clear difference between the two genres, however, is in the scope of their fictions’ ambitions. Since the earliest days of Crowther and Woods and Scott Adams, adventure games have roamed widely across the spectrum of storytelling; Infocom alone during the 1980s hit on most of the viable modern literary genres, from the obvious (fantasy, science fiction) to the slightly less obvious (mysteries, thrillers) to the downright surprising (romance novels, social satires). CRPGs, on the other hand, have been plowing more or less the same small plot of fictional territory for decades. How many times now have groups of stalwart men and ladies set forth to conquer the evil wizard? While we do get the occasional foray into science fiction — usually awkwardly hammered into a frame of gameplay conventions more naturally suited to heroic fantasy — it’s for the most part been J.R.R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons, over and over and over again.

This seeming lack of adventurousness (excuse the pun!) among CRPG designers raises some interesting questions. Can the simulation-oriented approach only be made to work within a strictly circumscribed subset of possible virtual worlds? Or is the lack of variety in CRPGs down to a simple lack of trying? An affirmative case for the latter question might be made by Origin Systems’s two rather wonderful Worlds of Ultima games of the early 1990s, which retained the game engine from the more traditional fantasy CRPG Ultima VI but moved it into settings inspired by the classic adventure tales of Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells. Sadly, though, Origin’s customers seemed not to know what to make of Ultima games not taking place in a Renaissance Faire world, and both were dismal commercial failures — thus providing CRPG makers with a strong external motivation to stick with high fantasy, whatever the abstract limits of the applicability of the CRPG formula to fiction might be.

Our subject for today — Darklands, the first CRPG ever released by MicroProse Software — might be described as the rebuttal to the case made by the Worlds of Ultima games, in that its failings point to some of the intrinsic limits of the simulation-oriented approach. Then again, maybe not; today, perhaps even more so than when it was new, this is a game with a hardcore fan base who love it with a passion, even as other players, like the one who happens to be writing this article, see it as rather collapsing under the weight of its ambition and complexity. Whatever your final verdict on it, it’s undeniable that Darklands is overflowing with original ideas for a genre which, even by the game’s release year of 1992, had long since settled into a set of established expectations. By upending so many of them, it became one of the most intriguing CRPGs ever made.

Darklands was the brainchild of Arnold Hendrick, a veteran board-game, wargame, tabletop-RPG, and console-videogame designer who joined MicroProse in 1985, when it was still known strictly as a maker of military simulations. As the first MicroProse employee hired only for a design role — he had no programming or other technical experience whatsoever — he began to place his stamp on the company’s products immediately. It was Hendrick who first had the germ of an idea that Sid Meier, MicroProse’s star programmer/designer, turned into Pirates!, the first MicroProse game to depart notably from the company’s established formula. In addition to Pirates!, for which he continued to serve as a scenario designer and historical consultant even after turning the lead-designer reins over to Meier, Hendrick worked on other games whose feet were more firmly planted in MicroProse’s wheelhouse: titles like Gunship, Project Stealth Fighter, Red Storm Rising, M1 Tank Platoon, and Silent Service II.

“Wild” Bill Stealey, the flamboyant head of MicroProse, had no interest whatsoever in any game that wasn’t a military flight simulator. Still, he liked making money even more than he liked flying virtual aircraft, and by 1990 he wasn’t sure how much more he could grow his company if it continued to make almost nothing but military simulations and the occasional strategic wargame. Meanwhile he had Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon, the latter being Sid Meier’s latest departure from military games, to look at as examples of how successful non-traditional MicroProse games could be. Not knowing enough about other game genres to know what else might be a good bet for his company, he threw the question up to his creative and technical staff: “Okay, programmers, give me what you want to do, and tell me how much money you want to spend. We’ll find a way to sell it.”

And so Hendrick came forward with a proposal to make a CRPG called Darklands, to be set in the Germany of the 15th century, a time and place of dark forests and musty monasteries, Walpurgis Night and witch covens. It could become, Hendrick said, the first of a whole new series of historical CRPGs that, even as they provided MicroProse with an entrée into one of the most popular genres out there, would also leverage their reputation for making games with roots in the real world.

The typical CRPG, then as now, took place in a version of Medieval times that had only ever existed in the imagination of a modern person raised on Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons. It ignored how appallingly miserable and dull life was for the vast majority of people who lived through the historical reality of the Middle Ages, with its plagues, wars, filth, hard labor, and nearly universal illiteracy. Although he was a dedicated student of history, with a university degree in the field, Hendrick too was smart enough to realize that there wasn’t much of a game to be had by hewing overly close to this mundane historical reality. But what if, instead of portraying a Medieval world as his own contemporaries liked to imagine it to have been, he conjured up the world of the Middle Ages as the people who had lived in it had imagined it to be? God and his many saints would take an active role in everyday affairs, monsters and devils would roam the forests, alchemy would really work, and those suspicious-looking folks who lived in the next village really would be enacting unspeakable rituals in the name of Satan every night. “This is an era before logic or science,” Hendrick wrote, “a time when anything is possible. In short, if Medieval Germans believed something to be true, in Darklands it might actually be true.”

He wanted to incorporate an interwoven tapestry of Medieval imagination and reality into Darklands: a magic system based on Medieval theories about alchemy; a pantheon of real saints to pray to, each able to grant her own special favors; a complete, lovingly detailed map of 15th-century Germany and lands adjacent, over which you could wander at will; hundreds of little textual vignettes oozing with the flavor of the Middle Ages. To make it all go, he devised a set of systems the likes of which had never been seen in a CRPG, beginning with a real-time combat engine that let you pause it at any time to issue orders; its degree of simulation would be so deep that it would include penetration values for various weapons against various materials (thus ensuring that a vagabond with rusty knife could never, ever kill a full-fledged knight in shining armor). The character-creation system would be so detailed as to practically become a little game in itself, asking you not so much to roll up each character as live out the life story that brought her to this point: bloodline, occupations, education (such as it was for most in the Middles Ages), etc.

Character creation in Darklands is really, really complicated. And throughout the game, the spidery font superimposed on brown-sauce backgrounds will make your eyes bleed.

All told, it was one heck of a proposition for a company that had never made a CRPG before. Had Stealey been interested enough in CRPGs to realize just how unique the idea was, he might have realized as well how doubtful its commercial prospects were in a market that seemed to have little appetite for any CRPG that didn’t hew more or less slavishly to the Dungeons & Dragons archetype. But Stealey didn’t realize, and so Darklands got the green light in mid-1990. What followed was a tortuous odyssey; it became the most protracted and expensive development project MicroProse had ever funded.

We’ve seen in some of my other recent articles how companies like Sierra and Origin, taking stock of escalating complexity in gameplay and audiovisuals and their inevitable companion of escalating budgets, began to systematize the process of game development around this time. And we’ve at least glimpsed as well how such systematization could be a double-edged sword, leading to creatively unsatisfied team members and final products with something of a cookie-cutter feel.

MicroProse, suffice to say, didn’t go that route. Stealey took a hands-off approach to all projects apart from his beloved flight simulators, allowing his people to freelance their way through them. For all the drawbacks of rigid hierarchies and strict methodologies, the Darklands project could have used an injection of exactly those things. It was plagued by poor communication and outright confusion from beginning to end, as Arnold Hendrick and his colleagues improvised like mad in the process of making a game that was like nothing any of them had ever tried to make before.

Hendrick today forthrightly acknowledges that his own performance as project leader was “terrible.” Too often, the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing. An example cited by Hendrik involves Jim Synoski, the team’s first and most important programmer. For some months at the beginning of the project, he believed he was making essentially a real-time fighting game; while that was in fact some of what Darklands was about, it was far from the sum total of the experience. Once made aware at last that his combat code would need to interact with many other modules, he managed to hack the whole mess together, but it certainly wasn’t pretty. It seems there wasn’t so much as a design document for the team to work from — just a bunch of ideas in Hendrick’s head, imperfectly conveyed to everyone else.

The first advertisement for Darklands appeared in the March 1991 issue of Computer Gaming World. The actual product wouldn’t materialize until eighteen months later.

It’s small wonder, then, that Darklands went so awesomely over time and over budget; the fact that MicroProse never cancelled it likely owes as much to the sunk-cost fallacy as anything else. Hendrick claims that the game cost as much as $3 million to make in the end — a flabbergasting number that, if correct, would easily give it the crown of most expensive computer game ever made at the time of its release. Indeed, even a $2 million price tag, the figure typically cited by Stealey, would also qualify it for that honor. (By way of perspective, consider that Origin Systems’s epic CRPG Ultima VII shipped the same year as Darklands with an estimated price tag of $1 million.)

All of this was happening at the worst possible time for MicroProse. Another of Stealey’s efforts to expand the company’s market share had been an ill-advised standup-arcade version of F-15 Strike Eagle, MicroProse’s first big hit. The result, full of expensive state-of-the-art graphics hardware, was far too complex for the quarter-eater market; it flopped dismally, costing MicroProse a bundle. Even as that investment was going up in smoke, Stealey, acting again purely on the basis of his creative staff’s fondest wishes, agreed to challenge the likes of Sierra by making a line of point-and-click graphic adventures. Those products too would go dramatically over time and over budget.

Stealey tried to finance these latest products by floating an initial public offering in October of 1991. By June of 1992, on the heels of an announcement that not just Darklands but three other major releases as well would not be released that quarter — more fruit of Stealey’s laissez-faire philosophy of game development — the stock tumbled to almost 25 percent below its initial price. A stench of doom was beginning to surround the company, despite such recent successes as Civilization.

Games, like most creative productions, generally mirror the circumstances of their creation. This fact doesn’t bode well for Darklands, a project which started in chaos and ended, two years later, in a panicked save-the-company scramble.

Pirates!

Darklands

If you squint hard enough at Darklands, you can see its roots in Pirates!, the first classic Arnold Hendrick helped to create at MicroProse. As in that game, Darklands juxtaposes menu-driven in-town activities, written in an embodied narrative style, with more free-form wanderings over the territories that lie between the towns. But, in place of the straightforward menu of six choices in Pirates!, your time in the towns of Darklands becomes a veritable maze of twisty little passages; you start the game in an inn, but from there can visit a side street or a main street, which in turn can lead you to the wharves or the market, dark alleys or a park, all with yet more things to see and do. Because all of these options are constantly looping back upon one another — it’s seldom clear if the side street from this menu is the same side street you just visited from that other menu — just trying to buy some gear for your party can be a baffling undertaking for the beginner.

Thus, in spite of the superficial interface similarities, we see two radically opposing approaches to game design in Pirates! and Darklands. The older game emphasizes simplicity and accessibility, being only as complex as it needs to be to support the fictional experience it wants to deliver. But Darklands, for its part, piles on layer after layer of baroque detail with gleeful abandon. One might say that here the complexity is the challenge; learning to play the entirety of Darklands at all requires at least as much time and effort as getting really, truly good at a game like Pirates!.

The design dialog we see taking place here has been with us for a long time. Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, the co-creators of the first incarnation of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, parted ways not long afterward thanks largely to a philosophical disagreement about how their creation should evolve. Arneson saw the game as a fairly minimalist framework to enable a shared storytelling session, while Gygax saw it as something more akin to the complex wargames on which he’d cut his teeth. Gygax, who would go on to write hundreds of pages of fiddly rules for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, his magnum opus, was happily cataloging and quantifying every variant of pole arm used in Medieval times when an exasperated Arneson finally lost his cool: “It’s a pointy thing on the end of a stick!” Your appreciation for Darklands must hinge on whether you are a Gary Gygax or a Dave Arneson in spirit. I know to which camp I belong; while there is a subset of gamers who truly enjoy Darkland’s type of complexity — and more power to them for it — I must confess that I’m not among them.

In an interview conducted many years after the release of Darklands, Arnold Hendrick himself put his finger on what I consider to be its core problem: “Back then, game systems were often overly complicated, and attention to gameplay was often woefully lacking. These days, there’s a much better balance between gameplay and the human psychology of game players and the game systems underlying that gameplay.” Simply put, there are an awful lot of ideas in Darklands which foster complexity, but don’t foster what ought to be the ultimate arbitrator in game design: Fun. Modern designers often talk about an elusive sense of “flow” — a sense by the player that all of a game’s parts merge into a harmonious whole which makes playing for hours on end all too tempting. For this player at least, Darklands is the polar opposite of this ideal. Not only is it about as off-putting a game as I’ve ever seen at initial startup, but it continues always, even after a certain understanding has begun to dawn, to be a game of disparate parts: a character-generation game, a combat game, a Choose Your Own Adventure-style narrative, a game of alchemical crafting. There are enough original ideas here for ten games, but it never becomes clear why they absolutely, positively all need to be in this one. Darklands, in other words, is kind of a muddle.

Your motivation for adventuring in Medieval Germany in the first place is one of Darklands’s original ideas in CRPG design. Drawing once again comparisons to Pirates!, Darklands dispenses with any sort of overarching plot as a motivating force. Instead, like your intrepid corsair of the earlier game, your party of four has decided simply “to bring everlasting honor and glory to your names.” If you play for long enough, something of a larger plot will eventually begin to emerge, involving a Satan-worshiping cult and a citadel dedicated to the demon Baphomet, but even after rooting out the cult and destroying the citadel the game doesn’t end.

In place of an overarching plot, Darklands relies on incidents and anecdotes, from a wandering knight challenging you to a duel to a sinkhole that swallows up half your party. While these are the products of a human writer (presumably Arnold Hendrick for the most part), their placements in the world are randomized. To improve your party’s reputation and earn money, you undertake a variety of quests of the “take item A to person B” or “go kill monster C” variety. All of this too is procedurally generated. Indeed, you begin a new game of Darklands by choosing the menu option “Create a New World.” Although the geography of Medieval Germany won’t change from game to game, most of what you’ll find in and around the towns is unique to your particular created world. It all adds up to a game that could literally, as MicroProse’s marketers didn’t hesitate to declare, go on forever.

But, as all too commonly happens with these things, it’s a little less compelling in practice than it sounds in theory. I’ve gone on record a number of times now with my practical objections to generative narratives. Darklands too often falls prey to the problems that are so typical of the approach. The quests you pick up, lacking as they do any larger relationship to a plot or to the world, are the very definition of FedEx quests, bereft of any interest beyond the reputation and money they earn for you. And, while it can sometimes surprise you with an unexpectedly appropriate and evocative textual vignette, the game more commonly hews to the predictable here as well. Worse, it has a dismaying tendency to show you the same multiple-choice vignettes again and again, pulling you right out of the fiction.

And yet the vignettes are actually the most narratively interesting parts of the game; it will be some time before you begin to see them at all. As in so many other vintage CRPGs, the bulk of your time at the beginning of Darklands is spent doing boring things in the name of earning the right to eventually do less boring things. In this case, you’ll likely have to spend several hours roaming the vacant back streets of whatever town you happen to begin in, seeking out and killing anonymous bands of robbers, just to build up your party enough to leave the starting town.

The open-ended structure works for Pirates! because that game dispenses with this puritanical philosophy of design. It manages to be great fun from the first instant by keeping the pace fast and the details minimal, even as it puts a definite time limit on your career, thus tempting you to play again and again in order to improve on your best final score. Darklands, by contrast, doesn’t necessarily end even when your party is too old to adventure anymore (aging becomes a factor after about age thirty); you can just make new characters and continue where the old ones left off, in the same world with the same equipment, quests, and reputation. Darklands, then, ends only when you get tired of it. Just when that exact point arrives will doubtless differ markedly from player to player, but it’s guaranteed to be anticlimactic.

The ostensible point of Darklands’s enormously complex systems of character creation, alchemy, religion, and combat is to evoke its chosen time and place as richly as possible. One might even say the same about its lack of an overarching epic plot; such a thing doesn’t exist in the books of history and legend to which the game is so determined to be so faithful. Yet I can’t help but feel that this approach — that of trying to convey the sense of a time and place through sheer detail — is fundamentally misguided. Michael Bate, a designer of several games for Accolade during the 1980s, coined the term “aesthetic simulations” for historical games that try to capture the spirit of their subject matter rather than every piddling detail. Pirates! is, yet again, a fine example of this approach, as is the graceful, period-infused but not period-heavy-handed writing of the 1992 adventure game The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes.

The writing in Darklands falls somewhat below that standard. It isn’t terrible, but it is a bit graceless, trying to make up for in concrete detail what it isn’t quite able to conjure in atmosphere. So, we get money that is laboriously explicated in terms of individual pfenniges, groschen, and florins, times of day described in terms that a Medieval monk would understand (Matins, Latins, Prime, etc.), and lots of off-putting-to-native-English-speakers German names, but little real sense of being in Medieval Germany.

Graphically as well, the game is… challenged. Having devoted most of their development efforts to 3D vehicular simulators during the 1980s, MicroProse’s art department plainly struggled to adapt to the demands of other genres. Even an unimpeachable classic like Sid Meier’s Civilization achieves its classic status despite rather than because of its art; visually, it’s a little garish compared to what other studios were putting out by this time. But Darklands is much more of a visual disaster, a conflicting mishmash of styles that sometimes manage to look okay in isolation, such as in the watercolor-style backgrounds to many of the textual vignettes. Just as often, though, it verges on the hideous; the opening movie is so absurdly amateurish that, according to industry legend, some people actually returned the game after seeing it, thinking they must have gotten a defective disk or had an incompatible video card.

One of Darklands’s more evocative vignettes, with one of its better illustrations as a backdrop. Unfortunately, you’re likely to see this same vignette and illustration several times, with a decided sense of diminishing returns.

But undoubtedly the game’s biggest single problem, at the time of its release and to some extent still today, was all of the bugs. Even by the standards of an industry at large which was clearly struggling to come to terms with the process of making far more elaborate games than had been seen in the previous decade, Darklands stood out upon its belated release in August of 1992 for its woefully under-baked state. Whether this was despite or because of its extended development cycle remains a question for debate. What isn’t debatable, however, is that it was literally impossible to complete Darklands in its initial released state, and that, even more damningly, a financially pressured MicroProse knew this and released it anyway. To their credit, the Darklands team kept trying to fix the game after its release, with patch after patch to its rickety code base. The patches eventually numbered at least nine in all, a huge quantity for long-suffering gamers to acquire at a time when they could only be distributed on physical floppy disks or via pricey commercial online services like CompuServe. After about a year, the team managed to get the game into a state where it only occasionally did flaky things, although even today it remains far from completely bug-free.

By the time the game reached this reasonably stable state, however, the damage had been done. It sold fairly well in its first month or two, but then came a slew of negative reviews and an avalanche of returns that actually exceeded new sales for some time; Darklands thus managed the neat trick of continuing to be a drain on MicroProse’s precarious day-to-day finances even after it had finally been released. Hendrick had once imagined a whole line of similar historical CRPGs; needless to say, that didn’t happen.

Combined with the only slightly less disastrous failure of the new point-and-click graphic-adventure line, Darklands was directly responsible for the end of MicroProse as an independent entity. In December of 1993, with the company’s stock now at well under half of its IPO price and the creditors clamoring, a venture-capital firm arranged a deal whereby MicroProse was acquired by Spectrum Holobyte, known virtually exclusively for a truly odd pairing of products: the home-computer version of the casual game Tetris and the ultra-hardcore flight simulator Falcon. The topsy-turvy world of corporate finance being what it was, this happened despite the fact that MicroProse’s total annual sales were still several times that of Spectrum Holobyte.

Stealey, finding life unpleasant in a merged company where he was no longer top dog, quit six months later. His evaluation of the reasons for MicroProse’s collapse was incisive enough in its fashion:

You have to be known for something. We were known for two things [military simulators and grand-strategy games], but we tried to do more. I think that was a big mistake. I should have been smarter than that. I should have stuck with what we were good at.

I’ve been pretty hard on Darklands in this article, a stance for which I don’t quite feel a need to apologize; I consider it a part of my duty as your humble scribe to call ’em like I see ’em. Yet there is far more to Darklands’s legacy than a disappointing game which bankrupted a company. Given how rare its spirit of innovation has been in CRPG design, plenty of players in the years since its commercial vanishing performance have been willing to cut it a lot of slack, to work hard to enjoy it on its own terms. For reasons I’ve described at some length now, I can’t manage to join this group, but neither can I begrudge them their passion.

But then, Darklands has been polarizing its players from the very beginning. Shortly after the game’s release, Scorpia, Computer Gaming World magazine’s famously opinionated adventure-game columnist, wrote a notably harsh review of it, concluding that it “might have been one of the great ones” but instead “turns out to be a game more to be avoided than anything else.” Johnny L. Wilson, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, was so bothered by her verdict that he took the unusual step of publishing a sidebar response of his own. It became something of a template for future Darklands apologies by acknowledging the game’s obvious flaws yet insisting that its sheer uniqueness nevertheless made it worthwhile. (“The game is as repetitive as Scorpia and some of the game’s online critics have noted. One comes across some of the same encounters over and over. Yet only occasionally did I find this disconcerting.”) He noted as well that he personally hadn’t seen many of the bugs and random crashes which Scorpia had described in her review. Perhaps, he mused, his computer was just an “immaculate contraption” — or perhaps Scorpia’s was the opposite. In response to the sidebar, Wilson was castigated by his magazine’s readership, who apparently agreed with Scorpia much more than with him and considered him to have undermined his own acknowledged reviewer.

The reader response wasn’t the only interesting postscript to this episode. Wilson:

Later, after 72 hours of playing around with minor quests and avoiding the main plot line of Darklands, I decided it was time to finish the game. I had seven complete system crashes in less than an hour and a half once I decided to jump in and finish the game. I didn’t really have an immaculate contraption, I just hadn’t encountered the worst crashes because I hadn’t filled my upper memory with the system-critical details of the endgame. Scorpia hadn’t overreacted to the crashes. I just hadn’t seen how bad it was because I was fooling around with the game instead of trying to win. Since most players would be trying to win, Scorpia’s review was more valid than my sidebar. Ah, well, that probably isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever done when I thought I was being fair.

This anecdote reveals what may be a deciding factor — in addition to a tolerance for complexity for its own sake — as to whether one can enjoy Darklands or not. Wilson had been willing to simply inhabit its world, while the more goal-oriented Scorpia approached it as she would any other CRPG — i.e., as a game that she wanted to win. As a rather plot-focused, goal-oriented player myself, I naturally sympathize more with her point of view.

In the end, then, the question of where the point of failure lies in Darklands is one for the individual player to answer. Is Darklands as a whole a very specific sort of failure, a good idea that just wasn’t executed as well as it might have been? Or does the failure lie with the CRPG format itself, which this game stretched beyond the breaking point? Or does the real failure lie with the game’s first players, who weren’t willing to look past the bugs and other occasional infelicities to appreciate what could have been a whole new type of CRPG? I know where I stand, but my word is hardly the final one.

Given the game’s connection to the real world and its real cultures, so unusual to the CRPG genre, perhaps the most interesting question of all raised by Darklands is that of the appropriate limits of gamefication. A decade before Darklands’s release, the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop RPG was embroiled in a controversy engendered by God-fearing parents who feared it to be an instrument of Satanic indoctrination. In actuality, the creators of the game had been wise enough to steer well clear of any living Western belief system. (The Deities & Demigods source book did include living native-American, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese religions, which raises some troublesome questions of its own about cultural appropriation and respect, but wasn’t quite the same thing as what the angry Christian contingent was complaining about.)

It’s ironic to note that much of the content which Evangelical Christians believed to be present in Dungeons & Dragons actually is present in Darklands, including the Christian God and Satan and worshipers of both. Had Darklands become successful enough to attract the attention of the same groups who objected so strongly to Dungeons & Dragons, there would have been hell to pay. Arnold Hendrick had lived through the earlier controversy from an uncomfortably close vantage point, having been a working member of the tabletop-game industry at the time it all went down. In his designer’s notes in Darklands’s manual, he thus went to great pains to praise the modern “vigorous, healthy, and far more spiritual [Catholic] Church whose quiet role around the globe is more altruistic and beneficial than many imagine.” Likewise, he attempted to separate modern conceptions of Satanism and witchcraft from those of Medieval times. Still, the attempt to build a wall between the Christianity of the 15th century and that of today cannot be entirely successful; at the end of the day, we are dealing with the same religion, albeit in two very different historical contexts.

Opinions vary as to whether the universe in which we live is entirely mechanistic, reducible to the interactions of concrete, understandable, computable physical laws. But it is clear that a computer simulation of a world must be exactly such a thing. In short, a simulation leaves no room for the ineffable. And yet Darklands chooses to grapple, to an extent unrivaled by almost any other game I’m aware of, with those parts of human culture that depend upon a belief in the ineffable. By bringing Christianity into its world, it goes to a place virtually no other game has dared approach. Its vending-machine saints reduce a religion — a real, living human faith — to a game mechanic. Is this okay? Or are there areas of the human experience which ought not to be turned into banal computer code? The answer must be in the eye — and perhaps the faith — of the beholder.

Darklands’s real-time-with-pause combat system. The interface here is something of a disaster, and the visuals too leave much to be desired, but the core idea is sound.

By my lights, Darklands is more of a collection of bold ideas than a coherent game, more of an experiment in the limits of CRPG design than a classic example of same. Still, in a genre which is so often in thrall to the tried and true, its willingness to experiment can only be applauded.

For sometimes experiments yield rich rewards, as the most obvious historical legacy of this poor-selling, obscure, bug-ridden game testifies. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, the joint CEOs of Bioware at the time that studio made the Baldur’s Gate series of CRPGs, have acknowledged lifting the real-time-with-pause combat systems in those huge-selling and much-loved games directly out of Darklands. Since the Baldur’s Gate series’s heyday around the turn of the millennium, dozens if not hundreds of other CRPGs have borrowed the same system second-hand from Bioware. Such is the way that innovation diffuses itself through the culture of game design. So, the next time you fire up a Steam-hosted extravaganza like Pillars of Eternity, know that part of the game you’re playing owes its existence to Darklands. Lumpy and imperfect though it is in so many ways, we could use more of its spirit of bold innovation today — in CRPG design and, indeed, across the entire landscape of interactive entertainment.

(Sources: the book Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay; Computer Gaming World of March 1991, February 1992, May 1992, September 1992, December 1992, January 1993, and June 1994; Commodore Magazine of September 1987; Questbusters of November 1992; Compute! of October 1993; PC Zone of September 2001; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of January 17 1992; New York Times of June 13 1993. Online sources include Matt Barton’s interview with Arnold Hendrick, Just Adventure’s interview with Johnny L. Wilson, and Arnold Hendrick’s discussion of Darklands in the Steam forum.

Darklands is available for purchase on GOG.com.)

Comments
37 Responses

- Andrew Pam

March 22, 2019 at 5:26 pm

You could argue that another spiritual successor to Darklands is the very successful “Kingdom Come: Deliverance”, which likewise attempts to portray a realistic mediaeval environment rather than the tratitional RPG fantasy world.

- Ronan

March 23, 2019 at 1:18 am

In fact, when I first saw the kickstarter for “Kingdom Come” my immediate reaction was :
“Wow! A spiritual sequel to Darklands”!!
:)

- matt w

March 23, 2019 at 12:22 pm

UnReal World (not related to the Unreal shooting games and Unreal engine) is another realisticish medieval cRPG (or does Iron Age Finland count as medieval?) which started as a fantasy game in 1992 but by 1996 had dropped the orcs, elves, and so on for animals, with maybe a touch of Nordic folklore of the time. I’ve only played a very little bit but it goes in on simulation, where the overriding goal is keeping yourself alive and there’s no overriding plot at all, I think.

- Infinitron

March 22, 2019 at 5:35 pm

“Darklands, the only CRPG ever released by MicroProse Software”

There were at least three! Challenge of the Five Realms and Bloodnet. The latter a fascinatingly terrible game, the former completely forgotten.

- Jimmy Maher

March 22, 2019 at 6:12 pm

Thanks!

- Jonathan Badger

March 23, 2019 at 3:34 pm

Although you have to admit that by combining the two hot genres genres of the early 1990s, cyberpunk and vampires, Bloodnet was brilliant in conception, if terrible in execution.

- Infinitron

March 24, 2019 at 4:00 pm

Hence the “fascinatingly”.

- Alex Smith

March 22, 2019 at 6:14 pm

“taking stocking of escalating complexity”

stock

- Jacen

March 22, 2019 at 6:43 pm

certain understanding has become to dawn -begun

wandering knight challenging you to a dual -dual wield for the duel

of a template for future Darklands apologies by acknowledging the game’s obvious flaws yet -apologists?

reduceable -is this a real word?

- Jimmy Maher

March 22, 2019 at 7:04 pm

Thanks!

An apologist writes an apology. And it’s a word, but a misspelled one. ;)

- Kai

March 22, 2019 at 7:42 pm

I’ve been really looking forward to that game when I first read about it, in some magazine prior to its release. But it never came out for the Amiga. In the end, I did not play it.

- Brian

March 23, 2019 at 3:33 am

I’m not sure I’d even heard of this title previously. In 1992 I was heading to college and gaming time for CRPGs was dropping rapidly though… probably just missed it in those heady days.

I’ll always remember Spectrum Holobyte for Gato! It was an awesome sub-simulator for 1984 level tech and gameplay.

- Zed Banville

March 23, 2019 at 5:05 am

“…it’s for the most part been J.R.R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons, over and over and over again.”

There are two types of RPGs: Dungeons & Dragons and imitations of Dungeons & Dragons.

- Laertes

March 23, 2019 at 3:06 pm

Some roguelikes have great emerging narratives, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup comes to mind. Playing as an orc priest of Beogh, for example, is something worth experiencing. I don’t know of any other game providing a similar adventure.

- Ronan

March 23, 2019 at 10:37 pm

https://www.gog.com/game/tales_of_majeyal

- Laertes

March 24, 2019 at 12:03 pm

I played Majeyal many years ago and if I remember correctly it has a scripted story, or at least so aspects of its world are scripted.

- Matthew Parsons

March 23, 2019 at 6:06 pm

Oh man, I remember this cover/box, one of the many that frequently tantalized my imagination, probably at the local Radio Shack. It’s always interesting to see how the reality of things matched up to what the boxart and blurbs promised.

“After my lights,” – not sure what this means. Never seen it a phrase before.

- Jimmy Maher

March 23, 2019 at 6:43 pm

Ah, should be “by my lights.” Not the first time of done that. I think Danish is creeping into my English…

- Captain Rufus

March 23, 2019 at 8:33 pm

I knew of the game but somehow never got around to buying it. Finding out about the bugs and Real Time With Pause combat are why I continue to not get around to it. Most real time rpg combat systems are utterly abysmal to me. And add in procedural generation? Hardest possible pass.

- nek

March 24, 2019 at 1:56 pm

I loved the game back then.. still do – as i like complexity. And alone the character generation is still unparalleld to this day. Sadly the combat was the worst point of it (didnt have so much trouble with bugs and liked the rest, which is critized here mainly). And exactly that was used onwards? Oh well… i´m just not a mainstream player i guess :/

- Martin

March 24, 2019 at 11:40 pm

“Martin the fat” – what are you trying to tell me?

- Jimmy Maher

March 25, 2019 at 7:25 am

:) The game auto-generated that name. A rare note of humor and whimsy, it would seem — something this incredibly self-serious game could have done with a bit more of.

- W

March 25, 2019 at 12:02 pm

I find symptomatic of the game, that official Darklands Clue Book states that
>> The random name generator, using historical first and last names in new patterns, has much to recommend it. However, it does not include cute appellations, such as “Hans the fat” or “Wiggi the red-nose.” <<
I was wondering why "the fat" can be found among other surnames in the game binary but I wasn't lucky enought to get the name in game.

- Jeff Morris

March 25, 2019 at 1:10 am

The game as described sounds incredibly familiar to Hendrick’s board game Barbarian King (Fighting Fantasy on steroids).

- Bmp

March 30, 2019 at 6:12 pm

You mean Barbarian Prince:
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1631/barbarian-prince

- Ross

March 25, 2019 at 9:12 pm

I’ve been trying to remember this game for years, but I never could cough up enough details to be googleable. I remember it completely failing to grab me before I ran out of time and gave up on it, despite the fact that I was incredibly stoked by the breadth and depth it seemed to offer. All these years, I’ve reckoned that if I’d been able to go back to it (I was playing at a friend’s house, iirc), I might have really liked it if I got over the initial hump. Or more likely, I’d have liked some other game in this style. Never felt like I found one.

- Derek

March 26, 2019 at 12:50 am

I played Darklands for many hours. But if I’m remembering right, I quit soon after starting not because of the bugs (which I didn’t encounter), but because one could not save the game in a dungeon / encounter. Those could go for hours.
I then found the hint book with a patch disk at EB that let you save anywhere, and all bets were off for me then.
I enjoyed the long-haul, boring simulation with killing countless bandits to build up my characters. I didn’t mind seeing the same situations a few times. I loved the alchemy and saint/prayer systems. And the graphics looked fine for me at the time.
I don’t think I ever finished the “main” storyline, but the game remains at the top of my list.

- Mika Oksanen

March 28, 2019 at 11:20 pm

About the appropriate limits of gamefication -. you say:
“Had Darklands become successful enough to attract the attention of the same groups who objected so strongly to Dungeons & Dragons, there would have been hell to pay”

I suppose so so but you have to wonder why. After all there are also games dealing with Christianity written from a Christian pespective. I understand the treament of medieval Christianity in Darklands is respectful, so how would it differ essentially from such a game as, oh, FIVE: Guardians of David (to choose a Christian game which is also sort of an RPG and not wholly terrible), which is based on Old Testament stories or king David? Though I suppose some of the more extreme Evangelical Christians do also object to FIVE, but surely not many?

- Jimmy Maher

March 29, 2019 at 7:48 am

I’m not familiar with the game you mention, but I do think these issues are a little more complicated than what you imply here. For one thing, Darklands’s portrayal of the Catholic Church is far from flattering, although one could certainly argue that it’s historically accurate — and of course one always need to separate any given church from Christianity in general.

But I think the real questions surround the game’s portrayal of religion as a vending machine: put prayers in, get divine favors out. While some people who call themselves religious do indeed seem to see it in that light, I think that most would consider that to be a pretty shallow, inherently demeaning take on their faith, even if it’s not explicitly intended as such. And yet it’s hard to imagine what *else* Darklands could have done, simply because of the nature of computer simulation. This must be the real crux of any discussion about the appropriate limits of gemeification.

- Pedro Timóteo

March 29, 2019 at 2:23 pm

I think the point of Darklands’ religion system is just like that of the rest of the game: it should work like people at the time believed it did. That included a lot of saints having “specialties”, and you’d pray to a specific saint to get help in that “specialty”. The fact that that makes it sound like spells in a fantasy RPG is beside the point, I think.

Another thing we see in the game is that priests are always “right” — no matter how corrupt a traveling priest asking you for a “donation” obviously is, you always get penalized (in terms of piety) for refusing; this is not a time where people could question a priest’s morality. And, of course, there were witches and Satanists everywhere, because the church had convinced ordinary people that it was so.

I really don’t see the game as disrespectful or offensive to religion in general, or Catholicism specifically, in any way, and, before anyone says “oh, that’s because you’re a non-believer”, I *was* a Catholic (which is common in Portugal) back in 1992, when I first played the game. :)

- Brian Bruinewoud

March 30, 2019 at 2:17 am

Is it just me, or does the gauntlet cursor look like ‘raised middle finger’ gesture?
Aka: this emoji:

- Lhexa

April 1, 2019 at 2:44 am

Now that we’re getting closer to its time period, I’ll try to make a pitch for the importance of Spiderweb less irrationally.

The Exile (then Avernum) games are solid, imaginative titles one and all, but I don’t think I could make a case for them belonging in the canon of their era. (Though Exile 1 may contain the first example of an openly gay couple in computer gaming.) However, I do think I can make such a case for Geneforge, their third world. I’ll just put it out as a list.

The gameplay mechanics may be seen as metaphors for the themes of the plot, which few games then and now are able to accomplish.
It’s nonlinear without falling into the common pitfalls of nonlinearity.
It contains/presents multiple competing factions, with consequential choices to be made among them, every bit as well as Deus Ex, its contemporary. And its array of potential endings are far better designed/presented/justified than Deus Ex’s.
In a genre which, as you’ve said, has trouble moving beyond Tolkienian or Gygaxian fantasy, it presents a fascinating mix of fantasy and science fiction. It’s more Ursula LeGuin or C.J. Cherryh than Tolkien, albeit without the anthropological chops.
It competently deals with themes of the cultural identity, slavery (!), and the corruptive potential of power.
I don’t think the dialogue would impress you, for the same reason that you (in my opinion) misjudged Dr. Cat’s dialogue in Ultima VI: its virtues are to be found in its bulk aspects, not any of its lines or moments considered in isolation. But those virtues are there.
A little while ago you talked about games which seem immaculately conceived, that seem to get everything right on the first try; in my view, Geneforge is close to this, and a couple of its remaining flaws I might be able to justify on thematic grounds. Some of these decisions are quite clever on their own, as well, like having two MP-equivalents, one for short-term magical stamina and one for long-term magical investments.

Um… I guess that’s enough. Also, sorry for being so irrational and quarrelsome many months back. -_-

- Jimmy Maher

April 1, 2019 at 1:52 pm

We’re obviously a considerable ways out from any of this, but Spiderweb does strike me as interesting, both for the games themselves and for the rather remarkable one-man success story of their developer Jeff Vogel. Will try to give him and them their due when the time comes…

- Lhexa

April 1, 2019 at 8:53 pm

Hooray!

- Pingback: Lazy Reading for 2019/04/07 – DragonFly BSD Digest

- Mirir

April 11, 2019 at 4:37 pm

Since the name has been raised, may I ask if you’re going to cover the Falcon series? Sure it’s hardcore but Falcon 3.0 was a driving force in the 90’s and the flourish of flight simulators in that decade (the Jane’s series, EF2000, Flanker…) was probably in a big way thanks to it.

Falcon 4.0 has another whole story just only for it but I guess that is a little bit out of the scope of this blog.

- Jimmy Maher

April 11, 2019 at 7:25 pm

Perhaps a bit more in passing if the occasion arises, but no, no detailed analyses. Flight simulators tend to age more poorly than just about any other genre; while people can and do still enjoy MicroProse’s original Commodore 64 Pirates! today, I don’t think many are still thrilling to Gunship or F-15 Strike Eagle. And then it’s hard to know what to really say about most flight simulators that makes for *interesting* criticism, at least when using the rather literary approach which I tend to engage in here.

I really do, however, need to go back at some point and tell the story of subLogic’s Flight Simulator, which was in all its versions probably the best-selling single computer game of the 1980s. It’s a bit of a glaring hole as things stand. But I think I know where I can fit it in…

Interplay Takes on Trek
April 5, 2019

Original-series Star Trek is the only version I’ve ever been able to bring myself to care about. Yet this Star Trek I once cared about a great deal.

Doubtless like many of you of a similar age, I grew up with this 1960s incarnation of the show — the incarnation which its creator Gene Roddenberry so famously pitched to the CBS television network as Wagon Train to the Stars, the one which during my childhood was the only Star Trek extant. Three or four Saturdays per year, a local UHF television station would run a Star Trek marathon, featuring nine or ten episodes back to back, interspersed with interviews and other behind-the-scenes segments. Strange as it now sounds even to me in this era when vintage media far more obscure than Star Trek is instantly accessible at any time, these marathons were major events in my young life. I particularly loved the give and take on the bridge of the starship Enterprise during episodes such as “Balance of Terror,” which were heavily inspired by the naval battles of World War II. Upon realizing this, I became quite the little war monger for a while there, devouring every book and movie I could find on the subject. Even after it had slowly dawned on me that in the final reckoning the death and suffering brought on by war far outweigh any courage or glory it might engender, the fascination with history which had been thus awakened never died.

I loved the Star Trek movies of the 1980s as well. Young though I was, I recognized the poignancy inherent in watching the now middle-aged cast cram their increasingly substantial frames back into the confines of their Starfleet uniforms every couple of years. Yes, this made effortless fodder for the late-night comedians, but there was also a wry wisdom to these movies that one doesn’t usually find in such blockbuster fare, as the actors’ aging off-screen selves merged with their onscreen personas in a way we don’t often see in mainstream mass media. Think, for example, of the scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan where McCoy comes to visit Kirk and present him with his first pair of reading glasses. Decades before I fully understood what that moment — not to mention an expanding middle-aged waistline! — means in real life, I could sense the gravitas of the scene. I credit this side of Star Trek with showing me that there is as much drama and interest in ordinary life as there is in fantastic adventures in outer space. It primed me for the evening I begrudgingly opened Ethan Frome for my English class, and proceeded to devour it over the course of the next several rapt, tear-streaked hours. My English teacher was right, I realized; books without any spaceships or dragons in them really could be pretty darn great. Some years later, I took my bachelor degree in literature.

It must have been about the time I was discovering Ethan Frome that Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted on television. Like most of my peers, I was hugely excited by the prospect, and tuned in eagerly to the first episode. Yet I was disappointed by what I saw. The new incarnation of the Enterprise seemed cold and antiseptic in comparison to the old ship’s trusty physicality. Nor did I care for the new crew, who struck me as equally bland and bloodless. Being smart enough even at this tender age to recognize that fictional personalities, like real ones, need time to ripen and deepen, I gave the show another chance — repeatedly, over the course of years. But it continued to do nothing for me. Instead of Wagon Train to the Stars, this version struck me as Bureaucrats in Space.

All of this, I’ll freely admit, may have more to do with the fact that The Next Generation came along after I had passed science fiction’s golden age of twelve than anything else. Nevertheless, it does much to explain why I’m the perfect audience for our subject of today: the two Star Trek adventure games which Interplay made in the early 1990s. Throwbacks to the distant past of the franchise even when they were brand new, they continue to stand out from the pack today for their retro sensibilities. Fortunately, these are sensibilities which I unabashedly share.

Star Trek hadn’t been well-served by commercial computer games prior to the 1990s. Corporate nepotism had placed its digital-game rights in the slightly clueless hands of the book publisher Simon & Schuster, which was owned, like the show’s parent studio Paramount Pictures, by the media conglomerate known as Gulf and Western. The result had been a series of games that occasionally flirted with mediocrity but more typically fell short of even that standard. Even as each new Star Trek film topped the box-office charts, and even after Star Trek: The Next Generation became the most successful first-run series in the history of syndicated television, Simon & Schuster’s games somehow managed not to become hits. At decade’s end, Paramount granted the rights to a game based on the film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier to the dedicated computer-game publisher Mindscape, but the end product proved little better than what had come before in terms of quality or commercial success. Still, the switch to Mindscape did show that an inkling of awareness of the money all these half-assed Star Trek games were leaving on the table was dawning at last upon Paramount.

As the new decade began, the silver anniversary of the original series’s first broadcast on September 8, 1966, was beginning to loom large. Paramount decided to celebrate the occasion with something of a media blitz, anchored by a two-hour television special that would air in 1991 as close as possible to the show’s exact 25th anniversary. For the first time on this occasion, Paramount decided to make digital games into a concerted part of their media strategy rather than an afterthought. They signed a contract with the Japanese company Konami to make a game, entitled simply Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, for the Nintendo Entertainment System, the heart of the videogame mass market, and for the Nintendo Gameboy, the hot new handheld videogame system. Rather than the Next Generation crew or even the original Enterprise crew in their most recent, most rotund incarnations, these games were to wind the clock all the way back to those heady early days of 1966, when Captain Kirk was still happy to appear on camera with his shirt off.

That deal still left a space for an anniversary title in the computer-game market. Said market was, it was true, much smaller than the one for Nintendo games, but it was notable for its older, more well-heeled buyers willing to pay more money for more ambitious games. Yet computer-game publishers proved more reluctant to sign on for the project than the broad popularity of the Star Trek brand in general might lead one to believe.

It didn’t require the benefit of hindsight to see that the Star Trek franchise, although it was indeed more popular than ever before, was going through a period of transition in 1990. The Next Generation had been on the air for three seasons now and was heading into a fourth; it was thus about to exceed the on-air longevity of the series that had inspired it. Meanwhile the cast of that older series were bowing to the realities of age at last; it had been announced that Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, due for release in late 1991, was to be the last feature film in which they would star. A time when the Next Generation crew would become the default face of Star Trek, the original crew creaky anachronisms, was no longer impossible to imagine.

Given this passing of the torch that seemed to be in progress, most computer-game publishers were skeptical of Paramount’s plans for games featuring the original Enterprise and its crew in their youngest incarnations. They felt that this version of Star Trek was already all but dead in commercial terms, what with the success of all of the franchise’s more recent productions.

Brian Fargo of Interplay Entertainment was among the few who didn’t agree with this point of view. He pitched a computer game to Paramount that would share a name with Konami’s efforts, but would otherwise be a completely separate experience. Aided by his natural charm and the relative disinterest of most of Interplay’s competitors, he made the deal.

Disinterested competitors or no, it was quite a coup for his company, nowhere close to the largest or most prominent in its industry, to secure a license to make Star Trek games — especially given that the deal was made just months after Interplay had acquired the rights to another holy totem of nerd culture, The Lord of the Rings. While the Tolkien games would prove rather a disappointment, the Star Trek license would work out better all the way around.

Interplay signed an open-ended contract with Paramount which allowed them to make Star Trek games all the way until the year 2000, with some significant restrictions: they would be subject to the studio’s veto power over any and all of their aspects, and they could be set only in the time of Captain Kirk and company’s first five-year mission. With these restrictions in mind, Interplay set out to make a game that would be slavishly faithful to the original television series’s format. Instead of a single epic adventure, the game would consist of eight independent “episodes,” each roughly equivalent in plot complexity and geographic scope to those that had aired on television back in the day.

The structure of each episode would be the same: the Enterprise would be called upon by Starfleet to handle some new crisis at the episode’s beginning, whereupon the player would have to warp to the correct star system and engage in some action-oriented space combat, before beaming down to the real heart of the problem and sorting it all out in the guise of an adventure game. Interplay noted that the episodic format could make for a refreshing change from the norm in adventure games, being amenable to a more casual approach. Each episode would be designed to be completable in an evening; after finishing one of them, you could start on the episode that followed the next day, the next week, or the next month, without having to worry about all of the plot and puzzle threads you left dangling last time you played. From Fargo’s perspective, the episodic structure also had the advantage that each part of the game could be designed without much reference to or dependence on any of the others; this made things vastly easier from the standpoint of project management.

Fargo turned to a familiar source for the episodes’ scripts: Michael Stackpole, a member of the Arizona Flying Buffalo fraternity who had played a leading role on Interplay’s Wasteland CRPG and contributed to such other titles as Neuromancer. Stackpole had been busying himself recently with writing tie-in novels set in the universe of the BattleTech tabletop-game franchise. He thus thought that he knew what to expect from working with a licensed property, but he was unprepared for the degree of micromanagement that a bureaucratic giant like Paramount, stewarding one of the most valuable media properties of the age, was willing to engage in. He submitted scripts for fifteen episodes for a game that was anticipated to contain only eight, assuming that should surely cover all his bases; Interplay and Paramount could decide between themselves which eight they actually wanted to include.

To everyone’s shock, Paramount outright rejected all but a handful of them weeks later, usually for the most persnickety of reasons. Interplay’s frustration was still evident in a preview of the game published much later in Computer Gaming World magazine, which noted that “the film studio decided against plot elements derived from episodes which were already part of the Star Trek legend.” With Stackpole having returned to writing his novels, Fargo brought in Elizabeth Danforth, another Flying Buffalo alumnus who had worked with Interplay before, to write more episodes and shepherd them through the labyrinthine approval process.

All of this was happening during one of the most chaotic periods in Interplay’s history. Their distributor Mediagenic had just collapsed, defaulting on hundreds of thousands of dollars they had owed to Interplay and destroying the company’s precious pipeline to retail. The Lord of the Rings game, which was supposed to have been their savior, missed the Christmas 1990 buying season and, when it did finally ship early the following year, met with lukewarm reviews and disappointing sales. Only the strategy game Castles, an out-of-left-field hit from a third-party developer, kept them alive.

Amidst it all, the team making Star Trek: 25th Anniversary kept plugging away — but, inevitably, the game fell behind schedule. September of 1991 arrived, bringing with it the big television special and the Nintendo Entertainment System game, but Interplay’s own tie-in product remained far from complete. It didn’t ship until March of 1992, by which time all of the anniversary hoopla was in the past. Interplay’s game had all the trappings of an anticlimax; it really should have been known as Star Trek: 26th Anniversary, noted more than one commentator pointedly. For those inside the company, the story of the game was taking on some worrisome parallels to that of their Lord of the Rings title: a seeming surefire hit of a high-profile licensed game that arrived late and wound up underwhelming everyone.

They needn’t have worried. Star Trek: 25th Anniversary was a much more polished, more fully realized evocation of its source material than The Lord of the Rings had been, and it came at one of the Star Trek franchise’s high-water marks in popularity. Star Trek VI, which had hit theaters just three months before Interplay’s game, had become everything one could have hoped for from the original crew’s valedictory lap, garnering generally stellar reviews and impressive box-office receipts. Meanwhile The Next Generation was now in its fifth season on television and more popular than ever. The only shadow over proceedings was the death of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, on October 24, 1991. Yet even that event was more help than hindrance to the Interplay game’s commercial prospects, in that it created an appetite among wistful fans to look back to the franchise’s beginnings.

Interplay dedicated Star Trek: 25th Anniversary to Gene Roddenberry.

Indeed, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary thrived in this febrile atmosphere of contemporary success tinged with nostalgia. It became the biggest Interplay hit since Battle Chess, selling over 250,000 copies in all and doing much to set the company’s feet back on firm financial ground after the chaos of the previous couple of years.

The game continues to stand up fairly well today, with a few caveats. Undoubtedly its least satisfying aspect is the space-combat sequence that must be endured at the beginning of each episode. Perhaps not coincidentally, this is one of the few places where the game isn’t faithful to the spirit of Star Trek.

Science fiction’s two most successful media franchises take very different approaches to battles in outer space: while Star Trek portrays its combatants as lumbering naval vessels, jockeying for position in a slow-paced tactical game of cat and mouse, Star Wars looks to the skies of World War II for inspiration, opting for frenetic dog fights in space. But 25th Anniversary goes all-in for Star Wars instead of Star Trek in this respect; the Enterprise turns into Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing fighter, dodging and weaving and spinning on a dime in response to the joystick. The reason for the switch can be summed up in two words: Wing Commander. Origin Systems’s cinematic action game of outer-space dog-fighting was taking the market by storm as Interplay was starting work on their own science-fiction game, and the company wanted to capitalize on their rival’s success. They described their game as “Sierra meets Wing Commander” at early trade-show presentations, and even made it possible to engage in randomized fights just for fun by visiting star systems other than those to which you’ve been directed, just in case the fighting you get to do in the episodes proper isn’t enough for you.

That was quite the stretch; the combat in 25th Anniversary really isn’t much fun as anything more than an occasional palate cleanser, and it’s hard to imagine anyone voluntarily deciding to look for more of it. Not only does this part of the game clash with its faithfulness to Star Trek in just about every other respect, but it doesn’t work even on its own terms. The controls are awkward, it’s hard to understand where your enemies are in relation to you, and it’s simply too hard — a point I’ll be returning to later. For now, suffice to say that Star Trek: 25th Anniversary ain’t no Wing Commander.

The worst part by far of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary.

Thankfully, the rest of the game — the “Sierra” in Interplay’s pithy formulation — is both more engaging and more faithful to the Star Trek of old. When you leave the Enterprise’s bridge, the game turns into a point-and-click graphic adventure, marking the first time Interplay had dabbled in the format since Tass Times in Tonetown back in 1986. You control Kirk directly, but Spock, McCoy, and some poor expendable redshirt also come along, ready to offer their advice and use their special talents when needed — or, in the case of the redshirt, to take one for the team, dying so that none of the regulars have to do so.

The interface can be a little confusing at first; it’s not always clear when you should be “using” Spock or McCoy themselves on something and when you should be using their tricorders. But you start to get a feel for things after just a few minutes, and soon the interface fades into the background of what could stand on its own as a solid little graphic adventure — or, rather, eight solid little mini-adventures. Some of the puzzles can get a bit fiddly, but there are no outrageously unfair ones. The episodic nature of the game does much to make it manageable by limiting the possibility space you need to explore in order to solve any given puzzle; most of the episodes play out over just half a dozen or so locations.

Still, what elevates a fairly workmanlike adventure game to something far more memorable is the Star Trek connection. This is clearly a game made by and for fans of the source material. If you count yourself among them, you almost can’t help but be delighted. The writers do a great job of evoking the characters we know and love; McCoy lays into Spock like the old racist country doctor he is, Spock plays such a perfect straight man that one can’t help but suspect that he’s laughing up his sleeve behind his facade of “logic,” and Kirk still loves to egg them both on and enjoy the fireworks.

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary apes the look of its source material down to the title card that opens each episode.

The interactive episodes are true to the rhythms of their non-interactive antecedents; each one begins with a title card superimposed over a stately Enterprise soaring toward its latest adventure, and ends with some humorous banter on the bridge and a final command from Kirk of “Warp factor 4!” to send it on its way to the next. Even the visuals, presented in slightly pixelated low-res VGA, conjure up the low-rent sets of the show; more photo-realistic graphics, one suspects, would only ruin the effect. For the music, George “The Fat Man” Sanger and Dave Govett, whose work was everywhere during this period — they scored Wing Commander and Ultima Underworld as well, among many others — mix the familiar Star Trek theme with their own period-perfect motifs. The only things missing from their score in comparison to that of the original show are those oh-so-sixties orchestral stabs at dramatic moments. (There does come a point, Sanger and Govett must have decided, when nostalgia descends into outright cheese.)

It’s true that the episodes work more on the level of pastiche than that of earnest attempts at storytelling — another reason that enjoying this game probably does require you be a fan of vintage Star Trek. Most of the scripts read like a Mad Libs take on the original series, mixing and matching its most familiar tropes. The crew has to shut down another misguided computer (a la “A Taste of Armageddon”), engage in some gunboat diplomacy with the Romulans (“The Enterprise Incident”), and negotiate an earthly religious mythos transplanted to another planet (“Who Mourns for Adonais?”). Harry Mudd, the intergalactic con man whose antics featured in two episodes of the original series, makes a third appearance here. Even Carol Marcus, scientist and Kirk paramour, shows up to foreshadow the major role she’ll later play in the movie Star Trek II.

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary in its graphic-adventure mode. The gang’s all here, including the poor terrified red shirt hiding behind a pillar.

If none of the interactive episodes can challenge the likes of “The City on the Edge of Forever” for the crown of Best of Trek, they’re certainly far less embarrassing than most of what the series produced during its painfully bad third season. They encompass the full tonal palette of the show, from screwball comedy to philosophical profundity. The graphic-adventure format does force a shift in emphasis away from dialog and action to more cerebral activities — the Kirk on television never had to slow down to solve set-piece logic puzzles like some of the ones we see here — but that shift is entirely understandable.

Unfortunately, all of the good will the game engenders is undermined to a considerable extent by one resoundingly terrible design decision — a decision that’s ironically built upon a foundation of very good design choices. Each episode permits multiple solutions to most of the problems it places before you; this is, of course, a good thing. At the end of each episode, assuming you don’t get yourself killed, you receive an evaluation from Starfleet Command in the form of a percentile grade. You’re rewarded with a better grade if you’ve managed to keep the poor redshirt who beamed down with you alive — this game’s writers show far more compassion for the expendable crew members than the original series’s writers ever did! — and if you’ve accomplished things with a minimum of violence — i.e., if you’ve kept your metaphorical and sometimes literal phasers on “stun” rather than “kill.” All of this too is a good thing, seeming evidence of a progressive design sensibility that’s become ubiquitous today, when countless games let you finish each scenario with a bronze, silver, or gold star, allowing you to be exactly as completionist and perfectionist as you choose to be.

But now the bad part comes in. The final grades you receive on the episodes affect the performance of your crew during the remaining space-combat sequences, which themselves become steadily more difficult as you progress through the game. In fact, the final battle is so hard that you virtually have to have scored 100 percent on all of the preceding episodes to even have a chance in it. It turns out that the seeming easygoing attitude of the game, encouraging you to do better but letting you slide if you just want to move on through the episodes, has been a colossal lie, an ugly trap to get you 90 percent of the way to the finish line and then stop you cold. This is like a caricature of awful, retrograde game design — something even Sierra at their absolute nadir would have thought twice about. Either tell the player at the end of the episode that she just hasn’t done well enough and make her do it again, or honor your promise to let her continue with a less than stellar score. Don’t lie to her about it and then cackle about how you got her in the end.

Pro tip: this is not good enough to get you through the game.

Not only is this design decision terrible on its own terms, but it clashes with all of the implications of Interplay’s own characterization of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary as a more casual sort of adventure game than the norm, one that will let you play through a satisfying episode in a single relaxing evening. Interplay heard about this cognitive dissonance from their fans — heard so much about it that they begrudgingly issued an optional patch that let players skip past the combat sequences altogether by triggering a hot key. It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but it was better than nothing.

This discordant note aside, the worst complaint you could make about Star Trek: 25th Anniversary in 1992 is one that doesn’t apply anymore today: that it was just a bit short in light of its $40 street price. And yet, worthy effort though Interplay’s first Star Trek game is on the whole, they would comprehensively top it with their second.

Given 25th Anniversary’s commercial success and the open-ended license Interplay had acquired from Paramount, a sequel was rather inevitable. There wasn’t much point in making bold changes to a formula that had worked so well. Indeed, when they made the sequel they elected to change nothing whatsoever on the surface, retaining the same engine, the same episodic structure, and even the same little-loved combat sequences. Yet when we peer beneath the surface we see the product of a development team willing to learn from their mistakes. As sometimes happens in game development, the fact that the necessary enabling technology was already in place in the form of an existing engine allowed design in the abstract to come even more to the fore in the sequel. The end result is a game that, while hardly a transformative leap over its predecessor, is less frustrating, more narratively ambitious, and even more fun to play.

Although Star Trek: Judgment Rites continues with the episodic structure of its predecessor, it adapts it to a format more typical of television shows of the 1990s than those of the 1960s. An overarching “season-long” story arc is woven through the otherwise discrete episodes, to come to a head in a big finale episode. This gives the game a feeling of unity that its predecessor lacks.

Even more welcome, however, is a new willingness within the individual episodes to move beyond pastiche and into some narratively intriguing spaces of their own. Virtually all of Judgment Rites’s episodes, written this time by the in-house Interplay employees Scott Bennie and Mark O’Green in addition to the returning contractors Michael Stackpole and Elizabeth Danforth, mix things up rather than stick with the unbending 25th Anniversary formula of a space combat followed by Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and a semi-anonymous redshirt beaming down somewhere. Combat this time around is neither as frequent nor as predictably placed in the episodes, and the teams that beam down now vary considerably; Scotty, Uhura, and Sulu all get at least one chance of their own to come along and use their special talents.

My favorite episode in Judgment Rites also happens to be the longest and most complex in either of the games. In Bennie’s “No Man’s Land,” a team from the Enterprise beams down to a planet which is being forced to reenact a simulacrum of Earth’s World War I by Trelane, the childish but almost infinitely powerful demigod who was introduced in the original-series episode “The Squire of Gothos.” As his inclusion would indicate, “No Man’s Land” is very aware of Star Trek lore. It’s plainly meant partially as an homage to the original show’s occasional “time-travel” episodes, like “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” “A Piece of the Action,” or “Patterns of Force.” These were beloved by fans for giving the familiar crew the chance to act out a bit in an entirely different milieu. (They were beloved by the show’s perpetually cash-strapped producers for another reason: they let them raid their studio’s stash of stock sets, props, and costumes).

Yet “No Man’s Land” transcends homage to become a surprisingly moving meditation on the tragedy of a pointless war.

Another standout is Stackpole’s “Light and Darkness,” a pointed allegory about the folly of eugenics.

In addition to showing far more confidence in its storytelling, Judgment Rites also addresses the extreme difficulty of the space-combat sequences in its predecessor and the false promise that is letting you continue after completing an episode with a less-than-perfect score. You now have a choice between no combat at all, easy combat, and hard combat. The middle setting is calibrated just about right. Combat at this level, while still a long way from the likes of Wing Commander, becomes an occasional amusing diversion that doesn’t overstay its welcome instead of an infuriating brick wall that kills the rhythm of the game. And, at this level, moving on from any given episode with a score of less than 100 percent is no longer a fool’s gambit.

Although a better game than its predecessor in almost every respect, Judgment Rites couldn’t muster the same sales. It didn’t ship until December of 1993 — i.e., almost two full years after 25th Anniversary — and by that time the engine was beginning to show its age. Nor did it help that Interplay themselves undercut its launch by releasing a “talkie” version of the first game on CD-ROM just a month later.

That said, it’s not hard to understand Interplay’s eagerness to get the talkie version onto the market. In what can only be described as another major coup, Interplay, working through Paramount, brought in the entirety of the original cast to voice their iconic roles. At a time when many CD-ROM-based games were still being voiced by their programmers, it promised to be quite a thrill indeed to listen to the likes of William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and Deforest Kelley in the roles that had made them famous.

The reality was perhaps a little less compelling than the promise. While no one would ever accuse any member of the show’s cast of being a master thespian in the abstract, they had been playing these roles for so long that doing so once more for a computer game ought to have presented little problem on the face of it. Yet they plainly struggled with this unfamiliar medium. Their voice acting runs the gamut from bored to confused, but almost always sounds like exactly what it is: actors in front of microphones reading lines on a page. It seems that none of them knew anything about the stories to which the lines related, which can only be construed as a failure on Interplay’s part — albeit one perhaps precipitated by the sharply limited amount of time during which they had the actors at their disposal. Over the course of a scant few days, the cast was asked to voice all of the dialog not for one but for two complete games; the voices for a CD-ROM version of Judgment Rites were recorded at the same time. And they had to do it all bereft of any dramatic context whatsoever.

Somewhat disapointing though the final result is, these sessions represent a melancholy milestone of their own in Trek history, marking the last time the entire cast to the original show was assembled for a new creative project. As such, the talkie versions of these games are the last gasps of an era.

Personally, though, I prefer the games without voices — not only because of the disappointing voice work but because Interplay chose to implement it in a really annoying way, with Kirk/Shatner saying each choice in every dialog menu before you choose one. Interplay, like most of their peers, was still scrambling to figure out what did and didn’t work in this new age of multimedia computing.

Despite holding a license to the original series for the balance of the decade, Interplay would never release another game set in this era of Star Trek after the talkie version of Judgment Rites shipped in March of 1994. The company did work intermittently on an ambitious 3D action-adventure featuring Kirk and the rest of the classic crew, tentatively entitled Secret of Vulcan Fury, near the end of the decade, but never came close to finishing it. Gamers and Trekkies were moving on, and the newer incarnations of the show were becoming, just as some had predicted they would, the default face of the franchise. Indeed, no Star Trek game since the two Interplay titles discussed in this article has revisited the original show. This fact only makes 25th Anniversary and especially Judgment Rites all the more special today.

That would make for a good conclusion to this article, but we do have one more thing to cover — for no article about Interplay’s takes on classic Trek could be complete without the media meme they spawned.

Like a fair number of other memes, this one involves William Shatner, for more than half a century now one of the odder — and more oddly endearing — characters on the media landscape. Back when he was a struggling young actor trying to make it in Hollywood, it was apparently drilled into him by his agents that he should never, ever turn down paying work of any kind. He has continued to live by this maxim to this day. Shatner will do absolutely anything if you pay him enough: pitch any product, sing-talk his way through fascinatingly terrible albums, “write” a new memoir every couple of years along with some of the worst science-fiction novels in history. He’s the ultimate cultural leveler, seeing no distinction between a featured role in a prestigious legal drama and one in a lowest-common-denominator sitcom based on someone’s Twitter feed.

And yet he manages to stay in the public’s good graces by doing it all with a wink and a nod that lets us know he’s in on the joke; when he goes on a talk show to plug his latest book, he can’t even be bothered to seriously pretend that he actually wrote it. He’s elevated crass commercialism to a sort of postmodern performance art. When the stars align, the kitschy becomes profound, and the terrible becomes wonderful. (“Why is this good?” writes a YouTube commenter in response to his even-better-than-the-original version of “Common People.” “It has no right to be this good.”) For this reason, as well as because he’s really, truly funny — one might say that he’s a far better comedian than he ever was an actor — he gets a pass on everything. At age 88 as of this writing, he remains the hippest octogenarian this side of Willie Nelson.

In keeping with his anything-for-a-buck career philosophy, Shatner is seldom eager to spend much time second-guessing — much less redoing — any of his performances. His reputation among media insiders as a prickly character with a taste for humiliation has long preceded him. It’s especially dangerous for anyone he perceives as below him on the totem pole to dare to correct him, challenge him, or just voice an opinion to him. Like a dog, he can smell insecurity, and, his eagerness to move on to the next gig notwithstanding, he’s taken a malicious delight in tormenting many a young assistant director. Craig Duman, the Interplay sound engineer who was given the task of recording Shatner’s lines for the CD-ROM versions of 25th Anniversary and Judgment Rites, can testify to this firsthand.

The problem began when Shatner was voicing the script for the first episode of Judgment Rites. Coming to the line, “Spock, sabotage the system,” he pronounced the word “sabotage” rather, shall we say, idiosyncratically: pronouncing the vowel of the last syllable like “bad” rather than “bod.” A timid-sounding Duman, all too obviously overawed to be in the same room as Captain Kirk, piped up to ask him to say the line again with the correct pronunciation — whereupon Shatner went off. “I don’t say sabotahge! You say sabotahge! I say sabotage!” (You say “potato,” I say “potahto?”) His concluding remark was deliciously divaish: “Please don’t tell me how to act. It sickens me.”

Link to audio:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/sabotage.mp3

This incident would have remained an in-joke around Interplay’s offices had not an unknown employee from the sound studio they used leaked it to the worst possible person: morning-radio shock jock Howard Stern. Driving to work one morning, Brian Fargo was horrified to hear the outtake being broadcast across the country by this self-proclaimed “King of All Media.” Absent the “it sickens me,” the clip wouldn’t have had much going for it, but with it it was absolutely hilarious; Stern played it over and over again. Fargo was certain he had just witnessed the death of one of Interplay’s most important current projects.

He was lucky; it seems that Shatner wasn’t a regular Howard Stern listener, and didn’t hear about the leak until after both of the talkies had shipped. But the clip, being short enough to encapsulate in a sound file manageable even over a dial-up connection, became one of the most popular memes on the young World Wide Web. It also found a receptive audience within Hollywood, where plenty of people had had similar run-ins with Shatner’s prickly off-camera personality. It finally made its way into the 1999 comedy film Mystery Men, where Ben Stiller parrots, “Please don’t tell me how to act. It sickens me,” on one occasion, and Janeane Garofalo later inserts a pointed, “You say sabotahge! I say sabotage!”

Thank to Howard Stern, Mystery Men, and the mimetic magic of the Internet, this William Shatner outtake has reached a couple of orders of magnitude more people than ever played the game which spawned it; most of those who have engaged with the meme have no idea of its source. If it seems unfair that this of all things should be the most enduring legacy of Interplay’s loving re-creations of the Star Trek of yore, well, such is life in a world of postmodern media. As Shatner himself would attest, just reaching people, no matter how you have to do it, is an achievement of its own. And if you can make them laugh while you’re about it, so much the better.

(Sources: Computer Gaming World of December 1991, May 1992, March 1994, and May 1994; Questbusters of April 1992; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of December 9 1991; the special video features included with the Star Trek: Judgment Rites Collector’s Edition. Online sources include Matt Barton’s interview with Brian Fargo and Fargo’s appearance on Angry Centaur Gaming’s International Podcast. Finally, some of this article is drawn from the collection of documents that Brian Fargo donated to the Strong Museum of Play.

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and Judgment Rites are both available for purchase from GOG.com.)

Comments
47 Responses

- Ben

April 5, 2019 at 4:37 pm

I’ve been looking forward to this one! Fun game but those combat sequences are absolutely awful.

I’m assuming you didn’t plan it this way, but today is a special day on the Trekkie calendar – it’s the future anniversary of first contact (4/5/2063). How fortuitous.

- Sig

April 5, 2019 at 4:57 pm

I adored the first game, and was apparently oblivious to the terrible voice acting because my fond memories are of the full talkie version. Fond memories.

I thought I was just terrible at the space combat; it didn’t occur to me at that age that there might be a game design flaw.

- Sniffnoy

April 5, 2019 at 6:03 pm

Quick editing notes: “palette cleanser” should be “palate cleanser”; the “Tass Times in Tonetown” link should likely link to your own article where you discuss it; and the “goes on a talk show” link seems to be malformed.

- Jimmy Maher

April 5, 2019 at 8:11 pm

Thanks! I actually linked to the article in question earlier in this one, which is why I sent the Tass Times link straight to MobyGames.

- Damian Glenny

April 17, 2019 at 12:06 am

I cannot believe you didn’t reply to this with “please don’t tell me how to write”.

- Alex Smith

April 5, 2019 at 8:02 pm

“Star Trek hadn’t been well-served by computer games prior to the 1990s.”

This is no doubt true when we are talking about officially licensed product, but this evaluation ignores the long and highly successful run of tactical combat Star Trek games that proliferated across every timesharing mainframe and microcomputer platform in the 1970s and early 1980s. You could certainly argue that a Star Trek game that consists of nothing but combat ignores most of what made Star Trek great, but commanding the USS Enterprise against hordes of Klingon Battlecruisers was a formative computer gaming experience for many people.

- Jimmy Maher

April 5, 2019 at 8:14 pm

Yeah, I talked about that lineage briefly in my article on the Simon & Schuster era of Star Trek games. They do strike me as pretty non-Trekkie in spirit, but I added the qualifier of “commercial.” Thanks!

- Ross

April 5, 2019 at 10:33 pm

I’d note that, for example, until I discovered EGATrek in the mid ’90s, my personal favorite of the all-basically-the-same tactical space combat star trek simulators was one that had had all the Star Trek Branding carefully removed for legal reasons.

- Gnoman

April 5, 2019 at 10:48 pm

“To everyone’s shock, Paramount outright rejected all but a handful of them weeks later, usually for the most persnickety of reasons.”

This wasn’t unusual for Paramount in that era, and extended even to the then-current show. The material Paramount rejected (or reworked into terrible Wesley episodes) was better than a lot of what they put on the screen in the early seasons of TNG.

- Jimmy Maher

April 6, 2019 at 6:51 am

I’ve heard that Gene Roddenberry was actually a big part of the problem with The Next Generation’s early seasons. His creative instincts could be really, really bad. (Witness the turgid lump of would-be profundity that was Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and how much better the movies got after he was sidelined.) But I’m obviously not all that invested in any Star Trek after the original series, so I’ve never delved into the topic in detail.

- Gnoman

April 6, 2019 at 11:46 pm

That’s pretty accurate. Roddenberry had some really strange ideas (at one point, he envisioned Kirk and the rest as the last stubborn holdouts to individuality, with the rest of humanity being a single hive mind – in other words, his utopian view of the future was humanity turning into the Borg), and many of the problems in early TNG can be traced to one or another of his policies.

It is no coincidence that most of the finer TNG episodes (“The Drumhead” and “Measure of A Man” in particular stand out as deeply philosophical episodes he would have vetoed) came after he was kicked upstairs.

- stepped pyramids

April 8, 2019 at 3:35 pm

“Measure of a Man” was in the second season, when Roddenberry still had some degree of control over the series. The writer, Melissa Snodgrass, says Gene nearly shot down the episode because he believed there would be no lawyers in the 24th century.

- Gnoman

April 10, 2019 at 11:11 pm

They were already easing him out at that point (the rebellion started late in season 1), and his control was very weakened. The reasons that he nearly shot down one of the series’s finest episodes for are sort of the reason why the first season and much of the second was so lifeless.

Now that I think about it, there are a lot of similarities between Roddenberry and Steve Jobs.

- Aula

April 11, 2019 at 10:15 am

The second season of TNG was significantly affected by the Writers’ Guild strike that was going on at the time (S2 had fewer episodes than any other, the scripts of several episodes were originally written for the Star Trek II series that never happened, and one episode was almost completely recycled footage from various earlier episodes). It’s not quite fair to blame Roddenberry for *every* flaw of S2.

- ATMachine

April 6, 2019 at 4:56 am

Small nitpick: that screenshot of “what’s not good enough” is from Judgment Rites rather than 25th Anniversary, the game actually being critiqued at that point.

- Jimmy Maher

April 6, 2019 at 6:47 am

Woops. Thanks!

- Laertes

April 6, 2019 at 12:05 pm

Reading glasses are unavoidable but, fortunately, not the expanding waistline. Though it takes some effort to keep it in check.

- Steve McCrea

April 6, 2019 at 4:51 pm

I don’t hear anything egregious about Shatner’s pronunciation of sabotage. If anything it sounds better than the voice director’s pronunciation. Perhaps it’s a regional thing (Shatner is Canadian, I’m Northern Irish). The voice director was likely not very experienced – and might have gotten better performances if he had been.

- stepped pyramids

April 6, 2019 at 10:03 pm

The word is a recent (early 20th century) borrowing from French, and I can’t find any resource that lists it using a different vowel than ɑ. Same vowel as mirage, corsage, etc.

Practically nobody was an experienced video game voice director in 1993. This was the same year that the CD-ROM version of King’s Quest VI came out, which really started the trend of games being voiced by professional casts. It took a while before other game companies started treating voice acting as something other than unusually elaborate sound effects. This being a case in point — the “director” here was an audio engineer and sound designer.

I doubt Shatner was interested in being directed in any case.

- Laertes

April 7, 2019 at 5:39 am

I don’t hear anything strange either but I am spanish so how do I know how to pronounce it? I don’t.

- Brian

April 6, 2019 at 11:46 pm

Those were the same years that produced Rescue, a gem of the Mac shareware world. It was also combat heavy, in the spirit of late TNG. No scripted episodes, just a sandbox of algebraic missions in the neutral zone.

- Nate

April 7, 2019 at 4:25 am

Fun history. I didn’t know about that Mystery Men reference. I’ll have to watch it again.

“You see potato, I say potahto”

Do you mean “say” in the first case?

- Jimmy Maher

April 7, 2019 at 6:35 am

Indeed. Thanks!

- Jeremy Reimer`

April 7, 2019 at 4:48 am

I loved the first 25th Anniversary game, and as a huge fan of Wing Commander I neither hated the ship combat nor found it too difficult– except of course for that final mission! To this day I had no idea that the difficulty level scaled inversely with your mission rating scores. I will say that it is *possible* to win the final battle without having a full 100% on each mission, because I remember doing it. But it was stupidly hard.

For some reason I never played the sequel, and finding out that it’s available on GoG just made my day! I get to enjoy it for the first time!

- Jimmy Maher

April 8, 2019 at 11:41 am

You’re in for a treat! Judgment Rites really is a better game in virtually every respect, so if you liked the first one…

- Boris Schneider-Johne

April 7, 2019 at 9:21 am

Jimmy, didn’t Interplay work on a third Star Trek game (Vulcan Fury?), that would have been 3D rendered animations? It was highly ambitious and of course way too big to ever get finished.

- Jimmy Maher

April 7, 2019 at 10:09 am

Yes, that did deserve a mention, didn’t it? Duly added. Thanks!

- Chris Chapman

April 7, 2019 at 4:34 pm

I spent about ten months on a Secret of Vulcan Fury history video a few years ago, reaching out to all the former team members I could locate to try to find out how much work was done, whether any of it still exists, and the reasons behind the failure of the project. It’s a niche subject within a niche subject — I don’t think anyone else has ever tried to research it specifically — but it may be of interest. I was surprised by what I found; there was much more surviving footage than had been publicly seen.

Not sure about the rules on self-promotion here, so I won’t link to it, but you can find it on YouTube.

- Jeremy Reimer

April 7, 2019 at 8:31 pm

Chris, that video was fantastic! Thanks for making it!

- Captain Kal

April 9, 2019 at 7:04 pm

Great Video, Chris!! I really liked it!!

- Sung J. Woo

April 7, 2019 at 4:57 pm

Hello Jimmy — thank you for all the great work you do. Just a minor quibble — it’s Starfleet, one word:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfleet

I’m currently on ebook 1984 and loving every sentence. It makes me very happy to know that there’s another seven years and change to go. You rock, sir, pure and simple.

– Sung

- Jimmy Maher

April 7, 2019 at 11:25 pm

Thanks for the correction, thanks for the kind words, and thank you so much for your generous Patreon support!

- Bruce Schlickbernd

April 7, 2019 at 7:26 pm

If the author is curious about design decisions about the game, my recommendations would be to interview Jay Patel (lead programmer, designer) and Bruce Schlickbernd (Producer, designer), who put more hours into the game than anyone else, and seem curiously omitted from the article. The author makes some wrong assumptions, some inciteful moments, and even finds some things I didn’t know (Fargo could be secretive on occasion), but generally got things right.

- Jacob Bauer

April 8, 2019 at 6:15 am

Jeremy Reimer is right, it is actually possible to win the final mission without 100%. The trick is to set your ship speed so that you are flying backwards. For me, this made the final battle go from impossible to almost easy. I managed to finish the game with one of the lowest possible scores.

- ShadowAngel

April 8, 2019 at 5:36 pm

“conjure up the low-rent sets” – It’s sad that Star Trek has this “low budget” stigma, when in reality back then it was one of the most expensive shows put on TV and one only has to compare contemporary shows like Lost in Space to see the difference. From the set pieces to the special effects, Star Trek was anything but “low-rent”
Sure it doesn’t hold up to todays CGI-infested “make everything look as fake and plastic as possible” kind of style but considering it was made over 50 years ago, for TV, to call it low-rent is a big insult. The Special Effects were even groundbreaking for its time, like the episode The Corbomite Maneuver. Desilu employed 4 different Special Effects studios in Hollywood to get Star Trek done.

The average budget per episode for Season 1 was around 190,000 dollars, in Season 2 it was 187,500 to 192,000 dollars and Season 3 dropped to around 178,000. Which still was way higher than the 120,000 for the contemporary Outer Limits, Lost in Space (180,000-140,000) as mentioned and only slightly below the usualy budget of later sci-fi shows, like Space:1999 that was produced from 1975 on with a episode budget of 200,000 dollars per episode.
The two pilots costed even more: 700,000 for The Cage and 500,000 for Where no man has gone beofe

- Adamantyr

April 10, 2019 at 3:16 pm

I played a demo version of this game back in the day, but I never got past the first combat.

So the game ALWAYS threw you into combat right off? I would dutifully study the star map and pick the right star and the game would tell me I was “in violation of treaty” and either in Romulan or Klingon space. So naturally I thought I had done something wrong. I systematically tried every star system and finally concluded in frustration the game was broken.

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- Boot

April 11, 2019 at 4:09 am

“Even after it had slowly dawned on me that in the final reckoning the death and suffering brought on by war far outweigh any courage or glory it might engender”

Woefully misguided. The US is currently remaking the Middle East with war after war. When it’s all done and the borders have been re-adjusted to eliminate the mistakes of European colonialists, all wars there will cease. Forever.

Without the USA’s muscular hegemony to accomplish this historical act, the Middle East would war with itself. Forever. Imagine Saddam Hussein and his sons in power, or the Assads, and there is no force for good to overthrow them. Moreover what if a dictator appears and unifies the warring factions, as has happened so many times before? Israel, the only democracy, would be threatened and would possibly be backed into a corner and have no choice but to use its nuclear weapons.

Those who beat their swords into plowshares will plow for those who keep theirs.

- Aula

April 11, 2019 at 10:21 am

It looks like this article concludes the topics for 1992 that you listed at https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/ebooks-and-future-plans/ (which incidentally puts you ahead of both The Adventure Gamer and The CRPG Addict). What plans do you have for 1993?

- Jimmy Maher

April 11, 2019 at 10:42 am

Yes, will have another state-of-the-blog address soon to announce the 1992 ebook and move us into 1993. It’s a big one — Myst and Doom, CD-ROM going mainstream, SVGA graphics arriving, etc. One might even call it the linchpin year of computer-gaming history. Look at almost any game and, while you might not be able to guess its exact year of release, you can feel pretty sure whether it was released pre- or post-1993.

- Liz Danforth

April 11, 2019 at 11:04 pm

Thanks for a blast from the past, and the kind words about the heart and the work that went into the game (from nearly everyone who touched the games’ creation, development, and delivery).

I remember how much Mike Stackpole and I were aghast by what Paramount refused to let us do from the first outlined ideas. We really wanted it to be the “missing year” of the five year mission, and pick up so many dangling loose ends from the series itself. (As just one example, What *was* the deal with the green Orion slave girl in the end credits? That seemed like an obvious tale to tell. We wanted to explore and explain, but Paramount said no.)

I also remember hearing how much DeForest Kelley HATED the dialog he had to deliver in Judgment Rites. In our own defense, we weren’t screenwriters but wordsmiths who expected our words to be read, not read aloud. We had a lot to learn, for all that, but I’ve always cringed since Kelley was my favorite among the three.

Thanks again!

- Ross

April 12, 2019 at 8:50 pm

Hm. I don’t really recall the combat being nearly so awful as everyone else remembers, except if you failed the copy protection and were punished with a nigh-unwinnable battle. I do recall there being a missable thing you could do in one mission that would increase the power of your torpedoes, though I never really quantified how much.

Would love to see televised star trek give a little nod to the possibilty of turning the brightness all the way up to locate cloaked ships though.

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- Brian Bagnall

April 27, 2019 at 10:13 pm

Interplay made another Trek game after Judgement Rites called Star Trek: Starfleet Academy in 1997. I’ve never played it but Wikipedia says the sales were decent.

On another topic regarding layout, typically the photo/image comes after the text references the topic in the image.

Jimmy M: “Please don’t tell me how to do layout. It sickens me.”

- Jimmy Maher

April 29, 2019 at 9:29 am

You took the words right out of my mouth. ;) But seriously, it’s a judgment call. Text is a linear medium, and sometimes I want the reader to have *seen* what I’m talking about before I talk about it. And sometimes it feels better to introduce the subject and then show the illustration.

- Brian Bagnall

April 30, 2019 at 3:11 pm

Great article by the way! I loved the first Star Trek adventure by Interplay but am not too sure if I graduated to the sequel. In light of your explanation of the increasing difficulty of space battles, I’m not even sure I finished the first one. That would have been pretty demoralizing not to be able to finish off a great game and might have precluded me from moving on to the sequel (and judging from the lower sales, that might have impacted others). It just doesn’t feel right to move onto part two if part one is still lingering unfinished.

I can see your point about the location of images and there are probably instances where it makes more sense to show it prior to discussion. I’ve been using the McGraw-Hill style manual for a while and have grown accustomed to it. From purely a reader’s experience, when a new image appears without context, the reader can feel confused because it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the article, and may even wonder if it was put there in error. Typically they skip the photo and keep reading and usually don’t go back to it. Whereas when the photo comes after some discussion in the text, the ideas have been planted in the reader’s mind and they’ll pore over it longer and with greater interest.