Jimmy Maher (maher@filfre.net)

The Digital Antiquarian
Volume 17: 1995
Comments Edition

Read the blog
http://www.filfre.net

Support the blog on Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/DigitalAntiquarian

This eBook was converted on
July 8th, 2022

Design and conversion for eBooks by
Richard Lindner (rlindner81@gmail.com)

Contents

1. Full Throttle

1. Comments

2. The Dig

1. Comments

3. Making Sierra Pay

1. Comments

4. The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery

1. Comments

5. The Neo-Classical Interactive Fiction of 1995

1. Comments

6. Shannara (or, Bookware Mark 2)

1. Comments

7. Mission Critical

1. Comments

8. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

1. Comments

9. The Dark Eye

1. Comments

10. Boffo Games

1. Comments

11. Might and Magic

1. Comments

12. Heroes of Might and Magic

1. Comments

13. A Web Around the World, Part 1: Signals Down a Wire

1. Comments

14. A Web Around the World, Part 2: If At First You Don’t Succeed…

1. Comments

15. A Web Around the World, Part 3: …Try, Try Again

1. Comments

16. A Web Around the World, Part 4: From Telegraphy to Telephony

1. Comments

17. A Web Around the World, Part 5: Selling the Telephone

1. Comments

18. A Web Around the World, Part 6: Routing Calls

1. Comments

19. A Web Around the World, Part 7: Computers On the Wire

1. Comments

20. A Web Around the World, Part 8: The Intergalactic Computer Network

1. Comments

21. A Web Around the World, Part 9: A Network of Networks

1. Comments

22. A Web Around the World, Part 10: A Web of Associations

1. Comments

23. A Web Around the World, Part 11: A Zero-Sum Game

1. Comments

Full Throttle
July 2, 2021

The adventure makers at LucasArts had a banner 1993. One of the two games they released that year, Day of the Tentacle, was the veritable Platonic ideal of a cartoon-comedy graphic adventure; the other, Sam and Max Hit the Road, was merely very, very good.

Following a quiet 1994 on the adventure front, LucasArts came roaring back in the spring of 1995 with Full Throttle, a game that seemed to have everything going for it: it was helmed by Tim Schafer, one of the two lead designers from Day of the Tentacle, and boasted many familiar names on the art and sound front as well. Yet it wasn’t just a retread of what had come before. This interactive biker movie had a personality very much its own. Many soon added it to the ranks of LucasArts’s most hallowed classics.

Sadly, though, I’m not one of these people…

It’s easy — perhaps a bit too easy — to read LucasArts’s first post-DOOM adventure game as a sign of the changes that id Software’s shareware shooter wrought on the industry after its debut in December of 1993. Action and attitude were increasingly in, complexity and cerebration more and more out. One can sense throughout Full Throttle its makers’ restlessness with the traditional adventure form — their impatience with convoluted puzzles, bulging inventories, and all of the other adventure staples. They just want to have some loud, brash fun. What other approach could they possibly bring to a game about outlaw motorcycle gangs?

The new attitude is initially bracing. Consider: after a rollicking credits sequence that plays out behind over-driven, grungy rock and roll, you gain control of your biker avatar outside a locked bar. Your first significant task is to get inside the bar. Experimenting with the controls, you discover that you have just three verb icons at your disposal: a skull (which encompasses eyes for seeing and a mouth for talking), a raised fist, and a leather boot. Nevertheless, the overly adventure-indoctrinated among you may well spend quite some time trying to be clever before you realize that the solution to this first “puzzle” is simply to kick the door in. Full Throttle is a balm for anyone who’s ever seethed with frustration at being told by an adventure game that “violence isn’t the answer to this one.” In this game, violence — flagrant, simple-minded, completely non-proportional violence — very often is the answer.

But let’s review the full premise of the game before we go further. Full Throttle takes place in the deserts of the American Southwest during a vaguely dystopian future — albeit not, Tim Schafer has always been at pains to insist, a post-apocalyptic one. You play Ben, a stoic tough guy of few words in the Clint Eastwood mold, the leader of a biker gang who call themselves the Polecats. “The reason bikers leaped out at me is that they have a whole world associated with them,” said Schafer in a contemporary interview, “but it’s not a commonplace environment. It’s a fantastic, bizarre, wild, larger-than-life environment.” And indeed, everything and everyone in this game are nothing if not larger than life.

Ben, the hero of Full Throttle.

The plot hinges on Corley Motors, the last manufacturer of real motorcycles in the country — for the moment, anyway: a scheming vice president named Adrian Ripburger is plotting to seize control of the company from old Malcolm Corley and start making minivans instead. When the Polecats get drawn into Ripburger’s web, Ben has to find a way to stop him in order to save his gang, his favorite model of motorcycle, and the free-wheeling lifestyle he loves. The story plays out as a series of boisterous set-pieces, a (somewhat) interactive Mad Max mixed with liberal lashings of The Wild One. Although I’m the farthest thing from a member of the cult of Harley Davidson — I’m one of those tree huggers who wonders why it’s even legal to noise-pollute like some of those things to do — I can recognize and enjoy a well-done pastiche when I see one, and Full Throttle definitely qualifies.

Certainly none of this game’s faults are failures of presentation. As one might expect of the gaming subsidiary of Lucasfilm, LucasArt’s audiovisual people were among the best in the industry. They demonstrated repeatedly that the label “cartoon-comedy graphic adventure” could encompass a broader spectrum of aesthetics than one might first assume. While Day of the Tentacle was inspired by the classic Looney Tunes shorts, and Sam and Max Hit the Road by the underground comic books of the 1980s, Full Throttle’s inspirations were the post-Watchmen world of graphic novels and trendy television: the game’s hyperactive jump cuts, oblique camera angles, and muddy color palette were all the rage on the MTV of Generation Grunge.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/FT.mp4

In fact, Schafer tried to convince Soundgarden, one of the biggest rock bands of the time, to let him use their music for the soundtrack — only to be rejected when their record company realized that “we weren’t going to give them any money” for the privilege, as he wryly puts it. Instead he recruited a San Francisco band known as the Gone Jackals, who were capable of a reasonable facsimile of Soundgarden’s style, to write and perform several original songs for the game. Bone to Pick, their 1995 album which included the Full Throttle tracks, would sell several hundred thousand copies in its own right on the back of the game’s success. All of this marked a significant moment in the mainstreaming of games, a demonstration that they were no longer siloed off in their own nerdy pop-culture ghetto but were becoming a part of the broader media landscape. The days when big pop-music acts would lobby ferociously to have their work selected for a big game’s in-world radio station were not that far away.

The Gone Jackals. Like so many rock bands who haven’t quite made it, they always seem to be trying just a bit too hard in their photographs…

Full Throttle’s writing too has all the energy and personality one could ask for. If the humor is a bit broad and obvious, that’s only appropriate; Biker Ben is not exactly the subtle type. The voice acting and audio production in general are superb, as was the norm for LucasArts thanks to their connections to Hollywood and Skywalker Sound. Particular props must go to a little-known character actor named Roy Conrad, who delivers Ben’s lines in a perfect gravelly deadpan, and to Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame, who, twelve years removed from his last gig as Luke Skywalker, was enjoying a modest career renaissance in cartoons and an ever-increasing number of videogames. He shows why he was so in-demand as a voice actor here, tearing into the role of the villain Ripburger with a relish that belies his oft-wooden performances as an actor in front of cameras.

The sweetest story connected with Full Throttle is that of Roy Conrad, a mild-mannered advertising executive who decided to reconnect with his boyhood dream of becoming an actor at age 45 in 1985, and went on to secure bit parts in various television shows and movies. As you can see, he looked nothing like a leader of a motorcycle gang, but his voice was so perfect for the role of Ben that LucasArts knew they’d found their man as soon as they heard his audition tape. Conrad died in 2002.

But for all its considerable strengths, Full Throttle pales in comparison to the LucasArts games that came immediately before it. It serves as a demonstration that presentation can only get you so far in a game — that a game is meant to be played, not watched. And alas, actually playing Full Throttle is too often not much fun at all.

The heart of Full Throttle’s problem is a mismatch between the type of game it wants to be and the type of game its technology allows it to be. To be sure, LucasArts tried mightily to adapt said technology to Tim Schafer’s rambunctious rock-and-roll vision. They grafted onto SCUMM (“Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion“), their usual adventure-game engine, a second, action-oriented engine called INSANE (“INteractive Streaming ANimation Engine”), which had been developed for 1993’s Star Wars: Rebel Assault, a 3D vehicular rail shooter. This allowed them to interrupt the staid walking-around-talking-and-solving-puzzles parts of Full Throttle with blasts of pure action. “We didn’t think it would fly if we told players they were a bad-ass biker,” says LucasArts animator Larry Ahern, “and then made them sit back and watch every time Ben did a cool motorcycle stunt, and then gave them back the cursor when it was time for him to run errands. With Full Throttle, I think the combination [of action and traditional adventure elements] made a lot of sense, but I think the implementation just didn’t live up to the idea.”

It most definitely did not: the action mini-games range from tedious to excruciating. Schafer elected to partially reverse LucasArts’s longstanding “no deaths and no dead ends” policy, sacrosanct since 1990’s The Secret of Monkey Island, by allowing the former if not the latter in Full Throttle. This decision was perhaps defensible in light of the experience he was hoping to create, but boy, can it get exhausting in practice. The second-to-worst mini-game is an interminable sequence inspired by the 1991 console hit Road Rash, in which you’re riding on your motorcycle trying to take out other bikers by using exactly the right weapon on each of them, wielded with perfect timing. Failure on either count results in having to start all over from the beginning. To be fair, the mini-game looks and sounds great, with electric guitars squealing in the background and your chopper’s straight pipes throbbing under you like a 21-gun salute every few seconds. It’s just no fun to play.

LucasArts sound man Clint Bajakian captures the sound of a straight-piped Harley. Full Throttle was the first LucasArts game, and one of the first in general, to have an “all-digital” soundtrack: i.e., all of the sound in the game, including all of the music, was sampled from the real world rather than being synthesized on the computer. This was another significant moment in the evolution of computer games.

The very worst of the action mini-games, on the other hand, is a rare moment where even Full Throttle’s aesthetics fail it. Near the end of the game, you find yourself in a demolition derby that for my money is the worst single thing ever to appear in any LucasArts adventure. The controls, which are apparently meant to simulate slipping and sliding in the mud of a fairground arena, are indeed impossible to come to grips with. Worse, you have no idea what you’re even trying to accomplish. The whole thing is an elaborate exercise in reading the designers’ mind to set up an ultra-specific, ultra-unlikely chain of happenstance. I shudder to think how long one would have to wrestle with this thing to stumble onto the correct ordering of events. (Personally, I used a walkthrough — and it still took me quite some time even once I knew what I was trying to do.) Most bizarrely of all, the mini-game looks like a game from five or eight years prior to this one, as if someone pulled an old demo down off the shelf and just threw it on the CD. It’s a failure on every level.

The demolition derby, also known as The Worst LucasArts Thing Ever. No, really: it’s incomprehensibly, flabbergastingly bad.

All told, the action mini-games manage to accomplish the exact opposite of what they were intended to do: instead of speeding the story along and making it that much more exciting, they kill its momentum dead.

What, then, of the more traditional adventure-game sections threaded between the action mini-games and the many lengthy cut-scenes? Therein lies a somewhat more complicated tale.

Some parts of Full Throttle are competently, even cleverly designed. The afore-described opening sequence, for example, is a textbook lesson in conveying theme and expectation to the player through interactivity. It teaches her that any convoluted solutions she might conceive to the dilemmas she encounters are not likely to be the correct ones, and that this will be an unusually two-fisted style of adventure game, admitting of possibilities that its more cerebral cousins would never even consider. The first extended adventure section in the game sends you into a dead-ender town in search of a welding torch, a set of handlebars, and some gasoline, all of which you need to get your damaged bike back on the road after Ripburger’s goons have sabotaged it. The game literally tells you that you need these things and waits for you to go out and find them; it doesn’t attempt to be any trickier than that. And this is fine, being thoroughly in keeping with its ethos.

But threaded among the straightforward puzzles are a smattering that fail to live up to LucasArts’s hard-won reputation for always giving their players a fair shake. At one point in that first town, you have to trigger an event, then run and hide behind a piece of scenery. But said scenery isn’t implemented as an object that might bring it to your attention, and it’s very difficult to discover that you can walk behind it at all. In some adventure games, the ones that promise to challenge you at every turn and make you poke around to discover every single possibility, this puzzle might fit the design brief. Here, however, it’s so at odds with the rest of the game that it strikes me more as a design oversight than a product of even a mistaken design intent. Such niggles continue to crop up as you play further, and continue to pull you out of the fiction. One particularly infamous “puzzle” demands that Ben kick a wall over and over at random to discover the one tiny spot that makes something happen.

Do you see that thing shaped a bit like a gravestone just where the streetlight is pointing? It turns out you can walk behind that. Crazy world, isn’t it?

As time goes on, Full Throttle comes to rely more and more on one of my least favorite kinds of adventure puzzles: the pseudo-action sequence, where the designer has a series of death-defying action-movie events, improvisations, and coincidences in mind, and you have to muddle your way through by figuring just how he wants his bravura scene to play out. In other words, you have to fail again and again, using your failures as a way to slowly deduce what the designer has in mind. Fail-until-you-succeed gameplay can feel rewarding in some circumstances, but not when it’s just an exercise in methodically trying absolutely everything until something works, as it tends to be here. The final scene of the game, involving a gigantic cargo plane teetering on the edge of a cliff with a staggering quantity of explosives inside, becomes the worst of all of them by adding tricky timing to the equation.

It’s in places like this one that the mismatch between the available technology and the desired experience really comes to the fore. In a free-roaming 3D engine with the possibility of emergent behavior, the finale could be every bit as rousing as Schafer intended it to be. But in a point-and-click adventure engine whose world simulation goes little deeper than the contents of your inventory… not so much. Executing, say, a death-defying leap out of the teetering plane’s cargo hold on your motorcycle rather loses its thrill when said leap is the only thing the designer has planned for you to do — the only thing you’re allowed to do other than getting yourself killed. The leap in question is the designer’s exciting last-minute gambit, not yours; you’re just the stooge bumbling and stumbling to recreate it. So, you begin to wish that all of the game’s action sequences were proper action sequences — but then you remember how very bad the action-oriented mini-games that do exist actually are, and you have no idea what you want, other than to be playing a different, better game.

What happened? How did a game with such a promising pedigree turn out to be so underwhelming? There is no single answer, but rather a number of probable contributing factors.

One is simply the way that games were sold in 1995. Without its more annoying bits, Full Throttle would offer little more than two hours of entertainment. There’s room for such a game today — a game that could be sold for a small price but in big quantities through digital storefronts. In 1995, however, a game that cost this much to make could reach consumers only as a premium-priced boxed product; other methods of distribution just didn’t exist yet. And consumers who paid $30, $40, or $50 for a game had certain expectations as to how long it should occupy them, as was only reasonable. Thus the need to pad its length to make it suit the realities of the contemporary marketplace probably had more than a little something to do with Full Throttle’s failings.

Then there’s the Star Wars factor. Many of the people who worked for LucasArts prior to 1993 have commented on what a blessing in disguise it was for George Lucas’s own games studio not to be able to make Star Wars games, a happenstance whose roots can be found in the very first contract Lucas signed to make Star Wars toys just before the release of the very first film in 1977. When another series of accidents finally brought the rights back to Lucasfilm, and by extension to LucasArts, in 1992, the latter jumped on Star Wars with a vengeance, releasing multiple games under the license every year thereafter. This was by no means an unmitigatedly bad thing; at least one of their early Star Wars games, TIE Fighter, is an unimpeachable classic, on par in its own way with any LucasArts adventure game, while many of them evince a free-spirited joie de vivre that’s rather been lost from the franchise’s current over-saturated, overly Disneyfied personification. But it did lead in time to a decline in attention to the non-Star Wars graphic adventures that had previously been the biggest part of LucasArts’s identity. So, it was probably not entirely a coincidence that the LucasArts adventure arm peaked in 1993, just as the Star Wars arm was getting off the ground. In the time between Sam and Max Hit the Road and Full Throttle, adventure games suddenly became a sideline for LucasArts, with perhaps a proportional drop-off in their motivation to make everything in a game like Full Throttle just exactly perfect.

Another factor, one which I alluded to earlier, was the general sense in the industry that the market was now demanding faster paced, more immediate and visceral experiences. And, I rush to add, games with those qualities are fine in themselves. It’s just that that set of design goals may not have been a good pairing with an engine and a genre known for a rather different set of qualities.

These generalized factors were accompanied by more specific collisions of circumstance. When studying the development history of Day of the Tentacle, one comes away with the strong impression that Tim Schafer was the creator most enamored with the jokes and the goofy fiction of the game, while his partner Dave Grossman obsessed mostly over its interactive structure and puzzle design. Perhaps we should not be surprised, then, that when Schafer struck out on his own we got a game with a sparkling fictional presentation and lousy interactive elements.

Full Throttle was not made on the cheap. Far from it: it was the first LucasArts adventure to cost over $1 million to produce. But the money that was thrown at it wasn’t accompanied by a corresponding commitment to the process of making good games. Its development was instead chaotic, improvised rather than planned; Tim Schafer personally took on the titles of Writer, Designer, and Project Leader, and seems to have been well out of his depth on at least the last of them. As a result, the game, which had originally been slated for a Christmas 1994 release, fell badly behind schedule and over budget, and what Larry Ahern describes as a “huge section” of it had to be cut out before all was said and done. (Another result of Full Throttle’s protracted creation was its use of vanilla VGA graphics, which made it something of an anachronism in the spring of 1995, what with the rest of the industry’s shift to higher-resolution SVGA; fortunately, LucasArts’s artists were so talented that their work couldn’t be spoiled even by giant pixels.) During the making of Day of the Tentacle, the design team had regularly brought ordinary folks in off the street to play the latest build and give their invaluable feedback. This didn’t happen for Full Throttle. Instead there was just a mad rush to complete and release a game that nobody had ever really tried to play cold. Alas, this is an old story in the history of adventure games, and a more depressingly typical one than that of the carefully built, meticulously tested game. The only difference on this occasion was that it hadn’t used to be a story set in LucasArts’s offices.

Still, LucasArts paid little price at this time for departing from their old ethos that Design Matters. Full Throttle was greeted by glowing reviews from magazine scribes who were dazzled by its slick, hip presentation, so different from anything else on the gaming scene. For example, the usually thoughtful Charles Ardai of Computer Gaming World gave it four and a half out of five stars even as he acknowledged that “its weakest point is its gameplay.” For all that this might strike us today as the very definition of judging a book by its cover, such formulations were par for the course during the madcap multimedia frenzy of the mid-1990s. Tim Schafer claims that the game sold an eventual 1 million copies, enough to make MTV seriously consider turning it into a television cartoon.

Many of those buyers remember Full Throttle fondly today, although a considerable number of naysayers with complaints similar to the ones I’ve aired in this article have also joined the discussion since the game was remastered and re-released in 2017. It seems to me that attitudes toward this game in particular tend to neatly delineate two broad categories of adventure players. There are those who aren’t overly chuffed about puzzles and other issues of design, who consider a modicum of obtuseness to be almost an intrinsic part of the genre, and who thus don’t hesitate to reach for a walkthrough at the first sign of trouble. This is fair enough in itself; as I’ve said many times, there is no wrong way to play any game as long as you’re having fun. I, however, don’t tend to have much fun playing this way. I consider a good interactive design to be a prerequisite to a good game of any stripe. And when I reach for a walkthrough, I do so knowing I’m going to be angry afterward at either myself or the game. If it turns out to be a case of the latter… well, I’d rather just watch a movie.

And indeed, that has to be my final verdict on Full Throttle for those of you who share my own adventure-game predilections: just find yourself a video playthrough to watch, thereby to enjoy its buckets of style and personality without having to wrestle with all of the annoyances. If nothing else, Full Throttle makes for a fun cartoon. Pity about the gameplay.

(Sources: the book Full Throttle: Official Player’s Guide by Jo Ashburn; Computer Gaming World of November 1994 and August 1995; LucasArts customer newsletter The Adventurer of Winter 1994/1995 and Summer 1995; Retro Gamer 62; the “director’s commentary” from the 2017 re-release of Full Throttle. Online sources include interview with Tim Schafer by Celia Pearce and Chris Suellentrop.

A “remastered” version of Full Throttle is available for digital purchase.)

Comments
43 Responses

- Ian C

July 2, 2021 at 4:04 pm

An interesting overview of a game I didn’t know about before today – sadly, it sounds rather more like a review of a Sierra game, than of a LucasArts product.

- Damiano

July 2, 2021 at 4:23 pm

I spoke with Larry Ahern recently in an interview for my website (https://genesistemple.com/interview-with-larry-ahern-lucasarts-crackpot-entertainment-part-1-of-2) and, among the things that didn’t make the cut, I expressed fair surprise that once he himself learned about the failure of the action sequences in Full Throttle, nonetheless he and Ackley decided to try them again while designing The Curse of Monkey Island. That’s why, Larry says, he insisted to make them skippable.

To be fair, they are better implemented than Full Throttle, but I think it can be argued that they’re still mostly their weakest point in an otherwise solid adventure.

- John Witte

July 2, 2021 at 4:35 pm

I remember playing it when it first came out in 1995. I was vacationing at a friend’s house and played it on their computer. My memories of it were fonder than your review, Jimmy. I do remember that it was a shorter game and that it was an easier game from Lucasarts. Of the three games that Schafer directed, I always view this one as his most cinematic one, in the sense that it felt more like an interactive movie than an adventure game.

I do enjoy reading your posts and hopefully you will continue writing enough history to get around to Schafer’s magnum opus Grim Fandango.

- Brent

July 2, 2021 at 6:44 pm

Love this game and Grim Fandango even though they are both gameplay disasters (I’d argue Grim Fandango even moreso).

Having started playing Sierra adventures at a very young age, by the time this game came out I had long internalized that you were supposed to get stuck in these games for months due to obscure reasons. These days I basically can’t stand adventure games of any kind!

- Alan

July 2, 2021 at 6:45 pm

I hate action sequences in my adventure games, so, yeah, the action sequences weren’t great. I’m really terrible at fighting games, so I specifically loathed the bike-to-bike combat. The _idea_ of weapon progression and tradeoffs could work, ironically akin to insult sword fighting in Monkey Island, just with actual violence. But in practice: bletch.

But I ultimatly I loved the game. It’s a pleasure to just wallow in the sheer style of the thing and have an adventure game where thematically appropriate violence works.

I think part of what “killed” adventure games the first time was the idea that games needed action sequences. It’s a pattern that continued for a decade or so into multiple genres. It often works (it popularized real-time strategy games and action oriented RPGs, despite early backlashes against games like Balder’s Gate and Fallout 3), but it definitely felt forced and ill implemented a lot of the time.

An aside: I wouldn’t call Star Wars: Rebel Assault a run-and-gun game. I’d describe it as a rail shooter as you’re stuck with the path the pre-rendered camera go with sprite-based enemies rendered on top.

- Jimmy Maher

July 2, 2021 at 8:44 pm

That is indeed a better description. Thanks!

- Sniffnoy

July 2, 2021 at 7:30 pm

Typo spotting: “cerebation” for “cerebration”; “Disnefied” for… well, I’m not sure if there’s a canonical correct spelling of this, but that one looks wrong. :P

- Lisa H.

July 2, 2021 at 7:58 pm

“Disneyfied”, usually.

- Jimmy Maher

July 2, 2021 at 8:54 pm

Thanks!

- Jimmy Maher

July 2, 2021 at 8:46 pm

Thanks!

- Dan Fabulich

July 2, 2021 at 8:22 pm

We talked about this a few years ago at https://www.filfre.net/2015/07/the-14-deadly-sins-of-graphic-adventure-design/ but I feel like the sense of rage you get at bad puzzles interferes with your ability to enjoy a lot of good adventure games.

But, specifically, it seems like when you give up on a puzzle, you reach for a “walkthrough” and not invisiclues/UHS or other partial/gradual hints. Is that right? Do you never use gradual hints? (Why not? Is it because you’re already so pissed off that you refuse to play the game any further?)

If I may play the role of therapist here, it’s this “all or nothing” approach that amplifies your sense of rage. I agree, once you’re reading a walkthrough, the puzzle of the game really is *ruined*. But don’t you agree that partial/gradual hints only slightly diminish the enjoyment of solving the puzzle? Wouldn’t that be, inherently, less enraging?

- Jimmy Maher

July 2, 2021 at 9:23 pm

UHS Hints are my first recourse, if they’re available. If I find the failure is on me, fair enough. If it’s on the game — i.e., a bad puzzle — then I turn to a walkthrough, as at that point I know I can’t trust the game.

As far as my “rage” goes… You do have to allow your patient a little bit of hyperbole, Doctor, especially when he’s a writer trying to make a point. ;) While there are things in this world that I really can get angry — perhaps even enraged — about, adventure games are not among them.

- mycophobia

July 2, 2021 at 8:22 pm

“Loony Tunes” –> “Looney Tunes”

- Jimmy Maher

July 3, 2021 at 1:17 pm

Thanks!

- Kai

July 2, 2021 at 9:05 pm

That’s the one latter-day LucasArts adventure I skipped back then, and I don’t think I missed out. Muddy color palettes are just not my thing, and neither is the biker gang milieu. I guess I might not have minded the actual gameplay if the setting and visuals had been to my taste, though.

- Leo Vellés

July 2, 2021 at 10:24 pm

I don’t know if it was that i was growing up or what, but as a teenager I always felt that from Sam & Max onwards, LucasArts games droped their quality. None of them felt like a masterpiece to me, unlike the ones that came before. Maybe it was the change from the verb UI to the icons, which I never liked. Sam & Max and Full Throttle, although I replayed them again this year after a decade or two, didn’t cause an impression on me. Although I gotta say that Curse of Monkey Island was pretty good (except the final chapter) and, to this day, I never played Grim Fandango. Shame on me.

- Jimmy Maher

July 2, 2021 at 10:59 pm

While I would date the start of the decline to after rather than before Sam and Max Hit the Road, I otherwise tend to agree that LucasArts’s designs got at best much more inconsistent after that point.

- Arthur

July 2, 2021 at 10:32 pm

I was a LucasArts kid growing up, having played through the preceding adventures (aside from Loom, which I didn’t get around to until last year) and loved them. Full Throttle came out when I was right at the start of my teens, an age when badass dudes on motorbikes seem incredibly cool to young boys and when the somewhat edgier content of Full Throttle would have probably appealed. And I like a good swathe of Full Throttle itself…

…But Full Throttle was also the game which prompted me to stop getting new LucasArts adventures. I got around to playing their Dig-and-onwards adventures eventually, but in every case it was years after release. (Grim Fandango I didn’t play until the remastered version – which, I note, throws in point and click controls!) And it was largely the horrible action sequences that did it.

The thing is, I’d also played some action-oriented games too – I loved Dark Forces, which released the same year. And so, like most videogame-literate folk of my age, I knew full well what a good action sequence played like, and I could tell that the ones in Full Throttle were bad.

A big problem to my mind of both the Road Rash ripoff and the demolition derby is that they look like pure action sequences, but they aren’t. In both case they’re actually puzzles disguised as action sequences, and with (shoddy) action controls with which you are expected to implement the solution. (The Road Rash, sequence, is basically an inventory puzzle, except one which you can fail at if you actually have the right answer, but don’t implement it properly.)

And this means you’re in the worst of all possible worlds. Not only do you have a puzzle which you can fail at solving even when you know exactly what you need to do – bad puzzle design, I think you will agree – but you have a sequence which, because it’s disguised as an action sequence, tricks you into thinking it’s possible to solve it if you just get skilled enough at the action. But you can’t – not without also arriving at the puzzle solution. It’s not just horrible gameplay, it’s horrible communication of what the game expects out of you in the first place.

Nobody who actually played action-oriented games at the time would accept a game as janky as those action sequences, so it beggars belief in retrospect that LucasArts thought people deliberately seeking out an adventure game – some of who might enjoy action sequences, some of whom might hate them – would accept such a thing in an adventure game. My feeling at the time – and I still think my early-teens-self might have had the right instincts about this – was that someone at LucasArts assumed that the target audience for their adventure games wouldn’t be especially versed in action games, and so wouldn’t realise just how subpar the action sequences in Full Throttle were.

I really enjoyed looking over the reasons behind that in your article and I do think you are onto something when you say it’s about playing time issues. I put more of my thoughts on the game – and the LucasArts adventures that followed it – in my blog if you’re interested: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/2020/09/08/gogathon-curses-grimly-market-forces-throttled-a-genre-but-it-escaped-dig-it/

- Jimmy Maher

July 2, 2021 at 11:07 pm

You have a sequence which, because it’s disguised as an action sequence, tricks you into thinking it’s possible to solve it if you just get skilled enough at the action. But you can’t – not without also arriving at the puzzle solution. It’s not just horrible gameplay, it’s horrible communication of what the game expects out of you in the first place.

That’s a great observation, stating the fundamental problem better than I managed to. And an ironic one, given how masterfully the game adjusts your expectations in the opening adventure sequence.

- Venya

July 3, 2021 at 8:07 am

I know this one would not have aged well. I remember beating my head against it when it was new, and then again circa 2001 with the aid of walkthroughs to finally beat it. I’d utterly forgotten the horrible demolition derby minigame until I read this. I enjoyed the story, the game rather less so.

- Benedict Singleton

July 3, 2021 at 2:13 pm

Well in some ways it has aged very well. I bought it for three pounds. I got value for money but agree with basically all the comments here. It was a good destruction for a couple of weeks.

- Aula

July 3, 2021 at 3:30 pm

“The controls, which are apparently meant to simulate slipping and sliding in the mud of a fairground arena”

Uh, no, that’s a rather thorough misunderstanding of the controls, and actually far more charitable than the game deserves; the reality is much worse than that.

I’m going to guess that you didn’t play Full Throttle with a joystick. If you had, you would have found the controls of the demolition derby minigame pleasingly exact; push the joystick forward of its center position and your car moves forward, pull the joystick back and your car moves backward, tilt the joystick left or right and your car turns left or right, in each case the speed of movement depending on how far off center the joystick is. Of course figuring out what you need to do in order to complete the minigame still wouldn’t be a particularly good puzzle, but it wouldn’t be quite as bad as what you experienced.

So what goes wrong here? To answer that, we need to look at how SCUMM generally uses the joystick. When the joystick is in its center position, the cursor is in the center of the screen; when you move and then hold the joystick, the cursor moves and then stays in place; let go of the joystick, which snaps back to the center, and the cursor returns to screen center. Because of the way SCUMM is designed, the actual game can only read cursor position, so for the minigame to work as described, your car’s movement forward or backward is based on how far the cursor is above or below the horizontal midline of the screen, while its turning left or right is based on how far the cursor is left or right of the vertical midline of the screen. This is fine when the cursor is controlled by a joystick; however, when you use a mouse or the keyboard to move the cursor, this control scheme makes no sense whatsoever. In fact, using a mouse makes this minigame so unplayable that I can only conclude that no one even tried to play it with a mouse during development, and therefore no one ever tried to play through the entire Full Throttle with a mouse before it was released. That would be a gross failure of quality control from almost any company, but from LucasArts it’s utterly mindboggling.

- Jimmy Maher

July 3, 2021 at 4:22 pm

I didn’t even know it was *possible* to play it with a joystick…

- Arthur

July 3, 2021 at 4:42 pm

I can sort of understand why they might have skimped on that playtesting if they wanted to punt the game out of the door on time and in budget and didn’t mind shipping a somewhat broken game as the consequence of that. Goodness knows Sierra did that often enough.

On the other hand, the same year saw the Dig come out after a development period of six years, which for modern AAA stuff might not be too bad but by the standards of the era was totally absurd. (One could argue that more or less the entire “golden age” of LucasArts adventure came and went whilst they persistently failed to get The Dig done.)

Sure, The Dig had Spielberg’s name attached to it, so it was unlikely to ever be cancelled no matter how deep it got into the weeds. But still, if you’re going to allow a project like that to slip that much but not spend a teeny bit more time and money properly testing Full Throttle, what is wrong with you?

- Leo Vellés

July 3, 2021 at 3:40 pm

One more thing about Full Throttle that I think shows why is a flawed game is the tone: it works just fine when the story is told like it’s main caracther: dry, a little bleak líke the setting. But when in it tries to be funny, it fails every single time: when Ben runs to not get caught by the dog in the junkyard, the bit with the bunnies and the land miles…for me, that examples really got me out of the atmosphere the game was building

- GeoX

July 3, 2021 at 6:56 pm

I dunno–I still think “not with my box of bunnies!” and “that’s not one of meat’s many uses” are classic lines.

- Joshua Barrett

July 3, 2021 at 5:30 pm

This really does seem like a reflection, or even a perfect miniature version, of every single failing that Tim Schafer would manifest in his post-Lucasarts career.

And I say that as someone who absolutely loves Double Fine’s work, but there are some pretty evident problems that have plagued the company from day 1. Every single Double Fine game, almost to a fault, was late, over-budget, and if there were any expectations placed upon it, underwhelming, with only some smaller projects avoiding the curse. Time and again, Schafer has proven himself to be a pretty good writer, an adequate game designer, and a poor manager.

Psychonauts is one of my favorite games, but it’s full of… greater or lesser flaws in its execution. If you compare it to its contemporaries in the genre, it’s less polished than almost any of the others that are fondly remembered in terms of gameplay. It’s full of weird difficulty spikes and awkward controls and occasional bad ideas. The pacing is off, the start of the game is a tutorial level that seems to just drag on, and then two more tutorial levels for good measure afterwards. The reason I and so many others forgive it this is that it’s also a wildly creative game that brings a lot of very cool gameplay ideas to the table (Lungfishopolis, The Milkman Conspiracy, Black Velvetopia, and Waterloo-o being the most famous examples) and then perfectly integrates those ideas into its story so that the mechanics actually convey story and context and feed into the writing, which is really really good. That’s partly because Tim Schafer is pretty funny, and partly because he brought in the also very funny Eric Wolpaw as a co-writer (who will likely come up if and when this blog delves into the 2000s).

All of which is to say that I feel like Full Throttle is a strong signpost of were Schafer’s career went afterwards, and a pretty solid early demonstration of his strengths and weaknesses as a creator.

- Terry R

July 5, 2021 at 7:05 pm

I played this game for the first time about a month ago (was a free GoG promotion years ago). Prior to that my only other point-n-click adventure game was The Dig which had a fantastic ambience.

The biker action sequences and the airplane escape sequence felt like playing Don Bluth’s Dragon’s Lair. Simple input sequences with lots of deaths.

The experience of this game felt “thin”. I kept waiting for the “real” game to begin until I noticed the save menu said the game was 63% complete.

- CD Master

July 6, 2021 at 5:58 am

Wow! These games are ancient now. Back then, in adventure games like these, we would save the game as ‘ArcadSeq – Derby’ so we could replay they action sequence.

Some space quest and Robin Hood Sierra games had 6 or more mini games! Sure, the quality differed, but it was worth a save file.

Full Throttle should have had more action sequences, that’s for sure. A motorcycle race ala Spy Hunter?

- Niall

July 9, 2021 at 1:09 pm

The more I played of Full Throttle back when it first came out, the more I came to respect The Secret of Monkey Island.

In that game, when you finally met the Sword master, you fully expected it to descend into a half-arsed fencing mini-game which you’d have to suffer through for a while to progress. It was simply par-for-the-course in those days.

But instead of Hero-Quest style sword-fighting, they elected to implement battles through something that adventure games traditionally did very well: dialogue. It’s a genius piece of game design, an exemplar of how Lucasfilm planned to do things differently and it has gone on to be maybe the most beloved thing in all their games.

How Full Throttle could have used even an ounce of that kind of outside-the-box thinking and innovation. Instead, Schaefer and his team fell into every trap that an adventure game trying to convey action could. The upshot, ironically, is a game that is utterly turgid.

Thankfully, despite sporting flaws of its own, their next game, Grim Fandango, managed to transcend a poor 3D interface and a few rubbish action puzzles with charm, humour and no shortage of good ideas to offset the bad ones.

- John

July 9, 2021 at 6:23 pm

Although I can’t really dispute any of the things that Mr. Maher says about Full Throttle, I nevertheless have a certain fondness for the game. The things that bothered him bothered me also, but not nearly to the same degree. It helped, I think, that I when I first played Full Throttle, I was very much not an adventure gamer. I’d played a few, but never for very long. My impression of adventure games was “the genre where you try using each thing with all of the other things until some arbitrary combination of things finally solves a puzzle”. I can’t say that Full Throttle defied my expectations, exactly. I can say, however, that I found several of its puzzle solutions–combining “my fist” and “the bartender’s face” or combining “my foot” and “the door of that jerk’s trailer”–to be delightfully intuitive and direct by the standards of the genre.

It also helped that Full Throttle came along at around the time where I first began to pay attention to voice acting credits in games and television. Mark Hamill’s Ripburger is a variation on Hamill’s standard villain voice–see also Joker (Batman) and Hobgoblin (Spider-Man)–but one that clearly reflects that Ripburger is old, tired, and fat. Other recognizable voices include Tress MacNeille, Maurice Lamarche, and Kath Soucie. Soucie, the voice of Maureen, is playing rather against type, as I believe she specializes in doing voices for child characters (e.g., the Nickolodeon cartoon Rugrats). Roy Conrad and Hamilton Camp are also good, though I regret to say that I know little about their work outside of Full Throttle.

Then there’s the music. I am one of those people who went out and bought the Gone Jackal’s Bone to Pick album after playing the game. I don’t regret it. I will note, however, that the best songs on the album are generally the ones in the game and that the band has an unfortunate tendency for really long and self-indulgent instrumental segments. The version of the song Born Bad from the game, for example, which plays during the opening credits, is a better, tighter song than the one on the album. I also note that that the band’s lyricist is only about 75% as clever as he thinks he is. Finally, for those who care about such things, I will note that some of the album’s songs are explicitly political. (Born Bad is a protest song. I’m not even kidding. Go listen to the first verse, if you can. The fact that it plays while a bunch of bikers run over a rich guy’s hover limousine is not a coincidence.) I personally don’t mind. Those aren’t quite my personal politics but the album rocks anyway.

Like Terry R above, I played Full Throttle again not too long ago when GOG gave the re-mastered version away for free. I was surprised to see how many of the puzzle solutions I still remembered. I got stuck just a couple of times. The bike-combat section is skippable in the remastered version but the demolition derby section is not. The car is difficult to control but the real problem is that it’s not clear what you’re supposed to be doing with the car in the first place. You can ram Ripburger’s goons’ car all day long and it won’t accomplish anything. The derby is, as Arthur suggested earlier, a puzzle disguised as an action sequence. Once you know the solution to the puzzle–I am not ashamed to confess that I ultimately went and looked it up–it’s not that bad. The controls are awkward, yes, but not insurmountably so. If the solution to the puzzle were more apparent from the beginning I don’t think that people would hate it quite so much. It isn’t until you’ve spent ten minutes fruitlessly trying to ram other cars that the controls become infuriating.

- Hoagie

July 10, 2021 at 9:36 pm

I played Full Throttle, The Dig and Grim Fandango many years after their release and disappointed by all, I even thought I had become blasé of graphic adventures. But I quickly understood what went wrong in these games, and I agree with all the points described here: the decline of LucasArts adventures from this game (it’s exactly when they dropped the floppy disks to work exclusively on CD-ROMs, with more cutscenes and spoken dialogues, while keeping an average rhythm of one graphic adventure per year), the fact that Tim Schaffer is good when he works in a team and less good in solo (Grim Fandango has its share of flaws too), the awful “action” sequences (the ones in Indiana Jones 3 & 4 were far better, and sometimes they could be avoided!), some obtuse puzzles… I was also unimpressed by the plot and its predictable twists.
Another letdown not mentioned here is the lack of interactive dialogues. I think there are less than 20 occasions to talk to another character, the huge majority of the dialogues come from the cutscenes. I know the plot takes place in wastelands, but these interactive discussions were a part of the charm of LucasArts games and they added depth to the plot. You don’t even get to know your gangmates?!
It’s a bit of shame that magazines gave Full Throttle positive reviews just because it had LucasArts written on it. I think the only one that really bashed it was Computer Games/Strategy Plus.
Regarding the scenery puzzle, it reminds me of the goat puzzle in Broken Sword/Circle of Blood: both require to think beyond the automatic reflexes we’ve got so used to in graphic adventures, and they look logical in hindsight. But yes, it was unusual among the other puzzles, and it would have been easier to guess with direct control of the character, like in Grim Fandango.

- Nate

July 15, 2021 at 12:50 am

I went on a tear through most of the LucasArts adventure catalog a year or two ago, and I recalled Full Throttle being one of the ones I liked well enough in spite of myself. I think the atmosphere and look of the thing won me over. But it’s probably got the least “game” of any of the LucasArts line-up. When it’s doing the adventure-game thing it does alright, but there just isn’t a whole lot of it there. The action parts are…not good, but I don’t recall anything in the game truly frustrating me the way some of the puzzles in Grim Fandango did.

My experiences with both this and Grim Fandango leave me inclined to think that Tim Schaffer is the Tim Burton of video games. He’s good enough to produce something really great, especially in collaboration with someone else, but he’s usually content to have a cool look and atmosphere, and forgets to do the hard work that goes into actual design.

- Andrew Nenakhov

July 17, 2021 at 10:13 am

“Worse, you have no idea what you’re even trying to accomplish.” – in Demolition derby they TELL you what to do. You just need listen to what Maureen says.

Had no difficulty with this bit at all.

- Sam

July 17, 2021 at 4:23 pm

I recently bought the remastered version on GOG because I remember Full Throttle as probably the best adventure I played in my early teens. But like the author, I was very underwhelmed by the experience of playing the game nowadays and I noticed so many flaws I didn’t recall it had.

I guess it’s just that, a massive change of perspective. When I was young, I had loads of time and probably didn’t mind failing countless times. I probably didn’t mind clicking around pointlessly and try out any possible combination of actions. I don’t remember the puzzles to be unfair or challenging. On the contrary, I think I knew the solution right away and found the puzzles rather easy. I loved the mini games. I remember a complex story and a captivating atmosphere. I remember discussing the game with friends.

None of that magic survived for me as an adult. It’s kind of sad…

- threepwood

July 17, 2021 at 8:21 pm

Hello!
A great article as always, but this one sentence kind of bothers me:
“Experimenting with the controls, you discover that you have just three verb icons at your disposal: a skull, a raised fist, and a leather boot.”

The verbs are actually four, since the skull icon has eyes and a mouth that can be clicked. Granted, “look” may not be detrimental to gameplay, but that was a good part of what made adventure games fun to me personally.

- Jimmy Maher

July 18, 2021 at 11:21 am

Fair enough. Thanks!

- Pingback: July 18th – Critical Distance

- Wolfeye Mox

August 15, 2021 at 5:16 pm

I actually playing Full Throttle. I’m not a fan of adventure games, too much puzzle, not enough fun (for me). But, Full Throttle initially charmed me, I thought “maybe it’s different from those unfun puzzle games”. But, nope, while it had some action scenes, they weren’t fun, instead badly done, and it had puzzles. If a game isn’t fun, to it’s not worth playing, definitely not worth getting out a walkthrough. So, I stopped playing before long. Thought it was me, because I don’t enjoy adventure games, and this was just another one.

But, if you, a fan of adventure games, who enjoys them, thinks it’s gameplay was bad, maybe it wasn’t just me.

Guess that game was all flash and no substance. Shame, because the story is pretty good. Probably will end up watching it on YouTube. But, it’s a failure at being a game.

- Wolfeye Mox

August 15, 2021 at 5:18 pm

*played. Really wish you had a way to edit comments. I always seem to catch typos after I posted my comment. Lol

- Whybird

August 23, 2021 at 3:30 pm

“One particularly infamous “puzzle” demands that Ben kick a wall over and over at random to discover the one tiny spot that makes something happen.”

This isn’t quite fair. The NPC who’s telling you how to get past it says words to the effect of “I used to open Dad’s secret passage by going to where the crack was at eye level, waiting ’till the meters were all on black, and kicking the wall”.

The trick is remembering that she’s talking about when she was a kid. If you go straight to where the wall is about eye level for a child that age and kick it, it’ll work.

- Pingback: h. Play» Blog Archive » Psychonauts 2

- Alex

November 6, 2021 at 8:45 am

Being a fan of Lucas Arts since early childhood, Full Throttle was the last game of theirs I truly enjoyed. Neither The Dig, nor Grim Fandango or the latter Monkey Islands managed to impress me, mostly due to a mix of technical and gameplay-based reasons. Full Throttle truly hit the spot for me. Like most people, I enjoyed the banging soundtrack, but also the scenario, the charakters, the story, the puzzles and the mini-games. I had no problem with them whatsoever. Having said that, it was also the first adventure game I experienced where the presentation promised more than the game itself could keep. I paid more than a hundred bucks for a game I beat in three days. While I never regretted it it could have been so much more. I still catch myself dreaming about the cancelled sequel.

The Dig
July 23, 2021

As you would imagine, a lot of the things you can do in a comedy game just don’t work when trying to remain serious. You can’t cover up a bad puzzle with a funny line of self-referential dialog. Er, not that I ever did that. But anyway, it was also a challenge to maintain the tone and some semblance of a dramatic arc. Another challenge was cultural — we were trying to build this game in an environment where everyone else was building funny games, telling jokes, and being pretty outlandish. It was like trying to cram for a physics final during a dorm party. It would have been a lot easier to join the party.

— Sean Clark, fifth (and last) project lead on The Dig

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[1]LucasArts was known as Lucasfilm Games until the summer of 1992. To avoid confusion, I use the name “LucasArts” throughout this article.The Dig, born from an idea for an adventure game that had been presented to LucasArts by none other than Steven Spielberg. Soon after that bit of business was taken care of, remembers Falstein, “we felt the room start to shake — not too unusual, we’d been through many earthquakes in California — but then suddenly it got much stronger, and we started to hear someone scream, and some glass crash to the floor somewhere, and most of us dived under the mahogany conference table to ride it out.” It was the Loma Prieta Earthquake, which would kill 63 people, seriously injure another 400, and do untold amounts of property damage all around Northern California.

Perhaps Falstein and his colleagues should have taken it as an omen. The Dig would turn into a slow-motion fiasco that crushed experienced game developers under its weight with the same assiduity with which the earthquake collapsed Oakland’s Nimitz Freeway. When a finished version of the game finally appeared on store shelves in late 1995, one rather ungenerous question would be hard to avoid asking: it took you six years to make this?

In order to tell the full story of The Dig, the most famously troubled project in the history of LucasArts, we have to wind the clock back yet further: all the way back to the mid-1980s, when Steven Spielberg was flying high on the strength of blockbusters like Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. During this period, many years before the advent of Prestige TV, Spielberg approached NBC with a proposal for a new anthology series named Amazing Stories, after the pulp magazine that had been such an incubator of printed science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s. He would direct the occasional episode himself, he promised, but would mostly just throw out outlines which could be turned into reality by other screenwriters and directors. Among those willing to direct episodes were some of the most respected filmmakers in Hollywood: people like Martin Scorsese, Irvin Kershner, Robert Zemeckis, and Clint Eastwood. Naturally, NBC was all over it; nowhere else on the television of the 1980s could you hope to see a roster of big-screen talent anything like that. The new series debuted with much hype on September 29, 1985.

But somehow it just never came together for Amazing Stories; right from the first episodes, the dominant reaction from both critics and the public was one of vague disappointment. Part of the problem was each episode’s running time of just half an hour, or 22 minutes once commercials and credits were factored in; there wasn’t much scope for story or character development in that paltry span of time. But another, even bigger problem was that what story and characters were there weren’t often all that interesting or original. Spielberg kept his promise to serve as the show’s idea man, personally providing the genesis of some 80 percent of the 45 episodes that were completed, but the outlines he tossed off were too often retreads of things that others had already done better. When he had an idea he really liked — such as the one about a group of miniature aliens who help the residents of an earthbound apartment block with their very earthbound problems — he tended to shop it elsewhere. The aforementioned idea, for example, led to the film Batteries Not Included.

The episode idea that would become the computer game The Dig after many torturous twists and turns was less original than that one. It involved a team of futuristic archaeologists digging in the ruins of what the audience would be led to assume was a lost alien civilization. Until, that is, the final shot set up the big reveal: the strange statue the archaeologists had been uncovering would be shown to be Mickey Mouse, while the enormous building behind it was the Sleeping Beauty Castle. They were digging at Disneyland, right here on Planet Earth!

The problem here was that we had seen all of this before, most notably at the end of Planet of the Apes, whose own climax had come when its own trio of astronauts stranded on its own apparently alien world had discovered the Statue of Liberty half-buried in the sand. Thus it was no great loss to posterity when this particular idea was judged too expensive for Amazing Stories to produce. But the core concept of archaeology in the future got stuck in Spielberg’s craw, to be trotted out again later in a very different context.

In the meantime, the show’s ratings were falling off quickly. As soon as the initial contract for two seasons had been fulfilled, Amazing Stories quietly disappeared from the airwaves. It became an object lesson that nothing is guaranteed in commercial media, not even Steven Spielberg’s Midas touch.

Fast-forward a couple of years, to when Spielberg was in the post-production phase of his latest cinematic blockbuster, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which he was making in partnership with his good friend George Lucas. Noah Falstein of the latter’s very own games studio had been drafted to design an adventure game of the movie. Despite his lack of a games studio of his own, Spielberg was ironically far more personally interested in computer games than Lucas; he followed Falstein’s project quite closely, to the point of serving as a sort of unofficial beta tester. Even after the movie and game were released, Spielberg would ring up LucasArts from time to time to beg for hints for their other adventures, or sometimes just to shoot the breeze; he was clearly intrigued by the rapidly evolving world of interactive media. During one of these conversations, he said he had a concept whose origins dated back to Amazing Stories, one which he believed might work well as a game. And then he asked if he could bring it over to Skywalker Ranch. He didn’t have to ask twice.

The story that Spielberg outlined retained futuristic archaeology as its core motif, but wisely abandoned the clichéd reveal of Mickey Mouse. Instead the archaeologists would be on an actual alien planet, discovering impossibly advanced technology in what Spielberg conceived as an homage to the 1950s science-fiction classic Forbidden Planet. Over time, the individual archaeologists would come to distrust and eventually go to war with one another; this part of the plot hearkened back to another film that Spielberg loved, the classic Western The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Over to you, Noah Falstein — after the unpleasant business of the earthquake was behind everybody, that is.

Noah Falstein

The offices of LucasArts were filled with young men who had grown up worshiping at the shrines of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, and who now found themselves in the completely unexpected position of going to work every day at Skywalker Ranch, surrounded by the memorabilia of their gods and sometimes by the deities themselves. Their stories of divine contact are always entertaining, not least for the way that they tend to sound more like a plot from one of Spielberg’s films than any plausible reality; surely ordinary middle-class kids in the real world don’t just stumble into a job working for the mastermind of Star Wars, do they? Well, it turns out that in some cases they do. Dave Grossman, an aspiring LucasArts game designer at the time, was present at a follow-up meeting with Spielberg that also included Lucas, Falstein, and game designer Ron Gilbert of Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island fame. His account so magnificently captures what it was like to be a starstruck youngster in those circumstances that I want to quote it in full here.

The Main House at Skywalker is a pretty swanky place, and the meeting is in a boardroom with a table the size of a railroad car, made of oak or mahogany or some other sort of expensive wood. I’m a fidgety young kid with clothes that come pre-wrinkled, and this room makes me feel about as out of place as a cigarette butt in a soufflé. I’m a little on edge just being in here.

Then George and Steven show up and we all say hello. Now, I’ve been playing it cool like it’s no big deal, and I know they’re just people who sneeze and drop forks like everybody else, but… it’s Lucas and Spielberg! These guys are famous and powerful and rich and, although they don’t act like any of those things, I’m totally intimidated. (I should mention that although I’ve been working for George for a year or so at this point, this is only the second time I’ve met him.) I realize I’m really fairly nervous now.

George and Steven chit-chat with each other for a little bit. They’ve been friends a long time and it shows. George seems particularly excited to tell Steven about his new car, an Acura I think – they’re not even available to the public yet, but he’s managed to get the first one off the boat, and it’s parked conspicuously right in front of the building.

Pretty soon they start talking about ideas for The Dig, and they are Rapid-Fire Machine Guns of Creativity. Clearly they do this a lot. It’s all very high-concept and all over the map, and I have no idea how we’re going to make any of it into a game, but that’s kind of what brainstorming sessions are all about. Ron and Noah offer up a few thoughts. I have a few myself, but somehow I don’t feel worthy enough to break in with them. So I sit and listen, and gradually my nervousness is joined by embarrassment that I’m not saying anything.

A snack has been provided for the gathering, some sort of crumbly carbohydrate item, corn bread, if I remember correctly. So I take a piece – I’m kind of hungry, and it gives me something to do with my hands. I take a bite. Normally, the food at Skywalker Ranch is absolutely amazing, but this particular corn bread has been made extra dry. Chalk dry. My mouth is already parched from being nervous, so it takes me a while before I’m able to swallow the bite, and as I chomp and smack at it I’m sure I’m making more noise than a dozen weasels in a paper bag, even though everyone pretends not to notice. There are drinks in the room, but they have been placed out of the way, approximately a quarter-mile from where we’re sitting, and I can’t get up to get one without disrupting everything, and I’m sure by now George and Steven are wondering why I’m in the meeting in the first place.

I want to abandon the corn bread, but it’s begun falling apart, and I can’t put it down on my tiny napkin without making a huge mess. So I eat the whole piece. It takes about twenty minutes. I myself am covered with tiny crumbs, but at least there aren’t any on the gorgeous table.

By now the stakes are quite high. Because I’ve been quiet so long, the mere fact of my speaking up will be a noteworthy event, and anything I say has to measure up to that noteworthiness. You can’t break a long silence with a throwaway comment, it has to be a weighty, breathtaking observation that causes each person in the room to re-examine himself in its light. While I’m waiting for a thought that good, more time goes by and raises the bar even higher. I spend the rest of the meeting in a state of near-total paralysis, trying to figure out how I can get out of the room without anyone noticing, or, better yet, how I can go back in time and arrange not to be there in the first place.

So, yes, I did technically get to meet Steven Spielberg face-to-face once while we were working on The Dig. I actually talked to him later on, when he called to get hints on one of our other games (I think it was Day of the Tentacle), which he was playing with his son. (One of the lesser-known perks of being a famous filmmaker is that you can talk directly to the game designers for hints instead of calling the hint line.) Nice guy.

The broader world of computer gaming’s reaction to Spielberg’s involvement in The Dig would parallel the behavior of Dave Grossman at this meeting. At the same time that some bold industry scribes were beginning to call games a more exciting medium than cinema, destined for even more popularity thanks to the special sauce of interactivity, the press that surrounded The Dig would point out with merciless clarity just how shallow their bravado was, how deep gaming’s inferiority complex really ran: Spielberg’s name was guaranteed to show up in the first paragraph of every advertisement, preview, or, eventually, review. “Steven Spielberg is deigning to show an interest in little old us!” ran the implicit message.

It must be said that the hype was somewhat out of proportion to his actual contribution. After providing the initial idea for the game — an idea that would be transformed beyond all recognition by the time the game was released — Spielberg continued to make himself available for occasional consultations; he met with Falstein and his colleagues for four brainstorming sessions, two of which also included his buddy George Lucas, over the course of about eighteen months. (Thanks no doubt to the prompting of his friend, Lucas’s own involvement with The Dig was as hands-on as he ever got with one of his games studio’s creations.) Yet it’s rather less clear whether these conversations were of much real, practical use to the developers down in the trenches. Neither Spielberg nor Lucas was, to state the obvious, a game designer, and thus they tended to focus on things that might yield watchable movies but were less helpful for making a playable game. Noah Falstein soon discovered that heading a project which involved two such high-profile figures was a less enviable role than he had envisioned it to be; he has since circumspectly described a project where “everyone wanted to put their two cents in, and that can be extremely hard to manage.”

In his quest for a game that could be implemented within the strictures of SCUMM, LucasArts’s in-house point-and-click adventure engine, Falstein whittled away at Spielberg’s idea of two teams of archaeologists who enter into open war with one another. His final design document, last updated on January 30, 1991, takes place in “the future, nearly 80 years since the McKillip Drive made faster-than-light travel a possibility, and only 50 years since the first star colonies were founded.” In another nod back to Spielberg’s old Amazing Stories outline that got the ball rolling, an unmanned probe has recently discovered an immense statue towering amidst other alien ruins on the surface of a heretofore unexplored planet; in a nod to the most famous poem by Percy Shelley, the planet has been named Ozymandias. Three humans have now come to Ozymandias to investigate the probe’s findings — but they’re no longer proper archaeologists, only opportunistic treasure hunters, led by a sketchy character named Major Tom (presumably a nod to David Bowie). The player can choose either of Major Tom’s two subordinates as her avatar.

A series of unfortunate events ensues shortly after the humans make their landing, over the course of which Major Tom is killed and their spaceship damaged beyond any obvious possibility of repair. The two survivors have an argument and go their separate ways, but in this version of the script theirs is a cold rather than a hot war. As the game goes on, the player discovers that a primitive race of aliens living amidst the ruins are in fact the descendants of far more advanced ancestors, who long ago destroyed their civilization and almost wiped out their entire species with internecine germ warfare. But, the player goes on to learn, there are survivors of both factions who fought the apocalyptic final war suspended in cryogenic sleep beneath the surface of the planet. Her ultimate goal becomes to awaken these survivors and negotiate a peace between them, both because it’s simply the right thing to do and because these aliens should have the knowledge and tools she needs to repair her damaged spaceship.

This image by Ken Macklin is one of the few pieces of concept art to have survived from Noah Falstein’s version of The Dig.

For better or for worse, this pared-down but still ambitious vision for The Dig never developed much beyond that final design document and a considerable amount of accompanying concept art. “There was a little bit of SCUMM programming done on one of the more interesting puzzles, but not much [more],” says Falstein. He was pulled off the project very early in 1991, assigned instead to help Hal Barwood with Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. And when this, his second Indiana Jones game, was finished, he was laid off despite a long and largely exemplary track record.

Meanwhile The Dig spent a year or more in limbo, until it was passed to Brian Moriarty, the writer and designer of three games for the 1980s text-adventure giant Infocom and of LucasArts’s own lovely, lyrical Loom. Of late, he’d been drafting a plan for a game based on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, the franchise’s slightly disappointing foray into television, but a lack of personal enthusiasm for the project had led to a frustrating lack of progress. Moriarty was known as one of the most “literary” of game designers by temperament; his old colleagues at Infocom had called him “Professor Moriarty,” more as a nod to his general disposition than to the milieu of Sherlock Holmes. And indeed, his Trinity is as close as Infocom ever got to publishing a work of high literature, while his Loom possesses almost an equally haunting beauty. Seeing himself with some justification as a genuine interactive auteur, he demanded total control of every aspect of The Dig as a condition of taking it on. Bowing to his stellar reputation, LucasArts’s management agreed.

Brian Moriarty

Much of of what went on during the eighteen months that Moriarty spent working on The Dig remains obscure, but it plainly turned into a very troubled, acrimonious project. He got off on the wrong foot with many on his team by summarily binning Falstein’s vision — a vision which they had liked or even in some cases actively contributed to. Instead he devised an entirely new framing plot.

Rather than the far future, The Dig would now take place in 1998; in fact, its beginning would prominently feature the Atlantis, a Space Shuttle that was currently being flown by NASA. A massive asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. Humanity’s only hope is to meet it in space and plant a set of nuclear bombs on its surface. Once exploded, they will hopefully deflect the asteroid just enough to avoid the Earth. (The similarity with not one but two terrible 1998 movies is presumably coincidental.) You play Boston Low, the commander of the mission.

But carrying the mission out successfully and saving the Earth is only a prelude to the real plot. Once you have the leisure to explore the asteroid, you and your crew begin to discover a number of oddities about it, evidence that another form of intelligent being has been here before you. In the midst of your investigations, you set off a booby trap which whisks you and three other crew members light years away to a mysterious world littered with remnants of alien technology but bereft of any living specimens. Yet it’s certainly not bereft of danger: one crew member gets killed in gruesome fashion almost immediately when he bumbles into a rain of acid. Having thus established its bona fides as a serious story, a million light years away from the typical LucasArts cartoon comedy, the game now begins to show a closer resemblance to Falstein’s concept. You must explore this alien world, solve its puzzles, and ferret out the secrets of the civilization that once existed here if you ever hope to see Earth again. In doing so, you’re challenged not only by the environment itself but by bickering dissension in your own ranks.

This last element of the plot corresponded uncomfortably with the mood inside the project. LucasArts had now moved out of the idyllic environs of Skywalker Ranch and into a sprawling, anonymous office complex, where the designers and programmers working on The Dig found themselves in a completely separate building from the artists and administrators. Reading just slightly between the lines here, the root of the project’s troubles seems to have been a marked disconnect between the two buildings. Moriarty, who felt compelled to create meaningful, thematically ambitious games, became every accountant and project planner’s nightmare, piling on element after element, flying without a net (or a definitive design document). He imagined an interface where you would be able to carry ideas around with you like physical inventory items, a maze that would reconfigure itself every time you entered it, a Klein bottle your characters would pass through with strange metaphysical and audiovisual effects. To make all this happen, his programmers would need to create a whole new game engine of their own rather than relying on SCUMM. They named it StoryDroid.

A screenshot from Moriarty’s version of The Dig. Note the menu of verb icons at the bottom of the screen. These would disappear from later versions in favor of the more streamlined style of interface which LucasArts had begun to employ with Sam and Max Hit the Road.

There were some good days on Moriarty’s Dig, especially early on. Bill Tiller, an artist on the project, recalls their one in-person meeting with Steven Spielberg, in his office just behind the Universal Studios Theme Park. Moriarty brought a demo of the work-in-progress, along with a “portable” computer the size of a suitcase to run it. And he also brought a special treat for Spielberg, who continued to genuinely enjoy games in all the ways George Lucas didn’t. Tiller:

Brian brought an expansion disk for one of the aerial battle games Larry Holland was making. Spielberg was a big computer-game geek! He was waiting for this upgrade/mission expansion thing. He called his assistant in and just mentioned what it was. She immediately knew what he meant and said she’d send it home and tell someone to have it installed and running for him when he arrived. I decided at that moment I would have an assistant like that someday.

Anyway, when we were through we told him we had a few hours to kill and wondered what rides we should get on back at the theme park. He said the E.T. ride, since he helped design it. It was brand new at the time. His people said that he was really crazy about it and wanted to show it off to everyone. One of his assistants took us there on a back-lot golf cart. We didn’t have to get another taxi. We didn’t even have to stand in line! They took us straight to the ride and cut us in the line in front of everyone, like real V.I.P.s. Everyone had to stand back and watch, probably trying to figure out who we were. All I remember is Brian with the stupid giant suitcase going through the ride.

But the best part of the whole thing for me was [Spielberg’s] enthusiasm. He really likes games. This wasn’t work to him to have to hear us go on about The Dig.

Brian Moriarty’s version of The Dig was more violent than later versions, a quality which Steven Spielberg reportedly encouraged. Here an astronaut meets a gruesome end after being exposed to an alien acid rain.

But the bonhomie of the Universal Studios visit faded as the months wore on. Moriarty’s highfalutin aspirations began to strike others on the team — especially the artists who were trying to realize his ever-expanding vision — as prima-donna-ish; at the end of the day, after all, it was just a computer game they were making. “I used to tell Brian, when he got all excited about what people would think of our creation, that in ten years no one will even remember The Dig,” recalls Bill Eaken, the first head artist to work under him. He believes that Moriarty may even have imagined Spielberg giving him a screenwriting or directing job if The Dig sufficiently impressed him. Eaken:

I liked Brian. Brian is a smart and creative guy. I still have good memories of sitting in his office and just brainstorming. The sky was the limit. That’s how it should be. Those were good times. But I think as time went on he had stars in his eyes. I think he wanted to show Spielberg what he could do and it became too much pressure on him. After a while he just seemed to bog down under the pressure. When all the politics and Hollywood drama started to impede us, when it wasn’t even a Hollywood gig, I [got] temperamental.

The programming was a complete disaster. I had been working for several years at LucasArts at that time and had a very good feel for the programming. I taught programming in college, and though I wasn’t a programmer on any games, I understood programming enough to know something was amiss on The Dig. I went to one of my friends at the company who was a great programmer and told him my concerns. He went and tried to chat with the programmers about this or that to get a look at their code, but whenever he walked into the room they would shut off their monitors, things like that. What he could see confirmed my worries: the code was way too long, and mostly not working.

The project was “completely out of control and management wouldn’t listen to me about it,” Eaken claims today. So, he quit LucasArts, whereupon his role fell to his erstwhile second-in-command, the aforementioned Bill Tiller. The latter says that he “liked and disliked” Moriarty.

Brian was fun to talk with and was very energetic and was full of good ideas, but he and I started to rub each other the wrong way due to our disagreement over how the art should be done. I wanted the art organized in a tight budget and have it all planned out, just like in a typical animation production, and so did my boss, who mandated I push for an organized art schedule. Brian bristled at being restricted with his creativity. He felt that the creative process was hindered by art schedules and strict budgets. And he was right. But the days of just two or three people making a game were over, and the days of large productions and big budgets were dawning, and I feel Brian had a hard time adjusting to this new age.

Games were going through a transition at that time, from games done by a few programmers with little art, to becoming full-blown animated productions where the artists outnumber the programmers four to one. Add to the mix the enormous pressure of what a Spielberg/Lucas project should be like [and] internal jealousy about the hype, and you have a recipe for disaster.

He wanted to do as much of the game by himself as possible so that it was truly his vision, but I think he felt overwhelmed by the vastness of the game, which required so much graphics programming and asset creation. He was used to low-res graphics and a small intimate team of maybe four people or less. Then there is the pressure of doing the first Spielberg/Lucas game. I mean, come on! That is a tough, tough position for one guy to be in.

One of LucasArt’s longstanding traditions was the “pizza orgy,” in which everyone was invited to drop whatever they were doing, come to the main conference room, eat some pizza, and play a game that had reached a significant milestone in its development. The first Dig pizza orgy, which took place in the fall of 1993, was accompanied by an unusual amount of drama. As folks shuffled in to play the game for the very first time, they were told that Moriarty had quit that very morning.

We’re unlikely ever to know exactly what was going through Moriarty’s head at this juncture; he’s an intensely private individual, as it is of course his right to be, and is not at all given to baring his soul in public. What does seem clear, however, is that The Dig drained from him some fragile reservoir of heedless self-belief which every creative person needs in order to keep creating. Although he’s remained active in the games industry in various roles, those have tended to be managerial rather than creative; Brian Moriarty, one of the best pure writers ever to explore the potential of interactive narratives, never seriously attempted to write another one of them after The Dig. In an interview he did in 2006 for Jason Scott’s film Get Lamp, he mused vaguely during a pensive interlude that “I’m always looking for another Infocom. But sometimes I think we won’t give ourselves permission.” (Who precisely is the “we” here?) This statement may, I would suggest, reveal more than Moriarty intended, about more of his career than just his time at Infocom.

At any rate, Moriarty left LucasArts with one very unwieldy, confused, overambitious project to try to sort out. It struck someone there as wise to give The Dig to Hal Barwood, a former filmmaker himself who had been friends with Steven Spielberg for two decades. But Barwood proved less than enthusiastic about it — which was not terribly surprising in light of how badly The Dig had already derailed the careers of two of LucasArts’s other designers. Following one fluffy interview where he dutifully played up the involvement of Spielberg for all it was worth — “We’re doing our best to capture the essence of the experience he wants to create” — he finagled a way off the project.

At this point, the hot potato was passed to Dave Grossman, who had, as noted above, worked for a time with Noah Falstein on its first incarnation. “I was basically a hedge trimmer,” he says. “There was a general feeling, which I shared, that the design needed more work, and I was asked to fix it up while retaining as much as possible of what had been been done so far — starting over yet again would have been prohibitively expensive. So I went in with my editing scissors, snip snip snip, and held a lot of brainstorming meetings with the team to try to iron out the kinks.” But Grossman too found something better to do as quickly as possible, whereupon the game lay neglected for the better part of a year while much of Moriarty’s old team went to work on Tim Schafer’s Full Throttle: “a project that the company loved,” says Bill Tiller, drawing an implicit comparison with this other, unloved one.

In late 1994, The Dig was resurrected for the last time, being passed to Sean Clark, a long-serving LucasArts programmer who had moved up to become the producer and co-designer of Sam and Max Hit the Road, and who now saw becoming the man who finally shepherded this infamously vexed project to completion as a good way to continue his ascent. “My plan when I came in on the final incarnation was to take a game that was in production and finish it,” he says. “I didn’t get a lot of pressure or specific objectives from management. I think they were mainly interested in getting the project done so they could have a product plan that didn’t have The Dig listed on it.” Clark has admitted that, when he realized what a sorry state the game was actually in, he went to his bosses and recommended that they simply cancel it once and for all. “I got a lot of resistance, which surprised me,” he says. “It was hard to resist the potential [of having] a game out there with a name like Spielberg’s on it.” In a way, George Lucas was a bigger problem than Spielberg in this context: no one wanted to go to the boss of bosses at LucasArts and tell him they had just cancelled his close friend’s game.

Sean Clark with a hot slice. Pizza was a way of life at LucasArts, as at most games studios. Asked about the negative aspects of his job, one poor tester said that he was “getting really, really tired of pizza. I just can’t look at pizza anymore.”

So, Clark rolled up his sleeves and got to work instead. His first major decision was to ditch the half-finished StoryDroid engine and move the project back to SCUMM. He stuck to Brian Moriarty’s basic plot and characters, but excised without a trace of hesitation or regret anything that was too difficult to implement in SCUMM or too philosophically esoteric. His goal was not to create Art, not to stretch the boundaries of what adventure games could be, but just to get ‘er done. Bill Tiller and many others from the old team returned to the project with the same frame of reference. By now, LucasArts had moved offices yet again, to a chic new space where the programmers and artists could mingle: “Feedback was quick and all-encompassing,” says Tiller. If there still wasn’t a lot of love for the game in the air, there was at least a measure of esprit de corps. LucasArts even sprang for a couple more (reasonably) big names to add to The Dig’s star-studded marque, hiring the science-fiction author Orson Scott Card, author of the much-admired Ender’s Game among other novels, to write the dialogue, and Robert Patrick, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s principal antagonist from Terminator 2, to head up the cast of voice actors. Remarkably in light of how long the project had gone on and how far it had strayed from his original vision, Steven Spielberg took several more meetings with the team. “He actually called me at home one evening as he was playing through a release candidate,” says Sean Clark. “He was all excited and having fun, but was frustrated because he had gotten stuck on a puzzle and needed a hint.”

Clark’s practicality and pragmatism won the day where the more rarefied visions of Falstein and Moriarty had failed: The Dig finally shipped just in time for the Christmas of 1995. LucasArts gave it the full-court press in terms of promotion, going so far as to call it their “highest-profile product yet.” They arranged for a licensed strategy guide, a novelization by the king of tie-in novelists Alan Dean Foster, an “audio drama” of his book, and even a CD version of Michael Land’s haunting soundtrack to be available within weeks of the game itself. And of course they hyped the Spielberg connection for all it was worth, despite the fact that the finished game betrayed only the slightest similarity to the proposal he had pitched six years before.

Composer Michael Land plays a timpani for The Dig soundtrack. One can make a strong argument that his intensely atmospheric, almost avant-garde score is the best thing about the finished game. Much of it is built from heavily processed, sometimes even backwards-playing samples of Beethoven and Wagner. Sean Clark has described, accurately, how it sounds “strange and yet slightly familiar.”

Link to audio:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/06-A-River-Canyon.mp3

But the reaction on the street proved somewhat less effusive than LucasArts might have wished. Reviews were surprisingly lukewarm, and gamers were less excited by the involvement of Steven Spielberg than the marketers had so confidently predicted. Bill Tiller feels that the Spielberg connection may have been more of a hindrance than a help in the end: “Spielberg’s name was a tough thing to have attached to this project because people have expectations associated with him. The general public thought this was going to be a live-action [and/or] 3D interactive movie, not an adventure game.” The game wasn’t a commercial disaster, but sold at less than a third the pace of Full Throttle, its immediate predecessor among LucasArts adventures. Within a few months, the marketers had moved on from their “highest-profile product yet” to redouble their focus on the Star Wars games that were accounting for more and more of LucasArts’s profits.

One can certainly chalk up some of the nonplussed reaction to The Dig to its rather comprehensive failure to match the public’s expectations of a LucasArts adventure game. In a catalog that consisted almost exclusively of cartoon comedies, it was a serious, even gloomy game. In a catalog of anarchically social, dialog-driven adventures that were seen by many gamers as the necessary antithesis to the sterile, solitary Myst-style adventure games that were now coming out by the handful, it forced you to spend most of its length all alone, solving mechanical puzzles that struck many as painfully reminiscent of Myst. Additionally, The Dig’s graphics, although well-composed and well-drawn, reflected the extended saga of its creation; they ran in low-resolution VGA at a time when virtually the whole industry had moved to higher-resolution Super VGA, and they reflected as well the limitations of the paint programs and 3D-rendering software that had been used to create them, in many cases literally years before the game shipped. In the technology-obsessed gaming milieu of the mid-1990s, when flash meant a heck of a lot, such things could be ruinous to a new release’s prospects.

But today, we can presumably look past such concerns to the fundamentals of the game that lives underneath its surface technology. Unfortunately, The Dig proves far from a satisfying experience even on these terms.

An adventure game needs to be, if nothing else, reasonably good company, but The Dig fails this test. In an effort to create “dramatic” characters, it falls into the trap of merely making its leads unlikable. All of them are walking, talking clichés: the unflappable Chuck Yeager-type who’s in charge, the female overachiever with a chip on her shoulder who bickers with his every order, the arrogant German scientist who transforms into the villain of the piece. Orson Scott Card’s dialog is shockingly clunky, full of tired retreads of action-movie one-liners; one would never imagine that it comes from the pen of an award-winning novelist if it didn’t say so in the credits. And, even more unusually for LucasArts, the voice acting is little more inspired. All of which is to say that it comes as something of a relief when everyone else just goes away and leaves Boston Low alone to solve puzzles, although even then you still have to tolerate Robert Patrick’s portrayal of the stoic mission commander; he approaches an unknown alien civilization on the other side of the galaxy with all the enthusiasm of a gourmand with a full belly reading aloud from a McDonald’s menu.

Alas, one soon discovers that the puzzle design isn’t any better than the writing or acting. While the puzzles may have some of the flavor of Myst, they evince none of that game’s rigorous commitment to internal logic and environmental coherence. In contrast to the free exploration offered by Myst, The Dig turns out to be a quite rigidly linear game, with only a single path through its puzzles. Most of these require you just to poke at things rather than to truly enter into the logic of the world, meaning you frequently find yourself “solving” them without knowing how or why.

But this will definitely not happen in at least two grievous cases. At one point, you’re expected to piece together an alien skeleton from stray bones when you have no idea what said alien is even supposed to look like. And another puzzle, involving a cryptic alien control panel, is even more impossible to figure out absent hours of mind-numbing trial and error. “I had no clue that was such a hard puzzle,” says Bill Tiller. “We all thought it was simple. Boy, were we wrong.” And so we learn the ugly truth: despite the six years it spent in development, nobody ever tried to play The Dig cold before it was sent out the door. It was the second LucasArts game in a row of which this was true, indicative of a worrisome decline in quality control from a studio that had made a name for themselves by emphasizing good design.

At the end of The Dig, the resolution of the alien mystery is as banal as it is nonsensical, a 2001: A Space Odyssey with a lobotomy. It most definitely isn’t “an in-depth story in which the exploration of human emotion plays as important a role as the exploration of a game world,” as LucasArts breathlessly promised.

So, The Dig still manages to come across today as simultaneously overstuffed and threadbare. It broaches a lot of Big Ideas (a legacy of Falstein and Moriarty’s expansive visions), but few of them really go anywhere (a legacy of Grossman and Clark’s pragmatic trimming). It winds up just another extended exercise in object manipulation, but it doesn’t do even this particularly well. Although its audiovisuals can create an evocative atmosphere at times, even they come across too often as disjointed, being a hodgepodge of too many different technologies and aesthetics. Long experience has taught many of us to beware of creative expressions of any stripe that take too long to make and pass through too many hands in the process. The Dig only proves this rule: it’s no better than its tortured creation story makes you think it will be. Its neutered final version is put together competently, but not always well, and never with inspiration. And so it winds up being the one thing a game should never be: it’s just kind of… well, boring.

As regular readers of this site are doubtless well aware, I’m a big fan of LucasArts’s earlier adventures of the 1990s. The one complaint I’ve tended to ding them with is a certain failure of ambition — specifically, a failure to leave their designers’ wheelhouse of cartoon comedy. And yet The Dig, LucasArts’s one concerted attempt to break that mold, ironically winds up conveying the opposite message: that sometimes it’s best just to continue to do what you do best. The last of their charmingly pixelated “classic-look” adventure games, The Dig is sadly among the least satisfying of the lot, with a development history far more interesting than either its gameplay or its fiction. A number of people looked at it with stars in their eyes over the six years it remained on LucasArts’s list of ongoing projects, but it proved a stubbornly ill-starred proposition for all of them in the end.

(Sources: the book The Dig: Official Player’s Guide by Jo Ashburn; Computer Gaming World of March 1994, September 1994, September 1995, October 1995, December 1995, and February 1996; Starlog of October 1985; LucasArts’s customer newsletter The Adventurer of Spring 1993, Winter 1994, Summer 1994, Summer 1995, and Winter 1995. Online sources include Noah Falstein’s 2017 interview on Celebrity Interview, Falstein’s presentation on his history with Lucasfilm Games for Øredev 2017, the “secret history” of The Dig at International House of Mojo, the same site’s now-defunct “Dig Museum,” ATMachine’s now-defunct pages on the game, Brian Moriarty’s 2006 interview for Adventure Classic Gaming, and Moriarty’s Loom postmortem at the 2015 Game Developers Conference. Finally, thank you to Jason Scott for sharing his full Get Lamp interview archives with me years ago.

The Dig is available for digital purchase on GOG.com.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

LucasArts was known as Lucasfilm Games until the summer of 1992. To avoid confusion, I use the name “LucasArts” throughout this article.

Comments
83 Responses

- Benjamin M Vigeant

July 23, 2021 at 4:50 pm

Typo: Ender’s Game (not Endor’s Game)

Great piece.

I will say though, as a person that read a lot of Orson Scott Card’s novels as a teen, I wouldn’t consider him someone that was particularly gifted with natural dialogue. I’d want him more as a Big Ideas guy, and it seems like this already had enough of them.

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2021 at 4:52 pm

Thanks!

- Lt. Nitpicker

July 23, 2021 at 4:51 pm

> Endor’s Game

This typo is kinda funny since you were talking about LucasArts,but the correct spelling is Ender’s Game.

- Lt. Nitpicker

July 23, 2021 at 4:59 pm

And another one:

> but wisely abandoned the clichéd reveal of Micky Mouse.

(You correctly spelled Mickey Mouse a couple sentences back from this quote, incidentally)

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2021 at 5:04 pm

Thanks!

- Nate

July 23, 2021 at 4:58 pm

I’m not sure the photo of the design session was from 1989. It appears that some people have silver laptops and another has a flip phone? Maybe this was early 2000’s?

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2021 at 5:04 pm

Ouch. Thanks!

- Jason Dyer

July 23, 2021 at 5:24 pm

Agreed the soundtrack is the best thing on the game.

I didn’t find the two puzzles you cite overly distressing (I heard the bones puzzles was infamous after I had solved it, but surely it doesn’t sink to the demolition derby puzzle level) although the control panel was probably too early and could have used an extra clue or two.

I wasn’t necessarily disappointed by the initial clichés, but figured the characters would develop as time went on. They did not. All the character interaction was awkward and tentative, like the developers really just wanted object-fiddling but had to deal with these pesky people.

- CdrJameson

July 24, 2021 at 9:09 pm

I played it recently with no idea of the game’s history or development woes and I really quite liked it. It had a refreshingly serious and intriguing setup, the puzzles were diverse and largely fitted in with the world and exploring a mysterious alien planet was always going to be fun.

The disappointments for me were the rather unsympathetic and wooden lead character (although from other accounts this might be an accurate portrayal of a senior astronaut), one confusing not-even-puzzle where a button has to be held, not just pressed, and inevitably the ending which by resolving things obviously destroys a lot of the mystery.

The bones puzzle is pretty straightforward if you spot the MASSIVE CLUE nearby.
The alien control panel is just a fun little challenge if you happen to be a computer programmer, but I accept it might take a while if you aren’t.

All in all I found it one of the more enjoyable Lucasarts adventures because it was so different. I mean, not a patch on Day of The Tentacle, but still excellent in its own way.

Infocom had of course tackled similar ground with Rama-with-the-numbers-filed-off Starcross some time earlier.

- Jake Wildstrom

July 23, 2021 at 5:46 pm

[Falstein] was pulled off the project very early in 1991, assigned instead to help Hal Barwood with Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. And when this, his second Indiana Jones game, was finished, he was laid off despite a long and largely exemplary track record.

Is there any good explanation for whythis happened? That seems to be a rather extraordinary turn of events to happen to the successful designer on a flagship product unless there was some sort of falling-out with management.

a Klein bottle your characters would pass through with strange metaphysical and audiovisual effects

Is it unfair to accuse Moriarty of recycling a (cleverly used) device from Trinity here?

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2021 at 6:09 pm

Falstein himself has avoided directly explaining the circumstances of his departure, and I don’t feel it’s really my place to speculate any deeper. I generally hesitate to dig too hard after such things; getting demoted or fired is unpleasant enough without the details being published on the Internet.

And yeah, Moriarty obviously did have a fascination with Klein bottles. ;)

- Arthur

July 23, 2021 at 6:45 pm

I’ve written about my thoughts on the Dig elsewhere (https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/2020/09/08/gogathon-curses-grimly-market-forces-throttled-a-genre-but-it-escaped-dig-it/) but they’re largely in line with yours.

It feels like the story suffers from a bunch of elements which no longer quite make sense in the version we eventually got to play, because they’re holdovers from old versions. Ones I remember vividly are as follows:

– Boston jumps to the conclusion of using some of the McGuffin crystals to revive one of the crew members. When I played the game this felt like a bit of a wild leap in the dark, and didn’t see why Boston would have any reason to expect this would work; he’s working off images shown in a particular museum, but these are monochromatic, unclear images, in which it is far from self-evident that the material used for revival is the same as that Boston uses to save his crewmate. Apparently in an earlier iteration these images were meant to be realistic full-colour holograms – so it’d be much more unambiguous what substance was being used.

– More fundamentally, why are half the crew even here? Earth is in mortal peril, the collapse of civilisation is imminent, this is NASA’s one and only chance to steer the asteroid off-course. Why send up an archaeologist and a linguist when they could send up people with more directly relevant expertise, so as to provide redundancy of skillset just in case? It’s absurd. Even though there’s some throwaway lines about NASA suspecting something might be up with the asteroid to semi-justify it, it still feels like an utterly pointless gamble with the lives of everyone on the planet, including those responsible for signing off on the plan. Just send the demolition specialists up to do the job, then send the scientific party along as a follow-up mission.

– Why does the cranky German keep insisting that he should be in charge as an archaeologist? This is not and has never been a specifically archaeological mission. This would make way more sense if the expedition was an archaeological trip from the start and was briefed as such. Sure, sure, he’s meant to be the unreasonable one who goes off the rails, but this doesn’t make him look like a villain or a troubled genius, it makes him seem like a whiny goof.

– Why do so many puzzles involve the shovel? Well, if they didn’t the name would make absolutely no sense, because this mission isn’t an archaeological dig!

- Fuck David Cage

July 23, 2021 at 9:02 pm

My guess is that Lucasarts was inspired by the Rama series, which was made into an excellent adventure game by Sierra. Rama involved Earth being threatened by a large object which appeared to be an asteroid, but when it came closer turned out to be a spaceship. Sending archaeologists and linguists was a logical move in that series since the planners knew they were dealing with the first signs of aliens.

- Arthur

July 23, 2021 at 11:28 pm

See, that makes sense! But in The Dig it literally comes across like they just thought it might be an alien ship as a remote possibility, and tossed in those personnel on a just-in-case basis.

It’d be much better to just drop the “Earth in danger” angle – something which is never actually all that important to the game, because you resolve it with the first puzzle – and say “hey, it’s an anomalous asteroid, NASA are sending an expedition to check it out, the archaeologist and linguist are there just in case”. It would better support the rest of the plot and avoid the need for complications about secret NASA in-case-of-aliens-follow-instructions protocols.

Then again, it might be even more Rama-ish – in the original novel as I recall NASA knows it’s an anomalous object from the start – and they might have been hesitant about potentially treading on toes, especially since Sierra probably had the licence by this point (the game developed by Dynamix came out in 1996 after all). On the other hand, the actual concept we get is still a hell of a lot like Rama – it just makes less sense. Boggles the mind.

- Richard

July 24, 2021 at 7:08 am

The “meteor about to hit earth” thing never made any sense to me – the press conference shown in the intro cutscene is very relaxed and laid back, as if it’s just going to be a routine shuttle mission. And when they get to the meteor it’s *really* close to Earth but seems to be just gently orbiting it? At that distance it would have been just seconds from impact if it really were on a collision course.

A very simple fix would have been to just say that there’s a strange meteor that has entered the Earth’s orbit and a team is going to investigate. That would cleanly justify sending a reporter and an archeologist, and would fix all the illogicalities in the premise.

- Arthur

July 23, 2021 at 7:05 pm

Oh, one more thought. It’s interesting that this story involves LucasArts management refusing to cancel a point-and-click adventure project which they perhaps should have, rather than cancelling a project where the developers felt that it was in good shape and was close to completion (as happened with Sam and Max: Freelance Police).

Could the commercial flop of The Dig have inadvertently led to LucasArts management being more trigger-happy about cancelling adventure games, because they had the chance to walk away from The Dig and didn’t take it and ended up regretting it?

- Andrew Plotkin

July 23, 2021 at 7:07 pm

> nearly 80 years since the McKillip Drive made faster-than-light travel a possibility…

Has anyone ever dug into this? Patricia McKillip isn’t as well-known a writer as Orson Scott Card, but any SF/F fan reading an intro in 1991 would recognize her name. (Her one pure-SF novel, _Fool’s Run_, was published in 1987.) Was this a deliberate homage?

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2021 at 10:02 pm

I’m not familiar with her at all, but I would certainly guess it to be a deliberate homage given your description. It seems an odd name to make up out of the blue.

- Fuck

July 23, 2021 at 8:45 pm

This game was disappointing and mediocre, but an ideal, near perfect sci fi game came out in 1995: Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger is my favorite R.P.G. and it has a great story, great characters, a great sense of mystery and adventure as you explore a variety of settings in different time periods. Time travel is used perfectly: It really makes you feel accomplished as you watch time change based on your actions, the effects on both story and gameplay are quite significant and comparing the different time periods gives you great insights into the world and the characters.

Chrono Trigger looks cartoonish, but it actually explores darker themes like the cruelty of evolution and the endless finality of death. Enemies seem like monsters at first, but as you explore their history you realize that they are the victims of the capricious hand of evolution. You explore cities made by the enemies, can forgive a villain and add him to your party, and even make them the dominant species in an alternate ending.

Chrono Trigger had about 13 endings, all based on the time period in which you kill the final boss; and these endings are quite satisfying. They range from serious to satisfying to surreal and they give the game endless replay value. They also encourage carefully leveling the party, as some of the endings require beating the game early, with poor characters.

- Owen C.

July 24, 2021 at 5:33 am

Chrono Trigger is a great and well known game (they even played its music on the Olympics opening ceremony yesterday after all) but this site normally limits its scope to only writing about PC games. There is plenty of stuff written about it elsewhere on the Internet already.

On another note, I can confirm that The Dig was also pretty boring and disappointing for someone like me who came into it who liked Myst style adventure games, never really got into LucasArts or Sierra but bought into the marketing glitz and Spielberg hype surrounding the game. Mostly, like was said in the article it felt dated and the puzzles didn’t seem to have much obvious logic behind them.

- No

July 23, 2021 at 8:57 pm

> the earthquake collapsed San Francisco’s Nimitz Freeway

*Oakland’s

Wrong side of the bay :)

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2021 at 9:59 pm

:) Thanks!

- Eric Nyman

July 23, 2021 at 8:58 pm

I think the lack of graphics fidelity hurt their attempt to have Myst-style puzzles. You really need to be able to show the machines and devices in detail to pull off that type of a game (Zork III tried one such puzzle in text form, and while they did their best, it’s unwieldy).

It’s a shame that Moriarty never got to finish this game. I think his version would have been much better than the ultimate end product. There were a lot of good ideas here, but as others said, it just feels frustratingly unfinished and rushed.

It’s also too bad he hasn’t gotten back into producing or writing games. Nowadays he would find it much easier to independently produce games without having to be restricted by budgets and other constraints imposed by a major studio, and he’d also be freed of many of the technical and file size constraints that Infocom faced as well (imagine a version of A Mind Forever Voyaging or Trinity without such impositions with more room to really flesh things out).

Instead of space tourism or whatnot, I wish a few rich people would invest seed money for an interactive fiction/adventure game company (or at least donate to existing projects). There’s a lot of talented, hard working people in the field who deserve to be able to “given permission” as Moriarty put it to be able to show what they could really do if they could throw themselves into the work full time.

- fform

July 25, 2021 at 2:58 am

On the one hand, I agree that it’s a shame that Moriarty hasn’t gotten back into making games in the present environment given the new tools for creation and distribution we have available, and the massive popularity of independent gaming at present.

On the other hand, given the description of his work and creative style on this particular project, perhaps the file size limitations were a blessing in disguise. So many artists, when given an infinite canvas, show that they need restrictions in order to pare down their vision to the core elements. Sometimes the infinite canvas works, for example with the mind-boggling complexity of Dwarf Fortress (arguably works, I guess), but most artists need editing and in most cases the artist feels that they’re the only ones capable of doing the editing. They often don’t bother, and their work suffers badly for it.

- LasseS

July 25, 2021 at 6:22 am

Agreed, the Dig feels like a neutered game that’s been rushed out. It is a bland and even dull experience and I think this is largely due to so much of it being cut and changed just to get it out of the door ASAP.
Would love to see what Brian Moriarty’s version would have been had it been finished, he did seem to have some vision and passion for the game which the final game sadly seems to lack.

I wish Brian Moriarty would do what Bob Bates did with Thaumistry and just do another fully text based game solo…
That game clearly wasn’t some big money maker though, but personally I really enjoyed it.

- Michael

July 23, 2021 at 9:32 pm

“after many torturous twists and turns”
=tortuous

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2021 at 10:00 pm

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I never knew that “torturous” and “tortuous” are separate words. Thanks!

- Arthur

July 26, 2021 at 5:06 pm

To be fair I think “torturous turns” actually makes more sense than “tortuous turns”. The former implies that these turns are painful and traumatic, which is apt for this story and the growing pains the project went through. The latter just means “turny turns”; it’s a redundancy.

- Arthur

July 26, 2021 at 5:06 pm

(I mean, I know “tortuous turns” is the more usual turn of phrase… I just don’t think it’s a very good phrase! “Torturous turns” is a) a legitimate phrasing and b) better.)

- Jimmy Maher

July 27, 2021 at 5:10 am

I like it better too, and I’m going to take this as a form of validation. ;) Thanks!

- Jeff C.

July 23, 2021 at 10:46 pm

“…all the enthusiasm of a gourmand with a full belly reading aloud from a McDonald’s menu.”

That’s hilarious…I’m not sure how I’ll do it, but I somehow HAVE to work that phrase into a conversation.

- Diego

July 24, 2021 at 1:25 am

Thanks for this insightful article. I, for one, really enjoyed playing The Dig and most of the criticism about the final game makes little sense to me.

The graphics are so beautifully done in all its pixelated glory, suggestive and mysterious, the animations are great and the use of colours is truly excellent (all those warm orange shades with the cold blues for contrast!).

The story doesn’t go deep trying to explain everything carefully and I don’t think it needs to. Feels more mature than other Lucas games (which of course I also enjoyed immensely) and have a serious dramatic atmosphere. I think the story and the characters do evolve in fascinating ways for a video game of its time.

The only criticism I can agree on is in the difficulty of some of its puzzles, which are a bit cryptic.

Just adding my two cents and standing up for it, as for me it will always be the last great point and click adventure game of a fading era.

It was a pleasure reading about its convoluted creation process. Thanks again!

- dusoft

July 24, 2021 at 7:20 pm

Indeed, I played it as a teenager and was just fascinated both by graphics, the life crystals idea and the gloomy atmosphere. I loved the cut scenes where you traveled in globes etc.

I don’t remember if the puzzles were really such pain in the ass.

- Ninja DOdo

August 21, 2021 at 11:57 am

Some of the criticisms in this article really aren’t fair to the puzzles. The alien control panel wasn’t actually that hard to figure out with a little experimentation and saying the skeleton reconstruction has no hints is completely untrue as there is a very obvious hint in the form of the living alien turtle creature right next to it at the water edge, which shows up repeatedly, so you really can’t miss it.

An otherwise interesting retrospective somewhat marred by the highly subjective (and unwarranted) negative tone of the conclusion.

- Ninja Dodo

August 21, 2021 at 9:16 pm

I will say there are some puzzles that are genuinely unfair or lacking in hints, like the one where you have to press and HOLD a button instead of simply pressing it (which you’re never taught to do and this input is used nowhere else in the game), and there are moments where there is a lack of direction and few hints on what you should even be focusing on, which can lead to aimless wandering and trying random things. Overall, while I did consult hints once or twice, it’s quite approachable as point & click adventures go.

There are occasional weird leaps of logic in the writing where the characters seem to understand things before the player does for no apparent reason, or make some pretty wild assumptions. Nevertheless, it is an intriguing and highly atmospheric game… and I say this having just recently played it for the first time, so that’s not nostalgia talking.

- Adam M

July 31, 2021 at 2:11 am

I for one entirely agree with you. I posted my own comment further down. Often, the mood or style of a game is enough for me. I don’t need or expect technical or artistic perfection in a game, and I couldn’t care less whether a game had a tortured development path. I won’t wince at hard or obscure puzzles either, having been trained on Sierra games. Incidentally, on the subject of the graphics, the 1993 artwork in a 1995 game is less important now, particularly given the new found popularity of pixel art adventure games with a retro feel. Anyway, like with movies, I don’t care what other people think. The bar I set is whether I enjoy something or not. I enjoyed playing The Dig, and I thank all those involved in making it.

- Kai

July 31, 2021 at 9:33 am

Yep, I loved every bit of it when I played it back then. From the iridescent game box to the cinematic intro and cut-scenes, the background music, the Sci-Fi theme, the art style, the voice overs … and the list goes on.

I’m not sure whether I would regard it with the same favour if I played it for the first time today, but for 1995 I think it was as good as one could possibly hope for.

I’m not quite certain if I was entirely happy with the puzzles or the ending, but if I had any issues than those must have been that there weren’t enough puzzles and that the ending came too soon.

- The Eidolon

July 24, 2021 at 3:11 am

Great timing on this article. Alan Dean Foster’s autobiography just came out this week, and chapter 19 is about–The Dig.

- Aula

July 24, 2021 at 5:19 am

“a less enviable role than then he had envisioned”

I don’t know if there’s any situation where “than then” would be correct, but this isn’t one of them.

- Jimmy Maher

July 24, 2021 at 7:33 am

Thanks!

- njarboe

July 24, 2021 at 6:30 am

Just a small correction. The Nimitz freeway is in Oakland not San Francisco.

- Kaj Sotala

July 24, 2021 at 8:35 am

Oh man, I really hoped that you’d have kinder words for what’s one of my all-time favorite adventure games. I do agree with most of your criticisms – the characters aren’t very deep, and there were indeed a couple of terrible puzzles… but to me, the main appeal of the game was always the delight of getting to explore a beautiful, haunting alien world.

I always felt that from the moment during the opening cutscene when Commander Low says “we have only one chance to get it right” to when the end credits start rolling, there’s a constant sense of majesty from the characters being somewhere that’s much vaster and older than they are. A sense that the game quite skillfully maintains, with e.g. all the seemingly “filler” screens that just involve the character walking from one end of it to the other, giving the player the opportunity to just pause for a moment as their eyes take in the sights and sounds. (And the music is indeed gorgeous.)

- Kaj Sotala

July 24, 2021 at 8:37 am

(Er, as *they take in the sights and sounds. Their eyes probably don’t take in sounds, unless they have synesthesia.)

- Jonathan Badger

July 24, 2021 at 10:58 am

“They were digging at Disneyland, right here on Planet Earth! The problem here was that we had seen all of this before, most notably at the end of Planet of the Apes”

I don’t think that’s the same trope at all, though. The shock at the end of the Planet of the Apes wasn’t that it was just Earth, it was the horror that the Earth the astronauts knew had been destroyed (“God damn it, you blew it to hell!”). The idea of future archeologists digging up ruins of our civilization (and often humorously misinterpreting things, like assuming Mickey Mouse was our god), is a different thing, although it has been also been done before (Macaulay’s “Motel of the Mysteries” and the Pepsi ad where the Pepsi-drinking future archeologist has no idea what Coca-Cola was, etc.)

- Petter Sjölund

July 24, 2021 at 1:07 pm

While The Dig may not have lived up to its hype, it is still head and shoulders above pretty much all contemporary non-LucasArts adventure games. The most obvious comparison is Dynamix’ RAMA, which has all the higher-resolution graphics and full-motion video (lots of it!) that The Dig missed out on, but turned out super boring. Playing them today, The Dig is clearly the better game by every measure.

Playing the Dig in 1995, I loved the more serious tone and Myst-like puzzles, and had a great time until the happy ending, which completely ruined it for me.

- Sebastian Gerstl

July 24, 2021 at 2:52 pm

In remember back in the day that German gaming magazines (traditionally very good of adventure games in general) were actually for the most part pretty smitten with the game when it came out; at least one of them felt its puzzles in particular were more of a “return to form” for Lucas Arts when compared to the”more lackluster and simplistic” Full Throttle (their words not mine).

But interestingly the shine went off pretty quickly… I remember reading about a comparison of adventure games some time in early 1996, were the editor complained about the lack of depth in more recent adventure games. As an example he pulled out a comparison of locations and inventories: where “Fate of Atlantis” could provide more than a dozen individual distinct locations, many with dozens of screens themselves, and about a hundred different inventory items (he actually provided a concise number, but unfortunate I can’t find the article in question or I would provide a link), the dig could only provide for a very limited amount of screens on two locations, many of which looking rather similar, and about 40 inventory items, 12 of which simply being various rods that serve as keys. That may be a bit nitpicky in comparison, but it kind of shows how drastically limited and reduced in scope “The Dig” felt like when compared to earlier LA games. (Though the location comparison isn’t really fair IMO – Day of the Tentacle has a very limited amount of screens, the same locations repeated over three time zones – but on the other hand, even in that limited space, there was just so much you could DO there. The Dig, on the other hand, feels empty and lifeless – which might provide a decent atmosphere, but didn’t really oder much in terms of fun or entertainment.

If you want I can try locating the article in question – I’m pretty sure a scan must exist online somewhere. It must’ve been either PC Player or Power Play Magazine I believe, because those were the ones I read regularly at the time…

- Jimmy Maher

July 25, 2021 at 7:36 am

I appreciate the sentiment of the article you describe, but I’m not sure there’s much value to trying to quantify things in such a way. The Dig’s issues don’t involve complexity or a lack thereof, but a thoroughgoing incoherence in its writing, aesthetics, and, yes, puzzle structure, capped off by a presumption of profundity which it never earns. As you note, more rooms don’t automatically make a better game, nor even a bigger — i.e., more time-consuming — one. The absurd end point of this kind of argument is the advertisements that Level 9 published for their text adventure Snowball in 1983: “over 7000 locations!” What they neglected to mention was that 6900 of them were empty red herrings…

Actually, none of the classic LucasArts adventures strike me as all that *big*. And this is generally to their benefit rather than detriment. Less stuff means more opportunity to polish the stuff you do have.

- Sebastian Gerstl

July 25, 2021 at 8:09 am

Yeah … I guess the trick is not how expansive your game is, but what you do with the resources available. I also get how a game centered around a crew flung deep into space, far from home, might benefit from a forlorn and more or less “lifeless” atmosphere. But the problem is that The Dig doesn’t give you all that much to do in the environs, not much to observe, so you walk through empty rooms, collect keys and solve puzzles to open new passageways. Which may also be down to the fact that the game was cut down immensely to finally get it done already, but it just seems so uninspired as a result… Not to mention a bit boring. It still has that spark of LucasArts adventure magic, but in the end I would agree that it’s over of their lesser offerings

- Martin

July 24, 2021 at 7:08 pm

So a genetL question. Had there ever been a game that had this sort of birth that ended up being a “good” game? You can define “good” in any way you choose.

- Martin

July 24, 2021 at 7:09 pm

The word in the first sentence was supposed to be “general”.

- Sebastian Gerstl

July 24, 2021 at 9:09 pm

Resident Evil 4 had three or four incarnations that were discarded and started anew over a span of six years before eventually being released. And many consider that a classic, reinvigorating the Survival Horror and introducing many gameplay mechanics now considered standard into third-person perspective games. So Yeah… It may be rare, but it can be done.

- Rowan Lipkovits

July 25, 2021 at 7:34 am

It certainly seemed to suffer a similar origin and fate to Infocom’s Bureaucracy!

- Jimmy Maher

July 25, 2021 at 7:50 am

Infocom’s version of The Dig was Bureaucracy, right down to the detail of being almost impossible to cancel thanks to the involvement of a high-profile figure who provided the initial idea and then not much else that was all that useful — Douglas Adams in this case. I think it turned out pretty well, although that sentiment is by no means universal.

Starflight is another early example of development hell, a game that became a joke at Electronic Arts because of the way it kept turning up like a bad penny at every planning meeting for the first four years of the company’s existence. It’s now universally acknowledged as a classic.

So, yeah, there are exceptions. But the pattern of The Dig is more the norm.

- CdrJameson

July 26, 2021 at 4:57 pm

Half-Life was largely scrapped and rewritten from scratch part way through development.

That is generally considered to have turned out OK.

- Gnoman

July 26, 2021 at 9:42 pm

I think the big thing here is that most of the counter examples were ones where the company had the sense to just throw it all into the trash, maybe pulling a few bits out for another project or two.

Games like this one almost always get most of their problems by keeping stuff that no longer fits. The premier example from the article is The Dig’s severely dated graphics. Another well-known example is Duke Nukem Forever, which had core elements (particularly the heavy sexualization that was massively transgressive when the previous game was released in 96) that were nearly 20 years old at the time of release and were no longer culturally relevant.

Sometimes the solution to a failing project is to shoot the engineer. Sometimes, however, you just have to put the dog down.

- Josh Martin

July 31, 2021 at 5:51 pm

The fourth Doom game started development at least as far back as 2008, was completely rebooted in 2011, survived the departure of much of the original staff in 2013, and came out in 2016 to broad acclaim despite the numerous red flags (including Bethesda’s refusal to send out review copies).

- Lhexa

October 26, 2021 at 3:26 am

Demon’s Souls is a good example. Miyazaki is a vanishingly rare creator talented both as a designer and a manager. He helped turned a collection of disparate assets into the prototype of a new genre.

- PRI

July 24, 2021 at 11:17 pm

You seem to enjoy humorous games a lot more than dramatic ones. I could’ve just forgotten, but I can’t recall an article where you speak highly of a serious, non-comedic adventure game.

- Eriorg

July 25, 2021 at 12:52 pm

There was at least Trinity: https://www.filfre.net/2015/01/trinity/

- Derek

July 26, 2021 at 5:15 am

I think Maher’s attitude — which he’s made clear enough times that I feel fairly safe in summarizing it for him — is more complex than that. His review of The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes (a largely serious game, by the sound of it, and one he regards highly), says “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.” Note also his reviews of Gabriel Knight and Police Quest: Open Season, which criticize those games’ designs while crediting Sierra for aspiring to move beyond comedy. The problem is that it’s harder to make an adventure game that is both serious and playable. But Maher has written several positive reviews of mostly serious games, ranging from Zork III to Myst, in addition to his obvious admiration for Trinity.

- Michael Davis

July 26, 2021 at 8:09 pm

Plus, he *did* actually *make* one…

- PRI

July 26, 2021 at 8:29 pm

He did? What’s it called?

- Derek

July 27, 2021 at 12:34 am

The King of Shreds and Patches.

- Lisa H.

July 27, 2021 at 12:57 am

There’s a link in the sidebar on the right – http://maher.filfre.net/King

- Goatmeal

July 25, 2021 at 2:53 am

“Of late, he’d been drafting a plan for a game based on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Spielberg’s latest disappointing foray into television, but a lack of personal enthusiasm for the project had led to a frustrating lack of progress.”

I believe that The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was solely George Lucas’s pet project (“created by,” “story”/”based on a story by,” and “executive producer”) and that Spielberg had very little — if anything — to do with it. If he did contribute something to the series, he’s not credited on IMDB…

- Jimmy Maher

July 25, 2021 at 7:25 am

Fair enough. Thanks!

- Adam M

July 31, 2021 at 1:38 am

I remember playing the game through twice, and while it suffered from some obscure puzzles, I appreciated the overall aesthetic and vision of the game, although imperfectly realized. It was thought provoking at many points, and the art is actually quite pretty in my opinion. However, Michael Land’s brilliant score is the enduring legacy of this game. I have the original score and also the “bonus” soundtrack. Some of the best ambient music I have heard and it has often got me through long bouts of report and essay writing. I’ll always have a soft spot for The Dig and I’m glad they managed to get it made.

- Kai

July 31, 2021 at 5:08 pm

“his Trinity is a close as Infocom ever got to” – missing an ‘s’.

- Jimmy Maher

August 1, 2021 at 10:52 am

Thanks!

- Bernie Paul

August 6, 2021 at 4:19 pm

Well, this has been said many times here already, but I also liked the game. Still got my copy around, without the box but with the companion novel.

Speaking of the novel, the part of the package least discussed here, I read it before booting the game and found it quite enjoyable. It set up the scenario very well for me and I think Alan Dean Foster deserves credit for helping the game enormously.

I also enjoyed the art a lot, pixels and limited colors and all, even more than that of Myst and other SVGA-3D-photorealistic games.

For me the real problem was that the experience was a patchwork of plot, concept and puzzle design. Even though I’m a Sci-Fi fan (even more in the 90’s) and a LucasArts fan, back in the day Myst was the better adventure game for me because it was a more consistent “package”. I think LucasArts should have taken a look a what the Miller brothers were doing, not audiovisually but in terms of integrating the puzzles and multimedia content seamlessly into the fiction. Right from the opening video they hook into their linking-books premise, and then you find the library an a lot of books are burned, and so on. LucasArts tells you that an asteroid is going to hit earth, opens with some guys around a space shuttle (the least likely vehicle to use for this) and then presents a crew with an archeologist and a linguist because it’s called “The Dig”, right ? , so you get a little confused right from the start. The first thing Myst teaches you is that you solve the puzzle to get another book, to advance the story and eventually there is one that takes to a new “island” (i.e. new game map), and so on. Pretty straighforward.

- Wolfeye Mox

August 15, 2021 at 9:33 pm

Now I want to play a game that’s like Spielberg’s original vision of the Dig. You play as an Indiana Jones style “archaeologist”, in the far future, so far that Earth is a myth and humans live in Alpha Centauri or whatever, and it turns out in the end that the hostile alien planet you’ve been exploring was Earth the whole time. No apes, or Mickey Mouse, of course. lol But… instead of an adventure game I’d rather have a first person POV RPG, like Skyrim. Lol.

- Sticky Bones

September 13, 2021 at 7:31 pm

Hey!

So i just googled it for fun but could not find anyone selling it.
Wounder what a signed copy of the dig, wich im not selling yet anyways. By Robert Patrick could go for. Whats your guesses?

- Jimmy Maher

September 13, 2021 at 7:39 pm

At least $200,000, I’d say.

- dusoft

September 29, 2021 at 10:19 pm

Hello, you have some issues with your RSS feed as some older posts sometimes get republished again as the latest news. Currently it happened for The Dig and And Onward to 1995… (July 2021 posts)

- Jimmy Maher

September 30, 2021 at 2:33 pm

Is anyone else having problems with the RSS feed?

- Ross

September 30, 2021 at 3:25 pm

No, but I did have a bunch of phantom reposts from another wordpress site recently; possibly something in the last wordpress upgrade changed the uuids making old posts appear as new?

the RSS feed currently goes back to June, so it sounds like dusoft’s problem is some form of “everything in the current feed got marked as new”

- Lisa H.

September 30, 2021 at 3:37 pm

I get this “regurgitation” from various RSS feeds I subscribe to from time to time. I never considered whether it might be connected to WordPress backends specifically and haven’t tried collecting details when I see it happen. I haven’t got one from this blog lately that I recall. (Although an ongoing minor issue is that the comments feed seems to update faster than the post feed, so when there is a new post on a Friday, I will start seeing comments on it a few hours ahead of seeing the post itself.)

- Ross

September 30, 2021 at 8:52 pm

Since this site doesn’t use pubsubhubub, it’s up to your rss reader to decide when to fetch the RSS feed. I know Newsblur has a general sense that the main feed updates about once a week, so it only checks for new articles a few times a day, but the comment feed is checked about every 45 minutes.

- Lisa H.

September 30, 2021 at 9:26 pm

I have no idea what The Old Reader is actually doing, heh.

- Jimmy Maher

October 1, 2021 at 6:47 am

Okay, sounds like it’s the usual slight RSS flakiness rather than anything unique to this site. Thanks!

- Dan

October 29, 2021 at 4:46 pm

I read the novelization of The Dig in middle school, not realizing it was based on a game. As a not very discriminating 11-year-old, I found it entertaining, though I suspect I would be less engaged by it as an adult. I did play a bit of the game some years later, but I don’t recall getting very far in it. Maybe I should … dig it out and try it again.

Also, a typo: there’s one instance of Grosssman.

- Jimmy Maher

November 2, 2021 at 4:13 pm

Thanks!

- Whatty

February 20, 2022 at 3:17 pm

I’m glad they didn’t use Mickey Mouse. It was enough for me when he showed up in “History Lesson” by Arthur C. Clark. (Although not mentioned specifically.)

Making Sierra Pay
August 6, 2021

Scenes from the Phantasmagoria set, with Roberta Williams in pride of place at center.

At the conclusion of my previous article on Sierra Online’s corporate history, we saw how Ken and Roberta Williams moved their company’s headquarters from the tiny Northern California town of Oakhurst to the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, home to Microsoft among others, in September of 1993. They did so for a mixture of personal and professional reasons, as Ken has since acknowledged. Their children were getting older, for one thing, and the schools in Oakhurst were far from world-class. Additionally, life in general as the biggest fish of all in the fishbowl of a company town that Oakhurst had become wasn’t always pleasant; for example, Ken has claimed that his kids were at times bullied by “the children of former Sierra employees who had a grudge against Sierra.” Some other former employees suspect still another reason for the move to Bellevue, one that Ken neglects to mention: the fact that Washington State had no personal income tax, while California’s was the highest in the nation.

Still, there are no grounds to doubt that the public reason Ken gave for the move back in the day was indeed a major part of the calculation: the need to recruit the sort of seasoned business talent that could take Sierra to the next level. The company’s annual revenues had grown every single year since 1987, more often than not substantially, and this was of course wonderful. But less wonderful was the fact that profits had never been as high as that progression would imply; Sierra had a knack for spending almost every dime they earned. Of late in fact, the bottom line had dipped sharply into loss territory even as revenues continued their steady climb. Under pressure from his shareholders, Ken Williams realized that he had to find a way to make his company start to pay off. He believed that doing so must entail assembling the kind of top-flight management team which could only be found in a big city. He’d been seeking a rock star of a chief financial officer for a long time from Oakhurst to no avail. Ken Williams:

I had hired a San Francisco-based company, Heidrick & Struggles, to lead the search, and after months of getting nowhere I called my contact at Heidrick in frustration. “Why do you keep sending me B and C level candidates?” I asked. I was tired of having my time wasted interviewing candidates who were not at the level I was seeking. The answer came back without hesitation: “Ken, you’re aren’t getting it. No A player wants to move to Oakhurst.”

Nine months after the move to Bellevue, Ken finally found his rock star in the form of one Mike Brochu, a financial whizz who had spent the last nineteen years working for Burlington Resources. The man whom Ken still describes as “probably the best hire I ever made” was a garrulous Texan who “inspired confidence in everyone around him.” Not coincidentally, Sierra began to display a newly hard-nosed, bottom-line-focused attitude toward their business from virtually the moment of his arrival. As one of his first projects, Brochu led the negotiations that resulted in the sale of The ImagiNation Network, Sierra’s visionary but perpetually money-losing online-gaming service, to AT&T for $40 million in cash in November of 1994.

Meanwhile Sierra implemented a significant shift in their product-development strategy. For many years now, the heart of the company’s identity had been a set of long-running adventure-game series, most of which worked the word “quest” somewhere into their title. Dodgy from the standpoints of both writing and design though they sometimes were, they’d all displayed enough lovable qualities to worm their way into fans’ hearts. I’ve described in earlier articles how Sierra fandom could feel like belonging to a big extended family. These games, then, were the cousins whom you could always expect to see at the family reunion every couple of years, dressed perhaps a bit differently than last time around but always the same person at bottom. They were comfortingly predictable, and that was exactly how the fans liked them.

But for all that these ramshackle, puzzle-heavy adventure games were good at cementing the loyalty of the already converted, they were less equipped to unleash the sort of explosive growth Sierra was now after. It was a pivotal moment in the history of the personal computer, as Ken Williams and Mike Brochu well recognized. In 1994, more home computers would be sold than televisions, as consumers, tempted by the ease of use of Microsoft Windows, the magic of multimedia, and rumors of a thing called the World Wide Web, jumped onboard the computing bandwagon in staggering numbers. These people didn’t know a King’s Quest from an Ultima. Reaching them would require a different sort of game: fresher, hotter in the Marshall McLuhan sense, more in tune with what they were seeing on television and at the movies. It seemed like it was now or never for Sierra to capture their interest, even if it meant that some of the old fans were left feeling a bit abandoned.

So, Sierra’s new Bellevue management team took a hard look at their existing series in order to decide which were expendable and which were not. King’s Quest, the company’s longstanding flagship series, which already enjoyed a measure of name recognition outside the traditional computer-gaming ghetto, would have been an obvious keeper even if it hadn’t been the baby of Roberta Williams. Leisure Suit Larry also had proven appeal with non-traditional demographics, and was thus also a no-brainer to keep around. Space Quest was an edge case, but the managers decided to green-light one more game, if only to throw a bone to the old-school fans. But Police Quest would get revamped from a line of adventure games into a line of tactical 3D action games, while Quest for Glory would get the axe entirely. Going forward, the main focus would be on bigger-budget adventures employing filmed human actors, for which Sierra was now building their own sound stage down in Oakhurst at considerable cost. They would make fewer of this new type of adventure, but each of them would be a flashy, high-fidelity production, able to appeal to a mass market weaned on big-screen televisions and CD players. The idea was to make the release of each Sierra adventure from now on a real event.

Unfortunately, the transition from one product strategy to another came with a pitfall: it would take some time to bring it off, meaning that 1994 would be an unusually quiet year in terms of new games. And that reality, combined with the new management team’s more hard-nosed attitude, meant that some of the folks in Oakhurst must lose their jobs. Among them were Corey and Lori Cole, the husband-and-wife team behind Quest for Glory, who saw their roles cancelled along with the fifth game in their series, the most impressive of all the series in the Sierra lineup in terms of design ambition and innovation. Corey recalls a scene which made it all too clear to everyone present that Sierra was now being run as a business, not a family: “All employees in the meeting were handed envelopes; about half of them contained ‘pink slips’ notifying them that they no longer worked for Sierra. Those employees were escorted back into the building and watched as they retrieved personal belongings from their desks.” Layoffs are never easy. Corey especially remembers the sight of Gano Haine, who had worked on Sierra’s two EcoQuest games and Pepper’s Adventures in Time, standing in the parking lot crying: “Sierra had been her dream, and she was so thrilled to have gotten the job there.”

During this year of wrenching transition, Sierra released just one new Oakhurst-built adventure game, making it their least prolific year in that respect in almost a decade. Thankfully for the bean counters, the game in question was the latest installment in Sierra’s most bankable adventure series of them all. King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride was a typical entry in a series that had been Sierra’s ever-evolving technological showpiece since 1984. But then, that description in itself implies innovation on at least a technical front, and this the new entry certainly delivered.

The King’s Quest VII opening movie. Ken Williams has often said that Walt Disney was one of his biggest role models. With King’s Quest VII, this influence became almost distressingly literal.

Although it did not employ filmed actors, King’s Quest VII was indicative in another way of Sierra’s new direction: rather than an interactive movie, it aimed to be an interactive cartoon worthy of comparison to the likes of Disney, an ambition which required it to look beyond Sierra’s own stable of talented in-house artists for some of its visuals. Ken Williams first reached out to an up-and-coming animation studio known as Pixar. He even spoke personally with Steve Jobs, Pixar’s chairman and majority owner, but in the end the studio proved to be simply too busy working on Toy Story, their first full-length feature film, to take on this task as well. So, Sierra ended up contracting sequences out to no fewer than four other outside animation studios, in addition to employing their own artists to create what truly was an audiovisual extravaganza by the standards of its time. King’s Quest VII went full Disney, as Charles Ardai described in his review for Computer Gaming World magazine.

I tried this game on my mother (a big fairy-tale fan), who asked, “Is that a game from Disney?” When I replied in the negative, she said, “But they’re trying to do Disney, right?”

They are indeed. From the opening frames, where drops of dew in an enchanted forest drop on the tummy of an enchanted ladybug, to the scene a few seconds later in which lovely Princess Rosella sings her royal heart out in a tuneful paean to her about-to-be-lost adolescence, King’s Quest VII exudes Disney-like quality from each of its cel-animated poses.

Every frame is beautiful, every line is neat and pert, the camera soars and glides, and the notes of the musical score tinkle out in bounding effervescence like the fizz out of a bottle of soda pop. This is the Disney of The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast, or Aladdin, if you deduct that film’s adult-targeted sense of irony. It’s the Disney of The Sword in the Stone and of Alice in Wonderland, light and fluffy as a soufflé. It’s not the Disney of Bambi or Snow White; here even the menaces are adorable bits of whimsy. If the villains ever frighten, it’s only for a brief time, and then everyone gets together again for one more song.

It matters not at all that the game is from Sierra rather than Disney. It is true to the Disney spirit.

Along with the mouth-watering new look, the game showed some welcome design evolution over Roberta Williams’s earlier work. Four years after LucasArts’s The Secret of Monkey Island had pointed the way, King’s Quest VII finally managed to free itself from the countless hidden dead ends that had always made playing a Roberta Williams game feel like playing make-believe with a sadist. Player deaths, on the other hand, were still copious, and still so unclued as to be essentially random, but were now at least relatively painless. Rather than expecting you to save every five minutes, the game was now kind enough to return you to the point you were at before you were so foolish as to look at the wrong thing or dilly-dally in the wrong room a second too long. In fact, save files as such disappeared altogether; exiting the game now automatically bookmarked your progress.

These changes all existed in the name of making the game more welcoming to brand new players, out of the hope that they could be convinced to give it a try despite the ominous Roman numeral after its name. To further emphasize that this was a kinder, gentler King’s Quest, it used a radically simplified interface built around a one-click-does-it-all mouse cursor. More oddly, Sierra made it possible to play any of its chapters at any time, meaning you could start with the climax and work backward to the prologue if you were so inclined. (The real point of this feature, of course, was to let you watch each chapter’s opening movie without having to get your hands dirty with the actual game, if you happened to be one of the many people who typically bought each new King’s Quest as a tech demo for their latest computer.)

But alas, in other ways this latest entry really was just another King’s Quest. The writing from Roberta Williams and Lorelei Shannon, her latest apprentice co-designer, was the usual scattershot blend of fairy-tale and pop-culture ephemera, lacking sufficient wit or imagination to be all that compelling even as pastiche, while the puzzle design was made less infuriating than usual only by the lack of dead-player-walking situations. Both the writing and the puzzles got noticeably worse as the game wore on, evidence perhaps of a lead designer who was feeling increasingly bored with her big series, and was in fact already working on her next, very different game. All of this was doubly disappointing coming on the heels of King’s Quest VI, a game which had seemed to herald a series that was at last beginning to take its craft a bit more seriously. Even the much-vaunted look of King’s Quest VII, although impressive in its individual parts, made for a rather discordant jumble when taken in the aggregate, being the work of so many different teams of animators.

Nevertheless, King’s Quest VII sold very well upon its release in November of 1994, as games in the series always did. Meanwhile Dynamix, the most consistent of Sierra’s subsidiary studios, delivered solid performers in the non-adventure games Aces of the Deep, Front Page Sports: Football ‘Pro 95, and Metaltech: EarthSiege. Most of all, though, it was the ImagiNation windfall that turned what would otherwise have been an ugly year into one that actually looked pretty good on the bottom line: $83.4 million in revenues, up from $59.5 million in 1993, with an accompanying $12 million profit, in contrast to an $8.6 million loss the previous year. Now it was up to the new product strategy to keep the party going in 1995.

The first big test of that strategy was to be the game that Roberta Williams had been working on concurrently with King’s Quest VII. Phantasmagoria would take full advantage of the Oakhurst sound stage Sierra had just built. It was to be a play against type worthy of any pop diva: Roberta, the family-friendly “queen of adventure gaming,” was going dark and sexy. “With Phantasmagoria,” wrote Sierra’s marketers, “Roberta Williams has created a superbly written interactive story, fraught with horror and suspense, and totally in the player’s control at all times.” Bill Crow, the mastermind of Sierra’s new sound stage, believed that “Phantasmagoria is going to open the market to a much broader audience of game players. We’re now starting to deliver an audiovisual experience that’s much closer to what the average consumer can relate to.” With Phantasmagoria, in other words, computer games were about to burst out of their nerdy ghetto to become sophisticated entertainments for discerning adults.

How times do change. Today Phantasmagoria is more or less a laughingstock, a tidy microcosm of everything that was wrong with the full-motion-video era of adventure games. In truth, some of its bad rap is a bit exaggerated; it’s not really any worse than dozens of other similarly dated productions of the mid-1990s. Certainly plenty of other games had equally cheesy acting, equally clueless writing, and equally trivial gameplay. Phantasmagoria’s modern reputation for hilarious ineptitude stems to a large extent from its mainstream prominence in its heyday. The wave of hype that Sierra unleashed, much of it issuing from the mouth of Roberta herself, is catnip for snarky reviewers like yours truly, who can’t help but throw it all back in her face. “I want to explore games with a lot of substance and deep emotions,” Roberta said. But Phantasmagoria is so very, very much not that kind of game. If you squint just right, you can see what she was trying to create: a game of claustrophobic psychological horror, an interactive version of The Shining. But alas, nobody involved had the chops to pull it off.

Phantasmagoria revolves around a couple of artsy newlyweds named Adrienne and Don, a novelist and a photographer respectively. As the story begins, they’ve just moved into a rambling old mansion on a sparsely inhabited island off the coast of New England. They’re the first people to attempt to live in the house, we soon learn, in almost a century. The last person to do so before them was a strange stage magician named Carno the Magnificent, who went through pretty young wives at a prodigious rate — all of them abruptly disappearing from the island, never to be seen again. In the end, Carno himself disappeared, and that was that for the house until our heroes turn up. It comes as a surprise to absolutely no one except them when the place turns out to be haunted by a malevolent spirit. It quickly begins to take over the mind of Don, leaving Adrienne, the character the player controls, to try to sort out the mystery before her husband murders her like Carno killed all of his wives.

Somewhat surprisingly in light of Sierra’s mass-market aspirations, they never attempted to hire “name” actors for Phantasmagoria in the way that Origin Systems was doing at the time for the Wing Commander franchise. The role of Adrienne went to Victoria Morsell, whom Sierra rather ambitiously described as a “film, TV, and theater star,” having apparently confused bit parts with starring ones. Still, she does a decent job within the awkward constraints of her task. David Homb in the role of Don, on the other hand, is just awful; his wooden performance comes off as more creepy before the horror starts, when he’s trying to play a loving husband and failing at it abjectly, than it does after his head starts metaphorically spinning around. The rest of the cast is a similarly mixed bag.

Sierra hired a director named Peter Maris, with a long run of schlocky ultra-low-budget films behind him, for a shoot that wound up taking fully four months. Even given that his oeuvre wasn’t exactly of Oscar caliber, his complete disregard for pacing is bizarre. Phantasmagoria’s seven CDs — yes, seven — are filled with interminable sequences where Adrienne disassembles a brick chimney piece by piece, or breaks through a wooden door board by board, or applies her morning makeup layer by agonizing layer. Indeed, Adrienne insists on stopping and preening herself at each of the many mirrors in the house throughout the game, and we’re forced to watch and wait while she does so, hoping against hope that something interesting might happen this time around. (For all of Roberta Williams’s status as a female pioneer in a male-dominated industry, her games’ view of gender isn’t always the most progressive.) All of this, combined with the clumsy, overly wordy script, makes the game seem much longer than the few hours it actually takes to play. There’s a (bad) 90-minute horror flick worth of plot-advancing footage here at the best; Sierra could easily have ditched three of the seven CDs without losing much at all.

The much-vaunted “adult” content is rather less than it’s cracked up to be. The opening movie includes the least sexy sex scene in the history of media. Ken Williams says that it was originally to have shown Adrienne topless, but Sierra lost their nerve in the end: “When it came time to release the game, we edited it to only show some side boob.” Given how weird and awkward it already is, we can only be thankful for their last-minute fit of prudishness.

Nor is the game remotely scary, although it does get gruesome — a very different quality — from time to time. These sequences come when Adrienne is visited by visions of the murders that took place long ago in the different rooms of the house, or, in the latter stages of the game, when she herself meets an unfortunate end thanks to a failure on the player’s part. For better or for worse, the methods of murder might just be the most creatively inspired parts of the game: Carno kills one wife by sticking a funnel into her mouth and stuffing disgusting offal down her throat, another by shackling her into a machine that twists her head around until her neck snaps, while Adrienne can get her head sliced in two by an axe blade or her face literally ripped off by a demon. These scenes are certainly gross and shocking in their way, but it’s all strictly B-movie-slasher fare — Friday the 13th Part V rather than the Shining vibe Roberta was going for.

The scene which prompts by far the most discussion today takes place out of the blue one morning, when Don creeps up behind Adrienne at her bedroom mirror and proceeds to… well, to rape her. Needless to say, this is a disturbing place for even an adults-only game to go. Roberta Williams is hopelessly out of her writerly depth here; in contemporary interviews, she seems utterly oblivious to the real trauma of rape, describing the scene as nothing more than a plot device to show Don’s descent into evil. Its one saving grace is the fact that no one involved is up to the task of making the rape seem remotely realistic; Don humps and thrusts a bit without ever actually taking his boxer shorts off, and that’s that. (One can only hope that Sierra didn’t shoot a more explicit version of this scene…) Afterward Adrienne, rather in contrast to Roberta’s stated desire to explore “deep emotions,” just cleans herself up and gets on with her day, apparently none the worse for wear. Even amidst the more lackadaisical sexual politics of 1995, the scene prompted considerable discussion and a measure of public outrage here and there. Australia’s Office of Film and Literature Classification refused to accept the game because of it, with the result that it was effectively banned from sale in that country.

So much for Phantasmagoria the movie. In terms of gameplay, it isn’t up to all that much at all. Its reliance on canned snippets of static video dramatically limits the scope of its interactivity, while its determination to be as accessible as possible means that all of its puzzles are broadly obvious; a version of that tired old adventure saw, the locked door with a key in the keyhole on the other side and a handy nail and newspaper, is about as complicated as things ever get. The simplified interface from King’s Quest VII makes a return, it’s once again possible to play the chapters in any order you choose, and bookmarks once more replace save files in the game’s terminology, although it is at least possible to make your own bookmarks whenever you like now.

In a way, all of this is a blessing: it lets you power right on through Phantasmagoria, laughing at it all the while, without getting hung up on the design flaws that dog most of Roberta Williams’s games. I’m not generally a fan of high camp, but even I could probably enjoy Phantasmagoria with the right group of friends. If ever a game was ripe for the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment, it’s this one.

Note the ESRB rating at the bottom right of the Phantasmagoria box. In the face of the internecine split over rating systems among computer-game publishers, Sierra generally backed the ESRB over its rival the RSAC. (The much more extreme sequel-in-name-only Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh would go with the RSAC in order to avoid the ESRB’s dreaded “Adults Only” rating, which most retailers refused to touch.)

Adrienne just can’t resist a mirror.

Objects in your inventory can be viewed as rotatable 3D models, a capability that debuted in King’s Quest VII. Indeed, Phantasmagoria’s environments were all built using 3D-modeling software rather than being hand-drawn pixel art. This is the only way Sierra could possibly have included more than 1000 different views in the game, as their marketers proudly told anyone who would listen; the typical old-style Sierra adventure had less than 100. But the new approach didn’t lead to increased environmental interactivity — rather the opposite, I’m afraid.

Adrienne with psycho-hubby Don. Both wear the same clothes for all seven days of the game, a fact that has prompted much joking over the years. This was judged necessary so that the developers could mix and match video sequences as needed. The outfit that Adrienne wears is actually the one that Victoria Morsell, the actress who portrayed her, just happened to turn up in on the first day of filming. “By the time the filming for Phantasmagoria was complete,” wrote Sierra in their customer newsletter, “duct tape, patches, and prayers were all that held Tori’s pants together. She had worn them to the set every single day of the fifteen weeks of filming.”

One of Carno’s ingenious execution devices. Sierra had these props built by local Oakhurst craftsmen, prompting much discussion in the town about just what it was they were up to inside the building that housed their sound stage.

The real horrors of Phantasmagoria are Harriet and her son Cyrus, a pair of bumpkin ingrates who are meant to serve as comic relief. They’re exactly as unfunny as this screenshot looks.

But that, of course, is now. When it was released in the summer of 1995, accompanied by the most lavish marketing campaign Sierra had ever sprung for, Phantasmagoria was hailed as the necessary future of gaming — and not just by Sierra’s own marketers. All of the drawbacks of its technical approach, which would have still been present even with better writing, designing, acting, and directing, were overlooked by industry scribes eager to see the fusion of Silicon Valley and Hollywood. “For horror fans,” wrote Computer Gaming World, “Phantasmagoria is a signal event, one of the most powerful titles ever released in the genre, and easily the most single-mindedly horrific.” In a fit of exuberance, Roberta Williams let slip her dream of becoming “the Steven Spielberg of interactivity.” Thus she must have reveled most of all in the mainstream-press coverage. USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, and Billboard all gave the game positive reviews; “Hotly awaited and, well, just hot, Phantasmagoria lives up to the advance billing,” wrote the last. Notices like these easily made up for the refusal of some squeamish retailers, among them the national chain Comp USA, to stock the game at all.

Every article was sure to mention the game’s budget of fully $4 million, an absolutely astronomical sum by the standards of the time, and one which Sierra too trumpeted for all it was worth in their advertising. In truth, much of that money had gone into the building of the Oakhurst sound stage that Sierra planned to use for many more games, but no one was going to let such details get in the way of a headline about a $4 million computer game. Phantasmagoria became a massive hit; its sales soared past the magic mark of 1 million units and just kept right on going. It was a perfect game to take home with a shiny new computer, the perfect way to show your friends and neighbors what your new wundermachine could do. The window of time in which a game like this could have success on a scale like this was to prove sharply limited, but Phantasmagoria managed to slip through behind Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, The 7th Guest, and Myst just before said window slammed shut. It would prove the last such sparkling success among its peculiar species of game.

But what a success it was while it lasted. Phantasmagoria still stands as the best-selling game ever released by an independent Sierra. Small wonder that Ken and Roberta Williams both remember it so fondly today. Rather than a laughingstock, they remember Phantasmagoria as a mainstream-press darling and chart-topping hit, and love it for that. Thus Ken continues to describe it as “awesome,” while Roberta still names it as her favorite of all the games she made. It was all too easy in 1995 to believe that Phantasmagoria really was the future of gaming writ large.

The Oakhurst folks finished three other adventure games that year, with more mixed commercial results. Space Quest 6, which was made with a lot of the traditional Sierra style but without a lot of enthusiasm from upper management, validated the latter’s skepticism when it failed to sell all that well, signifying the end of that series. Torin’s Passage, a workmanlike fantasy adventure in the King’s Quest mold by Al Lowe of Leisure Suit Larry fame, was another mediocre performer, one whose reason for existing at all at this juncture was a little hard to determine. Finally, the second of the new generation of Sierra adventures, built like Phantasmagoria around filmed actors, was The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery. I’ll return to it in my next article.

Yet Oakhurst was no longer the be all, end all of Sierra. In the new corporate order envisioned by Ken Williams and Mike Brochu, the adventure games that came out of Oakhurst were to be only a single piece of the overall Sierra puzzle. They planned to build an empire from Bellevue that would cover all of the bases in consumer-oriented software. Already over the course of the previous half-decade, Sierra had acquired the Oregon-based jack-of-all-trades games studio Dynamix, the Delaware-based educational-software specialist Bright Star, and the artsy French games studio Coktel Vision. Now, in the first year after Brochu’s hiring, they made no fewer than six more significant acquisitions: the Texas-based Arion Software, maker of the recipe-tracking package MasterCook; the Washington-based Green Thumb Software, maker of Land Designer and other tools for gardeners; the British Impressions Software, maker of a diverse lineup of strategy games; the Massachusetts-based Papyrus Design Group, a specialist in auto-racing simulations; the Washington-based Pixellite Group, the maker of Print Artist, a software package for creating signs and banners; and the Utah-based Headgate Studios, a specialist in golf simulations.

Of all the other products Sierra released in 1995, the one that came closest to matching Phantasmagoria’s success came from good old reliable Dynamix. “I was in a high-level meeting,” remembers Dynamix’s founder Jeff Tunnell, “and the sales manager for all of Sierra said, ‘These fishing games are selling in Japan on the Nintendo.’ Everybody started laughing. But I said, ‘I’ll do one.'” Like Phantasmagoria, Trophy Bass was consciously designed for a different demographic than the typical computer game; it looked more at home on the shelves of Walmart than Electronics Boutique or Software Etc. It shocked everybody by outselling all other Sierra games in 1995, with the exception only of Roberta Williams’s big adventure, becoming in the process the best-selling game that Dynamix ever had or ever would make. Thanks to it, the later 1990s would see a flood of other fishing and hunting games, most of them executed with less love than Trophy Bass. Hardcore computer gamers scoffed at these simplistic knockoff titles and the supposed simple-minded rednecks who played them, but they sold and sold and sold.

Along with Phantasmagoria and other Sierra products like The Incredible Machine, Trophy Bass provided proof positive that there were any number of new customer bases out there just waiting to be tapped, made up of people who were looking for something a bit less demanding of their time and energy than the typical computer game for the hardcore, with themes other than the nerdy staples of science fiction, fantasy, and military simulations. Whatever his faults and mistakes — you know, those ones which I haven’t hesitated to describe at copious length in these articles — Ken Williams realized earlier than most that these people were out there, and never stopped trying to reach them, even as he also navigated the computer-game market as it was currently constituted. For this, he deserves enormous credit.

As Sierra came out of 1995, he had good reason to feel pleased with himself. Revenues had nearly doubled over those of the previous year, to $158.1 million, and even all of the acquisitions couldn’t prevent the company from clearing over $16 million in profits. With Electronic Arts, the only publisher of consumer software with equal size and clout, now investing more and more heavily in console games, Sierra seemed to stand on the verge of complete dominance of the exploding marketplace for home-computer software. Ken’s longstanding dream of selling software to everyone was so close to fruition that he could taste it. And as for Roberta: her own dream of becoming the Steven Spielberg of interactivity seemed less and less far-fetched each day.

If you had told the pair that Roberta would never get the chance to make another point-and-click adventure game, or that the Oakhurst sound stage would be written off as a colossal blind alley and decommissioned within the next few years, or that neither of them would still be working for Sierra by that point, or that Sierra’s Oakhurst branch as a whole would be shuttered well before the millennium… well, they would presumably have been surprised, to say the least.

(Sources: the books Phantasmagoria: The Official Player’s Guide by Lorelei Shannon and Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line by Ken Williams, Computer Gaming World of February 1995 and November 1995, Los Angeles Times of November 14 1995, Sierra’s customer newsletter InterAction of Fall 1994, Holiday 1994, Spring 1995, and Holiday 1995; press releases, annual reports, and other internal and external documents from the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play. Video sources include a vintage making-of-Phantasmagoria video and Matt Chat 201. Other online sources include “How Sierra was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud” by Duncan Fyfe at Vice, Sierra’s SEC filing for 1996, Anthony Larme’s Phantasmagoria fan site, the Adventure Classic Gaming interview with Roberta Williams, Ken Williams’s comments in a Sierra Gamers discussion of King’s Quest opening movies, and the current MasterCook website. 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.)

Comments
51 Responses

- Zack

August 6, 2021 at 4:58 pm

Damn, I didn’t know Sierra had such a rich history before they started making the city-builders games I know them for. I guess it’s still a long way before getting there…

- Jimmy Maher

August 6, 2021 at 5:08 pm

Those games were made by Impressions. Caesar and Caesar II had already been released — both published by Sierra — before Sierra acquired the studio. Will indeed cover them at some point, when we get to the later installments that are a bit more playable by modern standards. I’m particularly partial to Pharaoh.

- Zack

August 6, 2021 at 9:16 pm

I played all of them, starting with Emperor. Seeing you were talking about Sierra and all, I got worried for a second seeing you didn’t mention those games at all. But I’m glad to hear we’ll talk about it further down the line.
Personally I’m partial to the latest one, Emperor, because A) It was the first one I played and B) The French version (I’m French) had really memorable voice-overs and writing, I still can quote most of them to this day. I got on the others one later, and these days yeah, Pharaoh is probably the one that’s most memorable, the one with very striking vision (also the only one with an expansion pack, I think.)

- Phil B.

August 7, 2021 at 2:52 pm

Zeus also has an expansion pack (Poseidon). Pharoah and Zeus are definitely my two favorite in that series.

- Not Fenimore

August 8, 2021 at 1:57 pm

Caesar III was the first game I ever personally bought; Emperor is still my favorite city-builder (just nice quality of life inprovements). Even after literal years of Mr Maher’s articles, my brain, deep down, still thinks of Sierra as a competitor to Maxis (“the other most important computer game maker”).

- Leo Vellés

August 6, 2021 at 5:13 pm

“hoping against hope that something interesting might happen this around”.
I’m not sure, but i found a little off that final “around”. You meant “round”?

- Jimmy Maher

August 6, 2021 at 6:58 pm

I dropped a word, actually. Thanks!

- Martin

August 6, 2021 at 5:49 pm

So you are on a desert island and can only have one game, Phantasmagoria or 7th Guest. Which do you pick? No, “I wouldn’t pick either” answers allowed. I’m really trying to ask, which is better, or worst?

- Jimmy Maher

August 6, 2021 at 7:04 pm

7th Guest for me. I suppose the set-piece puzzles might have some replay value if I get really bored — although in all honesty, I could probably invent more exciting games with rocks and sand, given sufficient time — and a lack of gratuitous rape scenes generally boosts a game in this critic’s estimation.

- Ross

August 6, 2021 at 10:13 pm

There’s a tragic irony here that you’ve cited a criteria that might lead you a reversal had you been offered the respective sequels.

- Alex Smith

August 7, 2021 at 5:28 pm

In fairness, I don’t think the rape scene was gratuitous so much as poorly executed (which is a general problem with the entire game). It’s meant to contrast with their earlier tender lovemaking scene to illustrate how much the possession is changing Don. What makes it fail utterly, and yes admittedly even feel a bit gratuitous, is the reason you articulate in the body that there is zero emotional fallout from the scene. I do think if it were handled appropriately it would have served both the plot and the characters, but obviously it was not.

- Lasse

August 6, 2021 at 6:06 pm

Typo: “Robera Williams’s earlier work.”

- Jimmy Maher

August 6, 2021 at 6:58 pm

Thanks!

- Sean Barrett

August 6, 2021 at 7:15 pm

I can’t figure out the reason for this article’s title. Is it just meant as as a fake-out with the actual meaning being “Making Sierra Pay Off”?

- Jimmy Maher

August 6, 2021 at 7:27 pm

The same phrase could mean to make Sierra pay in the mob-movie sense, or to make Sierra pay (off). I went back and forth on it, but decided I liked it better without the dangling preposition. I could be convinced otherwise, however, if others find it weird or confusing.

- Michael

August 6, 2021 at 10:49 pm

I’d leave it as written. What you mean is “Making Sierra Profitable,” but that’s a terrible title, and “Making Sierra Pay Off” definitely evokes images of a guy named Nunzio with a baseball bat.

- Andrew Nenakhov

August 6, 2021 at 8:31 pm

Interestingly, that morning ‘rape’ scene was shown only when loading Chapter 4 from Chapter 3. If you wanted to just start Chapter 4, it just started with Adrienne tying shoelaces on her sneakers.

- California Tax Payer

August 17, 2021 at 2:44 pm

In the beta, it shows the scene if you start a new game on chapter 4.

Another other difference I see is that there are no captions on the intro videos of (at least) chapter 1. It didn’t seem to let me use the poker on the fireplace in the beta.

- Leo Vellés

August 6, 2021 at 9:23 pm

One minor typo. The french studio name is Cocktel Vision, not Visions

- Jimmy Maher

August 7, 2021 at 7:40 am

Thanks!

- Michael

August 6, 2021 at 9:40 pm

“So, Sierra’ new Bellevue management team”
= Sierra’s

- Jimmy Maher

August 7, 2021 at 7:41 am

Thanks!

- Jonathan O

August 6, 2021 at 10:14 pm

Typo alert: “pop-culture ephmera” -> “pop-culture ephemera”

- Jimmy Maher

August 7, 2021 at 7:44 am

Thanks!

- Owen C.

August 7, 2021 at 1:40 am

Among other things, you could say Phantasmagoria wasted a lot of effort and then-precious CD space filming tons of clips of a live actor going through the mundane motions of a Sierra character like walking between every room and interacting with every object in the game. Stuff which was easy to implement in their older games with a sprite moving around the screen but required a ton of effort and space that could have been better spent elsewhere when switching to live action. There’s definitely a reason why most other FMV adventure games of the period chose not to go down this route and instead chose to adopt the first-person perspective adopted by Myst, The 7th Guest and others where they don’t have to film the player character performing every action in the game.

- Eric Nyman

August 7, 2021 at 3:14 am

The idea that no “A” level talent would want to live in Oakhurst is strange to me. Yes, it’s a small isolated town, but it sits near Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks in close proximity to the Sierra Nevada, the tallest mountains in the contiguous USA (from which the company derived its name and logo). Surely they could have found an outdoorsy type who would consider that paradise.

Though to be fair, Bellevue also has world class mountain and national park access, as well as an ocean nearby and a major city. So on balance it’s a more attractive destination for most.

An acquaintance of mine worked for Dynamix in Eugene, OR and prior to that at the Oakhurst office for Sierra (not as a programmer however–she was in HR, I believe). She did not find the Williamses to be personable or even taking much notice of what they considered lower level employees, but on balance she found it to be a pleasant place to work.

- Jimmy Maher

August 7, 2021 at 7:50 am

Having become an inveterate hiker since reaching middle age, I’d love to live there myself. But it was one more quality to look for in what was already a fairly small pool of people Ken Williams considered to be qualified.

In the end, Ken dreamed of building a software empire to rival even Microsoft in its way, and didn’t believe he could do so from Oakhurst. And this was a fair assessment, on the whole. Just the lack of proximity to a major international airport was crippling. After all, Microsoft moved from Albuquerque — a much larger city — to Seattle for similar reasons.

- Nate

August 8, 2021 at 12:58 am

I grew up not far from there and Oakhurst of the 80’s and early 90’s was still pretty remote. There were no other software companies. The closest analog I can think of is Atari’s Grass Valley center.

Despite the nearby beauty, it was just too isolated from other opportunities available nearby in Silicon Valley.

- Steve Nicholson

August 8, 2021 at 8:10 am

I’ve lived in in Nevada City, which borders Grass Valley, for 21 years and have worked in Grass Valley for most of that time. I didn’t know until now that the Atari 2600 was developed there. I’m amazed that this isn’t more well-known in the community. Mostly we hear about Grass Valley Group who made broadcast video equipment and spawned a slew of spin-offs like Telestream and AJA Video.

- Peter Orvetti

August 7, 2021 at 3:17 pm

That’s a funny anecdote about Victoria Morsell’s wardrobe, given that one of the jokes I see about the game is how unrealistically high her belt/waistline is.

The guy who plays Don has his game image as his social media avatar. He seems to have a sort of wry appreciation of his brief fame, like the little girl from “Manos: Hands of Fate”.

- Emily Bowman

August 17, 2021 at 10:04 pm

Anyone who says her waistline was unrealistically high must have the distinct pleasure of not remembering the mid-90’s. That fad’s come back around a couple times, but thankfully never has much staying power.

- Lisa H.

August 18, 2021 at 12:22 am

Trufax!

- Pingback: Tech roundup 105: a journal published by a bot - Javi López G.

- Joshua Barrett

August 8, 2021 at 12:45 am

While it’s also not a good game, I confess to finding Phantasmagoria 2 somewhat more compelling than the first. No, I don’t have an excuse. It’s just… well, it’s not exactly original, but it’s considerably *more original* than the first.

- Ross

August 8, 2021 at 2:46 am

It was certainly more of a Noble Failure than the first. Properly experimental in ways that seem to have influenced the handful of 21st-century FMV efforts. The first game was, for all its oddities, sort of a “safe” approach to an FMV horror game – a very standard and traditional Spooky House story with broadly gothic sensibilities with gameplay and puzzles that was a bit clumsy but for the most part basically just a very straight adaptation of Sierra’s house style to the limitations of live action.

- Aaron A. Reed

August 8, 2021 at 6:25 pm

I have a massive soft spot for Phantasmagoria 2 because as a young gay man (I think I was 16 when it came out), it was the first computer game I ever played with queer characters– more than one, even!– who weren’t just there as one-off jokes. They were major characters and they were taken seriously by the other characters as people, not just stand-ins for their sexuality. That was so hugely important to me at the time; not just encountering it at all, but also through playing the game with my friends (who I wasn’t yet out to) and seeing them accept that part of those characters non-judgmentally and not make jokes about it… that experience was a big factor in my ability to come out to my friend group a few months later.

Whatever its other faults, I’ll always love Phantasmagoria 2 and Lorelei Shannon et al for that non-token representation, years (decades, really) before most other game companies would dare to put characters like that front and center.

- Jay Friday

August 8, 2021 at 8:53 am

I remain a huge fan of the Papyrus racing simulation games. They were absolutely the cream of the crop in that particular genre, only remotely rivalled by Geoff Crammond’s Formula 1 games. Strangely enough, in a genre that thrives on technical sophistication, they also remain very playable to this day. I still like to play IndyCar Racing II or one of the NASCAR games from time to time, for instance. And, of course, the monumental Grand Prix Legends from 1998, which still retains an active community.

They were always maybe a little too hardcore to find mainstream appeal, but gosh, were they good. Huge get for Sierra back then, definitely. And when their parent company pulled Papyrus into the abyss with them in the mid 2000s, they became iRacing, which to this day is a standard in hardcore simulation racing. Incidentally, this is where they finally lost me – I just can’t afford to put in the time to actually play that game the way it wants to be played.

- Greg

August 8, 2021 at 1:12 pm

There’s a popular retro gaming YouTuber who goes by MetalJesusRocks that worked at Sierra in Bellevue in this period. I’m not affiliated with dude, but check out “We Worked at Sierra! – The Rise, Fall & Scandal of Sierra On-Line”. His buddy he does that video with has an incredible archive of old interviews he did for an internet radio show on Worldstream. “Slow Death of Publisher Sierra – Lost Interview During Layoffs 1999” has him talking with the developers of a Babylon 5 game and a Lord of the Rings game, the day of the layoffs. Sadly, the majority of MJR’s audience isn’t quite as interested in these rare time capsules so they’ve only uploaded a few, which is a bummer because apparently he’s got an interview with Jane Jensen from around this time.

Anyways, looking forward to the GK2 article! Kriminalkommissar Lieber…is he here?

- Greg

August 8, 2021 at 1:18 pm

Forgot to add that I thought of all of this because in the layoff interview, the devs he talks with sarcastically refer to the fishing games. Have a good one!

- Fuck David Cage

August 8, 2021 at 10:06 pm

Sierra was my favorite adventure game company, but it died of cancer, screaming and begging for death. Phantasmagoria was dogshit, the worst example of the awful F.M.V. bubble that nearly destroyed video games: Nothing happens until the last ten minutes, the gameplay consists of boring chores and stupid puzzles, the writing is the worst video game writing because David Cage’s work and Life is Strange are movies, and it has no tension or horror, just cheap, stereotypical mid ’90s attempts at shock. I thought it was one of the worst games ever at the time, and even after playing Ultima 8, Universal Combat, To The Moon, Gemini Rue, NES Rambo and watching playthroughs of The Last of Us 2, Cyberpunk 2077, XIII remake and Ride to Hell Retribution I still stand by it. Gabriel Knight 2, sequel to my favorite adventure game suffered from the same problems and was a horror set in the bright sunlight in a quaint, charming city. Phantasmagoria 2 and Gabriel Knight 3 were marginally better and things actually happened in them, but still terrible. Space Quest 6 ruined a great series in the same way as Phantasmagoria and the Gabriel Knight sequels: While it was not as bad, it had very simplistic puzzles, very little humor, a lot of filler and many contradictions of the previous games. King’s Quest 7 was almost a tolerable adventure game, but there were many bugs that could stop your progress and force you to skip stages, as I had to a couple of times, and the writing was childish and awkward.

- Fuck David Cage

August 8, 2021 at 10:14 pm

I recommend that anyone who hates the final years of Sierra as much as I check out the perfect fanmade Sierra games, Space Quest Incinerations and Vohaul Strikes Back. They give perfect endings to Sierra’s best series, particularly if you get all the points in Incinerations and have hilarious humor, great puzzles and deaths and hilarious responses to every possible action.

I also recommend Mage’s Initiation: Reign of the Elements and Al Emmo and The Lost Dutchman’s Mine, inspired by Sierra classics. Mage’s Initiation is a Quest for glory tribute with all the humor and style you would expect from Sierra. It could use more puzzles, but at least unlike Hero U it actually has some puzzles. Al Emmo does the same for Leisure Suit Larry and Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist and also has a lot of complex puzzles.

- Arthur

August 8, 2021 at 10:37 pm

On King’s Quest 7, which I covered my own thoughts on here, I think it really suffered from having so many hands handling the animation. Apparently, the first studio to accept work on it was a Russian outfit who claimed they could handle the whole thing, then couldn’t, hence farming bits of work out to other places – some of whom had never animated for videogames before. I thought the animation was kind of disjointed – and in particular, some weird prioritisation was occurring, so some really important plot-critical bits were animated in a fairly rudimentary fashion whilst some parts which were just not that important seemed to have been lavished with attention.

On Phantasmagoria, which I reviewed here, I thought the rape scene was handled well in the moment in the sense that it did at least seem to acknowledge that something bad and abusive was happening here, but agree that it kind of fails to follow through on the emotional impact of it. (It also sets up a “he’s only abusive because he’s possessed” angle, which I feel plays into unhelpful “he’s abusive but if I love him enough I can change him and he’ll stop” tropes.)

In terms of its laughable aspects there’s two things which jump to mind for me:

– Adrienne finds two people literally living in the barn and is… fine with it. She’s not at all worried or concerned or even suspicious, and then hires them as household staff on the spot, because of course when people have invaded your home the first thing you do is give them unlimited access to the entire rest of your home.

– The backgrounds. People giggle at the FMV and the acting and the plot and so on, and for the most part they are right to, but I’ve always found the backgrounds in the game to be jarring. It’s rather evident that the actors think they are in, if not a Stephen King movie, then at least a B-grade slasher, but the animators doing the backgrounds were going for a campy Hammer Horror aesthetic. It’s an utter mismatch.

I agree with the people upthread that Phantasmagoria 2 is actually kind of better than the first game and has more redeeming features. Not enough to counterbalance its flaws – it’s not a good game which has a few stumbles, it’s a bad game with a lot of heart and which occasionally pulls its socks up and has periods of being actually pretty interesting. But enough to make it perhaps more worth a look back to these days than a lot of the FMV schlock of the era.

- Saint Podkayne

August 12, 2021 at 1:41 am

To me the major moment of failure is the entirety of Adrienne and Don’s relationship. They just suck. They are in different marriages from the very beginning before the possession even occurs. I can’t imagine a scenario where I find myself unlocking a secret occult chapel behind a fireplace in a large, creepy house inhabited by only myself and my husband, and my very first reaction isn’t “Huh, this doesn’t look right, hey, husband, you want to come over here to look at this creepy shit for a sec?” and then my husband’s first reaction isn’t “Hold on, I’m coming, what creepy shit?”. Later, after he’s possessed, Adrienne totally fails to be surprised or shocked or upset by any of his terrible behavior. She seems to expect to be treated this way. She does not seem to expect the basic politeness of someone opening a door to talk to her instead of yelling through it. To me the tragedy isn’t even her lack of reaction to the rape, it’s her lack of reaction to the constant contempt and rudeness.

- Martin

August 12, 2021 at 3:00 pm

You would be surprised what people make ‘work’ in their relationships. Sounds like yours is holding together but people make far worse act as their norm.

Ok, the fireplace creppy shit isn’t what relationships have to endure – more likely is finding out uncle-grandpa’s final secret is as far as people go in real life. But there are people out there that identify with this way of living, unfortunately.

- Adam M

August 9, 2021 at 11:25 am

Thanks for this. I am looking forward to your next and I presume final installment on the Sierra On-Line story.

- Lt. Nitpicker

August 13, 2021 at 8:33 pm

But Police Quest would get revamped from a line of adventure games into a line of tactical 3D action games..

The first SWAT game was a hybrid between a tactical game and a conventional Sierra adventure of the period, and the second game didn’t come out until a couple of years later. I would use the phrase slowly in this context.

- California Tax Payer

August 15, 2021 at 7:34 pm

I took a tour of the Oakhurst office around 1993. The guide mentioned the move to Washington, which was then unknown to me, and did mention taxes as a reason. They didn’t mention the home-town disadvantage.

The 1994 games KQ7 and Outpost were the only times I ever used Sierra’s money back guarantee — and didn’t feel bad about it. Outpost got a few updates, and KQ7 ended up with a ‘2.0’ release.

I believe the studio set was in the Old Barn building. In any case, the building burned down a few years ago when a wildfire burned through that end of town. I have a 7-CD beta version of Phantas which had some missing video, a rougher version of the video, and lacking most sound, as I recall. It was dated only about two months before completion, so either the game came together very near the end, or they intentionally crippled it. The primary purpose was probably to test out all the DOS SVGA chipset drivers and Windows SVGA and audio drivers; the final product has a pretty extensive tech support document.

In the files:
If you find that you need to send for replacement CD disks,

blah blah blah
blah blah blah

In the letter by Jerry Bowerman, General Manager, Sierra Publishing, June 2, 1995:
“A group of about 40 people at Sierra Publishing here in Oakhurst … Our goal is to produce the most enjoyed game of 1995. … After compositing the blue screen elements … making the movies into AVIs from tape… We didn’t feel the results were of the quality we needed … In addition, we decided to go to an outside sound design house for the foley and sound effects, and the integration of the sound track. So, we captured some scratch movies from VHS [for beta] … Some of them look pretty bad. I apologize for this but rest assured the final movies will be of a quality consistent with Sierra’s products.”
“

- Jonathan

December 10, 2021 at 2:31 am

I just wanted to say thanks so much for this informative, entertaining, enlightening, etc etc etc good points… good points… blog.

I’m reading it from the perspective of someone who grew up playing mostly Sierra games in the 80’s to mid 90’s, with absolutely no background in programming or computers in general. You’ve really made topics which are way over my head (somewhat) easier for me to understand, but most importantly completely compelling. Thank you so much.

I totally see your point about a lot of the insane logic and sloppy puzzle design of most of the Sierra games, but for me, the puzzles or endless deaths / dead ends just didn’t matter. I played the games for the characters, the settings and atmosphere, the art (especially the background paintings), the music, and the stories. The puzzles were almost incidental. I used a lot of walkthroughs or persuaded my dad to fax questions to the Sierra hint department because I really just wanted to enjoy these worlds without the hassle of having to figure out what random objects you had to use to advance the plot. I know that flies in the face of good game design, but I suppose my point is, for people like me it just didn’t matter. I loved these games for an entirely different reason, and they’re still near and dear to my heart. To be fair the games with good puzzle design like Quest for Glory are nearer and dearer to my heart than the sloppier ones, but still I was always willing and able to just sort of ignore the puzzles in favor of loving the worlds I got sucked into.

Anyway I just wanted to say thanks and express what it was that drew me to Sierra games from my own perspective. I agree with basically everything you’ve written on here, and yeah good puzzles and design should be integral to making a quality game, but I still loved / love those games so much. I know the puzzles were shit, though ;-)

- clubside

February 15, 2022 at 5:59 pm

One plural too many:

“Hardcore computers gamers scoffed…”

- Jimmy Maher

February 16, 2022 at 4:15 pm

Thanks!

- Lisa M Cundy

April 23, 2022 at 3:47 am

I worked for Sierra in Bellevue and loved it! Worked my way up to purchasing assistant before the department was set to move back to Cali after the company sale…I was so sad! And I rocked the front desk before my last promotion with Ken too the Left and Roberta too right! ☺✌ lol and always looking for ya both behind homeplate

The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery
August 20, 2021

Personally, I’ve never been one to imagine small things.

— Jane Jensen

When Jane Jensen first said that she would like to make a dark-tinged, adult-oriented mystery of a Sierra adventure game, revolving around an antihero of a paranormal detective named Gabriel Knight, her boss Ken Williams wasn’t overly excited about the idea. “Okay, I’ll let you do it,” he grumbled. “But I wish you’d come up with something happier!”

What a difference a year and a half can make. At the end of that period of time, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers was a hit, garnering vive la différence! reviews and solid sales from gamers who appreciated its more sophisticated approach to interactive storytelling. Rather than remaining an outlier in the company’s catalog, it bent Sierra’s whole trajectory in its direction, as Ken Williams retooled and refocused on games that could appeal to a different — and larger — demographic of players.

There was no question whatsoever about a sequel. In January of 1994, just six weeks after the first Gabriel Knight game had shipped, Jane Jensen was told to get busy writing the second one.

She was more than ready to do so. In fact, she already knew exactly what she wanted the second story to be: a tale of werewolves, Richard Wagner, and Ludwig II, the (in)famously eccentric last king of an independent Bavaria. She’d developed a fascination for all of these subjects when she’d spent nine months living in Germany just before coming to Sierra. “It was initially the plot for the first game,” she says, “but when I started looking at it, I felt I needed to go back further in the characters’ history.” Now, having told how a New Orleans pulp-novel writer, bookstore owner, lady’s man, and general layabout named Gabriel Knight became a “Schattenjäger” — a “shadow hunter” of things that go bump in the night — she was ready to send him to Germany to face The Beast Within.

Very early on during the design phase if not right away, The Beast Within was earmarked to become the second of a new generation of Sierra adventures, which were to be built around filmed snippets of live actors. It was an enormous change from the hand-painted pixel graphics of the first game, but Jensen was, as she says, “all for it.” Although shooting on location in Germany would have been her dream scenario, there was no way the budget would stretch that far. Instead her actors would have to perform in front of a blue screen that would be filled in with computer-generated backgrounds after the shoot, as was the norm for these kinds of productions.

In lieu of taking the whole project to Germany, she did convince management to allow her to bring a piece of that country to Sierra’s offices in Oakhurst, California. During the second half of 1994, she and other Sierra staffers made three separate trips to Germany, spending more than a month there in all, painstakingly photographing among other places Munich’s city center, the Wagner Museum in Bayreuth, and Neuschwanstein, “mad king” Ludwig’s fairy-tale castle. These photos were then touched up as necessary to serve as the scenery behind the actors. This in itself represented a marked change in approach from the 3D-modeled backgrounds employed by Phantasmagoria, Sierra’s first game of this type. It was a wise choice for this project; while the mixing of media is by no means always seamless, the photographic look gives The Beast Within an unusually strong atmosphere of place. The hazy, slightly washed-out look of the backgrounds — an unavoidable byproduct of the state of digital imaging at the time — contributes to rather than detracts from the mood. “We were lucky in all three of the trips over there in that it was fairly overcast, so we didn’t have any harsh, direct lighting on most of the things,” says Nathan Gams, the project’s creative director and chief photographer. “We wanted a soft, gloomy kind of European spring feel. It kind of reflects the alien place where Gabriel is at this time.”

With the background images duly captured, it was time to think about the foreground actors. The budget only allowed for the Screen Actors Guild minimum wage, which precluded “name” stars such as Tim Curry and Mark Hamill, both of whom had provided voice acting in the first game.

Sierra wound up casting in the role of Gabriel one Dean Erickson, a 36-year-old with an interesting story behind him. He had been working in finance on Wall Street at age 30, when he suddenly decided that he wanted to be an actor instead, despite having never performed in so much as a high-school play prior to that point. Six years on from that decision, his chief claim to fame was a bit part in three episodes of the sitcom Frasier. Jane Jensen was initially uncertain that he had the chops to play the role of Gabriel, even though in appearance he was “spookily like what I would have thought the character would be”: “It was more a matter of being sure that he could play all the different faces of Gabriel Knight.” But she allowed herself to be convinced in the end.

Dean Erickson and Jane Jensen.

“I would like to be the lead guy in major features,” Erickson himself said at the time, “and hopefully my performance in this will lead someone to believe that I can help carry a movie.” Hope does tend to spring particularly eternal in Hollywood. In the world of reality rather than Hollywood fantasy, a much older and perhaps wiser Dean Erickson would come to look back on The Beast Within as the best that things ever got for him as an actor, what with “making SAG scale for three and a half months in an idyllic setting under controlled conditions with nice people.”

It was intense in that we shot fairly quickly, only one or two takes per shot. But we were mostly shooting on an air-conditioned sound stage in a beautiful part of the country during the summer near a lake. We worked mostly nine to five, Monday through Friday, so it was about the best situation one could have as an actor. It truly couldn’t have worked out better, other than maybe getting work afterwards.

The role of Grace Nakimura, Gabriel’s strait-laced research assistant and potential love interest, went to Joanne Takahashi, a stage actress and print-advertising model who was also trying to break through in Hollywood. Meanwhile a Polish actor named Peter Lucas would all but steal the show in the role of the darkly enigmatic Baron Friedrich Von Glower, who slowly emerges as the principal antagonist of the story. The cast was rounded out with more than 40 other speaking parts, all recruited like the leads from the ranks of Hollywood hopefuls flashing their SAG membership cards.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.whose grainy, hyperkinetic productions can be credited with inculcating much of the look of MTV during the grunge era. It would have been intriguing indeed to see what he might have done with The Beast Within. But those plans fell through at the last minute, and Sierra instead hired a less distinctive aesthetic personality named Will Binder, a graduate of UCLA film school who had recently been serving as a director’s assistant in such films as The Scent of a Woman.[1]This résumé would later lead to my favorite ever interview opening, from the adorably fannish website Adventure Classic Gaming: “You have worked with some of the best actors in the business — Al Pacino, Michael J. Fox, Bruce Boxleitner, Mira Furlan, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and of course, Dean Erickson and Joanne Takahashi.” Two of these names are not like the others…

Before talking about how any of these folks performed, it’s only fair that we take a moment to appreciate just how awkward this style of “film-making” really was. The difficulties and constraints extended even to the clothing worn by the cast; the chroma-keying process which allowed the programmers to superimpose the live actors over the digitized photographic backgrounds came complete with many restrictions, as noted by costumer Marcelle Gravel:

There are a lot of limitations in terms of colors. [We can’t use] anything that is close to blue or anything white that can reflect the blue, or any green that has a little blue in it. Sometimes black doesn’t work because when it gets wrinkled, it reflects.

So the wardrobe has to be very safe. Gabriel was supposed to be wearing a black jacket, a white tee-shirt, and blue jeans — an American uniform. It is James Dean, Marlon Brando, all those people. And when I started Gabriel, I can’t use black, I can’t use white, I can’t use blue. So what am I going to do to create that effect?

He ended up wearing green. Since he’s got the red hair, I think the green has a good effect on him.

The blue screen also meant that much or most of the evolved language of film had to be tossed. The camera wasn’t allowed to swoop or soar; it had to remain stock still if the computer-generated backgrounds were to look coherent after they were inserted. Thus the scenes had to be staged and blocked like live-theater productions which happened to perform for a camera rather than a live audience.

Making an interactive story, in which scenes could occur in many different orders, played havoc with the actors’ ability to inhabit their roles. Will Binder:

[The player] can jump around during the game at any point, so the actor has to have a neutral emotion at the start of each scene. [The scene currently being filmed] could [be] before a big scene happened or could [be] after a big scene.

In a regular movie, you would like to tell [the actor], “Okay, this just happened: you just broke up with your girlfriend.” Or, “An hour ago you found out some information about a person you have been dealing with.”

In the game,  [the player] can go anywhere [they] want. So there is no linear progression.

Joanne Takahashi:

With this shoot, you are taking so many different paths you are not sure where the character is going. It is a challenge.

I am just feeling it through and letting things come to me as I go along. It was something to adjust to because a lot of what actresses do is inspired by what they are feeling. That was a difficult challenge, but that was a requirement on this kind of project.

Most of the actors were not technically oriented, and had little concept of how the scenes they were shooting would be cobbled together into a coherent final product. Certainly there was nothing like the daily rushes of conventional filmmaking, which help actors understand how a production is coming together while the shoot is still progress. The actors working on The Beast Within were swimming blind in unknown waters.

Keeping all that in mind, then, how did the actors do?

Dean Erickson is a rather counterintuitive case in some ways. On the one hand, he badly misses the mark of the Gabriel Knight that Jane Jensen likes to describe. Far from a cool lady-killer, he radiates discomfort in his own skin virtually every moment he spends onscreen; he’s forever sighing and twitching and glancing nervously away as if looking for direction (which he quite possibly is, come to think of it), coming across as a guy for whom propositioning a girl comes as naturally as foreign languages. (American to the core, Gabriel has managed to avoid picking up a word of German during the months he’s already spent in the country.) Needless to say, nothing about this performance will convince you that Erickson is Hollywood leading-man material.

And yet Erickson’s take on Gabriel kind of works despite itself. His discomfort before Will Binder’s cameras mirrors that which any born-and-bred New Orleanian would feel after being transplanted to such an utterly foreign clime as southern Germany. For all of Erickson’s manifest limitations as an actor, I have to say that I like his Gabriel more than I do the one Tim Curry voice-acted in Sins of the Fathers. He’s relatable in his way, and, if he doesn’t exactly radiate masculine virility, nor does he come across like a member of the #metoo Most Wanted brigade, as Curry’s Gabriel too often did. He’s not bad company on the whole, once you get used to his incessant fidgeting. In achieving this much, he fulfills the first and most important criterion of any good adventure-game protagonist.

Will Binder directs Joanne Takahashi. She needed all the help she could get.

But Joanne Takahashi’s Grace is, alas, less likeable. This is a problem in that Grace steps up to almost equal time with Gabriel in this second game; the player controls her rather than Gabriel through two and a half of the game’s six chapters. Her apparently unrequited affection for Gabriel and jealousy of his beautiful German secretary Gerde are doubtless intended to be endearing, but are written and acted with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball to the head. Whether because she’s got them old lovesick blues or because she’s just made that way, Grace is bitchy toward everyone and everything she encounters for much of the game. Only toward the end, when she’s finally accepted that Gerde isn’t after her man and that Gabriel really needs her help, does she start to lighten up a bit. But even then, the actress who plays her remains stiff as a board.

Peter Lucas by contrast gives by far the most natural performance, as Baron Von Glower, the libertine leader of a mysterious big-game hunting club which Gabriel stumbles upon in the course of his investigations. Every time he appears, he lights up the screen with his romance-novel looks and his enticing aura of danger; his scenes with Gabriel flare with far more sexual tension than Gabriel ever strikes up with Grace. Lucas’s onscreen performance stands out as one of the best of the entire full-motion-video era of gaming — granted, not an overly high bar to clear, but we should give him his props nevertheless.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/GK_edit.mp4

The smoldering attraction between Gabriel and Van Glower is remarkable in the context of its time. Mass-market computer games just didn’t go to these places in 1995. If the beats of the plot can be read as allegorical in a thoroughly retrograde way — Gabriel must overcome the temptation of lycanthropy, which in turn becomes accidentally or purposefully associated with homosexuality in the script, in order to return to the good girl Grace — what we see on the screen never feels as judgmental as that formulation would imply. (It is perhaps not completely inappropriate to mention at this juncture that Jane Jensen has become a successful writer of gay romance fiction in recent years.)

The Beast Within took over Sierra’s new Oakhurst sound stage in May of 1995. Filming there lasted almost four months in all. At its conclusion, the crew moved to Seattle for a few days to shoot the game’s climactic scenes on location in the city’s opera house, complete with many of the local opera company’s own players. Here the constraints imposed by the game’s peculiar technological stew fell away, and Will Binder got to shoot something resembling scenes from a proper movie. He was a lucky guy; very few other full-motion-video productions from the 1990s ponied up for a full-fledged location shoot.

Coming to this article, I had fonder memories of The Beast Within than Sins of the Fathers, and I was curious to find out whether that impression would hold up. I was gratified that it generally did. The game is as shaggy as its namesake even if one looks beyond the uneven acting, being full of unnecessary stumbling blocks in its interactivity that prevent me from giving it a full-throated recommendation here or making a place for it in my personal Hall of Fame, where fairness to the player is a prerequisite. But it’s a fascinating piece of work all the same, created as it was just at the apogee of that window of time when interactive narratives starring “real” actors were considered the necessary future of gaming by big companies like Sierra — so much so that they were building million-dollar sound stages for themselves to churn them out with the alacrity of any Hollywood studio. Jane Jensen would never get a chance to work on a scale like this again. And it must be said that she made the most of it: the overweening ambition of The Beast Within — the sheer grandiosity of it all — makes it a sight to behold. This is a computer game for which an opera was composed, for God’s sake. Everyone involved with it was unabashedly shooting for the moon.

The game opens several months after the conclusion of Sins of the Fathers, when a very reluctant Gabriel has moved into his ancestral castle in Germany to take up the family business of shadow-hunting. Meanwhile Grace has been left behind in New Orleans to run his old bookstore.

One dark night, a group of German villagers straight out of Hammer Horror central casting knocks on the front door of Gabriel’s castle. “We have come for the Schattenjäger,” says their leader. It seems that a little girl living in another small town near Munich has been killed — by, the visitors believe, a werewolf. (“At least she died quickly,” says the village patriarch to her grieving father, a line so hilariously tone deaf that one has to assume it was intended to be funny.) Gabriel has his doubts, but he agrees to take the case. His investigations will eventually lead him to the hunting club led by Baron Von Glower.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/GK2_edit.mp4

When Grace learns of the case, she hightails it to Germany, but doesn’t join up directly with Gabriel. Instead she occupies herself with research on the real or mythical history of lycanthropy. She learns that Ludwig II, king of Bavaria from 1864, seems to have become a werewolf himself while still a young man, and that this may account for much of his legendarily strange behavior. Further, she discovers that he told his friend Richard Wagner of his plight, prompting the latter to compose a magical opera which he hoped would be able to drive out the curse. But he was unable to complete it before Ludwig died under mysterious circumstances in 1886 — he had become a persistent irritant to the new, Prussia-dominated united Germany, making his death fodder for all sorts of conspiracy theories — and the opera was never performed. What there was of it was lost, seemingly forever — until the dogged Grace digs it up again. She soon has urgent need of it, as Gabriel has by now gotten himself infected with the curse.

All of this is mind-bogglingly ridiculous, of course, but the game leans into it with a commitment that would make Dan Brown proud, and darned if it doesn’t do a pretty good job of selling it. The Beast Within is nothing if not a slow burn. Gabriel doesn’t meet his first indubitable werewolf in the flesh until over two-thirds of the way in, while Grace’s chapters involve little more than poring over musty books and museum exhibits, giving them at times more of the flavor of an educational CD-ROM than an adventure game.

Much of Grace’s time is spent touring Neuschwanstein Castle, complete with the obligatory tourist audio guide.

Clearly Jane Jensen was touched by the wistful, sorrowful life of Ludwig, enough so as to make it the thematic bedrock of her game. She saw parallels with a certain modern eccentric whose days would also end in tragedy and controversy:

He was a real misfit, never in sync with the world. He lived in a fantasy world, and because he had a lot of money, he could surround himself with fantasy, not unlike Michael Jackson now.

As time went on, he got more and more beaten down by the world. His relationships never worked out, and he was always disillusioned. He was a very sensitive soul who was just hurt by everything, who kept retreating and withdrawing.

When he was young, he was very much a Prince Charming type. And of course his end was very tragic. So I just think it is a very beautiful, sad story of a life.

Grace’s historical research and Gabriel’s more active investigations meet only in the sixth and final chapter of the game, when the former arranges a public premiere of the lost opera in order to cure the latter of the affliction he’s picked up. The audacity of this bit is almost unbelievable. Not only did the game’s soundtrack composer Robert Holmes — also Jane Jensen’s husband — dare to write an opera, he had the colossal cheek to make it a lost Wagner opera. It took him “about a week,” as he remembers it. (One has to assume that the real Wagner devoted somewhat more time to his masterworks). I’m in no way qualified to judge the worthiness of Holmes’s opera, but I must assume it to be dire enough to send aficionados running from the room with their hands over their ears. Nevertheless, here’s to ambition. One certainly can’t accuse this game of pulling any of its punches.

All of its interest in place and history can rather overshadow its bona fides as a work of horror. Much of the time, it’s more eerie than terrifying, more melancholy than thrilling; suffice to say that it lives in a place far removed from the schlocky sensationalism of Roberta Williams’s Phantasmagoria. When the time finally does come to confront werewolves nose to snout, however, The Beast Within doesn’t disappoint. There’s one scene in the penultimate chapter — anyone who’s played the game will know which one I’m talking about — that’s unsettling enough to give you nightmares. While it’s easy enough to laugh off Phantasmagoria’s cartoonish execution scenes, you won’t be laughing at this one. If the climax in the opera house is ironically less horrifying than what comes immediately before it, fair enough; one scene like that should be enough for any game.

All of which is to say that The Beast Within is a richly textured, admirably complex work of fiction in many ways. At its best and judged in the context of its time, it was one of the most impressive interactive narratives yet attempted on a computer by 1995. But alas, it isn’t always this best version of itself. What with so much love having been so clearly poured into the game from so many different quarters, I can’t help but wonder why Jane Jensen couldn’t manage to make it just a little bit better. Mixed in with all of its rarefied intellectual and thematic aspirations is plenty of B-movie amateurishness. The language barrier gets erected and torn down willy-nilly, depending on whether Jensen wants to make a plot element out of it or not at any given instant; particularly amusing is the Schattenjäger library in Gabriel’s family castle, consisting of a bunch of Medieval texts helpfully written in modern English. There’s no reason that plausible ways around the language problems couldn’t have been built into the game’s puzzle structure, doing much for its sense of mimesis and potentially even for its character-building in the process. (Perhaps Grace needs to enlist the help of the hated Gerde to translate?) Similarly, the game’s timeline makes no sense whatsoever. Gabriel and Grace’s separate investigations overlap with one another in ways that would only be possible if one or both had a time machine to hand.

These may strike some as the pettiest of niggles, but the fact is that continuity matters in the crafting of believable fictions of any stripe. No credible book-publishing house or film studio would allow a story to go out in such a state as this one. Plot may stand at a lower rung on the artistic totem pole than character or theme in the minds of many, but even most of these will acknowledge that a coherent plot is a necessary prerequisite to those other things.

The Beast Within has some really good puzzles that stretch the interface beyond the typical “use item X on hotspot Y.” One, for example, requires you to construct a fake telephone message by splicing together snippets of recorded speech.

And then there is the interactive design. Jane Jensen resisted any pressure that may have come her way to dumb down The Beast Within in the manner of Phantasmagoria: her game is full of real puzzles worthy of the name, in some cases pretty good ones. In fact, it fares considerably better on this metric than Sins of the Fathers. Nevertheless, there remains a smattering of bad design choices that serve to pull you out of the game every time you feel yourself on the verge of becoming truly immersed in its world. A few of the puzzles hinge on the sort of moon logic for which adventure games have been so often justifiably criticized. (Using a cuckoo clock on a potted plant? Really, Jane?) Even one example of this sort of thing can be ruinous to the player’s experience, in that it destroys her trust in the game’s interactive design at the same time that it demolishes the integrity of its fiction.

In Grace’s chapters, Jensen lays claim to the dubious status of being the inventor of the hidden-object genre: you have to pixel-hunt your way through several big areas, looking for that one tiny thing you overlooked the last dozen times through. You see, this game really, really wants you to know everything possible about Richard Wagner and King Ludwig II: it won’t let the plot proceed until you’ve clicked on every last hotspot on every last detail in every last musty little corner of their respective museum and castle — in a few cases twice. Finding it all can be a challenge even if you’re playing directly from a walkthrough.

And when we get to the big finale, Jensen falls into the common trap of assuming that the ending of an adventure game ought to be much harder than what has come before. (In reality, the opposite is true; the player has already done lots of thinking during the mushy middle, and now just wants an exciting climax followed by victory, with a minimum of fuss.) One key puzzle here hinges on manipulating an object in a way that the interface has never allowed before and never even hinted was a possibility. And the literal last action you need to do in the game is a tricky exercise in perfect timing and precise clicking that’s also out of keeping with everything that’s come before, so much so that you could easily assume you’ve missed something and waste hours looking for it.

But regular readers have heard similar litanies of design sins from me many times before, so I won’t belabor these issues further here. The Beast Within is yet another checkered product of Sierra’s creative culture, which, in marked contrast to such other adventure specialists as Infocom, LucasArts, and Legend Entertainment, never emphasized outside play-testing or even serious discussion of the craft of design in the abstract. Interesting and engaging as it is in its present state, it could have been so much better, if only a process had been put in place to make it better. Whatever the merits of his year-to-year choices as a businessman, Ken Williams’s failure to do so — a byproduct of his personal disinterest in actually playing his company’s games — will always stand as his biggest single lapse in my book.

Wagner’s Lost Opera, the grand finale to The Beast Within. Most games, then and since, have tended to front-load their most impressive scenes so that everyone — not least potential buyers — can see them. This one’s willingness to hold off until the very end says something, I think, about the spirit of grandiose (operatic?) idealism that marked the whole project.

The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery shipped on six CDs less than a week before the Christmas of 1995, half a year after Phantasmagoria had been greeted with huge sales and much mainstream-press attention. Everything about this latest release reflected the current ebullient mood at Sierra, where everyone was convinced they were about to truly hit the big time, with a vastly expanded customer base. For example, the box was careful not to say that this was “Gabriel Knight 2,” for fear of scaring away that new generation of buyers, who might not be keen on starting a series in the middle and might be even less keen on playing an “old-fashioned” game like Sins of the Fathers.

Indeed, even Sierra’s new fictional genre of choice reflected the new focus on the mainstream. Horror was a less stereotypically nerdy ghetto than fantasy or science fiction, yet one that was still fairly well-suited to adventure-game modes of interaction. So, after never touching the genre for the first decade and change of their existence, Sierra was now all over it. Three of the five domestically-developed adventures they released in 1995 were horror games. (The third companion to Phantasmagoria and The Beast Within in this respect was the lower-profile Shivers, a solitary Myst-style first-person puzzler created by a breakaway team at Bright Star, Sierra’s educational-software subsidiary.)

In comparison to the adventure-lite Phantasmagoria, The Beast Within was perhaps a wolf in sheep’s clothing: it was, as we’ve seen, a game that evinced a full measure of respect for its audience’s collective intelligence, with challenging puzzles and complex present-day and historical mysteries to tease out. Still, there’s little reason to believe it was because of this that it failed to sell anywhere near as well as its predecessor. The mainstream magazines and newspapers that had covered the older game as a curiosity showed little interest in the newer one; ditto the many people who had bought Phantasmagoria strictly to show off their new multimedia computer systems. That left only the traditional adventure market, the same people who had bought Sins of the Fathers. It seemed that Sierra was suddenly back to square one.

This state of affairs was, to say the least, deeply disconcerting to everyone there, as they all found themselves having to adjust their paradigm of gaming’s necessary future at lightning speed. Sierra programmer Greg Tomko-Pavia expressed the collective confusion in a contemporary online interview whose frankness presumably wouldn’t have endeared it to his managers:

I must say that I’m surprised Phantasmagoria has done so well. Presently, we’ve sold over 700,000 copies — more than any other Sierra game. I can’t account for it. In my opinion, Phantasmagoria suffered from weak writing, acting, and direction. I don’t understand why Gabriel Knight 2, to my mind superior in every detail, isn’t doing nearly so well. What do I know? I just write code!

At the time of The Beast Within’s release, Sierra was already filming their third big interactive horror film on their Oakhurst sound stage, a sequel-in-name-only to Phantasmagoria subtitled A Puzzle of Flesh. Its garish grindhouse aesthetic made its two boundary-pushing predecessors look downright prudish — which was, one supposes, further progress of a sort. But it would prove the last production of its type. Once it too had disappointed in the marketplace, its feverish courting of controversy having largely come up dry, the facility Sierra had built with such pride and at such expense would be used only occasionally, for 3D motion captures and the like. It was now clear that gaming writ large was going in a different direction entirely, leaving the sound stage a fork in a world of soup.

As for Gabriel and Grace: against all the odds, they would return for one final game, but that would be a more constrained production than this one, using one of the 3D engines that were taking over the industry. There’s a world-weariness about that game — a sense of existential despair on the part of its creators that’s almost palpable when playing it — that you won’t find in this one, which was created by a team who saw only limitless potential everywhere they looked. The Beast Within is the product of a rare moment when the creative and the commercial impulse seemed united as one. For all its frustrating infelicities, it positively soars with its makers’ enthusiasm, with their bracing willingness to just try. Neither Jane Jensen nor any of the rest of them realized how lucky they were to be given the time and money to do so.

Six months after the release of The Beast Within, Roberta Williams, who was always the bellwether of the current creative direction of Sierra, gave a new verdict on the current state of adventure games that contradicted everything Sierra had been saying and doing for the past couple of years:

I believe adventure games have now gotten too plot-heavy. Not just ours, but also a lot of our competitors’ games. I think game designers need to get back to the game and forget all this wanna-be-writer-and-director stuff. They don’t realize people just want to play a game. They want to have control over what happens. Video clips are fine — if they’re very short, to the point, concise, and then… get out of there.

The times, they were still a-changing.

(Sources: the books Influential Game Designers: Jane Jensen by Anastasia Salter and The Beast Within: Official Player’s Guide by Corey Sandler with Jane Jensen; Computer Gaming World of November 1995 and February 1996; Sierra’s customer newsletter InterAction of Fall 1994, Spring 1995, Fall 1995, Holiday 1995, Spring 1996, and Summer 1996. Online sources include Anthony Larme’s interview with Greg Tomko-Pavia, “The Making of… the Gabriel Knight Trilogy” at Edge Online, Andrea Santorio’s interview with Jane Jensen, Martin Bourassa’s interview with Dean Erickson, Jane Jensen and Robert Holmes’s appearance on a Reddit “Ask Me Anything,” and Ingrid Heyn’s interview with Will Binder.

Now re-titled with the numeral Sierra once eschewed, Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

This résumé would later lead to my favorite ever interview opening, from the adorably fannish website Adventure Classic Gaming: “You have worked with some of the best actors in the business — Al Pacino, Michael J. Fox, Bruce Boxleitner, Mira Furlan, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and of course, Dean Erickson and Joanne Takahashi.” Two of these names are not like the others…

Comments
62 Responses

- Sol_HSA

August 20, 2021 at 10:16 am

The use of filmed actors instead of drawn (or 3d) characters in the beast within undelined, for me, how much of an a-hole a generic adventure game character is.

Take the scene where you go to someone’s office (whom you know nothing about, or suspect of any wrongdoing), ask them to fetch you some water to get them out of the office, and then go through their stuff.

For a virtual character that’s understandable, in an adventure game logic kind of way, but to see an actual actor do it? Ummm..

- Niccolò

August 20, 2021 at 10:45 am

Great article as always! I played this game a few months ago and while I agree that the writing is *way* better than most adventure games, I was decidedly underwhelmed by the actual puzzles and gameplay. The world just isn’t very interactive, navigating it is excruciatingly slow, a lot of locations are mostly empty, and puzzles that feel interesting but not completely arbitrary are few and far between. Personally, I liked the sequel (Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned) a LOT better in that regard: conversations, locations, puzzles and general interactivity felt much richer and deeper. It felt much more like a “real” game, to me at least.

- Petter Sjölund

August 20, 2021 at 1:08 pm

I wouldn’t call the writing in The Beast Within better than the average LucasArts game. In fact I can’t think of any LucasArts game, The Dig included, that doesn’t have better written dialogue. The fact that The Beast Within takes place in the real world, however, and is so ambitious and well researched, makes it in many ways more interesting than those games.

- JackyT

August 26, 2021 at 2:09 pm

I loved this game. In fact I had an hour-long discussion in Bad Ischl with an American author of a book on Ludwig at his book launch. All my information was based on ‘The Beast Within’!

- Peter Olausson

August 20, 2021 at 12:20 pm

“Frasier” was easily spotted. :-)

As for the opera, how much of it do we see/hear? Perhaps Wagner could have created a work of similar length in “about a week”? Creating a Wagner replica sounds very daring, to the point that you would do it only if you knew exactly what you were doing.

You mention GK(2) shipped just in time for the Christmas buying season. Jensen has mentioned (on Gamespot Designer Diaries) that it arrived in stores on Christmas Eve, which ought to be among the worst days of the year for such a release.

- Jimmy Maher

August 20, 2021 at 5:58 pm

Thanks!

We see about ten minutes of the opera in the game, but what’s there is surprisingly complete: music, libretto, stage set, costumes, singers and orchestra.

I don’t have an exact release date for the game; it’s unfortunately not found in the American copyright registry, whose “publication date” field has been the gift that’s kept on giving for years when it comes to questions like this. Jane Jensen may very well be right, but I wouldn’t just take her word on such a specific data point without corroboration. Not that she would be dishonest — it’s just that memory is a malleable thing, and developers’ awareness of the logistics of distribution is often vague under any circumstances.

- Brian Mathews

August 21, 2021 at 2:20 pm

It is too bad we don’t have super accurate writing and release information as we do for the origin of the Ultima series!

I would guess the release and sales records for many books, games, movies, etc., are now irretrievably lost or slowly moldering away in boxes in attics and warehouses…

- California Tax Payer

August 22, 2021 at 8:12 pm

Looking at CD timestamps, it looks like December 12, 1995 was the finish date. That would be just enough time to rush duplication and shipping for around Christmas Eve. Most importantly for Sierra Inc, the revenue would hit in the right quarter.

- Jimmy Maher

August 23, 2021 at 8:54 am

That’s some solid evidence. Edit made. Thanks!

- Don

August 20, 2021 at 12:37 pm

Love your series! In the image captions “ Will Binder directs Joanne Takahasi” should read TakahasHi.

- Jimmy Maher

August 20, 2021 at 5:59 pm

Thanks!

- Peter Olausson

August 20, 2021 at 2:32 pm

Regarding “films from the pre-Citizen Kane era” … I don’t know which you have seen, but films like Wings (1927) and All quiet on the western front (1930) have plenty of scenes spectacular in every way — a long, long way from live-theater productions indeed!

- Jimmy Maher

August 20, 2021 at 6:01 pm

Yeah, I put that in just before publishing this piece. Bad decision. Thanks!

- Peter Orvetti

August 21, 2021 at 10:06 pm

A fair point, but “Citizen Kane” certainly defined a new paradigm in filmmaking (that most other films still did not reach until at least the mid-1950s).

- Martin

August 20, 2021 at 6:45 pm

A couple of questions.

You mentioned SAG a few times at the top. Was it just a choice to use SAG actors or something of a requirement.

Secondly you said the plot was ‘mind-bogglingly ridiculous’. Can you expand on that. Was it Ludwig being a werewolf, the Wagner angle, Grace discovering the opera, all above or someing else?

- Jimmy Maher

August 20, 2021 at 6:59 pm

1. It was, I think, a combination of practicality and aspiration. On the former front: the membership roll of SAG is by far the best tool for finding reasonably competent professional actors quickly and efficiently. On the latter front: Sierra was very invested in the notion of interactive movies, and wanted them to be taken seriously by Hollywood. And Hollywood was and is a SAG town. Without a SAG membership card, you don’t work there. Conversely, hiring SAG actors demonstrated a certain professionalism and seriousness of intent.

2. Reread your list of possible reasons. I think you’ll find you’ve answered your own question. ;)

- Lisa H.

August 20, 2021 at 6:52 pm

Friedrich Von Glower

Wow, this is almost a Sesame Street name for this kind of character. (As far as I can tell, “Von Glower” is not a real name; all the search hits I get are either directly related to this game or are people using the name e.g. as a Twitter handle.)

[The player] can jump around during the game at any point, so the actor has to have a neutral emotion at the start of each scene. [The scene currently being filmed] could [be] before a big scene happened or could [be] after a big scene.
In a regular movie, you would like to tell [the actor], “Okay, this just happened: you just broke up with your girlfriend.” Or, “An hour ago you found out some information about a person you have been dealing with.”
In the game, [the player] can go anywhere [they] want. So there is no linear progression.

What is the original text here without all your emendations in brackets? I guess “[The scene currently being filmed]” was “It” and “[the actor]” was “him”, but I’m having trouble figuring out what words you thought were unclear that you changed them to “the player” and “they”, and what was said instead of “be”.

Mass-marked computer games

(in the caption of the first video clip) Mass-marketed?

Am I wrong in thinking the old guy calling Gabriel “Herr Knight” the second clip looks familiar from somewhere, or is it just that these central casting guys always look alike?

There’s one scene in the penultimate chapter — anyone who’s played the game will know which one I’m talking about — that’s unsettling enough to give you nightmares.

I haven’t played this game and have no particular intention of doing so. Would someone care to spoil this for me?

In fact, it fairs considerably better

Fares.

- Peter Olausson

August 20, 2021 at 7:15 pm

I find a few von Glowers in old newspapers, American and Austrian. Never a common name, it has at least existed.

- Jimmy Maher

August 20, 2021 at 7:20 pm

Thanks for the corrections!

The interview quote comes from page 73 of the Official Player’s Guide, which you can find here: https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/downloads/. It’s quite garbled in the original, and sports some emendations even there that attempt to clean it up, but don’t do a great job of it. To answer your specific questions: 1) “the player” and “they” were “you” in the original, but this can easily be confused with “you” the actor from the previous paragraph. 2) In the case of the “be,” the tense suddenly shifts to the present perfect (“have been”) in the original.

The shocking scene happens when Gabriel comes upon a werewolf that has reverted to human form and is, well, *feeding* on his human prey. You can doubtless find it in many place on YouTube. It happens in Chapter 5 out of 6 — so, toward the end of the game, but not *right* at the end.

- ShadowAngel

September 3, 2021 at 8:45 pm

Von Glower is at least a believable name for Germany (i am German) unlike Gerde. That’s simply not a name in use here, instead the correct form would be Gerda. It’s one of the three things that make me laugh, the other being how Gabriel pronounces Königlich-Bayrische Hofjagdlodge (it sounds like he just swallows his tongue half-way through) and in general, all the attempts at speaking german, it even tops the horribly broken german in Die Hard, namely the cop in the police station who is so unfriendly to Gabriel, just because he wants “Liebe” (i think that joke flew over the heads of a lot of non-german speaking people, that Leber, pronounced by Gabriel sounds like “Liebe” (Love) :D )

Kay E. Kuter, probably the only “big” name in this (at least he was in a massive boatload of TV Shows and The Last Starfighter, he’s a “Oh, it’s THAT guy!” kind of actor), does a pretty good job at playing a bavarian though.

I love the game, it’s a lot of fun to play, the story is interesting and of course there’s a lot of nostalgia for somebody who group up around and in Munich.

- xxx

August 20, 2021 at 7:05 pm

“A fork in a world of soup” is an amazing turn of phrase. Well played!

Typo: “three episodes of the sitcom Fraser” — it’s “Frasier”.

- Jimmy Maher

August 20, 2021 at 7:27 pm

I’m afraid I cheerfully stole that from Noel Gallagher of Oasis fame, who applied it to his brother Liam. (Or was it the other way around? I can never keep them straight. But I *think* Noel is the cleverer of the pair, who would be more likely to say something like that.)

- Niall

September 5, 2021 at 8:35 am

There’s an old Irish expression: “If it was raining soup, I’d have a fork.” It would be well-known to folk in the North of England, Noel Gallagher included ;)

- Richard

August 20, 2021 at 7:25 pm

I love this game so much. The acting is awful and the plot is weird. I love the atmosphere, and the history you learn, and all the digital photography. I love games where you learn, and I felt good learning about real places and real people. This is a snapshot of what I wish interactive movies had brought to games. Also, this reminded me a lot of the first graphic adventure game I ever played, the CD-ROM version of Sierra’s Lost in Time. That was another game that used a lot of digitized photographs as background images, but only had a few very short video clips. I loved the atmosphere of wandering around the digitized images of the French manor in the first half of that game. I definitely preferred the real world feel of using digital photography as backgrounds in adventure games rather then the pre-rendered background of Myst. I recognize the digital photos are usually uglier and make for a clunkier experience playing the game, but even so, I always felt they drew me in better.

- Marco

August 20, 2021 at 7:37 pm

A fair review, which picks up both the good and the bad of this game. I do like adventure games that blend fact and fiction to a point that’s almost unsettling, which The Beast Within definitely scores on. It gets bonus points from me for bringing attention to an often-neglected side of German history (i.e. not the Nazis), and was clearly written as a labour of love in that respect.
The homoerotic subtext also mirrors much literature of the period, especially Dorian Gray.

As you note though, the puzzling is a bit all over the place. I equally remember getting stuck for ages at one point because I hadn’t clicked on one hotspot twice.

The third game takes many of the same ingredients, e.g. lots of pixel hunting for clues, baddies who don’t appear until most of the way through the game, but lacks whatever it was that kept The Beast Within reasonably together and coherent, so collapses into (imo) complete garbage.

- Zack

August 20, 2021 at 8:32 pm

Gabriel Knight 2 is infamous in french for one of the worst dubbing in the entire business. During some lines you can hear the recording crew talking in the background, actors looking for their text and repeating lines to get in character, or try to. It has completely eclipsed the actual merits or demerits of the game. In France, if you speak about Gabriel Knight 2, those who know it will know it based on its horrible dub, basically.

- William Hern

August 20, 2021 at 9:18 pm

Great article Jimmy!

You wrote: “I’m not aware of any other full-motion-video productions from the 1990s that ponied up for a full-fledged location shoot.”

The X-Files game, released in 1998, was a full-motion-video point-and-click adventure game and had a number of location shoots, including at a former US naval base. Maybe you’ll take a look at it when you get to 1998?

- Jimmy Maher

August 21, 2021 at 7:36 am

I expected a comment like yours. ;) Thanks, duly noted.

- Jan Rydzak

August 21, 2021 at 11:45 am

Seconded, fantastic article!

I would love to read your take on the X-Files game, which I think is criminally underrated for what it aspires to be (and in my opinion achieves). AFAIK the vast majority of the scenes in the game were location shoots with minimal use of rendering. Alas, despite its merits, it ended up getting sucked into the same time warp that was consuming other adventure games by 1998, and the use of FMV was nothing if not anachronistic by that point.

- Jimmy Maher

August 21, 2021 at 12:18 pm

I haven’t played it yet myself, but I do look forward to it.

- Josh Martin

August 24, 2021 at 5:12 pm

Digital Pictures (who we’ve encountered before) did location shoots for some of their games. Ground Zero: Texas was filmed in an actual desert (in California, not Texas) and for Corpse Killer they went all the way to Puerto Rico. American Laser Games did location shoots for some of their popular arcade shooting gallery games like Mad Dog McCree and Crime Patrol. And who could forget the CD-i adaptation of the Florida-set syndicated TV series Thunder in Paradise…

- Jimmy Maher

August 24, 2021 at 7:30 pm

Ah, how could I forget Digital Pictures? Thanks!

- Harry Kaplan

August 21, 2021 at 3:36 am

A few, small, might-have-been notes. At one point, long ago in an oh-no-it-can’t-be-over-yet galaxy far away, I had a little email correspondence with Dean Ericson. He was making a living as a personal trainer in LA then (look him up, he’s gone on to explore many other things since) but was having very serious back problems. As was I, which is the subject about which we were comparing notes. He mentioned that Jane Jensen had tried to pitch to Sierra (guess that means Ken) a fourth Gabriel Knight game as another FMV that would be written with him in mind, but Ken didn’t bite. I think the supernatural element was to be ghosts, but a very new idea of ghosts that Jane was working through. I know that much later Jane wrote an intro short story for a new GK game, sent out to her fans, based on yet a different supernatural idea, and there’s also a three-part comic book (not hard to find on the Internet) more or less pitching to the world another GK story idea. Activision at that time (and maybe still?) had the legal rights to the character, and Jane’s never-say-die fans put a GK4 petition out there directed at that company. I cheerfully signed it.

- Adam M

August 21, 2021 at 4:54 am

Where does Urban Runner fit into the story of FMV Sierra games? It was published under the Coktel Vision label in 1996, according to Moby Games. It looks like it was set in Paris, so I wondered how and why this game was developed and released, in the context of what was happening with Sierra’s FMV productions produced back in Oakhurst.

- Jay Friday

August 21, 2021 at 6:52 am

Coktel Vision wasn’t a publishing label, but an old and storied French development house that was acquired by Sierra. Their games were generally very, very French – meaning ambitious and unique, but often failing in a lot of the categories that, say, gaming magazines would use to determine whether a game would be good or not. Their most well known games (and probably most palatable for American audiences) were the Gobliiins series of surreal room escape puzzle games.

As far as I know they remained fairly independent from main branch Sierra, and kept making the games that they were making. I wonder if Urban Runner came from a Sierra directive or not. It definitely fits into the Sierra portfolio of that time more than their games have ever done.

- Aula

August 21, 2021 at 7:54 am

“Fraser” should be “Frasier” (and since earlier comments make me think you may have difficulty grasping the error here, the correct spelling is F-R-A-S-I-E-R)

- Jimmy Maher

August 21, 2021 at 9:35 am

Thanks!

- Brian Mathews

August 21, 2021 at 2:24 pm

“You have worked with some of the best actors in the business — Al Pacino, Michael J. Fox, Bruce Boxleitner, Mira Furlan, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and of course, Dean Erickson and Joanne Takahashi.”

Ooh… totally jumping off thread… but Babylon 5 is due for a rewatch soon!

- Ian C

August 21, 2021 at 11:44 pm

That was one of our lockdown shows (we have the DVDs). The special effects of season one are a bit iffy, but the rest of the show holds up quite well. I keep hoping someone will run an image-sharpening machine-learning filter over the old lo-res footage and boost the show’s resolution into the modern era.

- Brian M

August 24, 2021 at 10:42 am

That would be cool… although I have a feeling it is unlikely.

- Captain Kal

September 2, 2021 at 5:06 pm

There is a Babylon 5 HD version, on Amazon

- Buck

August 21, 2021 at 2:56 pm

“I’m in no way qualified to judge the worthiness of Holmes’s opera, but I must assume it to be dire enough to send aficionados running from the room with their hands over their ears.”

So, pretty much like a Wagner opera then.

- GeoX

August 23, 2021 at 3:43 am

It’s fair to criticize Wagner for being an anti-Semitic asshole, but as one of the said aficionados…you’re not right. And I realize it’s more or less a joke, but the “lol isn’t Wagner boring jokes” are just lazy and dumb.

(Though okay, granted, fair enough: Parsifal IS kind of boring.)

- Buck

August 24, 2021 at 7:51 pm

I was half joking. If Holmes sends people running from the room with his (partial) opera – well, that’s pretty much my reaction to Wagner, so maybe he’s not too far off.

(I really don’t believe in the worthiness of a piece of music. But as far as the game goes, Holmes opera is intended to sound like a lost Wagner piece to players who are probably not that familiar with Wagner, and I assume it does that reasonably well. I tried to listen to it, but I couldn’t stand it for long. It did sound rather modern to my ears, but I think so does Wagner at times).

BTW if something sends you running from the room, it’s probably not boring ;)

- Sniffnoy

August 21, 2021 at 4:34 pm

Hi, just a comment on a website issue… it seems like recently something has happened where the text starts closer to the left edge of the “notebook page” than it used to? It doesn’t look right.

- Jimmy Maher

August 21, 2021 at 8:25 pm

Do you mean in the comments area? I did adjust the margins and indentations recently to make room to nest comments eight instead of five levels deep. The text of the articles should not have been affected, however.

- Lisa H.

August 21, 2021 at 9:00 pm

Now that Sniffnoy has pointed it out, I see it too. I think the post text is also affected. The left margin is narrower than the right.

- Jimmy Maher

August 22, 2021 at 7:05 am

Okay, I think it should be sorted now. (On most browers, you need to reload the page with the shift key held down to clear the old stylesheet from the cache.) Thanks for your good eyes!

- Sniffnoy

August 22, 2021 at 4:38 pm

Ah, thanks!

- Emily VanDerWerff

August 21, 2021 at 11:45 pm

Storytelling-wise, the Gabriel Knight games do leave certain things to be desired, but I always admire their crackpot ambition. I wish there were 16 more.

I do think the weird, lugubrious quality of what the games are doing has a surprising amount in common with the eight-episode Netflix streaming season. You can easily imagine The Beast Within, in particular, fitting into that storytelling format, largely as is.

- Mike Whalen

August 22, 2021 at 10:35 pm

Great article as always

Take from a New Orleans native:

It’s New Orleanian, not New Orleansian.

- Jimmy Maher

August 23, 2021 at 5:05 am

I wondered about that. Thanks!

- Dev F

August 23, 2021 at 6:55 am

For all its ambition, one thing that always struck me about Beast Within was how much it was straining against the limits of how much FMV Sierra could comfortably fit into a game, even one that shipped on six CDs. Jensen has talked about how she had to cut two full chapters of material (including one in which the player apparently played as King Ludwig!) early in the development process, but it’s clear that they were still nipping and tucking things right up to the end.

The last-minute cut that stood out to me is late in the game, when Grace gets hold of the letter from Von Glower to Gabriel in which the baron makes his big “join me in werewolfry” pitch. There was so clearly supposed to be a major dramatic scene in which Grace gives the letter to Gabriel and he has to choose, in essence, between Grace and Von Glower. But whenever you try to have Grace give him the letter, she gives a “I’ll do that later” type reply — until the now-or-never moment comes, and when you try to offer him the letter at that point, you get a weird TEXT pop-up that nopes out on the whole idea. Apparently this was something that was still in the game until it was too late to even loop in a single line of new dialogue.

I always thought it was a shame that the team couldn’t have cut some final-disc footage of people walking up and down stairs or trying to hang grates back on the wall to make room for the emotional climax of the story!

- Jonathan Badger

August 23, 2021 at 5:57 pm

“‘You have worked with some of the best actors in the business — Al Pacino, Michael J. Fox, Bruce Boxleitner, Mira Furlan, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and of course, Dean Erickson and Joanne Takahashi.’ Two of these names are not like the others…”

Yes, Furlan and Hoffman are sadly no longer with us. That’s what you meant, right? Not something about the talent of the last two, heaven forbid.

- Michael

August 23, 2021 at 10:40 pm

It’s interesting to me that no one has commented on how much the acting (at least in the sample clips here) resembles that seen on the soap opera “Dark Shadows.” I suspect that its fanbase (small though it is and was) would find this an enjoyable game as well. Soaps probably face some of the same challenges of having to get actors up to speed from a “neutral” position quickly, although their narrative hinges on the exact opposite expectation that the audience knows all of the history behind each scene in obsessive detail.

- Fuck David Cage

August 24, 2021 at 6:57 pm

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father is my favorite adventure game, but this game fucked it up and the series never recovered. Sins of the Father was set in a mysterious, dark corner of New Orleans filled with mysteries, threats and atmospheric; The Beast within was set in a quaint German village in the daylight with virtually no threats and no tension. Gabriel, Mosley and Grace were memorable characters who mixed cynicism and humor and changed their attitude over time in Sins of the Father; in The Beast within, they were boring, featureless cyphers who were only there to serve the plot. Sins of the Father had plenty of great, challenging puzzles and clever jokes; The Beast within had only a few puzzles and was entirely humorless. Sins of the Father had memorable villains; The Beast within had a generic German stereotype who was not even trying to hide his evil plans.

- Harry Kaplan

August 26, 2021 at 8:57 pm

Did we play the same game?

- Harry Kaplan

August 26, 2021 at 9:12 pm

Aw, c’mon, Jimmy! I can’t believe you’re snubbing both of the first two Gabriel Knight games in your Hall of Fame. You’re certainly right in your intro when you make it clear that your Hall of Fame is a very personal selection, because I just finished a game that lives there (it shall go unnamed) that must have pulled in a marker with you to be awarded that degree of praise.

Still friends, right?

- Ross

September 4, 2021 at 6:35 pm

Tim Curry obviously has the far superior voice, but Gabe in this game has an awkwardness to him that makes the character SO much better. In the first game, he comes off like a genre character written by someone who only has a superficial pop-culture understanding of the genre: that Jensen had this surface-level idea of what traits a Cool Supernatural Detective Story hero possesses but didn’t appreciate the way that professionals at writing the genre balance those traits out to prevent a character from becoming unlikeable. So the Sins of the Fathers Gabe comes off as a cad rather than sexy; stupid rather than aloof; arrogant rather than unflappable. (If you’ve seen Star Trek Lower Decks, it reminds me of a scene where an insecure Boimer tries to make himself look cool by synthesizing all the traits of “cool” clothing into an outfit that is part motorcycle jacket, part letterman’s jacket, covered in gold chains, with a football, one of Gaga’s pink boots and a green Chuck Taylor).

In The Beast Within, the fact that Dean Erickson’s awkwardness constantly undermines Gabe’s try-hard coolness makes the character work better.

- Niall

September 5, 2021 at 8:27 am

I was a big adventure gamer in my youth, but lost interest in my mid-teens, around about the same time as the death of the Amiga. It wasn’t until I went to college and had to purchase my first laptop that I fell back in love with them. And the game that brought me back in, as it happens, was Sins of the Father, which I discovered many years after its release.

Despite its flaws, I’d never played a game with such a sense of place, and such a meticulously researched story.

On finishing it, l hunted out and eventually found a copy of the sequel. Expecting more of the same, as you would, I was horrified to discover the new approach they had taken. I was unaware of this brief, nauseating trend in FMV games (I’m only really finding out about it now thanks to your blog) — I simply couldn’t fathom why someone would think this a better or more practical way to make an adventure game.

So it’s largely to the game’s credit that I persevered and, in the end, really enjoyed it. It’s true that, after being a dislikable bastard in the first game, Gabriel comes across as a more sympathetic character here, and this more sensitive approach works well with the not-so-subtle homoerotic undertones.

Nonetheless, during my play-through, I couldn’t help but think how much better each section would have played as a traditional point-and-click adventure. And now that I realise how much had to be cut, it seems that, had they taken a more conventional approach, this could have been by far the best game in the series.

It’s a real shame Sierra was more keen on chasing a non-existent mainstream adventure game audience than trying to understand the audience it had already built.

Anyway, thanks for the education: the blog is great.

- Erik Moeller

November 21, 2021 at 7:40 pm

Small typo: Grace Nakamura -> Grace Nakimura

Just went back and fixed that in my own review ( https://lib.reviews/the-beast-within-a-gabriel-knight-mystery ).

- Jimmy Maher

November 21, 2021 at 7:51 pm

Thanks!

The Neo-Classical Interactive Fiction of 1995
September 3, 2021

For all that it was a period with some significant sparks of heat and light, we might reasonably call the time between 1989 and 1994 the Dark Ages of Interactive Fiction. It was only in 1995 that the lights were well and truly turned on again and the Interactive Fiction Renaissance began in earnest. This was the point when a number of percolating trends — the evolving TADS and Inform programming languages, the new generation of Z-Machine interpreters, the serious discussions of design craft taking place on Usenet — bore a sudden and rather shockingly verdant fruit. It became, one might say, Year One of the interactive-fiction community as we know it today.

The year is destined always to be remembered most of all for the very first Interactive Fiction Competition, better known as simply the “IF Comp” to its friends. Its influence on the design direction of what used to be called text adventures would soon become as undeniable as it was unwelcome in the eyes of some ultra-traditionalists: its guidance that entries should be finishable in two hours or so led in the course of things to an interest in depth in place of breadth, in literary and formal experimentation in place of the “gamier” pleasures of point-scoring and map-making.

But the Comp’s influence would take time to make itself known. This first edition of it, organized by an early community pillar named G. Kevin Wilson, was a relatively modest affair, with just twelve entries, six in each of the two categories into which it was divided: one for TADS games, one for Inform games. (This division would fall by the wayside in future Comps.) The entries did prefigure some of the self-referential experimentation to come: Undo by Neil deMause placed you at the very end of a (deliberately) broken, corrupted game and expected you to muddle your way to victory; Mystery Science Theater 3000 Presents Detective by C.E. Forman made somewhat mean-spirited, television-inspired fun of a really, really bad game released a few years earlier by a twelve-year-old author; The Magic Toyshop by Gareth Rees took place all in one room, thus becoming the perfect treat for mapping haters. Yet in my opinion none of these games join the ranks of the year’s very best works.

In retrospect, the lineup of games in that first Comp is perhaps most notable for becoming the venue for the first polished work of interactive fiction by Andrew Plotkin; his influence on the future direction of the community, in terms of both aesthetics and technology, would be comparable only to that of Mike Roberts and Graham Nelson among the figures we’ve already met in previous articles. But his A Change in the Weather, a punishingly difficult meta-puzzle of a game which one couldn’t hope to solve without many replays, stands as a fairly minor entry in his impressive oeuvre today, despite winning the Inform category of that first Comp.

So, I’d like to reserve any more discussion of this and subsequent IF Comps for future articles, and focus today on what I consider to be the real standout text adventures of 1995, of which there are a gratifying number. The games below evince no concern whatsoever about keeping their playing time down to a couple of hours. On the contrary: all of the games that follow are big enough that Infocom could conceivably have released them, while at least one or two of them are actually bigger than Infocom’s technology could possibly have allowed. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that works like these are my personal sweet spot for interactive fiction: big, puzzly works which are well-written but which aren’t afraid to be games — albeit games which incorporate the design lessons of those pioneers that came before them. Neo-classical interactive fiction, if you will. (Yes, I’m aware that we’ve jumped from the Renaissance to Neoclassicism with dizzying speed. Such is life when you’re making broad — overly broad? — historical metaphors.) If your preferences are anything like mine, the games that follow will be heaven for you.

In fact, let me close this introduction with something of a personal plea. I’ve noticed a reluctance on the part of many diehard Infocom fans to give what came afterward a fair shake. I do understand that nostalgia is a big part of the reason people read sites like this one and play the games that are featured here, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Although I do try very hard to keep nostalgia out of my own game criticism, I firmly believe that no reason to play a game is ever a wrong one, as long as you’re enjoying yourself. And yet I also believe, and with equal firmness, that the games you’ll find below aren’t just as good as those of Infocom: in a lot of ways, they’re superior. There’s nothing postmodern or pretentious or precious here (all of these being labels I’ve heard applied to other strands of post-Infocom interactive fiction as a reason for not engaging with it), just good clean old-school fun, generally absent the worst old-school annoyances. Please do consider giving one or more of these games a try, if you happen to be a fan of Infocom who hasn’t yet explored what came afterward. Nostalgia is all well and good, but sometimes it’s nice to make new memories.

Christminster

You haven't seen your brother Malcolm since he received his fellowship at Biblioll College - pressure of work was his excuse not to come down to London. So when you received that telegram from him you leapt at the excuse to come up to the university town of Christminster for the day and visit him.

It’s all too easy to dismiss Gareth Rees’s “interactive conspiracy” Christminster as a sort of Curses-lite. It shares with Graham Nelson’s epic a droll, very English prose style, an arch sense of humor, and a casual erudition manifested in a love of literary quotations and classical references. Indeed, the connections between the games go deeper still: Graham and Gareth were not only both Oxbridge academics but friends who helped one another out creatively and technically. If you spend enough time poking around in Christminster’s library, you’ll discover that their games apparently belong to the same universe, when you uncover numerous references to the Meldrew family of Curses fame. But going too far with this line of description is doing Christminster a disservice. It may be smaller than Curses — to be fair, very few games aren’t — but it’s plenty rich in its own right, whilst being vastly more soluble by a reasonably motivated person in a reasonable amount of time.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Christminster takes place in the fictional English university town of the same name, but is obviously drawn to a large extent from the author’s lived experience.[1]For example, Graham Nelson informs us that “the appalling Professor Bungay,” the principal villain of the piece, “is a thinly disguised portrait of [name withheld], a Cambridge tutor, an awful man in a number of respects though not quite so bad as Gareth makes out. There is a wonderful bit where he can be heard gratuitously bullying a history undergraduate, winding up with a line like ‘Perhaps you had better change to Land Economy.’ This was an eccentric Cambridge degree which combined the second sons of the gentry, who would actually have to run large landed estates as their career, with a random selection of hapless students washed out of more high-brow subjects. Switching to Land Economy was Cambridge jargon for failing maths.”

None of this need be taken overly seriously. The game’s milieu of bumbling, slightly cracked old dons comes straight from the pages of Waugh, Amis, and Wodehouse, while its gloriously contrived central mystery would doubtless have pleased Agatha Christie. Thankfully, Christminster runs on plot time rather than clock time: the story evolves in response to your progress rather than placing you in thrall to some inexorable turn counter, in the way of the polarizing early Infocom mysteries. This leaves plenty of time to poke at every nook and cranny of the musty old campus and to enjoy some ingenious puzzles. In a few places, the design does show its age; the very first puzzle of the game is one of the very hardest, leaving you trapped outside of the college’s walls with nothing to do until you solve it — not exactly the most welcoming opening! But by all means do try to carry on, as the English like to say. If you do, you might just find Christminster to be one of the best cozy mysteries you’ll ever play.

John’s Fire Witch

It’s a cold weekend in December of 1990, and it’s been far too long since you have seen your friend John Baker! But you’ve finally managed to take some time out of your schedule to drive to Columbus and spend some “quality time” together. Quality time, of course, means that you and he are going to sample every bar that Ohio State University’s High Street has to offer.

John was to meet you at a favorite pizza and beer spot to start off the evening, but he hasn’t showed up. John’s always been rather spontaneous (read that as ‘erratic’), so you think he’ll show up eventually. But as the night wears on and you tire of downing beers by yourself, you decide to drive to his place and see if he’s left a note or something for you there.

You find his front door unlocked and John nowhere to be found. Pretty tired from your earlier drive, and also buzzing a bit from the beer you drank, you quickly doze off in the living room.

It is now morning. A terrible snow storm is raging outside, the worst you’ve ever seen. You can’t believe how much snow has piled up over the night. You still haven’t heard from John, and you seem to now be trapped in his apartment.

John’s Fire Witch by John Baker is an example of what we used to call “snack-sized interactive fiction” back in the day. Although the shortest game featured in this collection of reviews, it would be considered medium-sized today, with a typical play time in the range of two to five hours — i.e., not much if any shorter than, say, Infocom’s The Witness.

But no self-respecting member of the interactive-fiction literati would dare to release a game that opens like this one today. Waking up in your slovenly friend’s apartment is just one step removed from that ultimate in text-adventure clichés: the game that starts in your — or rather the author’s — bedroom. Make that half a step removed: note that the guy whose apartment you wake up in and the author of this game are the same person. “John, like many IF characters,” wrote David Welbourn in an online play-through of the game, “seems to live in a pigsty and eat nothing but snow.”

So, John’s Fire Witch is willfully unambitious; all it wants to do is entertain you for a few hours. Poking around your vanished friend’s apartment, you discover that he’s gotten himself caught up in a metaphysical struggle between an “ice wizard” and a “fire witch.” It’s up to you to rescue him by completing a number of unlikely tasks, such as collecting a handy grab bag of the seven deadly sins for a certain pitchfork-wielding character who dwells in the Down Below. (Luckily, good old John tends to partake in just about all of them on a regular basis, so his apartment makes a pretty good hunting ground.)

For two and a half decades now, critics like me have been intermittently trying to explain why John’s Fire Witch succeeds in being so appealing almost in spite of itself. Its prose treads that fine line between breezy and tossed-off, its thematic aspirations are non-existent, its puzzles are enjoyable but never breathtaking. In the end, maybe it just comes down to being good company. Its author’s personality comes through in droves, and you can’t help but like him. Beyond that… well, if it it never does anything all that amazingly great, it never does anything all that egregiously wrong either.

The real John Baker disappeared without a trace after making this modest little game — good luck Googling that name! — leaving it behind as his only interactive-fiction legacy. He tells us that he’d like his players to send him $6, for lunch: “My favorite lunch is a soup & sandwich combo at a restaurant on Sawmill Road.” I for one would be happy to pay. Just drop me a line, John.

Lethe Flow Phoenix

A cool wind whips across the peak you stand on, sending tiny dust-devils whirling about your feet. The stars above you seem especially bright tonight, their silver light reaching across generations to speak to you. It is midnight, the hour of magic. The moon is not in sight tonight. All is still. All is waiting.

Perhaps it was a mistake to come and camp out here on this night. Not something you could have predicted in advance, of course, but still ... perhaps it was a little foolish. All Hallows’ Eve is not the most auspicious of nights. Still, you packed your bags up, tossed them next to the one-man tent in your trunk, and drove out here to spend a few days and get your life sorted out.

You were awakened in the middle of the night by something. You weren’t quite sure what, but you could tell something was wrong when you woke up. The desert was too quiet, too dark ... too eager. Like a sleep walker, you stumbled to the cliff nearby. You stood for a minute, catching your breath, and looked around. Behind you, at the other end of the shaky dirt trail, your car and tent wait patiently for your return. In other directions, you have a wide-open view of the desert, and can see it stretches in all directions, until it touches the feet of the mountains. The missing moon, curiously, does not concern you, nor does the fact that you can see as well now as if it were there.

You absentmindedly take another step forwards. If possible, the night becomes even more quiet, and the stars even brighter. Another step, and then another. You stand silently at the very edge of the cliff, looking outwards.

Then the ground gives way. “I’ve gone too far,” you think, almost casually. Not even screaming, you fall from the edge of the cliff.

***

There is a sudden sense of a presence around you as you fall. When you are rescued in mid-air, the event seems almost natural – bluesilver wings surround you, feathers caress you, and merciful darkness embraces you.

***

You awaken, and find yourself in a grassy field. The sun is shining brightly overhead, and a brook babbles gently as it flows along. A small tree grows in the center of the field, its branches ripe with apples.

If John Fire’s Witch is the My Stupid Apartment sub-genre of interactive fiction elevated to a weirdly sublime pitch, then Dan Shiovitz’s Lethe Flow Phoenix does the same for another hackneyed perennial of the post-commercial era: the Deeply Meaningful Exploration of the Subconscious. One always seems to find one or two games of this stripe, generally the products of younger scribes whose earnestness is almost painfully palpable, sloshing about in the lower rungs of any given IF Comp. Alas, their attempts to reveal inner truths through surrealistic imagery tend to come off as more banal than profound — rather like reading the diary of that angst-ridden fifteen-year-old so many of us used to be.

Dan Shiovitz was himself a fairly young man when he wrote Lethe Flow Phoenix, a game whose labored Latinate title doesn’t appear to bode well. Yet it turns out to be far better than one would ever dare to hope. Shiovitz has a knack for devising and describing beautifully twisted landscapes, through which he then proceeds to thread a series of deviously satisfying puzzles. At times, this game almost plays like a textual version of Myst, with much the same atmosphere of stately desolation and the same style of otherworldly but oddly logical dilemmas to overcome.

And then, around the halfway point, Lethe Flow Phoenix turns into something else entirely. Shiovitz provides an explanation for his protagonist’s personal problems, and it’s not at all what you might expect. I hesitate to say too much more here, but will go so far as to reveal that aliens from outer space — as opposed to just alienated humans — suddenly come into the picture. Again, this development should be disastrous, but somehow it works. The game manages to maintain your interest right up to its happy ending.

Dan Shovitz went on to write several other text adventures after this one, perhaps most notably Bad Machine, an exploration of the frontiers of language sufficient to set any postmodern linguistic theorist’s heart aflutter. But even that experimental masterstroke shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow this early piece of work. Yes, the author of Lethe Flow Phoenix is clearly a young man, but this particular young man is also an observant, talented writer. His protagonist’s final redemption is genuinely moving, the journey to that point satisfying on several levels. Lethe Flow Phoenix pairs heart with craftsmanship, and the results are pretty great.

The Light: Shelby’s Addendum

A strangeness has fallen. You first became aware of it with the darkening of the skies: the majestic, threatening storm clouds that seemed on the verge of deluging the earth in a torrent, yet hung motionless, impatient, as though awaiting further instructions from some unseen and malignant higher power. Of course Holcroft had on many occasions disproved to you the existence of such higher beings with his charts and calculations, and you do not believe in such foolishness as ghosts, gods and goblins, but events such as those unfolding before you now are causing you to question all that you have learned.

First the clouds, then the sudden silence of the birdsong, and the people. Where were the people? The village was deserted as you passed through. Not a soul to be seen. You knew you had to alert Barclay and Holcroft that something was terribly wrong with the balance of things, but before you had reached even the main gate an impenetrable mist had rolled in from below the cliffs and obscured the path to the lighthouse.

You decided to wait in the drum shed until the mist had lifted, rather than risk life and limb on the cliff walk, but you were weary from your journey and fell into a deep sleep. When you awoke it was near nightfall. The mist had barely dissipated, but your task was too important, so you took your chances on the cliff walk regardless. It was so dark. Why hadn’t Barclay or Holcroft lit the beacon? In the two years since beginning your apprenticeship you had never known the Regulators to neglect their duties. On the contrary, you found them to be slavishly by the book. “Routine begets knowledge,” Barclay once told you. (He had obviously never cleaned the septic tank every month for two straight years).

When, at last, you reached the courtyard entrance, something even stranger happened. You began to feel suddenly and inexplicably weak, as though the very life were being drawn from your bones. You had eaten well on the train journey from the Commission’s headquarters in the capital city, and passed your last physical with glowing colors, yet you felt as though you were at death’s door.

You had to see Holcroft. He, perhaps, could explain....

Colm McCarthy’s The Light: Shelby’s Addendum is another game that’s better than its ambiguously pretentious name. You play the eponymous Shelby, a junior — very junior — apprentice in a lonely lighthouse that provides more than just illumination: its beam maintains a delicate balance between our reality and other, alternate planes of existence. The hows and wherefores of its functioning are never explained all that well; ditto just when and where this story is supposed to be taking place. (We’re definitely on the Earth, probably in the near future, but is this our Earth or an alternate Earth?) In the end, the vagueness matters not a whit. A more thorough explanation would only interfere with the game’s atmosphere of mysterious Lovecraftian dread. You can almost smell the fetid seaside air as you play.

As the game opens, you’re returning to your post from a much-deserved holiday, only to find the lighthouse and even the village near it devoid of their usual inhabitants. Worse, the beacon itself has gone haywire, and the multiverse is slipping out of harmony as a result, producing unsettling effects all around you. Exploring the environs, you turn up evidence of the all-too-human disputes that gave rise to this slow-moving cosmic disaster. It looks like you are the only one who can correct the fault in our stars.

A big, lavish game, carefully written and implemented in most ways, The Light does from time to time trade in its polished personality for a more ramshackle old-school feel. If you don’t solve a pivotal puzzle within the first 100 turns — and you almost certainly won’t the first time through — it’s game over, thanks for playing. And there’s a mid-game submarine ride where the atmosphere suddenly changes from Lovecraftian dread to a scene straight out of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. Like most reviewers, I can only shake my head at this bit’s existence and wonder what the heck McCarthy was thinking.

Still, such breakdowns are very much the exception to the rule here. I’m nonplussed by some reviewers’ struggles with the puzzles; I solved the entire game without a hint, a feat which I’m happy to consider a testament to good design rather than any genius on my part. I’m kind of bummed that the sequel Colm McCarthy promises us in his denouement has never materialized. I’d love to know whether poor Shelby finally got a promotion after saving the multiverse and all.

Theatre

Another day, another dollar! Life is good at the moment, the property market is booming. Still, it does have its down side; when showing those Mulluer Corporation executives around that old theatre dump, err, opportunity you must have left your pager down in the basement. Better hurry, you have to meet the others at the opera in an hour, and be careful. It wouldn’t do to show up with your clothes all dirty.

Brendon Wyber’s “interactive night of horror” Theatre does us the favor of including its inspiration right in the game itself. As Wyber writes in his introduction, he made Theatre after reading an allegedly true haunted-house story by Joel Furr, one of the early Internet’s more prominent online characters, whose claims to fame include popularizing the term “spam.” Furr’s story, which is readable in its entirety via an in-game menu, is riveting whether you choose to go on to play said game itself or not. It involves the Lyric Theatre of Blacksburg, Virginia, a rambling old place stemming from 1930 that has been restored and is enjoying a new lease on life today, but was at its lowest ebb when Furr made its acquaintance in the early 1990s. As a Kiwi, Wyber had never been to the Lyric, yet that didn’t stop him from using Furr’s description of it as the basis for the setting if not the plot of his game.

You play a yuppie real-estate agent who rushes back inside the old theater he’s trying to unload to retrieve his forgotten pager — this is the 1990s, after all! — only to emerge again to find his car stolen. Rather than venturing out into the seedy neighborhood around the theater on foot, you opt to spend the night inside. Let the haunting begin…

Our frustrations with the medium understandably cause us to spend a lot of time talking about the things that textual interactive fiction, and adventure games in general for that matter, struggle to do well. For better or for worse, we tend to spend less time on the medium’s natural strengths. I’ll just note here, then, that setting must top any list of same. All of the games I’ve featured in this piece make this point, but none do it better than this one. Its name is no misnomer: the theater truly is this game’s main attraction. Its geography expands slowly and organically as you solve puzzles to open up new areas; there’s always some new cranny or crawlspace to uncover in the building, always some new aspect of its sinister history to bring to light. And it’s a fresh spine-shivering delight every time you do.

Before you become a full-fledged participant in the proceedings, you learn about the horror story at the center of it all through the journal pages you discover as you worm your way deeper and deeper into the theater’s bowels, deeper and deeper into its past. I must say that I like the first two-thirds of the game best, when it has a Gothic flavor in complete harmony with Joel Furr’s story. In time, however, it goes full Lovecraft, and not even in the relatively understated way of The Light. Still, one can’t accuse Wyber of pulling any punches; the big climax is as exciting as you could ask for.

Through it all, the real star remains the theater itself, whose faded elegance and delicious decay will remain with you long after you’ve exorcised the malevolent spirits that roam its spaces. You might want to save this one for Halloween.

Jigsaw

New Year's Eve, 1999, a quarter to midnight and where else to be but Century Park! Fireworks cascade across the sky, your stomach rumbles uneasily, music and lasers howl across the parkland... Not exactly your ideal party (especially as that rather attractive stranger in black has slipped back into the crowds) - but cheer up, you won't live to see the next.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Curses, Graham Nelson’s “interactive history” Jigsaw was the most hotly anticipated text adventure of 1995. This game is even bigger than Curses — so big that Nelson had to employ a new, post-Infocom incarnation of the Z-Machine, a version 8 standard with the ability to handle story files of up to 512 K in size, in order to run the full version.[2]Nelson did also provide a version of Jigsaw that could run on older interpreters by moving his historical notes and some other bits to a separate story file.Jigsaw is the more accessible and enjoyable of the two games to play today.

It definitely doesn’t lack for ambition. Written just as millennial jitters were beginning to find a home in the minds of many of us, it’s a time-travel caper focusing on the horrible, magnificent century that was about to pass away, ranging in time and space from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on the day of the Wright brothers’ first flight to Berlin on the day the Wall came down. The principal antagonist and possible love interest — a timeline-wrecking “rather attractive stranger” of indeterminate gender, whom the game refers to only as “Black” after his or her choice of wardrobe — is misguided rather than evil, attempting to alleviate some of the century’s many injustices rather than bring on any apocalypse. But such retroactive changes are out of our mortal purview, of course, and can only lead to worse tragedies. “The time is out of joint,” as Hamlet said. Now, it’s up to you to set it right.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Titanic was actually not the first ship in history to send an SOS distress signal, for example, or note that his depiction of the Beatles of 1967 (“lurching wildly from one project to the next, hardly collaborating, always arguing”) seems displaced in time by at least a year.[3]Still less can I agree with his opinion that “a good deal of their music was dross by this stage.” I’ll be the first to argue that the Beatles never made a better album than A Hard Day’s Night, only different ones, but come on…feel of each historical event. I also appreciate that his choices of historical linchpins aren’t always the obvious ones. For every voyage aboard a Titanic, there’s a visit to the cork-lined Parisian flat of Marcel Proust; for every trip to the Moon, there’s a sojourn in the filthy and disorganized laboratory of Alexander Fleming, the luckiest microbiologist who ever lived.

The episodic structure keeps Jigsaw manageable despite its overall sprawl, in marked contrast to Curses. Nelson, who had been thinking and writing seriously about design since his first game, went so far as to include a helpful little gadget which can alert you as to whether you’re leaving behind anything vital in each time period. Meanwhile the puzzles themselves are never less than solid, and are often inspired. One of them, in which you must decode a secret message using an only slightly simplified example of the German Enigma machines from the Second World War, has justly gone down in interactive-fiction lore as one of the best ever. Like so much of Jigsaw, it teaches even as it intrigues and entertains. I missed an important clue when I played through the game recently, which made this particular puzzle much harder than it was supposed to be. No worries — I enjoyed my two or three hours as a member of Alan Turing’s legendary team immensely, and positively jumped for joy when I finally produced a clear, cogent message from a meaningless scramble of letters.

My one real design complaint is the endgame, which takes place in a surreal fantasy landscape of the sort we’ve seen in too many other adventure games already. It feels both extraneous and thoroughly out of keeping with what has come before — and too darn hard to boot. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: by the time an adventurer reaches the endgame, especially of a work of this size, she just wants to be made to feel smart once or twice more and then to win. The designer’s job is to oblige her rather than to try to make himself feel smart. I must confess that I broke down and used hints for the endgame of Jigsaw, after solving the entirety of the rest of the game all by myself.

But the frustration of the endgame pales before the other delights on offer here. Nelson would never attempt a game of this size and scope again, making Jigsaw only that much more worth cherishing. Curses may be his most important game, but by my lights Jigsaw is his masterpiece.

Bonus:

Graham Nelson on Jigsaw

Curses had been written under the spell of the great cave games – Colossal Cave, Zork, Acheton. Games delving into a miscellany of doors, light puzzles, collection puzzles, and the like. Games written incrementally which ended up with epic, sprawling maps, but which started out only as entertainments written for friends. Each of those things is true about Curses as well.

But not Jigsaw. Once again Gareth Rees and Richard Tucker were the playtesters and de-facto editors, and the two games were recognisably from the same stable. There are many similarities, even down to having a one-word title, which I liked because it meant that the filename on an FTP server would likely be the whole title. It was always going to be a Z-machine story file once again, written with Inform. And it was playable under the same .z5 format as Curses, though I also offered a sort of director’s cut version with some extra annotation using the new .z8 format. (This was a sneaky way to try to persuade interpreter-writers to adopt .z8, which I worried people might think bogus and non-canonical, and so would not implement.)

Unlike Curses, though, Jigsaw was conceived holistically, had a rigorous plan, and was meant for the public rather than for friends. I set out to make the sort of rounded cultural artefact which middle-period Infocom might have offered — Dave Lebling’s Spellbreaker and Brian Moriarty’s Trinity are the obvious antecedents, but not the only ones. (Let me also praise Mike Dornbrook here, who was instrumental in making those games into clearly delineated works.) Those mature works of Infocom were satisfying to start, and satisfying to finish, and distinctive from each other. Infocom wasn’t big on historical settings (a shame that Stu Galley never completed his draft about the Boston of 1776), but in presentation, Jigsaw wouldn’t look out of place in their catalogue. In that sense, it’s rather derivative, even imitative, but this wasn’t seen as an eccentric or retro choice at the time; more of a mark of quality. But in any case, Jigsaw had other ambitions as well, and it’s on those other ambitions that it stands or falls.

Jigsaw strains to be a work of art, and though the strain shows from time to time, I think it mostly gets there. There are little embedded prose poems, generally at hinges in the story. Certain images – the nightjar, for example – are suggestive rather than explicated. There is also something a little poetic — and here I’m perhaps thinking more of the modernism of Ezra Pound’s cantos than of his more famous friend Eliot — about the interleaving of old formulations, old turns of speech. Jigsaw plays on the tantalising way that past times were so confident at being themselves. Nobody using an Apollo Guidance Computer thought of it as twee or retro. And you could say the same about a tram-ticket or a gas lamp, things that people used without a second thought. We have absolute confidence only about our own present moment, while the past seems hazy and uncertain. But the people who lived in that past felt exactly the same about their own present moments. For historical fiction to work, it has to side with them, not with us.

And on the other hand, while it is a modernist impulse to clash the old and the new, it’s a Romantic one to re-enact the old, to imaginatively take part in it. I’ve always liked the biographer Richard Holmes’s observation that to write a biography is an inherently Romantic act.

As I wrote Jigsaw in 1995, the twentieth century was coming to a relatively placid end — I hope anyone caught up in the Yugoslav civil wars will forgive me writing that. It was zeitgeisty to see the story of the age as being mostly done, even with a few years still to go. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History (1992) was less sceptically received at the time than its later reputation might suggest. People were already gathering and tidying up the twentieth century. So I wasn’t the only one to jump the gun in writing about it.

Jigsaw has a classical IF structure, with a prologue, a middle game, and an end game. Less conventionally, a form of the end game – an area called “The Land” – is seen in a ghostly way throughout, while the middle game is divided into a grid of what amount to mini-games. Notably, these have named chapter headings.

The prologue takes place on the final night of 1999, on the margins of a public festival. I anticipated an event at a London park, and that was indeed the English response, though it turned out to be the ultra-modern Millennium Dome at Greenwich (begun in 1997) and not my more Victorian-sounding “Century Park”. The setting has something of the flavour of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, but in fact I semi-lifted it from an episode of Charles Chilton’s iconic BBC radio serial Journey into Space. That involved an enigmatic character named Whittaker who had been taken out of normally-running time in 1924 from a London park celebration (“There are special trains from Baker Street”). Other than scene-setting, the prologue’s goal is to make the complex jigsaw mechanism comprehensible. It’s a familiar IF travel-around-the-map mechanism, with the puzzle pieces serving as objects of desire which unlock further play. But at the same time, it is also the game’s organising metaphor. So these mechanics have to seem natural and fun to players. Getting the textual display and command verbs right was a major concern in early play-testing.

With prologue out of the way, we enter the past. Jigsaw claims in its banner to be “an interactive history”, which is awfully bold of it. As we’ve already established, it’s a work of fantasy. But perhaps the claim to be “a history” can just about be made. Attempts to define what that even means — cf. E. H. Carr, “What Is History?”; Richard Evans, “In Defence of History” — end up devoting much of their space just to enumerating lines of approach, after all. Mine is odder than most, but less odd than some. At its crudest, the historian’s choice is between asking “who took what decisions?” and asking “what was life like?”. Is 19th-century Europe the story of Napoleon and Bismarck and Garibaldi, who started wars and redrew maps, or is all of that froth compared to railways, manufacturing, anesthetics, and newspapers? Jigsaw goes the second way, with Lenin being I think the only world leader seen close up.

The Titanic sequence, the first one I wrote, is the one I would now leave out. Rich people drowned, but other rich people took their places, and history wasn’t much dented. Perhaps it left a greater sense of possible catastrophe in the popular imagination, but the Sarajevo 1914 sequence makes that point better anyway. Besides, having an accidental time traveller arrive on the Titanic is a very hackneyed plot device. (I’ve just been dismayed to find from Wikipedia that it’s even the pilot episode plot of Irwin Allen’s spangly TV show The Time Tunnel.) Still, the ocean liner was fun to recreate as a period piece. The bit where a passenger says, “Never mind, worse things happen at sea,” is my favourite joke in the whole game. And researching this did lead to one happy accident. Going through a heap of books and pamphlets in the Bodleian Library, I chanced on something I remembered from somewhere else, and this led to a short paper in the literary-discoveries journal Notes & Queries. That squib of a paper is still occasionally cited, and I was amused to see “Nelson, Graham” back to back with “Nietzsche, Friedrich” in the bibliography of a monograph as a result.

A better choice was the Apollo programme. The lunar module was controlled using VERB and NOUN commands, which made it pleasingly IF-sounding: why not send the player to the moon? I also wanted to have something about the mid-century zenith of big-state action — a world in which Kennedy could just decide that the United States would do something immense, and it would happen. (The Manhattan Project is another example, but Trinity had already done that.) Another take on Apollo would be that it changed our sensibility, forcing us to see ourselves from the outside. The cover art for Jigsaw is the Apollo 8 shot of the earth rising from lunar orbit, maybe the most reproduced photo of the century. But I also tried to evoke Apollo’s troubling sense of abandonment. First steps were last steps. The century’s most powerful civilisation did something astonishing and then just lost interest. To me, the question about the Pyramids is not why the pharaohs built them, but why they stopped.

In fact, even as I wrote, Apollo’s posthumous reputation was beginning a slow comeback. A new generation of geeks devoured Andrew Chaikin’s landmark book A Man on the Moon (1994). Also, the Internet had arrived. In 1995, Eric Jones’s Apollo Lunar Surface Journal became an extremely useful website. I corresponded a little with Eric at the time; he was, tellingly, having trouble finding a publisher. But thanks to his work, the Apollo sequence of Jigsaw — whatever its fantastical additions — is quite true to the actual Taurus-Littrow valley of the moon, and not a grey abstraction.

Fourteen historical vignettes is too many. It was hard to do much in so few rooms and items each, especially as they had to be playable in multiple orders. A fundamentally un-cave-like quality of Jigsaw is that you can’t wander about from era to era, and it is only rarely that something in one era is helpful in another. (Even then, alternative solutions are sometimes provided.) But I worried that the lack of space made these mini-games too easy, and over-compensated with highly convoluted device-based puzzles. Fly your very own B-52! I truly repent of how difficult that sequence is to play.

A happier example was the Enigma machine. I’ve used one in real life, encoding a very short message on a surviving Enigma which belongs to the science writer Simon Singh. Still, this section was really based on the oral histories of Bletchley Park edited by Hinsley and Stripp in 1993; accounts which, a bit madly, had only just been declassified. I imbibed some of the recherché jargon of the codebreakers, who lived in a strangely appealing world of their own. I was very taken with the vulnerability of Enigma, caused by the frequent presence of double letters in German words. One of the myths of Bletchley was that the invention of the computer flat-out defeated Enigma, as if you just had to press a button. It would be fairer to say that the computer made breaking the code just on the edge of what was possible. A certain cunning was still needed, and luck as well. They found ways to make their own luck, but there were also terrible periods when they failed, and when many sailors went to the bottom of the Atlantic as a result. My grandfather served on two Royal Navy convoys to Murmansk, and he was fortunate that those coincided with a good run at Bletchley, though he never knew it. That, and the thought that I might have been there myself if I had been an Oxford maths post-doc in 1942 rather than 1995, made this vignette more personal to me.

Fourteen vignettes is also too few. I chose Marcel Proust and the Beatles as my artists of the century, for example, and with them I had used up the entire space available for cultural history. My fourteen moments have to spread themselves very thinly over a lot of ground, and there is clearly no single or perfect solution to this. Still, Jigsaw has a clear Western bias. I probably should have chosen the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 rather than the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Africa appears only tangentially, in the Suez Crisis of 1956, which has to stand for the whole of postcolonialism. Even then, my main inspiration was Christopher Hampton’s autobiographical play White Chameleon, and Hampton is British. China does not appear at all, which from a 21st-century viewpoint seems very jarring. From the vantage point of 2021, civil rights also look pretty salient, but in 1995 it did not seem that way: the movement for women’s suffrage is all you get. Why no M.L.K.? That now seems very odd, except that I had plenty of the 1960s already. Some potential topics were also dropped just for lack of puzzles about them, or because they didn’t really fit anywhere. Though I don’t know to what extent players were ever aware of it, the connection points on the jigsaw pieces tried to suggest thematic links. The Wright brothers to Apollo, and so on.

Another consideration was, for want of a better word, taste. Fascism seemed mostly done in 1995, but it had clearly been a big part of the story. It isn’t a big part of Jigsaw because, in the end, is there any ethical way to recreate the experience of being massacred for no reason? The Holocaust does have a presence in Jigsaw, but very indirectly. Buried somewhere is a little anecdote about a young Jewish boy in Berlin in the 1930s, who had picked up a shiny badge in the street with no understanding that it was Nazi regalia which he could be killed just for touching – one of the few moments in Jigsaw told to me by an eye-witness, the boy himself, who survived to be a retired professor. What I really did not want to do was to recreate a version of Auschwitz which came with an escape hatch. And then of course Vietnam, Cambodia, the genocide of the Armenian Turks, Kosovo, Rwanda, you name it. Quite the charnal house we made for ourselves, you have to say. In a room of the end game which, if memory serves, was called the Toll Gate, there is a cumulative graph of humans deliberately killed, plotted against time. This graph surges at the World Wars but it certainly isn’t flat in between them.

There are a few other grim moments like that in the endgame, too. The endgame is the strangest part of Jigsaw and probably the least successful. But here’s what I think I was trying for. The Land does partly bring in concerns not tied to specific moments – pollution, for example, though not global warming, which we were all cheerfully ignoring in 1995. (But not now, right? Right?) At the same time, I didn’t want bleakness to dominate, and I wanted to end on brighter, more fantastical colours. There is supposed to be a sort of Eden-like rebirth as another century is coming, with this endgame area as the Garden of that Eden. Underlying all of history, but often invisible from it, there is always the goodness of the world, our one place of happiness. The chapter title for the endgame is “The Living Land”, and it’s about life in opposition to death.

But it is also too fiddly and is not the enjoyable romp I intended it to be. I don’t like the self-indulgent references to past IF games: what are they even for? The extent of the Land was a more understandable mistake — it’s because of the structural obsession of Jigsaw with its key mechanic. Rooms in The Land correspond to the original pieces, but that meant having quite a lot of them, which in turn meant padding out this space with puzzles. In fact, the endgame is so long that it has a little endgame of its own, taking us back to Century Park. But that was absolutely the right way to end. When you are composing a set of variations, finish on a da capo repetition of the original theme.

Finally, whereas Curses has no significant characters other than the protagonist, in Jigsaw the player has a significant other, called Black. In timecop sci-fi novels, the hero generally does battle with a rival time traveller. One tries to rewrite history, the other to keep it on track. Well, that is basically the situation here. Emphasising this, Black is a symbolic and non-human sort of name: White’s opponent in a game. (The Apollo lunar lander shared with Black has the call-sign “Othello”, and this is a reference to the strategy game, not the Shakespeare play.) The neutral name Black also worked better for blurring gender than having to use contrived unisex forenames like Hilary, Pat, or Stevie.

In retrospect, this genderless romance is the main thing people remember about Jigsaw. I wouldn’t make much claim for the depth or solidity of that romantic subplot: but at least it was there, and was something you wouldn’t find in the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys sort of milieu of most earlier IF. There is even, however glancingly, a presence of sex. That much was deliberate. But when I was writing, the absence of genders seemed just another narrative choice. I wanted a certain universalism, a sort of every-person quality to the player. And I didn’t want some sort of performative nonsense like the barroom scene at the start of Leather Goddesses of Phobos, where you demonstrate your gender by picking a bathroom, but have no way to demonstrate your orientation.

Anyway, this seemed like a statement only after publication, when I began to get rather touching emails from players. I think Jigsaw may have been quite widely played, and this was easily the aspect most responded to. Happy emails were often from women. I did also get a smaller amount of homophobic mail, and that was invariably from men, who reacted as if they’d been catfished.

We easily forget now that in 1995 gay relationships were socially invisible. There were no openly gay characters in The West Wing, Gilmore Girls, or Star Trek: The Next Generation. A handful of New York sitcoms were just starting to go there, but for the most part, in popular culture, gay people existed as people with problems. Tom Hanks won an Oscar for Philadelphia in 1993, but it’s a movie about a closeted man with AIDS. Sleepless in Seattle, the same year, could easily have played some non-binary games with its two lovers, since they don’t meet until the very end. But it doesn’t. In the 1990s, romance in popular culture was almost exclusively straight. Nobody thought that odd at the time, and nor did I. I didn’t write a gay romance at all, I simply wrote a romance which was whatever you wanted to imagine it was. I would like to say that the gender games in Jigsaw were a nod to the gradual emancipation of love in the twentieth century. But that was the one thing about Jigsaw which was completely unplanned.

One of those emails I received was from the young Emily Short, though we did not meet for many years, and it was in another century that we married. History is full of surprises.

(All of the games reviewed in this article are freely available via the individual links provided above and are playable on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux using the Gargoyle interpreter among other options.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

For example, Graham Nelson informs us that “the appalling Professor Bungay,” the principal villain of the piece, “is a thinly disguised portrait of [name withheld], a Cambridge tutor, an awful man in a number of respects though not quite so bad as Gareth makes out. There is a wonderful bit where he can be heard gratuitously bullying a history undergraduate, winding up with a line like ‘Perhaps you had better change to Land Economy.’ This was an eccentric Cambridge degree which combined the second sons of the gentry, who would actually have to run large landed estates as their career, with a random selection of hapless students washed out of more high-brow subjects. Switching to Land Economy was Cambridge jargon for failing maths.”

↑2

Nelson did also provide a version of Jigsaw that could run on older interpreters by moving his historical notes and some other bits to a separate story file.

↑3

Still less can I agree with his opinion that “a good deal of their music was dross by this stage.” I’ll be the first to argue that the Beatles never made a better album than A Hard Day’s Night, only different ones, but come on…

Comments
30 Responses

- Andrew Plotkin

September 3, 2021 at 4:57 pm

IFComp marked my first *game* in the IF scene. But I like to think I had some impact in 1993-1994 by releasing Z-machine interpreters (for Unix and MacOS 7) that were fully GUI-oriented: copy/paste, proportional fonts, bold/italic styles, scrollback, and so on.

- Andrew Plotkin

September 3, 2021 at 4:59 pm

(Not to harp too much on my own brilliance. You’re doing fine on that account, thank you. :)

- Harry Kaplan

September 12, 2021 at 5:49 pm

Andrew, feel free to harp on your own brilliance. You’re certainly not the only one I would say this about – and that would include Jimmy, not so much for the game he wrote but for his progressive dedication as reviewer/SPAG editor/now unparalleled historian – but IF would never have become such a wonderland without you.

- Jimmy Maher

September 3, 2021 at 8:41 pm

Fair enough. Thanks!

- Keith Palmer

September 3, 2021 at 10:36 pm

1995 was the year I got connected to the Internet (maybe I’ll be able to say a bit more about that in a comment on a future post here), and nudged by thoughts of getting hints to finish Trinity and A Mind Forever Voyaging at last I did some poking around and ran into SPAG and the First Interactive Fiction Competition. I do have to admit MST3K: Detective worked for me, with the game, its supporting material, and some SPAG reviews serving as an intriguing introduction to the TV show itself (which wasn’t on cable in my country). In between playing the game and seeing the show, though, I did get into “non-interactive MSTings,” which I suppose could also reprise the question of whether amateur “riffing” on fiction by amateur authors is riskier than what the show managed with B-and-lower-movies. Toonesia, “Looney Toons as a text adventure,” also seems to have stuck in my mind since the Competition.

I have played a number of the bigger games described here, if with considerable aid from walkthroughs. I can acknowledge Jigsaw’s significance, but have to admit the “if we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we put a man on the moon?” mood of the Apollo segment irked me as it usually does and may have kept me away from the rest of the game. To be honest, maybe resorting to all those walkthroughs put me fairly soon on into a mood where I appreciate that text-based interactive fiction is still being written, but hardly ever get around to playing it…

- Leo Vellés

September 4, 2021 at 11:13 am

Jimmy, i want to read this article in my phone, but the page loads and look only in the web version, which is very unconfortable to read from the phone. The previous articles doesn´t have this problem. I know this happened at least once. I hope you can fix it.

- Jimmy Maher

September 4, 2021 at 1:13 pm

Looks like a setting in my caching plugin changed itself for some reason. Let me know if it’s okay now.

- Leo Vellés

September 4, 2021 at 1:18 pm

It’s OK now. Thanks!

- Steve Nicholson

September 4, 2021 at 2:42 pm

Typo: “John’s First Witch”

- Jimmy Maher

September 5, 2021 at 10:36 am

Thanks!

- Martin

September 5, 2021 at 1:37 am

Two Lovecraftians in one year. A trend or a coincidence?

- Jimmy Maher

September 5, 2021 at 10:40 am

Definitely a trend. Lovecraft has remained a staple of textual interactive fiction right to the present day, for practical reasons as well as authorial proclivities. The investigative gameplay model from the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG tends to work really well in a text adventure.

- Martin

September 5, 2021 at 1:12 pm

So is there any view about what has been the best ‘Lovecraftian’ created? Of course tastes may vary.

- Niall

September 5, 2021 at 2:35 pm

I would say Anchorhead by Michael Gentry, without hesitation. It’s brilliant.

- Emily Short

September 8, 2021 at 7:56 pm

Jimmy may be too modest to mention his own entry in this genre, but in addition to Anchorhead, I’d also recommend The King of Shreds and Patches ( https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=9ntef9expou18abv ), which I found thoroughly enjoyable.

It is great fun destroying your protagonist’s sanity with glimpses of forbidden knowledge and then conveniently UNDOing in order to play on…

- Leo Vellés

September 5, 2021 at 3:41 pm

There is a small typo in the first footnote:
“an awful man in a number of respects though not quite so bad a Gareth makes out”.
Should be “…so bad as Gareth mates out”

- Leo Vellés

September 5, 2021 at 3:41 pm

Makes out, not mates out. Damn autocorrector

- Jimmy Maher

September 6, 2021 at 8:17 am

Thanks!

- Peter Olausson

September 6, 2021 at 7:52 am

Christminster looked interesting. Gave it a try, didn’t get in, gave it a miss (cheating on the very first puzzle seems a bit rich). If I’m too stupid for a game, I shouldn’t play it.

- GeoX

September 6, 2021 at 11:48 pm

Yeah, I had the same issue. This very emphatically is NOT a game that wants me to play it.

- Andrew Plotkin

September 10, 2021 at 2:03 pm

That’s not really fair. It’s a game that fetishized the early Infocom “try a lot of things and eventually one of them will work” play experience. As practically all our IF did in 1995. We were a few years out from the idea of the smooth player on-ramp.

On top of that, these games were released in the context of a supportive Internet forum. People could talk about them and trade hints in near-real-time! Which was *not* true in the Infocom era.

If you’re surveying historical IF, and you want to play the games, you wind up using walkthroughs. I’m sure Jimmy can attest to that.

- GeoX

September 15, 2021 at 6:02 pm

Fair enough. It’s important to see things in their historical context. But in this post, Jimmy is presenting these as things that you should play in the here and now, and I think that’s going to be very difficult for a lot of people who weren’t part of the there and then. As good a job as he generally does contextualizing these things, I do think his immersion in this IF culture has left him with a bit of a blind spot when it comes to judging how non-initiates are likely to react to these things.

- Jonathan O

September 17, 2021 at 5:16 pm

In the text quoted from “Theatre”, is the name “Mulluer” correct?

- Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2021 at 3:13 pm

Yes, it is.

- Venya

September 18, 2021 at 4:58 pm

This is actually the era from which I first started playing IF. I somehow came across “Let’s tell a story together” in mid October 2010–i know because I read it on my Kindle to my newborn son (who wasn’t very interested, alas, and is still more into FPS games). Afterward, I started playing some of the relatively recent stories I’d read about.

So I hope that isn’t too weird to anyone, but to me, these will always be the classic era stories that I first enjoyed.

- Kamineko

September 25, 2021 at 1:33 pm

I’m so glad you posted this. I’ve been looking for titles to try after my big Infocom replay (inspired by you, no less!), and have struggled a bit with the IFDB rankings as a selection tool. I’d rather have a curated list of recommendations.

I’d love to see similar posts in the future!

Thanks

- David Meyer-Lindenberg

October 19, 2021 at 10:45 am

Minor nitpick: Nelson must be misremembering, since the Christminster villain who launches into the “Land Economy” rant isn’t Doctor Jarboe but Professor Bungay, and he’s bullying a history undergrad, not math. I’d guess it’s general Oxbridge shorthand for failing something?

Anyway, this game is great and definitely worth a play (though I found it to be hard as nails, about as tough as Varicella. Maybe Jimmy’s just more hardcore than I am.)

- Jimmy Maher

October 19, 2021 at 10:58 am

It’s obviously been too long since I played it. I took the liberty of editing Nelson’s text, as he was a bit uncertain about the details himself. Thanks!

- Lhexa

October 26, 2021 at 6:20 am

Whoa! I’ve watched a dozen or so films in the Lyric Theater, since my father lived in Blacksburg. Most memorably I watched Spirited Away three nights in a row. I’ll definitely give Theatre a play.

- Jimmy Maher

October 26, 2021 at 6:28 am

Neat! I’ve actually toyed with going there once or twice over years because the game and especially the story on which it’s partially based made such an impact on me. At one time, I contemplated an Official Digital Antiquarian Field Trip there. Then the pandemic hit…

Shannara (or, Bookware Mark 2)
September 17, 2021

Book publishers, book authors, and booksellers first discovered computer software in 1983. Spurred by the commercial success of early text adventures like Zork and The Hobbit and by the rhetoric surrounding them, which described the new frontier of text-based digital interactive storytelling as the beginning of a whole new era in literature, publishers like Simon & Schuster, Addison-Wesley, and Random House made significant investments in the field, even as authors from Isaac Asimov to Roger Zelazny signed on for book-to-text-adventure conversions. Meanwhile B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, the two largest bookstore chains in the United States, set aside substantial areas in their stores for software. (Ditto W.H. Smith in Britain.) Those shelves were soon groaning with “computer novels,” “interactive novels,” and “living literature.” Well-known books in the genres of science fiction and fantasy, along with mysteries, thrillers, horror novellas, comic novels… all became computer games. Even the venerable likes of William Shakespeare, Hans Christian Andersen, and Robert Louis Stevenson appeared in shiny new interactive editions. A future American Poet Laureate wrote a text adventure, and Simon & Schuster came within a whisker of buying Infocom, the king of what the latter now preferred to call “interactive fiction” rather than mere text adventures.

This era of “bookware” was as short-lived as it was heady. In 1983, contracts were signed and groundwork was laid; in 1984, bookware products began reaching the public in large numbers; in 1985, with only Infocom’s adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy having lived up to its maker’s commercial expectations, book publishers began nervously formulating their exit strategies; in 1986, the last stragglers reached the market almost unremarked and bookware passed into history. With computer graphics and sound rapidly improving, game makers now set off to hunt the chimera of the interactive movie instead of the interactive book. It seemed that bookware had been nothing more than an exercise in faulty metaphors.

But then, exactly one decade after the beginning of the first bookware boom, it all started up again, as many of the same big names from last time around woke up to the potential of computer software all over again. Instead of parser-driven text adventures, however, they were now entranced by the notion of the CD-ROM-based electronic book: a work of non-fiction or fiction that was designed to be read non-linearly, for which purpose it was strewn with associative hyperlinks, and that incorporated photographs, illustrations, diagrams, sound effects, music, and video clips to augment the text wherever it seemed appropriate. In the face of all these affordances, some believed that the days of the paper-based book must surely be numbered. The big book publishers themselves weren’t so sure, but were terrified of being left behind by something they didn’t quite understand. “Everyone knows this business [of multimedia CD-ROMs] is potentially enormous,” said Alberto Vitale, Random House’s hard-driving CEO. “But what kind of shape it will take, how big it will actually be, and how it will evolve remains a very big question mark.” Laurence Kirshbaum of Warner Books was blunter: “I don’t know if there’s the smell of crisis in the air, but there should be. Publishers should be sleeping badly these days. They have to be prepared to compete with software giants like Bill Gates.”

The book publishers coped with the uncertainty in the way that big companies often do: by throwing their weight and money around in an attempt to bludgeon their way into continued relevance. And none of them did so more energetically than Alberto Vitale’s Random House. In 1993, they signed a high-profile deal with Broderbund Software to produce multimedia versions of Dr. Seuss’s classic children’s books, sending the smaller company’s share price soaring from $3.75 to $41 and sending a sum of money “well into the seven figures” to the late author’s widow. They also invested in Humongous Entertainment, a publisher of children’s edutainment founded by the Lucasfilm Games veteran Ron Gilbert, to create a series of “Junior Encyclopedias.” They formed their own software-distribution arm, under the tech-trendy portmanteau appellation of RandomSoft, to move the products of their partners and friends into bookstores. And, in the summer of 1994, in a deal that represented the most obvious throwback yet to the previous era of bookware, they invested $2.5 million in Legend Entertainment.

The investment didn’t come out of the blue: the two companies had worked together before. In 1991, Legend had sought and acquired a license to make a pair of games based on Random House author Frederick Pohl’s Gateway series of science-fiction novels. That deal had been followed by two more, to make games based on Piers Anthony’s Xanth series and Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Death Gate series. Legend, in other words, had been making bookware games for Random House on their own initiative since before the latter even knew they wanted such things. Now that that realization had dawned, Random House’s investment would serve to bind Legend closer to them and ensure that more of their books could become well-executed games. They already had a first candidate in mind: the bestselling Shannara series of high-fantasy novels.

The Sword of Shannara, the first book in the series, had appeared in 1977, one of the early heralds of a post-Dungeons & Dragons boom in fantasy fiction that would soon cause the fantasy genre to utterly eclipse its traditional sibling genre of science fiction in sales. The author of the 700-plus-page epic was Terry Brooks, a 33-year-old attorney who had spent the last ten years working on it intermittently in his spare time. The very first novel to be published by the new science-fiction and fantasy imprint Del Rey Books, it was a huge success right from the start; it sold 125,000 copies in its first month and became the first fantasy novel to make the New York Times bestseller list for trade paperbacks. But at the same time, it was savaged by even much of the genre-fiction establishment as little more than bad Lord of the Rings fan fiction. The prominent editor and critic Lin Carter, for example, pronounced it “the single most cold-blooded, complete ripoff of another book that I have [ever] read.” From a further remove in time, the J.R.R. Tolkien expert John Lennard can describe it only slightly more kindly today as “the first of a number of overt imitations of The Lord of the Rings that are, however popular, manifestly inferior works, but testify to the taste for [the] high and extended fantasy epic that Tolkien created.”

As Lennard’s recent dismissal of Shannara suggests, the combination of big sales and deep-seated critical antipathy has clung to the series right to the present day, as has Terry Brooks’s status as Public Offender #1 in the rogue’s gallery of Tolkien ripoff artists. Shannara is, the scoffers say, a simulacrum of the surface elements of The Lord of the Rings — warriors and wizards, magical swords and apocalyptic battles — without any of its thematic depth or philosophical resonance, a charge which even Brooks’s fans must find difficult to entirely refute. On the other hand, the same description applies to thousands of other works of fantasy in book, movie, and game form, so why single this one out so particularly? Brooks himself was and is by all indications a decent sort, who loves his work and has few illusions about his place in the literary pantheon. “I don’t have any desire to write the great American novel,” he said in 1986. “Why experiment with something that’s an unknown quantity when I’m comfortable working with fantasy?” He noted forthrightly in 1995 that he wasn’t exactly catering to the most refined literary tastes: “I think you are most intense in your reading habits when you’re in your teenage years. Magic is ‘real,’ your hormones are raging, and you’re more open. When I’m writing, I’m always writing to that group of people.” For all that I may have no personal use for the likes of a Terry Brooks novel at this stage of my life, I and every other critic should keep in mind the wise words of Edmund Wilson before rushing to condemn his books too lustily: “If other persons say they respond, and derive from doing so pleasure or profit, we must take them at their word.”

Brooks himself was not a gamer in 1994, but his twelve-year-old son was: “I enjoy watching him,” he said at the time. He hit it off wonderfully with Bob Bates of Legend at their first meeting, and was excited enough to describe this partnership as the potential beginning of a whole new, trans-media era for the Shannara series: “I like the idea that I will continue to write the books and others will work on projects which surround the timeline, characters, and settings I’ve established.”

It sounded like an excellent plan to everyone involved. But alas, Shannara’s computer debut would turn into a “troubled” project, the first of that infamous breed of game in Legend’s relatively drama-free history up to that point. It was plagued by communications problems and a mismatched set of expectations on the part of Legend and Corey and Lori Ann Cole, the game’s out-of-house design team. But, having talked at length to both Bob Bates and Corey Cole about what went down, I can confidently say that no one involved is angry or vindictive about any of it today; “sad” would be a more accurate adjective. Everyone involved was genuinely trying to make his or her own vision of Shannara into the best game it could possibly be. And, as we’ll see in due course, the end result actually succeeds pretty darn well in spite of itself.

The Coles first came to work with Legend due to a pressing lack of in-house designers capable of taking on the Shannara project. At the time the Random House deal was consummated, Bob Bates was working on an “ethics training game” for the American Department of Justice, an odd but profitable sideline from Legend’s main business of making adventure games, while Steve Meretzky had recently moved on to start his own software studio. Of the three trainee designers who had made Gateway a few years before — a project consciously conceived as a sort of designer boot camp — Glen Dahlgren was finishing up Death Gate, Mike Verdu was in the planning stages of a non-licensed game called Mission Critical, and Michael Lindner was planning a sequel to the non-Legend game Star Control II. Programmers were in similarly short supply. Legend was a company with more food on its plate than it could eat, which was definitely better than the opposite situation, but a problem nonetheless. They wanted very much to please Terry Brooks and Random House by making a great Shannara game in a timely fashion, but they just didn’t have the bodies to hand to do so. So, they decided to look for outside help.

Bob Bates had met the Coles for the first time before Legend even existed, at a dinner hosted by Computer Gaming World editor Johnny L. Wilson during the late 1980s. He liked them personally, and was pleased for them when the Quest for Glory series which they were creating for Sierra did well. He started to talk seriously with them about doing a game for Legend in early 1994, when their future with Sierra was looking more and more uncertain in light of that company’s push into bigger-budget interactive movies starring real actors. Within weeks of that conversation, the worst happened: Quest for Glory V was cancelled in its early design phase and the Coles were told that their services were no longer required by Sierra.

Thus when Random House strongly suggested that Legend make a Shannara game, it seemed like kismet to everyone concerned. Not only were the Coles highly respected adventure-game designers, but specialists in the fantasy breed of same. Still, the source material initially “gave us pause,” admits Corey.

Both Lori and I had read The Sword of Shannara in college, and we weren’t impressed. We considered it a blatant Lord of the Rings copy. Sad to say, we enjoyed both Raymond E. Feist and David Eddings more than Terry Brooks.

However, we decided to keep our minds open and reread The Sword of Shannara. My revised opinion was that the first one-third of the book was a blatant ripoff, but after that, the book delved into new territory and became its own work. We went on to read The Elfstones of Shannara [the second book in the series] and agreed that it had merit. Our belief is that Brooks started out as a beginning writer thinking the way to make a book as successful as The Lord of the Rings was to essentially write the same book. But as he went along, he developed his own authorial voice and became a much stronger writer.

Terry Brooks gave the Coles his all-important nod of approval after they met with him and showed themselves to be familiar with his work. “There’s the matter of losing control,” he conceded, “but when I talked to these folks and realized how much they cared about the books and the characters, I felt better.” The Coles proposed slotting an original story between the first and second books in the series — for here there was, as Bob Bates puts it, “a generational gap”: “the hero of the second book was the grandson of the hero of the first book.”

The hero of the Coles’ game, then, would be the son of the hero of the first book. The game would take place about ten years after said book’s conclusion, casting the player in the role of Jak Ohmsford, son of Shea. (The Ohmsfords and their fellow residents of the bucolic Shady Vale are the equivalent of Tolkien’s hobbits of the Shire). Jak would learn from the wizard Allanon (Gandalf) that Brona (Sauron) was feeling his oats once again and was up to no good. The quest that followed would take Jak and the party of companions he would acquire across the length and breadth of Brooks’s well-developed if less than breathtakingly original fantasy world, at minimal cost to the continuity of the extant novels.

The Coles were friendly with a fellow named Bob Heitman, who had worked for years at Sierra as one of the company’s best software engineers, until he had left with Sierra’s chief financial officer Edmond Heinbockel and Police Quest designer Jim Walls to form Tsunami Media, a somewhat underwhelming attempt to do what Sierra was already doing. (Tsunami was also another player in the second bookware boom, creating a pair of poorly received games based on Larry Niven’s Ringworld series.) Now, Heitman had cut ties with Tsunami as well and set up his own software house, which he called Triton Interactive. Between them, the Coles and Triton should be able to make the Shannara game using Legend’s technology, with only light supervision from Bob Bates and company — which was good, considering that Legend was located in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Chantilly, Virginia, the Coles and Triton three time zones away in rural Oakhurst, California. The project began in earnest in the fall of 1994. All parties agreed that the Shannara computer game would be finished within one year — i.e., in time for the Christmas of 1995 — for a budget of $362,000.

The problems began to crop up on several separate fronts soon after the new year of 1995. Heitman could be abrasive; Corey liked to say that “some people do not suffer fools gladly, but Bob Heitman doesn’t suffer them at all.” Bob Bates, whom Heitman may or may not have considered a fool, was unimpressed with his counterpart’s shoot-from-the-hip way of running his development studio. Following a visit to Oakhurst in February, his assessment of Triton’s performance was not good:

1) No one is really taking charge of project management.

2) The animation requirement is up to 60 man-weeks, and they haven’t been able to hire any artists yet.

3) One background artist we supplied simply isn’t producing.

4) They’re not segmenting text from code, so there’s a big localization problem coming.

5) Internal personality problems are plaguing the team.

Bob Bates was also worried that Triton might use the software technology Legend was sharing with them in other companies’ projects, and almost equally worried that other companies’ code might sneak into Shannara with potential legal repercussions, given the chaos that reigned in their offices.

With tempers flaring, the Coles stepped in to try to calm the waters. They formed their own company, which they called FAR Productions, after Flying Aardvark Ranch, their nickname for their house in Oakhurst. Officially, FAR took over responsibility for the project, but the arrangement was something of a polite fiction in reality: FAR leased office space from Triton and continued to work with largely the same team of people. Nevertheless, the arrangement did serve to paper over the worst of the conflicts.

Meanwhile Bob Bates had other issues with the Coles themselves — issues which had less to do with questions of competence or even personality and more to do with design philosophy. The Coles had enjoyed near-complete freedom to make the Quest for Glory games exactly as they wanted them, and were unused to working from someone else’s brief. They wanted to make their Shannara game an heir to their previous series in the sense of including a smattering of CRPG elements, including a combat engine. Bob Bates, a self-described “adventure-game purist,” saw little need for them, but, perhaps unwisely, never put his foot down to absolutely reject their inclusion. Instead they remained provisionally included — included “for now,” as Bob wrote in February — as the weeks continued to roll by. In July, with the ship date just a few months away, combat was still incomplete and thus untested on even the most superficial level. “This would have been a good time to drop it,” admits Bob, “but we did not.”

While the one source of tension arose from a feature that the Coles dearly wanted and Bob Bates found fairly pointless, the other was to some extent the opposite story. From the very beginning, Bob had wanted the game to include an “emotion-laden scene” near the climax that would force the player to make a truly difficult ethical decision, of the sort with no clear-cut right or wrong answer. The Coles had agreed, but without a great deal of enthusiasm on the part of Lori, the primary writer of the pair. Considering Bob’s cherished ethical dilemma little more than a dubious attempt to be “edgy,” she proved slow to follow through. This caused Bob to nag the Coles incessantly about the subject, until Lori finally wrote a scene in which the player must decide the fate of Shella, the daughter of another character from the first novel and a companion in Jak’s adventures. (We’ll return to the details and impact of that scene shortly.)

But the ironic source of the biggest single schedule killer was, as Corey Cole puts it, having too few constraints rather than too many: “A mentor once told me that the hardest thing [to do] is to come up with an idea, or build something, with no constraints.” Asked by Bob Bates what they might be able to do to make the game even better if they had an extra $50,000 to hand, the Coles, after scratching their heads for a bit, suggested adding some pre-rendered 3D cut scenes. “If I had known then what I found out by the end of the project,” says Corey, “I’d have said, ‘No, thanks, we’ll finish what we started.’ I ended up sleeping at the office, since each render required hand-tweaking and took about four hours.”

Still more problems arose as the months went by. The father of the art director had a heart attack, and his son was forced to cut his working hours in order to care for him. Another artist — the same one who “simply isn’t producing” in the memo extract above — finally confessed to having terminal cancer; he wished to continue working, and no one involved was heartless enough not to honor that request, but his productivity was inevitably affected.

Legend had agreed to handle quality control themselves from the East Coast. But in these days before broadband Internet, testing a game of 500 MB or more from such a distance wasn’t easy. Bob Bates:

All development work had to cease while a CD was being burnt. Then it was Fed-Exed across the country, and then we would boot it. Sometimes it just didn’t work, or if it did work, there would be a fatal bug early in the program. The turnaround cycle on testing was greatly reducing our efficiency. By the time testers reported bugs, the developers believed they had already fixed them. Sometimes this was true, sometimes it wasn’t.

On October 2, 1995, about five weeks before the game absolutely, positively needed to be finished if it was to reach store shelves in time for Christmas, Bob Bates delivered another damning verdict after his latest trip to Oakhurst:

* There is no doc for the rest of the handling in the game. [This cryptic shorthand refers to “object-on-object handling,” a constant bone of contention. Bob perpetually felt like the game wasn’t interactive enough, and didn’t do enough to acknowledge the player’s actions when she tried reasonable but incorrect or unnecessary things. Lori Ann Cole, says Corey, “felt that would distract players from the meaningful interactions; she refused to do that work as a waste of her time, and potentially harmful to her vision of the game.”]

* The final game section is not coded.

* Combat is not done.

* Lots of screen flashes and pops.

* Adventurer’s Journal is not done.

* Too many long sequences of non-interaction.

* Too many places where author’s intent is not clear.

* Map events (major transitions) are not done.

* Combat art is blurred.

* Final music hasn’t arrived from composer.

As Bob saw it, there was only one alternative. He flew Corey Cole and one other Oakhurst-based programmer to Virginia and started them on a “death march” alongside whatever Legend personnel he could spare. Legend was struggling to finish up Mission Critical at the same time, meaning they were suddenly crunching two games simultaneously. “The fall of 1995 was really enjoyable at Legend,” Bob says wryly. “We coded like hell until the thirteenth of November. We hand-flew the master to the duplicators and the game came out Thanksgiving week. Irreparable damage [was done] to the team. We have not worked together since.” The final cost of the game wound up being $528,000.

The scale of Legend’s great Problem Project is commensurable with the company’s size and industry footprint. The development history of Shannara isn’t an epic that stretches on for years and years, like LucasArts’s The Dig; still less is it a tale of over-the-top excess, like Ion Storm’s Daikatana. Shannara didn’t even ship notably late by typical industry standards. Still, everything is relative: as a small company struggling to survive in an industry dominated more and more by a handful of big entities, Legend simply couldn’t afford to let a project drag on for years and years. In their position, every delay represented an existential threat, and outright cancellation of a project into which they’d invested significant money was unthinkable. For those inside Legend, the drama surrounding Shannara was all too real.

But the Shannara story does have an uncommon ending for tales of this stripe: the game that resulted is… not so bad at all, actually. It’s not without its flaws, but it mostly overcomes them to leave a good taste in the mouth when all is said and done. In the interest of being a thorough critic, however, let me be sure to address said flaws, which are exactly the ones you would expect to find after reading about the game’s development.

One might say that Shannara is at its worst when it’s trying to be a Quest for Glory. Lacking the time and resources to make the game into a full-fledged CRPG/adventure hybrid, but determined not to abandon what had become their design trademark, the Coles settled for a half-baked combat engine that’s unmoored from the rest of the game and ultimately, as Bob Bates noted above, rather pointless. With no system of experience points or levels being implemented, you earn nothing from fighting monsters, even as the whole exercise further fails to justify its existence by being any fun in its own right. There are the seeds of some interesting player choices in the combat engine, but they needed much more work to result in something compelling. Legend’s last-minute solution to the problem during that hellish final crunch was to dial the difficulty way, way back, thereby trivializing the combat without eliminating it. Such compromises serve no one well in the end.

In the name of fairness, I should note that Corey Cole offers a different argument for the combat being there at all and taking the form it does — one that I don’t find hugely convincing on the face of it, but to each his own:

The “pointless combat” is very much as planned in the design. It’s an anti-war point that fits closely into the Sword of Shannara zeitgeist, and which we reinforced in the game text: there are no winners in war (or in battle). The enemy forces are vast, and our hopefully realistic characters are not superheroes. Their object is to traverse the map while fighting as little as possible. When they do fight, it is risky and saps the party’s strength. Think of the hobbits vs. the ringwraiths atop Amon Sul (Weathertop). They had no chance. That’s Jak and Shella’s situation against the forces of Brona. The “win condition” is escaping with their lives.

I must confess that I struggle to identify much of an “anti-war point” in a series of books which revels in an endless series of apocalyptic wars, but I’ve only skimmed the surface of Terry Brook’s huge oeuvre. Perhaps I’m missing something.

Bob Bates’s own hobby horse — his big ethical dilemma — doesn’t fare much better in my opinion. Near the end of the game, Jak’s companion Shella is mortally wounded by an evil shifter.  (Shifters are Brooks’s version of Tolkien’s ringwraiths). If allowed to expire on her own, her soul will be claimed by Brona. Another of Jak’s companions can heal her using the magical Elfstones he carries, but expending them now will mean he can’t use them for their intended purpose of stopping Brona’s plans for world domination in their tracks. Jak’s only other choice is to kill Shella himself, then perform a Ritual of Release to free her soul; this is what she herself is begging him to do. It certainly sounds like a difficult choice in the abstract. Once again, though, a difference in design priorities resulted in a half-baked compromise in practice. In the finished game, saving Shella with the Elfstones results in a few screens of text followed by a game over — meaning that the ethical choice isn’t really a choice at all for any player who wishes to actually finish the game she paid good money for. The whole comes across as overwrought rather than moving, manipulative rather than earnest.

Yet neither the halfhearted combat nor the half-baked moral choice fills enough of the game to ruin it. Constrained though the Coles may have been from indulging in another of the delightful free-form rambles that their Quest for Glory series was at its best, they remained witty writers well able to deliver an entertaining guided tour through Terry Brooks’s world. And despite all the day-to-day problems on the art front, the final look of the game lives up to Legend’s usual high standards, as does the voice acting and the music by the legendary game composer George “The Fat Man” Sanger. If the puzzles are seldom anything but trivially easy — a conscious design choice for a game that everyone hoped would, as Corey Cole puts it, “attract many Terry Brooks fans who had no previous adventure-game experience” — they give the game a unique and not unwelcome personality: Shannara plays almost like an interactive picture book or visual novel rather than a traditional hardcore adventure game. With so little to impede your progress, you move through the story quickly, but there’s still enough content here to fill several enjoyable evenings.

Upon its release, Shannara approached 100,000 units in sales, enough to turn a solid profit. Although its impact on the market was ultimately less than what Random House and Terry Brooks had perhaps hoped for, its relative success came as a relief by this point to Bob Bates and everyone else at Legend, who had had such cause to question whether the game would ever be finished at all. Reviews, on the other hand, tended to be unkind; hardcore gamers looking for a challenge were all too vocally unimpressed with the game’s simple storybook approach. Computer Gaming World’s adventure columnist Scorpia went on a rather bizarre rant about the fate of Shella, which she somehow twisted into a misogynistic statement:

I would not have minded had she died gloriously in battle; that is often the fate of heroes and heroines. What happens is: Shella is mortally wounded, but lingering on, and Jak — to save her soul — must kill her on the spot and perform a certain ritual. The only woman in the entire game, and she not only dies, but goes out a helpless lump.

I’ve heard that game designers are wondering how they can get more women playing games; if they keep presenting us with garbage like this, it isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Far too many products these days have exclusively male heroes doing this, that, and the other; women are either nonexistent or mere adjuncts, at best.

While I agree wholeheartedly with Scorpia’s last sentence in the context of the times, the rest of her outrage seems misplaced, to say the least. Shella is never presented as anything other than strong, smart, and brave in Shannara, and she dies nobly in the end. Any number of other games would have made a more worthy target for Scorpia’s ire.

For my own part, I can happily recommend Shannara to anyone looking for a bit of comfortable, non-taxing fantasy fun. “In hindsight, we’re very proud of the game we made,” says Corey Cole. That pride is justified.

The inclusion of Terry Brooks’s novel in the Shannara box is a throwback to the olden days of bookware.

The graphics are bright and inviting.

There’s a seemingly free-form overland-movement view, although the places to which you can actually travel are always constrained by the needs of a linear plot. Monsters wander the map as well. You can attempt to fight or avoid them; most players will find the latter preferable, given how unsatisfying combat is.

The combat screen. There are the seeds of some interesting ideas here — the Coles could always be counted on to put some effort into their combat engines — but it’s poorly developed.

Shella and Jak keep up a nice, flirting banter throughout most of the game. Like so much here, their relationship has the flavor of a well-done young-adult novel. Belying the bad feelings that came to surround its making at times, Shannara never fails to be likable from the player’s perspective, a tribute to Corey Cole’s professionalism and to Lori Ann Cole’s deft writerly touch.

(Sources: the books Tolkien’s Triumph: The Strange History of The Lord of the Rings by John Lennard, Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 by Edmund Wilson, and the post-1991 edition of Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks; Computer Gaming World of November 1994, November 1995, and March 1996; Starlog of June 1986; CD-ROM Today of June/July 1994 and January 1995; New York Times of September 11 1993 and May 22 1995; Newsweek of August 13 1995; Los Angeles Times of April 21 1994; Atlantic of September 1994. Most of this article, however, is drawn from an interview with Bob Bates and internal Legend documents shown to me by him, as well as an email correspondence with Corey Cole. My huge thanks go out to both of them for taking the time.

Shannara is not available for purchase today, but you might find the CD image archived somewhere — hint, hint — if you look around. I’ve prepared a stub of the game that’s ready to go if you just add to the appropriate version of DOSBox for your platform of choice and a BIN/CUE or ISO image of the CD-ROM.)

Comments
27 Responses

- Marco

September 17, 2021 at 6:09 pm

“What do you mean Lord of the Rings rip-off, officer? My Bom Tombadil is an entirely original character…”

- Andrew Plotkin

September 17, 2021 at 8:38 pm

You think you’re kidding, but that was the “King of the Silver River”.

(Terry Pratchett took the, er, piss out of this one by inventing a “King of the Golden River” — the ruler of the Ankh-Morpork sewers.)

And then there was the terrifying trek through the underground Mines of Definitely Not Moria. I forget what they were called in the book.

Nonetheless, Corey Cole’s comment above is fair. Brooks got past the “asset-flip” stage rapidly and wrote a lot of books out of his own creative vision. I didn’t read a lot of them but they were fun rides.

- John Elliott

September 18, 2021 at 6:42 pm

I always took that as a reference to John Ruskin’s fairytale “King of the Golden River”.

- Iffy Bonzoolie

September 17, 2021 at 7:16 pm

This is a fascinating case study. Everyone involved must have known their words would eventually be read by all parties, so I can’t imagine it’s drunk-at-the-bar-level honesty, but it’s rare to get a Rashomon-style perspective into a real “troubled” project.

I’ve been on one side of trouble in a project many times, and its difficult for any good-faith self-analysis not to absorb some or all of the blame — especially when there’s no one to do an unbiased investigation, because you just don’t know the other parties’ experience.

I love this quote from Bates:

“Irreparable damage [was done] to the team. We have not worked together since”

Been there.

- Lee Hauser

September 17, 2021 at 7:53 pm

The main reason the Shannara books sold as well as they did is that people were desperate for more Tolkien, and Terry Brooks was the first writer to step up and try to fill the gaping hole. The first book was little more than LOTR dumped into a bottle, shaken (not stirred) and poured out again.

That being said, Terry Brooks did indeed turn into a decent writer. His novelization of The Phantom Menace was far, far better than the movie.

- Richard Wells

September 18, 2021 at 6:57 am

Sword of Shannara was helped immensely by the inclusion of art by the Brothers Hildebrandt, probably one of the first US novels aimed at an older audience to have the illustrations that used to be common in children’s books. Not only did Shannara start the surge of Tolkien style novels, it also created an illustrated novel genre. I leave a comparison of the Dinotopia books with games like Myst to others.

- Aula

September 18, 2021 at 7:30 am

“the Corey Coles’ professionalism”

should be either “the Coles’ professionalism” or “Corey Cole’s professionalism” unless you want to imply there’s more than one Corey.

- Jimmy Maher

September 18, 2021 at 8:31 am

Thanks!

- arthurdawg

September 18, 2021 at 1:36 pm

I don’t think I even realized this game existed… but it brings back some happy memories of growing up in the 1980s… Epic high fantasy was the rage and most of it used Tolkien as a roadmap. After Tolkien, I read Shannara, Feist, Eddings, Dragonlance, etc.

I think Robert Jordan finally burned me out as I transitioned to College. Waiting a zillion years for his massively over-long epic and then his early death pretty much left me burned on out on Fantasy by 1994 other than finishing up Wheel of Time. I’m still a sucker for an occasional sci fi novel though.

Neat article as always! Thanks for the trip down Memory Lane!

- Ian Crossfield

September 18, 2021 at 2:15 pm

Clive Sinclair, a frequent star of the earlier pages of this blog, just passed away:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/16/home-computing-pioneer-sir-clive-sinclair-dies-aged-81

- arthurdawg

September 19, 2021 at 3:08 pm

The speccy was a legend in early computing… somewhere out there on a bucket list is to download an emulator and try it out!

- Sebastian Gerstl

September 19, 2021 at 11:45 am

While Scorpia’s assessment does indeed seem a bit harsh, I can definitely see where she is coming from: Here’s Sheila, finally a capable, heroic female character taking (not quite) center stage in the adventure – and she STILL gets fridged so the hero gets enabled to save the day. I imagine that it was that particular disappointed that left her be so vitriolic about the characters fate (mind you, it didn’t take that much for Scorpia to get bitter, especially as the nineties went on).

- Torbjörn Andersson

September 21, 2021 at 12:56 pm

I had never heard the term “Junior Encyclopedias” before. I assume these are the games that are now known as “Junior Field Trips”. At least they say “Humongous Entertainment and Random House present” when you start them.

- Jimmy Maher

September 21, 2021 at 12:59 pm

Yes. They first shipped as “Junior Encyclopedias,” then got the new name at some point in the late 1990s — presumably because most kids will take a field trip over an encyclopedia any day.

- Michael

September 22, 2021 at 3:07 pm

If you want the full game box experience with all the inserts and manual etc. you can get Shannara on eBay without much trouble. I did.

Let me now slide into a non sequitur. I need help. I collect old Infocom games. The older games run fine. But every Infocom game with graphics asks for “disk 3″ when I play. But I play with the 3.5″ disk. There’s only one 3.5″ disk included in games such as Journey and Shogun. So the game is impossible to play because there is no disk 3.

To clarify. The boxes state that they include only one 3.5” disk, so no disks are missing. Yet with both Shogun and Journey, the game refuses to run unless I insert non-existent “disk 3” which allegedly contains the graphics.

When you install you have the option to play with graphics or to play without graphics. Even if you choose the “no graphics” option, the game STILL insists that you insert non-existent “disk 3″ to play.

I thought, maybe all the data is on this one 3.5” disk so if I leave it in and hit enter, the game will think it has disk 3. Nope. That did not work.

Solution, anyone?

Has anyone encountered this and found a solution?

- Jimmy Maher

September 22, 2021 at 6:23 pm

The easiest way to play the graphical games today is to use the modern interpreter WinFrotz or its equivalent for another platform. However, if you want the experience of playing on vintage hardware: it sounds like either the interpreter cannot find the story file, or the story file cannot find the graphical assets. Are you attempting to run the MS-DOS version? If so, there might be an installation program you need to run to decompress the data on the floppy disk and copy it to your hard disk. I don’t know that these games can be run directly from floppy disk.

Let me know a) if running on vintage hardware is a priority for you and (if so) b) which platform you’re attempting to run the game on, and perhaps I can help you further.

- Martin

September 22, 2021 at 9:45 pm

Disk 3 sounds like a reference to the third disk in the sequence not the size of the disk. There was an old 3 inch disk type but that was never for the pc.

- Michael

September 23, 2021 at 11:48 pm

Thanks for the comments.

The games tell me to put in disk 1 (even though it was already in) when I was ready to install and press enter, which indicates that when it refers to “disk 1” or “disk 3” it means just that, rather than the size of the disk.

I am playing the DOS versions of these games using DoxBox on an old Windows 98 computer. I have also played some Infocom games by “shutting down” to DOS rather than using DosBox, which you can do on pcs running Win 98.

These Infocom games with graphics also can be played from the floppy disk according to the instruction manuals, but even using that method, the game STILL asks for disk 3.

I just purchased Zork Zero and it does the same thing as Journey and Shogun. And yet, as I mentioned earlier, the oldest Infocom games, the ones with NO graphics, work just fine on this same pc using DosBox.

Someone suggested that the problem I am having might be related to a change in the capacity of 3.5″ disks during the years Infocom was putting out these games. I’m not sure exactly HOW that would play into things, but maybe this is connected to the problem somehow?

I hope this added info helps you guys come up with more suggestions. Thanks!

- Michael

September 24, 2021 at 12:23 am

I solved the problem. The secret is to totally ignore what the disks are telling you upon installation and when you start to play.

The request for “disk 3″ is some sort of mistake on the 3.5” disks. All you have to do to run the game is to type, for example “Shogun /dm” and the “dm” command after the word Shogun will load the graphics. Same is true for Zork Zero. You just type ZorkZero /dm and you are off to the races.

Thanks!

- Jimmy Maher

September 24, 2021 at 5:14 am

Glad to hear it. I’m not overly enamored with any of the late graphical games myself, but some folks really like them — especially Zork Zero and Arthur. Here’s hoping you prove to be in the latter group!

- Jonathan O

September 25, 2021 at 6:47 pm

The comment from Edmund Wilson is an interesting one. However, he maybe should have kept it in mind when he wrote his notorious hatchet job on Golden Age detective fiction, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”

Incidentally, in my view Brooks’ best work is in the Landover series – a pity he seems to have abandoned it again, after what looked like a new start with “A Princess of Landover”.

- Jimmy Maher

September 25, 2021 at 7:41 pm

Yes, the quote always comes complete with the irony that Edmund Wilson was himself an infamous literary snob…

- Peter Olausson

September 29, 2021 at 9:25 pm

Every single time I read the name “Ohmsford”, I think they’re obviously part of the resistance. Silly joke I can’t get out of my head.

- Lisa H.

September 30, 2021 at 1:13 am

Mehhhh, out of here with your old jokes. We want current ones, you know, jokes that’ll really amp us up!

- Lhexa

October 26, 2021 at 8:07 pm

I read a fair amount of Brooks, and he did find his own voice. Unfortunately, the term “apocalyptic” you used earlier applies well. It becomes exasperating when the same fantasy world faces a new, unprecedented existential threat every fifty years. His lighter-hearted “Kingdom for Sale: Sold!” series also fell into the same trap.

On a broader scale, major fantasy authors seem to follow the “tragic flaw” theory in literature, their talents weighed against equally large flaws. Some readers, notably Moorcock, can’t get past Tolkein’s devotion to scene-setting. Moorcock himself catches glimpses of profound themes, only to lose them amidst the pulp. Robert Jordan writes a tense, emotional narrative… that goes on and on and on. Andre Norton’s work is solid but markedly unambitious. George Martin has great worldbuilding and characterization, plastered on top of a soap opera. The only well-rounded top fantasy author I know is Pratchett.

- Dan

November 5, 2021 at 9:51 pm

Not sure if this is your typo or Scorpia’s. If the latter, perhaps it should be followed by a [sic].

Shella is mortally wounded, but lingering on, and Jake — to save her soul

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2021 at 7:29 am

Probably my error. Thanks!

Mission Critical
October 1, 2021

Legend Entertainment fought something of a rear-guard action through the first half of the 1990s. In an industry that had embraced the movies as its aesthetic example, their works remained throwbacks to older ideas about interactive books: “We had the editorial sensibilities of a book publisher rather than a movie company,” says Legend co-founder Mike Verdu. Their games were wordy, and even after the migration to CD-ROM the player was expected to read many of those words for herself rather than have them read aloud to her; they sported illustrations that were carefully composed and lovely to look at, but that were also static in a motion-obsessed gaming milieu, and thus were better suited to stand up well a quarter-century later than they were to wow the masses in their own day. Enough players were intrigued by Legend’s low-key, literary approach to buy 30,000 to 60,000 copies of each new game, but those consistent numbers translated to a steady erosion of Legend’s market share in a fast-expanding industry; by mid-decade, many new games were selling over 100,000 copies each year, and blockbuster million-sellers were appearing at a clip of three or four per annum. Verdu and his partner Bob Bates felt serious pressure to up Legend’s sales and keep pace with their peers.

But, you might say, surely market share isn’t everything. Why couldn’t Legend be content within the niche they had built for themselves? The answer comes down not to hubris but to the harsh realities of game distribution in the 1990s. Games of the type that Legend made still needed to exist as physical products at that time. (Although there was a thriving shareware scene taking advantage of digital distribution, the dial-up online access that was the universal norm could support only small, multimedia-light titles — not the assets-heavy, CD-filling monstrosities of Legend.) Physical products required physical warehousing, physical distribution, and, most critically of all, precious physical shelf space inside brick-and-mortar stores. Here was the real rub. A niche product like a Legend adventure game was a hard sell to a retail purchasing manager who could instead fill the space it would occupy with the likes of a 7th Guest, Myst, DOOM, or Wing Commander III. In short, Legend’s modest product line was in danger of drowning in the flood of flashier, better-advertised games. All of the quality in the world would avail them nothing if they could no longer get their games into the hands of their fans.

So, after the book publisher Random House was inspired by Legend’s literary bona fides to invest $2.5 million in the company in the summer of 1994, Verdu and Bates decided to use a substantial chunk of that money to make a play for the big time. They would make a game set in a node-based, 3D-modelled environment much like that of Myst, and hire a name actor beloved by science-fiction fandom to star in filmed “full-motion-video” sequences, just like Wing Commander III had done. But, because they were Legend, they would invest all of this trend-chasing with meticulous attention to detail in terms of world-building, plot, and puzzle design, and would respect their player’s intelligence and time in a way that too few of their superficially similar peers were doing. What else could Legend do? They were just made that way.

Mike Verdu wrote and designed the game in question, which went by the name of Mission Critical, and shepherded it through every phase of its development. I recently talked with him at some length about the project, and I’ve elected to present this article to a large extent as his own oral history of it. This seemed to me the most appropriate approach, given that he’s more than articulate enough in his own right, and given how his recollections provide such a fascinating picture of how the nuts and bolts of a game came together during the much-ballyhooed era of Siliwood — that semi-mythical convergence of Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

For me, full-motion video wasn’t so much the imperative. It was creating the next generation of adventure gaming using immersive environments. With a text adventure, the world is really in your head; it’s created in your mind by the words that we put in front of you. We added illustrations to the picture that the words formed in your mind, but I always dreamed of actually putting you in the world, having it become a fully immersive experience.

So, the primary driver for me was immersiveness. Full-motion video was a cool thing that you got because you had CD-ROM as a storage medium. I had long dreamed of creating a world that you could actually inhabit. The world would feel alive. We wouldn’t have to tell you what it was like, we could show you. That’s where CD-ROM met the state of the art in 3D. We could use AutoCAD and those sorts of tools to deliver a world at a very high level of fidelity through pre-rendered segments. The creative spirit that guided me was bringing a fully realized 3D world to life, and then telling a story in it. That was just delicious. I loved that challenge, couldn’t wait to take it on.

Mission Critical stands today as a landmark in Legend’s history in more ways than one. Legend’s first and, as it would transpire, only serious flirtation with the full-motion-video trend, it would also prove the very last Legend game that was entirely original to them, not being based on any preexisting literary or gaming license. Which isn’t to say that it isn’t derivative in another way: it’s a military space opera of a stripe that will be familiar to readers of David Weber, with some Big Ideas almost worthy of a Vernor Vinge hidden behind its façade of outer-space adventure aboard the Lexington, an interstellar ship of the line in the year 2134.

The Lexington is a combatant in an Earthly world war which has spilled well beyond the boundaries of our solar system. The backstory begins with the evolution of the United Nations into a tyrannical “world government” by the late 21st century. (The political connotations of this setup in the context of our conspiracy-theory-plagued contemporary world are perhaps unfortunate…) Out of fear of a forthcoming technological Singularity, the UN orders a halt to all forms of research and development, opting for a world that is frozen in amber over one where computer brains replace human ones. Feeling that “the cure is worse than the disease,” the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Singapore, along with all of the planet’s nascent space colonies, rebel, and are promptly targeted for “brutal suppression” by the UN. The Lexington, naturally, fights on the side of the freedom-loving pro-techologists, who call themselves the Alliance of Free States.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/mission1.mp4

The game’s backstory is presented in a documentary/propaganda film called Why We Fight, obviously modeled on Frank Capra’s classic World War II productions of the same name.

I had a personal passion for science fiction — not a surprise, given my Gateway games — and had been doing a lot of reading about where technology was at and the Singularity and the early ponderings of what would happen when artificial intelligence surpassed human intelligence. What would that mean? Would it result in an alien form of life, or would it be anthropomorphic in some way because its creators would endow it with human qualities? What would it mean for humanity to reckon with the emergence of artificial intelligence? Would it tear us apart or bring us together? That was the beating heart of the story I wanted to tell.

Then I combined it with a love of ships and the Navy and sailing. I’ve been fascinated by ships forever. I used to draw them and collect models of them and was always thrilled to go down to a port and see the ships there.

I tried to make the science behind the ship’s systems as real as possible. I did a lot of thinking about what actual combat in space might be like. It was certainly not going to be managed by humans; it would be managed by drones. The ships are really just drone carriers. They send the drones out to resolve the battle, and the humans, once the battle starts, are just sitting there going, “Oh, God, I hope this goes our way!”

All of these ingredients came together in a creative stew. But then, there were lots of constraints imposed by the medium. You couldn’t put other characters in there. It had to be a sterile environment, like you saw in The 7th Guest and some of the other earlier products in this space. My answer was to put the other characters in the full-motion-video sequences. Your emotional connections would be made in the opening sequence, and then other video snippets that you would bump into. But it was still pretty thin gruel. A lot of games from this era feel very empty because you couldn’t put other characters in these kinds of environments.

So, that was a major constraint. I was going to have this really cool ship filled with drones that could fight battles, but there couldn’t be anybody else on it. So, there had to be a fictional reason why you were by yourself. But that also is very heroic because, if it’s just you, and you turn the tide of an important event in history, that’s a nice character arc. And there is some artistic resonance to one human alone on a ship light years from anyone else. What that feels like, the lack of connection, the sense that it’s all riding on you.

So, yeah, the story had to be thought-through in a way we had not had to do with previous Legend games, just because, like in a movie, every scene had to be designed, scripted, and then fed to the people who were actually doing all of the rendering. We had very little ability to mess with the story after it had been shaped. That constraint was unfamiliar to me because we had been able to tweak previous Legend games all the way down to the end. It was just writing code — change responses, change puzzles, write some new text, maybe commission a couple of new pieces of 2D art. This time, everything had to be down well in advance, then it was locked down. So, I’d never done so much up-front planning on a game before.

It was a lot of work. I worked harder on that game than I’ve ever worked on anything. The team slept under their desks, worked through the night and into the next day.

The player’s situation is set up in a bravura ten-minute movie that opens the game, filling most of the first of its three CDs. The Lexington is on a beyond-top-secret mission to a planet called Persephone, escorting a science vessel known as the Jericho. But it seems that the Alliance’s security has failed: the ships are met there by a much larger UN cruiser. The Lexington’s drones are easily defeated, leaving it and the Jericho helpless. At this juncture, the Lexington’s Captain Dayna, who is played by none other than Michael Dorn — the Klingon Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation — concocts a clever if suicidal plan for preventing the logs of the Jericho, which give the full details of its mission, from falling into enemy hands. He surrenders to his opposite number, and makes arrangements for the crews of both of the vessels in his task force to fly over to the UN cruiser in shuttles. But then he does two things the UN captain does not expect. First, he plants a nuclear bomb in one of the shuttles that will blow up and destroy the UN cruiser and everyone aboard, along with all of the other shuttles and everyone aboard them, as soon as it enters the cruiser’s docking bay. And then he leaves one crew member behind on the Lexington — one person not being worth the UN captain’s bother when he scans the ship to make sure Dayna is abiding by their agreement — to hopefully find a way to complete the original mission alone. That crew member, of course, is you the player.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/mission2.mp4

To say that Mission Critical’s opening movie owes a “considerable” debt to Star Trek would be a considerable understatement. Meanwhile Captain Dayna’s, shall we say, unorthodox tactics serve to illustrate yet again that one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.

Michael Dorn and the other actors received top billing in the credits of a game that absorbed at most a few days of their time, while the names of the people who worked for months on end and slept under their desks came in smaller lettering much later in the credits sequence. Such was the strange reality of Siliwood — which, come to think of it, is not that different from standard Hollywood practice.

There was a trend in gaming at the time to lean into celebrities; it was part of this convergence with Hollywood. I knew that I was telling an entirely original story, that we were making one of the biggest bets in the company’s history. I had a sense that we needed a hook that would give a customer reading about the game or looking at it on a shelf some sense of familiarity — a brand that they could latch onto. I knew the market was very crowded with games that looked somewhat like this. So, I thought to cast an actor who would have a resonance with the story we were telling. People would think about the actor in that context, and say, “Oh, I get what kind of story this is going to be.” I was trying to come up with a shorthand way of communicating what it was all about.

We knew absolutely nothing about film making, but I did work with an artist named Kathleen Bober, who had all sorts of connections in the theater scene in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and with a number of video-production companies, including one called Flight Three, which did commercials and other television productions. She and I did a lot of the initial explorations. How do you hire an actor? How does it work? How do you actually do a video shoot? Who can we hire to stage the production? How much does it all cost?

I knew something about dealing with agents because we had dealt with literary agents. So, reaching out to see if we could find an actor who felt right for the role, who had a brand compatible with the story we wanted to tell, was weirdly the least challenging part of it all. The much more challenging part was finding a director and a production facility, learning how to shoot in green screen and composite in environments. Kathleen put together a team for that. The director’s name was Peter Mullett. We brought him on, then worked with Flight Three to create a plan and a budget and a script. I wrote the script; all the painful dialog is my fault. The filming was done in a suburb of Baltimore. We only flew Michael Dorn out for a day or two for the opening movie. It really was that short. Then all of the other little segments took another day or two. The prep for it all and then the post-production took all the time; that was months.

My entire career at that point was just learning, drinking in how to do all kinds of new stuff. I just saw this as one more thing to learn.

When the opening movie finishes and the game proper begins, you find yourself standing in a corridor of the wounded Lexington, observing the world around you from a first-person view. The latter in itself isn’t unusual for Legend; all of their games prior to Mission Critical use the same view. Yet a difference in kind quickly becomes apparent. Whereas the older Legend games, in keeping with the company’s roots in text adventures, use a room-based approach to navigation, Mission Critical’s is based on nodes within a larger contiguous environment. Thus you can now spin around to view your surroundings in any of four directions. And instead of using pixel art, the views have been pre-rendered in a 3D modeler. Legend, in other words, has seemingly gone full Myst.

You encounter a series of intricate mechanical puzzles as you begin to explore this environment. The first third of the game comes to revolve around repairing the Lexington enough to make it reasonably space-worthy and even combat-worthy again. In the course of doing so, you learn about the lives and personalities of your late fellow crew members by rummaging through their personal effects, and also identify the traitor who betrayed your mission to the UN. Again, the Myst comparisons are unavoidable; the Miller brothers’ game uses much the same kind of environmental storytelling.

There were a bunch of Myst-style games, including some that have faded from memory. CD-ROM enabled a certain kind of production, and then there were a whole bunch of games that seemed similar. It was like this brief emergence of a genre. Then the state of the art moved on, and people figured out how to tell more character-based stories.

I wanted to put real puzzles in one of these games. My sense with these games was that the player interactions were really basic. Legend was known for making great puzzles; I wanted to put great puzzles in one of these games. I wanted to make a true Legend adventure game that just happened to be within this amazing immersive environment. I would like to think that what distinguishes Mission Critical from some of those other products — and may actually have limited its commercial potential, frankly — was the depth and sophistication of the puzzles. The puzzles in this game are serious, hardcore adventure-game puzzles. It was my attempt to make this very rich experience, and not have it be just manipulation of objects. That was my way of differentiating Mission Critical from Myst and other products of that type.

I might quibble with some of Mike’s characterizations of Myst; whatever the design sins of its many imitators, Myst’s own worlds are scrupulously consistent within the game’s fantastic premise, and its puzzles are quite rigorously logical. Still, there’s no question that Mission Critical boasts a much richer, deeper environment, if perhaps a more prosaic and less evocative one, and that its custom engine admits of forms of interactivity that the simple off-the-shelf software tools employed by the Miller brothers and many of those who followed them couldn’t hope to match. Myst and many other games of its lineage don’t even have player inventories; this may lend them a degree of minimalist elegance in aesthetic terms, but is profoundly limiting in terms of gameplay.

Mike Verdu was obviously aiming for something else. The Lexington is not just vividly but realistically realized once one accepts the black-box premise of faster-than-light travel. Its systems work in a consistent, thought-through way, with nary a gratuitous slider puzzle nor instance of awkward self-referential humor to be found. Anyone annoyed by the artificiality of most adventure-game puzzles needs to play this game. One might go so far as to say that the Lexington itself is Mission Critical’s most impressive single achievement. The game’s commitment to the lived reality of the ship remains complete from first to last.

I did a stint in defense contracting where I worked on Navy projects, including a lot of submarine-related projects. If you see any verisimilitude — a feeling that the world of the Lexington has some degree of reality to it — that’s me drawing on experiences of visiting Navy yards and tramping around submarines and reading lots and lots of documents. The Lexington is really a submarine in space. I drew on my experience to make it feel like a lived-in ship.

Your efforts to repair the Lexington are lent an added sense of urgency when you learn that another UN force is on its way to Persephone to investigate the fate of the first one. Dealing with it comes to occupy the middle third of the game. Space combat is implemented in the form of a surprisingly well-realized real-time strategy game that’s embedded within the adventure game. While the graphics don’t rival the likes of its standalone contemporary Warcraft II, much less a modern release in the genre, I find that it defies a long tradition of dubious adventure mini-games by being genuinely engaging. As usual, Legend’s design instincts are good; instead of plunging you into a fight to the death within a mini-game interface you’ve never seen before, they introduce it through a series of training simulations that get you up to speed within the framework of the story.

What you’re seeing there is my love of strategy gaming shining through. It’s probably no surprise that I went on to make a bunch of real-time-strategy games after my adventure games because my two great loves are storytelling and strategy. I grew up playing Avalon Hill board games; my dad taught me to play Tactics II and Afrika Korps and Squad Leader. Then I played a lot of the first generation of computer strategy games. I dearly, desperately wanted to make my own strategy game at some point. This game seemed to offer the opportunity to put in a little taste of strategy that would feel very natural. So, why not? Bob Bates was sort of horrified that I wanted to put an entirely different genre of experience into an adventure game. The compromise we reached was a button you could hit to just have it resolved. You never really had to do the strategy game.

Mark Poesch, the engineer who did most of the coding on Mission Critical, spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to build it out. We wanted to bring to life this notion that the battles were fought with drones, and also that fighting in 3D is very different from fighting in 2D. Almost all outer-space strategy games take place on a plane. Those games like Homeworld that tried to introduce a third dimension found that it’s very hard to convey the sense of fighting in 3D space.

In the last third of the game, we shift gears dramatically once again. Now you finally make your way down to the surface of the planet Persephone to find out what the science team aboard the Jericho was so interested in. It’s here that our relatively well-grounded military-science-fiction tale spirals off into Vernor Vinge territory. You encounter an almost godlike race of multidimensional “electronic life forms” who send you hopscotching over vast distances in time and space. The last of the Myst comparisons fall away, as Mission Critical seems to lose interest in immersive environmental storytelling and becomes a much more typical Legend adventure game, full of character interactions and gallons and gallons of plot coming at you thick and fast. Instead of a single ship, you now hold the fate of the entire human race and, indeed, much of the multiverse in your hands.

This is the most problematic part of the game in many ways. The ideas being explored are certainly audacious, for all that they aren’t strikingly original for anyone versed in recent trends in literary science fiction at the time of Mission Critical’s creation. Yet the contrast with what came before remains jarring, as the game turns into an exponentially less granular experience. It used to take a couple of dozen clicks to repair a breach in the hull of a spaceship; now it takes one or two to change the destiny of billions of sentient beings. My first instinct, born from researching the development history of countless other games, was that constraints of time and money had forced Legend to put the game on fast-forward when the project was already in midstream; Mission Critical would hardly be the first adventure game whose early environments are far more fully realized than its later ones. Mike Verdu confirmed that there was some of that going on, but also revealed that it was more planned and less improvised than I first suspected.

There was supposed to be a sense of increasing momentum, of the sense of scale increasing, the stakes increasing… that was a conscious decision. But you’re right that my ambition was too great for my budget and my schedule. I really hoped the latter part of the game would have the same production values and 3D assets as the first part. Instead things move more and more toward shorthand as you move toward the end.

I came to this upfront because we had to lay everything out then. Do I tell the story I want to tell and scrimp a bit on the assets and the fidelity toward the end? Or do I limit the ambition of the story? I decided I didn’t want to tell a story that was just about wandering around a spaceship fixing things. I made a bet that the first part of the game would ground the player in the world through fidelity and verisimilitude and immersion. Then they would forgive us for moving to a more shorthand sort of storytelling toward the end. Because at that point, what really matters is the story. You’re either hooked by the story or you’re not. If you are, you’re probably going to push on through, and what you’ll remember are the big ideas and the resolution more than the fact that Persephone was not rendered with the same level of fidelity as the Lexington and our cool AI environments were just paintings.

Legend had once hoped to release Mission Critical in the summer of 1995, but that date was eventually pushed back to November. It appeared at that time simultaneously with Shannara, their other game for the year. Neither was an outright commercial failure, but neither provided the commercial paradigm shift Legend had been looking for either.

Mission Critical didn’t sell a ton  — maybe 70,000 copies, which meant that it probably broke even at best. Random House was disappointed. The hope had been that it would catapult us out of that range of 30,000 to 100,000 in sales. But we spent three times the budget and got essentially the same result. In that sense, it was a failure.

Yet Mission Critical, despite being so thoroughly of its time in terms of technology and approach, would prove oddly enduring in the memories of both its principal creator and the select group of gamers whom it touched. This lumpy amalgamation of full-motion video, Myst-style pre-rendered environments, real-time strategy, and the traditional Legend approach to interactive storytelling is an artifact from a time when games were not yet all sorted on the basis of gameplay genre alone, when a designer could begin with a narrative experience in mind and just go from there, employing whatever approach seemed best suited to bring his imaginative conceptions to life. Mike Verdu would go on to a high-profile career after Legend at companies like Electronic Arts, Zynga, Facebook, and now Netflix, but he would never again get the opportunity to be a gaming auteur like he was on Mission Critical.

It’s the thing I’ve created that’s lasted the longest. The story seemed to really strike a chord with some people. I would get emails from people saying I’d blown their mind, or it was the most immersive thing they’d ever played. When it reached somebody, it really reached them. But that wasn’t a huge number of people. As an artist, if you reach a small number of people in a profound way, is that better than reaching a million people in a very shallow way? Because this was the game I created that reached a few people in a profound way. The rest of the games I’ve created, especially in the latter part of my career, reached in some cases tens of millions of people, but in a light-touch kind of way.

From a creator’s standpoint, Mission Critical is one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever made. It astounds me, but people still play it. I’d always thought of computer games as an ephemeral medium — something you create that quickly becomes obsolete because the advance of technology makes it literally unplayable. People can experience it for a brief window of time, then all they have is their memories. I had resigned myself to that. But it astounds me now that people are still playing the game and posting reviews. This is a much more enduring medium than I thought.

I’ve been delighted that Mission Critical and some of the other Legend games have stood the test of time.

(Sources: This article is drawn in its virtual entirety from the recollections of Mike Verdu. I thank him for taking the time from his busy schedule to talk with me, and wish him all the best in his latest gig with Netflix.

Mission Critical is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com. It comes highly recommended.)

Comments
19 Responses

- Martin

October 1, 2021 at 5:29 pm

How well did the game sell in the countries that were not part of the freedom crowd.

Also, can’t say I’ve ever seen Michael Dorn out of Klingon makeup. The voice is unmistakable though.

- F

October 15, 2021 at 7:44 pm

Funny you should say that – I was heading to the comment section just to point out that for some reason this game never made it to Italy in any form at the time, and it’s very strange, as we more or less got everything. All its contemporaries were imported and reviewed, and I would’ve noticed a game starring Dorn right away, yet nothing. Maybe Doom-mania and Quake hype completely overshadowed the FMV genre.

- Chris Floyd

October 1, 2021 at 6:29 pm

I am undoubtedly part of that “select group of gamers.” Mission Critical floored me, and stuck in my mind for many years while it was impossible to run and unavailable to purchase. It did something similar to System Shock, just through a different user interface lens: It created a truly convincing, lived-in sci-fi world. And it made solving very practical problems in practical ways feel exciting and important (I think Verdu did this well in Gateway, too). Seeing it come to GOG was truly delightful, and replaying it a blast from the past. I think the final act doesn’t hold up as well as the first for the reasons you mentioned, but I appreciate Verdu’s big swing and thoughtful approach. Nice to hear about the game’s development in his own words.

- Mike Duncan

October 5, 2021 at 2:44 am

This is the first PC game I can remember that was more or less an interactive movie. I was limited to what was in the bargain bin in the late 90s, and I skipped a lot of the initial CD-ROM revolution, so this one was an huge eye-opener on my new Pentium I rig, transitioning directly from a 8mhz XT. It might as well have been VR. Linear, but well done.

I remain amazed that the left-alone-on-a-space-station/ship genre is not yet played out, but I suppose it still hits the sweet spot of both gaming technology and our grasp of space and humanity’s response to it.

- Gordon Cameron

October 1, 2021 at 8:17 pm

Mike Verdu: “As an artist, if you reach a small number of people in a profound way, is that better than reaching a million people in a very shallow way?”

/raises hand

Yeah! But we all have to make a buck, too.

Thanks again for another great article.

- Sebastian

October 2, 2021 at 12:25 pm

Nit: “want on” -> “went on”

- Jimmy Maher

October 2, 2021 at 3:10 pm

Thanks!

- Kyle Haight

October 7, 2021 at 4:50 am

Ah, I remember this one. In fact, I still have my original boxed copy on a shelf in my closet. Some of the screenshots bring back memories.

I was never much of an adventure gamer. RPGs were more my thing, but they were a bit thin on the ground at that time and I was desperate enough to give it a try. I was not disappointed.

- Ben P. Stein

October 9, 2021 at 11:35 am

I read with interest that the Mission Critical scenes were filmed in a suburb of Baltimore. I’m wondering if it could have been Columbia, Maryland (my current hometown), where interior scenes for Veep and The Wire were filmed. If someone who knows exactly where could answer here, that would be great. Thanks!

- Ross

October 9, 2021 at 4:21 pm

As a fellow Columbiaite, I’d be interested too, but it seems to me like Bethesda or Silver Spring would be more likely.

- Ben P Stein

October 9, 2021 at 4:50 pm

Wow, that’s great you are also in Columbia!. Though Bob Bates lived closer (or perhaps even in) Bethesda and Silver Spring, they seem to be more frequently considered DC suburbs. A Baltimore suburb seems to be the descriptor for places farther north such as Columbia, Ellicott City, Hunt Valley (where of course Firaxis is now) or Owings Mills (where the Louis Rukeyser financial TV show was filmed).One more Columbia connection: IF legend Andrew Plotkin had an address here in the 90s. Anyway, I have a feeling we are going to find out the answer soon!

- Jimmy Maher

October 9, 2021 at 8:32 pm

I can check with Bob and Mike next week. Will report back if can learn anything.

- Ben P. Stein

October 10, 2021 at 12:44 pm

Thanks so much!

- Jimmy Maher

October 14, 2021 at 6:26 am

So, here it is from the horse’s (Mike Verdu’s) mouth:

We filmed and did post-production at Flite 3 Studios in Baltimore. I know they recorded music there as well. A Google search reveals that they went out of business in the early 2000s, which is a shame.

I don’t remember where in Baltimore we filmed… I have strong memories of the stage and post-production facilities, but not so much the drive there or where I parked.

FWIW, I did find this reference to Flite 3 in a random Google search result:

“Flite 3 Studios provides a full range of production services for radio and television commercials, corporate productions, television programming and feature films. It has been in continuous operation since 1958.

“Flite 3 Recordings, Ltd. 1130 East Coldspring Lane, Baltimore, MD 21239”

The Coldspring Lane address does generate a tiny flicker of familiarity.

- Ross

October 14, 2021 at 2:27 pm

Okay wow. That brings back some memories. It’s about halfway between Loyola University (then Loyola College), a smallish Catholic college with a regionally significant business school (also, coincidentally, my alma mater) and Morgan State University, a fairly big-name HBCU. There’s something odd about the address; it should be on the north side of the street, but there’s nothing there but a 7-Eleven, a coin-op laundry and a gas station, and that was true as far back as ’97 – my roommate inexplicably drug us there to do laundry once. There’s a large building back from the road that I’m guessing may have been Flite 3; it’s some sort of drug rehab non-profit now, but their address shows up as the cross-street.

- Ben P. Stein

October 16, 2021 at 3:38 am

Thanks very much to everyone for the info!

- Ian C

October 9, 2021 at 4:51 pm

No update on Friday… Here’s hoping that this doesn’t signal the end of our journey!

- Martin

October 10, 2021 at 7:26 pm

That would be terrible!

- Lisa H.

October 10, 2021 at 9:41 pm

I think he just doesn’t necessarily do every week these days… what with Analog Antiquarian and stuff.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
October 22, 2021

To the person who [is] contemplating buying this game, what would I say? I would say take your money and give it to the homeless, you’ll do more good. But if you are mad to buy this game, you’ll probably have a hell of a lot of fun playing it, it will probably make you uneasy, and you’ll probably be a smarter person when you’re done playing the game. Not because I’m smarter, but because everything was done to confuse and upset you. I am told by people that it is a game unlike any other game around at the moment and I guess that’s a good thing. Innovation and novelty is a good thing. It would be my delight if this game set a trend and all of the arcade bang-bang games that turn kids into pistol-packing papas and mamas were subsumed into games like this in which ethical considerations and using your brain and unraveling puzzles become the modus operandi. I don’t think it will happen. I don’t think you like to be diverted too much. So I’m actually out here to mess with you, if you want to know it. We created this game to give you all the stuff you think you want, but to put a burr into your side at the same time. To slip a little loco weed into your Coca-Cola. See you around.

— Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison made a very successful career out of biting the hands that fed him. The pint-sized dervish burst into literary prominence in the mid-1960s, marching at the vanguard of science fiction’s New Wave. In the pages of Frederick Pohl’s magazine If, he paraded a series of scintillatingly trippy short stories that were like nothing anyone had ever seen before, owing as much to James Joyce and Jack Kerouac as they did to Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Ellison demanded, both implicitly in his stories and explicitly in his interviews, that science fiction cast off its fetish for shiny technology-fueled utopias and address the semi-mythical Future in a more humanistic, skeptical way. His own prognostications in that vein were almost unrelentingly grim: “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” dealt with a future society where everyone was enslaved to the ticking of the government’s official clock; “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” told of the last five humans left on a post-apocalyptic Earth, kept alive by an insane artificial intelligence so that he could torture them for all eternity; “A Boy and His Dog” told of a dog who was smarter than his feral, amoral human master, and helped him to find food to eat and women to rape as they roamed another post-apocalyptic landscape. To further abet his agenda of dragging science fiction kicking and screaming into the fearless realm of True Literature, Ellison became the editor of a 1967 anthology called Dangerous Visions, for which he begged a diverse group of established and up-and-coming science-fiction writers to pick a story idea that had crossed their mind but was so controversial and/or provocative that they had never dared send it to a magazine editor — and then to write it up and send it to him instead.

Ellison’s most impactful period in science fiction was relatively short-lived, ending with the publication of the somewhat underwhelming Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972. He obstinately refused to follow the expected career path of a writer in his position: that of writing a big, glossy novel to capitalize on the cachet his short stories had generated. Meanwhile even his output of new stories slowed in favor of more and more non-fiction essays, while those stories that did emerge lacked some of the old vim and vinegar. One cause of this was almost certainly his loss of Frederick Pohl as editor and bête noire. Possessing very different literary sensibilities, the two had locked horns ferociously over the most picayune details — Pohl called Ellison “as much pain and trouble as all the next ten troublesome writers combined” — but Pohl had unquestionably made Ellison’s early stories better. He was arguably the last person who was ever truly able to edit Harlan Ellison.

No matter. Harlan Ellison’s greatest creation of all was the persona of Harlan Ellison, a role he continued to play very well indeed right up until his death in 2018. “He is a test of our credulity,” wrote his fellow science-fiction writer David Gerrold in 1984. “He is too improbable to be real.”

Harlan Ellison on the set of Star Trek with Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner.

The point of origin of Harlan Ellison as science fiction’s very own enfant terrible can be traced back to the episode of Star Trek he wrote in 1966. “The City on the Edge of Forever” is often called the best single episode of the entire original series, but to Ellison it was and forever remained an abomination in its broadcast form. As you may remember, it’s a time-travel story, in which Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are cast back into the Great Depression on Earth, where Kirk falls in love with a beautiful social worker and peace activist, only to learn that he has to let her die in a traffic accident in order to prevent her pacifism from infecting the body politic to such an extent that the Nazis are able to win World War II. As good as the produced version of the episode is, Ellison insisted until his death that the undoctored script he first submitted was far, far better — and it must be acknowledged that at least some of the people who worked on Star Trek agreed with him. In a contemporaneous memo, producer Bob Justman lamented that, following several rounds of editing and rewriting, “there is hardly anything left of the beauty and mystery that was inherent in the screenplay as Harlan originally wrote it.” For his part, Ellison blamed Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry loudly and repeatedly for “taking a chainsaw” to his script. In a fit of pique, he submitted his undoctored script for a 1967 Writers Guild Award. When it won, he literally danced on the table in front of Roddenberry inside the banquet hall, waving his trophy in his face. Dorothy Fontana, the writer who had been assigned the unenviable task of changing Ellison’s script to fit with the series’s budget and its established characters, was so cowed by his antics that for 30 years she dared not tell him she had done so.

Despite this incident and many another, lower-profile one much like it, Ellison continued to work in Hollywood — as, indeed, he had been doing even before his star rose in literary science-fiction circles. Money, he forthrightly acknowledged, was his principal reason for writing for a medium he claimed to loathe. He liked creating series pilots most of all, he said, “because when they screw those up, they just don’t go on the air. I get paid and I’ve written something nice and it doesn’t have to get ruined.” His boorish behavior in meetings with the top movers and shakers of Hollywood became legendary, as did the lawsuits he fired hither and yon whenever he felt ill-used. Why did Hollywood put up with it? One answer is that Harlan Ellison was at the end of the day a talented writer who could deliver the goods when it counted, who wasn’t unaware of the tastes and desires of the very same viewing public he heaped with scorn at every opportunity. The other is that his perpetual cantankerousness made him a character, and no place loves a character more than Hollywood.

Then again, one could say the same of science-fiction fandom. Countless fans who had read few to none of Ellison’s actual stories grew up knowing him as their genre’s curmudgeonly uncle with the razor wit and the taste for blood. For them, Harlan Ellison was famous simply for being Harlan Ellison. Any lecture or interview he gave was bound to be highly entertaining. An encounter with Ellison became a rite of passage for science-fiction journalists and critics, who gingerly sidled up to him, fed him a line, and then ducked for cover while he went off at colorful and profane length.

Harlan Ellison was a talk-show regular during the 1970s. And small wonder: drop a topic in his slot, and something funny, outrageous, or profound — or all three — was guaranteed to come out.

It’s hard to say how much of Ellison’s rage against the world was genuine and how much was shtick. He frequently revealed in interviews that he was very conscious of his reputation, and hinted at times that he felt a certain pressure to maintain it. And, in keeping with many public figures with outrageous public personas, Ellison’s friends did speak of a warmer side to his private personality, of a man who, once he brought you into his fold, would go to ridiculous lengths to support, protect, and help you.

Still, the flame that burned in Ellison was probably more real than otherwise. He was at bottom a moralist, who loathed the hypocrisy and parsimony he saw all around him. Often described as a futurist, he was closer to a reactionary. Nowhere could one see this more plainly than in his relationship to technology. In 1985, when the personal-computer revolution had become almost old hat, he was still writing on a mechanical typewriter, using reasoning that sounded downright Amish.

The presence of technology does not mean you have to use that technology. Understand? The typewriter that I have — I use an Olympia and I have six of them — is the best typewriter ever made. That’s the level of technology that allows me to do my job best. Electric typewriters and word processors — which are vile in every respect — seem to me to be crutches for bad writing. I have never yet heard an argument for using a word processor that didn’t boil down to “It’s more convenient.” Convenient means lazy to me. Lazy means I can write all the shit I want and bash it out later. They can move it around, rewrite it later. What do I say? Have it right in your head before you sit down, that’s what art is all about. Art is form, art is shape, art is pace, it is measure, it is the sound of music. Don’t write slop and discordancy and think just because you have the technology to cover up your slovenliness that it makes you a better writer. It doesn’t.

Ellison’s attitude toward computers in general was no more nuanced. Asked what he thought about computer entertainment in 1987, he pronounced the phrase “an oxymoron.” Thus it came as quite a surprise to everyone five years later when it was announced that Harlan Ellison had agreed to collaborate on a computer game.

The source of the announcement was a Southern California publisher and developer called Cyberdreams, which had been founded by Pat Ketchum and Rolf Klug in 1990. Ketchum was a grizzled veteran of the home-computer wars, having entered the market with the founding of his first software publisher DataSoft on June 12, 1980. After a couple of years of spinning their wheels, DataSoft found traction when they released a product called Text Wizard, for a time the most popular word processor for Atari’s 8-bit home-computer line. (Its teenage programmer had started on the path to making it when he began experimenting with ways to subtly expand margins and increase line spacings in order to make his two-page school papers look like three…)

Once established, DataSoft moved heavily into games. Ketchum decided early on that working with pre-existing properties was the best way to ensure success. Thus DataSoft’s heyday, which lasted from roughly 1983 to 1987, was marked by a bewildering array of television shows (The Dallas Quest), martial-arts personalities (Bruce Lee), Sunday-comics characters (Heathcliff: Fun with Spelling), blockbuster movies (Conan, The Goonies), pulp fiction (Zorro), and even board games (221 B Baker St.), as well as a bevy of arcade ports and British imports. The quality level of this smorgasbord was hit or miss at best, but Ketchum’s commercial instinct for the derivative proved well-founded for almost a half a decade. Only later in the 1980s, when more advanced computers began to replace the simple 8-bit machines that had been the perfect hosts for DataSoft’s cheap and cheerful games, did his somewhat lackadaisical attitude toward the nuts and bolts of his products catch up to him. He then left DataSoft to work for a time at Sullivan Bluth Interactive Media, which made ports of the old laser-disc arcade game Dragon’s Lair for various personal-computing platforms. Then, at the dawn of the new decade, he founded another company of his own with his new partner Rolf Klug.

The new company’s product strategy was conceived as an intriguing twist on that of the last one he had founded. Like DataSoft, Cyberdreams would rely heavily on licensed properties and personalities. But instead of embracing DataSoft’s random grab bag of junk-food culture, Cyberdreams would go decidedly upmarket, a move that was very much in keeping with the most rarefied cultural expectations for the new era of multimedia computing. Their first released product, which arrived in 1992, was called Dark Seed; it was an adventure game built around the striking and creepy techno-organic imagery of the Swiss artist H.R. Giger, best known for designing the eponymous creatures in the 1979 Ridley Scott film Alien. If calling Dark Seed a “collaboration” with Giger is perhaps stretching the point — although Giger licensed his existing paintings to Cyberdreams, he contributed no new art to the game — the end result certainly does capture his fetishistic aesthetic very, very well. Alas, it succeeds less well as a playable game. It runs in real time, meaning events can and will run away without a player who isn’t omniscient enough to be in the exact right spot at the exact right time, while its plot is most kindly described as rudimentary — and don’t even get me started on the pixel hunts. Suffice to say that few games in history have screamed “style over substance” louder than this one. Still, in an age hungry for fodder for the latest graphics cards and equally eager for proof that computer games could be as provocative as any other form of media, it did quite well.

By the time of Dark Seed’s release, Cyberdreams was already working on another game built around the aesthetic of another edgy artist most famous for his contributions to a Ridley Scott film: Syd Mead, who had done the set designs for Blade Runner, along with those of such other iconic science-fiction films as Star Trek: The Motion Picture, TRON, 2010, and the Alien sequel Aliens. CyberRace, the 1993 racing game that resulted from the partnership, was, like its Cyberdreams predecessor, long on visuals and short on satisfying gameplay.

Well before that game was completed — in fact, before even Dark Seed was released — Pat Ketchum had already approached Harlan Ellison to ask whether he could make a game out of his classic short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” Doing so was, if nothing else, an act of considerable bravery, given not only Ellison’s general reputation but his specific opinion of videogames as “an utter and absolute stupid waste of time.” And yet, likely as much to Ketchum’s astonishment as anyone else’s, he actually agreed to the project. Why? That is best left to Ellison to explain in his own inimitable fashion:

The question frequently asked of me is this: “Since it is common knowledge that you don’t even own a computer on which you could play an electronic game this complex, since it is common knowledge that you hate computers and frequently revile those who spend their nights logging onto bulletin boards, thereby filling the air with pointless gibberish, dumb questions that could’ve been answered had they bothered to read a book of modern history or even this morning’s newspaper, and mean-spirited gossip that needs endless hours the following day to be cleaned up; and since it is common knowledge that not only do you type your books and columns and TV and film scripts on a manual typewriter (not even an electric, but an actual finger-driven manual), but that the closest you’ve ever come to playing an actual computer- or videogame is the three hours you wasted during a Virgin Airlines flight back to the States from the UK; where the hell do you get off creating a high-tech cutting-edge enigma like this I Have No Mouth thing?”

To which my usual response would be, “Yo’ Mama!”

But I have been asked to attempt politeness, so I will vouchsafe courtesy and venture some tiny explication of what the eff I’m doing in here with all you weird gazoonies. Take your feet off the table.

Well, it goes back to that Oscar Wilde quote about perversion: “You may engage in a specific perversion once, and it can be chalked up to curiosity. But if you do it again, it must be presumed you are a pervert.”

They came to me in the dead of night, human toads in silk suits, from this giant megapolitan organization called Cyberdreams, and they offered me vast sums of money — all of it in pennies, with strings attached to each coin, so they could yank them back in a moment, like someone trying to outsmart a soft-drink machine with a slug on a wire — and they said, in their whispery croaky demon voices, “Let us make you a vast fortune! Just sell us the rights to use your name and the name of your most famous story, and we will make you wealthy beyond the dreams of mere mortals, or even Aaron Spelling, our toad brother in riches.”

Well, I’d once worked for Aaron Spelling on Burke’s Law, and that had about as much appeal to me as spending an evening discussing the relative merits of butcher knives with O.J. Simpson. So I told the toads that money was something I had no trouble making, that money is what they give you when you do your job well, and that I never do anything if it’s only for money. ‘Cause money ain’t no thang.

Well, for the third time, they then proceeded to do the dance, and sing the song, and hump the drums, and finally got down to it with the fuzzy ramadoola that can snare me: they said, “Well (#4), you’ve never done this sort of thing. Maybe it is that you are not capable of doing this here now thing.”

Never tell me not to go get a tall ladder and climb it and open the tippy-topmost kitchen cabinet in my mommy’s larder and reach around back there at the rear of the topmost shelf in the dark with the cobwebs and the spider-goojies and pull out that Mason jar full of hard nasty petrified chickpeas and strain and sweat to get the top off the jar till I get it open and then take several of those chickpeas and shove them up my nose. Never tell me that. Because as sure as birds gotta swim an’ fish gotta fly, when you come back home, you will find me lying stretched out blue as a Duke Ellington sonata, dead cold with beans or peas or lentils up my snout.

Or, as Oscar Wilde put it: “I couldn’t help it. I can resist anything except temptation.”

And there it is. I wish it were darker and more ominous than that, but the scaldingly dopey truth is that I wanted to see if I could do it. Create a computer game better than anyone else had created a computer game. I’d never done it, and I was desirous of testing my mettle. It’s a great flaw with me. My only flaw, as those who have known me longest will casually attest. (I know where they live.)

Having entered the meeting hoping only to secure the rights to Ellison’s short story, Pat Ketchum thus walked away having agreed to a full-fledged collaboration with the most choleric science-fiction writer in the world, a man destined to persist forevermore in referring to him simply as “the toad.” Whether this was a good or a bad outcome was very much up for debate.

Ketchum elected to pair Ellison with David Sears, a journalist and assistant editor for Compute! magazine who had made Cyberdreams’s acquaintance when he was assigned to write a preview of Dark Seed, then had gone on to write the hint book for the game. Before the deal was consummated, he had been told only that Cyberdreams hoped to adapt “one of” Ellison’s stories into a game: “I was thinking, oh, it could be ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,’ or maybe ‘A Boy and His Dog,’ and it’s going to be some kind of RPG or something.” When he was told that it was to be “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” he was taken aback: “I was like, what? There’s no way [to] turn that into a game!” In order to fully appreciate his dismay, we should look a bit more closely at the story in question.

Harlan Ellison often called “No Mouth” “one of the ten most-reprinted stories in the English language,” but this claim strikes me as extremely dubious. Certainly, however, it is one of the more frequently anthologized science-fiction classics. Written “in one blue-white fit of passion,” as Ellison put it, “like Captain Nemo sitting down at his organ and [playing] Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” it spans no more than fifteen pages or so in the typical paperback edition, but manages to cram quite a punch into that space.

The backstory entails a three-way world war involving the United States, the Soviet Union, and China and their respective allies, with the forces of each bloc controlled by a supercomputer in the name of maximal killing efficiency. That last proved to be a mistake: instead of merely moving ships and armies around, the American computer evolved into a sentient consciousness and merged with its rival machines. The resulting personality was twisted by its birthright of war and violence. Thus it committed genocide on the blighted planet’s remaining humans, with the exception of just five of them, which it kept alive to physically and psychologically torture for its pleasure.  As the story proper opens, it’s been doing so for more than a century. Our highly unreliable narrator is one of the victims, a paranoid schizophrenic named Ted; the others, whom we meet only as the sketchiest of character sketches, are named Gorrister, Benny, Ellen (the lone woman in the group), and Nimdok. The computer calls itself AM, an acronym for its old designation of “Allied Mastercomputer,” but also a riff on Descartes: “I think, therefore I AM.”

The story’s plot, such as it is, revolves around the perpetually starving prisoners’ journey to a place that AM has promised them contains food beyond their wildest dreams. It’s just one more of his cruel jokes, of course: they wind up in a frigid cavern piled high with canned food, without benefit of a can opener. But then something occurs which AM has failed to anticipate: Ted and Ellen finally accept that there is only one true means of escape open to them. They break off the sharpest stalactites they can find and use them to kill the other three prisoners, after which Ted kills Ellen. But AM manages to intervene before Ted can kill himself. Enraged at having his playthings snatched away, he condemns the very last human on Earth to a fate more horrific even than what he has already experienced:

I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.

Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance.

Inwardly: alone. Here. Living under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last.

AM will be the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet… AM has won, simply… he has taken his revenge…

I have no mouth. And I must scream.

Harlan Ellison was initially insistent that the game version of No Mouth preserve this miserably bleak ending. He declared himself greatly amused by the prospect of “a game that you cannot possibly win.” Less superciliously, he noted that the short story was intended to be, like so much of his work, a moral fable: it was about the nobility of doing the right thing, even when one doesn’t personally benefit — indeed, even when one will be punished terribly for it. To change the story’s ending would be to cut the heart out of its message.

Thus when poor young David Sears went to meet with Ellison for the first time — although Cyberdreams and Ellison were both based in Southern California, he himself was still working remotely from his native Mississippi — he faced the daunting prospect of convincing one of the most infamously stubborn writers in the world — a man who had spent decades belittling no less rarefied a character than Gene Roddenberry over the changes to his “City on the Edge of Forever” script — that such an ending just wouldn’t fly in the contemporary games market. The last company to make an adventure game with a “tragic” ending had been Infocom back in 1983, and they’d gotten so much blow back that no one had ever dared to try such a thing again. People demanded games that they could win.

Much to Sears’s own surprise, his first meeting with Ellison went very, very well. He won Ellison’s respect almost immediately, when he asked a question that the author claimed never to have been asked before: “Why are these [people] the five that AM has saved?” The question pointed a way for the game of No Mouth to become something distinctly different from the story — something richer, deeper, and even, I would argue, more philosophically mature.

Ellison and Sears decided together that each of AM’s victims had been crippled inside by some trauma before the final apocalyptic war began, and it was this that made them such particularly delightful playthings. The salt-of-the-earth truck driver Gorrister was wracked with guilt for having committed his wife to a mental institution; the hard-driving military man Benny was filled with self-loathing over his abandonment of his comrades in an Asian jungle; the genius computer scientist Ellen was forever reliving a brutal rape she had suffered at the hands of a coworker; the charming man of leisure Ted was in reality a con artist who had substituted sexual conquest for intimacy. The character with by far the most stains on his conscience was the elderly Nimdok, who had served as an assistant to Dr. Josef Mengele in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.

You the player would guide each of the five through a surreal, symbolic simulacrum of his or her checkered past, helpfully provided by AM. While the latter’s goal was merely to torture them, your goal would be to cause them to redeem themselves in some small measure, by looking the demons of their past full in the face and making the hard, selfless choices they had failed to make the first time around. If they all succeeded in passing their tests of character, Ellison grudgingly agreed, the game could culminate in a relatively happy ending. Ellison:

This game [says] to the player there is more to the considered life than action. Television tells you any problem can be solved in 30 minutes, usually with a punch in the jaw, and that is not the way life is. The only thing you have to hang onto is not your muscles, or how pretty your face is, but how strong is your ethical behavior. How willing are you to risk everything — not just what’s convenient, but everything — to triumph. If someone comes away from this game saying to himself, “I had to make an extremely unpleasant choice, and I knew I was not going to benefit from that choice, but it was the only thing to do because it was the proper behavior,” then they will have played the game to some advantage.

Harlan Ellison and David Sears were now getting along fabulously. After several weeks spent working on a design document together, Ellison pronounced Sears “a brilliant young kid.” He went out of his way to be a good host. When he learned, for example, that Sears was greatly enamored with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novels, he called up said writer himself on his speakerphone: “Hi, Neil. This is David. He’s a fan and he’d love to talk to you about your work.” In retrospect, Ellison’s hospitality is perhaps less than shocking. He was in fact helpful and even kind throughout his life to young writers whom he deemed to be worth his trouble. David Sears was obviously one of these. “I don’t want to damage his reputation because I’m sure he spent decades building it up,” says Sears, “but he’s a real rascal with a heart of gold — but he doesn’t tolerate idiots.”

Harlan Ellison prepares to speak at the 1993 Game Developers Conference.

The project had its industry coming-out party at the seventh annual Computer Game Developers Conference in May of 1993. In a measure of how genuinely excited Harlan Ellison was about it, he agreed to appear as one of the most unlikely keynote speakers in GDC history. His speech has not, alas, been preserved for posterity, but it appears to have been a typically pyrotechnic Ellison rant, judging by the angry response of Computer Gaming World editor Johnny L. Wilson, who took Ellison to be just the latest in a long line of clueless celebrity pundits swooping in to tell game makers what they were doing wrong. Like all of the others, Wilson said, Ellison “didn’t really understand technology or the challenges faced daily by his audience [of game developers].” His column, which bore the snarky title of “I Have No Message, but I Must Scream,” went on thusly:

The major thesis of the address seemed to be that the assembled game designers need to do something besides create games. We aren’t quite sure what he means.

If he means to take the games which the assembled designers are already making and infuse them with enough human emotion to bridge the gaps of interpersonal understanding, there are designers trying to accomplish this in many different ways (games with artificial personalities, multiplayer cooperation, and, most importantly, with story).

If he objects to the violence which is so pervasive in both computer and video games, he had best revisit the anarchic and glorious celebration of violence in his own work. Violence is an easy way to express conflict and resolution in any art form. It can also be powerful. That is why we advocate a more careful use of violence in certain games, but do not editorialize against violence per se.

Harlan Ellison says that the computer-game design community should quit playing games with their lives. We think Ellison should stop playing games with his audiences. It’s time to put away his “Bad Melville” impression and use his podium as a “futurist” to challenge his audiences instead of settling for cheap laughs and letting them miss the message.

Harlan Ellison seldom overlooked a slight, whether in print or in person, and this occasion was no exception. He gave Computer Gaming World the rather hilarious new moniker of Video Wahoo Magazine in a number of interviews after Wilson’s editorializing was brought to his attention.

But the other side of Harlan Ellison was also on display at that very same conference. David Sears had told Ellison shortly before he made his speech that he really, really wanted a permanent job in the games industry, not just the contract work he had been getting from Cyberdreams. So, Ellison carried a fishbowl onstage with him, explained to the audience that Sears was smart and creative as heck and urgently needed a job, and told them to drop their business cards in the bowl if they thought they might be able to offer him one. “Three days later,” says Sears, “I had a job at Virgin Games. If he called me today [this interview was given before Ellison’s death] and said, ‘I need you to fix the plumbing in my bathroom,’ I’d be on a plane.”

Ellison’s largess was doubly selfless in that it stopped his No Mouth project in its tracks. With Sears having departed for Virgin Games, it spent at least six months on the shelf while Cyberdreams finished up CyberRace and embarked on a Dark Seed II. Finally Pat Ketchum handed it to a new hire, a veteran producer and designer named David Mullich.

It so happens that we met Mullich long, long ago, in the very early days of these histories. At the dawn of the 1980s, as a young programmer just out of university, he worked for the pioneering educational-software publisher Edu-Ware, whom he convinced to let him make some straight-up games as well. One of these was an unauthorized interactive take on the 1960s cult-classic television series The Prisoner; it was arguably the first commercial computer game in history to strive unabashedly toward the status of Art.

Mullich eventually left Edu-Ware to work for a variety of software developers and publishers. Rather belying his earliest experiments in game design, he built a reputation inside the industry as a steady hand well able to churn out robust and marketable if not always hugely innovative games and educational products that fit whatever license and/or design brief he was given. Yet the old impulse to make games with something to say about the world never completely left him. He was actually in the audience at the Game Developers Conference where Harlan Ellison made his keynote address; in marked contrast to Johnny L. Wilson, he found it bracing and exciting, not least because “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” was his favorite short story of all time. Half a year or so later, Pat Ketchum called Mullich up to ask if he’d like to help Ellison get his game finished. He didn’t have to ask twice; after all those years spent slogging in the trenches of commerce, here was a chance for Mullich to make Art again.

His first meeting with Ellison didn’t begin well. Annoyed at the long delay from Cyberdreams’s side, Ellison mocked him as “another member of the brain trust.” It does seem that Mullich never quite developed the same warm relationship with Ellison that Sears had enjoyed: Ellison persisted in referring to him as “this new David, whose last name I’ve forgotten” even after the game was released. Nonetheless, he did soften his prejudicial first judgment enough to deem Mullich “a very nice guy.” Said nice guy took on the detail work of refining Sears and Ellison’s early design document — which, having been written by two people who had never made a game before, had some inevitable deficiencies — into a finished script that would combine Meaning with Playability, a task his background prepared him perfectly to take on. Mullich estimates that 50 percent of the dialog in the finished game is his, while 30 percent is down to Sears and just 20 percent to Ellison himself. Still, even that level of involvement was vastly greater than that of most established writers who deigned to put their names on games. And of course the core concepts of No Mouth were very much Ellison and Sears’s.

Pat Ketchum had by this point elected to remove Cyberdreams from the grunt work of game development; instead the company would act as a design mill and publisher only. Thus No Mouth was passed to an outfit called The Dreamers Guild for implementation under Mullich’s supervision. That became another long process; the computer game of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream wasn’t finally released until late 1995, fully three and a half years after Pat Ketchum had first visited Harlan Ellison to ask his permission to make it.

The latter’s enthusiasm for the project never abated over the course of that time. He bestowed his final gift upon David Mullich and the rest of Cyberdreams when he agreed to perform the role of AM himself. The result is one of the all-time great game voice-acting performances; Ellison, a man who loved to hear himself speak under any and all circumstances, leans into the persona of the psychopathic artificial intelligence with unhinged glee. After hearing him, you’ll never be able to imagine anyone else in the role.

Upon the game’s release, Ellison proved a disarmingly effective and professional spokesman for it; for all that he loved to rail against the stupidity of mainstream commercial media, he had decades of experience as a writer for hire, and knew the requirements of marketing. He wrote a conciliatory, generous, and self-deprecatory letter to Computer Gaming World — a.k.a., Video Wahoo Magazine — after the magazine pronounced No Mouth its Adventure Game of the Year. He even managed to remember David Mullich’s last name therein.

With a bewildering admixture of pleasure and confusion — I’m like a meson which doesn’t know which way to quark — I write to thank you and your staff. Pleasure, because everybody likes to cop the ring as this loopy caravanserie chugs on through Time and Space. Confusion, because — as we both know — I’m an absolute amateur at this exercise. To find myself not only avoiding catcalls and justified laughter at my efforts, but to be recognized with a nod of approval from a magazine that had previously chewed a neat, small hole through the front of my face… well, it’s bewildering.

David Sears and I worked very hard on I Have No Mouth. And we both get our accolades in your presentation. But someone else who had as much or more to do with bringing this project to fruition is David Mullich. He was the project supervisor and designer after David Sears moved on. He worked endlessly, and with what Balzac called “clean hands and composure,” to produce a property that would not shame either of us. It simply would not have won your award had not David Mullich mounted the barricades.

I remember when I addressed the Computer Game Designers’ banquet a couple of years ago, when I said I would work to the limits of my ability on I Have No Mouth, but that it would be my one venture into the medium. Nothing has changed. I’ve been there, done that, and now you won’t have to worry about me making a further pest of myself in your living room.

But for the honor you pay me, I am grateful. And bewildered.

Ellison’s acknowledgment of Mullich’s contribution is well-taken. Too often games that contain or purport to contain Deep Meaning believe this gives them a pass on the fundamentals of being playable and soluble. (For example, I might say, if you’ll allow me just a bit of Ellisonian snarkiness, that a large swath of the French games industry operated on this assumption for many years.) That No Mouth doesn’t fall victim to this fallacy — that it embeds its passion plays within the framework of a well-designed puzzle-driven adventure game — must surely be thanks to Mullich. In this sense, then, Sears’s departure came at the perfect time, allowing the experienced, detail-oriented Mullich to run with the grandiose concept which Sears and Ellison, those two game-design neophytes, had cooked up together. It was, one might say, the best of both worlds.

But, lest things start to sound too warm and fuzzy, know that Harlan Ellison was still Harlan Ellison. In the spring of 1996, he filed a lawsuit against Cyberdreams for unpaid royalties. Having spent his life in books and television, it appears that he may have failed to understand just how limited the sales prospects of an artsy, philosophical computer game like this one really were, regardless of how many awards it won. (Witness his comparison of Cyberdreams to the television empire of Aaron Spelling in one of the quotes above; in reality, the two operated not so much in different media galaxies as different universes.) “With the way the retail chain works, Cyberdreams probably hadn’t turned a profit on the game by the time the lawsuit was filed,” noted Computer Gaming World. “We’re not talking sales of Warcraft II here, folks.” I don’t know the details of Ellison’s lawsuit, nor what its ultimate outcome was. But I do know that David Mullich estimates today that No Mouth probably sold only about 40,000 copies in all.

Harlan Ellison didn’t always keep the sweeping promises he made in the heat of the moment; he huffily announced on several occasions that he was forever abandoning television, the medium with which he passed so much of his career in such a deadly embrace, only to be lured back in by money and pledges that this time things would be different. He did, however, keep his promise of never making another computer game. And that, of course, makes the one game he did help to make all the more special. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream stands out from the otherwise drearily of-its-time catalog of Cyberdreams as a multimedia art project that actually works — works as a game and, dare I say it, as a form of interactive literature. It stands today as a rare fulfillment of the promise that so many saw in games back in those heady days when “multimedia” was the buzzword of the zeitgeist — the promise of games as a sophisticated new form of storytelling capable of the same relevance and resonance as a good novel or movie. This is by no means the only worthwhile thing that videogames can be, nor perhaps even the thing they are best at being; much of the story of gaming during the half-decade after No Mouth’s release is that of a comprehensive rejection of the vision Cyberdreams embodied. The company went out of business in 1997, by which time its artsy-celebrity-driven modus operandi was looking as anachronistic as Frank Sinatra during the heyday of the Beatles.

Nevertheless, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream remains one of the best expressions to stem from its confused era, a welcome proof positive that sometimes the starry-eyed multimedia pundits could be right. David Mullich went on to work on such high-profile, beloved games as Heroes of Might and Magic III and Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines, but he still considers No Mouth one of the proudest achievements of a long and varied career that has encompassed the naïvely idealistic and the crassly commercial in equal measure. As well he should: No Mouth is as meaningful and moving today as it was in 1995, a rare example of a game adaptation that can be said not just to capture but arguably to improve on its source material. It endures as a vital piece of Harlan Ellison’s literary legacy.

In I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, you explore the traumas of each of the five people imprisoned by the psychotic supercomputer AM, taken in whatever order you like. Finding a measure of redemption for each of them opens up an endgame which offers the same chance for the rest of humanity — a dramatic departure from the infamously bleak ending of the short story on which the game is based.

Each character’s vignette is a surreal evocation of his tortured psyche, but is also full of opportunities for him to acknowledge and thereby cleanse himself of his sins. Harlan Ellison particularly loved this bit of symbolism, involving the wife and mother-in-law of the truck driver Gorrester: he must literally let the two principal women in his life off the hook. (Get it?) Ellison’s innocent delight in interactions like these amused the experienced game designer David Mullich, for whom they were old hat.

In mechanical terms, No Mouth is a fairly typical adventure game of its period. Its engine’s one major innovation can be seen in the character portrait at bottom left. The background here starts out black, then lightens through progressive shades of green as the character in question faces his demons (literally here, in the case of Ted — the game is not always terribly subtle). Ideally, each vignette will conclude with a white background. Be warned: although No Mouth mostly adheres to a no-deaths-and-no-dead-ends philosophy — “dying” in a vignette just gets the character bounced back to his cage, whence he can try again — the best ending becomes impossible to achieve if every character doesn’t demonstrate a reasonable amount of moral growth in the process of completing his vignette.

The computer genius Ellen is mortified by yellow, the color worn by the man who raped her. Naturally, the shade features prominently in AM’s decor.

The professional soldier Benny confronts the graves of the men who died under his command.

If sins can be quantified, then Nimdok, the associate to Dr. Mengele, surely has the most to atone for. His vignette involves the fable of the Golem of Prague, who defended the city’s Jewish ghetto against the pogroms of the late sixteenth century. Asked whether he risked trivializing the Holocaust by putting it in a game, Harlan Ellison answered in the stridently negative: “Nothing could trivialize the Holocaust. I don’t care whether you mention it in a comic book, on bubble-gum wrappers, in computer games, or write it in graffiti on the wall. Never forget. Never forget.“

People say, “Oh, you’re so prolific.” That’s a remark made by assholes who don’t write. If I were a plumber and I repaired 10,000 toilets, would they say, “Boy, you’re a really prolific plumber?”

If I were to start over, I would be a plumber. I tell that to people, they laugh. They think I’m making it up. It’s not funny. I think a plumber, a good plumber who really cares and doesn’t overcharge and makes sure things are right, does more good for the human race in a given day than 50 writers. In the history of the world, there are maybe, what, 20, 30 books that ever had any influence on anybody, maybe The Analects of Confucius, maybe The History of the Peloponnesian Wars, maybe Uncle Tom’s Cabin. If I ever write anything that is remembered five minutes after I’m gone, I will consider myself having done the job well. I work hard at what I do; I take my work very seriously. I don’t take me particularly seriously. But I take the work seriously. But I don’t think writing is all that inherently a noble chore. When the toilet overflows, you don’t need Dostoevsky coming to your house.

That’s what I would do, I would get myself a job as a plumber. I would go back to bricklaying, which I used to do. I would become an electrician. Not an electrical engineer. I would become an electrician. I would, you know, install a night light in a kid’s nursery, and at the end of the day, if I felt like writing, I would write something. I don’t know what that has to do with the game or anything, but you asked so I told you.

— Harlan Ellison (1934-2018)

(Sources: the books The Way the Future Was by Frederick Pohl, These Are the Voyages: Season One by Marc Cushman with Susan Osborn, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream: Stories by Harlan Ellison, and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: The Official Strategy Guide by Mel Odom; Starlog of September 1977, April 1980, August 1980, August 1984, November 1985, and December 1985; Compute! of November 1992; Computer Gaming World of March 1988, September 1992, July 1993, September 1993, April 1996, May 1996, July 1996, August 1996, November 1996, and June 1999; CU Amiga of November 1992 and February 1993; Next Generation of January 1996; A.N.A.L.O.G. of June 1987; Antic of August 1983; Retro Gamer 183. Online sources include a 1992 Game Informer retrospective on I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream and a history of Cyberdreams at Game Nostalgia. My thanks also go to David Mullich for a brief chat about his career and his work on No Mouth.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com.)

Comments
45 Responses

- Jim G

October 22, 2021 at 5:33 pm

“a medium he claimed to loath” – should that be “loathe?”

(Also, great article, as usual.)

- David Meyer-Lindenberg

October 22, 2021 at 6:22 pm

And it’s “Toccata and Fugue,” though the error may be in the original.

Thanks for introducing me to this one, Jimmy, I look forward to playing it it I ever get the time. Though I think it’s more likely I’ll pick up some of Ellison’s written work first… I like what I saw here.

- Jimmy Maher

October 22, 2021 at 7:45 pm

Thanks!

- Richard Smith

October 27, 2021 at 12:18 am

“Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” is a good place to start. I think that was his best story. It won him his first Hugo.

- Jimmy Maher

October 22, 2021 at 7:44 pm

Yes. Thanks!

- Peter Olausson

October 22, 2021 at 7:22 pm

I must confess I’ve never heard of Ellison or any of his works. After reading this article, I went out for “No Mouth”, found it and read it. It’s certainly a very special story, that no mere description can make justice. For this new acquaintance, I thank you.

- Michael Waddell

October 22, 2021 at 7:39 pm

> ways to subtly shrink margins and increase line spacings in order to make his two-page school papers look like three…

You probably mean ways to subtly expand margins. (Great summary of a great character, by the way, in your description of Ellison!)

- Jimmy Maher

October 22, 2021 at 7:46 pm

Indeed. Thanks!

- Brent

October 22, 2021 at 9:05 pm

This was an unexpected surprise (although given its literary merits, it probably shouldn’t have been). I love this game, although it’s worth warning people who might give it a try that it’s quite buggy. Mostly they are cosmetic problems that unfortunately detract from the experience but it’s a good idea to keep more than one save slot to be safe.

- Pingback: Pixel Scroll 10/22/21 I Must Not Scroll, Scroll Is The Pixel-Killer | File 770

- Graham

October 23, 2021 at 1:28 am

Another typo, which I doubt is Ellison’s mistake: “The Analects of Confucius”, not “Analytics”.

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2021 at 8:52 am

Thanks!

- Ben P. Stein

October 23, 2021 at 3:07 am

Great article! It appears to be a transcription error in the original interview but Harlan probably said the “Analects of Confucius.”

- Aula

October 23, 2021 at 7:36 am

“she dared not tell him that she had done so for 30 years.”

I think “had been doing so” would be better.

“blockbuster movies (Conan, The Goonies)”

The Conan game is https://www.mobygames.com/game/conan__ but the link points to your article on The Beast Within which seems completely unrelated.

“the Swiss artist H.R. Giger, best known for his set designs for the 1979 Ridley Scott film Alien.”

Surely he’s better known for designing the Alien itself rather than just a couple of sets in the movie.

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2021 at 8:50 am

Thanks! (I’m afraid your first suggestion would destroy the meaning of the sentence…)

- Aula

October 24, 2021 at 8:03 am

It would? In that case I’m not sure I have any idea what that sentence is supposed to mean.

- Jimmy Maher

October 24, 2021 at 8:16 am

In 1966, Dorothy Fontana changed Ellison’s script. For 30 years thereafter, she was afraid to tell him she had done so. Your suggested construction would imply that she was constantly changing the script over that span of time.

The sentence reads fine to me as written, but if anyone else is having trouble with it, let me know.

- Aula

October 26, 2021 at 6:52 am

I see now where I got it wrong; the thirty years is meant to be the duration of the not daring to tell instead of the doing so, and “had done so” then refers to the specific action of editing that one particular script rather than generally editing other people’s scripts. Maybe you could move “for 30 years” away from the end of the sentence to make it less ambiguous.

- Jimmy Maher

October 26, 2021 at 6:56 am

Done. Thanks!

- Bobby Impollonia

October 23, 2021 at 4:49 pm

Wikipedia says “Ellison showed the first six pages… to Frederik Pohl, who paid him in advance to finish it. Ellison finished writing the story in a single night.”

Given that that first chunk of six pages would constitute roughly half the story (and may itself have been worked on over multiple days), it’s not really accurate to describe the story as a whole as being written in one night

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2021 at 10:15 pm

Fair enough. Thanks!

- Martin

October 23, 2021 at 7:07 pm

Random thoughts.

I do occasionally run through Darkseed with a walk through by my side. It’s flawed as a game but there is a certain uncanny ambience about the whole thing. It’s good to compare the our world screens against the ‘Giger-ied’ ones.

Kind of liked the story if only it was because how different it was. Sounds like the attempt to turn it into a game looks really well done. Did it get an ESRB rating?

What I didn’t get from the article was your real opinion on the game. If I had to guess, it would be a well conceived and implemented game but not really to your taste. Close?

I did trip back to The Prisoner link and that was an article (2 actually) that I enjoyed back then. AND back then was almost 10 years to the day. How do you keep a blog going that long!

Finally, the opening quote implied that playing the game could make you a better person. Is that the usual hyperbole from this man or is there something to that?

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2021 at 10:11 pm

I don’t see a rating of any sort on the box.

My opinion of No Mouth? As I wrote, I consider it “as meaningful and moving today as it was in 1995, a rare example of a game adaptation that can be said not just to capture but arguably to improve on its source material.” It’s very much to my taste. Will it make you a better person? I don’t know… if it makes you think or feel something you otherwise might not, possibly.

- A. Freed

October 24, 2021 at 1:00 am

This is obviously a delicate topic, but I’m going to wade in anyway. I’m absolutely not an expert on Ellison and never met the man, but sections like the following…

Yes, he often talked before he thought and always punched hard, but he was seldom a bully; he usually punched upward rather than downward. Underneath all of the posturing, there was something almost sweetly old-fashioned about Harlan Ellison.

…paint a picture of a someone more charmingly irascible than what I’ve seen described elsewhere. I don’t doubt he could be incredibly generous! But “seldom a bully” doesn’t cover incidents like the 2006 Hugo Awards, or the horror stories about how he treated students at workshops.

There’s a lot of stuff written about Ellison’s behavior over the years. Cory Doctorow’s obituary strikes me as a good effort to sort through it all from a personal vantage: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/28/rip-harlan-ellison.html.

My point isn’t to cast judgment on him, just to note that the description of Ellison in this article feels more generous than the controversies would imply.

- Jimmy Maher

October 24, 2021 at 7:14 am

It’s a fair point. This perspective is obviously filtered somewhat through the game he helped to make. David Sears and David Mullich both went to him expecting the worst, and found an irascible but earnest and loyal collaborator. I won’t presume to analyze what went on at the 2006 Hugo Awards. On the broader question of bullying… yes, okay. Again, I know little about his specific behavior at writers workshops, but I can’t imagine him having much patience for the, shall we say, more modestly talented, dilettantish attendees — which is, let’s be honest, usually the vast majority of them at such a thing. This is indeed perhaps at odds with my claim that he was seldom a bully.

So, I’ve excised that bit. Thanks! (For what it’s worth, I came to this article with little use for Ellison’s shtick. But over the course of researching and writing it, he slowly charmed me. A line like, “When the toilet overflows, you don’t need Dostoevsky coming to your house,” tends to cover for a multitude of sins in my book.)

- Richard Smith

October 27, 2021 at 12:27 am

There is also his massive failure to edit The Last Dangerous Visions. That does sour my attitude towards him a bit. He spent so much time trying to get as much money squeezed out of his work as he could (he even trademarked his name), yet he held so many writers’ stories hostage. Some didn’t even live to see them in print.

- Jimmy Maher

October 27, 2021 at 6:34 am

Yes, Ellison’s attitude toward copyright was extreme, to say the least. Like so much about him, it came I think from a fundamentally moral place. He was outraged by what he saw as the victimization of the previous generation of science-fiction writers at the hands of editors and publishers. When he loudly resigned from the Science Fiction Writers of America circa 1977, stating he was doing so because the SFWA wasn’t doing enough to protect writers, he used Fritz Leiber as a case study. The latter was, at least according to him, living in a squalid one-room flat at the time, forced to perch his typewriter on his bed when he wrote because there wasn’t enough room for a desk. I think Ellison’s worldview was that of a war between those who create and those who publish and distribute, and the former had darn well better employ every weapon in the arsenal. I think he really believed his ongoing fight for “writers’ rights,” even after he himself had more than enough money, was a selfless moral crusade. In the end, like so much about the man, it was more reactionary than progressive.

- zardoz

October 27, 2021 at 10:10 pm

Imagine writing an obituary on someone and the first thing you mention is how their views on copyright than yours, and that one time they called someone a “motherfucker.”

Ellison should have been a plumber, indeed. At least as a plumber he wouldn’t have had to meet people like Doctorow.

- Pingback: October 24th – Critical Distance

- Mike Duncan

October 24, 2021 at 8:09 pm

Ellison is best in brief dosages, but this game is an exception. A good piece.

- Sniffnoy

October 24, 2021 at 9:12 pm

Hm, I haven’t played the game, but from the description given here, I can’t help but notice that, like… it seems wrong to me that, out of the five survivors, four of them did horrible things, and one of them had something done to her. While I’m guessing it makes more sense in context, the implications still seem pretty off. If it were split three-and-two rather than four-and-one, so that there was less of a pattern, it might not read that way, but at four-and-one it seems harder to avoid…

- LuneGuy77

October 24, 2021 at 9:25 pm

Gorrister didn’t do anything bad either, though it is admittedly true that he THINKS that he did.

- GeoX

October 24, 2021 at 10:34 pm

That is an excellent point. It does look like a bit of implicit sexism snuck in there.

- LuneGuy77

October 24, 2021 at 9:27 pm

I won’t say I hate this game, but it IS a game where the story is far greater than the gameplay. Make one wrong move ( or worse: do the right things in the wrong order) and the game is unwinnable, though you won’t know until hours later.

- Blair

October 24, 2021 at 10:57 pm

Reading the quote critiquing Ellison’s speech at the Computer Gaming Show, the bit he said about “doing more than just making games” really hit me, especially nowadays, where big companies seem to only make games for the sole purpose of making money rather than that “something else” Ellison mentioned. Seems fitting that a man who absolutely despised technology and would never work on games again would have this sort of stance that’s probably been common among smaller creators.

- Narwhal

October 24, 2021 at 11:23 pm

I had recently played “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” because of its stellar reputation ; it is one of these games you must play.

Therefore I played it without nostalgia, and… I did not like it. The writing is superb, but I did not enjoy the redemption story. Truly, I did not even read it as a “redemption story”, maybe because I played Ellen first and of course Ellen’s story is not about redemption, so how could the other stories be about redemption? I read it as stories where the characters try to overcome what makes them vulnerable to AM – sometimes regrets, sometimes not. I also found the puzzles contrived, and the endgame a mess.

I much prefered Mission Critical, which I discovered thanks to you, granted I have not finished it yet.

- Leo Vellés

October 25, 2021 at 2:12 pm

I don’t know if you found about this in your research, but i have read several times that Nimdok’s chapter was chopped off in it’s entirety on the german release of the game due to the Nazi theme. Ironically, by doing this, they made the game unwinnable, thus fulfilling Ellison’s desire when he was first approached by Cyberdreams

- Jimmy Maher

October 25, 2021 at 2:17 pm

Yes, I did see this, but wasn’t quite sure of the veracity of it — not so much the removal of any content dealing with Nazism, which was commonplace in German versions of games, but that it would be done in such a reckless way as to render the game unwinnable almost beggars belief.

- David Meyer-Lindenberg

October 25, 2021 at 7:56 pm

Seems to be true. I speak German and French and hunted up a few reviews by game owners on Steam and GOG. Many flagged the complete removal of Nimdok’s chapter as a major concern. Can’t say I’m surprised at how “reckless[ly]” it was done; German censorship has always been a blunt tool, and wielded by inexpert hands.

- Alianora La Canta

October 26, 2021 at 8:06 pm

It is true. In both Germany and France, Nimdok’s chapter was removed. So were all other overt references to him (even in the opening screen/selection menu, AM only has four humans to play with, not five, and there is a gap where Nimdok should be standing). This can be confirmed if you have the GOG.com version by switching your version into German or French (if your GOG.com isn’t set to German/French in the first place), waiting for it to finish “installing the update”, then running the game. Two reasons are believed to be the case, one applicable to both Germany and France, the other to Germany only. Both may apply.

The idea of a Nazi so heavily complicit in the Holocaust getting anything even slightly resembling a sympathetic portrayal (in the sense that “How can someone so evil as to have partaken of the Holocaust ever improve their Spiritual Barometer or have a good ending (to the extent that this game can be said to have one)?”, though I don’t know if either was the exact tripping point) As far as I can tell, the originating story is perfectly legal in both countries, so I’m unsure if this problem was anticipated by those involved in the project. I suspect that if David Sears had been cowed by Harlan Ellison’s reputation initially and elected to preserve the original ending (rather than use his commercial instincts and ability to gain Harlan’s respect to create a less miserable ending), Nimdok would not have needed to be removed entirely to meet censor approval (though some elements of his section would need to have been removed/changed).

In the case of Germany, the graphic violence might also prevented the game from being released conventionally in uncensored form. Different publishers have handled it different ways, but I suppose removing the character is one approach. This is especially the case given the Nazism and the lack of evidence of other paths having edits.

It is fairly obvious why “hack out entire sections including offending code wholesale” is not the default response to censorship for videogames…

Somewhat off-topic, but: Drew Cook at Gold Machine (golmac.org) mentioned you in the introduction he’s written for a literary-based approach to the Infocom canon he’s in the process of writing. Specifically, that you did “an excellent job exploring each title’s historical-critical context”. You deserve the plaudits and thought you ought to know.

- Jimmy Maher

October 27, 2021 at 6:37 am

Cool! Good to know others are carrying on the tradition, as it were. ;)

- Pingback: Harlan Ellison : I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream — Retro Archives

- Jonas

November 4, 2021 at 2:30 pm

I remember playing a long time ago this game and being shocked by the adult themes.
In word of Ellison about his work:

“…I am and adversary to my fans, I hate the word fans, to my readers. I’m their adversary. I’m not there to make them feel good. I’m not there to win their approbation. I don’t give a damn whether they love me. What I want is for the work to go at them and savage them . I want my work to come at them and attack them. I want my work to leave them with some feeling that they have been throught and experience. That is what I want…”

Harlan Ellison in a interview in the tv show “Prisioners of Gravity”

- Arkadesh

December 23, 2021 at 4:57 pm

The game is now available for free on GOG.com. Grab it while it’s on the giveaway.

- Pingback: This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2021 – Critical Distance

The Dark Eye
November 5, 2021

The user-interface constructs that are being developed in computer games are absolutely critical to the advancement of digital culture, as much as it might seem heretical to locate the advancement of civilization in game play. Now, yes, if I thought my worth as a person would be judged in the next century by the body counts I amassed in virtual-fighting games, I guess I’d be worried and dismayed. But if the question is whether a wired world can be serious about art, whether the dynamics of interactive media’s engagement can provide a cultural experience, I think it’s silly to argue that there are inherent reasons why it cannot.

— Michael Nash

Michael Nash

The career arc of Michael Nash between 1991 and 1997 is a microcosm of the boom and bust of non-networked “multimedia computing” as a consumer-oriented proposition. The former art critic was working as a curator at the Long Beach Museum of Art when Bob Stein, founder of The Voyager Company, saw some of the cutting-edge mixed-media exhibitions he was putting together and asked him to come work for him. Nash jumped at the chance, which he saw as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a curator on a much grander scale.

I was very interested in TV innovators like Ernie Kovacs and Andy Kaufman, in the development of music videos, and in the work of artists using the computer. [I believed] that opportunities can open up for artists at key times in the history of media — artists dream up the kinds of possibilities that push media to envision new things before the significance of these things is generally understood. “Where do you want to go today?” the [technical] architects of the new media ask, because they don’t know. They’re waiting for some great vision to make all this abstract possibility into compelling experiences that will provide shape, purpose, and direction. The potential of the new media to express cultural ideas has increased much faster than the development of new cultural ideas, so the potential is there.

Michael Nash’s official title at Voyager was that of Director of the Criterion Collection, the company’s line of classic films on laser disc — also its one reliably profitable endeavor, the funding engine that powered all of Bob Stein’s more esoteric experiments in interactive multimedia. But roles were fluid at Voyager. “It felt like a lair of tech-enamored bohemians,” remembers Nash. “The company style was 1970s laid-back mixed with intense intellectual ferment and communalism. The work environment was frenetic, at times even a little chaotic.”

As the hype around multimedia reached a fever pitch, everyone who was anyone seemed to want a piece of Voyager. In a typical week, the receptionist might field phone calls from rock star David Bowie, from thriller author Michael Crichton, from counterculture guru Timothy Leary, from cognitive scientist Donald Norman, from Apple CEO John Sculley, from computer scientist Alan Kay, from particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann, from evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould, from classical cellist Yo Yo Ma, and from film critic Roger Ebert. The star power on the production side of the equation dwarfed the modest sales of Voyager’s CD-ROMs almost to the point of absurdity. (Only two Voyager CD-ROMs would ever crack 100,000 units in total sales, while most failed to manage even 10,000.)

Another of the stars who wound up working with Voyager — a star after a fashion, anyway — was the Residents, a still-extant San Francisco-based collective of musicians and avant-garde conceptual artists whose members have remained anonymous to this day; they dress in disguises whenever they perform live. Delighting in the obliteration of all boundaries of bourgeois good taste, the Residents both deconstruct existing popular music — their infamous 1976 album The Third Reich n’ Roll, for example, re-contextualized dozens of classic postwar hits as Hitler Youth anthems — and perform their own bizarre original songs. Sometimes it’s difficult to know which is which; their 1979 album Eskimo, for instance, purported to be a collection of Inuit folk songs, but was really a put-on from first to last.

During the 1980s, the Residents began to make the visual element of their performances as important as the music, creating some of the most elaborate concert spectacles this side of Pink Floyd. The term “multimedia” had actually enjoyed its first cultural vogue as a label for just this sort of performance, after it was applied to the Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows put on by Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground in 1966 and 1967. Thus it was rather appropriate for the Residents to embrace the new, digital definition of multimedia when the time came. It was Michael Nash who made the deal to turn the Residents’ 1991 album Freak Show, a song cycle about the lives and loves of a group of circus freaks, into a 1994 Voyager CD-ROM. Nash:

Within alienage, we discover a lot about the paradox of our own alienation. The recognition of difference is the way we establish our identity and the uniqueness of our own point of view. We are drawn to extreme kinds of “alien” identity — freak shows, fanatics, psychotics, serial killers, nightmares, monsters from outer space — because we are fascinated by absolute otherness, lying as it does at the heart of our own sense of self. We never tire of this paradox because it is so charged by opposites: quirky, eccentric, weird, dark, transgressive vision is so different from our own and yet so full of the very thing that makes us different, that gives our identity its integrity. I think it’s a powerful dynamic to draw on in establishing the essential attributes of extraordinary inner realms that distinguish the best work in the field.

Jelly Jack, one of the freaks of Freak Show.

Critics of the capitalistic system though they were, the Residents weren’t above using the Freak Show CD-ROM to sell some other merch — in a suitably ironic way, of course.

Personally, I find the sentiment above — and the tortured grad-school diction in which it’s couched — to be something the best artists grow out of, just as I find raw honesty to produce a higher form of art than the likes of the Residents’ onion of off-putting artificiality and provocation for the sake of it. Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks, the obvious inspiration for the Residents’ album and the CD-ROM, offers a more empathetic, compassionate glimpse of circus “aliens” in my opinion. But to each his own: there’s no question that Freak Show was another bold statement from Voyager that interactive CD-ROMs could and should deal with any and all imaginable subject matter.

The same year that Freak Show was released, Michael Nash left Voyager to set up his own multimedia publisher. Freak Show had been one of the few Voyager discs that could be reasonably labeled a game. Now, Nash wanted to move further in that direction with the company he called Inscape. In a testament to both the tenor of the times and his own considerable charisma, HBO and Warner Music Group agreed to invest $2.5 million each in the venture. Any number of existing games publishers would have killed for a nest egg such as that.

But then, Inscape and Michael Nash himself were the polar opposite of all existing stereotypes about computer games. Certainly the dapper, well-spoken Nash could hardly have been less like the scruffy young men of id Software, those makers of DOOM, the biggest hardcore-gaming sensation of the year. The id boys were just the latest of the long line of literal or metaphorical bedroom programmers who had built the games industry as it currently existed, young men who played games and obsessed over the inner workings of the computers that ran them almost to the exclusion of all the rest of life’s rich pageant. Nash, on the other hand, was steeped in a broader, more aesthetically nuanced tradition of arts and humanities, and knew almost nothing about the games that had come before the multimedia boom he found so bracing. In an ideal world, each might have learned from the other: Nash might have pushed the existing game studios to mine some of the rich veins of culture beyond epic fantasy and action-movie science fiction, and they in their turn might have taught Nash how to make good games that made you want to keep coming back to them. In the real world, however, the two camps mostly just sniped snidely at one another — when, that is, they deigned to acknowledge one another’s existence at all. Nash was too busy beating the drum for “radical alternative subversive perspectives, what I call transgressive work” to think much about the more grounded, sober craft of good game design.

Most of Inscape’s output, then, is all too typical of such an entity in such an era. The Residents stayed loyal to Nash after he left Voyager, and helped Inscape to make Bad Day on the Midway, another, modestly more ambitious take on the lives of circus freaks. Meanwhile Nash, who seemed to have a special affinity for avant-garde rock music, also joined forces with the only slightly less subversive but much more commercially successful collective known as Devo — in a reflection of their shared sensibilities, both Devo and the Residents had once recorded radically deconstructed versions of the Rolling Stones classic “Satisfaction” — to make something called Adventures of the Smart Patrol. Such works garnered some degree of praise in their time from organs of higher culture who were determined to see that which they most wished to see in them; writing for The Atlantic, Ralph Lombreglia went so far as to call Smart Patrol “the CD-ROM equivalent of Terry Gilliam’s remarkable film Brazil.” Those who encounter these and other, similar rock-star vanity projects today, from artists as diverse as Prince and Peter Gabriel, are more likely to choose adjectives like “aimless” and “tedious.” (“Will we look back in nostalgia on such titles as Bad Day on the Midway and Adventures of the Smart Patrol?” asked Lombreglia in his 1997 article, which was already mourning the end of the multimedia boom. Well, I’m from the future, Ralph… and no, we really don’t.)

It seems to me that the discipline of game design has often suffered from the same fallacy that dogs writing: the assumption that, because virtually everyone can design a game on some literal level, the gulf between bad and good design is easily bridged, with no special skills or experience required. Most of the products of Inscape and their direct competitors serve as cogent examples of where that fallacy — and its associated disinterest in the process that leads to compelling interactivity, from the concept to the testing phase — can lead you.

In the case of Inscape, however, there is one blessed exception to the rule of trendy multimedia mediocrity. And it’s to that exception, which is known as The Dark Eye, that I’d like to devote the rest of this article.

The Dark Eye was Inscape’s very first game, released in late 1995. It’s an interactive exploration of the macabre world of Edgar Allan Poe — not a particularly easy thing to pull off, which explains why games that use Poe’s writings as a direct inspiration are so rare. When we do encounter traces of him in games, it’s generally through the filter of H.P. Lovecraft, the longstanding poet laureate of ludic horror, who himself acknowledged Poe as his most important literary influence. But Poe, whose short, generally unhappy life ended in 1849, was a vastly better, subtler writer than his twentieth-century disciple, with both a more variegated and empathetic emotional range and an ear for language that utterly eluded him. While Poe can occasionally lapse into Lovecraftian turgidity in prose, his poetry is almost uniformly magnificent; works like “The Bells” and “Annabel Lee” positively swing with a musical rhythm that belies his popular reputation as a parched, unremittingly dour soul. Like so much of the best writing, they beg to be read aloud.

Link to audio:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/annabel_lee.mp3

The problem with adapting Poe’s stories into a computer game — or into a movie, for that matter — is that their action, such as it is, is so internal. Their narrators, who are generally mentally disturbed if not outright insane and therefore thoroughly unreliable, are always their most fascinating characters. Their stories are constructed as epistles to us the readers; we learn of their protagonists not through dialog or their actions in the physical world, but through the words they write directly to us, explaining themselves to us. Without this dimension, the stories would be fairly banal tales of misfortune and mayhem, pulp rather than fine literature.

Bringing the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe to life on the computer, then, requires getting beyond the realm of the literal in which most digital games exist. It requires an affinity for subtlety and symbolism, and a fearless willingness to deploy them in a medium not terribly known for such things. Fortunately, Michael Nash had a person with just such qualities to hand, in the form of one Russell Lees.

In 1994, Lees was an electrical engineer and aspiring playwright who had little interest in or experience with computer games. But then Nash, a “friend of a friend,” happened to show him Freak Show. He found it endlessly intriguing, and was in fact so enthusiastic that Nash suggested he send him a list of possible projects he might like to make for this new venture called Inscape. One of the suggestions Lees came up with was, he remembers, “dropping into the tales of Poe.” Only after Nash gave the Poe project the green light and Lees found himself suddenly thrust into the unlikely role of game designer did the difficulties inherent in such an endeavor dawn on him: “What have I done? Dropping into the tales of Poe? What does that mean? It’s a completely nonsensical sentence!”

Lees and Inscape eventually decided to present three Poe stories in an interactive format, along with an original tale in his spirit that would serve as a jumping-off and landing place for the player’s explorations of the master’s works. Two of the trio, “The Tell-tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” are among Poe’s most famous works of all, the stuff of English-language high-school curricula for time immemorial; the other, “Berenice,” is less commonly read, but is if you ask me the most disturbing of the lot. All are intimate tales of psychological obsession and, in two cases, murder. (“Berenice” settles for necrophilia in its stead…)

The game begins with you knocking on the door of your uncle’s house. Once inside, your casual family visit takes on a more serious dimension, when you become the reluctant go-between in a love affair between your beautiful young cousin and your brother — a love affair of which your uncle most definitely does not approve. (The relationship is a presumably deliberate echo of Poe’s courtship and marriage to his own thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm, whose long, slow death from tuberculosis became the defining event of his life, the catalyst for his final descent into alcoholism, despair, and at last the sweet release of death.) As this frame story plays out, you’re periodically plunged into nightmares and hallucinations in which you enact Poe’s tales. In fact, you enact each of them twice: once in the role of the aggressor, once in that of the victim.

Through it all, The Dark Eye shows the unmistakable influence of the adventure games that other studios were making at the time. The creepily expressive human hand it uses for a mouse cursor, for example, is blatantly stolen from The 7th Guest. But the more pervasive model is Myst. The Dark Eye’s node-based navigation through contiguous environments, first-person viewpoint, and minimalist, inventory-less interface are obvious legacies of Myst. The technologies behind it as well are the same as Myst: a middleware presentation engine (Macromedia Director in this case), 3D modelers, QuickTime movie clips, all far removed from the heavily optimized bare-metal code which powered games like DOOM (and thus one more reason for fans and programmers of games like that one to hold this one in contempt).

Likewise, all four of the stories that make up The Dark Eye engage in a style of environmental storytelling — or, perhaps better said, backstory-revealing — that will on one level be familiar to players of Myst and its many heirs. And yet it serves a markedly different agenda here. The character you played in Myst was you or whomever else you chose to imagine her to be, a blank slate wandering an alternate multiverse. Not so in The Dark Eye. Lees:

I think coming from a theater background influenced how I thought about it. In my head, “dropping into the tales of Poe” is only interesting if you drop into a character: if you drop into some character’s head. We’re asking the player to not play themself. In many games, the whole idea is that the player gets to be themself, with all kinds of freedom. If you’re playing Grand Theft Auto, you’re you, but a different version of you who can steal cars.

We weren’t interested in that at all. What we were interested in was… you drop into a character, and basically you’re an actor trying to play that character. What does that mean? If you’re a real actor playing the narrator in “The Tell-tale Heart,” for example, you would read through [the script], come up with some backstory for the character, try to flesh the character out so that every line in the performance resonates with a life lived. As the player, you’re not going to get that. So, how do we make up for that in an interactive situation? The way we solved it — and I feel like we did solve it, in fact — was this:

We tried to map that psychological investigation that an actor would bring to a part onto spatial investigation. You’re exploring a space where certain objects have importance to you. It’s not just, I pick up a letter and learn about my character [by reading it]. It’s, I pick up an object that’s important to my character and I hear my character thinking about it, or that object triggers a movie where I see something from my character’s past, or maybe it just plays a little bit of music. So, all these objects are imbued with something from your past. We were trying to “trick” the player into doing a psychological investigation of the part they were playing.

The Dark Eye is interested in enriching your experience of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, not in giving you a way of changing them; you can’t choose not to plunge the knife into the old man who is murdered in “The Tell-tale Heart.” But you can inhabit the story and the characters in a way interestingly different from, if not necessarily superior to, the way you can understand them through the pages of a book. The best compliment I can give to Russell Lees is that the framing story and the three Poe narratives from the perspective of the victims feel thoroughly of a piece with the three more familiar stories and perspectives. It’s no trivial feat to expand upon the work of a literary master so seamlessly.

The Dark Eye employs many tricks to evoke Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic nineteenth-century world. As you uncover more story segments, for example, you can return to them from this screen. It’s based upon the pseudo-science of phrenology, of which Poe, like many of his peers, was a great devotee. (“The forehead is broad, with prominent organs of ideality,” he wrote in a typical reference to it, in an 1846 character sketch of his fellow poet William Cullen Bryant.)

“The Tell-tale Heart”

“The Cask of Amontillado”

“Berenice”

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/heart.mp4

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/amontilado.mp4

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/berenice.mp4

Like so many of gaming’s more esoteric art projects, The Dark Eye is a polarizing creation. Some people love it, while others greet it with a veritable rage that seems entirely out of proportion to such a humble relic of a bygone age. It rams smack into one of the fundamental tensions that have dogged adventure games as long as they have existed. Ought you to be playing yourself in these games, or is it acceptable to be asked to play the role of someone else, perhaps even someone you would never wish to be in real life? The question was first thrashed over in the gaming press in 1983, when Infocom released Infidel, a text adventure whose fleshed-out protagonist was almost as unpleasant as a Poe narrator. It has continued to raise its head from time to time ever since.

But there’s even more to the polarization than that. It seems to me that The Dark Eye divides the waters so because, although it bears many of the surface trappings of a traditional adventure game, its goals are ultimately different. While a game like Myst is built around its puzzles, The Dark Eye has quite literally no puzzles at all. In fact, admits Russell Lees, freely acknowledging the worst of the criticism leveled against it,  it has “no gameplay beyond exploration.” You don’t “beat” The Dark Eye, in other words; you explore it. More specifically, you explore its characters’ interior spaces. Watching many gamers engage with it is akin to watching fans of genre fiction confronted with a literary novel, except that here “where’s the puzzles?” stands in for “where’s the plot?” This is not to say that those who appreciate The Dark Eye are better, more refined souls than those who find it aimless and tedious, any more than those who enjoy John Steinbeck are superior to readers of John Grisham. It’s just to say that clashes of expectation can be difficult things to overcome. “We need some new words for works that are interactive but aren’t so much games,” says Lees — a noble if hopeless proposition.

We can see these things play out in the reaction to The Dark Eye from the gaming press after its release. Most reviewers just didn’t know what to do with it. The always articulate Charles Ardai of Computer Gaming World reacted somewhat typically:

As with many of the new “exploration” adventure games, the environment reeks of emptiness, especially at first. But it’s worse here than in most: not only are there too many empty rooms, but you aren’t asked to solve puzzles of any sort, not even the lame brainteasers most games use as filler. Making matters worse, there are hallways you see that, for no apparent reason, the computer doesn’t let you go down; doors the game doesn’t let you open; and characters the game doesn’t let you click on. Even the few objects you run across — a meat cleaver, a paper knife — the game doesn’t let you take.

But, because he is a thoughtful if not infallible critic, Ardai must also acknowledge The Dark Eye to be “a singular, disturbing vision equal to the task of rendering Poe’s nightmare worlds.” He even calls it “brave.”

Instead of puzzles, The Dark Eye gives you atmosphere — all the atmosphere you can inhale, enough atmosphere to send you running to a less pressurized room of your house after spending a while in its company. You witness no actual violence on the screen; the camera always cuts away at the pivotal moment. Yet the game is thoroughly unnerving, more psychologically oppressive than a thousand everyday videogame zombies; this game will creep you the hell out. It’s in vacant eyes of the stop-motion-animated digitized puppets that are used to represent the other characters; in the way that the soundtrack, provided by associates of avant-rock musician Thomas Dolby, suddenly swells with nerve-jangling ferocity and then fades into silence again just as quickly; in knowing what awaits you as perpetrator or victim in each of the stories, and being unable to stop it.

The crowning touch is the voice of the legendary Beat author William S. Burroughs, a rare instance of stunt casting that worked out perfectly. Michael Nash, who seemed never to have heard of an edgy cultural icon whose involvement in one of his multimedia projects he didn’t want to trumpet in his advertising, sought out and cast Burroughs for the game without Lees even being aware he was attempting to do so. But Lees was very, very happy when he was informed of it. Burroughs plays the part of your crotchety uncle in the game, and also provides two non-interactive Edgar Allan Poe recitals for you to stumble across: of the poem “Annabel Lee,” which you can hear earlier in this article, and of the story “The Masque of the Red Death.” One anecdote which Lees has shared about the three days he spent directing Burroughs’s performances in the author’s Lawrence, Kansas, home is too delicious not to include here.

He liked starting off the day by toking up. We’re in the [sound] booth and he’s lighting up his marijuana and he says, “Do you want a drag?” And I say, “You know, Inscape’s spending a lot of money to send me out here. I think I have to stay on the ball. You go ahead.”

So, he’d start off by getting a little bit high, and that would loosen him up. Then in the afternoon he liked to drink vodka and Sprite. He would start around 3 PM, and things would get a little mushy, but it also brought some interesting performances out.

I have to admit that on the very last day when we were finishing up, he lit up a joint, and I did share it with Bill.

Within two years of these events, the confluence of cultural forces that could produce such an anecdote would be ancient history. Russell Lees was about halfway through the production of a game based on the Tales from the Crypt comic books and television series when Michael Nash sold Inscape to Graphix Zone, a Voyager-like publisher of multimedia CD-ROMs that was scrambling to reinvent itself as a games publisher in a changing world. The attempt wasn’t successful: the conjoined entity, which was known as Ignite Games, disappeared by the end of 1997. Nash went on to a high-profile career as a music executive, and was instrumental in convincing the hidebound powers that were in that industry to reluctantly embrace streaming rather than attempting to sue it out of existence in the post-Napster era. Russell Lees continued to bounce among the worlds of theater, home video, and games for many years, until finding a stable home at last as a staff writer for Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise in 2011.

As the fate of the company that developed and published it would indicate, The Dark Eye wasn’t an overly big seller in its day. Yet it’s still remembered fondly in some circles today — and deservedly so. It solves one of the basic paradoxes of licensed works by not attempting to replace the stories on which it’s based, but rather to complement them. If you haven’t read them before playing it– or if haven’t done so since your school days — you might find yourself wanting to when you’re done. And if you have read them recently, the new perspectives on them which the game opens up might just unnerve you all over again. Then again, you might merely be bored by it all. And that’s okay too; not all art is for everyone.

(Sources: in addition to the Edgar Allan Poe collection that belongs in every real or virtual library — the Penguin one is excellent — the book DVD and the Study of Film: The Attainable Text by Mark Parker and Deborah Parker; Computer Gaming World of April 1996 and May 1996; Electronic Entertainment of August 1995; MacAddict of December 1996; Next Generation of August 1997; Wired of March 1995; Los Angeles Times of July 12 1994 and February 28 1997; American Literature of November 1930. Online sources include “What Happened to Multimedia?” by Ralph Lombreglia in Atlantic Unbound and an accompanying interview with Michael Nash, Emily Rose’s podcast interview with Russell Lees, and Lees’s own website.

The Dark Eye isn’t available for sale, but the CD image can be downloaded from The Macintosh Garden; note that you’ll need StuffIt to decompress it. Unfortunately, it’s a Windows 3.1 application, which means it’s somewhat complicated to get running on modern hardware. But you can do it with a bit of time and patience: Egee has written a very good tutorial on getting Windows 3.1 set up in DOSBox, and you can find the vintage software you’ll need on WinWorld. Another option is to run it on a real or emulated classic Macintosh, as the CD-ROM is a hybrid disc for both Windows and Mac computers. See my article on ten standout Voyager discs for some advice on doing this.)

Comments
33 Responses

- David Boddie

November 5, 2021 at 5:36 pm

It’s interesting to see adaptations like this where developers tried to use game-like mechanics to unleash the potential of multimedia and CD-ROM. Unfortunately, when the result resembles a game, it only leads to confusion and disappointment from the potential audience. It would be like making a music video for an audiobook, or taking it on a big stage tour.

Some corrections:
“All our intimate tales” -> “All are intimate tales”
“The always atriculate Charles Ardai” -> “The always articulate Charles Ardai”

- Jimmy Maher

November 5, 2021 at 8:52 pm

Thanks!

- Chris Floyd

November 5, 2021 at 6:05 pm

Really glad you covered this game. I was pretty obsessed with it when it came out, despite all its rough edges.

I think there’s more to be said, though, and that’s about the art! I wish I knew more about the artists involved and how the work was done–particularly the characters, which I assume are real miniature sculptures posed and photographed. Bad Day on the Midway had a collaged/pasted-together look that was (I think) intentionally ugly, if intriguing. Dark Eye was much more cohesive and equally evocative. As I remember it, anyway.

I don’t know if it was legal reasons that kept you from linking to the WS Burroughs reading of Masque of the Red Death, with the illustrations, but I highly encourage your readers to Google “Burroughs Dark Eye Red Death” and check it out. It’s a small masterpiece.

- Jimmy Maher

November 5, 2021 at 8:55 pm

You might want to listen to Emily Rose’s interview with Russell Lees, which is linked to in the sources at the bottom of the article. I believe he does talk a bit more about process.

I agree that the William Burroughs reading of Masque of the Red Death is pretty great. I felt it was just a bit too long to include as a multimedia element in the article — and I’d rather leave folks something to discover for themselves in the game proper…

- James Schend

November 5, 2021 at 7:49 pm

The industry seems to have settled on the term “walking simulator” to describe games like this, Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, Gone Home, etc. It’s a terrible term, in my opinion, but I think people generally know what you mean now when you use it.

- Owen C.

November 6, 2021 at 2:52 pm

I came here to post this too, “walking simulator” started off intended as a derisive term to poke fun at purely narrative driven games like this, which is why it’s a poor label for them even though it’s become the de facto term for them. Though of course now even more than then, with the short-lived “multimedia CD-ROM” label no longer around, so-called walking simulators, visual novels, puzzle-less narrative driven IF, etc. all just get lumped under the category of “games” and distributed primarily on game-centric platforms like Steam, the fact that they don’t deliver the kind of direct interactivity that people expect from most video games just serves to continue the heated debate about them that was mentioned in this article.

One minor correction on the actual article, I feel like the wording implies that Myst was made in Macromedia Director when it was made in HyperCard, I know the point is to say they’re similar as limited use middleware that isn’t primarily intended as a game engine but I wonder if it could be worded differently to avoid confusion.

- Mark

November 6, 2021 at 4:00 pm

This reminds me of a video I came across a while back that addressed some claims that a Doom WAD was the “first-ever walking sim” and how that wasn’t actually true. It then goes on to posit that the claim stems from some desire to legitimize so-called walking sims… which the host argues isn’t necessary, since games have a long history of “environmental exploration games” (with The Dark Eye being casually showcased among other examples).

https://youtu.be/4BboKXXPDoA

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2021 at 4:52 pm

I changed the wording a bit. Thanks!

- Scummer

November 7, 2021 at 9:05 am

SCUMMVM recently introduced support for games based on Director, the “multimedia engine” of the 1990s on which many adventure and edutainment titles were based. This could offer another route to play games like The Dark Eye.

- Derek

November 5, 2021 at 8:21 pm

Coincidentally, just a few days ago I saw an in-depth video about another of Inscape’s creepy games, Drowned God. It seems to be not nearly as coherent as The Dark Eye, with puzzles that aren’t anything special. But between its paranoid atmosphere and the disturbing end met by its creator, it’s an… interesting footnote in adventure game history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y3Z74XRKDA&ab_channel=ARealHuman

- M. Casey

November 6, 2021 at 1:15 am

Very interesting. This is one that I would’ve been VERY interested in at the time, but I’d never heard of it and must’ve missed the write-up in CGW.

I hope you’ll humor me for one little nitpick:

> Any number of existing games publishers would have killed for a slush fund such as that.

I think you’ve got the wrong term here and you mean something more akin to nest egg or seed money or something like that. “Slush fund” implies embezzlement or graft of some kind and I don’t think you intend to say that of the Inscape investment…

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2021 at 7:25 am

My idioms dictionary says that a “slush fund” can simply mean money set aside for a rainy day. But I agree that “nest egg” probably captures the sense better here. Thanks!

- Jaina

November 6, 2021 at 7:54 am

serves a markely different agenda

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2021 at 7:59 am

Thanks!

- Mark

November 6, 2021 at 4:12 pm

While I don’t necessarily agree with the somewhat dismissive tone regarding the many celebrity-backed CD-ROM projects of the 90s (even if I’d agree that many of them were vanity projects), I do however agree that The Dark Eye is one of the best games to emerge from that overall scene. It just has a unique and unsettling atmosphere and Burroughs is a good fit for the material and the tone they’re going for.

One recommendation I’d make for anyone looking to play this is to check out The Collection Chamber’s upload of the game. They put together custom installers for old and unavailable games packaged in emulation wrappers so that they’re easy to run on modern PCs. Most of the time, it’s no more complicated than downloading the game, installing it, then using the shortcut it makes.

https://collectionchamber.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-dark-eye.html

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2021 at 4:53 pm

I didn’t know anything like The Collection Chamber existed. That’s great.

- Martin

November 7, 2021 at 5:20 pm

I tried it and it worked first time, no problems. The site seems to have a load of other intriguing software out there too.

- Peter Orvetti

November 7, 2021 at 12:39 am

The “walking simulator” notion is interesting. Infocom’s “A Mind Forever Voyaging” was ALMOST a walking simulator, if not for that final section…

- Andrew Pam

November 7, 2021 at 5:28 am

Is it perhaps worth briefly mentioning the far better known “The Dark Eye” German roleplaying game and associated computer games just to clarify that this project is not connected to them? Otherwise you may get some confused readers who came here from search results!

- Not the German RPG

November 7, 2021 at 6:54 am

I would have read this article anyway (and enjoyed it) as a long time follower, but when I clicked through I did think I was about to discover a connection to the German RPG.

- Jimmy Maher

November 7, 2021 at 8:04 am

I don’t know. This site isn’t really designed to be quickie Google fodder anyway, and perhaps sometimes a bit of confusion is good for discovering interesting new things. ;)

- California Taxpayer

November 7, 2021 at 5:59 pm

The recently released ScummVM 2.5 includes Director engine support. It detects this game, although it doesn’t seem to be operable yet(or I have the files arranged wrong). I’m leaving this comment since future updates will probably make ScummVM a convenient way to play.

Extracting the .sit file from Macintosh Garden is still a major hassle, as well as needing to run the installer to get the game executable(either mac or win). So the Collection Chamber version is probably a better source; after running their installer, you can find darkeye.exe and a .bin(usable in place of .iso) of the CD and use that to extract the needed files.

I’ll also point out existence of ScummVM Dumper Companion, a webpage that lets you extract files from Mac-only CD images. It works with the Macintosh Garden ISO, but not the Collection .bin in this particular case.

- Chemtrailpilot

November 8, 2021 at 11:59 am

“The dark eye” is in Germany the name of a PnP role play game.
Das schwarze Auge (translation) is the german answer to D&D / AD&D.

There were also 3 or 4 PC Games in the setting of “Das schwarze Auge”, and they translated it to “Realms of Arkania”. Maybe because of this game?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Eye

- Jimmy Maher

November 8, 2021 at 1:04 pm

No, the first two of those games appeared before this one. I can understand why the name was changed: “The Dark Eye” is an oddly specific name for a wide-ranging fantasy RPG. It sounds like the name of an RPG adventure module, not a whole RPG game system. Compare it with the more all-encompassing, not to say generic name “Dungeons & Dragons…” I’m sure it seems perfectly natural to those who have grown up with it, but the English-speaking world was not full of such people like the German world was.

- Sebastian Redl

November 9, 2021 at 7:45 am

And of course the literal translation “The Black Eye” would give a rather misleading connotation.

- Sebastian Redl

November 9, 2021 at 7:47 am

Macromedia Director set me on the path to become a programmer. Very fond memories.

Not a fan of tortured mind topics in fiction though.

- Nate

November 11, 2021 at 1:20 am

Interesting article. I hadn’t heard of this game.

This sentence is hard to parse because it’s so long:

“But Poe, whose short, generally unhappy life ended in 1849, was a vastly better, subtler writer than his twentieth-century disciple, with both a more variegated and empathetic emotional range than the rather one-note Lovecraft and an ear for language that utterly eluded him.”

Here’s one attempt:

“But Poe was a vastly better, subtler writer than his twentieth-century disciple, with both a more variegated and empathetic emotional range than the rather one-note Lovecraft and an ear for language that utterly eluded him. Sadly, his short, generally unhappy life ended in 1849.”

You could probably remove “than the rather one-note Lovecraft” as another option.

- Jimmy Maher

November 11, 2021 at 6:34 am

I can implement your second suggestion. ;) Thanks!

- William Rave

November 11, 2021 at 5:53 pm

” ‘We need some new words for works that are interactive but aren’t so much games,’ says Lees — a noble if hopeless proposition.”

See, I think we already have a term for works like “The Dark Eye”. It’s “Visual Novel”. But people in the western games milieu tend to either be utterly ignorant of them, hold them in contempt, or both.

- Jason Dyer

November 13, 2021 at 4:13 pm

No visual novels occur to me off-hand which are “pure exploration”. There are Japanese games vaguely if not purely along those lines (like Cosmology of Kyoto or Gadget) but none of them describe themselves as being in the visual novel space.

And if we’re just talking about the more general comment, visual novels don’t cover things like Mountain, which is almost more or a … screensaver? toy? I wouldn’t find finding more things like Mountain, but I’m not sure how to even look for them.

- Jim Nelson

November 16, 2021 at 12:21 am

“It seems to me that the discipline of game design has often suffered from the same fallacy that dogs writing: the assumption that, because virtually everyone can design a game on some literal level, the gulf between good and bad design is easily bridged, with no special skills or experience required.”

There’s another fallacy about writing I’m sure has been applied to game design: That it can’t be taught. You either have the gift or you don’t.

These fallacies might seem in opposition to one another, but they both point to a reluctance by people to accept the idea that writing, game design, and art in general are crafts one learns and improves on over time.

- Throteka

January 8, 2022 at 7:39 am

Russell Lees has passed away. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2022-01-07-assassins-creed-veteran-russell-lees-dies

- Jimmy Maher

January 8, 2022 at 8:42 am

RIP.

Boffo Games
November 19, 2021

After Infocom was shut down in 1989, Mike Dornbrook, the mastermind behind the company’s InvisiClues hint books and much else that has become iconic for interactive-fiction fans of a certain generation, was determined to start a company of his own. Indeed, he was so motivated that he negotiated to take much of Infocom’s office furniture in lieu of cash as part of his severance package.

But alas, his entrepreneurial dream seemed vexed. He embarked on a mail-order catalog for maps and travel books — until he learned that Rand-McNally was starting a catalog of its own. He pivoted to offering customized traffic reports for drivers on the go — until it was decided by the authorities in the Boston area where he lived that mobile-phone users would not be allowed to call “premium-rate” numbers like the one he was setting up. So, in January of 1991, he started a regular job at a targeted-marketing and data-processing consultancy that had recently been purchased by American Express. Two years later, he was laid off, but carried his knowledge and contacts into his own data-mining startup. He was still trying to line up enough investment capital to get that company going properly when he got a call from Steve Meretzky, who before becoming a star Infocom designer had been his roommate in a little Boston apartment; in fact, it was Dornbrook who had first introduced Meretzky to the wonders of Zork, thus unleashing him on the world of adventure games.

Unlike Dornbrook, Meretzky had stayed in the games industry since Infocom’s shuttering, designing four adventures for Legend Entertainment and one for Activision from his Boston home. But he had grown tired of working remotely, and dearly missed the camaraderie and creative ferment of life at Infocom. Superhero League of Hoboken, his latest game for Legend (and by far the most inspired of his post-Infocom career in this critic’s opinion), had turned into a particularly frustrating experience for him; delays on the implementation side meant that it was still many months away from seeing the light of day. He had thus decided to start a games studio of his own — and he wanted his old pal Mike Dornbrook to run it for him. “I’ll help you to get it going,” agreed a somewhat reluctant Dornbrook, who after enduring the painful latter years of Infocom wasn’t at all sure he actually wanted to return to the industry.

And so Boffo Games was born. Sadly, all of Dornbrook’s forebodings would prove prescient.

At the time, the hype around multimedia computing was reaching a fever pitch. One of the biggest winners of the era was a Singaporean company called Creative Labs, whose Sound Blaster sound cards had been at the vanguard of a metamorphosis in computer audio since 1989. More recently, they had also begun selling CD-ROM drives, as well as “multimedia upgrade kits”: sound cards and CD-ROM drives in one convenient package, along with a few discs to get purchasers started on their magical journey.

Of late, however, another company had begun making waves in the same market. The Silicon Valley firm Media Vision had first captured headlines in newspaper financial sections in November of 1992, when it raised $45 million in an initial public offering in order to go head to head with Creative. Soon after, Media Vision released their Pro AudioSpectrum 16 sound card, the first to offer 16-bit — i.e., audio-CD-quality — sound playback. It took Creative months to follow suit with the Sound Blaster 16.

In the end, Media Vision would not be remembered for their honesty…

But Media Vision’s ambitions extended well beyond the sound-card and CD-ROM-drive market, which, as most financial analysts well realized, looked likely to plateau and then slowly tail off once everyone who wanted to add multimedia capabilities to an existing computer had done so and new computers were all shipping with these features built-in. To secure their long-term future, Media Vision planned to use their hardware profits to invest heavily in software. By the Christmas buying season of 1993, announced the company’s CEO Paul Jain at the beginning of that same year, they would have ten cutting-edge CD-ROM games on the market. To prove his bona fides, he had recruited to run his games division one Stan Cornyn, a legendary name among music-industry insiders.

Cornyn had been hired by Warner Bros. Records in 1958 to write liner notes, and had gone on to become instrumental in building Warner Music into the biggest record company in the world by the end of the 1980s, with superstars like Madonna and Prince in its stable of artists. During his last years at Warner, Cornyn had headed the Warner New Media spinoff, working on Philips CD-I titles and such other innovations as the CD+G format, which allowed one to place lyrics sheets and pictures on what were otherwise audio CDs. In 1992, he had left Warner. “Corporate [leadership] wanted my company to turn a profit, and I had no idea how our inventions would conquer the world,” he would write later. “That, I left to others.” Instead he decided to reinvent himself as a games-industry executive by signing on with Media Vision. His entrance said much about where the movers and shakers in media believed interactive entertainment was heading. And sure enough, he almost immediately scored a major coup, when he signed press darling Trilobyte to release their much-anticipated sequel to The 7th Guest under the Media Vision banner.

As it happened, Marc Blank, one of the original founders of Infocom, had worked at Warner New Media for a time with Cornyn; he had also remained friendly with both Mike Dornbrook and Steve Meretzky. When he read about Cornyn’s hiring by Media Vision, it all struck Dornbrook as serendipitous. “I thought, ‘Aha!'” he remembers. “‘We have a new person who needs content and has a massive budget, and we have a connection to him.'” It was now the fall of 1993. Media Vision hadn’t published the ten games that Paul Jain had promised by this point — they’d only managed two, neither of them very well-received — but that only made Cornyn that much more eager to sign development deals.

Blank proved as good a go-between as Dornbrook had hoped, and a meeting was arranged for Monday, January 17, 1994, in the Los Angeles offices of Stan Cornyn’s operation. Taking advantage of cheaper weekend airfares, Dornbrook and Meretzky took off from a Boston winter and landed amidst the storied sunshine of Southern California two days before that date. Looking at the pedestrians strolling around in their shorts and flip-flops while he sweated in his winter pullover, Dornbrook said to his friend, “You know, I can kind of see why people want to live out here.”

“You’d never catch me out here,” answered Meretzky, “because of the earthquakes.”

“It would be just our luck, wouldn’t it…” mused Dornbrook.

Fast-forward to 4:30 AM on Monday morning, in the fourth-floor hotel room they were sharing. Dornbrook:

The initial shock threw Steve out of his bed and threw me up in the air. I grabbed onto my mattress and held on for dear life. It was like riding a bucking bronco. The building was shaking and moving in ways I didn’t think a building could survive. I was convinced that at any second the ceiling beams were going to fall on me and crush me. That went on for 35 seconds — which feels like about five minutes in an earthquake. And then it stopped.

We were both fine, but it was pitch black in the room; all the lights were out. But I noticed there was a little red light on the TV. I thought, “Oh, we still have power.” So, I decided to turn the TV on. All my life, the public-broadcast system was telling me, in case of an emergency, they would tell me what to do. While I’m turning it on, Steve is yelling, “We need to get out of here!”

I said, “I want to see what they’re telling us to do.” It was a newsroom in LA, one of the main network stations. The camera was zoomed all the way back in a way you normally didn’t see. There were all these desks, all empty except one. That person was screaming and putting his hands over his head and crawling under the desk — and then the power went out.

I knew the TV station was many, many miles from us. This was not just local; this was a major quake. I’m thinking that the San Andreas Fault might have given way. We might not have water; we’re in a desert. We might be trapped here with no water! So, I crawled into the bathroom and started filling the bathtub with water. Steve is yelling, “What the hell are you doing? We’ve got to get out of here!”

I said, “We need water!”

After the bathtub was full, we got dressed in the dark and worked our way down the hall. We had no way of knowing if there was floor in front of us; it was pitch black. So, I let him go first. He felt his way down the hall, making sure there was a floor there. We got to the exit stairs, and they were pitch black also. We went down step by step, making sure there was another step in front of us, all the way to the first floor.

Then we opened the door into the parking lot, and I remember gasping at the sight. We’re in a desert, it’s dry as can be, and there’s no power for hundreds of miles. You could see stars right down to the horizon. I’ve never seen a sky so clear. It was stunning.

The 1994 Los Angeles earthquake killed 57 people, injured more than 9000, and did tens of billions of dollars of property damage. But the show must go on, as they say in Hollywood. The meeting with the Media Vision games division convened that afternoon in Stan Cornyn’s house, delayed only about six hours by the most violent earthquake in Los Angeles history.

Anyone familiar with my earlier coverage of Steve Meretzky’s career will know that he collected game ideas like some people collect stamps. True to form, he showed up at Cornyn’s house with no less than 21 of them, much to the chagrin of Dornbrook, who would have vastly preferred to pitch just one or two: “Because they don’t really have a clue what will work, and they think you do.” On this occasion, though, everyone in the room was feeling giddy from having survived the morning, not to mention the bottles of good wine Cornyn brought up from his cellar, as they listened to Meretzky work through his list. When he was finally finished, Cornyn and his team huddled together for a few minutes, then returned and announced that they’d take eleven of them, thank you very much, and they’d like the first by Christmas at the latest. As a demonstration of good faith while the lawyers wrote up the final contracts, Cornyn handed Dornbrook and Meretzky a check for $20,000. “Get started right now,” he said. “We don’t want you to lose a day.”

After they’d digested this bombshell, Dornbrook and Meretzky asked each other which idea they could possibly bring to fruition in the span of just nine months or so, given that they were literally starting from scratch: no office, no staff, no computers, no development tools, no investors. (Boffo’s founding capital had been exactly $10.) They decided on something called Hodj ‘n’ Podj.

Hodj ‘n’ Podj wasn’t a traditional adventure game, but it was a classic Steve Meretzky project, a game concept which had caught his fancy a long time ago and had remained in his notebook ever since. Its origins reached back to Fooblitzky, the most atypical Infocom game ever: a multiplayer board game that happened to be played on the computer, designed mostly by Mike Berlyn circa 1984. It was a roll-and-move game which revolved around deducing which four of eighteen possible items your character needed to collect in order to win, and then carrying them across the finish line before your competitors did the same with their collections. Played on the company’s big DEC PDP-10, Fooblitzky was a fixture of life inside mid-period Infocom. In late 1985, it became the one and only Infocom product to use their little-remembered cross-platform graphics engine, becoming in the process something of a case study in why such an engine was more problematic than their ubiquitous textual Z-Machine: Fooblitzky shipped only for the IBM PC, the Apple II, and the Atari 8-bit line of computers, running on the last two at the speed of treacle on a cold day and not coming close to utilizing the full graphics capabilities, modest though they may have been, of any of its hosts. A casual family game at a time when such things were virtually unheard of on computers, and a completely silent and graphically underwhelming one at that, it sold only about 7500 copies in all.

Meretzky’s idea, then, was to update Fooblitzky for an era of home computing that ought to be more friendly to it. He would retain the core mechanics — roll and move, deduce and fetch — but would polish up the interface and graphics, write a fresh framing story involving a kidnapped princess in a fairy-tale kingdom, and add one important new element: as you moved around the board, you would have to play puzzle- and/or action-based mini-games to earn the clues, items, and money you needed. The game would run under Windows — no futzing about with MS-DOS IRQ settings and memory managers! — in order to reach beyond the hardcore-gamer demographic who would probably just scoff at it anyway. It seemed a more than solid proposition, with an important practical advantage that shot it right to the top of Boffo’s project list: the mini-games, where the bulk of the programming would be required, were siloed off from one another in such a way that they could be developed by separate teams working in parallel. Thus the project should be finishable in the requested nine months or so.

Back in cold but blessedly stable Boston, Dornbrook and Meretzky rented office space, hired staff, and bought computers on Media Vision’s dime. The final contract arrived, and all still seemed fine, so much so that Dornbrook agreed to wind up his data-mining venture in favor of doing games full time again. Then, one morning in early April, he opened his newspaper to read that Media Vision was being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for serious accounting malfeasance.

In retrospect, the signs had been there all along, as they usually are. The move into software should have raised antennas already more than a year before. “When a company switches or expands its business line into something completely different, it generally means management fears that growth will slow in the main line,” wrote stock-market guru Kathryn F. Staley as part of the round of Monday-morning quarterbacking that now began. “When they expand into a highly competitive business that costs money for product development (like software game titles) when the base business eats money as well, you sit back and watch for the train wreck to happen.” Herb Greenberg, a financial correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, had been sounding the alarm about Media Vision since the summer of 1993, noting how hard it was to understand how the company’s bottom line could look as good as it did; for all the buzz around Media Vision, it was Creative Labs who still appeared to be selling the vast majority of sound cards and CD-ROM drives. But nobody wanted to listen — least of all two Boston entrepreneurs with a dream of starting a games studio that would bring back some of the old Infocom magic. Media Vision’s stock price had stood at $46 on the day of that earthquake-addled meeting in Los Angeles. Four months later, it stood at $5. Two months after that, the company no longer existed.

As the layers were peeled away, it was learned that Paul Jain and his cronies had engaged in a breathtaking range of fraudulent practices to keep the stock price climbing. They’d paid a fly-by-night firm in India to claim to have purchased $6 million worth of hardware from them that they had never actually made. They’d stashed inventory they said they had sold in secret warehouses in several states. (This house of cards started to fall when Media Vision’s facilities manager, who was not in on the scheme, asked why she kept getting bills from warehouses she hadn’t known existed.) They’d capitalized the expense of their software projects so as to spread the bills out over many years — a practice that was supposed to be used only for permanent, ultra-expensive infrastructure like factories and skyscrapers. Herb Greenberg revealed in one of his articles that they’d go so far as to capitalize their corporate Christmas party. After long rounds of government investigations and shareholder lawsuits, Paul Jain and his chief financial officer Steve Allan would be convicted of wire fraud and sentenced to prison in 2000 and 2002 respectively. “This was certainly one of the dirtiest cases I was ever involved in,” said one lawyer afterward. There is no evidence to suggest that Stan Cornyn’s group was aware of any of this, but the revelations nevertheless marked the end of it alongside the rest of Media Vision. Cornyn himself left the games industry, never to return — understandably enough, given the nature of his brief experience there.

Showing amazing fortitude, Dornbrook, Meretzky, and the team of programmers and artists they’d hired just kept their heads down and kept working on Hodj ‘n’ Podj while Media Vision imploded. When the checks stopped coming from their benefactor, the founders quit paying themselves and cut all other expenses to the bone. That October, Hodj ‘n’ Podj was finished on time and under budget, but it was left in limbo while the bankruptcy court sorted through the wreckage of Media Vision. In December, the contract was bought at the bankruptcy fire sale by Virgin Interactive, and against all odds the game reached store shelves under their imprint in March of 1995. (Virgin also wound up with The 11th Hour, the sequel to The 7th Guest — an ironic and rather delicious turn of events for them, given that they had actually been the publisher of The 7th Guest back in the day, only to be abandoned by a starstruck Trilobyte when the time came to make the sequel.)

Hard sales figures for Hodj ‘n’ Podj aren’t available, but we can say with confidence that it wasn’t a big seller. In a 1998 Game Developers Conference presentation, Dornbrook blamed a shakeup at Virgin for its disappointing performance. It seems that the management team that bought it at the bankruptcy sale was excited about it, but another team that replaced the first was less so, and this latter refused to fund any real advertising.

These things were doubtless a major factor in its lack of commercial success, but it would be a bridge too far to call Hodj ‘n’ Podj a neglected classic. Although it’s bug-free and crisply presented, it wears out its welcome way more quickly than it ought to. A big part of the problem is the mini-games, which are one and all reskinned rehashes of hoary old perennials from both the analog and digital realms: Battleship, cryptograms, Solitaire, Kalah, video poker, etc. (“These tired old things are games you could play in your sleep, and a bit of freshening up on the soundtrack does little to encourage you to stay awake,” wrote Charles Ardai, harshly but by no means entirely inaccurately, in his review for Computer Gaming World.) Hodj ‘n’ Podj gives you no reason to explore the entire board, but rather makes the most efficient winning gambit that of simply hanging around the same few areas, playing the mini-games you are best at over and over; this speaks to a game that needed a lot more play-testing to devise ways to force players out of their comfort zones. But its most devastating weakness is the decision to support only two players in a game that positively begs to become a full-blown social occasion; even Fooblitzky allows up to four players. A board filled with half a dozen players, all bumping into and disrupting one another in all kinds of mischievous ways, would make up for a multitude of other sins, but this experience just isn’t possible. Hodj ‘n’ Podj isn’t a terrible game — you and a friend can have a perfectly enjoyable evening with it once or twice per year — but its concept is better than its implementation. Rather than becoming more interesting as you learn its ins and outs, as the best games do — yes, even the “casual” ones — it becomes less so.

The main game board. Whatever else you can say about it, Hodj ‘n’ Podj is beautifully presented, thoroughly belying its hurried assembling by a bunch of short-term hired hands. Its pixel art still looks great today.

Yes, there are riddles, always the last resort of a game designer out of other ideas.

Whack-a-beaver!

After Hodj ‘n’ Podj, the story of Boffo turns into a numbing parade of games that almost were. By Mike Dornbrook’s final tally, 35 of their proposals were met with a high degree of “interest” by some publisher or another; 21 led to “solid commitments”; 17 garnered verbal “promises”; 8 received letters of intent and down payments; 5 led to signed contracts; and 2 games (one of them Hodj ‘n’ Podj) actually shipped. I don’t have the heart to chronicle this cavalcade of disappointment in too much detail. Suffice to say that Boffo chose to deal — or was forced to deal — mostly with the new entities who had entered the market in the wake of CD-ROM rather than the old guard who had built the games industry over the course of the 1980s. As the venture capitalists and titans of traditional media who funded these experiments got nervous about a multimedia revolution that wasn’t materializing on the timetable they had expected, they bailed one by one, leaving Boffo out in the cold. Meanwhile the hardcore gaming market was shifting more and more toward first-person shooters and real-time strategy, at the expense of the adventure games which Steve Meretzky had always created. The most profitable Boffo project ever, notes Dornbrook wryly, was one which disappeared along with Time Warner Interactive, leaving behind only a contract which stipulated that Boffo must be paid for several months of work that they now didn’t need to do.

But Boffo did manage to complete one more game and see it released, and it’s to that project that we’ll turn now. The horrid pun that is its title aside, the thunderingly obvious inspiration for Steve Meretzky’s The Space Bar is the cantina scene from Star Wars, with its dizzying variety of cute, ugly, and just plain bizarre alien races all gathered into one seedy Tatooine bar, boozing, brawling, and grooving to the music. Meretzky wanted to capture the same atmosphere in his game, which would cast its player as a telepathic detective on the trail of a shapeshifting assassin. To solve the case, the player would not only need to interrogate the dozens of aliens hanging out at The Thirsty Tentacle, but enter the minds of some of them to relive their memories. Meretzky:

The main design goal for the project was to create an adventure game which was composed of a lot of smaller adventure games: a novel is to a short-story collection as a conventional adventure game would be to The Space Bar. In addition to just a desire to try something different, I also felt that people had increasingly scarce amounts of [free] time, and that starting an adventure game required setting aside such a huge amount of time, many tens of hours. But if, instead, you could say to yourself, “I’ll just play this ‘chapter’ now and save the rest for later,” it would be easier to justify picking up and starting the game. Secondary design goals were to create a spaceport bar as compelling as the one in the first Star Wars movie, to create a Bogart-esque noir atmosphere, to be really funny, and to prove that you could make a graphic adventure that, like the Infocom text games, could have a lot of “meat on the bones.” As with Hodj ‘n’ Podj, I felt that just a collection of independent games was too loose and required a connecting thread; thus the meta-story involving [the player character] Alien Node’s search for the shapeshifter Ni’Dopal. Empathy Telepathy was just a convenient device for connecting the “short stories” to the meta-story.

In the spring of 1995, the tireless Mike Dornbrook was on the verge of clinching a deal to make this game — and for once it was not a deal with a trend-chasing multimedia dilettante: he had no less enviable a fish than Microsoft on the hook. Then Meretzky learned of a startup called Rocket Science Games that had on its staff one Ron Cobb, a visual-design legend who had crafted the look of such films as Alien, The Terminator, Back to the Future (yes, the Delorean time machine was his…), The Abyss, and Total Recall, who had even according to Hollywood rumor been the uncredited creator of E.T., Steven Spielberg’s $792 million-grossing extra-terrestrial. But before all of that, Cobb had made his name by doing the cantina scene for Star Wars. It would be crazy to pass up the chance to have him create the aliens in The Space Bar, said Meretzky. Dornbrook thought it was far crazier to turn down a deal with Microsoft in favor of an unproven startup, but he sighed and made the calls. Soon after, Boffo signed a contract with Rocket Science.

Once again, the warning signs were all there, at least in retrospect. Rocket Science’s founder Steve Blank (no relation to Marc Blank) was a fast-talking showman fond of broad comparisons. His company was “Industrial Light & Magic and Disney combined!” he said. Or, even more inexplicably, it was Cream, the 1960s rock supergroup. Tellingly, none of his comparisons betrayed any familiarity with the current games industry. “Rocket Science feels good and looks good, even though when someone asks me to describe it, I’m somewhat at a loss,” said Blank. In most times and places, a founder unable to describe his company is cause for concern among pundits and investors. But in Silicon Valley in 1995, it was no problem as long as its products were to ship on little silver discs. Blank told his interviewers that he was so awash in investment capital that he could run his company for five years without pulling in any revenue at all.

That was the version of Rocket Science which Boffo signed on with, the one which was capturing the cover of Wired magazine. The following year, “I found out that our games are terrible, no one is buying them, our best engineers [have] started leaving, and with 120 people and a huge burn rate, we’re running out of money and about to crash,” Blank later remembered in a mea culpa published in Forbes. The games in question consisted mostly of simplistic arcade-style exercises, not terribly well designed or implemented, threaded between filmed video snippets, not terribly well written or acted. Gamers took one look at them and then returned to their regularly scheduled sessions of DOOM and Warcraft.

Just as they had with Hodj ‘n’ Podj, Boffo kept their heads down and kept working on The Space Bar while Rocket Science was “cratering,” to use Steve Blank’s favorite vernacular. Meretzky did get to work with Ron Cobb on the visual design, which was quite a thrill for him. A seasoned animation team under Bill Davis, Sierra On-Line’s former head of game visuals, created the graphics using a mixture of pixel art and 3D models, with impressive results. Everyone kept the faith, determined to believe that a game as awesome as this one was shaping up to be couldn’t possibly fail — never mind the weakness of Rocket Science, much less the decline of the adventure-game market. As the months went by and the reality of the latter became undeniable, Meretzky and his colleagues started to talk about The Space Bar as the game that would bring adventures back to the forefront of the industry. “We concentrated on making The Space Bar such a winner that everyone would want to work with us going forward,” says Dornbrook.

In the meantime, Rocket Science continued its cratering. The embattled Steve Blank was replaced by Bill Davis in the CEO’s chair in 1996, and this bought the company a bit more money and time from their investors. In the long run, though, this promotion of an animation specialist only emphasized Rocket Science’s core problem: a surfeit of audiovisual genius, combined with a stark lack of people who knew what made a playable game. In April of 1997, the investors pulled the plug. “It’s tragic when a collection of talent like Rocket Science assembled is disbanded,” said Davis. “It’s a great loss to the industry.” Yet said industry failed to mourn. In fact, it barely noticed.

The Space Bar was in its final stages of development when the news came. Boffo’s contract was passed to SegaSoft, the software division of videogame-console maker Sega, who had invested heavily in Rocket Science games for the underwhelming Sega Saturn. Dornbrook and Meretzky couldn’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu. Just as had happened with Hodj ‘n’ Podj, The Space Bar was crawling out from under the wreckage of one publisher into the arms of another who didn’t seem to know quite what to do with it. In the weeks before the game’s release, SegaSoft ran a series of weirdly tone-deaf advertisements for it; for reasons that no one could divine, they were take-offs on the tabloid journalism of The National Enquirer. They were so divorced from the game they claimed to be promoting that the one silver lining, says Dornbrook, was that “at least no one would associate them with our game.”

Unlike Hodj ‘n’ Podj, The Space Bar didn’t prove a commercial disappointment: it turned into an outright bomb. Meretzky still calls its disastrous failure the bitterest single disappointment of his career. Soon after, he and Dornbrook finally gave up and shuttered Boffo. Four years of failure and frustration were enough for anyone.

Dornbrook’s 1998 GDC presentation on the rise and fall of Boffo focused almost exclusively on the little studio’s poor treatment by its larger partners, on the many broken promises and breaches of faith they were forced to endure, until they could endure no more. But at the end of it, he did acknowledge that he might appear to be “blaming all of this on others. Weren’t we also at fault here? Did we have problems on our end?” He concluded that, an unfortunate decision here or there aside — the decision to sign with Rocket Science instead of Microsoft certainly springs to mind — they largely did not. He noted that they never failed to emphasize their biggest strength: “Steve’s a fantastic game designer.”

Does The Space Bar support this contention?

On the surface, the game has much going for it: its rogues’ gallery of misfit aliens is as ingenious and entertaining as you would expect from a meeting of the minds of Steve Meretzky and Ron Cobb; it’s as big and meaty as advertised, packed wall to wall with puzzles; its graphics and voice acting are mostly pretty great; it fills three CDs, and feels like it ought to fill even more. It’s the product of a team that was obviously thinking hard about the limitations of current adventure games and how to move past them — how to make the genre more welcoming to newcomers, as well as tempting once again for those who had gotten tired of the adventure-game status quo and moved on to other things. Among its innovative interface constructs are an auto-map that works wonderfully and a comprehensive logbook that keeps track of suspects, clues, and open puzzles. Dornbrook has called it “a labor of love,” and we have no reason to doubt him.

Nevertheless, it is — and it gives me no pleasure to write this — a flabbergastingly awful game. It plays as if all those intense design discussions Meretzky took part in at Infocom never happened, as if he was not just designing his first adventure game, but was the first person ever to design an adventure game. All the things that Ron Gilbert told the world made adventure games suck almost a decade earlier are here in spades: cul-de-sacs everywhere that can only be escaped by pressing the “restore” button, a need to do things in a certain order when you have no way of knowing what that order is, a need to run though the same boring processes over and over again, a stringent time limit that’s impossible to meet without hyper-optimized play, player deaths that come out of nowhere, puzzles that make sense only in the designer’s head. It’s not just sadistically but incompetently put together as a game. And as a marketplace proposition, it’s utterly incoherent, not to say schizophrenic; how can we possibly square this design with Meretzky’s stated goal of making a more approachable adventure game, one that would be digestible in snack-sized chunks? The Space Bar would seem to be aimed at two completely separate audiences, each the polar opposite of the other; I don’t believe there’s any hidden demographic of casual masochists out there. And there’s no difficulty slider or anything else that serves to bridge the chasm.

One of the oddities of the Boffo story is the sanguine belief on the part of the otherwise savvy Mike Dornbrook that he could use Steve Meretzky’s supposed “star power” to sell games, as demonstrated by his prominent billing here on the cover of the Space Bar box. Meretzky wasn’t any Sid Meier or John Romero; he was a cult figure rather than a household name even among hardcore gamers, adored by a small group of them for his work with Infocom but largely unknown to the rest of them. His last game to sell over 100,000 copies had been Leather Goddesses of Phobos in 1986, his last to manage 50,000 Spellcasting 101 in 1990.

It wouldn’t be a Steve Meretzky game without a bit of this sort of thing…

These aliens are among the funniest. They’re an incredibly advanced and powerful race, but they look like Tiki drinks, and everyone is forever picking them up and trying to sip from them.

The very well-done auto-map.

If The Space Bar sold ten copies, that was ten too many; I hope those ten buyers returned it for a refund. I don’t blame Mike Dornbrook for not being aware of just how terrible a game The Space Bar was; he was way too close to it to be expected to have an objective view under any circumstances, even as he was, as he forthrightly acknowledges, never really much of a gamer after his torrid early romance with Zork had faded into a comfortable conviviality. Still, to analyze the failure of Boffo only in terms of market pressures, bad luck, and perhaps just a few bad business choices is to fail at the task. In addition to all of these other factors, there remains the reality that neither of their two games were actually all that good. Nothing about The Space Bar would lead one to believe that Steve Meretzky is “a fantastic game designer.”

Yet Meretzky could in fact be a fantastic game designer. Back in 2015, writing about his 1987 Infocom game Stationfall, I called him “second to no one on the planet in his ability to craft entertaining and fair puzzles, to weave them together into a seamless whole, and to describe it all concisely and understandably.” I continue to stand by that statement in the context of his games of that era. So, how did we get from Stationfall to The Space Bar?

I belabor this question not because I want to pick on Steve Meretzky, whose half-dozen or so stone-cold classic games are half a dozen more than I can lay claim to, but because I think there’s an important lesson here about the need for collaboration in game design. I tend to see Meretzky’s rather disappointing output during the 1990s — including not only his Boffo games but those he did for Legend and Activision — as another ironic testament to Infocom’s genius for process. Infocom surrounded the designer of each of their games with skeptical, questioning peers, and expected him to work actively with a team of in-house testers who were empowered to do more than just point out bugs and typos, who were allowed to dig into what was fun and unfun, fair and unfair. Meretzky never worked in such an environment again after Infocom — never worked with people who were willing and able to tell him, “Maybe this joke goes on a bit too long, Steve,” or, “Maybe you don’t need to ask the player to go through this dozen-step process multiple times. ” The end results perhaps speak for themselves. Sometimes you need colleagues who do more than tell you how fantastic you are.

Steve Meretzky never designed another full-fledged adventure game after The Space Bar. Following a few dissatisfying intermediate steps, he found his way into the burgeoning world of casual social games, distributed digitally rather than as boxed products, where he’s done very well for himself since the turn of the millennium. Meanwhile Mike Dornbrook signed on with a little company called Harmonix that reminded him somewhat of Infocom, being staffed as they were with youthful bright sparks from MIT. After years of refining their techniques for making music interactive for non-musicians, they released something called Guitar Hero in 2005. Both of the principals behind Boffo have enjoyed second acts in the games industry that dwarf their first in terms of number of players reached and number of dollars earned. So, it all worked out okay for them in the end.

(Sources: the books Games Design Theory and Practice, second edition, by Richard Rouse III Exploding: The Hits, Hype, Heroes, and Hustlers of the Warner Music Group by Stan Cornyn, Capital Instincts: Life as an Entrepreneur, Financier, and Athlete by Richard L. Brandt, Thomas Weisel, and Lance Armstrong, and The Art of Short Selling by Kathryn F. Staley; Computer Gaming World of May 1995, August 1995, May 1997, and December 1997; Questbusters 116; Computer Games Strategy Plus of August 1996; Wired of November 1994 and July 1997; San Francisco Chronicle of August 29 2000; the June 1993 issue of Sierra’s customer newsletter InterAction. Online source include a CD Mag interview with Steve Meretzky, an Adventure Classic Gaming interview with Steve Meretzky, a Happy Puppy interview with Steve Meretzky, “Failure and Redemption” by Steve Blank at Forbes, and Mike Dornbrook’s presentation “Look Before You Leap” at the 1998 Game Developers Conference. But my most valuable source of all was Karl Kuras’s more than four-hour (!) interview with Mike Dornbrook for his Video Game Newsroom Time Machine podcast, a truly valuable oral history of the games industry from a unique perspective. Thanks, Karl and Mike!)

Comments
30 Responses

- dsparil

November 19, 2021 at 5:24 pm

I never knew about all the financial shenanigans around Media Vision. I used a PAS16 from 1993 to around 1998 and figured the company would have been fine since games supported the card for so long. I was glad to move to a Sound Blaster Live though since the wave table made MIDI music bearable.

Three of the five games Rocket Science developed were garbage, but the adventure game Obsidian is pretty good if you like Myst clones. The racing game Rocket Jockey isn’t too bad either and some of the music was done by Dick Dale. I got it for really cheap, and it was worth it for the Red Book surf music alone.

It’s worth noting that The Space Bar was actually well reviewed when it came out. I only bought it on the strength of those reviews and ended up finding it immensely frustrating. It seems like reviewers were willing to cut Meretzky some slack since his name did mean something to them. It also did eventually get some normal advertising that was a little bland but much less inscrutable.

- dsparil

November 19, 2021 at 5:57 pm

CGW 156 actually has two different ads! I always thought it was weird that there was an ad index in the back, but it made finding them so easy. One is on page 48 and the other on 87. They’re PDF pages 52 and 91 in the Archive.org or CGW Museum scans. I recommend the CGWM PDF as it’s a better scan.

The second one is the one I remember, but the first is a police line up that makes a whole lot more sense than a fake tabloid spread.

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2021 at 9:19 pm

The reviews were actually kind of all over the place. Certainly the Computer Gaming World review was notably lukewarm — and honestly, review inflation being what it was during this era, it was quite rare for a game to receive a flat-out bad review. Most gamers tacitly understood, I think, that “lukewarm” actually meant “pretty bad.”

- dsparil

November 20, 2021 at 1:29 pm

CGW never officially reviewed The Space Bar. Scorpia did write a mostly negative column that reads like a review in #161/Dec ’97, but the CGW staff came up with a score as a group at that time at least so it’s not clear how they would have scored it. The short write up in the holiday gift guide in the same issue called it one of the year’s best adventure games so they probably would have rated it highly.

Of the other two main PC game magazines, PC Gamer’s review was an absolutely glowing 90% and Computer Games [Strategy Plus] was also had a very positive 4 star review. Next Generation gave it 4 stars and GameSpot gave it a 7.7 review that is positive towards the gameplay. Most of the negative remarks are towards the audiovisual aspects and sometimes the disc swapping.

I don’t disagree with anything you wrote, and like I said I didn’t particularly like it either, but the most prominent press was positive. That isn’t to say literally every review was as one site I used to visit that no longer exists, Adrenaline Vault which was not as action focused as the name suggests, did give it a somewhat mixed review. A lot of it comes down to how reviewers felt about the difficulty. However, Scorpia’s article calls the game bug free but then points out something that clearly seems to be a scripting bug. It’s very possible that the game ended up gaining some unintended difficulty from having to avoid tripping silent bugs.

- Owen C

November 20, 2021 at 10:48 am

I was kind of sad to read here about what sort of company Rocket Science was since I loved Obsidian.

- Ice Cream Jonsey

November 19, 2021 at 5:27 pm

I still have my copy of The Space Bar! :) I have a memory of SegaSoft shrinkwrapping it together with Rocket Jockey and selling them both like that, which is how I think I got mine. Rocket Jockey is still one of the 25 greatest games on Earth so I have no memories of being disappointed by that purchase in the aggregate.

The Space Bar’s concept, as you describe, is still really good! And I’m probably the same age now as when Steve designed it, and the concept of playing a small chunk of a game and getting to a good spot to feel accomplished and saving really resonates.

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2021 at 9:20 pm

You must tell us how you managed to stop the aging process. ;)

Sorry, couldn’t resist. I know what you meant…

- mycophobia

November 19, 2021 at 8:31 pm

“Among it’s innovative interface constructs”

it’s > its

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2021 at 9:14 pm

Thanks!

- Sniffnoy

November 19, 2021 at 8:50 pm

Typo spotting: The sentence

To prove his bona fides, he had recruited to run his games division one Stan Cornyn, a legendary name among music-industry insiders

is missing a period at the end.

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2021 at 9:15 pm

Thanks!

- YellowSign

November 19, 2021 at 9:09 pm

…half-dozen or so stone-cold classic games are half a dozen more than I can lay claim to…

I think you’re underestimating your game design chops here. The King of Shreds and Patches is great.

- Josh Martin

November 19, 2021 at 11:48 pm

I was excited for The Space Bar on account of the premise and some adulatory reviews from PC Gamer and Next Generation (I had no idea who Meretzky was, so that didn’t factor in). I remember the reviews kind of offhandedly mentioning that the game was hard but didn’t make much of it. I got as far as the god-awful mine maze where you have to repeatedly backtrack to open different doors and then follow an incredibly precise route to catch an egg, lest it break and the player forced to reload a saved game. What little I did play had some pretty funny moments so maybe I should give it another whirl with a walkthrough.

It’s nice to see so much love for Rocket Jockey, a very fun game that was hobbled out of the gate by shipping with no multiplayer support and being a bit too early for robust online support. Really wish someone would resurrect it or just rip it off—I get so disappointed every time a new game is announced with “rocket” in the title and it turns out to be something else.

CD+G was incredibly successful in the karaoke space and discs are still made for that purpose (though by now they’ve mostly been replaced by songs streamed from a server or hard disk). I don’t know if there’s any relation between the two other than the basic concept and part of the name, but there was also a laserdisc equivalent (LD-G) that was mainly used in Japan, both for karaoke discs and to provide closed captioning (since the Japanese writing system was too complicated for the caption encoding schemes of the time).

- mircalla

November 20, 2021 at 12:49 am

Burn Ward Games announced a Rocket Jockey remake a while back, but it seems to have died on the vine. itch.io has at least one other take on it (https://awesometongames.itch.io/rocket-jockeys-the-remake), but I haven’t tried that one out either.

- Gnoman

November 20, 2021 at 6:08 am

Hodj ‘n’ Podj seems incredibly similar in concept to the Mario Party franchise (a game for up to 4 players that involves running around a game board with minigames at regular intervals) that would begin 3 years later in 1998.

It is pretty low probability that such a low-selling game in the US would have gotten into the hands of someone in Japan with the ability to direct Nintendo, so it almost certainly isn’t a direct influence, but this is a strong indicator that the commercial failure was a matter of execution, not core concept. Your point about “the need for collaboration in game design” seems like the obvious culprit – having more people looking in with input like “these minigames aren’t fun” and “this should support more than 2 players” would have corrected some of the flaws.

- Sniffnoy

November 21, 2021 at 8:02 pm

Oh, huh, I didn’t make that connection, that’s kind of interesting… except, Hodj ‘n’ Podj isn’t the first example of the “roll and move with minigames” genre either; Jimmy discussed The Three Stooges a while back which also loosely has this structure. Although I think there the minigames are all single-player.

Are there other earlier examples of this? I kind of want to say that you can see the evolution of the structure here, from The Three Stooges, to Hodj ‘n’ Podj, to Mario Party; except of course that it’s not clear at all to what extent these actually influenced the later ones vs to what extent the later ones were independent reinventions. I wonder if anyone’s looked into that?

- Steve-O

November 24, 2021 at 2:07 am

The earliest example of the form that I can think of is “Chivalry”, published way back in 1983 by Xerox, of all people. (Technically it was published by Weekly Reader Software, the same folks behind the popular Stickybear series of educational games, but they were a division of Xerox.)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/chivalry

Being an early Apple II game, the minigame mechanics were simple and a little bit janky. And the board was not displayed in-game; rather, the game shipped with a physical board and playing pieces. This was either a clever way to save limited disk space, or a clever means of copy protection, or both. Though it was perhaps less than foolproof as copy-protection, since as a kid I played through my bootleg copy enough times to draw my own map by hand on graph paper.

- Martin

November 21, 2021 at 2:11 pm

You must really hate the game as you don’t provide any way to play it. :)

Is there a worthy walk through out there that can take us through the game? At least to explore the better parts of the game – assuming there are any.

- Jimmy Maher

November 21, 2021 at 3:43 pm

You can find it on archive.org in a ready-to-install-on-modern-computers version. I haven’t seen a good walkthrough, but there is a reasonably thorough UHS Hints file.

- Martin

November 22, 2021 at 2:45 am

Actually thinking about it, if someone does play this (or any other game) with a walkthru by their side, are you effectively playing a game like The Dark Eye – a walking simulator, as there are no puzzles as you have all the answers?

- Robb Sherwin

November 25, 2021 at 12:58 am

You are the MVP of the internet. For years I had been hoping for a RJ remake and this is it. It’s incredible. Thank you for mentioning it!

- Robb Sherwin

November 25, 2021 at 5:11 pm

Whoops, I replied to the wrong message. What I meant to do was offer thanks to mircalla for posting that link on itch for “Rocket Jockeys”, the modern rework of Rocket Jockey. It plays really well!

- David Meyer-Lindenberg

November 25, 2021 at 7:29 am

Interesting! Another few games I’d never heard of. Notwithstanding your bad review, I think I’ll give The Space Bar a shot – if nothing else, it looks pretty. Thanks.

PS: “vexed” should be “hexed.”

- Marcus Johnson

November 28, 2021 at 4:44 am

I think it’s a little harsh to call CD + G a “dubious innovation” and “misbegotten effort”; while it might have flopped as a normal consumer format it ultimately found success in the karaoke world and people are still making discs in the format today

- Jimmy Maher

November 28, 2021 at 4:47 am

Fair enough. Edit made. Thanks!

- Ross

November 29, 2021 at 5:17 am

I’ve noticed that when I talk to “computer” people about CD+G, they universally respond “Is that still around? that was a total failure that died decades ago”, whereas if you talk to karaoke people, it’s, well, the one and only commercial format for karaoke with absolutely no sense that it’s in any kind of a decline.

- David Meyer-Lindenberg

December 7, 2021 at 10:29 am

Jimmy, your claim in this post that “[Meretzky] hadn’t written a game that sold over 35,000 copies since Leather Goddesses of Phobos in 1986” is belied by your claim in the Spellcasting article that Spellcasting 101 “sold more than 50,000 copies as Legend’s very first product.”

- Jimmy Maher

December 7, 2021 at 12:15 pm

Ouch. Color me embarrassed. Thanks!

- Nevin

December 22, 2021 at 2:12 pm

Interesting – The Space Bar was one of my favorite graphical adventure games of the 90’s, and the few people I’ve talked to who also played it liked it a lot as well. I haven’t revisited it in at least 20 years, so I can’t say how well it holds up, but I remember including it on a list of all-time favorite games about 10 years ago. I’d been looking forward to your eventual retrospective on the game.

I think you overlooked a huge factor in the game’s commercial failure: It was given an M rating. That would have been fine at the time for a lot of hard-core shooters, but for a graphical adventure game, it ensured that most of the target audience wouldn’t even consider it. The common refrain I remember from reviews and online discussions back then was “this is a really good game, and I have no idea why it has an M rating?” I never got confirmation, but I’m confident that the reason is that one scene has you playing as a drug dealer trying to smuggle your wares off-planet. It’s a colorful cartoon world and a fictional drug, so it came across as pretty innocuous to everyone I talked to, but I assume that the ratings board took a hard line on fictional drug smuggling. The scene in question was a good one, but this is probably the sort of mistake that a more competent company would have avoided.

- Rowan Lipkovits

January 11, 2022 at 7:49 pm

It must just be a case of funny timing and parallel evolution, but when I read about the design decisions informing the Space Bar, they kept reminding me of Josh Mandel’s similarly-premised “Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon” game with Legend, which came out the same year.

Might and Magic
December 10, 2021

Wizardry and Ultima were great inspirations for me. But I wanted to make my own vision for a CRPG. I wanted more of an open-world feel, with quests, puzzles, and an emphasis on exploration and discovery. I wanted party-based tactical combat, tons of magic items to find, and an ever-increasing feeling of power as you leveled your characters. Most of all, I wanted players to feel free to experiment with all of the “tools” I put in the game, so that they could enjoy playing any way they wanted to.

— Jon Van Caneghem

The long-running Might and Magic CRPG series is an easy thing for a project like this one to overlook. These games were never obviously, forthrightly innovative, being content to rework the same high-fantasy territory over and over again. Meanwhile their level of commercial success, although certainly considerable at times, never became so enormous as to make them sit up and demand our attention.

What Might and Magic consistently did have going for it, however, was the quality of being fun. Jon Van Caneghem, the series’s guiding light, was himself a lifelong compulsive gamer, and he stuffed his creations full of the things that he himself enjoyed: quests to fulfill, dungeons to explore, loot to collect, and an absurd variety of monsters to fight, all couched inside a non-linear, open-ended philosophy of gameplay that eschewed the sort of (overly?) elaborate set-piece plots that had begun to mark many of his series’s peers by the dawn of the 1990s. Might and Magic games, in other words, weren’t so much stories to be experienced as places to be explored.

Chet Bolingbroke — better known as The CRPG Addict — names “generous” as his defining adjective for Might and Magic.

The Might and Magic games have always been generous. Jon Van Caneghem clearly had a history with tabletop RPGs and early CRPGs, but he envisioned worlds of bounty where those titles were sparse and unyielding. In Wizardry, Might and Magic’s most obvious forebear, a 16 x 16 map might only hold a couple of fixed combats and two textual encounters. Van Caneghem’s strategy was to give you something in every row and column. I have maps from the first game in which I had to go into the double letters to annotate everything. A Dungeons & Dragons module might take you from Level 2 to 5 over the course of 30 hours of campaigning. Van Caneghem had no problem offering games in which you hit Level 100 or more. Where Dungeons and Dragons and Wizardry regarded attributes as closely policed within a 3-18 range, you might start at 15 strength in Might and Magic and end at 500.

Throughout its long history as a series, Might and Magic never strayed far from this gonzo approach. It remained always that which it had first aspired to be: an exercise in exploring spaces, killing the monsters you met there, and taking their stuff so that you could use it to kill even tougher monsters somewhere else. But within that template, it did find room to innovate — to do so, in fact, in more ways than it’s generally given credit for, including a few innovations that have become staples of the CRPG genre today. If it was no poster child for games as art, it had arguments of its own to make for games as pure fun.

Jon Van Caneghem was in some ways the last of a breed: the last of the living-room gaming entrepreneurs who dominated at the very start of the industry, with their self-coded products, their homemade packaging, and their naïve gumption that took the place of business plans and venture capital.

Van Caneghem grew up as a child of privilege in the 1970s near the heart of Hollywood, the stepson of a prominent neurologist. His parents had high ambitions for him; he attended grade school at the elite bilingual Lycée Français de Los Angeles. But he never quite fit the mold his parents had cast for him. A slow reader and reluctant student, he was obsessed with games from a very young age, beginning with checkers, then moving on to chess, Risk, and Diplomacy, then to Avalon Hill’s wargames and finally, inevitably to Dungeons & Dragons. He entered UCLA as a pre-med student in 1979, but becoming a doctor was his parents’ dream for him, not his own. Once there, he continued to devote the bulk of his energies to playing games, as well as another, more dangerous obsession: racing cars on the legendary Mulholland Drive.

Van Caneghem discovered computers and computer games during his middle years at university, just as many of his friends were finding jobs and significant others, and were left with less time for game nights as a result. “Then a friend of mine showed me an Apple II, and he was playing a bunch of simple games on it,” he remembers. “This was great! I could play any time I wanted and didn’t have to wait for anyone to get together. So, I immediately got one.”

Like at least half of the Apple II world at the time, he was soon in the throes of a full-blown Wizardry addiction; he guesses he must have finished it “seven or eight times.” The original Ultima also consumed plenty of hours. It was ironically the flaws in these pioneering but technologically limited early CRPGs that drove him to go from being a game player to a game maker.

Everyone started to tell me, “You’re always complaining about these games. Why don’t you make your own?” And I said that I didn’t have the slightest idea how to program. But it intrigued me. I switched from being a pre-med student to a math and computer-science major at UCLA and just started delving into the Apple II, absorbing every magazine and piece of information I could find. Everything I was learning at school was just ancient history as far as the computer was concerned, with punched cards and mainframes. There was nothing about personal computers. So I pretty much had to teach myself everything.

Much to his parents’ relief, he finished his Bachelor’s program at UCLA in 1983, albeit not in the major they had planned for him. Then he dropped a bombshell on them: he wanted to make his own computer game and sell it. They reluctantly agreed to give him a couple more years of room and board while he chased his dream.

In the end, it would take him almost three years to make the grandiosely titled Might and Magic: Book One — The Secret of the Inner Sanctum. In what Van Caneghem still calls the most satisfying single creative experience of his life, he designed and programmed the whole thing himself. He drew the graphics with some help from a pair of outside artists he hired, and outsourced some of the writing to his wife. But at least 90 percent of the sprawling final product was his work alone.

When he began to shop the game around to publishers at last in 1986, he found they were very interested; CRPGs were enjoying a boom at that time, with Ultima IV and The Bard’s Tale having been two of the biggest hits of the previous year. Yet he was sadly underwhelmed by the terms he was offered, which might allow him to earn $1 per copy sold at a retail price of $35 or more.

So, having come this far alone, he decided to self-publish his game. Being a self-described “ultimate Star Trek nut,” he chose New World Computing — as in “strange new worlds and new civilizations” — for the name of his new company. He recruited friends to draw the art for a box and a rather handsome map of his game’s land of Varn, then bought himself a PO Box and a toll-free order line along with advertisements in Computer Gaming World and A+, respectively computing gaming’s journal of record and one of the most popular of the Apple II magazines. Having been taught from a young age that success in life often hinges on looking like a success, he pulled out all the stops for the advertisements. Instead of the quarter-page black-and-white ad with fuzzy stick-figure art that was typical of home-grown software entrepreneurs like him, he convinced his parents to splash out one more time for a professionally laid-out, full-page, full-color spread that looked as good as any of those from the more established competition and better than most of them; this was an advertisement that couldn’t help but get Might and Magic noticed.

The first Might and Magic advertisement, which came complete with veiled jabs at The Bard’s Tale. It’s amusing to see how it describes pencil-and-paper map-making as a virtue rather than a necessary evil. Most gamers apparently didn’t agree: the very next game in the series would feature one of the CRPG genre’s first simple auto-maps.

And it did get noticed: it was a case of the right game at the right time putting its best foot forward, and the response exceeded all of his expectations. The order line which he’d installed in his bedroom rang all night long, and Van Caneghem, who had no intention of missing a single sale, turned into a sleep-deprived zombie thanks to it. Relief came in the form of another phone call, this one from Jim Levy, the CEO of Activision. Levy explained that Activision was starting something they called an “affiliated-label program” to help small developers get their products to market, and he thought that New World Computing would be an excellent candidate. (He may have been motivated to atone, to Activision’s stockholders if no one else, for his infamous rejection of Interplay’s The Bard’s Tale as “niche-ware for nerds” — a rejection which had delivered to Activision’s arch-rival Electronic Arts their biggest hit to date.) Activision could take phone orders and, much more importantly, distribute Might and Magic to stores all over the country, all while taking a smaller cut than a traditional publisher and leaving the New World logo as the only prominent one on the box; they could even put Van Caneghem in touch with people who could port it to other platforms. It sounded very good indeed to the young entrepreneur.

Within weeks of this conversation, Levy was fired from Activision, but the deal he had made with Van Caneghem remained in place. Might and Magic’s arrival in stores in early 1987 was heralded by a glowing review in Computer Gaming World from Scorpia, the magazine’s longstanding adventure and CRPG columnist. She called it “world touring on a grand scale”: “There is so much to learn and enjoy in Might and Magic because its scope and complexity are amazing.” Ports to the IBM PC and Commodore 64 (the latter done by none other than John Romero of later DOOM fame) were available well before the Christmas of 1987. While it would never quite manage to join Ultima, The Bard’s Tale, and, soon, Pool of Radiance and the other SSI Gold Box games in the very top commercial tier of late-1980s CRPGs, it did become the leading name among the second tier, more than enough to get New World off the ground properly and create high expectations for a sequel.

Despite Scorpia’s rapture over it, this first Might & Magic game was, like all of the ones that would follow it, disarmingly easy to underestimate. It wore the influence of Wizardry and its successors, The Bard’s Tale among them, prominently on its sleeve: it too was an exercise in turn-based, grid-based exploration, which you navigated from a first-person point of view despite controlling a party of up to six characters. (The oddity of this has led to its sub-genre’s modern nickname of “blobber,” for the way it “blobs” all of your characters together into one octopus-like mass of sword-wielding arms and spell-casting hands.) Its technology verged on the primitive even in 1987, the year which saw the introduction of real-time gameplay to the CRPG genre in Dungeon Master. Nor was it any paradigm of balanced design: the early stages, when your newly created party consisted of naked, penniless club-wielders, proved so difficult that Van Caneghem grudgingly added a slightly — slightly, mind you — more hardy pre-made starting party to later releases. Even once your characters made it to level three or so and were no longer as weak as infants, the difficulty level remained more jagged than curved; monsters could suddenly appear on some levels that were an order of magnitude more powerful than anything else you’d met there, killing you before you knew what had hit you. This was an especial problem given that you could only save your game from one of the nine adventurer’s inns scattered around the sprawling world, a result more of technical limitations than designer intent. Meanwhile the story was mostly nonexistent, and silly where it did exist, culminating in the revelation that the entire world of Varn you’d been exploring was really a giant artificial biosphere created by space aliens; “Varn” turned out to be an acronym for “Vehicular Astropod Research Nacelle.”

If you could get past all that, however, it was a surprisingly rich game. Caneghem has noted that, though he became a pretty good programmer in the course of making Might and Magic, he was always a game designer first, a game programmer second: “I wasn’t a programmer who knew a neat graphics routine and then turned it into a game. I think most people at the time, except for a few, came from that end of it.” As one of the few who didn’t, Van Caneghem took a more holistic approach. Here we have to return to this idea of generosity that the CRPG Addict broached for us at the beginning of this article. Primitive though it was, Might and Magic was still crammed to bursting with stuff, enough to fill a couple of hundred hours if you let it: 250 different items to collect, 94 different spells to cast, 200 different monsters to fight, 55 individual 16-square-by-16-square areas to map. It boasted not only dungeons and towns, but a whole grid-based outside world to explore. The lumpy amalgamation was riddled with cheap exploits as well, of course, but discovering them was half the fun. One should never dismiss the appeal of building a group of adventurers from a bunch of babes in the woods who fall over dead if a goblin looks at them sideways to a six-person blob of terror that can annihilate a thousand of the little buggers at the stroke of a key.

For all its manifest derivativeness in the broad strokes, Might and Magic wasn’t without a smattering of genuinely new ideas, at least one of which became quietly influential on the future course of its genre. As you explored its maps, you often met people who gave you quests: tasks to accomplish apart from revealing more territory and collecting more experience points. These could range from such practical affairs as delivering a letter to another town to more, shall we say, whimsical endeavors, such as climbing every tree in a given area. Completing these side-quests provided rewards in the form of additional experience points and riches. More importantly, it added an additional impetus to your wanderings, a new dimension of play that was different from methodically lawn-mowering through a sometimes numbing procession of dungeons and monsters. In time, sub-quests like these would become an essential component of many or most CRPGs.

Jon Van Caneghem took advantage of his first game’s success to set up a proper office for New World in Van Nuys, California, and hire a staff made up of people much like himself. “A lot of our employees had met at game conventions, and all of our roots were in gaming,” he says. “At 5:30, the office would shut down and the gaming would start. Everyone was always there until all hours of the night, playing games.” He noted in a contemporary magazine profile that he wished above all to keep the New World offices “loose, friendly, and creative.”

He and his fellow travelers shipped Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World in December of 1988. Although clearly of the same technological lineage as its predecessor, it was a big step forward in terms of the details. Not only did it offer an even vaster profusion of stuff, spread over 60 different discrete areas this time, but it came with some significant quality-of-life improvements, including a reasonably usable auto-map if you chose to invest in the Cartography skill for at least one of your characters. Another subtle but welcome improvement came in your ability to set a “disposition” for your party, from “inconspicuous” to “thrill-seeker”; this allowed you to set the frequency of random monster encounters to your own liking, depending on whether you were just trying to get someplace or were actively grinding for experience points. But the most obvious improvement of all was the revamped graphics, courtesy of the full-time artists Van Caneghem had now hired; a version for the Commodore Amiga, the audiovisual wundermachine of the era, looked particularly good. The story was as daft as the last one, taking place on another world… err, alien biosphere called Cron instead of Varn. (The stories of Might and Magic do rather tend to satirize themselves…) But, just like last time, it really didn’t matter at all in a game that was all about the joy of exploration and exploitation.

The improved audiovisuals of Might and Magic II highlighted another aspect of the series that had perhaps been obscured by the primitiveness of the first game. In keeping with Van Caneghem’s sunny, optimistic personality — writer and designer Neal Halford, who came to work with him at New World during this era, calls him “terminally mellow” — the environs of Might and Magic would always be bright, colorful, fun places to inhabit. The series would never embrace the “dark, gritty” aesthetics that so much of the games industry came to revel in as the 1990s wore on.

Jon Van Caneghem the businessman seemed to live a charmed life not out of keeping with his vaguely fairy-taleish visual aesthetic. For instance, he dropped Activision in favor of becoming an affiliated label of Brøderbund in 1989, just before the former company — by this point officially known as Mediagenic — imploded, defaulting on their payments to their entire network of affiliated labels and destroying many of them thereby. He even escaped relatively unscathed from a well-intentioned but financially ill-advised venture into the board-game market, which I’ll cover in more detail in my next article.

For now, though, suffice to say that it was a big part of the reason that Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra wasn’t released until 1991. Like its predecessors, this latest entry in the series tossed you into another new world and let you have it. Still, while philosophically and even formally identical to the first two games — it remained a turn-based, grid-based blobber — it was a dramatic leap forward in terms of interface and presentation. Designed on and for a 32-bit MS-DOS machine instead of the 8-bit Apple II, it sported 256-color VGA graphics that replaced many of the older games’ numbers with visual cues, a lovely soundtrack composed for the new generation of multi-voice sound cards, and a mouse-driven interface. But its most gratifying improvement of all was more basic: it finally let you save your progress inside dungeons or anywhere else you liked. I would venture to guess that this change alone cut the number of hours the average player could expect to spend finishing the game in half, in spite of the fact that its number of individual areas actually grew slightly, to 64.

Veterans of the series could and sometimes did complain that the new level of professionalism and polish came at the cost of some of its old ramshackle charm, and Van Caneghem himself has confessed to being worried that people would notice how the new game’s average completion time was more likely to be in the tens than the hundreds of hours. But he needn’t have been: gamers ate it up.

In his review for Computer Gaming World, Charles Ardai captured how impressive Might and Magic III was in many ways, but also made note of the ennui that can come to cling to a series like this one — a series which is dedicated to doing the same thing better in each installment rather than doing anything dramatically, holistically new.

Unfortunately, Might and Magic III is also a remarkable exercise in water-treading, which does not advance the genre one inch in terms of plot, event, or ontology. Here we are again, one realizes, a band of hardy adventurers — elves, gnomes, dwarves, clerics, paladins, sorcerers — tramping about the wilderness and facing off against assorted orcs, rats, bugs, and other stock uglies.

Here we are, once more mapping a corner of Middle-earth, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, in pursuit of yet another necromatic ne’er-do-well with a faux-mythic name and a bad disposition. Here we are again — will we never be somewhere else?

On the other hand, there is a market for this stuff. David Eddings rewrites the same high-fantasy novel over and over again and never fails to hit the bestseller lists with it…

Ardai concluded that “the gamer who wants to be surprised by discovery, conversation, and story is likely to be disappointed in Might and Magic III, while the gamer who simply wants to play [emphasis original] may be ecstatic with the game.” Few sentences sum up the Might and Magic series as a whole more cogently.

The next pair of games in the series pushed the boundaries in terms of size without even attempting to address Ardai’s complaints. (After all, if it worked for David Eddings…) The name of 1992’s Might and Magic: Clouds of Xeen reflected a sudden games-industry conventional wisdom that numbered titles could actually be a drag on sales, being a turn-off to the many folks who were acquiring home computers for the first time in the early 1990s. “I felt strongly that everyone wants to see the next James Bond movie, but no one wants to see Rocky IX,” says Van Caneghem. “So off came the numbers.” This sentiment would die away as quickly as it had flared, both inside and outside of New World.

Both Clouds of Xeen and the would-be Might and Magic V, which was known simply as Might and Magic: Darkside of Xeen upon its release in 1993, took place, as you might have guessed, in yet another new land of adventure known as Xeen. More interestingly, when combined they represented another of New World’s subtle experiments with the nuts and bolts of the CRPG form if not the substance. If you installed them both on the same computer, they turned into World of Xeen, a single contiguous game encompassing no less than 201 discrete areas. Outside of its central gimmick, World of Xeen continued the Might and Magic tradition of careful, compartmentalized evolution. It was, for example, the first CRPG I know of that included an automatic quest log as a replacement for the dog-eared, hand-written notebooks of yore. It also added a global difficulty setting. Van Caneghem:

I added a feature when you first start the game where you’re asked if you want an Adventurer game or a Warrior game. This was my wife’s idea. She really liked the game, the adventure. But she wasn’t into combat. She was like, well, you know, monsters are fun, but let’s get on with the story. I said, “Okay, well, I’m sure there’s plenty of people out there just like you, who aren’t into the numbers and the hit points. They just want to get on with the story.” There’s a lot of quests, a lot of fun things to do. So I put the choice in, and what Adventurer does is it makes it easier to win all the battles. So you get through that part of the game a lot quicker.

There’s other stuff to do, and we want to expand our audience, to bring in more and more people who wouldn’t normally play this kind of game.

But this notion of “expanding our audience” was becoming a sticking point for Might and Magic by the time the conjoined World of Xeen appeared in the inevitable single box in 1994. Some of Charles Ardai’s criticisms appeared to be coming home to roost; the market had been flooded with fantasy CRPGs over the last half decade, most of which appeared all but indistinguishable from one another to the casual browser. It was extremely difficult even for a well-done example of the form, such as Might and Magic had always been on the whole, to stand out from the competition. The new generation of gaming neophytes to whom Van Caneghem imagined his Adventurer mode appealing didn’t have the likes of Might and Magic and its peers on their radar at all; they were buying things like The 7th Guest, Myst, and Phantasmagoria. The CRPG genre had transitioned from boom to bust, and was now deeply out of fashion.

This reality left Jon Van Caneghem and his company facing some hard questions. The engine which had powered the last three Might and Magic games was several years old now, its once-impressive VGA graphics looking a bit sad in comparison to the latest high-resolution Super VGA wonders. Clearly it would need to be rethought and rebuilt from scratch for any possible Might and Magic VI. But was there really a business case for taking on such an expensive task in the current market? Or had the franchise perhaps run its course, as such venerable rivals as Wizardry, The Bard’s Tale, and Ultima seemed to have done?

Van Caneghem’s solution to this dilemma of what was to be done with a respected CRPG franchise in an era when CRPGs themselves seemed to be dead on the vine would prove as unexpected as it would refreshing, and would spawn a great rarity in gaming: a spinoff franchise that became even more popular than its parent.

(Sources: the book Might and Magic Compendium: The Authorized Strategy Guide by Caroline Spector and the individual hint books published by New World Computing for each of the first five Might and Magic games; Compute! of May 1993; Computer Gaming World of December 1986, April 1987, October 1988, March 1989, May 1989, May 1991, January 1992, September 1993, and April 2004; Retro Gamer 49; XRDS: The ACM Magazine for Students of Summer 2017. Online sources include the CRPG Addict’s final post on Might and Magic: Darkside of Xeen, Matt Barton’s interviews with Jon Van Caneghem and Neal Hallford, and the RPG Codex interview with Jon Van Caneghem.

The first six Might and Magic CRPGs can be purchased as a digital bundle at GOG.com.)

Comments
38 Responses

- Aula

December 10, 2021 at 5:30 pm

“a virtue rather a necessary evil”

rather than

“turned-based”

turn-based

“this allowed you set”

to set

- Jimmy Maher

December 10, 2021 at 8:58 pm

Thanks!

- morg

December 11, 2021 at 1:01 am

also a “Cangehem” in there

- Jimmy Maher

December 11, 2021 at 7:24 am

Thanks!

- Alan

December 10, 2021 at 7:12 pm

The only one I seriously played was Xeen. It’s been a long time, but I remember finishing Clouds and at least dabbling in Darkside. And I remember having a preposterous amount of fun, a huge, vibrant, and slightly goofy world. I also loved the lists of adjectives that modified weapons and armor, leading silliesness like a “glass sword” being superior to a “steel sword” (from memory). Since I learned that ScummVM had added support, I’d been meaning to take it for a new spin.

- Sniffnoy

December 10, 2021 at 8:14 pm

If you installed them both on the same computer, they turned into World of Xeen, a single contiguous game encompassing no less than 201 discrete areas.

Oh, heh, before Sonic & Knuckles, even. :)

- Brian

December 10, 2021 at 9:58 pm

I downloaded M&M from GOG a few years ago having never played it back in the day and enjoying working my way through the first few areas… have been meaning to get back to it!

Funny though at the mention of David Eddings above… I just fell for and started rereading The Belgariad last week. Along with some other bad fantasy and sci-fi from that time.

- Alex Freeman

December 10, 2021 at 10:07 pm

What’s so wrong with the plot twist that Varn is a giant artificial biosphere? I think that’s a clever way to distinguish it from the usual fantasy RPG.

- Plot twist

December 10, 2021 at 11:17 pm

@alex freeman mainly I think because as a plot twist it was a cliche even then.

- Alex Freeman

December 11, 2021 at 10:27 pm

Really? What stories or games before M&M used that plot twist?

- whomever

December 11, 2021 at 11:26 pm

Alternate Reality, for one, a very interesting series of games from the mid 80s that Jimmy didn’t cover (cos he can’t cover them all).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Reality:_The_City

- Martin

December 12, 2021 at 12:24 am

A rather fun story was actually penned by Alan Moore in the UK comic 200AD in 1977. It was only as two pager but the basic concept was that large ants kept a glass box of oblivious humans and watched them fight it out as kids might watch an ant farm colony work. The final ‘shock’ panel is in this following link:

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ppN3ywUvVoI/Ut9ehyMH_KI/AAAAAAAAD30/AvYUMhMGtzI/s1600/025+p18+thargs+future+shocks.jpg

- eobet

December 12, 2021 at 3:28 pm

Did you know that Bonita Long-Hemsath did the graphics for both Alternate Reality and the Might & Magic games? It’s rare that someone mentions Alternate Reality, and even rarer that anyone mentions her (she unfortunately died a year or so ago, I’ve heard from someone who worked with her).

Also, did Wizardry do the space theme mixed with fantasy before or after Might & Magic?

- Jimmy Maher

December 13, 2021 at 8:17 am

I don’t think Wizardry pulled the “it’s really a spaceship!” stunt until Bane of the Cosmic Forge in 1990.

- Patrick Smith

December 12, 2021 at 5:15 pm

My brother and I owned the first Alternate Reality game. It seemed quite cool (it even had it’s own theme song, with lyrics!) but the frustrating thing was, you couldn’t do a whole lot because going anywhere outside the City required one of the other games (if memory serves me, there was a Dungeon below the city we couldn’t enter.) I don’t remember if those games just weren’t out yet, or if we simply didn’t buy them, but it made for a curiously truncated experience.

- arthurdawg

December 16, 2021 at 5:57 pm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Reality_(series)

The Dungeon was released, although it was intended to be a part of the original game.

Interesting history!

- stepped pyramids

December 12, 2021 at 12:26 am

The “secret worldship” storyline goes back well into the mid 20th century, but most relevant to Might & Magic is probably the Star Trek episode “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”, which features a primitive civilization in a worldship disguised as an asteroid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_World_Is_Hollow_and_I_Have_Touched_the_Sky

I believe there’s a name drop of this episode either in this game or one of the sequels. Harlan Ellison also worked on a 1973 series called The Starlost, which is even closer — a huge generation ship consisting of many biospheres that were isolated from each other in the distant past.

That said, I don’t think the twist is itself bad because it had been done before. The issue with the twist is that it’s literally the last thing that happens in the game and has virtually nothing to do with the plot.

- Kyle Haight

December 10, 2021 at 11:28 pm

I still have my Apple copies of the first two games in the series, and fond memories of mapping them out on graph paper. The second one is also the only game I remember that used the Apple’s extended high resolution graphics mode. It looked great at the time.

- Tim Kaiser

December 11, 2021 at 6:00 am

I’m a huge fan of the Might and Magic series. Reading those quotes from the Jon Van Caneghem and the CRPG Addict put a smile on my face in helping me remembered why I enjoyed playing them so much. And the goofy fantasy/sci-fi story is a unique aspect to the series as well.

- James McNeill

December 11, 2021 at 1:18 pm

I loved these games. The scale of player-character power growth was ridiculous: ridiculously fun, that is. I remember drinking barrels of color-coded liquids that would raise a stat permanently. After running into several of them in one of the early dungeons I started to realize what the trajectory of my numbers was going to be over the course of the game and being somewhat gobsmacked. This becomes even more apparent in M&M 6, where an area that takes laborious effort to clear of enemies at the beginning of the game can be dealt with via a meteor strike or two by the end.

Another example of the games being fun first: in one of them there is a dungeon laid out as a crossword puzzle.

The art style was definitely its own thing too. I always described it as using every crayon in the box with favor toward none.

- Leo Vellés

December 11, 2021 at 11:00 pm

In the text below the photo of the first M&M ad there is a double “would”

- Jimmy Maher

December 12, 2021 at 8:28 am

Thanks!

- Martin

December 11, 2021 at 11:34 pm

There does seem to be a discussion about the ending which I don’t want to interfere with so I’ll my part about it here instead.

I haven’t played the game(s) before and I’m unlikely to invest the 200 hours of play to find these details out, so let me ask them anyway.

– I don’t know how the game got to the biosphere ending but were there any clues along the way which with hindsight made it obvious or at least logical?

– Did it need the biosphere ending or had other things been tided up by then? Was it just an extra shock ending?

– Did the game do anything with the knowledge that at least one person knew about the aliens and their biosphere and did that action fit in with the rest of the game.

My personal views of the alien biosphere (or ant farm in the biology class) kind of twist is that you have to do something with it or you shouldn’t include it. If we assume that the aliens are so advanced compared to the people of Varn, what can the people of Varn do about it when they actually find out? If nothing, then why bring it up? If something, then how could a person of Varn advance so much to be able to even interact with them let alone challenge them?

On both of these, I am again assuming that something has to be done about these aliens for some reason because again, if the people of Varn are OK about being a research project of the aliens, why bring it up again?

Would be interested to here other opinions about this type of ending and if it has ever been used well in a game.

- stepped pyramids

December 12, 2021 at 12:15 am

(Spoilers for Might & Magic I: The Secret of the Inner Sanctum follow.)

M&M I starts you off in the world of Varn with absolutely no plot or goal. The manual says “the object of an adventure game is the game itself, rather than a particular goal”. The only real hint to an ultimate objective is the title of the game. In the course of the game, you discover vague hints that the King of Varn is not who he appears to be. You also encounter a group of stranded aliens (like, Greys who say “eep oop!”) who, if approached properly, will warn you that they’re seeking out another alien who is impersonating a noble of Varn. It’s possible to miss both of these hints, but if you systematically explore every map you’ll eventually find the actual King, who will give you an item to break the impostor’s illusion. When you do that, the impostor will banish you into the “Soul Maze”, where you must find his true name in the walls (literally spelled out in walls on the map) before you can escape. When you do, after a bunch of unexplained sci-fi babble, you’ll find the original King is back on his throne, and he tells you to seek out the Inner Sanctum. To do _that_, you travel to the “Astral Plane” multiple times, each time unlocking more of the way to the Inner Sanctum. When you finally reach it, you encounter the caretaker of the Sanctum, and the titular “Secret” is “hey, this whole place is a big spaceship, and by making it here you’re eligible to transfer off the ship to a new world”. Then you go do that, game won, see you in M&M II.

So, to answer your question, the nature of Varn as an artificial biosphere is never really important in the game. Nobody in the game reacts to the discovery. It’s certainly never depicted as a bad thing (the people who created Varn are implicitly the good guys in the series). You never revisit Varn again for the rest of the series. Indeed, a lot of individual details about Varn and the aliens end up being ignored or contradicted by the rest of the series. The alien impersonator plot isn’t actually meaningfully connected to the “Varn is a spaceship” revelation, other than that resolving one is necessary to reach the other.

- Chet Bolingbroke

December 15, 2021 at 6:08 pm

To add to this answer, stepped pyramids already noted that the source of the game’s revelation is the Star Trek episode “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.” That very phrase is etched in the wall of a castle where the real king is imprisoned, so that’s a bit of a clue.

- Nate

December 12, 2021 at 6:18 am

“an especial problem” — did you mean “special”?

- Jimmy Maher

December 12, 2021 at 8:25 am

As intended, thanks. (“Especial” lives in a place somewhere between “special” and “particular…”)

- Manuel

December 12, 2021 at 12:59 pm

Thanks for the new word! I’m originally Spanish, and sometimes you block certain English words that look too close to Spanish like Especial.

I thanks to the writter, I never got into these games when I was a child, but I loved reading about the world’s in the magazines of the 80s, and this article brought me back there.

Thanks to everyone in the comments section and of course the writer of the article!?

- Kromz

December 12, 2021 at 9:18 am

One of the best rpgs ever.
Such good written lore.. mm6 to 8 is so …uncomperble to anything.
Best ever.
Mmmerged is still very much a thing .
It has big communitys and i wish we had a decent continuation of it.
Mm9 and legacy pale in comparison.

- GeoX

December 12, 2021 at 10:55 pm

I’ve actually beaten every Might & Magic from I through VIII (the post-New-World-Computing games never seemed worth bothering with). How about that? Nothing else to say. Just that I’m a fan. Also, man, I really wish they had used that VI-VIII engine for another game. I know people complained, but I thought it was SO SOLID. It’s just to bad that VIII, for entirely unrelated reasons, isn’t very good.

- Chris Floyd

December 13, 2021 at 1:23 am

I feel like you glossed over the physical map a bit too quickly. I know Ultima had beautiful cloth maps too, but the M&M map was especially beautiful, I thought, and oddly informative? Like, there were four big beasts shown on the map, as I recall, and they seemed like “Here Be Dragons” kinds of decoration, but they actually pretty accurately showed you where you could encounter four key bosses. Other map features like mountain paths and desert bluffs clearly reflected the shape of the gridded sectors, too.

Those grid sectors were kind of ingenious, too. They made exploring the sweeping open world seem achievable. You knew when you’d seen everything in a sector, and hints about secret passages, etc, would emerge as you mapped them out–there was rarely any dead space, as I recall, you just had to find the way in. (When you did some uber-tough monster would destroy you, often.) Maybe all that was standard in Wizardry and Bard’s Tale… I could never get very far in those. Might & Magic always felt less oppressive, less gated.

- Chet Bolingbroke

December 15, 2021 at 6:00 pm

Brilliant article as always. This filled in a lot of the gaps in my knowledge about Van Caneghem’s early years and the founding of New World. I look forward to the next installment!

- Christopher G

December 15, 2021 at 6:35 pm

I don’t know why, but RPGs are so resonant, so timeless, I love reading about all of them, no matter whether I played them or not – Might & Magic is one I did play, and adored.

I’d love to hear about VI and beyond, and Heroes (another amazing series).

- Sietse Wijker

December 26, 2021 at 8:11 pm

I started playing Might and Magic 7 with a friend. He always had stories how awesome Might and Magic 6 was. I remember his father going into an area with devils and shooting them with a laser gun.
Might and Magic 7 still defined my taste for RPG’s in general. The opening quest on the island, the hill fortress of the orcs, where you could shoot them with a cannon, the caves with troglodytes, the castle with giants, the mines with medusas.
I loved the system with the different magic guilds: fire, water, air, earth, body, soul, and mind. And I am still amazed by the upgrades for classes. I don’t remember it exactly, but I thought you could go from scout to ranger to hunter or something, with some really cool quests.
My friend was exploiting the way to level up by sneaking in and getting some quest items faster. His father said:
“It is called Might and Magic Peter, not Stealth and Sneak.”
I had MM8 myself, and while it was certainly entertaining. Playing as a dragon or vampire brought some new flavour. I really loved spamming meteor shower on my enemies. But I don’t remember that much else.
All the games I played after never scratched that same itch completely. Morrowind came close, but missed the charm of the Might and Magic universe, the cohesiveness of it’s own mythology.

- Rowan Lipkovits

January 11, 2022 at 8:38 pm

Getting caught up on these articles, I can see the winds blowing toward the HOMM series for the “What would be next for New World when the formula grew stale?” question this one ends on… but it’s worth tossing a footnote to Catware’s Swords of Xeen, one of the first “total conversion” fan modifications to successfully go commercial. Maybe the reviewers had had enough of what M&M had to offer, but clearly the fans had not yet 8)

- Andy M

April 14, 2022 at 11:02 pm

Thanks for the great article. I have a soft spot for games of this type, maybe because MM1 was the first CRPG I ever played (at the impressionable age of 9). It was massive and mysterious and undirected and packed to overflowing with STUFF, and I absolutely loved it. If they still made games like that, I would probably still play them today. :-)

- Andrew

May 16, 2022 at 11:35 am

Loved this article.

I first purchased Might and Magic III from a pawn shop back in the early 2000’s (2003?) for the SNES. It was one of the only games I could afford, but it came to be one of the best choices I’ve ever made. It turns out to be most likely my favorite game of all time.

MMIII was difficult to learn as I had no manual or experience with these crawler types of games, but after a while I got used to it. Unfortunately, the SNES version is riddled with bugs, including some minor game-breaking ones like being unable to raise the personality stat and randomly finding millions of gold in random places.

Since then, I’ve played MM 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and the fan-created game Swords of Xeen. The best in the series is 3-7, with most people probably enjoying 6-7 the most. Or 4 for the more dated and retro cRPG experience.

- Nic Allen

June 9, 2022 at 10:43 pm

Articles like this is why I keep coming back to the blog. You did a great job explaining reasons why I think I always liked Might and Magic over its contemporaries, in particular it’s brighter and more open ended nature.

As a relatively younger gamer to others likely here, I did not play PC games until the early 90s and then I did not play RPGs of any kind until the late 90s, but Might and Magic VI was the first game of its kind I played any substantial amount of, and still go back to play on occasion.

That being said, I went through a phase after playing the original Etrian Odyssey on the Nintendo DS, where I’d try any ‘blobber’ I could get my hands on, new and old. M&M came up fairly well in those regards and I’m really happy to see it covered here!

Heroes of Might and Magic
December 24, 2021

The Heroes of Might and Magic series of fantasy strategy games was an anomaly during its period of peak popularity at the turn of the millennium: it remained defiantly turn-based in an industry that had gone almost entirely real-time, and it likewise continued to rely on lovingly hand-drawn pixel art in lieu of trendy 3D graphics. All of this gave the series the feel of — dare I say it? — a board game, at a time when such things were deeply out of fashion with digital gamers looking for the latest and greatest in immersive whiz-bang pyrotechnics. And yet it sold millions upon millions of copies.

When we dig a bit deeper, we find that the origins of Heroes’s retro tabletop sensibility are as explicable as its popularity is inexplicable. As we learned in the last article, its principal creator Jon Van Caneghem was a tabletop gamer long before he became a computer gamer, much less a computer-game designer and programmer. Heroes of Might and Magic was as heavily influenced by the delightfully tactile boards, cards, counters, and dice which had marked his adolescence as it was by anything he had seen or done on a computer since. More specifically, it was the belated fruit of what had once seemed a quixotic attempt on his part to bridge the analog-versus-digital split in gaming — a venture which dated back to more than seven years before the first game in the Heroes series arrived in late 1995.

One of the young Jon Van Caneghem’s favorite tabletop games was Star Fleet Battles, a “simulation” of outer-space combat in the Star Trek universe. His love for it persisted even after he decided to become a computer-game entrepreneur. Indeed, the self-described Star Fleet Battles “fanatic” found time amidst the run up to the release of the original Might and Magic to win the game’s biggest tournament in 1986, thus securing for himself the status of best player in the world as of that instant in time.

The publisher of Star Fleet Battles was an Amarillo, Texas-based outfit known as Task Force Games. Two plucky freshly minted Texas Tech graduates named Stephen Cole and Allen Eldridge had founded Task Force in 1978, whereupon they had managed to acquire a license for one of the biggest science-fiction properties in the world by employing a circuitous — not to say dubious — stratagem: they had sub-licensed the intellectual property from Franz Joseph, the author of a tome called the Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual. Task Force would eventually secure a more direct contract with Paramount Pictures, the owners of Star Trek, but their game would always live on precarious legal ground, entirely at the sufferance of a corporate overlord which seemed only intermittently to realize that it existed. The tortuously circumscribed contract which allowed Task Force to make their game stipulated that they could use the ships and hardware and the various alien societies and races from the television show, but that they couldn’t mention specific characters or plot lines. Nevertheless, Star Fleet Battles has survived if not always thrived right up to the present day, even as countless other, higher profile efforts to make interactive versions of Star Trek have come and gone.

In 1983, Cole and Eldridge parted ways to some extent: the former started a new company called Amarillo Design Group to conjure up fresh Star Fleet Battles rules, scenarios, and supplements, while the latter continued as the head of Task Force, which in turn remained the publisher of the aforementioned game line and others. Some five years later, word reached Jon Van Caneghem at New World Computing, now flush with the commercial success which Might and Magic was enjoying, that Eldridge was interested in selling Task Force. It struck Van Caneghem as a chance to become a new type of gaming mogul, uniting the worlds of tabletop and computer gaming under a shared umbrella for the very first time. The dedicated grognards at Task Force could become a “proving ground for systems” on the tabletop before they were implemented on the computer, and product lines too could cross and recross the digital divide in pursuit of synergies no one had yet dared to imagine.

So, New World purchased Task Force and moved them into their offices in Van Nuys, California. Stephen Cole insisted on retaining control of the Amarillo Design Group and keeping it in its namesake city, but he did agree to continue to provide Task Force with their most prominent product line. To run the tabletop side of his empire, Van Caneghem hired one John Olsen, a board-gaming insider with an impressive resume; he had most recently headed the major British tabletop publisher Games Workshop’s American operation.

The whole scheme appealed greatly to a dedicated old-school gamer like Van Caneghem, but it was in reality muddle-headed in the extreme. He had bought into the tabletop industry when it was smack in the middle of a brutal downturn, prompted largely by, ironically enough, computer games. Avalon Hill, the old king of hobbyist wargames, was bleeding money, and even the likes of Dungeons & Dragons was rather less than it once had been. It would be some years yet before collectible card games and a new breed of ruthlessly balanced abstract board games known as “Eurogames” would breathe life back into the tabletop market. In the meantime, it was a disheartening place to be, where the only people making any real money were the big conglomerates marketing hoary family staples like Monopoly. “We really made a go at board games, but compared to the dollars and profitability of software… there was just no comparison,” Van Caneghem would later admit. “It didn’t make any sense.”

But that realization would take some time to fully dawn on him. Thus the output of New World Computing immediately after 1988’s Might and Magic II was dominated by the tabletop-to-computer (or vice versa) synergies Van Caneghem hoped to create. Granted, Task Force’s biggest property of all was a nonstarter here: there was no way that Paramount was going to allow Star Fleet Battles onto computers to compete with other efforts to bring Star Trek to the digital realm. But Task Force also had a long-established relationship with the Arizona game maker Flying Buffalo, and now served as a conduit for bringing some of the latter’s designs to the computer. First came a credible port of the venerable satirical card game Nuclear War. And then came a more ambitious project, a computer game based on Tunnels & Trolls, Flying Buffalo’s simpler would-be rival to Dungeons & Dragons. The system being very popular in Japan, this project became a trans-Pacific collaboration: a design document was written by the Flying Buffalo regulars Elizabeth Danforth and Michael Stackpole (both of whom already had a track record with computer games as well), then passed to a team in Japan for implementation. Finally, said team sent it sent back to New World to be made presentable in its original language. Unsurprisingly, the finished product felt more than a trifle schizophrenic, while its audiovisuals captured the charmingly pulpy, low-rent feel of its tabletop source material perhaps a bit too well for the presentation-driven contemporary computer-game market. “It didn’t go over all that well” in its native country, admits Van Caneghem, although it did do somewhat better in Japan.

But the most interesting of all the products of this rather confused period in New World Computing’s history is also the one which came closest to being a truly synergistic effort. Rather than being a tabletop game ported to the computer, King’s Bounty had one foot planted squarely in each realm from first to last.

It all started when Jon Van Caneghem began musing one day about how to bring some of the flavor of another of his old tabletop favorites to the computer: a board game known as Titan, one of those gloriously messy experiences from the heyday of Avalon Hill, the sort of game in which half the players might be eliminated in the first hour while the other half grind away at one another for five or six hours more. In Titan, players move their “stacks” of monsters over a highly abstracted map, trying to recruit additional monsters to add to their legions even as they also try to outmaneuver and attack the other players’ stacks when the advantage is with their side. When two players’ armies do bump into one another, the focus shifts to a tactical battle map representing the terrain in which the clash is occurring. The ultimate goal is to defeat each of your opponents’ titans — their super-units, the equivalent of the king in chess — as this is the only way to force them out of the game; you must also be careful to protect your own titan, of course. Getting to the end of a game of Titan can be a long journey indeed, one that can be by turns riotously entertaining and numbingly tedious.

Fond though he was of the game, Van Caneghem felt it would be problematic to bring a similar experience to life on the computer, mostly because of the difficulty of implementing an opponent artificial intelligence able to challenge a human player; at the time, New World was still making their games for 8-bit platforms with as little as 64 K of memory, which didn’t leave much scope for such things. But then Van Caneghem happened to talk to John Olsen about a concept Task Force had in development, with the working title of Bounty Hunter. Designed primarily by one Robert L. Sassone, it cast its players as the titular vigilantes for hire, moving around a board trying to nab more fugitives than their opponents. Van Caneghem thought the idea was brilliant in a big-picture sort of way, but a trifle under-baked in the details. But what if they combined it with some of the themes and mechanics of Titan? And what if they then made it into both a computer game and a board game?

The resulting game of King’s Bounty first appeared on computers in 1990, beginning with versions for the Apple II and for MS-DOS machines. Living in the hazily delineated borderlands between the CRPG and strategy genres, it was a refreshingly light-hearted, fast-playing change of pace from the more ponderous epics which dominated to either side of it. You start out by picking one of four protagonists to guide: the Knight, the Paladin, the Barbarian, or the Sorceress. Then you proceed to wander the four continents of its world, fighting some monsters and recruiting others, visiting towns, besieging castles, looting treasure chests, and, yes, capturing villains for bounties, growing steadily stronger all the while. In addition to a cash reward, each successfully hunted bounty reveals another piece of a treasure map, an idea cheerfully stolen from Sid Meier’s Pirates!. Said map points the way to the King’s Sceptre, the recovery of which ends the game in victory. Rather than competing directly against a computer opponent who tries to accomplish the same goal as you, you battle the calendar: you have between 200 and 1000 days to complete your quest for the Sceptre, depending on the difficulty level you choose. By this means was New World able to dodge the problem of creating an artificial intelligence capable of going head to head with a human player.

A complete game of King’s Bounty generally takes only a few hours, making it a positively snack-sized offering in comparison to the 100-hour-plus likes of a Might and Magic. Yet it provides a compressed version of the same satisfying power fantasy — what Alan Emrich, reviewing King’s Bounty for Computer Gaming World magazine, called “expanding megalomania.”

There is some sort of intangible “charge” that comes out of seeing one’s character become a more powerful warlord, leading bigger armies, gaining an ever-increasing commission, subduing ever larger foes, and so forth. While this is hardly an original concept (it dates back to the first games of Dungeons & Dragons), it still holds an endearing appeal when done well. In King’s Bounty, this “Monty Haul” brand of adventuring is exquisitely executed, rewarding the player with plenty of strokes on his way to finding the Sceptre.

Unlike the typical one-and-done CRPG, the computer game of King’s Bounty is designed to be played multiple times, as one would a board game. Not only are there four protagonists and four difficulty levels to choose from, but the placement of monsters, treasures, bounties, and the Sceptre itself are randomized with each new game. If it isn’t a hugely deep game even by the standards of its day, it can be an entertaining one for far more hours than a rundown of its simple mechanics might suggest. As we’ll soon see, this trait along with many of its other, more prosaic qualities would return years later in the more famous series of games for which it served as something of a prototype.

In the here and now of 1990, however, King’s Bounty on the computer proved a modest commercial success but not a sterling one. By the time it appeared, Jon Van Caneghem had reluctantly acknowledged that it was tough enough for his company to survive as a maker of computer games alone, and was in the process of divesting New World of Task Force Games: he sold out to John Olsen, who then moved Task Force back to Amarillo. In 1991, Olsen’s Task Force finally published the board game of King’s Bounty. It preserved most of the key elements of the computer game in forms modified to suit the tabletop, but it attracted little attention in a moribund marketplace, and quickly went out of print. (Task Force itself would continue to release new products until 1996 and to market the best of the old ones until 2004.)

Meanwhile, with the dream of making analog and digital games side by side now consigned to the past alongside other follies of youth, Van Caneghem retrenched and refocused on New World Computing’s core commercial strength: namely, the Might and Magic CRPG series. New World made a slick new engine that left behind 8-bit machines like the Apple II, then made three new Might and Magic games with it between 1991 and 1993. During this period, as these games were garnering strong reviews and equally strong sales, it was easy enough to see King’s Bounty as just one more misbegotten sign of a confused time.

But by 1994, the Might and Magic line seemed to be losing momentum, in tandem with a dramatic downturn in the CRPG market in general. The new standard bearers for narrative-oriented games were tightly scripted “interactive movies” like Under a Killing Moon, along with 3D-rendered slideshow adventures like Myst; many had come to see the sort of sprawling, open-ended high-fantasy CRPGs which New World made as relics of the past. New World stood at a proverbial fork in the road. Their second-generation Might and Magic engine too had now passed its sell-by date. Did they damn the torpedoes and surge ahead with the expensive task of making a new one for a genre that had fallen so badly out of fashion? Or did they try something else entirely? Van Caneghem looked around and weighed his options.

The enormous success of id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM had heralded the emergence of a less highfalutin and more visceral, action-oriented strand of computer gaming to challenge the artsier experiments of the period. Yet computer gaming as a whole has never been a monolithic or even a bifurcated beast. Along with the likes of DOOM and Myst, that yang and yin of the era, strategy games were enjoying a quieter golden age in the wake of such classics as Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, and Master of Orion. Further, some of the latest explorations of the genre almost seemed to have taken a lesson from King’s Bounty about the appeal of CRPG-style character building within a strategic framework: X-COM and Master of Magic remain famous to this day for the intense personal bonds they forge between their characters and the players who control them. Perhaps, mused Van Caneghem, King’s Bounty had just been a bit too far ahead of the curve, implemented using technology that couldn’t quite do justice to its concept. Perhaps he should try again.

But, this being an older and wiser Jon Van Caneghem, he would do some things differently this time. Whatever the current state of the CRPG market, the Might and Magic name still had the benefit of widespread familiarity. Why let that go to waste? Why not make the new game a spinoff of Might and Magic rather than a completely new, completely unfamiliar thing?

And so Heroes of Might and Magic was born. Van Caneghem could hardly have imagined how successful it would prove on every level, from the crass commercial measure of units sold to the more idealistic one of hours of fun delivered to millions of people all over the world.

At this point, I owe it to those readers who aren’t among said millions to explain just what Heroes of Might and Magic is all about. It has ironically less to do with the CRPG series whose name it borrows than it does with King’s Bounty. Beyond sharing a fantasy theme that involves plenty of monster killing and leveling up as a reward for it, and some halfhearted efforts to tie it into the CRPG series’s universe, it has almost nothing to do with its older namesake. “If not for copyright lawyers, Heroes of Might and Magic could as easily have been called Heroes of Ultima, Heroes of Wizardry, or Heroes of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons,” noted Jason Kapalka accurately in his review of the first game in the series for Computer Gaming World.

But even the influence of King’s Bounty shouldn’t be overstated. For all that its roots so plainly lie there, Heroes is at bottom a very different sort of game; there’s far more distance between King’s Bounty and the first Heroes than there is between the latter and any of the subsequent entries in the series. Heroes abandons the business about bounty hunting in favor of being a true strategic wargame, complete with computer and/or human opponents who are trying to conquer the same map that you are. Rather than guiding a single hero, you can now recruit and control up to eight of them, along with the sedentary garrisons you collect to defend your castles against the other players whose heroes are also roaming the map with their armies.

Newbies to the series today are often advised to skip the first game, on the argument that everything it does is done bigger and better by the later ones. This is true enough as a statement of fact; those games are packed full of much more stuff — stuff which, in contrast to that found in many sequels, really does make an already compelling game that much more compelling. Still, I don’t really agree with the argument that this fact makes Heroes I extraneous. On the contrary, it strikes me as a perfect place to start with the series. It introduces the core concepts that carry through all of the subsequent games, leaving those successors free to layer their additional complexities and nuances onto its sturdy frame. So, this article will focus exclusively on the often neglected first game. There will be plenty of time to praise the others in later articles.

At the time of its release in the fall of 1995, Heroes I seemed merely the latest exemplar of what was already a long tradition of fantasy strategy on the computer. The most notable recent game of this sort had been Steve Barcia’s Master of Magic. It and Heroes of Might and Magic share many similarities: both are games of conquest that expect you to recruit and nurture individual heroes to lead your armies, even as you also guide the development of the castles and towns that spawn the soldiers who fight under them; both prominently feature the magic that is found in both their names; both shift between a strategic map where the big decisions are made and a tactical view used for battles. Yet the two games’ personalities are markedly different, so much so that no one who has actually played both of them could ever confuse them. Master of Magic is a gonzo, ramshackle creation, stuffed with so many spells, monsters, treasures, and general flights of fancy that it doesn’t really matter that a third or more of it all doesn’t really work, on a design or even sometimes a purely technical level. Heroes, by contrast, is a much finer honed creation, replacing the fascination of Master of Magic’s multitudinous sprawl with its own brand of fiendishly addictive playability.

One difference between the two stands out above all the others: while Master of Magic trusts in its random world generator to create interesting dilemmas for the player, Heroes embraces set-piece, human-crafted scenarios. These fall into two categories: there are standalone scenarios you can play — no fewer than 34 of them in the version of the game found at digital storefronts today — and also an eight-scenario campaign which you can play through from the point of view of any of the four factions in the game. This campaign lacks most of the bells and whistles that came in the sequels: each successive scenario is introduced by a bare few sentences of text rather than one of the elaborate cut scenes that came later. As a result, it inculcates little sense of narrative momentum and still less of a sense of identification with the faction leader you’re meant to be playing; if the campaign scenarios had merely been shoveled into the mix as yet more standalone scenarios, no one would likely have been the wiser. Still, it’s a start, the germ of an idea which New World later took to much more ambitious heights.

Whether standalone or a part of the campaign, a scenario generally gives you one hero with a few units under his command and one partially developed castle with which to start. Fog of war means that only a tiny portion of the full map is revealed to you at the beginning. In the example shown below, we’ve started as a Barbarian, one of the four possible factions; the others are the Knights, the Sorceresses, and, replacing King’s Bounty’s Paladins, the Warlocks. One player of each faction is found in each scenario. All of the factions have their own strengths and weaknesses, but in general the Barbarians and Knights are better suited for physical combat while the Sorceresses and Warlocks are better at casting spells.

Each of the four factions has its own style of castle, with its own roster of structures to be built up. Each castle can provide different types of units to fight for you — up to six types in all after you build the appropriate “dwellings” for them by spending your gold and other resources. We’ve been given a very generous start here; we already have four of the six possible Barbarian units types — namely goblins, wolves, orcs, and ogres — available to join our legions. Only trolls and the fearsome cyclopes are still to go.

In fact, we find that we have the necessary resources — 20 ore and 4000 gold — to build a bridge that will produce trolls already. A few of the creatures in question become available to hire as soon as a dwelling is built, followed by more at the beginning of every week; each turn consists of one day.

We can also recruit additional heroes at our castles, at the cost of 2500 gold each. Two are shuffled to the top of the pool for our consideration at any given time. Note that, although our starting faction is the Barbarians, we need not confine ourselves to recruiting only Barbarian heroes; nor must individual heroes “follow suit” in terms of the types of units which join their armies, although there is a morale advantage to grouping units of the same faction together.

With money tight, resources scarce, your armies weak, and your heroes unproven, the early game is always a race to scout out as much of the map as possible in order to better understand your strategic position, whilst also grabbing up any loot you find lying about. (Luckily, our Barbarian hero is particularly well-suited to this stage of the game, being the fastest mover of the four types.) There’s so much that is tempting: gold and other resources to replenish our scant stocks, sawmills and mines that can provide a constant supply of resources, magic artifacts which our heroes can carry around to aid them, obelisks which reveal pieces of a treasure map to an ultra-powerful Ultimate Artifact (a legacy of King’s Bounty’s King’s Sceptre), even some places where we can recruit new units to join our ranks without having to pay for them, as we must at our castles.

But soon the easy pickings around our starting castle have all been scarfed up, and it’s time to start fighting some of the monsters scattered about the map, who guard things that we want and block passes that can take us farther afield. The hero who commands each of your armies is a typical armchair general: he doesn’t fight directly, but rather stays in the rear, adding his Attack and Defense scores to those of his troops, and casting spells that can become devastating by the late game. (For this reason, Barbarians and Knights tend to do best in the earlier stages of a scenario, but can be in for a rude shock if they don’t eliminate their spell-casting rivals before they grow too powerful.) In a testament to the old adage that heroes never die but only fade away, a hero whose army is defeated is merely returned to the pool of his colleagues that are waiting to be hired; if you’re not careful, you might find yourself fighting against a hero who was once one of yours, whom you spent a long time lovingly parenting for the benefit of one of your opponents.

The turn-based combat is as conceptually simple and fast-playing as the rest of the game, but nevertheless boasts surprising tactical subtleties. Each unit type has its own initiative value, movement speed, attack type (melee or ranged), attack potency, armor class, and hit points, and sometimes its own special strengths and weaknesses on top of all of these basic ones. Learning to build and use your armies most effectively, and learning how best to counter the various types of enemies you meet, takes quite some complete games, but doing so is very rewarding.

Sooner or later, you’ll come into contact with one of the other players — sooner if you’re playing on a smaller map, later in the case of a larger. Once that happens, exploration begins to compete with military strategy in your ranking of priorities. In most scenarios your goal is simply to capture all of your enemies’ castles, although a few of the campaign scenarios do mix things up a bit by asking you to be the first to recover the Ultimate Artifact or to capture a specific neutral castle. Regardless, Heroes shares with King’s Bounty a quality of brevity that sets it apart from most strategy games of the mid-1990s. Even its largest maps seldom take more than a few hours to explore and conquer. (Of course, this doesn’t mean that you won’t immediately start on another scenario…)

Such is a very, very broad overview of Heroes of Might and Magic. Yet it hardly begins to explain what makes it such a great game. This is every critic’s dilemma: it’s always easier to identify the flaws that keep a given game from greatness than it is to capture that peculiar kismet that yields a game as compulsively playable as this one. Still, it’s part of what I’m paid to do here, so I’ll do my best.

Like so many of the great ones, Heroes is perhaps most of all a tribute to its designer’s willingness to test and test and iterate endlessly until he gets it right. Jon Van Caneghem:

Any time you’re creating a new game — a game that has mechanics people haven’t seen before — there’s a lot of resistance to it. They’re used to something they’ve been playing all the time, and now you’re giving them something new. It’s foreign, so the first reaction is, “I don’t like it.” And if the game isn’t really good, that makes it even worse. If it’s not balanced or it’s not playing right, it becomes, “I don’t like this at all.”

So, my testing department on Heroes was not liking the game. They didn’t like the mechanics; it had a lot of imbalance to it; it was too slow; it was too different. And I just kept hammering at it. I said, “I know this is going to be fun. This is gonna work.” I really analyzed what they were doing and what was bothering them. The length of the turns was too long. If I made the distance that the heroes got to move on the map [in a single turn] too short, they didn’t like it. The same if I made it too long. There was a sweet spot. I made all these little tweaks, and said, “Try it again. Try it again. Try it again.”

All of a sudden, they started getting into it. They started battling each other. Then they started arguing over strategies. That’s my usual moment of clarity in game development. The moment QA is arguing over which strategy is best to win, you’re ready to ship.

This willingness to take every scrap of feedback seriously placed its stamp on every aspect of the game, from the interface, which is as well-nigh perfect as the technology of 1995 could possibly have allowed, to more abstract questions of playability and balance. Consider, for example, the limit of eight heroes per player. Such a number gives you a wealth of possibilities each turn by the late game, but keeps the game’s scope from exploding to the point where keeping track of everything becomes a daunting chore rather than a pleasure, as tends to happen in such predecessors as Master of Magic.

The opponent artificial intelligence is another case study in the ruthless pursuit of fun. It’s a virtual given that the computer will be allowed to cheat somehow in a game of this sort stemming from this era; it simply wasn’t possible at this time to program opponents that could give a decent human player a run for her money on a level field. But instead of merely increasing all of the computer players’ relevant numbers by 50 percent or more, as so many strategy games of the 1990s did, Heroes cheats in a way that isn’t so obviously egregious: its computer players suffer from no fog of war, meaning they know where every resource and castle is on the map from the start and can react accordingly. The resulting competition remains decidedly asymmetrical, but it feels like a struggle against deviously clever opponents rather than blatantly cheating ones. And at the end of the day, the subjective feel of the experience is all that matters. (Then again, if you really want a challenge, you can play against up to three human friends in hot-seat mode, or against one friend over a network. These too are options that surprisingly few turn-based strategy games of Heroes’s era offer.)

In the final analysis, there is no magic bullet that makes Heroes so much fun, just a long string of small decisions, decided almost invariably correctly thanks to Van Caneghem’s willingness to listen to what his first players told him. The result is a game that’s addictive for all the right reasons — one that’s simple and approachable on the surface but is full of unexpected depths, a possibility space that’s enormously rewarding to explore and learn how to optimize. You’ll feel as if you’re leveling up like one of your heroes as you learn how to play on the Easy scenarios, polish your skills on the Normal ones, and at last find ways to triumph even over the Tough and Impossible ones. You might occasionally slam down your computer’s lid in frustration along the way, but you’ll always come back the next day to try again.

To all of this must be added the game’s immensely appealing presentation, which makes its world a nice place to be even when the tide of war is going against you. One similarity it does share with the CRPG series which gives it its name is its eschewing of the “dark, gritty” aesthetic of so many drearily serious fantasy games of its own era and later ones. Heroes is serious about being fun, but it never takes itself all that seriously in any other sense. Its world is one of bright primary colors that pop right on your monitor screen, of cartoon-style monsters duking it out without ever shedding a visible drop of blood. Its stories and settings don’t make a lick of sense, being a pastiche of whatever mythologies, fairy tales, and pop-culture tropes happened to be lying around the offices of New World. Why do the Sorceress’s glitter-splattered sprites, unicorns, and phoenixes look like an explosion at a My Little Pony factory? And why on earth do cyclopes spring forth from Mesoamerican-style pyramids, and what has any of that got to do with Barbarians anyway? Nobody knows and nobody cares. Heroes succeeds to a large degree through its sheer giddy likability, a reflection of the personality of the man who conceived it. No game less pretentious than this one has ever been made.

Another thing to love about the game is the fact that its roster of heroes consists of women and men in nearly equal proportion. The former are every bit as cool and capable as the latter, without ever being over-sexualized in order to please the male gaze. This level of enlightenment was sadly rare among mainstream strategy games of the 1990s. Heroes stands almost alone in being so welcoming to absolutely everyone.

Complaints? Any critic worth his salt must come up with a few, I suppose. So, I’ll note that some of the more difficult scenarios are as much exercises in puzzle solving as pure strategizing, almost demanding that you fail a few times before you can piece together the correct route to victory. Then, too, despite all the extensive play-testing it received, Heroes is no paradigm of balanced game design by modern lights. The Warlock faction is much more powerful than any of the others. Its top-end units are dragons, the best in the game by far. They have an absurd number of hit points, are completely immune to magical attacks, and can kill two stacks of enemies in one shot thanks to their fiery breath; the first player able to start purchasing significant numbers of dragons is all but guaranteed to win. And Heroes by no means resolves what has long been the biggest conundrum in wide-angle strategy-game design: that of the anticlimactic mopping up that follows that tipping point when you know you’re going to win. The need to optimize your play and weigh every decision carefully — do I spend my precious resources on a dwelling that will produce better units or on an addition to my mage guild that will give me better spells? — goes away after this point. All of the most interesting choices and the most nail-biting drama are front-loaded.

On the other hand, none of these things are necessarily unadulterated negatives.”Solving” a difficult map that’s been giving you fits can be a thoroughly satisfying accomplishment in its own right. And any faction can capture a Warlock castle and thereby gain a pathway to dragons, meaning that the starting Warlock player is most definitely not guaranteed to win — and then as well, the sheer joy of romping across the landscape with a ridiculously overpowered army of dragons shouldn’t be taken lightly when considering these matters. Much the same riposte heads off complaints about the anticlimactic endgame. It usually doesn’t take that long to win once the tipping point is reached, and doing so always warms the heart with megalomaniac joy.

I’ve used the word “addictive” a couple of times already in relation to Heroes of Might and Magic. And indeed, the word seems unavoidable in any review of it. The “one more turn” syndrome these games provoke has long been infamous. I’m not overly prone to gaming addiction myself — unlike some of my friends, I have no stories to tell of playing Civilization or Europa Universalis for 48 hours straight — but Heroes of Might and Magic is the closest thing to my personal gaming Kryptonite. Playing Heroes — solo or, even better, with your friends — is so much fun that it can be downright dangerous to your life balance. I do believe I’ve spent more time with this series than any other in the quarter century since I first encountered it. Heroes is just that engaging, even as it remains hard to explain exactly why. Chalk it up to the ineffability of interactive flow.

Upon its release in September of 1995, Heroes of Might and Magic reaped all of the commercial rewards it deserved. It became the biggest hit in the history of New World Computing to that point, and was pronounced Strategy Game of the Year by Computer Gaming World. His CRPG series forgotten for the moment, Jon Van Caneghem went right to work on a Heroes II, which he would make bigger, richer, and even more addictive than its predecessor. I will, needless to say, be writing about that one as well once we reach that point in our journey through time.

(Sources: the books Might and Magic Compendium: The Authorized Strategy Guide by Caroline Spector and Designers & Dragons Volumes 1 and 2 by Shannon Appelcline; Computer Gaming World of October 1988, November 1990, December 1995, and April 2004; Retro Gamer 49; Space Gamer of August 1981; XRDS: The ACM Magazine for Students of Summer 2017. Online sources include the CRPG Addict’s final post on Might and Magic: Darkside of Xeen, Matt Barton’s interviews with John Van Caneghem and Neal Hallford, Julien Pirou’s interview with John Van Caneghem, the RPG Codex interview with John Van Caneghem, and The Grognard Files interview with Tim Olsen.

Heroes of Might and Magic can be purchased as a digital download at GOG.com.)

Comments
32 Responses

- Throteka

December 24, 2021 at 3:54 pm

The strategic layer of Heroes bears striking semblance to “King of the Tabletop”, a game published in Dragon magazine. KotT also is on the record as an inspiration to Magic: The Gathering, along with Titan. If you read KotT’s rules, you’ll discover it essentially laid down the framework for both Heroes & MtG, enough that both can be called its adaptations or expansions.

One discussion on the lineage of these games is here:
https://www.celestialheavens.com/forum/7/16005

Two addenda to the above:
– Yet another inspiration to MtG is the fantasy novel “Master of the Five Magics”.
– The two strands would converge when years later, Gus Smedstad became the lead designer on Heroes 4, and adopted Master of Magic and MtG’s “five magic schools in a wheel” structure.

- Throteka

December 24, 2021 at 4:03 pm

As mentioned in the above, the commercial relese version of KotT “Kings and Things” also influenced Settlers of Catan. It was quite the Holy Family of games.

- Gordon Cameron

December 25, 2021 at 8:41 pm

Yes! King of the Tabletop was a wonderful experience at the time (though it lacked any sort of overworld map, just an abstracted line of domains owned by each player). The goofy David Trampier illustrations on the tiles gave it much of the whimsy and charm that you’d later see in HOMM. I imagine TItan and KotT were birthed somewhat from the same creative stew; anyway Trampier also did illustrations for Titan, if memory serves. I’m not sure what overlap there was between the Avalon Hill and TSR design shops in the early ’80s, though.

As a kid I myself tried to develop a board game that had the basic skeleton of King of the Tabletop but added the possibility for the Hero characters to form small parties and go on quests, alongside the army stuff. There was also a drawn-out overworld map, I think. I called it ‘Quest and Conquest’ and spent a lot of time working on it, but it fizzled out with a million other childhood projects. Years later I felt that HOMM captured much of the feel I was hoping for with that abortive design.

I played a lot of King’s Bounty on the Amiga, but missed out on HOMM when it was new. Some years later I tried HOMM 2 but struggled to master the tactical combat. It wasn’t until the 2010s that I experienced the full addiction of that game. I played it a ton, and it’s even money this article will get me to boot it up again…

- Conor

December 24, 2021 at 4:54 pm

I spent so much time with these games in the 90s that I’m delighted you’re covering them.

I think you also did a great job pointing out the little things that made this stand out from similar games. It made unit “tile” games like Warlords look so very dated.

- John Santosuosso

December 24, 2021 at 4:58 pm

This hits hard in the nostalgia department. Astute analysis of a game that was grossly underrated during its time. This brought back a flow of memories from an untapped portion of my brain. Thank you.

I remember the barometer of success for me was when I was playing was when I had accumulated enough Dragons or Phoenix to inflict damage on two of my opponent’s army members at once via a super powerful flame.

Thanks again for sharing and Happy Holidays!

- Niall M

December 24, 2021 at 5:07 pm

Completely agreed. My personal favourite is HOMM3, which I think really perfected the formula, but the first three as a whole have a serious claim to be the best turn-based games for PC so far. Huge kudos to Van Caneghem and his team.

- Aula

December 24, 2021 at 5:09 pm

“there was just was no comparison”

one “was” too many

“you might yourself fighting”

might find yourself

- Jimmy Maher

December 24, 2021 at 8:23 pm

Thanks!

- Throteka

December 24, 2021 at 5:10 pm

Phew, finished the piece. A great synthesis of sources, as always.

Since you plan to write more on the series, have you been reading the newsletters by Greg Fulton, lead designer of Heroes 3? In each letter he includes an anecdote about its development. While not always essential, they do sometimes broach important topics, like here about the alleged misconduct of Phil Steinmeyer.

https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter15

- Jimmy Maher

December 24, 2021 at 8:24 pm

No, I didn’t know about that. Will make a note-to-self for the future. Thanks!

- Throteka

December 25, 2021 at 6:38 am

Yeah, the above story would at least shed a little new light on Heroes 2’s development.

Other topics I remember as particularly relevant include his time at Dreamworks Interactive & NWC job interview (#12), and Dustin Browder in the pre-Red Alert 2 days (#16).

I also wonder often about Julia Ulano, lead artist of Heroes 1/2/M&M6, who must have been critical in establishing their art styles. Yet in David’s Heroes anniversary interview, she or at least her work was unceremoniously thrown under the bus for being lame and not EPIC like Warhammer.

- Jimmy Maher

December 25, 2021 at 11:37 am

I’ll take the Might and Magic visual aesthetic over that of Warhammer any day…

- Martin

December 24, 2021 at 7:46 pm

A theory about cyclops(s) and pyramids. Cyclopean is a word that came from walls built with stones so big that only a cyclops could have built them. Where were the biggest stone blocks in the ancient world, Egypt’s Pyramids sooooo, maybe there was a cyclops thought to be behind them and inside every Pyramid is a cyclops toiling away.

- Throteka

December 25, 2021 at 7:29 am

Even more fun, the cyclops pyramids in Heroes 1&2 are Mesoamerica-style step pyramids. The logic behind them seems fairly simple – cyclopi were the top-level Barbarian troops. Barbarians are an uncivilized non-magic faction, the “Other” in contrast to the Knight faction’s medieval European humans, whose top-level troops are Paladins from a Cathedral, and a Mesoamerican pyramid was the epitome of a savage, exotic landmark.

The cyclopi in Heroes games are visually kinda innovative – the Heroes 1 version combines the monstrous head and hunched back of the Harryhausen cyclops with armor and greaves to suggest intelligence, and breathes fire to suggest mystical power. The Heroes 2 design is more like the traditional Greek smith, but attacks with eye laser (from X-Men’s Cyclops, obviously). The pyramids fit this image of menacing, mystical demigod. However, there’s zero further elaboration on their nature and abilities.

In Heroes 3, cyclopi would be downgraded to a level 6 unit, and lose the mystical look, ability (they throw rocks now) and impressive pyramid building. Instead the Mesoamerican pyramid design was used on the demonic and swamp beast factions – again showing how they perceived it as a design element.

- Martin

December 25, 2021 at 6:41 pm

Have to admit that the only cyclopi I can imagine these days are the Harryhausen ones.

- Jan H

December 24, 2021 at 9:03 pm

Great article as always, thanks!

“even the likes of Dungeons & Dragons was rather less than it once had been”

I’m not sure about this sentence, is there a word missing?

- Jimmy Maher

December 25, 2021 at 11:33 am

As intended, thanks.

- Feedle

December 25, 2021 at 6:59 am

The CGW reviewer you quote, Jason Kapalka, will go on to found Popcap Games in the late nineties and become best known as the designer of Bejewelled. It’s interesting that Popcap’s golden years catalog is remembered for the same exuberant fun, colorful graphics, and finely tuned gameplay as Heroes. Apparently he was taking notes?

- Alianora La Canta

December 26, 2021 at 3:04 pm

Happy holidays! Missed Heroes of Might and Magic the first time, though I do have some fun memories of Heroes of Might and Magic 3.

- John Smith

December 26, 2021 at 4:46 pm

Just check this project out: https://github.com/ihhub/fheroes2

- Conor

December 27, 2021 at 4:41 pm

I love remakes, but the game itself is on GOG for $2.79 USD right now.

- Aula

December 26, 2021 at 5:20 pm

“Unlike the typical one-and-done CRPG, the computer game of King’s Bounty is designed to be played multiple times”

I’m not sure I agree about the characterization of the “typical” CRPG in this sentence. I think that most early CRPGs were intended to be played repeatedly, first to learn how to win the game and afterwards just for the joy of trying out all the different choices that the game allows you to make. It wasn’t until games like Betrayal at Krondor and Lands of Lore that CRPGs started to offer little or no replay value.

- Jimmy Maher

December 26, 2021 at 7:08 pm

Well, King’s Bounty was released in 1990, which was well after the era of “early” CRPGs by my reckoning. In my experience, most people played more contemporaneous CRPGs like Bard’s Tale, Ultima, Wasteland, the Gold Box games, etc., (not to mention Might and Magic) until they beat them or got tired of trying, then moved on to something else. If they returned to them after beating them once, it was months, years, or decades later. Which isn’t to say there weren’t exceptions, of course…

- Sorcerer is the best

December 26, 2021 at 10:48 pm

Well, I never thought of neither King’s Bounty or HOMM as RPG games – sure, they have some RPG elements(IMO, HOMM has more of it than in King’s Bounty), but they both are only strategy games in fantasy setting, unlike M&M 1-10, which were RPG games, where you had to look after a team of characters and improve their skills and equipment to progress in the game.

It all depends on personal experience, but to me HOMM is a defining game, as it made all the other games, including Civilization as “early games”, as soon as I saw those dwarves in a Sorcerers castle on my friends CRT monitor. I think, it has more to do, that it was a proper VGA game and it was released around the same time when Windows 95 appeared – it is a milestone for PCs, where before you had to log out of Windows 3 to play games, that run on DOS. And if you had not enough RAM and VRAM, you had to do the same in Windows 95 – that is how I played MOO2.

Looking from a time perspective, I don’t really understand why there should be anything special about HOMM, as HOMM and much better HOMM2 were released in a very rapid sequence and most of people who played HOMM2 did not even notice HOMM. I played HOMM, and I even had a hot-seat game with friends, but most of the time was spent with HOMM2, which was another milestone game with better graphics. Randomized maps is HOMM3 feature – with all the maps that came with HOMM2 there was no real need for that, as I played them all and it took a lot of time to play them all and existing maps were providing replayability value.

“The Warlock faction is much more powerful than any of the others.”
This is an archeological meme for both HOMM and HOMM2, and it is only true, if HOMM is played at lowest difficullty where all the resources are provided and all the rest of AI players are playing to dumbest level and you are arriving with your Dragon to undeveloped Castle – where is even fun in doing that?
On highest difficulty enemy is at the gates of your castle before you even have a chance to build that Dragon tower – at best it is only beginning of 3rd week, because at highest difficulty there is no resource advantage and all the resources has to be gathered.
My favourite in HOMM1&2 was Sorcerer, because of the glitch, where fastest troop was providing longest walking distance – when stationed in castle after resting. This “feature” alone provided dominance over whole map. HOMM2 this “feature” together with Gateway spell meant end of game for anything on map. Fast troops in battle means also, that your troops are moving first and fast archers meant, that some of enemy troops did not made a move at all and died.
Sorcerer with exception to dwarves, had troops that were very fast and 2 fastest archers meant, that fight was very quickly over. As for the Dragon – in HOMM it had Medium speed and rest of troops somewhat sucked and centaurs were bad as archers. Flying troops in general were only good against archers – if my memory serves well, then even in HOMM1 Cyclop could turn Dragon into a stone and that was end of battle for it, when every other hand-to-hand troops whacked all the HP out of him.

- Zack

December 27, 2021 at 10:25 am

Reading about Heroes always make it seem like a lot of fun, but I guess I’m to infected with the sense of scale and immediacy that Total War provides. When playing Heroes, there’s always too much downtime. If you get your stack wiped, which can always happen, you’re stuck doing nothing for X turns until the new week. This has always struck me as a terrible design flaw, but I guess it is part of the original idea. My girlfriend is a mega Heroes nerd, but even playing with her was downright boring, playing samey and rote battles over and over with a hero that is content with slouching in the corner. It’s just not a game a for me. But when it works, it works really well.

- Mikko

December 29, 2021 at 10:02 am

I’m slightly surprised that SSG’s Warlords (1990) or especially Warlords 2 (1993) was not mentioned as an inspiration. When I played Heroes of Might and Magic back in the day, I always thought of it as a polished, elaborated single-player version of Warlords 2 – with the board game feel and added things to do, but without the lengthy hotseat multiplayer and AI player movement delays. I guess the RPG elements were also more complex, though the Warlords heroes also had things like XP, levels, and you could explore ruins for special items if I remember… it truly was a board game, but the minimal RPG elements made it different.

The probable reason I never got obsessed with Heroes of Might and Magic was that I’d played WL 2 to death already by the time it appeared. There were numerous user created scenarios that could be downloaded through BBSes, including Middle Earth of course, and I’d had my fill of fantasy scenarios in the genre for a long time!

This is based on memories of a game I last played almost 25 years ago, mind you. But it looks like GOG has the Warlords games available… hmm!

- Mikko

December 29, 2021 at 10:21 am

I think I managed to somehow mess up my description of WL 2 vs HOMM – what I tried to say was that the difference was about the *focus” of the game – WL 2 always struck me as made to be multiplayer, but the computer opponents’ AI was good enough that the single player experience was also excellent if rather slow-paced. Meanwhile HOMM felt like there was more for a single player to do in any given turn. But, again, my memory is growing hazy after 25 years…

- Bmp

December 31, 2021 at 3:07 am

When discussing the ancestors and inspirations for Heroes of Might and Magic, one game that was obviously influental is “Hammer of the Gods”, developed by Holistic Design and published by New World Computing at the end of 1994.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/hammer-of-the-gods

While Jon Van Caneghem is credited as Executive Producer for that game, Holistic Design is credited for the Design.

Screenshots show the similarities:

https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/hammer-of-the-gods/screenshots/gameShotId,50088/

However, the structure of the game seems to be quite different. The player needs to solve a series of quests, instead of conquering computer players.

- mycophobia

January 4, 2022 at 2:39 am

Europa Univeralis should be Europa Universalis

- Jimmy Maher

January 5, 2022 at 9:48 am

Thanks!

- Mark

January 9, 2022 at 9:57 pm

Wonderful writeup! I agree on nearly everything, having been 13 when this game was released, and had been PC (and console) gaming since the Atari 2600, Commodore 128 and 286. I think it’s the best of the series, because it was the simplest. Some genres, especially RTS, got to the point (at least in multiplayer) where I felt like I was deserving a paycheck for all the micromanagement. That’s when the fun ends. I also think later entries of certain series get more fanfare because the market was simply larger by that point. I spent countless hours in Civ1, and I caught that spell right at the start, like with HOMM1. I can’t say I’ve ever been as enamored with Civ4 etc. The bright, big, colorful graphics of HOMM1 are the best of the series as well.

- Robert S

January 25, 2022 at 8:34 pm

Plenty of comparisons and parallels, but not a single one to Warlords, which came out the same year as King’s Bounty and to me HoMM seems to be a perfect blend of the two.

A Web Around the World, Part 1: Signals Down a Wire
January 7, 2022

The microcomputer had a well-nigh revolutionary impact on the way that business was done over the first twenty years after its invention: the arrival of a computer on every desk made the workplace more efficient in countless ways. But the gadget’s impact on our personal lives during this period was less all-encompassing. Yes, many youngsters and adults learned the advantages of word processing over typewriting, and a substantial minority of both learned the advantages of computer over console gaming. Meanwhile smaller minorities learned of the pleasures of programming, and some even ventured online to meet others of their ilk. Yet the wide-angle social transformation promised by the most starry-eyed pundits during the would-be Home Computer Revolution of the early 1980s didn’t materialize on the timetable we were promised. For a good decade after the heyday of such predictions, one could get on perfectly well as an informed, aware, plugged-in member of society without owning a computer or caring a whit about them. The question of what a home computer was really good for, beyond word processing, entertainment, and accessing fairly primitive online services at usually exorbitant prices, was difficult to answer for the average person. Most of the other usage scenarios proposed during the early 1980s, from storing recipes to balancing one’s checkbook, remained easier and cheaper on the whole to do the old-fashioned way. The personal computer seemed a useful invention in its realm, to be sure, but not a society-reshaping one.

All of that changed in the mid-1990s, when the Internet entered the public consciousness. By the turn of the millennium, those unable or unwilling to buy a computer and enter cyberspace were well and truly left behind, having no seat at the table where our most important cultural dialogs were suddenly taking place. It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the impact the Internet has had on us: on the way we access information, on the way we communicate and socialize with one another, on the way we entertain ourselves, on the very way we think. The claim that the Internet is the most important advance in the technologies of information and communication since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, which once seemed so expansive, now seems almost picayune in relation to the change we’ve witnessed. Coming at the end of a century of wondrous inventions, the Internet was the most wondrous of them all. We may still be waiting for our flying cars and cheap tickets to Mars, but the world we live in today would nevertheless have seemed thoroughly science-fictional just 30 years ago. Seen in this light, the computer itself seems merely a comparatively plebeian bit of infrastructure that needed to be laid down for the really earth-shattering technology to build upon. Or perhaps we were just seeing computers the wrong way before the Internet: what seemed most significant as a tool for, well, computation was actually a revolution in communication just waiting to happen. In this formulation, a computer without the Internet is like a car without any roads.

When I talk about the Internet in this context, of course, I really mean the combination of a globe-spanning network of computers — one which was already a couple of decades old by the beginning of the 1990s — with the much younger World Wide Web, which applied to the network a new paradigm of effortless navigation based on associative hyperlinks. This serves as a useful reminder that no human invention since the first stone tools has ever been monolithic; inventions are always amalgamations of existing technologies, iterations on what came before. In A Brief History of the Future, his classic millennial history of and philosophical meditation on the Internet, John Naughton noted that “it’s always earlier than you think. Whenever you go looking for the origins of any significant technological development, you find that the more you learn about it, the deeper its roots seem to tunnel into the past.”

I thought about those words a lot as I considered how best to tell the story of the Internet and the World Wide Web here. And as I did so, I kept coming back to this word “Web.” In the strict terms by which Tim Berners-Lee meant the word when he invented the World Wide Web, it refers to a logical web of links. But the prerequisite for that logical web is the physical web of cables that allows computers to talk to one another over long distances in the first place. This infrastructure was not originally designed for computers; it is in fact much, much older than they are. Still, this network — the physical network — strikes me as the most logical place to start this series of articles about the Internet, that ultimate expression of instantaneous worldwide communication.

Aeschylus’s tragedy Agamemnon of the fifth century BC deals, like so much classical Greek literature, with the Trojan War, an event historians now believe to have occurred in approximately 1000 BC. In the play, we’re told how the Greek soldiers abroad sent news of their victory over the Trojans back to their homeland far more quickly than any ship- or horse-borne messenger could possibly have delivered it. This ecstatic paean to modern communication issues from the mouth of Clytemnestra, the wife of the Greek commander Agamemnon, who has been waiting on her husband for ten years at home in the Peloponnesian city of Argos:

Hephaestus, who sent the blazing light from Ida;
then beacon after beacon’s courier flame:
from Ida first, to Hermes’ crag at Lemnos.
Third came the Athos summit, which belongs
to Zeus: it, too, received the massive firebrand.
Ascending now to shoot across the sea’s back,
the journeying torch in all its power and joy.
The pine wood, like a second sun, conveyed
the gold-gleam to the watchtower on Macistus.
Prompt and triumphant over feckless sleep,
unslacking in its task as courier,
passing Euripus’s streams, the beacon’s light
signaled far off to watchmen on Messapion.
They sent out light in turn, sent on the message,
setting alight a rick of graying heather.
Potent against the dimming murk, the light
went leaping high across Asopus’ plain
like the beaming moon, and at Cathaeron’s scarp
roused missive fire still another relay.
The lookout there did not defy the light
sent from far off; the new blaze shot up stronger.
The glow shot past the lake called Gorgon’s Face;
arriving at the mountains where the goats roam,
it urged the fire-ordnance on.
With all their strength, men raised a giant flame,
beard-shaped, to overshoot and pass beyond
the headland fronting the Saronic strait —
so bright the blaze. Darting again, it reached
Arachne’s lookout peak, this city’s neighbor;
then it fell here, on the Atreides’ mansion.
The light we see descends from Ida’s fire.
Tourchbearers served me in this regimen,
with every handoff perfectly performed.
The runners who came first and last both win.
This is my proof, the pledge of what I tell you.
My husband passed the news to me from Troy.

In this fascinating passage, then, we learn of what may have been the first near-instantaneous long-distance communications network ever conceived, dating back more than 3000 years. The signal began with a burning pyre atop Mount Ida near Troy itself, then flashed onward like a torch being passed between the members of a relay team: to the highlands of the island of Lemnos, to Mount Athos on a northeastern peninsula of the Greek mainland, to the northern tip of the island of Euboea, to finally reach the mainland city of Aulas, whence the Greek fleet had sailed for Troy so long before. From there, the signal fires spread across Greece. Historians and geographers are skeptical whether such a signal system might truly have been practicable, even given the mountainous landscape of the region with its many rarefied peaks. But even if it never existed in reality, Aeschylus — or some other, anonymous earlier Greek who created the legend before him — deserves a great deal of credit for imagining that such a thing might exist.

Others after Aeschylus refined the idea further, into something that would function over shorter distances in places without mountain peaks in useful proximity to one another, something that might be used to send a message at least slightly more complicated than word of a war won. During the Second Punic War of the late second century BC, both Rome and its enemy Carthage are believed to have built networks of signal towers for purposes of battlefield communication. Very simple messages — signals to attack or withdraw, etc. — could be passed from tower to tower by waving torches in distinctive patterns. Many more short-range optical-signal systems followed: the Chinese used fireworks on their border walls to raise the alarm if one section was attacked by the “barbarians” on the other side; harbors raised flags to inform ships of the height and movement of the tides.

But all such systems were sharply limited in the types of information they could transmit and the distances over which they could send it. On any broader, more flexible scale, the speed of communication was still the same as that of messengers on horseback, or of sailors in ships at the mercy of the wind and waves. The impact this had on commerce, on diplomacy, and on warfare is difficult for us children of the mass-media age to appreciate; there are repeated instance in history of such follies as bloody battles fought after the wars that spawned them had already ended, because word of the ceasefire couldn’t be gotten to the front lines in time. The people of the past, for their part, had equally little conception of any alternative speed of communication; for them, the weeks that were required to, say, get a message from the Americas to Europe were as natural as a transatlantic telephone call is to us.

Claude Chappe

But in 1789, one Claude Chappe, a French seminary student whose studies had been interrupted by his country’s political revolution, began to envision something else. He became obsessed with the idea of a fast long-range communications network that could transmit messages as arbitrary as the content of any given written letter. He first thought of using electricity, a phenomenon which scientists and inventors were just starting to consider how to turn to practical purposes. But it was still a dangerous, untamed beast at this juncture, and Chappe quickly — and probably wisely — set it aside. Next he turned to sound. He and his four brothers discovered that a cast-iron pot could be heard up to a quarter of a mile away if hit hard enough with a steel mallet. Thus by beating out patterns they could pass messages across reasonably long distances, a quarter-mile at a time. But the method had some obvious problems: its range was highly dependent on the vagaries of wind and weather, and the brothers’ experiments certainly didn’t make them very popular with their neighbors. So, Chappe went back to the drawing board again — went back, in fact, to the ancient solution of optical signalling.

After much experimentation, he arrived at a system based on semaphores mounted atop towers. Each semaphore consisted of three separate, jointed pieces which could be positioned in multiple ways, enough so that there were fully 98 possible distinct configurations of the apparatus as a whole. Six of the configurations were reserved for special purposes, the equivalent of what a digital-network engineer would call “control blocks”: stop and start signals, requests for re-transmission, etc. The other 92 stood for numbers. Chappe provided a code dictionary consisting of 8464 words, divided into 92 pages of 92 words each. The transmission of each word was a two-step procedure: first a number pointing to the page, then another pointing to the word on that page. The system even boasted a form of error correction: since the operator of the next tower in the chain would need to configure his semaphores to match those of the tower before his in order to transmit the message further, the operator in the previous tower got a chance to confirm that his message had been received correctly, and was expected to send a hasty “Belay that!” signal in the case of a mistake.

A contemporary sketch of Chappe’s semaphore system.

Optical engineering had by now progressed to the point that Chappe’s towers could be placed much farther apart than any of the signal towers of old, for they could now be viewed through a telescope rather than with the naked eye. Chappe envisioned a vast network of towers, separated from one another by 10 to 20 miles (15 to 30 kilometers) depending on the terrain, the whole extending across the country of France or even eventually across the whole continent of Europe.

The system was labor-intensive, requiring as it did a pair of attendants in every tower. It was also slow — at best, it was good for about one word per minute — and at the mercy of the hours of daylight and to some extent the weather. But when the conditions were right it worked. Appropriately given how the germ of the concept stemmed from Aeschylus, Chappe turned to Greek for a name for his invention. He first wanted to call it the tachygraphe, combining two Greek cognates meaning “fast” and “writing.” But a friend in the government suggested télégraphe — “distant writing” — instead.

Living in revolutionary times tends to bring challenges along with benefits: Chappe and his brothers had to run for their lives during at least one of their tests, when a mob decided they must be Royalist sympathizers passing secret messages of sedition. On the other hand, the new leaders of France were as eager as any have ever been to throw out the old ways of doing things and to embrace modernity in all its aspects. Some of the innovations they enacted, such as the metric system of measurement, have remained with us to this day; others, such as a new calendar that used ten-day weeks (Revolutionary France had a positive mania for decimals), would prove less enduring. Chappe’s telegraph would fall somewhere in between the two extremes, adding a word and an idea to our culture that would long outlive this first practical implementation of it.

On July 26, 1793, following a series of proof-of-concept demonstrations, the National Convention gave Claude Chappe the title of “Telegraph Engineer” in the Committee of Public Safety. And so, while other branches of the same Committee were carrying out the Reign of Terror with the assistance of Madame la Guillotine, Chappe was building a chain of signal towers stretching from Lille to Paris; the terminus in the capital stood on the dome of the Louvre Palace, newly re-purposed as a public art museum.

On August 15, 1794, shortly after the telegraph went officially into service, it brought news of a major French victory in the war with the old, conservative order of Europe that was going on on the country’s northern border. A National Convention delegate named Lazare Carnot ascended to the podium in the Salles des Machines in Paris. “Quesnoy is restored to the Republic,” he read out from the scrap of paper in his hands. “Its surrender took place at six o’clock this morning.” A wave of jubilation swept the hall, prompted not only by the military victory thus reported but by the timeliness with which the news had arrived, which seemed an equally potent validation of the whole forward-looking revolutionary project. A delegate to the Convention named Joseph Lakanal summed up the mood: “What brilliant destiny do science and the arts not reserve to a republic which, by the genius of its inhabitants, is called to instruct the nations of Europe!”

In the end, the republic in question had a shorter career than Lakanal might have hoped for it, but Chappe’s telegraph survived its demise. By the time Napoleon seized power from the corrupt and dysfunctional remnants of the Revolution in 1799, most of France had been bound together in a web of towers and semaphores. Napoleon supported the construction of many more stations as part of his mission to make France the world’s unrivaled leader in science and technology. But Chappe found himself increasingly sidelined by the French bureaucracy, even as he apparently suffered from a debilitating bladder disease. On January 25, 1805, at the age of 42, he either cut his own throat while standing beneath a telegraph tower on the Rue de Saint Germain in Paris, or deliberately threw himself into a well, or stumbled accidentally into one. (Reports of the death of Claude Chappe, like many of those pertaining to his life, are confused and contradictory, a byproduct of the chaotic times in which he lived.)

This statue of Claude Chappe used to stand in central Paris on the site where some say he committed suicide, just next to one of his preserved telegraph towers. It was removed and melted down by the Nazis during World War II.

His optical telegraph would live on for another half-century after him, growing to fully 556 towers, concentrated in France but stretching as far as Amsterdam, Brussels, Mainz, Milan, Turin, and Venice. According to folk history, it was used for the last time in 1855, to bring news of the victory of France and its allies in the siege of Sevastopol — a fitting bookend for a system which had announced its arrival with word of another military victory more than 60 years before.

Remnants of Chappe’s telegraph network can still be seen in many places in France. This semaphore tower stands in the commune of Saverne in the northeastern part of the country.

One morning he made him a slender wire,
As an artist’s vision took life and form,
While he drew from heaven the strange, fierce fire
That reddens the edge of the midnight storm;
And he carried it over the Mountain’s crest,
And dropped it into the Ocean’s breast;
And Science proclaimed, from shore to shore,
That Time and Space ruled man no more.
“We are one!” said the nations, and hand met hand,
In a thrill electric from land to land.

— “The Victory,” written anonymously in honor of Samuel Morse upon his death in 1872

This photograph of Samuel Morse was taken in 1840, in the midst of his struggle to interest the world in his electric telegraph.

In 1824,  a 33-year-old American painter named Samuel Morse traveled to Washington, D.C. An artist of real talent with a not unimpressive track record — he had once been commissioned to paint President James Monroe — he had previously been in the habit of prioritizing his muse over his earnings. But now he was determined to change that: he went to the capital in the hope of becoming one of a small circle of painters who earned a steady living by making flattering official portraits of prominent men.

On February 10, 1825, Morse sent a letter back home to his wife in New Haven, Connecticut, with some exciting news: he had won a lucrative contract to paint the Marquis de Lafayette, a famous hero of both the American and French Revolutions. But his wife never got to read the letter: she had died on February 7. The day after Morse had posted his missive, word of her death finally reached him. He immediately left for home, but by the time he arrived she had already been buried. The episode was a painful lesson in the shortcomings of current communications methods in the United States, a country which had not embraced even the optical telegraph.

In addition to his more well-known accomplishments as an inventor, Samuel Morse was a painter of no small talent and not inconsiderable importance. He painted his rather magnificent Grand Gallery of the Louvre on his trip to Europe of 1829 to 1832.

Seven years later, Morse found himself aboard a packet ship called the Sully, returning to his homeland from France after an extended sojourn in Europe during which he had combined the profitable business of making miniature copies of European masterpieces with the more artistically satisfying one of trying to create new masterpieces of his own. One of his fellow passengers enjoyed dabbling with electricity, and showed him a battery and some other toys he had brought onboard. Morse was not, as is sometimes claimed, a complete neophyte to the wonders of electricity at this point; a man of astonishingly diverse interests and aptitudes, he had attended a series of lectures on the subject a few years earlier, and had even befriended the instructor. Nevertheless, he clearly had a eureka moment aboard the Sully. “It occurred to me,” he would later write, “that by means of electricity, signs representing figures, letters, or words might be legibly written down [emphasis original] at any distance.” He chattered almost manically about it to anyone who would listen throughout the four-week passage home. His brother Sidney, who met him at the dock upon the Sully’s arrival in New York City, would later recall that he was still “full of the subject of the [electric] telegraph during the walk from the ship, and for some days afterward could scarcely speak about anything else.”

His surprise and excitement at the thought were in some ways a measure of his ignorance: the idea of an electric telegraph that would not be subject to all of the multitudinous drawbacks of optical systems was practically old hat by now in engineering and invention circles. Still, no one had ever quite managed to get one to work well enough to be useful. This may strike us as odd today; as Tom Standage has noted in his book The Victorian Internet, any clever child of today can construct a working one-way electric telegraph in the course of an afternoon. All you need is a length of wire, a breaker switch, an electric lamp of some sort, and a battery. Run the wire between the breaker switch and the lamp, connect the whole circuit to the battery, and you can sit at one end of the wire making the bulb at the other end flash on and off to your heart’s content. All that’s left to do is to decide upon some sort of code to give meaning to the flashes.

But for electrical experimenters at the turn of the nineteenth century, the devil was in the details. One serious problem was that of detecting the presence or absence of electric current at all, many decades before reasonably reliable incandescent light bulbs became available. By 1800, it had been discovered that immersing the end of a live wire into water would generate telltale bubbles; we now understand that these are the result of a process known as electrolysis, in which an electric current breaks water molecules down into their component hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Experiments were conducted which attempted to apply this phenomenon to telegraphy, but it was difficult, to say the least, to read a coherent message from bubbles floating in a pot of water.

A breakthrough came in 1820, when a Danish scientist named Hans Christian Ørsted discovered that electric current pulls the needle of a compass toward itself. Electricity, in other words, generates its own magnetic field. By winding together a coil of wire, one can make an electromagnet, which affects a compass or anything else containing ferromagnetic materials just like an ordinary magnet, with one important difference: this magnet functions only when electric current is flowing through the coil. The implications for telegraphy were enormous: an electromagnet should finally make it possible to instantly and precisely detect the presence or absence of current in a wire.

But there was still another problem: it didn’t seem to be possible to transmit currents over really long wires. Over such distances as those which separated two typical towers in Claude Chappe’s optical-telegraph system — much less that which separated, say, Lille from Paris — the signal just seemed to peter out and disappear. In 1825, a Briton named Peter Barlow, one of the eminent mathematical and scientific luminaries of his day, conducted a series of experiments to determine the scale of the problem. His conclusions gave little room for optimism. A current’s strength on a wire, he wrote, was inversely proportional to the square of its distance from the battery that had spawned it. As for the telegraph: “I found such a sensible diminution with only 200 feet [60 meters] of wire as at once to convince me of the impracticality of the scheme.”

Luckily for the world, not everyone was ready to defer to Barlow’s reputation. An American named Joseph Henry, a teacher of teenage boys at The Albany Academy in New York who was possessed at the time of neither a university degree nor an international reputation, conducted experiments of his own, and found that Barlow had been mistaken in one of his key conclusions: he found that the strength of a current was inversely proportional to its distance from the battery, full stop — i.e., not from the distance squared. In the course of further experimenting, Henry discovered that higher voltages lost proportionally even less of their strength over distance than weaker ones. Fortunately, the state of the art in batteries was steadily improving. Henry found that a cutting-edge 25-cell battery had enough “projectile force” to push a current a fairly long distance; it was able to ring a bell at the end of a wire more than a mile (1.6 kilometers) long. He published his findings in 1831, while a blissfully unaware Samuel Morse was painting pictures in Europe. But the world of science and invention did take notice; suddenly a workable electric telegraph seemed like a practical possibility once again.

Meanwhile Morse spent the years after his eureka moment aboard the Sully as busily and diversely as ever: teaching art at New York University, teaching private pupils how to paint, painting more pictures of his own, serving on the American Academy of Fine Arts, writing feverish anti-Catholic screeds, even running for mayor of New York City under the auspices of the anti-immigration Native American Democratic Association. (Like too many men of his era, Morse was a thoroughgoing racist and bigot in addition to his more positive qualities.) In light of all this activity, it would be a stretch to say he was consistently consumed with the possibility of an electric telegraph, but he clearly did tinker with the project intermittently, and may very well have followed the latest advancements in the field of electrical transmission closely as part of his interest.

But while people like Joseph Henry were asking whether and how an electrical signal might be sent over a long distance in the abstract, Morse was asking how an electric telegraph might actually function as a tool. How could you get messages into it, and how could you get them out of it?

Morse’s first solution to the problem of sending a message is a classic example of how old paradigms of thought can be hard to escape when inventing brand-new technology. He designed his electric telegraph to work essentially like a long-distance printing press. The operator arranged along a groove cut into a three-foot (1-meter) beam of wood small pieces of metal “movable type,” each having from one to ten teeth cut into it to represent a single-digit number; ten teeth meant zero. He then slotted the beam into a sending apparatus Morse called a “port-rule,” attached to one end of the telegraph wire. The operator turned a hand crank on the port-rule’s side to move the beam through the contraption. As he did so, the teeth on the metal type caused a breaker connected to the telegraph wire to close and open, producing a pattern of electrical pulses.

Morse’s movable type. We see here two pieces representing the number two, and one representing each of three, four, and five.

The whole port-rule apparatus.

At the other end of the wire was an electromagnet, to which was mounted a pencil on the end of a spring-loaded arm made from a ferromagnetic metal. The nib of the pencil rested on a band of paper, which could be set in motion by means of a clockwork mechanism driven by a counterweight. When a message came down the wire, the electrical pulses caused the electromagnet to switch on and off, pulling the pencil up and down as the paper scrolled beneath it. The resulting pattern on the paper could then be translated into a series of digits, which could then be further decoded into readable text using a code dictionary not dissimilar to the one employed by Claude Chappe’s optical telegraph.

Morse’s receiving mechanism, which he called the “register.”

It was all quite fiddly and complicated, but by 1837 — i.e., fully five years after Morse’s eureka moment — it more or less worked on a good day. Range was his biggest problem; not having access to the cutting-edge batteries that were available to Joseph Henry, Morse found that his first versions of his telegraph could only transmit a message 40 feet (12 meters). Pondering this, he came up with a rather brilliant stopgap solution, in the form of what is now called a “repeater”: an additional battery partway down the wire, activated by an electromagnet that responded to the current coming down the prior section of wire. “By the same operation the same results may again be repeated,” Morse wrote in his patent application, “extending and breaking at pleasure such current through yet another and another circuit, ad infinitum.” If you had enough batteries and electromagnets, in other words, you could extend the telegraph to a theoretically infinite length.

With his invention looking more and more promising, Morse befriended a younger man named Alfred Vail, the scion of a wealthy family with many industrial and political connections. Vail became an important collaborator in ironing out the design of the telegraph, while his family signed on as backers, giving Morse access to much more advanced batteries among other benefits. In January of 1838, he sent a “pretty full letter” down a wire 10 miles (16 kilometers) long. “The success is complete,” he exalted.

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to rest it, and I will move the world,” the ancient engineer Archimedes had once (apocryphally) said. Now, Morse paraphrased him with an aphorism of his own: “If [the signal] will go ten miles without stopping, I can make it go around the globe.”

One month after their ten-mile success, Morse and Alfred Vail traveled to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate the telegraph to members of Congress and even to President Martin Van Buren himself. The demonstration was not a success; it’s doubtful whether most of the audience, the president among them, really understood what they were being shown at all. This was not least because Morse was forced to set up his sending and receiving stations right next to one another in the same room, then to try to explain that the unruly tangle of wire lying piled up between them meant that they could just as well have been ten miles apart. As it was, his telegraph looked like little more than a pointless parlor trick to busy men who believed they had more important things to worry about.

So, Morse decided to try his luck in Europe. Upon arriving there, he learned to his discomfiture that various Europeans were already working on the same project he was. In particular, a pair of Britons named William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, building upon the ideas and experiments of a Russian nobleman named Pavel Lvovitch Schilling, had made considerable progress on a system which transmitted signals over a set of ten wires to a set of five needles, causing them to tilt in different directions and thereby to signify different letters of the alphabet.

Morse pointed out to anyone who would listen that this system’s need for so many wires made it far more complicated, expensive, and delicate than his own system, which required just one.Yet few of the Europeans Morse met showed much interest in yet another electric-telegraph project, much less one from the other side of the Atlantic. He grew almost frantic with worry that one of the European projects would pan out before he could get his own telegraph into service. Against all rhyme and reason, he began claiming that Cooke and Wheatstone had stolen from him the very idea for an electric telegraph; it had, he said, probably reached them through one of the other passengers who had sailed on the Sully back in 1832. This was of course absurd on the face of it; the idea of an electric telegraph in the broad strokes had been batted about for decades by that point. Morse’s invention was a practical innovation, not a conceptual one. Yet he heatedly insisted that he alone was the father of the electric telegraph in every sense. Europeans didn’t hesitate to express their own opinion to the contrary. The argument quickly got personal. One French author, for example, took exception with Morse’s habit of calling himself a “professor.” “It may be well to state here,” he sniffed, “that he [is] merely professor of literature and drawing, by an honorary title conferred upon him by the University of New York.”

Morse returned to the United States in early 1839 a very angry man. He now enlisted the nativist American press in his cause. “The electric telegraph, that wonder of our time, is an American discovery,” wrote one broadsheet. “Professor Morse invented it immediately after his return from France to America.” To back up his claim of being the victim of intellectual theft, Morse even tracked down the Sully’s captain and got him to testify that Morse had indeed spoken of his stroke of genius freely to everyone onboard.

But even Morse had to recognize eventually that such pettiness availed him little. There came a point, not that long after his return to American shores, when he seemed ready to give up on his telegraph and all the bickering that had come to surround it in favor of a new passion. While visiting Paris, he had seen some of the first photographs taken by Louis Daguerre, had even visited the artist and inventor personally in his studio. He had brought one of Daguerre’s cameras back with him, and now, indefatigable as ever, he set up his own little studio; the erstwhile portrait painter became New York City’s first portrait photographer, as well as a teacher of the new art form. His knack for rubbing shoulder with Important Men of History hadn’t deserted him: among his students was one Mathew Brady, whose images of death and destruction from the battlefields of the American Civil War would later bring home the real horrors of war to civilians all over the world for the first time. Morse also plunged back into reactionary politics with a passion; he ran again, still unsuccessfully, for mayor of New York on an anti-immigration, anti-Catholic, pro-slavery platform.

So, Morse might have retired quietly from telegraphy, if not for an insult which he simply couldn’t endure. Over in Britain, Cooke and Wheatstone had been making somewhat more headway. They had found that the men behind the new railroads that were then being built showed some interest in their telegraph as a means of keeping tabs on the progress of trains and avoiding that ultimate disaster of a collision. In 1839, Cooke and Wheatstone installed the first electric telegraph ever to be put into everyday service, connecting the 13 miles (21 kilometers) that separated Paddington from West Drayton along Britain’s Great Western Railway. Several more were installed over the next few years on other densely trafficked stretches. One story has it that, when three of the five indicator needles on the complex system conked out on one of the lines, the operators in the stations improvised a code for passing all the information they needed to using only the remaining two needles. The lesson thus imparted would only slowly dawn on our would-be electric-telegraph entrepreneurs on both sides of the Atlantic: that both of their systems were actually more complicated than they needed to be, that a simpler system would be cheaper and more reliable while still doing everything it needed to.

But first, the insult: flush with their relative success, Cooke and Wheatstone wrote to Morse in early 1842 to ask whether, in light of all his experience with electric telegraphy in general, he might be interested in peddling their system to the railroads in his country — in becoming, in other words, a mere salesman for their telegraph. It may have been intended as an honest conciliatory overture, a straightforward attempt to bury the hatchet. But that wasn’t how Morse took it. Livid at this affront to his inventor’s pride, he jumped back into the telegraphy game with a vengeance; he soon extended his system’s maximum range to 33 miles (53 kilometers).

He wrote a deferential letter to Joseph Henry, whose experiments had by now won him a position on the faculty of Princeton University and the reputation of the leading authority in the country on long-distance applications of electricity. Morse knew that, if he could get Henry to throw his weight behind his telegraph, it might make all the difference. “Have you met with any facts in your experiments thus far that would lead you to think that my mode of telegraphic communication will prove impracticable?” he asked in his letter. Not only did Henry reply in the negative, but he invited Morse up to Princeton to talk in person. This was, needless to say, exactly what Morse had been hoping for. Henry agreed to support Morse’s telegraph, even to publicly declare it to be a better design than its competitor from Britain.

Thus Henry was in attendance when Morse exhibited his telegraph in New York City in the summer of 1842, garnering for it the first serious publicity it had received in a couple of years. Morse continued beavering away at it, adding an important new feature: a sending and receiving station at each end of the same wire, to turn his telegraph into an effortless two-way communications medium. The British system, by contrast, required no fewer than twenty separate wires to accomplish the same thing. In December of 1842, the growing buzz won Morse another hearing in Washington, D.C. Knowing that this was almost certainly his last chance to secure government funding, he lobbied for and got access to two separate audience halls. He installed one station in each, and he and Alfred Vail then mediated a real-time conversation between two separate groups of politicians and bureaucrats who could neither see nor hear one another.

This added bit of showmanship seemed to do the trick; at last some of those assembled seemed to grasp the potential of what they were seeing. A bill was introduced to allocate $30,000 to the construction of a trial line connecting Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, a distance of 40 miles (65 kilometers). On February 23, 1843, it passed the House by a vote of 89 to 83, with 70 abstainers. On March 3, the Senate passed it unanimously as a final piece of business in the literal last minute of the current term, and President John Tyler signed it. More than a decade after the idea had come to him aboard the Sully, Morse finally had his chance to prove to the world how useful his telegraph could be.

He had no small task before him: no one in the country had ever attempted to run a permanent electrical cable over a distance of 40 miles before. Morse asked the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company for permission to use their right-of-way between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. They agreed, in return for free use of the telegraph, thus further cementing a connection between railroads and telegraphs that would persist for many years.

The project was beset with difficulties from the start. A plan to lay the cable underground, encased within custom-manufactured lead pipe, went horribly awry when the latter proved to be defective. The team had to pull it all up again, whereupon Morse decided to string the cable along on poles instead, where it would be more exposed to the elements and to vandals but also much more accessible to repair crews; thus was born the ubiquitous telegraph — later telephone — pole.

This experience may have taught Morse something of the virtues of robust simplicity. At any rate, it was during the construction of the Washington-to-Baltimore line that he finally abandoned his complicated electrical printing press in favor of a sending apparatus that was about as simplistic as it could be. It was apparently Alfred Vail rather than Morse himself who was primarily responsible for designing what would be immortalized as the “Morse key”: a single switch which the operator could use to close and open the circuit breaker manually. The receiving station, on the other hand, remained largely unchanged: a pencil or pen made marks on a paper tape turning beneath it.

The Morse key. For well over a century the principal tool and symbol of the telegraph operator’s trade, it was actually a last-minute modification of a more ambitious design.

To facilitate communication using such a crude tool, Morse and Vail created the first draft of the system that would be known forevermore as Morse code. After being further refined and simplified by the German Friedrich Clemens Gerke in 1848, Morse code became the first widely used binary communications standard, the ancestor of later computer protocols like ASCII. In lieu of the zeroes and ones of the computer age, it encoded every letter and digit as a series of dots and dashes, which the operator at the sending end produced on the roll of paper at the other end of the line by pressing and releasing the Morse key quickly (in the case of a dot) or pressing and holding it for a somewhat longer time (in the case of a dash). The system demanded training and practice, not to mention significant manual dexterity, and was far from entirely foolproof even with a seasoned operator on each end of the line. Nonetheless, plenty of people would get very, very good at it, would learn practically to think in Morse code and to transcribe any text into dots and dashes almost as fast as you or I might type it on a computer keyboard. And they would learn to turn a received sequence back into characters on the page with equal facility. The electromagnet attached to the stylus on the receiving end gave out a distinct whine when it was engaged; thanks to this, operators would soon learn to translate messages by ear alone in real time. The sublime ballet of a telegraph line being operated well would become a pleasure to watch, in that way it is always wonderful to watch competent people who take pride in their skilled work going about it.

On May 24, 1844, the Washington-to-Baltimore telegraph line was officially opened for business. Before an audience of journalists, politicians, and other luminaries, Morse himself tapped out the first message in, of all places, the chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States. At the other end of the line in Baltimore, Alfred Vail decoded it before an audience of his own. “What hath God wrought?” it read, a phrase from the Old Testament’s Book of Numbers.

For our purposes, a perhaps more appropriate question might be, “What hath the telegraph wrought?” Thanks to Samuel Morse and his fellow travelers, the first stepping stone toward a World Wide Web had fallen into place.

(Sources: the books A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet by John Naughton; The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage; From Gutenberg to the Internet: A Sourcebook on the History of Information Technology edited by Jeremy M. Norman; The Greek Plays edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm; Les Télégraphes by A.L. Ternant, Power Struggles: Scientific Authority and the Creation of Practical Electricity Before Edison by Michael B. Schiffer, and Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F.B. Morse by Kenneth Silverman. And the paper “The Telegraph of Claude Chappe: An Optical Communications Network for the XVIIIth Century” by J.M. Dilhac.)

Comments
28 Responses

- Jacob

January 7, 2022 at 5:12 pm

This feels like reading a new episode of James Burke’s “Connections” (and that’s not a bad thing).

- Andrew Plotkin

January 7, 2022 at 6:00 pm

> A linear drop-off was certainly better than an exponential one.

This is the fussiest nitpick, but inverse-square is different from exponential.

- Jimmy Maher

January 7, 2022 at 8:52 pm

Thanks!

- Aula

January 7, 2022 at 7:26 pm

“Morse and Vail created the first widely used binary communications standard”

Except that it really wasn’t binary. In addition to the dit (one unit length) and the dah (two unit lengths), the original Morse code used the long dah (four unit lengths, for the letter L) and the very long dah (at least five unit lengths, for the numeral zero), and it also used two different intra-character pauses (of one and two unit lengths); these latter ones were necessary to distinguish the character groups I and O (both had two dits), C, R, and S (all had three dits), and H, Y, Z, and & (all had four dits). Later variants of Morse code that use only dits and dahs (of one and three unit lengths) and one intra-character pause (of one unit length) were developed by other people independently of Morse and Vail.

- EPG

January 7, 2022 at 8:44 pm

The binary is on-off status of the signal.

- Jimmy Maher

January 7, 2022 at 9:03 pm

It’s an argument… but no, he’s right. ;) I was thinking of code itself, not of the underlying physical layer.

- Jimmy Maher

January 7, 2022 at 9:02 pm

Thanks! Made an edit that will hopefully keep me on the right side of the facts without getting too far down in the weeds on this one.

- Ognyan Chernokozhev

January 7, 2022 at 9:03 pm

Great and informative article!

The section about the semaphores in France reminded me of one of the chapters in “The Count of Monte Cristo” book, where the protagonist bribes an employee in a semaphore tower to change the message that was being passed. As a result, one of his adversaries (baron Danglar) receives false information and based on it makes a wrong financial decision and loses a lot of money.
There is even a mention that the man in the preceeding semaphore tower sees that a wrong message was being passed forward.

So, the Count of Monte Cristo was the first (fictional) hacker.

- Jimmy Maher

January 8, 2022 at 8:35 am

That’s great. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never read any Dumas.

- Peter Olausson

January 7, 2022 at 10:35 pm

Thanks for another splendid text. The scope reminds me of your wonder of the world-articles; this modern wonder certainly deserves to be treated like the old ones.

Note 1: Since the optical telegraph required visibility, many of the towers were placed on hills. There are still quite a few Telegraph Hills, Telegrafenhügeln, Telegrafbakker etc in many places, including the possibly most well known one in San Francisco.

Note 2: I found that a system used in Sweden – the second country to build an optical telegraph network – could signal 12 characters per minute. Since it used 9 bits (shutters instead of semaphore arms), this gives a data speed of 1,8 bps.

- Martin

January 8, 2022 at 3:24 am

So where did the actual idea of coding the common and important letters in the shortest and/or easiest to remember/recognize codes come from? Was such a concept already in place from someone else or did Morse and Vail come up with the idea. Was it already known from printing technology where the printer would need many more copies of ‘e’s and ‘t’s letters than ‘z’s and ‘q’s?

- Jimmy Maher

January 8, 2022 at 8:40 am

Yes, it was pretty obvious that some letters of the alphabet are used more than other ones; one doesn’t need to be a printer to notice that. I don’t know offhand of other codes that made use of this fact before Morse code, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t exist.

As an interesting side note: Cooke and Wheatstone’s British system could actually only send twenty letters; the inventors jettisoned six letters they judged to be superfluous.

- Aula

January 8, 2022 at 4:01 pm

Well, the idea of analysing letter frequencies as a method of breaking monoalphabetic substitution ciphers was already centuries old by that time, and polyalphabetic substitution as well as more complicated ciphers had been developed to be resistant to frequency analysis, so people were certainly aware of the importance of the concept in communications. However, Morse and Vail may well have been the first ones to apply it to make communication more (rather than less) efficient.

- Martin

January 8, 2022 at 11:16 pm

I guess that’s I mean, it may seem obvious to us now to use letter frequency to simplify and shorten codes but it wasn’t obvious to Cooke and Wheatstone who I assume didn’t consider it.

It also wasn’t where it went with ASCII which also uses fixed length codes.

Also parallels with early computers that seemed to use either RS-232 (serial like Morse code) or Centronics (parallel like Cooke and Wheatstone) for printers. In the end, our USB world shows serial, like Morse code, won out. Certainly inside computers it was and always will be parallel data transfer, but mass market external data transfer seems to only be serial now.

- Aula

January 9, 2022 at 7:20 am

“Certainly inside computers it was and always will be parallel data transfer”

No, actually even that is serial now. The reason is that parallel data transfer needs to have multiple electric connections to change their state synchronously, and this puts rather strict limits on the maximum transfer rate; since modern processors and memory chips can exceed that rate by a considerable amount, they’ve gone serial years ago.

- Eric

February 17, 2022 at 9:37 am

In his book Code (which shows how to build a rudimentary computer from telegraph relays), Charles Petzold considers Louis Braille to be the “first person to successfully translate the letters of written language to an interpretable code”. He does not give a date, but according to Wikipedia, that would be no more than a handful of years before Morse’s. To my surprise, I learned that the original code did not include the letter w “which isn’t used in classical French” (Braille did have codes for letters with accent marks, though).

Petzold also notes that modern Braille has compression techniques for common groups of letters, which I assume are different in English and French.

- Ethan Johnson

January 8, 2022 at 6:56 am

I know that the larger subject being covered in here is “communications”, but the more specific concept of “data transfer” has been something I wish would be written more in depth about. To me that’s always been the most fascinating aspect of human technological advancement. It basically combines all the best of communications, technology, and historical passage of information through time.

There was a video series I found that took some of the same route that you’re going in explaining links between receiving poles, starting first with written language and moving through signal fires. It was really effective in the beginning and became a bit too technical by the end. Looking forward to see how you’ll be communicating the rest.

- Andrew Pam

January 8, 2022 at 7:47 am

Terry Pratchett’s novel “Going Postal” also covers much of this territory in a fictionalised way, with the intent of conveying it to people more readily engaged by fantasy than by history.

- John

January 8, 2022 at 2:57 pm

My favorite French signal tower system story is the one in which a couple of provincial businessmen bribe a Parisian tower operator to include seemingly-junk data in official transmissions to their city in order to get news of the Parisian markets faster than their competitors. I first heard about it from Tom Standage’s Secret History of the Future podcast, but I would not be surprised if it were also covered in his book.

- Conor

January 8, 2022 at 5:04 pm

I’ve always been fascinated at how the original telegraph lines would “sing.” The technology to dampen acoustic resonance on long wires had to follow the process of putting them up.

Like so many little improvements in technology, it’s one we don’t even think of today.

- Petter Sjölund

January 9, 2022 at 8:48 pm

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned The Information by James Gleick, a very pleasant read on this subject and many related ones. This almost reads like a summary of one of the early chapters.

- Paul

January 13, 2022 at 2:34 pm

Another reading tip: The Tower and the Square, by Niall Ferguson. More about networks (as in, between people), but with interesting chapters on the telegraph as well as other advances that were the necessary building blocks of a global society.

- ghurt

January 15, 2022 at 10:50 am

A similar series of articles on this topic can be found at https://technicshistory.com/ , starting with this article: https://technicshistory.com/2016/11/25/an-expeditious-method-of-conveying-intelligence/

- Michael

January 15, 2022 at 10:55 pm

On re-reading, I decided this isn’t an error, but I thought I’d mention that the phrase:
“much less that which separated, say, Lille from Paris”
brought me up short, and at first I thought it was missing “than” before “that.” In fact, it’s good English as is, but might be confusing to some readers.

- Jimmy Maher

January 16, 2022 at 6:48 am

Thanks, but I think in this case I’m going to leave it be.

- Rinus

January 16, 2022 at 2:20 pm

Fascinating stuff. This reminds me of the book “Flash Boys” by Michael Lewis. It tells the story of a high speed communications line used to gain an unfair advantage when trading stocks (among other things).

- Steve Nicholson

January 22, 2022 at 4:58 pm

“had had ever”

My wife and I lived in Oslo from August 1995 to August 1996. When we left, the Internet was not firmly entrenched in the general public. I remember while in Norway thinking it was finally starting to be useful. Driving from SFO when we returned in 1996, I was amazed that *every* billboard on 101 contained a URL.

- Jimmy Maher

January 22, 2022 at 5:08 pm

Thanks!

A Web Around the World, Part 2: If At First You Don’t Succeed…
January 21, 2022

The early history of the telegraph in commercial service can largely be told as a series of anecdotes, publicity coups that served to convince people that this was a technology worth embracing. The first of these occurred just a few days after the Washington-to-Baltimore line’s inauguration. On May 18, 1844, this first American telegraph service brought to the capital the shocking news that, after nine ballots’ worth of wrangling over the issue, the Baltimore-based Democratic National Convention had settled on a dark-horse candidate for president by the name of James K. Polk; word of this game changer reached the ears of the Washington political establishment within five minutes of the deciding votes being cast. Clearly the telegraph had its uses, in politics as in so many other facets of life. The newspapers were soon filled with more personal anecdotes about the new technology, such as reports of births and deaths delivered instantaneously to the family members affected.

Nevertheless, Samuel Morse found Congress to be stubbornly unforthcoming with more money to build more telegraph lines. After lobbying fruitlessly over the balance of 1844 for what struck him as the next logical step, an extension of the existing line from Baltimore to New York City, he gave up and turned to the private investors who were now beginning to knock at his door. Although neither he nor they could possibly realize it at the time, it would prove a fateful change of course whose aftereffects can still be felt in the world of today. Unlike the European nations, whose communications networks would be funded and managed by their governments, the United States would rely mostly on private industry. The two contrasting funding and governance models more or less persist to the present day.

Rather than attempting to raise capital and wire the United States all by himself, Morse was content to license his telegraph patent to various regional players. The first of these private telegraph lines, linking Philadelphia to New York City, opened in January of 1846. The telegraph’s spread thereafter was breathtaking; the stampede to get onto the World Wide Web during the 1990s has nothing on the speed with which the telegraph became a fixture of everyday American life during the second half of the 1840s.

By 1851, one could send telegraph messages to and from almost any decent-sized American town east of the Mississippi River. To the average mid-nineteenth-century American, the telegraph seemed literally to be a form of magic. Newspapers published rapturous poetry dedicated to Morse’s wondrous invention, which had “annihilated time and space.” Thanks to the telegraph, the United States as a whole became infatuated with the wonders of technology — an infatuation that has never really left it. A thoroughly impressed British visitor reported on the extraordinary range of uses to which the telegraph was already being put just five years after the first lines opened for business:

It is employed in transmitting messages to and from bankers, merchants, members of Congress, officers of government, brokers, and police officers. [It is used for] items of news, election returns, announcements of deaths, inquiries respecting the health of families and individuals, daily proceedings of the Senate and the House of Representatives, orders of goods, inquiries respecting the sailing of vessels, proceedings of cases in various courts, summoning of witnesses, messages for express trains, invitations, the receipt of money at one station and its payment at another; for persons requesting the transmission of funds from debtors, consultation of physicians, and messages of every character usually sent by the mail. The confidence in the efficiency of telegraphic communication is so complete that the most important commercial transactions daily transpire by its means between correspondents several hundred miles apart.

The financiers who built this network out from nothing in almost no time at all were more often than not connected with the railroads that were busily binding the sprawling nation together in another way. Indeed, the telegraph and the railroad were destined to be boon companions for a long, long time to come; the two usually ran along the same rights-of-way, just as with that very first telegraph line from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. Together they were the necessary prerequisites of a burgeoning new age of big business; they became the handmaids of the modern bureaucratic corporation, with its tendrils stretching across the country like the arms of an octopus (a rather sinister analogy that would become a populist favorite during the Gilded Age to come).

In the meanwhile, Western Europe was being wired together at a slower pace. The telegraph first captured anecdotal headlines in Britain on August 6, 1844, when it was used to send word from Windsor Palace to Fleet Street that Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second son, had been born. The Duke of Wellington forgot to bring his best suit down from London with him for the celebratory banquet, but the telegraph and the railroad, those two fast stablemates of Progress, saved the day: an urgent electronic message was sent back up the line, and the duke’s ensemble arrived on the next train.

On January 3, 1845, the railroad and the telegraph had starring roles in a sensational murder case, when one John Tawell killed his mistress in Slough and jumped on a train for London. The police in Slough sent a telegraph message to their counterparts in London to watch for him at the station, and the blackguard was apprehended as he climbed down from his carriage. “It may be observed,” wrote the London Times, “that had it not been for the efficient aid of the London telegraph, the greatest difficulty as well as delay would have occurred in the apprehension of the party now in custody.” After the murderer was duly executed, the telegraph was immortalized in verse as “the cords that hung John Tawell.”

Observing the more rapid expansion of the telegraph in the United States, Britain and the other European nations grudgingly came to accept that Samuel Morse’s simple, robust system was more practical than any of their more baroque approaches. And so, gradually, the rudimentary tool that was the Morse key and the more refined one that was the Morse Code became an international standard. Morse himself, who was determined to receive every dollar and every bit of credit he felt he had coming to him for his inventions, was less pleased than he might have been by these developments, in that he usually wasn’t paid for Europe’s copycat systems. (In 1860, France and several other European nations would finally agree to pay him a one-time joint indemnity of $80,000, far less than he believed he was owed.)

Of course, Morse’s original telegraph had to evolve in some ways in order for a single 40-mile wire to be transformed into a dense network of connections binding entire nations together. Although the core components of Morse’s telegraph — a Morse key used to transmit Morse Code — would remain the same for a century and more, everything else was ripe for improvement. Better batteries and better cables stretched the possible distance between stations and repeaters almost exponentially year by year; switchboards, timetables, and manual routing protocols were developed to move messages through the system quickly and efficiently from any given source to any given destination.

The new telegraph companies attracted the sort of brainy young men who, had they been born in the following century, might have become computer hackers. A freewheeling culture of competitive cooperation that wasn’t at all far removed from the future hacker culture developed around the telegraph, as all of these bright sparks relentlessly optimized their systems, creating their own legends and lore, heroes and villains in the process. They developed shortcuts for talking with one another along the wires that smack of nothing so much as Internet chat: “SFD” stood for “stop for dinner,” “GM” for “good morning”; one almost expects to find an “LOL” lurking around in there somewhere. During downtime, they filled the lines with such idle chatter, or played checkers and chess with their counterparts in other cities using a special system of codes they’d developed — the original form of networked gaming. And surely they must have made fun of the clueless suits who believed they were the ones running things…

As the second half of the nineteenth century began, then, the telegraph had already become an inexorable transformative force on two continents. There now remained only the most world-transforming feat of connectivity of them all: to bridge the aforementioned two continents themselves, thereby to turn two discrete communications networks into one.

Over the last 50 years, the arrival of steamships on the scene had reduced the time it took to get news across the Atlantic from four or six weeks to as little as ten days under ideal conditions. Yet in the new age of the telegraph such an interval still seemed painfully long. What was needed was obvious: a telegraph wire running across — or rather under — the Atlantic Ocean. Samuel Morse had envisioned just such a thing already in 1843: “A telegraph communication on my plan may with certainty be established across the Atlantic! Startling as this may seem now, the time will come when this project is realized.” Nine years later, the magazine Scientific American dreamed of a future when “the earth will be belted by the electric wire, and New York will yet be able to send the throb of her electric pulse through our whole continent, Asia, Africa, and Europe in a second of time.” Such aspirations seemed far-fetched even in light of the magical powers of current telegraph systems. And yet one thoroughly remarkable man would soon set in motion a major transatlantic effort to realize them — an effort whose vision, daring, and sheer audacity makes it worthy of comparison to the twentieth century’s Project Apollo.

Cyrus Field

This giant nerve, at whose command
The world’s great pulses throb or sleep —
It threads the undiscerned repose
Of the dark bases of the deep.

Around it settle in the calm
Fine tissues that a breath might mar,
Nor dream what fiery tidings pass,
What messages of storm and war.

Far over it, where filtered gleams
Faintly illumine the mid-sea day,
Strange, pallid forms of fish or weed
In the obscure tide softly sway.

And higher, where the vagrant waves
Frequent the white, indifferent sun,
Where ride the smoke-blue hordes of rain
And the long vapors lift and run,

Pauses, perhaps, some lonely ship
With exile hearts that homeward ache —
While far beneath it flashed a word
That soon shall bid them bleed or break.

— “The Atlantic Cable” by Charles G.D. Roberts

During this antebellum era of the United States, New York City’s Astor House was the most famous hotel in the country, the place where all of the movers and shakers stayed when they came to the business capital of the nation. In January of 1854, two of the Astor’s guests happened to be Matthew Field, a prominent railroad engineer, and Frederick Gisborne, a British entrepreneur who was attempting to secure additional funding for a project that had proved much more difficult than he had first anticipated: a telegraph line linking the town of St. John’s on the island of Newfoundland with the town of Sydney on the island of Cape Breton, which entailed some 400 miles of overland and about 85 miles of undersea cable.

The undersea portion of the telegraph line would need to be run between Channel-Port aux Basques and the northern tip of Cape Breton, where Cape Breton Highlands National Park is today.

When they bumped into one another one evening in the bar and Gisborne told Field how strapped for cash he was, his interlocutor could well understand the reluctance of potential investors. He asked Gisborne why on earth he wanted to build a telegraph cable in such a remote and inhospitable location at all, serving a Newfoundland population of fishermen that numbered in the bare handful of thousands. Gisborne’s response surprised him: he explained that St. John’s was actually the most easterly town in the Americas, fully one-third closer to Europe than New York City was. If fast steamers carrying urgent messages docked there instead of at one of the larger eastern cities, then passed said messages on to a telegraph operator there, they could substantially cut the communication time between the two continents. Gisborne envisioned a bustling trade of businesses and governments willing to pay well to reduce their best-case communication lag from ten to seven days.

Matthew Field was intrigued enough that he mentioned Gisborne and his scheme to his brother Cyrus Field, who at the age of just 33 was already one of the richest men in New York City. He had made his fortune in paper, but was now semi-retired from business life; being possessed of a decided taste for adventure, he had recently returned from an expedition to some of the more remote regions of South America, in the company of the great landscape painter Frederic Church. Cyrus Field took a meeting with Gisborne, but wasn’t overly impressed with his plan, which struck him as an awful lot of trouble and expense for a fairly modest gain in communication speed. The matter might have ended there — but for one thing. “After [Gisborne] left,” wrote Henry M. Field (another of Cyrus’s brothers) in his history of the Atlantic Cable, “Mr. Field took the globe which was standing in the library, and began to turn it over. It was while thus studying the globe that the idea first occurred to him that the telegraph might be carried further still, and be made to span the Atlantic Ocean.”

It’s hard not to compare this realization with Samuel Morse’s own eureka moment aboard the Sully 22 years earlier. Like Morse at the time, Field was enough of a rank amateur to believe that his brainstorm was a new idea under the sun. Knowing nothing whatsoever about telegraphy, eager to find out if a transatlantic cable was a realistic possibility, Field dispatched two letters. One was to Morse, the one name in the field that absolutely everyone was familiar with. The other was to one Matthew Fontaine Maury, a noted oceanographer and intellectual jack-of-all-trades who wore the uniform of the United States Navy. Both responded enthusiastically: Morse was excited enough to join the project as an official advisor and to offer Field the use of his precious telegraph patent for free, while Maury explained that he had thought about the question enough already to propose a route for the cable between Newfoundland and Ireland, based upon deep-sea soundings he had recently conducted. The route in question was, he said, “neither too deep nor too shallow; yet it is so deep that the wires but once landed will remain forever beyond the reach of vessels’ anchors, icebergs, and drifts of any kind, and so shallow that the wires may be readily lodged upon the bottom.”

The planned course of the cable between Ireland and Newfoundland.

Field’s further inquiries revealed that underwater telegraphy wasn’t an entirely black art. As early as 1845, well before the landlocked telegraph became a reality of daily life in the developed world, an experimental cable had been laid under the Hudson River between New York City and Fort Lee, New Jersey, sheathed in a rubber-packed lead pipe; it had functioned for several months, until the winter ice did it in. In 1851, an underwater cable had bridged the 31 miles of the English Channel, to be followed soon after by another cable connecting Britain to Ireland. Using the latest batteries and wiring, such distances and more were by now possible without employing any repeaters.

So, Field set about enlisting other wealthy men into his cause, whilst getting Gisborne to accept a relegation to the role of chief engineer in what was now to be a much more ambitious venture than he had ever envisioned. In March of 1854, a company was founded with an appropriately ambitious name: the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company. The founders estimated that they would need about $1.5 million to complete their task. This was no small sum in 1854; the entire budget of the federal government of the United States that year totaled just $54 million. Nevertheless, the project would end up costing far, far more. “God knows that none of us were aware of what we had undertaken to accomplish,” Cyrus Field would muse later. Had they known, it is doubtful they ever would have begun.

There is nothing in the world easier than to build a line of railroad or of telegraph on paper. You have only to take the map and mark the points to be connected, and then with a single sweep of the pencil to draw the line along which the iron track is to run. In this airy flight of the imagination, distances are nothing. All obstacles disappear. The valleys are exalted, and the hills are made low, soaring arches span the mountain streams, and the chasms are leaped in safety by the fire-drawn cars.

Very different it is to construct a line of railroad or of telegraph in reality; to come with an army of laborers, with axes on their shoulders to cut down the forests, and with spades in their hands to cast up the highway. Then poetry sinks to prose, and instead of flying over the space on wings, one must traverse it on foot, slowly and with painful steps. Nature asserts her power, and, as if resentful of the disdain with which man in his pride affected to leap over her, she piles up new barriers in his way. The mountains with their rugged sides cannot be moved out of their place, the rocks must be cleft in twain, to open a passage for the conqueror, before he can begin his triumphal march. The woods thicken into impassable jungle, and the morass sinks deeper, threatening to swallow up the horse and his rider, until the rash projector is startled at his own audacity. Then it becomes a contest of forces between man and nature, in which, if he would be victorious, he must fight his way. The barriers of nature cannot be lightly pushed aside, but must yield at last only to time and toil, and “man’s unconquerable will.”

— Henry M. Field, The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph

The newly incorporated New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company decided that its first goal ought to be the completion of Gisborne’s original project, which would also constitute the fulfillment of two-thirds of its name: a telegraph line linking Newfoundland to New York City, via Cape Breton. Such a line would hopefully bring some money in to help fund the vastly more audacious final third of the company’s name.

The first stage of this first goal required no underwater cable, but was daunting enough in its own right: it entailed running an overland cable from St. John’s across the widest part of Newfoundland to the point where the underwater cable was planned to begin. Gisborne had managed to complete the first 40 miles of this link before his money ran out; that left 260 miles still to go. Matthew Field took charge of this endeavor in the summer of 1854, anticipating that it would be done within a year. But he hadn’t reckoned with the rugged, isolated, in many places well-nigh unmapped terrain the work party had to cross, where opportunities for living off the land were few. The logistics surrounding the building of the line thus became much more complicated than the construction effort itself; the 600 men involved in the effort had to build their own roads as they went just to get supplies in and out. “Recently, in building half a mile of road, we had to bridge three ravines,” wrote Matthew Field to his brother Cyrus on one occasion. “Why didn’t we go around the ravines? Because Mr. Gisborne had explored twenty miles in both directions and found more ravines. That’s why!” The whole project could have served as a case study in why builders of telegraph lines usually preferred to follow the smooth, straight paths which the builders of railroads had already cut through the landscape. Alas, that wasn’t an option on Newfoundland.

And then the dark, cold northern winter set in, exacerbating the builders’ suffering that much more. “What hardships and suffering the men endured — all this is a chapter in the History of the Telegraph which has not been written, and which can never be fully told,” writes Henry Field. Bridging Newfoundland and then constructing another 100 miles of overland telegraph line on Cape Breton to reach Sydney wound up taking two years and costing more than $1 million all by itself.

While Matthew Field’s party was inching its way thorough the wilds, Cyrus Field was growing impatient to begin laying the undersea part of the route, which he saw as an important test run of sorts for the eventual laying of an Atlantic-spanning cable. He went to London to purchase 85 miles of the best undersea cable money could buy, the same as that which had been used to connect Britain to France and Ireland. It consisted of three intertwined copper-alloy wires, sheathed in tarred hemp, gutta-percha, and galvanized iron wire — guaranteed, so the sellers said, to be impervious to water forever. Field made plans to lay the undersea cable already in the summer of 1855, when the overland cable was still only half completed.

Having as keen an instinct for publicity as any tech mogul of today, Field decided to turn the laying of the cable into a junket for existing and potential investors. Thus on August 7, 1855, the luxury coastal steamer James Adgar departed New York Harbor with many of the brightest stars in the moneyed East Coast firmament aboard. It was to rendezvous off the coast of Newfoundland with an older sailing ship, a sturdy brig called the Sarah L. Bryant carrying the shiny new cable from London, then tow it as it paid out the cable behind it across the Cabot Strait that separates Newfoundland from Cape Breton.

Right from the start, everything that possibly could went wrong, a result not only of bad luck but of a thoroughgoing lack of planning and preparation. The Bryant failed to turn up at the appointed time. When it did appear several days late, it was in a sorry state, having been badly battered by a rough Atlantic crossing weighted down by the cable in its hold. More days were spent on repairs, after which an impenetrable fog rolled in and forced the two ships to sit idle for yet 48 more hours. When the weather cleared at last and the Adgar tried to take the Bryant in tow to begin the operation, a series of cock-ups caused the steamship to ram the brig broadside, very nearly breaking it in two. The captain of the Adgar, whose name was Turner, was by now convinced — and not without justification, it must be admitted — that he was dealing with a bunch of rank amateurs; he grew willfully uncooperative, refusing to steer the course and speed asked of him even after he finally had the Bryant in tow. Cyrus Field and his party watched with alarm as the Adgar’s high speed, combined with the weight of the cable spooling out behind, caused the Bryant’s stern to dip lower and lower into the water. Meanwhile the light breeze that had marked the morning’s weather was becoming a howling sidelong gale by mid-afternoon, threatening to capsize the already floundering brig. The captain of the Bryant felt he had no choice: he cut both the tow rope and the telegraph cable, letting the latter fall uselessly into the ocean.

John Wells Stancliff, an amateur painter who was a part of the 1855 attempt to lay a telegraph cable from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia, created this dramatic image of the Sarah L. Bryant being towed through dangerously choppy seas by the James Adgar.

The company’s first attempt to lay an undersea cable had proved an unadulterated fiasco, with the chattering class in ringside seats for the whole sorry spectacle. The final price tag: $351,000 almost literally tossed into the ocean.

Publicly, the partners blamed it all, more than a little disingenuously, on Captain Turner of the Adgar: “We had spent so much money, and lost so much time, that it was very vexatious to have our enterprise defeated by the stupidity and obstinacy of one man.” In truth, though, the obstinate captain was neither the only nor the most important reason that everything had gone sideways. The company had learned the hard way that a sailing ship in tow simply didn’t have the maneuverability necessary to lay a cable in the notoriously temperamental waters of the North Atlantic.

Luckily, Cyrus Field was a man capable of learning from his mistakes. He traveled to London again and bought another cable. And the next summer, just as the overland lines across Newfoundland and Cape Breton were being completed, he tried again to lay it under the ocean. This time, however, he used the agile modern steamer Propontis for the purpose, and invited no one to witness the endeavor, in case it all went wrong again. He needn’t have worried: it all went off without a hitch. The newly minted telegraph connection between St. John’s and Sydney would suffer no service interruptions for the next ten years — a very impressive service record for any line by the standards of the mid-nineteenth century.

Unfortunately, the completion of Frederick Gisborne’s original project had cost the company all of its starting capital and then some — and yet there were still 2000 miles to go if the cable was to reach Ireland. The completed stretch of line ended up bringing in the merest pittance, as Field had suspected it would when Gisborne first broached his idea to him.

So, Field traveled yet again to London, the financial capital of the world, to beat the bushes for more investors. He met with no less skepticism there than he had in his home country; no less august a personage than the head of the Royal Greenwich Observatory called it “a mathematical impossibility to submerge the cable at so great a depth, and if it were possible, no signals could be transmitted through so great a length.” But Cyrus Field could be persuasive: by the time he left Britain six months later, he had formed a new corporation called the Atlantic Telegraph Company, with £350,000 (the equivalent of £40 million or $53 million today) of investment capital; the roll call of those who had pledged their money to the cause included such well-known names as the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. Lest anyone accuse him of failing to put his money where his mouth was, know that the total also included the majority of Field’s own remaining fortune.

Almost as importantly, the British government promised to pay £14,000 per year to use the telegraph for diplomatic dispatches, and offered to loan the company the recently commissioned 3500-ton steam-powered battleship HMS Agamemnon for the laying of the cable — a poetically appropriate choice, given how the ship shared a name with the ancient tragedy which contains the first documented description of a long-distance signaling system. So, just like that, the Atlantic Telegraph Company had its first customer. Shortly thereafter, it gained its second, when the American government agreed to virtually the same deal: $70,000 per year to make use of the cable. And the Americans too offered a ship for the purpose of laying it: the USS Niagara, a fast, modern 5200-ton steam-powered frigate that was due to be commissioned in the spring of 1857 in the New York Navy Yard. The pride of the United States Navy already, the Niagara was set to become the biggest and arguably the most powerful warship in service anywhere in the world.

The USS Niagara. It dates from that odd era in naval history when builders were still hedging their bets between sail and steam power by equipping their ships with both. Its hull too was a hybrid of old and new, being made of wood draped over a skeleton of steel.

Working from the proposals of Matthew Fontaine Maury, the company plotted a relatively level course for the cable across the Atlantic seafloor. The company’s engineers believed that, by combining a big power source with a cable big enough to handle all the juice it put out without melting, they could push a signal fully 2000 miles without a single repeater; the old, vexing problem of signal loss down a wire had largely been solved by now by brute force. But another potential problem had since cropped up that rather smacked of this older one.

Earlier underwater telegraph cables had proved to be subject to a peculiar phenomenon: the farther the signal traveled down the wire, the more distorted it became. “A signal which is sent off as a short, sharp, sudden impulse,” writes the historian of telegraphy Silvanus P. Thompson, “in being transmitted to greater and greater distances is changed in character, smoothed out into a longer-lasting impulse, which rises gradually to a maximum and then gradually dies away.” It became harder and harder for the telegraph operator at the other end of the line to work out the dots and dashes of Morse Code from a signal that was slowly being transformed from a stair-step pattern to a series of gentler waves and troughs as it traveled farther and farther down the wire.

This phenomenon, which was dubbed signal “retardation,” was odd in that it didn’t show itself in overland telegraph lines at all. So far, it had been an annoyance rather than a showstopper even for underwater telegraphy — but then, no one had yet tried to lay an underwater cable 2000 miles long. The British physicist Michael Faraday demonstrated retardation to be a direct result of the immersion of an insulated wire into the conductive material that is water; this can cause the insulation to become charged with static electricity, which in turn distorts the signal in the wire it is designed to protect.

A British mathematician and physicist named William Thomson concluded that there was a “law of squares” governing retardation, meaning it was proportional to the square of the cable’s length. But one Wildman Whitehouse, a British surgeon and gentleman experimenter, begged to differ: he claimed that retardation increased linearly down the length of a cable. So, he said, the problem actually wasn’t as big as Thomson made it sound. And there was, he noted, a straightforward solution of sorts to the problem of retardation even when it was at its worst: operators could simply work their Morse keys more slowly to ensure that every pulse remained distinct. In the end, Cyrus Field felt he had no choice but to gamble that he would be able to transmit quickly enough along his line to make a profit.

Field then asked both William Thomson and Wildman Whitehouse what type of cable they thought would work best. Predictably enough, they were in complete disagreement. Thomson believed that the thicker the wire at the core of the cable and the thicker the layer of protective insulation around it, the less retardation the whole would be subject to; he thus recommended a cable as big around as a man’s upper arm. He also believed that a more naturally conductive wire would be subject to less retardation, and therefore proposed a core made of pure copper rather than the more typical copper alloy. Finally, he proposed a new, ultra-sensitive galvanometer for detecting signals on the receiving end, something he had ideas for but had yet to make a reality.

Whitehouse, on the other hand, was vastly more sanguine. A thinner cable made from a copper alloy, combined with the already proven technologies for sending and receiving, would be just fine according to him; his proposed cable would be only as big around as a man’s wrist.

Unsurprisingly, Field opted for Whitehouse’s approach, by far the cheaper and easier of the two to see through in the real world. In fact, his engineers had told him that it was doubtful whether a cable conforming to Thomson’s specifications could be laid at all; it would wind up being simply too heavy to handle.

The future Atlantic Cable being made in London.

So, without considering the matter further, Field sent an order to London for 2500 miles of Whitehouse’s cable, at a price of £225,000. (The peaks and valleys of the ocean floor, plus the fact that the cable would not be stretched completely taut, meant that crossing 2000 miles of ocean would surely take considerably more than just 2000 miles of the stuff.) When Thomson was given a snippet of it to test, he was horrified to discover its alloy core was so sloppily made that some sections were twice as conductive as other sections. But the die was now cast.

Whitehouse’s cable may have been comparatively light, but it still weighed one ton per mile, and there was no ship in the world at the time capable of carrying a load of 2500 tons. Therefore the company made plans to load half of this longest length of cable ever made aboard each of the Agamemnon and the Niagara. The ships would sail together, and when the first ship ran out of cable somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, the other would splice the beginning of its cable onto the end of the first and complete the job.

On April 24, 1857, the Niagara departed New York Harbor on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic, its decks and holds cleared of guns and ammunition to make room for the massive weight of cable that was to be loaded in Britain. Aboard were the Field brothers, Samuel Morse, and a party of engineers and technicians in the employ of one or the other of Cyrus Field’s recently formed telegraph companies; more personnel would be picked up in Britain. Relations between the United States and Britain were not yet as warm as they would become in later decades; the British Army had, after all, sacked and burned Washington, D.C., within the lifetime of most of the politicians there. The Atlantic cable and the cooperative endeavor of laying it were therefore invested with huge symbolic importance by the governments of both nations. Windy speeches and toasts accompanied the Niagara as it met up with the Agamemnon in Plymouth, England, then continued apace as the two ships loaded their unique cargoes, a tricky process that wound up taking quite some weeks. When that task was completed at last, they sailed on to the tiny port of Queenstown (now known as Cobh) on the southern tip of Ireland, where the eastern end of the cable was to make landfall. As a further symbol of the emerging spirit of transatlantic cooperation and trust, the American Niagara was to begin the laying of the cable on the British side of the ocean, while the British Agamemnon would complete it on the American side.

Loading the cable aboard the ships was no small task in itself. It had to be dragged up from the quay and laboriously wound around the giant spools in the ships’ holds.

But first, the two ships anchored side by side off the coast of Ireland to conduct an important test. The crew of the Niagara ferried the end of their cable over to the Agamemnon, where it was spliced with the one onboard that ship. Telegraph operators aboard each of the ships then sent a series of test signals back and forth. The 2500-mile connection worked. Whatever the ultimate merits of the cable Field had elected to purchase, the moment was a telling testament to an extraordinarily rapid evolution in electrical engineering and materials science since that time less than two decades before when Samuel Morse had struggled to push a decipherable signal down 40 feet of wire.

With the test completed, it was time to begin the actual laying of the cable. Its end came ashore on the evening of August 5, 1857, to the accompaniment of much celebration and speechifying. Cyrus Field was clearly touched when he stepped up to the podium:

I have no words to express the feelings which fill my heart tonight — it beats with love and affection for every man, woman, and child who hears me. I may say, however, that, if ever at the other side of the waters now before us, any one of you shall present himself at my door and say that he took hand or part, even by an approving smile, in our work here today, he shall have a true American welcome. I cannot bind myself to more, and shall merely say, “What God has joined together, let not man put asunder.”

Paying out the first of the cable from the stern of the Niagara. Note the cage around the ship’s screws, put there to make sure the cable couldn’t become entangled in them. The sailors liked to call it a “crinoline,” after the wire hoops used to support ladies’ skirts.

A 25-year-old British telegraph engineer named Charles Bright had designed an ingenious mechanism for drawing the cable up from the spools in the ships’ holds and paying it out in a controlled fashion behind them. As the Niagara and its escort crept away from Ireland at a speed of three to six knots, Bright himself monitored his machine day and night, adjusting it constantly to account for the shifting topography of the seafloor beneath and the wind and waves that buffeted the vessel on whose deck it rode. Telegraph operators ashore in Ireland and aboard the ship tapped out a constant patter back and forth to confirm that the cable was still functioning. The distinctive, steady rumble of the pay-out mechanism became an equally important source of comfort to everyone aboard, another reminder that everything was working as it ought to. “If one should drop to sleep, and wake up at night,” wrote Henry Field later, “he has only to hear the sound of ‘the old coffee mill,’ and his fears are relieved, and he goes to sleep again.”

Charles Bright’s paying-out mechanism on the deck of the Niagara.

By the dawn hours of August 10, almost 300 miles of cable had been laid without a hitch, and Bright stepped away from his machine for some much needed rest, leaving it in the charge of one of his assistants. At 3:45 AM, the ship plunged into the trough of an unusually large wave. As it rose again, the cable was pulled taut. The attendant Bright had left in charge should have reduced the braking force in the mechanism, to let the cable spool out faster and ease the strain on it. But he failed to do so in time. The cable snapped with a sound that reverberated through the decks like the clap of doom. In a flash, the frayed end was lost forever beneath the ocean.

“Instantly ran through the ship a cry of grief and dismay,” writes Henry Field. “All gathered on deck with feelings which may be imagined.” The captain of the Niagara would remember the moment as akin to the death of a “dear friend”; he promptly ordered his ship’s flag lowered to half mast.

Field and his colleagues did a quick assessment, and concluded that the well over 300 miles of cable they had lost left them without enough of it remaining to start over again and hope to complete their task. There was nothing for it but to return to Britain. Once back in London, Field learned that it wasn’t possible to manufacture the needed additional cable before the Atlantic winter made the project of laying it too dangerous to attempt. So, the Niagara sailed for home for the season, and the naysayers and mockers on both sides of the ocean came out in force. A parody of “Pop Goes the Weasel!” made the music-hall rounds:

Pay it out! Oh, pay it out
As long as you are able:
For if you put the damned brake on:
Pop goes the cable!

But Cyrus Field professed himself to be undaunted — indeed, to be more encouraged than discouraged by recent events. Rather than the dismal failure described in the popular press, he chose to see his first attempt to lay his Atlantic Cable as a successful proof of concept; he had sent and received underwater telegraph signals over a gap several times longer than anyone had ever managed before. All he needed to go the full distance were a modestly redesigned paying-out mechanism and some equally modest operational refinements. He said as much in a letter to his investors:

The successful laying down of the Atlantic Telegraph Cable is put off for a short time, but its final triumph has been fully proved by the experience that we have had. My confidence was never so strong as at the present time, and I feel sure that, with God’s blessing, we shall connect Europe and America with the electric cord.

The first Atlantic cable may have been lost forever beneath the cold, dark waves of the ocean, but Field’s passion for the task burned as warmly as ever.

(Sources: the books The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage, Power Struggles: Scientific Authority and the Creation of Practical Electricity Before Edison by Michael B. Schiffer, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F.B. Morse by Kenneth Silverman, A Thread across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Telegraph by John Steele Gordon, The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph by Henry M. Field, and The Life of William Thomson by Silvanus Phillips Thompson; The Atlantic Monthly of November 1862. Online sources include “The Telegraph and Chess” by Bill Wall, Distant Writing: A History of the Telegraph Companies in Britain between 1838 and 1868 by Steven Roberts, and History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications.)

Comments
24 Responses

- Ishkur

January 21, 2022 at 6:41 pm

Loving this episode of James Burke’s Connections.

What are your sources for this, Jimmy? I would love to know more. This period of technological bravery is fascinating to me. The things people tried and the obstacles they encountered to get stuff to work.

You should turn this into a YouTube documentary series, since most of the Internet doesn’t read longform articles anymore.

(also: “Lady’s skirts” should be “Ladies’ skirts” if you want to use the plural possessive)

- Jimmy Maher

January 21, 2022 at 8:27 pm

Thanks!

Sources are at the bottom of the article. ;) A Thread Across the Ocean is a very good, readable history of the Atlantic cable. Henry Field’s book is also surprisingly good, but does require a tolerance of/appreciation for the more ornate prose style of the nineteenth century.

- cpt kangarooski

January 24, 2022 at 8:00 am

Another good source, which may be helpful if this series goes where it looks like it’s going to go, is Neal Stephenson’s essay Mother Earth Mother Board from Wired in the 90s (it was pretty clearly also research for Cryptonomicon). Although it mostly deals with undersea fiber optic cables there is also a good discussion of early undersea telegraph cables.

- ST

January 21, 2022 at 11:05 pm

A great post, as usual.

However, a small nitpick: at one point you refer to the “Royal Army” burning down DC. The British Army very pointedly does not carry the prefix royal of the navy ( and later air force), for historic reasons ( having grown out of the anti-royal parliamentary new army in the civil war). Some individual regiments carry it and are thus the Royal X, but there is no such thing as a Royal Army in the British context.

- Jimmy Maher

January 22, 2022 at 8:04 am

I’m embarrassed to say, given all the World War II history I read as a kid, that I didn’t realize that. Thanks!

- Jerzy

January 22, 2022 at 12:18 am

What a riveting tale!

Small typo:
“one almost expects to find an “LOL” lurking around in their somewhere”
should be
“…in there…”

- Jimmy Maher

January 22, 2022 at 8:05 am

Thanks!

- Martin

January 22, 2022 at 2:45 am

Can you say more about where the electricity came from? This is all before the theories of Maxwell so no generators and we are left with accumulator cells. Not exactly known for their voltage which you say had to be upped to get the signal to travel further. Plus Newfoundland is cold which is not the best place for batteries either.

- Jimmy Maher

January 22, 2022 at 8:19 am

Not a subject I know enough about to go into huge detail, but I do know that the batteries being used in telegraphy at this stage were still voltaic piles, and would remain such until the 1870s. The main way of increasing output was increasing the size and quantity of battery cores. It should be understood that what might have been considered high voltage in the middle of the nineteenth century really wasn’t that much in modern terms.

At a later stage, attempts were made to increase voltage by wiring multiple batteries up to accumulator coils, but the cables proved incapable of handling the load. We’ll get into just a bit of that next time…

- flowmotion

January 22, 2022 at 4:12 am

Reminds me of when I first got on the Internet in the very early 1990s. The entire UK was said to be connected to the ‘net by a cable roughly the speed of a T1 line (1.5Mbps). Email etc was fine, but file transfers were said to be very slow. Some silicon valley techie types had a faster connection into their house.

- Nate

January 22, 2022 at 7:59 am

I see you’ve found a way to bring the Analog Antiquarian and Digital together. Great idea, and you should do this more.

Matthew Fontaine Maury was my great great grandfather. Pretty amazing person.

Missing a period:
“ license his telegraph patent to various regional players The first of these”

- Jimmy Maher

January 22, 2022 at 8:07 am

Wow. Small world. Thanks!

- Fredrik Arnerup

January 22, 2022 at 9:49 am

“Electricity, like all electromagnetic energy, moves through a vacuum at the speed of light.”

I’m sorry, but I have to nitpick. First, an electric current is carried by particles with mass, usually electrons, which can never move at the speed of light, though they can move through a vacuum. Electromagnetic radiation, e.g. light, is carried by massless photons and can move at the speed of light. Second, the speed of the electrons themselves is not relevant. In wire they move quite slowly. What matters is the speed of the signal. Imagine lining up a long line of billiard balls. If you hit the first one, the last will move almost instantaneously, but the ones in between while hardly have moved at all.

As for the “retardation”, what I believe the problem was is that the transmission speed of a signal depends on the frequency of the signal. A sine wave has a single frequency, so it would pass unaltered, but the square wave of morse code contains many different frequencies, so the signal will start to distort as soon as it is being transmitted. The longer the line, the more time the signal has to smear.

- Jimmy Maher

January 22, 2022 at 11:26 am

Thanks for this. I’ve altered the explanation. Let me know if there are still problems…

- Sniffnoy

January 22, 2022 at 4:21 pm

Word swap error: You have “exhibition” for “expedition”.

- Jimmy Maher

January 22, 2022 at 4:51 pm

Thanks!

- Aula

January 23, 2022 at 12:33 pm

“Maury explained that he had thought about the question enough already to propose a route for the cable between Newfoundland and Ireland, based upon deep-sea soundings he had recently conducted”

Maybe it should be noted that Maury’s picture of the bottom of the Atlantic wasn’t really very accurate at all; his soundings were so few and far between that he couldn’t even detect the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

“that odd era in naval history when builders were still hedging their bets between sail and steam power by equipping their ships with both”

That’s an odd way to frame the situation. The two modes of propulsion were originally intended for different purposes; the steam engines were meant for low speed and accurate maneuverability, to be used in situations where a sail-only ship would need to be pulled and/or pushed by tugs, while the sails were for high speed ocean crossing. Then, as designers learned from practical experience what worked and what didn’t, steam engines were gradually developed to be more reliable and more powerful, until people realized that sails had become completely superfluous.

“a signal traveling at just one percent of the speed of light can still cross the Atlantic in less than one second”

While that’s true, it’s also irrelevant; the difference between the speed of light and the speed of signal propagation in electric wires is much smaller than the actual speed itself.

“The real issue was that different frequencies of current traveled at different speeds”

That is also true but mostly irrelevant; the frequency dependency of speed is too tiny to matter much for human-generated Morse code even at such a large distance. What caused most of the spreading of the rectangular Morse code pulses is the fact that the *dampening* of the signal depends strongly on the frequency.

- Martin

January 23, 2022 at 6:36 pm

I know this is going off subject, but I have to ask. If they used a sine wave for the signal, and let’s say 30 hz for a dot and 60 hz for a dash (and signal breaks between them), are you saying all (most) of the problems would go away?

- Aula

January 24, 2022 at 4:14 pm

No, not really. Even if you ignore the fact that the technology to generate and detect sine waves didn’t exist yet at the time, the method you suggest wouldn’t have allowed much increase in transmission speed, because modulating a sine wave with a on/off pulse still generates a lot of higher frequency components, and if these are filtered out, the base frequency will still spread out at the receiving end.

- Jimmy Maher

January 23, 2022 at 7:39 pm

I appreciate the additional details on Maury and steamships, but I’m comfortable not going any further into the weeds there.

On the subject of retardation, though, I went on a dive into older sources — particularly Silvanus Phillips Thompson’s 1910 biography of William Thompson and a November 1862 article from The Atlantic Monthly of all places — and I think I’ve finally got the explanation right this time.

- Veronica Summers

January 29, 2022 at 6:07 pm

Great read as always, Jimmy!

One question I have is that you frequently refer to “Canadians” and “Canada”
However these events all take place prior to Confederation in 1867, so “Canada” didn’t exist. There were British and French settlements referred to as Upper and Lower Canada, but the residents considered themselves French and British. The notions of “Canada” and “Canadians” did not exist.

Previously, your stated policy has been to refer to historical people as the public would have referred to them at the time (not as we would now, looking back). Has this policy changed?

- Jimmy Maher

January 29, 2022 at 9:59 pm

I had assumed that Newfoundland and Cape Breton were part of the British province of Canada, but I see now they were not. (Newfoundland didn’t actually become a part of Canada until 1949…) Thanks!

- Gareth

February 22, 2022 at 5:11 am

I don’t think you want the “inversely” in “inversely proportional to”.

- Jimmy Maher

February 25, 2022 at 9:45 am

Yes! Thanks!

A Web Around the World, Part 3: …Try, Try Again
February 4, 2022

A major financial panic struck the United States in August of 1857, just as the Niagara was making the first attempt to lay the Atlantic cable. Cyrus Field had to mortgage his existing businesses heavily just to keep them going. But he was buoyed by one thing: as the aftershocks of the panic spread to Europe, packet steamers took to making St. John’s, Newfoundland, their first port of call in the Americas for the express purpose of passing the financial news they carried to the island’s telegraph operators so that it could reach Wall Street as quickly as possible. It had taken the widespread threat of financial ruin, but Frederick Gisborne’s predictions about the usefulness of a Newfoundland telegraph were finally coming true. Now just imagine if the line could be extended all the way across the Atlantic…

While he waited for the return of good weather to the Atlantic, Field sought remedies for everything that had gone wrong with the first attempt to lay a telegraph cable across an ocean. The Niagara’s chief engineer, a man named William Everett, had examined Charles Bright’s paying-out mechanism with interest during the last expedition, and come up with a number of suggestions for improving it. Field sought and was granted Everett’s temporary release from the United States Navy, and brought him to London to redesign the machine. The result was actually simpler in most ways, being just one-fourth of the weight and one-third of the size of Bright’s design. But it incorporated a critical new feature: the brake now set and released itself automatically in response to the level of tension on the cable. “It seemed to have the intelligence of a human being, to know when to hold on and when to let go,” writes Henry Field. In reality, it was even better than a human being, in that it never got tired and never let its mind wander; no longer would a moment’s inattention on the part of a fallible human operator be able to wreck the whole project.

Charles Bright accepted the superseding of his original design with good grace; he was an engineer to the core, the new paying-out machine was clearly superior to the old one, and so there wasn’t much to discuss in his view. There was ongoing discord, however, between two more of Cyrus Field’s little band of advisors.

Wildman Whitehouse and William Thomson had been competing for Field’s ear for quite some time now. At first the former had won out, largely because he told Field what he most wished to hear: that a transatlantic telegraph could be made to work with an unusually long but otherwise fairly plebeian cable, using bog-standard sending and receiving mechanisms. But Field was a thoughtful man, and of late he’d begun losing faith in the surgeon and amateur electrical experimenter. He was particularly bothered by Whitehouse’s blasé attitude toward the issue of signal retardation.

Meanwhile Thomson was continuing to whisper contrary advice in his ear. He said that he still thought it would be best to use a thicker cable like the one he had originally proposed, but, when informed that there just wasn’t money in the budget for such a thing, he said that he thought he could get even Whitehouse’s design to work more efficiently. His scheme exploited the fact that even a heavily retarded signal probably wouldn’t become completely uniform: the current at the far end of the wire would still be full of subtle rises and falls where the formerly discrete dots and dashes of Morse Code had been. Thomson had been working on a new, ultrasensitive galvanometer, which ingeniously employed a lamp, a magnet, and a tiny mirror to detect the slightest variation in current amplitude. Two operators would work together to translate a signal on the receiving end of the cable: one, trained to interpret the telltale patterns of reflected light bobbing up and down in front of him, would translate them into Morse Code and call it out to his partner. Over the strident objections of Whitehouse, Field agreed to install the system, and also agreed to give Thomson access to the enormous spools of existing cable that were now warehoused in Plymouth, England, waiting for the return of spring. Thomson meticulously tested the cable one stretch at a time, and convinced Field to let him cut out those sections where its conductivity was worst.

The United States and Royal Navies agreed to lend the Atlantic Telegraph Company the same two vessels as last time for a second attempt at laying the cable. To save time, however, it was decided that the ships would work simultaneously: they would sail to the middle of the Atlantic, splice their cables together there, then each head toward a separate continent. So, in April of 1858, the Niagara and the Agamemnon arrived in Plymouth to begin the six-week process of loading the cable. They sailed together from there on June 10. Samuel Morse elected not to travel with the expedition this time, but Charles Bright, William Thomson, Cyrus Field and his two brothers, and many of the other principals were aboard one or the other ship.

They had been told that “June was the best month for crossing the Atlantic,” as Henry Field writes. They should be “almost sure of fair weather.” On the contrary, on June 13 the little fleet sailed into the teeth of one of the worst Atlantic storms of the nineteenth century. The landlubbers aboard had never imagined that such a natural fury as this could exist. For three days, the ships were lashed relentlessly by the wind and waves. With 1250 tons of cable each on their decks and in their holds, both the Niagara and the Agamemnon rode low in the water and were a handful to steer under the best of circumstances; now they were in acute danger of foundering, capsizing, or simply breaking to pieces under the battering.

The Agamemnon was especially hard-pressed: bracing beams snapped below decks, and the hull sprang leaks in multiple locations. “The ship was almost as wet inside as out,” wrote a horrified Times of London reporter who had joined the expedition. The crew’s greatest fear was that one of the spools of cable in the hold would break loose and punch right through the hull; they fought a never-ending battle to secure the spools against each successive onslaught. While they were thus distracted, the ship’s gigantic coal hampers gave way instead, sending tons of the filthy stuff skittering everywhere, injuring many of the crew. That the Agamemnon survived the storm at all was thanks to masterful seamanship on the part of its captain, who remained awake on the bridge for 72 hours straight, plotting how best to ride out each wave.

An artist’s rendering of the Agamemnon in the grip of the storm, as published in the Illustrated London News.

Separated from one another by the storm, the two ships met up again on June 25 smack dab in the middle of an Atlantic Ocean that was once again so tranquil as to “seem almost unnatural,” as Henry Field puts it. The men aboard the Niagara were shocked at the state of the Agamemnon; it was so badly battered and so covered in coal dust that it looked more like a garbage scow than a proud Royal Navy ship of the line. But no matter: it was time to begin the task they had come here to carry out.

So, the cables were duly spliced on June 26, and the process of laying them began — with far less ceremony than last time, given that there were no government dignitaries on the scene. The two ships steamed away from one another, the Niagara westward toward Newfoundland, the Agamemnon eastward toward Ireland, with telegraph operators aboard each ship constantly testing the tether that bound them together as they went. They had covered a combined distance of just 40 miles when the line suddenly went dead. Following the agreed-upon protocol in case of such an eventuality, both crews cut their end of the cable, letting it drop uselessly into the ocean, then turned around and steamed back to the rendezvous point; neither crew had any idea what had happened. Still, the break had at least occurred early enough that there ought still to be enough cable remaining to span the Atlantic. There was nothing for it but to splice the cables once more and try again.

This time, the distance between the ships steadily increased without further incident: 100 miles, 200 miles, 300 miles. “Why not lay 2000 [miles]!” thought Henry Field with a shiver of excitement. Then, just after the Agamemnon had made a routine splice from one spool to the next, the cable snapped in the ship’s wake. Later inspection would reveal that that section of it had been damaged in the storm. Nature’s fury had won the day after all. Again following protocol for a break this far into the cable-laying process, the two ships sailed separately back to Britain.

It was a thoroughly dejected group of men who met soon after in the offices of the Atlantic Telegraph Company. Whereas last year’s attempt to lay the cable had given reason for guarded optimism in the eyes of some of them, this latest attempt seemed an unadulterated fiasco. The inexplicable loss of signal the first time this expedition had tried to lay the cable was in its way much more disconcerting than the second, explicable disaster of a physically broken cable, as our steadfast Times of London reporter noted: “It proves that, after all that human skill and science can effect to lay the wire down with safety has been accomplished, there may be some fatal obstacle to success at the bottom of the ocean, which can never be guarded against, for even the nature of the peril must always remain as secret and unknown as the depths in which it is encountered.” The task seemed too audacious, the threats to the enterprise too unfathomable. Henry Field:

The Board was called together. It met in the same room where, six weeks before, it had discussed the prospects of the expedition with full confidence of success. Now it met as a council of war is summoned after a terrible defeat. When the Directors came together, the feeling — to call it by the mildest name — was one of extreme discouragement. They looked blankly in each other’s faces. With some, the feeling was almost one of despair. Sir William Brown of Liverpool, the first Chairman, wrote advising them to sell the cable. Mr. Brooking, the Vice-Chairman, who had given more time than any other Director, sent in his resignation, determined to take no further part in an undertaking which had proved hopeless, and to persist in which seemed mere rashness and folly.

Most of the members of the board assumed they were meeting only to deal with the practical matter of winding up the Atlantic Telegraph Company. But Cyrus Field had other ideas. When everyone was settled, he stood up to deliver the speech of his life. He told the room that he had talked to the United States and Royal Navies, and they had agreed to extend the loan of the Niagara and the Agamemnon for a few more weeks, enough to make one more attempt to lay the cable. And he had talked to his technical advisors as well, and they had agreed that there ought to be just enough cable left to span the Atlantic if everything went off without a hitch. Even if the odds against success were a hundred to one, why not try one more time? Why not go down swinging? After all, the money they stood to recoup by selling a second-hand telegraph cable wasn’t that much compared to what had already been spent.

It is a tribute to his passion and eloquence that his speech persuaded this roomful of very gloomy, very pragmatic businessmen. They voted to authorize one more attempt to create an electric bridge across the Atlantic.

The Niagara and the poor, long-suffering Agamemnon were barely given time to load coal and provisions before they sailed again, on July 17, 1858. This time the weather was propitious: blue skies and gentle breezes the whole way to the starting point. On July 29, after conducting tests to ensure that the entirety of the remaining cable was still in working order, they began the laying of it once more. Plenty of close calls ensued in the days that followed: a passing whale nearly entangled itself in the cable, then a passing merchant ship nearly did the same; more sections of cable turned up with storm-damaged insulation aboard the Agamemnon and had to be cut away, to the point that it was touch and go whether Ireland or the end of the last spool would come first. And yet the telegraph operators aboard each of the ships remained in contact with one another day after day as they crept further and further apart.

At 1:45 AM on August 6, the Niagara dropped anchor in Newfoundland at a point some distance west of St. John’s, in Trinity Bay, where a telegraph house had already been built to receive the cable. One hour later, the telegraph operator aboard the ship received a message from the Agamemnon that it too had made landfall, in Ireland. Cyrus Field’s one-chance-in-a-hundred gamble had apparently paid off.

Shouting like a lunatic, Field burst upon the crew manning the telegraph house, who had been blissfully asleep in their bunks. At 6:00 AM, the men spliced the cable that had been carried over from the Niagara with the one that went to St. John’s and beyond. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean, the crew of the Agamemnon was doing the same with a cable that stretched from the backwoods of southern Ireland to the heart of London. “The communication between the Old and the New World [has] been completed,” wrote the Times of London reporter.

The (apparently) successful laying of the cable in 1858 sparked almost a religious fervor, as shown in this commemorative painting by William Simpson, in which the Niagara is given something very like a halo as it arrives in Trinity Bay.

The news of the completed Atlantic cable was greeted with elation everywhere it traveled. Joseph Henry wrote in a public letter to Cyrus Field that the transatlantic telegraph would “mark an epoch in the advancement of our common humanity.” Scientific American wrote that “our whole country has been electrified by the successful laying of the Atlantic telegraph,” and Harper’s Monthly commissioned a portrait of Field for its cover. Countless cities and towns on both sides of the ocean held impromptu jubilees to celebrate the achievement. Ringing church bells, booming cannon, and 21-gun rifle salutes were the order of the day everywhere. Men who had or claimed to have sailed aboard the Niagara or the Agamemnon sold bits and pieces of leftover cable at exorbitant prices. Queen Victoria knighted the 26-year-old Charles Bright, and said she only wished Cyrus Field was a British citizen so she could do the same for him. On August 16, she sent a telegraph message to the American President James Buchanan and was answered in kind; this herald of a new era of instantaneous international diplomacy brought on yet another burst of public enthusiasm.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.The Story of the Telegraph.[1]No relation to the much more comprehensive history of the endeavor which Henry Field would later write under the same title.Times of London decided that “the Atlantic telegraph has half undone the Declaration of 1776, and has gone far to make us once again, in spite of ourselves, one people.” Others found prose woefully inadequate for the occasion, found they could give proper vent to their feelings only in verse.

‘Tis done! The angry sea consents,
The nations stand no more apart,
With clasped hands the continents
Feel throbbings of each other’s heart.

Speed, speed the cable; let it run
A loving girdle round the earth,
Till all the nations ‘neath the sun
Shall be as brothers of one hearth;

As brothers pledging, hand in hand,
One freedom for the world abroad,
One commerce every land,
One language and one God.

But one fact was getting lost — or rather was being actively concealed — amidst all the hoopla: the Atlantic cable was working after a fashion, but it wasn’t working very well. Even William Thomson’s new galvanometer struggled to make sense of a signal that grew weaker and more diffuse by the day. To compensate, the operators were forced to transmit more and more slowly, until the speed of communication became positively glacial. Queen Victoria’s 99-word message to President Buchanan, for example, took sixteen and a half hours to send — a throughput of all of one word every ten minutes. The entirety of another day’s traffic consisted of:

Repeat please.

Please send slower for the present.

How?

How do you receive?

Send slower.

Please send slower.

How do you receive?

Please say if you can read this.

Can you read this?

Yes.

How are signals?

Do you receive?

Please send something.

Please send Vs and Bs.

How are signals?

Cyrus Field managed to keep these inconvenient facts secret for some time while his associates scrambled fruitlessly for a solution. When Thomson could offer him no miracle cure, he turned back to Wildman Whitehouse. Insisting that there was no problem with his cable design which couldn’t be solved by more power, Whitehouse hooked it up to giant induction coils to try to force the issue. Shortly after he did so, on September 1, the cable failed completely. Thomson and others were certain that Whitehouse had burned right through the cable’s insulation with his high-voltage current, but of course it is impossible to know for sure. Still, that didn’t stop Field from making an irrevocable break with Whitehouse; he summarily fired him from the company. In response, Whitehouse went on a rampage in the British press, denouncing the “frantic fooleries of the Americans in the person of Cyrus W. Field”; he would soon publish a book giving his side of the story, filled with technical conclusions which history has demonstrated to be wrong.

On October 20, with all further recourse exhausted, Field bit the bullet and announced to the world that his magic thread was well, truly, and hopelessly severed. The press at both ends of the cable turned on a dime. The Atlantic Telegraph Company and its principal face were now savaged with the same enthusiasm with which they had so recently been praised. Many suspected loudly that it had all been an elaborate fraud. “How many shares of stock did Mr. Field sell in August?” one newspaper asked. (The answer: exactly one share.) The Atlantic Telegraph Company remained nominally in existence after the fiasco of 1858, but it would make no serious plans to lay another cable for half a decade.

Cyrus Field himself was, depending on whom you asked, either a foolish dreamer or a cynical grifter. His financial situation too was not what it once had been. His paper business had suffered badly in the panic of 1857; then came a devastating warehouse fire in 1860, and he sold it shortly thereafter at a loss. In April of 1861, the American Civil War, the product of decades of slowly building tension between the country’s industrial North and the agrarian, slave-holding South, finally began in earnest. Suddenly the paeans to universal harmony which had marked a few halcyon weeks in August of 1858 seemed laughable, and the moneyed men of Wall Street turned their focus to engines of war instead of peace.

Yet the British government at least was still wondering in its stolid, sluggish way how a project to which it had contributed considerable public resources, which had in fact nearly gotten one of Her Majesty’s foremost ships of the line sunk, had wound up being so useless. The same month that the American Civil War began, it formed a commission of inquiry to examine both this specific failure and the future prospects for undersea telegraphy in general. The commission numbered among its members none other than Charles Wheatstone, along with William Cooke one of the pair of inventors who had set up the first commercial telegraph line in the world. It read its brief very broadly, and ranged far afield to address many issues of importance to a slowly electrifying world. Most notably, it defined the standardized units of electrical measurement that we still use today: the watt, the volt, the ohm, and the ampere.

But much of its time was taken up by a war of words between Wildman Whitehouse and William Thomson, each of whom presented his case at length and in person. While Whitehouse laid the failure of the first transatlantic telegraph at the feet of a wide range of factors that had nothing to do with his cable but much to do with the gross incompetence of the Atlantic Telegraph Company in laying and operating it, Thomson argued that the choice of the wrong type of cable had been the central, precipitating mistake from which all of the other problems had cascaded. In the end, the commission found Thomson’s arguments more convincing; it did seem to it that “the heavier the cable, the greater its durability.” Its final conclusions, delivered in July of 1863, were simultaneously damning toward many of the specific choices of the Atlantic Telegraph Company and optimistic that a transatlantic telegraph should be possible, given much better planning and preparation. The previous failures were, it said, “due to causes which might have been guarded against had adequate preliminary investigation been made.” Nevertheless, “we are convinced that this class of enterprise may prove as successful as it has hitherto been disastrous.”

Meanwhile, even in the midst of the bloodiest conflict in American history, all Cyrus Field seemed to care about was his once and future transatlantic telegraph. Graduating from the status of dreamer or grifter, he now verged on becoming a laughingstock in some quarters. In New York City, for example, “he addressed the Chamber of Commerce, the Board of Brokers, and the Corn Exchange,” writes Henry Field, “and then he went almost literally door to door, calling on merchants and bankers to enlist their aid. Even of those who subscribed, a large part did so more from sympathy and admiration of his indomitable spirit than from confidence in the success of the enterprise.” One of his marks labeled him with grudging admiration “the most obstinately determined man in either hemisphere.” Yet in the course of some five years of such door-knocking, he managed to raise pledges amounting to barely one-third of the purchase price of the first Atlantic cable — never mind the cost of actually laying it. This was unsurprising, in that there lay a huge unanswered question at the heart of any renewal of the enterprise: a cable much thinner than the one which almost everyone except Wildman Whitehouse now agreed was necessary had dangerously overburdened two of the largest ships in the world, very nearly with tragic results for one of them. And yet, in contrast to the 2500 tons of Whitehouse’s cable, Thomson’s latest design was projected to weigh 4000 tons. How on earth was it to be laid?

But Cyrus Field’s years in the wilderness were not to last forever. In January of 1864, in the course of yet another visit to London, he secured a meeting with Thomas Brassey, one of the most famous of the new breed of financiers who were making fortunes from railroads all over the world. Field wrote in a letter immediately after the meeting that “he put me through such a cross-examination as I had never before experienced. I thought I was in the witness box.” (He doesn’t state in his letter whether he noticed the ironic contrast with the way this whole adventure had begun exactly one decade earlier, when it had been Frederick Gisborne who had come with hat in hand to his own stateroom for an equally skeptical cross-examination.)

It seems that Field passed the test. Brassey agreed to put some of his money and, even more importantly, his sterling reputation as one of the world’s foremost men of business behind the project. And just like that, things started to happen again. “The wheels were unloosed,” writes Henry Field, “and the gigantic machinery began to revolve.” The money poured in; the transatlantic telegraph was on again. Cyrus Field placed an order for a thick, well-insulated cable matching Thomson’s specifications. The only problem remaining was the same old one of how to actually get it aboard a ship. But, miraculously, Thomas Brassey believed he had a solution for that problem too.

During the previous decade, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, arguably the greatest steam engineer of the nineteenth century, had designed and overseen the construction of what he intended as his masterpiece: an ocean liner called the Great Eastern, which displaced a staggering 19,000 tons, could carry 4000 passengers, and could sail from Britain to Australia without ever stopping for coal. It was 693 feet long and 120 feet wide, with ten steam engines producing up to 10,000 horsepower and delivering it through both paddle wheels and a screw propeller. And, most relevantly for Brassey and Field, it could carry up to 7000 tons of cargo in its hold.

T.G. Dutton’s celebratory 1859 rendering of the Great Eastern.

Alas, its career to date read like a Greek tragedy about the sin of hubris. The Great Eastern almost literally killed its creator; undone by the stresses involved in getting his “Great Babe” built, Brunel died at the age of only 53 shortly after it was completed in 1859. During its sea trials, the ship suffered a boiler explosion that killed five men. And once it entered service, those who had paid to build it discovered that it was just too big: there just wasn’t enough demand to fill its holds and staterooms, even as it cost a fortune to operate. “Her very size was against her,” writes Henry Field, “and while smaller ships, on which she looked down with contempt, were continually flying to and fro across the sea, this leviathan could find nothing worthy of her greatness.” The Great Eastern developed the reputation of an ill-starred, hard-luck ship. Over the course of its career, it was involved in ten separate ship-to-ship collisions. In 1862, it ran aground outside New York Harbor; it was repaired and towed back to open waters only at enormous effort and expense, further burnishing its credentials as an unwieldy white elephant. Eighteen months later, the Great Eastern was retired from service and put up for sale. A financier named Daniel Gooch bought the ship for just £25,000, less than its value as scrap metal. And indeed, scrapping it for profit was quite probably foremost on his mind at the time.

But then Thomas Brassey came calling on his friend, asking what it would cost to acquire the ship for the purpose of laying the transatlantic cable. Gooch agreed to loan the Great Eastern to him in return for £50,000 in Atlantic Telegraph Company stock. And so Cyrus Field’s project acquired the one ship in the world that was actually capable of carrying Thomson’s cable. One James Anderson, a veteran captain with the Cunard Line, was hired to command it.

Observing the checkered record of the Atlantic Telegraph Company in laying working telegraph cables to date, Brassey and his fellow investors insisted that the latest attempt be subcontracted out to the recently formed Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, the entity which also provided the cable itself. During the second half of 1864, the latter company extensively modified the Great Eastern for the task before it. Intended as it was for a life lived underwater, the cable was to be stored aboard the ship immersed in water tanks in order to prevent its vital insulation from drying out and cracking.

Then, from January to July of 1865, the Great Eastern lay at a dock in Sheerness, England, bringing about 20 miles of cable per day onboard. The pendulum had now swung again with the press and public: the gargantuan ship became a place of pilgrimage for journalists, politicians, royalty, titans of industry, and ordinary folks, all come to see the progress of this indelible sign of Progress in the abstract. Cyrus Field was so caught up in the excitement of an eleven-year-old dream on the cusp of fulfillment that he hardly noticed when the final battle of the American Civil War ended with Southern surrender on April 9, 1865, nor the shocking assassination of the victorious President Abraham Lincoln just a few days later.

On July 15, the Great Eastern put to sea at last, laden with the 4000 tons of cable plus hundreds more tons of dead weight in the form of the tanks of water that were used to store it. Also aboard was a crew of 500 men, but only a small contingent of observers from the Atlantic Telegraph Company, among them the Field brothers and William Thomson. Due to its deep draft, the Great Eastern had to be very cautious when sailing near land; witness its 1862 grounding in New York Harbor. Therefore a smaller steamer, the Caroline, was enlisted to bring the cable ashore on the treacherous southern coast of Ireland and to lay the first 23 miles of it from there. On the evening of July 23, the splice was made and the Great Eastern took over responsibility for the rest of the journey.

So, the largest ship in the world made its way westward at an average speed of a little over six knots. Cyrus Field, who was prone to seasickness, noted with relief how different an experience it was to sail on a behemoth like this one even in choppy seas. He and everyone else aboard were filled with optimism, and with good reason on the whole; this was a much better planned, better thought-through expedition than those of the Niagara and the Agamemnon. Each stretch of cable was carefully tested before it fell off the stern of the ship, and a number of stretches were discarded for failing to meet Thomson’s stringent standards. Then, too, William Everett’s paying-out mechanism had been improved such that it could now reel cable back in again if necessary; this did indeed prove to be the case twice, when stretches of cable proved not to be as water-resistant as they ought to have been despite all of Thomson’s efforts.

The days went by, filled with minor snafus to be sure, but nothing that hadn’t been anticipated. The stolid and stable Great Eastern, writes Henry Field, “seemed as if made by Heaven to accomplish this great work of civilization.” And the cable itself continued to work even better than Thomson had said it would; the link with Ireland remained rock-solid, with a throughput to which Whitehouse’s cable could never have aspired.

At noon on August 2, the Great Eastern was well ahead of schedule, already almost two-thirds of the way to Newfoundland, when a fault was detected in the stretch of cable just laid. This was annoying, but nothing more than that; it had, after all, happened twice before and been dealt with by pulling the bad stretch out of the water and discarding it. But in the course of hauling it back in this time, an unfortunate burst of wind and current spelled disaster: the cable was pulled taut by the movement of the ship and snapped.

Captain Anderson had one gambit left — one more testament to the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company’s determination to plan for every eventuality. He ordered the huge grappling hook with which the Great Eastern had been equipped to be deployed over the side. It struck the naïve observers from the Atlantic Telegraph Company as an absurd proposition; the ocean here was two and a half miles deep — so deep that it took the hook two hours just to touch bottom. The ship steamed back and forth across its former course all night long, dragging the hook patiently along the ocean floor. Early in the morning, it caught on something. The crew saw with excitement that, as the grappling machinery pulled the hook gently up, its apparent weight increased. This was consistent with a cable, but not with anything else that anyone could conceive. But in the end, the increasing weight of it proved too much. When the hook was three quarters of a mile above the ocean floor, the rope snapped. Two more attempts with fresh grappling hooks ended the same way, until there wasn’t enough rope left aboard to touch bottom.

It had been a noble attempt, and had come tantalizingly close to succeeding, but there was nothing left to do now but mark the location with a buoy and sail back to Britain. “We thought you went down!” yelled the first journalist to approach the Great Eastern when it reached home. It seemed that, in the wake of the abrupt loss of communication with the ship, a rumor had spread that it had struck an iceberg and sunk.

Although the latest attempt to lay a transatlantic cable had proved another failure, one didn’t anymore have to be a dyed-in-the-wool optimist like Cyrus Field to believe that the prospects for a future success were very, very good. The cable had outperformed expectations by delivering a clear, completely usable signal from first to last. The final sticking point had not even been the cable’s own tensile strength but rather that of the ropes aboard the Great Eastern. Henry Field:

This confidence appeared at the first meeting of directors. The feeling was very different from that after the return of the first expedition of 1858. So animated were they with hope, and so sure of success the next time, that all felt that one cable was not enough, they must have two, and so it was decided to take measures not only to raise the broken end of the cable and to complete it to Newfoundland, but also to construct and lay an entirely new one, so as to have a double line in operation the following summer.

Nothing was to be left to chance next time around. William Thomson worked with the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company to make the next cable even better, incorporating everything that had been learned on the last expedition plus all the latest improvements in materials technology. The result was even more durable, whilst weighing about 10 percent less. The paying-out mechanism was refined further, with special attention paid to the task of pulling the cable in again without breaking it. And the Great Eastern too got a refit that made it even more suited to its new role in life. Its paddle wheels were decoupled from one another so each could be controlled separately; by spinning one forward and one backward, the massive ship could be made to turn in its own length, an improvement in maneuverability which should make grappling for a lost cable much easier. Likewise, twenty miles of much stronger grappling rope was taken onboard. Meanwhile the Atlantic Telegraph Company was reorganized and reincorporated as the appropriately trans-national Anglo-American Telegraph Company, with an initial capitalization of £600,000.

This time the smaller steamer William Corry laid the part of the cable closest to the Irish shore. On Friday, July 13, 1866, the splice was made and the Great Eastern took over. The weather was gray and sullen more often than not over the following days, but nothing seemed able to dampen the spirit of optimism and good cheer aboard; many a terrible joke was made about “shuffling off this mortal coil.” As they sailed along, the crew got a preview of the interconnected world they were so earnestly endeavoring to create: the long tether spooling out behind the ship brought them up-to-the-minute news of the latest stock prices on the London exchange and debates in Parliament, as well as dispatches from the battlefields of the Third Italian War of Independence, all as crystal clear as the weather around them was murky.

The Great Eastern maintained a slightly slower pace this time, averaging about five knots, because some felt that some of the difficulties last time had resulted from rushing things a bit too much. Whether due to the slower speed or all of the other improvements in equipment and procedure, the process did indeed go even more smoothly; the ship never failed to cover at least 100 miles — usually considerably more — every day. The Great Eastern sailed unperturbed beyond the point where it had lost the cable last time. By July 26, after almost a fortnight of steady progress, the excitement had reached a fever pitch, as the seasoned sailors aboard began to sight birds and declared that they could smell the approaching land.

The following evening, they reached their destination. “The Great Eastern,” writes Henry Field, “gliding in as if she had done nothing remarkable, dropped her anchor in front of the telegraph house, having trailed behind her a chain of 2000 miles, to bind the Old World to the New.” A different telegraph house had been built in Trinity Bay to receive this cable, in a tiny fishing village with the delightful name of Heart’s Content. The entire village rowed out to greet the largest ship by almost an order of magnitude ever to enter their bay, all dressed in their Sunday best.

The Great Eastern in Trinity Bay, 1866. This photograph does much to convey the sheer size of the ship. The three vessels lying alongside it are all oceangoing ships in their own right.

But there was one more fly in the ointment. When he came ashore, Cyrus Field learned that the underwater telegraph line he had laid between Newfoundland and Cape Breton ten years before had just given up the ghost. So, there was a little bit more work to be done. He chartered a coastal steamer to take onboard eleven miles of Thomson’s magic cable from the Great Eastern and use it to repair the vital span; such operations in relatively shallow water like this had by now become routine, a far cry from the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company’s wild adventure of 1855. While he waited for that job to be completed, Field hired another steamer to bring news of his achievement to the mainland along with a slew of piping-hot headlines from Europe to serve as proof of it. It was less dramatic than an announcement via telegraph, but it would have to do.

Thus word of the completion of the first truly functional transatlantic telegraph cable, an event which took place on July 27, 1866, didn’t reach the United States until July 29. It was the last delay of its kind. Two separate networks had become one, two continents sewn together using an electric thread; the full potential of the telegraph had been fulfilled. The first worldwide web, the direct ancestor and prerequisite of the one we know today, was a reality.

(Sources: the books The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage, Power Struggles: Scientific Authority and the Creation of Practical Electricity Before Edison by Michael B. Schiffer, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F.B. Morse by Kenneth Silverman, A Thread across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Telegraph by John Steele Gordon, and The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph by Henry M. Field. Online sources include “Heart’s Content Cable Station” by Jerry Proc, Distant Writing: A History of the Telegraph Companies in Britain between 1838 and 1868 by Steven Roberts, and History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

No relation to the much more comprehensive history of the endeavor which Henry Field would later write under the same title.

Comments
33 Responses

- S. Ben Melhuish

February 4, 2022 at 8:56 pm

Great storytelling.

One typo: “scraping it for profit” should probably be “scrapping it for profit”.

- Jimmy Maher

February 4, 2022 at 9:01 pm

Thanks!

- Not Fenimore

February 4, 2022 at 9:36 pm

Really good! As previously noted by another commenter, very connections-esque

(It says 125 tonnes per ship – should that be 1250 tonnes, as per the previous article?)

- Jimmy Maher

February 5, 2022 at 7:08 am

Yes, indeed. (And I do need to investigate this Connections thing everyone keeps talking about…)

- Todd Carson

February 6, 2022 at 2:43 am

“ (And I do need to investigate this Connections thing everyone keeps talking about…)”

If you do, note that it also spawned a delightfully campy mid-90s CD-ROM adventure game which might make suitable fodder for a post in your series.

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2022 at 8:07 am

That does look really interesting. Like the television show, it’s completely new to me. I’ll put it on my list of stuff to check out.

- Peter Malamud Smith

February 9, 2022 at 2:49 pm

Oh my god, Jimmy, you of all people are going to LOVE that show. The original ‘70s series is so good.

- Brent

February 5, 2022 at 1:48 am

The story of the transatlantic cable is fascinating and could easily have been its own series. I can’t wait for this whole story to be finished and epub’d so I can send it to my Dad – I think he’ll love it!

- Gordon Cameron

February 5, 2022 at 1:53 am

Bravo – this series seems to be the place where the Digital and Analog Antiquarians meet and shake hands.

Also, this needs to be a movie!

- Gordon Cameron

February 5, 2022 at 2:02 am

(Unless it already is one.)

- Jimmy Maher

February 5, 2022 at 7:13 am

Not that I know of. I agree that it would make a fine historical epic.

- Ben P. Stein

February 5, 2022 at 5:35 pm

Marvelous story. Thank you for telling it so well. It makes me appreciate the internet all the more.

Maybe I misread this part, but should there be a “not” before “administer” here?
“Even if Whitehouse did administer the coup de grace, the cable’s death was surely only a matter of time.”

- Jimmy Maher

February 5, 2022 at 10:42 pm

As intended, but it was an unnecessarily confusing — and simply unnecessary — sentence. I’ve nixed it. Thanks!

- Leo Vellés

February 5, 2022 at 7:44 pm

Gotta say Jimmy, one more time, his multi-piece series that blends social history to reach the game or technology advance that is the final destination, is truly superb. Anyone who is enjoying this one, should also read the ones Jimmy wrote for Tetris, Trinity or Wings (and of course, all The Analog Antiquarian).
A very small typo: “an ocean liner called the Great Eastern, which displaced a staggering 19,000 tons”. There is a double space between “ocean” and “liner”

- Jimmy Maher

February 5, 2022 at 10:43 pm

Thanks!

- That guy!

February 5, 2022 at 8:14 pm

Hello,
sorry for being “that guy” but I really don’t care about the last three articles (A web around the world). This is just my opinion I’m sure that other people love them. However I think they are a little out of scope. Any idea when we’ll return to the normal, gaming-related articles? I’m really looking forward to it…

- Jimmy Maher

February 5, 2022 at 10:59 pm

No worries. I fully expected this series to divide the waters, so to speak, and even expected to take a bit of a hit for it in my pocketbook. So far these things show every sign of coming to pass. ;) But this story is a hugely important one for the “digital culture” side of this site’s brief, and I felt that to neglect it would be a betrayal of that broader view.

Anyway, to answer your specific question: I’m afraid we’re probably looking at around ten to twelve parts. Computers should finally enter the mix about halfway through. ;)

- Robert Barron

February 6, 2022 at 8:37 am

I think the “divided waters” will be linked by cables even stronger than telegraph ones.

One more vote in favour of this series.

- Mike Russo

February 6, 2022 at 6:55 pm

10-12 parts sounds great to me, bring ’em on! :) I never thought the first transatlantic cable laying would turn out to be this difficult or beset with so many setbacks, and yet perseverance and research (and being able to change your mind as a result of that research) eventually paid off!

- Gnoman

February 6, 2022 at 3:17 pm

If your sources have it, it would be nice to compare the available “bandwidth” for wireless telegraph and radiotelephone when that comes along. It is pretty clear that the cables were superior (else they’d have stopped laying them when the wireless was invented), but precisely how superior they are is something I’ve been unable to find with casual searches.

- Peter Olausson

February 6, 2022 at 6:53 pm

The data speed of cables and wireless is difficult to compare since both increased over the years. As for the 1866 cable, one source states a speed of 6–8 words per minute; I don’t know how many letters or Morse symbols that is supposed to be.

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2022 at 10:09 pm

I believe the 1866 cable could manage twelve words per minute without too much trouble. This was considerably less than what one could expect from a terrestrial cable with a skilled operator on each end, but the speed did increase fairly quickly from there.

That said, it may be slightly anachronistic to think of these things purely in terms of the throughput allowed by the technology — and this may explain why your searches have come up blank. The limiting factor was a human one: the speed with which an operator could work the Morse key on the sending side, and another operator could decipher the message on the receiving side. (For this reason, really, really fast operators were the rock stars of the telegraphy world, and got paid accordingly. Thomas Edison first made a name for himself by working the fastest key in the East.) Already by 1875, companies were investing heavily in multiplex telegraph systems to work around the upper bounds of human capacity; these allowed multiple messages to pass over the same line at the same time by giving each signal a unique frequency “thumbprint.” (A comparison might be drawn with the way that computer-chip designers turned to parallel processing when certain physical limitations began to make it hard to continue to increase clock speeds.)

The advantages that a wired connection offered over a wireless one weren’t so much related to speed or bandwidth as to reliability and robustness. A wireless signal was limited in range under the best of conditions, and was subject to countless vagaries of geography, weather, and possible interference from other signals on or close to the same band. And then there’s the issue of privacy; anyone could listen in to a wireless message. If you sent a message over a wire, on the other hand, you could feel confidant it would reach its intended destination — and only its intended destination — strong and ungarbled. Therefore wireless was reserved for situations where a wired connection just wasn’t possible, such as aboard a ship. If everyone had stopped using the wires after Marconi came along, nobody would have been able to send anything; there just wouldn’t have been enough room on the frequency spectrum.

- Peter Olausson

February 6, 2022 at 6:57 pm

Minor note regarding “sailors are a notoriously superstitious lot”: One might have expected the date to give them pause, if they knew that Friday 13th is supposed to be an unlucky day. This is a fairly new piece of superstition and was nowhere near as common in 1866 as it is today.

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2022 at 9:53 pm

I had assumed it was one of those things that had been around almost literally forever. Thanks!

- Wolfeye Mox

February 6, 2022 at 9:00 pm

These articles about the start of the Web are so good, I want them in a book. A print book, on a shelf.

- Martin

February 6, 2022 at 10:20 pm

Sound like an Oregon Trail like game could be made of the whole process. Avoiding the whales would be the equivalent of the OT hunting game, keeping the operators awake, going in the right direction, speed, avoiding storms and running out of fuel, I can see it all now.

I guess a text only first cut wouldn’t be too hard to create.

- Aula

February 7, 2022 at 7:52 am

“The Great Eastern almost literally killed its creator”

The “the” at the beginning of that sentence is italicized but shouldn’t be.

- Jimmy Maher

February 7, 2022 at 8:12 am

Thanks!

- Jogy

February 12, 2022 at 7:25 pm

This was an amazing story! Thank you so much for writing it!

- Mateusz Krzesniak

February 14, 2022 at 8:23 pm

Another great one! I first heard you on the Video Game History Hour and started catching up on older articles, so it’s exciting to get in on the ground level for some new ones.

One tiny thing I noticed was two “the” words where there should only be one in the following sentence: “William Thomson worked with the the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company…”

- Jimmy Maher

February 14, 2022 at 8:28 pm

Thanks!

- Nikolai Kondrashov

March 7, 2022 at 3:08 pm

A wonderful read, thank you!
Typo: “blues skies”.

- Jimmy Maher

March 7, 2022 at 3:15 pm

Thanks!

A Web Around the World, Part 4: From Telegraphy to Telephony
February 18, 2022

For ten very odd days during the late summer of 1866, the entire world directed its attention toward the tiny Newfoundland fishing village of Heart’s Content, population about 100 souls. Then the Great Eastern sailed again, and the telegraph house there became just another unnoticed part of the world’s communications infrastructure, one of those thousands upon thousands of installations that no one thinks about until they stop working. The once wondrous Atlantic telegraph cable itself joined the same category not long after, almost as soon as the Great Eastern completed the final part of its assignment for the year: that of fishing the broken cable from the previous year up out of the ocean’s depths and completing its run to Newfoundland. Thus well before the end of 1866, there were two Atlantic cables in service, the second providing additional bandwidth and, just as importantly, redundancy in the case of a break in the first. Never since has the link between the two continents been severed.

The Anglo-American Telegraph Company’s final bill for this permanent remaking of the time scale of international diplomacy, business, and journalism came to £2.5 million, equivalent to about £320 million or $430 million in 2022 currency; this total includes all of the earlier failed attempts to lay the cable, but ignores the costs to American and British taxpayers entailed by the loaning of the Niagara and the Agamemnon and many other forms of government support. Thanks more to Cyrus Field’s stubbornness than any grand design, the transatlantic cable had become an international infrastructure project more expensive than any yet undertaken in the history of the world. And yet in the long term the cost of the cable was paltry in comparison to how much it did to change the way all of the people of the world viewed themselves in relation to the rest of their planet.

In the shorter term, however, this latest, working transatlantic cable was greeted with fewer ecstatic poems and joyful jubilees than the sadly muddled one of 1858 had enjoyed. The reaction was especially muted in the United States. Perhaps the long years of war that separated the two events had made those old dreams of a new epoch of international harmony seem hopelessly quaint, or perhaps the impatient Americans just thought it was high time already that this cable they’d been hearing about for so long started working properly. One of the few eloquent exceptions to the rule of blasé acceptance was provided by a prominent New York attorney named William Maxwell Evans. He noted the inscription on the base of a statue of Christopher Columbus in Madrid: “There was one world. He said, ‘Let there be two.’ And there were two.” Now, said Evans, Field had dared to reverse Columbus: “There were two worlds. He said, ‘Let there be one.’ And there was one.”

In lieu of more windy speeches, the working transatlantic telegraph prompted “a commercial revolution in America,” as Henry Field puts it — prompted a whole new era of globalized trade which has changed more in magnitude than in character in all the years since:

Every morning, as [Cyrus] Field went to his office [in New York City], he found laid on his desk at nine o’clock the quotations on the Royal Exchange at twelve! Lombard Street and Wall Street talked with each other as two neighbors across the way. This soon made an end of the tribe of speculators who calculated on the fact that nobody knew at a particular moment the state of the market on the other side of the sea, a universal ignorance by which they profited by getting advances. Now everybody got them as soon as they, for the news came with the rising of each day’s sun, and the occupation of a class that did much to demoralize trade on both sides of the ocean was gone.

The same restoration of order was seen in the business of importations, which had been hitherto almost a matter of guess-work. A merchant who wished to buy silks in Lyons sent his orders months in advance, and of course somewhat at random, not knowing how the market might turn, so that when the costly fabrics arrived he might find that he had ordered too many or too few. A China merchant sent his ship round the world for a cargo of tea, which returned after a year’s absence bringing not enough to supply the public demand, leaving him in vexation at the thought of what he might have made “if he had known,” or, what was still worse, bringing twice too much, in which case the unsold half remained on his hands. This was a risk against which he had to be insured, as much as against fire or shipwreck. And the only insurance he could have was to take reprisals by an increased charge on his unfortunate customers.

This double risk was now greatly reduced if not entirely removed. The merchant need no longer send out orders a year beforehand, nor order a whole shipload of tea when he needed only a hundred chests, since he could telegraph his agent for what he wanted and no more. With this opportunity for getting the latest intelligence, the element of uncertainty was eliminated and the importer no longer did business at a venture. Buying from time to time, so as to take advantage of low markets, he was able to buy cheaper, and of course to sell cheaper. It would be a curious study to trace the effect of the cable upon the prices of all foreign goods. A New York merchant who has been himself an importer for forty years tells me that the saving to the American people cannot be less than many millions every year.

That said, it was the well-heeled who most directly benefited from the Atlantic cables in their early months and years. For all of William Thomson’s work, the bandwidth of each of them was still limited to little more than twelve words per minute, making them a precious resource indeed. The initial going rate for sending a message between continents was a rather staggering £1 or $7.50 per word, at a time when a skilled craftsman’s weekly wage might be around $10.

But that was merely the curse of the early adopter, something with which a technology-mad world would become all too familiar over the century and a half to come. In time, the pressure of competition combined with ever-improving cables and systems brought the price down dramatically. The Anglo-American Telegraph Company’s first competitor entered the ring already in 1869, when a French cooperative laid a cable of its own from Brest to Newfoundland and then on to Boston. By 1875, a transatlantic telegram cost a slightly more manageable $1 per word; by 1892, the price was down to 25¢ per word — still a stretch for the average American or European to use for private correspondence, but cheap enough for markets, businesses, governments, and news organizations to use very profitably, given their economies of scale. Soon “the wire” was synonymous with news itself.

By 1893, no fewer than ten transatlantic telegraph cables were in service, all of them transmitting at several times the speed of the cables of 1866; just seven years later, the total was fifteen. Other undersea cables pulled India, Australia, China, and Japan into this first worldwide web. It was now possible to send a message from any reasonably sized city in the world all the way around the world, until it made it back to its starting point from the opposite direction just a few hours later.

Henry Field again, writing in 1893:

The morning news comes after a night’s repose, and we are wakened gently to the new day which has dawned upon the world. That which serves to such an end, which is a connecting link between countries and races of men, is not a mere material thing, an iron chain, lying cold and dead in the icy depths of the Atlantic. It is a living, fleshly bond between severed portions of the human family, thrilling with life, along which every human impulse runs swift as the current in human veins, and will run forever. Free intercourse between nations, as between individuals, leads to mutual kindly offices that make those who at once give and receive feel that they are not only neighbors but friends. Hence the “mission” of submarine telegraphy is to be the minister of peace.

Sentiments like these had once again become commonplace even in the United States by the end of the nineteenth century, as the memories of civil war faded. It was now widely believed that the developed world at least had become too intimately intertwined, thanks largely to the telegraph, to ever seriously contemplate war again. The bloody twentieth century to come would prove such sentiments sadly naïve, but it was a nice thought while it lasted. (Internet idealists would of course be slowly and painfully disabused of much the same sentiments a century later; human technology, it seems, cannot so easily overcome human nature.)

By the time the century turned, the machines and men who had created this revolution in communications were mostly gone.

The Great Eastern, that colossal white elephant that had finally found a purpose with the laying of the first transatlantic cables, continued in its new role for some time thereafter, laying three further cables across the Atlantic and still more of them in the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, and the Mediterranean. But its new career was ended by the completion of the CS Faraday, the first ship designed from the hull up for the purpose, in 1874; this vessel could lay cables far cheaper and more efficiently. Cast adrift on the waters of life once more with no clear purpose, the Great Eastern spent some time as a floating concert hall and tourist attraction, even at one point became a mobile billboard sailing up and down the Mersey River. Its glory days now a distant memory, the rusting hulk was sold for scrap in 1888.

The Great Eastern near the end of its days, when it was reduced to serving as a floating billboard for Lewis’s department stores.

Charles Bright died the same year at age 55, after a high-profile public career as a proponent of electrical technology in all its forms and a three-year stint in the House of Commons.

William Thomson was blessed with a longer, even more spectacular career that encompassed a diverse variety of achievements in the theoretical and applied sciences, from atomic physics to geology, as well as five years spent as the president of the Royal Society. In 1891, Queen Victoria ennobled him, making him Lord Kelvin, after the river that flowed through the University of Glasgow where he taught and researched. He didn’t die until 1907 at age 83, whereupon he was given a funeral in Westminster Abbey commensurate with his status as the grand old man of British science. A system for measuring temperature on an absolute thermodynamic scale, which he had first begun working on well before the transatlantic cable, became known after his death as “the kelvin scale” by the universal consensus of the international scientific community.

His erstwhile arch-rival Wildman Whitehouse, on the other hand, shrank from public life after it became clear to everyone that he had been wrong and Thomson had been right about the best design for the first Atlantic cable. When Whitehouse died in 1890 at age 73, the event went entirely unremarked.

Cyrus Field was made richer than ever for a while by the transatlantic telegraph. He splashed his millions around Wall Street both in the hope of making more millions and out of that spirit of idealism that was such an indelible part of the man’s character. For example, he funded much of the construction of New York City’s “El” lines of elevated trains, the precursor to its current subway system, by all indications out of a simple conviction that the people of the city deserved better than “crowded to suffocation” streetcars. Prone as he was to prioritize his ideals over his pocketbook, he gradually fell back out of the first rank of Gilded Age money men. He died in 1892 at age 72, whereupon he was buried behind the family church in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. His unremarkable gravestone bears an epitaph that is as straightforward as the man himself:

Cyrus West Field, to whose courage, energy, and perseverance the world owes the Atlantic telegraph.

Samuel Morse, that brilliant but deeply flawed original motivating force behind the telegraph, left behind a more mixed legacy. Even as Field had been struggling to make the transatlantic telegraph a reality, Morse had taken to occupying himself mostly with litigation of one form or another; cases brought by him reached the Supreme Court on no fewer than fifteen separate occasions. When Morse died in 1872 at the age of 80, his private reputation inside a telegraph industry that publicly eulogized him wasn’t much better than that of the typical patent troll of today, thanks to his meanness about payments and credit. Thankfully, his telegraph patents had expired eleven years earlier, which had served to draw the worst of his venom. Morse’s design for the telegraph itself as well as for the Morse key and Morse Code had thus been freed to take on a life of their own independent of their inventor, as all important inventions eventually must.

In addition to changing the world in the here and now, those same inventions paved the way for the next stage in the evolution of the global village. What that stage might entail had begun to show itself already one day in May of 1846, when the telegraph in service was still a curiosity and the idea of a transatlantic telegraph still a pipe dream. On the day in question, Joseph Henry — the most respected American theoretical scientist of telegraphy, whose advocacy had been so crucial for winning support for Morse’s design — happened to be visiting Philadelphia, where he was invited to witness a mechanical “speaking figure” created by a German immigrant named Joseph Faber. The automaton could, it was claimed, literally speak in recognizable English. Henry always took a certain ironic pleasure in revealing the fraud behind inventions that seemed too good to be true, a species to which he surely must have suspected Faber’s speaking figure to belong. But what he saw and heard that day instead thrilled him in a different way.

The astute German’s contraption took the physical form of a Turkish-looking boy sitting crossed-legged on a table. Faber made it “talk” by forcing air through a mechanical replica of the human mouth, tongue, glottis, and larynx, which could be reconfigured on the fly to produce any of sixteen elementary sounds. By “playing” it on a repurposed organ keyboard, Faber could indeed bring his puppet to produce labored but basically comprehensible English speech. Joseph Henry was entranced — not so much by the puppet itself, which he rightly judged to be no more nor less than a clever parlor trick, but by the potential of combining mechanical speech with telegraphy. “The keys,” he noted, “could be worked by means of electromagnets, and with a little contrivance, not difficult to execute, words might be spoken at one end of the telegraph line which had their origin at the other.” It was the world’s first documented inkling of the possibility of a telephone — a tool for “distant speaking,” as opposed to the “distant writing” of the telegraph. That tool, when it came, would transmit the speech of real humans rather than a synthetic version of it, but Henry’s words were nonetheless prescient.

Many of the others who saw Faber’s automaton were less thrilled. The very idea of the human voice being reproduced mechanically had an occult aura about it in the mid-nineteenth century. It thus comes as little surprise that the legendary showman and conman P.T. Barnum, who specialized in all things uncanny and disturbing, recruited Faber and his artificial boy for one of his traveling exhibitions. In this capacity, the two made their way across the Atlantic to London’s Egyptian Hall. The description provided by one witness who saw them there sounds almost like an extract from a macabre tale by Edgar Allan Poe or H.P. Lovecraft:

The exhibitor, Professor Faber, was a sad-faced man, dressed in respectable well-worn clothes that were soiled by contact with tools, wood, and machinery. The room looked like a laboratory and workshop, which it was. The professor was not too clean, and his hair and beard sadly wanted the attention of a barber. I had no doubt that he slept in the same room as the figure — his scientific Frankenstein monster — and I felt the secret influence of an idea that the two were destined to live and die together. The professor, with a slight German accent, put his wonderful toy in motion. He explained its action: it was not necessary to prove the absence of deception. The keyboard, touched by the professor, produced words which slowly and deliberately in a hoarse sepulchral voice came from the mouth of the figure, as if from the depths of a tomb. It wanted little imagination to make the very few visitors believe that the figure contained an imprisoned human — or half human — being, bound to speak slowly when tormented by the unseen power outside.

As a crowning display, the head sang a sepulchral version of “God Save the Queen,” which suggested inevitably God save the inventor. This extraordinary effect was achieved by the professor working two keyboards — one for the words and one for the music. Never probably before or since has the national anthem been so sung. Sadder and wiser, I and the few visitors crept slowly from the place, leaving the professor with his one and only treasure — his child of infinite labour and unmeasurable sorrow.

Joseph Faber with his “Euphonia,” or speaking machine.

Alas, Joseph Faber met a fate worthy of an Edgar Allan Poe protagonist. Exploited and underpaid like all of P.T. Barnum’s entourage of curiosities, he committed suicide in 1850 on the squalid streets of London’s East End.

Before he did so, however, there came to his room in the Egyptian Hall one open-minded visitor who was more fascinated than appalled by the performance: a Scottish phonetician named Alexander Melville Bell, who had spent most of his life studying the mechanisms of speech in the cause of teaching the deaf to communicate with the hearing. This man’s son, who was still in the womb when his father saw Faber’s automation, would go on to create a different form of mechanical speech, making his family name virtually synonymous with the telephone.

The young Alexander Graham Bell.

Alec is a good fellow and, I have no doubt, will make an excellent husband. He is hot-headed but warm-hearted — sentimental, dreamy, and self-absorbed, but sincere and unselfish. He is ambitious to a fault, and is apt to let enthusiasm run away with judgment. I have told you all the faults I know in him, and this catalogue is wonderfully short.

— Gardiner Greene Hubbard, writing to his daughter Mabel on the subject of Alexander Graham Bell

When a 23-year-old Alexander Graham Bell fetched up on North American shores from his hometown of Edinburgh on August 1, 1870, he resembled a sullen, lovesick adolescent more than a brilliant inventor. Earlier that year, his elder brother had died of tuberculosis. Devastated by grief, disappointed at the cool reception his techniques for teaching the deaf to read lips and to enunciate understandable speech in return had garnered in Britain, his father Alexander Melville had opted for a fresh start in Canada. The younger Alexander had initially agreed to join his father, mother, and widowed sister-in-law in the adventure, but almost immediately regretted it, thanks not least to a girl in Edinburgh whom he hoped to marry. But his pointed hints about his change of heart availed him nothing; his father didn’t let him off from his promise. On the passage over, young Alexander filled his journal with petulant musings about how “a man’s own judgment should be the final appeal in all that relates to himself. Many men do this or that because someone else has thought it right.”

But he wasn’t a malcontent by nature, and he soon made the best of things in the New World. Like his father, he would always consider his true life’s calling to be improving the plight of the deaf. Their dedication had a common source: Eliza Bell, Alexander Graham Bell’s mother, was herself so hard of hearing as to be effectively deaf. In April of 1871, her son became a teacher at the School for Deaf Mutes in Boston. A kindly, generous man at bottom, he approached his work there with an altruistic zeal. “My feelings and sympathies are every day more and more aroused,” he wrote home to his family. “It makes my very heart ache to see the difficulties the little children have to contend with.”

He wasn’t just empathetic; he was also effective. By combining instruction in elocution and lip-reading with sign language, he did wonders for many of his students’ ability to engage with the hearing world around them. He wrote articles for prestigious journals, and earned the reputation of something of a miracle worker among the wealthy families of New England, who clamored to employ him as a private tutor for their hearing-impaired children.

Worthy though Bell’s work as a teacher of the deaf was, it would seem to be far removed from the telegraph and other marvels of the burgeoning new Age of Electricity. But there was another side to Alexander Graham Bell. His interest in elocution in the abstract had led from an early age to an interest in the biological mechanisms of human speech, and possible ways of artificially reproducing them. When he was just sixteen, he and his now-deceased brother had made a crude duplicate of a human soft palate and tongue out of wood, rubber, and cotton; by manipulating it in just the right way whilst blowing through an attached tube, they could get it to say a few simple words like “Mama.” One day when they were playing with it on the stairwell outside the family apartment, a neighbor poked her head out to see “what was wrong with the baby”; they viewed this as a triumph. Now the boys’ focus shifted to the family dog. They trained it to growl on cue while they manipulated the poor, patient animal’s mouth and throat — and out came some semi-recognizable facsimile of, “How are you, grandmama?”

Needless to say, the young Alexander had listened to his father’s stories of Joseph Faber’s talking automaton with rapt attention. Another phonetician told him that another German scientist and inventor by the name of Hermann von Helmholtz had recently written a book on the possibility of synthetic speech. It explained how vowel sounds could be generated by passing electrical currents through different combinations of tuning forks. The operator sat behind a keyboard not dissimilar to the one used by Faber, and like him pressed different combinations of keys to make different sounds; the big difference was that, while Faber’s puppet was powered by compressed air, Helmholtz’s gadget was entirely electrical. But Bell didn’t read German, and so could do little more than look at the diagrams of Helmholtz’s device that were included in the book. This led to an important misunderstanding: whereas in reality each tuning fork was connected to the master keyboard via its own wire, Bell thought that one wire passed through all of the forks, and that it was the characteristics of the current on that wire — more specifically, its frequency — that caused some of them to ring out while others remained silent. “The notion was entirely mistaken,” writes the historian of telephony John Brooks, “but the mistake was an accident of destiny.”

Bell’s destiny became manifest on October 18, 1872, when he opened a Boston newspaper to see an article about the “duplex telegraphy” system of a local man named Joseph B. Stearns. An important advance in the state of the art of electrical communication in its own right, duplex telegraphy allowed one to send separate messages simultaneously in opposite directions along a single telegraph wire. In a world where telegraph congestion was becoming a major issue, this was a more than significant gain in efficiency. Being quite fast and cheap to retro-fit onto existing telegraph lines in busy areas, Stearns’s system would soon become commonplace. But already other inventors were beginning to think about how to go even farther, how to send even more messages simultaneously down a single wire. Oddly enough, Alexander Graham Bell, teacher of the deaf, became one of these.

Joseph Stearns’s ingenious system for duplex telegraphy, which inspired Alexander Graham Bell’s initial investigations in the field. B in the diagram above is an iron bar. The wire running from the local battery (b) is split in two. Both of these wires are wound around the bar, but only wire 1 goes on to connect with the station at the other end of the line; wire 2 runs directly to ground. An electromagnetic switch is connected to the bar at N, and to the other side of this switch is connected the receiving apparatus. Because a locally generated signal passes evenly through the bar, the bar does not become magnetically unbalanced, and thus does not activate this switch. But a signal originating from the other station passes through only half of the bar, magnetizing it and tripping the switch, which allows the signal to go on to the receiving apparatus.

Bell’s idea was to pass the signal from each of several Morse keys attached to a single wire through a device known as a rheotome, which interrupted the flow of an electrical current at a user-adjustable speed, causing it to “vibrate” at a distinct frequency — akin to a distinct pitch when thought of in acoustic terms, as Bell most assuredly did. At the far end of the line would be a set of steel reeds attuned to each of these frequencies via tension screws, so that they would resonate and become magnetized only when their matching frequency reached them. These reeds, in combination with electromagnetic switches which they would trigger, would serve to sort out all of the different frequencies coming down the same wire, matching each Morse key at the sending end with the appropriate receiver by means of its unique electro-acoustic thumbprint. By the end of 1873, however, Bell had gotten only as far as being able to produce audible, simultaneous tones on his receiving reeds by pressing different Morse keys; he had done little more than duplicate the functionality of Hermann von Helmholtz’s vowel-speaking machine, albeit by wiring his reeds serially rather than in parallel like Helmholtz’s tuning forks.

Nevertheless, in January of 1874 Bell, still a loyal Briton despite his residency in the United States, wrote to the British Superintendent of Telegraphs explaining that he believed himself to be on the verge of an important breakthrough in the emerging field of multiplex telegraphy, one which he wished to offer to Her Majesty’s government free of charge. The reply was coldly impersonal, not to say disinterested: “If you will submit your invention it will be considered, on the understanding, however, that the department is not bound to secrecy in the matter, nor to indemnify you for any loss or expense you may incur in the furtherance of your object, and that in the event of your method of telegraphy appearing to be both original and useful, all questions of remuneration shall rest entirely with the postmaster-general.” Bell understandably took this as “almost a personal affront,” and decided to turn to private industry in the United States instead. The whole incident thus became another of those hidden, fateful linchpins of history. In so rudely rejecting its citizen inventor, the British government ensured that the telephone, like the telegraph before it, would go down in history as a product of the American can-do spirit.

Then again, the British government’s skepticism about this amateur inventor working so far outside of his usual field would scarcely have been questioned by any reasonable person at the time. Bell was not deeply versed in the vagaries of electricity, and his progress always seemed to be a matter of two steps forward, one step back — or the inverse.

Still, his experiments were intriguing enough that he attracted a pair of patrons, both of whose deaf children he had taught. Thomas Sanders was a wealthy leather merchant, while Gardiner Greene Hubbard was a prominent lawyer and public-spirited scion of old Boston wealth. Of the two, Hubbard would take the more active role, becoming at some times a vital source of moral support for Bell and at others a vexing micromanager. Their relationship was further complicated by the fact that Bell was desperately in love with Hubbard’s deaf daughter — and his own former student — Mabel.

Sanders and Hubbard joined their charge in forming the Bell Patent Association. They provided him with his first proper workshop and hired a part-time assistant to join him, a young machinist named Thomas A. Watson. Bell and Watson became fast friends despite their differences in socioeconomic status, their rapport taking on something of the flavor of another famous pairing which involves the name of Watson; instead of “Elementary, my dear Watson,” Bell’s catchphrase became, “Watson, we are on the verge of a great discovery!” And yet their demonstrable progress remained damnably slow. Even with the help of his assistant, who had many of the practical skills he lacked, Bell just couldn’t seem to get his “harmonic telegraph” to work reliably.

Everyone involved was keenly aware that Bell was not the only person in hot pursuit of further advances in multiplex telegraphy. Among his competition were the distinguished electrical engineer Elisha Gray, co-founder of a company known as Western Union that had come to dominate virtually all American telegraphy, and a young whiz kid named Thomas Edison. Bell was in a race, one that he felt himself to be losing to these men of vastly greater experimental know-how, who lived and breathed electric current in a way that he never would. Trying to keep up nearly killed him; he was still spending his days teaching the deaf students he couldn’t bear to abandon, even as he spent every evening in his laboratory.

From the perspective of today, it may seem that Bell was missing the forest for the trees as he continued to fashion ever more baroque devices for combining and then separating signals of different frequencies running down the same wire. He understood well that an electrical waveform could theoretically be made into an exact duplicate of a sound wave; all of his work was contingent on the similarities between the two. Yet it took him a long time to fully embrace a goal which seems obvious to us: that of transmitting sound electronically as a purpose unto itself, a revolutionary advance to which any potential incremental advances in multiplex telegraphy couldn’t hold a candle.

There was one central problem which prevented Bell from making that leap: he knew how to create an electronic waveform that captured only half of the data encoded by a sound wave in the real world. His circuits were all powered by an external battery, providing direct current at a fixed amplitude. He could vary the frequency of this current using a rheotome, but he had no way of changing its amplitude. In other words, he could transmit a sound’s pitch (or frequency) but not its volume (or amplitude). This meant that he could mimic uniform tones in electric current, but not the complexities of, say, human speech.

Using a rheotone, Bell could transmit uniform sounds of low (left) or high (right) pitch.

He couldn’t, however, transmit a more complex waveform like the one above.

June 2, 1875, was a miserably hot day in Boston. Bell and Watson were working in a rather desultory fashion on their harmonic telegraph in their cramped laboratory; their progress of late had been as slow as ever. Bell was on the sending end in one room, Watson on the receiving end in the other, and, as usual, the thing wasn’t working correctly; one reed on the receiving end stubbornly refused to sound. So, they shut down the battery, and Watson started plucking the recalcitrant reed to make sure it was free to move as it should.

Because the system would need to be able to send messages in both directions, it was equipped with both rheotomes and receiving reeds on each of its ends. But, because they weren’t in use at the moment, the reeds on Bell’s end had been left untuned. And it was these latter that now gave Alexander Graham Bell one of the shocks of his life: he found that he could see and faintly hear the reeds on his side vibrate in time with Watson’s plucking, even with no power flowing through the circuit. He realized that a residual magnetism in Watson’s reed must be creating a faint electrical signal of its own on the wire. And, crucially, this signal varied not just in pitch but in amplitude. It seemed that one counterintuitive trick to sending sound down a wire was to remove the amplitude-obscuring battery from the circuit entirely. “I have accidentally made a discovery of the greatest importance,” Bell wrote in a letter to Hubbard. “I have succeeded today in transmitting signals without any battery whatsoever!” The harmonic telegraph was momentarily forgotten in favor of this new possibility.

Bell sketched for Watson a design that used identical devices on each end of a wire for both sending and receiving the spoken word. They consisted of a single untuned metal reed, an electromagnet, and a thin diaphragm. If one spoke into one of them shortly after power had been supplied to the wire — i..e, when the electromagnets still retained some residual magnetism — the resulting vibrations of the diaphragm ought to induce a very faint electrical signal of the same character as the sound wave that had caused the vibration. At the other end of the wire, this signal would be translated back into sound when it caused the reed to vibrate.

Alexander Graham Bell’s very first attempt at a telephone, using unpowered magnetic induction. It was later given the rather morbid nickname of the “gallows telephone,” after its resemblance to an execution gallows when turned on end.

Experts who have looked at the design since have concluded that it is workable in principle. In practice, however, it stubbornly refused to function properly. Bell and Watson just couldn’t seem to get the fine-tuning right, could get it to transmit some form of sound but not comprehensible speech. The Achilles heel of the “magnetic induction” method of sound transmission was the vanishing faintness of the signals it produced. Even under perfect conditions, a human voice could reach the other end of a wire as the barest whisper, audible only to a person with very keen hearing — and the slightest technical infelicity would mean it couldn’t even manage that much.

Faced with this latest setback, and with his harmonic telegraph also seemingly going nowhere, Alexander Graham Bell came very close to giving up on electrical invention altogether. He and Watson were both utterly frazzled, having worked themselves to the bone in recent months. Gardiner Hubbard remained enthusiastic about telegraphy, but was less interested in telephony, and didn’t hesitate to tell Bell this. Bell himself now believed that his harmonic telegraph stood little chance against its competition even if he could get it working — by now Thomas Edison had already patented a design for a telegraph capable of sending four messages simultaneously down the same wire — but he hesitated to say as much to his prospective father-in-law. Instead he prevaricated, devoting more time and energy once again to his teaching. Needless to say, this too displeased Hubbard. “I have been sorry to see how little interest you seem to take in telegraph matters,” he wrote to Bell that fall. “Your whole course has been a very great disappointment to me, and a sore trial.” What Bell and Hubbard didn’t know, but would doubtless have been even more consternated to learn, was that Elisha Gray had also turned away from multiplex telegraphy in the wake of Edison’s patent and begun pursuing the possibility of telephony.

What time Bell did spend on his electrical pursuits during the second half of 1875 was largely devoted to preparing a patent application for his inventions, even though none of them quite worked yet. Hubbard helped him to file it, on February 14, 1876. Incredibly, just a few hours later on that same day Gray filed a “caveat” — a claim of primacy submitted before a formal patent application — detailing his plans for a “speaking telephone.” Had the order been reversed, the history of the telephone in service might have gone much differently, with the name of “Gray” replacing that of “Bell” in the annals of invention.

But as it was, Bell’s own patent application, which was approved on March 7, 1876, would go on to become one of the most valuable and controversial in American history. To say it buries the lede is an understatement: rather than Gray’s speaking telephone, it promises only “improvements in telegraphy,” never even using the word “telephone.” And rather than the transmission of intelligible speech, it promises only the transmission of “vocal or other sounds” — which was accurate enough, considering that this was all that Bell and Watson had managed to date by even the most generous possible interpretation.

Still, the patent filing did reinvigorate the young inventor and his assistant: they returned to their laboratory and began working in earnest again. The day after his patent was approved, Bell was futzing about alone when he did something that seems almost inexplicable on the face of it, being out of keeping with all of his experiments to date. First he attached a battery to a wire. He then split one end of the wire into two leads, running one of them to a tuning fork and dropping the other into a dish of water. At the other end of the wire he attached one of his metal reeds, but left it untuned so that it would vibrate freely in response to any signal. He tapped the tuning fork to make it vibrate and dipped one of its arms into the dish of water, whereupon he was rewarded with a “faint sound” from the reed. Excited now, he added some sulfuric acid to the water to make it a better conductor, then repeated the experiment. Sure enough, the sound from the reed got louder. He attached the lead in the water to a submerged ribbon of brass, and the sound got louder still.

What was happening here? The liquid in the dish and the metal of the tuning fork both being conductive, they were serving to bridge the two leads, allowing the current from the battery to flow between them. But the vibrations of the tuning fork were varying the resistance of the circuit, which in turn varied the frequency and amplitude of the current flowing along it. This “variable resistance” method of transmitting a sound wave was far superior to the unpowered magnetic induction Bell had been relying on earlier, which had been able to create the merest trace of a signal on the line. This signal, by contrast, was stronger to begin with, and could be further amplified to whatever extent one desired simply by using more and/or larger batteries. It was the great breakthrough on the road to a practical, usable telephone. Bell immediately went in search of Watson.

Two days later, all was in readiness for the pivotal test. Watson, who had by now taken on a recording function for the duo’s adventures not that far removed from his literary namesake, describes the scene:

I had made Bell a new transmitter, in which a wire, attached to a diaphragm, touched acidulated water contained in a metal cup, both included in a circuit through the battery and receiving telephone. The depth of the wire in the acid and consequently the resistance of the circuit was varied as the voice made the diaphragm vibrate, which made the galvanic current undulate in speech form.

At the other end of the wire was of course an untuned metal reed, waiting to receive whatever electrical signal came down the wire and turn it back into sound waves.

Bell’s crude sketch of his first “liquid transmitter” telephone.

Bell took his spot at the transmitting station, while Watson went to the receiving station behind a closed door in the adjacent room. And then Watson heard the canonical first words ever spoken into a working telephone: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.”

I rushed into his room and found he had upset the acid of a battery over his clothes. He forgot the accident in the joy of his new transmitter when I told him how plainly I had heard his words.

The two men spent hours running between the rooms testing out their contraption, which did indeed work — not perfectly, mind you, but vastly more reliably than anything they had created to date. In an inadvertent homage to poor Joseph Faber, Bell concluded the evening’s festivities by singing “God Save the Queen” into the wire. “This is a great day with me,” he wrote. “I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem — and the day is coming when telegraph [sic] wires will be laid on to houses just like water or gas — and friends converse with each other without leaving home.” The words were prescient. Alexander Graham Bell, elocutionist and teacher of the deaf, working alone except for one talented assistant, had invented the telephone before anyone else.

Or had he?

In the very near future, individuals and courts would come to speculate endlessly about where the sudden burst of insight that a sound wave could be transmitted on a powered wire by varying the circuit’s resistance had actually come from. The possibility is mentioned in Bell’s patent application, but only as a last-minute, hand-scrawled notation in the margin. Elisha Gray’s patent caveat, by contrast, includes not only the principle but a detailed description of how a transmitter very similar to the one Bell employed might be made, right down to a diaphragm with a lead dangling into a dish of acidulated water. Bell himself wrote in a letter to his father that he had become friendly with the clerk who had accepted both documents, and continued to talk with him regularly while his own patent was going through the approval process. Did the clerk let slip these details of Gray’s design, or possibly even allow Bell to look at the document itself? Did he let Bell add that crucial note to the margin of his own patent application after its submission? (Bell did later acknowledge that he was allowed to “clarify” some other terms that the patent office deemed too vague in the first draft.) All of these things would soon be insinuated in court.

Elisha Gray, the man who some insist deserves at least equal credit with Alexander Graham Bell for the invention of the telephone.

Alexander Graham Bell’s personal papers did provide some exculpatory evidence after they were donated to the Library of Congress in 1976. Bell’s notes show that he was thinking about the potential of using variable resistance to transmit sound as early as May 4, 1875, and even conducted some experiments in that direction shortly thereafter. Likewise, he did tinker with “liquid transmitters” from time to time prior to that fateful date of March 8, 1876. Still, he never thought to combine a transmitter using acidulated water with the principle of variable resistance until suspiciously close to the moment that Elisha Gray submitted a detailed plan for doing so to a man with whom Bell later had several fairly long conversations. The evidence is highly circumstantial, to be sure, but is no less hard to discount entirely for that. Historians have combed through all of the relevant papers thoroughly without finding any more definitive smoking gun pointing one way or the other. It seems that the truth of the matter will never be known with complete certainty.

On the other hand, if we judge that the credit for an invention should go to the first person to make a working version of it, full stop, then we can comfortably declare Alexander Graham Bell to be the inventor of the telephone; there is no suggestion that Gray actually built the telephone he designed on paper prior to Bell’s first successful test on March 10, 1876. The whole controversy serves to remind us that any remotely modern technology is a mishmash of ideas and discoveries, and the order and primacy of the whole is not always as clear as we might wish.

At any rate, the telephone was now a reality. And now that it was invented, it needed to be put into service.

(Sources: the books The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage, Power Struggles: Scientific Authority and the Creation of Practical Electricity Before Edison by Michael B. Schiffer, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F.B. Morse by Kenneth Silverman, A Thread across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Telegraph by John Steele Gordon, The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph by Henry M. Field, Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude by Robert V. Bruce, Alexander Graham Bell: The Life and Times of the Man Who Invented the Telephone by Edwin S. Grosvenor, Reluctant Genius: Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention by Charlotte Gray, Telephone: The First Hundred Years by John Brooks, and American Telegraphy and Encyclopedia of the Telegraph by William Maver, Jr. Online sources include History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications and “Joseph Faber and the Euphonia Talking Device” at History Computer.)

Comments
19 Responses

- Roberto

February 18, 2022 at 6:57 pm

Somebody wouldn’t agree, I guess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Meucci

By the way thanks for your encyclopedic work, I really appreciate it.

- Gio

February 19, 2022 at 11:41 am

Typical american approach: taking innovative ideas from Europeans and telling they were created by yankees…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Meucci#Invention_of_the_telephone
Give credits to some other telephone pioneers, as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bourseul
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Philipp_Reis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocenzo_Manzetti

- Mike K

February 18, 2022 at 7:35 pm

Thoroughly enjoying this series of articles!

- Dan V.

February 18, 2022 at 11:31 pm

Minor nitpick: “and a young whizz kid named Thomas Edison” should be whiz with one Z. A whizz kid would be doing something else.

Great work on this series, by the way.

- Jimmy Maher

February 19, 2022 at 7:35 am

Thanks!

- Rowan Lipkovits

February 19, 2022 at 1:53 am

“after his death by the universal consensus of the international scientific community”

I don’t know if this wants a comma or what, but it sounds like an incredible spin on the “Murder on the Orient Express” twist.

- Jimmy Maher

February 19, 2022 at 7:37 am

Ah, I see how you read that… Thanks!

- Ian Crossfield

February 19, 2022 at 2:26 am

We’ve come a long way since Getting Lamps and Hunting Wumpus… still enjoying the ride.

- Aula

February 19, 2022 at 7:16 am

“Never since has the electrical link between the two continents been severed.”

All current (and presumably future) transatlantic cables use optical fiber instead of electric wire, so “electrical” isn’t the right word.

- Jimmy Maher

February 19, 2022 at 7:38 am

Thanks!

- Tuna

February 19, 2022 at 6:15 pm

While the data travels as photons in fiber, submarine optical cables also contain an electrical cable (typically very high voltage DC). Light can only make so far in glass, and so all current long cables contain repeaters at steady intervals, and they need to be powered.

Interestingly, this might actually change in the reasonably near future. ZBLAN fiber manufactured in microgravity can be clear enough that you can push the same signal across an ocean without using any repeaters. This is often considered one of the very few candidate products that can only be manufactured in orbit, and which would be sufficiently valuable to make setting up orbital manufacturing worth it.

- Daniel Wolf

February 19, 2022 at 7:52 am

I was a bit confused when I read the first long quotation starting with “Every morning, as Mr. Field went to his office”. Is this Henry Field talking about himself in the third person?

Also, on a purely stylistic note, I noticed the word “stint” twice in two consecutive sentences; maybe one could be rephrased.

- Jimmy Maher

February 19, 2022 at 8:11 am

He’s talking about Cyrus Field. Added an emendation to reflect that. Thanks!

- Martin

February 20, 2022 at 12:21 am

Serious question. So when did the classic two cans and a string ‘telephone’ come from?

- Gnoman

February 20, 2022 at 1:00 am

Mid 1600s is when the device is first described. Purely acoustic devices of this sort were tinkered with for a very long time before the invention of the electronic telephone, and were quite common by the 19th century.

This is one of the big areas where Meucci’s claim to the telephone runs aground – it is certain that he built multiple acoustic speaking devices that may have had an electrical component, but it is far from certain that he made the leap to a full-electric system before Bell did.

- Peter Olausson

February 20, 2022 at 10:02 am

What a plot twist to realise William Thomson was Lord Kelvin. Fantastic.

And a terrific side quest, this “victorian Internet” thing. Keep it up!

- Nate

February 22, 2022 at 10:23 pm

I’m also enjoying these adventures in communications.

I find the switch between currencies jarring in these passages. It makes them hard to compare:

“rather staggering £1 or $7.50 per word, at a time when a skilled craftsman’s weekly wage might be around $10.”

“a slightly more manageable $1 per word; by 1892, the price was down to 25¢ per word”

Perhaps you could convert all of them to one currency (in the same year) for the sake of comparison?

- Martin

February 24, 2022 at 4:15 pm

If the exchange rates remained constant that would make sense but as the pound to dollar exchange rate has changed significantly, one value (either one) would make little sense for users of the other currency.

- Whomever

February 25, 2022 at 2:28 pm

I disagree with this (converting currency). The reason is that it’s not really a simple relationship; the exchange rate between £ and $ has radically changed over time, and inflation is not just a simple thing of “all prices rise at the same time”. See eg https://fullstackeconomics.com/why-agatha-christie-could-afford-a-maid-and-a-nanny-but-not-a-car/ for an article that has been going around recently that perfectly illustrates this. The original prices have context which would be lost.

A Web Around the World, Part 5: Selling the Telephone
March 4, 2022

Our history textbooks tell us that Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas A. Watson built and tested the world’s first working telephone on March 10, 1876. This statement is, broadly speaking, correct. Yet it can obscure what a crude instrument that first telephone really was, with its one end terminating in a tuning fork dunked in a bowl of pungent liquid, its other in a metal reed that functioned as the most rudimentary imaginable form of speaker. The device was unidirectional, which made holding an actual conversation over it an impossibility. If you breathed in when you leaned down to talk into the transmitting diaphragm, you would be rewarded with a lungful of fumes and a coughing fit. And as you used the telephone an ugly black deposit on the exposed wire in the bowl gradually ruined the connection, unless and until you scraped the toxic gunk away with a knife. The whole contraption looked and acted more like something from Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory than a tool of modern communications.

Certainly Gardiner Greene Hubbard was thoroughly unimpressed with what he saw when he visited his protege’s workshop on March 13: he “seemed rather skeptical,” according to Bell’s laconic diary entry. Even now the telephone continued to strike him as a pointless distraction from the lucrative field of telegraphy. Seeing that they had probably lost the race to create a viable multiplex telegraph that improved on Joseph B. Stearns’s duplex design, Hubbard and Bell had recently agreed to pivot to what they called an “autograph” telegraph, which smacks of nothing so much as the fax machines of our own recent past. In an inadvertent echo of Samuel Morse’s original conception of the telegraph as a sort of electronic printing press, the autograph telegraph would allow an entire document to be “typeset” electronically and sent down the wire, using multiplexing to increase the transmission speed. To be sure, the idea was visionary in its way, but it was also most likely unachievable in the context of 1876, especially by one of Bell’s modest technical skills. At any rate, progress on it had been painfully slow. Yet Hubbard’s heart remained set on it.

Hubbard wrote to Bell shortly after his visit that he should devote himself exclusively to the autograph telegraph: “If you would work steadily on one thing [emphasis original] until you had perfected it, you would soon make it a success. While you are flying from one thing to another you may accidentally accomplish something, but you probably will never perfect anything.” Then he brought out his big gun: he persuaded his daughter Mabel to write to the lovelorn Bell that she could never think of marrying him until he had honored his agreement with her father to create the autograph telegraph. Bell was devastated. “I want to marry you, darling, because I love you,” he wrote in reply. “I wish to feel that you would marry me for the same reason.”

The ruthless pressure Hubbard was applying wasn’t quite enough to get Bell to abandon telephony altogether. But, not knowing how to package up his variable-resistance transmitter in some way that didn’t involve a lung-scalding bowl of acidulated water, he did lose faith on that front, returning to his older researches into the possibilities of unpowered magnetic-induction transmission. Within weeks, he and Watson had built a magnetic-induction telephone that could also transmit intelligible speech. Continuing with this method, which required no messy bowls of acidulated water and easily permitted a bi-directional conversation over a single wire, struck him as the most reasonable way forward. Bell would spend the rest of his fairly brief-lived career as an inventor in the fields of telegraphy and telephony chasing down the blind alleys of the autograph telegraph and the magnetic-induction telephone, never returning to his stroke of genius of March 10, 1876.

Much of the 1876 Philadelphia World’s Fair was devoted to the wonders of technology. Here we see the Machinery Hall, where a colossal Corliss steam engine dwarfs the full-size locomotives lined up in front of it. The telephone, the most important of all the technologies to make their debut at the fair, was seen only by a select few and attracted little press attention at the time.

The period between the American Civil War and World War II was the heyday of the World’s Fairs, international exhibitions of science, invention, and industry on a lavish scale. The very first World’s Fair to be held in the United States took place from May 10 to November 10 of 1876. It was presented in honor of the nation’s centennial in Philadelphia, the city where the Declaration of Independence had been signed. Hubbard used his connections to secure Bell a slot at a by-invitation-only demonstration of the latest techniques in telegraphy, which was to take place on June 25.

The day in question proved a brutally hot one; the air inside the temporary auditorium that had been erected on the fairgrounds was stifling. With no commercial record and no name recognition, the Bell Patent Association was relegated to the very last presentation of a long program of them. By the time Alexander Graham Bell took the stage, following such men of distinction as Elisha Gray, the audience of scientific, business, and political luminaries — among them was none other than William Thomson, the principal technical architect of the first transatlantic telegraph cable — was positively lethargic. While 2000 miles to the west Lieutenant Colonel George Custer was launching his ill-fated attack at Little Big Horn, Bell droned on about multiplex telegraphy and the autograph telegraph to a bored audience who had already heard enough of that sort of thing on this day. Then, just before he finished, he said that he would like to demonstrate another invention that was still “in embryo.”

Showing a flair for showmanship which his presentation to this point had never so much as hinted at, Bell invited Thomson to join him onstage, seating him before a table on which lay something that looked for all the world like a useless lump of iron. He told his august guinea pig to press the lump to his ear, then ran to a room behind the stage where its twin lay hidden. He began to declaim into it the famous soliloquy from Hamlet — “To be or not to be, that is the question” — in his dulcet Scottish brogue, itself a tribute to his family’s tradition of research in elocution. Onstage, Thomson’s face lit up in astonishment. Forgetting himself completely in the moment, the distinguished scientist jumped up and ran off like a schoolboy in search of Bell, leaving the audience perplexed as to what was going on here.

Bell’s next guinea pig made it clear to everyone. Emperor Pedro II of Brazil was something of a celebrity throughout the Americas, a portly, jolly man who looked and acted rather like Santa Claus, whose down-to-earth humanity belied his majestic station. “Dom Pedro,” as he was known, pushed the lump ever tighter to his ear and screwed up his face in concentration. Then he leaped up from his seat. “I hear! I hear!” he shouted in his broken English. Then, in Portuguese: “My God! It talks!” The room erupted in pandemonium. Forgetting about the heat and the long day stretching up to this point, the audience detained Bell for hours; every single one of them insisted on having his own chance to try out Bell’s magical telephone. The reaction finally convinced Hubbard that it was the telephone rather than Bell’s experiments in telegraphy that could make them both a fortune. He forgot everything he had ever said about his protege’s misplaced priorities. From this day forward, it would be full speed ahead on the telephone alone.

When he returned home to Britain, William Thomson said that the telephone had been the “most wonderful thing” he had seen at the Centennial Exhibition. Still not grasping that Bell’s invention was so revolutionary as to deserve a name of its own, he called it “the greatest marvel hitherto achieved by the electric telegraph,” noting as well that it had been “obtained by appliances of quite a homespun and rudimentary character.” (“I have never quite forgiven Sir William for that last sentence,” Thomas Watson would later remark with a wink.) But the public at large was slower to catch on, largely because not a single member of the mainstream press had attended the telephone’s coming-out party; journalists had all assumed that the day would contain nothing but incremental, fairly plebeian improvements on the existing technologies of telegraphy, interesting for those in the trade no doubt but hardly riveting for the general reader.

Still, word that something kind of amazing was afoot did slowly begin to spread. On August 3, Hubbard arranged to borrow a five-mile stretch of existing telegraph line connecting the towns of Mount Pleasant and Brantford in Ontario, and Bell conducted the first demonstration of his telephone to use outdoor wires that crossed a non-trivial distance. On October 9, again using a borrowed telegraph line, Bell and Watson had the first two-way conversation at a distance, speaking across the Charles River that separates Boston from Cambridge. On November 27, they communicated over the sixteen miles that separate Boston from Salem; they were able to extend the range this far by shifting from electromagnetic transmitters, relying upon a residual electrical charge from a battery, to more powerful permanent magnets that had no need at all for a battery.

On January 30, 1877, Bell was awarded a second telephony patent, one that much more fully described his design for a magnetic-induction telephone than had the previous one. By now the press was well and truly onto the story. “Professor Bell,” wrote the Boston Herald after the November 27 test, “doubts not that he will ultimately be able to chat pleasantly with friends in Europe while sitting comfortably in his Boston home.”

But such accommodating journalism was rare. Taking their lead from Western Union and the other established powers in the telegraph industry, most reporters treated the telephone as a novel curiosity rather than a supplement to — much less a threat to — the extant telegraph network. And there was in truth ample reason for skepticism. Even with the best permanent magnets Bell and Watson could find, the voices that came down their wires were whisper-faint. Ironically given Bell’s lifelong dedication to helping the deaf participate in the society around them, they were audible and decipherable only by people like him with excellent hearing. A comparison with that first transatlantic telegraph cable of 1858 is apt: these first telephones worked after a fashion, but they didn’t work all that well. In practice, most people tended to spend most of their time screaming “What did you say?” into them; the wonder the telephone initially provoked tended to shade with disarming speed into rank frustration. In his personal journal, Thomas Watson didn’t shy away from acknowledging the magnetic-induction telephone’s infelicities: it “would talk moderately well over a short line, but the apparatus was delicate and complicated and didn’t talk distinctly enough for practical use.”

Hubbard too showed signs of losing heart. At one point in late 1876, he reportedly asked Western Union whether they would be interested in buying Bell’s telephone lock, stock, and barrel for $100,000. He was turned down flat.

Bell lacked the requisite patience for the sort of slow, plodding laboratory work that might have improved his telephone, but he still needed to bring some money in for himself and Hubbard if he was to win the hand of the fair Mabel. So, he found an alternative to which his personality was more naturally suited: he hit the traveling-exhibition circuit with Watson in tow, crisscrossing the Northeast through much of the first half of 1877 like a boffinish P.T. Barnum. After his magic-lantern slideshow — the nineteenth century’s equivalent to Microsoft PowerPoint — he would present telephonic performances by brass bands, string quartets, opera singers, or church organs — the louder the racket they could make, the better — while his audience strained their ears to make sense of what they were hearing, or thought they heard. The disembodied human voices especially were fraught with sinister implications for many of those who assembled. In fact, the delicious thrill they provoked was doubtless a big part of the reason that audiences paid good money for a ticket; the seances of Spiritualism were becoming all the rage in the broader culture at the time. The Providence Star noted that it was “difficult, hearing the sounds out of the mysterious box, to wholly resist the notion that the powers of darkness are somehow in league with it.” “Had the hall been darkened,” wrote the Manchester Union, “we really believe some [from the audience] would have left unceremoniously.” The Boston Advertiser called the demonstration “weird”; the New York Herald declared it “almost supernatural.”

A Bell magnetic-induction “box” telephone from 1877. The cone mounted on the end served as both transmitter and receiver, necessitating some dexterous juggling on the part of the user.

The proprietors of the telephone are now prepared to furnish telephones for the transmission of articulate speech through instruments not more than twenty miles apart. Conversation can easily be carried on after slight practice and with occasional repetition of a word or sentence. On first listening to the telephone, though the sound is perfectly audible, the articulation seems to be indistinct. But after a few trials the ear becomes accustomed to the peculiar sound.

— The first advertisement for the Bell telephone, May 1877

By the late spring of 1877, Bell and Watson’s roadshow showed signs of running out of steam. It seemed they had to put up or shut up: the partners needed either to make a serious attempt to commercialize the telephone or just move on with their lives. After much debate, they chose the former course. That May, they signed their first customer, an enterprising banker named Roswell C. Downer, who paid for a telephone line connecting his home with his office. This harbinger of the modern condition was followed by no fewer than 600 more of his ilk by August 1. All of the connections were point-to-point setups linking one telephone to exactly one other telephone. But one decision the partners made would prove crucial to the eventual development of a more flexible telephone network: they leased telephones rather than sold them to their customers, and retained ownership and control of the cables binding them together as well. To state the case in modern terms, the telephone industry was to be a service rather than a hardware provider.

Each of these early telephones looked like a block of wood with a hole on one end and some wire sticking out the other. After shouting into the hole, one then had to shift it quickly to one’s ear to catch the response. “When replying to communication from another, do not speak too promptly,” pleaded the instruction manual. “Much trouble is caused from both parties speaking at the same time. When you are not speaking, you should be listening.” Being completely unpowered, these first telephones had no ability to ring; if someone didn’t happen to be standing at the other end when you shouted down the line, you were just out of luck. They were so heavy that using them was a veritable workout; Thomas Watson described the experience as akin to holding a suitcase up to one’s ear for minutes at a time. And yet there was a reasonably substantial group of people willing to pay for the dream of being in instant voice communication with others a considerable distance away, however circumscribed the reality of the telephone in service might have been.

The summer of 1877 was an exciting one for Alexander Graham Bell. On July 9, the Bell Telephone Company was formed, superseding the old Bell Patent Association. Two days later, he was finally allowed to marry Mabel. And on August 1, the Bell Telephone Company issued its first 5000 shares: 1497 of them to the mostly silent partner Thomas Sanders; 1497 to the young woman who was now known as Mabel Bell; 1387 to Gardiner Hubbard; 499 to Thomas A. Watson; 100 to Hubbard’s wife; ten to Hubbard’s brother; and all of ten shares to Bell himself, who in the throes of his newlywed bliss had signed all of the rest that he had coming over to his wife.

Shortly thereafter, Alexander Graham and Mabel Bell sailed for Britain, both to enjoy an extended honeymoon — it was Bell’s first return to his homeland since his emigration seven years before — and to act as ambassadors for the telephone on the other side of the Atlantic. In the latter capacity, they demonstrated it to Queen Victoria on January 14, 1878. There were some problems getting the connection going over the borrowed telegraph wire, and the queen’s attention began to wander. But suddenly Bell heard through the gadget the voice of a woman he had hired to sing “Kathleen Mavourneen,” one of the queen’s favorite ballads. In his excitement, he reached out and grabbed her by the arm. Everyone in the room gasped — but Queen Victoria didn’t even seem to notice, merely pressed the box to her ear and listened with a rapt expression. She wrote in her diary that night that Bell’s telephone was “most extraordinary.”

The audience with the queen created a widespread frisson of excitement over the telephone in Britain the likes of which had ironically not yet been seen in its birth country, where its thunder had recently been stolen by the announcement of Thomas Edison’s phonograph. Toy telephones became popular on Britain’s high streets. “Wherever you go,” wrote Mabel Bell in a letter back home to her mother, “on newspaper stands, at news stores, stationers, photographers, toy shops, fancy-goods shops, you see the eternal little black box with red face, and the word ‘Telephone’ in large black letters. Advertisements say that 700,000 have been sold in a few weeks.” If Bell Telephone could have leased anywhere near as many of the real thing back in the United States, everyone involved would have been thrilled.

But the harsh truth was that, even as the Bells were doing their public relations overseas, the company that bore their name was floundering in the domestic market. Many or most of the customers who had initially signed up in such gratifying numbers were dissatisfied by the underwhelming reality of their telephones, and no amount of patiently pedantic instruction manuals were going to get them to love a device that just didn’t work all that well. Worst of all, there was now a formidable competitor about to enter the field with a telephone much better than the one being peddled by Bell, thanks to the inventive genius of one Thomas Edison.

Thomas Edison at about age 30, when he was active in telegraphy and telephony and also in the process of inventing the phonograph.

Thomas Alva Edison was born in Ohio on February 11, 1847, the seventh and last child of parents who had just been driven out of British Canada for backing an insurrection against the provincial government there. When his father wasn’t rebelling, he was an odd-jobber and striver whose schemes never quite seemed to pan out. His mother was a former schoolteacher; almost all of the limited education Edison received came from her in the family home. Already at age twelve, he started riding the rails, working as a newsboy on trains. Showing the same entrepreneurial streak as his father but demonstrating more ability to turn his schemes into profits, he soon became a full-fledged mobile shopkeeper, buying snacks, books, and magazines cheap and selling them at a mark-up to passengers. He even published his own newspaper for a time from a compartment on the train with the help of an old printing press he had acquired. But it was the telegraph houses that stood everywhere the trains traveled that really captured the teenage Edison’s interest.

He happened to be sitting on a station platform one day when he saw a young boy wander onto the tracks in front of an approaching locomotive. Edison leaped to the rescue, successfully. The boy’s father happened to be the telegraph master at the station. The grateful man agreed to teach Edison some of the basics of telegraphy, and also lent him a number of books on the subject. Edison studied the description of Morse Code found therein with fanatical dedication — “about eighteen hours a day” was his own claim later in life — and got his first paying gig as a telegraph operator in Stratford Junction, Ontario, at the age of sixteen.

He quickly became a star among the telegraph fraternity. The speed with which he could decode messages coming down the wire became legendary; if one of his colleagues was sick, he could do this other’s job as well as his own, decoding two separate messages from two skilled senders simultaneously. And, because even brainy boys will be boys, he became equally legendary for his practical jokes. One of his favorites combined a wet floor with an induction coil to give his fellow operators a very unpleasant electrical shock as soon as they sat down in front of their Morse keys.

As that anecdote would indicate, Edison was fast becoming more than just a skilled end-user of the telegraph. He was fascinated by electrical technology in the abstract in a way that Alexander Graham Bell would never be; he lived and breathed it, experimenting and tinkering endlessly whenever he wasn’t on duty in a telegraph house. He applied for his first patent at age 21, for an automated vote recorder that he imagined would be used by the United States Congress; each representative need only push either the aye or the nay button installed at his seat, and the results would be automatically tabulated and displayed on a big dial mounted on the wall. But no one in the capital proved to be interested in it — because, as it was belatedly explained to Edison, the slow, inefficient method of voting that was currently used was actually an essential part of the legislative process, providing as it did ample opportunities to lobby, whip, and negotiate for votes. He took away from the experience a lesson that would never leave him: an inventor who wishes to be successful must ask what the people want, and invent that thing instead of the thing that makes him feel clever. With this lesson in hand, Edison would go on to become history’s archetype of the commercially successful inventor.

Though he was rough-hewn in demeanor and largely uneducated in anything other than the vagaries of mechanisms and circuits, Edison nonetheless displayed a peculiar ability to talk to moneyed men of business and win their support. In 1869, he retired from his career as a telegraph operator and became a sort of telegraphy consultant, helping his clients to improve their systems and processes. In 1874, he scored his first major triumph as an inventor of things that people really wanted, and crushed the first telegraphy dream of Alexander Graham Bell in the process: he patented a quadriplex telegraph with the ability to double again the throughput of Joseph B. Stearns’s recently introduced duplex system. Unlike Bell’s design, which stamped each of its signals with a unique frequency on the sending end and used these as a way to sort them out again on the receiving end, Edison’s system combined Stearns’s innovations with differing electrical polarities that served as another way of separating signals from one another. Most importantly, his system consistently worked, which was more than could ever be said for Bell’s.

The quadriplex telegraph catapulted him into the next stage of his career. In the spring of 1876, Edison moved into his soon-to-be-famous laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, from which he would invent so many of the trappings of our modern world. Later that year, as we’ve seen, press notices about Bell’s magnetic-induction telephone began to appear. Edison had been very hard of hearing since boyhood, which meant that Bell’s invention as currently constituted was useless to him. So, he decided to make a better telephone, one that even he would be able to use without difficulty.

There no longer remained any mystery about the best theoretical approach to such a goal. Clearly the key to a louder telephone was the use of a variable-resistance transmitter instead of one that relied on magnetic induction; this Bell himself had demonstrated before losing heart. Bell had given up because he didn’t know of any substances other than acidulated water whose resistance could be made to vary in tandem with the vibrations of a diaphragm that was being struck by sound waves issuing from a human mouth. But Edison was possessed of both a much wider range of electrical knowledge and a methodical patience which eluded the high-strung Bell.

Edison made his own experimental telephone, and throughout most of 1877 used it to test many solid or semi-solid materials, keeping careful notes on the results. He tried paper, lead, copper, graphite, felt, and platinum among other substances, all of them in countless forms, combinations, and configurations, conducting over 2000 separate trials in all. In the end, he wound up back at the very first material he had tested: carbon, in the form of lampblack — i.e., residual soot scraped from a lamp or chimney. Lampblack was, he judged, as close as a solid could come to the properties of acidulated water.

Edison’s final design for a variable-resistance transmitter used a cone with a thin metal diaphragm installed at its base, much like Bell’s extant telephones. But instead of a magnet, his diaphragm rested atop a sealed container of lampblack, through which a powered electrical circuit flowed. As the diaphragm vibrated in rhythm with the user’s words, its movements varied the resistance of this circuit to create a facsimile of the sound wave in electrical current — just as had the acidulated water in Bell’s experiment of the previous year, but in a far more practical and reliable way. An electromagnet and diaphragm, designed by a prolific telegraph engineer and occasional associate of Edison named George Phelps, served as a receiver at the other end of the line in lieu of Bell’s metal reed, giving much better fidelity. Edison’s telephone did have the disadvantage of being unidirectional; a two-way conversation required two wires, each fitted with its own transmitter and receiver. Then again, such a setup meant that the user no longer needed to keep moving the telephone between mouth and ear; she could speak and listen at the same time, and do the latter without straining her ears.

All told, it was a tremendous breakthrough, one with the potential to increase not only the volume but also the range of the telephone. Edison applied for a patent on his variable-resistance transmitter already on April 27, 1877, when he was still very much in the process of inventing it. After much back and forth, the patent was finally granted in February of 1878. By the time it was, Edison himself had become famous, thanks not to the telephone but the phonograph, which he had been working on concurrently with his experiments in telephony.

An early Western Union telephone. The user spoke into the round piece on the left, whilst holding the star-shaped receiver on the right up to her ear.

Already two months before the final patent on Edison’s transmitter was issued, Western Union cut a deal with the inventor for the right to use it, forming a new subsidiary called the American Speaking Telephone Company to put it into service. A David-and-Goliath fight was now in the offing between Bell Telephone and Western Union. The latter corporation was in many ways a model for the other great trusts in this emerging Gilded Age of American business; for all intents and purposes it owned telegraphy writ large in the United States, as it seemed it now intended to own telephony. To make that happen, it had a market capitalization of $41 million (the equivalent of $1.4 billion in 2022 currency), net annual profits of more than $3 million, and established rights-of-way for its wires in every corner of the nation. And now it had a telephone that was by any objective standard vastly superior to the one being peddled by its puny rival.

The telephones which Western Union began leasing to customers in 1878 were the first in commercial service to be recognizable as such things to modern eyes, having separate attachments for talking and listening. A variable-resistance telephone of course required a powered circuit; in lieu of expensive and maintenance-heavy batteries, the end-users provided this power via elbow grease, by cranking from time to time a magneto attached to the telephones. It was a small price to pay for a device that was ergonomically superior and, most importantly of all, louder than anything that Bell Telephone could offer. For the first time, it was possible to have something resembling an ordinary conversation using these telephones.

Justifiably unnerved by these developments, Gardiner Hubbard asked a businessman named Theodore N. Vail to take over as head of Bell Telephone. Only 32 years old at the time he agreed to do so, Vail had, like Thomas Edison, gotten his start as an ordinary telegraph operator. But his genius ran in the direction of finance and management rather than the nuts and bolts of technology itself. He left his prestigious and well-paid post as head of the Railway Mail Service largely because he was bored with it and wanted a challenge. Whatever else one could say about it, Bell Telephone certainly qualified on that front.

After arriving at the company’s recently opened headquarters in New York City, Vail sat down to consider what he had gotten himself into. He realized that victory in the war with Western Union would have to come through the courts; as matters currently stood, Bell Telephone had no chance of winning via the free market alone. The patent situation was confusing to say the least. Alexander Graham Bell had patented the first working telephone, but had mentioned the principle of variable resistance that could make the telephone truly usable only in an addendum hand-scrawled in the margin of that patent. And now Thomas Edison instead of Bell had patented the carbon transmitter that was the key to a practical variable-resistance telephone, suitable for mass production and deployment. It seemed that Bell Telephone and Western Union each owned half of the telephone. This clearly wouldn’t do it at all.

So, Vail had Thomas Watson troll through the records at the patent office, looking for some way out of this impasse. In an incredible stroke of luck, he found just what they needed. On April 14, 1877 — thirteen days before Edison had filed a patent application for his variable-resistance transmitter — a German immigrant, janitor, and amateur inventor named Emile Berliner had filed for a patent caveat on a variable-resistance transmitter of his own. It used a different approach than Edison’s design: a wire inside it was only loosely screwed onto its terminal, which allowed the point of contact to vibrate in tandem with the diaphragm mounted above the wire, thus varying the resistance of the circuit. Berliner’s design was, everyone could agree, nowhere near as effective as Edison’s finalized carbon transmitter — but it had come first, and that was the important thing. Vail tracked down Berliner, who was still pushing a broom for a living, and hired him at a generous salary in return for the rights to his patent caveat. Vail’s intention was never to put Berliner’s transmitter into production, but rather to create a plausible legal argument that the principle of the variable transmitter, like all of the other aspects of a practical telephone, was now the sole intellectual property of the Bell Telephone Company. The new variable-resistance telephones which Bell began sending to its customers as soon as it had acquired the rights to Berliner’s transmitter actually cloned Edison’s carbon-transmitter design.

On September 12, 1878, the Bell Telephone Company filed for an injunction against Western Union’s telephones in the Circuit Court of the United States for the District of Massachusetts. Following some preliminary skirmishing, Western Union, whose telegraphy business still dwarfed that of telephony, decided on November 10, 1879, that the telephony sideshow just wasn’t worth the trouble. It agreed to give up all of its claims to telephone technology and to get out of the telephone business altogether in return for 20 percent of all of its rival’s earnings from telephony for the lifetime of the patents around which the whole conflict had revolved. It was the Gilded Age in a nutshell: one established monopolist politely made space for another, would-be monopolist in a related but separate field.

But it wasn’t the end of the disputes over the origins of the telephone. Far from it: over the course of the following decade, Bell Telephone beat back some 600 separate legal challenges to its monopoly — including one from Elisha Gray, striking out on his own from Western Union, the company he had co-founded. The record of court filings came to fill 149 thick volumes. One of the cases went as far as the Supreme Court in March of 1888, where it was won by Bell Telephone by the thinnest of possible margins: the vote was four to three in favor of the validity of the Bell patents. By this point, however, the point verged on becoming moot: Bell Telephone now had a well-nigh unassailable head start over any potential competition, and the patents were due to expire in a few years anyway.

Alexander Graham Bell himself regarded the realities of the telephone business with ever-increasing distaste, and felt himself ever more estranged from the enterprise that bore his name. And to a large extent, the feeling was mutual: he had disappointed and angered his ostensible partners in Bell Telephone by, as they saw it, deserting them in their time of greatest need. He had been entirely absent from the American scene from August of 1877 until September of 1878, when he grudgingly agreed to return from Britain to act as a witness in court. “Business is hateful to me at all times,” he wrote to Gardiner Hubbard on one occasion. “I am sick of the telephone and [wish to] have done with it altogether, excepting as a plaything to amuse my leisure moments,” he wrote on another. “Why should it matter to the world who invented the telephone, so long as the world gets the benefit of it?” he wrote on yet a third occasion. “I have not kept up with the literature of telephonic research,” he remarked dismissively when he did finally turn up in person for the legal proceedings. These were not the messages which the men behind a company girding for the battle for its life — a company with the petulant messenger’s name on the marque — wished to hear.

Alexander Graham and Mabel Bell gradually cashed out of said company between 1879 and 1883. They were left wealthy, but not extraordinarily so. Ditto Sanders, Hubbard, and Watson, all of whom likewise sold most of their shares in Bell Telephone before the company was ten years old. “No mighty, self-perpetuating fortunes came out of telephony in America,” noted the historian John Brooks in 1975. “No counterpart to a Ford, Rockefeller, or Duke now survives as a ‘telephone heir.'” But this shouldn’t be construed to imply that the telephone didn’t make an enormous amount of money for Bell Telephone and others in the decades after its founders left the scene.

Alexander Graham Bell continued for the rest of his life to split his time between invention — he dabbled with somewhat mixed results in everything from medical technology to aviation, nautical transport to cinema — and his passion for improving the lot of the deaf. Mabel Bell provided a suitable epitaph when he died in 1922 at the age of 75: “He is big enough to stand as he is, very imperfect, lacking in things that are lovely in other men, but a good big man all the same…” It is true that, in a juster or at least more painstakingly accurate world, we might all agree to call the telephone a joint triumph, to be credited not only to Bell but to Edison, Gray, and perhaps some worthy others whose names have appeared not at all or only in passing in these articles. But history in the world we do have doesn’t like to become muddied with so many equivocations. Thus it has chosen to credit the telephone to Alexander Graham Bell alone. And, if one man must be chosen, he is as good a choice as any.

(Sources: the books Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude by Robert V. Bruce, Alexander Graham Bell: The Life and Times of the Man Who Invented the Telephone by Edwin S. Grosvenor, Reluctant Genius: Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention by Charlotte Gray, Telephone: The First Hundred Years by John Brooks, and The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World by Randall E. Stross. Online sources include Bob’s Old Phones by Bob Estreich and “George M. Phelps” by John Casale on his website Telegraph History.)

Comments
15 Responses

- Aula

March 4, 2022 at 7:34 pm

“what they called an “autograph” telegraph, which smacks of nothing so much as the fax machines of our own recent past”

Far more like telex machines, actually; in fact, telex was the direct result of attempts to automate telegraphy.

“General George Custer was launching his ill-fated attack at Little Big Horn”

Although he had been a major general during the Civil War, Custer was only a lieutenant colonel at the time of his death.

““Dom Pedro,” as he was affectionately known”

There was nothing affectionate about it; “Dom” was his formal style.

- Jimmy Maher

March 4, 2022 at 10:09 pm

I believe the autograph telegraph actually was closer to a fax machine than a telex machine; another name for the concept was the “facsimile” telegraph. The name “autograph” derived from its ability — if it had ever worked, that is — to reproduce signatures on documents. From Robert Bruce’s biography of Alexander Graham Bell:

Bell saw at once that this made the multiple telegraph adaptable to an “autograph telegraph” device. Instead of having each receiver stylus trace its broken line on a separate strip of moving paper, he could have as many as thirty styluses at once drawing closely spaced parallel broken lines on a single sheet. This could be made to come out like a picture or a document seen through a fine grid. If an original autograph message or a drawing were made with special paper or ink that would close a contact where written on and break contact where blank, it could be pulled along under contact points connected to thirty transmitters and thus be reproduced by the receivers — in theory.

Thanks for the other corrections, as always.

- Nate

March 5, 2022 at 8:36 am

Wow, you really went all out with the colons throughout this post. It reads better to me if you move them to separate sentences.

‘Thomas Watson didn’t shy away from acknowledging the magnetic-induction telephone’s infelicities: it “would talk moderately well over a short line, but the apparatus was delicate and complicated and didn’t talk distinctly enough for practical use.”’

I’d reword it, perhaps as “… infelicities, noting it …”

“Certainly Gardiner Greene Hubbard was thoroughly unimpressed with what he saw when he visited his protege’s workshop on March 13: he “seemed rather skeptical,” according to Bell’s laconic diary entry. Even now the telephone continued to strike him as a pointless distraction from the lucrative field of telegraphy.”

“Certainly” and “even now” introductory phrases should be followed with commas. Also, the colon here may be grammatically incorrect for a parenthetical phrase.

“Yet Hubbard’s heart remained set on it.”
“Yet” also needs a comma.

This subclause really breaks the flow of the sentence it splits:
“among them was none other than William Thomson, the principal technical architect of the first transatlantic telegraph cable”
Suggest splitting out the mention of Thomson and Elisha Gray to a prior sentence (following “stifling”):

“… was stifling. The audience of scientific, business, and political luminaries included such men of distinction as Elisha Gray and William Thomson, the principal technical architect of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. With no commercial record and no name recognition, the Bell Patent Association was relegated to the very last presentation of a long program of them. By the time Alexander Graham Bell took the stage, they were positively lethargic.”

“tended to shade with disarming speed”
I’m not familiar with “shade” used this way.

- Jimmy Maher

March 5, 2022 at 10:10 am

I do appreciate the effort you’ve gone through, here and elsewhere, to make these articles better. I’ve gradually come to realize, however, their our opinions about what constitutes good and bad prose are quite different. I thus sometimes struggle to take your suggestions on board, and this is one of those cases. I do feel a bit bad about that because I assume your motivations are good. I hope you believe me when I say there’s really no egoism involved from my side, just a different set of writerly sensibilities.

- Yannis

March 5, 2022 at 12:36 pm

I’ll be honest, unsolicited advice tends to put me in a bad mood but I like your response to Nate here. I think it is written in good faith if you want a second opinion.

Do you plan to collect this series in a small pamphlet/book like you do on the Analog Antiquarian Jimmy?

- Jimmy Maher

March 5, 2022 at 2:08 pm

I had planned on simply rolling it into the next annual ebook, but I could probably be convinced to make it an ebook for itself as well if there’s enough interest. ;)

- Leo Vellés

March 5, 2022 at 9:29 pm

As a I said in previous articles, this type of series, along with multi-part series like the ones you wrote about Tetris, Civilization, Wings and Trinity (surely i am forgetting other series) would be an excellent companion to The Analog Antiquarian books. I really find them super interesting and entertaining to read.

- Mark Williams

March 7, 2022 at 7:37 am

That would be a great idea, it’s very interesting on its own.

- Nate

March 18, 2022 at 10:07 pm

No offense taken. All criticism is useful, even if only to learn something about the person providing it.

I’m happy to limit my input to less subjective areas like typos and fragments, or not include it at all. Whatever you want; I just appreciate the blog.

- Jimmy Maher

March 19, 2022 at 8:21 am

I will always look at and be grateful for any good-faith feedback you or anyone else wishes to provide. When it gets into more subjective areas, however, I may not always have the same opinion. Then again, sometimes I will; some of your stylistic suggestions have prompted me to make changes. So feel free to continue as you were!

- Gordon Cameron

March 7, 2022 at 2:30 am

I think your age and date of death for Bell are inaccurate; anyway Wikipedia has it as 1922, aged 75. Great article!

- Gordon Cameron

March 7, 2022 at 2:33 am

Unless the 1934 date is for Mabel, in which case “he” should be “she?”

- Jimmy Maher

March 7, 2022 at 5:46 am

Don’t know how I did that. Thanks!

- Keith

March 19, 2022 at 5:29 pm

“from which he would invent so many of the trapping of our modern world.”

Should be “trappings”.

- Jimmy Maher

March 19, 2022 at 5:36 pm

Thanks!

A Web Around the World, Part 6: Routing Calls
March 18, 2022

The telegraph networks of the late nineteenth century functioned much like the railroad networks with which they were so closely associated in the minds of the public. Each pair of Morse keys and receivers was connected to exactly one other pair via a fixed “track.” Messages traveled from station to station through the network like railroad passengers. A telegram sent from Smalltown, USA, would first be sent up the line to a larger hub station, where it would be dropped into the “outgoing” basket of another line connected to the same station that would take it to its next stop. And so on and so on, until it reached its final destination.

But the telephone wasn’t conducive to this approach. Alexander Graham Bell’s dream of being “able to chat pleasantly with friends in Europe while sitting in his Boston home” would require a different sort of network model, one more akin to the roads that would soon be built to handle automobile traffic. It would need to be possible for a message to steer its own way down a multitude of highways and byways to reach one of thousands or millions of individual addresses accessible on the network. And each message would need to do so at the same time that many other messages were doing the same thing, using the same roads. Network engineers would never again have it so easy as they had in the days when the telegraph was the only game in town.

Indeed, in contrast to this puzzle of dynamic routing, the invention of the telephone itself would soon seem a fairly minor challenge to have overcome. This new problem was too difficult, diffuse, and abstract to be solved in one eureka moment, or even a dozen of them. The worldwide telecommunications network that came into existence by the middle of the twentieth century was instead the result of steady incremental progress over the course of the decades, guided by people whose names have not found a place in history textbooks alongside those of Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Alva Edison. Yet the worldwide web these institutional inventors slowly pieced together was in its way more remarkable than any of the aforementioned men’s discrete creations. And it was also both the necessary precursor to and the medium of the computer-communications networks that would follow in the second half of the twentieth century.

The New Haven District Telephone Company’s exchange was the first of its type, heralding as much as the telephone itself a new era in communications.

The first system for letting any one telephone on a large network communicate with any other came into being in New Haven, Connecticut, on January 28, 1878. It was operated by the New Haven District Telephone Company, a spinoff of Bell Telephone, and connected 21 founding subscribers using a very simple, very physical method. The wire from each telephone on the network ran to a central exchange manned by a human operator. When you picked up your home phone to make a call, you were thus immediately connected to this individual. You told him which other subscriber you wished to speak to — the concept of phone numbers did not yet exist — whereupon he cranked a magneto to cause a bell to ring at the other end of your desired interlocutor’s line. If the individual in question picked up, the operator then linked your two telephones together using a patch cable.

It may strike us as a crude arrangement today. Certainly it was beset by obvious practical problems (what happened when more people tried to make calls than the operator could handle?) and privacy concerns (the operator could tell if a call was finished only by periodically listening in). Yet it spread like wildfire in lieu of any alternatives. The world’s second telephone exchange opened just three days after its first; by the end of 1878 there were several dozen of them in the United States, and a ringer had become an essential piece of telephony’s standard equipment. By the beginning of 1881, there were only nine cities with a population over 10,000 in the United States which didn’t boast at least one telephone exchange.

An early telephone exchange manned by boys, circa 1880. Such a place was called the “operating room” in telephony parlance, creating some amusing connotations.

The first exchange operators were, in the words of John Brooks,

an instant and memorable disaster. The lads, most of them in their late teens, who manned the telephone exchanges were simply too impatient and high-spirited for the job, which, in view of the imperfections of the equipment and inexperience of the subscribers, demanded above all patience and calm. They were given to lightening the tedium of their work by roughhousing, shouting constantly at each other, and swearing frequently at the customers.

Southwestern Bell historian David G. Park shares a typical anecdote:

In Little Rock, [Arkansas,] a prominent saloon keeper rang up and told one of the boy operators, fifteen-year-old Ashley Peay, “Connect me with my telephone at home. I want to talk to my wife.”

Ashley replied, “Your wife is talking to someone else.”

“What do you mean, my wife is talking to someone else?” the saloon keeper growled.

“I mean your line is busy,” Ashley snapped.

The saloon keeper wasn’t accustomed to being turned down by fifteen-year-old boys. “Get my wife on the line right now!” he shouted.

Young Peay’s reaction was to say, “Aw, shut up,” or words to that effect, and yank the connection.

The boy went on to handle other calls. Suddenly he was seized from behind, lifted from the floor, and shaken up and down by a furious saloon keeper. Just as the man was about to fling Peay through a glass window onto the street below, a man in the office came to the operator’s rescue.

Incidents like these occurred throughout the country…

But soon the telephone exchanges hit upon a solution: they replaced the boys with girls, who were not only more demure but willing to work for even lower wages. A newspaper article listed the job requirements:

The physical requirements of girls who are given positions in the telephone exchange are almost as stringent as those insisted upon in men enlisting in the army. To become a “hello” girl, the applicant must be not more than 30 years old [and] not less than five feet six inches tall. Her sight must be good, her hearing excellent, her voice soft, her perception quick, and her temper agile.

Every girl’s sight and hearing is tested and her height is measured before she is hired. Tall, slim girls with long arms are preferred for work on the switchboards. Fat, short girls occupy too much room and are not able to reach all of the six feet of space allocated to each operator.

With regard to nationality, it is said that girls of Irish parentage make the best operators.

The Little Rock, Arkansas, telephone exchange circa 1920, long after the unruly boys had been replaced with girls.

Almost from the very beginning, then, the job of telephone operator was seen as a female occupation, joining the jobs of schoolteacher and nanny in the eyes of the broader culture as another transitory way station for women between the onset of adulthood and marriage. The standard pay of between $1.00 and $1.50 per day reflected this. Those numbers would go up with inflation, but the other parameters of the job would remain the same for well over a century, for as long as it existed. Meanwhile the realization that female voices tend to be less threatening and more soothing in the ears of both genders would become even more embedded in the culture. (When was the last time a computer, smartphone, or GPS gadget spoke to you in a male voice?)

The systems and processes that drove the telephone exchanges improved steadily after 1878, even as the core model of a subscriber asking an operator to manually route his call via a patch wire and a switchboard remained in place for a surprisingly long time. The first telephone numbers made an appearance already in 1879, and quickly became commonplace, what with the way they eased the burden on the operators’ memory and provided telephony’s customers with at least an impression of anonymity. In December of 1887, the first Switchboard Conference was held in New York City. Tellingly, it devoted as much time to social engineering as it did to the technical side of telephony. Many a hand was wringed over the tendency of operators to say, “They won’t answer,” rather than “they don’t answer” in the case of a call that wasn’t picked up, what with the former’s intimation of neglectful intent. And it was agreed that operators should employ short rather than long rings when placing a call because “a short ring excites the curiosity of the subscriber.”

It wasn’t that no one was interested in an automated alternative to manual exchanges. The latter were inherently inefficient; a rule of thumb said that one operator was required during peak hours for every 100 telephone subscribers on a network, constituting an enormous financial drain on service providers even given the minimal salaries they paid to these employees. Despite this ample incentive, the problem kept engineers stymied for years. It was first partially solved by, of all people, an undertaker living in Kansas City, Missouri. Coming along in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Almon B. Strowger was one of the last of the breed of maverick independent inventors cum entrepreneurs who had built the telegraphy and telephony industries in earlier decades, who were soon to give way once and for all to the corporate institutionalists.

Almon B. Strowger

That said, Strowger conformed to no one’s stereotype of the genius inventor. Already 50 years old at the time of his achievement, he was a crotchety character whose irascibility verged on paranoia. The stage was set for his stroke of genius when he became convinced that the operators at his local telephone exchange had it in for him, and were deliberately misrouting his calls or not even bothering to place them. (If the anecdotes about his personality are anything to go by, there was perhaps another reason that so few people wanted to talk to him…) One of the operators was the wife of his principal rival in the undertaking business; he believed she was routing his potential customers’ calls to her husband’s establishment instead of his own.

So, he set out to remove the human operator from the equation altogether. His pique and grievance became the impetus behind the first workable automated switching system in the field of telephony.

Imagine a telephone whose cable terminates in a rotating electro-mechanical switch or relay, which looks rather like a windshield wiper. There is a button on the telephone. Every time the user presses it, a pulse of current goes down the line which causes the wiper to rotate one step, making a connection with a different receiving telephone. When the user has pressed the button a number of times corresponding to the “phone number” of the person she wishes to call, she presses a second button to cause that phone to ring, and proceeds to have a conversation. When she sets her phone down again, a switch is triggered that resets the system, dropping the wiper back to its home position in preparation for the next call. This is the Strowger system in its most basic form. Routing is still based on changing the physical connections between wires, but those physical changes are themselves now driven by electricity. For this reason, we call it an “electro-mechanical” design.

A very basic single-stage Strowger switch.

A network of more than ten or so nodes would be irredeemably tedious for the end-user of such a system, what with all the button-pressing it would require. But, crucially, the system could also be expanded by wiring more relays into it, and adding more buttons to the individual phones to control them. The system which Strowger first publicly demonstrated, for example, used two relay/button combinations to accommodate up to 100 phones, each with a unique two-digit number; the user tapped out the tens digit on one button, the ones digit on the other. In principle, the system could be extended to infinity by wiring yet more relays and buttons into the circuit.

Strowger was awarded a patent for his invention on March 10, 1891, and formed his own company soon after to exploit it. The first fully automated telephone exchange opened in La Porte, Indiana, on November 3, 1892. It was billed as the “girl-less, cuss-less, and wait-less telephone.” Strowger’s company would continue in the exchange business until 1983, first under the name of the Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company and then as simply Automatic Electric.

But automated telephone exchanges would remain the exception to the rule for a long time after 1892; most people understandably preferred speaking a number to a fellow human being over pecking out long strings of digits manually and hoping for the best. Not until the 1920s would automated exchanges come to outnumber the manual ones, relegating the job of telephone operator to that of an occasional provider of information or extra help rather than the essential conduit of every single call. The key breakthrough that finally led to automated telephony’s widespread acceptance was the replacement of Strowger’s push buttons with spring-loaded dials; such “rotary phones” would remain the standard for decades to come, and would continue to function into the 1980s and beyond.

Rotary telephones like this one replaced buttons with a spring-loaded dial that sent the necessary bursts of electricity to move the switching relays at the exchange as it spun back to its resting position.

In the meantime, telephony made do with the manual exchanges. All of their inefficiencies and infelicities were thoroughly outweighed by the magic of the telephone itself. By the turn of the century, 1.4 million telephones were in service in the United States, and 25,000 or more girls and women were employed as operators. The impact of the telephone was different in nature from that of the telegraph, but no less socially significant. While it perhaps didn’t have the same immediate transformative effect on big business and international diplomacy, it was a vastly more democratic instrument, making a far more tangible change in the lives of its millions of individual users. The telegraph was a service, and thus to a large extent an abstraction; the telephone was a personally empowering technology, one you could literally hold in your hand.

Like the smartphones and tablets of our own day, telephones were condemned by certain segments of the intelligentsia, for destroying the old art of letter writing and for being a nuisance and a distraction from the truly important things in life; one article called them “an unmitigated domestic curse,” only good for “the exchange of twaddle between foolish women.” In another uncanny harbinger of more recent history, local newspapers fretted that telephones would slake the public’s thirst for their articles, columns, and calendars. (Unlike our more recent history, such fears would prove largely unfounded in this case.)

But the people couldn’t get enough of the telephone. American Bell — as Bell Telephone was now known, having adopted the new name in 1880 — was rather surprised to discover that the allegedly backward, rural areas of the country actually took to the telephone more readily than many of the nation’s urban centers. Farmers and particularly farmers’ wives, some of whom had heretofore been accustomed to going months at a time without talking to anyone outside their household, jumped on the telephone like a Titanic survivor on a lifeboat. The rural exchanges fostered a welcome new sense of community, becoming deeply embedded in the lives of the people they served, spreading news and gossip to all and sundry. Before Siri and “Hey, Google!,” there was the friendly local telephone operator to play the role of personal assistant, as captured in one housewife’s dialog from a gently satirical magazine article: “Oh, Central! Ring me up in fifteen minutes, so I don’t forget to take the bread out of the oven.” “Central, ring me up half an hour before the 2:17 train in the morning. See if it’s late before you call, please..”

For all the social changes it wrought, telephony extended its range much more slowly than telegraphy had. Cyrus Field’s transatlantic telegraph line had come to be just 22 years after the first telegraph line of any stripe was placed in service. The first transatlantic phone call, by contrast, didn’t take place until January 7, 1927, almost precisely 50 years after Roswell C. Downer had become the first person to have a telephone installed in his home. The delay was down to the nature of the two technologies.

The electrification of the Western world was in full swing at the turn of the century, to telephony’s immense benefit: hand-cranked magnetos and discrete batteries disappeared as companies like American Bell began to flood their networks with current from the grid. But the complex waveforms of telephony required much more power than a telegraph signal to travel an equivalent distance, due to a phenomenon known as attenuation: the tendency of a waveform to shed its peaks and valleys of amplitude and collapse toward uniformity as it travels farther and farther. Attenuation is in fact the same phenomenon in the broad strokes as the “signal retardation” which dogged the early days of undersea telegraphy, but it was never really an issue in terrestrial telegraphy, what with its staccato on-off approach to signaling. It could, however, play havoc with a sound waveform on a wire. The only way anyone knew of to fight attenuation was to add more power to the circuit, which in turn required thicker and thicker cables made of pure copper. This made the telephone into a peculiarly localized technology for instantaneous communication; it could and did foster a new sense of togetherness within communities, but struggled to reach between them. For decades, the American telephone network writ large was actually a bunch of local networks, connected to their peers if at all by just one or two long-distance lines.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[1]Even at the time of its inception, the name behind the acronym was anomalous if not meaningless, given that AT&T had no holdings in telegraphy; AT&T was content to leave that monopoly to Western Union. The name is perhaps best explained as a warning shot across Western Union’s bows, in case it should ever feel tempted to reenter the telephone market…

The thick, custom-made cables that AT&T employed were expensive to buy and string up, and could only carry one call at a time. These realities were reflected in the prices AT&T charged its subscribers: a ten-minute call over the 292-mile line from Boston to New York City — the longest and most celebrated line on the network at the turn of the century — cost $2 during the day or $1 at night. These were prices that only bankers and investors and other members of the well-heeled set could afford. Long-distance telephony would continue to be their prerogative alone for quite some time to come. Everyone else would have to rely on the telegraph or the even more old-fashioned medium of the hand-written paper missive for their long-distance communications needs. And needless to say, there was little point in thinking about a transatlantic telephone line while the length of even a terrestrial line was limited to 300 miles at the outside.

Rather than crossing the Atlantic, telephony’s overarching goal became to bridge the continent — to string a single telephone cable from the East to the West Coast. In addition to its practical utility, it would be an achievement of immense symbolic significance, a sort of telephonic parallel to the famous driving of the golden spike that had marked the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869.

One milestone came courtesy of a Serbian immigrant named Mihajlo Pupin. In 1900, he patented something called a loading coil, which, when placed at intervals along a telephone wire, could greatly reduce if not entirely eliminate a signal’s attenuation by magnetically increasing its inductance, or resistance to change. But there were limits to what loading coils could do. In combination with a very thick cable, they were enough to get a signal from New York City to Denver, but it couldn’t be coaxed any further. What was needed was an equivalent to Samuel Morse’s old telegraphic concept of the repeater: a way of actively boosting a signal as it traveled down a wire. Unfortunately, the simple system of discrete circuits joined by electromagnetic switches which Morse had proposed, and which had indeed become commonplace on telegraph lines by now, was useless for telephony, being unable to preserve the character of an audio waveform.

Then, in 1906, a researcher named Lee De Forest proposed something he called an audion. It was nothing less than the world’s first self-contained audio amplifier, built using vacuum tubes, a technology that would become hugely important outside as well as inside of telephony in the decades to come. The engineers at AT&T realized that it should be possible to install these audions — or simply repeaters, as they would quickly become known — along a terrestrial telephone line to make the voices it carried travel absolutely any distance. The details turned out to be a little bit more complicated than they first appeared, as generally happens in any form of engineering, but AT&T found a way to make it work at last. The company’s marketers came up with the perfect way to mark the occasion.

Alexander Graham Bell, center, prepares to make the first transcontinental phone call.

On January 25, 1915, a 67-year-old Alexander Graham Bell, stouter and grayer than once upon a time but still bursting with his old Scottish bonhomie, picked up a telephone before assembled press and public in New York City. “Hoy! Hoy!” he said in his booming brogue. (From the first days of his invention until the end of his own days, Bell loathed the standard telephonic greeting of “Hello.”) “Mr. Watson? Are you there? Do you hear me?”

In front of another assemblage in San Fransisco, Bell’s old friend and helper Thomas A. Watson answered him. “Yes, Mr. Bell. I hear you perfectly. Do you hear me well?”

“Yes, your voice is perfectly distinct,” said Bell. “It is as clear as if you were in New York.”

Inevitably, Bell was soon cajoled into repeating those famous first words ever spoken into a working telephone: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” Whereupon Watson noted that, instead of seven seconds, the journey would now take him seven days. It may not have been a transatlantic link quite yet, but it did feel like a culmination of sorts.

Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson weren’t the only ones on the line that memorable day. Theodore N. Vail, the erstwhile mastermind of Bell Telephone’s successful legal campaign against Western Union, had returned after a lengthy hiatus to serve as president of the company once again in 1907. He listened in to the historic conversation from a telephone on Jekyll Island, Georgia, where he was convalescing from the heart and kidney afflictions that would kill him in 1920.

But before his death, Vail established a new research-and-development division unlike any seen before in corporate America, a place designed to bring the best engineers in the country together and give them carte blanche to solve problems that the world might not even know it had yet. It would become known as Bell Labs, at first informally and then officially, and it would do much to shape the course of not just communications but the entirety of technology — not least the field of computing — over the balance of the twentieth century.

On its home turf of telephony, Bell Labs steadily improved the state of the art of automated switching and developed techniques for multiplexing, so that calls could be routed together along trunk lines instead of always requiring a wire of their own. And it devised ways to integrate Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi’s technology of wireless radio with the network, in order to bridge gaps where wired telephony simply wouldn’t serve. Because no one had yet found a way of installing repeaters on an undersea cable, a transatlantic connection would have to depend on these new techniques of “radiotelephony.”

The call of January 7, 1927, was a curiously muted affair in contrast to the completion of the first transatlantic telegraph cable or even the first transcontinental phone call, involving no greater luminaries than Walter S. Giffords, Vail’s successor as president of American Bell and AT&T, and Evelyn P. Murray, the head of the British mail service, which held a government-granted monopoly over telephony in that country. Nevertheless, it was a landmark moment; while Alexander Graham Bell’s dream of easy, casual conversation across an ocean was still decades away from fulfillment, a conversation was at least possible now, four and a half years after his death. Wireless links such as the one which facilitated this conversation would remain a vital part of the telephone networks of the future, whether in the form of conventional radio waves, microwave beams, or satellite feeds. “Distance doesn’t mean anything anymore,” said one of the engineers behind the first transatlantic call. “We are on the verge of a very high-speed world.” Truer words were never spoken.

Outside of telephony, the Bell Labs boffins created the first motion-picture projector with audio as well as video, and saw it used it in 1927’s The Jazz Singer, that harbinger of a new era of cinema. That same year — a banner one in its history — Bell Labs conducted the first American demonstration of television, starring Secretary of Commerce (and future President) Herbert Hoover. Two years later, it broadcast television for the first time in color. AT&T and American Bell may very well have extended their telephone empire to television in the next decade, had the Great Depression not intervened to put the damper on the consumer economy.

As it was, the fallout from the stock-market crash of late 1929 slowed the march of technology, but could hardly turn back the hands of time. By that point there were more than 15 million telephones in service under the auspices of American Bell alone. Their numbers dropped for a while in the aftermath of the crash, but relatively modestly. By 1937, there were more telephones than ever in the United States and, indeed, around the world.

A review of the literature surrounding the telephone during the decade provides yet more evidence that the concerns surrounding the trendy communications mediums of our own age are not as unique as we might like to think. It seems that worries about communications technologies leading to a dumbing-down of the populace and egotism running rampant did not begin with Facebook and Instagram. A sociological study of 1000 telephone conversations, for example, revealed with horror that only 2240 separate words were used in the course of all of them, which amounted to no more than 10 percent of the words heretofore considered fairly commonplace in English. Worse, the most frequently used words of all were “I” and “me.”

On a more positive note, the telephone was promoted — perchance a bit excessively — as the Great Leveler which would allow the proverbial little people to communicate directly with the movers and shakers of the world, just as Twitter and its ilk sometimes are today. An Ohioan with the delightfully folksy name of Abe Pickens took this lesson to heart, attempting to call up Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, Neville Chamberlain, Emperor Hirohito, and Adolf Hitler among others to give them a piece of his mind. He reportedly did manage to get himself connected directly to Hitler at one point, but Pickens spoke no German and Hitler spoke no English; the baffled Führer quickly fobbed his interlocutor off on an aide. Sadly, Pickens did not succeed in preventing World War II.

Even by this late date, the telephone had not yet annihilated its more static predecessor the telegraph. Western Union’s tacit bargain with Bell Telephone of 1878 — you take telephony, we’ll take telegraphy — could still be construed as a wise move on the part of both, in that both companies were still hugely powerful and hugely profitable. The field of journalism remained completely in thrall to telegraphy, as did large swaths of government and business. During the war to come, telegraphy would provide a precious lifeline to loved ones back home for countless soldiers serving in faraway places where telephones couldn’t reach. Still, the telegraph had now become a legacy technology, destined only for stagnation and gradual decline. The future lay in telephony.

This sprawling amalgamation of transmitters, receivers, lines, switches, and gates was one of the wonders of its world — so wondrous that it can still inspire awe when we step back to really think about it today. You could pick up a phone at any arbitrary location and, by dialing some numbers and perhaps talking with an operator or two, make a connection with any arbitrary other phone elsewhere in your country — or in many cases elsewhere on your continent or even planet. And then you could chat with the person who answered that other phone as if the two of you were sitting together in the same parlor. If you ask me, this is amazing — still amazing.

The technological web which allowed such interconnections was arguably the most complex thing yet created by human ingenuity — so complex that no one fully understood all of its nooks and crannies. The fact that it actually worked was flabbergasting, the fact  that it did so less than a century after Samuel Morse had first figured out how to send single bursts of electronic current down a single wire nothing short of mind-blowing. When we look at it today, when we think about its bustling dynamism, its little packets of conversation and meaning flying to and fro, it’s easy to see it as a sort of massive cyber-organic computer, doing the work of the world. If most contemporary people weren’t discussing the telephone network in those terms, it was because half of the analogy literally didn’t yet exist for them: the concept of an “anything machine” in the form of a programmable computer, while by no means a new one in some academic and intellectual circles, was still a foreign one to the general public.

But it wasn’t foreign to a young man named Claude Shannon.

Anything but a stuffy academic, Claude Shannon was one of the archetypes of the playful hacker spirit which would fully emerge at MIT during the postwar years. “When researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Bell Laboratories had to leap aside to let a unicycle pass,” writes James Gleick in The Information, “that was Claude Shannon.”

Shannon had grown up on a farm in rural Michigan, tinkering with homemade telegraphs that repurposed barbed-wire fences for communication. After taking a bachelor degree in electrical engineering and mathematics from the University of Michigan, he came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a 20-year-old prodigy in 1936, having been personally recruited by Dean of Engineering Vannevar Bush to work on the Differential Analyzer, a 100-ton semi-programmable analog calculating machine designed to relieve the grunt work of solving complex mathematical problems. Inside Shannon’s fecund mind, the Differential Analyzer collided with his abiding interest in telegraphy and telephony and his memories of a class he had taken in Michigan on symbolic logic, and out popped “A Symbolic Analysis of Relays and Switching Circuits,” a paper which has been called “the most important master’s thesis of the twentieth century.”

Within his thesis, Shannon presented a plan for an electro-mechanical computer built around the digital logic of ones and zeroes — a machine far more flexible than the likes of the Differential Analyzer, yet one that required only the off-the-shelf equipment of telephony rather than the many bespoke wheels and gears of its gargantuan steampunk inspiration. Shannon’s pivotal insight was that switches on a circuit could not only route information but constitute information: an open switch could indicate a one, a closed switch a zero, and everything else could be built up from there. Abstract logic could be rendered concrete in circuitry: “Any operation that can be completely described in a finite number of steps using the words ‘if,’ ‘or,’ ‘and,’ etc., can be done automatically with relays.” I should hasten to clarify that the only way to reprogram one of Shannon’s hypothetical computers was to physically rewire it — effectively to remake it into a brand new machine. And again, it was still at bottom an electro-mechanical rather than a purely electrical device. Still, it was a major milestone on the road to the modern digital computer.

The technologies of telephony would continue to be repurposed to suit the needs of the burgeoning field of computing in the years that followed. The vacuum tubes that served American Bell so well for so long, for example, found a new application at the heart of the first programmable digital computers of the postwar era. And that technology in turn gave way to another one first developed for telephony: the transistor, which was invented at Bell Labs in 1947 and went on to become, as John Brooks wrote in 1976, “the key to modern electronics,” facilitating everything from hearing aids to the Moon landing. The transistor also lay behind the first wave of truly widespread institutional computing, over the two decades prior to the arrival of personal computers on the scene in the late 1970s.

But these developments, important though they are, are not the main reason I’ve chosen to tell the story of the analog technologies of the telegraph and telephone on a site about the history of digital culture. I’ve rather done so because computer engineers did more than borrow from the tool kits of the electrical-communications infrastructure of their day: they also came to borrow the existing communication networks themselves. This was the result of an insight which seems so self-evident as to be almost banal once it has been grasped, but which took the brilliant mind of Claude Shannon to appreciate and articulate for the first time: the fact that an electric current which could carry the dots and dashes of Morse code or the sound of a human voice could be made to carry any kind of information. This simple realization was the key that opened the door to the Internet.

(Sources: the books Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude by Robert V. Bruce, Telephone: The First Hundred Years by John Brooks, Good Connections: A Century of Service by the Men and Women of Southwestern Bell by David G. Park Jr., From Gutenberg to the Internet: A Sourcebook on the History of Information Technology edited by Jeremy M. Norman, The Information by James Gleick, The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop, and The Practical Telephone Exchange Handbook by Joseph Poole. Online sources include Bob’s Old Phones by Bob Estreich, “Telephone History” by Tom Farley, “Telephone Switches” by Mark Csele, “The Strowger Telecomms Page” of SEG Communications, and “Today in History: The First Transatlantic Phone Call” by Priscilla Escobedo for UTA Libraries.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

Even at the time of its inception, the name behind the acronym was anomalous if not meaningless, given that AT&T had no holdings in telegraphy; AT&T was content to leave that monopoly to Western Union. The name is perhaps best explained as a warning shot across Western Union’s bows, in case it should ever feel tempted to reenter the telephone market…

Comments
31 Responses

- Matt Campbell

March 18, 2022 at 6:59 pm

I know this was tangential, but:

> (When was the last time a computer, smartphone, or GPS gadget spoke to you in a male voice?)

All the time, on both my PC and my Mac. The default for screen readers for the blind has historically been, and largely still is, a male voice, or at least an artificial voice in a typically male pitch range. Maybe that’s because we were early adopters of speech synthesis, and the early robotic voices sounded better at lower pitches. But even today, on Windows 10 and macOS Monterey, the built-in screen reader uses a natural-sounding, but still male, voice. On mobile platforms though, the screen readers use a female voice by default, at least in US English.

- Alianora La Canta

March 25, 2022 at 2:57 pm

I can confirm that on Windows, the default voice is “Microsoft Sam” and has been since Windows 2000. Since the visual novel I’m developing reads all text by default, defaults to whatever the system has set as that voice, and is developed on a Windows computer, it means I hear Sam a lot during testing…

However, female voices are quite popular as optional voices, and as a general rule, the devices whose core concepts were invented in the 21st century (smartphones, speaking exercise watches and the like) are more likely to have female voices than items with their main roots in the 20th century (things like desktop computers and speech augment assistance). Some of this appears to be an attempt to appeal to women, and also to make the products sound friendlier and/or show off the increased ability to produce more flexible sounds.

- LeeH

March 18, 2022 at 7:19 pm

> Sadly, Pickins did not succeed in preventing World War II.

This got a literal LOL out of me. Thanks, Jimmy :D

- Richard G Brown

March 18, 2022 at 9:07 pm

Fascinating article – thank you. But was it really Thomas *J* Watson? The legendary IBM Chairman kept his part in the telephony revolution quiet!

- Jimmy Maher

March 19, 2022 at 8:16 am

Woops! Should be Thomas *A* Watson. Thanks!

- Lars

March 18, 2022 at 10:21 pm

> In front of another assemblage in San Fransisco, Bell’s old friend and helper Thomas J.
> Watson answered him. “Yes, Mr. Bell. I hear you perfectly. Do you hear me well?”

Surely, this is Thomas A. Watson, sayeth the guy who used to work for IBM (and looking at part 5).

- Stormcrash

March 18, 2022 at 10:26 pm

While not raw telegraphy, AT&T did directly compete with Western Union in telegraphy’s more advanced form, the Teletype. The Teletype/Teleprinter being an essentially improved telegraph where a machine encodes and decodes the symbol rather than an operator manually outputting and listening to the encoding, both AT&T (TWX – TypeWiter eXchange) and Western Union (Telex) operated teletype networks that were arranged like the telephone system but electrically distinct from it.

AT&T owned the Teletype Corportation which developed and manufactured many of these heirs to the telegraph key, and the central offices which handled teletype services were still equipped with telegraph keys and could speak morse when needs must. The first commercial modem, The Bell 101, had as one of its original use cases being hooked up to a teletype to transmit over more ordinary toll lines instead of only dedicated TWX lines

- Jimmy Maher

March 19, 2022 at 8:26 am

Slight edit made. Thanks!

- Fredrik Arnerup

March 19, 2022 at 7:51 am

An example of early telephone madness:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Stockholm_telephone_tower

- Buck

March 19, 2022 at 10:02 am

As far as routing is concerned, the telephone network wasn’t really that different from telegraphy. It was routed via fixed curcuits, and once a connection was made, all data travelled the same path. Even ATM, a network protocol defined in the late 1980s by the “telephone people” (ITU), still showed a lot of that circuit switched thinking. I went to university in the late 90s/early 2000s and still learned and taught the ATM protocol, but by then it was becoming clear that the internet protocol would eventually replace it in pretty much every area. That makes it even more fascinating to read about the beginnings.

Also very much looking forward towards reading more about Claude Shannon.

- Aula

March 19, 2022 at 2:29 pm

“Among other things, attenuation explains why sounds traveling through the air are louder closer to their source.”

No, it doesn’t. Acoustic attenuation in air is negligible for any sound that humans can hear; it becomes relevant only at much higher frequencies. The reason a sound becomes quieter as you move away from the source is that the energy that the source emits gets spread out over the surface area of a sphere of increasing radius, while the area of your eardrums stays the same, so that the amount of energy that actually reaches your ears decreases.

- Jimmy Maher

March 19, 2022 at 2:42 pm

Thanks!

- Hadean

March 19, 2022 at 2:31 pm

Amazing series of articles! Has been so fun to read about this point in history and all the personalities (and can’t wait to purchase the book/ebook?).

Just to double check, is it Abe Pickens instead of Pickins? Google tells me the former, but your sources might be correct (as opposed to circular reporting in newspapers).

- Jimmy Maher

March 19, 2022 at 2:44 pm

I’m not at home just at the moment to confirm it, but the online sources are probably correct. Thanks!

- VeronicaConnor

March 19, 2022 at 3:53 pm

Wonderful as always, Jimmy.

I think your take on the switch from male to female telephone operators is missing the larger context, though. The boys were unruly and rude, but rather than teaching them that they couldn’t behave that way, they were replaced with women who were already conditioned to be submissive and demure in society. Female voices then became “more comforting” due to custom created by this entrenched institutional sexism, not because of some biological basis of female voices. The way you’ve written it makes the events sound inevitable, but in fact male privilege made it so. Boys were allowed to behave as they wished and the undesirable work was placed on the women instead, which then led to this being the norm that nobody ever questions anymore.

- Jimmy Maher

March 19, 2022 at 5:38 pm

I don’t really disagree with your analysis, but I think we can allow readers a bit of space to come to their own conclusions about these things.

- Andrew Pam

March 19, 2022 at 4:39 pm

I learned a new word today! “Wringed” is apparently an archaic form of “wrung”. Also, “four and a half year” is missing the plural “s”.

- Jimmy Maher

March 19, 2022 at 4:43 pm

Thanks!

- Leo Vellés

March 19, 2022 at 7:58 pm

“The first system for letting letting any one telephone on a large network communicate…”.
A double “letting” there.
Also, when you mention the nationality of any given person, you use an uppercase letter “Serbian”,”Italian”, “Scottish”, etc.(there was one more but I can’t remember where). Is that common in the english language? In spanish we use the lowercase for a nationality; the uppercase for the first letter we use it only to refer to a country, as I surmise all languages do

- Jimmy Maher

March 19, 2022 at 8:50 pm

Yes, nationalities are capitalized in English even when used in their adjective form. Thanks!

- Gnoman

March 20, 2022 at 7:31 am

“Shannon had grown up on a farm in rural Michigan, tinkering with homemade telegraphs that repurposed barbed-wire fences for communication. ”

With no intent to disparage Shannon in any way, given his later contributions, this is a stunning image of the progression of technology. In only fifty-ish years, the telegraph went from something that required some of the world’s greatest minds and the support of the governments of Great Powers to a toy that a farmboy could build.

“This sprawling amalgamation of transmitters, receivers, lines, switches, and gates was one of the wonders of its world — so wondrous that it can still inspire awe when we step back to really think about it today. You could pick up a phone at any arbitrary location and, by dialing some numbers and perhaps talking with an operator or two, make a connection with any arbitrary other phone elsewhere in your country — or in many cases elsewhere on your continent or even planet. And then you could chat with the person who answered that other phone as if the two of you were sitting together in the same parlor. If you ask me, this is amazing — still amazing.”

This is a great understatement, even if the later Internet dwarfs even that epochal accomplishment.

- Lisa H.

March 22, 2022 at 7:47 pm

In only fifty-ish years, the telegraph went from something that required some of the world’s greatest minds and the support of the governments of Great Powers to a toy that a farmboy could build.

This kinda happened with computers too.

- Ross

March 21, 2022 at 10:18 pm

Sadly, I believe research has shown that male listeners will on average reject a female voice if it is meant to be presenting objective scientific information, and will reject a male voice if it is giving them instructions.

- Alianora La Canta

March 25, 2022 at 3:01 pm

Which leads to an interesting dilemma for tech support service desks, which typically have to have the same voice provide both! (In practice, men and women are both capable of being accepted by the majority of listeners provided they have sufficient training in customer service and the technologies they support… …and the listener has a positive reason to make an effort to listen).

- Nikolai Kondrashov

March 22, 2022 at 7:31 pm

Wonderful series! Thank you, Jimmy!

An entertaining (but unflattering) video on Lee De Forest by “Kathy Loves Physics”: https://youtu.be/xV1I_tQtkEI

Also, if anyone wants a great read on Bell Labs, and Claude Shannon in particular, check out “The Idea Factory” – a classic!

- Steve McCrea

April 30, 2022 at 8:21 pm

Fascinating series!
The transistor was invented in 1947, not 1948.

- Jimmy Maher

May 1, 2022 at 9:52 am

Thanks!

- Eric Nyman

May 13, 2022 at 4:20 pm

Herbert Hoover didn’t replace Calvin Coolidge as President of the USA until 1929.

- Jimmy Maher

May 13, 2022 at 7:42 pm

Ah, he was still Secretary of Commerce at that time. Thanks!

- Mantipath

June 23, 2022 at 7:47 pm

“AT&T and American Bell may very well have extended their telephone empire to television in the next decade”

Since it didn’t happen this is “might very well”, not “may very well”.

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2022 at 8:20 pm

Either usage is acceptable. “May” may express possibility or permission, “might” only possibility. ;)

A Web Around the World, Part 7: Computers On the Wire
April 8, 2022

The world’s first digital network actually predates the world’s first computer, in the sense that we understand the word “computer” today.

It began with a Bell Labs engineer named George Stibitz, who worked on the electro-mechanical relays that were used to route telephone calls. One evening in late 1937, he took a box of parts home with him and started to put together on his kitchen table a contraption that distinctly resembled the one that Claude Shannon had recently described in his MIT master’s thesis. By the summer of the following year, it worked well enough that Stibitz took it to the office to show it around. In a testament to the spirit of freewheeling innovation that marked life at Bell Labs, his boss promptly told him to take a break from telephone switches and see if he could turn it into a truly useful calculating machine. The result emerged fifteen months later as the Complex Computer, made from some 450 telephone relays and many other off-the-shelf parts from telephony’s infrastructure. It was slow, as all machines of its electro-mechanical ilk inevitably were: it took it about one minute to multiply two eight-digit numbers together. And it was not quite as capable as the machine Shannon had described in print: it had no ability to make decisions at branch points, only to perform rote calculations. But it worked.

It is a little unclear to what extent the Complex Computer was derived from Shannon’s paper. Stibitz gave few interviews during his life. To my knowledge he never directly credited Shannon as his inspiration, but neither was he ever quizzed in depth about the subject. It strikes me as reasonable to grant that his initial explorations may have been entirely serendipitous, but one has to assume that he became aware of the Shannon paper after the Complex Computer became an official Bell Labs project; the paper was, after all, being widely disseminated and discussed at that time, and even the most cursory review of existing literature would have turned it up.

At any rate, another part of the Complex Computer project most definitely was completely original. Stibitz’s managers wanted to make the machine available to Bell and AT&T employees working all over the country. At first glance, this would have to entail making a lot more Complex Computers, at considerable cost, and even though the individual offices that received them would only need to make use of them occasionally. Might there be a better way, Stibitz wondered. Might it be possible to let the entire country share a single machine instead?

Stibitz enlisted a more experienced switching engineer named Samuel B. Williams, who figured out how to connect the Complex Computer to a telegraph line. By this point, telegraphy’s old manually operated Morse keys had been long since replaced by teletype machines that looked and functioned like typewriters, doing the grunt work of translating letters into Morse Code for the operator; similarly, the various arcane receiving mechanisms of old had been replaced by a teleprinter.

The world’s first digital network made its debut in September of 1940, at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society that was held at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. The attendees were given the chance to type out mathematical problems on the teletype, which sent them up the line as Morse Code to the Complex Computer installed at Bell Labs’s facilities in New York City. The latter translated the dots and dashes of Morse Code into numbers, performed the requested calculations, and sent the results back to Dartmouth, where they duly appeared on the teleprinter. The tectonic plates subtly shifted on that sunny September afternoon, while the assembled mathematicians nodded politely, with little awareness of the importance of what they were witnessing. The computer networks of the future would be driven by a binary code known as ASCII rather than Morse Code, but the principle behind them would be the same.

As it happened, Stibitz and Williams never took their invention much further; it never did become a part of Bell’s everyday operations. The war going on in Europe was already affecting research priorities everywhere, and was soon to make the idea of developing a networked calculating device simply for the purpose of making civilian phone networks easier to install and repair seem positively quaint. In fact, the Complex Computer was destined to go down in history as the last of its breed: the last significant blue-sky advance in American computing for a long time to come that wasn’t driven by the priorities and the funding of the national-security state.

That reality would give plenty of the people who worked in the field pause, for their own worldviews would not always be in harmony with those of the generals and statesmen who funded their projects in the cause of winning actual or hypothetical wars, with all the associated costs in human suffering and human lives. Nevertheless, as a consequence of this (Faustian?) bargain, the early-modern era of computers and computer networks in the United States is almost the polar opposite of that of telegraphy and telephony in an important sense: rather than being left to the private sphere, computing at the cutting edge became a non-profit, government-sponsored activity. The ramifications of this were and remain enormous, yet have become so embedded in the way we see computing writ large that we seldom consider them. Government funding explains, for example, why the very concept of a modern digital computer was never locked up behind a patent like the telegraph and the telephone were. Perhaps it even explains in a roundabout way why the digital computer has no single anointed father figure, no equivalent to a Samuel Morse or Alexander Graham Bell — for the people who made computing happen were institutionalists, not lone-wolf inventors.

Most of all, though, it explains why the World Wide Web, when it finally came to be, was designed to be open in every sense of the word, easily accessible from any computer that implements its well-documented protocols. Even today, long after the big corporations have moved in, a spirit of egalitarianism and idealism underpins the very technical specifications that make the Internet go. Had the moment when the technology was ripe to create an Internet not corresponded with the handful of decades in American history when the federal government was willing and able to fund massive technological research projects of uncertain ultimate benefit, the world we live in would be a very different place.

Programming ENIAC.

There is plenty of debate surrounding the question of the first “real” computer in the modern sense of the word, with plenty of fulsome sentiment on display from the more committed partisans. Some point to the machines built by Konrad Zuse in Nazi Germany in the midst of World War II, others to the ones built by the British code breakers at Bletchley Park around the same time. But the consensus, establishment choice has long been and still remains the American “Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator,” or ENIAC. It was designed primarily by the physicist John Mauchly and the electrical engineer J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania, and was funded by the United States Army for the purpose of calculating the ideal firing trajectories of artillery shells. Because building it was largely a process of trial and error from the time that the project was officially launched on June 1, 1943, it is difficult to give a precise date when ENIAC “worked” for the first time. It is clear, however, that it wasn’t able to do the job the Army expected of it until after the war that had prompted its creation was over. ENIAC wasn’t officially accepted by the Army until July of 1946.

ENIAC’s claim to being the first modern computer rests on the fact that it was the first machine to combine two key attributes: it was purely electrical rather than electro-mechanical —  no clanking telephone relays here! — and it was Turing complete. The latter quality requires some explanation.

First defined by the British mathematician and proto-computer scientist Alan Turing in the 1930s, the phrase “Turing complete” describes a machine that is able to store numerical data in internal memory of some sort, perform calculations and transformations upon that data, and make conditional jumps in the program it is running based upon the results. Anyone who has ever programmed a computer of the present day is familiar with branching decision points such as BASIC’s “if, then” construction — if such-and-such is the case, then do this — as well as loops such as its “for, next” construction, which are used to repeat sections of a program multiple times. The ability to write such statements and see them carried out means that one is working on a Turing-complete computer. ENIAC was the first purely electrical computer that could deal with the contemporary equivalent of “if, then” and “for, next” statements, and thus the patriarch of the billions more that would follow.

That said, there are ways in which ENIAC still fails to match our expectations of a computer — not just quantitatively, in the sense that it was 80 feet long, 8 feet tall, weighed 30 tons, and yet could manage barely one half of one percent of the instructions per second of an Apple II from the dawn of the personal-computing age, but qualitatively, in the sense that ENIAC just didn’t function like we expect a computer to do.

For one thing, it had no real concept of software. You “programmed” ENIAC by physically rewiring it, a process that generally consumed far more time than did actually running the program thus created. The room where it was housed looked like nothing so much as a manual telephone exchange from the old days, albeit on an enormous scale; it was a veritable maze of wires and plugboards. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to learn, then, that its programmers were mostly women, next-generation telephone operators who wandered through the machine’s innards with clipboards in their hands, remaking their surroundings to match the schematics on the page.

Another distinction between ENIAC and what came later is more subtle, but in its way even more profound. If you were to ask the proverbial person on the street what distinguishes a computer program from any other form of electronic media, she would probably say something about its “interactivity.” The word has become inescapable, the defining adjective of the computer age: “interactive fiction,” “interactive learning,” “interactive entertainment,” etc. And yet ENIAC really wasn’t so interactive at all. It operated under what would later become known as the “batch-processing” model. After programming it — or, if you like, rewiring it — you fed it a chunk of data, then sat back and waited however long it took for the result to come out the metaphorical other side of the pipeline. And then, if you wished, you could feed it some more data, to be massaged in exactly the same way. Ironically, this paradigm is much closer to the literal meaning of the word “computer” than the one with which we are familiar; ENIAC was a device for computing things. No more and no less. This made it useful, but far from the mind-expanding anything machine that we’ve come to know as the computer.

Thus the story of computing in the decade or two after ENIAC is largely that of how these two paradigms — programming by rewiring and batch processing — were shattered to yield said anything machine. The first paradigm fell away fairly quickly, but the second would persist for years in many computing contexts.

John von Neumann

In November of 1944, when ENIAC was still very much a work in progress, it was visited by John von Neumann. After immigrating to the United States from Hungary more than a decade earlier, von Neumann had become one of the most prominent intellectuals in the country, an absurdly accomplished mathematician and all-around genius for all seasons, with deep wells of knowledge in everything from atomic physics to Byzantine history. He was, writes computer historian M. Mitchell Waldrop, “a scientific superstar, the very Hollywood image of what a scientist ought to be, up to and including that faint, delicious touch of a Middle European accent.” A man who hobnobbed routinely with the highest levels of his adopted nation’s political as well as scientific establishment, he was now attached to the Manhattan Project that was charged with creating an atomic bomb before the Nazis could manage to do so. He came to see ENIAC in that capacity, to find out whether it or a machine like it might be able to help himself and his colleagues with the fiendishly complicated calculations that were part and parcel of their work.

Truth be told, he was somewhat underwhelmed by what he saw that day. He was taken aback by the laborious rewiring that programming ENIAC entailed, and judged the machine to be far too balky and inflexible to be of much use on the Manhattan Project.

But discussion about what the next computer after ENIAC ought to be like was already percolating, so much so that Mauchly and Eckert had already given the unfunded, entirely hypothetical machine a catchy acronym: EDVAC, for “Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer.” Von Neumann decided to throw his own hat into the ring, to offer up his own proposal for what EDVAC should be. Written betwixt and between his day job in the New Mexico desert, the resulting document laid out five abstract components of any computer. There must be a way of inputting data and a way of outputting it. There must be memory for storing the data, and a central arithmetic unit for performing calculations upon it. And finally, there must be a central control unit capable of executing programmed instructions and making conditional jumps.

But the paper’s real stroke of genius was its description of a new way of carrying out this programming, one that wouldn’t entail rewiring the computer. It should be possible, von Neumann wrote, to store not only the data a program manipulated in memory but the program itself. This way new programs could be input just the same way as other forms of data. This approach to computing — the only one most of us are familiar with — is sometimes called a “von Neumann machine” today, or simply a “stored-program computer.” It is the reason that, writes M. Mitchell Waldrop, the anything machine sitting on your desk today “can transform itself into the cockpit of a fighter jet, a budget projection, a chapter of a novel, or whatever else you want” — all without changing its physical form one iota.

Von Neumann began to distribute his paper, labeled a “first draft,” in late June of 1945, just three weeks before the Manhattan Project conducted the first test of an atomic bomb. The paper ignited a brouhaha that will ring all too familiar to readers of earlier articles in this series. Mauchly and Eckert had already resolved to patent EDVAC in order to exploit it for commercial purposes. They now rushed to do so, whilst insisting that the design had included the stored-program idea from the start, that von Neumann had in fact picked it up from them. Von Neumann himself begged to differ, saying it was all his own conception and filing a patent application of his own. Then the University of Pennsylvania entered the fray as well, saying it automatically owned any invention conceived by its employees as part of their duties. The whole mess was yet further complicated by the fact that the design of ENIAC, from which much of EDVAC was derived, had been funded by the Army, and was still considered classified.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[1]Inevitably, that wasn’t quite the end of it. Mauchly and Eckert continued their quest to win the patent they thought was their due, and were finally granted it at the rather astonishingly late date of 1964, by which time they were associated with the Sperry Rand Corporation, a maker of mainframes and minicomputers. But this victory only ignited another legal battle, pitting Sperry Rand against virtually every other company in the computer industry, who were not eager to start paying one of their competitors a royalty on every single computer they made. The patent was thrown out once and for all in 1973, primarily on the familiar premise that Von Neumann’s paper constituted prior disclosure.

Mauchly and Eckert had left the University of Pennsylvania in a huff by the time the Army’s lawyers made their decision. Without its masterminds, the EDVAC project suffered delay after delay. By the time it was finally done in 1952, it did sport stored programs, but its thunder had been stolen by other computers that had gotten there first.

The Whirlwind computer in testing, circa 1950. Jay Forrester is second from left, Robert Everett the man standing by his side.

The first stored-program computer to be actually built was known as the Manchester Mark I, after the University of Manchester in Britain that was its home. It ran its first program in April of 1949, a landmark moment in the proud computing history of Britain, which stretches back to such pioneers as Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. But this series of articles is concerned with how the World Wide Web came to be, and that is primarily an American story prior to its final stages. So, I hope you will forgive me if I continue to focus on the American scene. More specifically, I’d like to turn to the Whirlwind, the first stored-program all-electrical computer to be built in the United States — and, even more importantly, the first to break away from the batch-processing paradigm.

The Whirlwind had a long history behind it by the time it entered regular service at MIT in April of 1951. It had all begun in December of 1944, when the Navy had asked MIT to build it a new flight simulator for its trainees, one that could be rewired to simulate the flight characteristics of any present or future model of aircraft. The task was given to Jay Forrester, a 26-year-old engineering graduate student who would never have been allowed near such a project if all of his more senior colleagues hadn’t been busy with other wartime tasks. He and his team struggled for months to find a way to meet the Navy’s expectations, with little success. Somewhat to his chagrin, the project wasn’t cancelled even after the war ended. Then, one afternoon in October of 1945, in the course of a casual chat on the front stoop of Forrester’s research lab, a representative of the Navy brass mentioned ENIAC, and suggested that a digital computer like that one might be the solution to his problems. Forrester took the advice to heart. “We are building a digital computer!” he barked to his bewildered team just days later.

Forrester’s chief deputy Robert Everett would later admit that they started down the road of what would become known as “real-time computing” only because they were young and naïve and had no clue what they were getting into. For all that it was the product of ignorance as much as intent, the idea was nevertheless an audacious conceptual leap for computing. A computer responsible for running a flight simulator would have to do more than provide one-off answers to math problems at its own lackadaisical pace. It would need to respond to a constant stream of data about the state of the airplane’s controls, to update a model of the world in accord with that data, and provide a constant stream of feedback to the trainee behind the controls. And it would need to do it all to a clock, fast enough to give the impression of real flight. It was a well-nigh breathtaking explosion of the very idea of what a computer could be — not least in its thoroughgoing embrace of interactivity, its view of a program as a constant feedback loop of input and output.

The project gradually morphed from a single-purpose flight simulator to an even more expansive concept, an all-purpose digital computer that would be able to run a variety of real-time interactive applications. Like ENIAC before it, the machine which Forrester and Everett dubbed the Whirlwind was built and tested in stages over a period of years. In keeping with its real-time mission statement, it ended up doing seven times as many instructions per second as ENIAC, mostly thanks to a new type of memory — known as “core memory” — invented by Forrester himself for the project.

In the midst of these years of development, on August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, creating panic all over the Western world; most intelligence analysts had believed that the Soviets were still years away from such a feat. The Cold War began in earnest on that day, as all of the post-World War II dreams of a negotiated peace based on mutual enlightenment gave way to one based on the terrifying brinkmanship of mutually assured destruction. The stakes of warfare had shifted overnight; a single bomb dropped from a single Soviet aircraft could now spell the end of millions of American lives. Desperate to protect the nation against this ghastly new reality, the Air Force asked Forrester whether the Whirlwind could be used to provide a real-time picture of American airspace, to become the heart of a control center which kept track of friendlies and potential enemies 24 hours per day. As it happened, the project’s other sponsors had been growing impatient and making noises about cutting their funding, so Forrester had every motivation to jump on this new chance; the likes of flight simulation was entirely forgotten for the time being. On April 20, 1951, as its first official task, the newly commissioned Whirlwind successfully tracked two fighter planes in real time.

Satisfied with that proof of concept, the Air Force offered to lavishly fund a Project Lincoln that would build upon what had been learned from the Whirlwind, with the mission of protecting the United States from Soviet bombers at any cost — almost literally, given the sum of money the Air Force was willing to throw at it. It began in November of 1951, with Forrester in charge.

Whatever its implications about the gloomy state of the world, Project Lincoln was a truly visionary technological project, enough so as to warm the cockles of even a peacenik engineer’s heart. Soviet bombers, if they came someday, were expected to come in at low altitudes in order to minimize their radar exposure. This created a tremendous logistical problem. Even if the Air Force built enough radar stations to spot all of the aircraft before they reached their targets — a task it was willing to undertake despite the huge cost of it — there would be very little time to coordinate a response. Enter the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE); it was meant to provide that rapid coordination, which would be impossible by any other means. Data from hundreds of radar stations would pour into its control centers in real time, to be digested by a computer and displayed as a single comprehensible strategic map on the screens of operators, who would then be able to deploy fighters and ground-based antiaircraft weapons as needed in response, with nary a moment’s delay.

All of this seems old hat today, but it was unprecedented at the time. It would require computers whose power must dwarf even that of the Whirlwind. And it would also require something else: each computer would need to be networked to all the radar stations in its sector, and to its peers in other control centers. This was a staggering task in itself. To appreciate why Jay Forrester and his people thought they had a ghost of a chance of bringing it off, we need to step back from the front lines of the Cold War for a moment and check in with an old friend.

Claude Shannon in middle age, after he had become a sort of all-purpose public intellectual for the press to trot out for big occasions. He certainly looked the part…

Claude Shannon had left MIT to work for Bell Labs on various military projects during World War II, and had remained there after the end of the war. Thus when he published the second earthshaking paper of his career in 1948, he did so in the pages of the Bell System Technical Journal.

“A Mathematical Theory of Communication” belies its name to some extent, in that it can be explained in its most basic form without recourse to any mathematics at all. Indeed, it starts off so simply as to seem almost childish. Shannon breaks the whole of communication — of any act of communication — into seven elements, six of them proactive or positive, the last one negative. In addition to the message itself, there are the “source,” the person or machine generating the message; the “transmitter,” the device which encodes the message for transport and sends it on its way; the “channel,” the medium over which the message travels; the “receiver,” which decodes the message at the other end; and the “destination,” the person or machine which accepts and comprehends the message. And then there is “noise”: any source of entropy that impedes the progress of the message from source to destination or garbles its content. Let’s consider a couple of examples of Shannon’s framework in action.

One of the oldest methods of human communication is direct speech. Here the source is a person with something to say, the transmitter the mouth with which she speaks, the channel the air through which the resulting sound waves travel, the receiver the ear of a second person, and the destination that second person herself. Noise in the system might be literal background or foreground noise such as another person talking at the same time, or a wind blowing in the wrong direction, or sheer distance.

We can break telegraphy down in the same way. Here the source is the operator with a message to send, the transmitter his Morse key or teletype, the channel the wire over which the Morse Code travels, the receiver an electromagnet-actuated pencil or a teleprinter, and the destination the human operator at the other end of the wire. Noise might be static on the line, or a poor signal caused by a weak battery or something else, or any number of other technical glitches.

But if we like we can also examine the process of telegraphy from a greater remove. We might prefer to think of the source as the original source of the message — say, a soldier overseas who wants to tell his fiancée that he loves her. Here the telegraph operator who sends the message is in a sense a part of the transmitter, while the operator who receives the message is indeed a part of the receiver. The girl back home is of course the destination. When using this scheme, we consider the administration of telegraph stations and networks also to be a part of the overall communications process. In this conception, then, strictly human mistakes, such as a message dropped under a desk and overlooked, become a part of the noise in the system. Shannon provides us, in other words, with a framework for conceptualizing communication at whatever level of granularity might happen to suit our current goals.

Notably absent in all of this is any real concern over the content of the message being sent. Shannon treats content with blithe disinterest, not to say contempt. “The ‘meaning’ of a message is generally irrelevant,” he writes. “The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. [The] semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.” Rather than content or meaning, Shannon is interested in what he calls “information,” which is related to the actual meaning of the message but not quite the same thing. It is rather the encoded form the meaning takes as it passes down the channel.

And here Shannon clearly articulated an idea of profound importance, one which network engineers had been groping toward for some time: any channel is ultimately capable of carrying any type of content — text, sound, still or moving images, computer code, you name it. It’s just a matter of having an agreed-upon protocol for the transmitter and receiver to use to package it into information at one end and then unpack it at the other.

In practical terms, however, some types of content take longer to send over any given channel than others; while a telegraph line could theoretically be used to transmit video, it would take so long to send even a single frame using its widely spaced dots and dashes that it is effectively useless for the purpose, even though it is perfectly adequate for sending text as Morse Code. Some forms of content, that is to say, are denser than others, require more information to convey. In order to quantify this, one needs a unit for measuring quantities of information itself. This Shannon provides, in the form of a single on-or-off state — a yes or a no, a one or a zero. “The units may be called binary digits,” he writes, “or, more briefly, bits.”

And so a new word entered the lexicon. An entire universe of meaning can be built out of nothing but bits if you have enough of them, as our modern digital world proves. But some types of channel can send more bits per second than others, which makes different channels more or less suitable for different types of content.

There is still one more thing to consider: the noise that might come along to corrupt the information as it travels from transmitter to receiver. A message intended for a human is actually quite resistant to noise, for our human minds are very good at filling in gaps and working around mistakes in communication. A handful of garbled characters seldom destroys the meaning of a textual message for us, and we are equally adept at coping with a bad telephone connection or a static-filled television screen. Having a lot of noise in these situations is certainly not ideal, but the amount of entropy in the system has to get pretty extreme before the process of communication itself breaks down completely.

But what of computers? Shannon was already looking forward to a world in which one computer would need to talk directly to another, with no human middleman. Computers cannot use intuition and experience to fill in gaps and correct mistakes in an information stream. If they are to function, they need every single message to reach them in its original, pristine state. But, as Shannon well realized, some amount of noise is a fact of life with any communications channel. What could be done?

What could be done, Shannon wrote, was to design error correction into a communication protocol. The transmitter could divide the information to be sent into packets of fixed length. After sending a packet, it could send a checksum, a number derived from performing a series of agreed-upon calculations on the bits in the packet. The receiver at the other end of the line would then be expected to perform the same set of calculations on the information it had received, and compare it with the transmitter’s checksum. If the numbers matched, all must be well; it could send an “okay” back to the transmitter and wait on the next packet. But if the numbers didn’t match, it knew that noise on the channel must have corrupted the information. So, it would ask the transmitter to try sending the last packet again. It was in essence the same principle as the one that had been employed on Claude Chappe’s optical-telegraph networks of 150 years earlier.

To be sure, there were parameters in the scheme to be tinkered with on a situational basis. Larger packets, for example, would be more efficient on a relatively clean channel that gave few problems, smaller ones on a noisy channel where re-transmission was often necessary. Meanwhile the larger the checksum and more intense the calculations done to create it, the more confident one could be that the information really had been received correctly, that the checksums didn’t happen to match by mere coincidence. But this extra insurance came with a price of its own, in the form of the extra computing horsepower required to generate the more complex checksums and the extra time it took to send them down the channel. It seemed that success in digital communications was, like success in life, a matter of making wise compromises.

Two years after Shannon published his paper, another Bell Labs employee by the name of R.W. Hamming published “Error Detecting and Error Correcting Codes” in the same journal. It made Shannon’s abstractions concrete, laying out in careful detail the first practical algorithms for error detection and correction on a digital network, using checksums that would become known as “Hamming codes.”

Even before Hamming’s work came along to complement it, Shannon’s paper sent shock waves through the nascent community of computing, whilst inventing at a stroke a whole new field of research known as “information theory.” The printers of the Bell System Technical Journal, accustomed to turning out perhaps a few hundred copies for internal distribution through the company, were swamped by thousands of requests for that particular issue. Many of those involved with computers and/or communications would continue to speak of the paper and its author with awe for the rest of their lives. “It was like a bolt out of the blue, a really unique thing,” remembered a Bell Labs researcher named John Pierce. “I don’t know of any other theory that came in a complete form like that, with very few antecedents or history.” “It was a revelation,” said MIT’s Oliver Selfridge. “Around MIT the reaction was, ‘Brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that?’ Information theory gave us a whole conceptual vocabulary, as well as a technical vocabulary.” Word soon spread to the mainstream press. Fortune magazine called information theory that “proudest and rarest [of] creations, a great scientific theory which could profoundly and rapidly alter man’s view of the world.” Scientific American proclaimed it to encompass “all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another. [It] involves not only written and oral speech, but also music, the pictorial arts, the theatre, the ballet, and in fact all human behavior.” And that was only the half of it: in the midst of their excitement, the magazine’s editors failed to even notice its implications for computing.

And those implications were enormous. The fact was that all of the countless digital networks of the future would be built from the principles first described by Claude Shannon. Shannon himself largely stepped away from the table he had so obligingly set. A playful soul who preferred tinkering to writing or working to a deadline, he was content to live off the prestige his paper had brought him, accepting lucrative seats on several boards of directors and the like. In the meantime, his theories were about to be brought to vivid life by Project Lincoln.

The Lincoln Lab complex, future home of SAGE research, under construction.

In their later years, many of the mostly young people who worked on Project Lincoln would freely admit that they had had only the vaguest notion of what they were doing during those halcyon days. Having very little experience with the military or aviation among their ranks, they extrapolated from science-fiction novels, from movies, and from old newsreel footage of the command-and-control posts whence the Royal Air Force had guided defenses during the Battle of Britain. Everything they used in their endeavors had to be designed and made from whole cloth, from the input devices to the display screens to the computers behind it all, which were to be manufactured by a company called IBM that had heretofore specialized in strictly analog gadgets (typewriters, time clocks, vote recorders, census tabulators, cheese slicers). Fortunately, they had effectively unlimited sums of money at their disposal, what with the Air Force’s paranoid sense of urgency. The government paid to build a whole new complex to house their efforts, at Laurence G. Hanscom Airfield, about fifteen miles away from MIT proper. The place would become known as Lincoln Lab, and would long outlive Project Lincoln itself and the SAGE system it made; it still exists to this day.

AT&T — who else? — was contracted to set up the communications lines that would link all of the individual radar stations into control centers scattered all over the country, and in turn link the latter together with one another; it was considered essential not to have a single main control center which, if knocked out of action, could take the whole system down with it. The lines AT&T provided were at bottom ordinary telephone connections, for nothing better existed at the time. No matter; an engineer named John V. Harrington took Claude Shannon’s assertion that all information is the same in the end to heart. He made something called a “modulator/de-modulator”: a gadget which could convert a stream of binary data into a waveform and send it down a telephone line when it was playing the role of transmitter, or convert one of these waveforms back into binary data when it was playing the role of receiver, all at the impressive rate of 1300 bits per second. Its name was soon shortened to “modem,” and bits-per-second to “baud,” borrowing a term that had earlier been applied to the dots and dashes of telegraphy. Combined with the techniques of error correction developed by Shannon and R.W. Hamming, Harrington’s modems would become the basis of the world’s first permanent wide-area computer network.

At a time when the concept of software was just struggling into existence as an entity separate from computer hardware, the SAGE system would demand programs an order of magnitude more complex than anyone had ever attempted before — interactive programs that must run indefinitely and respond constantly to new stimuli, not mere algorithms to be run on static sets of data. In the end, SAGE would employ more than 800 individual programmers. Lincoln Lab created the first tools to separate the act of programming from the bare metal of the machine itself, introducing assemblers that could do some of the work of keeping track of registers, memory locations, and the like for the programmer, to allow her to better concentrate on the core logic of her task. Lincoln Lab’s official history of the project goes so far as to boast that “the art of computer programming was essentially invented for SAGE.”

In marked contrast to later years, programmers themselves were held in little regard at the time; hardware engineers ruled the roost. With no formal education programs in the discipline yet in existence, Lincoln Lab was willing to hire anyone who could get a security clearance and pass a test of basic reasoning skills. A substantial percentage of them wound up being women.

Among the men who came to program for SAGE was Severo Ornstein, a geologist who would go on to a notable career in computing over the following three decades. In his memoir, he captures the bizarre mixture of confusion and empowerment that marked life with SAGE, explaining how he was thrown in at the deep end as soon as he arrived on the job.

It seemed that not only was an operational air-defense program lacking, but the overall system hadn’t yet been fully designed. The OP SPECS (Operational Specifications) which defined the system were just being written, and, with no more background in air defense than a woodchuck, I was unceremoniously handed the task of writing the Crosstelling Spec. What in God’s name was Crosstelling? The only thing I knew about it was that it came late in the schedule, thank heavens, after everything else was finished.

It developed that the country was divided into sectors, and that the sectors were in turn divided into sub-sectors (which were really the operational units) with a Direction Center at the heart of each. Since airplanes, especially those that didn’t belong to the Air Force (or even the U.S.), could hardly be forbidden from crossing between sub-sectors, some coordination was required for handing over the tracking of planes, controlling of interceptors, etc., between the sub-sectors. This function was called Crosstelling, a name inherited from an earlier manual system in which human operators followed the tracks of aircraft on radar screens and coordinated matters by talking to one another on telephones. Now it had somehow fallen to me to define how this coordination should be handled by computers, and then to write it all down in an official OP SPEC with a bright-red cover stamped SECRET.

I was horrified. Not only did I feel incapable of handling the task, but what was to become of a country whose Crosstelling was to be specified by an ignoramus like me? My number-two daughter was born at about that time, and for the first time I began to fear for my children’s future…

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Dr. Strangelove.[2]That film’s title character was partially based on John Von Neumann, who after his work on the Manhattan Project and before his untimely death from cancer in 1957 became as strident a Cold Warrior as they came. “I believe there is no such thing as saturation,” he once told his old Manhattan Project boss Robert Oppenheimer. “I don’t think any weapon can be too large.” Many have attributed his bellicosity to his pain at seeing the Iron Curtain come down over his homeland of Hungary, separating him from friends and family forever.

Thankfully for all of us, the system was never subjected to a real trial by fire. Would it have actually worked? Most military experts are doubtful — as, indeed, were many of the architects of SAGE after all was said and done. Severo Ornstein, for his part, says bluntly that “I believe SAGE would have failed utterly.” During a large-scale war game known as Operation Sky Shield which was carried out in the early 1960s, SAGE succeeded in downing no more than a fourth of the attacking enemy bombers. All of the tests conducted after that fiasco were, some claim, fudged to one degree or another.

But then, the fact is that SAGE was already something of a white elephant on the day the very first control center went into operation; by that point the principal nuclear threat was shifting from bombers to ballistic missiles, a form of attack the designers had not anticipated and against which their system could offer no real utility. For all its cutting-edge technology, SAGE thus became a classic example of a weapon designed to fight the last war rather than the next one. Historian Paul N. Edwards has noted that the SAGE control centers were never placed in hardened bunkers, which he believes constitutes a tacit admission on the part of the Air Force that they had no chance of protecting the nation from a full-on Soviet first nuclear strike. “Strategic Air Command,” he posits, “intended never to need SAGE warning and interception; it would strike the Russians first. After SAC’s hammer blow, continental air defenses would be faced only with cleaning up a weak and probably disorganized counter-strike.” There is by no means a consensus that SAGE could have managed to coordinate even that much of a defense.

But this is not to say that SAGE wasn’t worth it. Far from it. Bringing so many smart people together and giving them such an ambitious, all-encompassing task to accomplish in such an exciting new field as computing could hardly fail to yield rich dividends for the future. Because so much of it was classified for so long, not to mention its association with passé Cold War paranoia, SAGE’s role in the history of computing — and especially of networked computing — tends to go underappreciated. And yet many of our most fundamental notions about what computing is and can be were born here. Paul N. Edwards credits SAGE and its predecessor the Whirlwind computer with inventing:

- magnetic-core memory

- video displays

- light guns [what we call light pens today]

- the first effective algebraic computer language

- graphic display techniques

- simulation techniques

- synchronous parallel logic (digits transmitted simultaneously rather than serially through the computer)

- analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion techniques

- digital data transmission over telephone lines

- duplexing

- multiprocessing

- networks (automatic data exchange among different computers)

Readers unfamiliar with computer technology may not appreciate the extreme importance of these developments to the history of computing. Suffice it to say that much-evolved versions of all of them remain in use today. Some, such as networking and graphic displays, comprise the very backbone of modern computing.

M. Mitchell Waldrop elaborates in a more philosophical mode:

SAGE planted the seeds of a truly powerful idea, the notion that humans and computers working together could be far more effective than either working separately. Of course, SAGE by itself didn’t get us all the way to the modern idea of personal computers being used for personal empowerment; the SAGE computers were definitely not “personal,” and the controllers could use them only for that one, tightly constrained task of air defense. Nonetheless, it’s no coincidence that the basic setup still seems so eerily familiar. An operator watching his CRT display screen, giving commands to a computer via a keyboard and a handheld light gun, and sending data to other computers via a digital communications link: SAGE may not have been the technological ancestor of the modern PC, mouse, and network, but it was definitely their conceptual and spiritual ancestor.

So, ineffective though it probably was as a means of national defense, the real legacy of SAGE is one of swords turning into plowshares. Consider, for example, its most direct civilian progeny.

SAGE in operation. For a quarter of a century, hundreds of Air Force Personnel were to be found sitting in antiseptic rooms like this one at any given time, peering at their displays in case something showed up there. It’s one way to make a living…

One day in the summer of 1953, long before any actual SAGE computers had been built, a senior IBM salesman who was privy to the project, whose name was R. Blair Smith, chanced to sit next to another Smith on a flight from Los Angeles to New York City. This other Smith was none other than Cyrus Rowlett Smith, the president of American Airlines.

Blair Smith had caught the computer fever, and believed that they could be very useful for airline reservations. Being a salesman, he didn’t hesitate to tell his seatmate all about this as soon as he learned who he was. He was gratified to find his companion receptive. “Now, Blair,” said Cyrus Smith just before their airplane landed, “our reservation center is at LaGuardia Airport. You go out there and look it over. Then you write me a letter and tell me what I should do.”

In his letter, Blair Smith envisioned a network that would bind together booking agents all over the country, allowing them to search to see which seats were available on which flights and to reserve them instantly for their customers. Blair Smith:

We didn’t know enough to call it anything. Later on, the word “Sabre” was adopted. By the way, it was originally spelled SABER — the only precedent we had was SAGE. SAGE was used to detect incoming airplanes. Radar defined the perimeter of the United States and then the information was signaled into a central computer. The perimeter data was then compared with what information they had about friendly aircraft, and so on. That was the only precedent we had. When the airline system was in research and development, they adopted the code name SABER for “Semi-Automatic Business Environment Research.” Later on, American Airlines changed it to Sabre.

Beginning in 1960, Sabre was gradually rolled out over the entire country. It became the first system of its kind, an early harbinger of the world’s networked future. Spun off as an independent company in 2000, it remains a key part of the world’s travel infrastructure today, when the vast majority of the reservations it accepts come from people sitting behind laptops and smartphones.

Sabre and other projects like it led to the rise of IBM as the virtually unchallenged dominant force in business computing from the middle of the 1950s until the end of the 1980s. But even as systems like Sabre were beginning to demonstrate the value of networked computing in everyday life, another, far more expansive vision of a networked world was taking shape in the clear blue sky of the country’s research institutions. The computer networks that existed by the start of the 1960s all operated on the “railroad” model of the old telegraph networks: a set of fixed stations joined together by fixed point-to-point links. What about a computer version of a telephone network instead — a national or international network of computers all able to babble happily together, with one computer able to call up any other any time it wished? Now that would really be something…

(Sources: the books A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet by John Naughton; From Gutenberg to the Internet: A Sourcebook on the History of Information Technology edited by Jeremy M. Norman, The Information by James Gleick, The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America by Paul N. Edwards, Project Whirlwind: The History of a Pioneer Computer by Kent C. Redmond and Thomas M. Smith, From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D Story of the SAGE Air Defense Computer by Kent C. Redmond and Thomas N. Smith, The SAGE Air Defense System: A Personal History by John F. Jacobs, A History of Modern Computing (2nd ed.) by Paul E. Ceruzzi, Computing in the Middle Ages by Severo M. Ornstein, and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind by Hans Moravec. Online sources include Lincoln Lab’s history of SAGE and the Charles Babbage Institute’s interview with R. Blair Smith.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

Inevitably, that wasn’t quite the end of it. Mauchly and Eckert continued their quest to win the patent they thought was their due, and were finally granted it at the rather astonishingly late date of 1964, by which time they were associated with the Sperry Rand Corporation, a maker of mainframes and minicomputers. But this victory only ignited another legal battle, pitting Sperry Rand against virtually every other company in the computer industry, who were not eager to start paying one of their competitors a royalty on every single computer they made. The patent was thrown out once and for all in 1973, primarily on the familiar premise that Von Neumann’s paper constituted prior disclosure.

↑2

That film’s title character was partially based on John Von Neumann, who after his work on the Manhattan Project and before his untimely death from cancer in 1957 became as strident a Cold Warrior as they came. “I believe there is no such thing as saturation,” he once told his old Manhattan Project boss Robert Oppenheimer. “I don’t think any weapon can be too large.” Many have attributed his bellicosity to his pain at seeing the Iron Curtain come down over his homeland of Hungary, separating him from friends and family forever.

Comments
40 Responses

- mycophobia

April 8, 2022 at 6:01 pm

“In the end, SAGE would employee more than”

employ?

- Jimmy Maher

April 8, 2022 at 8:19 pm

Thanks!

- Jack Brounstein

April 8, 2022 at 7:25 pm

Defining “Turing complete” for a non-technical audience is always difficult, but I’d note that “if/then/else” isn’t sufficient for Turing completeness. Douglas Hofstadter’s BlooP, for instance, has conditional statements but still isn’t Turing-complete.

Also, pedants will tell you that ENIAC isn’t Turing complete because no real-world computer is–it’s a theoretical model of computation that requires unlimited memory, and there’s only a finite amount space. Personally I don’t think that’s a problem, that outside of a Computer Science textbook “is theoretically Turing-complete assuming infinite resources” is a reasonable short-hand, but it’s something to be aware of.

- Jimmy Maher

April 8, 2022 at 8:38 pm

I added a footnote. For obvious reasons, I’d rather not get too down in the weeds on this, and I don’t really think it’s necessary. In most real-contexts, the “if/then/else” rule of thumb is a sufficient test, especially when we’re applying it to hardware rather than a programming language, and it’s something anyone with just a bit of familiarity with programming can easily grasp. Thanks!

- Aula

April 9, 2022 at 5:32 am

For programming languages, a sufficient definition of Turing-completeness is either “if/then/else and loops” or “if/then and goto” (you don’t need either the “else” part or loop statements if you can jump arbitrarily). However, neither definition makes any sense for hardware; in that case, the correct definition is that a piece of hardware is Turing complete if it has conditional jumps.

- mb

April 9, 2022 at 9:49 am

Yes, I want to second this. The “if-then-else” definition of Turing
completeness is seriously wrong, and risks confusing people. Conditional jumps
(“if this, then continue from this instruction”) is a good simple way to
explain the key idea.

- Jimmy Maher

April 9, 2022 at 10:15 am

Okay. Removed “else” from the equation. Thanks!

- Aula

April 9, 2022 at 3:09 pm

That’s still not right. If-then gives you the ability to jump forward, but that’s not good enough; you need to be able to jump backwards as well. If you really want to keep it as simple as possible, remove the if-then thing altogether and say that a Turing-complete programming language needs to have *loops* since that’s the essential distinguishing feature.

- Jimmy Maher

April 9, 2022 at 3:19 pm

The thing is, we’re not really so interested in Turing-complete programming languages. We’re rather interested in Turing-complete hardware, which is defined — in my understanding at least — by the ability to do conditional branches (making it hardware which can *support* a Turing-complete programming language). “If, then” is just a way of explaining that to a non-technical reader for whom the phrase “conditional branch” might not immediately cause bells to go off. I’m assuming that most readers have probably dabbled in BASIC or the like at some point in their lives.

- Aula

April 10, 2022 at 4:21 am

“in my understanding at least”

Well, that’s the issue; your understanding isn’t quite right. Whether we are talking about programming languages or hardware, Turing-completeness needs the ability to jump back to an earlier point in code, and a non-technical reader will absolutely not grasp that if you just mention if-then. In terms of BASIC, it’s GOTO that makes it Turing-complete, not IF-THEN. Or to put it facetiously, it’s the ability to get stuck in an infinite loop that defines Turing-completeness.

- Jimmy Maher

April 10, 2022 at 7:12 am

Okay, that’s helpful. I hope we’ve got it now. I stole your bit about infinite loops. ;) Thanks!

- Buck

April 10, 2022 at 8:02 am

In non-technical terms, Turing-complete means that a language/instruction set can compute everything that is computable (and something is computable if it can be computed by a Turing machine, but that is getting technical again). It’s possible to create a Turing-complete, single-instruction computer, with the instruction “substract and jump if less than zero”. If we assume arithmetic as given, the conditional (non-resticted) jump is indeed the important element.

A machine that always terminates eventually cannot be Turing-complete, but I’m not sure if the reverse is also true (an abstract counterexample would be a language that has just infinite loops, but does nothing else). Your definition of Turing-completeness with conditional branches seems perfectly fine to me. When translating it into BASIC terms, why not just use GOTO in addition to if-then? It’s the programming language equivalent to conditional branches, and I’m sure more people are familiar with GOTO than with FOR NEXT. Who hasn’t written code like 100 PRINT “HELLO” 200 GOTO 100 when starting with BASIC?

(There are perfectly normal applications for infinite loops, btw – webservers, threadpools, the software that keeps a plane flying, …)

- Jimmy Maher

April 10, 2022 at 9:45 am

I’m a little reluctant to lean on goto because, while it was indeed a fixture of the 8-bit BASICs many of us grew up with, its use is frowned upon in more recent implementations of the language, if they even allow it at all. I try not to make too many assumptions about readers’ backgrounds. Many readers who think of BASIC may think Visual BASIC first, not Commodore BASIC 2.0 or Applesoft BASIC.

I nixed the parenthetical about infinite loops, since it seems we may not be quite sure about that. Pity; I kind of liked that bit. ;) Thanks!

- Peter Olausson

April 8, 2022 at 7:29 pm

“Baud” is frequently misunderstood. It’s not bps but symbols per second. If the symbols transmitted come in two states – which I assume was the case to begin with – they are equal to bits, and indeed baud = bits per second. If, however, a symbol can have four states, it represents 2 bits, and 1 baud = 2 bps. Eight states means 1 baud = 3 bps … And so on.

- Jimmy Maher

April 8, 2022 at 8:44 pm

In telegraphy, it simply referred to the number of dots and dashes coming down the wire — generally from a teletype rather than a human-operated Morse key, since any human operator would presumably struggle to transmit at much more than baud. The first modems used simple on/off states effectively equivalent to dots and dashes, so I think this explanation is sufficient for our purposes.

- Rowan Lipkovits

April 8, 2022 at 9:54 pm

“enough so as to warm the cackles of even a peacenik engineer’s heart”

It’s an odd expression, but I believe the word usually used there is “cockles”.

- Jimmy Maher

April 9, 2022 at 7:09 am

Thanks!

- Martin

April 9, 2022 at 8:37 pm

Does the Complex Computer still exist? Are there any pictures of it?

- Jimmy Maher

April 10, 2022 at 7:16 am

Not to be my knowledge, no. The only place I found it described in any detail is The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop (a superb book, by the way.)

- Ethan Johnson

April 10, 2022 at 6:36 pm

The CHM has a photo purportedly from 1939 which I assume would be the most directly related device to the Complex Computer as such. There are a few photos of the teletype though this may be the only one of the telephone-relay computer.

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/birth-of-the-computer/4/85

- Goatmeal

April 9, 2022 at 8:48 pm

“After immigrating from Hungary more than a decade earlier, von Neumann…”

Should that be ’emigrating’ ?

- Jimmy Maher

April 10, 2022 at 7:21 am

That leaves it a bit too open-ended in a where-did-he-end-up sense, but then so did my original sentence. Fixed it in another way. Thanks!

- Andrew Pam

April 10, 2022 at 4:59 am

“the principals first described by Claude Shannon” – typo for “principles”.

- Jimmy Maher

April 10, 2022 at 7:22 am

Thanks!

- Leo Vellés

April 11, 2022 at 3:54 pm

“If you were the ask the proverbial person on the street what distinguishes a computer program from any other form of electronic media”.
Shouldn’t be “If you were TO ask…”?
By the way, I suppose the delay of one week for this post is justified by the result, it was a long but nevertheless a very entertaining and informative read. Loving this series so far…and learning a lot too (for example, what bit meant)

- Jimmy Maher

April 11, 2022 at 3:57 pm

Yes. Thanks!

- Gnoman

April 11, 2022 at 11:48 pm

I’ve heard it said that “why didn’t I think of that” is the greatest expression of brilliance, because it means that you’ve not only come up with something genuinely new and clever (else somebody would have thought of it) but have explained it so well that others can grasp the concept very easily (else they wouldn’t think they should have thought of it). I suppose this is a principle of limited applicability, given how overconfident people tend to be in their self analysis, but when that reaction is coming from certified geniuses in their own right it probably fits.

- Doug Orleans

April 13, 2022 at 8:12 pm

I’m friends with a few people who have worked at Lincoln Lab, and they will sometimes correct you if you say “Lincoln Labs” (plural). Its correct name is Lincoln Lab, singular (as opposed to Bell Labs, which is correctly plural).

- Jimmy Maher

April 14, 2022 at 8:39 am

I didn’t know that. Thanks!

- Pauli Ojala

April 14, 2022 at 11:50 pm

The performance comparisons you mention for ENIAC and Whirlwind seem seriously off.

ENIAC had a 5 kHz clock speed and could do 0.00289 MIPS according to this source: https://eniacday.org/eniac-trivia

The MOS 6502 CPU in the Apple II ran at approximately 1 MHz and 0.5 MIPS. That’s 173x faster.

According to Wikipedia, the Whirlwind could do 20k operations per second, or 0.02 MIPS.

The Motorola 68000 in the original Mac was rated at 1.4 MIPS — seventy times faster than the Whirlwind.

Fundamentally it’s not really possible for a computer built out of vacuum tubes to be as fast as a microprocessor. Shorter physical connections are faster.

- Jimmy Maher

April 15, 2022 at 6:09 am

I got all of those figures from supplementary online materials for the book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind by Hans Moravec: https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book97/ch3/processor.list.txt. He lists .00289 MIPS for ENIAC, .0694 for Whirlwind, .02 for the Apple II, and .52 for the first-generation Macintosh. It looks like only the numbers for ENIAC are correct. I wondered a bit about that when I wrote the article; it did seem awfully generous to the ENIAC and Whirlwind. But I never revisited it. I should have listened to my instinct.

Since there is obviously more that goes into overall computing potential than raw instructions per second, I think Moravec may have been doing some other calculations, perhaps factoring in memory capacity or something. But if so, I can’t find it explained anywhere.

Anyway, thanks!

- Pauli Ojala

April 15, 2022 at 1:51 pm

You’re welcome!

I love your blog, have been a reader and supporter for years. These long detours around computing history are such fascinating context for the classic gaming and digital media articles.

- Larry Farr

April 22, 2022 at 2:46 pm

The word ‘sense’ should be here instead

‘when it finally came to be, was designed to be open in every since of the word,’\

Always enjoy your take on things

- Jimmy Maher

April 22, 2022 at 2:57 pm

A post-publication edit gone wrong. ;) Thanks!

- Mikko

April 28, 2022 at 3:58 pm

Thank you for this series!

“Presper and Eckert had already given the unfunded, entirely hypothetical machine a catchy”
and several other places should probably be either
“Presper Eckert” or “Mauchly and Eckert”

- Jimmy Maher

April 28, 2022 at 4:10 pm

Thanks!

- Pingback: h. Play» Blog Archive » The other day I L

- jalapeno_dude

May 29, 2022 at 8:09 am

The acronym SAGE enters abruptly about halfway through the article with no explanation, and in fact I had to go to Wikipedia to learn that it stood for Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. Perhaps a sentence or two got inadvertently deleted?

- jalapeno_dude

May 29, 2022 at 8:43 am

I see now that SAGE is defined in the 2012 article on the roots of Infocom which is linked to in the next part of this series, but, uh, while I did read that article, it was closer to 2012 then the present when I did…

- Jimmy Maher

May 29, 2022 at 6:27 pm

Woops. That must have gotten lost in editing. Thanks!

A Web Around the World, Part 8: The Intergalactic Computer Network
April 22, 2022

One could make a strong argument for the manned Moon landing and the Internet as the two greatest technological achievements of the second half of the twentieth century. Remarkably, the roots of both reach back to the same event — in fact, to the very same American government agency, hastily created in response to that event.

A replica of the Sputnik 1 satellite, the source of the beep heard round the world.

At dawn on October 5, 1957, a rocket blasted off from southern Kazakhstan. Just under half an hour later, at an altitude of about 140 miles, it detached its payload: a silver sphere the size of a soccer ball, from which four antennas extended in vaguely insectoid fashion. Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, began to send out a regular beep soon thereafter.

It became the beep heard round the world, exciting a consternation in the West such as hadn’t been in evidence since the first Soviet test of an atomic bomb eight years earlier. In many ways, this panic was even worse than that one. The nuclear test of 1949 had served notice that the Soviet Union had just about caught up with the West, prompting a redoubled effort on the part of the United States to develop the hydrogen bomb, the last word in apocalyptic weaponry. This effort had succeeded in 1952, restoring a measure of peace of mind. But now, with Sputnik, the Soviet Union had done more than catch up to the Western state of the art; it had surpassed it. The implications were dire. Amateur radio enthusiasts listened with morbid fascination to the telltale beep passing overhead, while newspaper columnists imagined the Soviets colonizing space in the name of communism and dropping bombs from there on the heads of those terrestrial nations who refused to submit to tyranny.

The Soviets themselves proved adept at playing to such fears. Just one month after Sputnik 1, they launched Sputnik 2. This satellite had a living passenger: a bewildered mongrel dog named Laika who had been scooped off the streets of Moscow. We now know that the poor creature was boiled alive in her tin can by the unshielded heat of the Sun within a few hours of reaching orbit, but it was reported to the world at the time that she lived fully six days in space before being euthanized by lethal injection. Clearly the Soviets’ plans for space involved more than beeping soccer balls.

These events prompted a predictable scramble inside the American government, a circular firing squad of politicians, bureaucrats, and military brass casting aspersions upon one another as everyone tried to figure out how the United States could have been upstaged so badly. President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a major address just four days after Laika had become the first living Earthling to reach space (and to die there). He would remedy the crisis of confidence in American science and technology, he said, by forming a new agency that would report directly to the Secretary of Defense. It would be called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA. Naturally, its foremost responsibility would be the space race against the Soviets.

But this mission statement for ARPA didn’t last very long. Many believed that to treat the space race as a purely military endeavor would be unwise; far better to present it to the world as a peaceful, almost utopian initiative, driven by pure science and the eternal human urge to explore. These cooler heads eventually prevailed, and as a result almost the entirety of ARPA’s initial raison d’être was taken away from it in the weeks after its formal creation in February of 1958. A brand new, civilian space agency called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was formed to carry out the utopian mission of space exploration — albeit more quickly than the Soviets, if you please. ARPA was suddenly an agency without any obvious reason to exist. But the bills to create it had all been signed and office space in the Pentagon allocated, and so it was allowed to shamble on toward destinations that were uncertain at best. It became just another acronym floating about in the alphabet soup of government bureaucracy.

Big government having an inertia all its own, it remained that way for quite some time. While NASA captured headlines with the recruitment of its first seven human astronauts and the inauguration of a Project Mercury to put one of them into space, ARPA, the agency originally slated to have all that glory, toiled away in obscurity with esoteric projects that attracted little attention outside the Pentagon. ARPA had nothing whatsoever to do with computing until mid-1961. At that point — as the nation was smarting over the Soviets stealing its thunder once again, this time by putting a man into space before NASA could — ARPA was given four huge IBM mainframes, leftovers from the SAGE project which nobody knew what to do with, for their hardware design had been tailored for the needs of SAGE alone. The head of ARPA then was a man named Jack Ruina, who just happened to be an electrical engineer, and one who was at least somewhat familiar with the latest developments in computing. Rather than looking a gift horse — or a white elephant — in the mouth, he decided to take his inherited computers as a sign that this was a field where ARPA could do some good. He asked for and was given $10 million per year to study computer-assisted command-and-control systems — basically, for a continuation of the sort of work that the SAGE  project had begun. Then he started looking around for someone to run the new sub-agency. He found the man he felt to be the ideal candidate in one J.C.R. Licklider.

J.C.R. Licklider

Lick was probably the most gifted intuitive genius I have ever known. When I would finally come to Lick with the proof of some mathematical relation, I’d discover that he already knew it. He hadn’t worked it out in detail. He just… knew it. He could somehow envision the way information flowed, and see relations that people who just manipulated the mathematical symbols could not see. It was so astounding that he became a figure of mystery to the rest of us. How the hell does Lick do it? How does he see these things? Talking with Lick about a problem amplified my own intelligence about 30 IQ points.

— William J. McGill, colleague of J.C.R. Licklider at MIT

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider is one of history’s greatest rarities, a man who changed the world without ever making any enemies. Almost to a person, no one who worked with him had or has a bad word to say about him — not even those who stridently disagreed with him about the approach to computing which his very name came to signify. They prefer to wax rhapsodic about his incisive intellect, his endless good humor, his incomparable ability to inspire and motivate, and perhaps most of all his down-to-earth human kindness — not exactly the quality for which computer brainiacs are most known. He was the kind of guy who, when he’d visit the office soda machine, would always come back with enough Cokes for everyone. When he’d go to sharpen a pencil, he’d ask if anyone else needed theirs sharpened as well. “He could strike up a conversation with anybody,” remembered a woman named Louise Carpenter Thomas who worked with him early in his career. “Waitresses, bellhops, janitors, gardeners… it was a facility I marveled at.”

“I can’t figure it out,” she once told a friend. “He’s too… nice.” She soon decided he wasn’t too good to be true after all; she became his wife.

“Lick,” as he was universally known, wasn’t a hacker in the conventional sense. He was rather the epitome of a big-picture guy. Uninterested in the details of administration of the agencies he ostensibly led and not much more interested in those of programming or engineering at the nitty-gritty level, he excelled at creating an atmosphere that allowed other people to become their best selves and then setting a direction they could all pull toward. One might be tempted to call him a prototype of the modern Silicon Valley “disruptor,” except that he lacked the toxic narcissism of that breed of Steve Jobs wannabees. In fact, Lick was terminally modest. “If someone stole an idea from him,” said his wife Louise, “I’d pound the table and say it’s not fair, and he’d say, ‘It doesn’t matter who gets the credit. It matters that it gets done.'”

His unwillingness to blow his own horn is undoubtedly one of the contributing factors to Lick’s being one of the most under-recognized of computing’s pioneers. He published relatively little, both because he hated to write and because he genuinely loved to see one of his protegees recognized for fleshing out and popularizing one of his ideas. Yet the fact remains that his vision of computing’s necessary immediate future was actually far more prescient than that of many of his more celebrated peers.

To understand that vision and the ways in which it contrasted with that of some of his colleagues, we should begin with Lick’s background. Born in 1915 in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of a Baptist minister, he grew up a boy who was good at just about everything, from sports to mathematics to auto mechanics, but already had a knack for never making anyone feel jealous about it. After much tortured debate and a few abrupt changes of course at university, he finally settled on studying psychology, and was awarded his master’s degree in the field from St. Louis’s Washington University in 1938. According to his biographer M. Mitchell Waldrop, the choice of majors made all the difference in what he would go on to do.

Considering all that happened later, Lick’s youthful passion for psychology might seem like an aberration, a sideline, a long diversion from his ultimate career in computers. But in fact, his grounding in psychology would prove central to his very conception of computers. Virtually all the other computer pioneers of his generation would come to the field in the 1940s and 1950s with backgrounds in mathematics, physics, or electrical engineering, technological orientations that led them to focus on gadgetry — on making the machines bigger, faster, and more reliable. Lick was unique in bringing to the field a deep appreciation for human beings: our capacity to perceive, to adapt, to make choices, and to devise completely new ways of tackling apparently intricate problems. As an experimental psychologist, he found these abilities every bit as subtle and as worthy of respect as a computer’s ability to execute an algorithm. And that was why to him, the real challenge would always lie in adapting computers to the humans who used them, thereby exploiting the strengths of each.

Still, Lick might very well have remained a “pure” psychologist if the Second World War hadn’t intervened. His pre-war research focus had been the psychological processes of human hearing. After the war began, this led him to Harvard University’s Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, where he devised technologies to allow bomber crews to better communicate with one another inside their noisy airplanes. Thus he found the focus that would mark the rest of his career: the interaction between humans and technology. After moving to MIT in 1950, he joined the SAGE project, where he helped to design the user interface — not that the term yet existed! — which allowed the SAGE ground controllers to interact with the display screens in front of them; among his achievements here was the invention of the light pen. Having thus been bitten by the computing bug, he moved on in 1957 to Bolt Beranek and Newman, a computing laboratory and think tank with close ties to MIT.

He was still there in 1960, when he published perhaps the most important of all his rare papers, a piece entitled “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” in the journal Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics. In order to appreciate what a revolutionary paper it was, we should first step back to look at the view of computing to which it was responding.

The most typical way of describing computers in the mass media of the time was as “giant brains,” little different in qualitative terms from those of humans. This conception of computing would soon be all over pop culture — for example, in the rogue computers that Captain Kirk destroyed on almost a monthly basis on Star Trek, or in the computer HAL 9000, the villain of 2001: A Space Odyssey. A large number of computer researchers who probably ought to have known better subscribed to a more positive take on essentially the same view. Their understanding was that, if artificial intelligence wasn’t yet up to human snuff, it was only a matter of time. These proponents of “strong AI,” such as Stanford University’s John McCarthy and MIT’s own Marvin Minsky, were already declaring by the end of the 1950s that true computer consciousness was just twenty years away. (This would eventually lead to a longstanding joke in hacker culture, that strong AI is always exactly two decades away…) Even such an undeniable genius as Alan Turing, who had been dead six years already when Lick published his paper, had spent much effort devising a “Turing test” that could serve as a determiner of true artificial intelligence, and had attempted to teach a computer to play chess as a sort of opening proof of concept.

Lick, on the other hand, well recognized that to use the completely deterministic and algorithm-friendly game of chess for that purpose was not quite honest; a far better demonstration of artificial intelligence would be a computer that could win at poker, what with all of the intuition and social empathy that game required. But rather than chase such chimeras at all, why not let computers do the things they already do well and let humans do likewise, and teach them both to work together to accomplish things neither could on their own? Many of computing’s leading theorists, Lick implied, had developed delusions of grandeur, moving with inordinate speed from computers as giant calculators for crunching numbers to computers as sentient beings in their own right. They didn’t have to become the latter, Lick understood, to become one of the most important tools humanity had ever invented for itself; there was a sweet spot in between the two extremes. He chose to open his paper with a metaphor from the natural world, describing how fig trees are pollinated by the wasps which feed upon their fruit. “The tree and the insect are thus heavily interdependent,” he wrote. “The tree cannot reproduce without the insect; the insect cannot eat without the tree; they constitute not only a viable but a productive and thriving partnership.” A symbiosis, in other words.

A similar symbiosis could and should become the norm in human-computer interactions, with the humans always in the cat-bird seat as the final deciders — no Star Trek doomsday scenarios here.

[Humans] will set the goals and supply the motivations. They will formulate hypotheses. They will ask questions. They will think of mechanisms, procedures, and models. They will define criteria and serve as evaluators, judging the contributions of the equipment and guiding the general line of thought. The information-processing equipment, for its part, will convert hypotheses into testable models and then test the models against the data. The equipment will answer questions. It will simulate the mechanisms and models, carry out the procedures, and display the results to the operator. It will transform data, plot graphs. [It] will interpolate, extrapolate, and transform. It will convert static equations or logical statements into dynamic models so that the human operator can examine their behavior. In general, it will carry out the routinizable, clerical operations that fill the intervals between decisions.

Perchance in a bid not to offend his more grandiose colleagues, Lick did hedge his bets on the long-term prospects for strong artificial intelligence. It might very well arrive at some point, he said, although he couldn’t say whether that would take ten years or 500 years. Regardless, the years before its arrival “should be intellectually and creatively the most exciting in the history of mankind.”

In the end, however, even Lick’s diplomatic skills would prove insufficient to smooth out the differences between two competing visions of computing. By the end of the 1960s, the argument would literally split MIT’s computer-science research in two. One part would become the AI Lab, dedicated to artificial intelligence in its most expansive form; the other, known as the Dynamic Modeling Group, would take its mission statement as well as its name almost verbatim from Lick’s 1960 paper. For all that some folks still love to talk excitedly and/or worriedly of a “Singularity” after which computer intelligence will truly exceed human intelligence in all its facets, the way we actually use computers today is far more reflective of J.C.R. Licklider’s vision than that of Marvin Minsky or John McCarthy.

But all of that lay well in the future at the dawn of the 1960s. Viewing matters strictly through the lens of that time, we can now begin to see why Jack Ruina at ARPA found J.C.R. Licklider and the philosophy of computing he represented so appealing. Most of the generals and admirals Ruina talked to were much like the general public; they still thought of computers as giant brains that would crunch a bunch of data and then unfold for them the secrets of the universe — or at least of the Soviets. “The idea was that you take this powerful computer and feed it all this qualitative information, such as ‘the air-force chief drank two martinis’ or ‘Khrushchev isn’t reading Pravda on Mondays,'” laughed Ruina later. “And the computer would play Sherlock Holmes and reveal that the Russians must be building an MX-72 missile or something like that.” Such hopes were, as Lick put it to Ruina at their first meeting, “asinine.”

SAGE existed already as a shining example of Lick’s take on computers — computers as aids to rather than replacements for human intelligence. Ruina was well aware that command-and-control was one of the most difficult problems in warfare; throughout history, it has often been the principal reason that wars are won or lost. Just imagine what SAGE-like real-time information spaces could do for the country’s overall level of preparedness if spread throughout the military chain of command…

On October 1, 1962, following a long courtship on the part of Ruina, Lick officially took up his new duties in a small office in the Pentagon. Like Lick himself, Ruina wasn’t much for micromanagement; he believed in hiring smart people and stepping back to let them do their thing. Thus he turned over his $10 million per year to Lick with basically no strings attached. Just find a way to make interactive computing better, he told him, preferably in ways useful to the military. For his part, Lick made it clear that “I wasn’t doing battle planning,” as he later remembered. “I was doing the technical substrate that would one day support battle planning.” Ruina said that was just fine with him. Lick had free rein.

Ironically, he never did do much of anything with the leftover SAGE computers that had gotten the whole ball rolling; they were just too old, too specialized, too big. Instead he set about recruiting the smartest people he knew of to do research on the government’s dime, using the equipment found at their own local institutions.

If I tried to describe everything these folks got up to here, I would get hopelessly sidetracked. So, we’ll move directly to ARPA’s most famous computing project of all. A Licklider memo dated April 25, 1963, is surely one of the most important of its type in all of modern history. For it was here that Lick first made his case for a far-flung general-purpose computer network. The memo was addressed to “members and affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network,” which serves as an example of Lick’s tendency to attempt to avoid sounding too highfalutin by making the ideas about which he felt most strongly sound a bit ridiculous instead. Strictly speaking, the phrase “Intergalactic Computer Network” didn’t apply to the thing Lick was proposing; the network in question here was rather the human network of researchers that Lick was busily assembling. Nevertheless, a computer network was the topic of the memo, and its salutation and its topic would quickly become conflated. Before it became the Internet, even before it became the ARPANET, everyone would call it the Intergalactic Network.

In the memo, Lick notes that ARPA is already funding a diverse variety of computing projects at an almost equally diverse variety of locations. In the interest of not duplicating the wheel, it would make sense if the researchers involved could share programs and data and correspond with one another easily, so that every researcher could benefit from the efforts of the others whenever possible. Therefore he proposes that all of their computers be tied together on a single network, such that any machine can communicate at any time with any other machine.

Lick was careful to couch his argument in the immediate practical benefits it would afford to the projects under his charge. Yet it arose from more abstract discussions that had been swirling around MIT for years. Lick’s idea of a large-scale computer network was in fact inextricably bound up with his humanist vision for computing writ large. In a stunningly prescient article published in the May 1964 issue of Atlantic Monthly, Martin Greenberger, a professor with MIT’s Sloan School of Management, made the case for a computer-based “information utility” — essentially, for the modern Internet, which he imagined arriving at more or less exactly the moment it really did become an inescapable part of our day-to-day lives. In doing all of this, he often seemed to be parroting Lick’s ideology of better living through human-computer symbiosis, to the point of employing many of the same idiosyncratic word choices.

The range of application of the information utility includes medical-information systems for hospitals and clinics, centralized traffic controls for cities and highways, catalogue shopping from a convenient terminal at home, automatic libraries linked to home and office, integrated management-control systems for companies and factories, teaching consoles in the classroom, research consoles in the laboratory, design consoles in the engineering firm, editing consoles in the publishing office, [and] computerized communities.

Barring unforeseen obstacles, an online interactive computer service, provided commercially by an information utility, may be as commonplace by 2000 AD as a telephone service is today. By 2000 AD, man should have a much better comprehension of himself and his system, not because he will be innately any smarter than he is today, but because he will have learned to use imaginatively the most powerful amplifier of intelligence yet devised.

In 1964, the idea of shopping and socializing through a home computer “sounded a bit like working a nuclear reactor in your home,” as M. Mitchell Waldrop writes. Still, there it was — and Greenberger’s uncannily accurate predictions almost certainly originated with Lick.

Lick himself, however, was about to step back and entrust his dream to others. In September of 1964, he resigned from his post in the Pentagon to accept a job with IBM. There were likely quite a number of factors behind this decision, which struck many of his colleagues at the time as perplexing as it strikes us today. As we’ve seen, he was not a hardcore techie, and he may have genuinely believed that a different sort of mind would do a better job of managing the projects he had set in motion at ARPA. Meanwhile his family wasn’t overly thrilled at life in their cramped Washington apartment, the best accommodations his government salary could pay for. IBM, on the other hand, compensated its senior employees very generously — no small consideration for a man with two children close to university age. After decades of non-profit service, he may have seen this, reasonably enough, as his chance to finally cash in. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, he probably truly believed that he could do a lot of good for the world at IBM, by convincing this most powerful force in commercial computing to fully embrace his humanistic vision of computing’s potential. That wouldn’t happen in the end; his tenure there would prove short and disappointing. He would find the notoriously conservative culture of IBM impervious to his charms, a thoroughly novel experience for him. But of course he couldn’t know that prior to the fact.

Lick’s successor at ARPA was Ivan Sutherland, a young man of just 26 years who had recently created a sensation at MIT with his PhD project, a program called Sketchpad that let a user draw arbitrary pictures on a computer screen using one of the light pens that Lick had helped to invent for SAGE. But Sutherland proved no more interested in the details of administration than Lick had been, even as he demonstrated why a more typical hacker type might not have been the best choice for the position after all, being too fixated on his own experiments with computer graphics to have much time to inspire and guide others. Lick’s idea for a large-scale computer network lay moribund during his tenure. It remained so for almost two full years in all, until Sutherland too left what really was a rather thankless job. His replacement was one Robert Taylor. Critically, this latest administrator came complete with Lick’s passion for networking, along with something of his genius for interpersonal relations.

Robert Taylor, as photographed by Annie Leibowitz in 1972 for a Rolling Stone feature article on Xerox PARC, his destination after leaving ARPA.

Coming on as a veritable stereotype of a laid-back country boy, right down to his laconic Texan accent, Robert Taylor was a disarmingly easy man to underestimate. He was born seventeen years after Lick, but there were some uncanny similarities in their backgrounds. Taylor too grew up far from the intellectual capitals of the nation as the son of a minister. Like Lick, he gradually lost his faith in the course of trying to decide what to do with his life, and like Lick he finally settled on psychology. More or less, anyway; he graduated from the University of Texas at age 25 in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and minors in mathematics, philosophy, English, and religion. He was working at Martin Marietta in a “stopgap” job in the spring of 1960, when he stumbled across Lick’s article on human-computer symbiosis. It changed his life. “Lick’s paper opened the door for me,” he says. “Over time, I became less and less interested in brain research, and more and more heartily subscribed to the Licklider vision of interactive computing.” The interest led him to NASA the following year, where he helped to design the displays used by ground controllers on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo manned-spaceflight programs. In early 1965, he moved to ARPA as Sutherland’s deputy, then took over Sutherland’s job following his departure in June of 1966.

In the course of it all, Taylor got to talk with Lick himself on many occasions. Unsurprisingly given the similarities in their backgrounds and to some extent in their demeanors, the two men hit it off famously. Soon Taylor felt the same zeal that his mentor did for a new, unprecedentedly large and flexible computer network. And once he found himself in charge of ARPA’s computer-research budget, he was in a position to do something about it. He was determined to make Lick’s Intergalactic Network a reality.

Alas, instilling the same determination in the researchers working with ARPA would not be easy. Many of them would later be loath to admit their reluctance, given that the Intergalactic Network would prove to be one of the most important projects in the entire history of computing, but it was there nonetheless. Severo Ornstein, who was working at Lick’s old employer of Bolt Beranek and Newman at this time, confesses to a typical reaction: “Who would want such a thing?” Computer cycles were a precious resource in those days, a commodity which researchers coveted for their personal use as much as Scrooge coveted his shillings. Almost no one was eager to share their computers with people in other cities and states. The strong AI contingent under Minsky and McCarthy, whose experiments not coincidentally tended to be especially taxing on a computer’s resources, were among the loudest objectors. It didn’t help matters that Taylor suffered from something of a respect deficit. Unlike Lick and Sutherland before him, he wasn’t quite of this group of brainy and often arrogant cats which he was attempting to herd, having never made a name for himself through research at one of their universities — indeed, lacking even the all-important suffix “PhD” behind his name.

But Bob Taylor shared one more similarity with J.C.R. Licklider: he was all about making good things happen, not about taking credit for them. If the nation’s computer researchers refused to take him seriously, he would find someone else whom they couldn’t ignore. He settled on Larry Roberts, an MIT veteran who had helped Sutherland with Sketchpad and done much groundbreaking work of his own in the field of computer graphics, such as laying the foundation for the compressed file formats that are used to shuffle billions of images around the Internet today. Roberts had been converted by Lick to the networking religion in November of 1964, when the two were hanging out in a bar after a conference. Roberts:

The conversation was, what was the future? And Lick, of course, was talking about his concept of an Intergalactic Network.

At that time, Ivan [Sutherland] and I had gone farther than anyone else in graphics. But I had begun to realize that everything I did was useless to the rest of the world because it was on the TX-2, and that was a unique machine. The TX-2, [the] CTSS, and so forth — they were all incompatible, which made it almost impossible to move data. So everything we did was almost in isolation. The only thing we could do to get the stuff out into the world was to produce written technical papers, which was a very slow process.

It seemed to me that civilization would change if we could move all this [over a network]. It would be a whole new way of sharing knowledge.

The only problem was that Roberts had no interest in becoming a government bureaucrat. So Taylor, whose drawl masked a steely resolve when push came to shove, did what he had to in order to get his man. He went to the administrators of MIT and Lincoln Lab, which were heavily dependent on government funding, and strongly hinted that said funding might be contingent on one member of their staff stepping away from his academic responsibilities for a couple of years. Before 1966 was out, Larry Roberts reported for duty at the Pentagon, to serve as the technical lead of what was about to become known as the ARPANET.

In March of 1967, as the nation’s adults were reeling from the fiery deaths of three Apollo astronauts on the launchpad and its youth were ushering in the Age of Aquarius, Taylor and Roberts brought together 25 or so of the most brilliant minds in computing in a University of Michigan classroom in the hope of fomenting a different sort of revolution. Despite the addition of Roberts to the networking cause, most of them still didn’t want to be there, thought this ARPANET business a waste of time. They arrived all too ready to voice objections and obstacles to the scheme, of which there were no shortage.

The computers that Taylor and Roberts proposed to link together were a motley crew by any standard, ranging from the latest hulking IBM mainframes to mid-sized machines from companies like DEC to bespoke hand-built jobs. The problem of teaching computers from different manufacturers — or even different models of computer from the same manufacturer — to share data with one another had only recently been taken up in earnest. Even moving text from one machine to another could be a challenge; it had been just half a decade since a body called the American Standards Association had approved a standard way of encoding alphanumeric characters as binary numbers, constituting the computer world’s would-be equivalent to Morse Code. Known as the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII, it was far from universally accepted, with IBM in particular clinging obstinately to an alternative, in-house-developed system known as the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code, or EBCDIC. Uploading a text file generated on a computer that used one standard to a computer that used the other would result in gibberish. How were such computers to talk to one another?

The ARPANET would run on ASCII, Taylor and Roberts replied. Those computers that used something else would just have to implement a translation layer for communicating with the outside world.

Fair enough. But then, how was the physical cabling to work? ARPA couldn’t afford to string its own wires all over the country, and the ones that already existed were designed for telephones, not computers.

No problem, came the reply. ARPA would be able to lease high-capacity lines from AT&T, and Claude Shannon had long since taught them all that information was information. Naturally, there would be some degree of noise on the lines, but error-checking protocols were by now commonplace. Tests had shown that one could push information down one of AT&T’s best lines at a rate of up to 56,000 baud before the number of corrupted packets reached a point of diminishing returns. So, this was the speed at which the ARPANET would run.

The next objection was the gnarliest. At the core of the whole ARPANET idea lay the stipulation that any computer on the network must be able to talk to any other, just like any telephone was able to ring up any other. But existing wide-area computer networks, such as the ones behind SAGE and Sabre, all operated on the railroad model of the old telegraph networks: each line led to exactly one place. To use the same approach as existing telephone networks, with individual computers constantly dialing up one another through electro-mechanical switches, would be way too inefficient and inflexible for a high-speed data network such as this one. Therefore Taylor and Roberts had another approach in mind.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Communication Nets, an MIT researcher named Leonard Kleinrock extended the concept. There was no reason, he noted, that a packet couldn’t contain additional meta-information beyond the checksum. It could, for example, contain the destination it was trying to reach on a network. This meta-information could be used to pass it from hand to hand through the network in the same way that the postal system used the address on the envelope of a paper letter to guide it to its intended destination. This approach to data transfer over a network would soon become known as “packet switching,” and would prove of incalculable importance to the world’s digital future.[1]As Kleinrock himself would hasten to point out, he was not the sole originator of the concept, which has a long and somewhat convoluted history as a theory. His book was, however, the way that many or most of the folks behind the ARPANET first encountered packet switching.

A “star” network topology, in which every computer communicates with every other by passing packets through a single “Grand Central Station.”

How exactly might packet switching work on the ARPANET? At first, Taylor and Roberts had contemplated using a single computer as a sort of central postal exchange. Every other computer on the ARPANET would be wired into this machine, whose sole duty would be to read the desired destination of each incoming packet and send it there. But the approach came complete with a glaring problem: if the central hub went down for any reason, it would take the whole ARPANET down with it.

A “distributed” network topology in which all of the computers work together to move messages through the system. It lacks a single point of failure, but is much more complicated to implement from a technical perspective.

Instead Taylor and Roberts settled on a radically de-centralized approach. Each computer would be directly connected to no more than a handful of other machines. When it received a packet from one of them, it would check the address. If it was not the intended final destination, it would consult a logical map of the network and send the packet along to the peer computer able to get it there most efficiently; then it would forget all about it and go about its own business again. The advantage of the approach was that, if any given computer went down, the others could route their way around it until it came online again. Thus there would be no easy way to “break” the ARPANET, since there would be no single point of failure. This quality of being de-centralized and self-correcting remains the most important of all the design priorities of the modern Internet.

Everyone at the meeting could agree that all of this was quite clever, but they still weren’t won over. The naysayers’ arguments still hinged on how precious computing horsepower was. Every nanosecond a computer spent acting as an electronic postal sorter was a nanosecond that computer couldn’t spend doing other sorts of more useful work. For once, Taylor and Roberts had no real riposte for this concern, beyond vague promises to invest ARPA funds into more and better computers for those who had need of them. Then, just as the meeting was breaking up, with skepticism still hanging palpably in the air, a fellow named Wesley Clark passed a note to Larry Roberts, saying he thought he had a solution to the problem.

It seemed to him, he elaborated to Taylor and Roberts after the meeting, that running the ARPANET straight through all of its constituent machines was rather like running an interstate highway system right through the center of every small town in the country. Why not make the network its own, largely self-contained thing, connected to each computer it served only by a single convenient off- and on-ramp? Instead of asking the computer end-users of the ARPANET to also direct its flow of traffic, one could use dedicated machines as the traffic wardens on the highway itself. These “Interface Message Processors,” or IMPs, would be able to move packets through the system quickly, without taxing the other computers. And they too could allow for a non-centralized, fail-safe network if they were set up the right way. Today IMPs are known as routers, but the principle of their operation remains the same.

A network that uses the IMPs proposed by Wesley Clark. Each IMP sits at the center of a cluster of computers, and is also able to communicate with its peers to send messages to computers on other clusters. A failed IMP actually can take a substantial chunk of the network offline under the arrangement shown here, but redundant IMPs and connections between them all could and eventually would be built into the design.

When Wesley Clark spoke, people listened; his had been an important voice in hacker circles since the days of MIT’s Project Whirlwind. Taylor and Roberts immediately saw the wisdom in his scheme.

The advocacy of the highly respected Clark, combined with the promise that ARPANET need not cost them computer cycles if it used his approach, was enough to finally bring most of the rest of the research community around. Over the months that followed, while Taylor and Roberts worked out a project plan and budget, skepticism gradually morphed into real enthusiasm. J.C.R. Licklider had by now left IBM and returned to the friendlier confines of MIT, whence he continued to push the ARPANET behind the scenes. Especially the younger generation that was coming up behind the old guard tended to be less enamored with the “giant brain” model of computing and more receptive to Lick’s vision, and thus to the nascent ARPANET. “We found ourselves imagining all kinds of possibilities [for the ARPANET],” remembers one Steve Crocker, a UCLA graduate student at the time. “Interactive graphics, cooperating processes, automatic database query, electronic mail…”

In the midst of the building buzz, Lick and Bob Taylor co-authored an article which appeared in the April 1968 issue of the journal Science and Technology. Appropriately entitled “The Computer as a Communications Device,” it included Lick’s most audacious and uncannily accurate prognostications yet, particularly when it came to the sociology, if you will, of its universal computer network of the future.

What will online interactive communities be like? They will consist of geographically separated members. They will be communities not of common location but of common interest [emphasis original]…

Each secretary’s typewriter, each data-gathering instrument, conceivably each Dictaphone microphone, will feed into the network…

You will not send a letter or a telegram; you will simply identify the people whose files should be linked to yours — and perhaps specify a coefficient of urgency. You will seldom make a telephone call; you will ask the network to link your consoles together…

You will seldom make a purely business trip because linking consoles will be so much more efficient. You will spend much more time in computer-facilitated teleconferences and much less en route to meetings…

Available within the network will be functions and services to which you subscribe on a regular basis and others that you call for when you need them. In the former group will be investment guidance, tax counseling, selective dissemination of information in your field of specialization, announcement of cultural, sport, and entertainment events that fit your interests, etc. In the latter group will be dictionaries, encyclopedias, indexes, catalogues, editing programs, teaching programs, testing programs, programming systems, databases, and — most important — communication, display, and modeling programs…

When people do their informational work “at the console” and “through the network,” telecommunication will be as natural an extension of individual work as face-to-face communication is now. The impact of that fact, and of the marked facilitation of the communicative process, will be very great — both on the individual and on society…

Life will be happier for the online individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity. There will be plenty of opportunity for everyone (who can afford a console) to find his calling, for the whole world of information, with all its fields and disciplines, will be open to him…

For the society, the impact will be good or bad, depending mainly on the question: Will “to be online” be a privilege or a right? If only a favored segment of the population gets to enjoy the advantage of “intelligence amplification,” the network may exaggerate the discontinuity in the spectrum of intellectual opportunity…

On the other hand, if the network idea should prove to do for education what a few have envisioned in hope, if not in concrete detailed plan, and if all minds should prove to be responsive, surely the boon to humankind would be beyond measure…

The dream of a nationwide, perhaps eventually a worldwide web of computers fostering a new age of human interaction was thus laid out in black and white. The funding to embark on at least the first stage of that grand adventure was also there, thanks to the largess of the Cold War military-industrial complex. And solutions had been proposed for the thorniest technical problems involved in the project. Now it was time to turn theory into practice. It was time to actually build the Intergalactic Computer Network.

(Sources: the books A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet by John Naughton; Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, From Gutenberg to the Internet: A Sourcebook on the History of Information Technology edited by Jeremy M. Norman, The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop, A History of Modern Computing (2nd ed.) by Paul E. Ceruzzi, Communication Networks: A Concise Introduction by Jean Walrand and Shyam Parekh, Communication Nets by Leonard Kleinrock, and Computing in the Middle Ages by Severo M. Ornstein. Online sources include the companion website to Where Wizards Stay Up Late and “The Computers of Tomorrow” by Martin Greenberger on The Atlantic Online.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

As Kleinrock himself would hasten to point out, he was not the sole originator of the concept, which has a long and somewhat convoluted history as a theory. His book was, however, the way that many or most of the folks behind the ARPANET first encountered packet switching.

Comments
15 Responses

- Sean

April 22, 2022 at 6:39 pm

Hi there, “laconic Texan accident” should probably be “laconic Texan accent”

- Jimmy Maher

April 22, 2022 at 8:05 pm

Thanks!

- David Boddie

April 22, 2022 at 9:14 pm

Interesting as always. Thanks for writing it!

Some minor fixes:
“reason d’être” -> “raison d’être”
“Despite the addition to Roberts” -> “Despite the addition of Roberts”

- Jimmy Maher

April 23, 2022 at 6:13 am

Thanks!

- Peter Olausson

April 22, 2022 at 9:45 pm

Thanks for another great chapter in a great story. Especially mind-boggling to read about the terrific Licklider, and remember him – not much more than a name there, but still – from Infocom articles.

As for the creation of NASA, wasn’t part of it the reorganization of the much earlier NACA? Not that it matters here but it wasn’t really a brand new agency. Also, one of it’s chairmen was a certain Vannevar Bush, who also has been featured on this blog.

- Jimmy Maher

April 23, 2022 at 6:15 am

NASA can be traced back to the NACA in a way — the proposal to create originated there — but I do think it’s fair to consider a new agency. The bill to create it, signed by Eisenhower in July of 1958, certainly described it as such.

- sam

April 22, 2022 at 9:52 pm

Aside from the computational cost of every node doing routing, one other thing that might’ve put people off from a mesh network is that the more possible routes there are, the harder efficiently routing packets through the network is. I don’t know if that was appreciated in 1967 (e.g., the ‘Canadian traveller problem’, which captures the difficulty of routing when you don’t know the entire state of the network at the time you plan the route, was only explicitly identified in 1989), but I’d say that meshnet routing with relatively static nodes was only became practical in the 2000s, and with mobile nodes and very dynamic network conditions it’s still an open problem whether it can be made to work well enough for large deployments. As it was, the Internet was able to get away with quite dumb algorithms (including static routing) for quite a while, because the backbone was quite small and everyone knew each other; in a world where the initial design was a meshnet, I can imagine it not working nearly as well. If the Internet only wound up with its very practical structure due to researchers not wanting to share their CPU cycles, I’m glad that they guarded them so jealously!

- Gnoman

April 22, 2022 at 10:29 pm

It is kind of astounding that Sputnik was probably the most influential bluff in the history of the world. So much of the foundational technology of the modern world leads back to that pointless beeping basketball.

- Lee

April 24, 2022 at 2:37 am

I don’t think it was much of a bluff. It was a first step. Sure, everyone knew you could put things in orbit, but that hardly mattered until someone actually did it. Sputnik didn’t do much beyond going round and round the earth, but it *did* go around the earth, which no man-made object had done before. The Soviets did it several times before the United States succeeded; just because they didn’t put nuclear weapons in orbit, as everyone feared, didn’t mean they couldn’t.

- Gnoman

April 24, 2022 at 8:38 pm

Except that they actually couldn’t. The Soviets were massively behind in rocket (and thus missile) technology at that point in the Cold War. Rockets that could have carried Sputnik were already in production, they just saw no point in doing such a useless thing.

Sputnik convinced the US that they were far, far behind, which not only forced a diversion from directly military development into barely-useful things like Project Mercury, but made US leaders step much more warily than they otherwise might have.

The primary reason for the Cuban Missile Crisis was that the US not only had missiles in Eastern Europe that could strike Soviet soil, they had a large number of Titan I missiles that could do so from US soil.

The Soviets had precisely ONE missile that could hit the US from Soviet territory, which in practice meant that the US was effectively immune to attack without the missiles in Cuba. Had Kennedy realized this, there is a very real chance that he’d have gone for a full military solution secure in the knowledge that the Soviets wouldn’t start a nuclear war they were guaranteed to lose. He didn’t know this, and we avoided a potential nuclear exchange, because of Sputnik.

- IShkur

April 23, 2022 at 9:19 pm

All that just to look at dirty pictures.

- cpt kangarooski

April 24, 2022 at 6:07 am

And funny cats!

- Josh T.

April 25, 2022 at 12:14 am

This continues to be a wonderful series. It’s a small thing, but it’s a bit nostalgic seeing Steven Levy’s Hackers appear in the list of sources again.

- Ethan Johnson

June 7, 2022 at 2:15 am

“indeed, lacking even the all-important initials “PhD” behind his name.”

Should it be “in front of his name”?

While I’ve been enjoying learning about this – my brain seeming to have dumped most of what I read in Where Wizards Stay Up Late – I think you undersell the aspect of timesharing networks in this whole process. They are mentioned, but the idea of a distributed network starts with timesharing. I have to imagine that Licklider’s concept of a broader network came from the seed which also spawn Project MAC which birthed the general idea of timesharing. (Not to mention PLATO’s claims for originating the idea) The networking aspect already existed, it was the protocols that made ARPANET truly revolutionary.

- Jimmy Maher

June 8, 2022 at 4:57 am

“PhD” comes after a name, but “initials” was a poor word choice on my part. Thanks!

I actually cut several paragraphs about time-sharing from the article before this one (I think) because I was struggling to integrate it elegantly into the narrative and I felt the piece was growing too unwieldy. You’re probably right that the end result doesn’t do that revolutionary idea justice. My only defense comes down to readability.

A Web Around the World, Part 9: A Network of Networks
May 6, 2022

UCLA will become the first station in a nationwide computer network which, for the first time, will link together computers of different makes and using different machine languages into one time-sharing system. Creation of the network represents a major step in computer technology and may serve as the forerunner of large computer networks of the future. The ambitious project is supported by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which has pioneered many advances in computer research, technology, and applications during the past decade.

The system will, in effect, pool the computer power, programs, and specialized know-how of about fifteen computer-research centers, stretching from UCLA to MIT. Other California network stations (or nodes) will be located at the Rand Corporation and System Development Corporation, both of Santa Monica; the Santa Barbara and Berkeley campuses of the University of California; Stanford University and the Stanford Research Institute.

The first stage of the network will go into operation this fall as a sub-net joining UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. The entire network is expected to be operational in late 1970.

Engineering professor Leonard Kleinrock, who heads the UCLA project, describes how the network might handle a sample problem:

Programmers at Computer A have a blurred photo which they want to bring into focus. Their program transmits the photo to Computer B, which specializes in computer graphics, and instructs Computer B’s program to remove the blur and enhance the contrast. If B requires specialized computational assistance, it may call on Computer C for help. The processed work is shuttled back and forth until B is satisfied with the photo, and then sends it back to Computer A. The messages, ranging across the country, can flash between computers in a matter of seconds, Dr. Kleinrock says.

Each computer in the network will be equipped with its own interface message processor (IMP), which will double as a sort of translator among the Babel of computers languages and as a message handler and router.

Computer networks are not an entirely new concept, notes Dr. Kleinrock. The SAGE radar defense system of the fifties was one of the first, followed by the airlines’ SABRE reservation system. However, [both] are highly specialized and single-purpose systems, in contrast to the planned ARPA system which will link a wide assortment of different computers for a wide range of unclassified research functions.

“As of now, computer networks are still in their infancy,” says Dr. Kleinrock. “But as they grow up and become more sophisticated, we will probably see the spread of ‘computer utilities,’ which, like present electric and telephone utilities, will serve individual homes and offices across the country.”

— UCLA press release dated July 3, 1969 (which may include the first published use of the term “router”)

In July of 1968, Larry Roberts sent out a request for bids to build the ARPANET’s interface message processors — the world’s very first computer routers. More than a dozen proposals were received in response, some of them from industry heavy hitters like DEC and Raytheon. But when Roberts and Bob Taylor announced their final decision at the end of the year, everyone was surprised to learn that they had given the contract to the comparatively tiny firm of Bolt Beranek and Newman.

BBN, as the company was more typically called, came up in our previous article as well; J.C.R. Licklider was working there at the time he wrote his landmark paper on “human-computer symbiosis.” Formed in 1948 as an acoustics laboratory, BBN moved into computers in a big way during the 1950s, developing in the process a symbiotic relationship of its own with MIT. Faculty and students circulated freely between the university and BBN, which became a hacker refuge, tolerant of all manner of eccentricity and uninterested in such niceties as dress codes and stipulated working hours. A fair percentage of BBN’s staff came to consist of MIT dropouts, young men who had become too transfixed by their computer hacking to keep up with the rest of their coursework.

BBN’s forte was one-off, experimental contracts, not the sort of thing that led directly to salable commercial products but that might eventually do so ten or twenty years in the future. In this sense, the ARPANET was right up their alley. They won the bid by submitting a more thoughtful, detailed proposal than anyone else, even going so far as to rewrite some of ARPA’s own specifications to make the IMPs operate more efficiently.

Like all of the other bidders, BBN didn’t propose to build the IMPs from scratch, but rather to adapt an existing computer for the purpose. Their choice was the Honeywell 516, one of a new generation of robust integrated-circuit-based “minicomputers,” which distinguished themselves by being no larger than the typical refrigerator and being able to run on ordinary household current. Since the ARPANET would presumably need a lot of IMPs if it proved successful, the relatively cheap and commonplace Honeywell model seemed a wise choice.

The Honeywell 516, the computer model which was transformed into the world’s first router.

Still, the plan was to start as small as possible. The first version of the ARPANET to go online would include just four IMPs, linking four research clusters together. Surprisingly, MIT was not to be one of them; it was left out because the other inaugural sites were out West and ARPA didn’t want to pay AT&T for a transcontinental line right off the bat. Instead the Universities of California at Los Angeles and Santa Barbara each got the honor of being among the first to join the ARPANET, as did the University of Utah and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), an adjunct to Stanford University. ARPA wanted BBN to ship the first turnkey IMP to UCLA by September of 1969, and for all four of the inaugural nodes to be up and running by the end of the year. Meeting those deadlines wouldn’t be easy.

The project leader at BBN was Frank Heart, a man known for his wide streak of technological paranoia — he had a knack for zeroing in on all of the things that could go wrong with any given plan — and for being “the only person I knew who spoke in italics,” as his erstwhile BBN colleague Severo Ornstein puts it. (“Not he was inflexible or unpleasant — just definite.”) Ornstein himself, having moved up in the world of computing since his days as a hapless entry-level “Crosstelling” specialist on the SAGE project, worked under Heart as the principal hardware architect, while an intense young hacker named Will Crowther, who loved caving and rock climbing almost as much as computers, supervised the coding. At the start, they all considered the Honeywell 516 a well-proven machine, given that it had been on the market for a few years already. They soon learned to their chagrin, however, that no one had ever pushed it as hard as they were now doing; obscure flaws in the hardware nearly derailed the project on more than one occasion. But they got it done in the end. The first IMP was shipped across the country to UCLA right on schedule.

The team from Bolt Beranek and Newman who created the world’s first routers. Severo Ornstein stands at the extreme right, Will Crowther just next to him. Frank Heart is near the center, the only man wearing a necktie.

On July 20, 1969, American astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the Moon, marking one culmination of that which had begun with the launch of the Soviet Union’s first Sputnik satellite twelve years earlier. Five and a half weeks after the Moon landing, another, much quieter result of Sputnik became a reality. The first public demonstration of a functioning network router was oddly similar to some of the first demonstrations of Samuel Morse’s telegraph, in that it was an exercise in sending a message around a loop that led it right back to the place where it had first come from. A Scientific Data Systems Sigma 7 computer at UCLA sent a data packet to the IMP that had just been delivered, which was sitting right beside it. Then the IMP duly read the packet’s intended destination and sent it back where it had come from, to appear as text on a monitor screen.

There was literally nowhere else to send it, for only one IMP had been built to date and only this one computer was yet possessed of the ability to talk to it. The work of preparing the latter had been done by a team of UCLA graduate students working under Leonard Kleinrock, the man whose 1964 book had popularized the idea of packet switching. “It didn’t look like anything,” remembers Steve Crocker, a member of Kleinrock’s team. But looks can be deceiving; unlike the crowd of clueless politicians who had once watched Morse send a telegraph message in a ten-mile loop around the halls of the United States Congress, everyone here understood the implications of what they were witnessing. The IMPs worked.

Bob Taylor, the man who had pushed and pushed until he found a way to make the ARPANET happen, chose to make this moment of triumph his ironic exit cue. A staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, he had been suffering pangs of conscience over his role as a cog in the military-industrial complex for a long time, even as he continued to believe in the ARPANET’s future value for the civilian world. After Richard Nixon was elected president in November of 1968, he had decided that he would stay on just long enough to get the IMPs finished, by which point the ARPANET as a whole would hopefully be past the stage where cancellation was a realistic possibility. He stuck to that decision; he resigned just days after the first test of an IMP. His replacement was Larry Roberts — another irony, given that Taylor had been forced practically to blackmail Roberts into joining ARPA in the first place. Taylor himself would land at Xerox’s new Palo Alto Research Center, where over the course of the new decade he would help to invent much else that has become an everyday part of our digital lives.

About a month after the test of the first IMP, BBN shipped a second one, this time to the Stanford Research Institute. It was connected to its twin at UCLA by an AT&T long-distance line. Another, local cable was run from it to SRI’s Scientific Data Systems 940 computer, which was normally completely incompatible with UCLA’s Sigma machine despite coming from the same manufacturer. In this case, however, programmers at the two institutions had hacked together a method of echoing text back and forth between their computers — assuming it worked, that is; they had had no way of actually finding out.

On October 29, 1969, a UCLA student named Charley Kline, sitting behind his Sigma 7 terminal, called up SRI on an ordinary telephone to initiate the first real test of the ARPANET. Computer rooms in those days were noisy places, what with all of the ventilation the big beasts required, so the two human interlocutors had to fairly shout into their respective telephones. “I’m going to type an L,” Kline yelled, and did so. “Did you get the L?” His opposite number acknowledged that he had. Kline typed an O. “Did you get the O?” Yes. He typed a G.

“The computer just crashed,” said the man at SRI.

“History now records how clever we were to send such a prophetic first message, namely ‘LO,'” says Leonard Kleinrock today with a laugh. They had been trying to manage “LOGIN,” which itself wouldn’t have been a challenger to Samuel Morse’s “What hath God wrought?” in the eloquence sweepstakes — but then, these were different times.

At any rate, the bug which had caused the crash was fixed before the day was out, and regular communications began. UC Santa Barbara came online in November, followed by the University of Utah in December. Satisfied with this proof of concept, ARPA agreed to embark on the next stage of the project, extending the network to the East Coast. In March of 1970, the ARPANET reached BBN itself. Needless to say, this achievement — computer networking’s equivalent to telephony’s spanning of the continent back in 1915 — went entirely unnoticed by an oblivious public. BBN was followed before the year was out by MIT, Rand, System Development Corporation, and Harvard University.

It would make for a more exciting tale to say that the ARPANET revolutionized computing immediately, but such was not the case. In its first couple of years, the network was neither a raging success nor an abject failure. On the one hand, its technical underpinnings advanced at a healthy clip; BBN steadily refined their IMPs, moving them away from modified general-purpose computers and toward the specialized routers we know today. Likewise, the network they served continued to grow; by the end of 1971, the ARPANET had fifteen nodes. But despite it all, it remained frustratingly underused; a BBN survey conducted about two years in revealed that the ARPANET was running at just 2 percent of its theoretical capacity.

The problem was one of computer communication at a higher level than that of the IMPs. Claude Shannon had told the world that information was information in a networking context, and the minds behind the ARPANET had taken his tautology to heart. They had designed a system for shuttling arbitrary blocks of data about, without concerning themselves overmuch about the actual purpose of said data. But the ability to move raw data from computer to computer availed one little if one didn’t know how to create meaning out of all those bits. “It was like picking up the phone and calling France,” Frank Heart of BBN would later say. “Even if you get the connection to work, if you don’t speak French you’ve got a little problem.”

What was needed were higher-level protocols that could run on top of the ARPANET’s packet switching — a set of agreed-upon “languages” for all of these disparate computers to use when talking with one another in order to accomplish something actually useful. Seeing that no one else was doing so, BBN and MIT finally deigned to provide them. First came Telnet, a protocol to let one log into a remote computer and interact with it at a textual command line just as if one was sitting right next to it at a local terminal. And then came the File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, which allowed one to move files back and forth between two computers, optionally performing useful transformations on them in the process, such as going from EBCDIC to ASCII text encoding or vice versa. It is a testament to how well the hackers behind these protocols did their jobs that both have remained with us to this day. Still, the application that really made the ARPANET come alive — the one that turned it almost overnight from a technological experiment to an indispensable tool for working and even socializing — was the next one to come along.

Jack Ruina was now long gone as the head of all of ARPA; that role was now filled by a respected physicist named Steve Lukasik. Lukasik would later remember how Larry Roberts came into his office one day in April of 1972 to try to convince him to use the ARPANET personally. “What am I going to do on the ARPANET?” the non-technical Lukasik asked skeptically.

“Well,” mused Roberts, “you could do email.”

Email wasn’t really a new idea at the time. By the mid-1960s, the largest computer at MIT had hundreds of users, who logged in as many as 30 at a time via local terminals. An undergraduate named Tom Van Vleck noticed that some users had gotten in a habit of passing messages to one another by writing them up in text files with names such as “TO TOM,” then dropping them into a shared directory. In 1965, he created what was probably the world’s first true email system in order to provide them with a more elegant solution. Just like all of the email systems that would follow it, it gave each user a virtual mailbox to which any other user could direct a virtual letter, then see it delivered instantly. Replying, forwarding, address books, carbon copies — all of the niceties we’ve come to expect — followed in fairly short order, at MIT and in many other institutions. Early in 1972, a BBN programmer named Ray Tomlinson took what struck him as the logical next step, by creating a system for sending email between otherwise separate computers — or “hosts,” as they were known in the emerging parlance of the ARPANET.

Thanks to FTP, Tomlinson already had a way of doing the grunt work of moving the individual letters from computer to computer. His biggest dilemma was a question of addressing. It was reasonable for the administrators of any single host to demand that every user have a unique login ID, which could also function as her email address. But it would be impractical to insist on unique IDs across the entire ARPANET. And even if it was possible, how was the computer on which an electronic missive had been composed to know which other computer was home to the intended recipient? Trying to maintain a shared central database of every login for every computer on the ARPANET didn’t strike Tomlinson as much of a solution.

His alternative approach, which he would later describe as no more than “obvious,” would go on to become an icon of the digital age. Each email address would consist of a local user name followed by an “at” sign (@) and the name of the host on which it lived. Just as a paper letter moves from an address in a town, then to a larger postal hub, then onward to a hub in another region, and finally to another individual street address, email would use its suffix to find the correct host on the ARPANET. Once it arrived there, said host could drill down further and route it to the correct user. “Now, there’s a nice hack,” said one of Tomlinson’s colleagues; that was about as effusive as a compliment could get in hacker circles.

Stephen Lukasik, ARPA head and original email-obsessed road warrior.

Steve Lukasik reluctantly allowed Larry Roberts to install an ARPANET terminal in his office for the purpose of reading and writing email. Within days, the skeptic became an evangelist. He couldn’t believe how useful email actually was. He sent out a directive to anyone who was anyone at ARPA, whether their work involved computers or not: all were ordered to accept a terminal in their office. “The way to communicate with me is through electronic mail,” he announced categorically. He soon acquired a “portable” terminal which was the size of a suitcase and weighed 30 pounds, but which came equipped with a modem that would allow him to connect to the ARPANET from any location from which he could finagle access to an ordinary telephone. He became the prototype for millions of professional road warriors to come, dialing into the office constantly from conference rooms, from hotel rooms, from airport lounges. He became perhaps the first person in the world who wasn’t already steeped in computing to make the services the ARPANET could provide an essential part of his day-to-day life.

But he was by no means the last. “Email was the biggest surprise about the ARPANET,” says Leonard Kleinrock. “It was an ad-hoc add-on by BBN, and it just blossomed. And that sucked a lot of people in.” Within a year of Lukasik’s great awakening, three quarters of all the traffic on the ARPANET consisted of emails flying to and fro, and the total volume of traffic on the network had grown by a factor of five and a half.

With a supportive ARPA administrator behind them and applications like email beginning to prove their network’s real-world usefulness, it struck the people who had designed and built the ARPANET that it was time for a proper coming-out party. They settled on the International Conference on Computers and Communications, which was to be held at the Washington, D.C., Hilton hotel in October of 1972. Almost every institution connected to the ARPANET sent representatives toting terminals and demonstration software, while AT&T ran a special high-capacity line into the hotel’s ballroom to get them all online.

More than a thousand people traipsed through the exhibition over the course of two and half days, taking in several dozen demonstrations of what the ARPANET could do now and might conceivably be able to do in the future. It was the first that some of them had ever heard of the network, or even of the idea of computer networking in general.

One of the demonstrations bore an ironic resemblance to the SAGE system that had first proved that wide-area computer networking could work at all. Leonard Kleinrock:

One of the things that was demonstrated there was a distributed air-traffic-control system. The idea was there would be some air traffic on the system. And as a plane moved out of its region, it would be picked up by another computer in the next region, data would be exchanged, and collectively the computers would be managing airspace over a large region. This package also had the ability to freeze the simulation at any given point, take the program on Machine A, squeeze it over to Machine B, and then continue the simulation with the user being none the wiser. So there were really some sophisticated things going on there.

Severo Ornstein, who was also present, must have been having flashbacks to his early experiences with Crosstelling…

A Stanford researcher named Vint Cerf remembers three principal reactions among the attendees.

The first came from the die-hard circuit-switching people from the telephone industry, who didn’t believe packet switching could possibly work. And they were stunned because it did work. It was almost like the rail industry disbelieving that airplanes could really fly until they saw one in flight. The second group were the people who didn’t know anything about computer communications at all to speak of, and who were sort of overwhelmed by the whole thing. But then there was the third group: the people who were just as excited as little kids because of all these neat things that were going on.

Amidst the demonstrations of email, file transfers, remote logins, even remote software development, the hit of the show was something far more frivolous. Stanford’s AI Lab had brought a program called Parry, a “simulation” — we would call it a chatbot today — of a patient undergoing psychological therapy. They had wired Parry up to talk with another program called Eliza, a computerized psychotherapist created by one Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT back in 1966.

Good evening. Tell me your problems. Please terminate input with a period or a question mark.

People get on my nerves sometimes.

I am not sure I understand you.

You should pay more attention.

Suppose you should pay more attention.

You're entitled to your own opinion.

What makes you think I am entitled to my own opinion?

It bothers me just to be around people in general.

Please go on.

I went to the track at Bay Meadows a while back.

Why do you say that just now?

There's a lot of crooked gambling going on there.

Please go on.

I gamble on horses.

What does that suggest to you?

Do you know anything about bookies?

What makes you think I know anything about bookies?

A bookie didn't pay me off once.

What does that suggest to you?

I beat up the bookie who did not pay off, and I thought he might use his friends in the underworld to get even with me.

What are you really talking about?

Have you ever really thought about the mafia?

Suppose you ever really thought about the mafia.

Let's talk about something else.

And so it went. As Joseph Weizenbaum himself was at pains to point out later in his career, Eliza and Parry were nothing more than clever parlor tricks, a set of rote semantic transformations and randomized catchphrases meant to convey a tissue-thin simulacrum of real understanding, convincing only to the naïve and those actively determined to believe. Their presence here as the shabby best that the strong-AI contingent could offer, surrounded by so many genuinely visionary demonstrations of computing’s humanistic, networked future, ought to have demonstrated to the thoughtful observer how one vision of computing was delivering on its promises while the other manifestly was not. But no matter: the crowd ate it up. It seems there was no shortage of gullible true believers in the Hilton ballroom during those exciting two and a half days.

The International Conference on Computers and Communications provided the ARPANET with some of its first press coverage beyond academic journals. Within computing circles, however, the ARPANET’s existence hadn’t gone unnoticed even by those who, thanks to accidents of proximity, had no opportunity to participate in it. During the early 1970s, would-be ARPANET equivalents popped up in a number of places outside the continental United States. There was ALOHANET, which used radio waves to join the various campuses of the University of Hawaii, which were located on different islands, into one computing neighborhood. There was the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) network in Britain, which served that country’s research community in much the same way that ARPANET served computer scientists in the United States. (The NPL network’s design actually dated back to the mid-1960s, and some of its proposed architecture had influenced the ARPANET, making it arguably more a case of parallel evolution than of learning from example.) Most recently, there was a network known as CYCLADES in development in France.

All of which is to say that computer networking in the big picture was looking more and more like the early days of telephony: a collection of discrete networks that served their own denizens well but had no way of communicating with one another. This wouldn’t do at all; ever since the time when J.C.R. Licklider had been pushing his Intergalactic Computer Network, proponents of wide-area computer networking had had a decidedly internationalist, even utopian streak. As far as they were concerned, the world’s computers — all of the world’s computers, wherever they happened to be physically located — simply had to find a way to talk to one another.

The problem wasn’t one of connectivity in its purest sense. As we saw in earlier articles, telephony had already found ways of going where wires could not easily be strung decades before. And by now, many of telephony’s terrestrial radio and microwave beams had been augmented or replaced by communications satellites — another legacy of Sputnik — that served to bind the planet’s human voices that much closer together. There was no intrinsic reason that computers couldn’t talk to one another over the same links. The real problem was rather that the routers on each of the extant networks used their own protocols for talking among themselves and to the computers they served. The routers of the ARPANET, for example, used something called the Network Control Program, or NCP, which had been codified by a team from Stanford led by Steve Crocker, based upon the early work of BBN hackers like Will Crowther. Other networks used completely different protocols. How were they to make sense of one another? Larry Roberts came to see this as computer networking’s next big challenge.

He happened to have working just under him at ARPA a fellow named Bob Kahn, a bright spark who had already achieved much in computing in his 35 years. Roberts now assigned Kahn the task of trying to make sense of the international technological Tower of Babel that was computer networking writ large. Kahn in turn enlisted Stanford’s Vint Cerf as a collaborator.

Bob Kahn

Vint Cerf

The two theorized and argued with one another and with their academic colleagues for about a year, then published their conclusions in the May 1974 issue of IEEE Transactions on Communications, in an article entitled “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.” It introduced to the world a new word: the “Internet,” shorthand for Khan and Cerf’s envisioned network of networks. The linchpin of their scheme was a sort of meta-network of linked “gateways,” special routers that handled all traffic going in and out of the individual networks; if the routers on the ARPANET were that network’s interstate highway system, its gateway would become its international airport. A host wishing to send a packet to a computer outside its own network would pass it to its local gateway using its network’s standard protocols, but would include within the packet information about the particular “foreign” computer it was trying to reach. The gateway would then rejigger the packet into a universal standard format and send it over the meta-network to the gateway of the network to which the foreign computer belonged. Then this gateway would rejigger the packet yet again, into a format suitable for passing over the network behind it to reach its ultimate destination.

Kahn and Cerf detailed a brand-new protocol to allow the gateways on the meta-network to talk among themselves. They called it the Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP. It gave each computer on the networks served by the gateways the equivalent of a telephone number. These “TCP addresses” — which we now call “IP addresses,” for reasons we’ll get to shortly — originally consisted of three fields, each containing a number between 0 and 255. The first field stipulated the network to which the host belonged; think of it as a telephone number’s country code. The other two fields identified the specific computer on that network. “Network identification allows up to 256 distinct networks,” wrote Kahn and Cerf. “This seems sufficient for the foreseeable future. Similarly, the TCP identifier field permits up to 65,536 distinct [computers] to be addressed, which seems more than sufficient for any given network.” Time would prove these statements to be among their few failures of vision.

It wasn’t especially easy to convince the managers of other networks, who came from different cultures and were all equally convinced that their way of doings things was the best way, to accept the standard being shoved in their faces by the long and condescending arm of the American government. Still, the reality was that TCP was as solid and efficient a protocol as anyone could ask for, and there were huge advantages to be had by linking up with the ARPANET, where more cutting-edge computer research was happening than anywhere else. Late in 1975, the NPL network in Britain, the second largest in the world, officially joined up. After that, the Internet began to take on an unstoppable momentum of its own. In 1981, with the number of individual networks on it barreling with frightening speed toward the limit of 256, a new addressing scheme was hastily adopted, one which added a fourth field to each computer’s telephone number to create the format we are still familiar with today.

Amidst all the enthusiasm for communicating across networks, the distinctions between them were gradually lost. The Internet became just the Internet, and no one much knew or cared whether any given computer was on the ARPANET or the NPL network or somewhere else. The important thing was, it was on the Internet. The individual networks’ internal protocols came slowly to resemble that of the Internet, just because it made everything easier from a technical standpoint. In 1978, in a reflection of these trends, the TCP protocol was split into a matched pair of them called TCP/IP. The part that was called the Transmission Control Protocol was equally useful for pushing packets around a network behind a gateway, while the Internet Protocol was reserved for the methods that gateways used to pass packets across network boundaries. (This is the reason that we now refer to IP addresses rather than TCP addresses.) Beginning on January 1, 1983, all computers on the ARPANET were required to use TCP rather than NCP even when they were only talking among themselves behind their gateway.

Alas, by that point ARPA itself was not what it once had been; the golden age of blue-sky computer research on the American taxpayer’s dime had long since faded into history. One might say that the beginning of the end came as early as the fall of 1969, when a newly fiscally conservative United States Congress, satisfied that the space race had been won and the Soviets left in the country’s technological dust once again, passed an amendment to the next year’s Department of Defense budget which specified that any and all research conducted by agencies like ARPA must have “a direct and apparent relationship” to the actual winning of wars by the American military. Dedicated researchers and administrators found that they could still keep their projects alive afterward by providing such justifications in the form of lengthy, perhaps deliberately obfuscated papers, but it was already a far cry from the earlier days of effectively blank checks. In 1972, as if to drive home a point to the eggheads in its ranks who made a habit of straying too far out of their lanes, the Defense Department officially renamed ARPA to DARPA: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Late in 1973, Larry Roberts left ARPA. His replacement the following January was none other than J.C.R. Licklider, who had reluctantly agreed to another tour of duty in the Pentagon only when absolutely no one else proved willing to step up.

But, just as this was no longer quite the same ARPA, it was no longer quite the same Lick. He had continued to be a motivating force for computer networking from behind the scenes at MIT during recent years, but his decades of burning the candle at both ends, of living on fast food and copious quantities of Coca Cola, were now beginning to take their toll. He suffered from chronic asthma which left him constantly puffing at an inhaler, and his hands had a noticeable tremor that would later reveal itself to be an early symptom of Parkinson’s disease. In short, he was not the man to revive ARPA in an age of falling rather than rising budgets, of ever increasing scrutiny and internecine warfare as everyone tried to protect their own pet projects, at the expense of those of others if necessary. “When there is scarcity, you don’t have a community,” notes Vint Cerf, who perchance could have made a living as a philosopher if he hadn’t chosen software engineering. “All you have is survival.”

Lick did the best he could, but after Steve Lukasik too left, to be replaced by a tough cookie who grilled everyone who proposed doing anything about its concrete military value, he felt he could hold on no longer. Lick’s second tenure at ARPA ended in September of 1975. Many computing insiders would come to mark that day as the one when a door shut forever on this Defense Department agency’s oddly idealistic past. When it came to new projects at least, DARPA from now on would content itself with being exactly what its name said it ought to be. Luckily, the Internet already existed, and had already taken on a life of its own.

Lick wound up back at MIT, the congenial home to which this prodigal son had been regularly returning since 1950. He took his place there among the younger hackers of the Dynamic Modeling Group, whose human-focused approach to computing caused him to favor them over their rivals at the AI Lab. If Lick wasn’t as fast on his feet as he once had been, he could still floor you on occasion with a cogent comment or the perfect question.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Infocom, an obsession of the early years of this website, a company whose impact on the art of digital storytelling can still be felt to this day.[1]In fact, Lick agreed to join Infocom’s board of directors, although his role there was a largely ceremonial one; he was not a gamer himself, and had little knowledge of or interest in the commercial market for home-computer games that had begun to emerge by the beginning of the 1980s. Still, everyone involved with the company remembers that he genuinely exulted at Infocom’s successes and commiserated with their failures, just as he did with those of all of his former students.

He signed up for his two hours like everybody else. You’d come in and find this old guy sitting there with a bottle of Coke and a brownie. And it wasn’t even a good brownie; he’d be eating one of those vending-machine things as if that was a perfectly satisfying lunch. Then I also remember that he had these funny-colored glasses with yellow lenses; he had some theory that they helped him see better.

When you learned what he had done, it was awesome. He was clearly the father of us all. But you’d never know it from talking to him. Instead, there was always a sense that he was playing. I always felt that he liked and respected me, even though he had no reason to: I was no smarter than anybody else. I think everybody in the group felt the same way, and that was a big part of what made the group the way it was.

In 1979, Lick penned the last of his periodic prognostications of the world’s networked future, for a book of essays about the abstract future of computing that was published by the MIT Press. As before, he took the year 2000 as the watershed point.

On the whole, computer technology continues to advance along the curve it has followed in its three decades of history since World War II. The amount of information that can be stored for a given period or processed in a given way at unit cost doubles every two years. (The 21 years from 1979 to 2000 yielded ten doublings, for a factor of about 1000.) Wave guides, optical fibers, rooftop satellite antennas, and coaxial cables provide abundant bandwidth and inexpensive digital transmission both locally and over long distances. Computer consoles with good graphics displays and speech input and output have become almost as common as television sets. Some pocket computers are fully programmable, as powerful as IBM 360/40s used to be, and are equipped with both metallic and radio connectors to computer-communication networks.

An international network of digital computer-communication networks serves as the main and essential medium of informational interaction for governments, institutions, corporations, and individuals. The Multinet [i.e., Internet], as it is called, is hierarchical — some of the component networks are themselves networks of networks — and many of the top-level networks are national networks. The many sub-networks that comprise this network of networks are electronically and physically interconnected. Most of them handle real-time speech as well as computer messages, and some handle video.

The Multinet has supplanted the postal system for letters, the dial-telephone system for conversations and teleconferences, standalone batch-processing and time-sharing systems for computation, and most filing cabinets, microfilm repositories, document rooms, and libraries for information storage and retrieval. Many people work at home, interacting with clients and coworkers through the Multinet, and many business offices (and some classrooms) are little more than organized interconnections of such home workers and their computers. People shop through the Multinet, using its funds-transfer functions, and a few receive delivery of small items through adjacent pneumatic-tube networks. Routine shopping and appointment scheduling are generally handled by private-secretary-like programs called OLIVERs which know their masters’ needs. Indeed, the Multinet handles scheduling of almost everything schedulable. For example, it eliminates waiting to be seated at restaurants and if you place your order through it it can eliminate waiting to be served…

But for the first time, Lick also chose to describe a dystopian scenario to go along with the utopian one, stating that the former was just as likely as the latter if open standards like TCP/IP, and the spirit of cooperation that they personified, got pushed away in favor of closed networks and business models. If that happened, the world’s information spaces would be siloed off from one another, and humanity would have lost a chance it never even realized it had.

Because their networks are diverse and uncoordinated, recalling the track-gauge situation in the early days of railroading, the independent “value-added-carrier” companies capture only the fringes of the computer-communication market, the bulk of it being divided between IBM (integrated computer-communication systems based on satellites) and the telecommunications companies (transmission services but not integrated computer-communication services, no remote-computing services)…

Electronic funds transfer has not replaced money, as it turns out, because there were too many uncoordinated bank networks and too many unauthorized and inexplicable transfers of funds. Electronic message systems have not replaced mail, either, because there were too many uncoordinated governmental and commercial networks, with no network at all reaching people’s homes, and messages suffered too many failures of transfers…

Looking back on these two scenarios from the perspective of 2022, when we stand almost exactly as far beyond Lick’s watershed point as he stood before it, we can note with gratification that his more positive scenario turned out to be the more correct one; if some niceties such as computer speech recognition didn’t arrive quite on his time frame, the overall network ecosystem he described certainly did. We might be tempted to contemplate at this point that the J.C.R. Licklider of 1979 may have been older in some ways than his 64 years, being a man who had known as much failure as success over the course of a career spanning four and a half impossibly busy decades, and we might be tempted to ascribe his newfound willingness to acknowledge the pessimistic as well as the optimistic to these factors alone.

But I believe that to do so would be a mistake. It is disarmingly easy to fall into a mindset of inevitability when we consider the past, to think that the way things turned out are the only way they ever could have. In truth, the open Internet we are still blessed with today, despite the best efforts of numerous governments and corporations to capture and close it, may never have been a terribly likely outcome; we may just possibly have won an historical lottery. When you really start to dig into the subject, you find that there are countless junctures in the story where things could have gone very differently indeed.

Consider: way back in 1971, amidst the first rounds of fiscal austerity at ARPA, Larry Roberts grew worried about whether he would be able to convince his bosses to continue funding the fledgling ARPANET at all. Determined not to let it die, he entered into serious talks with AT&T about the latter buying the whole kit and caboodle. After months of back and forth, AT&T declined, having decided there just wasn’t any money to be made there. What would have happened if AT&T had said yes, and the ARPANET had fallen into the hands of such a corporation at this early date? Not only digital history but a hugely important part of recent human history would surely have taken a radically different course. There would not, for instance, have ever been a TCP/IP protocol to run the Internet if ARPA had washed their hands of the whole thing before Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf could create it.

And so it goes, again and again and again. It was a supremely unlikely confluence of events, personalities, and even national moods that allowed the ARPANET to come into being at all, followed by an equally unlikely collection of same that let its child the Internet survive down to the present day with its idealism a bit tarnished but basically intact. We spend a lot of time lamenting the horrific failures of history. This is understandable and necessary — but we should also make some time here and there for its crazy, improbable successes.

On October 4, 1985, J.C.R. Licklider finally retired from MIT for good. His farewell dinner that night had hundreds of attendees, all falling over themselves to pay him homage. Lick himself, now 70 years old and visibly infirm, accepted their praise shyly. He seemed most touched by the speakers who came to the podium late in the evening, after the big names of academia and industry: the group of students who had taken to calling themselves “Lick’s kids” — or, in hacker parlance, “lixkids.”

“When I was an undergraduate,” said one of them, “Lick was just a nice guy in a corner office who gave us all a wonderful chance to become involved with computers.”

“I’d felt I was the only one,” recalled another of the lixkids later. “That somehow Lick and I had this mystical bond, and nobody else. Yet during that evening I saw that there were 200 people in the room, 300 people, and that all of them felt that same way. Everybody Lick touched felt that he was their hero and that he had been an extraordinarily important person in their life.”

J.C.R. Licklider died on June 26, 1990, just as the networked future he had so fondly envisioned was about to become a tangible reality for millions of people, thanks to a confluence of three factors: an Internet that was descended from the original ARPANET, itself the realization of Lick’s own Intergalactic Computer Network; a new generation of cheap and capable personal computers that were small enough to sit on desktops and yet could do far more than the vast majority of the machines Lick had had a chance to work on; and a new and different way of navigating texts and other information spaces, known as hypertext theory. In the next article, we’ll see how those three things yielded the World Wide Web, a place as useful and enjoyable for the ordinary folks of the world as it is for computing’s intellectual elites. Lick, for one, wouldn’t have had it any other way.

(Sources: the books A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet by John Naughton; Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, From Gutenberg to the Internet: A Sourcebook on the History of Information Technology edited by Jeremy M. Norman, The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop, A History of Modern Computing (2nd ed.) by Paul E. Ceruzzi, Communication Networks: A Concise Introduction by Jean Walrand and Shyam Parekh, Computing in the Middle Ages by Severo M. Ornstein, and The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View edited by Michael L. Dertouzos and Joel Moses.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

In fact, Lick agreed to join Infocom’s board of directors, although his role there was a largely ceremonial one; he was not a gamer himself, and had little knowledge of or interest in the commercial market for home-computer games that had begun to emerge by the beginning of the 1980s. Still, everyone involved with the company remembers that he genuinely exulted at Infocom’s successes and commiserated with their failures, just as he did with those of all of his former students.

Comments
22 Responses

- Lee

May 6, 2022 at 5:48 pm

Jimmy, when I was a formative sysadmin geek in the 90s, I was taught that the “T” in TCP was for “Transmission,” rather than “Transport.” I’ve actually not ever heard “Transport Control Protocol” before reading this piece.

Do you have some historic sourcing on “transmission” vs “transport”? Is this one of those areas where history has corrupted an acronym, like how an unfortunately large number of people today seem to think the “I” in RAID stands for “independent” instead of the correct “inexpensive”? Would love to know.

Really enjoying this series. Thanks for writing it!

- Jimmy Maher

May 6, 2022 at 8:06 pm

I’d love that to be the case, but I’m afraid it was just an error on my part. I checked the original journal article from 1974, and it was indeed called Transmission Control Protocol from the start. Thanks for pointing it out!

- Derek

May 6, 2022 at 6:24 pm

Hearing the story of the first message sent via the internet, I’ve always assumed that once they got the system back up, they tried to type LOGIN again. Which would mean that the first three letters on the internet were “L O L”.

- Jimmy Maher

May 6, 2022 at 8:06 pm

:)

- David Boddie

May 6, 2022 at 11:09 pm

A small correction: “before Robert Kahn and Vint Cern could create it” (Cerf)

You were getting ahead of yourself, perhaps. ;-)

- Jimmy Maher

May 7, 2022 at 7:22 am

Indeed. :) Thanks!

- Keith Palmer

May 6, 2022 at 11:48 pm

I’ve been reading this series with interest, although the first comment I’ve really thought of making is a small anecdote about a possibly early reference to ARPANET, or rather “content on it.” The September-October 1976 issue of Creative Computing included three reviews of Joseph Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason, and the most critical of them (by John McCarthy) mentioned it had “originally ‘appeared’ in a public file on the ARPA net.” If this series gets around to mentioning Usenet (which I understand wasn’t “on the Internet” to begin with), I could mention a reference to it from 1985 I once came across.

- David Ghandehari

May 6, 2022 at 11:57 pm

Just a “little” background on IP vs TCP, and TCP’s less-well-known little brother, UDP. I’ve been telling my kindergartner about them to put him to sleep, lately, works great!

Internet Protocol is focused on getting packets to their destination — just routing. It has 3 major limitations:

1. It’s unreliable. Routers buffer packets if too many arrive at once, but if those buffers get too big, it causes all sorts of backup problems. So, the buffers are small, and when full, the buffers just drop packets. There are no guarantees about delivery of any given packet.

2. It’s unordered. Two packets, 1 and 2, sent from node A to node B might take different routes. One might be slower, and so packet 2 could easily arrive at B before packet 1.

3. It’s a fixed size. Generally around ~1500 bytes, but if your IP packet is bigger than fits on any leg of the journey, it’ll be dropped.

TCP then solves these problems by sending ACKnowledge packets back to say which IP packets were received, and retransmits lost packets. It also assigns an order number to each packet, and reorders packets that arrive out of order. Finally, TCP uses a metaphor of a streaming connection to avoid packet size concerns. You write bytes and it will break them into IP packets somehow. The other side gets bytes in the same order.

TCP has a big problem, too, though. It’s called Head-of-Line Blocking. If packet 73 gets dropped, then any packets after 73 will be held up until 73 is successfully ACKed. A lot of times, those other packets have nothing to do with packet 73, they are just being transmitted on the same TCP connection. This can add unpredictable latency to real-time latency-sensitive applications, like voice chat, video chat, and games.

So, these apps tend to use UDP, which stands for User Datagram Protocol. It’s much like IP in that it is unreliable and unordered, but it allows for much bigger packets, up to 64kb. And if they need ordering or reliability, they build it themselves, often in a lighterweight or partial way.

Google came up with QUIC, which has been approved to become HTTP/3. It is based on UDP to avoid the Head-of-Line Blocking problem, but it pretty much provides everything that TCP and HTTP and TLS (encryption) does. Things move very slowly in the Internet world, because no one can break compatibility with anything, but I think eventually we will move pretty much everything off of HTTP/TLS/TCP/IP and onto QUIC/UDP/IP.

- Daniel Wolf

May 7, 2022 at 5:49 am

Typo: “bids to built” -> “bids to build”

- Jimmy Maher

May 7, 2022 at 7:23 am

Thanks!

- Nate

May 8, 2022 at 5:19 am

Enjoying this series. Thanks

Typo: “United Sates Congress”

- Jimmy Maher

May 8, 2022 at 6:42 am

Thanks!

- Adam Sampson

May 8, 2022 at 3:32 pm

“Stanford’s AI Lab had brought a program called Parry, an evolution of Eliza, a computerized “psychotherapist” — we would call it a chatbot today — originally created by one Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in 1966.”

That maybe undersells PARRY a bit – it simulates a patient rather than a therapist, and it’s somewhat more complex than ELIZA. The SAILDART archive shows it was new in 1972 and was still being developed in 1978; as with ZORK at MIT, SAIL eventually had to limit ARPANET guest users’ access to it to reduce system load. The conversation you’re quoting is between the two programs, and is from RFC 439 in September 1972: “PARRY was running at SAIL and DOCTOR [ELIZA] at BBN Tenex, both being accessed from UCLA/SEX”.

The complete “Scenarios for using ARPANET” handout from the ICCC 1972 conference, with instructions for using all the services that participants had set up, is available here courtesy of Jack Haverty: https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/its-archives/blob/master/dmcg/ICCCScenarios1972.pdf

It’s interesting to see what applications the participants thought would be worth showing off fifty years ago – there are several chatbots and other games, including MIT’s JOTTO, which is effectively Wordle.

- Jimmy Maher

May 9, 2022 at 7:46 am

Ah, I didn’t get the detail that Parry was talking *to* Eliza. Edit made. Thanks!

- Conor

May 15, 2022 at 4:25 pm

I’m really enjoying this series. I read a story this week about the new internet cables that Google, Meta, and Amazon are laying, and I felt like I actually had context for my reading.

https://restofworld.org/2022/google-meta-underwater-cables/

- Matt Krzesniak

May 18, 2022 at 11:41 pm

Another great article!

I’m guessing this should be neighborhood?

“There was ALOHANET, which used radio waves to join the various campuses of the University of Hawaii, which were located on different islands, into one computing neighorbood.”

- Jimmy Maher

May 19, 2022 at 4:43 am

Yes. Thanks!

- Nathanael

May 29, 2022 at 5:56 am

Worth discussing the next stage, which generally gets left out of the histories: the massive network expansions related to CSNet and NSFNet in the US.

There were arguments over whether to use the “official” OSI model, or TCP/IP. TCP/IP was chosen. Shortly after this buildout all the universities in the US started having real-time always-on Internet connections usable by anyone — rather than the “delayed”, low-bandwidth, sometimes only on during certain hours of the day, internet connections which many had before (those older Internet connections were primarily useable for email or Usenet, but not for “live” activities). Similar things happened in other countries.

This is often a missing stage in the histories; it comes after the part discussed here, and before the WWW. There are some write-ups and lectures recorded on Youtube about it though.

- Wouter Lammers

June 18, 2022 at 6:34 pm

I spotted a “Seeing that no else was doing so”. “no one” or “nobody” maybe?
Enjoying this series a lot!

- Jimmy Maher

June 19, 2022 at 1:21 pm

Thanks!

- Peter Olausson

June 27, 2022 at 7:39 am

Minute remark: Charley Kline seems to be the preferred spelling of the pioneer’s name.

I hope there’s a statue or something of Licklider somewhere. And Derek, I really liked the LOL-remark!

- Jimmy Maher

June 27, 2022 at 3:22 pm

Thanks! Sadly, Licklider is not immortalized anywhere that I know of. It would be nice to see something on the MIT campus if nowhere else…

A Web Around the World, Part 10: A Web of Associations
May 20, 2022

While wide-area computer networking, packet switching, and the Internet were coming of age, all of the individual computers on the wire were becoming exponentially faster, exponentially more capacious internally, and exponentially smaller externally. The pace of their evolution was unprecedented in the history of technology; had automobiles been improved at a similar rate, the Ford Model T would have gone supersonic within ten years of its introduction. We should take a moment now to find out why and how such a torrid pace was maintained.

As Claude Shannon and others realized before World War II, a digital computer in the abstract is an elaborate exercise in boolean logic, a dynamic matrix of on-off switches — or, if you like, of ones and zeroes. The more of these switches a computer has, the more it can be and do. The first Turing-complete digital computers, such as ENIAC and Whirlwind, implemented their logical switches using vacuum tubes, a venerable technology inherited from telephony. Each vacuum tube was about as big as an incandescent light bulb, consumed a similar amount of power, and tended to burn out almost as frequently. These factors made the computers which employed vacuum tubes massive edifices that required as much power as the typical city block, even as they struggled to maintain an uptime of more than 50 percent — and all for the tiniest sliver of one percent of the overall throughput of the smartphones we carry in our pockets today. Computers of this generation were so huge, expensive, and maintenance-heavy in relation to what they could actually be used to accomplish that they were largely limited to government-funded research institutions and military applications.

Computing’s first dramatic leap forward in terms of its basic technological underpinnings also came courtesy of telephony. More specifically, it came in the form of the transistor, a technology which had been invented at Bell Labs in December of 1947 with the aim of improving telephone switching circuits. A transistor could function as a logical switch just as a vacuum tube could, but it was a minute fraction of the size, consumed vastly less power, and was infinitely more reliable. The computers which IBM built for the SAGE project during the 1950s straddled this technological divide, employing a mixture of vacuum tubes and transistors. But by 1960, the computer industry had fully and permanently embraced the transistor. While still huge and unwieldy by modern standards, computers of this era were practical and cost-effective for a much broader range of applications than their predecessors had been; corporate computing started in earnest in the transistor era.

Nevertheless, wiring together tens of thousands of discrete transistors remained a daunting task for manufacturers, and the most high-powered computers still tended to fill large rooms if not entire building floors. Thankfully, a better way was in the offing. Already in 1958, a Texas Instruments engineer named Jack Kilby had come up with the idea of the integrated circuit: a collection of miniaturized transistors and other electrical components embedded in a silicon wafer, the whole being suitable for stamping out quickly in great quantities by automated machinery. Kilby invented, in other words, the soon-to-be ubiquitous computer chip, which could be wired together with its mates to produce computers that were not only smaller but easier and cheaper to manufacture than those that had come before. By the mid-1960s, the industry was already in the midst of the transition from discrete transistors to integrated circuits, producing some machines that were no larger than a refrigerator; among these was the Honeywell 516, the computer which was turned into the world’s first network router.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[1]When he first stated his law in 1965, Moore actually proposed a doubling every single year, but revised his calculations in 1975.

The next step was perhaps inevitable, but it nevertheless occurred almost by accident. In 1971, an Intel engineer named Federico Faggin put all of the circuits making up a computer’s arithmetic, logic, and control units — the central “brain” of a computer — onto a single chip. And so the microprocessor was born. No one involved with the project at the time anticipated that the Intel 4004 central-processing unit would open the door to a new generation of general-purpose “microcomputers” that were small enough to sit on desktops and cheap enough to be purchased by ordinary households. Faggin and his colleagues rather saw the 4004 as a fairly modest, incremental advancement of the state of the art, which would be deployed strictly to assist bigger computers by serving as the brains of disk controllers and other single-purpose peripherals. Before we rush to judge them too harshly for their lack of vision, we should remember that they are far from the only inventors in history who have failed to grasp the real importance of their creations.

At any rate, it was left to independent tinkerers who had been dreaming of owning a computer of their own for years, and who now saw in the microprocessor the opportunity to do just that, to invent the personal computer as we know it. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics sports one of the most famous magazine covers in the history of American technology: it announces the $439 Altair 8800, from a tiny Albuquerque, New Mexico-based company known as MITS. The Altair was nothing less than a complete put-it-together-yourself microcomputer kit, built around the Intel 8080 microprocessor, a successor model to the 4004.

The magazine cover that launched a technological revolution.

The next milestone came in 1977, when three separate companies announced three separate pre-assembled, plug-em-in-and-go personal computers: the Apple II, the Radio Shack TRS-80, and the Commodore PET. In terms of raw computing power, these machines were a joke compared to the latest institutional hardware. Nonetheless, they were real, Turing-complete computers that many people could afford to buy and proceed to tinker with to their heart’s content right in their own homes. They truly were personal computers: their buyers didn’t have to share them with anyone. It is difficult to fully express today just how extraordinary an idea this was in 1977.

This very website’s early years were dedicated to exploring some of the many things such people got up to with their new dream machines, so I won’t belabor the subject here. Suffice to say that those first personal computers were, although of limited practical utility, endlessly fascinating engines of creativity and discovery for those willing and able to engage with them on their own terms. People wrote programs on them, drew pictures and composed music, and of course played games, just as their counterparts on the bigger machines had been doing for quite some time. And then, too, some of them went online.

The first microcomputer modems hit the market the same year as the trinity of 1977. They operated on the same principles as the modems developed for the SAGE project a quarter-century before — albeit even more slowly. Hobbyists could thus begin experimenting with connecting their otherwise discrete microcomputers together, at least for the duration of a phone call.

But some entrepreneurs had grander ambitions. In July of 1979, not one but two subscription-based online services, known as CompuServe and The Source, were announced almost simultaneously. Soon anyone with a computer, a modem, and the requisite disposal income could dial them up to socialize with others, entertain themselves, and access a growing range of useful information.

Again, I’ve written about this subject in some detail before, so I won’t do so at length here. I do want to point out, however, that many of J.C.R. Licklider’s fondest predictions for the computer networks of the future first became a reality on the dozen or so of these commercial online services that managed to attract significant numbers of subscribers over the years. It was here, even more so than on the early Internet proper, that his prognostications about communities based on mutual interest rather than geographical proximity proved their prescience. Online chatting, online dating, online gaming, online travel reservations, and online shopping first took hold here, first became a fact of life for people sitting in their living rooms. People who seldom or never met one another face to face or even heard one another’s voices formed relationships that felt as real and as present in their day-to-day lives as any others — a new phenomenon in the history of social interaction. At their peak circa 1995, the commercial online services had more than 3.5 million subscribers in all.

Yet these services failed to live up to the entirety of Licklider’s old dream of an Intergalactic Computer Network. They were communities, yes, but not quite networks in the sense of the Internet. Each of them lived on a single big mainframe, or at most a cluster of them, in a single data center, which you dialed into using your microcomputer. Once online, you could interact in real time with the hundreds or thousands of others who might have dialed in at the same time, but you couldn’t go outside the walled garden of the service to which you’d chosen to subscribe. That is to say, if you’d chosen to sign up with CompuServe, you couldn’t talk to someone who had chosen The Source. And whereas the Internet was anarchic by design, the commercial online services were steered by the iron hands of the companies who had set them up. Although individual subscribers could and often did contribute content and in some ways set the tone of the services they used, they did so always at the sufferance of their corporate overlords.

Through much of the fifteen years or so that the commercial services reigned supreme, many or most microcomputer owners failed to even realize that an alternative called the Internet existed. Which is not to say that the Internet was without its own form of social life. Its more casual side centered on an online institution known as Usenet, which had arrived on the scene in late 1979, almost simultaneously with the first commercial services.

At bottom, Usenet was (and is) a set of protocols for sharing public messages, just as email served that purpose for private ones. What set it apart from the bustling public forums on services like CompuServe was its determinedly non-centralized nature. Usenet as a whole was a network of many servers, each storing a local copy of its many “newsgroups,” or forums for discussions on particular topics. Users could read and post messages using any of the servers, either by sitting in front of its own keyboard and monitor or, more commonly, through some form of remote connection. When a user posted a new message to a server, it sent it on to several other servers, which were then expected to send it further, until the message had propagated through the whole network of Usenet servers. The system’s asynchronous nature could distort conversations; messages reached different servers at different times, which meant you could all too easily find yourself replying to a post that had already been retracted, or making a point someone else had already made before you. But on the other hand, Usenet was almost impossible to break completely — just like the Internet itself.

Strictly speaking, Usenet did not depend on the Internet for its existence. As far as it was concerned, its servers could pass messages among themselves in whatever way they found most convenient. In its first few years, this sometimes meant that they dialed one another up directly over ordinary phone lines and talked via modem. As it matured into a mainstay of hacker culture, however, Usenet gradually became almost inseparable from the Internet itself in the minds of most of its users.

From the three servers that marked its inauguration in 1979, Usenet expanded to 11,000 by 1988. The discussions that took place there didn’t quite encompass the whole of the human experience equally; the demographics of the hacker user base meant that computer programming tended to get more play than knitting, Pink Floyd more play than Madonna, and science-fiction novels more play than romances. Still, the newsgroups were nothing if not energetic and free-wheeling. For better or for worse, they regularly went places the commercial online services didn’t dare allow. For example, Usenet became one of the original bastions of online pornography, first in the form of fevered textual fantasies, then in the somehow even more quaint form of “ASCII art,” and finally, once enough computers had the graphics capabilities to make it worthwhile, as actual digitized photographs. In light of this, some folks expressed relief that it was downright difficult to get access to Usenet and the rest of the Internet if one didn’t teach or attend classes at a university, or work at a tech company or government agency.

The perception of the Internet as a lawless jungle, more exciting but also more dangerous than the neatly trimmed gardens of the commercial online services, was cemented by the Morris Worm, which was featured on the front page of the New York Times for four straight days in December of 1988. Created by a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate student named Robert Tappan Morris, it served as many people’s ironic first notice that a network called the Internet existed at all. The exploit, which its creator later insisted had been meant only as a harmless prank, spread by attaching itself to some of the core networking applications used by Unix, a powerful and flexible operating system that was by far the most popular among Internet-connected computers at the time. The Morris Worm came as close as anything ever has to bringing the entire Internet down when its exponential rate of growth effectively turned it into a network-wide denial-of-service attack — again, accidentally, if its creator is to be believed. (Morris himself came very close to a prison sentence, but escaped with three years of probation, a $10,000 fine, and 400 hours of community service, after which he went on to a lucrative career in the tech sector at the height of the dot-com boom.)

Attitudes toward the Internet in the less rarefied wings of the computing press had barely begun to change even by the beginning of the 1990s. An article from the issue of InfoWorld dated February 4, 1991, encapsulates the contemporary perceptions among everyday personal-computer owners of this “vast collection of networks” which is “a mystery even to people who call it home.”

It is a highway of ideas, a collective brain for the nation’s scientists, and perhaps the world’s most important computer bulletin board. Connecting all the great research institutions, a large network known collectively as the Internet is where scientists, researchers, and thousands of ordinary computer users get their daily fix of news and gossip.

But it is the same network whose traffic is occasionally dominated by X-rated graphics files, UFO sighting reports, and other “recreational” topics. It is the network where renegade “worm” programs and hackers occasionally make the news.

As with all communities, this electronic village has both high- and low-brow neighborhoods, and residents of one sometimes live in the other.

What most people call the Internet is really a jumble of networks rooted in academic and research institutions. Together these networks connect over 40 countries, providing electronic mail, file transfer, remote login, software archives, and news to users on 2000 networks.

Think of a place where serious science comes from, whether it’s MIT, the national laboratories, a university, or [a] private enterprise, [and] chances are you’ll find an Internet address. Add [together] all the major sites, and you have the seeds of what detractors sometimes call “Anarchy Net.”

Many people find the Internet to be shrouded in a cloud of mystery, perhaps even intrigue.

With addresses composed of what look like contractions surrounded by ‘!’s, ‘@’s, and ‘.’s, even Internet electronic mail seems to be from another world. Never mind that these “bangs,” “at signs,” and “dots” create an addressing system valid worldwide; simply getting an Internet address can be difficult if you don’t know whom to ask. Unlike CompuServe or one of the other email services, there isn’t a single point of contact. There are as many ways to get “on” the Internet as there are nodes.

At the same time, this complexity serves to keep “outsiders” off the network, effectively limiting access to the world’s technological elite.

The author of this article would doubtless have been shocked to learn that within just four or five years this confusing, seemingly willfully off-putting network of scientists and computer nerds would become the hottest buzzword in media, and that absolutely everybody, from your grandmother to your kids’ grade-school teacher, would be rushing to get onto this Internet thing before they were left behind, even as stalwart rocks of the online ecosystem of 1991 like CompuServe would already be well on their way to becoming relics of a bygone age.

The Internet had begun in the United States, and the locus of the early mainstream excitement over it would soon return there. In between, though, the stroke of inventive genius that would lead to said excitement would happen in the Old World confines of Switzerland.

Tim Berners-Lee

In many respects, he looks like an Englishman from central casting — quiet, courteous, reserved. Ask him about his family life and you hit a polite but exceedingly blank wall. Ask him about the Web, however, and he is suddenly transformed into an Italian — words tumble out nineteen to the dozen and he gesticulates like mad. There’s a deep, deep passion here. And why not? It is, after all, his baby.

— John Naughton, writing about Tim Berners-Lee

The seeds of the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire — better known in the Anglosphere as simply CERN — were planted amidst the devastation of post-World War II Europe by the great French quantum physicist Louis de Broglie. Possessing an almost religious faith in pure science as a force for good in the world, he proposed a new, pan-European foundation dedicated to exploring the subatomic realm. “At a time when the talk is of uniting the peoples of Europe,” he said, “[my] attention has turned to the question of developing this new international unit, a laboratory or institution where it would be possible to carry out scientific work above and beyond the framework of the various nations taking part. What each European nation is unable to do alone, a united Europe can do, and, I have no doubt, would do brilliantly.” After years of dedicated lobbying on de Broglie’s part, CERN officially came to be in 1954, with its base of operations in Geneva, Switzerland, one of the places where Europeans have traditionally come together for all manner of purposes.

The general technological trend at CERN over the following decades was the polar opposite of what was happening in computing: as scientists attempted to peer deeper and deeper into the subatomic realm, the machines they required kept getting bigger and bigger. Between 1983 and 1989, CERN built the Large Electron-Positron Collider in Geneva. With a circumference of almost seventeen miles, it was the largest single machine ever built in the history of the world. Managing projects of such magnitude, some of them employing hundreds of scientists and thousands of support staff, required a substantial computing infrastructure, along with many programmers and systems architects to run it. Among this group was a quiet Briton named Tim Berners-Lee.

Berners-Lee’s credentials were perfect for his role. He had earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from Oxford in 1976, only to find that pure science didn’t satisfy his urge to create practical things that real people could make use of. As it happened, both of his parents were computer scientists of considerable note; they had both worked on the University of Manchester’s Mark I computer, the world’s very first stored-program von Neumann machine. So, it was natural for their son to follow in their footsteps, to make a career for himself in the burgeoning new field of microcomputing. Said career took him to CERN for a six-month contract in 1980, then back to Geneva on a more permanent basis in 1984. Because of his background in physics, Berners-Lee could understand the needs of the scientists he served better than many of his colleagues; his talent for devising workable solutions to their problems turned him into something of a star at CERN. Among other projects, he labored long and hard to devise a way of making the thousands upon thousands of pages of documentation that were generated at CERN each year accessible, manageable, and navigable.

But, for all that Berners-Lee was being paid to create an internal documentation system for CERN, it’s clear that he began thinking along bigger lines fairly quickly. The same problems of navigation and discoverability that dogged his colleagues at CERN were massively present on the Internet as a whole. Information was hidden there in out-of-the-way repositories that could only be accessed using command-line-driven software with obscure command sets — if, that is, you knew that it existed at all.

His idea of a better way came courtesy of hypertext theory: a non-linear approach to reading texts and navigating an information space, built around associative links embedded within and between texts. First proposed by Vannevar Bush, the World War II-era MIT giant whom we briefly met in an earlier article in this series, hypertext theory had later proved a superb fit with a mouse-driven graphical computer interface which had been pioneered at Xerox PARC during the 1970s under the astute management of our old friend Robert Taylor. The PARC approach to user interfaces reached the consumer market in a prominent way for the first time in 1984 as the defining feature of the Apple Macintosh. And the Mac in turn went on to become the early hotbed of hypertext experimentation on consumer-grade personal computers, thanks to Apple’s own HyperCard authoring system and the HyperCard-driven laser discs and CD-ROMs that soon emerged from companies like Voyager.

The user interfaces found in HyperCard applications were surprisingly similar to those found in the web browsers of today, but they were limited to the curated, static content found on a single floppy disk or CD-ROM. “They’ve already done the difficult bit!” Berners-Lee remembers thinking. Now someone just needed to put hypertext on the Internet, to allow files on one computer to link to files on another, with anyone and everyone able to create such links. He saw how “a single hypertext link could lead to an enormous, unbounded world.” Yet no one else seemed to see this. So, he decided at last to do it himself. In a fit of self-deprecating mock-grandiosity, not at all dissimilar to J.C.R. Licklider’s call for an “Intergalactic Computer Network,” he named his proposed system the “World Wide Web.” He had no idea how perfect the name would prove.

He sat down to create his World Wide Web in October of 1990, using a NeXT workstation computer, the flagship product of the company Steve Jobs had formed after getting booted out of Apple several years earlier. It was an expensive machine — far too expensive for the ordinary consumer market — but supremely elegant, combining the power of the hacker-favorite operating system Unix with the graphical user interface of the Macintosh.

The NeXT computer on which Tim Berners-Lee created the foundations of the World Wide Web. It then went on to become the world’s first web server.

Progress was swift. In less than three months, Berners-Lee coded the world’s first web server and browser, which also entailed developing the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) they used to communicate with one another and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for embedding associative links into documents. These were the foundational technologies of the Web, which still remain essential to the networked digital world we know today.

The first page to go up on the nascent World Wide Web, which belied its name at this point by being available only inside CERN, was a list of phone numbers of the people who worked there. Clicking through its hypertext links being much easier than entering commands into the database application CERN had previously used for the purpose, it served to get Berners-Lee’s browser installed on dozens of NeXT computers. But the really big step came in August of 1991, when, having debugged and refined his system as thoroughly as he was able by using his CERN colleagues as guinea pigs, he posted his web browser, his web server, and documentation on how to use HTML to create web documents on Usenet. The response was not immediately overwhelming, but it was gratifying in a modest way. Berners-Lee:

People who saw the Web and realised the sense of unbound opportunity began installing the server and posting information. Then they added links to related sites that they found were complimentary or simply interesting. The Web began to be picked up by people around the world. The messages from system managers began to stream in: “Hey, I thought you’d be interested. I just put up a Web server.”

Tim Berners-Lee’s original web browser, which he named Nexus in honor of its host platform. The NeXT computer actually had quite impressive graphics capabilities, but you’d never know it by looking at Nexus.

In December of 1991, Berners-Lee begged for and was reluctantly granted a chance to demonstrate the World Wide Web at that year’s official Hypertext conference in San Antonio, Texas. He arrived with high hopes, only to be accorded a cool reception. The hypertext movement came complete with more than its fair share of stodgy theorists with rigid ideas about how hypertext ought to work — ideas which tended to have more to do with the closed, curated experiences of HyperCard than the anarchic open Internet. Normally modest almost to a fault, the Berners-Lee of today does allow himself to savor the fact that “at the same conference two years later, every project on display would have something to do with the Web.”

But the biggest factor holding the Web back at this point wasn’t the resistance of the academics; it was rather its being bound so tightly to the NeXT machines, which had a total user base of no more than a few tens of thousands, almost all of them at universities and research institutions like CERN. Although some browsers had been created for other, more popular computers, they didn’t sport the effortless point-and-click interface of Berners-Lee’s original; instead they presented their links like footnotes, whose numbers the user had to type in to visit them. Thus Berners-Lee and the fellow travelers who were starting to coalesce around him made it their priority in 1992 to encourage the development of more point-and-click web browsers. One for the X Window System, the graphical-interface layer which had been developed for the previously text-only Unix, appeared in April. Even more importantly, a Macintosh browser arrived just a month later; this marked the first time that the World Wide Web could be explored in the way Berners-Lee had envisioned on a computer that the proverbial ordinary person might own and use.

Amidst the organization directories and technical papers which made up most of the early Web — many of the latter inevitably dealing with the vagaries of HTTP and HTML themselves — Berners-Lee remembers one site that stood out for being something else entirely, for being a harbinger of the more expansive, humanist vision he had had for his World Wide Web almost from the start. It was a site about Rome during the Renaissance, built up from a traveling museum exhibition which had recently visited the American Library of Congress. Berners-Lee:

On my first visit, I wandered to a music room. There was an explanation of the events that caused the composer Carpentras to present a decorated manuscript of his Lamentations of Jeremiah to Pope Clement VII. I clicked, and was glad I had a 21-inch colour screen: suddenly it was filled with a beautifully illustrated score, which I could gaze at more easily and in more detail than I could have done had I gone to the original exhibit at the Library of Congress.

If we could visit this site today, however, we would doubtless be struck by how weirdly textual it was for being a celebration of the Renaissance, one of the most excitingly visual ages in all of history. The reality is that it could hardly have been otherwise; the pages displayed by Berners-Lee’s NeXT browser and all of the others could not mix text with images at all. The best they could do was to present links to images, which, when clicked, would lead to a picture being downloaded and displayed in a separate window, as Berners-Lee describes above.

But already another man on the other side of the ocean was working on changing that — working, one might say, on the last pieces necessary to make a World Wide Web that we can immediately recognize today.

Marc Andreessen barefoot on the cover of Time magazine, creating the archetype of the dot-com entrepreneur/visionary/rock star.

Tim Berners-Lee was the last of the old guard of Internet pioneers. Steeped in an ethic of non-profit research for the abstract good of the human race, he never attempted to commercialize his work. Indeed, he has seemed in the decades since his masterstroke almost to willfully shirk the money and fame that some might say are rightfully his for putting the finishing touch on the greatest revolution in communications since the printing press, one which has bound the world together in a way that Samuel Morse and Alexander Graham Bell could never have dreamed of.

Marc Andreessen, by contrast, was the first of a new breed of business entrepreneurs who have dominated our discussions of the Internet from the mid-1990s until the present day. Yes, one can trace the cult of the tech-sector disruptor, “making the world a better place” and “moving fast and breaking things,” back to the dapper young Steve Jobs who introduced the Apple Macintosh to the world in January of 1984. But it was Andreessen and the flood of similar young men that followed him during the 1990s who well and truly embedded the archetype in our culture.

Before any of that, though, he was just a kid who decided to make a web browser of his own.

Andreessen first discovered the Web not long after Berners-Lee first made his tools and protocols publicly available. At the time, he was a twenty-year-old student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who held a job on the side at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, a research institute with close ties to the university. The name sounded very impressive, but he found the job itself to be dull as ditch water. His dissatisfaction came down to the same old split between the “giant brain” model of computing of folks like Marvin Minsky and the more humanist vision espoused in earlier years by people like J.C.R. Licklider. The NCSA was in pursuit of the former, but Andreessen was a firm adherent of the latter.

Bored out of his mind writing menial code for esoteric projects he couldn’t care less about, Andreessen spent a lot of time looking for more interesting things to do on the Internet. And so he stumbled across the fledgling World Wide Web. It didn’t look like much — just a screen full of text — but he immediately grasped its potential.

In fact, he judged, the Web’s not looking like much was a big part of its problem. Casting about for a way to snazz it up, he had the stroke of inspiration that would make him a multi-millionaire within three years. He decided to add a new tag to Berners-Lee’s HTML specification: “<img>,” for “image.” By using it, one would be able to show pictures inline with text. It could make the Web an entirely different sort of place, a wonderland of colorful visuals to go along with its textual content.

As conceptual leaps go, this one really wasn’t that audacious. The biggest buzzword in consumer computing in recent years — bigger than hypertext — had been “multimedia,” a catch-all term describing exactly this sort of digital mixing of content types, something which was now becoming possible thanks to the ever-improving audiovisual capabilities of personal computers since those primitive early days of the trinity of 1977. Hypertext and multimedia had actually been sharing many of the same digs for quite some time. The HyperCard authoring system, for example, boasted capabilities much like those which Andreessen now wished to add to HTML, and the Voyager CD-ROMs already existed as compelling case studies in the potential of interactive multimedia hypertext in a non-networked context.

Still, someone had to be the first to put two and two together, and that someone was Marc Andreessen. An only moderately accomplished programmer himself, he convinced a much better one, another NCSA employee named Eric Bina, to help him create his new browser. The pair fell into roles vaguely reminiscent of those of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak during the early days of Apple Computer: Andreessen set the agenda and came up with the big ideas — many of them derived from tireless trawling of the Usenet newsgroups to find out what people didn’t like about the current browsers — and Bina turned his ideas into reality. Andreessen’s relentless focus on the end-user experience led to other important innovations beyond inline images, such as the “forward,” “back,” and “refresh” buttons that remain so ubiquitous in the browsers of today. The higher-ups at NCSA eventually agreed to allow Andreessen to brand his browser as a quasi-official product of their institute; on an Internet still dominated by academics, such an imprimatur was sure to be a useful aid. In January of 1993, the browser known as Mosaic — the name seemed an apt metaphor for the colorful multimedia pages it could display — went up on NCSA’s own servers. After that, “it spread like a virus,” in the words of Andreessen himself.

The slick new browser and its almost aggressively ambitious young inventor soon came to the attention of Tim Berners-Lee. He calls Andreessen “a total contrast to any of the other [browser] developers. Marc was not so much interested in just making the program work as in having his browser used by as many people as possible.” But, lest he sound uncharitable toward his populist counterpart, he hastens to add that “that was, of course, what the Web needed.” Berners-Lee made the Web; the garrulous Andreessen brought it to the masses in a way the self-effacing Briton could arguably never have managed on his own.

About six months after Mosaic hit the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee came to visit its inventor. Their meeting brought with it the first palpable signs of the tension that would surround the World Wide Web and the Internet as a whole almost from that point forward. It was the tension between non-profit idealism and the urge to commercialize, to brand, and finally to control. Even before the meeting, Berners-Lee had begun to feel disturbed by the press coverage Mosaic was receiving, helped along by the public-relations arm of NCSA itself: “The focus was on Mosaic, as if it were the Web. There was little mention of other browsers, or even the rest of the world’s effort to create servers. The media, which didn’t take the time to investigate deeper, started to portray Mosaic as if it were equivalent to the Web.” Now, at the meeting, he was taken aback by an atmosphere that smacked more of a business negotiation than a friendly intellectual exchange, even as he wasn’t sure what exactly was being negotiated. “Marc gave the impression that he thought of this meeting as a poker game,” Berners-Lee remembers.

Andreessen’s recollections of the meeting are less nuanced. Berners-Lee, he claims, “bawled me out for adding images to the thing.” Andreessen:

Academics in computer science are so often out to solve these obscure research problems. The universities may force it upon them, but they aren’t always motivated to just do something that people want to use. And that’s definitely the sense that we always had of CERN. And I don’t want to mis-characterize them, but whenever we dealt with them, they were much more interested in the Web from a research point of view rather than a practical point of view. And so it was no big deal to them to do a NeXT browser, even though nobody would ever use it. The concept of adding an image just for the sake of adding an image didn’t make sense [to them], whereas to us, it made sense because, let’s face it, they made pages look cool.

The first version of Mosaic ran only on X-Windows, but, as the above would indicate, Andreessen had never intended for that to be the case for long. He recruited more programmers to write ports for the Macintosh and, most importantly of all, for Microsoft Windows, whose market share of consumer computing in the United States was crossing the threshold of 90 percent. When the Windows version of Mosaic went online in September of 1993, it motivated hundreds of thousands of computer owners to engage with the Internet for the first time; the Internet to them effectively was Mosaic, just as Berners-Lee had feared would come to pass.

The Mosaic browser. It may not look like much today, but its ability to display inline images was a game-changer.

At this time, Microsoft Windows didn’t even include a TCP/IP stack, the software layer that could make a machine into a full-fledged denizen of the Internet, with its own IP address and all the trimmings. In the brief span of time before Microsoft remedied that situation, a doughty Australian entrepreneur named Peter Tattam provided an add-on TCP/IP stack, which he distributed as shareware. Meanwhile other entrepreneurs scrambled to set up Internet service providers to provide the unwashed masses with an on-ramp to the Web — no university enrollment required! —  and the shelves of computer stores filled up with all-in-one Internet kits that were designed to make the whole process as painless as possible.

The unabashed elitists who had been on the Internet for years scorned the newcomers, but there was nothing they could do to stop the invasion, which stormed their ivory towers with overwhelming force. Between December of 1993 and December of 1994, the total amount of Web traffic jumped by a factor of eight. By the latter date, there were more than 10,000 separate sites on the Web, thanks to people all over the world who had rolled up their sleeves and learned HTML so that they could get their own idiosyncratic messages out to anyone who cared to read them. If some (most?) of the sites they created were thoroughly frivolous, well, that was part of the charm of the thing. The World Wide Web was the greatest leveler in the history of media; it enabled anyone to become an author and a publisher rolled into one, no matter how rich or poor, talented or talent-less. The traditional gatekeepers of mass media have been trying to figure out how to respond ever since.

Marc Andreessen himself abandoned the browser that did so much to make all this happen before it celebrated its first birthday. He graduated from university in December of 1993, and, annoyed by the growing tendency of his bosses at NCSA to take credit for his creation, he decamped for — where else? — Silicon Valley. There he bumped into Jim Clark, a huge name in the Valley, who had founded Silicon Graphics twelve years earlier and turned it into the biggest name in digital special effects for the film industry. Feeling hamstrung by Silicon Graphics’s increasing bureaucracy as it settled into corporate middle age, Clark had recently left the company, leading to much speculation about what he would do next. The answer came on April 4, 1994, when he and Marc Andreessen founded Mosaic Communications in order to build a browser even better than the one the latter had built at NCSA. The dot-com boom had begun.

(Sources: the books A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet by John Naughton, From Gutenberg to the Internet: A Sourcebook on the History of Information Technology edited by Jeremy M. Norman, A History of Modern Computing (2nd ed.) by Paul E. Ceruzzi, Communication Networks: A Concise Introduction by Jean Walrand and Shyam Parekh, Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee, How the Web was Born by James Gillies and Robert Calliau, and Architects of the Web by Robert H. Reid. InfoWorld of August 24 1987, September 7 1987, April 25 1988, November 28 1988, January 9 1989, October 23 1989, and February 4 1991; Computer Gaming World of May 1993.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

When he first stated his law in 1965, Moore actually proposed a doubling every single year, but revised his calculations in 1975.

Comments
35 Responses

- Ishkur

May 20, 2022 at 5:09 pm

The nerd/hacker/researcher/hobbyist culture of the early (pre-90s) Internet was certainly it’s own thing. Usenet back then had rules, and decorum, and etiquette (netiquette) that everyone seemed to abide by, adopted through osmosis by each newcomer over time. The culture remained firm as long as the flow of newcomers wasn’t too overwhelming.

But there was always a period where there would be a rush of newcomers, too many of them to assimilate into the culture immediately, and they would violate the semi-harmonious unwritten rules and decorum for a month or so before they settled down. This usually happened every September, as that was when universities welcomed a new class of freshmen with on-campus access to the Internet for the first time.

In this “September newbie” period Usenet was often rude, chaotic, and full of low quality signal-to-noise posts (not to mention spam), and by the 90s the old guard of Internet regulars noticed it getting longer and more obnoxious, often extending into October and November.

And then in 1993, the “September newbie” era extended well into 1994. And then AOL came out with their free dial-up package, extending it into 1995. And 1996 and beyond. The old “science & research” Internet was quickly swept aside in favor of commercial exploitation.

In Internet lore September 1993 is famously known as the Eternal September: The September that never ended.

- Andrew Plotkin

May 20, 2022 at 5:46 pm

This is where I show up, as part of Usenet’s (literal) freshman class of ’88. But from my point of view it wasn’t a *science and research* culture. It was a wild, fermenting discussion group about SF, fantasy, philosophy, math, sex, the SCA, and everything else that (primarily) American college students were obsessed with.

The AOL invasion wasn’t specifically about commercial exploitation, either. (Although it was the same era as the infamous Usenet green-card spam.) It was… just a cultural clash between an existing tribe of people talking about All That and a larger, incoming tribe. The tone of the discussion shifted and everybody hated that for the usual tribal reasons.

Usenet’s actual failure was its simplistic moderation model. There was no middle ground between “free-for-all” and “fully moderated, every post must be approved before it goes out.” Both models were completely unscalable. As “the Internet” got more popular, one Usenet group after another either collapsed, got overrun by spam, or just ossified (by becoming intolerably unpleasant for newcomers).

I hung on in the IF newsgroups until 2010, out of sheer stubbornness, but really the tolerable discussion had switched to web forums much earlier.

- Nate

May 21, 2022 at 6:04 am

It wasn’t just AOL that brought endless noise. It was the “IXers” (those using the easy setup Windows package of ix.netcom.com, which appeared earlier). Or the CompuServe or BIX, with their all-caps users. And I’m sure several before.

AOL was barely the final straw. I think Napster was actually the end of an era. People weren’t getting on the Internet to communicate, it was just for free stuff. You could run Napster, get free music, and never talk to anyone.

By that time, the Internet itself (the servers and routers I was fascinated by) was getting extremely homogeneous. Windows at the edge, Linux (and some Sun) at the center.

- Yeechang Lee

May 20, 2022 at 7:24 pm

As it matured into a mainstay of hacker culture, however, Usenet gradually became almost inseparable from the Internet itself in the minds of most of its users.

As one who was there, it’s hard to overstate how true this was. Email always seemed to be (to paraphrase Steve Jobs) a feature, not a product. Even if Usenet (intentionally) resembles SMTP email in appearance, protocol, and formatting, it always has been its own thing. As you wrote, it was very much what the Internet *was* to most users until WWW really started to take off. BBSs that advertised “Internet access” meant “access to Usenet”, not necessarily even Internet email.

One for X-Windows, the graphical-interface layer which had been developed for the previously text-only Unix, appeared in April.

It’s “X Window”; no hyphen, no plural. *Everyone* gets this wrong. (I won’t even get into the protocol’s idiosyncratic use of “server” versus “client”, but that’s irrelevant here.)

After years of dedicated lobbying on de Broglie’s part, CERN officially came to be in 1954, with its base of operations in Geneva, Switzerland, one of the places where Europeans have traditionally come together for all manner of purposes.

You’re missing a more important reason for choosing Geneva. It’s a Swiss city that is almost completely surrounded by France, so it’s easy (and politically beneficial) for CERN facilities, including the Large Hadron Collider, to sprawl across the border.

- Patrick Morris Miller

May 20, 2022 at 7:33 pm

It’s “the X Window System”, or just plain “X”. X is the name and a window system is what it is.

- Jimmy Maher

May 21, 2022 at 8:02 am

Thanks!

I remember setting up a Linux system from scratch back in the 1990s and trying to get X working. I remember having to export my IP address to the X “server.” Crazy what I used to do for fun. (Now I have no patience whatsoever for that sort of tinkering, and want my computers to Just Work.)

- Keith Palmer

May 20, 2022 at 10:17 pm

I’m certain I only noticed it years after the fact, but the November 1985 issue of IEEE Spectrum (my father had a subscription to it) contains a column from Robert W. Lucky where he discusses Usenet (without any explanation of how to connect yourself to it; I suppose IEEE members were thought smart enough to figure it out for themselves), frequently calling it just “the net.” This was back when all the newsgroups were named net.topic (Lucky mentions net.consumers, net.philosophy, net.movies, net.movies.sw (“to discuss the Star Wars saga”), and net.flame). He closed with “I am fascinated by the question of whether a new form of social interaction is in the making, or whether the phenomenon is just passing through an interesting, useful phase on its way to oblivion as thousands of new subscribers increase the noise and junk level until nothing but echoes of what-might-have-been remain.”

As for myself, I think the first time I really started to become aware of and intrigued by the Internet was around 1993, when a text file titled “Big Dummy’s Guide to the Internet” showed up on a “software of the month” disk we subscribed to. Usenet did seem “the killer app” then, but it wasn’t until late 1994 when, visiting the big city, I was able to dial into a “freenet” and dump newsgroup posts into text files for later perusal. I was given a book about Mosaic for Christmas in 1994, but there weren’t any Internet Service Providers in my small town then; I had to wait until the summer of 1995 for the first of them to start up (I managed to finagle my way into volunteering to see if Macintosh computers could be connected to their systems), and by that point I’d been supplied with a browser called “MacWeb” via Adam Engst’s “Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh” and Netscape was there to be noticed. I do still have the book about Mosaic, though.

- Yeechang Lee

May 21, 2022 at 1:14 am

I’m certain I only noticed it years after the fact, but the November 1985 issue of IEEE Spectrum (my father had a subscription to it) contains a column from Robert W. Lucky where he discusses Usenet (without any explanation of how to connect yourself to it; I suppose IEEE members were thought smart enough to figure it out for themselves), frequently calling it just “the net.”

Simultaneously, Jerry Pournelle occasionally mentioned having net access (through MIT) in his BYTE columns, although I think he switched to BIX, sponsored by the magazine, once that got going. He mentions receiving a public key-encrypted message.

He closed with “I am fascinated by the question of whether a new form of social interaction is in the making, or whether the phenomenon is just passing through an interesting, useful phase on its way to oblivion as thousands of new subscribers increase the noise and junk level until nothing but echoes of what-might-have-been remain.”

Pournelle on why he wanted a kill file for BIX:

whereas an open computer conference begins with a small number of well-informed and highly interested participants, it soon attracts others. That’s all right; it’s supposed to attract others. Where else would you get new ideas? But soon it attracts too many, far too many, and some of them are not only ignorant but aggressively misinformed. Dilution takes place. Arguments replace discussions. Tempers are frayed. The result is that while computer conferencing began by saving time, it starts to eat up all the time it saved and more. Communications come from dozens of sources. Much of it is redundant. Some of it is stupid. The user spends more and more time dealing with irrelevancies. One day the user wakes up, decides the initial euphoria was spurious, and logs off, never to return. This is known as burnout, and it’s apparently quite common. … I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it’s not always easy to do

plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

- stepped pyramids

May 21, 2022 at 8:11 pm

Pournelle lost his access via MIT at least in part because he kept on mentioning it in Byte, and the admins were worried that someone in power might start asking questions about why a science fiction author had free access to the ARPAnet. There was a little drama about whether it might have been politically motivated (and it clearly was also in part because the admins thought he was an ass). Fun bit of ancient internet drama, honestly pretty much exactly like modern internet drama:

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/07/how-jerry-pournelle-got-kicked-off-the-arpanet.html

- Yeechang Lee

May 22, 2022 at 3:23 am

Pournelle lost his access via MIT at least in part because he kept on mentioning it in Byte

I didn’t want to get into that here. But since you brought it up …

I’ve read every issue of BYTE during its first 13 years, including Pournelle’s columns over this period. He in no way flaunts his net access; he occasionally mentions it as a matter-of-fact thing, and much less often than (say) discussing his constantly receiving tons of mail delivering new products that companies hope he mentions in writing.

It’s pretty obvious in retrospect that Pournelle really was kicked because of his political beliefs. As Dean says in the comments to DeLong’s post, ARPANET a) had unofficial users since pretty much the beginning, and b) by 1985 wasn’t really ARPANET anymore. I mean, good grief, one person cites how Pournelle dares to criticize some MIT Lisp project! Talk about overreaching in order to avoid the real issue he has with Pournelle (or anyone like him) having an account.

There’s no reasonable way for Chris Stacy (who has never hidden his own politics, which are very different from Pournelle’s) or anyone else to fear that because Pournelle mentions having access to some computer, that hordes of the unwashed would rush to MIT demanding their own account, any more than expecting hordes to demand of the Sri Lankan Air Force a personal helicopter to travel around the island (which is what Pournelle received when he visited Arthur C. Clarke, as mentioned in another column). Note that Stacy a) never denies calling Pournelle a fascist, and b) tries to avoid further public discussion of the subject.

And, yes, if anyone had the pull to get “ARPANET” to get his own account back, it would be Pournelle. He was, indeed, very tied into the SDI program at this time. That he didn’t is, I presume, some combination of a) not wanting to go to the trouble, b) not wanting to go where one does not feel wanted, c) ARPANET no longer being “ARPA”net, and d) BIX by this time up and running (and quite possibly with more traffic than the net).

- Nate

May 21, 2022 at 6:06 am

Hey Keith, you didn’t happen to be in rural California did you? I started an ISP in summer 1995 that was the first one in the area that wasn’t long distance.

- Keith Palmer

May 21, 2022 at 11:49 am

I actually lived on the Lake Huron shore of Ontario (near a power plant, which might have made for some concentration of “technical types.”) Maybe that’s one more reminder I shouldn’t feel “those who connected to the Internet in 1994 were somehow sharper than those who did it in 1995, and for that matter computer-magazine columns about it were starting to become obvious in 1993…” One thing I didn’t mention before was having noticed (through very recent computer-magazine skimming) a brief mention of the Internet in an Apple II magazine from 1990, although I guess I don’t skim BYTE well enough to have noticed its brief mentions.

- Nate

May 21, 2022 at 6:56 pm

Neat, a parallel timeline. Yeah we started an ISP in summer 1995 when there were none in the area. The office was a converted house with fish tanks everywhere. We had to pay to get a T1 line dug out to the country. The workers kept wondering why.

Started with 10 modems and it became the hub of town business activity. User groups were teaching people how to make web pages. It was a wonderful time of change.

- Peter Olausson

May 20, 2022 at 10:55 pm

“Peter Tattam made a small fortune” – I really hope he did, but here’s an article which disagrees:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bmv3z3/the-story-of-shareware-the-original-in-app-purchase

My first experience of the web was with NCSA Mosaic (which must have been pretty new by then) on a Sun workstation with X11. But WWW wasn’t the first attempt to make the net more user friendly. One that might be worth mentioning was Gopher, essentially FTP with an interface. When the web came along, it declined pretty quickly.

And as for the WWW abbreviation, here’s a Douglas Adams quote: “The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it’s short for.”

- Jimmy Maher

May 21, 2022 at 7:58 am

I’m sorry to see that. I’d assumed that Tattam must have done very well indeed, given the quantity of deals he had with ISPs, bookstore Internet kits, etc.

I am aware of Gopher, as well as text-only Web solutions like Lynx. It’s always difficult to decide what to put in and what to take out. In this case, I’m afraid it would be a digression that interrupts the flow of the narrative a bit too much.

- Nate

May 21, 2022 at 6:57 pm

You can send a donation here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875

- Andrew Pam

May 23, 2022 at 9:00 am

There was definitely a transitional period; when I first set up our site Glass Wings in 1993, I used the “gn” server which offered the same content as both Gopher and Web (HTML/HTTP).

- Alan Estenson

May 23, 2022 at 6:54 pm

Wow, I hadn’t thought of Gopher in decades. In 1991-1992, I was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota with a part-time job working in the campus microcomputer labs. (aside, where another “labbie” introduced me to Usenet…) I can recall going to the Shepherd Labs building on campus for an informal introduction to Gopher from one of the developers. They wanted us to know enough about it to assist lab users with questions. A year or so later, I typed “mosaic” for the first time at the command prompt on a Sun workstation.

- Jim Nelson

May 26, 2022 at 11:57 pm

I recall just prior to the Web explosion (but during the multimedia boom) reading an article that asked whether hypertext would ever come into its own. The article pointed out that the largest distributor of a (non-networked) hypertext viewer was Microsoft in the form of WINHELP.EXE. Hypertext was one of the those concepts swirling around the PC revolution for years, but no one could seem to figure out the killer app that would cement it into place, like mobile/pen computing, or, heck, UNIX during the 1980s.

I’m surprised Ted Nelson (no relation) was not mentioned. My experience has been that most people uninformed about computer history are taken aback when they learn the underpinnings of the Web date back to the early 1960s, even if it was not fully realized back then. (Ted Nelson would say the WWW still hasn’t realized his vision, but that’s a longer topic.)

- declain

May 27, 2022 at 10:14 am

Ted Nelson was mentioned earlier in one of the previous articles.

https://www.filfre.net/2016/09/the-freedom-to-associate/

- Leo Vellés

May 21, 2022 at 12:31 pm

“At any rate, it was left to independent tinkerers who who had been dreaming of owning a computer of their own for years..”.
A double “who” there Jimmy.

- Jimmy Maher

May 21, 2022 at 1:06 pm

Thanks!

- Leo Vellés

May 21, 2022 at 2:12 pm

And a double “the” here:
“some might say are rightfully his for putting the finishing touch on the greatest revolution in communications since the the printing press…”

- Jimmy Maher

May 21, 2022 at 2:58 pm

Thanks!

- Joe Latshaw

May 21, 2022 at 5:38 pm

“dull as ditch water”

I believe the phrase is “dull as dishwater,” as dishwater is typically milky-gray and what’s in it is known, while ditch water could be full of just about *anything* – much of it pretty gross, which, while unpleasant, isn’t boring!

I’m loving this series of articles as it’s intersecting with my teen years and my relatively early introduction to the internet. My father had Compuserve and AOL, but when he brought home Mosaic on his work laptop in about 1993-1994, I was fascinated. I very quickly went looking for sites like Ford.com and CocaCola.com (there were no search engines yet, really) and was shocked that such sites didn’t exist. I very quickly suggested we purchase those URLs as they surely would soon come into demand. My parents weren’t keen on spending what was, at the time, a pretty high price for web addresses based on some hare-brained idea from their 12 or 13 year old kid. We could have been the first cybersquatters as they eventually became known, and unlike others, I’d have been happy to sell them to their eventual owners for something like $50,000 a pop. It would have paid for a better college than I eventually went to at least.

Part of me is bummed that I was in rural Pennsylvania rather than Silicon Valley and I wouldn’t have even known who to show my nascent HTML site building skills, but then it was mostly my own fault for specifically NOT going into a computer related field in college, having gotten bored with it all by 1999 or so.

I never ended up an internet millionaire, but then I was far too immature at that age to deal with success like that. My much more modest career in healthcare IT and the life it’s given me really is enough and came when I was mature enough for it. Well, mostly enough, anyway. :) But I do really have this era of innovation to thank for the influence it had on me. Many thanks for these articles, Jimmy!

- Jimmy Maher

May 21, 2022 at 7:17 pm

The original idiom was actually “ditch water.” But it is often written as “dishwater” today. Neither version can be called incorrect in contemporary usage, but I’m something of a classicist, and tend to be old school about such things. ;)

A life in healthcare is certainly nothing to look down upon. My wife is an oncologist, and I suspect that she does more real good in the world in a month than I do in a year.

- Alex Smith

May 22, 2022 at 1:31 am

As you say, it was “ditch” before “dish,” however near as I can tell, it should be “ditchwater” and not “ditch water.”

- Jimmy Maher

May 22, 2022 at 7:53 am

To compound a word or not is always a tricky question. (“Video game” or “videogame”?) I usually compound words that have a become a perennial in combination in everyday discourse. In the 21st century at least, “ditch” and “water” don’t quite qualify. ;)

- Alex Smith

May 23, 2022 at 3:26 am

Yes, but while various dictionaries disagree on “video game” versus “videogame” since the term is still so new (and bound to eventually go to one word if history is any guide), ditchwater seems to be the universal spelling everywhere from OED, to Merriam-Webster, Collins, Macmillan, Cambridge, and Britannica. The future of world language hardly hinges on your compounding preferences, but as a language pedant, I do feel compelled to point out you may be on the wrong side of history for this one. =p

- Jimmy Maher

May 23, 2022 at 6:06 am

Okay, have it your way. ;)

- mycophobia

May 22, 2022 at 4:37 pm

‘first in the form of fevered textual fantasies, than in the somehow even more quaint form of “ASCII art,’

“then” not “than”?

- Jimmy Maher

May 22, 2022 at 8:00 pm

Yes. Thanks!

- Charles

May 27, 2022 at 6:56 am

“… Soon anyone with a computer, a modem, and a valid credit card…”

When CompuServe was young, it was not actually necessary to have a credit card; they were perfectly happy to bill you like any other metered utility, and in my case I would receive an accounting of minutes in the usual fashion (via snail mail). Following that, I walked to the savings and loan, drew a money order from my passbook savings, and sent it to them to settle the account.

- Jimmy Maher

May 30, 2022 at 4:44 am

I didn’t realize that. Thanks!

- Doug Orleans

June 17, 2022 at 11:26 pm

I was a senior at UC Berkeley in 1992 and hung out at the eXperimental Computing Facility, a workstation lab for undergrads to work on independent projects. One day a quiet guy named Pei Wei showed me what he’d been working on: ViolaWWW. At the time I didn’t really understand what was cool about it, but it turns out to have been the first ever graphical web browser. I guess it was the Betamax to Mosaic’s VHS.

A Web Around the World, Part 11: A Zero-Sum Game
June 3, 2022

Mosaic Communications was founded on $13 million in venture capital, a pittance by the standards of today but an impressive sum by those of 1994. Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark’s business plan, if you can call it that, would prove as emblematic of the era of American business history they were inaugurating as anything they ever did. “I don’t know how in hell we’re going to make money,” mused Clark, “but I’ll put money behind it, and we’ll figure out a way. A market growing as quickly as that [one] is going to have money to be made in it.” This naïve faith that nebulous user “engagement” must inevitably be transformed into dollars in the end by some mysterious alchemical process would be all over Silicon Valley throughout the dot-com boom — and, indeed, has never entirely left it even after the bust.

Andreessen and Clark’s first concrete action after the founding was to contact everyone at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications who had helped out with the old Mosaic browser, asking them to come to Silicon Valley and help make the new one. Most of their targets were easily tempted away from the staid nonprofit by the glamor of the most intensely watched tech startup of the year, not to mention the stock options that were dangled before them. The poaching of talent from NCSA secured for the new company some of the most seasoned browser developers in the world. And, almost as importantly, it also served to cut NCSA’s browser — the new one’s most obvious competition — off at the knees. For without these folks, how was NCSA to keep improving its browser?

The partners were playing a very dangerous game here. The Mosaic browser and all of its source code were owned by NCSA as an organization. Not only had Andreessen and Clark made the cheeky move of naming their company after a browser they didn’t own, but they had now stolen away from NCSA those people with the most intimate knowledge of how said browser actually worked. Fortunately, Clark was a grizzled enough veteran of business to put some safeguards in place. He was careful to ensure that no one brought so much as a line of code from the old browser with them to Mosaic Communications. The new one would be entirely original in terms of its code if not in terms of the end-user experience; it would be what the Valley calls a “clean-room implementation.”

Andreessen and Clark were keenly aware that the window of opportunity to create the accepted successor to NCSA Mosaic must be short. They made it clearer with every move they made that they saw the World Wide Web as a zero-sum game. They consciously copied the take-no-prisoners approach of Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, which had by now replaced IBM as the most powerful and arguably the most hated company in the computer industry. Marc Andreessen:

We knew that the key to success for the whole thing was getting ubiquity on the [browser] side. That was the way to get the company jump-started because that gives you essentially a broad platform to build off of. It’s basically a Microsoft lesson, right? If you get ubiquity, you have a lot of options, a lot of ways to benefit from that. You can get paid by the product that you are ubiquitous on, but you can also get paid on products that benefit as a result. One of the fundamental lessons is that market share now equals revenue later, and if you don’t have the market share now, you are not going to have revenue later. Another fundamental lesson is that whoever gets the volume does win in the end. Just plain wins. There has to be just one single winner in a market like this.

The founders pushed their programmers hard, insisting that the company simply had to get the browser out by the fall of 1994, which gave them a bare handful of months to create it from scratch. To spur their employees on, they devised a semi-friendly competition. They divided the programmers into three teams, one working on a browser for Unix, one on the Macintosh version, and one on the Microsoft Windows version. The teams raced one another from milestone to milestone, and compared their browsers’ rendering speeds down to the millisecond, all for weekly bragging rights and names on walls of fame and/or shame. One mid-level manager remembers how “a lot of times, people were there 48 hours straight, just coding. I’ve never seen anything like it, in terms of honest-to-God, no BS, human endurance.” Inside the office, the stakes seemed almost literally life or death. He recalls an attitude that “we were fighting some war and that we could win.”

In the meantime, Jim Clark was doing some more poaching. He hired away from his old company Silicon Graphics an ace PR woman named Rosanne Siino. She became the mass-media architect of the dot-com founder as genius, visionary, and all-around rock star. “We had this 22-year-old kid who was pretty damn interesting, and I thought, ‘There’s a story here,'” she says. She proceeded to pitch that story to anyone who would take her calls.

Andreeseen, for his part, slipped into his role fluidly enough after just a bit of coaching. “If you get more visible,” he reasoned, “it counts as advertising, and it doesn’t cost anything.” By the mid-summer of 1994, he was doing multiple interviews most days. Tall and athletically built, well-dressed and glib — certainly no one’s stereotype of a pasty computer nerd — he was perfect fodder for tech journals, mainstream newspapers, and supermarket tabloids alike. “He’s young, he’s hot, and he’s here!” trumpeted one of the last above a glamor shot of the wunderkind.

The establishment business media found the rest of the company to be almost as interesting if not quite as sexy, from its other, older founder who was trying to make lightning strike a second time to the fanatical young believers who filled the cubicles; stories of crunch time were more novel then than they would soon become. Journalists fixated on the programmers’ whimsical mascot, a huge green and purple lizard named Mozilla who loomed over the office from his perch on one wall. Some were even privileged to learn that his name was a portmanteau of  “Mosaic” and “Godzilla,” symbolizing the company’s intention to annihilate the NCSA browser as thoroughly as the movie monster had leveled Tokyo. On the strength of sparkling anecdotes like this, Forbes magazine named Mosaic Communications one of its “25 Cool Companies” — all well before it had any products whatsoever.

Mozilla, the unofficial mascot of Mosaic (later Netscape) Communications. He would prove to be far longer-lived than the company he first represented. Today he still lends his name to the Mozilla Foundation, which maintains an open-source browser and fights for open standards on the Web — somewhat ironically, given that the foundation’s origins lie in the first company to be widely perceived as a threat to those standards.

The most obvious obstacle to annihilating the NCSA browser was the latter’s price: it was, after all, free. Just how was a for-profit business supposed to compete with that price point? Andreeseen and Clark settled on a paid model that nevertheless came complete with a nudge and a wink. The browser they called Mosaic Netscape would technically be free only to students and educators. But others would be asked to pay the $39 licensing fee only after a 90-day trial period — and, importantly, no mechanism would be implemented to coerce them into doing so even after the trial expired. Mosaic Communications would thus make the cornerstone of its business strategy Andreessen’s sanguine conviction that “market share now equals revenue later.”

Mosaic Netscape went live on the Internet on October 13, 1994. And in terms of Andreessen’s holy grail of market share at least, it was an immediate, thumping success. Within weeks, Mosaic Netscape had replaced NCSA Mosaic as the dominant browser on the Web. In truth, it had much to recommend it. It was blazing fast on all three of the platforms on which it ran, a tribute to the fierce competition between the teams who had built its different versions. And it sported some useful new HTML tags, such as “<center>” for centering text and “<blink>” for making it do just that. (Granted, the latter was rather less essential than the former, but that wouldn’t prevent thousands of websites from hastening to make use of it; as is typically the case with such things, the evolution of Web aesthetics would happen more slowly than that of Web technology.) Most notably of all, Netscape added the possibility of secure encryption to the Web, via the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). The company rightly considered SSL to be an essential prerequisite to online commerce; no one in their right mind was going to send credit-card numbers in the clear.

But, valuable though these additions (mostly) were, they raised the ire of many of those who had shepherded the Web through its early years, not least among them Tim Berners-Lee. Although they weren’t patented and thus weren’t proprietary in a legal sense — anyone was free to implement them if they could figure out how they worked — Mosaic Communications had rolled them out without talking to anyone about what they were doing, leaving everyone else to play catch-up in a race of their making.

Still, such concerns carried little weight with most users. They were just happy to have a better browser.

More pressing for Andreessen and Clark were the legal threats that were soon issuing from NCSA and the University of Illinois, demanding up to 50 percent of the revenue from Mosaic Netscape, which they alleged was by rights at least half theirs. These continued even after Jim Clark produced a report from a forensic software expert which stated that, for all that they might look and feel the same, NCSA Mosaic and Mosaic Netscape shared no code at all. Accepting at last that naming their company after the rival browser whose code they insisted they were not stealing had been terrible optics, Andreessen and Clark rechristened Mosaic Communications as Netscape Communications on November 14, 1994; its browser now became known as Netscape Navigator. Seeking a compromise to make the legal questions go away once and for all, Clark offered NCSA a substantial amount of stock in Netscape, only to be turned down flat. In the end, he agreed to a cash settlement instead; industry rumor placed it in the neighborhood of $2 million. NCSA and the university with which it was affiliated may have have felt validated by the settlement, but time would show that it had not been an especially wise decision to reject Clark’s first overture: ten months later, the stock NCSA had been offered was worth $17 million.

For all its exciting growth, the World Wide Web had made relatively few inroads with everyday Americans to this point. But all of that changed in 1995, the year when the Web broke through in earnest. There was now enough content there to make it an interesting place for the ordinary Joe or Jane to visit, as well as a slick, user-friendly browser for him or her to use in Netscape Navigator.

Just as importantly, there were for the first time enough computers in daily use in American homes to make something like the Web a viable proposition. With the more approachable Microsoft Windows having replaced the cryptic, command-line-driven MS-DOS as the typical face of consumer computing, with new graphics card, sound cards, and CD-ROM drives providing a reasonably pleasing audiovisual experience, with the latest word processors and spreadsheets being more powerful and easier to use than ever before, and with the latest microprocessors and hard drives allowing it all to happen at a reasonably brisk pace, personal computers had crossed a Rubicon in the last half-decade or so, to become gadgets that people who didn’t find computers themselves intrinsically fascinating might nonetheless want to own and use. Netscape Navigator was fortunate enough to hit the scene just as these new buyers were reaching a critical mass. They served to prime the pump. And then, once just about everyone with a computer seemed to be talking about the Web, the whole thing became a self-reinforcing virtuous circle, with computer owners streaming onto the Web and the Web in turn driving computer sales. By the summer of 1995, Netscape Navigator had been installed on at least 10 million computers.

Virtually every major corporation in the country that didn’t have a homepage already set one up during 1995. Many were little more than page or two of text and a few corporate logos at this point, but a few did go further, becoming in the process harbingers of the digital future. Pizza Hut, for example, began offering an online ordering service in select markets, and Federal Express made it possible for customers to track the progress of their packages around the country and the world from right there in their browsers. Meanwhile Silicon Valley and other tech centers played host to startup after startup, including plenty of names we still know well today: the online bookstore (and later anything-store) Amazon, the online auction house eBay, and the online dating service Match.com among others were all founded this year.

Recognizing an existential threat when they saw one, the old guard of circumscribed online services such as CompuServe, who had pioneered much of the social and commercial interaction that was now moving onto the open Web, rushed to devise hybrid business models that mixed their traditional proprietary content with Internet access. Alas, it would avail most of them nothing in the end; the vast majority of these dinosaurs would shuffle off to extinction before the decade was out. Only an upstart service known as America Online, a comparative latecomer on the scene, would successfully weather the initial storm, thanks mostly to astute marketing that positioned it as the gentler, friendlier, more secure alternative to the vanilla Web for the non-tech-savvy consumer. Its public image as a sort of World Wide Web with training wheels would rake in big profits even as it made the service and its subscribers objects of derision for Internet sophisticates. But even America Online would not be able to maintain its stranglehold on Middle America forever. By shortly after the turn of the millennium — and shortly after an ill-advised high-profile merger with the titan of old media Time Warner — it too would be in free fall.

One question stood foremost in the minds of many of these millions who were flocking onto the Web for the first time: how the heck were they supposed to find anything here? It was, to be sure, an ironic question to be asking, given that Tim Berners-Lee had invented his World Wide Web for the express purpose of making the notoriously confounding pre-Web Internet easier to navigate. Yet as websites bred and spawned like rabbits in a Viagra factory, it became a relevant one once again.

The idea of a network of associative links was as valid as ever — but just where were you to start when you knew that you wanted to, say, find out the latest rumors about your favorite band Oasis? (This was the mid-1990s, after all.) Once you were inside the Oasis ecosystem, as it were, it was easy enough to jump from site to site through the power of association. But how were you to find your way inside in the first place when you first fired up your browser and were greeted with a blank page and a blank text field waiting for you to type in a Web address you didn’t know?

One solution to this conundrum was weirdly old-fashioned: brick-and-mortar bookstore shelves were soon filling up with printed directories that cataloged the Web’s contents. But this was a manifestly inadequate solution as well as a retrograde one; what with the pace of change on the Web, such books were out of date before they were even sold. What people really needed was a jumping-off point on the Web itself, a home base from which to start each journey down the rabbit hole of their particular interests, offering a list of places to go that could grow and change as fast as the Web itself. Luckily, two young men with too much time on their hands had created just such a thing.

Jerry Yang and David Filo were rather unenthusiastic Stanford graduate students in computer science during the early 1990s. Being best friends, they discovered the Web together shortly after the arrival of the NCSA Mosaic browser. Already at this early date, finding the needles in the digital haystack was becoming difficult. Therefore they set up a list of links they found interesting, calling it “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” This was not unique in itself; thousands of others were putting up similar lists of “cool links.” Yang and Filo were unique, however, in how much energy they devoted to the endeavor.

Jerry Yang and David Filo. Bare feet were something of a staple of Silicon Valley glamor shots, serving as a delightful shorthand for informal eccentricity in the eyes of the mass media.

They were among the first wave of people to discover the peculiar, dubiously healthy dopamine-release mechanism that is online attention, whether measured in page views, as in those days, or likes or retweets, as today. The more traffic that came their way, the more additional traffic they wanted. Instead of catering merely to their personal interests, they gradually turned their site into a comprehensive directory of the Web — all of it, in the ideal at least. They surfed tirelessly day after day, neglecting girlfriends, family, and personal hygiene, not to mention their coursework, trying to keep up with the Sisyphean task of cataloging every new site of note that went up on the Web, then slotting it into a branching hierarchy of hundreds of categories and sub-categories.

In April of 1994, they decided that their site needed a catchier name. Their initial thought was to combine their last names in some ingenious way, but they couldn’t find one that worked. So, they focused on the name of Yang, by nature the more voluble and outgoing of the pair. They were steeped enough in hacker culture to think of a popular piece of software called YACC; it stood for “Yet Another Compiler Compiler,” but was pronounced like the Himalayan beast of burden. That name was obviously taken, but perhaps they could come up with something else along those lines. They looked in a dictionary for words starting with “ya”: “yawn,” “yawp,” “yaw,” “y-axis”… “yahoo.” The good book told them that “yahoo” derived from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, where it referred to “any of a race of brutish, degraded creatures having the form and all of the vices of man.” Whatever — they just liked the sound of the word. They racked their brains until they had turned it into an acronym: “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.” Whatever. It would do. A few months later, they stuck an exclamation point at the end as a finishing touch. And so Yahoo! came to be.

Yahoo! very shortly after it received its name, but before it received its final flourish of an exclamation point.

For quite some time after that, not much changed on the surface. Yang and Filo had by now appropriated a neglected camping trailer on one of Stanford’s back parking lots, which they turned into their squalid headquarters. They tried to keep up with the flood of new content coming onto the Web every day by living in the trailer, trading four-hour shifts with one another around the clock, working like demons for that sweet fix of ever-increasing page-view numbers. “There was nothing else in the world like it,” says Yang. “There was such camaraderie, it was like driving off a cliff.”

But there came a point, not long after the start of that pivotal Web year of 1995, when Yang and Filo had to recognize that they were losing their battle with new content. So, they set off in search of the funding they would need to turn what had already become in the minds of many the Web’s de-facto “front page” into a real business, complete with employees they could pay to do what they had been doing for free. They seriously considered joining America Online, then came even closer to signing on with Netscape, a company which had already done much for their popularity by placing their site behind a button displayed prominently by the Navigator browser. In the end, though, they opted to remain independent. In April of 1995, they secured $4 million in financing, thanks to a far-sighted venture capitalist named Mike Moritz, who made the deal in the face of enormous skepticism from his colleagues. “The venture community [had never] invested in anything that gave a product away for free,” he remembers.

Or had they? It all depended on how you looked at it. Yang and Filo noted that television broadcasters had been giving their product away for free for decades as far as the individual viewer was concerned, making their money instead by selling access to their captive audience to third-party advertisers. Why couldn’t the same thing work on the Web? The demographic that visited Yahoo! regularly was, after all, an advertiser’s dream, being largely comprised of young adults with disposable income, attracted to novelty and with enough leisure time to indulge that attraction.

So, advertising started appearing on Yahoo! very shortly after it became a real business. Adherents to the old, non-commercial Web ideal grumbled, and some of them left in a huff, but their numbers were dwarfed by the continuing flood of new Netizens, who tended to perceive the Web as just another form of commercial media and were thus unfazed when they were greeted with advertising there. With the help of a groundbreaking Web analytics firm known as I/PRO, Yahoo! came up with ways to target its advertisements ever more precisely to each individual user’s interests, which she revealed to the company whether she wanted to or not through the links she clicked. The Web, Yang and Filo were at pains to point out, was the most effective advertising environment ever to appear. Business journalist Robert H. Reid, who profiled Netscape, Yahoo!, I/PRO, and much of the rest of the early dot-com startup scene for a book published in 1997, summed up the advantages of online advertising thusly:

There is a limit to how targeted advertising can be in traditional media. [This is] because any audience that is larger than one, even a fairly small and targeted [audience], will inevitably have its diversity elements (certain readers of the [Wall Street] Journal’s C section surely do not care about new bond issues, while certain readers of Field and Stream surely do). The Web has the potential to let marketers overcome this because, as an interactive medium, it can enable them to target their messages with surgical precision. Database technology can allow entirely unique webpages to be generated and served in moments based upon what is known about a viewer’s background, interests, and prior trajectory through a site. A site with a diverse audience can therefore direct one set of messages to high-school boys and a wholly different one to retired women. Or it could go further than this — after all, not all retired women are interested in precisely the same things — and present each visitor with an entirely unique message or experience.

Then, too, on the Web advertisers could do more than try to lodge an impression in a viewer’s mind and hope she followed up on it later, as was the case with television. They could rather present an advertisement as a clickable link that would take her instantly to their own site, which she could browse to learn far more about their products than she ever could from a one-minute commercial, which she might even be able to use to buy their products then and there — instant gratification for everyone involved.

Unlike so many Web firms before and after it, Yahoo! became profitable right away on the strength of reasoning like that. Even when Netscape pulled the site from Navigator at the end of 1995, replacing it with another one that was willing to pay dearly for the privilege — another sign of the changing times — it only briefly affected Yahoo!’s overall trajectory. As far as the mainstream media was concerned, Yang and Filo — these two scruffy graduate students who had built their company in a camping trailer — were the best business story since the rise of Netscape. If anything, Jerry Yang’s personal history made Yahoo! an even more compelling exemplar of the American Dream: he had come to the United States from Taiwan at the age of ten, when the only word of English he knew was “shoe.” When Yang showed that he could be every bit as charming as Marc Andreessen, that only made the story that much better.

Declaring that Yahoo! was a media rather than a technology company, Yang displayed a flair for branding one would never expect from a lifelong student: “It’s an article of culture. This differentiates Yahoo!, makes it cool, and gives it a market premium.” Somewhat ironically given its pitch that online advertising was intrinsically better than television advertising, Yahoo! became the first of the dot-com startups to air television commercials, all of which concluded with a Gene Autry -soundalike yodeling the name, an unavoidable ear worm for anyone who heard it. A survey conducted in 1996 revealed that half of all Americans already knew the brand name — a far larger percentage than that which had actually ventured online by that point. It seems safe to say that Yahoo! was the most recognizable of all the early Web brands, more so even than Netscape.

See https://www.youtube.com/embed/X2_XzGPqBJ0

Trailblazing though Yahoo!’s business model was in many ways, its approach to its core competency seems disarmingly quaint today. Yahoo! wasn’t quite a search engine in the way we think of such things; it was rather a collection of sanctioned links, hand-curated and methodically organized by a small army of real human beings. Well before television commercials like the one above had begun to air, the dozens of “surfers” it employed — many of them with degrees in library science — had been relieved of the burden of needing to go out and find new sites for themselves by their own site’s ubiquity. Owners of sites which wished to be listed were expected to fill out a form, then wait patiently for a few days or weeks for someone to get to their request and, if it passed muster, slot it into Yahoo!’s ever-blossoming hierarchy.

Yahoo! as it looked in October of 1996. A search field has recently been added, but it searches only Yahoo!’s hand-curated database of sites rather than the Web itself.

The alternative approach, which was common among Yahoo!’s competitors even at the time, is to send out automated “web crawlers,” programs that jump from link to link, in order to index all of the content on the Web into a searchable database. But as far as many Netizens were concerned in the mid-1990s, that approach just didn’t work all that well. A search for “Oasis” on one of these sites was likely to show you hundreds of pages dealing with desert ecosystems, all jumbled together with those dealing with your favorite rock band. It would be some time before search engines would be developed that could divine what you were really looking for based on context, that could infer from your search for “Oasis band” that you really, really didn’t want to read about deserts at that particular moment. Search engines like the one around which Google would later build its empire require a form of artificial intelligence — still not the computer consciousness of the old “giant brain” model of computing, but a more limited, context-specific form of machine learning — that would not be quick or easy to develop. In the meantime, there was Yahoo! and its army of human librarians.

And there were also the first Internet IPOs. As ever, Netscape rode the crest of the Web wave, the standard bearer for all to follow. On the eve of its IPO of August 9, 1995, it was decided to price the shares at $28 each, giving a total value to the company of over $1 billion, even though its total revenues to date amounted to $17 million and its bottom line to date tallied a loss of $13 million. Nevertheless, when trading opened the share price immediately soared to $74.75. “It took General Dynamics 43 years to become a corporation worth today’s $2.7 billion,” wrote The Wall Street Journal. “It took Netscape Communications about a minute.”

Yahoo!’s turn came on April 12, 1996. Its shares were priced at $13 when the day’s trading opened, and peaked at $43 over the course of that first day, giving the company an implied value of $850 million.

It was the beginning of an era of almost incomprehensible wealth generated by the so-called “Internet stocks,” often for reasons that were hard for ordinary people to understand, given how opaque the revenue models of so many Web giants could be. Even many of the beneficiaries of the stock-buying frenzy struggled to wrap their heads around it all. “Take, say, a Chinese worker,” said Lou Montulli, a talented but also ridiculously lucky programmer at Netscape. “I’m probably worth a million times the average Chinese worker, or something like that. It’s difficult to rationalize the value there. I worked hard, but did I really work that hard? I mean, can anyone work that hard? Is it possible? Is anyone worth that much?” Four of the ten richest people in the world today according to Forbes magazine — including the two richest of all — can trace the origins of their fortunes directly to the dot-com boom of the 1990s. Three more were already in the computer industry before the boom, and saw their wealth exponentially magnified by it. (The founders I’ve profiled in this article are actually comparatively small fish today. Their rankings on the worldwide list of billionaires as of this writing range from 792 in the case of David Filo to 1717 for Marc Andreessen.)

And what was Tim Berners-Lee doing as people began to get rich from his creation? He did not, as some might have expected, decamp to Silicon Valley to start a company of his own. Nor did he accept any of the “special advisor” roles that were his for the taking at a multitude of companies eager to capitalize on the cachet of his name. He did leave CERN, but made it only as far as Boston, where he founded a non-profit World Wide Web Consortium in partnership with MIT and others. The W3C, as it would soon become known, was created to lead the defense of open standards against those corporate and governmental forces which were already demonstrating a desire to monopolize and balkanize the Web. At times, there would be reason to question who was really leading whom; the W3C would, for example, be forced to write into its HTML standard many of the innovations which Netscape had already unilaterally introduced into its industry-leading browser. Yet the organization has undoubtedly played a vital role in keeping the original ideal of the Web from giving way completely to the temptations of filthy lucre. Tim Berners-Lee remains to this day the only director the W3C has ever known.

So, while Marc Andreessen and Jerry Yang and their ilk were becoming the darlings of the business pages, were buying sports cars and attending the most exclusive parties, Tim Berners-Lee was riding a bus to work every day in Boston, just another anonymous commuter in a gray suit. It was fall when he first arrived in his new home, and so, as he says, “the bus ride gave me time to revel in New England’s autumnal colours.” Many over the years have found it hard to believe he wasn’t bitter that his name had become barely a footnote in the reckoning of the business-page pundits who were declaring the Web — correctly, it must be said — the most important development in mass media in their lifetimes. But he himself insists — believably, it must be said — that he was not and is not resentful over the way things played out.

People sometimes ask me whether I am upset that I have not made a lot of money from the Web. In fact, I made some quite conscious decisions about which way to take in life. Those I would not change. What does distress me, though, is how important a question it seems to be for some. This happens mostly in America, not Europe. What is maddening is the terrible notion that a person’s value depends on how important and financially successful they are, and that that is measured in terms of money. This suggests disrespect for the researchers across the globe developing ideas for the next leaps in science and technology. Core in my upbringing was a value system that put monetary gain well in its place, behind things like doing what I really want to do. To use net worth as a criterion by which to judge people is to set our children’s sights on cash rather than on things that will actually make them happy.

It can be occasionally frustrating to think about the things my family could have done with a lot of money. But in general I’m fairly happy to let other people be in the Royal Family role…

Perhaps Tim Berners-Lee is the luckiest of all the people whose names we still recognize from that go-go decade of the 1990s, being the one who succeeded in keeping his humanity most intact by never stepping onto the treadmill of wealth and attention and “disruption” and Forbes rankings. Heaven help those among us who are no longer able to feel the joy of watching nature change her colors around them.

In 1997, Robert H. Reid wrote that “the inevitable time will come when the Web’s dawning years will seem as remote as the pioneering days of film seem today. Today’s best and most lavishly funded websites will then look as naïve and primitive as the earliest silent movies.” Exactly this has indeed come to pass. And yet if we peer beneath the surface of the early Web’s garish aesthetics, most of what we find there is eerily familiar.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the explosion of the Web into the collective commercial and cultural consciousness is just how quickly it occurred. In the three and one quarter years between the initial release of the NCSA Mosaic browser and the Yahoo! IPO, a new digital society sprang into being, seemingly from nothing and nowhere. It brought with it all of the possibilities and problems we still wrestle with today. For example, the folks at Netscape, Yahoo!, and other startups were the first to confront the tension between free speech and hate speech online. (Straining to be fair to everyone, Yahoo! reluctantly decided to classify the Ku Klux Klan under the heading of “White Power” rather than “Fascism,” much less booting it off their site completely.) As we’ve seen, the Internet advertising business emerged from whole cloth during this time, along with all of the privacy concerns raised by its determination to track every single Netizen’s voyages in the name of better ad targeting. (It’s difficult to properly tell the story of this little-loved but enormously profitable branch of business in greater depth because it has always been shrouded in so much deliberate secrecy.) Worries about Web-based pornography and the millions of children and adolescents who were soon viewing it regularly took center stage in the mass media, both illuminating and obscuring a huge range of  questions — largely still unanswered today — about what effect this had on their psychology. (“Something has to be done,” said one IBM executive who had been charged with installing computers in classrooms, “or children won’t be given access to the Web.”) And of course the tension between open standards and competitive advantage remains of potentially existential importance to the Web as we know it, even if the browser that threatens to swallow the open Web whole is now Google Chrome instead of Netscape Navigator.

All told, the period from 1993 to 1996 was the very definition of a formative one. And yet, as we’ve seen, the Web — this enormous tree of possibility that seemed to so many to sprout fully formed out of nothing — had roots stretching back centuries. If we have learned anything over the course of the last eleven articles, it has hopefully been that no technology lives in a vacuum. The World Wide Web is nothing more nor less than the latest realization of a dream of instantaneous worldwide communication that coursed through the verse of Aeschylus, that passed through Claude Chappe and Samuel Morse and Cyrus Field and Alexander Graham Bell among so many others. Tellingly, almost all of those people who accessed the Web from their homes during the 1990s did so by dialing into it, using modems attached to ordinary telephone lines — a validation not only of Claude Shannon’s truism that information is information but of all of the efforts that led to such a flexible and sophisticated telephone system in the first place. Like every great invention since at least the end of prehistory, the World Wide Web stands on the shoulders of those which came before it.

Was it all worth it? Did all the bright sparks we’ve met in these articles really succeed in, to borrow one of the more odious clichés to come out of Silicon Valley jargon, “making the world a better place?” Clichés aside, I think it was, and I think they did. For all that the telegraph, the telephone, the Internet, and the World Wide Web have plainly not succeeded in creating the worldwide utopia that was sometimes promised by their most committed evangelists, I think that communication among people and nations is always preferable to the lack of same.

And with that said, it is now time to end this extended detour into the distant past — to end it here, with J.C.R. Licklider’s dream of an Intergalactic Computer Network a reality, and right on the schedule he proposed. But of course what I’ve written in this article isn’t really an end; it’s barely the beginning of what the Web came to mean to the world. As we step back into the flow of things and return to talking about digital culture and interactive entertainment on a more granular, year-by-year basis, the Web will remain an inescapable presence for us, being the place where virtually all digital culture lived after 1995 or so. I look forward to seeing it continue to evolve in real time, and to grappling alongside all of you with the countless Big Questions it will continue to pose for us.

(Sources: the books A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet by John Naughton, Communication Networks: A Concise Introduction by Jean Walrand and Shyam Parekh, Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee, and Architects of the Web by Robert H. Reid. Online sources include the Pew Research Center’s “World Wide Web Timeline” and Forbes’s up-to-the-minute billionaires scoreboard.)

Comments
26 Responses

- stepped pyramids

June 3, 2022 at 4:20 pm

Nit: “yacc” stands for “Yet Another Compiler-Compiler”.

- Jimmy Maher

June 3, 2022 at 6:30 pm

Thanks!

- Patrick Morris Miller

June 3, 2022 at 4:37 pm

YACC isn’t “Yet Another C Compiler”, it’s “Yet Another Compiler Compiler”: it takes a description of the grammar of a programming language (C or otherwise) and emits code (which happens to be in C because 1980s) to do much of the job of parsing code in said language. (The rest of the act of compilation, such as code generation, is *your* problem.)

- Yannis

June 3, 2022 at 4:42 pm

I believe you have gotten this comment several times but I will ask once again for good measure! Will we be seeing a collected & cleaned up ebook volume of this series?

- Jimmy Maher

June 3, 2022 at 6:40 pm

Yes, we can do that. I should be putting up the ebook for 1995 within the next few weeks. Look for a standalone “Web Around the World” edition then. ;)

- Lt. Nitpicker

June 3, 2022 at 5:18 pm

Meanwhile Silicon Valley played host to startup after startup, including plenty of names we still know well today: the online bookstore (and later anything-store) Amazon, the online auction house eBay, and the online dating service Match.com among others were all founded this year.

Amazon isn’t really a Silicon Valley startup. (even if you stretch the definition heavily) I’d use something like “Silicon Valley and beyond played host to startup after startup” to emphasize that quite a few startups were located well outside the valley.

- Jimmy Maher

June 3, 2022 at 6:34 pm

Good catch. Thanks!

- Rowan Lipkovits

June 3, 2022 at 7:06 pm

“Virtually every major corporation in the country that didn’t have a homepage already set one up during 1995.”

Would have been a fun place for an aside about Josh Quittner’s 1994 squatting of McDonalds.com for a Wired article, but I appreciate you could easily double the size of this article with fun asides, no compelling reason to dilute it like that.

- Jimmy Maher

June 3, 2022 at 7:55 pm

I actually thought about that, but it didn’t wind up making the cut. Maybe in some future article. We’ve certainly not seen the end of the dot-com boom.

- Nate

June 12, 2022 at 6:05 am

A former roommate had tacobell.com for a year or so, purely because he liked it to show up in his IRC /who results. They asked for it, and he just gave it to them. No demands for money or free tacos.

It was a fun and less serious time.

- Lisa H.

June 12, 2022 at 9:45 pm

Not holding it hostage for free tacos seems like a serious misstep. ;)

- Rowan Lipkovits

June 3, 2022 at 7:34 pm

“even America Online would not be able to maintain its stranglehold on Middle America forever. By shortly after the turn of the millennium — and shortly after an ill-advised high-profile merger with the titan of old media Time Warner — it too would be in free fall.”

Absorption by Time Warner seems to be an odd way to narratively contrast AOL from Netscape, given that both parties went down on the same ship — indeed, in the same cabin.

- Jimmy Maher

June 3, 2022 at 7:56 pm

I like to believe there’s a bit of foreshadowing in the article that all may not be completely well with Netscape either. ;)

- Dan V.

June 3, 2022 at 7:43 pm

This series of articles has been an illuminating journey. I knew many of the facts and players, but not to the depth or breadth in which you’ve presented them. Well done.

- YEECHANG LEE

June 3, 2022 at 9:01 pm

For quite some time after that, not much changed on the surface. Yang and Filo had by now appropriated a neglected camping trailer on one of Stanford’s back parking lots, which they turned into their squalid headquarters.

Another example of using Stanford premises is Yahoo!’s URL as of fall 1994, http://akebono.stanford.edu/~yahoo/. (Is there an older one?)

- David Boddie

June 4, 2022 at 10:36 am

Thanks for writing about those pivotal years and fast-moving times! It’s been interesting to revisit the time in my life when I was getting online and seeing the start of the Web. I notice that you refer to it as the “Web” throughout, which is gratifyingly consistent. ;)

It’s interesting to consider what technology would have evolved instead of the Web as we know it. Once the original seed of hypermedia had been planted, it seems that we would always have arrived at a similar place to where we are now, though that’s probably hindsight talking. Had the original idea not caught on, maybe something like more conventional broadcast media or commercial network services would have been rolled out, though maybe the openness of the Web needed to succeed before anything like that would have been commercially viable on a large scale.

A couple of corrections – sorry!
“which she might even [be] able to use”
“It brought with it with all of the possibilities” (with)

- Jimmy Maher

June 4, 2022 at 1:55 pm

Thanks!

- Aula

June 5, 2022 at 8:59 am

I’m surprised that you don’t mention how perfectly the release of Windows 95 coincided with the events you describe. Strictly speaking, of course, there was no connection; Windows 3.x could be used to access the Internet just fine, and Win 95 didn’t really improve the experience in any significant way. However, if you were buying Win 95 (either with a new computer, or just to upgrade your existing computer) you were very likely offered Internet access bundled with it, and a lot of people took that offer. If Microsoft had released the new version of Windows even a year earlier or later, its initial sales wouldn’t have boosted the user base of Netscape and Yahoo at just the right time to establish them as the big players they became.

- Jimmy Maher

June 5, 2022 at 10:35 am

I’m actually planning to write some articles on Windows 95 that will serve as a continuation of two series: this one and the “Doing Windows” series. Windows 95 is not notable exclusively for its prioritization of the Internet — DirectX was huge for gaming — but it was in many ways a reflection of Microsoft’s terror of losing their near-monopoly in consumer-grade operating systems to some sort of browser-based Web appliance. Those articles will also give us a chance to highlight the move to a more dynamic Web, through what have become staple technologies such as Java and JavaScript (and some nearly forgotten ones, such as VRML).

- Richard Smith

June 6, 2022 at 2:58 pm

Where eccentric tech folk allergic to socks in the 90s?

- Steve Nicholson

June 7, 2022 at 3:57 pm

I had a tangible illustration of the explosion of the Internet. My programming job with a Norwegian music software company had me and my wife living in Oslo from August 1995 to August 1996. When we left I felt like people were just beginning to catch on to the idea of the Web. When we came back, driving from SFO to my parents’ house in South San Francisco, every single billboard on 101 sported a URL.

- Marco

June 10, 2022 at 4:03 pm

This has been an interesting and very informative series, though I retain hopes that you will get back to reviewing adventure games at some point!

I have sat opposite Tim Berners-Lee at a couple of government meetings. I think he’s at heart an old-school eccentric academic, and made the right choice in terms of his happiness not to try and become an uber-capitalist. Perhaps the Mark Hamill of digital technology?

I’ve also met Charles Townes, whose area was lasers rather than computers but was probably the last survivor of that postwar generation of Bell Labs stars.

- Jimmy Maher

June 10, 2022 at 4:32 pm

Your wish will be granted starting with the next article. I have a whole slate of them coming up. ;)

- Kruthers

June 18, 2022 at 5:08 pm

Jimmy, just wanted to let you know I really enjoy these long form series more than I expected to. And especially when they add perspective to events from my own life, like this one. Thank you!

- Alex L.

June 20, 2022 at 5:47 am

Great article, good points made about then and now-current problems regarding the web. When I think about the way it progressed since I started going online on my own computer circa 1998, basically nothing really changed at core in the way people use it.

- mycophobia

July 2, 2022 at 3:24 pm

just wanted to remark that this has been a brilliant series of articles, in both concept and execution