Jimmy Maher (maher@filfre.net)

The Digital Antiquarian
Volume 18: 1996
Comments Edition

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Contents

1. Toonstruck (or, A Case Study in the Death of Adventure Games)

1. Comments

2. Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars

1. Comments

3. Discworld on Page and Screen, Part 1: Serious Comedy

1. Comments

4. Discworld on Page and Screen, Part 2: The First Three Discworld Games

1. Comments

5. The Case of the Rose Tattoo

1. Comments

6. Byron Preiss’s Games (or, The Promise and Peril of the Electronic Book)

1. Comments

7. Titanic Visions, Part 1: Sifting Through the Wreckage

1. Comments

8. Titanic Visions, Part 2: A Night to Remember

1. Comments

9. Titanic Visions, Part 3: An Adventure Out of Time

1. Comments

10. The Pandora Directive

1. Comments

11. Doing Windows, Part 10: Chicago

1. Comments

12. Doing Windows, Part 11: The Internet Tidal Wave

1. Comments

13. Doing Windows, Part 12: David and Goliath

1. Comments

14. Normality

1. Comments

15. Sequels in Strategy Gaming, Part 1: Civilization II

1. Comments

16. Sequels in Strategy Gaming, Part 2: Master of Orion II

1. Comments

17. Sequels in Strategy Gaming, Part 3: Heroes of Might and Magic II

1. Comments

18. Spycraft: The Great Game, Part 1 (or, Parallel Spies)

1. Comments

19. Spycraft: The Great Game, Part 2

1. Comments

20. Wing Commander IV

1. Comments

21. The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 1: Three Dimensions in Software (or, Quake and Its Discontents)

1. Comments

22. The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 2: Three Dimensions in Hardware

1. Comments

23. The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 3: Software Meets Hardware

1. Comments

24. Tomb Raider

1. Comments

25. A Dialog in Real Time (Strategy)

1. Comments

26. Going Rogue

1. Comments

27. Diablo

1. Comments

28. Realms of the Haunting

1. Comments

Toonstruck (or, A Case Study in the Death of Adventure Games)
June 17, 2022

Some time ago, in the midst of a private email discussion about the general arc of adventure-game history, one of my readers offered up a bold claim: he said that the best single year to be a player of point-and-click graphic adventures was 1996. This rings decidedly counterintuitive, given that 1996 was also the year during which the genre first slid into a precipitous commercial decline that would not even begin to level out for a decade or more. But you know what? Looking at the lineup of games released that year, I found it difficult to argue with him. These were games of high hopes, soaring ambitions, and big budgets. The genre has never seen such a lineup since. How poignant and strange, I thought to myself. Then I thought about it some more, and I decided that it wasn’t really so strange at all.

For when we cast our glance back over entertainment history, we find that it’s not unusual for a strain of creative expression to peak in terms of sophistication and ambition some time after it has passed its zenith of raw popularity. Wings won the first ever best-picture Oscar two years after The Jazz Singer had numbered the days of soundless cinema; Duke Ellington’s big band blew up a storm at Newport two years after “Rock Around the Clock” and “That’s All Right” had heralded the end of jazz music at the top of the hit parade. The same sort of thing has happened on multiple occasions in gaming. I would argue, for example, that more great text adventures were commercially published after 1984, the year that interactive fiction plateaued and prepared for the down slide, than before that point. And then, of course, we have the graphic adventures of 1996 — the year after the release of Phantasmagoria, the last million-selling adventure game to earn such sales numbers entirely on its own intrinsic appeal, without riding the coattails of an earlier game for which it was a sequel or any other pre-existing mass-media sensation.

There are two reasons why this phenomenon occurs. One is that the people who decide what projects to green-light always have a tendency to look backward at least as much as forward; new market paradigms are always hard to get one’s head around. The other becomes increasingly prevalent as projects grow more complex, and the window of time between the day they are begun and the day they are completed grows longer as a result. A lot can happen in the world of media in the span of two years or more — not coincidentally, the type of time span that more and more game-development projects were starting to fill by the mid-1990s. Toonstruck, our subject for today, is a classic example of what can happen when the world in which a game is conceived is dramatically different from the one to which it is finally born.

Let us turn the clock back to late 1993, the moment of Toonstruck’s genesis. At that time, the conventional wisdom inside the established games industry about gaming’s necessary future hewed almost exclusively to what we might call the Sierra vision, because it was articulated so volubly and persuasively by that major publisher’s founder and president Ken Williams. It claimed that the rich multimedia affordances of CD-ROM would inevitably lead to a merger of interactivity with cinema. Popular movie stars would soon be vying to appear in interactive movies which would boast the same production values and storytelling depth as traditional movies, but which would play out on computer instead of movie-theater or television screens, with the course of the story in the hands of the ones sitting behind the screens. This mooted merger of Silicon Valley and Hollywood — often abbreviated as “Siliwood” — would require development budgets exponentially larger than those the industry had been accustomed to, but the end results would reach an exponentially wider audience.

The games publisher Virgin Interactive, a part of Richard Branson’s sprawling media and travel empire, was every bit as invested in this prophecy as Sierra was. Its Los Angeles-based American arm was the straw that stirred the drink, under the guidance of a Brit named Martin Alper, who had been working to integrate games into a broader media zeitgeist for many years; he had first made a name for himself in his homeland as the co-founder of the budget label Mastertronic, whose games embraced pop-culture icons from Michael Jackson to Clumsy Colin (the mascot of a popular brand of chips), and were sold as often from supermarkets as from software stores. Earlier in 1993, his arm of Virgin had published The 7th Guest, an interactive horror flick which struck many as a better prototype for the Sierra vision than anything Sierra themselves had yet released; it had garnered enormous sales and adoring press notices from the taste-makers of mainstream media as well as those inside the computer-gaming ghetto. Now, Alper was ready to take things to the next level.

He turned for ideas to another Brit who had recently joined him in Los Angeles: a man named David Bishop, who had already worked as a journalist, designer, manager, and producer over the course of his decade in the industry. Bishop proposed an interactive counterpart of sorts to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the hit 1988 movie which had wowed audiences with the novel feat of inserting cartoon characters into a live-action world. Bishop’s game would do the opposite: insert real actors into a cartoon world. He urged Alper to pull out all the stops in order to make something that would be every bit as gobsmacking as Roger Rabbit had been in its day.

So far, so good. But who should take on the task of turning Bishop’s idea into a reality? The 7th Guest had been created by a then-tiny developer known as Trilobyte, itself a partnership between a frustrated filmmaker and a programming whiz. Taking the press releases that labeled them the avatars of the next generation of entertainment at face value, the two had now left the Virgin fold, signing a contract with a splashy new player in the multimedia sweepstakes called Media Vision. Someone else would have to make the game called Toonstruck.

In a telling statement of just how committed they already were to their interactive cartoon, Virgin USA, who had only acted as a publisher to this point, decided to dive into the development business. In October of 1993, Martin Alper put two of his most trusted producers, Neil Young and Chris Yates, in charge of a new, wholly owned development studio called Burst, formed just to make Toonstruck. The two were given a virtually blank check to do so. Make it amazing was their only directive.

So, Young and Yates went across town to Hollywood. There they hired Nelvana, an animation house that had been making cartoons of every description for over twenty years. And they hired as well a gaggle of voice-acting talent that was worthy of a big-budget Disney feature. There were Tim Curry, star of the camp classic Rocky Horror Picture Show; Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson (“D’oh!”); David Ogden-Stiers, who had played the blue-blooded snob Charles Emerson Winchester III on M*A*S*H; Dom Deluise of The Cannonball Run and All Dogs Go to Heaven fame; plus many other less recognizable names who were nevertheless among the most talented and sought-after voices in cartoon production, the sort that any latch-key kid worth her salt had listened to for countless hours by the time she became a teenager. In hiring the star of the show — the actor destined to actually appear onscreen, inserted into the cartoon world — Burst pulled off their greatest coup of all: they secured the signature of none other than Christopher Lloyd, a veteran character actor best known as the hippie burnout Jim from the beloved sitcom Taxi, the mad scientist Doc Brown from the Back to the Future films… and Judge Doom, the villain from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Playing in a game that would be the technological opposite of that film’s inserting of cartoon characters into the real world, Lloyd would become his old character’s psychological opposite, the hero rather than the villain. Sure, it was stunt casting — but how much more perfect could it get?

What happened next is impossible to explain in any detail. The fact is that Burst was and has remained something of a black box. What is clear, however, is that Toonstruck’s designers-in-the-trenches Richard Hare and Jennifer McWilliams took their brief to pull out all the stops and to spare no expense in doing so as literally as everyone else at the studio, concocting a crazily ambitious script. “We were full of ideas, so we designed and designed and designed,” says McWilliams, “with a great deal of emphasis on what would be cool and interesting and funny, and not so much focus on what would actually be achievable within a set schedule and budget. [Virgin] for the most part stepped aside and let us do our thing.”

Their colleagues storyboarded their ever-expanding design document and turned it into hours and hours of quality cartoon animation — animation which was intended to meet or exceed the bar set by a first-string Disney feature film. As they did so, the deadlines flew by unheeded. Originally earmarked with the eternal optimism of game developers and Chicago Cubs fans for the 1994 Christmas season, the project slipped into 1995, then 1996. Virgin trotted it out at trade show after trade show, making ever more sweeping claims about its eventual amazingness at each one, until it became an in-joke among the gaming journalists who dutifully inserted a few lines about it into each successive “coming soon” preview. By 1996, the bill for Toonstruck was approaching a staggering $8 million, enough to make it the second most expensive computer game to date. And yet it was still far from completion.

It seems clear that the project was poorly managed from the start. Take, for example, all that vaunted high-quality animation. Burst’s decision to make the cartoon of Toonstruck first, then figure out how to make use of it in an interactive context later was hardly the most cost-effective way of doing things. It made little sense to aim to compete with Disney on a level playing field when the limitations of the consumer-computing hardware of the time meant that the final product would have to be squashed down to a resolution of 640 X 400, with a palette of just 256 shades, for display on a dinky 15-inch monitor screen.

There are also hints of other sorts of dysfunction inside Burst, and between Burst and its parent company. One Virgin insider who chose to remain anonymous alluded vaguely in 1998 to the way that “internal politics made the situation worse. Some of the project leaders didn’t get on with other senior staff, and some people had friendships to protect. So there was finger-pointing and back-slapping going on at the same time.”

During the three years that Toonstruck spent in development, the Sierra vision of gaming’s necessary future was challenged by a new one. In December of 1993, id Software, a tiny renegade company operating outside the traditional boundaries of the industry by selling its creations largely through the shareware model, released a little game called DOOM, which featured exclusively computer-generated 3D environments, gobs of bloody action, and, to paraphrase a famous statement by its chief programmer John Carmack, no more story than your typical porn movie. Not long after, a studio called Blizzard Entertainment debuted a fantasy strategy game called Warcraft which played like an action game, in hectic real time; not the first of its type, it was nevertheless the one that really caught gamers’ imaginations, especially after Blizzard perfected the concept with 1995’s Warcraft II. With these games and others like them selling at least as well as the hottest adventures, the industry’s One True Way Forward had become a proverbial fork in the road. Publishers could continue to plow money into interactive movies in the hope of cracking into the mainstream of mass entertainment, or they could double down on their longstanding customer demographic of young white males by offering them yet more fast-paced mayhem. Already by 1995, the fact that games of the latter stripe tended to cost far less than those of the former was enough to seal the deal in the minds of many publishers.

Virgin Interactive was given especial food for thought that year when they wound up publishing Trilobyte’s next game after all. Media Vision, the publisher Trilobyte had signed with, had imploded amidst government investigations of securities fraud and other financial crimes, and an opportunistic Virgin had swooped into the bankruptcy auction and made off with the contract for The 11th Hour, the sequel to The 7th Guest. It seemed like quite a clever heist at the time — but it began to seem somewhat less so when The 11th Hour under-performed relative to expectations. Both reviewers and ordinary gamers stated clearly that they were already becoming bored of Trilobyte’s rote mixing of B-movie cinematics with hoary set-piece puzzles that mostly stemmed from well before the computer age — tired of the way that the movie and the gameplay in a Trilobyte creation had virtually nothing to do with one another.

Then, as I noted at the beginning of this article, 1996 brought with it an unprecedentedly large lineup of ambitious, earnest, and expensive games of the Siliwood stripe, with some of them at least much more thoughtfully designed than anything Trilobyte had ever come up with. Nonetheless, as the year went by an alarming fact was more and more in evidence: this year’s crop of multimedia extravaganzas was not producing any towering hits to rival the likes of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective in 1992, The 7th Guest in 1993, Myst in 1994, or Phantasmagoria in 1995. Arguably the best year in history to be a player of graphic adventures, 1996 was also the year that broke the genre. Almost all of the big-budget adventure releases still to come from American publishers would owe their existence to corporate inertia, being projects that executives found easier to complete and hope for a miracle than to cancel outright and then try to explain the massive write-off to their shareholders — even if outright cancellation would have been better for their companies’ bottom lines. In short, by the beginning of 1997 only dreamers doubted that the real future of the gaming mainstream lay with the lineages of DOOM and Warcraft.

Before we rush to condemn the philistines who preferred such games to their higher-toned counterparts, we must acknowledge that their preferences had to do with more than sheer bloody-mindedness. First-person shooters and real-time-strategy games could be a heck of a lot of fun, and lent themselves very well to playing with others, whether gathered together in one room or, increasingly, over the Internet. The generally solitary pursuit of adventure gaming had no answer for this sort of boisterous bonding experience. And there was also an economic factor: an adventure was a once-and-done endeavor that might last a week or two at best, after which you had no recourse but to go out and buy another one. You could, on the other hand, spend literally years playing the likes of DOOM and Warcraft with your mates.

Then there is one final harsh reality to be faced: the fact is that the Sierra vision never came close to living up to its billing for the player. These games were never remotely like waking up in the starring role of a Hollywood film. Boosters like Ken Williams were thrilled to talk about interactive movies in the abstract, but these same people were notably vague about how their interactivity was actually supposed to work. They invested massively in Hollywood acting talent, in orchestral soundtracks, and in the best computer artists money could buy, while leaving the interactivity — the very thing that ostensibly set their creations apart — to muddle through on its own, one way or another.

Inevitably, then, the interactivity ended up taking the form of static puzzles, the bedrock of adventure games since the days when they had been presented all in text. The puzzle paradigm persisted into this brave new era simply because no one could proffer any other ideas about what the player should be doing that were both more compelling and technologically achievable. I hasten to add that some players really, genuinely love puzzles, love few things more than to work through an intricate web of them in order to make something happen; I include myself among this group. When puzzles are done right, they’re as satisfying and creatively valid as any other type of gameplay.

But here’s the rub: most people — perhaps even most gamers — really don’t like solving puzzles all that much at all. (These people are of course no better or worse than those who do — just different.) For the average Joe or Jane, playing one of these new-fangled interactive movies was like watching a conventional movie filmed on an ultra-low-budget, usually with terrible acting. And then, for the pièce de résistance, you were expected to solve a bunch of boring puzzles for the privilege of witnessing the underwhelming next scene. Who on earth wanted to do this after a hard day at the office?

All of which is to say that the stellar sales of Consulting Detective, The 7th Guest, Myst, and Phantasmagora were not quite the public validations of the concept of interactive movies that the industry chose to read them as. The reasons for these titles’ success were orthogonal to their merits as games, whatever the latter might have been. People bought them as technology demonstrations, to show off the new computers they had just purchased and to test out the CD-ROM drives they had just installed. They gawked at them for a while and then, satiated, planted themselves back in front of their televisions to spend their evenings as they always had. This was not, needless to say, a sustainable model for a mainstream gaming genre. By 1996, the days when the mere presence of human actors walking and/or talking on a computer monitor could wow even the technologically unsophisticated were fast waning. That left as customers only the comparatively tiny hardcore of buyers who had always played adventure games. They were thrilled by the diverse and sumptuous smorgasbord that was suddenly set before them — but the industry’s executives, looking at the latest sales numbers, most assuredly were not. Just like that, the era of Siliwood passed into history. One can only hope that all of the hardcore adventure fans enjoyed it while it lasted.

Toonstruck was, as you may have guessed, among the most prominent of the adventures that were released to disappointing results in 1996. That event happened at the very end of the year, and only thanks to a Virgin management team who decided in the summer that enough was enough. “The powers that be in management had to step in and give us a dose of reality,” says Jennifer McWilliams. “We then needed to come up with an ending that could credibly wrap the game up halfway through, with a cliffhanger that would, ideally, introduce part two. I think we did well considering the constraints we were under, but still, it was not what we originally envisioned.” Another, anonymous team member has described what happened more bluntly: “The team was told to ‘cut it or can it’ — it either had to be shipped real soon, or not at all.”

The former option was chosen, and thus Toonstruck shipped just before Christmas, on two discs that between them bore only about one third of the total amount of animation created for the game, and that in a severely degraded form. Greeted with reviews that ran the gamut from raves to pans, it wound up selling about 150,000 copies. For a normal game with a normal budget, such numbers would be just about acceptable; if the 100,000-copy threshold was no longer the mark of an outright hit in the computer-games industry of 1996, selling that many copies and then half again that many more wasn’t too bad either. Unfortunately, all of the usual quantifiers got thrown out for a game that had cost over $8 million to make. One Virgin employee later mused wryly how Toonstruck had been intended to “blow the public away. The only thing that got blown was vast amounts of cash, and the public stayed away.”

Bleeding red ink from the failure of Toonstruck and a number of other games, Virgin’s American arm was ordered by the parent company in London to downsize their budgets and ambitions drastically. After creating a few less expensive but equally commercially disappointing games, Burst Studios was sold in 1998 to Electronic Arts, who renamed it EA Pacific and shifted its focus to 3D real-time strategy — a sign of the times if ever there was one.

Such is one tale of Toonstruck, a game which could only have appeared in its own very specific time and place. But, you might be wondering, how does this relic of a fizzled vision of gaming’s future play?

Toonstruck’s opening movie is not a cartoon. We instead meet Christopher Lloyd for the first time in the real world, in the role of Drew Blanc (get it?), a cartoonist suffering from writer’s block. He’s called into the office of his impatient boss Sam Schmaltz, who’s played by Ben Stein, an actor of, shall we say, limited range, but one who remains readily recognizable to an entire generation for playing every kid’s nightmare of a boring teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Wonder Years.

We learn that Drew is unhappy with his current assignment as the illustrator of The Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun Show, a piece of cartoon pablum with as much edge as a melting stick of butter. He rather wants to do something with his creation Flux Wildly, a hyperactive creature of uncertain taxonomy and chaotic disposition. Schmaltz, however, quickly lives up to his name; he’s having none of it. A deflated Drew resigns himself to an all-nighter in the studio to make up the time he’s wasted daydreaming about the likes of Flux. But in the course of that night, he is somehow drawn into his television — right into a cartoon.

There the bewildered Drew meets none other than Flux Wildly himself, finding him every bit as charmingly unhinged as he’d always imagined him to be. He learns that the cartoon world in which he finds himself is divided into three regions: Cutopia, where the fluffy bun bun bunnies and their ilk live; Zanydu, which anarchists like Flux call home; and Malevoland, where true evil lurks. Trouble is, Count Nefarious of Malevoland has gotten tired of the current balance of power, and has started making bombing raids on the other two regions in his Malevolator, using its ray of evil to turn them as dark and twisted as his homeland. King Hugh of Cutopia promises Drew that, if he first saves them all by collecting the parts necessary to build a Cutifier — the antidote to the Malevolator — he will send Drew back to his own world.

All of that is laid out in the opening movie, after which the plot gears are more or less shifted into neutral while you commence wandering around solving puzzles. And it’s here that the game presents its most welcome surprise: unlike so many other multimedia productions of this era that were sold primarily on the basis of their audiovisuals, this game’s puzzle design is clever, complex, and carefully crafted. I have no knowledge of precisely how this game was tested and balanced, but I have to assume these things were done, and done well. It’s not an easy game by any means — there are dozens and dozens of puzzles here, layered on top of one another in a veritable tangle of dependencies — but it’s never an unfair one. In the best tradition of LucasArts, there are no deaths or dead ends. If you are willing to observe the environment with a meticulous eye, experiment patiently, and enter into the cartoon logic of a world where holes are portable and five minutes on a weight bench can transform your physique, you might just be able to solve this one without hints.

The puzzles manage the neat trick of being whimsical without ever abandoning logic entirely. Take, for example, the overarching meta-puzzle you’re attempting to solve as you wander through the lands. Assembling the Cutifier requires combining matched pairs of objects, such as sugar and spice (that’s a freebie the game gives you to introduce the concept). Other objects waiting for their partners include a dagger, some stripes, a heart, some whistles, some polish, etc. If possible combinations have started leaping to mind already, you might really enjoy this game. If they haven’t, on the other hand, you might not, or you might have fallen afoul of the exception to the rule of its general solubility: it requires a thoroughgoing knowledge of idiomatic English, of the sort that only native speakers or those who have been steeped in the language for many years are likely to possess.

While you’re working out its gnarly puzzle structure, Toonstruck is doing its level best to keep you amused in other ways. Players who are only familiar with Christopher Lloyd from his scenery-chewing portrayals in Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit may be surprised at his relatively low-key performance here; more often than not, he’s acting as the straight man for his wise-cracking sidekick Flux Wildly and other gleefully over-the-top cartoon personalities. In truth, Lloyd was (and is) a more multi-faceted and flexible actor than his popular image might suggest, having decades of experience in film, television, and theater productions of all types behind him. His performance here, in what must have been extremely trying circumstances — he was, after all, constantly expected to say his lines to characters who weren’t actually there — feels impressively natural.

Drew Blanc’s friendship with Flux Wildly is the emotional heart of the story. Their relationship can’t help but bring to mind the much-loved LucasArts adventuring duo Sam and Max. Once again, we have here a subdued humanoid straight man paired with a less anthropomorphic pal who comes complete with a predilection for violence. Once again the latter keeps things lively with his antics and his constant patter. And once again you the player can use him like an inventory item from time to time on the problems you encounter, sometimes with productive and often with amusing results. Flux Wildly may just be my favorite thing in the game. I just wish he was around through the whole game; more on that momentarily.

Although Flux is a lot of fun, the writing in general is a bit of a mixed bag. As, for that matter, were contemporary reviews of the writing. Computer Gaming World found Toonstruck “hilarious”: “With humor that ranges from cutesy to risqué, Toonstruck keeps the laughter coming nonstop.” Next Generation, on the other hand, wrote that “the designers have tried desperately hard to make the game zany, wacky, crazy, twisted, madcap, and side-splittingly hilarious — but it just isn’t. The dialog, slapstick humor, and relentless ‘comedy’ situations are tired. You’ve seen most of these jokes done better 40 years ago.”

In a way, both takes are correct. Toonstruck is sometimes genuinely clever and funny, but just as often feels like it’s trying way too hard. There are reports that the intended audience for the game drifted over its three years in development, that it was originally planned as a kid-friendly game and only slowly moved in a more adult direction. This may explain some of the jarring tonal shifts inside its world. At times, the writing doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, veering wildly from the light and frothy to that depressingly common species of videogame humor that mistakes transgression for wit. The most telling example is also the one scene that absolutely no one who has ever played this game, or for that matter merely watched it being played, can possibly forget, even if she wants to.

While exploring the land of Cutopia, you come upon a sweet, matronly dairy cow and her two BFFs, a cute and fuzzy sheep and a tired old horse. Some time later, Count Nefarious arrives to zap their farm with his Malevolator. Next time you visit, you find that the horse has been turned into glue. Meanwhile the cow is spread-eagled on a “Wheel-O-Luv,” her udders dangling pendulously in a way that looks downright pornographic, cackling with masochistic delight while the leather-clad sheep gives her her delicious punishment. Words fail me… this is something you have to see for yourself.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/toonstruck3.mp4

Here and in a few other places, Toonstruck is just off, weird in a way that is not just unfunny or immature but that actually leaves you feeling vaguely uncomfortable. It demonstrates that, for all Virgin Interactive’s mainstream ambitions, they were still a long way from mustering the thematic, aesthetic, and writerly unity that goes into a slick piece of mass-market entertainment.

Toonstruck is at its best when it is neither trying to trangress for the sake of it nor to please the mass market, but rather when it’s delicately skewering a certain stripe of sickly sweet, creatively bankrupt, lowest-common denominator children’s programming that was all over television during the 1980s and 1990s. Think of The Care Bears, a program that was drawn by some of the same Nelvana animators who worked on Toonstruck; they must surely have enjoyed ripping their mawkish past to shreds here. Or, even better, think of Barney the hideous purple dinosaur, dawdling through excruciating songs with ripped-off melodies and cloying lyrics that sound like they were made up on the spot. Few media creations have ever been as easy to hate as him, as the erstwhile popularity of the Usenet newsgroup alt.Barney.dinosaur.die.die.die will attest.

Being created by so many insiders to the cartoon racket, Toonstruck is well placed to capture the very adult cynicism that oozes from such productions, engineered as they were mainly to sell plush toys to co-dependent children. It does so not least through King Hugh of Cutopia himself, who turns out to be — spoiler alert! — not quite the heroic exemplar of inclusiveness he’s billed as. Meanwhile Flux Wildly and his friends from Zanydu stand for a different breed of cartoons, ones which demonstrate a measure of respect for their young audience.

There does eventually come a point in Toonstruck, more than a few hours in, when you’ve unraveled the web of puzzles and assembled all twelve matched pairs that are required for the Cutifier. By now you feel like you’ve played a pretty complete game, and are expecting the end credits to start rolling soon. Instead the game pulls its next big trick on you: everything goes to hell in a hand basket and you find yourself in Count Nefarious’s dungeon, about to begin a second act whose presence was heretofore hinted at only by the presence of a second, as-yet unused CD in the game’s (real or virtual) box.

Most players agree that this unexpected second act is, for all the generosity demonstrated by the mere fact of its existence, considerably less enjoyable than the first. Your buddy Flux Wildly is gone, the environment darker and more constrained, and your necessary path through the plot more linear. It feels austere and lonely in contrast to what has come before — and not in a good way. Although the puzzle design remains solid enough, I imagine that this is the point where many players begin to succumb to the temptations of hints and walkthroughs. And it’s hard to blame them; the second act is the very definition of an anticlimax — almost a dramatic non sequitur in the way it throws the game out of its natural rhythm.

But a real ending — or at least a form of ending — does finally arrive. Drew Blanc defeats Count Nefarious and is returned to his own world. All seems well — until Flux Wildly contacts him again in the denouement to tell him that Nefarious really isn’t done away with just yet. Incredibly, this was once intended to mark the beginning of a third act, of four in total, all in the service of a parable about the creative process that the game we have only hints at. Laboring under their managers’ ultimatum to ship or else, the developers had to fall back on the forlorn hope of a surprise, sequel-justifying hit in the face of the marketplace headwinds that were blowing against the game. Jennifer McWilliams:

Toonstruck was meant to be a funny story about defeating some really weird bad guys, as it was when released, but originally it was also about defeating one’s own creative demons. It was a tribute to creative folks of all types, and was meant to offer encouragement to any of them that had lost their way. So, the second part of the game had Drew venturing into his own psyche, facing his fears (like a psychotically overeager dentist), living out his fantasies (like meeting his hero, Vincent van Gogh), and eventually finding a way to restore his creative spark.

It does sound intriguing on one level, but it also sounds like much, much too much for a game that already feels rather overstuffed. If the full conception had been brought to fruition, Toonstruck would have been absolutely massive, in the running for the biggest graphic adventure ever made. But whether its characters and puzzle mechanics could have supported the weight of so much content is another question. It seems that all or most of the animation necessary for acts three and four was created — more fruits of that $8 million budget — and this has occasionally led fans to dream of a hugely belated sequel. Yet it is highly doubtful whether any of the animation still exists, or for that matter whether the economics of using it make any more sense now than they did in the mid-1990s. Once all but completely forgotten, Toonstruck has enjoyed a revival of interest since it was put up for sale on digital storefronts some years ago. But only a small one: it would be a stretch to label it even a cult classic.

What we’re left with instead, then, is a fascinating exemplar of a bygone age; the fact that this game could only have appeared in the mid-1990s is a big part of its charm. Then, too, there’s a refreshing can-do spirit about it. Tasked with making something amazing, its creators did their honest best to achieve just that, on multiple levels. If the end result is imperfect in some fairly obvious ways, it never fails to be playable, which is more than can be said for many of its peers. Indeed, it remains well worth playing today for anyone who shivers with anticipation at the prospect of a pile of convoluted, deviously interconnected puzzles. Ditto for anyone who just wants to know what kind of game $8 million would buy you back in 1996.

(Sources: Starlog of May 1984 and August 1993; Computer Gaming World of January 1997; Electronic Entertainment of December 1995; Next Generation of January 1997, February 1997, and April 1998; PC Zone of August 1995, August 1996, and June 1998; Questbusters 117; Retro Gamer 174.

Toonstruck is available for digital purchase on GOG.com.)

Comments
67 Responses

- Gordon Cameron

June 17, 2022 at 4:24 pm

>Before we rush to condemn the philistines who preferred such games to their higher-toned counterparts, we must acknowledge that their preferences had to do with more than sheer bloody-mindedness. First-person shooters and real-time-strategy games could be a heck of a lot of fun, and lent themselves very well to playing with others, whether gathered together in one room or, increasingly, over the Internet.

Speaking as one of said philistines (though I’m not sure where the CRPG, my favorite genre, which was still trundling along before the late-90s boosts of Fallout and Baldur’s Gate, fits on this spectrum), I would offer another consideration: adventure games rely heavily on the use of puzzles, and some of us just don’t find puzzles very much fun. When sprinkled in judiciously, as is often the case with CRPGs or even shooters (e.g. Half-Life), they can add interest and variety; but to me, when they are the backbone of the interactive gameplay, they quickly become frustrating.

- Gordon Cameron

June 17, 2022 at 4:28 pm

>some of us just don’t find puzzles very much fun.

Ah, you addressed that very point a couple of paragraphs down. That’s what I get for replying before reading the whole piece.

- Marco

June 17, 2022 at 4:52 pm

Great to see 1996 finally, having been the person who sent that email!

I played Toonstruck a few years ago and have been meaning to give it a second go. I think this a very fair write-up: there are moments of brilliance (I remember some nifty puzzle work with water on the floor in Nefarious’s Castle) but also some oddly off moments. The development context is clearly part of the explanation, but there is as well that strange rule that you can get away with more in cartoons than in any other visual style. It’s an adventure game staple that there’s an irritating character like a receptionist blocking your path. In every other game you have to devise some complex but harmless distraction (I’m looking at you, Broken Sword). Toonstruck goes “no, let’s just murder them”.

All that material that was cut at the last minute is rather poignant. You may be right that it would never have worked anyway, but I’ve seen intriguing stills of Drew Blank in scenes like a Wild West town, so can’t help wondering.

- Kaj Sotala

June 17, 2022 at 6:33 pm

Interestingly, the whole “Wheel-O-Luv” thing never struck me as bad. Yes, it was kinda weird and uncomfortable, but given that the bad guys had just turned Cutopia into a dystopia, I always figured that a slightly creepy and uncomfortable vibe was intended? I thought it worked well.

- Jim Nelson

June 17, 2022 at 7:10 pm

I just can’t agree with the sentiment that Myst’s success was the result of people buying it for “technology demonstrations, to show off the new computers they had just purchased and to test out the CD-ROM drives they had just installed. They gawked at them for a while and then, satiated, planted themselves back in front of their televisions.”

The second and third installments of Myst may not have surpassed the first in terms of unit sales—how many games could?—but they each sold over a million copies. (As you said, selling 100,000 copies would be respectable, if not an “outright hit.”) By the time they were released, CD-ROM multimedia was old hat. Something else was driving their sales. Even if they don’t represent a long-term sustainable model for video games, the series struck a cultural vein.

- Andrew Plotkin

June 17, 2022 at 9:23 pm

I’m pretty sure that the success of Myst was *largely* as a tech demo or ambient “wander around, fail to solve puzzles” environment. And then the success of Riven was largely due to the success of Myst.

Everybody who loved dense puzzle games bought them and played them, but that’s not ten million people. That was a niche audience that couldn’t possibly sustain expectations of multi-million-selling games. The majority of sales were it’s-famous-for-being-famous.

The boom of 90s copycats (Zork Nemesis, Obsidian, dozens of others) sold much worse than Myst and Riven. You can argue Riven was the best of that era (I might) but you can’t argue it was *ten times* better than all the others.

(Indeed, Myst 3’s sales were a small fraction of Riven’s.) (Not getting into the weird saga where Myst 3 and 4 were contracted out to other studios…)

- Jim Nelson

June 20, 2022 at 4:03 pm

I readily acknowledge the original Myst’s eye-popping sales volume was due to its wow factor for new/upgraded multimedia PCs. That’s why my comment focused on the staying power of its sequels.

“That was a niche audience that couldn’t possibly sustain expectations.” Right. That’s why I said the Myst titles “don’t represent a long-term sustainable model for video games.” But it’s not my overall point, either.

“You can argue Riven was the best of that era (I might) but you can’t argue it was *ten times* better than all the others.” I assume you’re using the generic “you” here, as I’m not arguing that. The sequels’ sales numbers and longevity only tell me the first wasn’t a pure fluke, which is more to my point.

- Derek

June 17, 2022 at 10:00 pm

And the Myst series continued well into the 2000s, only hitting the financial wall in 2005.I don’t doubt that Myst’s cultural impact was lesser than its sales numbers would suggest, but I think the Antiquarian’s characterization is a bit exaggerated.

- Jimmy Maher

June 18, 2022 at 7:58 am

I hesitate to belabor this topic too much, since I think it was already pretty thoroughly hashed out in the Myst article proper, but the evidence strikes me as pretty clear. The Miller brothers themselves have often joked how the vast majority of people who bought Myst never got off the first island. Its success was a fluke; it showed what could be done with a modern multimedia PC just when the industry had need of such a demonstration. And then, as Andrew put it so well, it was famous for being famous, the go-to stocking suffer with every purchase of a new system, and its sales just snowballed. This was the only “cultural vein” it struck; I don’t see its austere landscapes or fractured worlds popping up anywhere else in mainstream 1990s pop culture, outside other games that were vastly less successful. DOOM spawned hits like Dark Forces, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, and eventually Half-Life, and a whole subculture of gaming that is still going strong; the only hits Myst spawned were its own sequels.

Speaking of which: Riven was a hit, yes, but it sold almost precisely one order of magnitude worse than its predecessor. Partly its sales were a tribute to branding and inertia, partly to its marketing as the *next* essential modern tech demo (it remains to this day a stunning game to look at), and partly due to players who really, genuinely engaged with and liked Myst as a game and wanted more of the same. (Yes, such people did exist…) We see the exact same thing play out with The 11th Hour, which sold reasonably well in the abstract, but about one order of magnitude worse than The 7th Guest. (Imagine if, say, one of the numbered Ultimas had sold ten times worse than its predecessor. It would have been considered a disaster…)

I feel a bit bad to have to make this argument because it seems inevitably to become a belittling of Myst, and that’s not my intention at all. As games, Myst and Riven are very good, not only beautiful (which is a feat in itself) but carefully thought-through and rigorously designed; the perception of them in many quarters of gaming culture as illogical and insoluble and somehow made in bad faith is extremely unfair (and probably another result of the fact that so few people who played them really tried to *play* them, if you take my meaning). They can and should be appreciated on their own merits. It’s just that those merits are, as I wrote in the article, orthogonal to their commercial success. They’re niche titles that sold like blockbusters through a fluke of time and place. More power to the Miller brothers; it’s great to be good, but it’s even better to be lucky and good.

- Richard Wells

June 18, 2022 at 9:07 pm

I think hidden object games are descendants of Myst and hidden object games are very successful. Those have the same standing in front of a static image while manipulating objects to get clues as mood music plays design. The puzzles are much simpler though. Myst took the puzzles to the limit of acceptable duration. Many of the Myst clones became an exercise in frustration as the player has to set something and then spend the next hour finding out what the result was before returning to try a different setting and repeating the process.

- Poddy

June 20, 2022 at 12:57 pm

I was a kid when Myst came out, in a family of early tech adopters. Myst was in my house because it was the Big Thing – definitely not because my dad wanted to play it. My uncles came to whistle over it and wax nostalgic over the days when Pong was state of the art. Myst was not the Blake Stone/Wolfenstein3D/Rise of the Triad type stuff that my dad thought of as GAMES. In fact, I remember all of us taking a crack at wandering around Myst, and it never occurred to me that it was a game, something intended to be processed to a resolution then stopped, for much this reason – a problem I had a lot as a kid.
But anecdotally, I can also tell you that I was in a very posh private Catholic school where most students had high-tech PCs and a copy of Myst at home – and there were, in fact, a couple of pockets of girls trading notes over it for a couple of years and feverishly discussing rooms they’d managed to be in and things they’d seen. My school had bought some copies with their new library computers, possibly by mistake because students were not allowed to play games on school machines, and they sat behind various CD-ROM encyclopedias. Myst was AROUND, and was even sold in office supply stores. So from experience, I completely buy it as an expensive toy, that few treated as a game.

- Alex Smith

June 17, 2022 at 7:58 pm

“he had first made a name for himself in his homeland as the founder of the budget label Mastertronic”

He would more properly be termed a co-founder, as Frank Herman, Terry Medway, and Alan Sharam were his partners in the venture and equally critical to the company’s success. The whole thing was Herman’s idea in the first place.

- Jimmy Maher

June 18, 2022 at 8:02 am

Thanks!

- mycophobia

June 17, 2022 at 9:12 pm

“Instead the game pulls it’s next big trick on you”

“its”

Sorry for just pointing out grammar/spelling stuff when I comment, I rarely have anything insightful to add. I do like your articles a lot though.

- Jimmy Maher

June 18, 2022 at 8:03 am

Thanks!

- Peter Olausson

June 17, 2022 at 9:19 pm

A dagger, some stripes, a heart … No, can’t say possible combinations have started leaping to my mind. What are they?

- Andrew Plotkin

June 17, 2022 at 9:25 pm

Off the top of my head, it must have been “cloak and dagger”, “stars and stripes”, “bells and whistles”, “spit and polish”. Maybe “heart and soul” but there are other possibilities there.

Very much a _Nord and Bert_ style puzzle.

- Jimmy Maher

June 18, 2022 at 8:04 am

Five for five. Congratulations!

- Glorkvorn

June 18, 2022 at 4:44 am

I feel like there was this idea from that time- the late 80s/early 90s- of a certain type of computer game. One where the computer can auto-generate a fully immersive environment and respond perfectly to all your commands, even very unexpected ones. Two specific examples are the holodeck in Star Trek, and the Fantasy Game in Ender’s Game.

There’s a Star Trek episode where they’re doing Sherlock Holmes mysteries in the holodeck, and it’s too easy because they already know the answers. So they tell the computer: “generate an original mystery, with a genius level opponent as the villain”. And the computer… does that, with no problems. Then they play through the mystery, with the computer understanding and reacting perfectly to everything they do, generating new original content the whole time.

That would be amazing! And I feel like that’s what these early 90s adventure games wanted to be. But they can’t- a computer can’t generate new stories that way, or react to open ended human commands. At least not at that time, maybe we’re getting there now with modern AI, but it’s still pretty spotty. The closest thing we have to that is tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, where a human acts as the “computer”, and most of the action takes place in your imagination. but a real computer is still just a big abacus for crunching numbers. So you’re left with a story that’s almost all pre-written, and the player having no real control over the story, except maybe what order events happen in, and a lot of irritating breaks while you try things that don’t work and don’t give any meaningful response.

Sometimes it can be funny, when the games are self aware about it. I think that’s why the wacky comedy adventure games tend to do best- at least they incorporate the absurdity of having the player do nonsensical actions. But the adventure games that try to be serious just seem like they would have been much better off as movies, without all the interruptions from the player.

I think games like DOOM and Warcraft are more successful because they’re actually suited to the medium of computers. In both of those, the player really does have meaningful choices. You can go anywhere, shoot anywhere, move your units wherever you want, and the computer will respond appropriately. Granted you’re still stuck just killing everything, but there’s an infinite number of ways to kill things! The computer automates all the tedious dice-rolling and statistics tracking that you’d have in a tabletop game, and provides the perfect interface for interacting with its world. They wouldn’t work in any other format (at least not without changing a lot), whereas I could easily imagine turning adventure games into a movie or book, as long as you take out the puzzles.

- Gordon Cameron

June 18, 2022 at 6:23 pm

Yeah, I think this also relates to why RPGs (and other genres) have tended to be combat focused. Combat is something that a computer can model pretty well and, as you say, there can be many permutations within the rules.

Any kind of storytelling is much, much harder to generate in any dynamic way. The two solutions usually hit upon are a) linear storytelling, or b) branching-path storytelling. These are both excellent adjuncts to gameplay but aren’t really gameplay in their own right (maybe the latter is, a bit, but for my money it’s not particularly engaging gameplay). And you always get that feeling that you are in the hands of a top-down storyteller. This isn’t necessarily a bad feeling (it’s why we watch movies and read novels, etc.) but it sometimes clashes against the ‘do anything, go anywhere, empower-the-player’ appeal of so many games.

- Lisa H.

June 18, 2022 at 5:18 am

This mooted merger of Silicon Valley and Hollywood — often abbreviated as “Siliwood”

Granted I was only around 15 years old, so I may not have been paying attention in the right places (like, we took Sierra’s InterAction magazine and I think that was about it other than what I might peruse in a software store), but I can’t remember ever hearing this term used at the time. It sounds so incredibly marketroidy.

an adventure was a once-and-done endeavor that might last a week or two at best

…you solve adventures incredibly fast, then! Just as a random example off the top of my head, I finally got into Monkey Island about 9 months ago, and have encountered plenty of stories of people being unable to solve Monkey Island 2 (particularly, but also 1 and 3) for months on end back in the 90s.

I’m probably unusual in that I don’t consider adventure games “one and done”: the majority that I’ve completed, I replay again and again. But even aside from that, wasn’t the whole thing of the times to try to make them as long as possible, even if it came to putting arbitrary obstacles in the way of the player in the name of extending the hours you got for your bucks? Ads would boast of tens of hours at the least, which is only “a week or two” if you’re doing it all day, every day like a full-time job.

[Lloyd’s] performance here, in what must have been extremely trying circumstances — he was, after all, constantly expected to say his lines to characters who weren’t actually there —

Completely unlike what he had to do in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, eh? ;)

- Jimmy Maher

June 18, 2022 at 8:14 am

The term “Siliwood” was quite common inside the industry, but perhaps somewhat less so among gamers. You’ll find it, for example, all over the early issues of Game Developer magazine.

Yes, adventures can be replayed in the same way that one might reread a good book, but most people only do that after a span of years. I don’t think it’s a possibility that affected buying habits in the moment; when buying a shiny new game, you were thinking of the next month’s entertainment, not what you might be returning to five years in the future. ;)

The state of “stuckness” and the way it extended playing time is a whole other discussion, and in fact another reason why many people turned away from adventure games. You could spend an evening alone, beating your head fruitlessly against a puzzle that was keeping you from progressing — or you could spend it with your friends, actively *playing* a game. For many people, the choice was obvious.

- Lisa H.

January 10, 2023 at 9:21 pm

So I recently played through this over my winter break. It’s kind of too bad what this article has to say about its reach exceeding its grasp and it having to be cut off to even get out the door, because I think there was some potential there. If one can stomach being doused in 1990s American cartoon wackiness at every turn, it’s not a bad game. It’s a lot more restrained in its use of FMV than some contemporaries I can think of. (It looked to me like they recorded Christopher Lloyd doing a sort of “movement inventory” that they could then assemble in various ways, something like making an artificial voice by recording a real voice doing a phonetic inventory.) The puzzle design was mostly almost modern in how forgiving it was. I did not get into any “dead man walking” situations and could always backtrack if I had missed something. I ran into a couple of “magic pixel” situations where I did not see an interactable object (oh, for a hotspot revealer) and really got steamed over one puzzle where I had the correct solution, but the game was neither taking an implied action nor at least allowing me to combine two items in inventory to get a hint that I was on the right track, and I thus spent a lot of time looking for an otherwise logical-seeming object that did not exist before I gave up and looked at a walkthrough. But other than the “classic” puzzles that I could have done without (you know the type – sliding tiles, a bookshelf that’s a logic puzzle to work out what order to pull the books in, a dreadfully long round of Simon), there were only a couple of points where I got stuck and couldn’t solve it on my own. That’s probably painfully easy by many people’s standards! But anyway, it was certainly good enough in writing and acting (the voice acting of course includes many well known talents and is quite high quality) to keep my interest. Certainly worth the $0 I paid for it, since I got it on that day in 2019 when they were giving it away for free, heh.

- Daniel Wolf

June 18, 2022 at 5:58 am

“Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the hit 1988 movie which had wowed audiences with the novel feat of inserting cartoon characters into a live-action world” — Actually, this was far from a novel feat by 1988. Other movies had done it before, as in the penguin scene in Mary Poppins (1964). I believe the novelty of Who Framed Roger Rabbit was more in the sheer scale and realism of its animations.

“… all in the service of a parable about the creative process that the game we have only hints at.” — Something isn’t quite right with this sentence.

“… it requires a thoroughgoing knowledge of idiomatic English, of the sort that only native speakers or those who have been steeped in the language for many years are likely to possess. (This may help to explain why Toonstruck, a commercial disappointment in its homeland, was an absolute bomb in Europe.)” — Actually, I don’t think this reasoning holds. I played Toonstruck in German back in the day, and they’d gone to great lengths to localize the puns, actually changing all the images on the malevolator. For instance, in the English version, there’s an image of needles, prompting you to insert bowling pins (pins and needles). In the German version, there’s an image of a child instead. When you insert those same pins, you get the German idiom “child and pins” (Kind und Kegel), which Leo tells me translates to “bag and baggage”. Not all the pairs are as intuitive as they are in English, but I remember finding them quite logical back then.

- Jimmy Maher

June 18, 2022 at 8:18 am

The sentence in question was as intended. ;) But that’s great to hear about the localizations. I hope they’re available in the modern digital-download versions.

- Mayhaym

June 18, 2022 at 4:03 pm

Well, Germany and France were pretty big markets (and have always been militant in preserving their languages) so you did get localisations/translations there. But Scandinavia for instance usually didn’t (as far as I know), and for me – living in Iceland – it was never going to happen, so these embedded English-isms would have been very hit or miss.

- Lee Hauser

June 19, 2022 at 7:08 pm

I think the real attraction of Roger Rabbit, other than the quantity of Toonage on display, was the coming together of the biggest Toon universes, Disney and Warner Brothers, on the same screen. As children of the 1950s, the very idea that these two beloved, yet completely separate, worlds could exist was an incredible concept. The fact that it was done so well was mind-boggling.

- Jack Brounstein

June 22, 2022 at 1:19 am

It’s true that Mary Poppins (and Anchors Aweigh before it) mixed live action and animation, but there was very little interaction between the worlds–it’s pretty clear that the penguins were drawn in around Dick van Dyke’s dance, and so forth. Roger Rabbit, on the other hand, went to incredible lengths to present the characters as sharing an environment, so Bob Hoskins will seamlessly hand a glass to Roger, Jessica will grab someone by the cheeks, or one of those very penguins will waddle by holding a non-animated tray of food. (This also extended to simulating realistic lighting on the toons, essential for the shadowy noir atmosphere.)
It’s not for nothing that the movie was recognized as an incredible technical achievement at the time.

- Patrick Ingram

June 18, 2022 at 6:07 am

Odd coincidence that this came out the same year as Stay Tooned, another Roger Rabbit-type adventure.

- Alex L.

June 18, 2022 at 7:58 am

Since I was obsessed with adventures in the early to mid-nineties as a kid, Toon Struck was a game I always wanted to play when I first saw it in a magazine. I never saw it in a shop around me though. As I grew older and the genre was on its way out, I steered away from adventures and moved over to RPGs of different kinds. I found it amazing that I actually could develop my character while still enjoying a great story with interesting dialogues. When adventures became popular again, I tried one or two of them, but I never enjoyed them as much as I did when I was young. Compared to the joy of character-development in RPGs, adventures now seemed pretty one-sided to me and I didn´t take the time to explore the genre any further.

Speaking about interactive movies, Final Fantasy 7 on the playstation back in the day was the first game that introduced me to the genre. While it sure lacked the interactivity of adventure games, I never felt passive or bored. I played some other games in the same style and never had the urge to turn them off since the character development was so intriguing to me. So, no matter how interactive a game is, it´s not interesting for me when skill development is not possible.

- Jimmy Maher

June 18, 2022 at 8:23 am

I think I’m actually going to play Final Fantasy VII. It will be my first ever encounter with a Japanese CRPG. Should be interesting, if nothing else…

But to your broader point: yes, I do think a lot of what adventure games were trying to do migrated into CRPGs, in a way that many people found more satisfying, using a more simulation-oriented approach in place of set-piece puzzles — albeit at a cost to the *types* of stories and settings that games could engage with. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that the CRPG drought ended just as the adventure drought began.

- Keith Palmer

June 18, 2022 at 11:51 am

Your mentioning you might play Final Fantasy VII has me thinking of Matt Alt’s recent book Pure Invention, the introduction to which begins with that game and proposes its release marked the moment when “Japanese pop culture” really started being sold and accepted in a much less modified (or less “disguised as something else”) form in America. With that said, the book ranges far further than just that game, so I can suppose I can’t just promote it as one of your primary sources.

- Jimmy Maher

June 19, 2022 at 1:23 pm

I’ve made a note of the book for when the time comes. Thanks!

- Vulpes

June 19, 2022 at 9:01 pm

I haven’t read his argument, so I can’t speak as to whether he’s right or not, but personally I would have said that if any game marks that transition it would be Pokémon.

- Keith Palmer

June 21, 2022 at 10:45 am

Alt does make a big deal of Pokemon as well later in the book, and for greater length than he covered Final Fantasy VII in the introduction. Conceivably the introduction could be seen as “trying to invoke visual effect.” As I said, as much interest as I took in Pure Invention I’m not quite sure it can be treated as “a single source to explain everything here…”

- Gordon Cameron

June 18, 2022 at 6:33 pm

While it’s true that e.g. SSI was floundering by the early ’90s, I’m wondering if there was much of a CRPG drought from the consumer’s point of view. Even as Ultima committed seppuku in 1994, you have Elder Scrolls beginning with Arena (and Daggerfall two years later). Might & Magic was still trundling along (World of Xeen is ’94). There was Darklands in ’92 and Betrayal at Krondor in ’93. SSI’s ‘last gasp,’ from a consumer perspective, constituted some strong games; they were there to be bought and played, even if users didn’t bother to do so. Ill-fated projects like Battlespire and Stonekeep were releasing at this time as well. Diablo comes out in ’96 (granted, there was plenty of debate over whether it counted as an RPG at all). Blink and you’re up to ’97 and Fallout.

I guess compared to the flood of CRPGs coming out in the mid to late 80s it was rather slim pickings. ‘Drought’ might be a relative term. The thing that gets me is how quickly it all happened. Two or three years hardly seems like any time at all to me, now. But then, the ‘great video game crash’ didn’t last more than ~3 years either.

- Jimmy Maher

June 18, 2022 at 8:09 pm

It was definitely remarked at the time. You can find comments scattered throughout the gaming magazines of the mid-1990s: “There aren’t too many games of this type being made anymore,” etc.

While some CRPGs were of course being made, they were a pretty underwhelming lot. The late SSI games tended to be half-realized and/or plagued by bugs. World of Xeen was a compilation, not an original game; there were no new Might and Magic CRPGs for five years while New World Computing switched their focus to the Heroes strategy series. Arena and Daggerfall both received mixed reviews and were not huge sellers (they would likely be entirely forgotten today were it not for Morrowind’s coming along years later). Ditto Battlespire and Stonekeep (which are pretty much forgotten). Meanwhile Ultima became a platformer and Wizardry became an adventure game.

Diablo was actually slated for release in early January 1997, although there are reports that it reached some store shelves between Christmas and New Years. Still, it’s best considered a 1997 title. It and to a slightly less extent Fallout were the games that revived the genre in 1997, followed by Baldur’s Gate and Might and Magic VI in 1998. It’s very reasonable to speak of a four-year period when fewer CRPGs were being made and those that were were attracting relatively few sales and little attention in the gaming press.

- Sam

June 18, 2022 at 8:37 am

I still find it incredible that the official name of the movie is “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” without a question mark. But yah, I do remember that movie and how excited everyone got about “WOAH, people and animation together? Crazy!”.

Thanks for this write-up and, uh, that weird BDSM cow video :)

- DDG Ahab

June 18, 2022 at 10:42 am

I am reminded, perhaps not coincidentally, of Peter Jackson’s early “masterpiece” Meet the Feebles.

- Alex L.

June 18, 2022 at 11:23 am

@ Jimmy Maher: If you are really going to try FF7, it would be interesting to read about your (first) impressions. The last time I played it, I was not impressed anymore.

- Vulpes

June 18, 2022 at 8:43 pm

I understand what you mean when you say that 1996 marked the beginning of the end for adventure games, but I always find it odd that few adventure game fans are willing to acknowledge how much of the spirit of those games lived on in action-adventure titles. Sure, lots of them leaned heavily on the action end of things, but, to use one example, many of the Zelda games are realio, trulio adventure games, with inventory puzzles and everything. Sure, they have combat, but so do lots of adventure games in one form or another, and many of Zelda’s enemies are basically puzzles anyway. You can’t tell me that defeating a well-armored giant lizard by feeding it a bomb wouldn’t be right at home in an Infocom game.

So if you’re open to playing console games like Final Fantasy VII, I’d like to encourage you to also consider playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. After all, for a long time those two games were seen as rivals of sorts. Plus afterwards you can play the sequel, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, which, in addition to being a great adventure game, has tons of atmosphere and thematic weight, plus a central mechanic that can be seen as a dramatic evolution of the dynamic world in Infocom’s Deadline.

I’ve been reading your blog, off and on, for a while now, and as I was always a console gamer as a child I’ve always been mildly disappointed that you don’t give the consoles much attention. Of course, I’ve read your reasons, and I totally respect your right to define your own interests. I hope you can forgive these suggestions, but I was so intrigued to hear you say you plan on playing Final Fantasy VII that I felt I had to make them.

- Jimmy Maher

June 19, 2022 at 8:24 am

We’ll see. My hedge in the case of Final Fantasy VII is that it did get a Windows release back in the day…

- Vulpes

June 19, 2022 at 9:06 pm

Be careful with that line of thinking, you might find yourself playing one of the truly heinous home computer ports of Street Fighter II.

- Jimmy Maher

June 20, 2022 at 4:38 am

There’s little danger of that. Not the sort of game I tend to find interesting. ;)

- gamerindreams

August 30, 2022 at 8:40 pm

Come on Jimmy! Even Chet on the CRPGAddict plays console RPGs now…I would love to see a writeup on how it changed platforms starting from Nintendo and finally ending up on the Playstation! I think you’ve covered the western gaming industry so well – why not a peek at the eastern one?

- Jason

July 27, 2023 at 9:31 am

I actually remember the Windows version of Final Fantasy VII being better than the PS1 version since it ran at 640×480 instead of the PlayStation’s resolution, which I believe was 320×240. If you play this version of the game, it’s worth noting that it originally shipped with a 4 MB SoundFont that provided for greatly improved music on compatible sound cards. The FFVII soundtrack – which is one of the game’s best features – sounds horrible on General MIDI. I’m sure there’s probably some way to make SoundFonts work with modern sound cards.

- Ross

July 27, 2023 at 3:37 pm

I’m not sure how you configure it in windows, but I think most modern computers are almost always emulating midi in software, so soundfonts are pretty straightforward. I know in Linux you edit the timidity conf file to change the font.

- Jesse Fuchs

June 26, 2022 at 4:24 pm

As a Mac-owning mostly-console gamer in his teens/20s in the 90s, I think there are some core differences between the somatics of consoles and computers at the period—lean-forward vs. lean-back just as much as mouse & keyboard vs. the Nintendo 64’s Jim Woodring creature of a controller—which make the puzzles feel much different in Zelda than in a point-and-click, even if the puzzles are isomorphic. Right now, I’m playing a Diablo game (II) for the first time, on Switch, and it’s interesting how much less like an MMO it feels than like a very simple beat ’em up with a weirdly byzantine cooldown powers system, just because of the context and controller.

Which isn’t to say that I wouldn’t like to see him look at consoles, especially as things get more and more blurred throughout the 90s. In fact, I would happily donate an extra $50 to the Patreon if Jimmy wrote a compare-and-contrast of Majora’s Mask and The Last Express—preferably, with a focus on how cartridge-and-controller vs. CD-and-mouse affordances affect their post-Deadline approach to the clockwork mystery subgenre. In purely selfish terms alone, it would easily be worth it to be able to use that in a reading packet the next time I have to teach about narrative game design, never my strong suit.

- Jesse Fuchs

June 26, 2022 at 4:25 pm

$75, if there’s also a multi-paragraph digression on how cool Tomi Pierce was.

- Vulpes

June 27, 2022 at 3:05 pm

The puzzles in Zelda do “feel” different than in a traditional point-and-click, but in many ways I think it’s to Zelda’s advantage. In a typical point and click, the actual items don’t actually have any impact on how you use them—you just select them and press the use button or whatever. There doesn’t need to be any relationship between the item and the problem it’s solving, as many poorly-designed puzzles can attest. Whereas the way items work in Zelda is closer to “actually” using the item—for example, correctly solving a puzzle involving the boomerang requires you understand the flight path it will follow and throwing it at the right place. I think this keeps the developers (more) honest—since the items work in a semi-mechanical way, they can’t make solutions be arbitrary combinations of items.

- Ross

June 27, 2022 at 6:02 pm

I would say that a big and mostly positive shift with the decline of “pure” adventure in favor of the encorporation of adventure elements into other genres is that the “set piece” puzzles common in late adventure games evolved into physics puzzles that had to play by the same rules as the rest of the game.

- Alex L.

June 19, 2022 at 6:02 am

Fallout is worth mentioning for sure when you want to speak about a good working combination of both the adventure and the roleplaying mechanics. While I never played such a complex title before, the adventure mechanics that became apparent in the vast dialogue options and in the different possibilities you could solve a quest felt so familiar that the game never seemed too confusing to me.

- Alex L.

June 19, 2022 at 12:08 pm

@ Vulpes: I can possibly see your point, but as someone who grew up playing on consoles as well as on the computer, in my point of view it´s quite safe to say that it is not possible to mix up these plattforms when talking about the genres of RPG or Adventure. Speaking from a historical point of view, while there may be some similarities between them, the games are just too different to compare in general when it comes to gameplay or world settings.

Personally I think it´s a good thing that Mr. Maher keeps his focus when talking about games. By the way, buying and playing the windows release of FF7 for the first time remains one of my most magical gaming experience ever. I was a fanboy in a second. By the way, I hope my postings don´t read too weird, writing in english is really hard for me.

- Vulpes

June 19, 2022 at 5:16 pm

I wouldn’t presume to tell Jimmy what he has to cover, and it’s entirely reasonable for him to concentrate on games on personal computers instead of consoles (at least for now—the distinction becomes less and less meaningful as time goes on). But I would argue that there are certain console games that, even in this era, were influential enough on gaming as a whole that they shouldn’t be ignored. I believe that Ocarina of Time is such a game. Of course, it’s his prerogative to decide if he agrees.

- Captain Rufus

June 24, 2022 at 6:08 am

I have to be honest in that both then and now I make no distinction of platform. A good game is good period. It’s just sometimes the platform lets something like Fallout 2 exist while most Playstation and Saturn rpgs were mostly linear slogs. But the Playstation had the Kings Field series which while much slower, were far better and more polished than what Ultima Underworlds and the Elder Scrolls of the time managed.

- Alex L.

June 19, 2022 at 5:40 pm

Reading about the influence of Zelda and of course Final Fantasy on the gaming industry as a whole, I can agree on this point. But to get really back to the topic: I now remember that I watched the ending of Toonstruck on YT. It felt totally unsatisfying to me since you spend so much time and still didn´t reach your (final) goal. Basically, you don´t get a real reward.

- Jaina

June 25, 2022 at 2:50 pm

The sequel adventure ideas remind me pretty strongly of psychonauts, and would be very interesting to see

- Jesse Fuchs

June 26, 2022 at 5:01 pm

I have owned Toonstruck since [checks GOG order history] June 14, 2019, when they were giving it away for free for a day and people on Twitter were saying nice things about it, but I never actually opened it up. I didn’t really play point-and-click games in the 90s, as I was much more of a console gamer by that point. But I have enjoyed a lot of VR escape room/puzzle games over the pandemic, so I feel more primed to check it out now.

Anyway, one thought I wanted to follow up on as a pattern is…well, I don’t have a good term for it, but the observation that the peak of a genre often occurs when it’s also a Dead Man Walking. I can think of several examples from the 80s/early 90s, some bigger than others:

• As Jimmy alludes, if you had to pick a peak year for Infocom games on purely aesthetic grounds, you’d probably go with 1986, i.e. the year after Cornerstone’s failure single-handedly (if perhaps only prematurely, since it’s hard to know how they’d have pivoted in a post-commercial text adventure world) destroyed the company’s future.

• Best year for Atari games is arguably 1983—certainly in terms of Activision’s lineup, that’s what I’d go with, with Keystone Kapers and Space Shuttle as exemplars. Although really, if you want to be impressed by an Activision game, you’d go with 1984’s Pitfall II, featuring the only use of the DPC chip, adaptive music, and, as far as I can tell, the first pure use of “there’s no lives, dying just sends you back to the last checkpoint”.

• Jimmy’s written extremely well about 1987 being both the pinnacle of the Commodore 64’s dominance of the console interregnum—California Games, Pirates!, and Pool of Radiance—and the start of its very rapid overshadowing by Nintendo’s cost, convenience, and Mario/Zelda knockout combo. Although in the UK, you still keep getting first-tier Commodore games until the early 90s, when the Amiga and Super NES start to gain enough ground.

• Similarly, the largest (768K!) non-Japan-only NES cartridge is 1993’s Kirby’s Adventure, which is two years after the SNES comes out and is a sequel to a Game Boy game, made by a designer who at that point had been working with the 6502 chip for over a decade. Similarly, probably the most impressive Apple II games are Ultima V and Prince of Persia, both made by people who know those systems so backwards and forwards that they’re arguably irrationally unwilling to move on and would rather just have other folks port them to the versions lots of people will actually buy.

I think that last bit gets at the paradox—even in the case of Infocom, it’s partly a matter of them finally going over to ZIL+ and 128K with Trinity and AMFV, but probably more about people getting comfortable enough with the format that you can have old hands like Leibling and Meretzky thinking bigger, along with a second sub-generation of folks with fresh angles like Moriarity and Briggs. When you look at “retro” programming contests, of course, it’s clear that there’s always more room to explore with these systems—but it does hit different when it’s a mainstream commercial product, instead of a hobbyist subculture.

- Jesse Fuchs

June 26, 2022 at 5:10 pm

P.S. I didn’t list Cinemaware’s two most impressive games being It Came From The Desert (1989) and Wings (1990) solely because Jimmy mentioned Wings (1927) at the beginning of the article, and my incredibly powerful brain apparently decided that this made it redundant.

- Sarah Summers

August 20, 2022 at 4:34 pm

“ Similarly, probably the most impressive Apple II games are Ultima V and Prince of Persia, both made by people who know those systems so backwards and forwards that they’re arguably irrationally unwilling to move on and would rather just have other folks port them to the versions lots of people will actually buy.”

I think your premise is right on, but I would push a little deeper into the Apple II catalogue for the examples. Origin had a long tail of *incredibly* impressive Apple II games towards the end that, as you say, represented a totally irrational clinging to a dead platform.

I would cite games like Space Rogue (solid fill 3D space battles!), Knights of Legend (elaborate blow-by-blow combat with a complicated GUI that took hours for a single skirmish) and Windwalker (full-screen real-time martial arts combat inside a huge RPG!).

All these games did things that the platform should not have been capable of, but they made it work (albeit at frame rates that are totally unacceptable by today’s standards). They were all amazing games. The sheer scope of Knights of Legend has to be seen to be believed. The manual is a small phone book of maps, weapons details, cultural artifacts, etc. All of these games would have been million-sellers five years earlier. However coming out when they did, they are perfect examples of Jimmy’s point about the best things coming out after the death of the platform/medium (and your point about technical experts clinging irrationally to a platform they know and like).

- Jesse Fuchs

June 26, 2022 at 5:12 pm

(Also, feel free to replace the word “genre” with “platform” in Paragraph 2 if it annoys you— if you think for too long about platform studies, the two can start to really blur.)

- Tim Kaiser

June 27, 2022 at 5:12 am

The idea that Myst and 7th Guest and Sherlock Holmes were only successful because they were the new technology still rings true today. In recent years we have had new technologies like 3D movies/TV, motion controls for video games, music video games with plastic controllers and things like that which initially were successful and sold well and then later people got tired of them as the appeal of the gimmick wore off and then sales dropped off and they all stopped getting made. Just like Jimmy’s comment, this isn’t to belittle all those things but it’s the reality of what happened in the market.

- Bobby Impollonia

June 29, 2022 at 9:40 pm

The (terrible) movie Cool World was released in 1992 and is a mix of live action and animation in which an artist is pulled into the cartoon world of characters he created. It also is “off, weird in a way that is not just unfunny or immature but that actually leaves you feeling vaguely uncomfortable”, as you say about this.

Coincidence? Obviously, most of the similarities are because both are imitating Roger Rabbit, but was this game also influenced by Cool World?

- Jimmy Maher

June 30, 2022 at 4:51 am

I’m afraid I don’t know the movie, but I’ve never seen it mentioned by anyone involved with Toonstruck. My guess would be that it was just a coincidence…

- Jeff Nyman

October 23, 2022 at 7:33 pm

Great article on an interesting game!

“But here’s the rub: most people — perhaps even most gamers — really don’t like solving puzzles all that much at all.”

I would probably argue that’s not true at all but with the caveat that you have to define “puzzle” broadly in games. For example, consider “Impossible Mission” by Epyx (to pick just one example). It was basically a platformer. But you had to figure out which furniture had passcodes and then where those passcodes had relevance. Then you had to collect a series of passcodes to get into Elvin’s stronghold at the end. Compare/contrast that with another game like “Countdown to Shutdown.” Compare/contrast that with a game like, say, “Infiltrator.”

Puzzles? Perhaps not. But certainly puzzle-like behavior, including navigation. Even remembering your path through levels in games, like “DOOM” or “Wolfenstein 3D,” could be seen as a form of layout puzzle to be solved.

What people rejected with these graphical adventures was, as you note, the static puzzles. And this is largely why text adventures were rejected as a whole, I believe. They were really nothing but puzzles; even the ones that tried to be more focused on the literary.

There’s a reason why Sierra was able to thread that needle for awhile with their parser-based AGI/SCI games that eventually morphed into pure point-and-click. There’s a reason why “Maniac Mansion” and “Monkey Island” did so well even though they too were basically really just about puzzles.

“…who’s played by Ben Stein, an actor of, shall we say, limited range…”

No, we should not say. :) The calling of history is not one of mean-spiritedness or humor at someone’s expense. If we’re going to level this charge at Stein, Christopher Lloyd could probably be seen in the same light as he most often played quirky, off-beat characters. From an acting standpoint, Stein is known as a character actor and had chosen to specialize in a particular type of such acting. He honed an image as much as Lloyd did.

“Being created by so many insiders to the cartoon racket, Toonstruck is well placed to capture the very adult cynicism that oozes from such productions,…”

Agreed! And I think this is one of the areas, historically, where “Toonstruck” didn’t step all that well. Think of “Shrek” for example. When that came out it managed to be funny as its own thing but with aspects of both overt and covert digs at Disney. But never anything one could take too much offense at necessarily.

“Toonstruck” had a chance, with said insiders, to do something similar and I’ve always felt they really missed the mark on that. Maybe. It’s also not the direction they should have been going, most likely, unless they had the target audience firmly set, which as you note, they seem to have vacillated on.

“it would be a stretch to label it even a cult classic.”

Agreed. And this has always been, I feel, one of the sadder aspects of this game. I think it should have been able to reach that status but it never has. It makes you wonder what the case would have been if they went with a more “Day of the Tentacle” approach to the animation — no real actors at all but relatively quality animation and thus budget could have perhaps been allocated differently.

“whether its characters and puzzle mechanics could have supported the weight of so much content is another question”

Very much so! And I often think this is a fascinating question for why adventure games never really became “epic” in that sense, in terms of stories. The mechanics of adventure games, particularly text adventures, often couldn’t support that “weight.”

Even now I find this interesting in games that reach and reach hard, regardless of context. Consider, as a very recent example, “Elden Ring.” A lot of players — even those enthusiastic for the game — wonder how much a Dark Souls mechanic and style really sits well with open world concepts. In film circles, consider how people still respond to something like “Phantasm” that tried to overlay its horror aspects with something much more psychological with people questioning if that “weight” could be supported by what was (allegedly) a horror film.

“Toonstruck” was, without doubt, ambitious. But sometimes being ambitious can be the thing that actually kills you if that ambition is not honed and framed well. I think the comments from McWilliams indicate that such honing and framing simply didn’t exist or, at the very, were fluid enough to prevent a cohesive vision that could be delivered in a way that would foster enough interest that would, in turn, demand more from this intriguing game.

- bert

December 21, 2022 at 7:01 am

Zelenhgorm Land of the Blue Moon , i really enjoyed that one.

Such a shame we didn’t get the full run ,forever stuck on episode one.

- greaterscott

January 10, 2023 at 4:10 pm

“Ditto for anyone who just wants to know what kind of game $8 million would buy you back in 1996” – exactly. It’s definitely worth a playthrough, even before Toonstruck 2 and the remaster of the original become a reality, because of the production value that went into it at such a weird time for games. It’s something of a phenomenon – a unique piece of gaming history.

Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars
July 1, 2022

The games of Revolution Software bore the stamp of the places in which they were conceived. Work on Beneath a Steel Sky, the company’s breakthrough graphic adventure, began in Hull, a grim postindustrial town in the north of England, and those environs were reflected in the finished product’s labyrinths of polluted streets and shuttered houses. But by the time Revolution turned to the question of a follow-up, they had upped stakes for the stately city of York. “We’re surrounded by history here,” said Revolution co-founder Tony Warriner. “York is a very historical city.” Charles Cecil, Revolution’s chief motivating force in a creative sense, felt inspired to make a very historical game.

The amorphous notion began to take a more concrete form after he broached the idea over dinner one evening to Sean Brennan, his main point of contact at Revolution’s publisher Virgin Interactive. Brennan said that he had recently struggled through Umberto Eco’s infamously difficult postmodern novel Foucault’s Pendulum, an elaborate satire of the conspiratorial view of history which is so carefully executed that its own conspiracy theories wind up becoming more convincing than most good-faith examples of the breed. Chasing a trail of literally and figuratively buried evidence across time and space… it seemed ideal for an adventure game. Why not do something like that? Perhaps the Knights Templar would make a good starting point. Thus was born Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars.

Our respectable books of history tell us that the Knights Templar was a rich and powerful but relatively brief-lived chivalric order of the late Middle Ages in Europe. It was founded in 1119 and torn up root and branch by a jealous King Philip IV of France and Pope Clement V in 1312. After that, it played no further role in history. Or did it?

People have been claiming for centuries that the order wasn’t really destroyed at all, that it just went underground in one sense or another. Meanwhile other conspiracy theories — sometimes separate from, sometimes conjoined with the aforementioned — have posited that the Knights left a fabulous hidden treasure behind somewhere, which perchance included even the Holy Grail of Arthurian legend.

In the 1960s, the old stories were revived and adapted into a form suitable for modern pop culture by a brilliant French fabulist named Pierre Plantard, who went so far as to plant forged documents in his homeland’s Bibliothèque Nationale. Three Anglo authors ingeniously expanded upon his deceptions — whether they were truly taken in by them or merely saw them as a moneymaking opportunity is unclear — in 1982 in the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. It connected the Knights Templar to another, more blasphemous conspiracy theory: that Jesus Christ had not been celibate as stated in the New Testament, nor had his physical form actually died on the cross. He had rather run away with Mary Magdalene and fathered children with her, creating a secret bloodline that has persisted to the present day. The Knights Templar were formed to guard the holy bloodline, a purpose they continue to fulfill. Charles Cecil freely admits that it was The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail that really got his juices flowing.

It isn’t hard to see why. It’s a rare literary beast: a supposedly nonfiction book full of patent nonsense that remains thoroughly entertaining to read even for the person who knows what a load of tosh it all is. In his review of it back in 1982, Anthony Burgess famously wrote that “it is typical of my unregenerable soul that I can only see this as a marvelous theme for a novel.” Many others have felt likewise over the years since. If Umberto Eco’s unabashedly intellectual approach doesn’t strike your fancy, you can always turn to The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown’s decidedly more populist take on the theme from 2003 — one of the most successful novels of the 21st century, the founder of a veritable cottage industry of sequels, knock-offs, and cinematic adaptations. (Although Brown himself insists that he didn’t use The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail for a crib sheet when writing his novel, pretty much no one believes him.)

For all their convoluted complexity, conspiracy theories are the comfort food of armchair historians. They state that the sweeping tides of history are not the result of diffuse, variegated, and ofttimes unease-inducing social and political impulses, but can instead all be explained by whatever shadowy cabal they happen to be peddling. It’s a clockwork view of history, A leading to B leading to C, which conveniently absolves us and our ancestors who weren’t pulling the strings behind the scenes of any responsibility for the state of the world. I’ve often wondered if the conspiratorial impulse in modern life stems at least in part from our current obsession with granular data, our belief that all things can be understood if we can just collect enough bits and bytes and analyze it all rigorously enough. Such an attitude makes it dangerously easy to assemble the narratives we wish to be true out of coincidental correlations. The amount of data at our fingertips, it seems to me, has outrun our wisdom for making use of it.

But I digress. As Burgess, Eco, and Brown all well recognized, outlandish conspiracy theories can be outrageously entertaining, and are harmless enough if we’re wise enough not to take them seriously. Add Charles Cecil to that list as well: “I was convinced a game set in the modern day with this history that resonated from Medieval times would make a very compelling subject.”

As he began to consider how to make a commercial computer game out of the likes of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Cecil realized that he needed to stay well away from the book’s claims about Jesus Christ; the last thing Revolution Software or Virgin Interactive needed was to become the antichrist in the eyes of scandalized Christians all over the world. So, he settled on a less controversial vision of the Knights Templar, centering on their alleged lost treasure — a scavenger hunt was, after all, always a good fit for an adventure game — and a fairly nondescript conspiracy eager to get their hands on it for a spot of good old world domination for the sake of it.

Cecil and some of his more committed fans have occasionally noted some surface similarities between his game and The Da Vinci Code, which was published seven years later, and hinted that Dan Brown may have been inspired by the game as well as by The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. In truth, though, the similarities would appear to be quite natural for fictions based on the same source material.

Indeed, I’ve probably already spent more time on the historical backstory of Broken Sword here than it deserves, considering how lightly it skims the surface of the claims broached in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and elsewhere. Suffice to say that the little bit of it that does exist here does a pretty good job of making you feel like you’re on the trail of a mystery ancient and ominous. And that, of course, is all it really needs to do.

In addition to being yet another manifestation of pop-culture conspiracy theorizing, Broken Sword was a sign of the times for the industry that produced it. Adventure games were as big as they would ever get in 1994, the year the project was given the green light by Virgin. Beneath a Steel Sky had gotten good reviews and was performing reasonably well in the marketplace, and Virgin was willing to invest a considerable sum to help Revolution take their next game to the proverbial next level, to compete head to head with Sierra and LucasArts, the titans of American adventure gaming. Broken Sword’s final production cost would touch £1 million, making it quite probably the most expensive game yet made in Britain.

Having such a sum of money at their disposal transformed Revolution’s way of doing business. Some 50 different people in all contributed to Broken Sword, a five-fold increase over the staff hired for Beneath a Steel Sky. Artist Dave Gibbons, whose distinctive style had done so much to make the previous game stand out from the pack, was not among them, having moved on to other endeavors. But that was perhaps for the best; Gibbons was a comic-book artist, adept at crafting striking static images. Broken Sword, on the other hand, would have lots of motion, would be more of an interactive cartoon than an interactive comic.

To capture that feel, Charles Cecil went to Dublin, Ireland, where the animator Don Bluth ran the studio behind such films as The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go to Heaven, and Thumbelina. There he met one Eoghan Cahill, who had been working with Bluth for years, and got a hasty education on what separates the amateurs from the professionals in the field. Cecil:

I have to say, I didn’t take layout all that seriously. But he asked me about layout, and I showed him some of the stuff we were working on. And he looked at me and said, “This is not good enough.” I felt rather hurt. He said, “You need to see my stuff and you need to employ me.” So I had a look at his stuff, and it was so beautiful.

I said, “I think I really do need to employ you.” And indeed, he came to work at Revolution as a layout artist.

Although Don Bluth himself had nothing to do with the game, Broken Sword is as marked by the unique sensibility he inculcated in his artists as Beneath a Steel Sky is by that of Dave Gibbons. The opening movie is a bravura sequence by any standard, a tribute not only to the advantages of Super VGA graphics and CD-ROM — Revolution’s days of catering to more limited machines like the Commodore Amiga were now behind them — but to the aesthetic sophistication which Cahill brought to the project. Broken Sword’s “pixel art,” as the kids call it today, remains mouth-wateringly luscious to look upon, something which most certainly cannot be said of the jaggy 3D productions of the mid-1990s.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/intro.mp4

The view with which the intro movie begins is a real one from the bell tower of Notre Dame Cathedral.

It’s worth dwelling on this movie a bit, for it does much to illustrate how quickly both Revolution and the industry to which they belonged were learning and expanding their horizons. Consider the stirring score by the noted film, television, and theater composer and conductor Barrington Pheloung, which is played by a real orchestra on real instruments — a growing trend in games in general at the time, which would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier for both technical and budgetary reasons.

Then, too, consider the subtle sophistication of the storytelling techniques that are employed here, from the first foreshadowing voice-over — the only dialog in the whole sequence — to the literal bang that finishes it. Right after the movie ends, you take control amidst the chaos on the sidewalk that follows the explosion. Assuming you aren’t made of the same stuff as that Notre Dame gargoyle, you’re already thoroughly invested at this point in figuring out what the heck just happened. The power of an in medias res opening like this one to hook an audience was well known to William Shakespeare, but has tended to elude many game developers. Charles Cecil:

There are two ways to start a game. You can give lots of background about a character and what he or she is doing or you can start in a way that is [in] the player’s control, and that’s what I wanted. I thought that since the player controlled the character and associated with him, I could afford to start a game without giving away a great deal about the character. So in the first scene, I didn’t want a long exposition. George is drawn into the plot unwillingly, having been caught up in an explosion, and he wants to do the right thing in finding out what was behind it.

All told, the jump in the quality of storytelling and writing from Beneath a Steel Sky to Broken Sword is as pronounced as the audiovisual leap. Beneath a Steel Sky isn’t really a poorly written game in comparison to others of its era, but the script at times struggles to live up to Dave Gibbons’s artwork. It bears the telltale signs of a writer not quite in control of his own material, shifting tones too jarringly and lapsing occasionally into awkward self-referential humor when it ought to be playing it straight.

None of that is the case with Broken Sword. This game’s writers know exactly where they want to go and have the courage of their conviction that they can get there. This is not to say that it’s dour — far from it; one of the greatest charms of the game is that it never takes itself too seriously, never forgets that it is at bottom just an exercise in escapist entertainment.

Remarkably, the improvement in this area isn’t so much a credit to new personnel as to the usual suspects honing their craft. Revolution’s games were always the vision of Charles Cecil, but, as he admits, he’s “not the world’s greatest writer.” Therefore he had relied since the founding of Revolution on one Dave Cummins to turn his broad outlines into a finished script. For Broken Sword, Cummins was augmented by a newcomer named Jonathan Howard, but the improvement in the writing cannot be down to his presence alone. The veterans at Revolution may have become harder to spot amidst the sea of new faces, but they were working as hard as anyone to improve, studying how film and television were put together and then applying the lessons to the game — but sparingly and carefully, mind you. Cecil:

When Broken Sword came out, we were riding on the back of these interactive movies. They were a disaster. The people knocking them out were being blinded; they wanted to rub shoulders with movie stars and producers, and the gaming elements were lost. They were out of touch with games. Of course, I am interested in film script-writing and I felt then and still do that there can be parallels with games. I felt we needed to learn from the movies with Broken Sword, but not mimic them. It was my intention to make Broken Sword cinematic — with great gameplay.

Revolution may have had global ambitions for Broken Sword, but it’s a deeply British game at heart, shot through with sly British humor. To properly appreciate any of that, however, we really need to know what the game is actually about, beyond the Knights Templar and international conspiracies of evil in the abstract.

Broken Sword’s protagonist is an American abroad with the pitch-perfect name of George Stobbart, who is winningly portrayed in the original game and all four of its official sequels to date by voice actor Rolf Saxon. George is a painfully earnest everyman — or at least every-American — who in an earlier era might have been played on the silver screen by Jimmy Stewart. He wanders through the game’s foreign settings safely ensconced in the impenetrable armor of his nationality, a sight recognizable to any observer of Americans outside their natural habitat. To my mind the funniest line in the entire script comes when he’s accosted by an overzealous French police constable brandishing a pistol. “Don’t shoot!” he yells. “I’m an American!” Whole volumes of sociology and history could be written by way of unpacking those five words…

Anyway, as we saw in the movie above, the vacationing George is sitting in a Parisian café when a killer clown bombs the place to smithereens, in what seems to have been a deliberate — and unfortunately successful — act of murder against one particular patron. Earnest fellow that he is, George takes it upon himself to solve the crime, which proves to be much more than a random act of street violence. As he slowly peels the onion of the conspiracy behind it all, he has occasion to visit Ireland, Syria, Spain, and Scotland in addition to roaming the length and breadth of Paris, the home base for his investigations. And why does Paris feature so prominently? Well, it was close enough to Britain to make it easy for Revolution to visit in the name of research, but still held a powerful romantic allure for an Englishman of Cecil’s generation. “England was very poor in the 1960s and 1970s, and London was gray and drab,” he says. “Paris was smart. People walked differently and they wore brighter clothes. You sat in restaurants and ate amazing food. The mythology of Paris [in] Broken Sword came from that imagery of my younger days.”

George’s companion — constantly in research, from time to time in adventure, and potentially in romance — is one Nico, a French reporter with a sandpaper wit whom he meets at the scene of the bombing. She was originally created by the game’s writers to serve a very practical purpose, a trick that television and movie scriptwriters have been employing forever: in acting as a diegetic sounding board for George, she becomes a handy way to keep the player oriented and up to date with the ramifications of his latest discoveries, helping the player to keep a handle on what becomes a very complex mystery. In this sense, then, her presence is another sign of how Revolution’s writers were mastering their craft. “It meant we didn’t need to have lengthy one-man dialogs or 30 minutes of cut scenes,” says Charles Cecil.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[1]It’s telling that, when Revolution recently produced a “director’s cut” of the game for digital distribution, the most obvious additions were a pair of scenes where the player gets to control Nico directly, giving at least the impression that she has a more active role in the plot. Sadly, one of these takes place before the bombing in the Parisian café, rather spoiling that dramatically perfect — and perfectly dramatic — in medias res opening.

So much for the characters. Now, back to the subject of humor:

There’s the time when George tells Nico that he’s just visited the costume shop whence he believes the bomber to have rented his clown suit. “Yeah, I like it. What are you supposed to be?” she asks. Da-dum-dum!

“I didn’t hire a costume,” answers our terminally earnest protagonist. “These are my clothes and you know it.”

And then there’s Nico and (a jealous) George’s discussion with a French historian about Britain’s status during the time of the Roman Empire. “To the Romans, the Mediterranean was the center of the universe,” says the historian. “Britain was a remote, unfriendly place inhabited by blue-painted savages.”

“It hasn’t changed much,” says Nico. Da-dum-dum-dum!

“Well, they’ve stopped painting themselves blue,” says our straight man George.

“Except when they go to a football match,” deadpans Nico. Da-dum-dum-dum-dum!

You get the idea. I should say that all of this is made funnier by the performances of the voice cast, who are clearly having a grand old time turning their accents up to eleven. (Like so many Anglosphere productions, Broken Sword seems to think that everyone speaks English all the time, just in funny ways and with a light salting of words like bonjour and merci.)

And yet — and this is the truly remarkable part — the campiness of it all never entirely overwhelms the plot. The game is capable of creating real dramatic tension and a palpable sense of danger from time to time. It demands to be taken seriously at such junctures; while you can’t lock yourself out of victory without knowing it, you can die. The game walks a tenuous tightrope indeed between drama and comedy, but it very seldom loses its balance.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/conspiracy.mp4

It wasn’t easy being a writer of geopolitical thrillers in the 1990s, that period of blissful peace and prosperity in the West after the end of the Cold War and before the War on Terror, the resurgence of authoritarianism, a global pandemic, and a widespread understanding of the magnitude of the crisis of global warming. Where exactly was one to find apocalyptic conflicts in such a milieu? It’s almost chilling to watch this clip today. What seemed an example of typically absurd videogame evil in 1996 feels disturbingly relevant today — not the Knights Templar nonsense, that is, but all the real-world problems that are blamed on it. If only it was as simple as stamping out a single cabal of occultists…

It’s hard to reconcile Broken Sword’s Syria, a place where horror exists only in the form of Knights Templar assassins, a peddler of dodgy kebobs, and — most horrifying of all — an American tourist in sandals and knee socks, with the reality of the country of today. The civil war that is now being fought there has claimed the lives of more than half a million people and shattered tens of millions more.

With Nico in her Parisian flat.

Wars and governments may come and go, but the pub life of Ireland is eternal.

A villa in Spain with a connection to the Knights Templar and a grouchy gardener whom George will need to outwit.

Amidst ruins of a Scottish castle fit for a work of Romantic art, on the cusp of foiling the conspirators’ nefarious plot.

Revolution spent an inordinate amount of time — fully two and a half years — honing their shot at the adventure-game big leagues. They were silent for so long that some in the British press consigned them to the “where are they now?” file. “Whatever happened to Revolution Software?” asked PC Zone magazine in January of 1996. “Two releases down the line, they seem to have vanished.”

Alas, by the time Broken Sword was finally ready to go in the fall of 1996, the public’s ardor for the adventure genre had begun to dissipate. Despite a slew of high-profile, ambitious releases, 1996 had yet to produce a million-selling hit like the previous year’s Phantasmagoria, or like Myst the year before that. Especially in the United States, the industry’s focus was shifting to 3D action-oriented games, which not only sold better but were cheaper and faster to make than adventure games. In what some might call a sad commentary on the times, Virgin’s American arm insisted that the name of Broken Sword be changed to Circle of Blood. “They wanted it to be much more ‘bloody’ sounding,” says Charles Cecil.

For all of its high production values, the game was widely perceived by the American gaming press as a second-tier entry in a crowded field plagued by flagging enthusiasm. Computer Gaming World’s review reads as a more reserved endorsement than the final rating of four stars out of five might imply. “The lengthy conversations often drag on before getting to the point,” wrote the author. If you had told her that Broken Sword — or rather Circle of Blood, as she knew it — would still be seeing sequels published in the second decade after such adventure standard bearers as King’s Quest and Gabriel Knight had been consigned to the videogame history books, she would surely have been shocked to say the least.

Ah, yes, Gabriel Knight… the review refers several times to that other series of adventure games masterminded by Sierra’s Jane Jensen. Even today, Gabriel Knight still seems to be the elephant in the room whenever anyone talks about Broken Sword. And on the surface, there really are a lot of similarities between the two. Both present plots that are, for all their absurdity, extrapolations on real history; both are very interested in inculcating a sense of place in their players; both feature a male protagonist and a female sidekick who develop feelings for one another despite their constant bickering, and whose rapport their audience developed feelings for to such an extent that they encouraged the developers to make the sidekick into a full-fledged co-star. According to one line of argument in adventure-game fandom, Broken Sword is a thinly disguised knock-off of Gabriel Knight. (The first game of Sierra’s series was released back in 1993, giving Revolution plenty of time to digest it and copy it.) Many will tell you that the imitation is self-evidently shallower and sillier than its richer inspiration.

But it seems to me that this argument is unfair, or at least incomplete. To begin with, the whole comparison feels more apt if you’ve only read about the games in question than if you’ve actually played them. Leaving aside the fraught and ultimately irrelevant question of influence — for the record, Charles Cecil and others from Revolution do not cite Gabriel Knight as a significant influence — there is a difference in craft that needs to be acknowledged. The Gabriel Knight games are fascinating to me not so much for what they achieve as for what they attempt. They positively scream out for critical clichés about reaches exceeding grasps; they’re desperate to elevate the art of interactive storytelling to some sort of adult respectability, but they never quite figure out how to do that while also being playable, soluble adventure games.

Broken Sword aims lower, yes, but hits its mark dead-center. From beginning to end, it oozes attention to the details of good game design. “We had to be very careful, and so we went through lots of [puzzles], seeing which ones would be fun,” says Charles Cecil. “These drive the story on, providing rewards as the player goes along, so we had to get them right.” One seldom hears similar anecdotes from the people who worked on Sierra’s games.

This, then, is the one aspect of Broken Sword I haven’t yet discussed: it’s a superb example of classic adventure design. Its puzzles are tricky at times, but never unclued, never random, evincing a respect for its player that was too often lost amidst the high concepts of games like Gabriel Knight.

Of course, if you dislike traditional adventure games on principle, Broken Sword will not change your mind. As an almost defiantly traditionalist creation, it resolves none of the fundamental issues with the genre that infuriate so many. The puzzles it sets in front of you seldom have much to do with the mystery you’re supposed to be unraveling. In the midst of attempting to foil a conspiracy of world domination, you’ll expend most of your brainpower on such pressing tasks as luring an ornery goat out of an Irish farmer’s field and scouring a Syrian village for a kebob seller’s lucky toilet brush. (Don’t ask!) Needless to say, most of the solutions George comes up with are, although typical of an adventure game, ridiculous, illegal, and/or immoral in any other context. The only way to play them is for laughs.

And this, I think, is what Broken Sword understands about the genre that Gabriel Knight does not. The latter’s puzzles are equally ridiculous (and too often less soluble), but the game tries to play it straight, creating cognitive dissonances all over the place. Broken Sword, on the other hand, isn’t afraid to lean into the limitations of its chosen genre and turn them into opportunities — opportunities, that is, to just be funny. Having made that concession, if concession it be, it finds that it can still keep its overarching plot from degenerating into farce. It’s a pragmatic compromise that works.

I like to think that the wisdom of its approach has been more appreciated in recent years, as even the more hardcore among us have become somewhat less insistent on adventure games as deathless interactive art and more willing to just enjoy them for what they are. Broken Sword may have been old-school even when it was a brand-new game, but it’s no musty artifact today. It remains as charming, colorful, and entertaining as ever, an example of a game whose reach is precisely calibrated to its grasp.

(Sources: the books The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln and Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders: How British Video Games Conquered the World by Magnus Anderson and Rebecca Levene; Retro Gamer 31, 63, 146, and 148; PC Zone of January 1996; Computer Gaming World of February 1997. Online sources include Charles Cecil’s interviews with Anthony Lacey of Dining with Strangers, John Walker of Rock Paper Shotgun, Marty Mulrooney of Alternative Magazine Online, and Peter Rootham-Smith of Game Boomers.

Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars is available for digital purchase as a “director’s cut” whose additions and modifications are of dubious benefit. Luckily, the download includes the original game, which is well worth the purchase price in itself.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

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It’s telling that, when Revolution recently produced a “director’s cut” of the game for digital distribution, the most obvious additions were a pair of scenes where the player gets to control Nico directly, giving at least the impression that she has a more active role in the plot. Sadly, one of these takes place before the bombing in the Parisian café, rather spoiling that dramatically perfect — and perfectly dramatic — in medias res opening.

Comments
57 Responses

- Marco

July 1, 2022 at 5:12 pm

This. This is why I love adventure games. Shadow of the Templars is one of the crown jewels of that all-too-brief period, literally two or three years in terms of release dates, when the technology was just in the right place and the budgets were aligned to get the best people working on them. Unlike the games of 1983 or 1993 they could make the graphics and sound truly immersive, with a simple enough interface that the player could actually start to suspend disbelief in the puzzles, as opposed to “oh – you were supposed to PUSH the pork barrel with the ostrich feather, not USE one on the other”. And unlike the games of 2003 and later, they weren’t one person’s kooky graphic novel turned into a slideshow in blocky 3D.

Something I think Shadow of the Templars does especially brilliantly is creating totally different atmospheres for the different locations. It’s obvious in the pictures above, though Barrington Pheloung’s music is also a big part of it. (He wrote the music for Inspector Morse, a TV series that was huge in Britain at the time and still remembered fondly.) Even though the game isn’t actually super-long, it gives the impression of being an epic quest: when you go from Paris to Ireland, then on to Spain and Syria, it’s one click on the screen but you almost mentally fill in the long journey, with flights and taxis and booking into cheap hotels.

- Sarah Walker

July 1, 2022 at 5:44 pm

Not sure if it spoils the 1996 narrative, but Wikipedia claims that Broken Sword did sell over 1 million copies. In a sign of the times though, around half of those were of the Playstation conversion.

- Jimmy Maher

July 1, 2022 at 7:11 pm

There are two stories from Charles Cecil that don’t quite add up in this respect. One says that Broken Sword was a big hit right out of the gate, while the other admits that Virgin was very reluctant to fund a sequel, and agreed to do so only at a sharply reduced budget and development time. The latter has more truthiness about it than the former in my view. ;)

I suspect that Broken Sword made money in the end, but most of it came from Europe and the PlayStation (where half a million copies was almost a floor for any game with reasonably good distribution). And I do wonder how many of those million copies mentioned in a 2001 press release — the only hard source I’ve found for that Wikipedia claim — were the budget re-release. I don’t believe it sold so many copies at all in first release for PCs in the United States. Certainly it was never discussed there as representing any sign of hope for the moribund adventure genre — just when the industry was eagerly looking for just such a thing.

- Jarno

July 1, 2022 at 11:32 pm

There’s quite an informative “Revolution 25th Anniversary Documentary” on Steam.

In the documentary, Sean Brennan talked about the sequel:
“It was difficult for us because we were at Virgin going through a very difficult stage there from a corporate perspective. Though there were elements in the company that didn’t want to commission the second game. So, certain elements in North America and elsewhere though ‘Well, is this really what we want to be doing?”. Which we thought was crazy and in the end we got our way and signed the second game, because, the first one, it was a critical success and it was a commercial success.”

- Sarah Walker

July 2, 2022 at 8:42 am

I had to remind myself where Virgin was at this point in time. Late 96 / early 97 (presumably when the sequel negotiations were taking place) would be about the time Viacom/Spelling decided to sell Virgin as they’d lost a good few million in 95/96 – I imagine Toonstruck contributed quite a bit to this.

- tony warriner

July 3, 2022 at 11:24 am

>Virgin was very reluctant to fund a sequel, and agreed to do so only at a sharply reduced budget and development time.

A decision made 6 months before BS1 released and by incoming new ‘management types’…

- Alec Chalmers

July 4, 2022 at 8:00 pm

Mr Tony Warriner himself! I think I speak for many people when I say thank you for making such an amazing game. It was THE game of my childhood, along with the sequel.

- tony warriner

July 7, 2022 at 9:47 am

Well, thank you for loving our game. It was all about the players, for us.

- Alianora La Canta

August 11, 2022 at 5:35 pm

And this is why it’s unwise to commit to not spending money on income items before establishing a ballpark figure of how much return is likely. Virgin was definitely on the wrong side of history on that one.

Thank you for taking up the challenge regardless, and giving us plenty of adventures to explore.

- Alianora La Canta

August 11, 2022 at 5:33 pm

Another part of the puzzle: depending on when exactly the million figure was produced, the iOS releases of Broken Sword remake and Broken Sword: The Smoking Mirror (i.e. Broken Sword 4), between them, apparently sold half-a-million units. It’s hard to fudge the sales figures from app stores, and logically one would expect the original to be at least half of that total because few people buy sequels to adventures without also buying the preceding entries if they can find them for their preferred platform.

So if 500,000 came from the Playstation port, and 250,000+ came from the iOS, that only leaves (at most) 250,000 to have come from PCs, potentially from a very long period of time (Wikipedia quotes from that famous source, “Citation Needed”).

If the million source came from, say, the mid-2010s (which is possible), it would explain a lot.

Furthermore, a big hit in the UK wouldn’t necessarily be a big hit Stateside, especially if “British humour” is a significant component of the charm (as here). Given that in the 1990s in particular, the USA formed by far the biggest market overall for computer games, and also given that many trends hit the UK 3 years after the USA, it’s possible Virgin may have considered that the UK was simply in the USA’s 1994 and that by the time a sequel came out, the UK would be in the equivalent of the USA’s 1996/1997 (i.e. not wanting to buy expensively-made adventures any more and thus only worth a smaller risk – and that because the team had undeniably produced an excellent game that people liked playing).

- Playstation Nation

December 15, 2022 at 8:13 pm

A fellow Playstation fan, perhaps?
Nice.png

- Alex

July 1, 2022 at 6:59 pm

I actually beat the game the first time on a playstation that a friend had borrowed me back in the late 90s. It never bothered me at all that I had to control it with the gamepad, as just one puzzle was based on timing (Catching the old goat in the Irish castle) It was a real joy – not just because of the graphic and the sound. The characters, the setting and the story were so mature in comparison to all the adventure games I played before. I managed to find my own copy for the pc and beat it all over again. Since I lost interest in the genre post the new millienium, it´s still the most mature adventure I´ve ever played, I think. And actually one of the most memorable. The last time I beat it was just about a year ago – it aged just fine. On a downside, I was all over the moon when I found the sequel (The Smoking mirror) last year on steam, but the magic was totally gone. I gave up just a few hours in.

- Marco

July 7, 2022 at 1:51 pm

The goat puzzle is notorious for that reason: it’s not difficult as such, but unlike every other puzzle in the game it’s based on timing and dexterity, so many players were thrown by it. The Director’s Cut version made it easier, but fans like me thought that a cop-out.

Smoking Mirror is indeed much weaker: the plot was a lot thinner, and they tried to paper over that with crass humour – literally fart jokes, which had no place within the restrained chic of the first game. Indeed, none of the sequels live up to Shadow of the Templars, although I have a soft spot for Sleeping Dragon (the third game), which is probably my favourite full-3D adventure game.

- Metz O'Magic

July 26, 2022 at 9:35 pm

Except for all the crate-pushing puzzles, which became very tedious. Another nit I had with The Sleeping Dragon was… although the constantly changing camera angles as you walked through a scene were very cinematic, they made running away from danger or trying to sneak very difficult because the camera view could suddenly shift from behind the character to in front of the character, making you instinctively want to run back into danger.

- Jaina

July 1, 2022 at 7:03 pm

Typo time “Add Charles Ceil to that list as well”

- Jimmy Maher

July 1, 2022 at 7:17 pm

Thanks!

- Mike

July 1, 2022 at 7:51 pm

It might be different in the original, but as I recall George’s line with the police constable is, on having a pistol aimed at him, “I’m innocent, I’m an American!”, to which the constable replies “Can’t make up your mind, eh?” It’s a cracking gag, perfectly delivered.

- Arthur

July 1, 2022 at 9:30 pm

I put my own thoughts on Broken Sword here, but for the most part I agree with you: I think it’s mildly unfair to criticise the first game as a Gabriel Knight ripoff because the first Gabriel Knight has this atmosphere of Southern Gothic horror, whereas the Broken Sword games have always traded more in this sort of Tintin-esque jolly adventure stuff.

Actually, come to think of it I suspect the second two Gabriel Knight games may have ended up not helping here, because they both involve much more in the way of European locations specifically (as well as having the protagonists be more of a double act). Parallel evolution surely in the case of GK2 – it came out in 1995, at a point when Revolution were no doubt deep into grinding out Broken Sword 1 – but the French setting and parallel inspirations of GK3 make it the best Broken Sword game Sierra ever made…

- Andrew McCarthy

July 2, 2022 at 12:05 am

Speaking of Gabriel Knight, I’m surprised that you didn’t mention that the third game in the series is much more explicitly based on The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail than the first Broken Sword is, even to the point of the book appearing in an unused shop window in the game’s texture files.

I’ve only played the first two Broken Sword games (in their original versions), and while I generally liked them, I found the writing painful at times. In particular, it felt like Revolution had great difficulty writing an American lead character who actually *sounded* American, rather than like somebody born and bred within that “green and pleasant land” of England.

A few of the other characters also irritated me at times, particularly in the Irish section (where a man who refuses to listen when George tells him his nephew is in mortal danger stands out as head-bangingly moronic). I think they actually trimmed some dialogue lines in that section in the remastered version, so I guess I’m not the only one who thought the writing was dodgy in places.

- Jimmy Maher

July 2, 2022 at 7:19 am

I do want to do something larger with the inspirations of Broken Sword II and Gabriel Knight III. It’s just such a great story, how all these conspiracy theories came to be — a lot more interesting than the conspiracy theories themselves, if you ask me. But, because Gabriel Knight III engages with it all in a much more in-depth way, I thought I’d reserve a full-fledged digression for then (he says, to groans from some members of the audience).

- Edward

July 7, 2022 at 6:57 am

I couldn’t hear your groans for the moustache made of cat hair..

- Metz O'Magic

July 26, 2022 at 9:48 pm

Looking forward to that one, Jimmy. Despite it’s… controversial ending, GK III is my second favourite adventure game of all time, largely due to it’s main, overarching puzzle.

I did happen to read The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail long before I played any of these games, in the mid-80’s soon after it was published. Needless to say, themes were borrowed.

- John

July 2, 2022 at 7:23 pm

“In particular, it felt like Revolution had great difficulty writing an American lead character who actually *sounded* American, rather than like somebody born and bred within that “green and pleasant land” of England.”

I haven’t played the game, but I think I get what you mean. Even some of the bits Jimmy quoted sound off. Americans *rent* things rather than hire them. (Americans hire *people*. See, for example, “. . . a five-fold increase over the staff hired for Beneath a Steel Sky.”) It’s pretty unlikely that an American speaking in English would say “I didn’t hire a costume”. I suppose you could assume that he’s speaking French to Nico and that the French has been translated into British English for the benefit of a presumed British audience, but, even so, it sounds distinctly odd to American ears.

- CdrJameson

July 2, 2022 at 11:09 pm

In the UK we’d also up sticks not stakes, and go for a Kebab not a Kebob.

(Not relevant here, but I find it funny that we might pay the bill with a cheque, where an American might pay the cheque with a bill).

From what I remember of the time, the templars were the #1 go-to conspiracy theory to the point of cliché and Gabriel Knight wasn’t that well known in the UK.

- Ross

July 5, 2022 at 5:42 pm

There’s a handful of SPECIFIC idioms in American usage where we’d use “hire” instead of “rent”. A tuxedo is one of them . But I think even these have become noticably less common over the past couple of decades.

- Lisa H.

July 5, 2022 at 6:33 pm

I’ve always said/heard “rent a tuxedo”…

- Andrew Pam

July 2, 2022 at 2:28 am

“the similarities would appear to be either quite natural” – is “either” a stray word here?

- Jimmy Maher

July 2, 2022 at 7:20 am

Yes. Thanks!

- Aula

July 2, 2022 at 6:20 am

“in any other than context” probably shouldn’t have that “than” in there.

Also, aren’t you going to post a list of the games and other topics from 1996 you intend to cover? While that’s a relatively recent feature of this blog (you only started doing those with 1993 IIRC) I think you should keep doing them. For one thing, just having a post with a year in its title makes the Table of Contents more useful. For another, I really like to have some idea about what I can expect to read about in the future. For third, the comment sections of the previous overview posts have been very interesting, highlighting games that might otherwise never get mentioned at all.

- Jimmy Maher

July 2, 2022 at 7:26 am

Thanks!

The good news is that there will be a “state of the blog” post coming before the next proper article, along with ebooks from the previous historical year, etc. The bad news is that it will come in two weeks *instead* of a proper article. I’m going to take a bit of time to celebrate my 50th birthday, so things will be pushed back one week.

- Jaina

July 2, 2022 at 8:45 am

Happy birthday!

So I’m just kind of rambling thoughts here. Bottom line is I’ve always loved the blog and will continue to do so. I do however find my attention waning during really long series of articles… Delphi and the web around the world, China. I was an, and continue to be an advocate for the analog series, but something about the long series of themed posts makes me stop in the middle and then come back to read the next half dozen once the series is complete. 5 months with the web series while also being deeply immersed in the China ones definitely strained my poor attention span.

Anyway, just my opinion about something I’ve noticed before. I really don’t have a point unfortunately, lol. Thank you for all your hard work on something that makes my Fridays extra great.

- Brian Bagnall

July 7, 2022 at 4:11 pm

I also put off reading the Internet articles though I will get back to them eventually. I guess I come here when I’m in the mood for reading about retro games. Looks interesting though and I’m sure Jimmy did a smashing job of summarizing the period. I look forward to taking them in all at one go.

- Brian

July 5, 2022 at 10:56 am

Yes! Happy Birthday… approaching that milestone myself…

- Brian Bagnall

July 7, 2022 at 4:08 pm

Happy Birthday Jimmy! I’m also reaching the same milestone later this year. God we’re old!

- Guillaume

July 2, 2022 at 10:37 am

@Jaina : I’m having the same problem with long series here (and anywhere, I think).

Maybe I should wait for them to be finished first. but there’s also the point I’m not coming there for this kind of posts (which does not mean they should not exists), even if their subjects are interesting in theory.

Happy birthday too !

- Fredrik Arnerup

July 2, 2022 at 12:05 pm

That is some hideous cover art though, at least for us with colour vision.

- Mayhaym

July 3, 2022 at 6:51 pm

This cover art just oozes (late) 90s edginess though – although I agree it doesn’t look all that great now.

- Dandy

July 3, 2022 at 9:24 am

I hugely enjoyed reading this blog about one of my favourite games. I’m a French citizen and played the French dub of Broken Sword as a child in the 90’s. When Steam released the director’s cut in 2010, I bought it hoping for some nostalgia. By then I was living in the UK and so I (accidentally or not) played the game in the original English dub and I could not get used to Nico’s accent! I found it too stereotypical and a little grating. Maybe Nico being merely a sounding board / female love interest (in the first game at least) made it worse. But mostly likely it’s because she fitted some romantic or one dimensional idea of a French / Parisian woman which I understand even more now that I’ve read more about Cecil’s motivation to set the game in Paris. I’m probably biased because I know her as a French speaker (who I think sounds great with the right amount of deadpan wit and understated glee from making fun of George.)

Having Nico’s nationality built in her character by way of accent doesn’t work well for me. With George it does: it tells a story of him trying to enjoy his holiday and ending up a victim of an explosion whose life will be turned upside down in a foreign country. But Nico? I really appreciate you pointing out that ‘Like so many Anglosphere productions, Broken Sword seems to think that everyone speaks English all the time, just in funny ways and with a light salting of words like bonjour and merci.)’ I don’t know if it’s limited to the Anglosphere though.

French speaking Nico also makes more sense since the game is partially set in France. That being said, George spoke French with an American accent to other English speakers and it never struck me as odd (which is an interesting insight into dubbed media, bias and language.)

I had a similar experience playing A Plague’s Tale on PS5. It is set in France and the characters are dubbed by English speakers putting on French accents (no offense to their acting skills it’s a good dub.) Thankfully there’s an option to put the original French dub on with English subtitles (although the subtitles aren’t very readable which can be an access issue.)

Interestingly though George is dubbed by a French actor..! I always thought he was dubbed by a French speaking American national growing up..! The truth is accents in fiction are a characteristic, but accents in real life are commonplace and don’t necessarily mean anything. Characters who have accents but whose character is not defined by that accent (and what it means about them) are rarer.

I thought broken sword 2 was great too and in fact it’s the first one I played on a PlayStation magazine demo (although some elements, notably the portrayal of South American characters, hasn’t aged well.) Nico does get more of a role in BS2 and we can play her, which was so exciting back then. I also remember getting the director’s cut on DS and playing without the voice acting was strange (and the Nico sections were a little underwhelming.) I have actually never played Beneath a Steel sky and will look into it.

- Petter Sjölund

July 5, 2022 at 8:41 am

I played Broken Sword right after finishing The Last Express, which handles different accents and languages masterfully, and the contrast could not be more stark. Pretty much every dialogue in Broken Sword has an actor doing a terrible accent or an adult trying to sound like a child. It might have been sufferable if the game had been pure comedy, or if the writing had been great, but alas it is not.

- Richard

July 3, 2022 at 8:01 pm

How do the puzzles compare with Beneath a Steel Sky?

- Martin

July 4, 2022 at 2:18 am

> I’ve often wondered if the conspiratorial impulse in modern life stems at least in part from our current obsession with granular data, our belief that all things can be understood if we can just collect enough bits and bytes and analyze it all rigorously enough.

Yes. Iain McGilchrist would characterize this as left-brain thinking (linear, analytical, abstract, logical, clockwork) vs. right-brain thinking (holistic, experiential, amenable to metaphor and uncertainty). His thesis is that western culture has swung back and forth a few times over the past millenia, and is now left-brain-dominant, much to the detriment of our own well-being.

His book is called Master and his Emissary. It’s brilliant, but I’m loathe to recommend it because it’s rather poorly written and therefore very difficult.

- Martin

July 4, 2022 at 2:18 am

> The first game of Serra’s series

Sierra’s

- Jimmy Maher

July 4, 2022 at 5:39 am

Thanks!

- declain

July 4, 2022 at 10:05 am

> For all their convoluted complexity, conspiracy theories are the comfort food of armchair historians. They state that the sweeping tides of history are not the result of diffuse, variegated, and ofttimes unease-inducing social and political impulses, but can instead all be explained by whatever shadowy cabal they happen to be peddling.

Alan Moore came to the same conclusion:
“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory.

The truth is far more frightening – Nobody is in control.

The world is rudderless.”

- Leo Vellès

July 4, 2022 at 2:48 pm

I’m surprised you didn`t said something about that infamous goat puzzle. I think it’s design felt very unnatural, because it is the only one that rely on that mechanic. Back in the day, when there were no walkthroughs at one single click of distance, i remember being stumped with that puzzle for a long time, and I believe many more people were too.

- Guille Crespi

July 5, 2022 at 3:44 pm

My thoughts exactly! That puzzle is so infamous that it even has its own Wikipedia page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goat_Puzzle

- Jimmy Maher

July 5, 2022 at 3:59 pm

Interesting. I had no idea of its reputation. I remember that it took me some time, but I’m sure I eventually solved it on my own — albeit not without a lot of experimentation. My instinct is to call it somewhat difficult, but not really unfair. (I did take a couple of hints when playing Broken Sword, but they were elsewhere. For some reason I had a lot of trouble with the Syrian section and that business with the kebob seller’s toilet brush…)

- Lisa H.

July 5, 2022 at 6:31 pm

I looked up a video of the Director’s Cut version after reading that, but I’m not quite sure what’s different or “more logical”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=couPpBEGfjw – or is this person doing it the normal way and it’s not showing the difference?
(I’ve never played this game so I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like.)

- Sebastian Gerstl

July 6, 2022 at 6:56 am

They eased the timing up a little in the Director’s Cut. In the original version of the puzzle, you only had a very, very narrow opportunity to click on the required solution item (you cursor vanished during George’s knock down animation, so you had to be ready to immediately spring into action when it returned again). Since it was the only puzzle in the entire game that required such intricate timing, and basically needed you to fail first before you can succeed, many felt it was badly telegraphed and such categorized it as “bad game design”. (I remember that I apparently was very lucky on my first playthrough of the game because I had solved the puzzle almost instantly by accident, but then struggling with it on my second one years later because I couldn’t get the timing down, even though I knew what I technically needed to do…)

In the Director’s Cut you can now click on the required item right after George’s knockdown, giving you a few very precious frames more time to get it done right.

(Personally the thing I like most about this puzzle is that when the series was revived for a fifth installment via Kickstarter campaign, one of the announced features – I think it was a stretch goal even – was that they would also include a revised version of that infamous goat puzzle… Which they did! )

- Jimmy Maher

July 6, 2022 at 7:46 am

Your anecdote makes me wonder whether there might be a timing issue with new machines that makes the puzzle more difficult than it ought to be. I played it with DOSBox set to…. let’s see. 30,000 cycles.

I can’t call trial and error bad game design in this case, since you don’t die or lose anything through failing.

- Captain Kal

July 7, 2022 at 9:13 am

“Revolution’s days of catering to more limited machines like the Commodore Amiga were now behind them”

OK!! That still hurts!!!!!!

- Alex

July 7, 2022 at 11:21 am

How interesting to hear about the difficulty of the goat-puzzle. I never had a problem with it. I admit, when I solved it on the Playstation for the first time, it took me a few tries, but it was nothing to get furious about. My biggest problem was also the toilet brush-puzzle in Syria, I think. It took me a while to figure out what to do exactly. Regarding the language: When you play the german version, you hear some people speaking with a “funny” french accent that doesn´t sound natural at all.

- Michael

July 7, 2022 at 11:39 pm

Not sure how those articles (or the conjunction) got in there, but even the link you provide gives the title as “Holy Blood, Holy Grail: The Secret History of Jesus, the Shocking Legacy of the Grail,” and not, by any means “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.”

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2022 at 5:01 am

The title of the original British edition was The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, so that’s what I’ve gone with. It was published shortly after in the United States as Holy Blood, Holy Grail. (Another amusing coincidence with Broken Sword, come to think of it…)

- S

July 18, 2022 at 2:32 pm

In Germany, ” Baphomets Fluch” is a relativly often mentioned cult classic within the old-timer adventure games demographics.

Before clicking on that GOG link which autotranslated it, I always thought it was a German Game, but apparently its this one! Seems it had a different name in every major market.

- Elise

August 27, 2022 at 12:16 pm

I remember reading the Da Vinci Code not long after it came out, even though it really wasn’t my sort of thing, just to find out why it was so popular (I still have no idea why; it wasn’t very good). After a few chapters I remember thinking “I bet he played Broken Sword!”

- Michael

January 23, 2023 at 11:23 pm

I just wanted to come past again to thank you for reminding me to actually READ the copy of Foucault’s Pendulum I had sitting on the shelf. Perhaps surprisingly, it turned out to be one of the literary highlights of my 2022 – apparently I sit firmly in whatever niche Eco was aiming at.

Discworld on Page and Screen, Part 1: Serious Comedy
July 22, 2022

One American writer said to me, “Your books will never sell in America because you can’t hear the elves sing. Americans go in for fantasy books where you can hear the elves sing.”

I would like that put on my gravestone: “At least you can say that in Pratchett’s books, the bloody elves never sang!”

— Terry Pratchett

Two arguments are commonly trotted out for the genre literature of the fantastic as actually or potentially something more than mere escapism. One, which applies only to the science-fiction side of the science-fiction/fantasy divide, claims that it can be a form of useful social prognostication. By observing the trends of the current day, the writer can extrapolate where we are likely to end up in the future and present it vividly on the page, whether as a prophecy or a warning. Granted, science fiction’s record of prediction is not particularly good; the writers of just a handful of decades ago almost all believed we would have settled Mars by now, while vanishingly few of them imagined anything like the modern Internet. Still, if you believe that a society’s hopes and fears for the future say a lot about its present, there is a certain sociological value even in the failed prognostications. (Indeed, the academic critic Farah Mendlesohn goes so far as the claim that much classic science fiction is “a sense of wonder combined with [a] presentism” which only masquerades as futurism.)

But it’s the other argument for fantastic literature’s enduring worth that I find most convincing: by transporting some of our most fraught current problems and conflicts into another, less familiar context, we can examine them in a fresh light. Many of us have thought at one time or another how weird our ceaselessly squabbling planet must look to any aliens who happen to stumble across it, what with all the trivialities we continue to fight and kill one another over and the looming existential threats we continue to leave woefully under-addressed. Not only science-fiction but also fantasy literature can literally or figuratively put us in the shoes of those aliens (assuming they wear shoes), allowing us to examine ideas and values with fresh eyes, less cultural baggage, and less of a knee-jerk response.

From the mid-1980s until the mid-2010s, the writer who made perhaps the most consistent case of all for fantasy literature as a laboratory of ideas that are eminently relevant to the real world was Terry Pratchett. And if that didn’t do it for you — well, he really was quite funny to boot.

Terry and Lyn Pratchett on their wedding day in 1968. On their honeymoon, Terry would grow the beard which he would sport for the rest of his life.

Terence David John Pratchett was born on April 28, 1948, in a rural village in Buckinghamshire, England. The only child of an auto mechanic and a secretary, he grew up in a house with no indoor toilet, no hot water, and no electricity. But a less economically advantaged upbringing does not automatically mean a bad one: young Terry spent his days rambling over the same green and pleasant English landscapes that had inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shire, while in the evenings he read books by the light of an oil lamp. Amidst it all, he absorbed his parent’s commonsense belief in what the British call “common decency.” He was not a member of the social class that typically went to university, and this was never regarded as a serious option for him by his teachers or his parents even when he showed an unusual talent for reading and writing. Instead he walked into the office of his local newspaper at the age of seventeen and asked to become an apprentice journalist.

And so he embarked on what his peers and his betters would have considered a perfectly respectable if not quite exciting life for one of his social station. He spent a decade and a half working as a small-town beat reporter, columnist, and editor, before switching to a less demanding job with the civil service, as a press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board. Betwixt and between his professional accomplishments, he married his first-ever girlfriend before he turned 21, fathered a daughter with her, and lived with his family in a tidy little cottage no better nor worse than a thousand others in its corner of England.

He had just one obvious eccentricity: he loved science-fiction and especially fantasy literature, and wrote some of it himself on and off. By 1982, he had published three competent if derivative novels, in small print runs with the help of a friend with the requisite connections. Yet his closest brush with real literary fame remained the letter he had received from J.R.R. Tolkien back in 1968, in response to a piece of fan mail he had sent to the aging Oxford don.

By this point, fantasy literature had well and truly come into its own, thanks to the ongoing popularity of Tolkien and an odd new tabletop game called Dungeons & Dragons that was reaching Britain from American shores. Bookstore shelves were filling up with fat, multi-volume epics from other authors like Terry Brooks and Raymond E. Feist, who were all straining so hard to be Tolkien that one could almost hear them huffing and puffing in the background as one turned the pages. But Terry Pratchett, despite loving Tolkien so much himself that he claimed to have read The Lord of the Rings at least once per year ever since discovering it at the age of thirteen, wasn’t at all sure that such slavish imitation was the best form of flattery. He decided to write a book making fun of the trend.

To be sure, it wasn’t the highest-hanging of fruit as targets of satire went; these ponderous, interminable, oh-so-serious tomes could almost be read as parodies of Tolkien already, albeit inadvertent ones. Nor was Pratchett the first writer to have the idea; as early as 1969, when “Frodo Lives!” could be found emblazoned on the walls of the Boston subway alongside “Clapton is God!”, a pair of Harvard students had published a satire of the counterculture’s favorite fantasist called Bored of the Rings. But thankfully, Pratchett had a cleverer approach in mind than their frat-boy slapstick.

The germ of it dated back to 1978, and a column he had written poking gentle fun at the Star Wars craze. His long experience as a reporter had taught him that the proverbial little people of our own or, presumably, any other world are more exercised by mundane concerns than epic adventure. Applying this lesson to Star Wars, he offered up a science-fictional take on the banality of evil, in the form of the chief personnel officer on the Death Star, fielding complaints about the lousy coffee in the canteen, parrying worries over all those droids that were taking so many human Stormtroopers’ jobs.

Now, taking the same approach over to a world of epic fantasy, Pratchett considered what the little people there would be doing while the heroes were prattling on about Courage and Sacrifice and all the rest of that rot. The star of this “realist fantasy” — a term invented by Pratchett’s biographer Marc Burrows — would be an inept wizard named Rincewind, a perpetual graduate student at a school of magic called Unseen University. His greatest talent would be that of shirking danger and, when push came to shove, simply running away as fast as his knobby-kneed little legs could carry him. For, as Burrows writes, “when faced with violence and the threat of death, most people do not throw themselves honourably into the fray: they get the hell out of there. Rincewind is the very distillation of Pratchett’s central premise of treating a fantasy world literally.”

The fantasy world in question is, as Pratchett wrote at the beginning of the book and then proceeded to spend the next 30 years patiently repeating at the beginning of every interview he gave to the mainstream media, a flat disc borne on the backs of four giant elephants, who in turn stand on the back of a giant turtle swimming through the outer space of “a distant and secondhand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly”; the premise displays Pratchett’s lifelong interest in astronomy and Hindu cosmology, as well as his love of dreadful puns. The chronically exasperated Rincewind and his unlikely companion, a naïve tourist named Twoflower whose insatiable curiosity causes him to run toward every danger from which Rincewind wants to run away, spend the book traveling across the Discworld and getting caught up in a series of comic misadventures that expose countless inviolate fantasy clichés to the cold, harsh light of real-world logic. At the time, Pratchett seems to have seen the book he called The Colour of Magic as little more than a palate cleanser between more substantial ones. The cliffhanger ending was just another concession to the genre he was lampooning; maybe he’d actually write a sequel someday, maybe he wouldn’t.

The original, rather drab-looking hardcover edition of The Colour of Magic.

The Colour of Magic was published in November of 1983, in a British print run of just 506 copies, a testament to its publisher’s low expectations. Nothing happened right away to prove they were mistaken; the books languished on shelves for months. But then Pratchett had the stroke of luck which every budding superstar author needs. Some years ago now, the BBC had broadcast a radio serial by one Douglas Adams, a comedic send-up of science fiction that was similar in spirit to what Pratchett was now doing for (or to) the fantasy genre. Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had gone on to become a very hot property indeed, spawning three internationally bestselling novels to date along with record albums, a BBC television series, and, soon, a hit computer game. In light of all this, the BBC decided to give The Colour of Magic a try over the airwaves. Between June 27 and July 10, 1984, BBC Radio 4 broadcast an abridged reading of the book by Nigel Hawthorne, one of the stars of the hugely popular television sitcom Yes, Minister. The programs received a very good response, putting Terry Pratchett’s name on the lips of everyday Britons for the first time ever. Just like that, things started to happen. In January of 1985, Corgi, a British division of Bantam Books, published The Colour of Magic in paperback, with an initial print run of no less than 26,000 copies. A second print run was needed well before the end of the year. Discworld was off and running.

With his fiction receiving widespread attention for the first time ever, Pratchett needed little encouragement to write that sequel to The Colour of Magic now rather than later. The Light Fantastic, which was published in June of 1986, was largely more of the same, notable mostly for having a slightly more focused plot and for giving prominent place to the character of Death — you know, the skeleton dressed all in black, with the scythe and so on. Belying his terrifying appearance, Death’s Discworld persona is that of an overworked, sometimes irascible, but basically well-meaning bureaucratic functionary. In time, he became arguably the most beloved of all Pratchett’s recurring characters. Many Discworld fans, facing the last days of a loved one or even their own final exit, have found surprising comfort in the seven-foot-tall, cat-loving apparition who brings peace with him rather than pain or judgment. He was an early sign that there might be something more to Discworld than just a succession of clever gags.

Pratchett was very fortunate to connect with an artist named Josh Kirby, whose colorful, winsome, but often subtly subversive covers became the indelible look of Discworld, impossible to separate in the minds of most fans from the words on the page.

Still, it wasn’t entirely unreasonable even at this stage to see Pratchett as an author trying his derivative darnedest to be fantasy fiction’s answer to Douglas Adams. It hadn’t helped his cause when, in a couple of unguarded early interviews, he had admitted that he had been reading the Hitchhiker’s books at the same time he was writing The Colour of Magic. Now, though, he was bristling at the comparison more and more. Adams’s works, he claimed with some truth, were archer, colder, and crueler than his own humor; Adams laughed at his characters, while Pratchett laughed with them at the absurdity of the universe.

Whether it was written in response to the accusations of unoriginality or was just a natural progression, the next book in the Discworld series made the argument that Pratchett was nothing more than a second-rate Douglas Adams untenable. That said, the leap Pratchett made with Equal Rites, the third Discworld novel, was in some ways a fairly obvious one. He was already mining humor from portraying a world of heroic fantasy in a “realistic” way, imagining the experience of the characters there who weren’t larger-than-life heroes on epic quests, and showing how even the fantastic becomes by definition mundane as soon as it becomes the stuff of everyday life. (If you doubt this truism, just look at the technological wonders all around us today which would have seemed almost like magic 30 years ago, but to which we hardly give a thought…) From here, it was a relatively short leap to begin using Discworld as a philosophical laboratory to address the questions and problems with which our own mundane societies are grappling. And yet, short leap though it may have been, it was an audacious one nonetheless. “I want to get away from the idea that I’m automatically sending fantasy up,” Pratchett would say a few years later. “What I’m concerned about now is sending up ideas, ways of looking at the world, people’s expectations.”

The phallic wand the female protagonist of Equal Rites is carrying as she claims powers usually reserved for men is a fine example of Josh Kirby’s subversive edge. Pratchett absolutely loved the image. As his characters loved to sing, “A wizard’s staff has a knob on the end…”

Published barely six months after The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites was the first Discworld novel that could be reasonably said to have overarching themes and a moral compass. Abandoning Rincewind and Twoflower for the time being, it’s a bildungsroman about the coming of age of a young girl — dangerous territory for a middle-aged male author to venture into, but Pratchett pulls it off pretty well. Of course, this being still a fantasy novel, her coming of age involves her coming into her own as a magic user, which in turn involves being apprenticed to the local witch and having many ensuing adventures. Nevertheless, the message the book hammers home relentlessly is as relevant to our own world as any message can possibly be. It’s right there in the book’s title (overlooking another dreadful pun): that women are every bit as capable as men, and deserve to be treated that way. There’s also an even broader and equally important theme, about the value of empathy in general. To illustrate this, Pratchett invents the magical skill of “borrowing,” which lets a being quite literally walk a mile in another being’s shoes — or, rather, in another being’s mind — experiencing the world as they do. If only all of us could and would do the same before we pass judgment…

The next Discworld book, Mort, was published in November of 1987, and remains among the most beloved of the canon, often recommended as an ideal place for beginners to start thanks to its very straightforward, self-contained plot. It involves Mortimer, a hapless young fellow who has just been hired for the dubious position of apprentice to Death. Among other things, the book is a sort of companion piece to Equal Rites, this story being about the travails of male adolescence. Even more so than its predecessor, Mort is elevated by its author’s essential humanity; there is no cruelty in Terry Pratchett. Pratchett:

In Mort, I keep referring to the “sex scenes,” and somebody who was interviewing me said, “But there aren’t any sex scenes in Mort!” I said, “No, but that’s what’s funny!” You see two young people who are terribly embarrassed in each other’s presence, which was about 90 percent of sex when I was a kid. That’s what it was all about: being horribly tongue-tied and embarrassed the whole time.

Much to Pratchett’s gratification, these most recent two, more ambitious Discworld novels sold even better than the first two, allowing him to quit his job in the civil service with the confidence of an established, bankable author. It was at this point that he separated himself from Douglas Adams in another way. If the latter had lived on the Discworld, he would doubtless have been written up as one of the practical jokes the gods there love to play on mortals: he was a brilliant writer who would rather do almost anything else than write, who, as he once memorably put it, preferred to spend his days soaking in a cozy bath and listening to deadlines whooshing by outside the window. Pratchett, on the other hand, had the work ethic of an ant colony. In the first five years after quitting his day job, he published ten Discworld novels, three non-Discworld novels for children, and the standalone novel Good Omens, a much-heralded collaboration with Neil Gaiman, author of the Sandman comic books. And then, as if all that wasn’t enough, Pratchett also found time to write a few short stories and a non-fiction book about cats.

The middle-aged family man Terry Pratchett and the too-cool-for-school hipster Neil Gaiman, hobnobber with rock stars, made an odd couple to be sure, but the two genuinely liked and respected one another, and many fans consider Good Omens to be among the best things either ever wrote.

Needless to say, we can’t hope to analyze this fire hose of output in any depth here. Suffice to say that Pratchett kept pushing at the boundaries of what a Discworld novel could be, producing everything from intricately plotted detective yarns to poignant character studies, along with the occasional unabashed satirical romp for diehard fans of Rincewind and Twoflower and their ilk. We shouldn’t get too precious about Pratchett’s books from this or any other period; as he would be the first to admit, he was first and foremost a commercial author writing with at least one eye on the needs of the market. He wasn’t above gloating a bit over each huge check that rolled in from his publisher, and very much wanted to keep the money spigot open. Doubtless many of his books could have been even better if he had spent more time with them, if he hadn’t felt compelled to rush pell-mell to the next one. On the other hand, much the same thing can be said of many another highly regarded author, and not just in the genre literatures; the names of William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens come to mind as just two of history’s insanely prolific writers-for-hire with a surfeit of genius.

We might pull out just a few books from this era by way of illustrating just how far Discworld could stray from the template of The Colour of Magic. Take, for example, the 1989 novel Guards! Guards!, another one often recommended by the Discworld cognoscenti as an excellent starting point.

In it, a cabal summons a dragon to lay piecemeal waste to the sprawling metropolis of Ankh-Morpork, the biggest city on the Disc. One of the usually shiftless Ankh-Morpork police force, a fellow named Sam Vimes who would go on to become the most frequently recurring Discworld-novel protagonist of all, has the bright idea of actually investigating for a change, leading to both comedy and drama. Guards! Guards! can be considered a landmark in the evolution of the Discworld series thanks to the presence of Vimes alone. He is, claims Pratchett’s biographer Burrows, “a character that grew out of Pratchett’s need to put his personality on the page. Vimes is a deposit for the author’s burning anger, and is fueled by a deep sense of injustice that Pratchet had so far managed to keep a lid on. The character is utterly flawed. He’s a drunk, he spends his life miserable, and, despite a keen intelligence, has a habit of speaking truth to power that has kept him from rising further than the city’s least-desirable command — captain of the night watch.”

Writing in a genre famous for seeing good and evil as (sometimes all too literally) white and black, Pratchett understands how the gray of ordinary people leading ordinary lives can slowly but surely turn into deepest ebony.

There are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a touch of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no.

Or take 1991’s Reaper Man, the second Discworld novel with Death as a main protagonist. The books begins with a crazy premise: that Death has retired to become a farmhand, which causes serious problems on the Disc as everyone currently alive becomes suddenly immortal. What initially seems like nothing but another clever gag becomes in due course a wise, compassionate meditation on time and its passing, on how birth and death are the natural, necessary way of the universe, on how old lives must ultimately end to make space for young ones.

No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away — until the clock he made winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.

Or take 1992’s Small Gods, a simultaneously satirical and sympathetic examination of the eternal human quest for Higher Truths, told from the standpoint of both idealists and cynics.

Take it from me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it’s because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place…

Here’s a riff on Plato that comes about as close as any passage can to summing up Pratchett’s philosophy of a happy life:

Life in this world is, as it were, a sojourn in a cave. What can we know of reality? For all we see of the true nature of existence is, shall we say, no more than bewildering and amusing shadows cast upon the inner wall of the cave by the unseen blinding light of absolute truth, from which we may or may not deduce some glimmer of veracity, and we as troglodyte seekers of wisdom can only lift our voices to the unseen and say, humbly, “Go on, do Deformed Rabbit… it’s my favorite.”

And then there’s my very favorite, as cogent an argument for the value of blue-sky research as I’ve ever read:

It’s always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it’s all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There’s No One There to Hear It, and then, just when you think they’re going to start dribbling, one of ’em says, “Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy’s ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles.”

By the early 1990s, Pratchett had managed an incredible, not to say paradoxical, feat: he had busted right out of the fantasy ghetto whilst remaining an unapologetic genre author in outlook and orientation. You were guaranteed to see at least one or two Discworld novels during any given trip on the London Underground, as often as not clutched in the hands of riders who were not your stereotypical fantasy nerds. Discworld cut across all the usual boundaries of class, age, race, and gender. In 1992, W.H. Smith, the biggest bookstore chain in Britain, stated that 10 percent of their total science-fiction and fantasy sales consisted of Terry Pratchett books. By 1998, Pratchett accounted for 2 percent of all their revenues. When you combined the sales of all of his novels together, he became simply the most popular single British author of the 1990s. There was something comforting in the way that these unpretentiously entertaining, gently wise books were able to hold their own and then some against all of the latest controversial political screeds and tawdry celebrity memoirs. If Discworld wasn’t quite great literature, it was certainly a cut above most of the rest of the bestseller list.

Pratchett himself was only slightly slowed by the interviews and book signings that came with being Britain’s most popular living author; he continued to crank out a reliable two books per year. Unlike so many authors whose names have become a brand, Pratchett never stooped to hiring ghostwriters to create his content; every word in every Discworld novel was his own. He became a very rich man, but that didn’t slow him down either. Clearly money wasn’t the main reason he wrote. While he enjoyed it in a way, that way was mostly as a handy measure of his success; his actual lifestyle changed surprisingly little.

Pratchett at a 1996 Discworld convention with a costumed fan.

For all of Discworld’s 1990s popularity in Britain and some other parts of Europe — Germany proved another especially strong market — it never became more than a cult phenomenon in the United States. (Tellingly, the British edition of Good Omens listed Pratchett’s name first as the more salable author, while the American edition did just the opposite.) This relative failure irked Pratchett, who went so far as to rewrite parts some of his books to better suit what he judged to be the American comedic sensibility. Nonetheless, he wouldn’t manage to place a book on the New York Times bestseller list until 2004.

There really are no obvious American analogues for Pratchett’s place in British pop culture during the decade before that one. Piers Anthony churned out whimsical fantasy novels set in his own pun-strewn world of Xanth at almost as prodigious a pace, and fostered a similarly personal connection with his readers, but his series was vastly more crass, formulaic, and juvenile, not at all the sort of thing most respectable adults were willing to be caught reading on a train.

Confined to Europe though it was, the 1990s Discworld mania was very real and very huge. In addition to the novels themselves, there were television cartoons, audio books, music CDs, collectible figures and toys, tee-shirts and other clothing, jewelry, candles, maps, companion source books, quiz books, a tabletop role-playing game, paper fanzines, conventions, websites, and one of the most popular newsgroups on Usenet: alt.fan.Pratchett, where the author himself occasionally dropped by to leave a post. “Anyone could be a Discworld fan,” writes Marc Burrows, “and sometimes it felt like just about everybody was.”

Naturally, then, there were also computer games…

(Sources: the books The Magic of Terry Pratchett by Marc Burrows and The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn; Starlog of August 1990 and May 2000. And of course the many books of Terry Pratchett!)

Comments
44 Responses

- CJ

July 22, 2022 at 3:53 pm

Thrilled that we’re getting a multi-part series on one of my favorite authors! Pratchett was quite a revelation to Younger Me, and I still revisit Discworld frequently.

One thing I love about the books is how the jokes often defy concise quoting. I frequently use “…and Björn Stronginthearm’s your uncle” in chats, in reference to an early bit in Guards! Guards! (a pair of dwarves discussing what to do with young Carrot). The joke’s nearly impossible to cut out of the book, though — it spans at least half a page and more than one paragraph. He was really good at weaving that kind of thing throughout long passages, and even across many chapters.

Relatedly, that’s one of the reasons the non-book versions of Discworld stories generally don’t work very well for me; there’s just not *time* to give the jokes the room they need, if you’re constrained to a few hours of screen time and need to keep the plot moving.

- Jack Brounstein

July 22, 2022 at 4:36 pm

I have an incredible soft spot for Terry Pratchett, and end up re-reading much of his catalogue every few years when I want a break from more serious fare. I have to admit I was a little worried going in to this article—for as much as I enjoy the work, there is a formula there, and I wasn’t sure I was emotionally ready for one of my favorite bloggers to tear down one of my favorite authors.

I’m looking forward to reading about the Discworld adventure games, which I’ve never played and heard somewhat negative things about. I’ve always been most curious about Discworld Noir, though it looks like that wasn’t released until 1999; I like hard-boiled pastiche a good deal more than I like general fantasy (or most actual hard-boiled detective stories), which is probably why I’ve also always gravitated to the Night Watch books. Speaking of…

> a fellow named Sam Vimes who would go on to become the most frequently recurring Discworld character of all

This is true for starring roles or number of pages, but I think in terms of books featuring the character it has to be Death.

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2022 at 7:30 am

Fair enough. Thanks!

- Cdrjameson

July 24, 2022 at 4:29 pm

Don’t forget the Librarian, who pops up pretty much every time.

- Peter Olausson

July 22, 2022 at 6:12 pm

There are plenty of Pratchett quote collections. Wikiquote has a lengthy one I keep returning to, as a virtually endless source of Pratchettiana. If anyone still wonders why one ought to read him, this might be a good place to start.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Discworld

- Ignacio

July 22, 2022 at 6:24 pm

Great piece! Thanks!!

One little typo: “it never becOme more”.

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2022 at 7:32 am

Thanks!

- Nathan Myers

July 22, 2022 at 7:38 pm

The live-action dramatic productions of his work have turned out very well, most particularly Hogfather, with a young Michelle Dockery in the lead as DEATH’s granddaughter. Casting throughout is inspired.

- Andy North

July 22, 2022 at 7:53 pm

Fun fact: the character of Twoflower wears glasses, which Rincewind has never seen before and mistakenly interprets as a second pair of eyes, in a throwaway joke about “four eyes” being a popular insult for nerds. Josh Kirby misunderstood and painted the character with four physical eyes on the cover of The Light Fantastic that you link in the article.

I think Terry addressed this at some point but can’t find the quote – basically that he thought the mistake was funny enough that he didn’t insist on it being corrected.

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2022 at 7:36 am

Yes, there’s some additional discussion of this in Burrows’s biography. Pratchett took a writerly lesson from the whole mix-up — that he shouldn’t outsmart himself by trying to be too clever, that he should remember that clarity also has a value. A very good lesson for all writers, one we all need to relearn from time to time.

- Armcie

July 22, 2022 at 8:41 pm

Colin Smythe initially commissioned Terry to write some short stories/novellas, which then became The Colour of Magic, which goes some way to explain its disjointed nature.

- Jeff Thomas

July 22, 2022 at 8:47 pm

This is a welcome and pleasant surprise. I distinctly remember the day in a used bookstore (“a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read” — Pratchett) that I spotted a dog-eared copy of Guards Guards and thought to myself, “Hey, that’s the guy who wrote Good Omens with Neil Gaiman, I wonder what he’s been up to?” What indeed. That moment was as moments in my reading life as the time I snuck The Fellowship of the Ring from my parents bedroom at 12 (I was too young, according to them) or when a school mate lent me his Foundation trilogy in Junior High. Pratchett had the amazing ability to wrap social commentary and big ideas into clever and amusing stories full of great humor AND humanity. He has the BEST take on elves too.

Yes, many people see him putting himself into his world as Vimes, and there’s probably something to that. But I personally think he put more of himself into Granny Weatherwax who was cornered into being The Good One because the role of Villain was already taken, and she wasn’t too happy about it. He saw all the injustice of the world, and the flaws in human nature that allowed them to happen, and it really angered him. If he could have taken a more active role than writing scathing social commentary disguised as popular entertainment he certainly would have.

“The trouble is, you see, that if you do know Right from Wrong, you can’t choose Wrong. You just can’t do it and live. So.. if I was a bad witch I could make Mister Salzella’s muscles turn against his bones and break them where he stood… if I was bad. I could do things inside his head, change the shape he thinks he is, and he’d be down on what had been his knees and begging to be turned into a frog… if I was bad. I could leave him with a mind like a scrambled egg, listening to colors and hearing smells…if I was bad. Oh yes.” There was another sigh, deeper and more heartfelt. “But I can’t do none of that stuff. That wouldn’t be Right.”

She gave a deprecating little chuckle. And if Nanny Ogg had been listening, she would have resolved as follows: that no maddened cackle from Black Aliss of infamous memory, no evil little giggle from some crazed Vampyre whose morals were worse than his spelling, no side-splitting guffaw from the most inventive torturer, was quite so unnerving as a happy little chuckle from a Granny Weatherwax about to do what’s Right.” — Terry Pratchett

He wrote over 50 books in his career, and yet he still died far, far too soon. I’m really looking forward to you covering his computer adventures, although I such a huge fan and have loved adventure games since I first played Colossal Cave on a PDP/11 I haven’t had a chance to get a working copy of any of them. His non-book works are still hard to get in America, though I can heartily recommend Neil Gaiman’s tv production of Good Omens which Gaiman has said he did as a homage to is old friend, constantly asking himself “what would Terry do?” while making it. It’ll be interesting to see what he does with a second season.

#GNUTerryPratchett

- Andrew Plotkin

July 23, 2022 at 1:16 am

> But I personally think he put more of himself into Granny Weatherwax…

Or, arguably, Lord Vetinari. Always behind the scenes. Responsible for every soul in Ankh-Morpork. Spends his life working on a life-spanning scheme to ensure that the city can survive past his death.

(Also, often acts by winding Sam Vimes up.)

GNUTerryPratchett indeed.

- deiseach

July 23, 2022 at 7:19 pm

“Responsible for every soul in Ankh-Morpork”

And twice as many people.

- Jeff Thomas

July 23, 2022 at 8:06 pm

Indeed. There is probably some truth to all of this. He put his heart and soul into these books, each character a different reflection of him. This is why they are so human.

- Peter Olausson

July 22, 2022 at 11:47 pm

By the way, there’s at least one direct computer reference in the Discworld geography: The Ramtop mountains. On the ZX Spectrum, the system variable RAMTOP is the highest memory address used by BASIC. Everything above is thus protected from NEW, and eg a suitable place to put machine code.

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2022 at 7:37 am

A Spectrum was Pratchett’s second computer, which he sold in favor of an Amstrad. ;)

- Michael Brazier

July 23, 2022 at 2:30 am

The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic aren’t really sending up Tolkien and his imitators; they’re sending up the older “sword and sorcery” type of fantasy, Robert E. Howard and Fritz Lieber and their ilk. Indeed, both books are quite similar to a Fafrhd and Grey Mouser collection of stories – not just because Lieber’s heroes were a duo while Howard’s worked alone, but also because Lieber was not … invariably serious. (I don’t remember a single time when Howard put a joke in his stories.)

Tolkien riffs do turn up occasionally in the Discworld – Captain Carrot bears a strong resemblance to Aragorn, for instance, and there’s the dwarfs – but the structure of Tolkienesque “epic fantasy” doesn’t really get into any of the books. Even the ones that bring in literally cosmos-shaking threats don’t echo the plot of The Lord of the Rings.

- WellTemperedClavier

July 23, 2022 at 5:36 am

I’ve never been able to really get into Pratchett’s work. After a few aborted attempts in grade school, I more recently tried “Guards! Guards!” at a friend’s recommendation, and just could not get engaged. The humor never managed to get more than a weak chuckle from me. Pratchett’s observations somehow felt unwelcome even though I largely agreed with them. Maybe they felt too much like an authorial intrusion on the narrative.

I’m baffled as to why it didn’t click. Based on what you write about Pratchett, his work sounds exactly like the kind of thing I’d be most interested in. One of the ways in which I judge a fictional setting is whether or not I can imagine living there as a regular person (and if it passes, I’ll probably like the setting). Likewise, I’ve often said I want to see more about the mundane sides of fantasy worlds. Everyone I know speaks highly of Pratchett, to the point that me not liking his books is starting to feel like a moral failing on my part.

Regardless, your post helps me see the value in Pratchett’s work. Fantasy (and a fair amount of “realist” literature as well) relies so heavily on the big picture that it easily loses touch with the human. We don’t all fit into neat categories and great social problems can’t be solved by killing one evil wizard. Any author who emphasizes such truths is doing a good thing, in my opinion, regardless of my personal enjoyment.

- Mike Taylor

July 25, 2022 at 1:25 pm

“Everyone I know speaks highly of Pratchett, to the point that me not liking his books is starting to feel like a moral failing on my part.,

That is exactly how i feel about Bob Dylan.

- Jimmy Maher

July 25, 2022 at 1:59 pm

He can be hit or miss for me as well, but when he nailed it back in the day, he nailed it good. I have this theory that every songwriter is born with a limited supply of interesting and original melodies. If so, Dylan’s well of same ran dry about 40 years ago. To compensate, he’s leaned heavily recently into the whole Nobel Prize-winning poet thing, speak-singing over repetitive blues chords. Lord save us from songwriters who’ve decided they’re really poets!

Anyway, even Dylan’s classic songs can be an easier sell when not sung by Dylan. Emma Swift released a lovely Dylan covers album not too long ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R94s8vxi9A. (Although even in this context, twelve minutes of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is about eight minutes too many…)

- Gnoman

July 23, 2022 at 7:16 am

The inability to rise above “cult” status in the US is one of the biggest similarities between Pratchett and Adams. I’ve never quite understood why, despite being one of the Americans for whom neither ever really clicked. There’s no fundamental cultural missteps that I’ve seen, they just have no “grip”, so to speak.

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2022 at 7:49 am

Douglas Adams did much better in the United States than Terry Pratchett. His books were bestsellers there during the 1980s, and were certainly very well known to me and my nerdy friends. Witness the success of Infocom’s Hitchhiker game. The Discworld text adventure, by contrast, never even found an American publisher. There just wasn’t enough of a market for it.

I think Adams was an easier sell to American teenagers because there’s a more direct through-line from the likes of Monty Python, which we never tired of watching and parroting ad nauseum, to Hitchhiker’s. Adams was doing social commentary of a sort — I’ve argued elsewhere that the line from P.G. Wodehouse to Hitchiker’s is more pronounced than any science-fiction influence — but, with occasional exceptions (So Long Thanks For All the Fish springs to mind) he didn’t show much interest in coherent world-building or the inner lives of his characters. Pratchett’s work was more subtle and more ambitious. For this reason, it didn’t quite fit into that comfortable “British comedy” box. Americans weren’t sure what to make of it.

- Gnoman

July 23, 2022 at 11:23 am

Adams being a Space Guy probably helped – there were far more space-themed works with mainstream success (Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, etc) when he made his debut than there were fantasy ones.

That said “nerdy” is kind of the key word there. Both Monty Python and Douglas Adams are things that I only really encountered from the “ghettoed” population – the folks already into sci-fi and fantasy and comics. The exception being ex-military people who spent a great deal of time stationed oversea. The same is true of Pratchett, despite his fans being far less inclined to annoying repetitive quotes.

Meanwhile just about every third British person I’ve encountered is a fan, even if they don’t fit into that demographic. I’ve never been able to figure out quite what causes the difference, any more than I can figure out why my own reaction is so negative despite everything in the books being normally right up my alley.

- Chris D

July 23, 2022 at 12:28 pm

I think the Monty Python link being part of Adam’s appeal to American readers is very true. One other thing I would suggest is that while both Adams and Pratchett are very English writers, Pratchett’s style reflects an England you don’t often see in films and novels. Adams is much more upper-middle class than Pratchett, having been to public school & Cambridge, and having worked for the BBC. Pratchett’s humour and characters have more of a lower-middle / working class background, and those characters and situations may be less familiar to US audiences just because they turn up in films less often (or at least, films that are popular outside of the UK).

I’m thinking of bits like the scene in Guards! Guards! where the watchmen get distracted by the suggestion of eating beef dripping on bread and rhapsodise about it for ages, or particularly, Granny Weatherwax and her family, who are portrayed in a way that would be very familiar to UK readers – within a page or two, they’re clearly the kind of family you might find on any council estate in the UK, but portrayed with a real warmth and insight, in a non-condescending way that is quite unlike the way most UK media portrays poor families. I suspect most people in the UK would respond to that character immediately, but they might not set off that feeling of recognition in other countries.

- Andrew Plotkin

July 23, 2022 at 4:35 pm

> Granny Weatherwax and her family

I trust you mean Nanny Ogg :)

It’s worth pointing out that American *fantasy readers* were keenly aware of Pratchett and, in general, were big fans. Some people never got into them (pace the commenters above) but many more loved the books and hovered around the bookstore waiting for each new one. US fantasy *writers* loved Pratchett; bookstore owners loved Pratchett. The 90s were the era of Big Awesome Bookstores (Borders, B&N) and there were rows of Pratchett hardbacks lined up on the shelves.

What Pratchett never got was the mainstream US pop-culture breakout that Douglas Adams and (later) Rowling got.

- Chris D

July 23, 2022 at 5:08 pm

Yes! It’s been a while since I read any Pratchett, and I did wonder whether I was thinking of Nanny Ogg.

- Drew

July 23, 2022 at 3:37 pm

This is awesome. Can’t wait for more.

- Alex

July 23, 2022 at 6:43 pm

This article perfectly describes why Pratchett is something special to me when it comes to Fantasy. Of course I knew his name and the name of Discworld for many years, but I´ve never read any of his books until two years ago. I just wasn´t interested enough to buy them and I never saw copies at flea markets or garage sales (I don´t know if he is that popular in Austria). Anyway, I have an aunt who lives in Britain part-time and who is an avid reader. She has got many of his books and lend me one which I read during the pandemic. I was really surprised about basically everything you wrote here. In general, I´m not really a fan of comedic fantasy, but this is really something different. I found one of the books in a german translation in a public book case a few weeks ago, but I have to read it yet. Good job, as always!

- Steve Nicholson

July 24, 2022 at 8:53 pm

Count me as another American who knew nothing about Terry Pratchett. I did read Good Omens years ago and remember liking it. But after seeing the Good Omens TV series (which I consider among the finest things ever broadcast) I thought I should look into his other writings. When I saw how many books there were in the Discworld series and calculated how many hundreds of dollars it would cost to get them all (I’m, unfortunately, an uncontrollable completist) I balked.

Reading this makes me think about reconsidering. Maybe I should start hitting up used book stores.

- Tom Cleaveland

July 27, 2022 at 7:16 pm

Steve: check your local library if you haven’t already. I’m fortunate that mine has the complete series and maybe yours does as well.

- cpt kangarooski

July 25, 2022 at 6:20 am

Regarding the caption for Equal Rites, I’m fairly sure that what Esk is holding there is her staff (disguised as a broom); it’s just that she’s holding it on her left, and we see her from her right.

- Leo Vellès

July 26, 2022 at 1:47 pm

I never read any one of his books, but for those who haven´t played the first Discworld computer game and aren`t sure if it is worthy to play it because all the ill reputation about it`s puzzles: play it with a walkthrough by your side and don´t be ashamed! Yes, the puzzles are nonsensical and surely a candidate for the most moon logic puzzle design of all time….but, but……the graphics are gorgeous, the humor is top notch, and the voice work is simply supeb. The cast is flawless, and Eric Idle as Rincewind is the funniest thing I ever heard (Idle can read all day a medical prescription an still be funny as hell).
Discworld 2 is more classic about it`s puzzle design and can be finished without any walkthrough. It`s a very good game, but I don`t know why I liked more the first one, with all the flaws that the sequel don´t have.

- Pog

July 27, 2022 at 1:13 am

It’s the first time of my life I am reading “pell mell”. Well, it’s pêle-mêle, and you should write it en français dans le texte, because that looks very odd to my French eyes. Continue the great work ! (I am the guy giving 30 euros per article for a few years now through Patreon, and I would like more articles per year ahah !)

- Gnoman

July 27, 2022 at 1:36 am

Why would the English phrase “pell mell” be spelled as if it were French? It isn’t French, it is English.

- Jimmy Maher

July 27, 2022 at 7:56 am

For 30 euros per article I’m tempted to give you what you want, but editorial ethics must be upheld. ;) Thanks for your support!

- Pog

July 27, 2022 at 9:23 pm

It’s the first time I read “pell mell”, I thought it was the French expression “pêle mêle” weirdly translated… which it is, in a way, because I found that “pêle mêle” was the inspiration of “pell mell”. But it looks like part of English now, so ok. I hope I will never hear it though, it might sound horrendous.

- Jimmy Maher

July 28, 2022 at 5:05 am

I daresay most of English sounds horrendous compared to French. ;)

- Tom Cleaveland

July 27, 2022 at 7:14 pm

I binge-read the Discworld series through Reaper Man and just haven’t had the energy to keep going. Much of that book and Moving Pictures seemed to me to be “cranky old man” satire and I had to force myself to finish. Death’s relationship with Miss Flitworth was written with such tenderness and it deserved a better side story.

My favorite among the first 11 books is Wyrd Sisters, a satire–and a warning–concerning language, memory, and history.

All in all a brilliant set of books so far, very much of a lineage of satire that includes Gulliver’s Travels.

- Wolfeye Mox

July 27, 2022 at 8:13 pm

I’ve read all but one of the Discworld books. I still haven’t read the last one, because I always want Terry to have another story to tell me.

- Brian Bagnall

July 31, 2022 at 2:54 pm

I started reading The Colour of Magic in light of this article, and with the fourth and final part of the book remaining, my impression is that he is a brilliant writer in many ways. I marvel at the imagination in his prose, and slightly less at the scenarios he invents. Definitely a lot is owed to Monty Python and Douglas Adams. The first half of the book is the strongest while the later parts seem more unmoored and without any particular goal or drive for the characters. They just sort of wander around from one random thing to the next, which doesn’t exactly keep me glued to the page. As this article mentions the later books are more focused so I will probably give them a try.

- Pingback: July 2022 In Review | Brain Baking

- James

August 13, 2022 at 2:06 am

“Adams’s works, he claimed with some truth, were archer, colder, and crueler than his own humor;”
Does Archer have a special meaning in this context? I’ve never come across it before.

- Jimmy Maher

August 13, 2022 at 7:08 am

As an adjective, “arch” means humorous in a sly, crafty way that has more to do with the head than the heart.

Discworld on Page and Screen, Part 2: The First Three Discworld Games
August 5, 2022

As a man of wide-ranging curiosity, Terry Pratchett was drawn to personal computers early. In 1981, he purchased a Sinclair ZX81 in kit form and soldered it together successfully. He soon upgraded to a Sinclair Spectrum and then to an Amstrad CPC 464, which was his first computer strong enough to run a practical word processor. From the second Discworld novel on, he wrote all of his books digitally; this was undoubtedly a factor in the prodigious writing and publishing pace he maintained for so many years. But computers were more than a tool to him: right from the beginning, he also played computer games enthusiastically. In a 1986 interview, for example, he mentions being obsessed with Infocom’s interactive version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The first Discworld computer game came surprisingly quickly, courtesy of a teenage entrepreneur named Fergus McNeill and his little company Delta 4, who had made a name for themselves by writing slapstick fantasy parodies as Quill-based text adventures, with names like Bored of the Rings (which didn’t share anything but a name and a certain sensibility with the book of the same name) and The Boggit. While it would be a stretch to say that they transcended their author’s age and the technology used to create them, they were amusing in their way, and became quite popular. Some of them reportedly sold as many as 20,000 copies, a very impressive number in the British games industry of the mid-1980s. They made McNeill a natural to adapt Terry Pratchett to an interactive medium, given that the latter’s first couple of Discworld novels were content to plow much the same satirical territory, albeit in a more erudite and sophisticated way.

The Boggit contains its share of literal toilet humor.

McNeill says that he originally bought the novel The Colour of Magic “as a present for someone else, but I accidentally started reading it myself and found myself unable to stop.” It was he who suggested an adaptation to Pratchett’s publisher, to capitalize on the British appetite for bookware. “It’s important to remember that this was Olden Times — the 1980s, for goodness sake,” he says. “So, when I said ‘Terry Pratchett,’ people didn’t laugh at my audacity for wanting to work with the great man. They frowned and said, “Who’s he?'”

Thus McNeill was able to make the deal, and created his Colour of Magic text adventure in short order, with some direct input from Pratchett himself. The end result, which was released in late 1986 in Britain and Europe only, is an abbreviated version of the novel, walking through its plot scene by scene. Solving it entails looking up what Rincewind did in the same situation in the book, then figuring out how to express the concept to the balky, fiddly parser. Those who have read the book, in other words, will vacillate between boredom and frustration, while those who haven’t will be utterly lost. Even in its day, when a disconcerting number of players were willing to accept fighting the parser as an inherent part of the challenge of playing a text adventure, the game was less popular than its license might suggest.

The Colour of Magic replaces the standard text-adventure compass directions with those of the Disc: “hubward,” “rimward,” “turnwise,” and “widdershins.” One plus for verisimilitude, but ten minuses for annoying the heck out of the player.

McNeill speaks of his communications with Pratchett fondly, going so far as to call him “a big inspiration for me,” whilst calling being allowed to make the game at all “a huge privilege.” Yet Pratchett was enough of a gamer himself to recognize how underwhelming the final product really was. In his view, it cheapened the Discworld brand, of which he was always keenly protective; he would refer to the interactive Colour of Magic only as a “bad experience” in later years. It was enough to make him shy away from further game adaptations for quite some time, despite his personal fondness for computers and the games they played. It wasn’t until mid-1993, when Discworld mania was in full swing, that someone managed to convince Pratchett to give the idea of ludic Discworld a second chance.

Actually, there were two someones, the first of whom was one Angela Sutherland, who had gotten her start in the games industry back in 1983. She had been studying to become a sculptor at that time at the Edinburgh College of Art, when a fellow student and good friend named Sandy White had showed her a simple action game called Ant Attack which he had been writing on his Sinclair Spectrum. She helped him to flesh it out and get it published, whereupon it became one of the big early hits on the Speccy. Sutherland worked with White on several more games after that, moved on to become head of development for Firebird and Rainbird, and then became a producer for the British division of Beam Software, the Australian software house famous for The Hobbit, probably the best-selling text adventure of all time (and the thing which Fergus McNeill’s early games were really parodying, at least as much as Tolkien’s books).

Seeing an opportunity in the market, she left Beam and founded her own studio, Teeny Weeny Games, in 1991. Its name reflected its focus: games for handheld systems like the Nintendo Game Boy. Such gadgets were not yet hugely popular among consumers in her home country, but the average British wage was lower than that of the average American or Japanese, making a British studio such as the one she was setting up a good option for big publishers looking to get a product onto the international market quickly and fairly inexpensively, but also competently. So, Teeny Weeny cut their teeth on playable but forgettable licensed fare and ports. For all that it was the games industry’s version of flyover country, this was also a space where a pragmatist like Sutherland could do very well for herself. These sorts of projects would remain the studio’s bread and butter throughout its lifetime.

Teeny Weeny enjoyed an unusual symbiotic relationship with another studio called Perfect 10 Productions, founded at almost the same time by Gregg Barnett, a former colleague of Sutherland from Beam. Perfect 10 had much the same business philosophy as Teeny Weeny, but focused on the full-sized console systems; this created an opportunity for the two developers to collaborate in order to bring the same game out on living-room and handheld consoles. And indeed, they came to share code, assets, strategies, and even office space and to some extent employees with one another, until it became difficult for the outside observer to see where one stopped and the other began.

Thus it was Sutherland and Barnett together who made the pitch to Terry Pratchett for a Discworld adventure game. It seems that their pragmatism had served to conceal a streak of more ambitious creativity, a desire to make something more exciting than the games that were currently keeping the lights on in their offices. But at the same time, they were still hard-nosed enough to appreciate the value of licenses — particularly a license of the biggest literary phenomenon in Britain, a series of novels which Sutherland and Barnett happened to adore, just like millions of their countryfolk.

Angela Sutherland, Terry Pratchett, and… Death.

Pratchett, however, was not easy to convince. It took six months of tireless courting, and ultimately the presentation of a complete design document written by Barnett himself, to get him to say yes. “The main reason he signed,” says Barnett, “was that we did a design, which showed we were willing to put in the work without any initial reward, and that we understood and respected the property.” Sutherland and Barnett promised Pratchett that they would wash away the bad taste of the Colour of Magic text adventure by sparing no expense or effort this time around. They would make a fully-voiced point-and-click graphic adventure for the latest CD-ROM-capable personal computers, one that was as good or better than any of the big titles coming out of the United States.

In fact, the Discworld game almost came out under one of those American publishers’ imprint. Using their international connections to maximum advantage, Sutherland and Barnett signed a deal with Sierra, along with LucasArts one of the two biggest names of all in adventure gaming. The agreement would let them make their game using that company’s state-of-the-art SCI engine, with the support of some Sierra personnel who would temporarily relocate to the project’s South London headquarters. But the American publisher didn’t quite seem to grasp what a huge license Discworld really was on the other side of the Atlantic. Bleeding money from their visionary but unprofitable online gaming space The Sierra Network, they backed out of the deal. Talks with the American giant Electronic Arts also fell through, whereupon Sutherland and Barnett finally signed with the homegrown publisher Psygnosis, best known for the global hit Lemmings, the most popular British-developed videogame prior to the Grand Theft Auto franchise many years later. By virtue of their location at Ground Zero of Discworld mania, Psygnosis knew very well how big a Discworld game could be, such that they had already tried without success to pitch the idea directly to the wary Pratchett. At their first meeting with Sutherland and Barnett, they became the suitor rather than the courted: they “wouldn’t leave until we did a deal,” says Barnett.

Pratchett himself was if anything even more into games now than he had been during the previous decade. For a man who had grown up in a house without electricity or an indoor toilet, the games of the 1990s were nothing short of wondrous. “I play games a lot — and I mean a lot,” he said in a contemporary interview. “Sitting in front of a screen writing, you need some relaxation, and what better way than to load in something like Wing Commander, which is one of my faves. One of the nice things about making lots of money from books is that I can go down to the local Virgin Store and buy what I want!” This habit, combined with his protectiveness of Discworld as a property, ensured that he would take a healthy interest in the Discworld game. He went so far as to rewrite some of Gregg Barnett’s dialog.

Barnett’s script borrows heavily from Pratchett’s 1989 novel Guards! Guards!. Given how close Watch Commander Sam Vimes, its protagonist, was to his creator’s heart, it must have rankled Pratchett a bit when Barnett elected to write him out of the story, replacing him with Rincewind as chief investigator and player’s avatar. Ditto when Barnett cut out most of the novel’s serious subtext, leaving behind only the gags, jokes, and tropes. And double ditto when the game’s developers eventually cast Eric Idle of Monty Python — a part of the archly absurdist Oxbridge comedy tradition that also included the likes of Douglas Adams, and to which Pratchett did not see Discworld as belonging — to voice the part of Rincewind.

Yet Pratchett was also a reasonable man with a good grasp of what it took to sell creative product, and he could see the logic behind each of Barnett’s decisions. Rincewind was still the series’s most well-known character at this stage in its evolution; serious themes are even harder to bring off in a comic adventure game than they are in a comic novel; and the casting of a real live member of Monty Python in any game was a tremendous coup, even if Eric Idle wasn’t Barnett’s first choice of John Cleese. (According to Barnett, “Fuck off! I don’t do games,” was the latter’s response to his inquiry…) The finished game does absorb some of the flavor of Monty Python — Barnett admits to making the onscreen Rincewind into something of a doppelgänger of Idle’s typically disheveled Python personae — but the combination works. I dare you to try to read a Discworld novel that stars Rincewind after playing this game without hearing Idle’s voice in your head.

The voice-acting cast was rounded out with some other enviable comedic talents: Tony Robinson, Blackadder’s perpetual sidekick; Kate Robbins of Spitting Image; Jon Pertwee, the third incarnation of Doctor Who; and Rob Brydon, a relative newcomer with a prolific career still in front of him (international audiences may know him best today for starring in the very funny Trip series of travel mockumentaries). The only problem with the cast is that there just aren’t enough of them, meaning that everyone with the exception of Idle is juggling many roles, a fact which mugging and accent-switching can’t completely obscure. Still, if one must settle for a cast of less than half a dozen, one couldn’t do much better these actors. It’s a pleasure to listen to the game’s collection of skittish, skeevy, occasionally lovable characters, every single one of them more or less off their nut, prattle on about nothing much in particular. “Is this fish fresh?” Rincewind asks a fishmonger. “Fresh? Fresh?” he replies. “It just made a pass at my wife, sir!”

The game’s visuals are equally distinctive. Under the direction of veteran artist Paul Mitchell, the metropolis of Ankh-Morpork, where the entire game takes place, becomes a Disney film as viewed by a cock-eyed drunk: everything is subtly warped and shifted, with nary a straight line to be seen (or heard, for that matter). Rincewind shuffles from location to location in his bedraggled wizard’s robes, looking like he would rather be anywhere else. (Maybe that’s understandable, given that every other character in the game asks him why he’s wearing a “dress.”) He’s trailed all the time by The Luggage, an inexplicably sentient suitcase with the legs of a centipede, the disposition of a pit bull, and the teeth of a bear trap; this movable feast serves as the means of conveyance of the incredible amount of stuff Rincewind will eventually collect and tote through the city.

As in the novel Guards! Guards!, the plot hinges on a fire-breathing dragon which a cabal of less-than-upstanding Ankh-Morpork citizens have summoned. Thwarting the monster and its minions requires playing through three lengthy, non-linear acts, followed by the climactic showdown with the dragon. Two of the main acts are scavenger hunts: find the five ridiculous things that are needed to build a Dragon’s Lair Revealer; steal the six golden talismans from the dragon-summoning cabal. We’ve all been here before — as has Rincewind apparently, judging from the scorn he is constantly heaping on the whole enterprise. Many adventure games use this sort of self-referential humor as a lazy excuse for derivative, uninspired design, and perhaps Discworld cannot be fully absolved of this sin. It does, however, have the virtue of being much, much funnier than the vast majority of such exercises. And, given that it’s meant to evoke the aesthetic of the early Discworld novels, which lampooned the conventions of paperback fantasy fiction in a similar way, the sin is venal rather than mortal.

Still, the game’s satire is at its best when it aims slightly higher in a meta-fictional sense. The point of the third act is to manipulate circumstances so that Rincewind will have exactly a million-to-one chance against the dragon. Because, as Terry Pratchett himself once put it, “we know — it is built into our very understanding of the narrative universe — that if it is a million-to-one chance that might just work, it will work. Because no one has ever heard of a million-to-one chance that just might work not working. In other words, a million-to-one chance is a certainty. It’s a cliché that we accept. We accept it from James Bond and from Bilbo Baggins.”

Josh Kirby, Terry Pratchett’s longtime cover illustrator, provided the art for the Discworld game box as well.

Rincewind with the Luggage.

Unseen University, where Rincewind has been studying without any obvious benefit to himself or society for years and years.

Death makes a cameo in the first Discworld graphic adventure. He will take a starring role in the second.

“A wizard’s staff has a knob on the end of it…”

Released in Britain in early 1995 under the name of simply Discworld, the game was praised to the skies by reviewer after reviewer. PC Zone magazine wasn’t that much of an outlier in calling it “possibly the best point-and-click adventure game ever made.” Everyone marveled over the graphics, the voice acting, and the humor, declaring that it really was like seeing the world of the novels come to life. Most of all, though, they marveled over the sheer size of the thing. They noted, accurately, that each of the game’s first three acts could easily have been a standalone game in its own right. It was and remains abundantly obvious that the people who made this game did so for all the right reasons, that they genuinely loved Anhk-Morpork and wanted to shove as much of it as possible onto a CD.

Unfortunately, these same people had never actually made an adventure game before. And, once the initial euphoria died down, players could all too plainly see this too in the finished product. It is — or at least ought to be — a truism in adventure design that every puzzle you make is ten times harder than you think it is. The only way to calibrate your game’s difficulty is to put it in front of real players and see how much they struggle. Sadly, it is all too clear that the people who made this game failed to do that in the midst of their zeal to keep adding more, more, more to it.

Discworld is for all intents and purposes insoluble. There is simply no way to reason out many of its puzzles; this is where the cockamamie nature of the world comes back to bite. The designers have paid no heed to what Bob Bates calls the “else” rule of good puzzle design. It states that, if the player has not done the correct thing, but she has done some other thing that might make some degree of logical or comedic sense, the game should recognize and acknowledge that in some way, ideally whilst embedding within its response a hint as to the correct way forward. In this game, though, everything you try to do that isn’t the One True Way Forward is met only by a scornful Eric Idle telling you, “That doesn’t work!” This is the one quote from Discworld that absolutely everyone remembers. Long before you finish the first act, it will have begun to haunt your very dreams, will pop back into your head to enrage you at random moments throughout your day. And just to ensure that you get to hear it even more often than you otherwise might, the game is littered with red herrings that have no purpose whatsoever.

To sum up, then, we have a huge environment to wander around in, one which provides no shortcuts to get from place to place, just Rincewind’s lackadaisical stroll; an enormous pile of objects, many of which are literally good for nothing; puzzles whose solutions are amusing in retrospect but cannot possibly be anticipated before the fact; and no middle ground between wrong and right when it comes to solving them, to provide useful feedback or at least some small dollop of amusement. Oh, and there are also dead ends that you can stumble into without realizing it, after which you’ll get to spend hours banging your head against brick walls even more fruitlessly than usual. As a piece of game design, Discworld is hopeless.

When the game came out in the United States several weeks after its British release, the reviewers there were clearer-eyed, being carried away with neither excitement over the very existence of a Discworld game nor home-country partisanship. Computer Gaming World magazine wrote that “the overall impression the game conveys is not one of richness but one of clutter and surfeit.” It sold in only middling numbers in the American market.

But that was not the case in Britain and much of Europe. There the game sold hundreds of thousands of copies before second takes started to appear in the gaming press and on the Internet, noting belatedly that labeling it “best adventure game of all time” may have been laying it on a bit thick. Needless to say, it was full speed ahead on the sequel.

Before starting on it in earnest, Angela Sutherland and Gregg Barnett finally did the logical thing and merged their two companies together as Perfect Entertainment. The new entity continued to devote the preponderance of its effort to workaday projects for the console market, but the connections forged thereby brought more than financial benefits to the passion projects: both Discworld and its sequel would be ported to the Sony PlayStation and the Sega Saturn, opening up whole new worlds of potential sales. (Their publisher Psygnosis had in fact been bought by Sony in 1993.)

If the first Discworld game is a sad story of good intentions and soaring ambitions derailed by a lack of experience with the nuts and bolts of adventure design, Discworld II: Missing, Presumed…!? is a happier tale of a development team willing and able to learn from their failures — a less common phenomenon than one might expect in the world of adventure games. It doesn’t so much try to break new ground as to perfect the experience which Perfect Entertainment had attempted to deliver last time around. And it succeeds on these terms rather magnificently. Right from the first page of the manual, where they promise that this Discworld game is “a little easier,” the makers make it clear that they understand what they did wrong last time.

Interestingly, Pratchett was less involved with the sequel. “I let them have their heads a bit more,” he said after its release. “It seemed that they could create a game that had the right kind of feel to it, so I didn’t have to shepherd them so much. There wasn’t quite so much shouting this time around.”

Once again the broad plot is lifted from a beloved Discworld novel: this time it’s 1991’s Reaper Man, in which Death leaves his job and retires to the countryside, with chaotic results for the whole Disc. As in the last game, matters are rejiggered to insert Rincewind into the story as the protagonist, while space is also made for elements of the 1990 Discworld novel Moving Pictures, an entertaining if not particularly deep pastiche of old Hollywood (“Holy Wood” on the Disc), with motion-picture cameras which consist of fast-painting imps trapped inside windowed boxes.

The second game is another joy to listen to; Eric Idle agreed to return, as did Kate Robbins and Rob Brydon. Tony Robinson elected not to, however, while the elderly Jon Pertwee was too ill to participate. (He died in May of 1996, leaving Discworld I as one of his last media legacies.) To take up some of the slack, Perfect hired Nigel Planer, another stalwart comedy veteran, who would go on to narrate almost all of the audio-book versions of the Discworld novels. Barnett tried to recruit Christopher Lee for the role of Death — an inspired choice by any standard — but Perfect couldn’t afford his asking price in the end. So, Rob Brydon took the role instead, and did very well with it, bringing out the mix of fussiness, petulance, and compassion that has since made Death arguably the most popular Discworld character of all time. On the whole, then, the voice acting in Discworld II is on a level with that of the first game — including, alas, the same major weakness of there just not being enough different actors. Kate Robbins, for example, voices every single female character in both games, and most of the children to boot.

The truly striking change from the first game to the second is the look of the production; the difference here is truly night and day. The switchover in the mid-1990s from the VGA graphics standard, with a typical resolution of 320 X 200, to SVGA, with a resolution of 640 X 480 or more, strikes me as the second of the two most dramatic inflection points in the history of computer-game graphics. (The first, for the record, is the arrival of the Commodore Amiga in the mid-1980s, followed soon after by VGA on MS-DOS machines.) The first and second Discworld graphic adventures stand on either side of the VGA/SVGA Rubicon, which divides games that look undeniably old today from those that can at least potentially still look quite contemporary. I would place Discworld II among this group without hesitation.

The higher resolution allowed Perfect to outsource the animation to Hanna-Barbera’s studio in the Philippines, a decision which would have made no sense under the constraints of VGA. Characters and backgrounds that looked a bit muddy and blurry in the first game pop on the screen in sharp, vivid cartoon colors this time around. Meanwhile the static views of the first game are replaced by fades, pans, and close-ups; it’s like going from the typical 1930s film to Citizen Kane.

Most importantly of all, Discworld II plays better. We have the same three-act structure as last time, with all of the acts no more than scavenger hunts at bottom. But this time we get to venture beyond Ankh-Morpork to other locations on the Disc. Counterintuitively with this last, the game as a whole is a bit smaller — and yet this is by no means a bad thing. The combinatorial explosion is much reduced, thanks to fewer locations, fewer objects, almost no red herrings, an absence of dead ends, and a much more concentrated effort to calibrate the puzzles to that sweet spot which lies equidistant from the trivial and the impossible. Discworld II isn’t an easy game; its puzzle-dependency chains are sometimes nested a dozen layers deep. Yet it is a soluble one, with puzzles that make a modicum of sense on the vast majority of occasions. Rincewind even deigns to say something other than “That doesn’t work!” some of the time when you try something that, well, doesn’t work. And the world of the game is even more of a delight than last time just to explore, being stuffed to the brim with eccentric characters and curious sights. Meaty, funny, generous, and yet unabashedly traditionalist, it succeeds in actually being everything its predecessor tried but failed to be.

Josh Kirby again provided the cover art for Discworld II.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/death.mp4

Eric Idle, who was always Monty Python’s go-to song-and-dance man, contributed an original song to Discworld II.

On a “Holy Wood” set, complete with troll security for the actors’ trailers.

You can move around on a larger world map this time. Notice the Luggage swimming behind Rincewind’s ship.

Visiting Death’s home, which is as Gothic chic as a Bauhaus song.

Oh, my, what’s happened here? In one of the best gags in a game that delights in pulverizing the fourth wall at every opportunity, Rincewind 2.0 gets transported for a few minutes back into the world of Discworld I, where he meets his low-res counterpart.

Thanks to already-built tools and the outsourcing of the animation, Perfect Entertainment was able to finish their second Discworld game in less than eighteen months, and Psygnosis released it in late 1996. By this time the adventure market in the United States was showing undeniable signs of mushiness, but it was still holding up comparatively well in Britain and Germany; Broken Sword, another homegrown British production from Revolution Software, would be a substantial hit that holiday season. Still, a sense of gloom was creeping in even on this side of the Atlantic. Discworld II testifies to this with a considerable amount of gallows humor about its genre. “Aren’t you gonna miss it when they stop making these games?” says Rincewind at one point.

Discworld II did reasonably well in the friendliest markets, but not as well as the first game. And it again made even less of an impact in the United States, despite a gushing review from Scorpia, Computer Gaming World’s long-tenured, infamously cantankerous adventure columnist. “It’s been too long since I could unreservedly recommend a game,” she wrote. “I can do it now.”

Between its computer and console versions, Discworld II sold just well enough to justify one more game. This would be a brave effort which eschewed the low-hanging fruit of cartoon comedy in favor of a dramatically different direction, enough so as to justify comparisons with Equal Rites, the Terry Pratchett novel which proved that the literary Discworld was more than just a fantasy version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We’ll turn to that final Discworld computer game to date, as well as the later years in Pratchett’s life and literary career, in due course, in another article.

For now, though, let me echo Scorpia’s unreserved endorsement of Discworld II. Its predecessor is an interesting but badly flawed creation, best left for hardcore fans of Rincewind who are willing to play with a walkthrough by their side, but the sequel deserves to be better remembered today as the minor classic it is. It represents the Discworld comedy game perfected.

(Sources: the books The Magic of Terry Pratchett by Marc Burrows and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld: The Official Strategy Guide by Glen Eldridge; Starlog of August 1990; CD-ROM Today of April 1995; Computer Gamer of January 1987; Computer Gaming World of June 1995 and May 1997; Computer and Video Games of September 1986; Electronic Entertainment of July 1995; GameFan of September 1997; Next Generation of August 1997; PC Zone of January 1995, August 1996, November 1996, and May 1999; PC Powerplay of November 1996 and July 1997; Sinclair User of December 1986; The One of September 1993; Retro Gamer 94 and 164.

None of the Discworld game are available for legal purchase today, doubtless due to complications with the literary license. Thankfully, Perfect Entertainment’s Discworld and Discworld II are available in ready-to-play Windows versions on The Collection Chamber. Mac and Linux users can import the data files there into their computer’s version of ScummVM.)

Comments
60 Responses

- Matt Campbell

August 5, 2022 at 4:42 pm

Tangentially, on the subject of Terry Pratchett and computers, I came across this interesting post from Eric Raymond (an influential early promoter of open source): http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=28

- Jeff Thomas

August 13, 2022 at 4:30 pm

That was really interesting and special. I am a professional programmer, have been for 30+ years, and the author is absolutely right. When I know exactly what I’m doing the job is boring and I’m not likely to stay in a job that requires only that for very long. The interesting stuff is trying out new technologies, learning new languages, trying new architectures and fortunatly the fast pace of technology means you end up doing this a lot if you want to stay current. The first version of something you build is always hacked together and patched and re-built no matter how well you try to plan it out, that’s just the nature of the beast.

It is a shame that Pratchett felt he didn’t have the math knowledge to pursue a technical career, but I have to guiltily admit that if he wouldn’t have become an author, I’m a bit glad of it.

- Pauli Ojala

August 5, 2022 at 5:11 pm

“… undoubtedly a factor in the torrid writing and publishing pace he maintained for so many years”

Torrid seems like the wrong choice of adjective here, as it implies difficulty and lack of creativity. Maybe “torrential”?

- Jimmy Maher

August 5, 2022 at 5:19 pm

It can also mean “passionate,” but yeah, maybe not the best choice. We’ll go with “prodigious.” Thanks!

- Andrew Plotkin

August 5, 2022 at 5:33 pm

Jon Pertwee, no “h”.

You also managed to invent a Josh Kilby, presumably to round out the Discworld artist trio with Kidby and Kirby.

- Jimmy Maher

August 5, 2022 at 6:45 pm

Thanks!

- Rob

August 5, 2022 at 7:36 pm

Great article! I really need to go back and give Pratchett another try.

One small typo:

“John Cleese. (According to Burnett, ”

s/Burnett/Barnett/

- Jimmy Maher

August 5, 2022 at 8:03 pm

Thanks!

- Brian Bagnall

August 5, 2022 at 8:05 pm

“…chance again the dragon.” against

You’ll probably disagree with this, but using “feast” to describe the contents of the trunk makes me think of food.

Since your last article I’ve read The Colour of Magic and watched the Sky TV production, Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic. It’s actually the first two novels mushed together into a two part series. Apparently they made three different adaptations of his novels that were fairly well received, with this being the second. It is awe inspiring to think of how much effort they must have put into the sets and props. The casting of Sean Astin as Twoflower seemed a poor choice, given that you can’t help but think of him as a Hobbit, especially with some of the similar lines he delivers. The actor playing Rincewood also seemed a bit too elderly. Good actor though. In the end, the lack of a strong plot undermines the whole thing and it gets a little tedious.

Can’t wait to crack into Discworld II on ScummVM. I had no idea this game was so well regarded.

- Jimmy Maher

August 6, 2022 at 6:22 am

It’s a play on words — more specifically, on the title of a famous book by Ernest Hemingway.

- Nate

August 6, 2022 at 11:47 pm

Maybe you kissed this suggested typo fix?

“again the dragon” -> “against”

- Jimmy Maher

August 7, 2022 at 6:13 am

I did… miss it. Thanks!

- Brian Bagnall

August 8, 2022 at 1:15 am

Oh wow, I never would have noticed that. Whoosh.

- CdrJameson

August 7, 2022 at 2:33 pm

Rincewind was played by David Jason, a comedy legend in the UK probably even more highly regarded than Eric Idle. He’d been known to want to play Rincewind for the best part of twenty years, so getting him was a definite publicity coup and probably at bargain rates. He’d have been a perfect choice for voice over in the game too.

The TV series also finally did get Christopher Lee to appear as Death.

Despite excellent casting and being pretty true to the source material I found it a bit rushed and incoherent, which was a shame. The TV adaptations have generally been rather too respectful of the original books to make good transitions to a different medium, with the notable exception of The Watch that went too far in the other direction.

- Adam Sampson

August 9, 2022 at 1:35 am

Christopher Lee first voiced Death in the Cosgrove-Hall animated Discworld adaptations. The pilot for those (based on Reaper Man) was made in 1996, so maybe he’d already discussed playing Death prior to Discworld 2…

“Tony Robinson elected not to […] To take up some of the slack, Perfect hired Nigel Planer, another stalwart comedy veteran, who had narrated almost all of the audio-book versions of the Discworld novels”

That was true a few years later, but when Discworld 2 came out, Tony Robinson’s abridged audiobooks for Corgi were quite a bit further into the series and had been out longer than Nigel Planer’s unabridged versions for ISIS. Planer was certainly a good choice to step into Robinson’s “de facto voice of Discworld” shoes.

I know The Watch has been polarising, but I really enjoyed it – it did rather remind me of the first Discworld game in the way that it mashed together storylines from several of the novels to make something that could work in a different medium.

- Jimmy Maher

August 9, 2022 at 4:43 am

Slight adjustment in tense made. ;) Thanks!

- Jim G

August 7, 2022 at 9:54 pm

Speaking of ScummVM, if anyone happens to have a guide on how to get the game working on macOS, I’d appreciate it. The files Jimmy links to on The Collection Chamber seem like they still need a PC to extract into a format that can then be imported into ScummVM on macOS.

I’ve been wanting to play Discworld II for decades (alas, I’m one of the ones who gave up on the first Discworld game.)

- Jim G

August 7, 2022 at 10:06 pm

And…never mind. I found an old Windows VM to extract the data files.

- John Elliott

August 5, 2022 at 9:04 pm

My recollection of the TCOM text adventure was that it was, according to the Zarfian scale, a cruel game — it’s possible to render the game unwinnable by omitting to do something in the first part, but the game lets you play right through to the third part before killing you off. Considerably more annoying in the days when moving from each part to the next involved saving your position to cassette tape, loading the next part (also from cassette tape) and then reloading your position, rather than using emulators and snapshots.

Part 3 also has an Easter egg: the IMAGINE command allows you to get cameos from Terry Pratchett (who comments “Don’t look at me! I’ve got enough problems playing ‘Hitch-hikers’.”) and the developers (Fergus, Colin and Judith).

- Sarah Walker

August 5, 2022 at 9:26 pm

Discworld II was one of 3 games we got at the same time as buying a new family PC in 1998. At the time it was an interesting introduction to CD-ROM gaming. Going back to it now, my only real comment is that I have to play it with the voices off; despite the calibre of talent behind it, I find the resulting voice acting to be skin-crawlingly awful. Thankfully subtitles are an option.

- Soh Kam Yung

August 5, 2022 at 10:49 pm

Off-topic. A new biography on Terry Pratchett, “Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes”, is about to be released.

More info at [ http://www.alifewithfootnotes.com/ ]

- Cheshire Noir

August 6, 2022 at 3:29 am

Was watching the little video snippet of the dancing skeleton, when I spotted a credit for dialogue to “Paul Kidd” so I went and checked, and yep, my old buddy Paul (Now Pauli) Kidd wrote some of the dialogue as well as the Strategy guide.
Small world. :-)

- Steve Taylor

August 8, 2022 at 7:34 am

Yeah – I read both Pratchett articles looking for any mention of Paul, and was surprised he didn’t get a look in.

(used to work at Melbourne House/Beam back in the day, so knew Paul from there)

- Torbjörn Andersson

August 6, 2022 at 3:39 am

“Watch Commander Sam Vines”

Vimes, not Vines, I believe?

‘Missing Presumed…!?’ was also released as ‘Mortality Bytes!’ with different box art and title screen. I have no idea what prompted the name change. I’m not a native English speaker, so the alterbative title makes little sense to me.

I don’t know if there were any other differences. I haven’t played the game in many years, and don’t even recognize most of the screenshots. I do remember thinking it was a much better game than its predecessor though.

- Jimmy Maher

August 6, 2022 at 6:25 am

Mortality Bytes was the subtitle in the United States. Neither is very good in my opinion. The British subtitle is hard to say, read, or remember, while the American one sounds more like Beavis and Butthead than Terry Pratchett.

Thanks for the correction!

- dsparil

August 7, 2022 at 9:54 am

Mortality Bytes has to be a reference to the movie Reality Bites which had come out a few years earlier.

- Alison Kirkland

September 30, 2022 at 3:37 pm

For what it’s worth, as you may know already, “Missing Presumed …” is a reference to the blurb on the back cover of “Reaper Man”. “Death is missing. Presumed, er, gone.” It’s funny if you know what it refers to, but I guess it doesn’t work very well out of context.

- Torbjörn Andersson

August 6, 2022 at 5:23 am

““Aren’t you gonna miss it when they stop making these games?” says Rincewind at one point.”

For many it was probably the other way around, but I remember watching the bomb defusing scene in (I think) Lethal Weapon 3 and going “Hey, I recognize this!”

- Aula

August 6, 2022 at 5:25 am

“this was undoubtedly a factor in the prodigious writing and publishing pace he maintained for so many years”

Well, I do doubt that, actually. Unless Pratchett himself has said otherwise, I would attribute his prolific output solely to his years working for a newspaper; that kind of job tends to force upon you not just the habit of cranking out text quickly, but also the easily recognizable “first draft is final” kind of mentality (which is quite typical among authors who used to be reporters), and if you rarely revise text you’ve already written, then a word processor isn’t really going to allow you to write any faster than an old-fashioned typewriter.

- Jim

August 7, 2022 at 10:26 pm

Probably a bit of both. Terry definitely credited his journalism background where, as he put it, “you very quickly learn the direct link between writing and eating.”

But using a computer probably didn’t hurt either. He definitely didn’t have a “first draft is final” mentality! To hear him describe it, it was more like bashing out words on paper—and then editing the heck out of it:

“But it may help if I give you an idea of how I go about writing. I’m about 10,000 words into my next book. Do I know what it is about? Yes, I do know what it is about, it’s just that I’m not telling myself. I can see bits of the story and I know the story is there. This is what I call draft zero. This is private. No one ever, ever gets to see draft zero. This is the draft that you write to tell yourself what the story is. Someone asked me recently how to guard against writing on auto-pilot. I responded that writing on auto-pilot is very, very important! I sit there and I bash the stuff out. I don’t edit — I let it flow. The important thing is that the next day I sit down and edit like crazy. . . .”

The editing part would definitely have benefited from using a computer instead of a typewriter.

The full interview here is well worth a read, BTW: https://www.writerswrite.com/journal/terry-pratchett-4001

- Derek

August 6, 2022 at 6:53 am

Trivia: Fergus McNeill went on to make a CDTV game called The Town With No Name, which has achieved some infamy in the YouTube era for being “so bad it’s good”. John Cleese did eventually lend his voice to a video game, Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic, though he did so only under a pseudonym.

- John

August 6, 2022 at 4:25 pm

I’d heard that John Cleese also did voice work for Bioware’s Jade Empire (2005). A quick Google search confirms that he did, and that his character was named, of all things, Sir Roderick Ponce Von Fontlebottom.

- Alex Smith

August 6, 2022 at 8:13 pm

He also did a voice for The Elder Scrolls Online. He clearly softened his stance at some point.

- Gnoman

August 7, 2022 at 1:59 pm

1995 and 2005 are wholly different worlds when it comes to game voice work. There was a time when it was was considered something you did only because you had no other choice, and was a lesser kind of work.

- Josh Martin

August 16, 2022 at 4:00 pm

The Town with No Name is indeed hilariously awful, but deserves credit for being one of the vanishingly few games you can win in about 15 seconds by immediately going back in the direction you came from. Now that’s true open-world gameplay.

- Alex

August 6, 2022 at 8:08 am

Regarding the games, there´s a sad story between me and them. When I was a kid, I saw the first game at Toys´R´Us, but it was so expensive my mum wouldn´t buy it for me. In later years I read the positive reviews for Discworld 2 and Discworld Noir right when they came out, but I never saw a single copy anywhere around me.

Finally, when I managed to find the first two games on some abandonware-sites not so long ago, it was a real struggle to get them running. The second one finally started, but I wasn´t so impressed about it, and the first one crashed so often an hour into the game (on DosBox as well as on ScummVM) that I lost interest to try it again. But I noticed the same things you wrote about: Great voice-acting and humor, head-scratching design and puzzles.

- Peter Olausson

August 6, 2022 at 9:43 am

Names from Monty Python, Blackadder, Spitting Images and Doctor Who in a Terry Pratchett game!? What an incredible hit parade; that’s a ton of modern British culture there. No wonder it sold like hot cakes.

- Sarah Walker

August 6, 2022 at 11:28 am

“It was and remains abundantly obvious that the people who made this game did so for all the right reasons, that they genuinely loved Anhk-Morpork and wanted to shove as much of it as possible onto a CD.”

Tedious nitpicking, but Discworld did release on 3.5″ floppies…

I’m guessing that this is the last adventure game this blog will cover that wasn’t designed exclusively with CD in mind. End of an era?

“The first and second Discworld graphic adventures stand on either side of the VGA/SVGA Rubicon, which divides games that look undeniably old today from those that can at least potentially still look quite contemporary. I would place Discworld II among this group without hesitation.”

Presumably the Playstation version of DW2 (which rescales the SVGA art down to VGA resolution) is sat right in the middle?

- Peter Olausson

August 7, 2022 at 8:18 am

How many floppies? Had to look that one up: 15. Oh the joy of installing disks by the pile …

- Leo Vellés

August 8, 2022 at 5:54 pm

I remember the nightmare time I had as a teen trying to install Wing Commander II. If i’m not mistaken, it came on 23 3.5 floppy disks and disk 22 being corrupted….hours and hours lost

- Sebastian Gerstl

August 7, 2022 at 8:29 pm

Discworld II is definitely the superior game compared to its predecessor. Alas, it wasn’t without flaws, and it could leave you in at least one walking dead situation (at least it did in the Saturn version, which happened to be the one I played BITD and where it happened to me): you need to get something out of the saddlebags of the prospector in Djelibeby, but if you wait to long, he rides off… And doesn’t return ever again, leaving you without a necessary item to proceed. It’s also something that occurs very late in the game, not that far away from the final act, which made it extremely frustrating for teenage me…

- Brian Bagnall

August 8, 2022 at 1:28 am

Starship Titanic also did something similar. I’ve always wanted to ask the designers why they did that, preferably while hooked to a car battery.

- Jimmy Maher

August 8, 2022 at 7:49 am

That may be a bug in the Saturn version. I *think* he will keep returning in the PC version.

- Lasse Rasinen

August 8, 2022 at 7:57 am

Discworld was also quite buggy (or at least the version I got). It kept crashing at the cinematic at the end of the first part (meh) and also at the final dragon bit (less of a meh). The internet was just about coming available so I was able to source a save at the start of the second part and soldier on.

And some lesser animation and sound bugs which weren’t a dealbreaker, though.

- GK

August 8, 2022 at 7:19 pm

Did Terry Pratchett own an Amiga at any point? There was a photo of him in Amiga Action in one issue. There’s a low quality scan at
http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/celebrities.html

- Belano

August 8, 2022 at 10:48 pm

“puzzles whose solutions are amusing in retrospect but cannot possibly be anticipated before the fact”

I recently played the game and had to use a walkthrough on two or three occasions only. I know that this is subjective but the solutions to the puzzles (except perhaps the octopus and the love potion) seemed logical, in a comedic kind of way, to me, not simple but inferable. From my point of view, the main problem is the lack of feedback to guide a little more towards the correct solution in some cases. Another interesting point that can be discussed regarding puzzle design is how far away a clue can be for the player to find the solution. For example, the solution of putting the toad in Rincewind’s mouth involves remembering a scene that happens at the beginning of the previous chapter. I at least didn’t remember it, and this was another solution I had to look at.

“Oh, and there are also dead ends that you can stumble into without realizing it, after which you’ll get to spend hours banging your head against brick walls even more fruitlessly than usual.”

I don’t remember any dead ends really, at least in the second version of the game, the one I’ve played. There is at least one, from what I’ve read, in the first version, but it was fixed, so it seems more of a bug than a feature.

- LDX#40

August 10, 2022 at 9:25 am

I think there’s a “of” lacking here: “…many which are literally good for nothing…”

- Jimmy Maher

August 10, 2022 at 8:48 pm

Yes. Thanks!

- Mikko

August 23, 2022 at 6:06 am

It’s really strange, because for me as a kid, the first Discworld was pretty much the adventure game I got the farthest in without ever resorting to a walkthrough (with the exceptions of Hero’s Quest and Quest for Glory 2). The puzzles made twisted sense in the context of Discworld, and I was able to figure many, many of them out. Not quite sure if I finished the game or not. It was LONG.

On the other hand, I never really got really far with Day of the Tentacle – lost interest somewhere there in the time travel puzzles.

It might have been helpful that I had read through all the published Discworld novels in the past year or two, and was in some kind of a Pratchett mania at the time.

Never really played Discworld 2 very much, it somehow did not get me as excited.

Perhaps there was a difference of expectation at the time: I did not expect to complete an adventure game, just make good progress and enjoy the experience.

- Stan Kaufman

August 29, 2022 at 11:31 pm

There seems to be a showstopper bug in The Collection Chamber’s version of Discworld 1. After Rincewind has chased away the cook by catching a pancake with the butterfly net and then descended back to the ground behind the university, it is impossible to return the ladder to the Luggage’s inventory. The ladder is stuck in Rincewind’s hands, meaning that it is impossible for Rincewind to pick up the frying pan or indeed do anything else in the game.

For that matter, this is also true at any earlier point in the game: the ladder cannot be returned to the Luggage’s inventory nor can it be put in Rincewind’s inventory even if there is only one other item there. Once selected, the ladder appears permanently affixed to Rincewind’s hands, effectively ending the game.

There are YouTube vids of people playing the game where this problem doesn’t occur, so either it’s just this particular set of game files at fault or I’m making some sort of silly blunder.

Our Google Overlords appear to be silent on this matter. If anyone knows a solution, I’d love to learn it. Hilarious game that I’d like to finish. Thanks in advance!

- Jimmy Maher

August 30, 2022 at 6:04 am

It sounds like a ScummVM bug. I’d recommend that you download the latest version of ScummVM (https://www.scummvm.org/downloads/#current) as a zip file and copy the executable over the one provided in the Collection Chamber package. I don’t know whether your save files will still work; hopefully so.

- Stan Kaufman

August 30, 2022 at 11:14 pm

Many thanks for your reply, Jimmy. The described behavior actually is happening with the latest ScummVM version (2.6.0).

To install the Collection Chamber files was actually quite a thrash on MacOS. The download from there is of a Win executable (Install-DW1_v4.exe) and a data file (Install-DW1_v4.D01). ScummVM itself could not recognize/process these files, but PortingKit (https://www.portingkit.com/) could, though the game, when installed and run within PortingKit, could not save game state (silent fail for some reason). However PortingKit has command line tools that expose the actual data files for the game, which when copied over and then added directly to ScummVM, work great — apart from this one (so far) bug. (And FWIW and even more bizarrely, CrossOver, another Wine-based tool, could read/install the Collection Chamber files but produced a broken, unplayable game where the cursor simply wandered around the screen on its own.)

All very weird. Well, your perceptive-as-always review of DW1 suggests that the game’s faults outweigh its merits, so perhaps it’s just as well.

Thanks again for your fantastic description of the great Mr. Pratchett and his work!

- Jimmy Maher

August 31, 2022 at 5:16 am

In that case, you could try an older version of ScummVM, perhaps whatever version is being used by that Collection Chamber package. My other suggestion, which is guaranteed to work, is to run it through DOSBox. You can find an ISO image of the game on archive.org to use for this purpose. I hesitated to recommend this approach earlier because it requires just a bit of technical know-how, but I judge from your comment above that you know your way around a computer.

Either way, I’d definitely file a bug report with the ScummVM folks.

- Stan Kaufman

August 31, 2022 at 11:39 pm

The ISO image from archive.org does indeed work in DOSBox, though installing it requires a fair bit of persistence. The big problem — which is likely why Boxer doesn’t work — is that sound files need to be moved manually after the install. This is well documented here: https://youtu.be/jw8KCH4ZdaY?t=662. I point this out for anyone else who finds themselves lost down this path.

While the ladder bug is gone, this DOSBox version of the game lacks the music enhancements of the ScummVM version posted by Collection Chamber. Not much of a loss, though, IMHO. Now on to Act 2!

Thanks again, Jimmy, for your brilliant work here!

- Stan Kaufman

September 1, 2022 at 2:33 am

Turns out that this ladder bug was reported to ScummVM a couple days ago: https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/13810. Apparently a new problem with ScummVM 2.6.0 that was absent in 2.5.1. I should have checked there first. I apologize for the wasted bandwidth, Jimmy. Thanks again for your help.

- Adria

October 9, 2022 at 4:31 pm

Late to the party but found this through looking for info on another game (Moonmist) and was scrolling through the table of contents and went “Wait, there’s three of these?!” In reference to the comments talking about how massive the game is, I bought the first game, used, for my PS1 back in the days of Media Play. I had to clear out almost an entire memory card just to save this single game (I think it took, like, 8 of 15 slots? Something like that. It was MASSIVE at the time.) I also remember going to Gamefaqs a lot for help. And the thief puzzle. Hoy. I couldn’t see the little sprite on my screen so I had no idea where I was supposed to even be looking until a walkthrough. I remember doing much better on the second game. And now to find out they did a third? I may have to *attempt* to hunt this down.

- Michael

November 13, 2022 at 11:28 am

“Once again the broad plot is lifted from a beloved Discworld novel: this time it’s 1991’s Reaper Man, in which Death decides to quit his job and retire to the countryside, with chaotic results for the whole Disc.”

Actually, in Reaper Man, Death was fired. He did not decide to quit. His curiosity about mortals and developing a family led to The Auditors of reality determining that he’s no longer fit to perform the objective goal of an anthropomorphic personification, so they gave him a short span of time to “live” in retirement while they created a replacement.

- Jimmy Maher

November 13, 2022 at 12:31 pm

Changed the wording a bit. Thanks!

- S

January 9, 2023 at 1:36 pm

” in which death leaves job” probably misses a “his” (or hers or its? Never read the novels)

- Jimmy Maher

January 10, 2023 at 8:39 am

Thanks!

The Case of the Rose Tattoo
August 19, 2022

What is it that we love about Sherlock Holmes?

We love the times in which he lived, of course, the half-remembered, half-forgotten times of snug Victorian illusion, of gas-lit comfort and contentment, of perfect dignity and grace. The world was poised precariously in balance, and rude disturbances were coming with the years, but those who moved upon the scene were very sure that all was well — that nothing ever would be any worse nor ever could be any better…

— Edgar W. Smith

The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Serrated Scalpel was an unusually quiet sort of computer game. It was quiet when you played it, being a game that rewarded contemplation as much as action, and one that placed as much emphasis on its text as its audiovisuals. It was quietly released in 1992 by Electronic Arts, a publisher well along by that point in their transition from being a collective of uncompromising “software artists” to becoming the slick, bottom-lined-focused populist juggernaut we know and don’t always love today. And yet, despite being so out of keeping with EA’s evolving direction, Serrated Scalpel quietly sold a surprising number of units over a span of several years.

That unexpected success had consequences. First it led EA to fund a 1994 re-imagining of the game for the 3DO living-room console, featuring video clips of live actors voicing dialog that had previously appeared only as text on the screen. And then, with the MS-DOS original still selling at a steady clip — in fact, rounding by now the magical 100,000-unit milestone — it led to a somewhat belated full-fledged sequel, which was released in mid-1996.

The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Rose Tattoo was largely the work of the same crew that had made its predecessor, notwithstanding the gap between the two projects. Once again, R.J. Berg, a former EA manual writer and perpetual Sherlock Holmes fan to the Nth power, wrote the script and generally masterminded the endeavor. And once again a small outfit called Mythos Software, based in Tempe, Arizona, handled all of the practicalities of the script’s transformation into a game, from the art to the programming.

Indeed, Rose Tattoo as a whole is very much a case of not fixing what wasn’t broken in one of my favorite adventure games of the 1990s, so much so that I almost fear that this review will come across as superfluous to those who have already read my homage to the original. The one really obvious difference is a reflection of the four years separating the two games’ release dates, over the course of which the technology of the typical home computer advanced considerably. So, Rose Tattoo is able to present its version of Victorian London with a more vivid clarity, thanks to a screen resolution of 640 X 480 rather than 320 X 200. More ingeniously, Mythos has found a middle ground between the pure pixel graphics of the original game and the awkwardly spliced video clips of the 3DO remake. “Sprites” made from real actors are shrunk down and inserted directly into pre-rendered 3D scenery, making an almost seamless fit.

Otherwise, though, Rose Tattoo is the purest form of sequel, striving not just to duplicate but to positively double down on everything its precursor did. In some contexts, that might be read as a condemnation. But not in this one: Serrated Scalpel was such a breath of fresh air that more of the same can only be welcome.

Once again, then, we have here a plot that is ironically more believable than the majority of Arthur Conan Doyle’s own Sherlock Holmes tales. Like Broken Sword, another standout adventure from the standout adventure-gaming year of 1996, Rose Tattoo kicks its proceedings off with a literal bang: it opens with Sherlock’s portly brother Mycroft Holmes getting seriously injured by an explosion at his Diogenes Club that everyone is all too eager to blame on a gas leak — “the price of progress,” as they all like to say. Even Sherlock initially refuses to believe otherwise; deeply distraught over his brother’s condition, he retreats into his bedroom to take refuge in his various chemical addictions. Thus you actually begin the game as John Watson, trying to dig up enough clues to shake Sherlock out of his funk and get him working on the case.

Once that has been accomplished, the game is truly afoot. Rather than a random gas explosion, the “accident” at the Diogenes Club turns out to be a deliberate murder plot that is connected to the theft of vital secrets from the British War Office. Your need to avenge Mycroft’s suffering will plunge you into the geopolitics of the late nineteenth century; you’ll even meet face to face with the young Kaiser Wilhelm II of the newly minted nation of Germany, who is depicted here as an intelligent, cultured, and to some extent even open-minded leader, one whose political philosophy has not yet hardened into the reactionary conservatism of his First World War persona. The game captures in their nascent form the political changes and even the evolution of the weaponry of war that would lead to the horrific conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century.

But that is only a small piece of the history which Rose Tattoo allows us to witness up close and personal. The usual videogame’s view of history encompasses war and politics and little else. Rose Tattoo, on the other hand, fastidiously recreates a fascinating time and place in social history, when the world that we know today was in many ways in the process of being invented. Your investigation takes you across the width and breadth of Victorian London and to all of its diverse social strata, from fussy lords and ladies who seem to be perpetually singing “Rule, Britannia!” under their breath to underground radicals who surface just long enough to preach their revolutionary philosophy of Marxism at Speaker’s Corner every Sunday. You visit clubs, hospitals, police departments, morgues, flats, townhouses, lofts, squats, mansions, palaces, monuments, tailors, bathhouses, billiard rooms, photography studios, animal emporiums, parks, gardens, aerodromes, laboratories, greengrocers, phrenologist’s offices, minister’s offices, barrister’s offices, warehouses, and opium dens, all of them presented in rich, historically accurate detail. “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” said Samuel Johnson. Indeed.

As in the first game, Sherlock Holmes’s iconic flat at 221B Baker Street serves as the starting point of your investigations and the home base to which you continually return. In addition to being a tribute to Sherlock’s wide-ranging curiosity, it’s a vastly more effective virtual museum of Victoriana than the real one that stands at that London address today. Spend some time here just rummaging about, and maybe follow some of its leads with some independent research of your own, and you’ll begin to feel the frisson of life in this amazing city, the melting pot of the Western world circa 1890. A small sample of the exhibits on hand:

- A portrait of the now largely forgotten abolitionist hero Henry Ward Beecher, who was arguably the most famous American in the world for a decade or two.

- A portrait of General Charles George “Chinese” Gordon, “the brave if not brilliant commander” who earned his nickname helping to put down the Taiping Rebellion and later “died defending Khartoum in ’85.”

- Some of London’s many newspapers, which, “though ephemeral, are among the wonders of the age,” being the first near-instantaneous form of mass media, the finger on the pulse of the world’s greatest metropolis, humming with all of its news, gossip, and scandal.

- Music by such less remembered composers as Pablo de Sarasate, César Franck, and Jacques Offenbach, placed here to serve as a reminder that the Romantic music scene of the late nineteenth century included more names than Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner.

- A book by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, the inventor of the mug shot as a tool for law enforcement.

- More books, including “Mommsen’s masterful history of Rome,” “C.F. McGlashan’s grisly account of the Donner party,” and “a particularly inept translation of The Brothers Karamazov.”

- Pictures of the convicted and executed murderers Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, William Palmer, and Louis Lingg (the last of whom may very well have been innocent), assembled as part of the dogged but consistently fruitless Victorian effort to scientifically discern character through facial features.

- An early wax-cylinder phonograph, marking Sherlock as his era’s version of those early adopters who in 1996 were playing this game on the latest personal computers.

But lest all of this start to sound like a tedious exercise in “edutainment,” know that the whole experience is enlivened enormously by R.J. Berg’s writing, which is even more finely honed here than it was in the first game, managing to be both of the time it depicts and an ongoing delight to read in 1996, 2022, or any other year. He takes a special delight in lacerating with delicate savagery the city’s many stuffed shirts, useless layabouts, and pretentious fools. (Perhaps we can learn something about character from appearance after all, at least in the world of this game…)

- Chinless and tending to fat, this young man sits like a beluga whale in a steam cabinet. His hooded eyes are partially closed and rivulets of sweat pour down his face. It is not possible to say whether he is enjoying himself.

- The lady masquerades as a debutante. Dressed in a hideous crepe gown, she has the carriage of a Palladium chorus girl. Possessed only of pretensions, she displays none of the high style to which she aspires.

- The corpulent, self-important clerk is fussily dressed. If he runs true to form, he spends his leisure time and money indulging passions for art books and Belgian chocolates.

- The man could pass as a mortician or a bank manager. Below his high domed forehead, his pale, pitted face wears a preternaturally neutral expression. The slow reptilian oscillation of his head is disconcerting.

Then there’s my absolute favorite turn of phrase: “Bledsoe awaits with the equanimity of a ring-tailed lemur in a room full of rocking chairs.“

And yet Berg seldom punches down, and is by no means without compassion for the ones who were not born with silver spoons stuck firmly up their derrières: “Like thousands of indigent girls, she was sucked to the city at fourteen by the promise of twelve pounds per annum and a bed in the attic. After 40 years in service, enduring drudgery, discomfort, insult, and every sort of meanness, she has risen to become Assistant Housekeeper at the Cavendish Hotel.”

Sherlock, Watson, and the indomitable Wiggins, head of the Baker Street Irregulars, outside 221B Baker Street. While the game’s graphics aren’t breathtaking, they are, like everything else about it, quietly apropos.

Investigating a suspicious death in the morgue. There will be more than one such corpse to examine before all is said and done.

On one of the newly constructed Thames Embankments, next to Cleopatra’s Needle, recently looted by the British Empire from Alexandria.

The bucolic environs of St James’s Park. We have need of that boy’s new pet dog, which happens to be the best tracker in all of London. Hmm… what could we offer the boy for it?

In addition to gobs of historical verisimilitude and some of the best writing to appear in a game since the heyday of Infocom, Rose Tattoo shares with its predecessor a gratifyingly grounded approach to puzzles. There are problems to solve here, many of which veteran adventure gamers will find very familiar in the abstract, such as the inordinate quantity of human gatekeepers who must be circumvented in one way or another in order to gain access to the spaces they guard. But, instead of employing ludicrously convoluted solutions that could only appear in an adventure game, solving these “puzzles” mostly entails doing what a reasonable person would under similar circumstances. A surprising number of the gatekeepers can be bypassed, for instance, simply by acquiring an official letter from Scotland Yard authorizing you to investigate the case, then showing it to the obstacle in question. Rose Tattoo resists the adventure genre’s centrifugal drift toward slapstick comedy as well any game ever made; Sherlock never gets up to anything really ridiculous, never surrenders his dignity as the world’s most famous detective. He does nothing in this game that one couldn’t imagine him doing in one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories.

As must be abundantly clear by now, I love this game dearly; it joins Serrated Scalpel on the short list of my favorite point-and-click graphic adventures of all time. It must also be acknowledged, however, that it aligns crazily well with my own background and interests. I spent my years in and around university immersed in this setting, reading tens of thousands of pages of Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope (the last being my favorite; as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once said, “there’s nothing better than going to bed early with a Trollope”). And yes, I read my share of Arthur Conan Doyle as well. Playing Rose Tattoo is like coming home for me.

But, to state the obvious, I am me and you are you, and your experience of Rose Tattoo may very well be different. I can all too easily imagine another person finding this game more exhausting than fascinating. It’s out of step with the fashion even of 1996, never mind today, in that it expects you to read all of its long descriptions; only the diegetic words — i.e., those actually spoken by the characters in the game — are voiced. And you can’t just ignore all of the Victorian bric-à-brac that litter its many scenes because there is in fact a smattering of vital clues and objects to be found amongst the clutter. Further, there’s little here to satisfy hardcore puzzle fiends; that ancient adventure-game saw of the newspaper shoved under the door to retrieve the key pushed out of the lock with the pin is about as elaborate as things ever get from that perspective. Solving the mystery rather hinges on collecting physical evidence, interviewing witnesses, and deducing on a broader canvas than that of the individual puzzle.

Of course, a point-and-click adventure game is a discrete possibility space, which means that you could solve the mystery by brute force — by going around and around and around the map of London, talking to everyone and picking up whatever isn’t nailed down and showing it to everyone. But to do so would be to miss the point entirely, in addition to subjecting yourself to mind-numbing tedium. I would rather encourage you to make full use of the in-game journal, in which the tireless Watson records every word of every conversation Sherlock has, and which can even be saved as a text file for perusal outside of the game. (Incidentally: all of the text, in the journal and elsewhere, uses British spellings, despite this being an American game — another nice touch.) I would encourage you, that is to say, to enter into the spirit of the thing and really try to solve the mystery yourself, as a real detective might. I can promise you that it does hang together, and that the game will reward you for doing so in a way that very few other alleged interactive mysteries — excepting its precursor, naturally — can match. If all of those words in the journal and locations on the map start to feel overwhelming, don’t worry about it: just take a break. The mystery will still be waiting for you when you come back. The Victorian Age was a foreign country; they did things more slowly there.

But if all of that is still a bit too tall of an order in this hurly-burly modern world of ours, that’s okay too. No game is for everyone, and this one perhaps less so than many. Certainly it was an anomaly at the time of its release, being about as out of step with an increasingly go-go, bang-bang gaming market as anything could be. Doubtless for that reason, EA released it with almost no fanfare, just as they had its predecessor. Alas, this time it didn’t defy its low expectations once it reached store shelves: it didn’t become a sleeper success like Case of the Serrated Scalpel. The magazines seemed to pick up on the disinterest of the game’s own publisher. Computer Gaming World, the closest thing the United States had to a gaming journal of record, never even gave it a full review, contenting themselves with a two-paragraph capsule summary whose writer betrayed little sign of ever having played it, who made the inexplicable claim that it “tried too hard to be an interactive movie”; in reality, no 1996 graphic adventure was less movie-like.

So, that was that for the Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes series. R.J. Berg continued working for EA as a producer, designer, and writer for years, but on less unique fare that gave him less opportunity to deploy his deliciously arch writerly voice. Mythos Software survived until about 2003 as a developer of multimedia educational products — they were behind the popular BodyWorks series of anatomical explorations — but never made another straight-up game.

Still, to complain that we didn’t get more of these games seems churlish. Better to be thankful that the stars aligned in such a way as to give us the two that we do have. Check them out sometime, when you’re in the mood for something a bit more on the quiet and thoughtful side. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll come to feel the same way about them that I do.

(Sources: Electronic Games of February 1993, Computer Gaming World of January 1997. Also Mythos Software’s now-defunct home page.

Like its predecessor, The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Rose Tattoo has never received a digital re-release. It is, however, supported by the ScummVM interpreter, so getting it running isn’t too much of a challenge on Windows, MacOS, or Linux once you acquire the original CD or an image of same. As of this writing, you can find several of the latter on archive.org, including one version that is already packaged up and ready to go with ScummVM. Just search for “sherlock rose tattoo”; I prefer not to link directly to avoid bringing unwanted attention to their existence from our friends in the legal trade.

And if you enjoy this type of contemplative sleuthing, you might also be interested in the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective board games, which play like analog versions of this game — perfect for a lazy late-summer afternoon on the terrace with a tall glass of something cold and the company of a good friend or two.)

Comments
32 Responses

- Michael Russo

August 19, 2022 at 4:49 pm

I read this last week when you accidentally posted it to your site and my RSS reader grabbed a copy. just figured I’d use it as an opportunity to say thanks again for writing interesting historical essays each week!

- Leo Vellés

August 19, 2022 at 7:21 pm

The love you shared by the two Sherlock Holmes games developed by Mythos is also shared by me. Thanks for this article. Since you mention it: what are the other games that made it to your short list of favorite point & click adventure games?

- Ido Yehieli

August 20, 2022 at 5:41 am

There’s the hall of fame linked on the right: https://www.filfre.net/about-me/hall-of-fame

Looking at that list you’ll find Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max Hit the Road and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

- Jimmy Maher

August 20, 2022 at 10:51 am

Yeah… I probably shouldn’t have teased a short list I haven’t actually made. ;) But there’s a pretty good long list there in the Hall of Fame.

- Marco

August 19, 2022 at 7:50 pm

I adore this game too: in fact it’s my second-favourite adventure game, after Titanic: Adventure out of Time. It’s also – according to my researching of the How Long to Beat website – the longest adventure game, taking over 30 hours. That’s five times the length of Zork: Grand Inquisitor.

It’s worth pointing out that Conan Doyle wrote an unofficial trilogy of short stories – The Naval Treaty, The Second Stain and The Bruce-Partington Plans – that all revolve around the theft of government documents. Rose Tattoo takes that idea but turns it into a far richer and more intricate plot. There’s no other game that immerses you in historical detail to the same level – e.g. Holmes referring to a recent Act of Parliament as a euphemism for a character being gay. Playing it through, the only anachronism I found was the appearance of John Brown, who died in 1883.

The version I found had some really annoying bugs – two points where if you don’t do exactly the right thing Wiggins will disappear and never reappear – but you tell me yours didn’t. A couple of other minor quibbles: it irritated me that the darts minigame was just repeated from Serrated Scalpel – my assumption is they were going to make it billiards but that proved too difficult? Also, while the Holmes and Watson voices are superb, there was a bit of a shortage of actors to voice the minor characters, seemingly a common problem in adventure games.

Such a shame it didn’t get the acclaim it merited at the time, but yes, I’d recommend anyone who’s at all a Sherlock Holmes fan to play it now.

- Marco

August 22, 2022 at 2:31 pm

Just spotted one error in the article – it should be “Kaiser Wilhelm II”…

- Jimmy Maher

August 23, 2022 at 4:07 pm

It’s Wilhelm I. (Wilhelm II actually was a bit of a goose-stepping martinet…) But, since Wilhelm I died in 1888, situating the game in “circa 1890” wasn’t quite accurate. A better bet would be about 1885. Thanks!

- Marco

August 23, 2022 at 10:14 pm

No, it really is Wilhelm II – the one who became Britain’s greatest enemy in 1914. The whole point is to tease the player by introducing someone who you are pretty damn sure must be a baddie, but within this game he’s actually a goodie. He’s portrayed as a young reformer, still finding his feet as he’s just come to the throne. (Wilhelm I was aged 90 when he died in 1888, so would never have been doing tours of Britain at that point.) The alternative history of what could have been if he’d stayed that way is then also teased – in the long discussion Holmes and Watson have in the endgame, they talk about how Queen Victoria’s family (i.e. her grandchildren Kaiser Wilhelm II, the future King George V and the future Tsar Nicholas II) are likely to fall out after the old queen dies, though they conclude she’ll be good for a few more years yet.

- Jimmy Maher

August 24, 2022 at 4:59 am

Somehow that flew over my head. Edits made. Thanks so much!

- Marco

August 24, 2022 at 12:53 pm

No worries! What adds confusion is that in the room you meet him there’s a photo of “the prince” shaking hands with Lord Palmerston (d. 1865) outside the British Museum. That’s actually referring to Prince Albert, whose old rooms they are, not to the Kaiser, but it threw me a bit on first playthrough.

- Peter Olausson

August 19, 2022 at 9:31 pm

This really looks like a game to my tastes. Will try!

Spelling: Otto von Bismarck it is.

- Jimmy Maher

August 19, 2022 at 10:48 pm

Thanks!

Be sure to have a look at the first Lost Files game as well, if you can bear the lower-resolution graphics. The two are very much of a piece.

- Alex

August 20, 2022 at 5:43 am

Since I consider the first game as one of the best adventures of all time, I will definitely check this one out, thanks for the recommendation!

- Buck

August 20, 2022 at 6:41 am

I think “The Riddle of Master Lu” does something similar graphically. At least the screenshots reminded me of it.

- Aula

August 20, 2022 at 7:18 am

“the four years separating the two games’s release dates”

games’

“the hand-drawn scenery”

The scenery was 3D rendered, just like in, say, Under a KIlling Moon. While UaKM allows you to move the “camera” freely in the 3D environment and this game doesn’t, you really couldn’t tell that from just looking at static screenshots; the quality of the rendering is only slightly better here. That’s actually kinda amusing; although this game was made about three years later than UaKM (which at the time meant a significant increase in computing power) and everything was rendered on the developers’ computers (which meant they could take all the time they wanted to render each scene) they still had to skimp on everything. For one obvious example, look at the tiles in the morgue; the same small tile pattern repeats over the walls (in two different color schemes for the upper and lower parts), and the arch over the exit has two identical copies of the same texture.

- Jimmy Maher

August 20, 2022 at 10:56 am

Thanks!

- Martin

August 20, 2022 at 11:33 pm

“there’s nothing better than going to bed early with a Trollope”. Guess there are going to be no non-native English readers that are going to get that Harold Macmillan comment/joke.

- declain

August 21, 2022 at 7:17 am

I’m non-native, somebody cares to explain?

- Mayhaym

August 21, 2022 at 10:24 am

AFAIK a trollop is a woman of loose morals.

- declain

August 22, 2022 at 6:45 am

Thanks, I get it now.

- Lisa H,

August 21, 2022 at 3:44 pm

As Mayhaym says; so there’s a pun on Anthony Trollope’s surname.

- Sebastian Redl

February 1, 2023 at 2:24 pm

I got it

- Carlton Little

August 24, 2022 at 6:39 pm

This is another favorite of mine, shame I never knew it existed before a dozen years ago! Is there any particular reason such a great and fabulously detailed game would be so little known? The first game seems to have been well marketed; everyone knew about it. Not so much, this time around…

I’ve gone through it a few times since then but must admit, the finer details of the plot are still lost on me somewhat. This is likely because I lack the background knowledge to tie up all the loose ends. I’m a very ‘ungifted’ reader to be blunt. Some more direct or concise resources that go over the main elements of this time period, might be appreciated if you have any suggestion? I’m sure it sounds like an odd request but there it be…

- Jimmy Maher

August 24, 2022 at 7:12 pm

For everyday life in the Victorian Age, How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman is a lot of fun and very informative. For great-power politics, Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower is wonderful. If you enjoy it, you can follow it with The Guns of August and The Zimmerman Telegram to complete her “World War I trilogy.”

- Ajax

August 27, 2022 at 2:20 pm

A couple of nitpicks: “Elliot” should be “Eliot” (one L), and “Saint James Park” should be “St James’s Park”.

Thank you for yet another intriguing and well-written article; I really enjoy reading this blog!

- Jimmy Maher

August 27, 2022 at 5:16 pm

Thanks!

- Robert

August 27, 2022 at 4:13 pm

Thanks for this article. I never played the second game but the first was certainly a favourite.

My 2nd favourite Holmes after Jeremy Brett!

- Mike Ducnan

August 28, 2022 at 4:42 am

My favorite part was the juxtaposition of Watson and Holmes in the beginning. Watson’s struggle to find anything to click on that will interest Holmes,… and then you’re driving Holmes, and the same rooms are chock full of things to click on and crazy detail. It’s a great use of the adventure game medium to cement the Watson-sees-but-Holmes-observes theme.

- Jonathan O

October 19, 2022 at 7:40 am

I find it slightly depressing that no-one’s yet noticed this error – the composer is Cesar Franck, not Eduard.

- Jimmy Maher

October 20, 2022 at 2:27 pm

Better late than never, right? Thanks!

- Tal Cohen

April 21, 2023 at 8:38 am

Bledsoe?
That’s odd, I’ve just finished the game and Bledsoe never did show up, even though I spoke about him to Farthington early on in the game.
Strange.

- Adrian

June 28, 2023 at 11:06 am

I had the same problem. I was surprised to be finishing the game when I hadn’t yet met Bledsoe, or Agnes Ratchet for that matter. I went back to an earlier save game from Spitalfields and couldn’t figure out what I’d missed. I’d thought I’d locked myself out somehow but it turned out I needed to try to talk to the guard at the grocer’s again (option was dimmed as I’d done it before) to get the necessary new dialog prompts.

The wire from Farthington to meet Bledsoe only arrived after I’d found and analyzed the original formula, which you can’t do until you’ve finished with Ratchet. There must have been some mix-up with the scripting there since Holmes makes a point of asking Bledsoe where Ratchet is – I don’t think it’s possible to talk with him without meeting her!

I also had a problem early on while playing this through ScummVM. Any time I (as Holmes) was trying to wake up Wiggins, the game would crash. Luckily I could get around that one by taking his scarf instead.

I loved the game, by the way. Was completely entranced. It’s caused a reassessment since usually I hate when progress in adventure games is mostly about revisiting people and exhausting all the dialogue. It turns out I don’t mind that at all when it feels this organic.

Byron Preiss’s Games (or, The Promise and Peril of the Electronic Book)
September 2, 2022

Byron Preiss in 1982 with some of his “Fair People.”

We humans always seek to understand the new in terms of the old. This applies as much to new forms of media as it does to anything else.

Thus at the dawn of the 1980s, when the extant world of media began to cotton onto the existence of computer software that was more than strictly utilitarian but not action-oriented videogames like the ones being played in coin-op arcades and on home consoles such as the Atari VCS, it looked for a familiar taxonomic framework by which to understand it. One of the most popular of the early metaphors was that of the electronic book. For the graphics of the first personal computers were extremely crude, little more than thick lines and blotches of primary colors. Text, on the other hand, was text, whether it appeared on a monitor screen or on a page. Some of the most successful computer games of the first half of the 1980s were those of Infocom, who drove home the literary associations by building their products out of nothing but text, for which they were lauded in glowing features in respected mainstream magazines and newspapers. In the context of the times, it seemed perfectly natural to sell Infocom’s games and others like them in bookstores. (I first discovered these games that would become such an influence on my future on the shelves of my local shopping mall’s B. Dalton bookstore…)

Small wonder, then, that several of the major New York print-publishing houses decided to move into software. As is usually the case in such situations, they were driven by a mixture of hope and fear: hope that they could expand the parameters of what a book could do and be in exciting ways, and fear that, if they failed to do it, someone else would. The result was the brief-lived era of bookware.

Byron Preiss was perhaps the most important of all the individual book people who now displayed an interest in software. Although still very young by the standards of his tweedy industry — he turned 30 in 1983 — he was already a hugely influential figure in genre publishing, with a rare knack for mobilizing others to get lots and lots of truly innovative things done. In fact, long before he did anything with computers, he was already all about “interactivity,” the defining attribute of electronic books during the mid-1980s, as well as “multimedia,” the other buzzword that would be joined to the first in the early 1990s.

Preiss’s Fiction Illustrated line produced some of the world’s first identifiable graphic novels. These were comics that didn’t involve superheroes or cartoon characters, that were bound and sold as first-run paperbacks rather than flimsy periodicals. Preiss would remain a loyal supporter of comic-book storytelling in all its forms throughout his life.

Preiss rarely published a book that didn’t have pictures; in fact, he deserves a share of the credit for inventing what we’ve come to call the graphic novel, through a series known as Fiction Illustrated which he began all the way back in 1975 as a bright-eyed 22-year-old. His entire career was predicated on the belief that books should be beautiful aesthetic objects in their own right, works of visual as well as literary art that could and should take the reader’s breath away, that reading books should be an intensely immersive experience. He innovated relentlessly in pursuit of that goal. In 1981, for example, he published a collection of stories by Samuel R. Delany that featured “the first computer-enhanced illustrations developed for a science-fiction book.” His non-fiction books on astronomy and paleontology remain a feast for the eyes, as does his Science Fiction Masterworks series of illustrated novels and stories from the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Fritz Leiber, Philip Jose Farmer, Frank Herbert, and Isaac Asimov.

As part and parcel of his dedication to immersive literature, Preiss also looked for ways to make books interactive, even without the benefit of computers. In 1982, he wrote and published The Secret: A Treasure Hunt, a puzzle book and real-world scavenger hunt in the spirit of Kit Williams’s Masquerade. As beautifully illustrated as one would expect any book with which Preiss was involved to be, it told of “The Fair People,” gnomes and fairies who fled from the Old to the New World when Europeans began to cut down their forests and dam the rivers along which they lived: “They came over and they stayed, and they were happy. But then they saw that man was following the same path [in the Americas] and that what had happened in the Old World would probably happen in the New. So the ones who had already come over and the ones who followed them all decided they would have to go into hiding.” They took twelve treasures with them. “I have been entrusted by the Fair People to reveal the whereabouts of the [treasures] through paintings in the book,” Preiss claimed. “There are twelve treasures hidden throughout North America and twelve color paintings that contain clues to the whereabouts of the treasure. Then, there is a poem for each treasure. So, if you can correctly figure out the poem and the painting, you will find one of the treasures.” Each treasure carried a bounty for the discoverer of $1000. Preiss’s self-professed ultimate goal was to use the interactivity of the scavenger hunt as another tool for immersing the reader, “like in the kids’ books where you choose your own ending.”

The Secret failed to become the sales success or the pop-culture craze that Masquerade had become in Britain three years earlier. Only one of the treasures was found in the immediate wake of its publication, in Chicago in 1983. Yet it had a long shelf life: a second treasure was found in Cleveland more than twenty years later. A 2018 documentary film about the book sparked a renewal of interest, and the following year a third treasure was recovered in Boston. A small but devoted cult continues to search for the remaining ones today, sharing information and theories via websites and podcasts.

In a less enduring but more commercially successful vein, Preiss also published three different lines of gamebooks to feed the hunger ignited by the original Choose Your Own Adventure books of Edward Packard and R.A. Montgomery. Unsurprisingly, his books were much more visual than the typical example of the breed, with illustrations that often doubled as puzzles for the reader to solve. A dedicated nurturer of young writing and illustrating talent, he passed the contracts to make books in these lines and others to up-and-comers who badly needed the cash and the measure of industry credibility they brought with them.

Being a man with a solid claim to the woefully overused title of “visionary,” Preiss was aware of what computers could mean for our relationship with storytelling and information from a very early date. He actually visited Xerox PARC during its 1970s heyday and marveled at the potential he saw there, told all of his friends that this was the real future of information spaces. Later he became the driving force behind the most concentrated and in many ways the most interesting of all the bookware software projects of the 1980s: the Telarium line of literary adaptations, which turned popular science-fiction, fantasy, and mystery novels into illustrated text adventures. I won’t belabor this subject here because I already wrote histories and reviews of all of the Telarium games years ago for this site. I will say, however, that the line as a whole bears all the hallmarks of a Byron Preiss project, from the decision to include colorful pictures in the games — something Infocom most definitely did not provide — to the absolutely gorgeous packaging, which arguably outdid Infocom’s own high standard for same. (The packaging managed to provide a sensory overload which transcended even the visual; one of my most indelible memories of gaming in my childhood is of the rich smell those games exuded, thanks to some irreplicable combination of cardboard, paper, ink, and paste. Call it my version of Proust’s madeleine.) The games found on the actual disks were a bit hit-or-miss, but nobody could say that Telarium didn’t put its best foot forward.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough; the Telarium games weren’t big sellers, and the line lasted only from 1984 to 1986. Afterward, Preiss went back to his many and varied endeavors in book publishing, while computer games switched their metaphor of choice from interactive novels to interactive movies in response to the arrival of new, more audiovisually capable gaming computers like the Commodore Amiga. Even now, though, Preiss continued to keep one eye on what was going on with computers. For example, he published novelizations of some of Infocom’s games, thus showing that he bore no ill will toward the company that had both inspired his own Telarium line and outlived it. More importantly in the long run, he saw Apple’s HyperCard, with its new way of navigating texts non-linearly through association — multimedia texts which could include pictures, sound, music, and even movie clips alongside their words. By the turn of the 1990s, Bob Stein’s Voyager Software was starting to make waves with “electronic books” on CD-ROM that took full advantage of all of these affordances. The nature of electronic books had changed since the heyday of the text adventure, but the idea lived on in the abstract.

In fact, the advances in computer technology as the 1990s wore on were so transformative as to give everyone a bad case of mixed metaphors. The traditional computer-games industry, entranced by the new ability to embed video clips of real actors in their creations, was more fixated on interactive movies than ever. At the same time, though, the combination of hypertext with multimedia continued to give life to the notion of electronic books. Huge print publishers like Simon & Schuster and Random House, who had jumped onto the last bookware bandwagon only to bail out when the sales didn’t come, now made new investments in CD-ROM-based software that were an order of magnitude bigger than their last ones, even as huge names in moving pictures, from Disney to The Discovery Channel, were doing the same. The poster child for all of the taxonomical confusion was undoubtedly the pioneering Voyager, a spinoff from the Criterion Collection of classic movies on laserdisc and VHS whose many and varied releases all seemed to live on a liminal continuum between book and movie.

One has to assume that Byron Preiss felt at least a pang of jealousy when he saw the innovative work Voyager was doing. Exactly one decade after launching Telarium, he took a second stab at bookware, with the same high hopes as last time but on a much, much more lavish scale, one that was in keeping with the burgeoning 1990s tech boom. In the spring of 1994, Electronic Entertainment magazine brought the news that the freshly incorporated Byron Preiss Multimedia Company “is planning to flood the CD-ROM market with interactive titles this year.”

They weren’t kidding. Over the course of the next couple of years, Preiss published a torrent of CD-ROMs, enough to make Voyager’s prolific release schedule look downright conservative. There was stuff for the ages in high culture, such as volumes dedicated to Frank Lloyd Wright and Albert Einstein. There was stuff for the moment in pop culture, such as discs about Seinfeld, Beverly Hills 90210, and Melrose Place, not to forget The Sci-Fi Channel Trivia Game. There was stuff reflecting Preiss’s enduring love for comics (discs dedicated to R. Crumb and Jean Giraud) and animation (The Multimedia Cartoon Studio). There were electronic editions of classic novels, from John Steinbeck to Raymond Chandler to Kurt Vonnegut. There was educational software suitable for older children (The Planets, The Universe, The History of the United States), and interactive storybooks suitable for younger ones. There were even discs for toddlers, which line Preiss dubbed “BABY-ROMS.” A lot of these weren’t bad at all; Preiss’s CD-ROM library is almost as impressive as that of Voyager, another testament to the potential of a short-lived form of media that arguably deserved a longer day in the sun before it was undone by the maturation of networked hypertexts on the World Wide Web.

But then there are the games, a field Bob Stein was wise enough to recognize as outside of Voyager’s core competency and largely stay away from. Alas, Preiss was not, and did not.

The first full-fledged game from Byron Preiss Multimedia was an outgrowth of some of Preiss’s recent print endeavors. In the late 1980s, he had the idea of enlisting some of his stable of young writers to author new novels in the universes of aging icons of science fiction whose latest output had become a case of diminishing returns — names like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke. Among other things, this broad concept led to a series of six books by five different authors that was called Robot City, playing with the tropes, characters, and settings of Asimov’s “Robot” stories and novels. In 1994, two years after Asimov’s death, Preiss also published a Robot City computer game. Allow me to quote the opening paragraph of Martin E. Cirulis’s review of same for Computer Gaming World magazine, since it does such a fine job of pinpointing the reasons that so many games of this sort tended to be so underwhelming.

With all the new interest in computer entertainment, it seems that a day doesn’t go by without another company throwing their hat, as well as wads of startup money, into the ring. More often than not, the first thing offered by these companies is an adventure-game title, because of the handy way the genre brings out all the bells and whistles of multimedia. I’m always a big fan of new blood, but a lot of the first offerings get points for enthusiasm, then lose ground and reinvent the wheel. Design and management teams new to the field seem so eager to show us how dumb our old games are that they fail to learn any lessons from the fifteen-odd years of successful and failed games that have gone before. Unfortunately, Robot City, Byron Preiss Multimedia’s initial game release, while impressive in some aspects, suffers from just these kinds of birthing pains.

If anything, Cirulis is being far too kind here. Robot City is a game where simply moving from place to place is infuriating, thanks to a staggeringly awful interface, city streets that are constantly changing into random new configurations, and the developers’ decision to put exterior scenes on one of its two CDs and interior scenes on the other, meaning you can look forward to swapping CDs roughly every five minutes.

Robot City. If you don’t like the look of this city street, rest assured that it will have changed completely next time you walk outside. Why? It’s not really clear… something to do with The Future.

Yet the next game from Byron Preiss Multimedia makes Robot City seem like a classic. I’d like to dwell on The Martian Chronicles just a bit today — not because it’s good, but because it’s so very, very bad, so bad in fact that I find it oddly fascinating.

Another reason for it to pique my interest is that it’s such an obvious continuation of what Preiss had begun with Telarium. One of Telarium’s very first games was an adaptation of the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451. This later game, of course, adapts his breakthrough book The Martian Chronicles, a 1950 “fix-up novel” of loosely linked stories about the colonization — or, perhaps better said, invasion — of Mars by humans. And the two games are of a piece in many other ways once we make allowances for the technological changes in computing between 1984 and 1994.

For example, Bradbury himself gave at least a modicum of time and energy to both game projects, which was by no means always true of the authors Preiss chose to honor with an adaptation of some sort. In the Telarium game, you can call Bradbury up on a telephone and shoot the breeze; in the multimedia one, you can view interview clips of him. In the Telarium game, a special “REMEMBER” verb displays snippets of prose from the novel; in the multimedia one, a portentous narrator recites choice extracts from Bradbury’s Mars stories from time to time as you explore the Red Planet. Then, too, neither game is formally innovative in the least: the Telarium one is a parser-driven interactive fiction, the dominant style of adventure game during its time, while the multimedia game takes all of its cues from Myst, the hottest phenomenon in adventures at the time of its release. (The box even sported a hype sticker which named it the answer to the question of “Where do you go after Myst?”) About the only thing missing from The Martian Chronicles that its predecessor can boast about is Fahrenheit 451’s gorgeous bespoke packaging. (That ship had largely sailed for computer games by 1994; as the scenes actually shown on the monitor got prettier, the packaging got more uniform and unambitious.)

By way of compensation, The Martian Chronicles emphasizes its bookware bona fides by bearing on its box the name of the book publisher Simon & Schuster, back for a second go-round after failing to make a worthwhile income stream out of publishing games in the 1980s. But sadly, once you get past all the meta-textual elements, what you are left with in The Martian Chronicles is a Myst clone notable only for its unusually extreme level of unoriginality and its utter ineptness of execution.

I must confess that I’ve enjoyed very few of the games spawned by Myst during my life, and that’s still the case today, after I’ve made a real effort to give several of them a fair shake for these histories. It strikes me that the sub-genre is, more than just about any other breed of game I know of, defined by its limitations rather than its allowances. The first-person node-based movement, with its plethora of pre-rendered 3D views, was both the defining attribute of the lineage during the 1990s and an unsatisfying compromise in itself: what you really want to be doing is navigating through a seamless 3D space, but technical limitations have made that impossible, so here you are, lurching around, discrete step by discrete step. In many of these games, movement is not just unsatisfying but actively confusing, because clicking the rotation arrows doesn’t always turn you 90 degrees as you expect it to. I often find just getting around a room in a Myst clone to be a challenge, what with the difficulty of constructing a coherent mental map of my surroundings using the inconsistent movement controls. There inevitably seems to be that one view that I miss — the one that contains something I really, really need. This is what people in the game-making trade sometimes call “fake difficulty”: problems the game throws up in front of you where no problem would exist if you were really in this environment. In other schools of software development, it’s known by the alternative name of terrible interface design.

Yet I have to suspect that the challenges of basic navigation are partially intentional, given that there’s so little else the designer can really do with these engines. Most were built in either HyperCard or the multimedia presentation manager Macromedia Director; the latter was the choice for  The Martian Chronicles. These “middleware” tools were easy to work with but slow and limiting. Their focus was the media they put on the screen; their scripting languages were never intended to be used for the complex programming that is required to present a simulated world with any dynamism to it. Indeed, Myst clones are the opposite of dynamic, being deserted, static spaces marked only by the buttons, switches, and set-piece spatial puzzles which are the only forms of gameplay that can be practically implemented using their tool chains. While all types of games have constraints, I can’t think of any other strand of them that make their constraints the veritable core of their identity. In addition to the hope of selling millions and millions of copies like Myst did, I can’t help but feel that their prevalence during the mid-1990s was to a large extent a reflection of how easy they were to make in terms of programming. In this sense, they were a natural choice for a company like the one Byron Preiss set up, which was more replete with artists and writers from the book trade than with ace programmers from the software trade.

The Martian Chronicles is marked not just by all of the usual Myst constraints but by a shocking degree of laziness that makes it play almost like a parody of the sub-genre. The plot is most kindly described as generic, casting you as the faceless explorer of the ruins of an ancient — and, needless to say, deserted — Martian city, searching for a legendary all-powerful McGuffin. You would never connect this game with Bradbury’s book at all if it weren’t for the readings from it that inexplicably pop up from time to time. What you get instead of the earnest adaptation advertised on the box is the most soul-crushingly dull Myst clone ever: a deserted static environment around which are scattered a dozen or so puzzles which you’ve seen a dozen or more times before. Everything is harder than it ought to be, thanks to a wonky cursor whose hot spot seems to float about its surface randomly, a cursor which disappears entirely whenever an animation loop is playing. This is the sort of game that, when you go to save, requires you to delete the placeholder name of “Save1” character by character before you can enter your own. This game is death by a thousand niggling little aggravations like that one, which taken in the aggregate tell you that no actual human being ever tried to play it before it was shoved into a box and shipped. Even the visuals, the one saving grace of some Myst clones and the defining element of Byron Preiss’s entire career, are weirdly slapdash, making The Martian Chronicles useless even as a tech demo. Telarium’s Fahrenheit 451 had its problems, but it’s Infocom’s Trinity compared to this thing.

It’s telling that many reviewers labelled the fifteen minutes of anodyne interview clips with Ray Bradbury the best part of the game.

Some Myst clones have the virtue of being lovely to look at. Not this one, with views that look like they were vandalized by a two-year-old Salvador Dali wannabee with only two colors of crayon to hand.

Computer Gaming World justifiably savaged The Martian Chronicles. It “is as devoid of affection and skill as any game I have ever seen,” noted Charlies Ardai, by far the magazine’s deftest writer, in his one-star review. Two years after its release, Computer Gaming World named it the sixteenth worst game of all time, outdone only by such higher-profile crimes against their players as Sierra’s half-finished Outpost and Cosmi’s DefCon 5, an “authentic SDI simulation” whose level of accuracy was reflected in its name. (DefCon 5 is the lowest level of nuclear threat, not the highest.) As for The Martian Chronicles, the magazine called it “tired, pointless, and insulting to Bradbury’s poetic genius.” Most of the other magazines had little better to say — those, that is, which didn’t simply ignore it. For it was becoming abundantly clear that games like these really weren’t made for the hardcore set who read the gaming magazines. The problem was, it wasn’t clear who they were made for.

Still, Byron Preiss Multimedia continued to publish games betwixt and between their other CD-ROMs for another couple of years. The best of a pretty sorry bunch was probably the one called Private Eye, which built upon the noir novels of Raymond Chandler, one of Preiss’s favorite touchstones. Tellingly, it succeeded — to whatever extent it did — by mostly eschewing puzzles and other traditional forms of game design, being driven instead by conversations and lengthy non-interactive cartoon cut scenes; a later generation might have labeled it a visual novel. Charlies Ardai rewarded it with a solidly mediocre review, acknowledging that “it don’t stink up da joint.” Faint praise perhaps, but beggars can’t be choosers.

The Spider-Man game, by contrast, attracted more well-earned vitriol from Ardai: “The graphics are jagged, the story weak, the puzzles laughable (cryptograms, anyone?), and the action sequences so dismal, so minor, so clumsy, so basic, so dull, so Atari 2600 as to defy comment.” Tired of what Ardai called Preiss’s “gold-into-straw act,” even Computer Gaming World stopped bothering with his games after this. That’s a pity in a way; I would have loved to see Ardai fillet Forbes Corporate Warrior, a simplistic DOOM clone that replaced monsters with rival corporations, to be defeated with weapons like Price Bombs, Marketing Missiles, Ad Blasters, Takeover Torpedoes, and Alliance Harpoons, with all of it somehow based on “fifteen years of empirical data from an internationally recognized business-simulation firm.” “Business is war, cash is ammo!” we were told. Again, one question springs to mind. Who on earth was this game for?

Corporate Warrior came out in 1997, near the end of the road for Byron Preiss Multimedia, which, like almost all similar multimedia startups, had succeeded only in losing buckets and buckets of money. Preiss finally cut his losses and devoted all of his attention to paper-based publishing again, a realm where his footing was much surer.

I hasten to add that, for all that he proved an abject failure at making games, his legacy in print publishing remains unimpeachable. You don’t have to talk to many who were involved with genre and children’s books in the 1980s and 1990s before you meet someone whose career was touched by him in a positive way. The expressions of grief were painfully genuine after he was killed in a car accident in 2005. He was called a “nice guy and honest person,” “an original,” “a business visionary,” “one of the good guys,” “a positive force in the industry,” “one of the most likable people in publishing,” “an honest, dear, and very smart man,” “warm and personable,” “charming, sophisticated, and the best dresser in the room.” “You knew one of his books would be something you couldn’t get anywhere else, and [that] it would be amazing,” said one of the relatively few readers who bothered to dig deep enough into the small print of the books he bought to recognize Preiss’s name on an inordinate number of them. Most readers, however, “never think about the guy who put it together. He’s invisible, although it wouldn’t happen without him.”

But regrettably, Preiss was a textbook dilettante when it came to digital games, more intrigued by the idea of them than he was prepared to engage with the practical reality of what goes into a playable game. It must be said that he was far from alone in this. As I already noted, many other veterans of other forms of media tried to set up similar multimedia-focused alternatives to conventional gaming, and failed just as abjectly. And yet, dodgy though these games almost invariably were in execution, there was something noble about them in concept: they really were trying to move the proverbial goalposts, trying to appeal to new demographics. What the multimedia mavens behind them failed to understand was that fresh themes and surface aesthetics do not great games make all by themselves; you have to devote attention to design as well. Their failure to do so doomed their games to becoming a footnote in history.

For in the end, games are neither books nor movies; they are their own things, which may occasionally borrow approaches from one or the other but should never delude themselves into believing that they can just stick the adjective “interactive” in front of their preferred inspiration and call it a day. Long before The Martian Chronicles stank up the joint, the very best game designers had come to understand that.

Postscript: On a more positive note…

Because I don’t like to be a complete sourpuss, let me note that the efforts of the multimedia dilettantes of the 1990s weren’t always misbegotten. I know of at least one production in this style that’s well worth your time: The Dark Eye, an exploration of the nightmare consciousness of Edgar Allan Poe that was developed by Inscape and released in 1995. On the surface, it’s alarmingly similar to The Martian Chronicles: a Myst-like presentation created in Macromedia Director, featuring occasional readings from the master’s works. But it hangs together much, much better, thanks to a sharp aesthetic sense and a willingness to eschew conventional puzzles completely in favor of atmosphere — all the atmosphere, I daresay, that you’ll be able to take, given the creepy subject matter. I encourage you to read my earlier review of it and perhaps to check it out for yourself. If nothing else, it can serve as proof that no approach to game-making is entirely irredeemable.

Another game that attempts to do much the same thing as The Martian Chronicles but does it much, much better is Rama, which was developed by Dynamix and released by Sierra in 1996. Here as well, the link to the first bookware era is catnip for your humble author; not only was Arthur C. Clarke adapted by a Telarium game before this one, but the novel chosen for that adaptation was Rendezvous with Rama, the same one that is being celebrated here. As in The Martian Chronicles, the lines between game and homage are blurred in Rama, what with the selection of interview clips in which Clarke himself talks about his storied career and one of the most lauded books it produced. And once again the actual game, when you get around to playing it, is very much in the spirit of Myst.

But Dynamix came from the old school of game development, and were in fact hugely respected in the industry for their programming chops; they wouldn’t have been caught dead using lazy middleware like Macromedia Director. Rama rather runs in a much more sophisticated engine, and was designed by people who had made games before and knew what led to playable ones. It’s built around bone-hard puzzles that often require a mathematical mind comfortable with solving complex equations and translating between different base systems. I must admit that I find it all a bit dry — but then, as I’ve said, games in this style are not usually to my taste; I’ve just about decided that the games in the “real” Myst series are all the Myst I need. Nevertheless, Rama is a vastly better answer to the question of “Where do you go after Myst?” than most of the alternatives. If you like its sort of thing, by all means, check it out. Call it another incarnation of Telarium 2.0, done right this time.

(Sources: Starlog of November 1981, December 1981, November 1982, January 1984, June 1984, April 1986, March 1987, November 1992, December 1992, January 1997, April 1997, February 1999, June 2003, May 2005, and October 2005; Compute!’s Gazette of December 1984; STart of November 1990; InCider of May 1993; Electronic Entertainment of June 1994, December 1994, January 1995, May 1995, and December 1995; MacUser of October 1995; Computer Games Strategy Plus of November 1995; Computer Gaming World of December 1995, January 1996, October 1996, November 1996, and February 1997; Next Generation of October 1996; Chicago Tribune of November 16 1982. Online sources include the announcement of Byron Preiss’s death and the outpouring of memories and sentiment that followed on COMICON.com.

A search on archive.org will reveal a version of The Martian Chronicles that has been modified to run on Windows 10. The Collection Chamber has a version of Rama that’s ready to install and run on Windows 10. Mac and Linux users can import the data files there into their computer’s version of ScummVM.)

Comments
26 Responses

- Rowan Lipkovits

September 2, 2022 at 10:58 pm

Always happy to hear the story of Byron Preiss once again somehow ducking, bobbing and weaving his way through another round.

The engine you consistently describe as “The Director” is, I think, Macromind’s product given the name Director, subsequently styled Macromedia Director following the company’s renaming and eventually called Adobe Director after the company was sold. I understand that Director support has arrived, at least partially, to SCUMMVM! However, I don’t believe it was ever presented with a label including its article.

- Ido Yehieli

September 3, 2022 at 6:20 am

Getting further off-topic, but I believe the very same Macromedia Director was later more usefully wielded by the fledgling PopCap for making their early games.

- Jimmy Maher

September 3, 2022 at 6:39 am

It seems that Macromind became Macromedia in 1993, but the article was indeed misplaced. Thanks!

It would be wonderful to see Director support in ScummVM. There are a lot of games that were created using Director for Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 that are really, really hard to get running on modern systems — much harder than MS-DOS-based games.

- Jessica

September 5, 2022 at 1:54 pm

Since you mention it – ScummVM added its first official support for Macromedia Director software in 2021 (https://www.scummvm.org/news/20211009/), though compatibility is presumably not all that high yet.

- Captain Kal

September 6, 2022 at 9:59 am

These environments (Windows 3.1 or Windows 95) can be emulated with professional software like VMware or open source like DosBox-X. The latter is preferable, since it offers some form of Direct3D or Glide emulation.

You will find some very useful guides installing all versions of Windows over DosBox-X, at DosBox Wiki Page (https://dosbox-x.com/wiki/).

You can even try to run these games natively in Win10, by using a DirectX Wrapper like dgVooDoo2 (http://dege.freeweb.hu/dgVoodoo2/dgVoodoo2/).

- Jimmy Maher

September 6, 2022 at 11:05 am

Yes, you can get almost anything to run using one of these tools if you work at it long enough, but they’re all imperfect and fiddly, and finding the right tool for any particular job can be a royal pain. Although there’s no reason for a Windows program to do busy-waits under any circumstances, some games do just that, making VMWare and VirtualBox’s lack of precise timing controls as much a deal breaker for those games as is their lack of good Direct3D support for other games. And DOSBox-X is just a pain for the everyday user in all sorts of ways: hard to get data in and out of, impossible to mount and dismount CDs on the fly, slow if you turn full CPU emulation on, hit-and-miss in terms of compatibility if you don’t. There’s nothing like a straightforward, works-(almost)every-time solution like DOSBox or ScummVM.

As far as vanilla Windows solutions go, WINEVDM (http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/otvdm.html) does a surprisingly good job of running some 16-bit software transparently (Civilization II works a treat), but the Director software stack is notoriously brittle; there are games out there that won’t even run on Windows 98, much less anything later than that. Of course, it doesn’t help that most of the people making multimedia-heavy Director games had a less than unshakeable grasp on the fundamentals of future-proof software engineering. ;)

Anyway, I don’t mean to disparage any of the solutions that are out there, for which I’m very grateful. I’d just like to see something more straightforward and guaranteed, for folks who don’t have the time, inclination, or technical know-how to juggle half a dozen virtual machines looking for the magic bullet that works. I know, I know… if wishes were courses.

- Captain Kal

September 21, 2022 at 7:49 pm

Agree on all counts!!!

You do need to have some basic understanding of the all of the different versions of Windows you want to emulate!! And you will have to spend time experimenting with different tools or different versions of the same tool.

If you ever need any help, getting a particular game to run, do not hesitate to ask. It’s one of my favorite aspects of retro gaming!!

- Brent

September 3, 2022 at 11:40 am

Long shot but some people out there might be interested in Hideo Kojima’s adventure game Policenauts someday. It used something like hypertext in order to explain setting-specific jargon and history – of which there was A LOT. The plot is a ridiculous riff on Lethal Weapon but the scifi setting is fascinating and very thoroughly considered. I played a fan translation on the Sega Saturn but there are probably emulators or somesuch out there for cheaper alternatives.

- Christopher G

September 4, 2022 at 3:31 pm

Agreed on Rama recommendation. I got quite a ways into it, for a game style that held no appeal to me (never made it more than 5 minutes into Myst) – due mostly to my interest in the story itself, which speaks to their successful execution of story as game. I just wanted into that particular world, and I got it.

- Derek

September 4, 2022 at 10:06 pm

I suppose it really does depend on what one grows up with. I’ve rarely felt particular difficulty in navigating Myst-like games, and certainly not within a single room. In contrast, I’ve always found it slightly annoying to navigate a text-adventure environment that I can’t see, and the inconsistent room connections found in early text adventures are not something I ever want to deal with.

- Sandy Duncan

September 6, 2022 at 3:43 pm

Great piece as always, Jimmy! One improvement that could help a lot with historical preservation– after the quote from Masquerade that reads:

“ But then they saw that man was following the same path [in the Americas] and that what had happened in the Old World would probably happen in the New.”

It would do well for the editor (in this case you) to acknowledge that of course “man” had already been here for thousands of years, in the form of 574 sovereign nations of indigenous people (population estimates ranging widely from 8-112 million people). Obviously the racism of Masquerade is not your fault, but acknowledging it goes a long way to stopping the erasure of indigenous cultures whose land we stole.

- Patrick

September 7, 2022 at 5:42 pm

1. The description is from The Secret.

2. I interpreted “following the same path” as metaphorical. As in, the people in the Americas were making the same evil deeds that people elsewhere were doing.

- Fictional Narrative

September 8, 2022 at 11:00 pm

You’re taking an apparatchik seriously. Don’t do that.

You really think it knows there were 574 “sovereign” nations(peaceful, too!), but population ranges from 8,000,000 to 112,000,000 people?

Of course, everybody knows they were all members of the United Alien Alliance, which was at that time over-extended with galactic debt and their collapse was imminent anyway. Who do you think built their pyramids?

Enough with these alien apologists.

- Patrick

September 7, 2022 at 5:39 pm

I read up on The Secret. I really hope there aren’t any treasures that are lost forever due to land development or the like.

- fb

September 8, 2022 at 2:30 am

Great read, as always.
Small typo (other = over) at: “Other the course of the next couple of years, […]”

- Jimmy Maher

September 8, 2022 at 8:39 am

Thanks!

- gamerindreams

September 9, 2022 at 8:49 pm

Thank you for this Jimmy – it is very interesting and sad to see well intentioned and budgeted people making bad games. Especially in these cases where the people could have taken their ideas and budgets to decent developers and built something that could have stood the test of time.

At least we still have the sick burns of CGW.

In the article, the game I was interested in the most was passed by with just a mention. I’d love to see your playthrough of Private Eye (1996) as it really seems to be in line with the walking simulators of today and even the new games by Sam Barlow (Her Story and, the new one Immortality which is actually coming on Microsoft’s Netflix for games, Gamepass on day 1)

The one detailed review on Mobygames is pretty positive (https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/private-eye/reviews/reviewerId,1020/)

For those interested, it is apparently playable on ScummVM (https://mobile.twitter.com/ScummVM/status/1374022730270523392) and the game itself is apparently downloadable from the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/private-eye-philip-marlowe)

- GeoX

September 10, 2022 at 9:57 am

I just want to note that, while I didn’t read many books in the series, young-me bought a Time Machine book called, I think, The Last Dinosaur at one of those scholastic book fairs and was absolutely obsessed with it for a while. My subjective impression was that it was a significant cut above most of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-type books that were so ubiquitous at the time.

- Chris Floyd

September 10, 2022 at 8:50 pm

Jimmy — Thanks for informing me, all these years later, that the man responsible for one of my most disappointing gaming experiences ever (Martian Chronicles) was also responsible for some of the most indelibly great ones–the Interplanetary Spy and Time Machine gamebooks.

- Adam

September 11, 2022 at 9:59 pm

Typo: “in reponse”

Thanks for another interesting look at bookware!

- Jimmy Maher

September 12, 2022 at 4:56 am

Thanks!

- Brian Bagnall

September 18, 2022 at 3:55 pm

“The first-person node-based movement, with its plethora of pre-rendered 3D views, is both the defining attribute of the lineage and an unsatisfying compromise in itself: what you really want to be doing is navigating through a seamless 3D space, but technical limitations have made that impossible, so here you are, lurching around, discrete step by discrete step.”

An interesting way to explore this limitation is to play Myst VR. The VR iteration removes the technological limitations of the time and allows an evaluation of the game rather than the game engine. It’s also frankly a great way to experience the slow burn of an adventure game without the frustrations of a text or graphical user interface. The game is probably best played standing, so that to turn around or look around, you simply move your head or body. Interacting with objects is the peak of intuitiveness where you reach out your hand and rotate or pull or whatever needs to be done. I really enjoyed the experience, probably because of how those distant memories of the original cause the neurons to sparkle.

With that said, it had been decades since I played the original Myst and I had forgotten everything except the most iconic images and sounds. Solving the puzzles was like playing it the first time. What stood out for me about the Myst structure is that for the first few hours I literally felt like I had not solved a single puzzle, because the other puzzles that allow you to leave Myst island are dependent on figuring out one central puzzle first. However it’s not obvious this is the case, so I spent a fair amount of time playing with unsolvable puzzles until eventually homing in on the one puzzle that opens up the others. Myst seems pretty unique in that one design, which might turn off more casual players from finding the other islands.

- Andrew Plotkin

September 19, 2022 at 5:07 pm

I missed the word “defining” on my original read-through…

Remember that the first free-movement port of Myst was released *twenty years* before the VR edition. It took a few more years for that to become standard kit — 2000-era 3D hardware was not yet good enough for Myst. But many games (including Myst 3/4) went for the compromise “panning” model, which had node-based movement but allowed full 360-spherical rotation.

So it’s a little hard to say that the slideshow was a *defining* part of the genre. As soon as better alternatives appeared, everybody lunged for them with a shout of “This is the way it always should have been!”

(Plus you don’t want to paint yourself into the corner of insisting that Myst 5 (2005, full-3D) was not a Myst-genre game.)

Contrast this with the text parser genre. You can say that the verb-noun-preposition parser model is a defining feature, and point to the fact that Inform 7 handles pretty much the same kinds of commands that Zork did. The improvements have been incremental, not transformative. I say this without judgement, obviously!

- Jimmy Maher

September 20, 2022 at 7:18 am

It’s an interesting question, actually. Is Myst 5 a Myst-like? If I use that term, most gamers — at least the ones of a certain age — will think of a node-based game, not one with non-discrete spaces. I suppose one could draw another parallel with Zork. If I called something “Zork-like,” most people would think of a text adventure, not the later graphical Zork games. The difference, of course, is that we don’t run around calling text adventures “Zork-likes,” but we’ve never settled on a better name for Myst-likes.

But anyway, point taken in the bigger picture. I added the qualifier “during the 1990s.” ;)

- Yoni

January 2, 2023 at 2:19 pm

Possible correction: “do not great games make” supposed to be “do not make great games”?

- Jimmy Maher

January 2, 2023 at 3:02 pm

Your phrasing is more customary and the one I would use 99 percent of the time, but in this case mine gives a rhythm that I quite like. ;)

Titanic Visions, Part 1: Sifting Through the Wreckage
September 23, 2022

Games are not made in a vacuum.

This truth ought to be self-evident, but it’s often lost in histories of gaming. People like me tend to rely, perhaps a bit too much, on what I sometimes call the cataloging approach to gaming history. You all know the recipe for such articles: start with a discrete classic (or occasionally infamous) game, add a narrative of who made it and how they did so, pour in an evaluation of its merits and demerits, and season the final concoction with a description of its place in the evolution of gaming in general. I’ve written plenty of such articles in the past, and will doubtless write plenty more of them in the future.

What such articles sometimes lose sight of, however, is a broader cultural context that’s to be found beyond the permeable borders of the gaming ghetto. The ideas and influences that are turned into games come from all over the place, being reflections of the societies that surround them and the interests of the people who make them. (For much of gaming history, these people have been mostly young white and Asian men from fairly privileged socioeconomic circumstances, which, needless to say, has had its own impact on the types of games that exist and the subjects they tackle.) Sometimes the pop culture that influences games is so blindingly obvious that we almost can become blind to it: what would digital games be today if Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson had never invented the tabletop game of Dungeons & Dragons, or if J.R.R. Tolkien had never written The Lord of the Rings, or if George Lucas had never made Star Wars? But it’s the subtler influences that I find most interesting to ferret out — like, for instance, the way that techno-thriller author Tom Clancy’s brand of American military triumphalism fed into the combat simulations made by companies like Microprose, which at times commanded a quarter or more of the overall computer-gaming market during the 1980s and 1990s.

When I realized a decade or so ago that I had somehow stumbled into writing a broad, encompassing history of computer gaming, I promised myself that I would try to bring out connections like these whenever possible. I’m not sure that I’ve always kept that promise on an article-by-article basis, but I have always tried to keep one eye at least on the bigger picture, to give this site some credibility as a broad cultural history rather than just a catalog of neat games that appeared down through time — not that it hasn’t also been the latter, of course. In short, I’ve always wanted to understand how outside culture bleeds into the seemingly insular world of gaming, and how gaming has left its mark on the world outside its boundaries. (This last has barely begun to happen at the point in history we’ve reached now, more than ten years into this project, but rest assured that the “gamefication” of everyday life is not that far away.) There are many reasons to play old games, the most popular ones being simply because they’re fun on their own merits and because of the warm and fuzzy feelings of nostalgia they invoke in us folks of a certain age. But another reason, which is no less defensible, is that they give us a chance to become time travelers in a more impersonal sense, by giving us a direct pipeline to a receding past.

So, please indulge me now in a case study about how changing fashions in the way we view one of the most enduring mytho-historical tropes of modern culture impacted games. The sinking of the brand-new, “unsinkable” luxury liner the Titanic following a collision with a North Atlantic iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, is the delicious tragedy that we just can’t seem to let go of, an irresistible mixture of symbolism, theme, romance, pathos, mystery, and heroism to which we keep returning over and over. Just as many historical novels have more to tell us about the times in which they were written than the times they allegedly chronicle, the lens through which we view the Titanic has been as much a mirror we hold up to our contemporary selves as a window into the past. For example, during the unsentimental, materialist 1980s, the last full decade before our virtual online existences started to compete with our flesh-and-blood reality, the Titanic was discussed primarily as a thing, to be found, probed, and perhaps even raised above the waves once again. But then, in 1997 — an altogether dreamier, more fanciful time to be alive — a hit film reminded us why we had all fallen in love with the Titanic to begin with: because it’s such a great story, or rather collection of them, a beautiful canvas for our imaginations. My next three articles will examine these competing visions of the Titanic, and the games that were made in response to them — no fewer than ten games in all, plus one intriguing idea for a game that was never made.

The first person to propose finding and raising the Titanic from its watery grave did so barely a year after the ship had sunk. Charles Smith was a Colorado mining engineer who knew nothing about ships or the sea, but was convinced that his own area of expertise was as applicable to the problem of a seaborne salvage operation as it was to that of cracking open an elusive new seam of gold. It seems that when one goes through life with a miner’s hammer in one hand, everything looks like a suitable nail. “My object is to deliver the Titanic to its owners without further injury so that the great vessel may be rebuilt,” Smith declared. “Much of the cargo, or all of it, would be recovered. All the bodies which sank with the doomed ship have long since been embalmed by the action of the seawater, and when they are at last brought back to the surface they will be easily identifiable and prepared for reverential burial.”

Smith’s plan hinged on electromagnets, one of the trendy technological wonders of his age. He would build a massive one — possibly the most massive one ever built — sail or drag it out to the Titanic’s last known location, turn it on, and let the sunken ship’s steel hull pull it to its bosom. With the wreck thus pinpointed on the ocean floor, he would descend in a custom-made submarine to attach hundreds more magnets to the hull, each with a rope leading back to a steam-powered winch aboard one of a dozen or so boats on the surface. When all was ready, the winches would all be activated in unison, and the 46,000-ton vessel would be slowly lifted back to the surface, then towed to a dry dock, repaired, and placed back into service. Smith estimated that the whole operation would require just $1.5 million and 162 men, and would take about three months: one month to find the wreck, one month to prepare it, and one month to raise it and tow it to safety. “It is merely a matter of magnets,” he insisted.

The plan left something to be desired in terms of basic physics, not to mention in its understanding of basic human psychology; how many passengers would really want to sail on a ship on which more than 1500 people had died in horrific circumstances? Yet it was taken bizarrely seriously in the popular press, which churned out excited headlines like “Can the Lost Titanic Be Raised?” Alas, potential investors proved less credulous: Smith managed to raise just $10,000 of the $1.5 million he said he needed. After the onset of the First World War, a more diffuse tragedy than the sinking of the Titanic but one that was many orders of magnitude more immense, he and his scheme faded back into obscurity, just another of the frivolous pipe dreams of a more innocent era.

More than half a century later, in the late 1960s, a British odd-jobber and Titanic obsessive named Doug Woolley captured headlines with a scheme that was almost as outlandish as that of Charles Smith. He would attach 200 deflated pontoons all around the Titanic’s hull. Then they would be filled with hydrogen which would be extracted from the surrounding seawater via electrolysis, and the ship would rise majestically to the surface like the mother of all hot-air balloons. He said the whole operation would cost about £4.8 million and could be accomplished within one year.

To say that Woolley lacked qualifications in deep-sea salvage hardly begins to state the case. He was working in a pantyhose factory at the same time that he was holding press conferences about raising the Titanic. He had never personally sailed farther than the width of the English Channel, and was conducting what he insisted were groundbreaking experiments in electrolysis in his dingy flat’s bathtub. And he was rather putting the cart before the horse anyway, given that no one knew precisely where the Titanic lay; whereas Charles Smith had at least made some attempt to address that part of the problem, Woolley just took it on faith that it would turn up when he started to look around for it.

Wooley’s dream never had a chance in the real world, but the world of fiction was another matter. In 1976, the American author Clive Cussler published the third of what would become many pulpy adventure novels featuring his hero Dirk Pitt, a sort of Tom Swift for grown-ups. The novel was called Raise the Titanic!, and had a plot involving byzanium, a precious (and fictional) mineral, a radioactive power source whose potential dwarfs that of uranium or plutonium, whose only known reserves happened to be aboard the Titanic on that fateful night. Pitt and his friends concoct a plan for raising the ship — why they don’t just try to raise the byzanium in its hold is never adequately explained — that bears distinct similarities to Doug Woolley’s scheme: they will seal off the interior of the ship and pump it full of compressed air to cause it to float to the surface. This they succeed in doing, fighting off Soviet saboteurs all the while.

The novel became a bestseller, whereupon Hollywood made it into a big-budget summer movie in 1980. The scale model of the Titanic that was constructed for the film’s climactic scene of the ship breaking the ocean’s surface cost $7 million, as much as the original vessel when not adjusting for inflation. But surprisingly, even the Titanic name and a titanic budget worthy of the ship couldn’t save the film; it was savaged by critics, and turned into a box-office bomb. “It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic,” quipped its producer Lew Grade later.

Although the method employed by Dirk Pitt and his friends for raising the Titanic was hopeless for a vessel of this size at this depth, it was adapted from real-world techniques already in use for raising ships that had sunk in shallower waters. For a cottage industry of shipwreck recovery had arisen after World War II. With an estimated quarter of a million or more ships having sunk since humanity first began to ply the world’s waterways, the pickings in the most popular sea lanes were rich. People made fortunes by poring over old nautical records, searching doggedly where the ships they found in them were believed to have sunk, and retrieving the gold, silver, and other valuable in their holds. The Caribbean, which had once positively teemed with Spain’s treasure-laden galleons sailing from the New World back to the Old, was particularly fertile ground.

Meanwhile others had invented the new field of maritime archaeology, with the purpose of studying and preserving the wrecks they found instead of looting them for profit. Soon every other issue of National Geographic seemed to contain some new undersea discovery, illustrated in full-color Kodachrome. For example, the Titanic’s sister ship the Britannic, which had struck a German mine and sunk off the coast of Greece in 1916 while serving as a hospital ship, was found by the famous French undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau in 1975.

Admittedly, the boundaries between the treasure hunter and the maritime archaeologist weren’t always clear. Many of the adventurous folks who got into this racket had a little bit of both in them, along with a hefty hankering for the notoriety that would come their way if they became, say, the first person to send back pictures of the most famous of all sunken ships in the world.

The problem with the Titanic, the thing which made it so much harder to find than the likes of the Britannic, was that it had sunk in the deep water of the open ocean rather than the coastal water of the Mediterranean. The deep ocean floor is the most inaccessible geography on our planet; even today, marine scientists like to say that we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the landscapes under our own planet’s oceans. That said, people did come up with various ideas for locating the Titanic from the ocean’s surface that were more or less feasible. For example, Commander John Grattan, the Royal Navy’s anointed expert in diving and submersibles, proposed scouring the ocean floor with a huge active sonar array towed behind a trawler. But such plans would be dauntingly expensive to implement. And, even if the Titanic was found from the surface, what next? Only a few submersibles in the world were capable of diving to the wreck’s depth of two and a half miles below the ocean’s surface, and they were all in the hands of the United States Navy, which wasn’t in the habit of renting them out to private treasure hunters to use for snapping pictures and collecting souvenirs.

One man, however, judged that the fame and money that would follow a credible claim of just having found the Titanic — never mind the photographs, much less any salvage operations — would be enough to make the task eminently worth taking on. “Cadillac” Jack Grimm was a flamboyant Texas oilman with a taste for exotic adventure and pseudoscience, who had already mounted expeditions in search of Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, and the Loch Ness Monster, who had once traveled to the North Pole in the hope of proving that the Earth was hollow. His greatest achievement to date in this mold, at least if you asked him, was the recovery of a piece of Noah’s Ark from the side of Mount Ararat in Turkey — never mind that the scientific community universally scoffed at his alleged find.

In the summer of 1980, while Raise the Titanic was bombing in box offices, Grimm funded a search for the real ship that was broadly similar to the approach suggested by John Grattan: a trawler dragged behind it a sonar array which hovered a few hundred feet above the ocean floor. Over a period of more than a week, the boat methodically covered an area of about ten square miles that was judged the most likely to contain the wreck. It returned to port without a smoking gun, but its crew did create a list of fourteen sites within the search area that had sent back suspiciously regular sonar echoes, any of which could be indicative of a large human-made object like the Titanic. “I think we got that heifer corralled in a box canyon,” Grimm told the press in his usual colorful diction.

Indeed, Grimm knew how to work the press like the master of ceremonies at a rodeo, and he poured on the juice now. He announced that he would mount a second expedition the following summer to exhaustively search each of the fourteen sites with a more sensitive sonar array, an iron-detecting magnetometer, and a camera capable of sending back grainy photographs. He arranged this time to borrow from the Coast Guard the Gyre, a cutting-edge oceanographic research vessel, and funded a documentary film that was to be hosted by Orson Welles; the film crew would sail with the second expedition in order to capture the instant of discovery. He was, he told the assembled journalists on the day he himself sailed with the Gyre, absolutely convinced that he would be known to the world as the man who had found the Titanic by the time his feet next touched dry land.

Looking for an expert to support, debunk, or qualify his showy optimism, some journalists turned to one Robert Ballard, an oceanographer and diver with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute who was arguably the world’s foremost expert on deep-ocean exploration of a more scientific bent, whose greatest achievement to date had been his discovery of underwater hydrothermal vents and the unique forms of animal life that clustered around these precious oases of warmth on the bitter-cold ocean floor. The polar opposite of Grimm in temperament, the cautious Ballard said that, while Grimm’s overall approach was viable if conducted carefully and thoroughly, it would nevertheless be difficult to convince the public that he truly had found the Titanic absent high-quality, closeup photographs of the wreck. He was diplomatic enough not to add that Grimm’s earlier trafficking in mythical monsters and Biblical literalism would cause any claim he made to seem that much more dubious without overwhelming proof.

Meanwhile Grimm’s expedition set to work, contending with unstable weather that kept the Gyre’s captain on a constant knife-edge. One by one, the crew eliminated the promising locations that had been identified the previous year. As the number of remaining possibilities dwindled, the mood onboard grew dimmer and dimmer. At last, the fourteenth and final site was crossed off the list. They had come up dry.

Or had they? On the way home, flipping in desultory fashion through the photographs that been returned to the surface, Grimm stumbled upon an image that gave him goosebumps: something that looked for all the world like a large human-made object, smoothly tapered like the wings of an airplane, rising out of the mud of the ocean floor. He was sure it must be a blade from one of the Titanic’s 26-ton propellers.

Grimm immediately radioed the Coast Guard and asked to hang onto the Gyre for another week. But the Coast Guard refused, even when he name-dropped President Ronald Reagan, whom he claimed was a close personal friend. There was nothing for it but to continue the journey home. He was certain he had found the Titanic, but even his own team of experts, never mind outsiders, were unconvinced. They said that the blurry photograph was more likely than not just another rocky outcropping. An extraordinary claim required extraordinary proof, and this one picture was not it. Which didn’t stop Grimm’s documentary, once it was finished, from claiming it to be all but conclusive proof.

Grimm did try one more time to seal the deal. In the summer of 1983, he set off again aboard a research vessel, borrowed this time from Columbia University. But this trip was plagued by even worse weather than the last one. After several days of frantic searching for a propeller which seemed to have disappeared back into the ocean floor whence it had sprouted, 40-knot winds forced him to cut the expedition short. Grimm, who was prone to seasickness and had a deadly fear of water, decided enough was enough after this latest miserable experience. He never mounted a fourth expedition.

But the Titanic wasn’t to remain hidden much longer. For even as Jack Grimm was capturing headlines with his expeditions, Robert Ballard and his colleagues at Woods Hole were quietly developing an uncrewed deep-water sled equipped with an array of powerful searchlights and high-resolution still and video cameras, all operable by remote control from the surface. He called it the Argo, after the ship which the mythical Greek hero Jason had sailed into the unknown sea that lay beyond the Hellespont. Being not without a streak of public-relations savvy of his own, Ballard thought it would be quite a coup to use his expensive new toy to find and send back images of the Titanic, an achievement for which Grimm had obligingly primed the press’s pump.

That, at any rate, was how the story was reported in the 1980s. A more complicated and truthful version emerged years later. It seems that the United States Navy had funded much of the Argo’s development and construction, with the understanding that it would be able to use it and its creator from time to time for its own purposes. (Ballard had longstanding relationships in the Navy, having served from 1967 to 1970 as an active-duty officer and being still a reservist.) The first favor was called in almost as soon as the Argo was ready for action. The Navy brass were very concerned about two nuclear attack submarines which had been lost in the 1960s in the North Atlantic, not far from where the Titanic had gone down. They were eager to ensure that the subs’ reactor cores had not ruptured and, just as importantly, that the Soviets hadn’t found the vessels and looted them for secrets. A search for the Titanic would make the perfect cover story for Ballard’s activities in this otherwise deserted stretch of open ocean. The Navy gave him two months to play with; if he completed his classified investigations more quickly than that, he could use the rest of his time to really search for the Titanic. As it happened, it took him slightly over a month and a half to find the two submarines and put the Navy’s mind at ease that neither was leaking radioactivity and neither had been plundered. He was left with twelve days in which to find the Titanic.

Ballard and his Argo were sailing aboard the research vessel Knorr, the workhorse of Woods Hole. That same summer, a French team under an oceanographer named Jean-Louis Michel had tried to find the Titanic using sonar, but had come up empty. This failure, combined with the failures of Jack Grimm’s expeditions, convinced Ballard that he shouldn’t be looking for a reasonably intact ship on the ocean floor; the area had been scoured so thoroughly with sonar by now that such an object would surely have been found if it existed. He believed that the ship must be far more badly damaged than had been previously assumed — in fact, that it had possibly broken into many pieces during its long plunge to the bottom. Instead of looking for a whole ship, he would look for the debris left by a sinking ship. Since sonar had no way of distinguishing small bits of human-made rubble from the natural detritus of the ocean floor, the only way to conduct such a search was visually, using the Argo’s camera feeds. Time was short, the area to be searched was large, and this was an exhaustingly tedious way to go about it, but he would do what he could before he had to head home.

The twelve days were half up on the early morning of September 1, 1985, when, with Ballard fast asleep in his cabin, a shout went up from the Argo control room: “Wreckage!” By the time Ballard had burst into the room, the crew had zeroed in on a clearly manufactured metal object that they were certain was a boiler for the great ship’s engines. Everyone in the cramped little room burst into spontaneous cheers. But then, just as quickly, the mood turned sober. “We realized we were dancing on someone’s grave, and we were embarrassed,” remembered Ballard later. He suggested that they all observe a moment of silence. This they did, and then they got back to work.

Ballard and company carefully traced the “debris field” they had found back to each of its termini. At one end lay the front half of the ship, intact enough to still be readily recognizable for what it was; at the other end lay the rear half, so badly mangled that it looked like little more than a colossal pile of rusted metal and other junk. It was obvious what had happened: the ship’s back had broken as it plunged beneath the waves, and the two halves had separated completely from one another and finished the long fall separately, raining boilers, supports, furniture, bric-à-brac, and doubtless plenty of now-vanished human corpses from their open ends down onto the ocean floor between the two, like a gigantic busted piñata.

Needless to say, this discovery caused all but the most committed of dreamers to give up on any hopes of raising the ship. Grimm’s “propeller” lay well away from the real wreck site, proving to be nothing more than the unusual rock formation so many scientists had suspected it to be. On the other hand, it would later emerge that Grimm had towed his sonar array within 500 feet of the real ship’s bow back in 1981. Robert Ballard had been both very good and very, very lucky — a potent combination in any endeavor.

The September 3, 1985, edition of The New York Times included a small article printed near the bottom of the front page: “Wreckage of Titanic Reported Discovered 12,000 Feet Down.” It was the first trickle in what would become a torrent of media coverage. Soon the first photographs began making their way back from the North Atlantic — haunting images of a propeller (the real one this time), of a cabin porthole, of crockery and pots and a stoking port for the boilers. The killer shot captured much of the ship’s bow, its shape unmistakable to even the rankest layperson.

At this point, the story becomes for better or for worse as much a tale of mass media as exploration and discovery. Robert Ballard became more than just a run-of-the-mill celebrity; “folk hero” is a better description of his status. He returned to the wreck in the summer of 1986 with a crewed submersible called the Alvin, one of those aforementioned few vehicles in the world capable of withstanding the almost inconceivable cold and pressure that exist two and a half miles below the ocean’s surface; Ballard’s enviable connections had allowed him to borrow this unique vessel from the Navy. The photographs he came up with this time were stunning, allegories of splendid desolation fit to be framed and hung in a Romantic poet’s library. The press and the public they served couldn’t get enough. They experienced vicariously the same emotions Ballard had felt as he gazed out the window of the Alvin: “As I peered entranced through my viewport, I could easily imagine people walking down the promenade, looking out of the windows I was now looking into. Here I was on the bottom of the ocean gazing at recognizable, man-made artifacts. I was looking [at] decks along which [people] had walked, rooms in which they had slept, joked, made love.”

The wreck of the Titanic was simply inescapable for the next few years in the United States, Britain, and much of the rest of the world, the subject of newspaper and magazine articles, books, documentary films, museum exhibits, and even tourism; charter companies sold expensive junkets out to the spot in the ocean directly above the wreck. And, as with any media sensation worth its salt, there were also controversies. Jack Grimm resurfaced with a spurious legal claim, quickly dismissed by the courts, that he rather than Robert Ballard was the rightful discoverer of the wreck by virtue of having passed so close to it with his sonar array. And already in 1987 a dodgy outfit managed to mount an underwater expedition of its own to the site, damaging the wreck in the process of grabbing a handful of objects that were later unveiled in a tacky syndicated-television special. Host Telly Savalas and his panel of “experts” pawing through these precious artifacts was the twentieth-century equivalent of the amateur archaeologists of the nineteenth century blasting away at the interior of the Pyramid of Khufu with gunpowder.

See https://www.youtube.com/embed/MXaYW2JE8KI?start=4637

The Titanic wreck site has continued to attract both earnest maritime archaeologists and shameless profiteers ever since, along with every gradient in between the two. But our interest today is in the early years of the Titanic mania spawned by the initial search for and discovery of the wreck. It’s time for us turn in that context to computer games, a very young form of media at the time Jack Grimm and Robert Ballard were making headlines, but one that was already responding to and reflecting the broader landscape of old media around it. In the case of the Titanic mania, this led to an entire sub-genre of games about the discovery of, exploration of, and in some cases the raising of the famous luxury liner. I’ll reveal upfront that none of these games is a deathless classic. Yet each is an instant of cultural history, suspended in the digital ether like the Titanic in its underwater grave.

The earliest game I know of which tackles the subject of the discovery and salvage of the Titanic predates Robert Ballard’s finding of the wreck by well over a year. Released in early 1984 in Britain only for the Sinclair Spectrum, the oddly titled Titanic: The Adventure Begins… is rather a reflection of the hype which surrounded Jack Grimm’s three expeditions. It was re-released two years later in not only the original Spectrum but a Commodore 64 version, doubtless in response to the news of Ballard’s discovery. It’s very much a product of the collective sugar rush that was the early British games industry, when just about any enterprising bedroom coder could slap a game together, pay a duplication house for a run of cassettes containing it, pay a print shop for a simple insert for the case, and sell the end result for a few quid in corner software shops all over the country.

Programmer Paul Hill, who called himself R&R Software, was clever enough to recognize that at least a third of the battle of finding the Titanic was funding the expedition. Accordingly, the first of the three radically different stages of his game involves finding a sponsor and outfitting your boat and crew, whilst keeping enough cash in reserve to pay your running costs once you head to sea. Stage two is the search for the wreck, which you conduct by sending diving teams down to promising locations identified on the NASA satellite photo you hopefully purchased during the previous stage; matters are complicated here by the icebergs that dot the ocean’s surface. Finally, stage three lets you actually explore the wreck, which in this alternate reality sits on the ocean floor conveniently intact. This stage, the most elaborate by far, is an exercise in mapping a three-level maze of almost 500 locations, looking for the game’s MacGuffin, a fortune in gold that supposedly went down with the ship.

Paul Hill’s knowledge of the realities of deep-water exploration is clearly nonexistent; the scuba divers he imagines frolicking through the wreck would have been crushed like bugs before they made it halfway down to 12,500 feet. Nor is his game any paragon of thoughtful design; much of your success or lack thereof depends on blind luck. Nevertheless, there’s a certain gonzo charm to the thing, a product of a time well before gameplay genres calcified into a set of straitjacketed expectations, when a game could do and be almost anything its programmer could dream up and dare to implement with the primitive tools at his disposal. In this sense, it’s a time capsule par excellence. I only wish I could hear the song which Paul Hill put on the tape’s flip side, an “epic rock track” by a bunch of his mates who called themselves Rare Breed. Sadly, this exposure did not lead to a record deal…

(You can download the original Spectrum version of Titanic: The Adventure Begins… from this site. Note that you’ll need a Spectrum emulator such as Fuse to run it.)

In Sinkable, his recent book-length meditation on the wreck of the Titanic and the hold it continues to exert on our imaginations, Daniel Stone writes that “the complexity of salvage can make it painfully boring. Like building an amusement park or passing a law, the process is far less interesting than the finished product. The film Raise the Titanic was a commercial flop because the title was the most breathtaking part.” Much the same might be said about many of the games featured here; an archaeological expedition to the Titanic is one of a surprisingly large number of possible game subjects which sound exciting in the abstract, but which are damnably difficult to turn into a satisfying gameplay loop once you drill down to the details. Unsurprisingly, then, those designers who came closest to making a compelling go of it were the ones who were willing to season their simulations with a degree of whimsy. The British game R.M.S. Titanic, which was also released in the United States as a budget title under the name of Titanic: The Recovery Mission, is a case in point.

Appearing in Britain in early 1986, R.M.S. Titanic technically postdates Robert Ballard’s discovery of the real ship, but was probably already in development before that point. It’s the product of a small studio who called themselves Oxford Digital Enterprises, whose one previous game was thoroughly in keeping with the highbrow expectations engendered by that name, being a four-stage journey through William Shakespeare’s Macbeth that was published at the height of the bookware boom. R.M.S. Titanic, which was released for the Commodore 64 only, is by contrast all of a piece. Although you have to manage your finances and logistics much like in The Adventure Begins, you do so side-by-side with your exploration of the wreck.

All of the facets of this game are much more involved. You have half a dozen fickle backers whom you must keep mollified in order to keep the funding coming in; this you do by recovering alluring artifacts from the wreck and generating favorable press coverage. Indeed, working the press is another important part of the game. You field questions from reporters in press conferences, trying to tailor your responses to the organs they write for; the Titanic Historical Society has different priorities than Pravda.

But the heart of the game still takes place underwater, as it should. The game presumes that you have already located the wreck, and thus focuses only on your exploration of same with an uncrewed, remote-controlled submersible, which is simulated in some detail. You control its movements, set the intensity of its light, and can pick up and manipulate objects using its mechanical arm, keeping one eye always on its battery level; running out of juice under the ocean is disastrously expensive. As in The Adventure Begins, the ship here is conveniently intact, a maze of decks and rooms to be explored. Here, however, your way is blocked by lots and lots of locked doors. The game’s fanciful side comes to the fore via your method of opening them: each door is a little object-combination puzzle. For example, you might need to combine a cherry with a sundae in order to open the door that leads into an ice-cream parlor.

The game’s fiction, such as it is, has it that a previous expedition has already placed eight deflated balloons in the ship, then somehow lost track of where they are (and apparently locked all of the doors behind themselves). Your ultimate goal is to reach all of the balloons and inflate them, in order to raise the ship to the surface. As must be abundantly clear by now, there is much about this game that makes no sense whatsoever. If you’re wondering how a sundae and a cherry have survived for more than 70 years on the ocean floor, I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for you.

Still, much the same sense of giddy possibility clings to R.M.S. Titanic as to The Adventure Begins, combined with more sophisticated programming. The underwater scenes are almost unnervingly atmospheric despite — or because of? — the low resolution of the graphics, all flickering light peering into the eerie gloom. I remember being quite captivated by this game for several weeks as a young teenager, even though I never got very far in it.

For its difficulty is its real Achilles heel. As you move deeper and deeper into the ship, the object combinations you must divine grow more and more esoteric and the sheer quantity of objects and geography to reckon with grows more and more daunting. The first documented instance of anyone solving this game dates from after the millennium, when a patient German named Stefan Schönfelder finally accomplished the feat by making extensive use of emulator save states. The ending sequence proved predictably underwhelming; in this era of gaming, the journey had to be its own reward.

(You can download R.M.S. Titanic from this site. Note that you’ll need a Commodore 64 emulator such as VICE to run it.)

By the late 1980s, the shift to more powerful computers made a credible full-on simulation of marine archaeology seem like an increasingly realizable possibility. This would prove a mixed blessing, for all of the reasons listed by Daniel Stone above.

Search for the Titanic was released in 1989 by the American budget software house Capstone, who were best known for casino simulations. There were a flagship version for MS-DOS and a heavily redacted one for the trusty old Commodore 64. Despite or because of having been “reviewed for authenticity by the staff of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute,” it’s one of the most brutally boring computer games ever made. The broad strokes are familiar: you have to deal with the business aspects of an expedition to the Titanic alongside the seaborne bits. This time out, however, you have to build up your reputation and financing by exploring a dozen or so less famous wrecks before you get a crack at the Titanic.

The actual dives are almost totally beyond your control; the game is primarily a simulation of finding the location of the wrecks from the surface. In this and much else, the designers’ guiding principal seems to have been, “Implement all the boring stuff, but be sure to leave out all the fun stuff.” If this is what you get when you do the research and take marine archaeology seriously, give me scuba divers swimming around at 12,500 feet and doors with ham-sandwich-activated locks any day.

There are two things that I find hilarious about this game. The first is that your reward for slogging through this simulation that has less pizazz than your average Excel spreadsheet is a set of digitized photographs of the wreck; it reminds me of those awful games of computerized strip poker I used to play as a sexually frustrated teenager, giving a whole new dimension to the neologism “disaster porn.” The other is that someone recently saw fit to dredge this stinker of a game up off the bottom and put it up for sale on a digital storefront for a fiver. To call that an audacious move is the understatement of the year. For, as Trent Nickson wrote in his 2005 review of Search for the Titanic for the Lemon 64 website, “I don’t really know how you could tart this game up to make it fun.” Suffice to say that the designers never even tried.

(The truly dedicated gaming historians among you can buy this game from GOG.com.)

Thankfully, someone else did try very hard to make marine archaeology fun. Sea Rogue was the first game by a small San Diego studio called Software Sorcery, and was published by Microprose for MS-DOS on their Microplay budget label in 1992. It was created with the assistance of a retired Navy captain whose expertise was underwater salvage, and was billed as a simulation. None of this sounds overly promising in light of the previous game in this survey.

But when you start to play the thing, it quickly becomes clear that Software Sorcery has made an aesthetic rather than a literal simulation — a game which endeavors to give you a taste of its real-world subject matter, but which never overwhelms you with boring detail, which understands that games need to be fun first and foremost. The Titanic is pushed somewhat into the background here; it’s just one of about 150 different wrecks you can find and explore, from the Spanish treasure galleons that litter the floor of the Caribbean to such other legendary modern wrecks as the World War II German battleship Bismarck. Sea Rogue is by far the most ambitious game on this list; there are a lot of moving parts here. I want to say that it’s the best game here as well.

The older game which Sea Rogue immediately brings to mind, even before any of the ones above, is the Sid Meier classic Pirates!. You start out in Norfolk with an old trawler, eager to make your fortune as a wreck hunter. So, you sail up and down the east coast of the United States and into the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, seeking clues to wreck sites at each port of call. As you find and dive the wrecks and sell off the loot you acquire thereby back on land, you gradually improve your boat and your equipment. Eventually, you’ll have enough dosh to replace your rusty old tub entirely, first with a state-of-the-art research vessel and then with a beyond-state-of-the-art submarine, the Sea Rogue from which the game takes it name. These vessels make it practical to travel much farther — all the way to Britain, Europe, Africa, and into the Mediterranean, another veritable watery junkyard. And the Sea Rogue allows you to reach deep-water wrecks like the Titanic.

As I said, there’s a lot going on here. You have a crew to manage, who have CRPG-style statistics that improve with experience, assuming you invest in shore-based training every time they level up. Your relationships with different countries are affected by how much respect — or lack thereof — you show to their ships’ wreck sites; aggravate them too much and they’ll send their navies after you. You can hire research assistants, take on salvage contracts, even detect undersea mineral deposits and earn a finder’s fee.

Meanwhile up to five computer-managed competitors are doing the same things you are. One of them, the fellow named Evil Eddie, is particularly nasty, and will sometimes attack your vessel at sea or ambush your divers underwater. This means you need to make provisions for defending yourself, need to have some guns of your own available.

I absolutely love the premise, love the way it blends the unabashedly fantastic with the real-world subculture of wreck hunting. Half of the thick manual is given over to a list of every single one of those 150 ships that are waiting to be found, each and every one of them a real, documented wreck, ranging from Viking longboats to modern Soviet submarines. In order to earn full value for any treasures you recover, you have to ferret out the name of any ship you find from clues at the site, cross-referenced with the descriptions in the manual. The Titanic and Bismarck aren’t the only ships in this game that you’ve heard of before: there are also vessels like the Hunley, the Andrea Doria, the Lusitania, and much of the Spanish Armada to be found. If you approach your endeavors in the right imaginative spirit, you’ll feel a genuine shiver go up your spine when you discover one of these storied ships, and may just go scurrying off to Wikipedia to learn more about it.

Still, it’s possible that my love for the premise makes me more kindly disposed toward the game than it deserves. For it lacks the compulsive playability of Pirates!. The interface is clunky, and, while the big manual does a reasonably good job of telling which keys to press and where to click the mouse, it often fails to explain why you’re doing so; I must confess that I still don’t completely understand the sonar-scanning screen even after playing the game for a considerable number of hours. And then, for all that the developers strained mightily to give you lots of different things to do, from decoding radio messages to chasing down Pirates!-style treasure maps, it never quite gels into a cohesive whole. The competition aspect of the affair never feels all that urgent even when Evil Eddie starts shooting at you. It all becomes a bit samey sooner than it ought to, sorely lacking Pirates!’s addictive kinetic quality; in the older game, you actually sail your ship from place to place with the joystick, where here you just plot a course on a map, hit a key, and jump instantly to your destination. Perhaps the game’s biggest weakness is the wreck-diving mini-game, which consumes far more time than anything else you do but plays like a not especially exciting board game, complete with an ocean floor made up of discrete squares. Again, the developers plainly tried to spice it up, by introducing roaming sharks that occasionally attack your divers. But there’s no variety from wreck to wreck to keep your interest up; you’ll quickly develop a rote approach to the task that works every time, one that is about as exciting as cutting your lawn (a task with which it has much in common).

In the end, then, Sea Rogue is more of a game that I want to love — that I sometimes manage to convince myself that I at least like — than one I really can enjoy over the longer haul. Call it a brilliant concept, imperfectly realized. In all the years since its release, there’s been nothing else quite like it. I remain convinced that there’s a great game in there somewhere, and I’d be thrilled to see the idea revived with richer and more varied content, ideally spanning all of the world’s oceans, with the sense of atmosphere that Sea Rogue’s workmanlike graphics and sound struggle to inculcate. We have hugely successful games today in which you do nothing but drive a truck around a continent’s highways and byways. Why not one where you travel its seaways in search of treasures from the past?

(I’ve prepared a Sea Rogue download for you which should be fairly simple to get running under your platform’s version of DOSBox.)

Whatever else one can say about Capstone, someone there clearly had a real interest in marine archaeology. For in 1993, four years after Search for the Titanic, they returned to the scene of that crime with Discoveries of the Deep for MS-DOS. It’s a vastly better effort. Then again, how could it not be?

Discoveries of the Deep is an edutational product aimed at youngsters, and sports the sense of whimsy that Search for the Titanic so sorely lacked, including a credible darts game and a shoot-em-up arcade game in your boat’s galley, ready to play when all of this oceanography business starts to become too much. The main game is structured around seven missions which you may undertake in any order. Only one of them involves the Titanic; the others range from investigating airplane crashes in the Bermuda Triangle to disposing of underwater toxic waste. It plays as a simplified version of the premise we’ve been seeing over and over: sail out to the general vicinity of your goal, search from the surface until you pinpoint it precisely, then get into your submersible to complete your mission. Only the economic element is lacking, replaced with a refreshing focus on environmental science; you definitely won’t be looting the Titanic this time out. Although there’s not overmuch to the experience in the final analysis, what there is is colorful and good-hearted. One can easily imagine this game going down a treat in a classroom back in the day, and it still wouldn’t be a bad choice for a kid of the right age — about ten years old is probably the sweet spot — with an interest in the ocean and the things that lie beneath it. Chalk it up as a partial atonement for Search for the Titanic.

(Like Search for the Titanic, Discoveries of the Deep is available on GOG.com as a digital purchase.)

The last wreck-hunting game of this lineage to date appeared in 1998, the year after James Cameron’s film about the disaster rejiggered all of the pop culture surrounding the Titanic in a way which we’ll examine in my next two articles. Titanic: Challenge of Discovery is simultaneously one of a number of cash-in products made in response to the film’s enormous success and a throwback to an earlier era, when the ship existed in the public’s imagination primarily as a wreck. The game’s box copy would have one believe that Robert Ballard himself made it, declaring it “a dramatic game of deep-sea exploration from the man who discovered the Titanic.” This only serves as grist for the mill of Ballard’s critics, who have been muttering behind the scenes for decades now that he is a bit too eager for the limelight and the money that comes with it, having by now lent his name to a jumble of slapdash products like this one that’s about as large as the sunken Titanic’s debris field.

Challenge of Discovery was created by a “multimedia” studio rather than a games studio, an outfit called Maris Multimedia to be exact, and was published by Panasonic Interactive for Windows. It came rather late in the day of the multimedia boom, but otherwise bears all the hallmarks of its checkered lineage: a surfeit of video clips, including some featuring Ballard himself, and a paucity of worthwhile gameplay. I’ve written about the problems which plagued creations of this sort at some length elsewhere, so I won’t belabor those points here.

In this game, you’re expected to explore three shipwrecks: a man-of-war from the Spanish Armada, the Bismarck (whose wreck was discovered by Ballard in 1989), and finally the Titanic. But it’s painfully clear that far more attention was lavished on the video clips than the gameplay, which is slow, dull, and buggy, to the point that parts of the game are outright broken. Neither the traditional hardcore gamer demographic nor the different, more casual audience whom Panasonic was presumably trying to attract had anywhere near enough patience for this exercise in tedium. All told, it makes for a dispiriting capstone to a strand of games that had a lot of potential in their individual ingredients, but that no one ever quite managed to bake into a comprehensively delicious cake.

(You can find CD images for Challenge of Discovery by searching on archive.org. But, like a lot of shoddily programmed early Windows software, this game is a nightmare to get running on modern systems. I was finally able to succeed by using a Windows 95 — not Windows 98, mind you — installation running through Oracle VirtualBox. If you’re determined to try out this terrible game for yourself, this YouTube video will show you how to get your Windows 95 virtual machine going.)

Next time, then, we’ll turn to a very different way of approaching the Titanic as a gaming subject, and find out whether anyone had more luck there…

(Sources: the books Sinkable: Obsession, the Deep Sea, and the Shipwreck of the Titanic by Daniel Stone, Into the Deep by Robert Ballard and Christopher Drew, The Discovery of the Titanic by Robert Ballard and Ken Marschall, Raise the Titanic! by Clive Cussler, Beyond Reach: The Search for the Titanic by William Hoffman and Jack Grimm, and Titanic and the Making of James Cameron by Paula Parisi; Crash! of June 1984 and October 1984; Your Computer of July 1984; Zzap! of June 1986; Ahoy! of April 1987; Games Machine of April 1990; Computer Gaming World of July 1992 and December 1993; National Geographic of December 1986.)

Comments
35 Responses

- Too Much Of a Pedant

September 23, 2022 at 4:49 pm

Not to be too much of a pedant, but “steam-powered wench” is quite a typo! Amusing, but probably you want “winch” there and elsewhere.

- Jimmy Maher

September 23, 2022 at 8:20 pm

Now that’s quite an image, isn’t it? Thanks!

- IJMC

September 23, 2022 at 4:53 pm

Thanks for another enjoyable update. Comparing these to the blog’s early entries (not that I was following then) makes me smile: imagine if you had felt the need to try to build a 5000-word essay of the importance of the Wumpus in the public consciousness…

Also: I had no idea that Clive Cussler had been writing for so long. I still see his novels in every airport bookstore — what a career!

- Gnoman

September 23, 2022 at 9:21 pm

Unfortunately, Cussler died several years ago. He was one of the authors who were popular enough that he lives on as a brand name.

On the other hand, a huge portion of the money he made writing went into actual searches for historic shipwrecks – one of the expedition he funded, for example, discovered the wreck of the submarine CSS Hunley (the only boat in history to have been lost with all souls aboard three times).

- Not Fenimore

September 27, 2022 at 12:52 am

Every time I hear about Cussler, I always think of the top entry in a “mash up two film titles” thing: Sink the Bismarck, Raise the Titanic!

- Gnoman

September 23, 2022 at 5:50 pm

You might be planning to cover this in the next parts, but the mythmaking of the Titanic has always been one of the most fascinating aspects of the whole affair to me.

I’m not just talking about the obvious parts – the band playing on, the number of wealthy men who chose to go down with the ship in order to free up lifeboats for others, and so on – but the more subtle way the story’s been shifted.

Perhaps the most obvious example, though not the only one, is the way the sinking is turned into a cautionary tale of hubris – much emphasis is put on claims that the ship was unsinkable, that they were so arrogant and so convinced that “God Himself could never sink this ship” that they considered lifeboats a needless expenditure and took as few as they could get away with, that they didn’t bother telling anybody that there was something wrong until it was too late.

Thing is, so much of that is post-facto. If there are any actual pre-voyage claims that the ship could not be sunk, I’ve never seen them. That the new design was far safer than older ones, yes. Those claims are easy to find. But that the ship was literally impossible to sink? That appears, by all accounts, to come from the post-tragedy news articles scrambling for anything to say on the biggest nautical disaster in years.

The lifeboats weren’t dismissed as “useless and ugly”, and the Titanic had exactly as many as a ship with that capacity was expected to carry. In those days, lifeboats were not expected to carry all souls aboard a ship, because the idea of a ship sinking that quickly was absurd – a passenger ship could very easily be damaged enough to go down, but any conceivable accident (absent something like a boiler explosion that would render the number of lifeboats aboard moot) would take many hours to put the ship under. Instead, the role of lifeboats was that of a ferry – a stricken ship would signal for assistance, other ships would come to their aid, and the ship’s lifeboats would make several trips (assisted by those of the aiding vessel(s) in most cases) to deliver everyone safely. What made the Titanic sinking so deadly was the sheer speed – she struck the iceberg at 11:40 PM, and the waves closed over the ship at 2:20 AM, far less than anybody thought was possible (and fast enough that evacuating the entire ship would have been difficult even with enough boats).

Despite this, the idea that the the 1514 lives lost were sacrificed to the arrogance of man is a powerful and enduring one.

That’s not the only example of what I’m talking about – the story has been spun in many ways over the last 110 years – but it is the easiest to explain. The way the story has been told, and the way it is interpreted for the times – what you might call the “myth” of the Titanic rather than the solid historical story – is fascinating.

- Jimmy Maher

September 24, 2022 at 6:13 am

No, no one actually called the Titanic unsinkable prior to its sinking. The ship was far less of a big deal at that time than we like to believe today. It wasn’t even unique, being the second of three sister ships. This is not to say that it wasn’t an expensive, luxurious, and prestigious vessel to sail on, but it was considered “just” those things, not any great avatar of its age.

Even in the immediate wake of the ship’s sinking, the whole episode was regarded as a horrible tragedy, but, again, nothing more than that. It certainly wasn’t invested with the symbolic importance we give it today. Soon enough, the First World War began, the Lusitania was torpedoed with almost equivalent loss of life, and the Titanic was relatively forgotten. The elevation of the Titanic into a modern mythology didn’t really being until the 1950s, and Walter Lord’s classic book A Night to Remember. (A television adaptation of the book, acted and broadcast live and thus lost forever to us today, was seen by a staggering 25 million Americans; this probably marks the real starting point of the Titanic as a ubiquitous cultural trope.)

The most important cause of the disaster was a run of unbelievably rotten luck. Hitting that iceberg there, well south of where it ought to have been, was a million-to-one chance. Then to hit it just right to do maximum damage, to be so far away from other ships, to have the closest ship be under the command of a negligent captain… it’s almost a supernatural run of ill fortune. When one sticks to the facts, the whole disaster reads more like a Greek than a Shakespearean tragedy — a lesson that, when the universe decides it’s out to get you, there’s not a darn thing you can about it.

We humans like to feel in control of our destiny, so when something like this happens we go looking for what we could have done differently to avert it. We have trouble accepting that sometimes we’re just the bug and the universe is the mother of all windshields. I think that’s where these legends about hubris and so on spring from in regard to the Titanic: an attempt to make some sort of moral if not practical sense out of a random tragedy.

- Marco

September 24, 2022 at 10:23 am

I don’t have A Night To Remember with me here but I’ve read it many times over the years and it is a brilliant book. Its Wikipedia page actually has a good section about why it was so groundbreaking in style, constantly jumping between contrasting moments of human experience.

I think Captain Smith had said something about not being able to imagine any circumstances in which a modern vessel would founder, but years before the Titanic was built. You’re right that the Olympic caused a much bigger stir on launch, being the first of its class. The initial reaction to the Titanic was “oh, another one.” Also – while the Titanic was initially the largest vessel ever built, within a year it had been overtaken by the German ship Imperator, later the Berengaria.

- Gnoman

September 24, 2022 at 2:18 pm

That’s sort of what I was getting at. Culturally, we’ve been reinterpreting the Titanic story over and over again to fit various ideological paradigms, and I find that reinterpretation to be one of the more interesting aspects of it.

- Alianora La Canta

September 27, 2022 at 4:16 pm

The one thing that might possibly have allowed A Night To Remember to have been saved is that NBC re-broadcast it on kinescope five weeks after the original live broadcast (May 2nd, 1956). It’s not clear whether NBC kept that recording of the live broadcast (kinescopic recordings were often considered not worth saving back then because they were poor quality, easy to damage and broadcasters often had limited stocks of them anyway), but there is a slim chance it might still exist. Unfortunately I have not seen any evidence that it received international syndication (had it done so, chances would improve from “slim chance” to “probably quite decent but still nowhere near certain”).

- Peter Olausson

September 26, 2022 at 12:49 pm

The term “unsinkable” was not uncommon at the time. It was used about many, many other vessels than the Titanic, including some that actually sunk. It was often modified into “practically unsinkable”, “well nigh unsinkable” etc. As such it was used in a frequently described and quoted White Star leaflet about the Olympic and Titanic, published in 1910: “… As far as it is possible to do so they have been designed to be unsinkable.” The importance of those modifiers were better known to engineers and seamen than the public.

There are other pre-voyage claims that the Titanic (and the Olympic) were unsinkable, at least in the British press. Here’s a particularly bold specimen I’ve uploaded, from The Liverpool Journal of Commerce, September 29 1910: https://hexmaster.com/faktoider/1910-09-29_Liverpool_JoC.jpg

- Jimmy Maher

September 26, 2022 at 1:09 pm

That clarifies a lot. I’m going to include that link in my next article, if you don’t mind.

- Peter Olausson

September 26, 2022 at 8:58 pm

I’d be honoured!

- Ken Brubaker

September 23, 2022 at 6:35 pm

You’ve used the word “wench” a couple times where I think you meant to use “winch”.

Also, the first paragraph for ‘Discoveries of the Deep’ ends with “Then again, how it could not be?”.

- Jimmy Maher

September 23, 2022 at 8:22 pm

Thanks!

- Aula

September 23, 2022 at 7:08 pm

“The Navy brass were very concerned about two nuclear attack submarines which been lost in 1968 in the North Atlantic”

should be “which had been lost” (and only one of them, USS Scorpion, had been lost in 1968; the other, USS Thresher, was lost in 1963)

- Jimmy Maher

September 23, 2022 at 8:23 pm

Thanks!

- Leo Vellés

September 24, 2022 at 2:23 pm

It seems Capstone made very bad games regardless of the gente. I remember playing the point & click adventures The Dark Half and Wayne’s World, and boy, they we’re really awful games

- Leo Vellés

September 24, 2022 at 2:24 pm

I meant regardless of the genre (damn spanish autocorrect)

- Brian Bagnall

September 24, 2022 at 3:24 pm

Thanks for another interesting article. The section on R.M.S. Titanic brought back a long forgotten memory of playing this game in the 80s. This probably entered my radar from seeing an Activision ad in Compute! magazine, which was for a kid in Canada about the only way to discover new games back then. It was a positively magical experience to dive down to the wreck and immediately get a first person 3D view aboard the Titanic in all its grainy glory. There was a powerful element of realism even with the limitations of an 8-bit computer in how you could brighten and dim the lights to reveal a grainy real-time image inside the Titanic. That made it so much more mysterious. Of course, having not legally purchased the game and having no manual, part of the fun was hitting every key to see what you could do. Still it was a great experience for a 14 year old kid to be able to handle a multi-million dollar submersible with a robot arm (oh how much the mind had to fill in back then). I just pulled out the original disk from back then and can tell by how the label is stained by thumb oil that I must have pulled this disk out dozens of times, only to be put off by the impossibility of getting anywhere. Back then, pre-Internet, you had no idea that others were also struggling and failing to figure it out, seemingly having never been completed until the 2000’s, at least on record. It’s incredible how impenetrable the designers made some of these games back then. Looking forward to the rest of this series.

- Adam Sampson

September 24, 2022 at 8:04 pm

“Pitt and his friends concoct a plan for raising the ship […] that bears distinct similarities to Doug Woolley’s scheme, with just enough variation to allow for plausible deniability: they will seal off the interior of the ship and pump it full of compressed air to cause it to float to the surface.”

No plausible deniability is needed here – this was a standard approach to raising sunken ships by the 1970s. It was used in the 1920s by Ernest Cox to salvage many of the scuttled German ships at Scapa Flow, for example, and there’s another fictional example in Stan Rogers’ 1979 song “Mary Ellen Carter”.

- Jimmy Maher

September 24, 2022 at 8:40 pm

I didn’t know that. Thanks!

- Not Fenimore

September 27, 2022 at 12:50 am

I just realized that I did not, until this very second, know what “hit the air” meant. I assumed it meant winch it up with the cables “fore and aft”. Thanks!

- Daniel Wolf

September 25, 2022 at 7:53 am

Great article, as always! Very minor typo: “If you’re determined *to* try out this terrible game for yourself…”

- Jimmy Maher

September 25, 2022 at 9:35 am

Thanks!

- xxx

September 25, 2022 at 8:21 pm

Typo: “Spectrium”.

Juvenile though it may be, I have to admit that I snorted out some coffee at the screenshot that says “ASS SCRAP MERCHANTS”.

- Jimmy Maher

September 26, 2022 at 4:42 am

Thanks!

- Ryan Stevens

September 25, 2022 at 10:40 pm

Ah was hoping for some of Scott Miller’s Beyond the Titanic to get a mention. Guess more scifi

- Glorkvorn

September 27, 2022 at 6:12 am

It seems like the Titanic is a story that’s really hard to make an interesting game about. It wasn’t a war or any kind of action scene, it was just a random accident while it was ferrying passengers. And part of the romance is the sense of doom and inevitability. We know of course that the ship sank, but it seems like even the passengers on the ship realized that it was going down and that they were going to die. There’s just… nothing to do that’s interactive. Maybe that’s why so many of these games focused on raising the ship after it was sunk? At least that gives a specific goal, rather than “show your gallantry and courage in the face of certain death.”

I wonder if, 100 years from now, people will be romanticizing the deaths in the twin towers on 9/11 the same way.

- littleterr0r

October 3, 2022 at 8:07 pm

Considering that we have a Titanic-themed bouncy house slide I would say, maybe.

- Captain Kal

September 27, 2022 at 11:21 am

Another excellent article!!

A point to add though: The Mediterranean Sea, is not a shallow sea!! Quoting the Wikipedia:

“The Mediterranean Sea has an average depth of 1,500 m (4,900 ft) and the deepest recorded point is 5,267 m (17,280 ft) in the Calypso Deep in the Ionian Sea.”

(For reference, the Baltic Sea, has an average depth of 55m).

You are absolutely right about “Sea Rogue”!!

Although it’s quite repetitive as a game, it’s presentation is spot on!! It even supported an 640×480 EGA resolution, if I remember correctly!!

For games from that era, that were inspired by real world events, I will point you to Mike Singleton’s “Ashes of the Empire”, the final game in the unofficial “Midwinter” trilogy, of 3D open world games. Impressive 3D engine, clunky interface!!

- Jimmy Maher

September 27, 2022 at 12:09 pm

The average depth of the Mediterranean is still only about 40 percent of the depth of the Titanic’s wreck, but it’s a fair point. What made the Britannic relatively easy to find, of course, was that it sank close to shore, where the water is much shallower than the Mediterranean’s average depth. I made a change to the text. Thanks!

- Captain Kal

October 3, 2022 at 4:13 pm

Not Titanic related, but I think it’s quite interesting:

https://www.filmfestival.gr/en/movie/movie/14393

- Soh Kam Yung

October 10, 2022 at 5:13 am

“The deep ocean floor is the most inaccessible geography on our planet; even today, marine scientists like to say that we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the landscapes under our own planet’s oceans.”

That is so true, even today, as the tragedy of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 shows. Even today, its final location remains unknown, despite the advances in technology.

- Alejo

February 7, 2023 at 3:00 am

I can’t believe Capstone, The Pinnacle of Entertainment Software, not only did some of the worst FPS to have blighted this world, but ALSO made horrible adventure games?

In the words of a guy who sucks at Blood: Capstone, The Pinnacle of It’s Always Fucking Something.

Titanic Visions, Part 2: A Night to Remember
October 7, 2022

Why does the sinking of the Titanic have such a stranglehold on our imaginations? The death of more than 1500 people is tragic by any standard, but worse things have happened on the world’s waters, even if we set aside deliberate acts of war. In 1822, for example, the Chinese junk Tek Sing ran into a reef in the South China Sea, drowning all 1600 of the would-be immigrants to Indonesia who were packed cheek-by-jowl onto its sagging deck. In 1948, the Chinese passenger ship Kiangya struck a leftover World War II mine shortly after departing Shanghai, killing as many as 4000 supporters of Chiang Kai-shek’s government who were attempting to flee the approaching Communist armies. In 1987, the Philippine ferry Doña Paz collided with an oil tanker near Manila, killing some 4300 people who were just trying to get home for Christmas.

But, you may object, these were all East Asian disasters, involving people for whom we in the West tend to have less immediate empathy, for a variety of good, bad, and ugly reasons. It’s a fair point. And yet what of the American paddle-wheel steamer Sultana, whose boiler exploded as it plied the Mississippi River in 1865, killing about 1200 people, or only 300 fewer than died on the Titanic?

I’m comfortable assuming that, unless you happen to be a dedicated student of maritime lore or of Civil War-era Americana, you probably don’t know much about any of these disasters. But everyone — absolutely everyone — seems to know at least the basic outline of what happened to the Titanic. Why?

It seems to me that the sinking of the Titanic is one of those rare occasions when History stops being just a succession of one damn thing after another, to paraphrase Arnold Toynbee, and shows some real dramatic flair. The event has enough thematic heft to curl the toes of William Shakespeare: the pride that goeth before a fall (no one will ever dare to call a ship “unsinkable” again); the cruelty of fate (experts have estimated that, if the Titanic somehow could have been raised and put into service once again, it could have made a million more Atlantic crossings without bumping into any more icebergs); the artificiality of money and social status (a form of communism far purer than anything ever implemented in the Soviet Union or China reigned in the Titanic’s lifeboats); the crucible of character in the breach (some people displayed tremendous, selfless bravery when faced with the ultimate existential impasse of their lives, while others behaved… less well). Unlike the aforementioned shipwrecks, all of which were short, sharp shocks, the sinking of the Titanic was a slow-motion tragedy that took place over the course of two and a half hours. This gave ample space for all of the aforementioned themes to play out. The end result was almost irresistibly dramatic, if you’ll excuse my callousness in writing about it like a film prospectus.

And then, of course, there is the power of the Titanic as a symbol of changing times, as an almost tangible way point in history. The spirit of a century doesn’t always line up neatly with the numbers in our calendars; the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were actually unusual in setting the tone for our muddled, complicated 21st-century existences so soon after we were all cheering our escape from the Y2K crisis and drinking toasts to The End of History on January 1, 2000. By way of contrast, one might say that the nineteenth century didn’t really get going in earnest until Napoleon was defeated once and for all at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Similarly, one could say that the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 makes for a much more satisfying fin de siècle than anything that occurred in 1900. On that cold April night in the North Atlantic, an entire worldview sank beneath the waves, a glittering vision of progress as an inevitability, of industry and finance and social refinement as a guarantee against any and all forms of unpleasantness, of war — at least war between the proverbial great powers — as a quaint relic of the past. Less than two and a half years after the Titanic went down, the world was plunged into the bloodiest war it had ever known.

That, anyway, is how we see the sinking of the Titanic today. Many people of our own era are surprised, even though they probably shouldn’t be, that the event’s near-mythic qualities went completely unrecognized at the time; the larger currents of history tend to make sense only in retrospect. While the event was certainly recognized as an appalling tragedy, it was not seen as anything more than that. Rather than trying to interrogate the consciousness of the age, the governments of both Britain and the United States took a more practical tack, endeavoring to get to the bottom of just what had gone wrong, who had been responsible, and how they could prevent anything like this from ever happening again. There followed interminable hearings in the Houses of Parliament and the Capitol Building, while journalists gathered the stories of the 700-odd survivors and wrote them up for a rapt public. But no one wrote or spoke of the event as any sea change in history, and in due course the world moved on. By the time the British luxury liner Lusitania, the queen of the Atlantic-crossing trade prior to the construction of the Titanic and its two sister ships, was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on May 7, 1915 — loss of life: 1200 — the Titanic was fading fast from the public consciousness, just another of those damn things that had happened before the present ones.

“Had the Titanic been a mud scow with the same number of useful workingmen on board and had it gone down while engaged in some useful social work,” wrote a muckraking left-wing Kansan newspaper, “the whole country would not have gasped with horror, nor would all the capitalist papers have given pages for weeks to reciting the terrible details.” This was harsh, but undeniably true. The only comfort for our Kansan polemicists, if it was comfort, was that the Titanic looked likely to be forgotten just as completely as that hypothetical mud scow would have been in the fullness of time.

But then, in the 1950s, the Titanic was scooped out of the dustbin of history and turned into an icon for the ages by a 30-something American advertising executive and part-time author named Walter Lord, who had crossed the Atlantic as a boy aboard the Titanic’s sister the Olympic and been fascinated by the ships’ stories ever since. Lord’s editor was unenthusiastic when he proposed writing the first-ever book-length chronicle of that fateful night, but grudgingly agreed to the project at last, as long as Lord wrote “in terms of the people involved instead of the ship.” Accordingly, Lord interviewed as many of the living survivors and their progeny as he could, then wove their stories together into A Night to Remember, a vividly novelistic minute-by-minute account of the night in question that has remained to this day the classic book about the Titanic, a timeless wellspring of lore and legend. It was Lord, for example, who first told the story of the ship’s band bravely playing on in the hope of comforting their fellow passengers, until the musicians and their music were swallowed by the ocean along with their audience. Ditto the story of the ship’s stoic Captain Edward Smith, who directed his crew to save as many passengers as they could and then to save themselves if possible, while he followed the unwritten law of the sea and went down with his ship. Published in November of 1955, A Night to Remember became an instant bestseller and a veritable cultural sensation. Walter Lord became Homer to the Titanic’s Trojan War, pumping tragedy full of enough heroism, romance, and melodrama to almost — almost, mind you — make us wish we could have been there.

The book was soon turned into an American teleplay that was reportedly seen by an astonishing 28 million people. “Millions, perhaps, learned about the disaster for the first time,” mused Lord later about the evening it was broadcast. “More people probably thought about the Titanic that night than at any time since 1912.” (Sadly, every trace of this extraordinary cultural landmark has been lost to us because it was shot and broadcast live without ever touching film or videotape, as was the norm in those days). The book then became a lavish British feature film in 1958. Surprisingly, the movie was a failure in the United States. Walter Lord blamed this on poor Stateside distribution on the part of the British producers and a newspaper strike in New York. A more convincing set of causes might begin with its lack of big-name stars, continue with the decision to shoot it in stately black and white rather than garish Technicolor, and conclude with the way it echoed the book in weaving together a tapestry of experiences rather than giving the audience just one or two focal points whom they could get to know well and root for.

Nevertheless, by the end of the 1950s the Titanic had been firmly lodged in the public’s imagination as mythology and metaphor, and it would never show any sign of coming unstuck. The first Titanic fan club — for lack of a better term — was founded in Massachusetts in 1960, whence chapters quickly spread around the country and the world. Initially called the Titanic Enthusiasts Society, the name was changed to the Titanic Historical Society after it was pointed out that being an “enthusiast” of a disaster like this one was perhaps not quite appropriate.  But whatever the name under which they traveled, these were obsessive fans in the classic sense, who could sit around for hours debating the minutiae of their favorite ship’s brief but glamorous life in the same way that others of their ilk were dissecting every detail of the starship Enterprise. (Doug Woolley, the first person to propose finding the wreck and raising it back to the surface, was every inch a product of this milieu.)

“The story of the Titanic is a curious one because it rolled on and on,” said Walter Lord decades after writing his seminal book, “becoming more newsworthy as time went by.” Needless to say, A Night to Remember has never come close to going out of print. Even as the 83 survivors who were still around in 1960 died off one by one and the mass-media spotlight shifted from them to the prospects of finding the wreck of the ship on which they had sailed all those years ago, it was always the stories of that one horrible night, with all of their pathos and their bizarre sort of glamour, that undergirded the interest. If there had been no Walter Lord to turn a disaster into a mythology, it would never have occurred to Jack Grimm and Robert Ballard to go in search of the real ship. It was thanks to 30 years of tellings and retellings of the Titanic story that those first pictures of the ship sent up from the depths by Ballard felt like coming face to face with Leviathan. For by the 1980s, you could use the Titanic as a simile, a metaphor, a parable, or just a trope in conversation with absolutely anyone, whether aged 9 or 90, and be certain that they would know what you were talking about. That kind of cultural ubiquity is extremely rare.

Thus we shouldn’t be stunned to learn that this totem of modern culture also inspired the people who made computer games. Even as some of their peers were casting their players as would-be Robert Ballards out to find and explore the wreck, others were taking them all the way back to the night of April 14, 1912, and asking them to make the best of a no-win situation.

The very first Titanic computer game of any stripe that I know of was written by an American named Peter Kirsch, the mastermind of SoftSide magazine’s “Adventure of the Month” club, whose members were sent a new text adventure on tape or disk every single month. Dateline Titanic was the game for May of 1982. Casting you as the ship’s captain, it begins with one of the cruelest fake-outs in any game ever. It seems to let you spot and dodge the deadly iceberg and change the course of history — until the message, “Oh, my God! You hit another one!” pops up. Simple soul that I am, I find this kind of hilarious.

Anyway, we’re back in the same old boat, so to speak. The game does permit you to be a bit less of a romantic old sea dog than the real Captain Smith and to save yourself, although you’re expected to rescue as many passengers as you can first. In an article he wrote for SoftSide a few months after making the game, Kirsch noted that “the days of simply finding treasure and returning it to a storage location are gone forever.” But, stuck as he was with an adventure engine oriented toward exactly this “points for treasures” model, he faced a dilemma when it came time to make his Titanic game. He ended up with a design where, instead of scarfing up treasures and putting them in your display case for safe keeping, you have to grab as many passengers as possible and chunk them into lifeboats.

That said, it’s a not a bad little game at all, given the almost unimaginable technological constraints under which it was created. The engine is written in BASIC, and it combined with the actual game it enables have to be small enough to fit into as little as 16 K of memory. You can finish the game the first time whilst rescuing no one other than yourself, if necessary, then optimize your path on subsequent playthroughs until you’ve solved all of the puzzles in the right order, collected everyone, and gotten the maximum score; the whole experience is short enough to support this style of try-and-try-again gameplay without becoming too annoying. Whether it’s in good taste to treat a tragedy in this cavalier way is a more fraught question, but then again, it’s hard to imagine any other programmer doing much better under this set of constraints. It’s hard to pay proper tribute to the dead when you have to sweat every word of text you include as if you’re writing a haiku.

(Although Dateline Titanic was made in versions for the Radio Shack TRS-80, Apple II, and Atari 8-bit line, only the last appears to have survived. Feel free to download it from here. Note that you’ll need an Atari emulator such as the one called simply Atari800. And you’ll also need Atari’s BASIC cartridge. Unfortunately, the emulator is not a particularly user-friendly piece of software, with an interface that is entirely keyboard-driven. You access the menu by hitting the F1 key. From here, you want to first mount the BASIC cartridge: “Cartridge Management -> Cartridge.” Press the Escape key until you return to the emulator’s main screen. You should see a “READY” prompt. Now you can run the “.atr” file by pressing F1 again, then choosing “Run Atari Program.” Be patient; it will take the game a moment to start up fully.)

Four years later, in the midst of the full-blown Titanic mania ignited by Robert Ballard’s discovery of the wreck, another Titanic text adventure appeared, again as something other than a standard boxed game. Beyond the Titanic by Scott Miller is interesting today mostly as a case of humble beginnings. After releasing this game and a follow-up text adventure as shareware to little notice and less profit, Miller switched his focus to action games. He and his company Apogee Entertainment then became the primary impetus behind an underground movement which bypassed the traditional publishers and changed the character of gaming dramatically in the early 1990s by providing a more rough-and-ready alternative to said publishers’ obsession with high-concept “interactive movies.” For all that it belongs to a genre whose commercial potential was already on the wane by 1986, Beyond the Titanic does display the keen instinct for branding that would serve Miller so well in later years. The Titanic was a hot topic in 1986, and it was a name in the public domain, so why not make a game about it?

Beyond the Titanic itself is a strange beast, a game which is soundly designed and competently coded but still manages to leave a laughably bad final impression. Miller obviously didn’t bother to do much if any research for his game. Playing the role of a sort of anti-Captain Smith, you escape from the sinking ship all by yourself in one of its lifeboats and leave everyone else to their fate. Luckily for you, in Miller’s world a lifeboat is apparently about the size of a canoe and just as easy for one person to paddle. (In reality, the lifeboats were larger than many ocean-going pleasure boats, being 30 feet long and 9 feet wide.)

Your escape doesn’t mark the end of the game but its real beginning. Now aliens enter the picture, sucking you into a cave complex hidden below the ocean. From this point on, the game lives up to its title by having nothing else to do with the Titanic; the plot eventually sends you into outer space and finally on a trip through time. “Overstuffed” is as kind a descriptor as I can find for both the plot and the writing. This one is best approached in the spirit of an Ed Wood film; Miller tries valiantly to grab hold of the right verbs and adjectives, but they’re forever flitting out of his grasp like fireflies on a summer night. Suffice to say that Beyond the Titanic won’t leave anyone regretting that he abandoned text adventures for greener pastures so quickly.

(Beyond the Titanic has been available for free from Scott Miller’s company 3D Realms since 1998. In light of that, I’ve taken the liberty of hosting a version here that’s almost ready to run on modern computers; just add your platform’s version of DOSBox.)

A relatively more grounded take on the Titanic’s one and only voyage appeared in 1995 as one of the vignettes in Jigsaw, Graham Nelson’s epic time-travel text adventure, which does have the heft to support its breadth. Indeed, Nelson’s game was the first ever to deliver a reasonably well-researched facsimile of what it was actually like to be aboard the doomed ship before and after it struck the iceberg. A fine writer by any standard, he describes the scenes with the appropriate gravity as you wander a small subsection of the ship’s promenades, staterooms, lounges, and crew areas.

Making a satisfying game out of the sinking of the Titanic presents a challenge for a designer not least in that really is the very definition of a no-win scenario: to allow the player to somehow avert the disaster would undercut the whole reason we find the ship so fascinating, yet to make a game simply about escaping doesn’t feel all that appropriate either. Many designers, including Scott Miller and now Graham Nelson in a far more effective way, therefore use the sinking ship and all of the associated drama as a springboard for other, original plots. (Because you’re a time traveler in Jigsaw, escape isn’t even an issue for you; you can ride the time stream out of Dodge whenever you feel like it.) Nelson imagines that the fabulously wealthy Benjamin Guggenheim, one of the glitterati who went down with the ship, is also a spy carrying a vital dispatch meant for Washington, D.C. Because Guggenheim, honorable gentleman that he is, would never think of getting into a lifeboat as long as women and children are still aboard the ship, he entrusts you with getting the message into the hands of a co-conspirator whose gender gives her a better chance of surviving: the “rich and beautiful heiress Miss Shutes.”

It must be emphasized that the Titanic is only a vignette in Jigsaw, one of fifteen in the complete game. Thus it comes as no surprise that the espionage plot isn’t all that well developed, or even explained. In addition, there are also a few places where Nelson’s background research falls down. The Titanic was not the first vessel ever to send an “SOS” distress signal at sea, as he claims. And, while there was an Elizabeth Shutes aboard the ship, she was a 40-year-old governess employed by a wealthy family, not a twenty-something socialite. On the more amusing side, Jigsaw walkthrough author Bonni Mierzejewska has pointed out that the compass directions aboard the ship would seem to indicate that it’s sailing due east — a good idea perhaps in light of what awaits it on its westward progress, but a decidedly ahistorical one nonetheless.

Still, Jigsaw gets more right than wrong within the limited space it can afford to give the Titanic. I was therefore surprised to learn from Graham Nelson himself just a couple of years ago that “the Titanic sequence is the one I would now leave out.” While it’s certainly a famous event in history and an enduring sign of changing times, he argues, it wasn’t of itself a turning point in history like his other vignettes, at least absent the insertion of the fictional espionage plot: “Rich people drowned, but other rich people took their place, and history wasn’t much dented.” This is true enough, but I for one am glad the Titanic made the cut for one of my favorite text adventures of the 1990s.

(Jigsaw is available for free from the IF Archive. Note that you’ll need a Z-Machine interpreter such as Gargoyle to run it.)

Yet the most intriguing Titanic text adventure of all is undoubtedly the one that never got made. Steve Meretzky, one of Infocom’s star designers, was one of that odd species of Titanic “fan”; his colleagues remember a shelf filled with dozens of books on the subject, and a scale model of the ship he built himself that was “about as big as his office.” Shortly after his very first game for Infocom, the 1983 science-fiction comedy Planetfall, became a hit, Meretzky started pushing to make a Titanic game. Just like the previous two designers in this survey, he felt he had to add another, “winnable” plot line to accompany the ship’s dramatic sinking.

You are a passenger on the Titanic, traveling in Third Class to disguise the importance of your mission: transporting a MacGuffin from London to New York. As the [game] opens and you feel a long, drawn-out shudder pass through the ship, you must begin the process of escaping the restricted Third Class section, retrieving the MacGuffin from the purser’s safe amidst the confusion, and surviving the sinking to complete your delivery assignment. The actual events of those 160 minutes between iceberg and sinking would occur around you. I see this as a game of split-second timing that would require multiple [playthroughs] to optimize your turns in order to solve the puzzles in the shortest possible time. But you could also ignore all the puzzles and simply wander around the ship as a “tourist,” taking in the sights of this amazing event.

To his immense frustration, Meretzky never was able to drum up any enthusiasm for the idea at Infocom. In 1985, he was finally allowed to make a serious game as his reward for co-authoring the third best-selling text adventure in history, but even then his colleagues convinced him to opt for a science-fiction exercise called A Mind Forever Voyaging instead of the Titanic game. The latter remained something of a running joke at Meretzky’s expense for years. “It was almost a cliché,” says his colleague Dave Lebling. “Steve would say, ‘We should do a Titanic game!’ And we would all say, “No, no Titanic game. Go away, Steve.'”

The dream didn’t die for Meretzky even after Infocom closed up shop in 1989, and he moved on to design games for Legend Entertainment, a company co-founded by his fellow Infocom alum Bob Bates. Sadly, Bates too saw little commercial potential in a Titanic game, leaving Meretzky stuck in his comedy niche for all four of the games he made for Legend.

And still the fire burned. When Meretzky and Mike Dornbrook, another old Infocom colleague, decided to start their own studio called Boffo Games in 1994, the Titanic game was high on the agenda. The changing times meant that it had by now evolved from a text adventure into a point-and-click graphic adventure, with a fully fleshed-out plot that was to place aboard the ship the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, which really was stolen from the Louvre in 1911. (Ever since the painting was recovered from the thieves two years later, conspiracy theories claiming that the Mona Lisa which was hung once again in the Louvre is a face-saving forgery have abounded.) Meretzky and Dornbrook pitched their Titanic game to anyone and everyone who might be willing to fund it throughout Boffo’s short, frustrating existence, and even created a couple of rooms as a prototype. But they never could get anyone to bite. “We were saying, you know, there’s this new movie coming out,” says Dornbrook. “And it might do well. It will come out about the time the game will. It’s [James] Cameron. He sometimes does good stuff…” But it was to no avail. Meretzky made his very last adventure game to date in 1997, and it had nothing to do with the Titanic.

Instead it was left to another graphic adventure to ride the wave kicked up by the movie Dornbrook mentioned to sales that bettered the combined totals of all of the other Titanic games I’ve mentioned in these last two articles by an order of magnitude. I’ll examine that game in detail in the third and final article in this series. But first, allow me to set the table for its success via the origin story of the highest-grossing movie of the twentieth century.

After the failures of the film versions of A Night to Remember and Raise the Titanic, the Hollywood consensus had become that nothing sank a feature film’s prospects faster than the Titanic. This was weird, given that the book A Night to Remember had spawned a cottage industry in print publishing and a whole fannish subculture to go along with it, but box-office receipts didn’t lie. The movers and shakers of Hollywood could only conclude that the public wanted a happy ending when they handed over their hard-earned money on a Friday night, which spelled doom for any film about one of the most infamously unhappy endings of all time. Even the full-fledged Titanic mania that followed Robert Ballard’s discovery of the wreck failed to sway the conventional wisdom.

But one prominent Hollywood director begged to differ. James Cameron was coming off the twin triumphs of The Terminator and Aliens in 1987, when he saw a National Geographic documentary that prominently featured Ballard’s eye-popping underwater footage of the wreck. An avid scuba diver, Cameron was entranced. He began to imagine a film that could unite the two halves of the Titanic’s media legacy: the real sunken ship that lay beneath the waves and the glamorously cursed vessel of modern mythology. He jotted his thoughts down in his journal:

Do story with bookends of present-day scene of wreck using submersibles inter-cut with memory of a survivor and re-created scenes of the night of the sinking. A crucible of human values under stress. A certainty of slowly impending doom (metaphor). Division of men doomed and women and children saved by custom of the times. Many dramatic moments of separation, heroism, and cowardice, civility versus animal aggression. Needs a mystery or driving plot element woven through with all this as background.

The last sentence would prove key. Just like Scott Miller, Graham Nelson, and Steve Meretzky in the context of games, Cameron realized that his film couldn’t succeed as a tapestry of tragedy only. If it was to capture a wide audience’s interest, it needed the foreground plot and obvious set of protagonists that the film of A Night to Remember had so sorely lacked.

Yet Cameron’s own Titanic film would be a long time in coming. The melancholy splendor of that National Geographic documentary first did much to inform The Abyss, his moody 1989 movie about an American nuclear submarine’s close encounter with aliens. There then followed two more straightforward action vehicles starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terminator 2 and True Lies.

Always, though, his Titanic movie stayed in the back of his mind. By 1995, he had more than a decade’s worth of zeitgeist-defining action flicks behind him, enough to make him the most bankable Hollywood crowd-pleaser this side of Steven Spielberg, with combined box-office receipts to his credit totaling more than $1.7 billion. With his reputation thus preceding him, he finally managed to convince an unusual pairing of 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures to share the risk of funding his dream project. Hollywood’s reluctance was by no means incomprehensible. In addition to the Titanic box-office curse, there was the fact that Cameron had never made a film quite like this one before. In fact, no one was making films like this in the 1990s; Cameron was envisioning an old-fashioned historical epic, a throwback to the likes of War and Peace, Cleopatra, and Gone with the Wind, complete with those films’ three-hour-plus running times.

Cameron’s plan for his movie had changed remarkably little from that 1987 journal outline. He still wanted to bookend the main story with shots of the real wreck. He filmed this footage first, borrowing a Russian research vessel and deep-ocean submersible in September of 1995 in order to do so. Then it was time for the really challenging part. The production blasted out a 17-million-gallon pool on Mexico’s Baja coast and replicated the Titanic inside it at almost a one-to-one scale, working from the original builder’s blueprints. The sight of those iconic four smokestacks — the Titanic is the one ship in the world that absolutely everyone can recognize — looming up out of the desert was surreal to say the least, but it was only the beginning of the realization of Cameron’s vision. Everything that came within the view of a camera was fussed over for historical accuracy, right down to the pattern of the wainscotting on the walls.

Still hewing to the old-school formula for Hollywood epics, Cameron decided to make his foreground protagonists a pair of starstruck lovers from different sides of the economic divide: a prototypical starving artist from Steerage Class and a pampered young woman from First Class. This suited his backers very well; the stereotype-rooted but nevertheless timeless logic of their industry told them that men would come for the spectacle of seeing the ship go down, while women would come for the romance. The lead roles went to Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, a pair of uncannily beautiful young up-and-comers. Pop diva Celine Dion was recruited to sing a big, impassioned theme song. For, if it was to have any hope of earning back its budget, this film would need to have something for everyone: action, romance, drama, a dash of comedy, and more than a little bit of sex appeal. (DiCaprio’s character painting Winslet’s in the altogether remains one of the more famous female nude scenes in film history.) But whether that would make it an entertainment spectacle for the ages or just an unwieldy monstrosity was up for debate.

The press at least knew where they were putting their money. When the project passed the $170 million mark to officially become the most expensive movie ever made, they had a field day. The previous holder of the record had been a deliriously misconceived 1995 fiasco called Waterworld, and the two films’ shared nautical theme was lost on no one. Magazines and newspapers ran headlines like “A Sinking Sensation” and “Glub! Glub! Glub!” before settling on calling Titanic — Cameron had decided that that simple, unadorned name was the only one that would suit his film — “the Waterworld of 1997.” By the time it reached theaters on December 19, 1997, six months behind schedule, its final cost had grown to $200 million.

And then? Well, then the press and public changed their tune, much to the benefit of the latest Titanic game.

(Sources: the books Sinkable: Obsession, the Deep Sea, and the Shipwreck of the Titanic by Daniel Stone, Titanic and the Making of James Cameron by Paula Parisi, A Night to Remember by Walter Lord, and The Way It Was: Walter Lord on His Life and Books edited by Jenny Lawrence; SoftSide of August 1982; the Voyager CD-ROM A Night to Remember. The information on Steve Meretzky’s would-be Titanic game is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me many years ago now, and from Jason’s “Infocom Cabinet” of vintage documents. Another online source was “7 of the World’s Deadliest Shipwrecks” at Britannica. My thanks to reader Peter Olausson for digging up a vintage newspaper headline that labels the Titanic “unsinkable” and letting me link to it.)

Comments
24 Responses

- Andrew Plotkin

October 7, 2022 at 4:23 pm

> the compass directions aboard the ship would seem to indicate that it’s sailing due east

It’s been a long time since I played through Jigsaw. But if I recall correctly, Graham attended to the detail of supporting shipboard directions while aboard ship. Instead of N, S, E, W, you can type F, P, S, A for forward, port, starboard, and aft.

But the compass directions *also* work. And if S means both south and starboard, the ship must be going east!

The notion that “ships always sail east in parser games” has been something of a running gag ever since.

- Rybread

October 8, 2022 at 2:14 am

posh: port out, starboard home

- Sniffnoy

October 8, 2022 at 4:47 pm

Note: Posh is not actually an acronym and does not stand for this.

- Alianora La Canta

October 13, 2022 at 10:24 pm

Apparently there is a superstition (perhaps more relevant to boats with sails) that depicting a boat sailing in the same direction as its flags and sails indicate it should be sailing is bad luck. Perhaps this is the digital equivalent of averting that superstition, applied to a boat that primarily uses an engine for propulsion?

- Peter Orvetti

October 7, 2022 at 6:56 pm

Thank you for the reminder of the existence of “Dateline Titanic”. I had forgotten all about it but played it often as a kid. And the only thing I remember now is “You hit another one!”

- Aula

October 7, 2022 at 7:44 pm

“And yet what of the American paddle-wheel steamer Sultana, whose boiler exploded as it plied the Mississippi River in 1865, killing about 1800 people?”

The Sultana exploded the day after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and the resulting hunt for the conspirators was perhaps understandably considered more noteworthy by the newspapers than the death of a bunch of Union soldiers who had been Confederate prisoners (who constituted more than 90% of the people aboard the ship). Also the number of deaths was more likely around 1200; there were over 900 confirmed survivors, and a ship of that size couldn’t possibly have held 2700 people, as even at the recorded 2130 it was exessively overcrowded.

“garish Techncolor”

should be “Technicolor”

“Beyond the Titanic has been available for free from Scott Miller’s company 3D Realms since 1998. In light of that, I’ve taken the liberty of hosting a version here”

It’s also freely available from the IF Archive (along with Miller’s second text adventure Supernova), and has been since before the archive moved from http://ftp.gmd.de to its current location. I don’t really see the need for you to host another copy of the game.

“The Titanic was not the first vessel ever to send an “SOS” distress signal at sea, as he claims.”

Nor did the Titanic only send SOS; apparently its radio operator also sent copious amounts of the older distress signal CQD.

- Jimmy Maher

October 7, 2022 at 7:57 pm

Thanks!

The version of Beyond the Titanic here is set up to be easy to get going in DOSBox…

- Jogy

October 7, 2022 at 8:34 pm

I might be in a minority, but I did not like the Titanic movie at all.

The very banal story of the pretty girl having to marry an unlikable rich man, but instead falling in love with the poor young artist for me was just diminishing the real tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic,

- He ruined the movie

October 7, 2022 at 11:26 pm

So on the subject of the movie, and Jimmy’s comment that absolutely everyone from nine to 90 knows the story.

There I was in the queue to go in to see Titanic.

Behind me, someone commented that he was looking forward to seeing the ship sinking.

He was assailed and berated by others in the line for ‘ruining the movie.’

- stepped pyramids

October 7, 2022 at 11:35 pm

I was pretty young when the movie came out, and it was remarkable and a little disorienting how quickly the public image of the movie flipped from “the height of deranged arrogance, a doomed waste of money” to “movie of the century”.

That old-school Hollywood take on appealing to both sexes worked for the teen boys I knew, at least. They didn’t want to admit liking it themselves, but girls liked it and it was a PG-13 movie with nudity. Truly a four-quadrant film.

- Jason Dyer

October 8, 2022 at 5:15 am

While Waterworld being a fiasco isn’t wrong insofar as the budget got almost hilariously inflated, it didn’t lose money (even accounting for advertising etc.). Pretty good rundown at Forbes here. Also, the Universal Studios stunt show apparently still does brisk business.

- Bronco

October 16, 2022 at 5:23 am

The link does not work?
The page’s source code just shows “” but no “href”.

- Captain Rufus

October 8, 2022 at 7:56 am

For the Atari 800 family of computers the best PC emulator is Altirra, and on Android devices Colleen will do the trick. Both have gui interfaces to use though Colleen is particular on where you poke and prod on the screen to access stuff.

- Leo Vellés

October 8, 2022 at 2:13 pm

“Press the Escape key until you you return to the emulator’s main screen.”
A double “you” here, Jimmy

- Jimmy Maher

October 8, 2022 at 5:28 pm

Thanks!

- Sarah Jarvis

October 8, 2022 at 6:44 pm

The truth about the Titanic that is supposed to be down there they can check the name plate on the ship as Titanic is riveted on the hull and over time two of the letters have come off showing the letters behind and there are etched into the hull and they don’t say Titanic they clearly say 2 letters from the Olympic which was switched with the Titanic.
Greatest insurance scam ever that went wrong as the iceberg that the ship hit. But the small ship that had been sent to with blankets and pillows was in the wrong place and haven’t been told all the facts that it was a scuttling going on. You can read more in the Book by Steve Hall, and Bruce Beveridge.

- Gnoman

October 9, 2022 at 2:35 am

This conspiracy theory is absolute nonsense from beginning to end.

To begin with, the usual claim made is that the switch was made because White Star Lines didn’t want to pay for the repair costs from the collision with HMS Hawke, and insurance wouldn’t cover it due to ongoing investigation. This theory has severe flaws. The most blatant is that Olympic was fully repaired and in-service by 1912, and this bolstered public confidence in the safety of the design. Therefore, there is absolutely no benefit to White Star in throwing away a valuable ship. Further, Titanic did not have “full coverage” insurance. An Olympic-class liner cost seven and a half million dollars to build, but the insurance payout for Titanic was only 5 million. This means that the “insurance scam” would have resulted in a 2.5 million dollar LOSS. Insuring for the full value of a ship was entirely possible, and it would not have been unusual for an operator to do so for the maiden voyage of such an expensive vessel. Meanwhile, even a sinking with no loss is extremely damaging to a company’s public image and thus bottom line – White Star had a massive downturn in business after Titanic. Even if they got the full cost of a brand-new Olympic class, they’d lose a fortune.

The second fundamental problem with the claim is that the Olympic-class ships were not identical. Titanic and Britannic had significant changes made due to experience with the older ship – extra staterooms replaced seldom used recreational spaces, extra screens were added in places to make the voyage more pleasant, an entirely additional restaurant was added. Even without the factor of age (after a full year there is significant weathering that you just don’t see on a brand new ship), disguising the older ship as the newer would require extensive and expensive refitting. Olympic DID undergo such refitting – in 1913, as part of the “Titanic’s loss revealed some design flaws we need to correct” refit.

Not only would this “insurance scam” inflict devastating loss, it would be incredibly expensive to pull off.

- Martin

October 9, 2022 at 3:09 pm

Conspiracy theory or not, it sounds like the making of an interesting game.

Perhaps the game would start with a seemingly routine murder from someone about to spill the beans. The detective character works out the “truth” and now they become the next target. If the game is set before the ship sets sail or before it hits the iceberg, the end is to stop the incident. If it is after the event, it’s to stop the insurance scam or take the scamers to justice.

All depends on how much you want to mess with established history.

- Jimmy Maher

October 10, 2022 at 6:00 am

What I love about this conspiracy theory is that a shadowy cabal spent a staggering amount of time and effort sweating every detail, except for the rather obvious one of the ship’s nameplate. Realizing this at the last minute, they hurriedly paid old Joe the Riveter down at the docks a fiver to stick a new name over the old one.

- Peter Orvetti

October 9, 2022 at 7:26 pm

I looked this up as I had not heard this theory before. The book you cite DEBUNKS the theory; it does not defend it.

- Martin

October 12, 2022 at 11:23 pm

Just happened to come across this today. Serendipity and all that:

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/is-this-a-photo-of-the-iceberg-that-sank-the-titanic?utm_source=pocket-newtab

- Jonathan O

October 25, 2022 at 7:39 am

I don’t think I can be the only person in the world who was unaware that the Titanic had four smokestacks, and so would have been unable to recognise it.

- RMM

November 14, 2022 at 8:17 pm

Jimmy, I’m curious about the font on your Beyond the Titanic screenshot! Is it a customization of the DosBox output? If I remember correctly this game was only out for DOS. I guess you changed the font for the TTF output?

- Jimmy Maher

November 15, 2022 at 4:43 pm

As far as I know, I didn’t do anything, certainly not intentionally. You can download the hosted version and look at the config file; this is exactly what I used to run the game.

Titanic Visions, Part 3: An Adventure Out of Time
October 21, 2022

It’s disarmingly easy to underestimate Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, by far the best-selling game in history about the doomed luxury liner. At first glance, after all, it looks like just another of the lifeless multimedia Myst clones that were cluttering up store shelves in such quantities in the mid-1990s. Meanwhile the studio behind it was known as CyberFlix, a name which positively reeks of the era when equally misbegotten “interactive movies” were all the rage. And indeed, CyberFlix really was founded by folks convinced that the future of games would be a collision between Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

But the prime mover behind the operation, a 30-something Tennessean named Bill Appleton, wasn’t just another of the clueless bandwagon jumpers who were using off-the-shelf middleware packages like Macromedia Director to cobble together dodgy games where the video clips took center stage and the interactivity was an afterthought. On the contrary, Appleton knew how to make innovative technology of his own, and had a lengthy resumé to prove it. His early software oeuvre was the ironic polar opposite of interactive movies, those ultimate end-user products that seemed designed to convince the human being behind the monitor that she couldn’t possibly create anything like this. In the beginning, Appleton was all about empowering people to make stuff for themselves.

A youthful overachiever from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Appleton studied painting and philosophy at university before settling on economics. He was weeks away from earning his master’s degree in that field from Vanderbilt University in the spring of 1984, when he saw an Apple Macintosh for the first time. Like any number of other curious minds who hadn’t heretofore taken much interest in computers, he allowed all of his plans for his life to be utterly derailed by the encounter. He dropped out of university, moved back into his parents’ basement, and rededicated his life to making the Mac do amazing things.

He created an adventure game called Enchanted Scepters, which combined vestiges of the text adventures that were popular on other platforms at the time with simple pictures, sounds, and mouse-driven interactions. In this sense, it was similar to such other early Mac graphic adventures as ICOM Simulations’s Deja Vu, although considerably less refined. The real stroke of genius came when Appleton, a year after releasing the game itself through a small publisher called Silicon Beach Software, packaged up all of the tools he had used to make it and released them as well, under the name of World Builder. The do-it-yourself toolkit spawned a small but dedicated amateur community of adventure makers and players that persisted well into the 1990s. Appleton also adapted World Builder into another product called Course Builder, aimed at educators who wanted to create interactive experiences for the classroom.

With its ethos of empowering a fairly non-technical end user to create original multimedia content, Course Builder especially was veering into the territory soon to be staked out by HyperCard, Apple’s own revolutionary hypertext-authoring system. It’s thus no surprise that, when that software did debut in 1987, Appleton first greeted it as a threat. He quickly decided, however, to adopt the old adage of can’t beat ’em, join ’em — or rather enhance ’em. He moved to Silicon Valley, took control of a team of programmers hired by Silicon Beach Software, and made SuperCard, a system that could run existing HyperCard “stacks” as-is, but that added a whole slew of additional native features to the environment. It attracted some interest in the Macintosh world, but proved unable to compete with HyperCard’s huge existing user base, the result of being bundled with every single new Mac. So, Appleton turned back to games. Hooking up with a Chicago-based developer and publisher called Reactor, he made a beat-em-up game in the tradition of Karateka called Creepy Castle, then embarked on an action-packed 3D extravaganza called Screaming Metal, only for Reactor to go out of business midway through development.

It was thus a thoroughly frustrated Bill Appleton who returned to Tennessee in 1992. His eight years in software had resulted in a pair of cults in the form of the World Builder and SuperCard communities, but he hadn’t ever managed to hit the commercial bullseye he was aiming for. He was a man of significant ambition, and the status of cult hero just wasn’t good enough for him. “I’ve built a lot [of programs] for Silicon Valley,” he said, then went on to air his grievances using the precious diction of a sniffy artiste: “This isn’t about money or power or technology. It’s about art. I’m an artist, and I’ve got to be able to control my work.” Like Bob Dylan and The Band retreating to that famous pink house in Woodstock, he decided he could do so as easily right there in Tennessee as anywhere else.

Appleton recruited a few other bright sparks, none of them your prototypical computer nerds. There were Scott Scheinbaum, a musician and composer who had spent the last fifteen years playing in various local rock bands and working in record stores to make ends meet; Jamie Wicks, an accomplished young visual artist, described by a friend from school as “the quiet guy who sits next to you in class and draws pictures of monsters”; Andrew Nelson, a journalist by education who had grown tired of writing puff pieces for glossy lifestyle magazines; and Eric Quist, an attorney and childhood friend of Appleton. “Bill inoculated [sic] us with his vision of becoming multimedia superstars and taking over the world,” says Scheinbaum. The five of them hatched their plans for world domination in Appleton’s basement before officially founding CyberFlix in May of 1993, with Appleton as the majority stakeholder and decider-in-chief. The division of labor on their games broke down obviously enough: Appleton would be the programmer, Scheinbaum the composer and sound-effects man, Wicks the pixel artist and 3D modeller, Nelson the designer and writer, and Quist the business guy. In fact, by this time they had their first game just about ready to go.

Lunicus

It went by the name of Lunicus. More of a tech demo than a carefully designed game, it began as a graphic adventure that took place on the titular Moonbase Lunicus, only to turn into a frantic corridor shooter, a slightly more sophisticated Castle Wolfenstein that came complete with a pounding rock-and-roll soundtrack. But everyone seemed to agree that its most impressive feature was the sheer speed with which it unspooled from the CD-ROM, thanks to some proprietary software technology developed by Appleton. Called a “mindblower” by no less a pundit than Steven Levy (author of the seminal book Hackers), the game sold 50,000 copies on the Macintosh, then was picked up by Paramount Interactive and ported to Microsoft Windows, where it did rather less well in the face of much stiffer competition. A follow-up called Jump Raven that was still faster did even better in a Mac marketplace that was starving for just this style of flashy action game, selling by some reports almost 100,000 copies.

Jump Raven

CyberFlix was riding high, basking in the glowing press they were receiving inside the small and fairly insular milieu of Mac gaming. Being so thoroughly immersed in that world could distort the founders’ perspective. Jump Raven “was the fastest thing on the Mac,” says one early CyberFlix employee. “And that was back when the Mac was going to take over everything.”

CyberFlix moved into a snazzy loft in the center of Knoxville, Tennessee, and set about burnishing their hipster credibility by throwing parties for the downtown set, with live bands and open bars. Knoxville wasn’t quite the country-bumpkin town that East and West Coast media sometimes like to stereotype it as; its three largest employers were the University of Tennessee, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Many people in local government and business were eager to see CyberFlix as the progenitors of a new line for the city in multimedia. In a major publicity coup, Newsweek magazine was enticed to come down and write a two-page feature on the company, in which the wide-eyed reporter said that Appleton had become “something of a legend” during his time in Silicon Valley — this was something of a stretch — and called the house in whose basement the founding quintet had gotten together a literal log cabin. Others, however, were less credulous. One consultant who was hired to help the company work out a proper business plan remembers that Appleton “absolutely would not listen. He would sit and seem to listen, and then he was off to something else. It was exasperating.”

One of the things he was off to was CyberFlix’s next big game, a Western homage or send-up — the distinction is never clear, and therein lies many of the game’s problems — called Dust: A Tale of the Wired West. It was to be an unadulterated adventure game, whose action elements were limited to a few anodyne mini-games. CyberFlix used mostly employees and friends to play its characters — and therein lies another of the problems. Like many games of its technological ilk and era, Dust lacks the courage of its convictions, resulting in a fatal case of split personality. It seems that CyberFlix first intended to tell a fairly serious story. But as the amateurish acting and the limitations of their tools presented themselves, it drifted further and further into camp as a sort of defense mechanism, albeit without excising the would-be “dramatic” beats that had already been laid down. The result was, as Arinn Dembo noted in a scathing review for Computer Gaming World magazine, a comedy with dramatic relief, an approach that doesn’t work nearly as well as the opposite. Dembo’s concluding paragraphs are so well-stated, and apply so well not just to this game but to many other adventure games, that I’d like to quote them here.

The confusion in the design of this game brings up a general point, which is this: if you want to use dramatic elements in any narrative, you have to earn them. That means taking your subject seriously, even if it is “just a computer game.” Someone has to go to the trouble of fashioning characters deeper than your average mud puddle (and that includes giving them names that aren’t farcical), and writing dialog for them that sounds like something a real person might say.

If, on the other hand, your intention is to satirize the form and make fun of its tropes and limitations, you lay your cards on the table from the start; you don’t try to tap into drama that you don’t deserve. It’s either Blazing Saddles or The Unforgiven — you can’t mix the two. Computer-game writers need to learn that comedy is not a fallback position, something you do when you don’t believe you’re competent to sustain the drama. Satire and farce can be done well, and I’m not against them, but I’m against using them as a screen for poor storytelling.

All of this was made even more problematic by the way that even the jokes usually failed to land. The name of Dust, for example, was intended as a strained “ironic play” on the name of Myst. But this literally no one cottoned onto, until a peeved-sounding CyberFlix employee revealed it in an interview.

Dust: A Tale of the Wired West

The same CyberFlix representative said that, of 90 publications that reviewed Dust, 88 of them recommended it. If so, I managed to stumble on both of the exceptions, and, unfortunately for CyberFlix, they were both biggies: the aforementioned Computer Gaming World, the journal of record among the hardcore set, and Entertainment Weekly, a major taste-maker among the mainstream-entertainment set which the company wanted desperately to reach. Released in late 1995, Dust sold only 30,000 copies between its Macintosh and Windows incarnations. In the aftermath of its failure, CyberFlix was forced to take on more plebeian contract work, such as porting software from Windows to Mac and implementing pre-written design briefs for educational products. Other folks at the company turned to simpler, less expensive sorts of original games. For many both inside and outside of Cyberflix were now beginning to wonder whether interactive movies were really destined to be the future of mainstream entertainment after all. But CyberFlix had one more big game of the old style still in them — the one that would write them into gaming history as something more than just another flash in the pan from the 1990s multimedia boom.

It must be conceded that Titanic: Adventure Out of Time did not have a very auspicious gestation. Its mastermind Andrew Nelson admits that he was prompted to make it by a logic far more plebeian than any of the grand philosophical meditations about fate and hubris that the great ship’s sinking has so often inspired. Back when CyberFlix was just getting off the ground, he’d had an interesting conversation with his sister-in-law: she “was intrigued with these new CD-ROM games, but she had heard they take forever and she didn’t have that much time.”  Soon after, he read a magazine article about the Titanic, which noted that the ship had sunk two and a half hours after hitting the iceberg. That seemed like just about the right amount of time for an interactive movie that could appeal to busy adults like his sister-in-law. He decided to take the idea up with Bill Appleton and his other colleagues.

Initially, he didn’t have any more luck than Steve Meretzky had enjoyed at Infocom or Legend with his own Titanic concept. Appleton was particularly unenthusiastic. But Nelson kept hammering away at him, and finally, after Appleton’s own brainchild of Dust had proved a bust, he got his way. The company would go all-in on one last big adventure game.

The project may have been born out of practical commercial reasoning, but that didn’t keep it from taking on a more idealistic personality now. Nelson and many of those around him became full-bore Titanic fanatics. “We read all the books, listened to tapes of survivors, looked at 750 different pictures,” says Scott Scheinbaum. They laid out their virtual ship from the builder’s blueprints that had been used for the original — the very same documents, in fact, that James Cameron and friends were using to build their Titanic replica out of real steel down in Mexico at the very same time, although no one at CyberFlix was aware of this. Computer games which are labelled as “historical” tend to be strategic war games, exercises in moving abstract units around abstract fields of battle. CyberFlix was attempting a different kind of historical re-creation — a living, immersive view of history that dropped you right into the past as an individual on the scene.

In that spirit, Nelson and his colleagues set out to present as accurate a reproduction of the ship as the resources at their disposal would allow; again, they took their own endeavor as seriously as James Cameron was taking his. They tried to make every detail of every room as authentic as possible, knowing all the while that, while a movie director’s cameras had the luxury of gliding quickly over the surface of things, their players would be able to move around of their own free will in the spaces CyberFlix created and linger over what they saw to their heart’s content. This only made it that much more important to get things right.

A journalist named J.C. Herz came to visit CyberFlix in Knoxville for part of a book she was writing about videogame culture. She found an office with a “24-hour Kinko’s Copies atmosphere — full of equipment and overworked twentysomethings, simultaneously frenetic and oddly mellow.” She was especially taken by a “photo researcher” named Billy, who in his country boy’s baseball cap looked and talked like Bo Duke from The Dukes of Hazzard. “I do the carpeting for the Titanic,” he told her by way of introduction.

We have a room where you start out in the game, and I’ve outfitted the desk with postcards that you can actually flip over and read, and magazines like Brave New World, and I’ve designed the covers for ’em, so you can pick those up and look at ’em. There’s a lot of detail in there that we don’t even expect people to actually look at. It’s like, if you were just tryin’ to half-ass it and get through it, you might make a lamp, but you might not make the electric cord that goes behind the desk. We’re tryin’ to get all the detail in there. There’s a lot of games that you look at today, and a lot of people don’t take the time and energy to go in and really work with their maps to make ’em look real, so they end up coming out lookin’ plastic or fake. I made it so that when you click on [a] scrapbook, it opens up, and then all the pages are just full of imagery, you know, ephemera, things like that. So I go out and I find all the stuff to go in the scrapbook and put it in there. That’s the fun job. I could spend a day or I could spend a month on that book.

I worked 36 hours in two days last week. But they try to make it as accommodating as possible. We’ve got showers, you know. And they stock the refrigerators with Cokes. Everybody gives you Cokes. They want you gettin’ wired so you stay there all the time. And they got some couches. So, I mean, you can stay here forever.

Another of the employees she met was named Alex, a rough-looking character with a Mohawk haircut, earrings, and tattoos to complement his “lengthy criminal record,” who had recently discovered a latent talent for computer art. He demonstrated that not quite everyone working on the Titanic game shared Billy’s passion for it. Long force of habit kept him talking about the people who ran CyberFlix as The Man, even though they let him get away with just about anything.

Whatever it takes to keep us here. Whatever we want. You can come in looking like a wreck, reeking of booze, whatever, and they’re never gonna fire you for it because they need you.

Luckily enough, they’ve been thoughtful not to force any kind of real schedule on us. Just get in when you can and do your shit. So, I just go to work doing whatever I have to do, build sets and do props, little things here and there where it needs to fit in, do movies and help. While I’ve got big jobs off running on the SGI [graphics workstation], I just jump around and do little different things, 2D work or whatever. As long as it takes is as long as you’ve got to spend, and if you’re here friggin’ eighteen hours a day, so be it.

And it’s kind of very strange for me because until I came up here to do this I was always working construction, my whole life, and I felt sorry for all the poor bastards trapped in air-conditioned prisons all day, and I thought it was so much fun to be roaming around on the job site, getting sun and running and hollering and screaming. And that’s all well and good, but you ain’t never gonna make shit. You’re gonna die poor or you’re gonna die pissing away your social-security check in some stinking little bar, and that’s no good. So, I just decided to take the step and at least do this for a few years to say that I could do it, and make some money out of it. If something went horribly wrong here tomorrow and I got kicked out or fired or I had to leave, I would just throw some things in the truck, get out, and go someplace else and do it. Because this industry is just replicating itself at such a disgusting rate, and everybody’s got something to do. And sure, not everything is quality, but it doesn’t matter. It’s like, you got money? All right, pay me, I’ll do it. Give it up. And then you just do it and move on again.

Of course, a game consists of more than just its graphical presentation, regardless of whether the latter is created lovingly or for reasons of filthy lucre. What, then, was CyberFlix’s Titanic game actually all about, beyond the obvious?

Andrew Nelson named his game Titanic: Adventure Out of Time because it really does involve time travel — which, as readers of the previous article in this series will recognize, is rather an ongoing theme in ludic Titanic fictions. It opens not in 1912 in the North Atlantic but in 1942. You play a former agent in His Majesty’s Secret Service who has fallen on hard times. You’ve been drinking your life away in your dingy flat, still haunted by the mission that destroyed your promising career — an espionage mission which took place aboard the Titanic. (Shades of Graham Nelson’s Jigsaw, although the similarities would appear to be completely coincidental.) Then a German bomb falls on your head, but instead of killing you it opens up a rift in space-time, sending you back to April 14, 1912, to try again.

You arrive in your cabin aboard the Titanic at 9:30 on that fateful evening, two hours before the collision with the iceberg. After an introductory spiel from the ship’s steward, you’re free to start exploring. Indeed, the meticulously re-created ship lies at the heart of this game’s appeal. You can roam freely through First Class, Second Class, and steerage; up to the promenade decks and into the bridge and wireless room; to the ship’s gym, complete with state-of-the-art exercise equipment like the “electric camel”; to the gentlemen’s smoking lounge and the Café Parisien; to the squash court and the Turkish sauna, with its alarmingly named “electric bath”; even down into the boiler rooms and the cargo holds. All of these and more are presented as node-based spaces pre-rendered in first-person 3D — in the superficial style of Myst, in other words. But do remember the opening to this article, when I warned you not to underestimate this game. CyberFlix’s technology was better than the vast majority of Myst clones that were flooding the market at this time, and their ambitions for this project at least were higher.

There are in fact only a handful Myst-style set-piece puzzles here, none of them terribly difficult. Instead of fiddling endlessly with esoteric mechanics in a deserted environment, you spend your time here — when not just taking in the views like a virtual tourist, that is — actually talking to a diverse cast of characters whom you meet scattered all over the ship, who in the aggregate are a pretty good representation of the many nationalities, professions, and social classes that were aboard the real Titanic. Having apparently learned a lesson from Dust, CyberFlix splashed out for mostly professional actors this time. The accents are pretty good, and the voice acting in general is, if not always inspired, serviceable enough by the standard of most productions of this nature and vintage.

Prior to the Titanic’s tragic rendezvous with the iceberg, Adventure Out of Time runs on plot rather than clock time. That’s to say that time aboard the ship, which you can keep track of via your handy pocket watch, advances in increments of anywhere from five to fifteen minutes only when you complete certain milestones. If you choose to do nothing but wander around taking in the scenery, in other words, you have literally forever in which to do so — which isn’t a bad thing, given how big a part of the game’s appeal this virtual tourism really is. In another testimony to just that reality, CyberFlix included a “tour mode” separate from the game proper, which lets you explore the ship whilst listening to historical commentary. One has to assume that, just as most of the people who bought Myst never got off the first island, most of the people who casually plucked this game off a shop shelf were content just to poke around the Titanic for a while and call it a day.

But let’s assume that you’re one of the minority who chose to go deeper. As noted above, progressing through the milestones doesn’t entail solving logic puzzles so much as it does social ones. You scurry all over the ship, from the top of the crow’s nest to the bowels of the engine rooms, talking to everyone you can find, running fetch quests and conducting third-party diplomacy. It goes without saying that a real person on the real ship could never possibly have covered this much ground in a bare two hours, but it doesn’t really matter. Thankfully, in most situations you can jump from place to place by clicking on a map of the ship given to you by the steward at the beginning of the game. You soon learn that there’s a bewildering amount of stuff going on aboard this version of the Titanic well before it hits the iceberg. British and German and Russian and Serbian spies and double agents are all aboard, intriguing their little hearts out in the name of great-power politics.There’s a jewelry-smuggling ring, a servant girl who’s blackmailing the steel kingpin who got her pregnant, even a former flame of your own begging you to help her out with this and that for old times’ sake. And then there’s a rather mediocre painting being passed around, which the epilogue will reveal is from the hand of an obscure Austrian artist named Adolf Hitler…

Finding out about everything that’s going on aboard will likely require multiple playthroughs. For every time you do something to add minutes to the clock, you run the risk of losing the chance to see things that were taking place during the time window that’s just passed. It’s occasionally possible to get all of the intricate plot machinery fouled up and end up with someone talking to you familiarly about things you know nothing about, but this is relatively unusual. Very few other adventure games have attempted to offer their players such a freewheeling story space as this one, and even fewer have succeeded this well. There are no complete dead ends here that I know of; every player’s story can eventually be brought to a resolution of some kind if she just keeps poking at things long enough.

These two hours before disaster strikes are charged with the dreadful foreknowledge of what’s coming — with the knowledge that, if the law of averages holds true, two out of every three of the people you talk to won’t live to see the dawn. I played this game last winter, when we were in the process of moving house and my wife was already working and staying in another town. Sitting all alone in an empty living room on a cold, dark Scandinavian evening, surrounded by the souvenirs of our life together packed up in moving boxes, now strikes me as the perfect environment in which to appreciate it. Others have similar memories. Andrew Nelson:

People use the word “haunting” a lot to describe this game. And I know the feeling, because late at night while I was checking out if the dialog was working and I was strolling down those hallways — and how they were lit by our designers, and the amazing score that Scott Scheinbaum did, it had a very otherworldly feeling to it. Sometimes even I would get chills walking through it and encountering some of these passengers.

It’s debatable to what extent these feelings are the product of real aesthetic intent and to what extent they’re mere artifacts of the technology used to create the game, not to mention the knowledge we possess that’s external to its world. Yet we shouldn’t be too eager to look askance at any game that manages for whatever reason to evoke feelings in its player that go beyond the primary emotional colors, as this one does. And then, too, some things plainly are done, cleverly and deliberately, to heighten the sense of encroaching doom. For example, little establishing cut scenes play from time to time, showing the ship sailing inexorably onward toward its date with a cruel destiny.

After said destiny comes to a head and the iceberg is struck, everything begins to feel more immediate and urgent, as it should. At this point, plot time goes away in favor of something close to if not quite the same as clock time: the clock ticks a handful of seconds every time you make a move as you attempt to wrap up your espionage mission and get certain vital objects safely off the ship along with your own person. One might say that this is the real stress test for the game as a fiction. Can it muster the gravitas to depict a tragedy as immense as this one in an honest, unflinching way?

Alas, the short answer is no, not really. Some of this can be blamed on technological constraints; a Myst-style engine is better suited to contemplative exploration than the mass chaos the game is now attempting to project. Yet there’s no denying that the writing also fails the test in the breach. One or two of the characters behave just about believably. The most unnervingly realistic reaction comes from a snobby old First Class busybody who has refused to get into the first lifeboat offered to her because it’s “full of people I don’t know,” and because, like so many passengers, she didn’t truly believe the ship would sink. Now she clutches her pearls alone there on the deck and begs forlornly for assurance that surely there will be more lifeboats, won’t there? But the majority of characters fall victim to the old Dust syndrome. Unable or unwilling to stare down tragedy without blinking, the game falls back on jarringly inappropriate comedy. In terms of its fiction, the actual sinking is by far the weakest part of the game; we can feel thankful that this climax takes up a fairly small portion of the full playing time. Still, it does have one practical saving grace: it gives you one last chance to wrap up any loose ends you failed to get to earlier — one last chance, as it turns out, to change history, hopefully for the better.

For in the epilogue the game returns you to 1942 and presents your actions aboard the Titanic as having determined the course of world history over the last 30 years; think of it as the ultimate riposte to Graham Nelson’s claim that the disaster was not any “turning point” in history. The history for which you’re responsible can be much the same as the timeline we know or even worse. There’s an element of black comedy to many of these scenarios, as when you avert both the First World War and the rise of Adolf Hitler (who has vanquished the monster called Envy that was lurking in the depths of his soul by becoming a successful painter selling vacantly pleasant landscapes to middle-class housewives), only to see the entire world get steamrolled by the Soviet Union. It makes me think of dodging the iceberg in Dateline Titanic: “Oh, no! You hit another one!” But in the ideal case, where you’ve chased down every single plot thread and wrapped them all up neatly, history turns out markedly better, with neither a First World War, a Second World War, nor (presumably, in that there is no Soviet Union) a Cold War.

Adventure Out of Time is an impressive piece of work in many respects, standing out not least because it’s so much more ambitious and, well, just better than CyberFlix’s track record before it would ever tempt one to suspect. It’s possible to finish it with a very different story to tell about your time aboard the Titanic than someone else who has accomplished the same feat. And that is a very rare quality in adventure games.

That said, I can’t quite say that I love this game unabashedly. Its failings in the writing department — its inability to make me really care about any of the characters aboard or to build upon the vague sense of dread it has so masterfully engendered when the time comes for sharper emotions — keep it from joining my own top rank of games. Nevertheless, its rich grounding in real history and the formal ambition it displays mark it as the labor of love it so clearly was. It remains well worth playing as an example of a path seldom taken in adventure games, a welcome example of a game that’s much, much more than it first appears to be.

Its commercial trajectory, on the other hand, is a case study in how those things sometimes don’t matter a whit. Sometimes, all you need to do to have a hit is to get the timing right.

Aboard the Titanic. The eeriness of wandering the doomed ship, which is almost deserted thanks to the limitations of the technology used to re-create it, is what most players seem to remember best about the game.

Penny Pringle, your intelligence contact aboard the ship. Stills of real people in costume were spliced over the computer-generated graphics. Their lips and facial expressions were then painstakingly hand-animated to match their dialog.

One of the relatively few mechanical puzzles involves a decoding machine. More shades of Graham Nelson’s Jigsaw, whose Enigma machine is one of text adventuring’s all-time classic puzzles.

Fans of James Cameron’s movie will recognize the Renault Type CB Coupé de Ville automobile in which Jack and Rose make love for the first and only time. It’s used for less carnal purposes here, as a handy source of illumination in a dark cargo hold. There really was such a vehicle aboard the Titanic, a car that a wealthy American coal and iron heir named William Carter had purchased and was taking home with him after a family vacation in Europe. Unlike their new car, Carter and his family survived the sinking. He filed a claim with the White Star Line and was reimbursed $5000.

Another amusing parallel with the movie is this pair of characters, named Jack and… Shailagh. (Okay, the parallel isn’t perfect.) They’re brother and sister rather than star-struck lovers, but Jack is as noble as Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, and like him sacrifices himself in the end to save the one he loves.

It all starts to go a bit sideways when the ship starts to actually sink, a tragedy which the game seems constitutionally incapable of facing, instead giving us awkward attempts at comedy.

We always knew how this game was going to end, didn’t we?

The Titanic was already having one of its recurring moments in media when Adventure Out of Time was released in late 1996, under CyberFlix’s own imprint because the old-media mavens that had been serving as their publishers until this point were all bailing out of games in the wake of disappointing sales. One of the biggest literary novels of the year, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was Beryl Bainbridge’s Every Man For Himself, about a young American who sails aboard the ship and interacts with many historical figures before and on the night of the disaster. The following April, a full-blown song-and-dance musical about the ship opened on Broadway, a dubious proposition on the face of it that would nonetheless run for 804 performances.

Tailwinds like these, along with the eternal recognizability of the Titanic name itself, were enough to lift Adventure Out of Time to sales of 100,000 copies in its first year on the market, despite reviews from the hardcore gaming press that were unenthusiastic at best about a product that was widely dismissed as just another tired Myst clone. “If the ocean were as shallow as Titanic’s gameplay,” wrote Computer Gaming World in a valiant but confused attempt at clever wordplay, “the real ship would never have sunk.” But such reviews really didn’t matter at all by this point; even during this first year, the people who bought Adventure Out of Time generally weren’t the ones who read the likes of Computer Gaming World. Be that as it may, 100,000 copies sold would no doubt have been the limit of the game’s success, had not James Cameron’s movie dropped on December 19, 1997, just as Adventure Out of Time was getting decidedly long in the tooth by the standards of the novelty-obsessed games industry.

The tide had begun to turn for Cameron’s over-time, over-budget film some weeks before that date, when critics traveled to Tokyo to catch some early screenings. They came back raving about what they proclaimed to be that rarest of beasts, a showy blockbuster that could also make its audience think and feel something that went beyond the adrenal emotions. One critic stated that “Titanic plumbs personal and philosophical story depths not usually found in event-scale movies.” “It is a masterwork of big-canvas storytelling,” said another, “broad enough to entrance and entertain yet precise and delicate enough to educate and illuminate.”

The movie earned $29 million in the United States on its opening weekend, then $35 million the next weekend. Just twelve days after its debut, it was already halfway to earning back its much-mocked $200 million budget from domestic receipts alone. Four weeks after that, that milestone was already $100 million in its rear-view mirror, with Hollywood Reporter declaring that it had “shattered all previous models of film performance at the nation’s theaters.” On February 24, 1998 —  just nine weeks after its release — it officially became the most successful film in history. One week later, its worldwide gross surpassed $1 billion. It was nominated for fourteen Academy Awards and won eleven of them, including those for Best Director and Best Picture.

Titanic was simply inescapable during 1998. When you turned on the radio, there it was, in the form of Celine Dion’s gloriously overwrought theme song; when you turned on the television, someone was bound to be talking about the film and/or the disaster that inspired it; when you went to work, your colleagues were discussing it around the water cooler; when you came home, you found that your teenage daughter had bought yet another poster of Leonardo DiCaprio to watch over her from her bedroom wall. Not everybody loved the film, mind you; some contrary souls dared to point out that the dialog was a bit trite and the love story more than a little contrived. But absolutely everyone had to reckon with it — not least among them its two young stars and its director, condemned to spend the rest of their careers answering as best they could the question of what you did next after you had already made the biggest movie in the history of the world.

All of this redounded to the immense benefit of some modest little CD-ROMs sitting on the shelves of software stores all over the country, due shortly to be sent back to the distributors that had sent them out. Now, thanks to the film, they suddenly started to sell again — to sell faster than they ever had before, so fast that store owners were soon clamoring for more of them from those selfsame distributors, causing a mad scramble at CyberFlix to crank up the presses once again. Adventure Out of Time enjoyed a whole new commercial life, an order of magnitude larger than its first one. Now companies were knocking at CyberFlix’s door to release the game to European and Asian markets; it was localized into seven different languages in a matter of weeks. By the end of 1998, worldwide sales had surpassed 1 million units. Well after the heyday of interactive movies and adventure games in general, it became the very last of its breed to hit that magical milestone.

But, surprisingly in an industry where one profitable game tends to beget another one just like it, CyberFlix never even tried to make anything else like Adventure Out of Time. After the game’s initial release and modest initial success, Andrew Nelson had wanted to continue to plow the same ground, with a game set aboard another glamorous and doomed means of conveyance: the airship Hindenburg. (Adventure Out of Time itself includes a hint about what was gestating in Nelson’s mind, via a Hindenburg ticket stub you can stumble across in your desk drawer in 1942.) “We’ve got this historical-fiction genre nailed,” said Nelson. “We have this new audience of people who never played a computer game.” But Bill Appleton, looking back on a 1996 which hadn’t yielded any huge adventure hits like in earlier years, wasn’t so sure. Nelson finally gave up trying to convince him and left the company in April of 1997, eight months before Cameron’s film changed everything. CyberFlix released only one major game after Adventure Out of Time, a pirate caper called Redjack: Revenge of the Brethren that returned to the model of Lunicus and Jump Raven, combining multimedia-heavy adventure-style gameplay with 3D action. It sank without a trace even as Adventure Out of Time was soaring to new heights; by some accounts, it sold as few as 10,000 copies in all.

That was enough to convince Bill Appleton, an unsentimental realist about the games market, that his company simply wasn’t made for these times. He was able to face what most others in his position would have closed their eyes to: that the success of Adventure Out of Time was sui generis, a fluke driven by a fortuitous happenstance, a stroke of blind luck that would never, ever come again, no matter how great an adventure game they made next time out. For it did nothing to change the fact that the multimedia boom, which had always been more wishful thinking than reality, was over, and the styles of game it had favored were in precipitous decline. So, he set about dismantling his company even as millions were still pouring into it from Adventure Out of Time. Better to pocket that money and go out a winner than to piss a fortune away on some grandiose new production that was as doomed to fail as the Titanic had been doomed to strike that iceberg. It was a brutal decision, but, from a pure business standpoint at least, it’s hard to argue that it was the wrong one.

Still, there are lingering questions about the way Appleton went about it, especially the bonuses of close to $2 million which he awarded to himself over the course of 1998 even as he was busily shedding staff. On November 30 of that year, he announced to the last of his employees that CyberFlix was done as anything but a holding company to collect the last of the revenues from Adventure Out of Time. Then he decamped for Silicon Valley to “build enterprise software for small companies,” never even saying goodbye to the four other dreamers who had once gathered in his cellar. Of them, only visual artist Jamie Wicks stayed in the games industry, going on to work on the hugely popular EA Sports lineup.

Neither Billy nor Alex, those two unlikely game developers interviewed by J.C. Herz when they were making Adventure Out of Time, ever worked in the industry again either. Likewise, Knoxville’s dream of becoming a new locus of artsy high tech died with CyberFlix. A 1999 history of the company’s rise and fall, written by one Jack Neely for the alternative urban newspaper Metro Pulse, describes the old offices standing “empty and silent,” bringing to mind those haunted corridors of the Titanic in Adventure Out of Time.

“This weekend I was in a mall in Atlanta,” said one former CyberFlix employee whom Neely interviewed for his article, “going through [a] store, and they had a copy of [Adventure Out of Time] on the cheap rack. It’s still around. But it’s kind of sad to see it there.” Already by then, the best game by far to come out of Cyberflix had met the inevitable fate of all Titanic productions, just another unmoored piece of ephemera in the ever-growing debris field of pop culture that surrounds the most famous sunken ship in the world.

(Sources: the books Titanic and the Making of James Cameron by Paula Parisi and Joystick Nation by J.C. Herz; InfoWorld of September 14 1987; Compute! of March 1989; Computer Play of April 1989; MacWorld of May 1989, June 1989, April 1992, June 1992, January 1994, and February 1995; Computer Gaming World of August 1993, April 1994, December 1995, and March 1997; MacUser of October 1993 and January 1996; Next Generation of November 1996; Knoxville News Sentinel of November 20 2006; Dragon of February 1987; JOM volume 50 number 1; Knoxville Metro Pulse 942; Newsweek of August 28 1994; Entertainment Weekly of September 22 1995. Online source include an Adventure Out of Time retrospective at PC Gamer, a Game Developer interview with Andrew Nelson, and Stay Forever’s interview with Andrew Nelson.

Titanic: Adventure Out of Time is available for digital purchase at GOG.com.)

Comments
23 Responses

- Derek

October 21, 2022 at 5:12 pm

Dust is indeed an awkward game. In addition to its general air of hokiness, its flexible approach to puzzle-solving, in which several puzzles have more than one solution, ends up tripping over itself. Sometimes the same problem can be solved twice, and sometimes taking one route to solve a puzzle will cause you to miss out on significant plot points that only appear on another route. In one case, there’s an item that you can but do not need to give away early in the game, which will become indispensable for a later puzzle. If you didn’t give it away early in the game, it will actually disappear from your inventory when the later puzzle crops up, requiring you to appease another character to give it back.

That said, there’s a remarkable amount of depth and ambition to the game’s backstory, including an entire mythology for the fictitious Native American tribe and a history of the town that goes back 250 years and encompasses such details as why there are no adobe buildings in the center of town. I find it strangely fascinating.

- Marco

October 21, 2022 at 5:39 pm

Clearly we do have a difference in taste: I’ve come to realise that I really can’t stand what I call “crossword puzzle” games, of which Day of the Tentacle and Discworld II are prime examples, i.e. there’s a set of objects and a set of non-player characters, all dispersed over a wide area. You have to find and match everything, it’s all very static and abstract, and often (I guess because they blur the line between animate and inanimate) a bit macabre.

Dust and Titanic: AOOT try to do two things very differently: the game sets you objectives but there’s more than one way to achieve them, and the non-player characters aren’t just roadblocks but have their own lives, routines and agendas. For me, that enables a suspension of disbelief which simply isn’t possible with crossword puzzle games. Although I fully agree Dust goes too far into broad comedy at points, I can see what they were getting at. I suspect they took inspiration from Tombstone (1993), one of the last great western films and one that frankly does manage to combine a bit of Unforgiven with a bit of Blazing Saddles. As Dust approaches the final showdown I genuinely started to feel tense and watchful, even when I was away from the computer.

With Titanic: AOOT, I grew up reading A Night to Remember and so when the game starts using the actual text of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to point you to actual locations like Scotland Road and the Parisian Café, that worked for me on a really deep, personal level. As you point out, the game’s atmosphere is its biggest draw and that is realised much less well in the sinking section. Interestingly, many fans of the game seem to like best of all the 1942 flat right at the beginning – Chopin’s Prelude on the radio, the landlady you can never push past, the mementoes of a life half-lived.

My personal criteria for the ideal adventure game puzzle are that 1) It should be self-contained (not having to pixel-hunt the whole game area); 2) It should feel plausible for the situation (not opening a door with a fox-chicken-grain puzzle); and 3) It should require a clever leap of logic. On that basis, the briefcase bomb is my favourite puzzle in any adventure game, with the Matryoshka safe also excellent, and in Dust I’d rate the prescription puzzle and the bank vault very highly too.

Finally, a shoutout to the first commenter that I agree the journal in Dust is a clever and subtle piece of narrative writing, which, if you have the patience to read through it all, gives a whole lot more depth to all the characters you’ve met.

- Gnoman

October 21, 2022 at 10:18 pm

“Among the longstanding but long-discredited Titanic tropes they trotted out are the claims that the steel used in the ship’s hull was somehow defective by the standards of the time”

Without having played the game, I don’t know how this is used, but the theory that there was something seriously wrong in the steel used for Titanic was everywhere at the time this game was made. Samples of steel taken from the wreck were tested and found to be far more brittle than it should have been, and these results were published in 1995 and early 1996. While those studies also stated that no period testing methods would have found the claimed flaws, the possibility of bad steel may well have been a case of the designer trying to use the very latest scholarship.

- Jimmy Maher

October 22, 2022 at 9:20 am

I thought the steel claim had already been disproved by 1996, but it seems not. Some steel was recovered from the sunken ship’s hull for testing that very year. The conclusion, published two years later in a metallurgical journal, was that the steel, although certainly not up to modern standards, was as good as could be purchased at the time the Titanic was built. This was the study that put the “bad steel” claim to bed for good.

In short… thanks! ;)

- Lava Ghost

October 21, 2022 at 11:07 pm

“They came back raving about what they proclaimed it to be that rarest of beasts” -> “proclaimed to be”

Great article!

- Jimmy Maher

October 22, 2022 at 9:10 am

Thanks!

- morg

October 22, 2022 at 12:49 am

Wait, so if the best ending has you wish away the 1917 revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union while Hitler becomes a painter of light avant la lettre, does that mean Russia remains a feudal society under the thumb of the tsar and China a plaything for Western imperialists?

Really interesting series! I’d wondered if you were going to cover Starship Titanic at all, which I’d seen in stores back in the day but never played, but then again it does have nothing whatsoever to do with history aside from the name as far as I know.

- Jimmy Maher

October 22, 2022 at 9:23 am

If I remember correctly, Russia goes liberal democratic; the first Russian revolution happens, but not the second. China goes entirely unmentioned.

I will write about Starship Titanic at a later date. Terrible game, but terrible in interesting ways — and a nice excuse for looking at Douglas Adams’s later life. ;)

- Jonathan Badger

October 24, 2022 at 6:08 pm

Also, Sun Yat-Sen’s revolution against the Chinese Emperor was in February 1912 (two months before the Titanic sinking) so presumably happened regardless.

- Jeff Thomas

October 27, 2022 at 10:17 pm

Ooh I’m glad to hear you will be covering Starship Titanic at some point. It IS a terrible game, there’s just no way around that, but it still fascinated me in its concept and world building. I look forward to hearing the story of how it turned out the way it did, though I have a feeling it will be a bit depressing, maybe at some point a good game went terribly wrong for avoidable reasons.

- Aula

October 22, 2022 at 5:49 am

“Can it it muster the gravitas”

duplicate “it”

“a mad scramble at CyberFlix to crank up the proverbial presses once again”

Presumably also the literal presses that were used to actually make the CD-ROMs.

- Jimmy Maher

October 22, 2022 at 9:12 am

Thanks!

- Alex

October 22, 2022 at 6:38 am

I have to confess that I never saw Titanic. Of course, it was all around around me like you describe, but I always thought it was some typical cheesy romantic movie, so it never caught my interest. And while I still have to check out the titanic game on youtube, I really like the quote from “Alex”. Very pragmatic. I hope he did well later in life.

Aside from that, I just watched a clip of Lunicus and I was stunned. It clearly reminded me of games like Half Life and Deus Ex. It seems to me it was clearly ahead of its time.

- Wade

October 22, 2022 at 8:00 am

Jump Raven was cool and fun (I’ve still got the big (I mean very big) boxed edition with nothing inside but a CD in a jewelcase and cardboard padding). But at the time I was conscious of the way the GUI kept the play area kind of small.

- Nate

October 23, 2022 at 2:35 am

Nice work on this series.

“He moved to Silicon Valley, took control of a team of programmers at Silicon Beach, and made SuperCard”

I don’t understand this. Silicon Beach is in LA, not the Bay Area
. Maybe you mean that was the name of his company? If so, adding “Software” to the name might clarify it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Beach_Software

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2022 at 8:14 am

Yeah, it’s a little confusing. Silicon Beach Software was indeed based in Silicon Beach, but Appleton repeatedly stated upon returning to Knoxville that he had been working in Silicon Valley. His current Wikipedia page, which looks suspiciously publicist-crafted, says the same. I have to assume that Silicon Beach had teams in the Valley…

Anyway, slight edit made. Thanks!

- Michael

October 24, 2022 at 12:14 am

I’m not sure why I thought to check this, but the cafe on the titanic was (If I remember my high-school French, correctly) called the “Café Parisien”, with an “e” – of course, the game might also have got this wrong.

- Jimmy Maher

October 24, 2022 at 5:55 am

No, they got it right and I got it wrong. Thanks!

- Lee Jones

October 30, 2022 at 4:52 pm

I just wanna say, as someone who is massively obsessed with the Titanoc since I was a child, I greatly appreciate these last three articles.

Thank you for this spotlight.

- René Moortgat

November 3, 2022 at 1:49 am

“You can roam freely through First Class, Second Class, and Steerage Class”

Either Third Class or steerage, steerage class is not a term. Third Class was colloquially termed “steerage” because in earlier ocean liners it tended to be housed on the stern of the ship, near the steering mechanism, where vibrations and noise were most keenly felt.

“It opens not in 1912 in the North Atlantic but in 1942, in London at the height of Blitz”

This is a historical error in the game itself, as in April 1942 the Blitz had already ended. Mass German bombing of London ended around summer 1941, as the Germans shifted their efforts and airforce to the East for the invasion of the Soviet Union. There was sporadic bombing of London for the remainder of the war, but never again with the same intensity as in 1940-1941, even when the V1 and V2 bombs started falling in 44.

Loved the review of one my favourite games, thanks so much for your work :)

- Jimmy Maher

November 3, 2022 at 3:41 pm

Thanks!

- Marco

November 3, 2022 at 4:57 pm

Just to add, the prologue scene of the game takes place on 14th April 1942. As you say, the actual Blitz had ended a year earlier – clearly they had a choice between being historically accurate but making it the 29th anniversary and making it a round 30 years at the cost of an anachronism, and went for the latter.

However, all the other war events mentioned, in the news bulletin on the radio and in the artefacts around the flat, are historically accurate for April 1942, showing how much effort they put in.

- JJ Japan

November 15, 2022 at 4:38 am

“the Turkish sauna, with its alarmingly named “electric bath”

Off topic, but I live in Japan and the public bath houses here sometimes have “denki furo” aka electric baths. You recline in chest deep hot water while a low level electrical current passes through your nether regions. It’s… weird.

Anyway great article as always! Thanks very much!

The Pandora Directive
November 4, 2022

When we started out with Mean Streets, we wanted a vintage, hard-boiled detective from the 1930s and 1940s. You know, the Humphrey Bogart, Raymond Chandler classic character. But since then, we’ve changed our picture of [our detective] Tex [Murphy]. We want to see some human vulnerability. We don’t want the superhero. Too much of the videogame genre is just these invincible characters. They aren’t real; they don’t have texture; they don’t have any kind of fabric to their personality. It’s not very interesting really, dealing strictly with such a one-dimensional character.

For us, the idea was to make this person seem more real. Whether he’s fumbling around or whatever — okay, let’s give him a talent, but let’s put a few defects in his character. He’s still a good guy, but he screws up a lot and says the wrong thing. He’s really from a different time period. We set it in the future because we wanted to give it the gadgets and get it out of today. So we take this man out of time. The general focus of Tex is this: I’m this guy who’s got these problems, who tries to date women but has a hard time with it, and ends up dating the wrong women. If someone good actually likes Tex, well, he figures there must be something wrong with them.

But now, to take Tex down three different paths… this is very interesting.

— Chris Jones in 1995, speaking about plans for The Pandora Directive

Under a Killing Moon, the first interactive full-motion-video film noir to feature the perpetually down-on-his-luck detective-out-of-time Tex Murphy, didn’t become one of that first tier of mid-1990s adventure games that sold over a million copies, captured mainstream headlines, and fomented widespread belief in a new era of interactive mainstream entertainment. It did become, however, a leading light of the second tier, selling almost half a million copies for its Salt Lake City-based developer and publisher Access Software over the course of the year after its release in late 1994. Such numbers were enough to establish Tex Murphy as something more than just a sideline to Links, Access’s enormously profitable series of golf simulations. Indeed, they made a compelling case for a sequel, especially in light of the fact that the second game ought to cost considerably less to make than the $5 million that had been invested in the first, what with the sequel being able to reuse an impressive game engine whose creation had eaten up a good chunk of that budget. The sequel was officially underway already by the beginning of 1995.

The masterminds of the project were once again Chris Jones and Aaron Conners — the former being the man who had invented the character of Tex Murphy and who still played him onscreen when not moonlighting as Access’s chief financial officer (or vice versa), the latter being the writer who had breathed new life into him for Under a Killing Moon. The sequel was to be an outlier in the novelty-driven world of game development, representing a creative and writerly evolution rather than a technological one. For the fact was that the free-roaming 3D adventuring engine used in Under a Killing Moon was still very nearly unique.

Conners concocted a new script, called The Pandora Directive, that was weightier and just plain bigger than what had come before; it was projected to require about half again as much time to play through. It took place in the same post-apocalyptic future and evinced the same Raymond Chandler-meets-Blade Runner aesthetic, but it also betrayed a marked new source of inspiration: the hit television series The X-Files, whose murky postmodern vision of sinister aliens and labyrinthine government conspiracies was creeping into more and more games during this era. Conners was forthright about its influence in interviews, revealing at the same time something of the endearingly gawky wholesomeness of The Pandora Directive’s close-knit, largely Mormon developers, which sometimes sat a little awkwardly alongside the subject matter of their games. Watching The X-Files in secret, away from the prying eyes of spouses and children, was about as edgy as this bunch ever got in their personal lives.

Everyone else in the development team is a family man, and X-Files is a little heavy for the kids. So they all ask me to record it. I bring it in and we watch it during lunch. I really like the show. It’s been nice because we watch carefully to see what they do with music and lighting to portray a mood. Their production is closer to what we do than to a cinematic feature — tighter budget, working faster. So we found the show very informative.

If anything, The X-Files’s influence on The Pandora Directive’s plot is a little too on-the-nose. Like its television inspiration, the game revolves around the UFO that allegedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, the wellspring of a thousand overlapping conspiracy theories in both real life and fiction. If the one in the game is ultimately less intricately confounding than its television counterpart, that is only, one senses, because Conners had less space to develop his mythology. It’s all complete nonsense, of course, but The Pandora Directive is hardly the only game to mine escapist fun from the overwrought fever dreams of the conspiracy theorists.

But Jones and Conners were as eager to experiment with the form of their game as its content. Like the vast majority of adventure games, Under a Killing Moon had draped only a thin skein of player agency over a plot whose broad beats were as fixed as those of any traditional novel or film. You could tinker with the logistical details, in other words — maybe do certain things in a different order from some other player — but the overall arc of the story remained fixed. Conners’s script for The Pandora Directive aimed to change that, at least partially. While your path to unraveling the conspiracy would remain mostly set in stone, you would be able to determine Tex’s moral arc, if you will. If you played him as a paragon of virtue, he might just win true love and find himself on the threshold of an altogether better life by the end of the game. Cut just a few ethical corners here and there, and Tex would finish the game more or less where he’d always been, just about managing to keep his head above water and make ends meet, in a financial and ethical sense. But play him as a complete jerk, and he’d wind up dissipated and alone. Chris Jones on the bad path, which was clearly a challenge for this particular group of people to implement:

It’s a gradual fall. Bit by bit. Bad decision here, another there. As Tex sees it and the surroundings begin to change, he realizes that he blew it. His opportunity’s gone; this other girl is dead because of his mistake. And that darkens the character. So if each step gets you just a little darker, then it’s believable. It starts to have a real texture to it. That’s what we’re trying to do. Tex makes choices, tripping down the dark path, and starts to question himself: “Do I want to save myself? Or maybe this is what I want.” And then eventually you’re trapped. And that’s when it gets very interesting. We start to give Tex some options where the player will say, “Whoa! Can I make this choice?” By the end of the game, he turns into a real cynical bastard. If he chooses to stay on the darker side — each choice is just a shade of gray really, but all those shades of gray add up to a pretty dark character by the time you’re done. Just like in life.

I’m a bit uncomfortable about the way the [dark] path turns out. That was never my vision of what Tex could be. On the other hand, we have this medium which allows you to do such a thing. It is our competitive advantage over movies and television to be able to say to our audience, “Sit in this seat, make different decisions, and see how it turns out.” If we can pull it off with our characterizations and acting… well, now, that’s a very powerful medium. And so I feel like we have a responsibility to do that, to provide these kinds of choices. As I said, as an actor, I feel uncomfortable with this portrayal of Tex. But I feel it would shortchange people who buy the game to say, no, this is Tex, do it my way. If you’re kind of leaning down the dark path, take it and see what happens. You become the character. I’m in your hands.

In addition to the artistic impulse behind it, the more broad-brushed interactivity was intended to allay one of the most notable weaknesses of adventure games as a commercial proposition: the fact that they cost as much or more than other types of games to buy, but, unlike them, were generally interesting to play through only once. Jones and Conners hoped that their players would want to experience their game two or three times, in order to explore the possibility space of Tex’s differing moral arcs.

They implemented a user-selectable difficulty level, another rarity in adventure games, for the same reason. The “Entertainment” level gives access to a hint system; the “Game Players” level removes that, whilst also removing some in-game nudges, adding some red herrings to throw you off the scent, making some of the puzzles more complex, and adding time limits here and there. Again, Jones and Conners imagined that many players would want to go through the story once at Entertainment level, then try to beat the game on Game Players.

But the most obvious way that Access raised the bar over Under a Killing Moon was the cast and crew that they hired for the cinematic cut scenes and dialogs that intersperse your first-person explorations as Tex Murphy. While the first games had employed such Hollywood actors as Margot Kidder, Brian Keith, Russell Means, and even the voice of James Earl Jones as its narrator, it had done so only as an afterthought, once Jones and Conners had already built the spine of their game around local Salt Lake City worthies. This time they chose to invest a good part of the money they had saved from their tools budget into not just “real” actors but a real, professional director.

The official resumé which Access’s press releases provided for Adrian Carr, the man chosen for the latter role, was written on a curve typical of interactive movies, treating the five episodes he had directed of the cheesy children’s show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, his most prominent American credit to date, like others might a prestigious feature film. “He has directed, written, and/or edited work in almost every genre, from features to documentaries, television drama to commercials,” Access wrote breathlessly. All kidding aside, Carr really was an experienced journeyman, who had directed two low-budget features in his native Australia and edited a number of films for Hollywood. He had never seriously played a computer game in his life, but that didn’t strike Jones and Conners as a major problem; they were confident that they had a handle on that side of the house. Carr was brought in not least because professional actors of the sort that he’d seen before on television or movie screens tended to intimidate Chris Jones, who’d directed Under a Killing Moon himself. He “didn’t know how to handle them exactly,” allowed Conners.

Whatever the initial impulse behind it, it proved to be a very smart move. Adrian Carr may not have been the film industry’s ideal of an auteur, but he was more than capable of giving The Pandora Directive a distinctive look that wasn’t just an artifact of the technology behind the production — a look which, once again, stemmed principally from The X-Files, from that television show’s way of portraying its shadowy conspiracies using an equally shadowy visual aesthetic. Carr:

We started lighting darker, and putting in Venetian blinds and shadows and reflections to create texture. And the poor people who render the backgrounds moaned, “But it’s so dark!” And I’d say, “But it’s a movie!”

This has been one of my contributions, I guess. The technicians have been learning about mood. Like when Tex comes home and the room is only lit from outside, or there’s just one lamp on — see, guys, the murkiness is actually good, it creates a certain texture for the mood that we want.

Gordon Fitzpatrick (Kevin McCarthy) and Tex Murphy (Chris Jones).

The cast as a whole remained a mixture of amateurs and professionals; those returning characters that had been played by locals in the previous game were still played by them in this one. Among these was Tex Murphy himself, played by Chris Jones, the man whom everyone agreed really was Tex in some existential sense; he probably wasn’t much of an actor in the abstract, probably would have been a disaster in any other role, but he was just perfect for this one. Likewise, Tex’s longtime crush Chelsee Bando and the other misfits that surround his office on Chandler Avenue all came back to make up for in enthusiasm what they lacked in acting-school credentials.

Chelsee Bando (Suzanne Barnes) is literally the girl next door; she runs a newspaper stand just outside of Tex’s office and apartment.

On the other hand, none of the professional actors make a return appearance. (I must admit that I sorely miss the dulcet tones of James Earl Jones.) The cast instead includes Tanya Roberts, who was one of Charlie’s Angels (in the show’s last season only), a Bond girl, and a Playboy centerfold during the earlier, more successful years of her career; here she plays Regan Madsen, the sultry femme fatale who may just be able to make Tex forget his unrequited love for Chelsee. Also present is Kevin McCarthy, who had been a Hollywood perennial with his name in every casting director’s Rolodex for almost half a century by the time this game was made, with his role in the 1956 B-movie classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers standing out as the one real star turn on his voluminous resumé; here he plays Dr. Gordon Fitzpatrick, the former Roswell scientist who draws Tex into the case. And then there’s John Agar, who first captured international headlines back in 1945, when he married the seventeen-year-old former child star Shirley Temple. He never got quite that much attention again, but he did put together another long and fruitful career as a Hollywood supporting player; he appears here as Thomas Malloy, another would-be Roswell whistleblower.

Tex Murphy and Regan Madsen (Tanya Roberts).

But the Pandora Directive actor that absolutely everyone remembers is Barry Corbin, in the role of Jackson Cross, the government heavy who is prepared to shut down any and all investigations into the goings-on at Roswell by any and all means necessary. Whereas McCarthy and Agar built careers out of being handsome but not overly memorable presences on the screen — a quality which served them well in their multitude of supporting roles, in which they were expected to be competent enough to fulfill their character’s purpose but never so brilliant as to overshadow the real stars — Corbin was and is a character actor of a different, delightfully idiosyncratic type, with a look, voice, and affect so singular that millions of viewers who have never learned his name nevertheless recognize him as soon as he appears on their screen: “Oh, it’s that guy again…” At the time of The Pandora Directive, he was just coming off his most longstanding and, to my mind anyway, defining role: that of the former astronaut Maurice Minnifield, town patriarch of Cicely, Alaska, in the weird and beautiful television show Northern Exposure. In Corbin’s capable hands, Maurice became a living interrogation of red-blooded American manhood of the stoic John Wayne stripe, neglecting neither its nobility nor its toxicity, its comedy nor its pathos.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/NE2.mp4

Give Barry Corbin a great script, and he’ll knock the delivery out of the park (to choose a sports metaphor of which Maurice Minnifield would approve).

Although The Pandora Directive didn’t give Corbin an opportunity to embody a character of such well-nigh Shakespearean dimensions, it did give him a chance to have some fun. For unlike Maurice Minnifield, Jackson Cross is exactly what he appears to be on the surface: a villain’s villain of the first order. Corbin delighted in chewing up the scenery and spitting it in the face of the hapless Chris Jones — a.k.a, Tex Murphy. Jones, revealing that he wasn’t completely over his inferiority complex when it came to professional actors even after giving up the director’s job:

It’s already a little intimidating to work with people who are just consummate professionals. Then the first scene we shot together, Tex was supposed to be grilled by Barry’s character, Jackson Cross. I’m sitting in this chair, and he just came up and scared the hell out of me. Really, he looked through me and I just melted. Fortunately, that’s what my character was supposed to do. I truly felt like I was going to die if I didn’t answer him right. It was frightening.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/pandora.mp4

The Pandora Directive couldn’t offer Corbin writing on the level of Northern Exposure at its best, but he clearly had fun with it anyway.

The Pandora Directive was released with high hopes all around on July 31, 1996, about 21 months after Under a Killing Moon. It shipped on no fewer than six CDs, two more than its predecessor, a fairly accurate gauge of its additional scope and playing time.

Alas, its arrival coincided with the year of reckoning for the interactive movie as a viable commercial proposition. Despite the improved production values and the prominent placement of Barry Corbin’s unmistakable mug on the box, The Pandora Directive sold only about a third as many copies as Under a Killing Moon. Instead of pointing the way toward a new generation of interactive mainstream entertainment, it was doomed to go down in media history as an oddball artifact that could only have been created within a tiny window of time in the mid-1990s. Much like Jane Jensen in the case of The Beast Within, Chris Jones and Aaron Conners were afforded exactly one opportunity in their careers to make an interactive movie on such a scale and with such unfettered freedom as this, before the realities of a changing games industry sharply limited their options once again.

Small wonder, then, that both still speak of The Pandora Directive in wistful tones today. Developed in an atmosphere of overweening optimism, it is and will probably always remain The One for them, the game that came closest to realizing their dreams for the medium, having been created at a time when a merger of Silicon Valley and Hollywood still seemed like a real possibility, glittering and beckoning just over the far horizon.

And how well does The Pandora Directive stand up today, divorced from its intended role as a lodestar for this future of media that never came to be? Pretty darn well for such an undeniable period piece, I would say, with only a few reservations. If I could only choose one of them, I think I would be forced to go with Under a Killing Moon over this game, just because The Pandora Directive can occasionally feel a bit smothered under the weight of its makers’ ambitions, at the expense of some of its predecessor’s campy fun. That said, it’s most definitely a close-run thing; this game too has a lot to recommend it.

Certainly there’s more than a whiff of camp about it as well. As the video clip just above amply attests, not even the talented actors in the cast were taking their roles overly seriously. In fact, just like Under a Killing Moon, this game leaves me in a bit of a pickle as a critic. I’ve dinged quite a few other games on this site for “lacking the courage of their convictions,” as I’ve tended to put it, for using comedy as a crutch, a fallback position when they can’t sustain their drama for reasons of acting, writing, or technology — or, most commonly, all three. I can’t in good faith absolve The Pandora Directive of that sin, any more than I can Under a Killing Moon. And yet it doesn’t irritate me here like it usually does. I think this is because there’s such a likeability to these Tex Murphy games. They positively radiate creative joy and generosity; one never doubts for a moment that they were made by nice people. And niceness is, as I’ve also written from time to time on this site, a very undervalued quality, in art as in life. The Tex Murphy games are just good company, the kind you’re happy to invite into your home. Playing them is like watching a piece of community theater put on by your favorite neighbors. You want them to succeed so badly that you end up willing them over the rough patches with the power of your imagination.

The archetypal Access Software story for me involves a Pandora Directive character named Archie Ellis, a hapless young UFO researcher who, in the original draft of the script, stepped where he didn’t belong and got himself killed in grisly fashion by Jackson Cross. Barry Corbin “just dominates that scene,” said Aaron Conners later. “It was like we let this evil essence into the studio.” Everyone was shocked by what had been unleashed: “The mood on the set was just so oppressive.” So, Conner scurried off to doctor the script, to give the player some way to save poor little Archie, feeling as he did that what he had just witnessed was simply too “traumatic” to leave an inevitability. You can call this an abject failure on his part to stick to his dramatic guns, but it’s hard to dislike him or his game for it, any more than you can, say, make yourself dislike Steve Meretzky for bringing the lovable little robot Floyd back to life at the end of Planetfall, thereby undercutting what had been the most compelling demonstration to date of the power of games to move as well as entertain their players.

I won’t belabor the finer points of The Pandora Directive’s gameplay and interface here because they don’t depart at all from Under a Killing Moon. The first-person 3D exploration, which lets you move freely about a space, looking up and down and peering into and over things, remains as welcome as ever; I would love it if more adventure games had been done in this style. And once again there are a bevy of set-piece puzzles to solve, from piecing torn-up notes back together to manipulating alien mechanisms. Nothing ever outstays its welcome. On the contrary, The Pandora Directive does a consistently great job of switching things up: cut scenes yield to explorations, set-piece visual puzzles yield to dialog menus. There are even action elements here, especially if you choose the Game Player mode; your furtive wanderings through the long-abandoned Roswell complex itself, dodging the malevolent alien entity who now lives here, are genuinely frightening. This 3D space and one or two others are far bigger than anything we saw in the last game, just as the puzzle chains have gotten longer and knottier. And yet there’s still nothing unfair in this game, even in Game Player mode; it’s eminently soluble if you pay attention to the details and apply yourself, and contains no hidden dead ends. Say it with me one more time: the folks who made this game were just too nice to mistreat their players in the way of so many other adventure games.

Exploring Tex’s bedroom in first-person 3D. His choice of wall art is… interesting.

I would like to write a few more words about the game’s one big formal innovation, letting the player determine Tex’s moral arc. Jones and Conners deserve a measure of credit for even attempting such a thing in the face of technological restrictions that militated emphatically against it. Live-action video clips filled a huge amount of space and cost a lot of money to produce, such that to offer a game with branching paths, thus leaving a good chunk of the content on the CDs unseen by many players, must have cut Chris Jones’s accountant’s heart to the quick. Points for effort, then.

As tends to the be the case with many such experiments, however, I’m not sure how much it truly adds to the player’s final experience. One of the big problems here is the vagueness of the dialog choices you’re given. Rather than showing you exactly what Tex will say, the menus offer options like “insensitive but cheerful” or “pretend nothing’s wrong,” which are open to quite a range of overlapping interpretations. In not making Tex’s next line of dialog explicit, the designers were trying to solve another problem, that of the inherent anticlimax of clicking on a sentence and then listening to Tex dutifully parrot it back. Unfortunately, though, the two solutions conflict with one another. Far too often, you click an option thinking it means one thing, only to realize that Tex has taken it in a completely different way. This doesn’t have to happen very often before the vision of Tex the game is depicting has diverged in a big way from the one you’re trying to inhabit, making the whole exercise rather moot if not actively frustrating.

Aaron Conners himself admitted that “95 percent of the people who play will end up on the B path,” meaning the one where Tex doesn’t prove himself to be a paragon of virtue and thus doesn’t get his lady love Chelsee — not yet, anyway — but doesn’t fall into a complete moral abyss either. And indeed, this was the ending I saw after trying to play as a reasonably standup guy. (For what it’s worth, I didn’t succeed in saving poor Archie either.) Predictably enough, the Internet was filled within days of the game’s release with precise instructions on how to hack your way through the thicket of dialog choices to arrive at the best ending (or the worst one, for that matter). All of which is well and good — fans gotta fan, after all — but is nevertheless the polar opposite of the organic experience that Jones and Conners intended. Why bother adding stuff that only 5 percent of your players will see without reading the necessary choices from a walkthrough? The whole thing strikes me as an example — thankfully, a rare one — of Jones and Conners rather outsmarting themselves, delivering a feature which sounded better in interviews about the amazing potential of interactive movies than it works in practice.

Then again, the caveat and saving grace which ought to be attached to my complaints is that none of it really matters all that much when all is said and done; the B ending that most of us will see is arguably the truest to the spirit of the Tex Murphy character anyway. And today, of course, you can pick and choose in the dialogs in whatever way feels best to you, then go hunt down the alternate endings on YouTube if you like.

It may sound strange to say in relation to a game about sinister government conspiracies, set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, but playing The Pandora Directive today feels like taking a trip back to a less troubled time. It’s just about the most 1990s thing ever, thanks not only to its passé use of video clips of real actors but to its X-Files-derived visual aesthetic, its subject matter (oh, for a time when the most popular conspiracy theories were harmless fantasies about aliens!), and even the presence of Barry Corbin, featured player in one of the decade’s iconic television programs. So, go play it, I say; go revel in its Mormon niceness. The post-millennial real world, more complicated and vexing than a thousand Roswell conspiracy theories, will still be here waiting for you when you return.

(Sources: the book The Pandora Directive: The Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba; Electronic Entertainment of July 1995; Computer Gaming World of March 1996 and December 1996; Retro Gamer 160. Online sources include the now-defunct Unofficial Tex Murphy Web Site and a documentary film put out by Chris Jones and Aaron Conners in recent years.

The Pandora Directive is available from GOG.com as a digital purchase.)

Comments
25 Responses

- Infinitron

November 4, 2022 at 4:52 pm

My problem with The Pandora Directive is that it’s *so* inspired by The X-Files that it feels like the game actually takes place in the 1990s. There’s very little use of the game’s post-nuclear future setting, as there was in Under A Killing Moon.

- Sean

November 4, 2022 at 5:54 pm

This: “Mighty Morphine Power Rangers” should probably be Morphin, not Morphine. That would be a different show entirely.

- David

November 4, 2022 at 5:55 pm

Correction:
” Mighty Morphine Power Rangers” should be ” Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” or perhaps “Morphin'”

The Power Rangers may be cheesy, but they weren’t drug dealers. ;)

- Jimmy Maher

November 4, 2022 at 6:18 pm

:) Thanks!

- Aula

November 4, 2022 at 7:01 pm

“first-person 3D otherwise existed only in the form of action-oriented shooters and static, node-based, pre-rendered Myst clones.”

Not quite true. Ultima Underworld and its sequel, Legends of Valour, and Betrayal at Krondor were among the first CRPGs with free-moving first-person 3D, and there were more of them by the time The Pandora Directive came out.

- Sarah Walker

November 4, 2022 at 7:29 pm

UAKM/TPD were’t even alone in being first-person 3D adventure games by this point – Gremlin’s Normality was an early 1996 point-and-clicker using a Doom-style engine.

- Jimmy Maher

November 4, 2022 at 8:23 pm

True. Thanks!

- Marco

November 4, 2022 at 11:04 pm

What was it about mid-90’s adventure games and Mayan labyrinths? Pandora Directive, Dust, Buried in Time and I’m sure others have very similar sections on that theme.

Seriously though, Pandora Directive’s real strength is its length. You absolutely get your money’s worth working through it even once, and then there’s all the replay value from the different paths. As you say, that aspect sounded a bit better in theory than it is in practice: to get on the best path you have to follow a very specific set of options in your first conversation with Chelsee, which you couldn’t guess and there’s no undoing.

My main issue with the game is that although the puzzles are satisfying to beat on an individual basis, they are implausibly abstract mathematical teasers that don’t follow from the plot. Additionally, the time limits to get maximum points are absolutely ridiculous, e.g. there’s a gradient-based jigsaw where they give you 3 minutes, and both times I went through the game it took me about 53 minutes. (They set much more sensible time limits in Overseer.)

- Aula

November 5, 2022 at 10:15 am

“What was it about mid-90’s adventure games and Mayan labyrinths?”

That’s actually easy to explain. In the 1990s there were a lot of crackpots claiming that the Mayan calendar “predicted” the end of the world in 2012, and The X-Files (among other things) did a lot to bring this idea into mainstream popular culture. Naturally this made many game makers to drop Mayan things into their games, and if you’re going to have your adventure game include an ancient Mayan temple, then obviously you’ll put a maze in it.

- Derek

November 5, 2022 at 7:11 pm

I’m not so sure. The 2012 phenomenon (as Wikipedia dubs it) was bandied about somewhat in the 1990s, but I think it only really gathered steam in the 2000s. The X-Files, which was surely the single biggest popularizer of the idea, only brought up the Maya calendar in its series finale in 2002, and the only adventure game I know of that involves the 2012 phenomenon and the Maya is The Omega Stone, from 2003.

Instead, I think it’s a combination of a couple of factors. The technology in the mid-1990s allowed people to explore locations in a visual medium as was never possible before, and exploring ancient ruins is a cool thing to do. So games were often set in the ruins of premodern societies that have some exotic cachet with the general public. Ancient Egypt is the most obvious one—in 1996 alone, at least three adventure games were partially or entirely set in Egypt—but the Maya probably take second place.

Second, the ancient astronaut hypothesis, which made a major splash in the 1970s, posited that various societies around the world (ones that seem exotic to Western audiences) had some connection with aliens. A particular Maya sarcophagus was one of the favorite pieces of “evidence” used by the hypothesis’ biggest evangelist, Erich von Däniken, so the general idea that the Maya might have some extraterrestrial connection was well established by the 1990s. That’s the context for the appearance of the Maya in Timelapse and, judging by the Wikipedia plot summary, in The Pandora Directive as well; it’s the context for the appearance of a nonspecific Mesoamerican site in Drowned God; and it’s probably the reason why The X-Files eventually connected the Maya calendar with alien invasion.

(I don’t know why Dust is relevant here, as the labyrinth in that case is supposed to have been built by a fictitious Puebloan society and not the Maya. I think that one is more of an offshoot of the “mystical Native Americans” trope that was big in the 1990s and was mostly applied to native peoples within the territory of the United States. Pueblo peoples only show up in one other game from this period, Timelapse, which supports my point about some societies having more cachet than others.)

- Ross

November 7, 2022 at 1:48 pm

Ancient Aliens make for cool sci fi stories and video games where you get to combine “cool ancient temple” with “cool sci fi lasers”, but von Danikenism has that whole unfortunate aspect where a lot of it comes down to white people saying “People who weren’t white achieved wonders which outclass anything Europe produced until millennia later? That can’t possibly be right. Must be aliens.”

- Marco

November 9, 2022 at 1:40 pm

You’re right the one in Dust isn’t Mayan – I lumped it in because structurally it’s similar to the others – roughly, they all give you a central table with markings to decipher and then doors north, south, east and west, which lead to separate challenges that you complete in your chosen order.

- Ahmet Elginöz

November 12, 2022 at 10:37 pm

“exploring ancient ruins is a cool thing to do.”
Also it is a cheap thing to do from cpu/gpu side. Reflaction is expensive, so you have stones and dust, viewing distance is expensive, so you have corners and turns which makes lighting easier too. 20 years ago I was writing a thesis on technological aspects defining architectural styles in videogames which I had to leave unfinished due to technical problems on my university’s registry database which is very ironic 8tself.

- Alex

November 5, 2022 at 6:31 am

Because of your enthustiatic article of “Under a Killing Moon”, I was so friggin´ close to buy it cheap on GOG, but then resisted. Well, since this article says the same things, I definitely will give these games a try on the next sale. I never played a FMV-Adventure before as they never appealed to me, but these games look like they would interest me. On an sidenote, Tex Murphy was somewhat known on the german market. My favourite game magazine gave him a mention, so I´m familiar to this name since the 90s.

- Metz O'Magic

November 5, 2022 at 11:42 am

About time you reviewed this one, though I respect you are following a certain chronology. It’s a toss-up whether this one or Gabriel Knight: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned is my favourite adventure game of all time. I guess I just like a good, lengthy, totally unpredictable yarn.

I was one of the walkthrough writers you mentioned; it was one of the first walkthroughs I wrote, way back in 1997. Because of the vagueness of the way the dialogue choices were presented, as you alluded to, I had to save the game just before every dialogue so I could figure out by trial and error how to get the player to all 7 paths/endings. As I recall, the ‘mildest’ ending on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams path was the hardest one to get to because Tex had to start off being a nasty, selfish twit but then redeem himself just enough near the end to get to that ending.

You’ve almost induced me to pluck it off the shelf and play it again. In the 2000’s you had to use a tool like VDMSound to get it to run at a decent pace, but now that processors are so fast you can use DOSBox.

- Leo Vellés

November 7, 2022 at 12:28 pm

Jimmy, I refresh the pague and now the mobile version isn’t working. This happened once some months ago. Hope You can fix it

- Jimmy Maher

November 7, 2022 at 12:42 pm

I was fixing some of the formatting problems on the mobile version (which I really, really need to learn to look at more often than once a year or so). It should be good to go again now.

- Leo Vellés

November 7, 2022 at 2:54 pm

It si fixes in this article, but Digital Antiquarian’s main page doesn’t load the mobile version

- Leo Vellés

November 7, 2022 at 2:56 pm

Correction: the main page works, but the Mastodon, for example, doesnt

- Leo Vellés

November 7, 2022 at 2:59 pm

Sorry to be so annoying, but checking again on the main page and it doesn’t load the mobile version. Maybe it’s My phone, idk

- Jimmy Maher

November 7, 2022 at 4:41 pm

Sorry. I think it should be okay now. This caching plug-in will be the death of me…

- Leo Vellés

November 8, 2022 at 10:38 am

Working perfect now!

- Steve Thompson

December 7, 2022 at 10:29 am

The documentary on YouTube is very nice and even has some shots of Bruce Carver, the founder of Access Software. I knew him and a few other immediate family members.

Yes, they were Mormons who were very nice and their humor can be cheesy. They like green Jello and they call Mac & Cheese “Yellow Death.”

If you click on the “Access”‘ tag link at the bottom of this article, it will take you to a couple other articles about Access Software, specifically about Bruce and Roger Carver. Another one is about, Leaderboard for the Commodore 64, a game that changed the world of simulated computer golfing which was later renamed LINKS.

I did see part of the development of Bruce’s first C64 game Neutral Zone. It felt like I was with ‘gods’ of video game programmers. It was the best of times. (There was no worst of times back then.)

As mentioned above, remember to also use the link provided at the end of the article ‘documentary film.’ Please watch it. It is very well done and even shows Bruce Carver at work! That was stunning to me since I haven’t seen him since the early 1980s. (He died very suddenly a few years back of cancer.)

Thanks for this great site and all your good work, Jimmy Maher. I wish you and everyone a very Merry Christmas.

- Brian Bagnall

December 23, 2022 at 3:40 pm

Anything by Bruce Carver was something you looked forward to back in the 80s. He infused his games with so much refinement and perfection. Things like shadows under the jet in Raid Over Moscow, smooth character animations, and actual voices. Those elements were mind blowing back then. The only game of his I didn’t really care for was Neutral Zone and that was his first published game.

- Steve Thompson

December 29, 2022 at 4:04 am

Neutral Zone became more of a novelty type game that was similar to an early “demo.” It showed off the graphics and sound of the C64, but in the style of a simple arcade game.

The game was released very early in the life of the C64 so it was new eye-candy at the time. But, it wasn’t a very good game. It just looked and sounded cool. He showed it to me when it was about halfway finished. It was hypnotic. But, the best was yet to come.

I always recommend Heavy Metal for the C64 because it’s a game not many have heard about that Bruce and his crew designed. It’s a true masterpiece with multiple stages similar to Raid Over Moscow and Beach Head.

Doing Windows, Part 10: Chicago
November 18, 2022

(As the name would indicate, this article marks a belated continuation of my series about the life and times of Microsoft Windows. But, because any ambitious dive into history such as this site has become is doomed to be a tapestry of stories rather than a single linear one, this article and the next couple of them will also pull on some of the other threads I’ve left dangling — most obviously, my series on the origins of the Internet and the World Wide Web, on the commercial online networks of the early personal-computing era, and on the shareware model for selling software online and the changes it wrought in the culture of gaming in particular. You might find some or all of the aforementioned worthwhile to read before what follows. Or just dive in and see how you go; it’s all good.)

For the vast majority of us in the PC software business, it’s important to realize that systems such as Windows 95 will be important and that systems such as Windows NT won’t be. Evolutionary changes are much easier for the market to accept. For a revolutionary upset to be accepted, it must be an order of magnitude better than what it seeks to replace. Not 25 percent or 33 percent better, but at least ten times better. Otherwise, change had better be gradual, like Windows 95. Products such as NT speak to too small a niche to be interesting. And even the NT sales that do occur don’t lead anywhere: right now I’m running on a network with an NT server, but no software is ever likely to be bought for that server. It sits in a closet that no one touches for weeks at a time. This is not the sort of platform on which to base your fortune.

If you’re choosing platforms for which to develop software, remember that what ultimately matters is not technical excellence but market penetration. The two rarely go hand-in-hand. This is not simply a matter of bowing to the foolish whims of the market, however: market penetration leads to standardization, and standards have tangible benefits that are more important than the coolest technical feature. Yes, Windows 95 still uses MS-DOS; no, it’s not a pure Win32 system; no, it’s not particularly integrated; no, it hasn’t been rewritten from the ground up; and yes, it is lacking some nice features found in Windows NT or OS/2. But none of these compromises will hurt Windows 95’s chances for success, and some will actually help make Windows 95 a success. Windows 95 will be the standard desktop-computing platform for the next five years, and that by itself is worth far more than the coolest technology.

— Andrew Schulman, 1994

In July of 1992, Microsoft hosted the first Windows NT Professional Developers Conference in San Francisco. The nearly 5000 hand-picked attendees were each given a coveted pre-release “developer’s version” of Windows NT (“New Technology”), the company’s next-generation operating system. “The major operating systems of today, DOS and Windows, were designed eight to twelve years ago, so they lie way behind our current hardware capabilities,” said one starry-eyed Microsoft partner. “We’ve now got bigger disks, displays, and memory, and faster CPUs than ever before. As a true 32-bit operating system, Windows NT exploits the power of the 32-bit chip.” Unlike Microsoft’s current 3.1 version of Windows and its predecessors, which were balanced precariously on the narrow foundation of MS-DOS like an elephant atop a lamp pole, Windows NT owed nothing to the past, and performed all the better for it.

But what follows is not the story of Windows NT.

It is rather the story of another operating system that was publicly mentioned for the very first time in passing at that same conference, an operating system whose user base over the course of the 1990s would eclipse that of Windows NT by a margin of about 50 to 1. Microsoft was calling it “Chicago” in 1992. The name derived from “Cairo,” a code name for a projected future version of Windows NT. “We wanted something between Seattle” — Microsoft’s home metropolitan area, which presumably stood for the current status quo — “and Cairo in terms of functionality,” said a Microsoft executive later. “The less ambitious picked names closer to Seattle — like Spokane for a minor upgrade, all the way to London for something closer to Cairo.” Chicago seemed like a suitable compromise — a daunting distance to travel, but not too daunting. The world would come to know the erstwhile Chicago three years later as Windows 95. It would become the most ballyhooed new operating system in the entire history of computing, even as it remained a far more compromised, less technically impressive piece of software architecture than Windows NT.

Why did Microsoft split their efforts along these two divergent paths? One answer lay in the wildly divergent hardware that was used to run their operating systems. Windows NT was aimed at the latest and the greatest, while Chicago was aimed at the everyday computers that everyday people tended to have in their offices and homes. But another reason was just as important. Microsoft had gotten to where they were by the beginning of the 1990s — to the position of the undisputed dominant force in personal computing — not by always or even usually having the best or most innovative products, but rather by being always the safe choice. “No one ever got fired for buying IBM,” ran an old maxim among corporate purchasing managers; in this new era, the same might be said about Microsoft. Part of being safe was placing a heavy emphasis on backward compatibility, thus ensuring that the existing software an individual or organization had gotten to know and love would continue to run on their shiny new Microsoft operating system. In the context of the early 1990s, this meant, for better or for worse, continuing to build at least one incarnation of Windows on top of MS-DOS, so that it could continue to run even a program written for the original IBM PC from 1981. Windows NT broke that compatibility in the name of power and performance — but, if getting that 1985-vintage version of WordPerfect up and running was more important to you than such distractions, Microsoft still had you covered.

Which isn’t to say, of course, that Microsoft wouldn’t have preferred for you to give up your hoary old favorites and enter fully into the brave new Windows world of mice and widgets. They had struggled for most of the 1980s to make Windows into a place where people wanted to live and work, and had finally broken through at the dawn of the new decade, with the release of Windows 3.0 in 1990 and 3.1 in 1992. The old stars of MS-DOS productivity software — names like the aforementioned WordPerfect, as well as Lotus, Borland, and others — were scrambling to adapt their products to a Windows-driven marketplace, even as Microsoft, whose ambitions for domination knew few bounds, was driving aggressively into the gaps with their own Microsoft Office lineup, which was tightly integrated with the operating system in ways that their competitors found difficult to duplicate. (This was due not least to Microsoft’s ability to take advantage of so-called “undocumented APIs,” hidden features and shortcuts provided by Windows which the company neglected to tell its competitors about — an underhanded trick that was an open secret in the software industry.) By  the summer of 1993, when Windows NT officially debuted with very little fanfare in the consumer press, Windows 3.x had sold 30 million copies in three years, and was continuing to sell at the healthy clip of 1.5 million copies per month. Windows had become the face of computing as the majority of people knew it, the MS-DOS command line a dusty relic of a less pleasant past.

With, that is, one glaring exception that is of special interest to us: Windows 3 had never caught on for hardcore gaming, and never would. Games were played on Windows 3, mind you. In fact, they were played extensively. Microsoft Solitaire, which was included with every copy of Windows, is almost certainly the single most-played computer game in history, having served as a distraction for hundreds of millions of bored office workers and students all over the world from 1990 until the present day. Some other games, generally of the sort that weren’t hugely demanding in hardware terms and that boasted a fair measure of casual appeal, did almost equally well. Myst, for example, sold an astonishing 5 million or more copies for Windows 3, while Microsoft’s own “Entertainment Packs,” consisting mostly of more simple time fillers much like Solitaire, also did very well for themselves.

But then there were the hardcore gamers, the folks who considered gaming an active hobby rather than a passive distraction, who waited eagerly for each new issue of Computer Gaming World to arrive in their mailbox and spent hundreds or thousands of dollars every year keeping the “rigs” in their bedrooms up to date, in much the same way that a previous generation of mostly young men had tinkered endlessly with the hot rods in their garages. The people who made games for this group told Microsoft, accurately enough, that Windows as it was currently constituted just wouldn’t do for their purposes. It was too inflexible in its assumptions about the user interface and much else, and above all just too slow. They loved the idea of a runtime environment that would let them forget about the idiosyncrasies of 1000 different graphics and sound cards, thanks to the magic of integrated device drivers. But it had to be flexible, and it had to be fast — and Windows 3 was neither of those things. Microsoft admitted in one of their own handbooks that “game graphics under Windows make slug racing look exciting.”

One big issue that game developers had with Windows 3 for a long time was that it was a 16-bit operating system in a world where even the most ordinary off-the-shelf computer hardware had long since gone 32 bit. The largest number that can be represented in 16 bits is 65,535, or 64 kilobytes. A 16-bit program can therefore only allocate memory in discrete segments of no more than 64 K. This became more and more of a problem as games grew more complex in terms of logic and especially graphics and sound. MS-DOS was also 16-bit, but, being far simpler, it was much easier to hack. The tools known as “32-bit DOS extenders” did just that, giving game developers a way of using 32-bit processors to their maximum potential more or less transparently, with a theoretical upper limit of fully 4 GB per memory segment. (This was, needless to say, much, much more memory than anyone actually had in their computers in the early 1990s.) Ironically, Windows 3 itself depended on a 32-bit DOS extender to be able to run on top of MS-DOS, but it didn’t extend all of its benefits to the applications it hosted. That did finally change, however, in July of 1993, when Microsoft released an add-on called “Win32S” that did make it possible to run 32-bit applications in Windows 3 (including many applications written for Windows NT).

That was one problem more or less solved. But another one was the painfully slow Windows graphics libraries that served as the intermediary between applications software and the bare metal of the machine. These were impossible to bypass by design; one of the major points of Windows was to provide a buffer between applications and the hardware, to enable features such as multitasking, virtual memory, and a consistent look and feel from program to program. But game developers saw only how slow the end result was. The only way they could consider coding for Windows was if Microsoft could provide libraries that were as fast — or at least 90 percent as fast — as banging the bare metal in MS-DOS.

In the meantime, game developers would continue to write for vanilla MS-DOS and to sweat the details of all those different graphics and sound cards for themselves, and the hardcore gamers would have to continue to spend hours tweaking memory settings and IRQ addresses in order to get each new game they bought up and running just exactly perfectly. Admittedly, some gamers did consider this almost half the fun, a talent for it as much a badge of honor as a high score in Warcraft; boys do love their technological toys, after all. Still, it was obvious to any sensible observer that the games industry as a whole would be better served by a universal alternative to the current bespoke status quo. Hardcore gamers made up a relatively small proportion of the people using computers, but they were a profitable niche, what with their voracious buying habits, and they were also trail blazers and influencers in their fashion. It would seem that Microsoft had a vested interest in keeping them happy.

Windows NT might sound like the logical place for such early adopters to migrate, but this was not Microsoft’s view. “Serious” users of computers in corporate and institutional environments — the kind at which Windows NT was primarily targeted — had a long tradition of looking down on computers that happened to be good at playing games, and this attitude had by no means disappeared entirely by the early 1990s. In short, Microsoft had no wish to muddy the waters surrounding their most powerful operating system with a bunch of scruffy gamers. Games of all stripes were to be left to the consumer-grade operating systems, meaning the current Windows 3 and the forthcoming Chicago. And even there, they seemed to be a dismayingly low priority for Microsoft in the eyes of the people who made them and played them.

This doesn’t mean that there was no progress whatsoever. By very early in 1994, a young Microsoft programmer named Chris Hecker, working virtually alone, had put together a promising system called WinG, which let Windows games and other software render graphics surprisingly quickly to a screen buffer, with a minimum of interference from the heretofore over-officious operating system.

Hecker knew exactly what game to target as a proof of concept for WinG: DOOM, id Software’s first-person shooter, which had recently risen up from the shareware underground to complete the remaking of a broad swath of gamer culture in the image of id’s fast-paced, ultra-violent aesthetic. If DOOM could be made to run well under WinG, that would lend the system an instant street cred that no other demonstration could possibly have equaled. So, Hecker called up John Carmack, the man behind the DOOM engine. A skeptical Carmack said he didn’t have time to learn the vagaries of WinG and do the port, even assuming it was possible, whereupon Hecker said that he would do it himself if Carmack would just give him the DOOM source — under the terms of a strict confidentiality agreement, of course. Carmack agreed, and Hecker did the job in a single frenzied weekend. (It doubtless helped that Carmack’s DOOM code, which has long since been released to the entire world, is famously clean and readable, and thus eminently portable.)

Hecker brought WinDOOM, as he called it, to the Computer Game Developers Conference in April of 1994, the place where the leading lights of the industry gathered to talk shop among themselves. When he showed them DOOM running at full speed on Windows, just four months after it had become a sensation on MS-DOS, they were blown away. “WinG could usher in a whole new era for computer-based entertainment,” wrote Computer Gaming World breathlessly in their report from the conference. “As a result of this effort, we should expect to see universal installation routines, hardware independence, and an end to the memory-configuration haze that places a minimum technical-expertise barrier over our hobby and keeps out the novice user.”

Microsoft officially released WinG as a Windows 3 add-on in September of 1994, but it never quite lived up to its glowing advance billing. Hecker was a lone-wolf coder, and by some reports at least a decidedly difficult one to work with. Microsoft insiders from the time characterize WinG more as a “hack” than a polished piece of software engineering. Hecker “was able to take a piece of shit called Windows and make games work on it,” says Rick Segal, a Microsoft executive who was then in charge of “multimedia evangelism.” “He strapped a jet engine on a Beechcraft and got the thing in the air.” But when developers started trying to work with it in the real world, “the wings came off first, followed by the rest of the plane.” That’s perhaps overstating the case: WinG combined with Win32S was used to bring a few dozen games to Windows more or less satisfactorily between 1994 and 1997, from strategy games like Colonization to adventure games like Titanic: Adventure Out of Time. WinG was not so much a defective tool as a sharply limited one. While it gave developers a way of getting graphics onto the screen reasonably quickly, it gave them no help with the other pressing problems of sound, joysticks and other controllers, and networking in a game context.

Many of Microsoft’s initiatives during this period were organized by and around their team of “evangelists,” charismatic bright sparks who were given a great deal of freedom and a substantial discretionary budget in the cause of advancing the company’s interests and “fucking the competition,” as it was put by the evangelist for WinG, an unforgettable character named Alex St. John. St. John was a 350-pound grizzly bear of a man who had spent much of his childhood in the wilds of Alaska, and still sported a lumberjack’s beard and a backwoods sartorial sense; in the words of one horrified Microsoft marketing manager, he “looked like a bomb going off.” Shambling onto the stage, the living antithesis of the buttoned-down Microsoft rep that everybody expected, he told his audiences of gamers and game developers that he knew just what they thought of Windows. Then he showed them a clip of a Windows logo being blown away by a shotgun. “The gamers loved it,” says Rick Segal. “They thought they had someone who had their interests at heart.”

St. John soon decided that his constituency deserved something much, much better than WinG. His motivations were at least partly personal. He had come to loathe Chris Hecker, who was intense in a quieter, more penetrating way that didn’t mix well with St. John’s wild-man persona; St. John was therefore looking for a way to freeze Hecker out. But he was also sincere in his belief that WinG just didn’t go far enough toward making Windows a viable platform for hardcore gaming. With Chicago on the horizon, now was the perfect time to change that. He thundered at his bosses that games were a $5 billion market already, and they were just getting started. Windows’s current ineptitude at running them threatened Microsoft’s share in not only that market but the many other consumer-computing spaces that surrounded it. At some point, game developers would say farewell to antiquated MS-DOS. If Microsoft didn’t provide them with a viable alternative, somebody else would.

He rallied two programmers by the names of Craig Eisler and Eric Engstrom to his cause. In attitude and affect, the trio seemed a better fit for the unruly halls of id Software than those of Microsoft. They ran around terrorizing their colleagues with plastic battle axes, and gave their initiative the rather tasteless name of The Manhattan Project — a name their managers found especially inappropriate in light of Japan’s importance in gaming. But they remained unapologetic: “The Manhattan Project changed the world, for good or bad,” shrugged Eisler. “And we really like nuclear explosions.”

As I just noted, St. John’s title of evangelist afforded him a considerable degree of latitude and an equally considerable financial war chest. Taking advantage of the lack of any definitive rejection of their schemes more so than any affirmation of them among the higher-ups, the trio wrote the first lines of code for their new, fresh-from-the-ground-up tools for Windows gaming on December 24, 1994. (The date was characteristic of these driven young men, who barely noticed a family holiday such as Christmas.) St. John was determined to have something to show the industry at the next Computers Game Developers Conference in less than four months.

Alex St. John, Craig Eisler, and Eric Engstrom prepare to run amok.

WinG was also still alive at this point, under the stewardship of the hated Chris Hecker — but not for long. Disney had released a CD-ROM tie-in to The Lion King, the year’s biggest movie, just in time for that Christmas of 1994. It proved a debacle; hundreds of thousands of children unwrapped the box on Christmas morning, pushed the shiny disc eagerly into the family computer… and found out that it just wouldn’t work, no matter how long Mom and Dad fiddled with it. The Internet lit up with desperate parents of sobbing children, and news of the crisis soon reached USA Today and Billboard, who declared Disney’s “Animated Storybook” to be 1994’s Grinch: the game that had ruined Christmas.

Although the software used WinG, that was neither the only nor the worst source of its problems. (That honor goes to its support for 16-bit sound cards only, as stipulated in tiny print on the box, at a time when many or most people still had 8-bit sound cards and the large majority of computers owners had no idea whether they had the one or the other.) Nevertheless, the disaster was laid at the feet of WinG inside the games industry, creating an overwhelming consensus that a far more comprehensive solution was needed if games were ever to move en masse from MS-DOS to Windows. Alex St. John shed no tears: “I was happy to be proven right about WinG’s inadequacy.” The WinG name was hopelessly tainted now, he argued. Chris Hecker was moved to another project, an event which marked the end of active development on WinG. When it came to Windows gaming in the long term, it was now the Manhattan Project or bust.

By the spring of 1995, St. John had managed to assemble a team of about a dozen programmers, mostly contractors with something to prove rather than full-time Microsoft employees. They settled on the label of “Direct” for their suite of libraries, a reference to the way that they would let game programmers get right down to making cool things happen quickly, without having to mess around with all of the usual Windows cruft. DirectDraw would do what WinG had done only better, letting programmers draw on the screen where, how, and when they would; DirectSound would give the same level of flexible control over the sound hardware; DirectInput would provide support for joysticks and the like; and DirectPlay would be in some ways the most forward-looking piece of all, providing a complete set of tools for online multiplayer gaming. The collection as a whole would come to be known as DirectX. St. John, a man not prone to understatement, told Computer Gaming World that “the PC game market has been suppressed for two major reasons: difficulty with installation and configuration, and lack of significant new hardware innovation for games, because developers have had to code so intimately to the metal that it has become a nightmare to introduce new hardware and get it widely adopted. We’re going to bring all the benefits of device independence to games, and none of the penalties that have discouraged them from using APIs.”

It’s understandable if many developers greeted such broad claims with suspicion. But plenty of them became believers in April of 1995, when Alex St. John crashed into the Computer Game Developers Conference like a force of nature. Founded back in 1988 by Chris Crawford, one of gaming’s most prominent philosophers, the CGDC had heretofore been a fairly staid affair, a domain of gray lecture halls and earnest intellectual debates over the pressing issues of the day. “My job was to see DirectX launched successfully,” says St. John. “I concluded that if we set up a session or a suite at the conference itself, no one would come. Microsoft would have to do something so spectacular that it couldn’t be ignored.” So, he rented out the entirety of the nearby Great America amusement park and invited everyone to come out on the day after the conference ended for rides and fun — and, oh, yes, also a presentation of this new thing called DirectX. When he took the stage, the well-lubricated crowd started mocking him with a chant of “DOS! DOS! DOS!” But the chanting ceased when St. John pulled up a Windows port of a console hit called Bubsy, running at 83 frames per second. It became clear then and there that the days of MS-DOS as the primary hardcore-gaming platform were as numbered as those of the old, hype-immune, comfortably collegial CGDC — both thanks to Alex St. John.

St. John and company had never intended to make a version of DirectX for Windows 3; it was earmarked for Chicago, or rather Windows 95, the now-finalized name for Microsoft’s latest consumer operating system. And indeed, most of us old-timer gamers still remember the switch to Windows 95 as the time when we began to give up our MS-DOS installations and have our fun as well as get our work done under Windows. But for all that DirectX couldn’t exist outside of Windows 95, it wasn’t quite of Windows 95. It wasn’t included with the initial version of the operating system that finally shipped, a year behind schedule, in August of 1995; the first official release of DirectX didn’t appear until a month later. “DirectX was built to be parasitic,” says St. John. “It was carried around in games, not the operating system.” What he means is that he arranged to make it possible for game publishers to distribute the libraries free of charge on their installation CDs. When a game was installed, it checked to see whether DirectX was already on the computer, and if so whether the version there was as new as or newer than the one on the CD; if the answer to either of these questions was no, the latest version of DirectX was installed alongside the game it enabled. In an era when Internet connectivity was still spotty and online operating-system updates still a new frontier, this approach doubtless saved game makers many, many thousands of tech-support calls.

Now, though, we should have a look at some of the new features that were an integral part of Windows 95 from the start. Previous versions of Windows were more properly described as operating environments than full-fledged operating systems; one first installed MS-DOS, then installed Windows on top of that, starting it up via the MS-DOS command line. Windows 95, on the other hand, presented itself to the world as a self-contained entity; one could install it to an entirely blank hard drive, and could boot into it without ever seeing a command line. Yet the change really wasn’t as dramatic as it appeared. Unlike Windows NT, Windows 95 still owed much to the past, and was still underpinned by MS-DOS; the elephant balanced on a light pole had become a blue whale perched nimbly up there on one fin. Microsoft had merely become much more thorough in their efforts to hide this fact.

And we really shouldn’t scoff at said efforts. Whatever its underpinnings, Windows 95 did a very credible job of seeming like a seamless experience. Certainly it was by far the most approachable version of Windows ever. It had a new interface that was a vast improvement over the old one, and it offered countless other little quality-of-life enhancements to boot. In fact, it stands out today as nothing less than the most dramatic single evolutionary leap in the entire history of Windows, setting in place a new usage paradigm that has been shifted only incrementally in all the years since. A youngster of today who has been raised on Windows 10 or 11 would doubtless find Windows 95 a bit crude and clunky in appearance, but would be able to get along more or less fine in it without any coaching. This is much less true in relation to Windows 3 and its predecessors. Tellingly, whenever Microsoft has tried to change the Windows 95 interface paradigm too markedly in the decades since, users have complained so loudly that they’ve been forced to reverse course.

Windows 95 may still have been built on MS-DOS, but 32-bit applications were now the standard, the ability to run 16-bit software relegated to a legacy feature in the name of Microsoft’s all-important backward compatibility. (Microsoft went to truly heroic lengths in the service of the latter, to the extent of special-casing a raft of popular programs: “If you’re running this specific program, do this.” An awful kludge, but needs must…) Another key technical feature, from which tens of millions of people would benefit without ever realizing they were doing so, was “Plug and Play,” which made installing new hardware a mere matter of plugging it in, turning on the computer, and letting the operating system do the rest; no more fiddling about with an alphabet soup of IRQ, DMA, and port settings, trying to hit upon the magic combination that actually worked. Equally importantly, Windows 95 introduced preemptive multitasking in place of the old cooperative model, meaning the operating system would no longer have to depend upon the willingness of individual programs to yield time to others, but could and would hold them to its own standards. At a stroke, all kinds of scenarios — like, say, rendering 3D graphics in the background while doing other work (or play) in the foreground — became much more practical.

A Quick Tour of Windows 95

One of the simplest but most effective ways that Microsoft concealed the still-extant MS-DOS underpinnings of Windows 95 and made it seem like its own, self-contained thing was giving it a graphical boot screen.

It seems almost silly to exhaustively explicate Windows 95’s interface, given that it’s largely the one we still see in Windows today. Nevertheless, I started a tradition in the earlier articles in this series that I might as well continue. So, note that the old “Program Manager” master window has been replaced by a Mac-like full-screen desktop, with a “Start” Menu of all installed applications at the bottom left, a task bar at the bottom center for switching among running applications, and quick-access icons and the clock at the bottom right. Window-manipulation controls too have taken on the form we still know today, with minimize, maximize, and close buttons all clustered at the top right of each window.

Plug And Play was one of the most welcome additions to Windows 95. Instead of manually fiddling with esoteric settings, you just plugged in your hardware and let Windows do it all for you.

Microsoft bent over backward to make Windows 95 friendly and approachable for the novice. What experienced users found annoying and condescending, new users genuinely appreciated. That said, the hand-holding would only get more belabored in the future, trying the patience of even many non-technical users. (Does anyone remember Clippy?)

In keeping with its role in the zeitgeist, the Windows 95 CD-ROM included a grab bag of random pop-culture non sequiturs, such as a trailer for the movie Rob Roy and a Weezer music video.

While Windows 95 made a big point of connectivity and did include a built-in TCP/IP stack for getting onto the Internet, it initially sported no Web browser. But that would soon change, with consequences that would reverberate from Redmond, Washington, to Washington, D.C., from Silicon Valley to Brussels.

The most obvious drawback to Windows’s hybrid architecture was its notorious instability; the “Blue Screen of Death” became an all too familiar sight for users. System crashes tended to stem from those places where the new rubbed up against the old — from the point of contact, if you will, between the blue whale’s flipper and the light pole.

Windows 95 stretched the very definition of what should constitute an operating system; it was the first version of Windows on which you could do useful things without installing a single additional application, thanks to built-in tools like WordPad (a word processor more full-featured than many of the commercially available ones of half a decade earlier) and Paint (as the name would imply, a paint program, and a surprisingly good one at that). Some third-party software publishers, suddenly faced with the prospect of their business models going up in smoke, complained voraciously to the press and to the government about this bundling. Nonetheless, the lines between operating systems and applications had been blurred forever.

Indeed, this was in its way the most revolutionary of all aspects of Windows 95, an operating system that otherwise still had one foot rooted firmly in the past. That didn’t much matter to most people because it was a new piece of software engineering second, a flashy new consumer product first. Well before the launch, a respected tech journalist named Andrew Schulman told how “the very name Windows 95 suggests this product will play a leading role” in “the movement from a technology-based into a consumer-product-based industry.”

If a Windows program queries the GetVersion function in Windows 95, it will get back 4.0 as the answer; a DOS program will get back the answer 7.0. But in its marketing, Microsoft has decided to trade in the nerdy major.minor version-numbering scheme (version x.0 had always given the company trouble anyway) for a new product-naming scheme based on that used by automobile manufacturers and vineyards. Windows 95 isn’t foremost a technology or an operating system; it’s a product. It is targeted not at developers or end users but at consumers.

In that spirit, Microsoft hired Brian Eno, a famed composer and producer of artsy rock and ambient music, to provide the now-iconic Windows 95 startup theme. Eno:

The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said, “And it must be 3.25 seconds long.”

I thought this was funny, and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.

In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time…

Ironically, Eno created this, his most-heard single composition, on an Apple Macintosh. “I’ve never used a PC in my life,” he said in 2009. “I don’t like them.”

Link to audio:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Microsoft-Windows-95-Startup-Sound.mp3

On a more populist musical note, Microsoft elected to make the Rolling Stones tune “Start Me Up” the centerpiece of their unprecedented Windows 95 advertising blitz. By one report, they paid as much as $12 million to license the song, so enamored were they by its synergy with the new Windows 95 “Start” menu, apparently failing to notice in their excitement that the song is actually a feverish plea for sex. “[Mick] Jagger was half kidding” when he named that price, claimed the anonymous source. “But Microsoft was in a big hurry, so they took the deal, unlike anything else in the software industry, where they negotiate to death.” Of course, Microsoft was careful not to include in their commercials the main chorus of “You make a grown man cry.” (Much less the fade-out chorus of “You make a dead man come.”)

See https://www.youtube.com/embed/wRdl1BjTG7c

Microsoft spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars in all on the Windows 95 launch, making it by a veritable order of magnitude the most lavish to that point in the history of the computer industry. One newspaper said the campaign was “how the Ten Commandments would have been launched, if only God had had Bill Gates’s money.” The goal was to make Windows, as journalist James Wallace put, “the most talked-about consumer product since New Coke” — albeit one that would hopefully enjoy a better final fate. Both goals were achieved. If you had told an ordinary American on the street even five years earlier that a new computer operating system, of all things, would shortly capture the pop-culture zeitgeist so thoroughly, she would doubtless have looked at you like you had three heads. But now it was 1995, and here it was. The Cold War was over, the War on Terror not yet begun, the economy booming, and the wonders of digital technology at the top of just about everyone’s mind; the launch of a new operating system really did seem like just about the most important thing going on in the world at the time.

The big day was to be August 24, 1995. Bill Gates made 29 separate television appearances in the week leading up it. A 500-foot banner was unfurled from the top floor of a Toronto skyscraper, while hundreds of spotlights served to temporarily repaint the Empire State Building in the livery of Windows 95. Even the beloved Doonesbury comic strip was co-opted, turning into a thinly veiled Windows 95 advertisement for a week. Retail stores all over the continent stayed open late on the evening of August 23, so that they could sell the first copies of Windows 95 to eager customers on the stroke of midnight. (“Won’t it be available tomorrow?” asked one baffled journalist to the people standing in line.) There were reports that some impressionable souls got so caught up in the hype that they turned up and bought a copy even though they didn’t own a computer on which to run it.

But the excitement’s locus was Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus, which had been turned into a carnival grounds for the occasion, with fifteen tents full of games and displays and even a Ferris wheel to complete the picture. From here the proceedings were telecast live to millions of viewers all over the world. Gates took the stage at 11:00 AM with a surprise sparring partner: comedian Jay Leno, host of The Tonight Show, the country’s most popular late-night talk show. He worked the crowd with his broad everyman humor; this presentation was most definitely not aimed at the nerdy set. His jokes are as fine a time capsule of the mid-1990s as you’ll find. “To give you an idea of how powerful Windows 95 is, it is able to keep track of all O.J.’s alibis at once,” said Leno. Gates wasn’t really so much smarter than the rest of us; Leno had visited his house and found his VCR’s clock still blinking 12:00. As for Windows 95, it was like a good date: “smart, user-friendly, and under $100.” The show ended with Microsoft’s entire senior management team displaying their dubious dance moves up there onstage to the strains of “Start Me Up.” “It was the coolest thing I’ve ever been a part of,” gushed Gates afterward.

Bill Gates and Jay Leno onstage.

Windows 95 sold 1 million copies in its first four days, 30 million copies in its first seven months, 65 million copies in its first sixteen months. (For the record, this last figure was 15 million more copies than the best-selling album of all time, thus cementing the operating system’s place in pop-culture as well as technology history.) By the beginning of 1998, when talk turned to its successor Windows 98, it boasted an active user base three and a half times larger than that of Windows 3.

And by that same point in time, the combination of Windows 95 and DirectX had remade the face of gaming. A watershed moment arrived already just one year after the debut of Windows 95, when Microsoft used DirectX to make the first-ever Windows version of their hugely popular Flight Simulator, for almost a decade and a half now the company’s one really successful hardcore gamer’s game. From that moment on, DirectX was an important, even integral part of Microsoft’s corporate strategy. As such, it was slowly taken out of the hands of Alex St. John, Craig Eisler, and Eric Engstrom, whose bro-dude antics, such as hiring a Playboy Playmate to choose from willing male “slaves” at one industry party and allowing the sadomasochistic shock-metal band GWAR to attend another with an eight-foot tall anthropomorphic vagina and penis in tow, had constantly threatened to erupt into scandal if they should ever escape the ghetto of the gaming press and make it into the mainstream. Whatever else one can say about these three alpha-nerds, they changed gaming forever — and changed it for the better, as all but the most hidebound MS-DOS Luddites must agree. By the time Windows 98 hit the scene, vanilla MS-DOS was quite simply dead as a gaming platform; all new computer games for a Microsoft platform were Windows games, coming complete with quick and easy one-click installers that made gaming safe even for those who didn’t know a hard drive from a RAM chip. The DirectX revolution, in other words, had suffered the inevitable fate of all successful revolutions: that of becoming the status quo.

St. John’s inability to play well with others got him fired in 1997, while Eisler and Engstrom grew up and mellowed out a bit and moved into Web technologies at Microsoft. (The Web-oriented software stack they worked on, which never panned out to the extent they had hoped, was known as Chrome; it seems that everything old truly is new again at some point.)

Speaking of the Internet: what did Windows 95 mean for it, and vice versa? I must confess that I’ve been deliberately avoiding that question until now, because it has such a complicated answer. For if there was one tech story that could compete with the Windows 95 launch in 1995, it was surely that of the burgeoning World Wide Web. Just two weeks before Bill Gates enjoyed the coolest day of his life, Netscape Communications held its initial public offering, ending its first day as a publicly traded company worth a cool $2.2 billion in the eyes of stock buyers. Some people were saying even in the midst of all the hype coming out Redmond that Microsoft and Windows 95 were computing’s past, a new era of simple commodity appliances connecting to operating-system-agnostic networks its future. Microsoft’s efforts to challenge this wisdom and compete on this new frontier were just beginning to take shape at the time, but they would soon become the company’s overriding obsession, with well-nigh earthshaking stakes for everyone involved with computers or the Web.

(Sources: the books Renegades of the Empire: How Three Software Warriors Started a Revolution Behind the Walls of Fortress Microsoft by Michael Drummond, Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic by Brad King and John Borland, Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace by James Wallace, The Silicon Boys by David A. Kaplan, Show-stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft by G. Pascal Zachary, Masters of DOOM: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner, Unauthorized Windows 95: A Developer’s Guide to the Foundations of Windows “Chicago” by Andrew Schulman, Undocumented Windows: A Programmer’s Guide to Reserved Microsoft Windows API Functions by Andrew Schulman, David Maxey, and Matt Pietrek, and Windows Internals: The Implementation of the Windows Operating Environment by Matt Pietrek; Computer Gaming World of August 1994, June 1995, and September 1995; Game Developer of August/September 1995; InfoWorld of March 15 1993; Mac Addict of April 2000; Windows Magazine of April 1996; PC Magazine of November 8 2005. Online sources include an Ars Technica piece on Microsoft’s efforts to keep Windows compatible with earlier software, a Usenet thread about the Lion King CD-ROM debacle which dates from Christmas Day 1994, a Music Network article about Brian Eno’s Windows 95 theme, an SFGate interview with Eno, and Chris Hecker’s overview of WinG for Game Developer. I owe a special thanks to Ken Polsson for his personal-computing chronology, which has been invaluable for keeping track of what happened when and pointing me to sources during the writing of this and other articles. Finally, I owe a lot to Nathan Lineback for the histories, insights, comparisons, and images found at his wonderful online “GUI Gallery.”)

Comments
64 Responses

- Alex Smith

November 18, 2022 at 6:51 pm

Man, having lived through that transition, it really was an incredible paradigm shift. Boot disks, autoexec.bat and config.sys edits, third-party memory management utilities, “guess the IRQ” sessions when installing a game to get sound, all a thing of the past in a shockingly short span of time.

- Sarah Walker

November 18, 2022 at 7:14 pm

Possibly worth noting that there was an interim stage between the “having to support 1000s of graphics and sound cards” of DOS and the DirectX era. Through 1995, most of the big DOS games were increasingly switching to what would now be called middleware for this – primarily Miles Sound System (to remove the need to directly support endless sound cards) and UNIVBE (to eliminate the awfulness that was VESA 1.x and its generally poor implementations, and allow SVGA graphics with some kind of speed). The resulting abstractions would have made porting games from this environment to DirectX much easier, which enabled the numerous games released in 96/97 which shipped with binaries for both environments on the CD.

The other thing is that (in the UK at least, as ever!) Windows 95 contributed to a boom in home PC sales in late 95. This caused something of a step change; while even earlier that year most new machines would have been 486s possibly without any multimedia support whatsoever, at Christmas 1995 Pentium machines outsold 486s for the first time, and sound cards, CD-ROM and PCI were all but standard. The latter would become increasingly important at the end of 1996…

- stepped pyramids

November 18, 2022 at 7:16 pm

The quote that opens the article is largely accurate in terms of 95’s significance, but I think it underrates NT, which got plenty of corporate use. And, of course, within a decade the two lines would merge in the form of Windows XP, which is just Windows NT with better compatibility and a candy coating.

- Joshua Barrett

November 18, 2022 at 8:15 pm

NT had a lot of corporate success in the mid to late 90s, apparently. And it did get ported to all the big RISC platforms and some of the small ones (although the SPARC version never saw commercial release), so NT workstations did exist.

I know NT servers definitely were in use by the end of the decade, because Elon Musk got fired as PayPal’s CEO for trying to get them to switch everything from Unix to NT. I guess some things never change.

- Jimmy Maher

November 18, 2022 at 8:37 pm

I agree. It’s insightful, but not omniscient.

- Niccolò

November 18, 2022 at 7:31 pm

“[…] Microsoft Office lineup, which was tightly integrated with the operating system in ways that their competitors found difficult to duplicate. (This was due not least to Microsoft’s ability to take advantage of so-called “undocumented APIs,” hidden features and shortcuts provided by Windows which the company neglected to tell its competitors about — an underhanded trick that was an open secret in the software industry, but to which Microsoft would fess up at last only years later.)”

I’m very curious about this (the usage of undocumented APIs in Office). I’m pretty sure I heard multiple Office developers strongly deny any such claims, even in recent years. Can I ask when and what did Microsoft exactly had to say about this?

- Jimmy Maher

November 18, 2022 at 9:00 pm

Andrew Schulman, who features prominently in this article, discovered 16 undocumented functions in Windows 3 that were used by Microsoft Office. He describes them in the 1992 book Undocumented Windows, which is long out of print but can be found on archive.org. Schulman actually gave a deposition to the government for the antitrust investigation that was ongoing against Microsoft in 1992. (Microsoft’s legal troubles might make a good subject for an article or three somewhere down the line…)

I had thought that Microsoft basically said, “Yeah, okay, folks, we did it,” at some point after the millennium, but I find I don’t have an explicit confession to hand. So, I excised that part, at least until I can find one.

- Richard Wells

November 18, 2022 at 10:12 pm

Most of the erstwhile undocumented APIs were documented in the Windows 1 and Windows 2 API reference. MS had replaced them with newer APIs in Windows 3 but retained them so older software didn’t need a rewrite. In some cases, the old API call passes through a translator before going to the new API call and thus would be slightly slower than the Windows 3 API. MS Office had a several years head start on developing for Windows which provided the advantages.

It wasn’t secret MS APIs that made WordPerfect for the Mac and Amiga such poor products. Sometimes, the skills rigorously honed by developers aren’t effective in a new environment.

- David Boddie

November 19, 2022 at 1:07 pm

I get the impression from various court exhibits that some folks at Microsoft knew that continuing to use undocumented APIs would give competitors grounds for complaint, but that it was often treated as a public relations issue to be smoothed over. There seems to have been real attempts to understand why other developers might be unhappy with Microsoft over issues like these. (See, for example this exhibit about .)

The underlying problem revealed by the use of undocumented APIs was the lack of separation between OS and application teams. (See this exhibit for instance.) Having access to the OS source code is the sort of thing that might give internal developers a head start over their competitors.

Underneath all this in the early 1990s is the growing problem that Microsoft is consolidating its monopoly in the PC OS market, which gives it certain responsibilities that haven’t been recognized yet. Hence the avalanche of court cases that came later.

- David Boddie

November 19, 2022 at 1:10 pm

Posted too soon, it seems. The first exhibit was about how Microsoft was fairly or unfairly perceived by the rest of the industry with respect to undocumented APIs.

- Geoff Dunbar

November 18, 2022 at 7:31 pm

Great article as always!

I don’t think this is quite correct:

“It sported a new interface, copied from Windows NT”

I’m pretty sure the new shell debuted on Windows 95. Windows NT 4 was the first NT to use it, and shipped in 1996. Wikipedia seems to agree.

- Dan V.

November 18, 2022 at 7:44 pm

Yeah, Windows NT 4.0 was the first NT version to support the new shell, and it didn’t ship until August 24, 1996, exactly one year after Win95. There were some NT 3.51-isms that showed up in Windows 95 (the Display panel is one I can think of off the top of my head) but by and large the new shell design was set in 95 first.

- Joshua Barrett

November 18, 2022 at 7:59 pm

NT4 and 95 were in development at the same time, but it seems like a lot of the design was happening 95-side from what accounts I can find. I can’t find anything conclusive though.

- Jimmy Maher

November 18, 2022 at 8:40 pm

I had assumed that Windows NT in 1993 debuted the Windows desktop, but I never used it, so it was only an assumption. Anyway, that makes the article cleaner, which is the opposite of what corrective comments usually do. ;) Thanks!

- John Elliott

November 18, 2022 at 9:33 pm

There was a downloadable beta of the Windows 95 interface in May 1995 (NewShell) that allowed the Windows 95 shell to be run on Windows NT 3.51. The default interface on NT 3.51 was very similar to Windows 3.1, though a few elements (such as the Display control panel applet) would be familiar to a Windows 95 user.

- Rowan Lipkovits

November 18, 2022 at 8:44 pm

“fucking the competition.”

That’s an incredible quote to drop unsourced. I don’t doubt it, I’m just curious where it came from.

I was going to note that it’s worth mentioning that Win95 ran on an MS-DOS 7 that many MS-DOS lifers would have been happy to use without all the Windows cruft on top of it, but you do have reference to it buried in a quote.

- Jimmy Maher

November 18, 2022 at 9:07 pm

That’s from Alex St. John, as quoted in Renegades of the Empire. I changed the sentence to make the attribution clear.

- Sniffnoy

November 18, 2022 at 9:45 pm

Windows 95 only sort of ran on MS-DOS 7; MS-DOS 7 was there, and you could use it, and Windows 95 needed it to start up, but once Windows 95 was running it no longer really made substantial use of it.

- dusoft

November 19, 2022 at 8:54 pm

But lots of software did.

- Sniffnoy

November 21, 2022 at 9:19 pm

Did you read the link I posted? What those programs actually mostly used was Windows presenting the old DOS interface; the program would think it was talking to DOS, but it would usually be Windows fulfilling the request.

- Keith Palmer

November 19, 2022 at 1:55 am

As part of the residue for who Windows 95 was less “the new dispensation” than “an approaching existential crisis” (regardless of the brave promises of an all-singing, all-dancing operating system upgrade of our own), I can now appreciate this particular perspective. I suppose I also muse every so often on an old article in MacAddict about “coping strategies if you just can’t stop your company from taking your Mac off your desk” and whether, in some unknowable circumstance, disgruntled “MacRefugees” might have worked out some clever program to move the Windows program menus into a global menu bar at the top of the screen… (Not that long ago, anyway, I did notice Ubuntu MATE can do that now.)

- Claverhouse

November 22, 2022 at 2:09 am

>whether, in some unknowable circumstance, disgruntled “MacRefugees” might have worked out some clever program to move the Windows program menus into a global menu bar at the top of the screen… (Not that long ago, anyway, I did notice Ubuntu MATE can do that now.<

I've been running Linux exclusively for about 15 years — almost entirely in KDE iterations — and the first two things I do on any installation is lift the taskbar to the sky and force the Classic ( cascading ) Menu. On any distro this has been possible for longer than I have been on Linux.

Being strictly reactionary, I prefer the computer paradigm of 2012 without innovations such as Fat Slab Style [ helped by using PCLinuxOS rather than anything from Ubuntu ], but even lesser managers have always allowed such customization. Prolly not Unity, but Unity died the death.

- Daniel Wolf

November 19, 2022 at 6:22 am

“it much be” should probably be “it must be”.

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2022 at 8:57 am

Thanks!

- Alex L.

November 19, 2022 at 8:08 am

What a flashback! The way the article describes the events around the release of the new windows really fits with my memories. Since I always was an early upgrader of my OS, it was really a watershed moment when I look back. As time went on and games gradually shifted from DOS to Windows, I completely forgot that there was a time before Windows. Regarding the combatibility, I actually never had a big problem running a game. If it would not run under Windows, it would run under DOS. I think I still have a handful of games sitting somewhere that you can run under DOS and Windows. Also, since Win 95 revolutionized the art of point and click, I sometimes shake my head in disbelief how I was able to operate DOS when I was just six years old.

- xxx

November 19, 2022 at 9:24 am

It is often said that Microsoft first tried to buy the rights to R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” as the Win95 theme song for a few million dollars, but R.E.M. told them to bugger off. The Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” was their second choice.

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2022 at 9:32 am

According to the book Overdrive — one of the best sources on this time — Microsoft wanted to buy the REM song in addition to rather than instead of the Rolling Stones number. But yes, REM told them flatly that they don’t sell their songs to advertisers. You have to respect them sticking to their guns; they left a lot of money on the table. A great band who always did things on their own terms and maintained their integrity from start to finish.

- Dylan

December 20, 2022 at 4:35 am

Delighted to find that in addition to your other excellent taste, you are also an REM fan :)

- Alex L.

November 19, 2022 at 9:29 am

Addendum: Regarding combatibility, I just remembered the conflict between using the computer for your working life and using it for playing games before the advent of Win 95. My uncle was already using computers for his work in the 1980s and was working in the field of IT later on occasionally. He was never a fan of using computers for games and would tell me that playing games on a professional computer would cause the system to crash and there could be a lot of damage. That was around the first half of the 1990s.

- Tim Kaiser

November 19, 2022 at 12:28 pm

I remember the good old days of autoexec.bat and config.sys. I used to be really knowledgable about what to edit on each to eek out every last bit of RAM to get newer games to work on my older computer at the time.

- arthur

November 19, 2022 at 3:09 pm

Sitting here having a cup of coffee… dogs in front of the heater… life is good…

…and then you just have to mention “Clippy!”

- Andrew Pam

November 22, 2022 at 5:48 am

Microsoft won’t let us forget Clippy! It’s on the 2022 Microsoft Ugly Christmas Sweater:

https://gear.xbox.com/products/clippy-holiday-sweater

- Matt Krzesniak

November 29, 2022 at 10:13 pm

And it’s sold out!

- JeroenJ

November 19, 2022 at 5:45 pm

I think “non sequiters” should be “non sequiturs”.

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2022 at 5:55 pm

Thanks!

- Gnoman

November 20, 2022 at 9:14 am

The degree to which Windows 95 remains a modern interface floating on top of DOS is even more than it looks.

It is quite possible to set Windows 95 up in a way that operates much like the older Win 3.1 – booting into DOS, and using the WIN command to load Windows without rebooting. I don’t recall ever seeing a single such setup back in the day, but I currently have my hobby 486 set up to operate that way – it gives me Fat32 support (added in the very last version of 95), but is otherwise a nearly pure DOS environment.

- Sniffnoy

November 21, 2022 at 9:23 pm

While you could start Windows that way, it’s worth noting that in a different (and IMO more relevant) sense, the extent to which Windows 95 was just an interface on top of DOS was much less than one would think. See this Raymond Chen post; once Windows 95 had started up, it was actually DOS that acted as an interface on top of Windows!

- 32-bit Windows Extender

November 21, 2022 at 11:08 pm

I think Schulman covered it, but Windows 3.x (in the guise of 386 Enhanced Mode, 32-bit Disk Access, and 32-bit File Access) actually did a lot of what people credit Windows 95 with doing first. That would seem to be either a marketing oversight, or marketing genius. (They may have decided that market momentum was theirs, and why needlessly complicate victory? Or maybe they judged IBM to be in the dark.)

And at the same time, all(most?) the 16-bit limitations of Win 3.x were still in Win95. Only when your apps were all Win32 did the 16-bit problems seem to vanish.

However it came about, the use of 386 features from DOS/emm386/smartdrv to Win9x kept them moving their market share forward until XP sealed the transition.

- Sebastian Gerstl

November 20, 2022 at 5:54 pm

Interesting to see that Bubsy was the game that wooed the crowd – these days the old mascot is much maligned, mostly due to its obnoxious advertising campaign and especially the massive failure that was Bubsy 3D, but what people tend to forget is that back in it’s day, the original game, though not without flaws, was actually quite well received and one of the better, and especially better-looking, mascot platformers out there.

- stepped pyramids

November 21, 2022 at 3:28 am

I’m surprised Jimmy didn’t (parenthetically) mention that Bubsy was created by Michael Berlyn.

- Jimmy Maher

November 21, 2022 at 7:20 am

I admit that I did try, but I couldn’t find a way to do so that didn’t read really awkwardly…

- Martin

November 20, 2022 at 10:48 pm

Have to ask, are you going to do an article on Microsoft Bob? Asking for a friend.

- Jimmy Maher

November 21, 2022 at 7:19 am

No, I think poor old Bob has been mocked enough. ;)

- Mike Taylor

November 21, 2022 at 11:11 pm

I am genuinely sorry to hear that. I think it would be a fascinating story.

- Kevin R

November 21, 2022 at 4:36 pm

Speaking of both Win95 and Computer Gaming World, a quote I always remember was from one of the CGW columnists making fun of the hype: “It’s just an operating system, not a Beatles reunion with John chiming in from the netherworld”.

- M. Casey

November 24, 2022 at 3:29 am

I might’ve been too young to appreciate it at the time, but wow, getting rid of so much of the legacy cruft from fifteen years of shortcuts and kludges was pretty impressive. Not perfect by any means, but it’s amazing how well everything still worked, BSoDs notwithstanding.

- Jim G

November 26, 2022 at 5:36 am

Catching up on this one late, but re: “He had come to loath Chris Hecker,” I think that should be “loathe.”

- Jimmy Maher

November 26, 2022 at 9:01 am

Thanks!

- Chris Floyd

November 26, 2022 at 6:39 am

There was only one game that could drag me, kicking and screaming, into Windows to play it, and that was Civilization 2. I was frightened, confused, angry when I realized it didn’t run in DOS. I had Windows 3.1, but why in the world would I ever boot it up? (Maybe I did for word processing? I don’t remember.) Suddenly, against all my wishes, Microprose had given me a reason.

What I can’t quite figure out is the timing… Civ2 is out in early 1996, so after the launch of Win95. Was the first notable (as far as I’m aware) Windows-native PC gamer’s game really launched for the last iteration of the OS? I suppose everyone was less nimble back then. Even if Win95 sold like hotcakes, games needed to support the OS everyone already had. And Microprose might not have known anything ahead of time about Win95 or its launch date, or didn’t have inside access like major publishers do now.

Huh. Curious what anyone here makes of the timing. Or if anyone here thinks of a different game as the one that got hardcore gamers to start booting up in Windows.

Maybe some of this is part of the Civ 2 story… Maybe a story told in a future article…

- Jimmy Maher

November 26, 2022 at 9:12 am

I will do an article in the coming months about Civilization II.

For the time being, though, we should remember that uptake of a new operating system, even one as overwhelmingly successful as Windows 95, is never immediate. Even by the time Windows 98 was coming out three years on, the Windows 95 user base was “only” three and a half times the size of that of Windows 3.x. This means there were still a *lot* of Windows 3 users out there even then. When you factor in that, plus development lag times, it makes sense that we would still be seeing a fair number of Windows 3 games coming out through 1996. After all, Windows 95 could run these games perfectly well, so it was a smart way of maximizing your market if you could live without DirectX. It’s worth noting in this context that Civilization, although hardcore in a lot of ways, has always had a pretty high level of casual name recognition and to some extent even appeal. I would guess that most people who don’t play games today have heard of Civilization…

As far the question of the first hardcore gamer’s game to popularize Windows 95 and DirectX: I haven’t researched it at all extensively, but my vote right now would have to be for Quake, which appeared in June of 1996. I would guess that caused quite a lot of the “DOS or Death!” brigade to bite the bullet and accept Windows.

- Sarah Walker

November 28, 2022 at 9:16 am

Quake was a native DOS game.

- Jimmy Maher

November 28, 2022 at 9:25 am

So it was. I stand corrected…

- Gnoman

December 2, 2022 at 12:53 pm

Doom 95 and WinQuake are heavily cited as making Win95 and DirectX attractive to gamers, even though neither Doom or Quake were Windows exclusive. Quake II (and, equally importantly, the Quake II engine) were also Windows only, as was the original Half-Life. So you’re not that far off.

- ghurt

December 2, 2022 at 6:29 pm

I’m pretty sure you could run civ2 in Windows 3.1 thanks to WinG.
My guess for the hardcore game that popularized Windows 95 would be Diablo.

- Alianora La Canta

December 2, 2022 at 11:30 pm

The original version of Civilization II was designed for Windows 3.1 with WinG. I remember WinG being pretty fussy, so it would not surprise me if it failed to work with a particular game for a particular player despite this. (I recall many fights with WinG to get it to work with Dr Drago’s Madcap Chase and Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol, some of which continue today since neither game works on modern systems…)

The extended version with multiplayer, Civilization II: Multiplayer Gold Edition strictly required Windows 95 or better, as did the remake Civilization II: Test of Time. This was released on December 9, 1998.

- Sarah Walker

December 4, 2022 at 11:32 am

I would have suggested C&C Red Alert (late 1996). While there was a DOS version on the disc, the much needed SVGA mode was exclusive to the Windows/DirectX version.

- Alianora La Canta

December 2, 2022 at 11:23 pm

Depends where you were located. There is an issue of Computer Gaming World that states that developers aiming for the European market could not safely assume people had Windows 95 until Christmas 1997. My family got it a year prior to this, not because of any specific program requiring it but because I had a relative interested in computing who’d finally upgraded their computer enough that it was physically possible to run Windows 95. A lot of my classmates never bothered with a PC until Windows 98 came out and they suddenly found out that school was going to insist on some homework being produced in Office 97 or Wordpad…

- S

November 29, 2022 at 2:47 pm

“with a minimum of interface from the heretofore over-officious operating system.”

I am not a native speaker, but did you mean either” interference from” or ” interface with” here?

- Jimmy Maher

November 29, 2022 at 8:09 pm

Yes! Thanks!

- Nikolai Kondrashov

December 10, 2022 at 12:39 pm

My last attempt to make a game for Windows was using WinG. I got something working, but never got anywhere far, getting distracted by something else, probably

Windows 95 was the talk of nerds even in the recently-disbanded Soviet Union, I remember those fascinating conversations about how great it would look and what it would do, vividly.

It was indeed much better than 3.11, and some say its UI is still better in some ways than the modern ones. I wanted it bad enough to have managed installing it on EGA at some point, via a tricky upgrade from 3.11.

- Alianora La Canta

December 15, 2022 at 12:18 pm

That must have taken some serious technical talent – congratulations!

- Steve-O

January 26, 2023 at 3:01 am

“The Internet lit up with desperate parents of sobbing children,”

This is a great turn of phrase, but it’s very unlikely that parents who didn’t know a Sound Blaster from an AdLib would have even ever heard the word “Internet” in December of ’94.

- Jimmy Maher

January 27, 2023 at 10:28 pm

It’s not a question of knowing a SoundBlaster from an AdLib, but rather of knowing the specifications of the digital sound card one did have. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have answered the question of whether the Tandy “multimedia PC” I bought in the summer of 1994 in order to check out this Web thing — it was my first ever Wintel machine! — had an 8-bit or a 16-bit sound system. That’s fairly esoteric information, even for early adopters.

- Steve-O

January 30, 2023 at 10:31 pm

I admit I was deliberately oversimplifying the sound card issue, for which I amply apologize to the desperate parents of 1994.

My point was that those parents almost certainly didn’t light up the Internet with their outraged cries, because they probably had no idea what an Internet was. Heck, I barely knew, and I had just graduated with a BS in Computer Science a few months earlier.

Doing Windows, Part 11: The Internet Tidal Wave
December 9, 2022

On August 6, 1991, when Microsoft was still in the earliest planning stages of creating the operating system that would become known as Windows 95, an obscure British researcher named Tim Berners-Lee, working out of the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) in Switzerland, put the world’s first publicly accessible website online. For years to come, these two projects would continue to evolve separately, blissfully unconcerned by if not unaware of one another’s existence. And indeed, it is difficult to imagine two computing projects with more opposite personalities. Mirroring its co-founder and CEO Bill Gates, Microsoft was intensely pragmatic and maniacally competitive. Tim Berners-Lee, on the other hand, was a classic academic, a theorist and idealist rather than a businessman. The computers on which he and his ilk built the early Web ran esoteric operating systems like NeXTSTEP and Unix, or at their most plebeian MacOS, not Microsoft’s mass-market workhorse Windows. Microsoft gave you tools for getting everyday things done, while the World Wide Web spent the first couple of years of its existence as little more than an airy proof of concept, to be evangelized by wide-eyed adherents who often appeared to have read one too many William Gibson novels. Forbes magazine was soon to anoint Bill Gates the world’s richest person, his reward for capturing almost half of the international software market; the nascent Web was nowhere to be found in the likes of Forbes.

Those critics who claim that Microsoft was never a visionary company — that it instead thrived by letting others innovate, then swooping in and taking taking over the markets thus opened — love to point to its history with the World Wide Web as Exhibit Number One. Despite having a role which presumably demanded that he stay familiar with all leading-edge developments in computing, Bill Gates by his own admission never even heard of the Web until April of 1993, twenty months after that first site went up. And he didn’t actually surf the Web for himself until another six months after that — perhaps not coincidentally, shortly after a Windows version of NCSA Mosaic, the user-friendly graphical browser that made the Web a welcoming place even for those whose souls didn’t burn with a passion for information theory, had finally been released.

Gates focused instead on a different model of online communication, one arguably more in keeping with his instincts than was the free and open Web. For almost a decade and a half by 1993, various companies had been offering proprietary dial-up services aimed at owners of home computers. These came complete with early incarnations of many of the staples of modern online life: email, chat lines, discussion forums, online shopping, online banking, online gaming, even online dating. They were different from the Web in that they were walled gardens that provided no access to anything that lay beyond the big mainframes that hosted them. Yet within their walls lived bustling communities whose citizens paid their landlords by the minute for the privilege of participation.

The 500-pound gorilla of this market had always been CompuServe, which had been in the business since the days when a state-of-the-art home computer had 16 K of memory and used cassette tapes for storage. Of late, however, an upstart service called America Online (AOL) had been making waves. Under Steve Case, its wunderkind CEO, AOL aimed its pitch straight at the heart of Middle America rather than the tech-savvy elite. Over the course of 1993 alone, it went from 300,000 to 500,000 subscribers. But that was only the beginning if one listened to Case. For a second Home Computer Revolution, destined to be infinitely more successful and long-lasting than the first, was now in full swing, powered along by the ease of use of Windows 3 and by the latest consumer-grade hardware, which made computing faster and more aesthetically attractive than it had ever been before. AOL’s quick and easy custom software fit in perfectly with these trends. Surely this model of the online future — of curated content offered up by a firm whose stated ambition was to be the latest big player in mass media as a whole; of a subscription model that functioned much like the cable television which the large majority of Americans were already paying for — was more likely to take hold than the anarchic jungle that was the World Wide Web. It was, at any rate, a model that Bill Gates could understand very well, and naturally gravitated toward. Never one to leave cash on the table, he started asking himself how Microsoft could get a piece of this action as well.

Steve Case celebrates outside the New York Stock Exchange on March 19, 1992, the day America Online went public.

Gates proceeded in his standard fashion: in May of 1993, he tried to buy AOL outright. But Steve Case, who nursed dreams of becoming a media mogul on the scale of Walt Disney or Jack Warner, turned him down flat. At this juncture, Russ Siegelman, a 33-year-old physicist-by-education whom Gates had made his point man for online strategy, suggested a second classically Microsoft solution to the dilemma: they could build their own online service that copied AOL in most respects, then bury their rival with money and sheer ubiquity. They could, Siegelman suggested, make their own network an integral part of the eventual Windows 95, make signing up for it just another step in the installation process. How could AOL possibly compete with that? It was the first step down a fraught road that would lead to widespread outrage inside the computer industry and one of the most high-stakes anti-trust investigations in the history of American business — but for all that, the broad strategy would prove very, very effective once it reached its final form. It had a ways still to go at this stage, though, targeting as it did AOL instead of the Web.

Gates put Siegelman in charge of building Microsoft’s online service, which was code-named Project Marvel. “We were not thinking about the Internet at all,” admits one of the project’s managers. “Our competition was CompuServe and America Online. That’s what we were focused on, a proprietary online service.” At the time, there were exactly two computers in Microsoft’s sprawling Redmond, Washington, campus that were connected to the Internet. “Most college kids knew much more than we did because they were exposed to it,” says the Marvel manager. “If I had wanted to connect to the Internet, it would have been easier for me to get into my car and drive over to the University of Washington than to try and get on the Internet at Microsoft.”

It came down to the old “not built here” syndrome that dogs so many large institutions, as well as the fact that the Web and the Internet on which it lived were free, and Bill Gates tended to hold that which was free in contempt. Anyone who attempted to help him over his mental block — and there were more than a few of them at Microsoft — was greeted with an all-purpose rejoinder: “How are we going to make money off of free?” The biggest revolution in computing since the arrival of the first pre-assembled personal computers back in 1977 was taking place all around him, and Gates seemed constitutionally incapable of seeing it for what it was.

In the meantime, others were beginning to address the vexing question of how you made money out of free. On April 4, 1994, Marc Andreessen, the impetus behind the NCSA Mosaic browser, joined forces with Jim Clark, a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur, to found Netscape Communications for the purpose of making a commercial version of the Mosaic browser. A team of programmers, working without consulting the Mosaic source code so as to avoid legal problems, soon did just that, and uploaded Netscape Navigator to the Web on October 13, 1994. Distributed under the shareware model, with a $39 licensing fee requested but not demanded after a 90-day trial period was up, the new browser was installed on more than 10 million computers within nine months.

AOL’s growth had continued apace despite the concurrent explosion of the open Web; by the time of Netscape Navigator’s release, the service had 1.25 million subscribers. Yet Steve Case, no one’s idea of a hardcore techie, was ironically faster to see the potential — or threat — of the Web than was Bill Gates. He adopted a strategy in response that would make him for a time at least a superhero of the business press and the investor set. Instead of fighting the Web, AOL would embrace it — would offer its own Web browser to go along with its proprietary content, thereby adding a gate to its garden wall and tempting subscribers with the best of both worlds. As always for AOL, the whole package would be pitched toward neophytes, with a friendly interface and lots of safeguards — “training wheels,” as the tech cognoscenti dismissively dubbed them — to keep the unwashed masses safe when they did venture out into the untamed wilds of the Web.

But Case needed a browser of his own in order to execute his strategy, and he needed it in a hurry. He needed, in short, to buy a browser rather than build one. He saw three possibilities. One was to bring Netscape and its Navigator into the AOL fold. Another was a small company called Spyglass, a spinoff of the National Center for Supercomputing (NCSA) which was attempting to commercialize the original NCSA Mosaic browser. And the last was a startup called Booklink Technologies, which was making a browser from scratch.

Netscape was undoubtedly the superstar of the bunch, but that didn’t help AOL’s cause any; Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark weren’t about to sell out to anyone. Spyglass, on the other hand, struck Case as an unimaginative Johnny-come-lately that was trying to shut the barn door long after the horse called Netscape had busted out. That left only Booklink. In November of 1994, AOL paid $30 million for the company. The business press scoffed, deeming it a well-nigh flabbergasting over-payment. But Case would get the last laugh.

While AOL was thus rushing urgently to “embrace and extend” the Web, to choose an ominous phrase normally associated with Microsoft, the latter was dawdling along more lackadaisically toward a reckoning with the Internet. During that same busy fall of 1994, IBM released OS/2 3.0, which was marketed as OS/2 Warp in the hope of lending it some much-needed excitement. By either name, it was the latest iteration of an operating system that IBM had originally developed in partnership with Microsoft, an operating system that had once been regarded by both companies as nothing less than the future of mainstream computing. But since the pair’s final falling out in 1991, OS/2 had become an irrelevancy in the face of the Windows juggernaut, winning a measure of affection only in some hacker circles and a few other specialized niches. Despite its snazzy new name and despite being an impressive piece of software from a purely technical perspective, OS/2 Warp wasn’t widely expected to change those fortunes before its release, and this lack of expectations proved well-founded afterward. Yet it was a landmark in another way, being the first operating system to include a Web browser as an integral component, in this case a program called Web Explorer, created by IBM itself because no one else seemed much interested in making a browser for the unpopular OS/2.

This appears to have gotten some gears turning in Bill Gates’s head. Microsoft already planned to include more networking tools than ever before in Windows 95. They had, for example, finally decided to bow to customer demand and build right into the operating system TCP/IP, the networking protocol that allowed a computer to join the Internet; Windows 3 required the installation of a third-party add-on for the same purpose. (“I don’t know what it is, and I don’t want to know what it is,” said Steve Ballmer, Gates’s right-hand man, to his programmers on the subject of TCP/IP. “[But] my customers are screaming about it. Make the pain go away.”) Maybe a Microsoft-branded Web browser for Windows 95 would be a good idea as well, if they could acquire one without breaking the bank.

Just days after AOL bought Booklink for $30 million, Microsoft agreed to give $2 million to Spyglass. In return, Spyglass would give Microsoft a copy of the Mosaic source code, which it could then use as the basis for its own browser. But, lest you be tempted to see this transaction as evidence that Gates’s opinions about the online future had already undergone a sea change by this date, know that the very day this deal went down was also the one on which he chose to publicly announce Microsoft’s own proprietary AOL competitor, to be known as simply the Microsoft Network, or MSN. At most, Gates saw the open Web at this stage as an adjunct to MSN, just as it would soon become to AOL. MSN would come bundled into Windows 95, he told the assembled press, so that anyone who wished to could become a subscriber at the click of a mouse.

The announcement caused alarm bells to ring at AOL. “The Windows operating system is what the dial tone is to the phone industry,” said Steve Case. He thus became neither the first nor the last of Gates’s rival to hint at the need for government intervention: “There needs to be a level playing field on which companies compete.” Some pundits projected that Microsoft might sign up 20 million subscribers to MSN before 1995 was out. Others — the ones whom time would prove to have been more prescient — shook their heads and wondered how Microsoft could still be so clueless about the revolutionary nature of the World Wide Web.

AOL leveraged the Booklink browser to begin offering its subscribers Web access very early in 1995, whereupon its previously robust rate of growth turned downright torrid. By November of 1995, it would have 4 million subscribers. The personable and photogenic Steve Case became a celebrity in his own right, to the point of starring in a splashy advertising campaign for The Gap’s line of khakis; the man and the pants represented respectively the personification and the uniform of the trend in corporate America toward “business casual.” Meanwhile Case’s company became an indelible part of the 1990s zeitgeist. “You’ve got mail!,” the words AOL’s software spoke every time a new email arrived — something that was still very much a novel experience for many subscribers — was featured as a sample in a Prince song, and eventually became the name of a hugely popular romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. CompuServe and AOL’s other old rivals in the proprietary space tried to compete by setting up Internet gateways of their own, but were never able to negotiate the transition from one era of online life to another with the same aplomb as AOL, and gradually faded into irrelevancy.

Thankfully for Microsoft’s shareholders, Bill Gates’s eyes were opened before his company suffered the same fate. At the eleventh hour, with what were supposed to be the final touches being put onto Windows 95, he made a sharp swerve in strategy. He grasped at last that the open Web was the here, the now, and the future, the first major development in mainstream consumer computing in years that hadn’t been more or less dictated by Microsoft — but be that as it may, the Web wasn’t going anywhere. On May 26, 1995, he wrote a memo to every Microsoft employee that exuded an all-hands-on-deck sense of urgency. Gates, the longstanding Internet agnostic, had well and truly gotten the Internet religion.

I want to make clear that our focus on the Internet is critical to every part of our business. The Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981. It is even more important than the arrival of [the] graphical user interface (GUI). The PC analogy is apt for many reasons. The PC wasn’t perfect. Aspects of the PC were arbitrary or even poor. However, a phenomena [sic] grew up around the IBM PC that made it a key element of everything that would happen for the next fifteen years. Companies that tried to fight the PC standard often had good reasons for doing so, but they failed because the phenomena overcame any weakness that [the] resistors identified.

Over the last year, a number of people [at Microsoft] have championed embracing TCP/IP, hyperlinking, HTML, and building clients, tools, and servers that compete on the Internet. However, we still have a lot to do. I want every product plan to try and go overboard on Internet features.

Everything changed that day. Instead of walling its campus off from the Internet, Microsoft put the Web at every employee’s fingertips. Gates himself sent his people lists of hot new websites to explore and learn from. The team tasked with building the Microsoft browser, who had heretofore labored in under-staffed obscurity, suddenly had all the resources of the company at their beck and call. The fact was, Gates was scared; his fear oozes palpably from the aggressive language of the memo above. (Other people talked of “joining” the Internet; Gates wanted to “compete” on it.)

But just what was he so afraid of? A pair of data points provides us with some clues. Three days before he wrote his memo, a new programming language and run-time environment had taken the industry by storm. And the day after he did so, a Microsoft executive named Ben Slivka sent out a memo of his own with Gate’s blessing, bearing the odd title of “The Web Is the Next Platform.” To understand what Slivka was driving at, and why Bill Gates took it as such an imminent existential threat to his company’s core business model, we need to back up a few years and look at the origins of the aforementioned programming language.

Bill Joy, an old-school hacker who had made fundamental contributions to the Unix operating system, was regarded as something between a guru and an elder statesman by 1990s techies, who liked to call him “the other Bill.” In early 1991, he shared an eye-opening piece of his mind at a formal dinner for select insiders. Microsoft was then on the ascendant, he acknowledged, but they were “cruising for a bruising.” Sticking with the automotive theme, he compared their products to the American-made cars that had dominated until the 1970s — until the Japanese had come along peddling cars of their own that were more efficient, more reliable, and just plain better than the domestic competition. He said that the same fate would probably befall Microsoft within five to seven years, when a wind of change of one sort or another came along to upend the company and its bloated, ugly products. Just four years later, people would be pointing to a piece of technology from his own company Sun Microsystems as the prophesied agent of Microsoft’s undoing.

Sun had been founded in 1982 to leverage the skills of Joy along with those of a German hardware engineer named Andy Bechtolsheim, who had recently built an elegant desktop computer inspired by the legendary Alto machines of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. Over the remainder of the 1980s, Sun made a good living as the premier maker of Unix-based workstations: computers that were a bit too expensive to be marketed to even the most well-heeled consumers, but were among the most powerful of their day that could be fit onto or under a single desktop. Sun possessed a healthy antipathy for Microsoft, for all of the usual reasons cited by the hacker contingent: they considered Microsoft’s software derivative and boring, considered the Intel hardware on which it ran equally clunky and kludgy (Sun first employed Motorola chips, then processors of their own design), and loathed Microsoft’s intensely adversarial and proprietorial approach to everything it touched. For some time, however, Sun’s objections remained merely philosophical; occupying opposite ends of the market as they did, the two companies seldom crossed one another’s paths. But by the end of the decade, the latest Intel hardware had advanced enough to be comparable with that being peddled by Sun. And by the time that Bill Joy made his prediction, Sun knew that something called Windows NT was in the works, knew that Microsoft would be coming in earnest for the high-end-computing space very soon.

About six months after Joy played the oracle, Sun’s management agreed to allow one of their star programmers, a fellow named James Gosling, to form a small independent group in order to explore an idea that had little obviously to do with the company’s main business. “When someone as smart as James wants to pursue an area, we’ll do our best to provide an environment,” said Chief Technology Officer Eric Schmidt.

James Gosling

The specific “area” — or, perhaps better said, problem — that Gosling wanted to address was one that still exists to a large extent today: the inscrutability and lack of interoperability of so many of the gadgets that power our daily lives. The problem would be neatly crystalized almost five years later by one of the milquetoast jokes Jay Leno made at the Windows 95 launch, about how the VCR in even Bill Gates’s living room was still blinking “12:00” because he had never figured out how to set the thing’s clock. What if everything in your house could be made to talk together, wondered Gosling, so that setting one clock would set all of them — so that you didn’t have to have a separate remote control for your television and your VCR, each with about 80 buttons on it that you didn’t understand what they did and never, ever pressed. “What does it take to watch a videotape?” he mused. “You go plunk, plunk, plunk on all of these things in certain magic sequences before you can actually watch your videotape! Why is it so hard? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just slide the tape into the VCR, [and] the system sort of figures it out: ‘Oh, gee, I guess he wants to watch it, so I ought to power up the television set.'”

But when Gosling and his colleagues started to ponder how best to realize their semi-autonomous home of the future, they tripped over a major stumbling block. While it was true that more and more gadgets were becoming “smart,” in the sense of incorporating programmable microprocessors, the details of their digital designs varied enormously. Each program to link each individual model of, say, VCR into the home network would have to be written, tested, and debugged from scratch. Unless, that is, the program could be made to run in a virtual machine.

A virtual machine is an imaginary computer which a real computer can be programmed to simulate. It permits a “write once, run everywhere” approach to software: once a given real computer has an interpreter for a given virtual machine, it can run any and all programs that have been or will be written for that virtual machine, albeit at some cost in performance.

Like almost every other part of the programming language that would eventually become known as Java, the idea of a virtual machine was far from new in the abstract. (“In some sense, I would like to think that there was nothing invented in Java,” says Gosling.) For example, a decade before Gosling went to work on his virtual machine, the Apple Pascal compiler was already targeting one that ran on the lowly Apple II, even as the games publisher Infocom was distributing its text adventures across dozens of otherwise incompatible platforms thanks to its Z-Machine.

Unfortunately, Gosling’s new implementation of this old concept proved unable to solve by itself the original problem for which it had been invented. Even Wi-Fi didn’t exist at this stage, much less the likes of Bluetooth. Just how were all of these smart gadgets supposed to actually talk to one another, to say nothing of pulling down the regular software updates which Gosling envisioned as another benefit of his project? (Building a floppy-disk drive into every toaster was an obvious nonstarter.) After reluctantly giving up on their home of the future, the team pivoted for a while toward “interactive television,” a would-be on-demand streaming system much like our modern Netflix. But Sun had no real record in the consumer space, and cable-television providers and other possible investors were skeptical.

While Gosling was trying to figure out just what this programming language and associated runtime environment he had created might be good for, the World Wide Web was taking off. In July of 1994, a Sun programmer named Patrick Naughton did something that would later give Bill Gates nightmares: he wrote a fairly bare-bones Web browser in Java, more for the challenge than anything else. A couple of months later there came the eureka moment: Naughton and another programmer named Jonathan Payne made it possible to run other Java programs, or “applets” as they would soon be known, right inside their browser. They stuck one of the team’s old graphical demos on a server and clicked the appropriate link, whereupon they were greeted with a screen full of dancing Coca-Cola cans. Payne found it “breathtaking”: “It wasn’t just playing an animation. It was physics calculations going on inside a webpage!”

In order to appreciate his awe, we need to understand what a static place the early Web was. HTML, the “language” in which pages were constructed, was an abbreviation for “Hypertext Markup Language.” In form and function, it was more akin to a typesetting specification than a Turing-complete programming language like C or Pascal or Java; the only form of interactivity it allowed for was the links that took the reader from static page to static page, while its only visual pizazz came in the form of static in-line images (themselves a relatively recent addition to the HTML specification, thanks to NCSA Mosaic). Java stood to change all that at a stroke. If you could embed programs running actual code into your page layouts, you could in theory turn your pages into anything you wanted them to be: games, word processors, spreadsheets, animated cartoons, stock-market tickers, you name it. The Web could almost literally come alive.

The potential was so clearly extraordinary that Java went overnight from a moribund project on the verge of the chopping block to Sun’s top priority. Even Bill Joy, now living in blissful semi-retirement in Colorado, came back to Silicon Valley for a while to lend his prodigious intellect to the process of turning Java into a polished tool for general-purpose programming. There was still enough of the old-school hacker ethic left at Sun that management bowed to the developers’ demand that the language be made available for free to individual programmers and small businesses; Sun would make its money on licensing deals with bigger partners, who would pay for the Java logo on their products and the right to distribute the virtual machine. The potential of Java certainly wasn’t lost on Netscape’s Marc Andreessen, who had long been leading the charge to make the Web more visually exciting. He quickly agreed to pay Sun $750,000 for the opportunity to build Java into the Netscape Navigator browser. In fact, it was Andreessen who served as master of ceremonies at Java’s official coming-out party at a SunWorld conference on May 23, 1995 — i.e., three days before Bill Gates wrote his urgent Internet memo.

What was it that so spooked him about Java? On the one hand, it represented a possible if as-yet unrealized challenge to Microsoft’s own business model of selling boxed software on floppy disks or CDs. If people could gain access to a good word processor just by pointing their browsers to a given site, they would presumably have little motivation to invest in Microsoft Office, the company’s biggest cash cow after Windows. But the danger Java posed to Microsoft might be even more extreme. The most maximalist predictions, which were being trumpeted all over the techie press in the weeks after the big debut, had it that even Windows could soon become irrelevant courtesy of Java. This is what Microsoft’s own Ben Slivka meant when he said that “the Web is the next platform.” The browser itself would become the operating system from the perspective of the user, being supported behind the scenes only by the minimal amount of firmware needed to make it go. Once that happened, a new generation of cheap Internet devices would be poised to replace personal computers as the world now knew them. With all software and all of each person’s data being stored in the cloud, as we would put it today, even local hard drives might become passé. And then, with Netscape Navigator and Java having taken over the role of Windows, Microsoft might very well join IBM, the very company it had so recently displaced from the heights of power, in the crowded field of computing’s has-beens.

In retrospect, such predictions seem massively overblown. Officially labeled beta software, Java was in reality more like an alpha release at best at the time it was being celebrated as the Paris to Microsoft’s Achilles, being painfully crash-prone and slow. And even when it did reach a reasonably mature form, the reality of it would prove considerably less than the hype. One crippling weakness that would continue to plague it was the inability of a Java applet to communicate with the webpage that spawned it; applets ran in Web browsers, but weren’t really of them, being self-contained programs siloed off in a sandbox from the environment that spawned them. Meanwhile the prospects of applications like online word processing, or even online gaming in Java, were sharply limited by the fact that at least 95 percent of Web users were accessing the Internet on dial-up connections, over which even the likes of a single high-resolution photograph could take minutes to load. A word processor like the one included with Microsoft Office would require hours of downloading every time you wanted to use it, assuming it was even possible to create such a complex piece of software in the fragile young language. Java never would manage to entirely overcome these issues, and would in the end enjoy its greatest success in other incarnations than that of the browser-embedded applet.

Still, cooler-headed reasoning like this was not overly commonplace in the months after the SunWorld presentation. By the end of 1995, Sun’s stock price had more than doubled on the strength of Java alone, a product yet to see a 1.0 release. The excitement over Java probably contributed as well to Netscape’s record-breaking initial public offering in August. A cavalcade of companies rushed to follow in the footsteps of Netscape and sign Java distribution deals, most of them on markedly more expensive terms. Even Microsoft bowed to the prevailing winds on December 7 and announced a Java deal of its own. (BusinessWeek magazine described it as a “capitulation.”) That all of this was happening alongside the even more intense hype surrounding the release of Windows 95, an operating system far more expansive than any that had come out of Microsoft to date but one that was nevertheless of a very traditionalist stripe at bottom, speaks to the confusion of these go-go times when digital technology seemed to be going anywhere and everywhere at once.

Whatever fear and loathing he may have felt toward Java, Bill Gates had clearly made his peace with the fact that the Web was computing’s necessary present and future. The Microsoft Network duly debuted as an icon on the default Windows 95 desktop, but it was now pitched primarily as a gateway to the open Web, with just a handful of proprietary features; MSN was, in other words, little more than yet another Internet service provider, of the sort that were popping up all over the country like dandelions after a summer shower. Instead of the 20 million subscribers that some had predicted (and that Steve Case had so feared), it attracted only about 500,000 customers by the end of the year. This left it no more than one-eighth as large as AOL, which had by now completed its own deft pivot from proprietary online service of the 1980s type to the very face of the World Wide Web in the eyes of countless computing neophytes.

Yet if Microsoft’s first tentative steps onto the Web had proved underwhelming, people should have known from the history of the company — and not least from the long, checkered history of Windows itself — that Bill Gates’s standard response to failure and rejection was simply to try again, harder and better. The real war for online supremacy was just getting started.

(Sources: the books Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace by James Wallace, The Silicon Boys by David A. Kaplan, Architects of the Web by Robert H. Reid, Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and Its Battle with Microsoft by Michael Cusumano and David B. Yoffie, dot.con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold by John Cassidy, Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner by Alec Klein, Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner by Nina Munk, and There Must be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle by Kara Swisher.)

Comments
15 Responses

- David R

December 9, 2022 at 6:18 pm

Sun only used Motorola chips until 1987, when they started producing workstations with internally-designed SPARC processors instead. So at the time they were releasing Java, they were not only running their own Unix-based OS, but also their own processor as well.

- Jimmy Maher

December 9, 2022 at 6:21 pm

Thanks!

- Dan V.

December 9, 2022 at 7:16 pm

Great overview of the threat that the web and Java posed to Microsoft. As much nostalgia that we may have for early web 1.0 days, I don’t think any of us long for the return of Trumpet WinSock.

Only one small nit to pick:

“In form and function, it was more akin to the typesetting specification Postscript than a Turing-complete programming language like C or Pascal or Java…”

PostScript is a Turing-complete programming language. One that’s geared towards graphics, yes, but there’s a vast gulf between (old) HTML and PostScript level 1, alone level 2. I get the gist of your point (that early HTML wasn’t a programming language) but I think the better comparison is something like TeX/LaTeX, which is a typesetting markup language that isn’t Turing-complete.

There was also GML and SGML, which HTML owes a debt to, but that’s not something that I have an intimate knowledge of like I do with PostScript.

- Jimmy Maher

December 9, 2022 at 7:28 pm

I didn’t know that about PostScript. Thanks!

- Whomever

December 10, 2022 at 2:26 am

Postscript is actually a pretty neat language. It’s stack based and actually surprisingly easy to write cool stuff in. Of course this means it needs a CPU; there was legendarily a point in time when the most powerful computer Apple sold was the Laserwriter.

- Ross

December 12, 2022 at 8:20 pm

Postscript is a language for controlling a printer. At a certain level of abstraction, a printer is fundamentally a little robot that runs around on top of a piece of paper carrying a pen. It is therefore less surprising or ridiculous than you would think that the language for controlling a printer would be as expressive as the language for controlling any sort of general purpose robot. Even more, “a little robot with a pen running around on a piece of paper” is pretty much the exact literal hypothetical model (I mean not quite since the actual abstract case requires the paper be a strip infinitely long and one character wide) of what a turing machine is. A turing machine basically is just a printer.

- Aula

December 9, 2022 at 8:00 pm

TeX is Turing-complete, so even it wouldn’t work as an example.

- Dan V.

December 11, 2022 at 4:59 am

You know, I hadn’t even considered its full capabilities because I had only used TeX in a markup context (whereas PostScript is never markup by definition, I’ve spent more time than I care to admit picking a part an interp’s stack). But you’re right.

- Keith Palmer

December 10, 2022 at 2:33 am

Bringing up AOL’s pivot towards the Internet does remind me of how it had offered Usenet access earlier on (and marked one beginning of the end for the discussions there, at least in the opinions of some who’d already been on it), but I can suppose that’s a point too small to have been brought up in the main article. So far as Microsoft’s proprietary online service plans go, I’d used some free trial hours for an Apple proprietary online service called eWorld at the end of 1994, but with a smaller user base to begin with eWorld didn’t make a good start… With that brought up, I also admit the focus on Sun had me remembering rumours it was going to buy the much-bruised Apple. In any case, Gates’s pivot-to-the-Internet memo precedes by months when I managed to establish a long-term connection to the Internet myself.

- Clemens Gedoensrath

December 10, 2022 at 2:34 am

I never hoped I could be able to contribute to your enjoyable and unprecedented history of game and computing as a (german) non-native speaker, but I hope I don’t miss a hidden meaning here:

“hype surrounding the release of Windows 95, an operating system far more expansive than any that had come out of Microsoft to date”

While this incarnation of Windows expanded in regard of size, GUI improvement, usability, the plug and play concept, APIs, driver supply and market share for sure as previously described, it was – in comparison to Java, being just a runtime environment and not an OS – expensive (to develop and to aquire) in the first place. I hope I got a point here :-)

- Rowan Lipkovits

January 7, 2023 at 9:41 am

“Chief Technology Officer Eric Schmidt”

That name sounds familiar, I thought, but I’m not very conversant with the history of Sun Microsystems…

That’s a real deadpan setting of the stage for later acts!

- Jimmy Maher

January 7, 2023 at 11:57 am

He went on to become the CEO of Google, and is still a big wheel in the tech-investment world.

- Rowan Lipkovits

January 8, 2023 at 11:46 pm

Absolutely, I figured it out. And once I did, I just thought it was funny for you to present him in passing as basically just some guy and then move on.

- Steve-O

January 31, 2023 at 2:21 am

Minor typo: “proprieatary dial-up services”

- Jimmy Maher

January 31, 2023 at 6:52 am

Thanks!

Doing Windows, Part 12: David and Goliath
December 23, 2022

Microsoft, intent on its mission to destroy Netscape, rolled out across the industry with all the subtlety and attendant goodwill of Germany invading Poland…

— Merrill R. Chapman

No one reacted more excitedly to the talk of Java as the dawn of a whole new way of computing than did the folks at Netscape. Marc Andreessen, whose head had swollen exactly as much as the average 24-year-old’s would upon being repeatedly called a great engineer, businessman, and social visionary all rolled into one, was soon proclaiming Netscape Navigator to be far more than just a Web browser: it was general-purpose computing’s next standard platform, possibly the last one it would ever need. Java, he said, generously sharing the credit for this development, was “as revolutionary as the Web itself.” As for Microsoft Windows, it was merely “a poorly debugged set of device drivers.” Many even inside Netscape wondered whether he was wise to poke the bear from Redmond so, but he was every inch a young man feeling his oats.

Just two weeks before the release of Windows 95, the United States Justice Department had ended a lengthy antitrust investigation of Microsoft’s business practices with a decision not to bring any charges. Bill Gates and his colleague took this to mean it was open season on Netscape.

Thus, just a few weeks after the bravura Windows 95 launch, a war that would dominate the business and computing press for the next three years began. The opening salvo from Microsoft came in a weirdly innocuous package: something called the “Windows Plus Pack,” which consisted mostly of slightly frivolous odds and ends that hadn’t made it into the main Windows 95 distribution — desktop themes, screensavers, sound effects, etc. But it also included the very first release of Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer browser, the fruit of the deal with Spyglass. After you put the Plus! CD into the drive and let the package install itself, it was as hard to get rid of Internet Explorer as it was a virus. For unlike all other applications, there appeared no handy “uninstall” option for Internet Explorer. Once it had its hooks in your computer, it wasn’t letting go for anything. And its preeminent mission in life there seemed to be to run roughshod over Netscape Navigator. It inserted itself in place of its arch-enemy in your file associations and everywhere else, so that it kept turning up like a bad penny every time you clicked a link. If you insisted on bringing up Netscape Navigator in its stead, you were greeted with the pointed “suggestion” that Internet Explorer was the better, more stable option.

Microsoft’s biggest problem at this juncture was that that assertion didn’t hold water; Internet Explorer 1.0 was only a modest improvement over the old NCSA Mosaic browser on whose code it was based. Meanwhile Netscape was pushing aggressively forward with its vision of the browser as a platform, a home for active content of all descriptions. Netscape Navigator 2.0, whose first beta release appeared almost simultaneously with Internet Explorer 1.0, doubled down on that vision by including an email and Usenet client. More importantly, it supported not only Java but a second programming language for creating active content on the Web — a language that would prove much more important to the evolution of the Web in the long run.

Even at this early stage — still four months before Sun would deign to grant Java its own 1.0 release — some of the issues with using it on the Web were becoming clear: namely, the weight of the virtual machine that had to be loaded and started before a Java applet could run, and said applet’s inability to communicate easily with the webpage that had spawned it. Netscape therefore decided to create something that lay between the static simplicity of vanilla HTML and the dynamic complexity of Java. The language called JavaScript would share much of its big brother’s syntax, but it would be interpreted rather than compiled, and would live in the same environment as the HTML that made up a webpage rather than in a sandbox of its own. In fact, it would be able to manipulate that HTML directly and effortlessly, changing the page’s appearance on the fly in response to the user’s actions. The idea was that programmers would use JavaScript for very simple forms of active content — like, say, a popup photo gallery or a scrolling stock ticker — and use Java for full-fledged in-browser software applications — i.e., your word processors and the like.

In contrast to Java, a compiled language walled off inside its own virtual machine, JavaScript is embedded directly into the HTML that makes up a webpage, using the handy “<script>” tag.

There’s really no way to say this kindly: JavaScript was (and is) a pretty horrible programming language by any objective standard. Unlike Java, which was the product of years of thought, discussion, and experimentation, JavaScript was the very definition of “quick and dirty” in a computer-science context. Even its principal architect Brendan Eich doesn’t speak of it like an especially proud parent; he calls it “Java’s dumb little brother” and “a rush job.” Which it most certainly was: he designed and implemented JavaScript from scratch in a matter of bare weeks.

What he ended up with would revolutionize the Web not because it was good, but because it was good enough, filling a craving that turned out to be much more pressing and much more satisfiable in the here and now than the likes of in-browser word processing. The lightweight JavaScript could be used to bring the Web alive, to make it a responsive and interactive place, more quickly and organically than the heavyweight Java. Once JavaScript had reached a critical mass in that role, it just kept on rolling with all the relentlessness of a Microsoft operating system. Today an astonishing 98 percent of all webpages contain at least a little bit of JavaScript in addition to HTML, and a cottage industry has sprung up to modify and extend the language — and attempt to fix the many infelicities that haunt the sleep of computer-science professors all over the world. JavaScript has become, in other words, the modern world’s nearest equivalent to what BASIC was in the 1980s, a language whose ease of use, accessibility, and populist appeal make up for what it lacks in elegance. These days we even do online word processing in JavaScript. If you had told Brendan Eich that that would someday be the case back in 1995, he would have laughed as loud and long at you as anyone.

Although no one could know it at the time, JavaScript also represents the last major building block to the modern Web for which Marc Andreessen can take a substantial share of the credit, following on from the “image” tag for displaying inline graphics, the secure sockets layer (SSL) for online encryption (an essential for any form of e-commerce), and to a lesser extent the Java language. Microsoft, by contrast, was still very much playing catch-up.

Nevertheless, on December 7, 1995 — the symbolism of this anniversary of the United States’s entry into World War II was lost on no one — Bill Gates gave a major address to the Microsoft faithful and assembled press, in which he made it clear that Microsoft was in the browser war to win it. In addition to announcing that his company too would bite the bullet and license Java for Internet Explorer, he said that the latter browser would no longer be a Windows 95 exclusive, but would soon be made available for Windows 3 and even MacOS as well. And everywhere it appeared, it would continue to sport the very un-Microsoft price tag of free, proof that this old dog was learning some decidedly new tricks for achieving market penetration in this new era of online software distribution. “When we say the browser’s free, we’re saying something different from other people,” said Gates, in a barbed allusion to Netscape’s shareware distribution model. “We’re not saying, ‘You can use it for 90 days,’ or, ‘You can use it and then maybe next year we’ll charge you a bunch of money.'” Netscape, whose whole business revolved around its browser, couldn’t afford to give Navigator away, a fact of which Gates was only too well aware. (Some pundits couldn’t resist contrasting this stance with Gates’s famous 1976 “Open Letter To Hobbyists,” in which he had asked, “Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?” Obviously Microsoft now could…)

Netscape’s stock price dropped by $28.75 that day. For Microsoft’s research budget alone was five times the size of Netscape’s total annual revenues, while the bigger company now had more than 800 people — twice Netscape’s total headcount — working on Internet Explorer alone. Marc Andreessen could offer only vague Silicon Valley aphorisms when queried about these disparities: “In a fight between a bear and an alligator, what determines the victor is the terrain” — and Microsoft, he claimed, had now moved “onto our terrain.” The less abstractly philosophical Larry Ellison, head of the database giant Oracle and a man who had had more than his share of run-ins with Bill Gates in the past, joked darkly about the “four stages” of Microsoft stealing someone else’s innovation. Stage 1: to “ridicule” it. Stage 2: to admit that, “yeah, there are a few interesting ideas here.” Stage 3: to make its own version. Stage 4: to make the world forget that the non-Microsoft version had ever existed.

Yet for the time being the Netscape tail continued to wag the Microsoft dog. A more interactive and participatory vision of the Web, enabled by the magic of JavaScript, was spreading like wildfire by the middle of 1996. You still needed Netscape Navigator to experience this first taste of what would eventually be labelled Web 2.0, a World Wide Web that blurred the lines between readers and writers, between content consumers and content creators. For if you visited one of these cutting-edge sites with Internet Explorer, it simply wouldn’t work. Despite all of Microsoft’s efforts, Netscape in June of 1996 could still boast of a browser market share of 85 percent. Marc Andreessen’s Sun Tzu-lite philosophy appeared to have some merit to it after all; his company was by all indications still winning the browser war handily. Even in its 2.0 incarnation, which had been released at about the same time as Gates’s Pearl Harbor speech, Internet Explorer remained something of a joke among Windows users, the annoying mother-in-law you could never seem to get rid of once she showed up.

But then, grizzled veterans like Larry Ellison had seen this movie before; they knew that it was far too early to count Microsoft out. That August, both Netscape and Microsoft released 3.0 versions of their browsers. Netscape’s was a solid evolution of what had come before, but contained no game changers like JavaScript. Microsoft’s, however, was a dramatic leap forward. In addition to Java support, it introduced JScript, a lightweight scripting language that just so happened to have the same syntax as JavaScript. At a stroke, all of those sites which hadn’t worked with earlier versions of Internet Explorer now displayed perfectly well in either browser.

With his browser itself more or less on a par with Netscape’s, Bill Gates decided it was time to roll out his not-so-secret weapon. In October of 1996, Microsoft began shipping Windows 95’s “Service Pack 2,” the second substantial revision of the operating system since its launch. Along with a host of other improvements, it included Internet Explorer. From now on, the browser would ship with every single copy of Windows 95 and be installed automatically as part of the operating system, whether the user wanted it or not. New Windows users would have to make an active choice and then an active effort to go to Netscape’s site — using Internet Explorer, naturally! — and download the “alternative” browser. Microsoft was counting on the majority of these users not knowing anything about the browser war and/or just not wanting to be bothered.

Microsoft employed a variety of carrots and sticks to pressure other companies throughout the computing ecosystem to give or at the bare minimum to recommend Internet Explorer to their customers in lieu of Netscape Navigator. It wasn’t above making the favorable Windows licensing deals it signed with big consumer-computer manufacturers like Compaq dependent on precisely this. But the most surprising pact by far was the one Microsoft made with America Online (AOL).

Relations between the face of the everyday computing desktop and the face of the Internet in the eyes of millions of ordinary Americans had been anything but cordial in recent years. Bill Gates had reportedly told Steve Case, his opposite number at AOL, that he would “bury” him with his own Microsoft Network (MSN). Meanwhile Case had complained long and loud about Microsoft’s bullying tactics to the press, to the point of mooting a comparison between Gates and Adolf Hitler on at least one occasion. Now, though, Gates was willing to eat crow and embrace AOL, even at the expense of his own MSN, if he could stick it to Netscape in the process.

For its part, AOL had come as far as it could with its Booklink browser. The Web was evolving too rapidly for the little development team it had inherited with that acquisition to keep up. Case grudgingly accepted that he needed to offer his customers one of the Big Two browsers. All of his natural inclinations bent toward Netscape. And indeed, he signed a deal with Netscape to make Navigator the browser that shipped with AOL’s turnkey software suite — or so Netscape believed. It turned out that Netscape’s lawyers had overlooked one crucial detail: they had never stipulated exclusivity in the contract. This oversight wasn’t lost on the interested bystander Microsoft, which swooped in immediately to take advantage of it. AOL soon announced another deal, to provide its customers with Internet Explorer as well. Even worse for Netscape, this deal promised Microsoft not only availability but priority: Internet Explorer would be AOL’s recommended, default browser, Netscape Navigator merely an alternative for iconoclastic techies (of which there were, needless to say, very few in AOL’s subscriber base).

What did AOL get in return for getting into bed with Adolf Hitler and “jilting Netscape at the altar,” as the company’s own lead negotiator would later put it? An offer that was impossible for a man with Steve Case’s ambitions to refuse, as it happened. Microsoft would put an AOL icon on the desktop of every new Windows 95 installation, where the hundreds of thousands of Americans who were buying a computer every month in order to check out this Internet thing would see it sitting there front and center, and know, thanks to AOL’s nonstop advertising blitz, that the wonders of the Web were just one click on it away. It was a stunning concession on Microsoft’s part, not least because it came at the direct cost of MSN, the very online network Bill Gates had originally conceived as his method of “burying” AOL. Now, though, no price was too high to pay in his quest to destroy Netscape.

Which raises the question of why he was so obsessed, given that Microsoft was making literally no money from Internet Explorer. The answer is rooted in all that rhetoric that was flying around at the time about the browser as a computing platform — about the Web effectively turning into a giant computer in its own right, floating up there somewhere in the heavens, ready to give a little piece of itself to anyone with a minimalist machine running Netscape Navigator. Such a new world order would have no need for a Microsoft Windows — perish the thought! But if, on the other hand, Microsoft could wrest the title of leading browser developer out of the hands of Netscape, it could control the future evolution of this dangerously unruly beast known as the World Wide Web, and ensure that it didn’t encroach on its other businesses.

That the predictions which prompted Microsoft’s downright unhinged frenzy to destroy Netscape were themselves wildly overblown is ironic but not material. As tech journalist Merrill R. Chapman has put it, “The prediction that anyone was going to use Navigator or any other browser anytime soon to write documents, lay out publications, build budgets, store files, and design presentations was a fantasy. The people who made these breathless predictions apparently never tried to perform any of these tasks in a browser.” And yet in an odd sort of way this reality check didn’t matter. Perception can create its own reality, and Bill Gates’s perception of Netscape Navigator as an existential threat to the software empire he had spent the last two decades building was enough to make the browser war feel like a truly existential clash for both parties, even if the only one whose existence actually was threatened — urgently threatened! — was Netscape. Jim Clark, Marc Andreessen’s partner in founding Netscape, makes the eyebrow-raising claim that he “knew we were dead” in the long run well before the end of 1996, when the Department of Justice declined to respond to an urgent plea on Netscape’s part to take another look at Microsoft’s business practices.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the conflict is just how long Netscape’s long run proved to be. It was in most respects David versus Goliath: Netscape in 1996 had $300 million in annual revenues to Microsoft’s nearly $9 billion. But whatever the disparities of size, Netscape had built up a considerable reservoir of goodwill as the vehicle through which so many millions had experienced the Web for the first time. Microsoft found this soft power oddly tough to overcome, even with a browser of its own that was largely identical in functional terms. A remarkable number of people continued to make the active choice to use Netscape Navigator instead of the passive one to use Internet Explorer. By October of 1997, one year after Microsoft brought out the big gun and bundled Internet Explorer right into Windows 95, its browser’s market share had risen as high as 39 percent — but it was Netscape that still led the way at 51 percent.

Yet Netscape wasn’t using those advantages it did possess all that effectively. It was not a happy or harmonious company: there were escalating personality clashes between Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen, and also between Andreessen and his programmers, who thought their leader had become a glory hound, too busy playing the role of the young dot.com millionaire to pay attention to the vital details of software development. Perchance as a result, Netscape’s drive to improve its browser in paradigm-shifting ways seemed to slowly dissipate after the landmark Navigator 2.0 release.

Netscape, so recently the darling of the dot.com age, was now finding it hard to make a valid case for itself merely as a viable business. The company’s most successful quarter in financial terms was the third of 1996 — just before Internet Explorer became an official part of Windows 95 — when it brought in $100 million in revenue. Receipts fell precipitously after that point, all the way down to just $18.5 million in the last quarter of 1997. By so aggressively promoting Internet Explorer as entirely and perpetually free, Bill Gates had, whether intentionally or inadvertently, instilled in the general public an impression that all browsers were or ought to be free, due to some unstated reason inherent in their nature. (This impression has never been overturned, as has been testified over the years by the failure of otherwise worthy commercial browsers like Opera to capture much market share.) Thus even the vast majority of those who did choose Netscape’s browser no longer seemed to feel any ethical compulsion to pay for it. Netscape was left in a position all too familiar to Web firms of the past and present alike: that of having immense name recognition and soft power, but no equally impressive revenue stream to accompany them. It tried frantically to pivot into back-end server architecture and corporate intranet solutions, but its efforts there were, as its bottom line will attest, not especially successful. It launched a Web portal and search engine known as Netcenter, but struggled to gain traction against Yahoo!, the leader in that space. Both Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen sold off large quantities of their personal stock, never a good sign in Silicon Valley.

Netscape Navigator was renamed Netscape Communicator for its 4.0 release in June of 1997. As the name would imply, Communicator was far more than just a browser, or even just a browser with an integrated email client and Usenet reader, as Navigator had been since version 2.0. Now it also sported an integrated editor for making your own websites from scratch, a real-time chat system, a conference caller, an appointment calendar, and a client for “pushing” usually unwanted content to your screen. It was all much, much too much, weighted down with features most people would never touch, big and bloated and slow and disturbingly crash-prone; small wonder that even many Netscape loyalists chose to stay with Navigator 3 after the release of Communicator. Microsoft had not heretofore been known for making particularly svelte software, but Internet Explorer, which did nothing but browse the Web, was a lean ballerina by comparison with the lumbering Sumo wrestler that was Netscape Communicator. The original Netscape Navigator had sprung from the hacker culture of institutional computing, but the company had apparently now forgotten one of that culture’s key dictums in its desire to make its browser a platform unto itself: the best programs are those that do only one thing, but do that one thing very, very well, leaving all of the other things to other programs.

Netscape Communicator. I’m told that there’s an actual Web browser buried somewhere in this pile. Probably a kitchen sink too, if you look hard enough.

Luckily for Netscape, Internet Explorer 4.0, which arrived three months after Communicator, violated the same dictum in an even more inept way. It introduced what Microsoft called the “Active Desktop,” which let it bury its hooks deeper than ever into Windows itself. The Active Desktop was — or tried to be —  Bill Gates’s nightmare of a Web that was impossible to separate from one’s local computer come to life, but with Microsoft’s own logo on it. Ironically, it blurred the distinction between the local computer and the Internet more thoroughly than anything the likes of Sun or Netscape had produced to date; local files and applications became virtually indistinguishable from those that lived on the Internet in the new version of the Windows desktop it installed in place of the old. The end result served mainly to illustrate how half-baked all of the prognostications about a new era of computing exclusively in the cloud really were. The Active Desktop was slow and clumsy and confusing, and absolutely everyone who was exposed to it seemed to hate it and rush to find a way to turn it off. Fortunately for Microsoft, it was possible to do so without removing the Internet Explorer 4 browser itself.

The dreaded Active Desktop. Surprisingly, it was partially defended on philosophical grounds by Tim Berners-Lee, not normally a fan of Microsoft. “It was ridiculous for a person to have two separate interfaces, one for local information (the desktop for their own computer) and one for remote information (a browser to reach other computers),” he writes. “Why did we need an entire desktop for our own computer, but only get little windows through which to view the rest of the planet? Why, for that matter, should we have folders on our desktop but not on the Web? The Web was supposed to be the universe of all accessible information, which included, especially, information that happened to be stored locally. I argued that the entire topic of where information was physically stored should be made invisible to the user.” For better or for worse, though, the public didn’t agree. And even he had to allow that “this did not have to imply that the operating system and browser should be the same program.”

The Active Desktop damaged Internet Explorer’s reputation, but arguably not as badly as Netscape’s had been damaged by the bloated Communicator. For once you turned off all that nonsense, Internet Explorer 4 proved to be pretty good at doing the rest of its job. But there was no similar method for trimming the fat from Netscape Communicator.

While Microsoft and Netscape, those two for-profit corporations, had been vying with one another for supremacy on the Web, another, quieter party had been looking on with great concern. Before the Web had become the hottest topic of the business pages, it had been an idea in the head of the mild-mannered British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. He had built the Web on the open Internet, using a new set of open standards; his inclination had never been to control his creation personally. It was to be a meeting place, a library, a forum, perhaps a marketplace if you liked — but always a public commons. When Berners-Lee formed the non-profit World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in October of 1994 in the hope of guiding an orderly evolution of the Web that kept it independent of the moneyed interests rushing to join the party, it struck many as a quaint endeavor at best. Key technologies like Java and JavaScript appeared and exploded in popularity without giving the W3C a chance to say anything about them. (Tellingly, the word “JavaScript” never even appears in Berners-Lee’s 1999 book about his history with and vision for the Web, despite the scripting language’s almost incalculable importance to making it the dynamic and diverse place it had become by that point.)

From the days when he had been a mere University of Illinois student making a browser on the side, Marc Andreessen had blazed his own trail without giving much thought to formal standards. When the things he unilaterally introduced proved useful, others rushed to copy them, and they became de-facto standards. This was as true of JavaScript as it was of anything else. As we’ve seen, it began as a Netscape-exclusive feature, but was so obviously transformative to what the Web could do and be that Microsoft had no choice but to copy it, to incorporate its own implementation of it into Internet Explorer.

But JavaScript was just about the last completely new feature to be rolled out and widely adopted in this ad-hoc fashion. As the Web reached a critical mass, with Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer both powering users’ experiences of it in substantial numbers, site designers had a compelling reason not to use any technology that only worked on the one or the other; they wanted to reach as many people as possible, after all. This brought an uneasy sort of equilibrium to the Web.

Nevertheless, the first instinct of both Netscape and Microsoft remained to control rather than to share the Web. Both companies’ histories amply demonstrated that open standards meant little to them; they preferred to be the standard. What would happen if and when one company won the browser war, as Microsoft seemed slowly to be doing by 1997, what with the trend lines all going in its favor and Netscape in veritable financial free fall? Once 90 percent or more of the people browsing the Web were doing so with Internet Explorer, Microsoft would be free to give its instinct for dominance free reign. With an army of lawyers at its beck and call, it would be able to graft onto the Web proprietary, patented technologies that no upstart competitor would be able to reverse-engineer and copy, and pragmatic website designers would no longer have any reason not to use them, if they could make their sites better. And once many or most websites depended on these features that were available only in Internet Explorer, that would be that for the open Web. Despite its late start, Microsoft would have managed to embrace, extend, and in a very real sense destroy Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of a World Wide Web. The public commons would have become a Microsoft-branded theme park.

These worries were being bandied about with ever-increasing urgency in January of 1998, when Netscape made what may just have been the most audacious move of the entire dot.com boom. Like most such moves, it was born of sheer desperation, but that shouldn’t blind us to its importance and even bravery. First of all, Netscape made its browser free as in beer, finally giving up on even asking people to pay for the thing. Admittedly, though, this in itself was little more than an acceptance of the reality on the ground, as it were. It was the other part of the move that really shocked the tech world: Netscape also made its browser free as in freedom — it opened up its source code to all and sundry. “This was radical in its day,” remembers Mitchell Baker, one of the prime drivers of the initiative at Netscape. “Open source is mainstream now; it was not then. Open source was deep, deep, deep in the technical community. It never surfaced in a product. [This] was a very radical move.”

Netscape spun off a not-for-profit organization, led by Baker and called Mozilla, after a cartoon dinosaur that had been the company’s office mascot almost from day one. Coming well before the Linux operating system began conquering large swaths of corporate America, this was to be open source’s first trial by fire in the real world. Mozilla was to concentrate on the core code required for rendering webpages — the engine room of a browser, if you will. Then others — not least among them the for-profit arm of Netscape — would build the superstructures of finished applications around that sturdy core.

Alas, Netscape the for-profit company was already beyond saving. If anything, this move only hastened the end; Netscape had chosen to give away the one product it had that some tiny number of people were still willing to pay for. Some pundits talked it up as a dying warrior’s last defiant attempt to pass the sword to others, to continue the fight against Microsoft and Internet Explorer: “From the depths of Hell, I spit at thee!” Or, as Tim Berners-Lee put it more soberly: “Microsoft was bigger than Netscape, but Netscape was hoping the Web community was bigger than Microsoft.” And there may very well be something to these points of view. But regardless of the motivations behind it, the decision to open up Netscape’s browser proved both a landmark in the history of open-source software and a potent weapon in the fight to keep the Web itself open and free. Mozilla has had its ups and downs over the years since, but it remains with us to this day, still providing an alternative to the corporate-dominated browsers almost a quarter-century on, having outlived the more conventional corporation that spawned it by a factor of six.

Mozilla’s story is an important one, but we’ll have to leave the details of it for another day. For now, we return to the other players in today’s drama.

While Microsoft and Netscape were battling one another, AOL was soaring into the stratosphere, the happy beneficiary of Microsoft’s decision to give it an icon on the Windows 95 desktop in the name of vanquishing Netscape. In 1997, in a move fraught with symbolic significance, AOL bought CompuServe, its last remaining competitor from the pre-Web era of closed, proprietary online services. By the time Netscape open-sourced its browser, AOL had 12 million subscribers and annual profits — profits, mind you, not revenues — of over $500 million, thanks not only to subscription fees but to the new frontier of online advertising, where revenues and profits were almost one and the same. At not quite 40 years old, Steve Case had become a billionaire.

“AOL is the Internet blue chip,” wrote the respected stock analyst Henry Blodget. And indeed, for all of its association with new and shiny technology, there was something comfortingly stolid — even old-fashioned — about the company. Unlike so many of his dot.com compatriots, Steve Case had found a way to combine name recognition and a desirable product with a way of getting his customers to actually pay for said product. He liked to compare AOL with a cable-television provider; this was a comparison that even the most hidebound investors could easily understand. Real, honest-to-God checks rolled into AOL’s headquarters every month from real, honest-to-God people who signed up for real, honest-to-God paid subscriptions. So what if the tech intelligentsia laughed and mocked, called AOL “the cockroach of cyberspace,” and took an “@AOL.com” suffix on someone’s email address as a sign that they were too stupid to be worth talking to? Case and his shareholders knew that money from the unwashed masses spent just as well as money from the tech elites.

Microsoft could finally declare victory in the browser war in the summer of 1998, when the two browsers’ trend lines crossed one another. At long last, Internet Explorer’s popularity equaled and then rapidly eclipsed that of Netscape Navigator/Communicator. It hadn’t been clean or pretty, but Microsoft had bludgeoned its way to the market share it craved.

A few months later, AOL acquired Netscape through a stock swap that involved no cash, but was worth a cool $9.8 billion on paper — an almost comical sum in relation to the amount of actual revenue the purchased company had brought in during its lifetime. Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen walked away very, very rich men. Just as Netscape’s big IPO had been the first of its breed, the herald of the dot.com boom, Netscape now became the first exemplar of the boom’s unique style of accounting, which allowed people to get rich without ever having run a profitable business.

Even at the time, it was hard to figure out just what it was about Netscape that AOL thought was worth so much money. The deal is probably best understood as a product of Steve Case’s fear of a Microsoft-dominated Web; despite that AOL icon on the Windows desktop, he still didn’t trust Bill Gates any farther than he could throw him. In the end, however, AOL got almost nothing for its billions. Netscape Communicator was renamed AOL Communicator and offered to the service’s subscribers, but even most of them, technically unsophisticated though they tended to be, could see that Internet Explorer was the cleaner and faster and just plain better choice at this juncture. (The open-source coders working with Mozilla belatedly realized the same; they would wind up spending years writing a brand-new browser engine from scratch after deciding that Netscape’s just wasn’t up to snuff.)

Most of Netscape’s remaining engineers walked soon after the deal was made. They tended to describe the company’s meteoric rise and fall in the terms of a Shakespearean tragedy. “At least the old timers among us came to Netscape to change the world,” lamented one. “Getting killed by the Evil Empire, being gobbled up by a big corporation — it’s incredibly sad.” If that’s painting with rather too broad a brush — one should always run away screaming when a Silicon Valley denizen starts talking about “changing the world” — it can’t be denied that Netscape at no time enjoyed a level playing field in its war against Microsoft.

But times do change, as Microsoft was about to learn to its cost. In May of 1998, the Department of Justice filed suit against Microsoft for illegally exploiting its Windows monopoly in order to crush Netscape. The suit came too late to save the latter, but it was all over the news even as the first copies of Windows 98, the hotly anticipated successor to Windows 95, were reaching store shelves. Bill Gates had gotten his wish; Internet Explorer and Windows were now indissolubly bound together. Soon he would have cause to wish that he had not striven for that outcome quite so vigorously.

(Sources: the books Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace by James Wallace, The Silicon Boys by David A. Kaplan, Architects of the Web by Robert H. Reid, Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and Its Battle with Microsoft by Michael Cusumano and David B. Yoffie, dot.con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold by John Cassidy, Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner by Alec Klein, Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner by Nina Munk, There Must be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle by Kara Swisher, In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters by Merrill R. Chapman, Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming by Peter Seibel, and Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee. Online sources include “1995: The Birth of JavaScript” at Web Development History, the New York Times timeline of AOL’s history, and Mitchell Baker’s talk about the history of Mozilla, which is available on Wikipedia.)

Comments
41 Responses

- Kaj Sotala

December 23, 2022 at 4:33 pm

> They remain to a large extent a fantasy even today, when the hardware and software that power our digital existences have advanced enormously; Google Docs in a browser has its place, but Microsoft Office on the desktop remains most people’s first choice to get real work done.

Huh, interesting – up to this point in the article, I was thinking that the predictions were a little bit premature but that a lot of them have come true today. Especially since I’ve stopped using desktop-based word processors / spreadsheets / slideshows for most purposes, and that seems to be the case with most people I know. But maybe I’m in a bubble and Office is still predominant in general?

I tried looking this up, but the results are hard to interpret since most comparisons seem to be comparing Google Suite / Google Apps to Office 365, and Office 365 contains a lot of things besides just Word / Excel / PowerPoint. Plus those are apparently offered as cloud-based versions as well!

But at least some of the results suggest that Google’s offering would at least be highly competitive, e.g. this page ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/983299/worldwide-market-share-of-office-productivity-software/ ) claiming that Office 365 had 48 percent of the global market share in Feb 2022, and that “Google’s office suite is the other major competitor in the market and has recent lost the lead to Office 365” – implying that Google Suite was actually more popular for a while.

- Ian Crossfield

December 23, 2022 at 4:50 pm

I thought the same thing, and the change is continuing in the direction of ‘cloud’ office suites: when I ask my university students to email me an assignment, it’s all too common that they think sending me a link to a shared online (Google, MS, etc.) document is the same as sending me the file itself.

I’d ask for a take someday on StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice (my go-to over the past many years), but I fear we long ago established the precedent that this site doesn’t take on such (unfortunately) niche cases.

- Gnoman

December 25, 2022 at 4:26 am

The “cloud” suites have a fundamental weakness that doesn’t impact most casual users, but is deadly for a lot of business uses – they’re on the public cloud. We’ve seen again and again how even the most respectable companies that should be impregnable -The infamous iCloud hacks that caused great harm to so many female celebrities several years ago comes to mind- show that you just can’t be sure your data is going to be secure that way.

Local software controlled through your internal network is fundamentally harder to breach (if only because somebody has to be targeting you specifically and not just breaking into the big cloud and grabbing stuff at random), and your security is entirely under your control.

This alone is likely to mean that on-computer programs aren’t going away, ever, for a great big chunk of users. And that chunk is the portion that would be most often paying for the software anyway.

- Ishkur

December 23, 2022 at 6:14 pm

I’ve worked in Open Office. It’s vastly inferior for my needs but I recognize that I am a power user who needs specific functions for certain tasks that browser-based spreadsheet, document, and page layout apps still cannot do (and that MS Office can do for over 20 years). They still have a long way to go.

But for most people who just want to write a simple form letter or build a sports standings table in a spreadsheet, it’s perfectly fine.

You want to scale your software needs with your project objectives. Fortune 500 companies don’t use Quickbooks after all.

- Lisa H.

December 23, 2022 at 6:32 pm

Desktop Office is still my go-to for a lot of things. We were forced into Office 365 at work, but I don’t ever use it online/cloud mode unless I have no other choice – you can download an installer and run it locally (although it’s still phoning home as far as the license, sigh).

Google Docs is a different use case for me. I often use it for personal (non-work-related) documents that I want to easily access and edit across two Windows desktop computers, an iPad, and an Android phone.

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2022 at 9:04 pm

Obviously I’m behind the times in this regard. We actually do have an Office 365 subscription, but I’ve always used it by downloading the software and running it locally. I gather from some of the other comments here that there’s a purely online way of running it as well?

Anyway, I delete that bit you quoted. One danger of being a Digital Antiquarian is that you can kind of end up living in 1996…

- Alianora La Canta

December 24, 2022 at 11:08 am

There are purely online ways of running Office 365, and I work in an organisation that uses both the online and downloaded methods, depending on the context in which users are working.

The downloaded version has a lot more functions (indeed, entire programs in the business version of Office 365 are only available in the downloaded version) and is easier to use for people used to traditional download-only office software. Plus it will continue working if the internet connection is lost after initial authentication – helpful in areas with brownouts.

On the other hand, the online version works even on computers that aren’t provided by the bill-payer (provided the user remembers their username and password, and has stable internet) and is cheaper to licence. At home, the online version is free as in beer but the downloaded
version costs money. For organisations, both versions cost money but the downloaded version costs almost 50% more. (If you have a license to download, you automatically also get the right to use the online version).

The result is that some people where I work use the online version, some the downloaded version and some a mixture of both depending on where they are.

At home, I use LibreOffice. Most people I know are using either open-source office software or a pre-Microsoft 365 version of Office for domestic needs, apart from some students who are obliged to use Google Docs because their school or university will not accept homework/coursework submitted in any other format (their opinions on this vary from “fantastic” to “awful”, with those thinking it “fantastic” also using Google Docs for everything else). I think open-source office software would be more popular if the option to use them online without having to set up their own server first existed. But that’s an expensive road to travel for a developer…

- nicolas woollaston

July 17, 2023 at 8:55 am

for anyone working collaboratively in a team context, the online office tools, whether MS or Google or others, are very useful – i think the collaboration aspect is more than compenation for the limited feature set

- Conor Kuzdas

December 25, 2022 at 1:54 pm

I tried digging at these numbers for awhile, and I can’t find any good ones. Most of the searches come up with statista.com articles with the same author and no sources.

The newest Office 365 came out in 2017 though, and so maybe it edging past Google Office is a different set of numbers than MS Office vs Google Office?

Judging by some of the other comments, it looks like Google is doing a much better job in academia because of students not being willing/able to pay for an office suite just for word processing.

Meanwhile, I’ve never had a job where Excel wasn’t installed before I started.

- Brian

December 31, 2022 at 9:15 pm

I have fairly minimal needs these days, but have used Google Docs and Sheets every since they came out for pretty much all of my word processing and spreadsheet needs…

Nice and accessible. And lots of stuff stored on GDrive.

- David Simon

December 23, 2022 at 4:34 pm

I think you’re being a little too hard on JavaScript – it’s (many many) weaknesses at that point in the Web’s history had more to do with implementation than with fundamental language design. The event-machine model it was based turned out to be enormously prescient, later allowing JavaScript to be a strong competitor on the server side as Nodejs. And later major advances in the language’s fundamental design (promises, async, binary machines entirely leading to WASM, and TypeScript) didn’t suffer by their backwards compatibility to original JavaScript, the way that we saw C++ struggle uphill to escape its C roots.

Not to say that working with JavaScript in the 90s and early oughts wasn’t painful, because it sure was! But that can mostly be laid at the feet of endless little incompatibilities between Netscape’s and IE ‘s implementations of the language, requiring that every little thing you write be double checked on multiple versions of both browsers.

- Ido Yehieli

December 23, 2022 at 5:28 pm

I wanted to say the same – and while due to backwards compatibility – you can still write horrible js today that works on modern browsers, idiosyncratic modern js is actually quite a nice language!

- Joshua Barrett

December 23, 2022 at 5:45 pm

Eeeh, I’m not sure about that. Javascript is not incompetent but it committed a number of Original Sins right at the start (the horrific semantics of var, implicit globals, null vs undefined vs 0 vs “”, this’s dynamic binding semantics, weak typing and implicit coercion, the relative unpleasantness of the DOM API… the list goes on) that make the blast radius of an error as simple as a typo effectively unbounded and create an infinite number of weird corner cases that are hard or impossible to get right. It also has really powerful features, like honest-to-god lexical scope and convenient lambdas and closures which were not common in other scripting languages at the time (probably because Eich wanted to write a Scheme originally). All the same, yes, modern JS absolutely suffers due to backwards compatibility commitments.

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2022 at 9:13 pm

Yes, this has been my experience. I’ve always found JavaScript infuriating to use on the few occasions I’ve been forced into it. Give me strongly typed variables that I have to declare upfront, please! There’s nothing more frustrating than having your program go haywire because you mistyped a variable name somewhere; I’d much prefer it if the program would just blow up and stop. Yes, you can fix some of this stuff with TypeScript and the like, but why you should have to?

Java, on the other hand, I love. What some people call baroque and pedantic I find comforting. ;)

- Joshua Barrett

December 23, 2022 at 4:53 pm

> Mozilla was to concentrate on the core code required for rendering webpages — the engine room of a browser, if you will. Then others — not least among them the for-profit arm of Netscape — would build the superstructures of finished applications around that sturdy core.

It is worth noting that the entire suite was open-sourced, however: later releases of Netscape would be based on Mozilla.

(This is mostly worth noting because Mozilla has now transitioned to primarily offering only a browser with the surrounding cruft of Communicator cut away—namely Firefox—to the point that people might not even be aware that the entire Communicator suite was developed under the Mozilla banner at the time—and, in fact, still is developed by a small group of diehards under the name SeaMonkey)

I must also suspect that Communicator is the genesis of Zawinski’s Law of Software Envelopment (which was coined by then-Netscape employee Jamie Zawinski): “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”

- Lt. Nitpicker

December 24, 2022 at 2:25 am

Jamie’s Law probably came about as a result of earlier experience with open source projects and Netscape 2.x. I’m pretty sure he has a different law regarding products like Communicator that could be paraphrased as “When a piece of software adds ‘groupware’ features, it has formally entered the mid-life crisis phase of life”

Anyway, I’ll point out that jwz (his long time handle online) is commonly credited as instigating the Mozilla project, allegedly inspired in part by a previous experience at the company Lucid where he forked GNU Emacs as part of their Energize IDE.

- anonymous

December 23, 2022 at 5:39 pm

I like how some time in the late 90s even Steve Jobs was quoted in Mac magazines saying “Internet Explorer is my browser of choice”, and they made fun of about how forced it sounded, like Bill Gates was personally holding a gun to his head.
And even in Windows 10 you still get a dialog box asking you to please consider using Microsoft Edge before changing your default browser.

- DG

December 24, 2022 at 11:55 am

well, at that point (1998-1999), netscape for macos was a bloated beast and suffered of every possible issue, and “alternative” browsers didn’t support enough of the stuff that everybody put in every web page to allow anything more than sporadic usage.

- Lee Hauser

December 23, 2022 at 7:13 pm

At my employer, we’ve switched to Microsoft365, and honestly, it’s pretty good. Along with SharePoint, it’s much, much easier to share and control documents and spreadsheets than it was to put them on a shared directory on the network…some of which was lost when our company was hit by ransomware.

That being said, I am not a fan of Microsoft products for my own use. Word is still the standard in offices, publishing houses, etc. but almost everything can produce output that can be opened by Word or Excel. It’s almost as if we can restate Zawinski’s law: all software evolves until it can read and write Microsoft-compatible files, and software that can’t is supplemented by conversion tools.

- Aula

December 23, 2022 at 8:02 pm

“Probably a kitchen sink too, if you look hard enough.”

Not at that time, but a few years later someone actually did write code for Mozilla that displays an ASCII rendering of a kitchen sink (with running water that you can turn on and off) if you type “about:kitchensink” in the URL bar. The extension to do that probably still works in modern versions of Firefox.

- Ognyan Chernokozhev

December 23, 2022 at 9:06 pm

It is not available in latest versions for FireFox, just gave it a try.

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2022 at 9:14 pm

:) That’s great.

- Alianora La Canta

December 24, 2022 at 11:31 am

Looks like it got removed on Firefox version 2. There was a bug report (#122411 at bugzilla.mozilla.org) requesting reinstatement but it was declined; it was deemed (minor) bloat that depended on a joke that made no sense in the new, leaner context of each program in the Mozilla suite doing one specific category of task. The Easter Egg Archive has a screenshot of what the sink looked like, for people who didn’t experience it at the time.

- JP

December 25, 2022 at 10:41 pm

Current Firefox users can still, however, type “about:mozilla” in their address bar and view a passage from The Book of Mozilla, a sort of mythologized version of the browser’s history, many earlier passages from which focused on the rivalry with MS which the book refers to as “Mammon”.

- JP

December 25, 2022 at 10:43 pm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Mozilla

- Aula

December 26, 2022 at 5:46 am

“Looks like it got removed on Firefox version 2. There was a bug report (#122411 at bugzilla.mozilla.org)”

That’s not what the bug report says; about:kitchensink was never removed because it was never included in Firefox in the first place. However, there was a downloadable *extension* that was available as late as 2018 from Mozilla’s website:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181102193136/https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aboutkitchensink/

- Richard moss

December 23, 2022 at 8:37 pm

“a comparison between Gates and Adolf Hitler on at least on occasion”

_one_ occasion?

- Gnoman

December 25, 2022 at 4:34 am

What really interests me in all this is that Microsoft was offering a straight-up superior product compared to Netscape for most of this period. Their aggressive leverage tactics ensured victory regardless, but they didn’t actually have to cheat.

Back in the day, most of the rhetoric was about Micro$oft bullying Netscape so M$ could push their bad software on the market. It was a whole thing with the open source cult, conveniently ignoring that Netscape was a commercial product that only went open-source from desperation.

- Richard Wells

December 25, 2022 at 11:54 pm

AOL was not turning a profit in the years of the great browser wars.
https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr16552.htm
which was followed by a second settlement with the SEC over incorrectly reported online advertising revenue.
https://www.sec.gov/news/press/2005-38.htm

- Jimmy Maher

December 26, 2022 at 5:56 am

AOL did pass through a period of crisis in 1995 and 1996, when the expenses of promoting its service in an increasingly competitive marketplace ate into its bottom line. Anyone who was around in the mid-1990s remembers how aggressive (and expensive) its promotions were; AOL carpet-bombed the whole country with its CDs. Over the course of 1996, the cost of adding each new subscriber went from $130 to $270. It seems that AOL engaged in some dodgy accounting during this period. (I hadn’t seen the first SEC press release before.)

AOL found a solution to the crisis in the form of online advertising, beginning with a landmark $100 million deal with a telephone-long-distance provider called Tel-Save that it signed in January of 1997. I elected to elide these details in the name of readability, given that AOL is more of a supporting player than one of the stars here. Anyway, during the years 1997, 1998, and 1999 was legitimately, hugely profitable.

- Alex Smith

December 26, 2022 at 8:06 pm

“ and took an “@AOL.com” suffix on someone’s email address as a sign that they were too stupid to be worth talking to”

Very occasionally when I track down video game industry figures for interviews, they even today have an AOL.com email address, and I die little bit inside…

- Martin Fiedler

December 30, 2022 at 11:31 pm

In the article, Netscape Communicator 4.x is described as a slow, bloated, unstable behemoth, but I’m not sure if that’s entirely fair. I, for one, don’t remember it having any of these traits; I used Communicator a lot, on multiple platforms, also including its — for the time — excellent e-mail and NNTP client (which went on to become today’s Thunderbird). I was a solid workhorse of a browser and communication suite, and even though sites that heavily utilized what was called “DHTML” (Dynamic HTML) back then eventually tended to work a lot better in Internet Explorer, many people I know, including myself, used Communicator as their main browser for a long time. (I can’t remember what ultimately displaced it for me, though … it might have been Opera 5.)

- Honore Doktorr

January 26, 2023 at 7:44 am

I don’t remember too many specific details from using communicator in that era, but I do remember thinking it was horrible early on and using netscape 3 for as long as that was viable. Also remember it crashing a *lot*, and thinking the integration between browser and email was a mistake. (Iirc they bought out another company and based communicator off of that acquisition’s codebase, rather than netscape 3’s).
It did get better over time / have best-in-period cross-platform support, but if my experience is at all typical netscape did not help itself in the short term by going that route.

- Bogdanow

December 31, 2022 at 11:20 pm

Netscape Communicator 4.77 is one of the most stable and pleasing software. My bubble was heavily using it until it stopped supporting modern web pages. It was also known for supporting multiple platforms (like Unixes) when IE was Windows only.

Netscape 6.0 was this bloated thing that stopped making any sense.

It got replaced with FF 1.0 for some people, and others went for Opera.

- Kyle

January 1, 2023 at 7:49 am

And in another case of history repeating itself, we’re once again overwhelmingly dependent on a single browser / rendering engine produced by a company looking to dominate the web.

I often wish we were as critical of Google and Chrome as we were of Microsoft and Internet Explorer.

- Leo Vellés

January 3, 2023 at 1:47 pm

“to the point of mooting a comparison between Gates and Adolf Hitler on at least on occasion”. I think the second “on” was meant to be “one”.
By the way, another super interesting article Jimmy

- Jimmy Maher

January 3, 2023 at 1:55 pm

Thanks! (And a belated thank you to Richard Moss as well. I thought you were making a comment on the content that I wasn’t quite understanding, not a typo correction…)

- Steve-O

February 2, 2023 at 2:47 am

Minor typo: “United State’s”

- Jimmy Maher

February 3, 2023 at 4:49 pm

Thanks!

- mycophobia

July 30, 2023 at 5:46 pm

“there were escalating personality clashes between Jim Clark and Marc Andreesssen”

gave Marc an extra S here

- Jimmy Maher

July 31, 2023 at 12:39 pm

Thanks!

Normality
January 6, 2023

Sometimes these articles come from the strangest places. When I was writing a little while back about The Pandora Directive, the second of the Tex Murphy interactive movies, I lavished with praise its use of a free-roaming first-person 3D perspective, claiming in the process that “first-person 3D otherwise existed only in the form of action-oriented shooters and static, node-based, pre-rendered Myst clones.” Such a blanket statement is just begging to be contradicted, and you folks didn’t disappoint. Our tireless fact-checker Aula rightly noted that I’d forgotten a whole family of action-CRPGs which followed in the wake of Ultima Underworld (another game I’d earlier lavished with praise, as it happened). And, more pertinently for our subject of today, Sarah Walker informed me that “Gremlin’s Normality was an early 1996 point-and-clicker using a DOOM-style engine.”

I must confess that I’d never even heard of Normality at that point, but Sarah’s description of it made me very interested in checking it out. What I found upon doing so was an amiable little game that feels somehow less earthshaking than its innovative technical approach might lead one to expect, but that I nevertheless enjoyed very much. So, I decided to write about it today, as both an example of a road largely not taken in traditional adventure games and as one of those hidden gems that can still surprise even me, a man who dares to don the mantle of an expert in the niche field of interactive narratives of the past.

The story of Normality’s creation is only a tiny part of the larger story of Gremlin Interactive, the British company responsible for it, which was founded under the name of Gremlin Graphics in 1984 by Ian Stewart and Kevin Norburn, the proprietors of a Sheffield software shop. Impressed by the coding talents of the teenagers who flocked around their store’s demo machines every afternoon and weekend, one-upping one another with ever more audacious feats of programming derring-do, Stewart and Norburn conceived Gremlin as a vehicle for bringing these lads’ inventions to the world. The company’s name became iconic among European owners of Sinclair Spectrums and Commodore 64s, thanks to colorfully cartoony and deviously clever platformers and other types of action games: the Monty Mole series, Thing on a Spring, Bounder, Switchblade, just to name few. When the 1980s came to an end and the 8-bit machines gave way to the Commodore Amiga, MS-DOS, and the new 16-bit consoles, Gremlin navigated the transition reasonably well, keeping their old aesthetic alive through games like Zool whilst also branching out in new directions, such as a groundbreaking line of 3D sports simulations that began with Actua Soccer. Through it all, Gremlin was an institution unto itself in British game development, a rite of passage for countless artists, designers, and programmers, some of whom went on to found companies of their own. (The most famous of Gremlin’s spinoffs is Core Design, which struck international gold in 1996 with Tomb Raider.)

The more specific story of Normality begins with a fellow named Tony Crowther. While still a teenager in the 1980s, he was one of the elite upper echelon of early British game programmers, who were feted in the gaming magazines like rock stars. A Sheffield lad himself, Crowther’s fame actually predated the founding of Gremlin, but his path converged with its on a number of occasions afterward. Unlike many of his rock-star peers, he was able to sustain his career if not his personal name recognition into the 1990s, when lone-wolf programmers were replaced by teams and project budgets and timelines increased exponentially. He remembers his first sight of id Software’s DOOM as a watershed moment in his professional life: “This was the first game I had seen with 3D graphics, and with what appeared to be a free-roaming camera in the world.” It was, in short, the game that would change everything. Crowther immediately started working on a DOOM-style 3D engine of his own.

He brought the engine, which he called True3D, with him to Gremlin Interactive when he accepted the title of Technical Consultant there in early 1994. “I proposed two game scenarios” for using it, he says. “Gremlin went with the devil theme; the other was a generic monster game.”

The “devil theme” would become Realms of the Haunting, a crazily ambitious and expensive project that would take well over two years to bring to fruition, that would wind up filling four CDs with DOOM-style carnage, adventure-style dialogs and puzzle solving, a complicated storyline involving a globe-spanning occult conspiracy of evil (yes, yet another one), and 90 minutes of video footage of human actors (this was the mid-1990s, after all). We’ll have a closer look at this shaggy beast in a later article.

Today’s more modest subject of inquiry was born in the head of one Adrian Carless, a long-serving designer, artist, writer, and general jack-of-all-trades at Gremlin. He simply “thought it would be cool to make an adventure game in a DOOM-style engine. Realms of the Haunting was already underway, so why not make two games with the same engine?” And so Normality, Realms of the Haunting’s irreverent little brother, was born. A small team of about half a dozen made it their labor of love for some eighteen months, shepherding it to a European release in the spring of 1996. It saw a North American release, under the auspices of the publisher Interplay, several months later.

To the extent that it’s remembered at all, Normality is known first and foremost today for its free-roaming first-person 3D engine — an approach that had long since become ubiquitous in the realm of action games, where “DOOM clones” were a dime a dozen by 1996, but was known to adventure gamers only thanks to Access Software’s Tex Murphy games. Given this, it might be wise for us to review the general state of adventure-game visuals circa 1996.

By this point, graphical adventures had bifurcated into two distinct groups whose Venn diagram of fans overlapped somewhat, but perhaps not as much as one might expect. The older approach was the third-person point-and-click game, which had evolved out of the 1980s efforts of Sierra and LucasArts. Each location in one of these games was built from a background of hand-drawn pixel art, with the player character, non-player characters, and other interactive objects superimposed upon it as sprites. Because drawing each bespoke location was so intensive in terms of human labor, there tended to be relatively few of them to visit in any given game. But by way of compensation, these games usually offered fairly rich storylines and a fair degree of dynamism in terms of their worlds and the characters that inhabited them. Puzzles tended to be of the object-oriented sort — i.e., a matter of using this thing from your inventory on this other thing.

The alternative approach was pioneered and eternally defined by Myst, a game from the tiny studio Cyan Productions that first appeared on the Macintosh in late 1993 and went on to sell over 6 million copies across a range of platforms. Like DOOM and its ilk, Myst and its many imitators presented a virtual world to their players from a first-person perspective, and relied on 3D graphics rendered by a computer using mathematical algorithms rather than hand-drawn pixel art. In all other ways, however, they were DOOM’s polar opposite. Rather than corridors teeming with monsters to shoot, they offered up deserted, often deliberately surreal — some would say “sterile” — worlds for their players to explore. And rather than letting players roam freely through said worlds, they presented them as a set of discrete nodes that they could hop between.

Why did they choose this slightly awkward approach? As happens so often in game development, the answer has everything to do with technological tradeoffs. Both DOOM and Myst were 3D-rendered; their differences came down to where and when that rendering took place. DOOM created its visuals on the fly, which meant that the player could go anywhere in the world but which limited the environment’s visual fidelity to what an ordinary consumer-grade computer of the time could render at a decent frame rate. Myst, on the other hand, was built from pre-rendered scenes: scenes that had been rendered beforehand on a high-end computer, then saved to disk as ordinary graphics files — effectively converted into pixel art. This work stream let studios turn out far more images far more quickly than even an army of human pixel-artists could have managed, but forced them to construct their worlds as a network of arbitrarily fixed nodes and views which many players — myself among them — can find confusing to navigate. Further, these views were not easy to alter in any sort of way after they had been rendered, which sharply limited the dynamism of Myst clones in comparison to traditional third-person adventure games. Thus the deserted quality that became for good or ill one of their trademarks, and their tendency to rely on set-piece puzzles such as slider and button combinations rather than more flexible styles of gameplay. (Myst itself didn’t have a player inventory of any sort — a far cry from the veritable pawn shop’s worth of seemingly random junk one could expect to be toting around by the middle stages of the typical Sierra or LucasArts game.)

By no means did Normality lift the set of technical constraints I’ve just described. Yet it did serve as a test bed for a different set of tradeoffs from the ones that adventure developers had been accepting before this point. It asked the question of whether you could make an otherwise completely conventional adventure game — unlike its big brother Realms of the Haunting, Normality has no action elements whatsoever — using a Doom-style engine, accepting that the end result would not be as beautiful as Myst but hoping that the world would feel a lot more natural to move around in. And the answer turned out to be — in this critic’s opinion, at any rate — a pretty emphatic yes.

Tony Crowther may have chosen to call his engine True3D, but it is in reality no such thing. Like the DOOM engine which inspired it, it uses an array of tricks and shortcuts to minimize rendering times whilst creating a reasonably convincing subjective experience of inhabiting a 3D space. That said, it does boast some improvements over DOOM: most notably, it lets you look up and down, an essential capability for an old-school adventure game in which the player is expected to scour every inch of her environment for useful thingamabobs. It thus proved in the context of adventure games a thesis that DOOM had already proved for action games: that gains in interactivity can often more than offset losses in visual fidelity. Just being able to, say, look down from a trapdoor above a piece of furniture and see a crucial detail that had been hidden from floor level was something of a revelation for adventure gamers.

You move freely around Normality’s world using the arrow keys, just as you do in DOOM. (The “WASD” key combination, much less mouse-look, hadn’t yet become commonplace in 1996.) You interact with the things you see on the screen by clicking on them with the mouse. It feels perfectly natural in no time — more natural, I must say, than any Myst clone has ever felt for me. And you won’t feel bored or lonely in Normality, as so many tend to do in that other style of game; its environment changes constantly and it has plenty of characters to talk to. In this respect as in many others, it’s more Sierra and LucasArts than Myst.

The main character of Normality is a fellow named Kent Knutson, who, some people who worked at Gremlin have strongly implied, was rather a chip off the old block of Adrian Carless himself. He’s an unrepentant slacker who just wants to rock out to his tunes, chow down on pizza, and, one has to suspect based on the rest of his persona, toke up until he’s baked to the perfection of a Toll House cookie. Unfortunately, he’s living in a dictatorial dystopia of the near future, in which conformity to the lowest common denominator — the titular Normality — has been elevated to the highest social value, to be ruthlessly enforced by any and all means necessary. When we first meet Kent, he’s just been released from a stint in jail, his punishment for walking down the street humming a non-sanctioned song. Now he’s to spend some more time in house arrest inside his grotty apartment, with a robot guard just outside the door making sure he keeps his television on 24 hours per day, thereby to properly absorb the propaganda of the Dear Leader, a thoroughly unpleasant fellow named Paul Mystalux. With your help, Kent will find a way to bust out of his confinement. Then he’ll meet the most ineffectual group of resistance fighters in history, prove himself worthy to join their dubious ranks, and finally find a way to bring back to his aptly named city of Neutropolis the freedom to let your freak flag fly.

Adrian Carless. It seems that the apple named Kent didn’t fall far from the tree named Adrian…

There’s a core of something serious here, as I know all too well; I’ve been researching and writing of late about Chairman Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China, whose own excesses in the name of groupthink were every bit as absurd in their way as the ones that take place in Neutropolis. In practice, though, the game is content to play its premise for laughs. As the creators of Normality put it, “It’s possible to draw parallels between Paul [Mystalux] and many of the truly evil dictators in history — Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin — but we won’t do that now because this is supposed to be light-hearted and fun.” It’s far from the worst way in the world to neutralize tyranny; few things are as deflating to the dictators and would-be dictators among us than being laughed at for the pathetic personal insecurities that make them want to commit such terrible crimes against humanity.

This game is the very definition of laddish humor, as unsubtle as a jab in the noggin, as rarefied as a molehill, as erudite as that sports fan who always seems to be sitting next to you at the bar of a Saturday night. And yet it never fails to be likeable. It always has its heart in the right place, always punches up rather than down. What can I say? I’m a simple man, and this game makes me laugh. My favorite line comes when, true adventure gamer that you are, you try to get Kent to sift through a public trashcan for valuable items: “I have enough trash in my apartment already!”

Normality’s visual aesthetic is in keeping with its humor aesthetic (not to mention Kent’s taste in music): loud, a little crude, even a trifle obnoxious, but hard to hate for all that. The animations were created by motion-capturing real people, but budget and time constraints meant that it didn’t quite work out. “Feet would float and swim, hands wouldn’t meet, and overall things could look rather strange,” admits artist Ricki Martin. “For sure the end results would have been better if it had been hand-animated.” I must respectfully disagree. To my mind, the shambolic animation only adds to the delightfully low-rent feel of the whole — like an old 1980s Dinosaur Jr. record where the tape hiss and distortion are an essential part of the final impression. (In fact, the whole vibe of the game strikes me as more in line with 1980s underground music than the 1990s grunge that was promised in some of its advertising, much less the Britpop that was sweeping its home country at the time.)

But for all its tossed-off-seeming qualities, Normality has its head screwed on tight where it’s important: it proves to be a meticulously designed adventure game, something neither its overall vibe not its creators’ lack of experience with the genre would lead one to expect. Thankfully, they learned from the best; all of the principals recall the heavy influence that LucasArts had on them — so much so that they even tried to duplicate the onscreen font found in classics like The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Sam and Max Hit the Road. The puzzles are often bizarre — they do take place in a bizarre setting, after all — but they always have an identifiable cartoon logic to them, and there are absolutely no dead ends to ruin your day. As a piece of design, Normality thus acquits itself much better than many another game from more established adventure developers. You can solve this one on your own, folks; its worst design sin is an inordinate number of red herrings, which I’m not sure really constitutes a sin at all. It’s wonderful to discover an adventure game that defies the skepticism with which I always approach obscure titles in the genre from unseasoned studios.

The game begins in Kent’s hovel of a flat.

The game’s verb menu is capable of frightening small children — or, my wife, who declared it the single ugliest thing I’ve ever subjected her to when I play these weird old games in our living room.

Sometimes Normality’s humor is sly. These rooms with painted-on furniture are a riff on the tendency of some early 3D engines to appear, shall we say, less than full-bodied.

Other times the humor is just dumb — but it still makes me laugh.

The game ends in a noisy concert that’s absolutely off the hook, which is absolutely perfect.

Normality was released with considerable fanfare in Europe, including a fifteen-page promotional spread in the popular British magazine PC Zone, engineered to look like a creation of the magazine’s editorial staff rather than an advertisement. (Journalistic ethics? Schmethics!) Here and elsewhere, Gremlin plugged the game as a well-nigh revolutionary adventure, thanks to its 3D engine. But the public was less than impressed; the game never caught fire.

In the United States, Interplay tried to inject a bit of star power into the equation by hiring the former teen idol Corey Feldman to re-record all of Kent’s lines; mileages will vary here, but personally I prefer original actor Tom Hill’s more laconic approach to Feldman’s trademark amped-up surfer-dude diction. Regardless, the change in casting did nothing to help Normality’s fortunes in the United States, where it sank without a trace — as is amply testified by the fact that this lifelong adventure fan never even knew it existed until recently. Few of the magazines bothered to review it at all, and those that did took strangely scant notice of its formal and technical innovations. Scorpia, Computer Gaming World’s influential adventure columnist, utterly buried the lede, mentioning the 3D interface only in nonchalant passing halfway into her review. Her conclusion? “Normality isn’t bad.” Another reviewer pronounced it “mildly fun and entertaining.” With faint praise like that, who needs criticism?

Those who made Normality have since mused that Gremlin and Interplay’s marketing folks might have leaned a bit too heavily on the game’s innovative presentation at the expense of its humorous premise and characters, and there’s probably something to this. Then again, its idiosyncratic vibe resisted easy encapsulation, and was perhaps of only niche appeal anyway — a mistake, if mistake it be, that LucasArts generally didn’t make. Normality was “‘out there,’ making it hard to put a genre on it,” says Graeme Ing, another artist who worked on the game — “unlike Monkey Island being ‘pirates’ and [Day of the] Tentacle being ‘time travel.'” Yet he admits that “I loved the game for the same reasons. Totally unique, not just a copy of another hit.”

I concur. Despite its innovations, Normality is not a major game in any sense of the word, but sometimes being “major” is overrated. To paraphrase Neil Young, traveling in the middle of the road all the time can become a bore. Therefore this site will always have time for gaming’s ditches — more time than ever, I suspect, as we move deeper into the latter half of the 1990s, an era when gaming’s mainstream was becoming ever more homogenized. My thanks go to Sarah Walker for turning me onto this scruffy outsider, which I’m happy to induct into my own intensely idiosyncratic Hall of Fame.

(Sources: the book A Gremlin in the Works by Mark James Hardisty, which with its digital supplement included gives you some 800 pages on the history of Gremlin Interactive, thus nicely remedying this site’s complete silence on that subject prior to now. It comes highly recommended! Also Computer Gaming World of November 1996, Next Generation of November 1996, PC Zone of May 1996, PC World of September 1996, Retro Gamer 11, 61, and 75.

Normality is available for digital purchase at GOG.com, in a version with the original voice acting. Two tips: remember that you can look up and down using the Page Up and Page Down, and know that you can access the map view to move around the city at any time by pressing “M.” Don’t do what I did: spend more than an hour searching in vain for the exit to a trash silo you thought you were trapped inside — even if that does seem a very Kent thing to do…)

Comments
18 Responses

- Carl Muckenhoupt

January 6, 2023 at 7:02 pm

I remember they also released a promotional screensaver that just showed Kent, sans context, running various animation cycles and musing philosophically. For years afterward, I kept seeing the screensaver in various shareware collections without any hint that it had anything to do with an adventure game. I could easily imagine someone discovering the game and saying “Whoa, they made an entire game about the screensaver guy?”

- Dave

January 7, 2023 at 6:18 am

Nice to see a game that I bought on a whim back in Malaysia (Pirated of course). I remember that this game was funny and most importantly EASY to finish. The 3d parts did impress me back in the day.

- Pingback: Normality (Digital Antiquarian Article) – The Gremlin Graphics Archive

- Alex L.

January 7, 2023 at 8:44 am

What a surprise to see this game here! I read a review of it when it came out as a kid and the visual style kept stuck in my head ever since. Bought in on GOG for small money last year and I agree: Basically it´s a run-of-the-mill product, one of the many immediately forgotten adventures developed after the genre run out of steam, but it´t not bad per se. It´s worth a try if you can get it for one or two bucks somewhere and if you are really interested in the genre.

- the GlitchKing

January 8, 2023 at 4:03 am

For a more in-depth exploration of Gremlin, from their birth in a Sheffield computer store, to the date of their merger with French software house Infogrames, please check out ‘the Story and Games of Gremlin’ by British YouTuber Kim Justice.

- Alex L.

January 8, 2023 at 9:50 am

Good recommendation! Although I don´t know this video yet, Kim Justice is just a great source for anyone interested in the history of the british computer games industry.

- Ookina Chongusu

January 8, 2023 at 9:12 pm

Wow, I’ve never heard of this one either, and it made it into your HoF? Strong praise!

I agree with your wife though, that menu is horrifying.

- Iffy Bonzoolie

January 9, 2023 at 8:35 am

That actually sounds like a pretty decent review from Scorpia…

I vaguely remember this coming out, but I really did not care for the art style or vibe as it was presented, so I never looked into it. Sounds like I might have enjoyed it, I am a sucker for oppressive dystopian stories.

- DamoclesAlpha

January 10, 2023 at 6:05 am

Crowther’s comment about Doom being his first time seeing a game with 3D graphics is somewhat surprising. He already was an experienced developer from country known for often experimental approaches towards 3D gaming and presentation even before Doom (Novagen’s Mercenary series, Incentive Software’s Freescape games, Mike Singleton’s and his team’s Midwinter series, the 1991 Hunter published by Activision and so on).

Of course, it is possible that he simply hadn’t played any of those games prior to Doom. Also, the transition to more “freeform” movement may have been rather logical step after Crowther’s earlier game, Liberation: Captive 2 (released in the same month as the first shareware release of Doom) for Amiga and CD32.

- Bill Maya

January 10, 2023 at 3:20 pm

Reading about this game reminded my of the Vonnegut dystopian short story “Harrison Bergeron” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

- the Glitch King

January 12, 2023 at 7:37 am

One thing Kim mentions in the documentary, and something folks who are familiar with retro TV in the UK might not know, violet berlin, of Bad Influence fame, makes a cameo in this game.

- Keith

January 13, 2023 at 6:51 pm

Minor typo:
“Why did they chose this slightly awkward approach?”

- Jimmy Maher

January 13, 2023 at 9:02 pm

Thanks!

- Ben Isaacs

January 18, 2023 at 10:35 pm

Captain Cod Piece is clearly inspired by Captain Birdseye, the iconic mascot of frozen food brand Birds Eye in the UK. It feels typical of Gremlin to put such an idiosyncratic British reference in an international release.

- Helm

January 24, 2023 at 7:10 pm

I maintain that the experience of the first room of Normality (and consciously so, the one used in the demo version) back in the day in the cultural context of the era was eye-opening to every single one of us. It’s one of the more together representations of virtual space and best feelings of embodiment to this day, for its genre and its level of representation. The art direction is perfect for it, and once you leave the apartment the experience takes a hit. The first space is just so good. I am glad you were exposed to it and I feel vindicated, as any fan of this game, that it still works on fresh but experience eyes.

- Vincent Kinian

January 28, 2023 at 5:44 am

“Rather than corridors teeming with monsters to shoot, they offered up deserted, often deliberately surreal — some would say “sterile” — worlds for their players to explore. And rather than letting players roam freely through said worlds, they presented them as a set of discrete nodes that they could hop between.

[…]

Further, these views were not easy to alter in any sort of way after they had been rendered, which sharply limited the dynamism of Myst clones in comparison to traditional third-person adventure games. Thus the deserted quality that became for good or ill one of their trademarks, and their tendency to rely on set-piece puzzles such as slider and button combinations rather than more flexible styles of gameplay. (Myst itself didn’t have a player inventory of any sort — a far cry from the veritable pawn shop’s worth of seemingly random junk one could expect to be toting around by the middle stages of the typical Sierra or LucasArts game.)”

Isn’t this a little reductive? For one, the sterile nature of these environments has as much to do with the choice of genre as it does the means of visually relaying gameplay to the player: discount how many objects are on screen at any given time, and you’re left with a fundamentally reactive world even in Sierra-style adventure games. More to the point purely node-based adventure games were able to accomodate item-based puzzles surprisingly quickly after Myst’s release: Return to Zork (1993), Mansion of Hidden Souls (1993), Lunacy (1996), Kowloon’s Gate (1997).

- Jimmy Maher

January 28, 2023 at 1:37 pm

Return to Zork was actually released before Myst, and wasn’t a Myst-style game. While it used a first-person view, its graphics were to a large extent hand-drawn rather than 3D-rendered, and its locations were relatively few, with no ability to rotate the point of view and no sense of navigating granularly through a coherent 3D space. Call it a first-person variant of the traditional adventure formula. The games of Legend Entertainment used the same style. I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the other titles you mention.

That said, there certainly are cases that blur the lines, especially after Myst was a few years old and players’ dissatisfaction with its limitations was rising from a rumble to a roar. Zork: Grand Inquisitor from 1997 is a notable example of re-purposing a first-person node-based engine (created for the very Myst-like Zork Nemesis) to a more old-school, items-and-dialog approach, although even here the number of nodes was drastically reduced to suit a different style of play. If we try to be too pedantic about these things we tend to find that we can’t say much of anything at all. Everyone knew what was meant by a Myst-style and a Sierra-and-LucasArts-style adventure in the 1990s, and I believe those definitions corresponded pretty closely to what I’ve just described.

- Michael

May 28, 2023 at 1:42 am

I was around 13 when Normality came out in Australia, probably the perfect age for it. I remember being dreadfully confused because the demo I played had the American voice acting, but the full version I bought had the British voice acting which made for quite a tonal shift!

To this day, I’m convinced that the extensive red herrings are a result of cut content. There are two puzzles in particular that stick in my mind. In one of them, you find a set of hidden keys. The first lets you gain access to a new room, the second lets you unlock a closet inside that room. But there is absolutely nothing you can do in the room or the closet. It’s all a complete waste of time.

The second is that you can find a box hidden underneath a bollard. You can then go and find a hammer somewhere to smash the box open, revealing yet another key, which turns out to open a padlocked fridge. And yes, again, there is nothing you can do in the fridge. Puzzles with multiple connected steps which all lead to nothing.

One thing worth mentioning is that the US release actually added some extra content to the endgame sequence, after fans complained that the original endgame sequence made so little sense as to seem almost a non-sequitur. Of course, since the British version is the only one you can buy online now, it’s nearly impossible to find the extra content.

I have a love-hate relationship with Normality, to the point where I did a Let’s Play of it nearly a decade ago (it’s at lparchive.org nowadays) in which I spent almost the entire time complaining about Kent, while nonetheless thoroughly enjoying myself. At the suggestion of a reader, I ended up putting together a little compilation of clips of Kent destroying things which still makes me smile when I look back on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QBqq_F-9jw

On a side note, I am finally almost caught up to live article after having read through the entire archive over the last three years. Thanks for all the entertainment and nostalgia Jimmy :) I’m looking forward to seeing new articles each fortnight as they arrive!

Sequels in Strategy Gaming, Part 1: Civilization II
January 20, 2023

How do you make a sequel to a game that covers all of human history?

— Brian Reynolds

At the risk of making a niche website still more niche, allow me to wax philosophical for a moment on the subject of those Roman numerals that have been appearing just after the names of so many digital games almost from the very beginning. It seems to me that game sequels can be divided into two broad categories: the fiction-driven and the systems-driven.

Like so much else during gaming’s formative years, fiction-driven sequels were built off the example of Hollywood, which had already discovered that no happily ever after need ever be permanent if there was more money to be made by getting the old gang of heroes back together and confronting them with some new threat. Game sequels likewise promised their players a continuation of an existing story, or a new one that took place in a familiar setting with familiar characters. Some of the most iconic names in 1980s and early 1990s gaming operated in this mode: Zork, Ultima, Wizardry, King’s Quest, Carmen Sandiego, Leisure Suit Larry, Wing Commander. As anyone who has observed the progress of those series will readily attest, their technology did advance dramatically over the years. And yet this was only a part of the reason people stayed loyal to them. Gamers also wanted to get the next bit of story out of them, wanted to do something new in their comfortingly recognizable worlds. Unsurprisingly, the fiction-driven sequel was most dominant among games that foregrounded their fictions — namely the narrative-heavy genres of the adventure game and the CRPG.

But there was another type of sequel, which functioned less like a blockbuster Hollywood franchise and more like the version numbers found at the end of other types of computer software. It was the domain of games that were less interested in their fictions. These sequels rather promised to do and be essentially the same thing as their forerunner(s), only to do and be it even better, taking full advantage of the latest advances in hardware. Throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s, the technology- or systems-driven sequel was largely confined to the field of vehicular simulations, a seemingly fussily specific pursuit that was actually the source in some years of no less than 25 percent of the industry’s total revenues. The poster child for the category is Microsoft’s Flight Simulator series, the most venerable in the entire history of computer gaming, being still alive and well as I write these words today, almost 43 years after it debuted on the 16 K Radio Shack TRS-80 under the imprint of its original publisher subLogic. If you were to follow this franchise’s evolution through each and every installment, from that monochrome, character-graphic-based first specimen to today’s photo-realistic feast for the senses, you’d wind up with a pretty good appreciation of the extraordinary advances personal computing has undergone over the past four decades and change. Each new Flight Simulator didn’t so much promise a new experience as the same old one perfected, with better graphics, better sound, a better frame rate, better flight modeling,  etc. When you bought the latest Flight Simulator — or F-15 Strike Eagle, or Gunship, or Falcon — you did so hoping it would take you one or two steps closer to that Platonic ideal of flying the real thing. (The fact that each installment was so clearly merely a step down that road arguably explains why these types of games have tended to age more poorly than others, and why you don’t find nearly as many bloggers and YouTubers rhapsodizing about old simulations today as you do games in most other genres.)

For a long time, the conventional wisdom in the industry held that strategy games were a poor fit with both of these modes of sequel-making. After all, they didn’t foreground narrative in the same way as adventures and CRPGs, but neither were they so forthrightly tech-centric as simulations. As a result, strategy games — even the really successful ones — were almost always standalone affairs.

But all that changed in a big way in 1993, when Maxis Software released SimCity 2000, a sequel to its landmark city-builder of four years earlier. SimCity 2000 was a systems-driven sequel in the purest sense. It didn’t attempt to be anything other than what its predecessor had been; it just tried to be a better incarnation of that thing. Designer Will Wright had done his level best to incorporate every bit of feedback he had received from players of his original game, whilst also taking full advantage of the latest hardware to improve the graphics, sound, and interface. “Is SimCity 2000 a better program than the original SimCity?” asked Computer Gaming World magazine rhetorically. “It is without question a superior program. Is it more fun than the original SimCity? It is.” Wright was rewarded for his willingness to revisit his past with another huge hit, even bigger than his last one.

Other publishers greeted SimCity 2000’s success as something of a revelation. At a stroke, they realized that the would-be city planners and generals among their customers were as willing as the would-be pilots and submarine captains to buy a sequel that enhanced a game they had already bought before, by sprucing up the graphics, addressing exploits, incongruities, and other weaknesses, and giving them some additional complexity to sink their teeth into. For better or for worse, the industry’s mania for franchises and sequels thus came to encompass strategy games as well.

In the next few articles, I’d like to examine a few of the more interesting results of this revelation — not SimCity 2000, a game about which I have oddly little to say, but another trio that would probably never have come to be without it to serve as a commercial proof of concept. All of the games I’ll write about are widely regarded as strategy classics, but I must confess that I can find unreserved love in my heart for only one of them. As for which one that is, and the reasons for my slight skepticism about the others… well, you’ll just have to read on and see, won’t you?

Civilization, Sid Meier’s colossally ambitious and yet compulsively playable strategy game of everything, was first released by MicroProse Software just in time to miss the bulk of the Christmas 1991 buying season. That would have been the death knell of many a game, but not this one. Instead Civilization became the most celebrated computer game since SimCity in terms of mainstream-media coverage, even as it also became a great favorite with the hardcore gamers. Journalists writing for newspapers and glossy lifestyle magazines were intrigued by it for much the same reason they had been attracted to SimCity, because its sweeping, optimistic view of human Progress writ large down through the ages marked it in their eyes as something uniquely high-toned, inspiring, and even educational in a cultural ghetto whose abiding interest in dwarfs, elves, and magic spells left outsiders like them and their readers nonplussed. The gamers loved it, of course, simply because it could be so ridiculously fun to play. Never a chart-topping hit, Civilization became a much rarer and more precious treasure: a perennial strong seller over months and then years, until long after it had begun to look downright crude in comparison to all of the slick multimedia extravaganzas surrounding it on store shelves. It eventually sold 850,000 copies in this low-key way.

Yet neither MicroProse nor Sid Meier himself did anything to capitalize on its success for some years. The former turned to other games inside and outside of the grand-strategy tent, while the latter turned his attention to C.P.U. Bach, a quirky passion project in computer-generated music that wasn’t even a game at all and didn’t even run on conventional computers. (Its home was the 3DO multimedia console.) The closest thing to a Civilization sequel or expansion in the three years after the original game’s release was Colonization, a MicroProse game from designer Brian Reynolds that borrowed some of Civilization’s systems and applied them to the more historically grounded scenario of the European colonization of the New World. The Colonization box sported a blurb declaring that “the tradition of Civilization continues,” while Sid Meier’s name became a possessive prefix before the new game’s title. (Reynolds’s own name, by contrast, was nowhere to be found on the box.) Both of these were signs that MicroProse’s restless marketing department felt that the legacy of Civilization ought to be worth something, even if it wasn’t yet sure how best to make use of it.

Colonization hit the scene in 1994, one year after SimCity 2000 had been accorded such a positive reception, and proceeded to sell an impressive 300,000 copies. These two success stories together altered MicroProse’s perception of Civilization forever, transforming what had started as just an opportunistic bit of marketing on Colonization’s box into an earnest attempt to build a franchise. Not one but two new Civilization games were quickly authorized. The one called CivNet was rather a stopgap project, which transplanted the original game from MS-DOS to Windows and added networked or hot-seat multiplayer capabilities to the equation. The other Civilization project was also to run under Windows, but was to be a far more extensive revamping of the original, making it bigger, prettier, and better balanced than before. Its working title of Civilization 2000 made clear its inspiration. Only at the last minute would MicroProse think better of making SimCity 2000’s influence quite so explicit, and rename it simply Civilization II.

Unfortunately for MicroProse’s peace of mind, Sid Meier, a designer who always followed his own muse, said that he had no interest whatsoever in repeating himself at this point in time. Thus the project devolved to Brian Reynolds as the logical second choice: he had acquitted himself pretty well with Colonization, and Meier liked him a lot and would at least be willing to serve as his advisor, as he had for Reynold’s first strategy game. “They pitched it to me as if [they thought] I was probably going to be really upset,” laughs Reynolds. “I guess they thought I had my heart set on inventing another weird idea like Colonization. ‘Okay, will he be too mad if we tell him that we want him to do Civilization 2000?’ Which of course to me was the ultimate dream job. You couldn’t have asked me to do something I wanted to do more than make a version of Civilization.”

Like his mentor Meier, Reynolds was an accomplished programmer as well as game designer. This allowed him to do the initial work of hammering out a prototype on his own — from, of all locations, Yorkshire, England, where he had moved to be with his wife, an academic who was there on a one-year Fulbright scholarship. While she went off to teach and be taught every day, he sat in their little flat putting together the game that would transform Civilization from a one-off success into the archetypal strategy franchise.

Brian Reynolds

As Reynolds would be the first to admit, Civilization II is more of a nuts-and-bolts iteration on what came before than any wild flight of fresh creativity. He approached his task as a sacred trust. Reynolds:

My core vision for Civ II was not to be the guy that broke Civilization. How can I make each thing a little bit better without breaking any of it? I wanted to make the AI better. I wanted to make it harder. I wanted to add detail. I wanted to pee in all the corners. I didn’t have the idea that we were going to change one thing and everything else would stay the same. I wanted to make everything a little bit better. So, I both totally respected [Civilization I] as an amazing game, and thought, I can totally do a better job at every part of this game. It was a strange combination of humility and arrogance.

Reynolds knew all too well that Civilization I could get pretty wonky pretty quickly when you drilled down into the details. He made it his mission to fix as many of these incongruities as possible — both the ones that could be actively exploited by clever players and the ones that were just kind of weird to think about.

At the top of his list was the game’s combat system, the source of much hilarity over the years, what with the way it made it possible — not exactly likely, mind you, but possible — for a militia of ancient spearmen to attack and wipe out a modern tank platoon. This was a result of the game’s simplistic “one hit and done” approach to combat. Let’s consider our case of a militia attacking tanks. A militia has an attack strength of one, a tank platoon a defense strength of five. The outcome of the confrontation is determined by adding these numbers together, then taking each individual unit’s strength as its chance of destroying the other unit rather than being destroyed itself. In this case, then, our doughty militia men have a one-in-six chance of annihilating the tanks rather than vice versa — not great odds, to be sure, but undoubtedly better than those they would enjoy in any real showdown.

It was economic factors that made this state of affairs truly unbalancing. A very viable strategy for winning Civilization every single time was the “barbarian hordes” approach: forgo virtually all technological and social development, flood the map with small, primitive cities, then use those cities to pump out huge numbers of primitive units. A computer opponent diligently climbing the tech tree and developing its society over a broader front would in time be able to create vastly superior units like tanks, but would never come close to matching your armies in quantity. So, you could play the law of averages: you might have to attack a given tank platoon five times or more with different militias, but you knew that you would eventually destroy it, as you would the rest of your opponent’s fancy high-tech military with your staggering numbers of bottom feeders. The barbarian-horde strategy made for an unfun way to play once the joy of that initial eureka moment of discovering it faded, yet many players found the allure of near-certain victory on even the highest difficulty levels hard to resist. Part of a game designer’s job is to save players like this from themselves.

This was in fact the one area of Civilization II that Sid Meier himself dived into with some enthusiasm. He’d been playing a lot of Master of Magic, yet another MicroProse game that betrayed an undeniable Civilization influence, although unlike Colonization it was never marketed on the basis of those similarities. When two units met on the world map in Master of Magic, a separate tactical-battle screen opened up for you to manage the fight. Meier went so far as prototyping such a system for Civilization II, but gave up on it in the end as a poor fit with the game’s core identity. “Being king is the heart of Civilization,” he says. “Slumming as a lowly general puts the player in an entirely different story (not to mention violates the Covert Action rule). Win-or-lose battles are not the only interesting choice on the path to good game design, but they’re the only choice that leads to Civ.”

With his mentor having thus come up empty, Brian Reynolds addressed the problem via a more circumspect complication of the first game’s battle mechanics. He added a third and fourth statistic to each unit: firepower and hit points. Now, instead of being one-and-done, each successful “hit” would merely subtract the one unit’s firepower from the other’s total hit points, and then the battle would continue until one or the other reached zero hits points. The surviving unit would quite possibly exit the battle “wounded” and would need some time to recuperate, adding another dimension to military strategy. It was still just barely possible that a wildly inferior unit could defeat its better — especially if the latter came into a battle already at less than its maximum hit points — but such occurrences became the vanishingly rare miracles they ought to be. Consider: Civilization II’s equivalent of a militia — renamed now to “warriors” — has ones across the board for all four statistics; a tank platoon, by contrast, has an attack strength of ten, a defense strength of five, a firepower of one, and three hit points when undamaged. This means that a group of ancient warriors needs to roll the same lucky number three times in a row on a simulated six-sided die in order to attack an undamaged tank platoon and win. A one-in-six chance has become one chance in 216 — odds that we can just about imagine applying in the real world, where freak happenstances really do occur from time to time.

This change was of a piece with those Reynolds introduced at every level of the game — pragmatic and judicious, evolutionary rather than revolutionary in spirit. I won’t enumerate them exhaustively here, but will just note that they were all very defensible if not always essential in this author’s opinion.

Civilization II was written for Windows 3, and uses that operating system’s standard Windows interface.

The layers of the program that were not immediately visible to the player got an equally judicious sprucing up — especially diplomacy and artificial intelligence, areas where the original had been particularly lacking. The computer players became less erratic in their interactions with you and with one another; no longer would Mahatma Gandhi go to bed one night a peacenik and wake up a nuke-spewing madman. Combined with other systemic changes, such as a rule making it impossible for players to park their military units inside the city boundaries of their alleged allies, these improvements made it much less frustrating to pursue a peaceful, diplomatic path to victory — made it less likely, that is to say, that the other players would annoy you into opening a can of Gandhi-style whoop-ass on them just to get them out of your hair.

In addition to the complications that were introduced to address specific weaknesses of the first game, Civilization II got a whole lot more stuff for the sake of it: more nationalities to play and play against (21 instead of 14); more advances to research (89 instead of 71); more types of units to move around the map (51 instead of 28); a bewildering variety of new geological, biological, and ecological parameters to manipulate to ensure that the game built for you just the sort of random world that you desired to play in; even a new, ultra-hard “Deity” difficulty level to address Reynold’s complaint that Meier’s Civilization was just too easy. There was also a new style of government added to the original five: “Fundamentalism” continued the tradition of mixing political, economic, and now religious ideologies indiscriminately, with all of them seen through a late-twentieth-century American triumphalist lens that might have been offensive if it wasn’t so endearingly naïve in its conviction that the great debates down through history about how human society can be most justly organized had all been definitively resolved in favor of American-style democracy and capitalism. And then the game got seven new Wonders of the World to add to the existing 21. Like their returning stablemates, they were a peculiar mix of the abstract and the concrete, from Adam Smith’s Trading Company (there’s that triumphalism again!) in the realm of the former to the Eiffel Tower in that of the latter.

Reynolds’s most generous move of all was to crack open the black box of the game for its players, turning it into a toolkit that let them try their own hands at strategy-game design. Most of the text and vital statistics were stored in plain-text files that anyone could open up in an editor and tinker with. Names could be changed, graphics and sounds could be replaced, and almost every number in the game could be altered at will. MicroProse encouraged players to incorporate their most ambitious “mods” into set-piece scenarios, which replaced the usual randomized map and millennia-spanning timeline with a more focused premise. Scenarios dealing with Rome during the time of transition from Republic to Empire and World War II in Europe were included with the game to get the juices flowing. In shrinking the timeline so dramatically and focusing on smaller goals, scenarios did tend to bleed away some of Civilization’s high-concept magic and turn it into more of a typical strategic war game, but that didn’t stop the hardcore fans from embracing them. They delivered scenarios of their own about everything from Egyptian, Greek, and Norse mythology to the recent Gulf War against Iraq, from a version of Conway’s Game of Life to a cut-throat competition among Santa’s elves to become the dominant toy makers.

The ultimate expression of Brian Reynolds’s toolkit approach can be seen right there on the menu every time you start a new game of Civilization II, under the heading of simply “Cheat.” You can use it to change anything you want any time you want, at the expense of not having your high score recorded, should you earn one. At a click of the mouse, you can banish an opposing player from the game, research any advance instantly, give yourself infinite money… you name it. More importantly in the long run, the Cheat menu lets you peek behind the curtain to find out exactly what is going on at any given moment, almost like a programmer sitting in front of a debugging console. Sid Meier was shocked the first time he saw it.

Cheating was an inherent part of the game now, right on the main screen? This was not good. Like all storytelling, gaming is about the journey, and if you’re actively finding ways to jump to the end, then we haven’t made the fantasy compelling enough. A gripping novel would never start with an insert labeled, “Here’s the Last Page, in Case You Want to Read It Now.” Players who feel so inclined will instinctively find their own ways to cheat, and we shouldn’t have to help them out. I could not be convinced this was a good idea.

But Reynolds stuck to his guns, and finally Meier let him have it his way. It was, he now acknowledges, the right decision. The Cheat menu let players rummage around under the hood of the game as it was running, until some of them came to understand it practically as well as Reynolds himself. This was a whole new grade of catnip for the types of mind that tend to be attracted by big, complex strategy games like this one. Meanwhile the loss of a high score to boast about was enough to ensure that gamers weren’t unduly tempted to use the Cheat menu when playing for keeps, as it were.

Of course, the finished Civilization II is not solely a creation of Brian Reynolds. After he returned from Britain with his prototype in hand, two other MicroProse designers named Doug Kaufman and Jeff Briggs joined him for the hard work of polishing, refining, and balancing. Ditto a team of artists and even a film crew.

Yes, a film crew: the aspect of Civilization II that most indelibly dates it to the mid-1990s — even more so than its Windows 3 interface — must surely be your “High Council,” who pop up from time to time to offer their wildly divergent input on the subject of what you should be doing next. They’re played by real actors, hamming it up gleefully in video clips, changing from togas to armor to military uniforms to business suits as the centuries go by. Most bizarre of all is the entertainment advisor, played by… an Elvis Presley impersonator. What can one say? This sort of thing was widely expected to be the future of gaming, and MicroProse didn’t want to be left completely in the cold when the much-mooted merger of Silicon Valley and Hollywood finally became a reality.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/civ2.mp4

Civilization II was released in the spring of 1996 to glowing reviews. Computer Gaming World gave it five stars out of five, calling it “a spectacularly addictive and time-consuming sequel.” Everything I’ve said in this article and earlier ones about the appeal, success, and staying power of Civilization I applies treble to Civilization II. It sold 3 million copies over the five years after its release, staying on store shelves right up to the time that the inevitable Civilization III arrived to replace it. Having now thoroughly internalized the lesson that strategy games could become franchises too, MicroProse sustained interest in the interim with two scenario packs, a “Multiplayer Gold Edition” that did for Civilization II what CivNet had done for Civilization I, and another reworking called Civilization II: Test of Time that extended the timeline of the game into the distant future. Civilization as a whole thus become one of gaming’s most inescapable franchises, the one name in the field of grand strategy that even most non-gamers know.

Given all of this, and given the obvious amount of care and even love that was lavished on Civilization II, I feel a bit guilty to admit that I struggled to get into it when I played it in preparation for this article. Some of my lack of enthusiasm may be down to purely proximate causes. I played a lot of Civilization I in preparation for the long series of articles I wrote about it and the Progress-focused, deeply American worldview it embodies, and the sequel is just more of the same from this perspective. If I’d come to Civilization II cold, as did the majority of those 3 million people who bought it, I might well have had a very different experience with it.

Still, I do think there’s a bit more to my sense of vague dissatisfaction than just a jaded player’s ennui. I miss one or two bold leaps in Civilization II to go along with all of the incrementalist tinkering. Its designers made no real effort to address the big issues that dog games of this ilk: the predictable tech tree that lends itself to rote strategies, the ever more crushing burden of micromanagement as your empire expands, and an anticlimactic endgame that can go on for hours after you already know you’re going to win. How funny to think that Master of Orion, another game published by MicroProse, had already done a very credible job of addressing all of these problems three years before Civilization II came to be!

Then, too, Civilization II may be less wonky than its predecessor, but I find that I actually miss the older game’s cock-eyed jeu d’esprit, of which those ancient militias beating up on tanks was part and parcel. Civilization II’s presentation, using the stock Windows 3 menus and widgets, is crisper and cleaner, but only adds to the slight sense of sterility that dogs the whole production. Playing it can feel rather like working a spreadsheet at times — always a danger in these kinds of big, data-driven strategy games. Those cheesy High Council videos serve as a welcome relief from the austerity of it all; if you ask me, the game could have used some more of that sort of thing.

I do appreciate the effort that went into all the new nationalities, advances, units, and starting parameters. In the end, though, Civilization II only provides further proof for me — as if I needed it — that shoehorning more stuff into a game doesn’t always or even usually make it better, just slower and more ponderous. In this sense too, I prefer its faster playing, more lovably gonzo predecessor. It strikes me that Civilization II is more of a gamer’s game, emphasizing min-maxing and efficient play above all else, at the expense of the original’s desire to become a flight of the imagination, letting you literally write your own history of a world. Sid Meier liked to call his game first and foremost “an epic story.” I haven’t heard any similar choice of words from Brian Reynolds, and I’ve definitely never felt when playing Civilization I that it needed to be harder, as he did.

I hasten to emphasize, however, that mine is very much a minority opinion. Civilization II was taken up as a veritable way of life by huge numbers of strategy gamers, some of whom have refused to abandon it to this day, delivering verdicts on the later installments in the series every bit as mixed as my opinions about this one. Good for them, I say; there are no rights or wrongs in matters like these, only preferences.

Postscript: The Eternal War

In 2012, a fan with the online handle of Lycerius struck a chord with media outlets all over the world when he went public with a single game of Civilization II which he had been playing on and off for ten years of real time. His description of it is… well, chilling may not be too strong a word.

The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation. There are three remaining super nations in AD 3991, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands.

The ice caps have melted over 20 times, due primarily to the many nuclear wars. As a result, every inch of land in the world that isn’t a mountain is inundated swampland, useless to farming. Most of which is irradiated anyway.

As a result, big cities are a thing of the distant past. Roughly 90 percent of the world’s population has died either from nuclear annihilation or famine caused by the global warming that has left absolutely zero arable land to farm. Engineers are busy continuously building roads so that new armies can reach the front lines. Roads that are destroyed the very next turn. So, there isn’t any time to clear swamps or clean up the nuclear fallout.

Only three massive nations are left: the Celts (me), the Vikings, and the Americans. Between the three of us, we have conquered all the other nations that have ever existed and assimilated them into our respective empires.

You’ve heard of the 100 Year War? Try the 1700 Year War. The three remaining nations have been locked in an eternal death struggle for almost 2000 years. Peace seems to be impossible. Every time a ceasefire is signed, the Vikings will surprise-attack me or the Americans the very next turn, often with nuclear weapons. So, I can only assume that peace will come only when they’re wiped out. It is this that perpetuates the war ad infinitum.

Because of SDI, ICBMs are usually only used against armies outside of cities. Instead, cities are constantly attacked by spies who plant nuclear devices which then detonate. Usually the downside to this is that every nation in the world declares war on you. But this is already the case, so it’s no longer a deterrent to anyone, myself included.

The only governments left are two theocracies and myself, a communist state. I wanted to stay a democracy, but the Senate would always overrule me when I wanted to declare war before the Vikings did. This would delay my attack and render my turn and often my plans useless. And of course the Vikings would then break the ceasefire like clockwork the very next turn. I was forced to do away with democracy roughly a thousand years ago because it was endangering my empire. But of course the people hate me now, and every few years since then, there are massive guerrilla uprisings in the heart of my empire that I have to deal with, which saps resources from the war effort.

The military stalemate is airtight, perfectly balanced because all remaining nations already have all the technologies, so there is no advantage. And there are so many units at once on the map that you could lose twenty tank units and not have your lines dented because you have a constant stream moving to the front. This also means that cities are not only tiny towns full of starving people, but that you can never improve the city. “So you want a granary so you can eat? Sorry! I have to build another tank instead. Maybe next time.”

My goal for the next few years is to try to end the war and use the engineers to clear swamps and fallout so that farming may resume. I want to rebuild the world. But I’m not sure how.

One can’t help but think about George Orwell’s Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia when reading of Lycerius’s three perpetually warring empires. Like Nineteen Eighty-Four, his after-action report has the uncanny feel of a dispatch from one of our own world’s disturbingly possible futures. Many people today would surely say that recent events have made his dystopia seem even more probable than ten years ago.

But never fear: legions of fans downloaded the saved game of the “Eternal War” which Lycerius posted and started looking for a way to end the post-apocalyptic paralysis. A practical soul who called himself “stumpster” soon figured out how to do so: “I opted for a page out of MacArthur’s book and performed my own Incheon landing.” In the game of Civilization, there is always a way. Let us hope the same holds true in reality.

(Sources: the book Sid Meier’s Memoir! by Sid Meier; Computer Gaming World of April/May 1985, November 1987, March 1993, June 1996, July 1996, and August 1996; Retro Gamer 86, 112, and 219. Online sources include Soren Johnson’s interviews with Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds, PC Gamer’s “Complete History of Civilization,” and  Huffington Post’s coverage of Lycerius’s game of Civilization and stumpster’s resolution of the stalemate. The original text of original Lycenrius’s Reddit message is posted on the Civilization II wiki.

Civilization II is not currently available for online purchase. You can, however, find it readily enough on any number of abandonware archives; some are dodgier than others, so be cautious. I recommend that you avoid the Multiplayer Gold Edition in favor of the original unless you really, really want to play with your mates. For, in a rather shocking oversight, MicroProse released the Gold Edition with bugged artificial intelligence that makes all of the computer-controlled players ridiculously aggressive and will keep you more or less constantly at war with everyone. If perpetual war is your thing, on the other hand, go for it…

Update: See Blake’s comment below for information on how to get the Multiplayer Gold Edition running with the original artificial intelligence, thereby getting the best of both worlds!

Once you’ve managed to acquire it, there’s a surprisingly easy way to run Civilization II on modern versions of Windows. You just need to install a little tool called WineVDM, and then the game should install and run transparently, right from the Windows desktop. It’s probably possible to get it running on Linux and MacOS using the standard Wine layer, but I haven’t tested this personally.)

In a feat of robust programming of which its makers deserve to be proud, Civilization II is capable of scaling to seemingly any size of screen. Here it is running on my Windows 10 desktop at a resolution of 3440 X 1440 — numbers that might as well have been a billion by a million back in 1996.

Comments
56 Responses

- Gwydden

January 20, 2023 at 7:21 pm

“It strikes me that Civilization II is more of a gamer’s game, emphasizing min-maxing and efficient play above all else, at the expense of the original’s desire to become a flight of the imagination, letting you literally write your own history of a world.”

RPGs and strategy games are easily my favorite genres (and I am very much looking forward to the rest of the entries in this series), but I’ve noticed they tend to draw a lot of folks like you describe, which sometimes leaves me feeling a bit out of place.

I have no interest in theorycrafting and don’t get much out of overcoming challenges for its own sake, so the appeal of these games for me is more about their experiential and narrative aspects. I don’t see an RPG as an engineering problem but as an opportunity for creative self-expression, and I approach strategy games less like doing my taxes and more like tending a garden. And they both are, or can be, great formats for interactive storytelling.

Of course, everyone should play however they like! But I appreciate this blog’s awareness that the same games can scratch very different itches in a variety of players.

- Jimmy Maher

January 20, 2023 at 8:16 pm

I’m very much the same. ;)

- John

January 21, 2023 at 3:21 am

Funnily enough, Brian Reynolds’ next big strategy game, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, was probably the first 4X game to include an explicit, written narrative along with the emergent kind. Certainly it was the first one I played. (There may be a case for the Simtex games, but my impression is that they had more of a premise than a narrative.) The drawback of this approach is that only the technology victory provides a truly satisfying conclusion to that narrative and factions who are better suited to other victory types suffer (a little) for it.

- Not Fenimore

January 20, 2023 at 8:20 pm

> If I’d come to Civilization II cold, as did the majority of those 3 million people who bought it, I might well have had a very different experience with it.

Can confirm. This wasn’t quite my *first* video game, but close enough, and I played the hell out of it. I still remember my first game when I “got” it, and was able to win, musketeers and cannons driving north to wipe out the Romans I also still remember my 8yo glee when I realized that the council just screamed incomprehensibly at each other if you opened them during anarchy.

- Martin

January 20, 2023 at 9:01 pm

Incheon landing – nice plug for your China Analog Antiquirian blog.

I assume you mean focus an attack far behind enemy lines to force them to abandon the front.

- John

January 21, 2023 at 3:32 am

You know, those FMV advisors are the one thing that I really miss about Civilization II. I think it’s the only time that the advisors in Civilization have ever had anything like personality. Otherwise, I think that Civilization II has been utterly superseded in every way by either later Civilizations or by Reynold’s own later work in Alpha Centauri, a game which is actually quite similar to Civilization II in many respects, but which is much, much more ambitious. It’s also (a) available for purchase online and (b) able to run tolerably well on modern hardware.

- Jimmy Maher

January 21, 2023 at 9:09 am

I’ve never played it, but it’s definitely one that I look forward to trying. As always when I start a new game, I’ll do so hoping to love it.

- glorkvorn

January 23, 2023 at 6:54 pm

It’s funny, I’ve heard so many people say that what they really miss from this game above all is the FMV advisors. And I agree, they were great (even if their advise was usually terrible). Why is it that in this one game, FMV worked so well, when for most games of the era, the FMV is just a glaring eyesore? Like in Gabriel Knight 2, I always think “this is a good game, but I wish they had stuck with the pixel graphics.” But the FMV advisors here are just massively better than the pixel image advisors from civ1, anything that the later games had for in-game characters.

- John

January 25, 2023 at 10:55 pm

FMV works well in Civ II because it’s used sparingly and judiciously and not necessarily because it’s good. I have fond memories of the military advisor, but I think I found the science advisor sort of embarrassing. To be perfectly honest, I don’t fully recall all of the performances any more. The point is that the FMV advisors are a tiny, mostly inessential part of the game. By the time their novelty has worn off, you most likely don’t need to deal with them any more. Contrast that with certain other games of the era, where FMV is the whole point of the thing and you’re stuck with it from the main menu to the game over screen.

- Gordon Cameron

January 21, 2023 at 4:17 am

I played Civ I quite a bit in the summer of ’93, but it’s Civ II that I played the most out of the series. It’s by far my favorite, and one of my favorite strategy games, period. (Not that it’s necessarily categorically better than I or IV or what have you; it was just the one that I played at the right time, I suppose.) I love the Wonder videos, too.

- M. Casey

January 21, 2023 at 6:21 am

To get the full effect from Civ 2, you really had to be there at the time. In 1996 there wasn’t much out there like it. And if it was a little overstuffed and the graphics were too austere, it still scratched an itch that a lot of us had, and we were happy to wile away the hours with it…

Master of Orion was the more elegant game, as you mention, and it holds up so much better today than Civ 2; I still go back to MoO from time to time, but haven’t touched Civ 2 in decades.

I’m really curious as to what you’d think of SMAC if you keep going to the turn of the century.

- Oded

January 21, 2023 at 1:58 pm

Surely “peak behind the curtain” should be “peek behind the curtain”?

- Jimmy Maher

January 21, 2023 at 8:05 pm

Thanks!

- Gordon Cameron

January 21, 2023 at 4:06 pm

>with all of them seen through a late-twentieth-century American triumphalist lens that might have been offensive if it wasn’t so endearingly naïve in its conviction that the great debates down through history about how human society can be most justly organized had all been definitively resolved in favor of American-style democracy and capitalism.

I was going to comment that perhaps Sid Meier had been influenced by Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History’ but that book was published in 1992. The book was, however, an expansion of a 1989 essay, according to Wikipedia…

- Jimmy Maher

January 21, 2023 at 8:11 pm

I’ve never seen Fukuyama’s book explicitly cited by anyone involved with Civilization, but the
first game and by extension the second absolutely oozes the very specific, very unique point in time that produced it; suffice to say that the idea of an “end of history” was very much in the air at the time. You might want to have a look sometime at my lengthy series on Civilization I, which delves quite deep into these subjects.

- Mattias Källman

January 21, 2023 at 4:30 pm

Oh, I’ve been waiting literally years for this essay. Personally, I was a Civ I nut, but didn’t have the same reaction to the sequel, for me it was the best game ever, just as the predecessor had been. But I suppose that what Brian Reynolds set out to do was exactly what I was craving, more of the same, only better.

But it was a long time ago, so long that in spite of the 1000+ hours I spent with Civ II I had completely forgotten about the video advisors…

I was disappointed with III (the corruption!!), loved IV over everything else, saw V as a step in the wrong direction (the Civ I’ve spent the least time on, by far) and fell – slightly grudgingly – in love with VI, but the first two years after launch, I still occasionally went back to IV like an ex one broke up with but couldn’t quite let emotionally go of…

Please do have a close look at Alpha Centauri when you move into 1999, it has a couple of unique traits in gaming history, and more than 20 years later I struggle to find a game that has done what it does better. Civ: Beyond Earth tried and failed miserabelt to update that formula.

- Mattias Källman

January 21, 2023 at 4:57 pm

I’ll digress a little bit, one of the formative moments of my life was when I received an envelope from Norway in the winter of 1991-92. I was 14 years old, and a hangaround in a Nordic ring trading cracked PC games (I think that particular crime is now… expired?) Among other things in the envelope were three 3,5″ disks saying simply “Civilization” (and of course, 1/3, 2/3, 3/3).

This was pre-internet and I lived in a small Swedish town where English-language games magazines were hard to find – in fact, another revelation I would have once I booted up the game was that “man, I need to start getting better sources of information than the Swedish games magazines.”

My two favourite games of all time, at the time, were Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon, and I had no idea that Civilization was a concept, in development, nothing. So I installed the cracked copy with no expectations whatsoever and when I saw the words “Sid Meier’s” I probably blacked out for a minute. Since then it’s been a way of life.

- Ian C

January 21, 2023 at 7:22 pm

> I had completely forgotten about the video advisors…

“Only fools run an empire without luxuries… king.” I haven’t played Civ2 in >20 years, but I’ll probably never forget those words.

- Whomever

January 22, 2023 at 1:30 pm

Wow, are you me? :-). I agree with everything you just wrote 100%. To this day Civ 2 is my favorite (I never really played Civ IV because of personal issues when it came out, I should totally revisit that, it’s in my Steam library). It cleaned up a number of the rougher edges of Civ 1.

Also agree 100% Re Civ 3 and corruption. I found it pretty unplayable because of that; I’ve since read that later releases fixed a lot of that and it became somewhat better, maybe I should revisit it.

Also Alpha Centauri is pretty awesome, but I see it almost as Civ 2 volume 2.

- Mattias Källman

January 26, 2023 at 10:37 am

> Also Alpha Centauri is pretty awesome, but I see it almost as Civ 2 volume 2.

I felt the same at the time, and played it like that, finding many of the new ideas like the customizable vehicles and the narrative of Planet as mere distractions. But when I look back at my experience of the game 20+ years later, those are the things that really stick with me and also probably the reason why I found Civ: Beyond Earth so underwhelming. That one REALLY was “Civ 5 volume 1.5” (or, “this would have made more sense as a Mod”).

- Throteka

January 21, 2023 at 9:15 pm

Some notes (I have too many of these rattling in my head):

1. I see you are very pick-and-choose regarding materials to incorporate into this article. E.g. skipping over the legal quagmire of the Civilization rights involving Avalon Hill, Activision and Hasbro. Which is fair, although it’s the reason why games like Civ2: Test of Time and the Call to Power series got made.

2. “He added a third and fourth statistic to each unit: firepower and hit points.”
The funniest part is Civ2’s combat system betrays Brian Reynolds’ background as a self-taught programmer (his initial job at MicroProse) with no formal STEM education. The math he described in the Civ2 manual is his *naive assumption* of how the combat system would work; its actual probalistic results are crazy complicated and not at all what he assumed.

You can read about the “real” formula here: https://lparchive.org/Civilization-2/Update%2029/
(The writer also ranted about “weird rules exceptions”, which were usually added to address perceived balance issues in Civ1.)

3. According to an interview with MicroProse multimedia director Michael Ely, who made Civ2 and Alpha Centauri’s in-game videos, MPS once canceled (another) remake of Civ1 called Civilization Gold, and he created some nice wonder movies for that. I assume these same videos were later reused in Civ2, though I’m curious if they were different.

4. I can clearly remember the beginning of the “nuclear Gandhi” myth, which Firaxis has themselves done much to perpetuate by baking it into Gandhi’s AI starting from Civ5.
The myth started on Civ fan forums like Apolyton, as hearsay about Civ2; it was only later attributed to Civ1, probably because the more primitive game makes the story more plausible, and Civ1 has animated leader to make the scene of “our words are backed by nuclear weapons” look that much more dramatic.
Of course, anyone who played Civ1&2 knows that their AIs are simplistic and predisposed to gang on the runaway human player. Late game aggression is their normal behavior.

—-
As you continue with the Microsoft series, I want to suggest again: are you interested in writing about the outstanding developers of multimedia CD-ROMs, like Microsoft Home and Dorling Kingsley? I’d read an article on the marvelous DK CD-ROM team, and am hungry for more, though I don’t know if there’s more info available.

- Throteka

January 22, 2023 at 4:59 am

Some more subject suggestions:
– the milsim dev NovaLogic;
– devs of continental Europe, though I’m not sure there are sufficient English-language sources.

Trivia #5:
I think I read in some corner of GamaSutra that when a publisher tried to do something with Civ2’s source code, they found it to be unsalvagable spaghetti code where a change to the audio system would wreck havoc on the gameplay logic.
OTOH Civ2 has been ported to the PS1 console, so I don’t know how bad it could be.

- Paul

January 26, 2023 at 11:28 am

Would like to second the call for stories about continental Europe’s developing scene! As a German, I always felt that there were some uniquely German titles that did extremely well here and were very little known elsewhere, and I’d love to hear your take on those. For instance, these franchises with production values comparable to international hits exploded onto the German scene to huge sales, but were recognized in other countries only much later, if at all:

Battle Isle (1991),
Das Schwarze Auge (1992),
Die Siedler (1993),
Anno (1998),
Gothic (2001… probably a little in this blog’s future yet).
Not to mention Germany’s strange obsession with football manager simulations!

If the language barrier is a problem, I’d be happy to assist with German-language texts – also, deepl.com does a credible impression of a professional translator, so the language barrier shouldn’t be too hard to overcome.

- Jimmy Maher

January 26, 2023 at 2:52 pm

Language isn’t so much the problem as my just never having found that special game that makes me want to make that deep dive. I’m going to indulge in some crude stereotyping here, so bear with me. My impression is that, whereas French games tend to be under-designed, trying to get by on theme and aesthetics alone, German games tend to be over-designed — or over-engineered, if you like. I really don’t need to play a CRPG that kills me because I failed to pack warm enough blankets for a trip. Some people find that level of complexity and detail-orientation fun, and more power to them, but I’m not among them.

Of course, there are whole swaths of German games I know nothing about, and these comments apply mainly to the more narrative-oriented genres that are my biggest interest. I’m sure that one of these days — hopefully before we get to Gothic, which I did play and enjoy many years ago — I’ll stumble upon that special one that really turns my crank.

- gamer indreams

March 10, 2023 at 9:29 pm

Hi Jimmy

Die Siedler (1993) or The Settlers is a franchise that is now owned by Ubisoft and is being still published.

One of the great things about Settlers is that, just like the Impressions Caesar games, you saw the people building/doing things, which was so entertaining for me coming from a background of Civilization where it was all very high level and depersonalized.

Love to see your opinions on this sometime!

- Bogdanow

January 21, 2023 at 9:56 pm

“A gripping novel would never start with an insert labeled, “Here’s the Last Page, in Case You Want to Read It Now.”

I don’t know if the irony was caught before (probably), but actually, any reader could always start reading a book from the last page if only prefers to do so.

- Ken Brubaker

January 23, 2023 at 3:53 pm

That’s kind of like what the movie “Love Story” does. Right from the first scene you know how it’s going to end, you just don’t know how it got there.

- Gordon Cameron

January 25, 2023 at 12:19 am

That’s a pretty common framing device. See also Sunset Boulevard.

I don’t think Meier’s analogy amounts to much, though, because there’s a considerable difference between turning to the last page of a book and digging around in the guts of a piece of interactive software…

- Martin

January 25, 2023 at 8:32 pm

A spin on that is you have that future scene at the beginning of the story and then actually play it differently when you reach that part of the story. Apart from the surprise of it now being different, it is explained as a quantum effect of you knowing the future and that changed it.

Can only use that approach once and I claim dibs if it hadn’t been used before. :)

- glorkvorn

January 24, 2023 at 8:12 am

Wasn’t there an old filfre post with a quote like that, but in reverse? It was making fun of adventure games saying something like “imagine you were reading a novel, but you’re not allowed to turn to the next page until you’ve solved some ridiculous puzzle on the current page.”

I’m starting to think this is a fundamental difference between games and other forms of storytelling. Neither one is necessarily better, but it’s a big difference. You also see the difference between reading a series of books that’s all finished, vs a new series where you have to wait years for the next volume to get released.

- Nate

January 21, 2023 at 11:58 pm

Good theme for a series of articles. One nit:

Add a comma before “subLogic”:
…”under the imprint of its original publisher subLogic”

- Martin

January 22, 2023 at 12:46 am

One thing that stuck out to me in the Lycerius postings is that a game of around 4000 years seems stretched in that no person lives for 4000 years and no dynasty survives that long either.

What I am interested in is a game of a life set inside a Civilization style model. What I mean is these games look to some sort of technological ending instead of the (hopefully) natural ending of a life.

What I’m thinking of is a game of three phases that model a possible life of a leader that could loose that leadership if they mess up. The first phase would be establishing a secure control of the realm (let’s say the previous ruler died suddenly and left the country in s not too good shape).

Phase 2 would be like the Civilization style games. With firm control of the Land, exploit it for what they can.

Phase 3 would be the part that everyone forgets about. We all get old and usually wish to pass control onto our favored successor. In the end we die but did everything work out as we planned?

Is there a game, which I assume would look something like Civilization, like this out there?

- Mattias Källman

January 22, 2023 at 8:53 am

Old World (by Civ IV head designer Soren Johnson) seems to be doing something along those lines, but I haven’t tried it out yet.

- Whomever

January 22, 2023 at 1:26 pm

Also Crusader Kings 3 is explicitly more about managing a dynasty than a nation state per-se.

- gamer indreams

March 12, 2023 at 9:18 pm

Not a game but if you want to see how someone tried to solve it, look at the first season of Foundation on AppleTV+
There are 3 storylines but the Empire one where they try to resolve the issue of succession is absolutely the best one.

- bufalo1973

January 22, 2023 at 11:37 am

Not even a reference to FreeCiv?

- Chris Floyd

January 22, 2023 at 6:28 pm

I played a lot of Civ 1 and Civ 2, and at the time would certainly have said that Civ 2 was simply bigger and better (even though I hated gaming in Windows). But I didn’t go any further down that road with the series: The absolute best iteration, in my opinion, is Civ Revolutions–helmed by Sid, built for console and mobile platforms, and truly an updated take on Civ 1, with less of the stuff that made the hardcore players gush over Civ IV or Alpha Centauri, and more of the cartoon version of history that, in retrospect, was so endearing about the original.

- Keith Palmer

January 23, 2023 at 12:39 am

I’ve found Civilizations Revolutions (on iPod touch and iPad, although I did give the Xbox version to my brother) quite playable myself. I also have to admit that while I’ve played Civilization IV, I never quite seemed to “click” into pushing into the game and figuring out just how it ticked. In recent years I have dabbled with Freeciv (its sheer number of playable countries does appeal), although after noticing the question of how to get Civilization II working without Windows I took another stab at getting its old Macintosh version running inside the SheepShaver emulator and found everything appearing to work now.

- Lenox

January 22, 2023 at 7:11 pm

My Civ II introduction was on a CD sampler of games for Mac. It took you as far as AD 1000 and then quit. I played it a lot before finally finding the CIV II full game (I live in the boondocks in Spain). Then I got the next one along, now with Windows, and have been playing Civ III for about twenty years. It’s a great time-filler and a game, as Readers will know, will last several weeks (or months).
I have never played any other computer game beyond Duke Nukem (once!).

- Glorkvorn

January 23, 2023 at 7:43 pm

Sometimes the small details really *matter*, and this is one of those cases. I know you’ve said that strategic wargames aren’t your cup of tea, and that’s fine, but I don’t think you can properly appreciate Civ2 without digging into the strategy of it. The meat of the game is in making these strategic decisions and trying to grow the power of your civilization as fast as possible. When the game is as imbalanced as Civ1, it really takes away the interesting strategic choices.

The combat in civ1 is wild. It’s not a rare occurrence to win weird fights. there are so many units fighting that it’s pretty much guaranteed to happen in every game. On the other hand, the opposite can happen too, where one superior unit can take down an entire enemy army without a scratch, like Achilles. The combat of civ2 is a lot more strategic because it’s not so dependent on random chance, while still having some random chance to spice things up. It offers the sort of strategic choices that strategy gamers really like to think about.

I also think the scenarios of civ2 add a lot to the game. They completely solve the problem of the tedious late game, because you just have to take a few limited objectives to win. And they take away some of the more tedious micro of growing small cities, because most cities have already been planted for you. The ww2 scenario is especially well done, and I think they made some changes to the base game just to help balance that scenario.

It’s too bad that they’ve never released an official remastered version that works on modern systems. I appreciate the tips that you give for getting it running, but I wish it was easier. One of the things I really liked about civ2 when it came out was that it just *worked* out of the box, because it was explicitly designed for windows. Civ1 starts with a dos prompt telling you to input which brand of sound card you have… not the most user friendly start. But at least Civ1 still works in DosBox. Running a windows VM isn’t the worst thing, but it’s still enough of a hurdle to make me not want to play Civ2 casually, and I’m guessing that’s true for most people.

- Jimmy Maher

January 25, 2023 at 2:45 am

I think the distinction here is one’s level of investment in Civilization as a “strategic wargame.” Many, probably most of the hardcore players approach it with that mentality, but that isn’t the only way to see it. If ones see it more as a grand narrative of Progress with the military aspect subordinated largely to a defensive/protective role, as I do, some of the combat wonkiness of Civilization I seems suddenly less important. Different strokes for different folks.

- Paul

January 26, 2023 at 12:47 pm

Your take on Civ is very different from that of most people then, Jimmy. Your take sounds a bit like somebody playing an early Tomb Raider for the story and character arc, with getting good at the action subordinated to an immersion-enhancing role… ;-P

- Jimmy Maher

January 26, 2023 at 2:42 pm

From the Civilization I manual:

The elimination of all other civilizations in the world is very hard to accomplish. You are much more likely to win by being in existence when colonists reach Alpha Centauri. Even if the colonists are not yours, the successful direction of your civilization through the centuries is an achievement. You have survived countless wars, the pollution of the industrial age, and the risks of nuclear weapons.

Games, like life, need only be as zero-sum as you choose to make them, my friend. ;)

- Eden

January 24, 2023 at 10:48 pm

I don’t doubt for a moment that SimCity 2000 had the pioneering effect you describe, but I just wanted to drop a mention here for Bullfrog’s Populous II: Trials of the Olympian Gods (1991), which seems to fit the bill as an earlier example of the “technical sequel” in strategy-gaming. Despite those grand Roman numerals, Populous II was also unashamedly just a technological upgrade to the successful strategic game, with a larger playing window, streamlined interface, new complexity without truly fundamental changes, etc.

It’s also fun to consider how that strategy colossus of the era, X-COM, avoided appending any digits to Terror from the Deep, yet I remember that contemporary players and reviewers persisted in calling it “XCOM 2” nonetheless!

Anyway, much appreciation for the wonderful article. I have a hunch we’ll soon be hearing about Master of Orion 2, and I’d be very curious to hear what you have to say on that score…

- Jimmy Maher

January 25, 2023 at 2:48 am

That is indeed an exception to the rule, one I hadn’t thought of.

- Eden

January 25, 2023 at 4:10 am

Also, it’s silly, but I can’t resist spelling out my guess: in addition to Civ2 and MOO2, the other strategy sequel will surely be Heroes of Might and Magic 2—and that game will get the nod of approval, because it enshrines what works in the original, resists bending toward some micro-managing direction, and refines the aesthetic into an even more effective theater for the player’s fantasy-empire-conquering narratives.

Of course, even if I’m wrong, I look forward to reading what’s next. (And I don’t expect you to comment on this guess, of course!)

- Jimmy Maher

February 17, 2023 at 4:17 pm

You called it, my friend. ;)

- eldomtom2

January 29, 2023 at 3:13 pm

“The fact that each installment was so clearly merely a step down that road arguably explains why these types of games have tended to age more poorly than others, and why you don’t find nearly as many bloggers and YouTubers rhapsodizing about old simulations today as you do games in most other genres.”

It does happen though, of course. Especially outside flight simulation, where titles are much more infrequent and much more variable in their quality, so that the prospective simmer would be best advised to buy Sim X if they’re interested in Subject Y, but if they’re interested in Subject Z they should instead get Sim A or Sim B (depending on how much they weigh various factors such as graphics, accuracy, mod support etc.).

- Blake

February 3, 2023 at 12:59 pm

Great article Jim! I help run the Civ2 forums at CivFanatics and we’ll be covering your work and send some more views your way! :) Speaking of which I’d like to address this part:

“I recommend that you avoid the Multiplayer Gold Edition in favor of the original unless you really, really want to play with your mates. For, in a rather shocking oversight, MicroProse released the Gold Edition with bugged artificial intelligence that makes all of the computer-controlled players ridiculously aggressive and will keep you more or less constantly at war with everyone. If perpetual war is your thing, on the other hand, go for it…”

MGE is the superior version (especially for scenario players) and these days there is the Civ2UIA patch tool that fixes the aggressive AI and returns it to its original behavior in original Civ2. The tool also makes a significant amount of other excellent improvements and modernizations to Civ2’s interface. It’s available here:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civilization-ii-mge-user-interface-additions-civ2uia.623515/

Many of the Civ2 modding community now consider Test of Time the superior version of Civ2 due to its superior graphics and scenario creation systems. Many of Civ2 MGE’s scenarios have been converted to ToT with many improvements. ToT also has a fan patch tool that significantly improves the game and extends its abilities in many areas. It’s available here:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-test-of-time-patch-project.517282/

Although there are still some (including myself) who continue to play and mod MGE.

- Jimmy Maher

February 3, 2023 at 4:47 pm

That’s great to know. Added a note to the article.

- Pingback: Sequels in Strategy Gaming, Part 1: Civilization II - CivFanatics

- Jonathan O

February 21, 2023 at 1:04 pm

Minor typo: Fulbright should be spelled thus, with only one L.

- Jimmy Maher

February 21, 2023 at 3:28 pm

Thanks!

- Pingback: PolyCast 416: Let Us Trade Maps! - CivFanatics

- vykromond

July 24, 2023 at 10:46 am

“a can of Gandhi-style whip-ass”

Almost certainly whoop-ass, or the variant whup. While it does derive from “[to] whip [the] ass [of] another,” by the time the expression has been idiomatically packed into a can I think whip is basically always transmuted to whoop-. Wiktionary, for ex., has a page for whoop-ass (canned), and no page for whip-ass at all, although it has whip-arse (uncanned) as a Britishism for a schoolteacher.

- Jimmy Maher

July 24, 2023 at 11:55 am

Fair enough. ;) Thanks!

Sequels in Strategy Gaming, Part 2: Master of Orion II
February 3, 2023

MicroProse had just published Master of Magic, the second grand-strategy game from the Austin, Texas-based studio SimTex, when SimCity 2000 made the world safe for numbered strategy sequels. After a quick palate cleanser in the form of a computerized version of the Avalon Hill board game 1830: Railroads & Robber Barons, Steve Barcia and the rest of the SimTex crew turned their attention to a sequel to Master of Orion, their 1993 space opera that was already widely revered as one of the finest ever examples of its breed.

Originally announced as a product for the Christmas of 1995, it took the sequel one full year longer than that to actually appear. And this was, it must be said, all for the better. Master of Magic had been a rather brilliant piece of game design whose commercial prospects had been all but destroyed by its premature release in a woefully buggy state. To their credit, SimTex patched it, patched it, and then patched it some more in the months that followed, until it had realized most of its immense potential as a game. But by then the damage had been done, and what might have been an era-defining strategy game like Civilization — or, indeed, the first Master of Orion — had been consigned to the status of a cult classic. On the bright side, MicroProse did at least learn a lesson from this debacle: Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares was given the time it needed to become its best self. The game that shipped just in time for the Christmas of 1996 was polished on a surface level, whilst being relatively well-balanced and mostly bug-free under the hood.

Gamers’ expectations had changed in some very significant ways in the three years since its predecessor’s release, and not generally to said predecessor’s benefit. The industry had now completed the transition from VGA graphics, usually running at a resolution of 320 X 200, to SVGA, with its resolutions of 640 X 480 or even more. The qualitative difference belies the quantitative one. Seen from the perspective of today, the jump to SVGA strikes me as the moment when game graphics stop looking undeniably old, when they can, in the best cases at any rate, look perfectly attractive and even contemporary. Unfortunately, Master of Orion I was caught on the wrong side of this dividing line; a 1993 game like it tended to look far uglier in 1996 than, say, a 1996 game would in 1999.

So, the first and most obvious upgrade in Master of Orion II was a thoroughgoing SVGA facelift. The contrast is truly night and day when you stand the two games up side by side; the older one looks painfully pixelated and blurry, the newer one crisp and sharp, so much so that it’s hard to believe that only three years separate them. But the differences at the interface level are more than just cosmetic. Master of Orion II’s presentation also reflects the faster processor and larger memory of the typical 1996 computer, as well as an emerging belief in this post-Windows 95 era that the interface of even a complex strategy game aimed at the hardcore ought to be welcoming, intuitive, and to whatever extent possible self-explanatory. The one we see here is a little marvel, perfectly laid out, with everything in what one intuitively feels to be its right place, with a helpful explanation never any farther away than a right click on whatever you have a question about. It takes advantage of all of the types of manipulation that are possible with a mouse — in particular, it sports some of the cleverest use of drag-and-drop yet seen in a game to this point. In short, everything just works the way you think it ought to work, which is just about the finest compliment you can give to a user interface. Master of Orion I, for all that it did the best it could with the tools at its disposal in 1993, feels slow, jerky, and clumsy by comparison — not to mention ugly.

The home screen of Master of Orion I…

…and its equivalent in Master of Orion II. One of the many benefits of a higher resolution is that even the “Huge” galaxy I’ve chosen to play in here now fits onto a single screen.

If Master of Orion II had attempted to be nothing other than a more attractive, playable version of its antecedent, plenty of the original game’s fans would doubtless have welcomed it on that basis alone. In fact, one is initially tempted to believe that this is where its ambitions end. When we go to set up a new game, what we find is pretty much what we would imagine seeing in just such a workmanlike upgrade. Once again, we’re off to conquer a procedurally generated galaxy of whatever size we like, from Small to Huge, while anywhere from two to eight other alien races are attempting to do the same. Sure, there are a few more races to play as or against this time, a new option to play as a custom race with strengths and weaknesses of our own choosing, and a few other new wrinkles here and there, but nothing really astonishing. For example, we do have the option of playing against other real people over a network now, but that was becoming par for the course in this post-DOOM era, when just about every game was expected to offer some sort of networked multiplayer support, and could expect to be dinged by the critics if it didn’t. So, we feel ourselves to be in thoroughly familiar territory when the game proper begins, greeting us with that familiar field of stars, representing yet another galaxy waiting to be explored and conquered.

Master of Orion II’s complete disconnection from the real world can be an advantage: it can stereotype like crazy when it comes to the different races, thereby making each of them very distinct and memorable. None of us have to feel guilty for hating the Darlocks for the gang of low-down, backstabbing, spying blackguards they are. If Civilization tried to paint its nationalities with such a broad brush, it would be… problematic.

But when we click on our home star, we get our first shock: we see that each star now has multiple planets instead of the single one we’re used to being presented with in the name of abstraction and simplicity. Then we realize that the simple slider bars governing each planetary colony’s output have been replaced by a much more elaborate management screen, where we decide what proportion of our population will work on food production (a commodity we never even had to worry about before), on industrial production, and on research. And we soon learn that now we have to construct each individual upgrade we wish our colony to take advantage of by slotting it into a build queue that owes more to Master of Magic — and by extension to that game’s strong influence Civilization — than it does to Master of Orion I.

By the middle and late game, your options for building stuff can begin to overwhelm; by now you’re managing dozens (or more) of individual colonies, each with its own screen like this. The game does offer an “auto-build” option, but it rarely makes smart choices; you can kiss your chances of winning goodbye if you use it on any but the easiest couple of difficulty levels. It would be wonderful if you could set up default build queues of your own and drag and drop them onto colonies, but the game’s interest in automation doesn’t extend this far.

This theme of superficial similarities obscuring much greater complexity will remain the dominant one. The mechanics of Master of Orion II are actually derived as much from Master of Magic and Civilization as from Master of Orion I. It is, that is to say, nowhere near such a straightforward extension of its forerunner as Civilization II is. It’s rather a whole new game, with whole new approaches in several places. Whereas the original Master of Orion was completely comfortable with high-level abstraction, the sequel’s natural instinct is to drill down into the details of everything it can. Does this make it better? Let’s table that question for just a moment, and look at some of the other ways in which the game has changed and stayed the same.

The old research system, which allowed you to make progress in six different fields at once by manipulating a set of proportional sliders, has been replaced by one where you can research just one technology at a time, like in Civilization. It’s one of the few places where the second game is less self-consciously “realistic” than the first; the scientific establishment of most real space-faring societies will presumably be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. But, in harking back so clearly to Civilization rather than to its own predecessor, it says much about where Steve Barcia’s head was at as he was putting this game together.

Master of Orion I injected some entropy into its systems by giving you the opportunity to research only a randomized subset of the full technology tree, forcing you to think on your feet and play the hand you were given. The sequel divides the full ladder of Progress into groupings of one to three technologies that are always the same, and lets you choose one of them from each group — and only one of them — for yourself rather than choosing for you. You still can’t research everything, in other words, but now it’s you who decides what does get researched. (This assumes that you aren’t playing a race with the “Creative” ability, which lets you gain access to all available technologies each step of the way, badly unbalancing the game in the process.)

The research screen in a game that’s pretty far along. We can choose to research in just one of the eight categories at a time, and must choose just one technology within that category. The others are lost to us, unless we can trade for or steal them from another race.

We’re on more familiar ground when it comes to our spaceships and all that involves them. Once again, we can design our own ships using all of the fancy technologies our scientists have recently invented, and once again we can command them ourselves in tactical battles that don’t depart all that much from what we saw in the first game. That said, even here there are some fresh complications. There’s a new “command point” system that makes the number of fleets we can field dependent on the communications infrastructure we’ve built in our empire, while now we also need to build “freighters” to move food from our bread-basket planets to those focused more on industry or research. Another new wrinkle here is the addition of “leaders,” individuals who come along to offer us their services from time to time. They’re the equivalent of Master of Magic’s heroes, to the extent that they even level up CRPG-style over time, although they wind up being vastly less consequential and memorable than they were in that game.

Leaders for hire show up from time to time, but you never develop the bonds with them that you do with Master of Magic’s heroes. That’s a pity; done differently, leaders might have added some emotional interest to a game that can feel a bit dry.

The last major facet of the game after colony, research, and ship management is your relationship with the other aliens you eventually encounter. Here again, we’re on fairly familiar ground, with trade treaties, declarations of war and peace and alliance, and spying for purposes of information theft or sabotage all being possible and, on the more advanced difficulty levels, necessary. We have three ways of winning the game, which is one more than in Master of Orion I. As before, we can simply exterminate all of the other empires, or we can win enough of them over through friendship or intimidation that they vote to make us the supreme leader of a Galactic Council. But we can now also travel to a different dimension and defeat a mysterious alien race called the Antarans that live there, whereupon all of the races back in our home dimension will recognize us as the superior beings we’ve just proved ourselves to be. Here there are more echoes of Master of Magic — specifically, of that game’s two planes of Arcanus and Myrror and the dimensional gates that link them together.

The workings of the Galactic Council vote are virtually unchanged from Master of Orion I.

What to make of this motley blend, which I would call approximately 50 percent Master of Orion I, 25 percent Civilization, and 25 percent Master of Magic? First, let me tell you what most fans of grand strategy think. Then, I’ll give you my own contrarian take on it..

The verdict of the masses is clear: Master of Orion II is one of the most beloved and influential strategy games of all time. As popular in the latter 1990s as any grand-strategy game not called Civilization, it’s still widely played today — much more so, I would reckon, than the likes of its contemporary Civilization II. (Certainly Master of Orion II looks far less dated today by virtue of not running under Windows and using the Windows 3 widgets — to say nothing of those oh-so-1990s live-action video clips Civilization II featured.)  It’s often described as the archetypal strategic space opera, the Platonic ideal which every new space-based grand-strategy game must either imitate or kick against (or a little of both). And why not? Having received several patches back in the day to correct the few issues in its first release, it’s finely balanced (that “Creative” ability aside — and even it has been made more expensive than it used to be), rich in content, and reasonably attractive to look at even today. And on top of all that there’s a gob-smackingly good interface that hardly seems dated at all. What’s not to like?

Well… a few things, in this humble writer’s opinion. For me, the acid test for additional complexity in a game is partially whether it leads to more “interesting choices,” as Sid Meier would put it, but even more whether it makes the fiction come more alive. (I am, after all, very much an experiential player, very much in tune with Meier’s description of the ideal game of Civilization as “an epic story.”) Without one or preferably both of these qualities, added complexity just leads to added tedium in my book. In the beginning, when I’m developing only one or two planets, I can make a solid case for Master of Orion II’s hands-on approach to colony management using these criteria. But when one or two colonies become one or two dozen, then eventually one or two hundred, the negatives rather outweigh the positives for me. Any benefits you get out of dragging all those little colonists around manually live only at the margins, as it were. For the reality is that you’ll quickly come up with a standard, rote approach to building up each new planet, and see it through as thoughtlessly as you put your shirt on each morning. At most, you might have just a few default approaches, depending on whether you want the colony to focus on agriculture, industry, or research. Only in a rare crisis, or maybe in the rare case of a truly exceptional planet, will you mix it up all that much.

Master of Orion II strikes me as emblematic of a very specific era in strategy gaming, when advances in computing hardware weren’t redounding entirely to the benefit of game design. During the 1980s and early 1990s, designs were brutally constrained by slow processors and small memories; games like the first Master of Orion (as well as such earlier space operas as the 1983 SSG classic Reach for the Stars) were forced by their circumstance to boil things down to their essentials. By 1996, however, with processor speeds starting to be measured in the hundreds of megahertz and memory in the tens of megabytes, there was much more space for bells, whistles, and finicky knob-twiddling. We can see this in Civilization II, and we can see it even more in Master of Orion II. The problem, I want to say, was that computing technology had fallen into a sort of uncanny valley: the latest hardware could support a lot more mechanical, quantitative complexity, but wasn’t yet sufficient to implement more fundamental, qualitative changes, such as automation that allows the human player to intervene only where and when she will and improved artificial intelligence for the computer players. Tellingly, this last is the place where Master of Orion II has changed least. You still have the same tiny set of rudimentary diplomatic options, and the computer players remain as simple-minded and manipulable as ever. As with so many games of this era, the higher difficulty levels don’t make the computer players smarter; they only let them cheat more egregiously, giving them ever greater bonuses to all of the relevant numbers.

There are tantalizing hints that Steve Barcia had more revolutionary ambitions for Master of Orion II at one point in time. Alan Emrich, the Computer Gaming World scribe who coined the term “4X” (“Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate”) for the first game and did so much to shape it as an early play-tester that a co-designer credit might not have been out of order, was still in touch with SimTex while they worked on the second. He states that Barcia originally “envisioned a ‘layered’ design approach so that people could focus on what they wanted to play. Unfortunately, that goal wasn’t reached.” Perhaps the team fell back on what was relatively easy to do when these ambitions proved too hard to realize, or perhaps at least part of the explanation lies in another event: fairly early in the game’s development, Barcia sold his studio to his publisher MicroProse, and accepted a more hands-off executive role at the parent company. From then on, the day-to-day design work on Master of Orion II largely fell to one Ken Burd, previously the lead programmer.

For whatever reason, Master of Orion II not only fails to advance the conceptual state of the art in grand strategy, but actually backpedals on some of the important innovations of its predecessor, which had already addressed some of the gameplay problems of the then-nascent 4X genre. I lament most of all the replacement of the first game’s unique approach to research with something much more typical of the genre. By giving you the possibility of researching only a limited subset of technologies, and not allowing you to dictate what that subset consists of, Master of Orion I forced you to improvise, to build your strategy around what your scientific establishment happened to be good at. (No beam-weapon technologies? Better learn to use missiles! Weak on spaceship-range-extending technologies to colonize faraway star systems? Better wring every last bit of potential out of those closer to home!) In doing so, it ensured that every single game you played was different. Master of Orion II, by contrast, strikes me as too amenable to rote, static strategizing that can be written up almost like an adventure-game walkthrough: set up your race like this, research this, this, and this, and then you have this, which will let you do this… every single time. Once you’ve come up with a set of standard operating procedures that works for you, you’ve done so forever. After that point, “it’s hard to lose Master of Orion II,” as the well-known game critic Tom Chick admitted in an otherwise glowing 2000 retrospective.

In the end, then, the sequel is a peculiar mix of craft and complacency. By no means can one call it just a re-skinning; it does depart significantly from its antecedent. And yet it does so in ways that actually make it stand out less rather than more from other grand-strategy games of its era, thanks to the anxiety of influence.

For influence, you see, can be a funny thing. Most creative pursuits should be and are a sort of dialog. Games especially have always built upon one another, with each worthy innovation — grandly conceptual or strictly granular, it really doesn’t matter — finding its way into other games that follow, quite possibly in a more evolved form; much of what I’ve written on this very site over the past decade and change constitutes an extended attempt to illustrate that process in action. Yet influence can prove a double-edged sword when it hardens into a stultifying conventional wisdom about how games ought to be. Back in 1973, the literary critic Harold Bloom coined the term “anxiety of influence” in reference to the gravitational pull that the great works of the past can exert on later writers, convincing them to cast aside their precious idiosyncrasies out of a perceived need to conform to the way things ought to be done in the world of letters. I would argue that Civilization’s set of approaches have cast a similar pall over grand-strategy-game design. The first Master of Orion escaped its long shadow, having been well along already by the time Sid Meier’s own landmark game was released. But it’s just about the last grand-strategy game about which that can be said. Master of Orion II reverts to what had by 1996 become the mean: a predictable set of bits and bobs for the player to busy herself with, arranged in a comfortably predictable way.

When I think back to games of Master of Orion I, I remember the big events, the lightning invasions and deft diplomatic coups and unexpected discoveries. When I think back to games of Master of Orion II, I just picture a sea of data. When there are too many decisions, it’s hard to call any of them interesting. Then again, maybe it’s just me. I know that there are players who love complexity for its own sake, who see games as big, fascinating systems to tweak and fiddle with — the more complicated the better. My problem, if problem it be, is that I tend to see games as experiences — as stories.

Ah, well. Horses for courses. If you’re one of those who love Master of Orion II — and I’m sure that category includes many of you reading this — rest assured that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. As for me, all this time spent with the sequel has only given me the itch to fire up the first one again…

Although I’ve never seen any hard sales numbers, all indications are that Master of Orion II was about as commercially successful as a game this time-consuming, slow-paced, and cerebral — and not named Civilization — could possibly be, most likely selling well into the hundreds of thousands of units. Yet its success didn’t lead to an especially bright future for SimTex — or MicroProse Austin, as it had now become known. In fact, the studio never managed to finish another game after it. Its last years were consumed by an expensive boondoggle known as Guardians: Agents of Justice, another brainchild of Steve Barcia, an “X-COM in tights,” with superheroes and supervillains instead of soldiers and aliens. That sounds like a pretty fantastic idea to me. But sadly, a turn-based tactical-combat game was at odds with all of the prevailing trends in an industry increasingly dominated by first-person shooters and real-time strategy; one frustrated MicroProse executive complained loudly that Barcia’s game was “slow as a pig.” It was accordingly forced through redesign after redesign, without ever arriving at anything that both satisfied the real or perceived needs of the marketers and was still fun to play. At last, in mid-1998, MicroProse pulled the plug on the project, shutting down the entirety of its brief-lived Austin-based subsidiary at the same time. And so that was that for SimTex; Master of Orion III, when it came, would be the work of a completely different group of people.

Guardians: Agents of Justice was widely hyped over the years. MicroProse plugged it enthusiastically at each of the first four E3 trade shows, and a preview was the cover story of Computer Games Strategy Plus’s December 1997 issue. “At least Agents never graced a CGW cover,” joshed Terry Coleman of the rival Computer Gaming World just after Guardians’s definitive cancellation.

Steve Barcia never took up the design reins of another game after conceiving Guardians of Justice, focusing instead on his new career in management, which took him to the very different milieu of the Nintendo-exclusive action-games house Retro Studios after his tenure at MicroProse ended. Some might consider this an odd, perchance even vaguely tragic fate for the designer of three of the most respected and beloved grand-strategy games of all time. On the other hand, maybe he’d just said all he had to say in game design, and saw no need to risk tarnishing his stellar reputation. Either way, his creative legacy is more than secure.

(Sources: the book The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry by Harold Bloom; Computer Gaming World of October 1995, December 1996, March 1997, June 1997, July 1997, and October 1998; Computer Games Strategy Plus of December 1997. Online sources include Alan Emrich’s retrospective on the old Master of Orion III site and Tom Chick’s piece on Master of Orion II for IGN.

Master of Orion I and II are available as a package from GOG.com. So, you can compare and contrast, and decide for yourself whether I’m justified in favoring the original.)

Comments
26 Responses

- Derek

February 3, 2023 at 4:10 pm

I’m not a mechanics-minded player by any means, and I still love MOO2. But I do wish it had a few more story-like elements. MOO3 gives the impression that it has some, buried somewhere deep in the game, but it’s so unsatisfying to play that I never got anywhere close.

Fun fact: given the game’s subtitle, you can also refer to it as MOO:BAA if you’re feeling silly.

Funner fact: After a literal 20 years of playing MOO2, I discovered that on April Fools’ Day you can get a message that says, “Citizens demand a Stadium. And more cream of celery soup.”

- Alianora La Canta

February 4, 2023 at 12:28 pm

Now I’m disappointed that Master of Orion III didn’t shorten to MOO:OINK, MOO:NEIGH or something along those lines!

- Broken25

February 3, 2023 at 5:23 pm

>it’s finely balanced (that “Creative” ability aside

Creative being OP is a common belief about MoO II.

It’s also completely, wholly incorrect, as anybody who has played MoO against a serious oponent (That is, other human players) can attest.

Creative costs 8 race points (Of a max total of 20) and it does literally zilch for you until at least midgame – to take advantage of your extra techs, first you have to research them, them you have to actually build ships/building that use them.

Meanwhile, you oponents that have used their points in something that increases their industrial output from the start will have severely outgrowth you (industrial developement grows at an exponential pace), and by the point where you are starting to build your fancy high tech fleet they will already have a complete, less fancy but still lethal fleet and they will murder you.

(They will even outtech you because industrial power->more laboratories->more research).

The true masterrace in MoOII, which often is banned in multiplayer, is Unification/Tolerant/Production+1, which can put almost all it’s population to build colony ships from turn 1 and as such grow at absurd speed.

(The strongest non-custom race are the Silicoids, that are only slighty less efficient).

- Tuna

February 4, 2023 at 12:48 am

Yup. Even something as simple as “rich homeworld” (costs 2 points) is much stronger than “creative” (8 points). Simply because 4x against competent players is about managing growth curves, and production early on means more colony ships, which gives you the kind of advantage that is really, really hard to catch up later.

- John

February 3, 2023 at 5:33 pm

I can’t comment on MOO2 as a sequel, as I still haven’t played the first one. When I bought them from GOG, I asked around and everyone I talked to said that MOO2 was the better game. Despite working from obviously incomplete information, I think I believe them. MOO2 is very good. The interface is downright elegant. There are places where it’s essentially a spreadsheet, but I regard that as a good thing. (For all that the internet may jeer at so-called spreadsheet games, a spreadsheet is an excellent way to summarize, display, and manipulate information. There are a lot of strategy games out there that could stand to be a little more spreadsheet-like.) The customization options are likewise excellent. My preferred way to play is in a small galaxy with a race of telepathic lithovores. Is that balanced? Possibly not. Perhaps even probably not. But it’s fun and it means that I usually don’t have to bother with planetary assaults, which to me is more important. The thing that I find most fascinating about MOO2, however, is its enduring influence on science fiction-themed strategy games. There are a lot of games that very clearly want to be MOO2, including, but not limited to, MOO3, Stardock’s Galactic Civilization series, Stardock’s MOO reboot, and even, to a certain extent, Paradox’s Solaris.

- Andrew Pam

February 3, 2023 at 6:20 pm

Paradox’s “Stellaris”? They have at least put considerable effort into adding story events and lots of classic space opera tropes so every playthrough is essentially creating the story of your people and their place in the history of the galaxy.

- John

February 3, 2023 at 7:35 pm

Stellaris, yes. It’s been a while since I last played, but the faction creation options and the various leaders remind me strongly of MOO2.

- andreas

February 3, 2023 at 10:06 pm

Paradox effectively took their “Clausewitz” engine, fed in scripts from scifi lore rather than history books, and had a group of software engineers tweak it so it becomes closer to a 5X game – which is to say MOO2. ;-)

Of course after so much time and progress they could take existing improvements (building queues…) and the now more realistic option to automate almost everything at least some of the time. (Shades of what MOO3 failed at).

I would even argue that Stellaris takes MOO2 to its logical conclusion, capturing more of the flair of storytelling that the review found missing except in the designs, further polishing the interface, but also bogging a player down forever.

(Paradox’ business model is the bait-and-switch of “grand strategy” with “overly long strategic foraging”.)

MOO1 and MOO2 were extensively play-tested but shipped to soon or massively delayed, respectively. For better or worse, Stellaris was shipped early on, has been play-tested since by paying customers, and will never finish evolving.

- Andrew Pam

February 3, 2023 at 6:26 pm

MOO2 casts a long shadow indeed. I’m currently playing “Interstellar Space: Genesis” which is very directly inspired, intended as effectively a modern reimagining of MOO2. It says something that game designers are still interested in spending time lovingly recreating MOO2!

- Throteka

February 3, 2023 at 7:11 pm

SimTex’s two canceled games, Mech Wars / Mech Lords / Metal Lords & Agents of Justice are tantalizing could-have-beens. Though I do wonder what design innovations they could have offered the strategy world.

- Throteka

February 3, 2023 at 7:26 pm

Huh, it sounds like Ken Burd also attempted to make a SimTex spiritual successor game “Mage Lords”, of which the only source is this MobyGames trivia. https://www.mobygames.com/game/star-lords/

- Glorkvorn

February 3, 2023 at 7:36 pm

Great review. I agree that, if you can get past the graphics (and that’s a big if), the first MOO holds up better as a game. It’s more unique, more experiential (really makes you feel like you’re the emperor of the galaxy, rather than some low-level bureaucrat telling individual workers what to do), and the AI is much more competent.

The latter is a big deal to me in these slow turn-based strategy games. It’s not very enjoyable to play a game where I can cruise through the lower difficulties with my eyes closed, but get wrecked on higher difficulties just because the AI has absurd bonuses. A lot of game devs seem to start off making a fun game, then design the AI as an afterthought, which doesn’t work. You need a game simple enough that the AI can actually understand it and play competently. Multiplayer with other humans just isn’t much fun in a slow game like this where’d you’d spend hours just waiting for other people to take their turns. Maybe someday an AI like AlphaZero can create a good, fair challenge for all games, but that’s not yet the case.

That said, I still have really fond memories of the game. I actually bought it on a trip when I was away from home and didn’t have access to a computer, so I couldn’t play it for a while. All I could do was read through the manual, endlessly designing different custom races in my head. It was weirdly fun, and I was blown away when I finally got home and tried it out for real. My advice is to play it in a small, crowded galaxy, so that the action heats up quickly and you never have to control too many planets.

Pretty depressing though, to think that such a successful game still couldn’t save the studio from going under. The games business sure is tough…

- Alianora La Canta

February 3, 2023 at 9:24 pm

One bad piece of software, if it takes too much energy out of a company, is very much capable of tanking it, no matter how good the other games it makes happens to be. We saw it with Infocom and Cornerstone, we saw it with SimTex and Guardians: Agents of Justice, and we will see it several more times in the story A Digital Antiquariam is likely to tell.

Thankfully, we’ll also see a few more stories like examples already seen for Origin and Microprose, where one or two bad pieces of software that took lots of energy out of the company did not destroy the company because one very good piece of software was then able to replenish enough cash-flow to stabilise things.

- andreas

February 3, 2023 at 10:17 pm

>> Pretty depressing though, to think that such a successful game still couldn’t save the studio from going under. The games business sure is tough…

I think this may be true for the entire software industry at the time.

My father likened this to cartoon characters who run over a cliff but keep on running obliviously on air – until they look down and begin to fall.

This is to say in the 70-80s software companies were still often run by people with a software engineering background who steered them to rough patches focusing on the work at hand.

Whereas the business-types who took over management in the 90s got itchy after making the mistake of actually looking at the financials ;-)

- Alianora La Canta

February 3, 2023 at 9:10 pm

I’ve put more than 200 hours into Master of Orion 2, and part of the reason for this is because I am an enthusiastic knob-turner/micro-manager. For someone like me who enjoys tinkering with every possible permutation of an idea, Master of Orion 2 is catnip. It, along with Transport Tycoon, are my go-to games when I take my laptop on holiday – the fact it’s old enough that you can get to most things with the keyboard helps).

For the rest of my family, the array of options is both superfluous and tedious. They’d probably much prefer Master of Orion 1, were it not for the lack of a multiplayer option that was friendly to modern operating systems (largely because it’s single-player). (As it stands, we play a lot of Civilization 3, which has many features of Master of Orion 2 but probably fewer options in total, as well as some rudimentary automation options to accommodate playstyles less enthused about micro-management).

I have a theory about how Master of Orion 2 specifically ended up so far away from Master of Orion 1 (for good and ill). Having the leadership of the project taken over by someone in-house who has experienced success in their previous role, often means they have particularly good ideas in that area of the project they wish to include. A talented artist being made leader might make particularly sure their project is visually impressive, a skilful quality assurance person in that position might ensure the testing regime is especially rigorous. Is it surprising that a programmer made leader ends up with a game with lots of intricately programmed miniature game loops?

Of course, a great game is strong in many areas, not just one – even if that one area is as essential as programming. For myself, I find several custom options overpowered unless counter-balanced with interesting weaknesses – aside from Creativity, there’s also Unification/Democracy, Telepathy and playing with both strong attack and defence bonuses. Thankfully, interesting weaknesses do in fact exist for all of these options, depending on playstyle. (People who feel MOO1 had the better research system would be wise to pick “Uncreative” as one of those weaknesses, since that makes the research a little bit more like MOO1 and gives more points to use in areas they would find more fun).

This is one of the problems when developing a game during one of gaming’s times of transition – there’s the urge to experiment, but only so many people, so many resources and so much time to corral those experiments into a comprehensively playable whole. This often results in games that appeal a lot to people who like the style of experiment, repel people who hate it and cause mixed emotions in everyone else.

- Alianora La Canta

February 3, 2023 at 9:28 pm

Addendum: inspired by the observation, “Master of Orion II, by contrast, strikes me as too amenable to rote, static strategizing that can be written up almost like an adventure-game walkthrough”… …a search for “Master of Orion II walkthrough” will produce 4 different ones in its first page of results. Of course, none of them completely agree with each other and all of them accept there are multiple good solutions for several gameplay loops, but Jimmy’s belief in this matter is entirely correct.

- andreas

February 3, 2023 at 9:46 pm

Ah, nostalgia…

The comparison to Master of Magic is apt, the game becomes more of a sandbox to design a lush world rather than a challenge.

To be fair, even today it would be extraordinarily difficult to write a competent AI for a game with so many possible exploits open to a committed player.

The unfortunately spot-on analysis for colony management can be extended to combat: The space battles have been redesigned as well, with every ship shown on (2D) screen rather than ships of the same class merged into a stand-in figure (as in MOO1).

While this allows more immersive (turn-based) combat including raids on enemy ship and so on, this level of micro-management really dragged down the game.

I fondly remember the telepathic ability to be absurdly overpowered, IIRC it packs not 1 but 3 powers:

1) brainwashing: bloodlessly take over planets with a large ships with no rebels
2) facilitate bullying the AI in the diplomatic screen: Trade agreement? No. Trade agreement? No. TRADE AGREEMENT! Ok.
3) actually marshal captured ships against the AI within the same combat ((including the Antaran starbase itself)

The telepathic ability is fairly cheap and even this cost could be offset by incurring a penalty on ground combat – there is no need to ever build troop transports at all. Telepathic goes especially well together with unification: resistance to assimilation into the hive-mind is now actually futile, the 20 turn rebel integration penalty is lowered to 0 turns.

When comparing to MOO1, apart from the much longer campaigns dragged down by micro-management, what I found missing the most was the sense of progress:

In MOO1, a colony founded later in the game can be developed exponentially faster, as factories become cheaper to build, even though there are more to be built, colonists can be grown and shipped increasingly quickly etc.
In MOO2 progress isn’t even linear, it’s almost non-existent: a new colony first needs the same basic improvements and their construction cannot be sped up meaningfully except by bringing in colonists. Then on to mid-level improvements, etc.
Consequently founding colonies becomes unimportant already in mid-game, since they take so long to contribute while demanding endless attention. This may be just as well so one may stop worrying about more colonies and their overhead.

(Also: advanced space empires can send millions through space subsisting on hydroponics but invariably need a substantial fraction of their populace employed as farmers when arriving at a planet?)

To me the single most memorable improvement over MOO1 was that expansion now entails taking over colonies resulting in multi-species empires with perks but morale problems.
Plus the opportunity to gain access to precursor technology through capturing Antaran raiders.

- Anders Hellerup Madsen

February 4, 2023 at 8:33 am

I have spend an almost endless amount of hours with Master of Orion 2, and I have found it over the years to be one of the few games from my youth that I still find I want to return to occasionally. I do get the criticism you rise here though – most playthroughs tend to start out exiting and interesting but as you overcome the challenges of the early game, they all invariantly ends up on very similar paths, as differences between races and starting situations are cancelled out by the tech tree.

Also, of course, as you write, the Civilization-like colony interface is much better suited to beginning of games, when you have a few planets instead of later when there is many more, and it mostly becomes a chore.

Still, that early part of the game does carry it a long way for me :-)

Also, interestingly, there is a modern remake of Master of Orion 1 available (“Remants of the Precursors”) which is more or less the high-resolution, more balanced AI version of Master of Orion 1 you wish for. It is also a game I can’t recommend enough!

- stepped pyramids

February 4, 2023 at 2:03 pm

It’s funny how tastes can differ. I don’t think of MoO as being ugly at all. The pixel art is great, and the fonts still look very attractive. I suspect that if I drop two links I’ll get caught in a spam trap, but the “tech complete” screens are very similar in both games, so they make a good comparison:

https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/master-of-orion/screenshots/gameShotId,570429/

The MoO2 version of this screen is higher resolution, far more realistic, but the game overall has a darker, green-brown palette I don’t find as visually interesting, and the off-the-shelf fonts are less appealing to my eye (although probably more readable). I still think MoO2 looks great, though. It came a bit too early to be ruined by really low-quality 3D prerenders, like a lot of late ’90s games.

Speaking of iffy 3D, in 1999 MicroProse released Star Trek: Birth of the Federation, which was in many ways just MoO2 with Star Trek stuff slapped on. However, it did include the concept of minor civilizations that could be diplomatically or forcefully annexed, and I felt like that added back a bit of that fictional flavor that you mention is missing in MoO2.

- Doug Orleans

February 5, 2023 at 3:26 am

A couple typos in a caption:

“chances of of winning” – duplicate “of”

“the game’s interest in automation doesn’t extent this far.” – should be “extend”

- Jimmy Maher

February 5, 2023 at 9:49 am

Thanks!

- Jude Giampaolo

February 5, 2023 at 12:45 pm

As much as I love MOO2, and have played hundreds of hours, I agree with your criticisms. After a few play throughs I did pretty much the same thing no matter what the race was I selected. In the end I preferred playing uncreative races as that forced me to alter my strategy. That sounds like something that you always had to deal with in the original (which I never player). Still, I had a blast playing.

- thedopefish

February 6, 2023 at 6:06 pm

I’m a big fan of MOO1, and I consider MOO2 as one of my favorite games of all time. I still go back and play both games from time to time, and I also host a server to facilitate online games of MOO2 for the community (so players don’t have to bother with firewall rules and such to connect). This series is very near and dear to my heart.

I think your assessment of the difference is quite fair. MOO1 does have a lot of elegance to its design, that the sequel loses some of with all the added details. Having said that, the addition of custom races and especially multiplayer capabilities in MOO2 adds a really vast amount of variety and replayability (to a genre that inherently has quite a bit already). I’d also argue the space combat in 2 feels a lot more satisfying, including the way the player forms attachments to specific ships in a way that wasn’t really possible in the simplistic 6-design, stack based model of the original.

In the end, you can’t really go wrong with either game.

- M. Casey

February 9, 2023 at 1:20 am

Well said Jimmy. Good review.

And you have to hand it to Simtex, in the four short years they were publishing they put out:

– MoO, a masterpiece;
– MoM, which probably would’ve been considered a masterpiece if it didn’t release with a million bugs;
– 1830, a minor entry but well done for the kind of people who like economic train games (like me!); and
– MoO2, considered by many to be another masterpiece (though you and I likely disagree with them).

That’s a hell of a run.

- Nate Owens

February 17, 2023 at 6:08 pm

After your MoO article a few years ago, I bought the game on GOG and spent several hours trying to get into it. There’s a lot about it that I liked in theory, but in the end I kind of bounced off of it. But being in a 4x mood lately, I tried out the sequel and it worked way better for me, though admittedly I’ve just done one full game of it.

Anyway I’ve been thinking about why it worked so much better for me. There are a few things at work there…

– The unit density in MoO2 is way lower, which was a welcome change form the giant stacks on MoO1.

– The slider system in MoO1 is really elegant, but I confess I found it a little abstract for my tastes. It was always a little tough for me to nail down what my cities were doing. I think this was made harder by zooming in and out of the interface, something else that MoO2 did better for me. While I will certainly concede that 2 has a lot more micro-managing, I was able to understand what has happening around my empire much better.

There are some other things, but those are the main things. I can certainly understand like MoO1 more, because it does feel more direct. But then again I’m a pretty active Civ VI fan, so micromanaging cities is something I’m pretty comfortable with.

- Pog

March 25, 2023 at 1:06 am

Well, that’s a 27 years-old spoiler

Sequels in Strategy Gaming, Part 3: Heroes of Might and Magic II
February 17, 2023

New World Computing’s Heroes of Might and Magic II: The Succession Wars is different from the strategy-game sequels we’ve previously examined in this series in a couple of important ways. For one thing, it followed much more quickly on the heels of its predecessor: the first Heroes shipped in September of 1995, this follow-up just over one year later. This means that it doesn’t represent as dramatic a purely technological leap as do Civilization II and Master of Orion II; Heroes I as well was able to take advantage of SVGA graphics, CD-ROM, and all the other transformations the average home computer underwent during the first half of the 1990s. But the Heroes series as a whole is also conceptually different from the likes of Civilization and Master of Orion. It’s a smaller-scale affair, built around human-crafted rather than procedurally-generated maps, with more overt, pre-scripted narrative elements. All of these factors cause Heroes II to blur the boundaries between the fiction-driven and the systems-driven sequel. Its campaign — which is, as we’ll see, only one part of what it has to offer — is presented as a direct continuation of the story, such as it was, of Heroes I. At the same time, though, it strikes me as safe to say that no one bought the sequel out of a burning desire to find out what happens to the sons of Lord Morglin Ironfist, the star of the first game’s sketchy campaign. They rather bought it because they wanted a game that did what Heroes I had done, only even better. And fortunately for them, this is exactly what they got.

Heroes II doesn’t revamp its predecessor to the point of feeling like a different game entirely, as Master of Orion II arguably does. The scant amount of time separating it from its inspiration wouldn’t have allowed for that even had its creators wished it. It would surely not have appeared so quickly — if, indeed, it ever appeared at all — absent the new trend of strategy-game sequels. But as it was, Jon Van Caneghem, the founder of New World Computing and the mastermind of Heroes I and II, approached it as he had his earlier Might and Magic CRPG series, which had seen five installments by the time he (temporarily) shifted his focus to strategy gaming. “We weren’t making a sequel for the first time,” says the game’s executive producer Mark Caldwell. “So we did as we always did. Take ideas we couldn’t use or didn’t have time to implement in the previous game and work them into the next one. Designing a computer game, at least at [New World], was always about iterating. Just start, get something working, then get feedback and iterate.” In the case of Heroes II, it was a matter of capitalizing on the first game’s strengths — some of which hadn’t been entirely clear to its own makers until it was released and gamers everywhere had fallen in love with it — and punching up its relatively few weaknesses.

Ironically, the aspects of Heroes I that people seemed to appreciate most of all were those that caused it to most resemble the Might and Magic CRPGs, whose name it had borrowed more for marketing purposes than out of any earnest belief that it was some sort of continuation of that line. Strategy designers at this stage were still in the process of learning how the inclusion of individuals with CRPG-like names and statistics, plus a CRPG-like opportunity to level them up as they gained experience, could allow an often impersonal-feeling style of game to forge a closer emotional connection with its players. The premier examples before Heroes I were X-COM, which had the uncanny ability to make the player’s squad of grizzled alien-fighting soldiers feel like family, and Master of Magic, whose own fantasy heroes proved to be so memorable that they almost stole the show, much to the surprise of that game’s designer. Likewise, Jon Van Caneghem had never intended for the up to eight heroes you can recruit to your cause in Heroes of Might and Magic to fill as big a place in players’ hearts as they did. He originally thought he was making “a pure strategy game that was meant to play and feel like chess.” But a rudimentary leveling system along with names and character portraits for the heroes, all borrowed to some extent from his even earlier strategy game King’s Bounty, sneaked in anyway, and gamers loved it. The wise course was clearly to double down on the heroes in Heroes II.

Thus we get here a much more fleshed-out system for building up the capabilities of our fantasy subordinates, and building up our emotional bond with them in the process. The spells they can cast, in combat and elsewhere, constitute the single most extensively revamped part of the game. Not only are there many more of them, but they’ve been slotted into a magic system complex enough for a full-fledged CRPG, with spell books and spell points and all the other trimmings. And there are now fourteen secondary skills outside the magic system for the heroes to learn and improve as they level up, from Archery (increases the damage a hero’s minions do in ranged combat) to Wisdom (allows the hero to learn higher level spells), from Ballistics (increases the damage done by the hero’s catapults during town sieges) to Scouting (lets the hero see farther when moving around the map).

Another thing that CRPGs had and strategy games usually lacked was a strong element of story. Heroes I did little more than gesture in that direction; its campaign was a set of generic scenarios that were tied together only by the few sentences of almost equally generic text in a dialog box that introduced each of them. The campaign in Heroes II, on the other hand, goes much further. It’s the story of a war between the brothers Roland and Archibald, good and evil respectively, the sons of the protagonist of Heroes I. You can choose whose side you wish to fight on at the outset, and even have the opportunity to switch sides midstream, among other meta-level decisions. Some effects and artifacts carry over from scenario to scenario during the campaign, giving the whole experience that much more of a sense of continuity. And the interstices between the scenarios are filled with illustrations and voice-over narration. The campaign isn’t The Lord of the Rings by any means — if you’re like me, you’ll have forgotten everything about the story roughly one hour after finishing it — but it more than serves its purpose while you’re playing.

Instead of just a few lines of text, each scenario in the campaign game is introduced this time by some lovely pixel art and a well-acted voice-over.

These are the major, obvious improvements, but they’re joined by a host of smaller ones that do just as much in the aggregate to make Heroes II an even better, richer game. When you go into battle, the field of action has been made bigger — or, put another way, the hexes on which the combatants stand have been made smaller, giving space for twice as many of them on the screen. This results in engagements that feel less cramped, both physically and tactically; ranged weapons especially really come into their own when given more room to roam, as it were. The strategic maps too can be larger, up to four times so — or for that matter smaller, again up to four times so. This creates the potential for scenarios with wildly different personalities, from vast open-world epics to claustrophobic cage matches.

The tactical battlefields are larger now, with a richer variety of spells to employ in ingenious combinations.

And then, inevitably, there’s simply more stuff everywhere you turn. There are two new factions to play as or against, making a total of six in all; more types of humans, demi-humans, and monsters to recruit and fight against; more types of locations to visit on the maps; more buildings to construct in your towns; way more cool weapons and artifacts to discover and give to your heroes; more and more varying standalone scenarios to play in addition to the campaign.

One of the two new factions is the necromancers, who make the returning warlocks seem cute and cuddly by comparison. Necromancer characters start with, appropriately enough, the “necromancy” skill, which gives them the potential to raise huge armies of skeletons from their opponents’ corpses after they’ve vanquished them. This has been called unbalancing, and it probably is in at least some situations, but it’s also a heck of a lot of fun, not to mention the key to beating a few of the most difficult scenarios.

The other new faction is the wizards. They can eventually recruit lightning-flinging titans, who are, along with the warlocks’ black dragons, the most potent single units in the game.

After Heroes II was released, New World delegated the task of making an expansion pack to Cyberlore Studios, an outfit with an uncanny knack for playing well with others’ intellectual property. (At the time, Cyberlore had just created a well-received expansion pack for Blizzard’s Warcraft II.) Heroes of Might and Magic II: The Price of Loyalty, the result of Cyberlore’s efforts, comes complete with not one but four new campaigns, each presented with the same lavishness as the chronicles of Roland and Archibald, along with still more new creatures, locations, artifacts, and standalone scenarios. All are welcome.

There are even riddles. Sigh… you can’t win them all, I guess. I feel about riddles in games the way Indiana Jones does about snakes in archaeological sites.

But wait, I can hear you saying: didn’t you just complain in those articles about Civilization II and Master of Orion II that just adding more stuff doesn’t automatically or even usually make a game better? I did indeed, and I’ve been thinking about why my reaction to Heroes II is so different. Some of it undoubtedly comes down to purely personal preferences. The hard truth is that I’ve always been more attracted to Civilization as an idea than an actual game; impressive as Civilization I was in the context of its time, I’ll go to my grave insisting that there are even tighter, even more playable designs than that one in the Sid Meier canon, such as Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon. I’m less hesitant to proclaim Master of Orion I a near-perfect strategy masterpiece, but my extreme admiration for it only makes me unhappy with the sequel, which removed some of the things I liked best about the original in favor of new complexities that I find less innovative and less compelling. I genuinely love Heroes I as well — and thus love the sequel even more for not trying to reinvent this particular wheel, for trying only to make it glide along that much more smoothly.

I do think I can put my finger on some objective reasons why Heroes II manages to add so much to its predecessor’s template without adding any more tedium. It’s starting from a much sparser base, for one thing; Heroes I is a pretty darn simple beast as computer strategy games of the 1990s go. The places where Heroes II really slathers on the new features — in the realms of character development, narrative, and to some extent tactical combat — are precisely those where its predecessor feels most under-developed. The rest of the new stuff, for all its quantity, adds variety more so than mechanical complexity or playing time. A complete game of Heroes II doesn’t take significantly longer to play than a complete game of Heroes I (unless you’re playing on one of those new epic-sized maps, of course). That’s because you won’t even see most of the new stuff in any given scenario. Heroes II gives its scenario designers a toolbox with many more bits and pieces to choose from, so that the small subset of them you see as a player each time out is always fresh and surprising. You have to play an awful lot of scenarios to exhaust all this game has to offer. It, on the other hand, will never exhaust you with fiddly details.

Anyway, suffice to say that I love Heroes II dearly. I’ve without a doubt spent more hours with it than any other game I’ve written about on this site to date. One reason for that is that my wife, who would never be caught dead playing a game like Civilization II or Master of Orion II, likes this one almost as much as I do. We’ve whiled away many a winter evening in multiplayer games, sitting side by side on the sofa with our laptops. (If that isn’t a portrait of the modern condition, I don’t know what is…) Sure, Heroes II is a bit slow to play this way by contemporary standards, being turn-based, and with consecutive rather than simultaneous turns at that, but that’s what good tunes on the stereo are for, isn’t it? We don’t like to fight each other, so we prefer the scenarios that let us cooperate — another welcome new feature. Or, failing that, we just agree to play until we’re the only two factions left standing.

What makes Heroes II such a great game in the eyes of both of us, and such a superb example of an iterative sequel done well? Simply put, everything that was fun in the first game is even more fun in the sequel. It still combines military strategy with the twin joys of exploration and character development in a way that I’ve never seen bettered. (My wife, bless her heart, is more interested in poking her head into every nook and cranny of a map and accessorizing her heroes like they’ve won a gift certificate to Lord & Taylor than she is in actually taking out the enemy factions, which means that’s usually down to me…) The strengthened narrative elements, not only between but within scenarios — a system of triggers now allows the scenario designer to advance the story even as you play — only makes the stew that much richer. Meanwhile the whole game is exquisitely polished, showing in its interface’s every nuance the hours and hours of testing and iterating that went into it before its release.

In this respect and many others, the strengths of Heroes II are the same as those of Heroes I. Both, for example, manage to dodge some of the usual problems of grand-strategy games by setting their sights somewhat lower than the 4X likes of Civilization and Master of Orion. There is no research tree here, meaning that the place where 4X strategizing has a tendency to become most rote is deftly dodged. Very, very little is rote about Heroes; many of its human-designed maps are consciously crafted to force you to abandon your conventional thinking. (The downside of this is a certain puzzle-like quality to some of the most difficult scenarios — a One True Way to Win that you must discover through repeated attempts and repeated failures — but even here, the thrill of figuring them outweighs the pain if you ask me.) Although the problem of the long, anticlimactic ending — that stretch of time after you know you’re going to win — isn’t entirely absent, some scenarios do have alternative victory conditions, and the fact that most of them can be played in a few hours at most from start to finish helps as well. The game never gets overly bogged down by tedious micromanagement, thanks to some sagacious limits that have been put in place, most notably the maximum of eight heroes you’re allowed to recruit, meaning that you can never have more than eight armies in the field. (It’s notable and commendable that New World resisted the temptation that must surely have existed to raise this limit in Heroes II.) The artificial intelligence of your computer opponents isn’t great by any means, but somehow even that doesn’t feel so annoying here; if the more difficult scenarios must still become that way by pitting your human cleverness against silicon-controlled hordes that vastly outnumber you, there are at least always stated reasons for the disparity to hand in a narrative-driven game like this one.

Also like its predecessor, Heroes II is an outlier among the hit games of the late 1990s, being turn-based rather than real-time, and relying on 2D pixel art rather than 3D graphics. Jon Van Caneghem has revealed in interviews that he actually did come alarmingly close to chasing both of those trends, but gave up on them for reasons having more to do with budgetary and time constraints than any sort of purist design ideology. For my part, I can only thank the heavens that such practicalities forced him to keep it old-school in the end. Heroes II still looks great today, which would probably not be the case if it was presented in jaggy 1990s 3D. New World’s artists had a distinct style, one that also marked the Might and Magic CRPG series: light, colorful, whimsical, and unabashedly cartoon-like, in contrast to the darker hued, ultra-violent aesthetic that marked so much of the industry in the post-DOOM era. Heroes II is perhaps slightly murkier in tone and tint than the first game, but it remains a warming ray of sunshine when stood up next to its contemporaries, who always seem to be trying too hard to be an epic saga, man. Its more whimsical touches never lose their charm: the vampires who go Blahhh! like Count Chocula when they make an attack, the medusae who slink around the battlefield like supermodels on the catwalk. Whatever else you can say about it, you can never accuse Heroes of Might and Magic of taking itself too seriously.

But there is one more way that Heroes II improves on Heroes I, and it is in some senses the most important of them all. The sequel includes a scenario construction kit, the very same tool that was used to build the official maps; the only thing missing is a way to make the cut scenes that separate the campaign scenarios. It came at the perfect time to give Heroes II a vastly longer life than it otherwise would have enjoyed, even with all of its other merits.

The idea of gaming construction kits was already a venerable one by the time of Heroes II’s release. Electronic Arts made it something of their claim to fame in their early years, with products like Pinball Construction Set, Adventure Construction Set, and Racing Destruction Set. Meanwhile EA’s affiliated label Strategic Simulations had a Wargame Construction Set and Unlimited Adventures (the latter being a way of making new scenarios for the company’s beloved Gold Box CRPG engine). But all of these products were hampered somewhat by the problem of what you the buyer were really to do with a new creation into which you had poured your imagination, talent, and time. You could share it among your immediate circle of friends, assuming they had all bought (or pirated) the same game you had, maybe even upload it to a bulletin board or two or to a commercial online service like CompuServe, but doing so only let you reach a tiny cross-section of the people who might be able and willing to play it. And this in turn led to you asking yourself an unavoidable question: is this thing I want to make really worth the effort if it will hardly get played?

The World Wide Web changed all that at a stroke, as it did so much else in computing and gaming. The rise of a free and open, easily navigable Internet meant that you could now share your creation with everyone with the same base game you had bought. And so gaming construction kits of all stripes suddenly became much more appealing, were allowed to begin to fulfill their potential at last. Heroes of Might and Magic II is a prime case in point.

A bustling community of amateur Heroes II designers sprang up on the Internet after the game’s release, to stretch it in all sorts of delightful ways that New World had never anticipated. The best of the thousands of scenarios they produced are so boldly innovative as to make the official ones seem a bit dull and workmanlike by comparison. For example, “Colossal Cavern” lives up to its classic text-adventure namesake by re-imagining Heroes II as a game of dungeon delving and puzzle solving rather than strategic conquest. “Go Ask Alice,” by contrast, turns it into a game of chess with living pieces, like in Alice in Wonderland. “The Road Home” is a desperate chase across a sprawling map with enemy armies that outnumber you by an order of magnitude hot on your heels. And “Agent of Heaven” is a full campaign — one of a surprising number created by enterprising fans — that lets you live out ancient Chinese history, from the age of Confucius through the rise of the Qin and Han dynasties; it’s spread over seven scenarios, with lengthy journal entries to read between and within them as you go along.

The scenario editor has its limits as a vehicle for storytelling, but it goes farther than you might expect. Text boxes like these feature in many scenarios, and not only as a way of introducing them. The designer can set them to appear when certain conditions are fulfilled, such as a location visited for the first time by the player or a given number of days gone by. In practice, the most narratively ambitious scenarios tend to be brittle and to go off the rails from a storytelling perspective as soon as you do something in the wrong order, but one can’t help but be impressed by the lengths to which some fans went. Call it the triumph of hope over experience…

As the size and creative enthusiasm of its fan community will attest, Heroes II was hugely successful in commercial terms, leaving marketers everywhere shaking their heads at its ability to be so whilst bucking the trends toward real-time gameplay and 3D graphics. I can give you no hard numbers on its sales, but anecdotal and circumstantial evidence alone would place it not too far outside the ballpark of Civilization II’s sales of 3 million copies. Certainly its critical reception was nothing short of rapturous; Computer Gaming World magazine pronounced it “nearly perfect,” “a five-star package that will suck any strategy gamer into [a] black hole of addictive fun.” The expansion too garnered heaps of justified praise and stellar sales when it arrived some nine months after the base game. The only loser in the equation was Heroes I, a charming little game in its own right that was rendered instantly superfluous by the superior sequel in the eyes of most gamers.

Personally, though, I’m still tempted to recommend that you start with Heroes I and take the long way home, through the whole of one of the best series in the history of gaming. Then again, time is not infinite, and mileages do vary. The fact is that this series tickles my sweet spots with uncanny precision. Old man that I’m fast becoming, I prefer its leisurely turn-based gameplay to the frenetic pace of real-time strategy. At the same time, though, I do appreciate that it plays quickly in comparison to a 4X game. I love its use of human-crafted scenarios, which I almost always prefer to procedurally-generated content, regardless of context. And of course, as a dyed-in-the-wool narratological gamer, I love the elements of story and character-building that it incorporates so well.

So, come to think of it, this might not be such a bad place to start with Heroes of Might and Magic after all. Or to finish, for that matter — if only it wasn’t for Heroes III. Now there’s a story in itself…

(Sources: Retro Gamer 239; Computer Gaming World of February 1997 and September 1997; XRDS: The ACM Magazine for Students of Summer 2017. Online sources include Matt Barton’s interview with John Van Caneghem.

Heroes of Might and Magic II is available for digital purchase on GOG.com, in a “Gold” edition that includes the expansion pack.

And here’s a special treat for those of you who’ve made it all the way down here to read the fine print. I’ve put together a zip file of all of the Heroes II scenarios from a “Millennium” edition of the first three Heroes games that was released in 1999. It includes a generous selection of fan-made scenarios, curated for quality. You’ll also find the “Agent of Heaven” campaign mentioned above, which, unlike the three other fan-made scenarios aforementioned, wasn’t a part of the Millennium edition. To access the new scenarios, rename the folder “MAPS” in your Heroes II installation directory to something else for safekeeping, then unzip the downloaded archive into the installation directory. The next time you start Heroes II, you should find all of the new scenarios available through the standard “New Game” menu. Note that some of the more narratively ambitious new scenarios feature supplemental materials, found in the “campaigns” and “Journals” folders. Have fun!)

Comments
26 Responses

- Joshua Barrett

February 17, 2023 at 9:54 pm

I was wondering what strategy sequel you were going to be positive on, but I really shouldn’t have been surprised it was Heroes II.

I only got into Heroes relatively recently, and mostly Heroes V at that (I’ve got friends who particularly like that one, so there’s a strong incentive to play that over the others), and at present Heroes 3 has probably the most robust online multiplayer (Heroes V, unfortunately, has been afflicted by the demise of GameSpy and a total absence of the ability to forge a direct IP connection). But it’s been great fun so far. I do tend to appreciate simpler game designs (especially with games with rather poor tutorials…) so trying out the older games might be worthwhile for me.

- Michael

February 17, 2023 at 10:24 pm

“from an important location visited to a given day number of days gone by.”

–I think there’s something missing here, at least a “/” between day and number, or maybe an “or?”

- Jimmy Maher

February 17, 2023 at 10:43 pm

Just badly worded. Thanks!

- Jaina Solo

February 17, 2023 at 11:39 pm

“Lord Morglin Ironfest”

Ironfist love me some HoMM, can’t wait till you hit 3!

- Jaina Solo

February 18, 2023 at 12:09 am

Couple more. Thank you for writing such lovely articles for me to nitpick over for many years

“Whatever else you can about it, you can never accuse Heroes of Might and Magic of taking itself too seriously.”

“The designer can set them to appear when certain conditions are fulfilled, such as a location visited or a given day number of days gone by”

- Jimmy Maher

February 18, 2023 at 7:54 am

Thanks!

- Gordon Cameron

February 18, 2023 at 12:58 am

I like lots of games despite lackluster graphics, but I feel like Heroes II is one example of a game where the art style really elevates the experience. (The music is great too.) The hand-drawn, fairy-tale, tapestry-like quality of the graphics never fails to enchant me. This is perhaps the main reason why I’ve struggled to get into Heroes III despite many people saying it’s the better game. It’s just nowhere near as beautiful.

- Tarnyko

March 12, 2023 at 7:17 am

I preferred Heroes II’s fantasy pixel art, too. But everybody was into Heroes III when it got out, and obviously it was a bigger and more varied experience, so…

- Andrew Pam

February 18, 2023 at 8:38 am

It’s worth mentioning “fheroes2” as a great way to play the game on modern systems, as it “reproduces the original game with significant improvements in gameplay, graphics and logic (including support for high-resolution graphics, improved AI, numerous fixes and user interface improvements)”:

https://github.com/ihhub/fheroes2

- fform

February 20, 2023 at 8:12 pm

Thanks for linking that, I knew someone would beat me to it. Runs on Android and my old PS Vita too, so maybe I’ll get around to playing some of those scenarios.

- Tim Kaiser

February 18, 2023 at 8:55 am

One of the things i love about the entire Might and Magic series is that unlike virtually every other RPG series, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It doesn’t really care that much about lore or world building and stuff like that. It knows its a game and has lots of goofy, fun and charming stuff in it.

- Gnoman

February 18, 2023 at 10:55 am

One thing that always struck me about this is that the titles almost seem backwards – “Heroes of…” sounds like what you’d title the RPG spinoff of a strategy franchise rather than the other way around.

- Sniffnoy

February 18, 2023 at 6:13 pm

Agreed.

- John

February 18, 2023 at 4:25 pm

Cyberlore! I’d forgotten about them. I didn’t know about their history as makers-of-expansions, but I can attest that their own game, Majesty, is a delight. Who knew that what the world needed was a fantasy RTS where you can’t actually control any of your units? Cyberlore did, and we’re all better off for it.

- FincasKhalmoril

February 18, 2023 at 7:33 pm

I do share some of your criticism towards Civ II, which is objectively better than Civ I, if only for the awesome LotR mod. Yet still I like Civ I more. It much better conveys the abstract idea of human social evolution into a game without getting bogged down in details. This is even truer for all other parts which I actually don’t like. With MoO II I am a bit divided and am also a huge fan of MoO II though I share your point on it becoming too detailed quickly.

HoMM II , however, cannot be praised too much! It’s a highly polished hem of a game and I am really sad that bo one has bothered yet to convert it to iOS so I can carry it around with me on the train!

A very nice love letter to a true classic!

- fform

February 20, 2023 at 8:14 pm

There’s always Android! Or a hacked Vita or Switch.

https://github.com/ihhub/fheroes2/blob/master/docs/INSTALL.md

- Dhraiden

February 18, 2023 at 7:55 pm

I greatly enjoy the HoMM series over the years. Was fantastic to play a Dwarf faction (fr V: Hammers of Fate). One of my favorite series of all time, especially the fourth installment which let your heroes directly participate in battles (very overpowered). Often imitated, not yet duplicated that I’ve seen (King’s Bounty being an example). The spiritual successor to which in this vessel’s mind would be the Age of Wonders series (a fourth is forthcoming, haha…)

- Tarnyko

March 12, 2023 at 7:32 am

At last, someone who shares my love for Heroes IV.
While it has its flaws (most notably, crippled AI and unexciting town screens) it is probably the most developed of the series strategy-wise.
Not only can heroes fight (overpowered indeed… until they get blasted by a powerful spell) but creatures can split, ambush, and carry items -having their own inventory. Magic system is revamped and more logical. Heroes have multiclassing ability, giving various bonuses for, say, teaching Nature magic to a Necromancer.

(always had trouble getting into AoW, wish I knew which one was the gem of the series…)

- GeoX

February 20, 2023 at 2:40 pm

I have a friend for whom the HoMM series has been an ongoing obsession since it started to be a thing; who’s played it in its various iterations for god knows how many thousands of hours. For what it’s worth, he would definitely swear to you that HoMMIII (the last one Van Caneghem was involved with) is the definitive, unsurpassed game in the series, the one he always comes back to. For what it’s worth, I kind of agree with him, from the limited time I’ve spent with the series. It feels like the pinnacle of what it originally was; the later games, whatever their virtues, are distinctly something different.

- Joshua Barrett

February 24, 2023 at 6:53 pm

I dunno. Heroes 4 was definitely a radical departure, but Heroes 5 felt a lot like it was trying to be closer to Heroes 3. If I had to take a guess, I’d say the team at Nival had probably played a lot of H3, both by the similarities between games and because it’s a Russian team and Heroes 3 is very big in Eastern Europe generally and Russia particularly, to the point that both of the really major fan projects to modernize the game (Heroes 3 HD+, which patches the engine, and VCMI, which is in the vein of fheroes2 and rebuilds it wholesale) come predominantly out of Russia.

No clue what’s up with H6 and H7 though.

- Tarnyko

March 12, 2023 at 7:45 am

H6 tried to pierce into Esport, by removing most sources of randomness (only 2 resources : wood and ore; perfectly balanced locations on maps…). It also got rid of town screens (they were re-added later in a patch, but buggy). As a result, it was very dull, hated, and I never managed to derive any pleasure from it personally.

H7 is a lot better, trying to reproduce the H3-H5 experience, just unfortunately underbudgeted (motionless cutscenes, reused assets from other games…). I managed to finish 3 missions of the 1st campaign, before life needed me. I would say it can be worth it you have play partners.

- MalcolmM

February 22, 2023 at 12:19 am

I wish the HoMM rights were owned by someone who could do the series justice. The last few have been so bad I gave up on the series.

It seems that turn based strategy/rpg games with hand crafted maps are not thought of as a large enough market by the bigger publishers. Even the latest Age of Wonders, AoW4 appears to be moving more towards a Civilization style of gameplay – no campaign and no hand crafted maps.

I am also a fan of the Kings Bounty series but the latest one seems to have sunk that franchise.

- Tarnyko

March 12, 2023 at 7:11 am

“a special treat for those of you who’ve made it all the way down”
Thanks a lot. We have been playing Heroes 2 to the bone with a friend during our childhood, and I must managed to convince him to give it a go again. This will be the cherry on the top ^^.

- Jim G

April 26, 2023 at 11:43 am

Coming in really later but is there a missing “or” in “a given day number of days gone by?”

- Jimmy Maher

April 27, 2023 at 4:50 am

An extra “day” in there. Thanks!

- ShoTgun

May 31, 2023 at 9:03 am

Oddly misssing here (at least in the comments) is a mention of Songs of Conquest:
https://www.songsofconquest.com/

Spycraft: The Great Game, Part 1 (or, Parallel Spies)
March 3, 2023

Police recover William Colby’s body on the coast of Maryland, May 6, 1996.

The last people known to have seen William Colby alive are a cottage caretaker and his sister. They bumped into the former head of the CIA early on the evening of April 27, 1996, watering the willow trees around his vacation home on Neale Sound in Maryland, about 60 miles south of Washington, D.C. The trio chatted together for a few minutes about the fine weather and about the repairs Colby had spent the day doing to his sailboat, which was moored in the marina on Cobb Island, just across the sound. Then the caretaker and his sister went on their way. Everything seemed perfectly normal to them.

The next morning, a local handyman, his wife, and their two children out on the water in their motorboat spotted a bright green canoe washed up against a spit of land that extended from the Maryland shore. The canoe appeared to be abandoned. Moving in to investigate, they found that it was full of sand. This was odd, thought the handyman; he had sailed past this same place the day before without seeing the canoe, and yet so much sand could hardly have collected in it naturally over the course of a single night. It was almost as if someone had deliberately tried to sink the canoe. Oh, well; finders keepers. It really was a nice little boat. He and his family spent several hours shoveling out the sand, then towed the canoe away with them.

In the meantime, Colby’s next-door neighbor was surprised not to see him out and about. The farthest thing from a layabout, the wiry 76-year-old was usually up early, puttering about with something or other around his cottage or out on the sound. Yet now he was nowhere to be seen outside and didn’t answer his door, even though his car was still in the driveway and the neighbor thought she could hear a radio playing inside the little house. Peeking around back, she saw that Colby’s green canoe was gone. At first, she thought the mystery was solved. But as the day wore on and he failed to return, she grew more and more concerned. At 7:00 that evening, she called the police.

When they arrived, the police found that both doors to the cottage were unlocked. The radio was indeed turned on, as was Colby’s computer. Even weirder, a half-eaten meal lay in the sink, surrounded by unwashed dishes and half a glass of white wine. It wasn’t at all like the man not to clean up after himself. And his wallet and keys were also lying there on the table. Why on earth would he go out paddling without them?

Inquiries among the locals soon turned up Colby’s canoe and the story of its discovery. Clearly something was very wrong here. The police ordered a search. Two helicopters, twelve divers, and 100 volunteers in boats pulling drag-lines behind them scoured the area, while CIA agents also arrived to assist the investigation into the disappearance of one of their own; their presence was nothing to be alarmed at, they assured everyone, just standard procedure. Despite the extent of the search effort, it wasn’t until the morning of May 6, nine days after he was last seen, that William Colby’s body was found washed up on the shore, just 130 feet from where the handyman had found his canoe, but on the other side of the same spit of land. It seemed that Colby must have gone canoeing on the lake, then fallen overboard and drowned. He was 76 years old, after all.

But the handyman who had found the canoe, who knew these waters and their currents as well as anyone, didn’t buy this. He was sure that the body could not have gotten so separated from the canoe as to wind up on the opposite side of the spit. And why had it taken it so long to wash up on shore? Someone must have gone out and planted it there later on, he thought. Knowing Colby’s background, and having seen enough spy movies to know what happened to inconvenient witnesses in cases like this one, he and his family left town and went into hiding.

The coroner noticed other oddities. Normally a body that has been in the water a week or more is an ugly, bloated sight. But Colby’s was bizarrely well-preserved, almost as if it had barely spent any time in the water at all. And how could the divers and boaters have missed it for so long, so close to shore as it was?

Nonetheless, the coroner concluded that Colby had probably suffered a “cardiovascular incident” while out in his canoe, fallen into the water, and drowned. This despite the fact that he had had no known heart problems, and was in general in a physical shape that would have made him the envy of many a man 30 years younger than he was. Nor could the coroner explain why he had chosen to go canoeing long after dark, something he was most definitely not wont to do. (It had been dusk already when the caretaker and his sister said goodbye to him, and he had presumably sat down to his dinner after that.) Why had he gone out in such a rush, leaving his dinner half-eaten and his wine half-drunk, leaving his radio and computer still turned on, leaving his keys and wallet lying there on the table? It just didn’t add up in the eyes of the locals and those who had known Colby best.

But that was that. Case closed. The people who lived around the sound couldn’t help but think about the CIA agents lurking around the police station and the morgue, and wonder at everyone’s sudden eagerness to put a bow on the case and be done with it…

Unusually for a septuagenarian retired agent of the security state, William Colby had also been a game developer, after a fashion at least. In fact, at the time of his death a major game from a major publisher that bore his name very prominently right on the front of the box had just reached store shelves. This article and the next will partly be the story of the making of that game. But they will also be the story of William Colby himself, and of another character who was surprisingly similar to him in many ways despite being his sworn enemy for 55 years — an enemy turned friend who consulted along with him on the game and appeared onscreen in it alongside him. Then, too, they will be an inquiry into some of the important questions the game raises but cannot possibly begin to answer.

Sierra’s Police Quest: Open Season, created with the help of controversial former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, was one of the few finished products to emerge from a brief-lived vision of games as up-to-the-minute, ripped-from-the-headlines affairs. Spycraft: The Great Game was another.

Activision’s Spycraft: The Great Game is the product of a very specific era of computer gaming, when “multimedia” and “interactive movies” were among the buzzwords of the zeitgeist. Most of us who are interested in gaming history today are well aware of the set of technical and aesthetic approaches these terms imply: namely, games built from snippets of captured digitized footage of real actors, with interactivity woven as best the creators can manage between these dauntingly large chunks of static content.

There was a certain ideology that sometimes sprang up in connection with this inclusion of real people in games, a belief that it would allow games to become relevant to the broader culture in a way they never had before, tackling stories, ideas, and controversies that ordinary folks were talking about around their kitchen tables. At the margins, gaming could almost become another form of journalism. Ken Williams, the founder and president of Sierra On-Line, was the most prominent public advocate for this point of view, as exemplified by his decision to make a game with Daryl F. Gates, the chief of police for Los Angeles during the riots that convulsed that city in the spring of 1992. Williams, writing during the summer of 1993, just as the Gates game was being released:

I want to find the top cop, lawyer, airline pilot, fireman, race-car driver, politician, military hero, schoolteacher, white-water rafter, mountain climber, etc., and have them work with us on a simulation of their world. Chief Gates gives us the cop game. We are working with Emerson Fittipaldi to simulate racing, and expect to announce soon that Vincent Bugliosi, the lawyer who locked up Charles Manson, will be working with us to do a courtroom simulation. My goal is that products in the Reality Role-Playing series will be viewed as serious simulations of real-world events, not games. If we do our jobs right, this will be the closest most of us will ever get to seeing the world through these people’s eyes.

It sounded good in theory, but would never get all that far in practice, for a whole host of reasons: a lack of intellectual bandwidth and sufficient diversity of background in the games industry to examine complex social questions in an appropriately multi-faceted way (the jingoistic Gates game is a prime case in point here); a lack of good ideas for turning such abstract themes into rewarding forms of interactivity, especially when forced to work with the canned video snippets that publishers like Sierra deemed an essential part of the overall vision; the expense of the games themselves, the expense of the computers needed to run them, and the technical challenges involved in getting them running, which in combination created a huge barrier to entry for newcomers from outside the traditional gamer demographics; and, last but not least, the fact that those existing gamers who did meet all the prerequisites were generally perfectly happy with more blatantly escapist entertainments, thank you very much. Tellingly, none of the game ideas Ken Williams mentions above ever got made. And I must admit that this failure does not strike me as any great loss for world culture.

That said, Williams, being the head of one of the two biggest American game publishers, had a lot of influence on the smaller ones when he prognosticated on the future of the industry. Among the latter group was Activision, a toppled giant which had been rescued from the dustbin of bankruptcy in 1991 by a young wheeler-dealer named Bobby Kotick. His version of the company got fully back onto its feet the same year that Williams wrote the words above, thanks largely to Return to Zork, a cutting-edge multimedia evocation of the Infocom text adventures of yore, released at the perfect time to capitalize on a generation of gamers’ nostalgia for those bygone days of text and parsers (whilst not actually asking them to read much or to type out their commands, of course).

With that success under their belts, Kotick and his cronies thought about what to do next. Adventure games were hot — Myst, the bestselling adventure of all time, was released at the end of 1993 — and Ken Williams’s ideas about famous-expert-driven “Reality Role-Playing” were in the air. What might they do with that? And whom could they get to help them do it?

They hit upon espionage, a theme that, in contrast to many of those outlined by Williams, seemed to promise a nice balance of ripped-from-the-headlines relevance with interesting gameplay potential. Then, when they went looking for the requisite famous experts, they hit the mother lode with William Colby, the head of the CIA from September of 1973 to January of 1976, and Oleg Kalugin, who had become the youngest general in the history of the First Central Directorate of the Soviet Committee for State Security, better known as the KGB, in 1974.

I’ll return to Spycraft itself in due course. But right now, I’d like to examine the lives of these two men, which parallel one another in some perhaps enlightening ways. Rest assured that in doing so I’m only following the lead of Activision’s marketers; they certainly wanted the public to focus first and foremost on the involvement of Colby and Kalugin in their game.

William Colby (center), looking every inch the dashing war hero in Norway just after the end of World War II.

William Colby was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on January 4, 1920. He was the only child of Elbridge Colby, a former soldier and current university professor who would soon rejoin the army as an officer and spend the next 40 years in the service. His family was deeply Catholic — his father thanks to a spiritual awakening and conversion while a student at university, his mother thanks to long family tradition. The son too absorbed the ethos of a stern but loving God and the necessity of serving Him in ways both heavenly and worldly.

The little family bounced around from place to place, as military families generally do. They wound up in China for three years starting in 1929, where young Bill learned a smattering of Chinese and was exposed for the first time to the often compromised ethics of real-world politics, in this case in the form of the United States’s support for the brutal dictatorship of Chiang Kei-shek. Colby’s biographer Randall Bennett Woods pronounces his time in China “one of the formative influences of his life.” It was, one might say, a sort of preparation for the many ugly but necessary alliances — necessary as Colby would see them, anyway — of the Cold War.

At the age of seventeen, Colby applied to West Point, but was rejected because of poor eyesight. He settled instead for Princeton, a university whose faculty included Albert Einstein among many other prominent thinkers. Colby spent the summer of 1939 holidaying in France, returning home just after the fateful declarations of war in early September, never imagining that the idyllic environs in which he had bicycled and picnicked and practiced his French on the local girls would be occupied by the Nazis well before another year had passed. Back at Princeton, he made the subject of his senior thesis the ways in which France’s weakness had allowed the Nazi threat on its doorstep to grow unchecked. This too was a lesson that would dominate his worldview throughout the decades to come. After graduating, Colby received his officer’s commission in the United States Army, under the looming shadow of a world war that seemed bound to engulf his own country sooner or later.

When war did come on December 7, 1941, he was working as an artillery instructor at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. To his immense frustration, the Army thought he was doing such a good job in that role that it was inclined to leave him there. “I was afraid the war would be over before I got a chance to fight,” he writes in his memoir. He therefore leaped at the opportunity when he saw an advertisement on a bulletin board for volunteers to become parachutists with the 82nd Airborne. He tried to pass the entrance physical by memorizing the eye chart. The doctor wasn’t fooled, but let him in anyway: “I guess your eyesight is good enough for you to see the ground.”

Unfortunately, he broke his ankle in a training jump, and was forced to watch, crestfallen, as his unit shipped out to Europe without him. Then opportunity came calling again, in a chance to join the new Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Just as the CIA would later on, the OSS had two primary missions: foreign intelligence gathering and active but covert interference. Colby was to be dropped behind enemy lines, whence he would radio back reports of enemy troop movements and organize resistance among the local population. It would be, needless to say, an astonishingly dangerous undertaking. But that was the way Colby wanted it.

William Colby finally left for Britain in December of 1943, aboard the British luxury liner Queen Elizabeth, now refitted to serve as a troop transport. It was in a London bookstore that he first encountered another formative influence, the book Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence — the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, who had convinced the peoples of the Middle East to rise up against their Turkish overlords during the last world war. Lawrence’s book was, Colby would later say, an invaluable example of “an outsider operat[ing] within the political framework of a foreign people.” It promptly joined the Catholic Bible as one of the two texts Colby carried with him everywhere he went.

As it happened, he had plenty of time for reading: the weeks and then months passed in Britain, and still there came no orders to go into action. There was some talk of using Colby and his fellow American commandos to sow chaos during the run-up to D-Day, but this role was given to British units in the end. Instead Colby watched from the sideline, seething, as the liberation of France began. Then, out of the blue, action orders came at last. On the night of August 14, 1944, Colby and two exiled French soldiers jumped out of a B-24 bomber flying over central France.

The drop was botched; the men landed fifteen miles away from the intended target, finding themselves smack dab in the middle of a French village instead of out in the woods. Luckily, there were no Germans about, and the villagers had no desire to betray them. There followed a hectic, doubtless nerve-wracking month, during which Colby and his friends made contact with the local resistance forces and sent back to the advancing Allied armies valuable information about German troop movements and dispositions. Once friendly armies reached their position, the commandos made their way back to the recently liberated Paris, thence to London. It had been a highly successful mission, with more than enough danger and derring-do to suffice for one lifetime in the eyes of most people. But for Colby it all felt a bit anticlimactic; he had never even discharged his weapon at the enemy. Knowing that his spoken German wasn’t good enough to carry out another such mission behind the rapidly advancing Western European front, Colby requested a transfer to China.

He got another offer instead. Being an accomplished skier, he was asked to lead 35 commandos into the subarctic region of occupied Norway, to interdict the German supply lines there. Naturally, he agreed.

The parachute drop that took place on the night of March 24, 1945, turned into another botched job. Only fifteen of the 35 commandos actually arrived; the other planes strayed far off course in the dark and foggy night, accidentally dropping their passengers over neutral Sweden, or giving up and not dropping them at all. But Colby was among the lucky (?) fifteen who made it to their intended destination. Living off the frigid land, he and his men set about dynamiting railroad tracks and tunnels. This time, he got to do plenty of shooting, as his actions frequently brought him face to face with the Wehrmacht.

On the morning of May 7, word came through on the radio that Adolf Hitler was dead and his government had capitulated; the war in Europe was over. Colby now set about accepting the surrender of the same German occupiers he had recently been harassing. While the operation he had led was perhaps of doubtful necessity in the big picture of a war that Germany had already been well along the path of losing, no one could deny that he had demonstrated enormous bravery and capability. He was awarded the Silver Star.

Gung ho as ever, Colby proposed to his superiors upon returning to London that he lead a similar operation into Francisco Franco’s Spain, to precipitate the downfall of that last bastion of fascism in Europe. Having been refused this request, he returned to the United States, still seeming a bit disappointed that it had all ended so quickly. Here he asked for and was granted a discharge from the Army, asked for and was granted the hand in marriage of his university sweetheart Barbara Heinzen, and asked for and was granted a scholarship to law school. He wrote on his application that he hoped to become a lawyer in the cause of organized labor. (Far from the fire-breathing right-wing extremist some of his later critics would characterize him to be, Colby would vote Democrat throughout his life, maintaining a center-left orientation when it came to domestic politics at least.)

Oleg Kalugin at age seventeen, a true believer in Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party.

While the war hero William Colby was seemingly settling into a more staid time of life, another boy was growing up in the heart of the nation that Colby and most other Americans would soon come to regard as their latest great enemy. Born on September 6, 1934, in Leningrad (the once and future Saint Petersburg), Oleg Kalugin was, like Colby, an only child of a couple with an ethic of service, the son of a secret-police agent and a former factory worker, both of whose loyalty to communism was unimpeachable; the boy’s grandmother caused much shouting and hand-wringing in the family when she spirited him away to have him baptized in a furtive Orthodox ceremony in a dark basement. That piece of deviancy notwithstanding, Little Oleg was raised to see Joseph Stalin as his god on earth, the one and only savior of his people.

On June 22, 1941, he was “hunting maybugs with a pretty girl,” as he writes, when he saw a formation of airplanes roar overhead and drop a load of bombs not far away. The war had come to his country, six months before it would reach that of William Colby. With the German armies nearing Leningrad, he and his mother fled to the Siberian city of Omsk while his father stayed behind to fight. They returned to a devastated hometown in the spring of 1944. Oleg’s father had survived the terrible siege, but the boy had lost all of his grandparents — including that gentle soul who had caused him to be baptized — along with four uncles to either starvation or enemy bullets.

Kalugin remained a true believer after the Great Patriotic War was over, joining the Young Communist League as soon as he was eligible at the age of fourteen. At seventeen, he decided to join the KGB; it “seemed like the logical place for a person with my academic abilities, language skills, and fervent desire to fight class enemies, capitalist parasites, and social injustice.” Surprisingly, his father, who had seen rather too much of what Soviet-style class struggle really meant over the last couple of decades, tried to dissuade him. But the boy’s mind was made up. He entered Leningrad’s Institute of Foreign Languages, a shallow front for the training of future foreign agents, in 1952.

When Stalin died in March of the following year, the young zealot wrote in his diary that “Stalin isn’t dead. He cannot die. His physical death is just a formality, one that needn’t deprive people of their faith in the future. The fact that Stalin is still alive will be proven by our country’s every new success, both domestically and internationally.” He was therefore shocked when Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, delivered a speech that roundly condemned the country’s erstwhile savior as a megalomaniac and a mass-murderer who had cynically corrupted the ideology of Marx and Lenin to serve his own selfish ends. It was Kalugin’s initiation into the reality that the state he so earnestly served was less than incorruptible and infallible.

Nevertheless, he kept the faith, moving to Moscow for advanced training in 1956. In 1958, he was selected on the basis of his aptitude for English to go to the United States as a graduate student. “Just lay the foundation for future work,” his superiors told him. “Buy yourself good maps. Improve your English. Find out about their way of life. Communicate with people and make as many friends as possible.” Kalugin’s joyous reaction to this assignment reflects the ambivalence with which young Soviets like him viewed the United States. It was, they fervently believed, the epicenter of the imperialism, capitalism, racism, and classism they hated, and must ultimately be destroyed for that reason. Yet it was also the land of jazz and rock and roll, of fast cars and beautiful women, with a standard of living so different from anything they had ever known that it might as well have been Shangri-La. “I daydreamed constantly about America,” Kalugin admits. “The skyscrapers of New York and Chicago, the cowboys of the West…” He couldn’t believe he was being sent there, and on a sort of paid vacation at that, with few concrete instructions other than to experience as much of the American way of life as he could. Even his sadness about leaving behind the nice Russian girl he had recently married couldn’t overwhelm his giddy excitement.

William Colby in Rome circa 1955, with his son Carl and daughter Catherine.

As Oleg Kalugin prepared to leave for the United States, William Colby was about to return to that same country, where he hadn’t been living for seven years. He had become a lawyer as planned and joined the National Labor Relations Board to forward the cause of organized labor, but his tenure there had proved brief. In 1950, he was convinced to join the new CIA, the counterweight to the KGB on the world stage. He loved his new “band of brothers,” filled as he found it to be with “adventuresome spirits who believed fervently that the communist threat had to be met aggressively, innovatively, and courageously.”

In April of 1951, he took his family with him on his first foreign assignment, under the cover identity of a mid-level diplomatic liaison in Stockholm, Sweden. His real purpose was to build and run an intelligence operation there. (All embassies were nests of espionage in those days, as they still are today.) “The perfect operator in such operations is the traditional gray man, so inconspicuous that he can never catch the waiter’s eye in a restaurant,” Colby wrote. He was — or could become — just such a man, belying his dashing commando past. Small wonder that he proved very adept at his job. The type of spying that William Colby did was, like all real-world espionage, more John Le Carré than Ian Fleming, an incrementalist milieu inhabited by just such quiet gray men as him. Dead-letter drops, secret codes, envelopes stuffed with cash, and the subtle art of recruitment without actually using that word — the vast majority of his intelligence contacts would have blanched at the label of “spy,” having all manner of other ways of defining what they did to themselves and others — were now his daily stock in trade.

In the summer of 1953, Colby and his family left Stockholm for Rome. Still riven by discontent and poverty that the Marshall Plan had never quite been able to quell, with a large and popular communist party that promised the people that it alone could make things better, Italy was considered by both the United States and the Soviet Union to be the European country most in danger of changing sides in the Cold War through the ballot box, making this assignment an unusually crucial one. Once again, Colby performed magnificently. Through means fair and occasionally slightly foul, he propped up Italy’s Christian Democratic Party, the one most friendly to American interests. His wife and five young children would remember these years as their happiest time together, with the Colosseum visible outside their snug little apartment’s windows, with the trapping of their Catholic faith all around them. The sons became altar boys, learning to say Mass in flawless Latin, and Barbara amazed guests with her voluble Italian, which was even better than her husband’s.

She and her children would gladly have stayed in Rome forever, but after five years there her husband was growing restless. The communist threat in Italy had largely dissipated by now, thanks to an improving economy that made free markets seem more of a promise than a threat, and Colby was itching to continue the shadowy struggle elsewhere. In 1958, he was recalled to the States to begin preparing for a new, more exotic assignment: to the tortured Southeast Asian country of Vietnam, which had recently won its independence from France, only to become a battleground between the Western-friendly government of Ngo Dinh Diem and a communist insurgency led by Ho Chi Minh.

Oleg Kalugin (center) at Columbia University, 1958.

While Colby was hitting the books at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in preparation for his latest assignment, Kalugin was doing the same as a philology student on a Fulbright scholarship to New York City’s Columbia University. (Fully half of the eighteen exchange students who traveled with him were also spies-in-training.) A natural charmer, he had no trouble ingratiating himself with the native residents of the Big Apple as he had been ordered to do.

He went home when his one-year scholarship expired, but returned to New York City one year after that, to work as a journalist for Radio Moscow. Now, however, his superiors expected a bit more from him. Despite the wife and young daughter he had left behind, he seduced a string of women who he believed could become valuable informants — so much so that American counter-espionage agents, who were highly suspicious of him, labeled him a “womanizer” and chalked it up as his most obvious weakness, should they ever be in need of one to exploit. (For his part, Kalugin writes that “I always told my officers, male and female, ‘Don’t be afraid of sex.’ If they found themselves in a situation where making love with a foreigner could help our work, I advised them to hop into bed.”)

Kalugin’s unlikely career as Radio Moscow’s foreign correspondent in New York City lasted almost four years in all. He covered — with a pro-Soviet spin, naturally — the election of President John F. Kennedy, the trauma of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassination of Kennedy by a man with Soviet ties. He was finally called home in early 1964, his superiors having decided he was now attracting too much scrutiny from the Americans. He found returning to the dingy streets of Moscow from the Technicolor excitement of New York City to be rather dispiriting. “Worshiping communism from afar was one thing. Living in it was another thing altogether,” he writes wryly, echoing sentiments shared by many an idealistic Western defector for the cause. Shortly after his return, the reform-minded Nikita Khrushchev was ousted in favor of Leonid Brezhnev, a man who looked as tired as the rest of the Soviet Union was beginning to feel. It was hard to remain committed to the communist cause in such an environment as this, but Kalugin continued to do his best.

William Colby, looking rather incongruous in his typical shoe salesman’s outfit in a Vietnamese jungle.

William Colby might have been feeling similar sentiments somewhere behind that chiseled granite façade of his. For he was up to his eyebrows in the quagmire that was Vietnam, the place where all of the world’s idealism seemed to go to die.

When he had arrived in the capital of Saigon in 1959, with his family in tow as usual, he had wanted to treat this job just as he had his previous foreign postings, to work quietly behind the scenes to support another basically friendly foreign government with a communist problem. But Southeast Asia was not Europe, as he learned to his regret — even if the Diem family were Catholic and talked among themselves in French. There were systems of hierarchy and patronage inside the leader’s palace that baffled Colby at every turn. Diem himself was aloof, isolated from the people he ruled, while Ho Chi Minh, who already controlled the northern half of the country completely and had designs on the rest of it, had enormous populist appeal. The type of espionage Colby had practiced in Sweden and Italy — all mimeographed documents and furtive meetings in the backs of anonymous cafés — would have been useless against such a guerilla insurgency even if it had been possible. Which it was not: the peasants fighting for and against the communists were mostly illiterate.

Colby’s thinking gradually evolved, to encompass the creation of a counter-insurgency force that could play the same game as the communists. His mission in the country became less an exercise in pure espionage and overt and covert influencing than one in paramilitary operations. He and his family left Vietnam for Langley in the summer of 1962, but the country was still to fill a huge portion of Colby’s time; he was leaving to become the head of all of the CIA’s Far Eastern operations, and there was no hotter spot in that hot spot of the world than Vietnam. Before departing, the entire Colby family had dinner with President Diem in his palace, whose continental cuisine, delicate furnishings, and manicured gardens almost could lead one to believe one was on the French Riviera rather than in a jungle in Southeast Asia. “We sat there with the president,” remembers Barbara. “There was really not much political talk. Yet there was a feeling that things were not going well in that country.”

Sixteen months later — in fact, just twenty days before President Kennedy was assassinated — Diem was murdered by the perpetrators of a military coup that had gone off with the tacit support of the Americans, who had grown tired of his ineffectual government and felt a change was needed. Colby was not involved in that decision, which came down directly from the Kennedy White House to its ambassador in the country. But, good soldier that he was, he accepted it after it had become a fait accompli. He even agreed to travel to Vietnam in the immediate aftermath, to meet with the Vietnamese generals who had perpetrated the coup and assure them that they had powerful friends in Washington. Did he realize in his Catholic heart of hearts that his nation had forever lost the moral high ground in Vietnam on the day of Diem’s murder? We cannot say.

The situation escalated quickly under the new President Lyndon Johnson, as more and more American troops were sent to fight a civil war on behalf of the South Vietnamese, a war which the latter didn’t seem overly inclined to fight for themselves. Colby hardly saw his family now, spending months at a stretch in the country. Lawrence of Arabia’s prescription for winning over a native population through ethical persuasion and cultural sensitivity was proving unexpectedly difficult to carry out in Vietnam, most of whose people seemed just to want the Americans to go away. It appeared that a stronger prescription was needed.

Determined to put down the Viet Cong — communist partisans in the south of the country who swarmed over the countryside, killing American soldiers and poisoning their relations with the locals — Colby introduced a “Phoenix Program” to eliminate them. It became without a doubt the biggest of all the moral stains on his career. The program’s rules of engagement were not pretty to begin with, allowing for the extra-judicial execution of anyone believed to be in the Viet Cong leadership in any case where arresting him was too “hard.” But it got entirely out of control in practice, as described by James S. Olsen and Randy W. Roberts in their history of the war: “The South Vietnamese implemented the program aggressively, but it was soon laced with corruption and political infighting. Some South Vietnamese politicians identified political enemies as Viet Cong and sent Phoenix hit men after them. The pressure to identify Viet Cong led to a quota system that incorrectly labeled many innocent people the enemy.” Despite these self-evident problems, the Americans kept the program going for years, saying that its benefits were worth the collateral damage. Olsen and Roberts estimate that at least 20,000 people lost their lives as a direct result of Colby’s Phoenix Program. A large proportion of them — possibly even a majority — were not really communist sympathizers at all.

In July of 1971, Colby was hauled before the House Committee on Government Operations by two prominent Phoenix critics, Ogden Reid and Pete McCloskey (both Republicans.) It is difficult to absolve him of guilt for the program’s worst abuses on the basis of his circuitous, lawyerly answers to their straightforward questions.

Reid: Can you state categorically that Phoenix has never perpetrated the premeditated killing of a civilian in a noncombat situation?

Colby: No, I could not say that, but I do not think it happens often. Individual members of it, subordinate people in it, may have done it. But as a program, it is not designed to do that.

McCloskey: Did Phoenix personnel resort to torture?

Colby: There were incidents, and they were treated as an unjustifiable offense. If you want to get bad intelligence, you use bad interrogation methods. If you want to get good intelligence, you had better use good interrogation methods.

Oleg Kalugin (right) receives from Bulgarian security minister Dimitri Stoyanov the Order of the Red Star, thanks largely to his handling of John Walker. The bespectacled man standing between and behind the two is Yuri Andropov, then the head of the KGB, who would later become the fifth supreme leader of the Soviet Union.

During the second half of the 1960s, Oleg Kalugin spent far more time in the United States than did William Colby. He returned to the nation that had begun to feel like more of a home than his own in July of 1965. This time, however, he went to Washington, D.C., instead of New York City. His new cover was that of a press officer for the Soviet Foreign Ministry; his real job was that of a deputy director in the KGB’s Washington operation. He was to be a spy in the enemy’s city of secrets. “By all means, don’t treat it as a desk job,” he was told.

Kalugin took the advice to heart. He had long since developed a nose for those who could be persuaded to share their country’s deepest secrets with him, long since recognized that the willingness to do so usually stemmed from weakness rather than strength. Like a lion on the hunt, he had learned to spot the weakest prey — the nursers of grudges and harborers of regrets; the sexually, socially, or professionally frustrated — and isolate them from the pack of their peers for one-on-one persuasion. At one point, he came upon a secret CIA document that purported to explain the psychology of those who chose to spy for that yin to his own service’s yang. He found it to be so “uncannily accurate” a description of the people he himself recruited that he squirreled it away in his private files, and quoted from it in his memoir decades later.

Acts of betrayal, whether in the form of espionage or defection, are almost in every case committed by morally or psychologically unsteady people. Normal, psychologically stable people — connected with their country by close ethnic, national, cultural, social, and family ties — cannot take such a step. This simple principle is confirmed by our experience of Soviet defectors. All of them were single. In every case, they had a serious vice or weakness: alcoholism, deep depression, psychopathy of various types. These factors were in most cases decisive in making traitors out of them. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that no [CIA] operative can consider himself an expert in Soviet affairs if he hasn’t had the horrible experience of holding a Soviet friend’s head over the sink as he poured out the contents of his stomach after a five-day drinking bout.

What follows from that is that our efforts must mostly be directed against weak, unsteady members of Soviet communities. Among normal people, we should pay special attention to the middle-aged. People that age are starting their descent from their psychological peak. They are no longer children, and they suddenly feel the acute realization that their life is passing, that their ambitions and youthful dreams have not come true in full or even in part. At this age comes the breaking point of a man’s career, when he faces the gloomy prospect of pending retirement and old age. The “stormy forties” are of great interest to an [intelligence] operative.

It’s great to be good, but it’s even better to be lucky. John Walker, the spy who made Kalugin’s career, shows the truth in this dictum. He was that rarest of all agents in the espionage trade: a walk-in. A Navy officer based in Norfolk, Virginia, he drove into Washington one day in late 1967 with a folder full of top-secret code ciphers on the seat of his car next to him, looked up the address of the Soviet embassy in the directory attached to a pay phone, strode through the front door, plunked his folder down on the front desk, and said matter-of-factly, “I want to see the security officer, or someone connected with intelligence. I’m a naval officer. I’d like to make some money, and I’ll give you some genuine stuff in return.” Walker was hastily handed a down payment, ushered out of the embassy, and told never under any circumstances to darken its doors again. He would be contacted in other ways if his information checked out.

Kalugin was fortunate enough to be ordered to vet the man. The picture he filled in was sordid, but it passed muster. Thirty years old when his career as a spy began, Walker had originally joined the Navy to escape being jailed for four burglaries he committed as a teenager. A born reprobate, he had once tried to convince his wife to become a prostitute in order to pay off the gambling debts he had racked up. Yet he could also be garrulous and charming, and had managed to thoroughly conceal his real self from his Navy superiors. A fitness report written in 1972, after he had already been selling his country’s secrets for almost five years, calls him “intensely loyal, taking great pride in himself and the naval service, fiercely supporting its principles and traditions. He possesses a fine sense of personal honor and integrity, coupled with a great sense of humor.” Although he was only a warrant officer in rank, he sat on the communications desk at Norfolk, handling radio traffic with submarines deployed all over the world. It was hard to imagine a more perfect posting for a spy. And this spy required no counseling, needed no one to pretend to be his friend, to talk him down from crises of conscience, or to justify himself to himself. Suffering from no delusions as to who and what he was, all he required was cold, hard cash. A loathsome human being, he was a spy handler’s dream.

Kalugin was Walker’s primary handler for two years, during which he raked in a wealth of almost unbelievably valuable information without ever meeting the man face to face. Walker was the sort of asset who turns up “once in a lifetime,” in the words of Kalugin himself. He became the most important of all the spies on the Kremlin’s payroll, even recruiting several of his family members and colleagues to join his ring. “K Mart has better security than the Navy,” he laughed. He would continue his work long after Kalugin’s time in Washington was through. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, Navy personnel wondered at how the Soviets always seemed to know where their ships and submarines were and where their latest exercises were planned to take place. Not until 1985 was Walker finally arrested. In a bit of poetic justice, the person who turned him in to the FBI was his wife, whom he had been physically and sexually abusing for almost 30 years.

The luster which this monster shed on Kalugin led to the awarding of the prestigious Order of the Red Star, and then, in 1974, his promotion to the rank of KGB general while still just shy of his 40th birthday, making him the youngest such in the post-World War II history of the service. By that time, he was back in Moscow again, having been recalled in January of 1970, once again because it was becoming common knowledge among the Americans that his primary work in their country was that of a spy. He was too hot now to be given any more long-term foreign postings. Instead he worked out of KGB headquarters in Moscow, dealing with strategic questions and occasionally jetting off to far-flung trouble spots to be the service’s eyes and ears on the ground. “I can honestly say that I loved my work,” he writes in his memoir. “My job was always challenging, placing me at the heart of the Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the United States.” As ideology faded, the struggle against imperialism had become more of an intellectual fascination — an intriguing game of chess — than a grand moral crusade.

William Colby testifies before Congress, 1975.

William Colby too was now back in his home country on a more permanent basis, having been promoted to executive director of the CIA — the third highest position on the agency’s totem pole — in July of 1971. Yet he was suffering through what must surely have been the most personally stressful period of his life since he had dodged Nazis as a young man behind enemy lines.

In April of 1973, his 23-year-old daughter Catherine died of anorexia. Her mental illness was complicated, as they always are, but many in the family believed it to have been aggravated by being the daughter of the architect of the Phoenix Program, a man who was in the eyes of much of her hippie generation Evil Incarnate. His marriage was now, in the opinion of his biographer Randall Bennett Woods, no more than a “shell.” Barbara blamed him not only for what he had done in Vietnam but for failing to be there with his family when his daughter needed him most, for forever skipping out on them with convenient excuses about duty and service on his lips.

Barely a month after Catherine’s death, Colby got a call from Alexander Haig, chief of staff in Richard Nixon’s White House: “The president wants you to take over as director of the CIA.” It ought to have been the apex of his professional life, but somehow it didn’t seem that way under current conditions. At the time, the slow-burning Watergate scandal was roiling the CIA almost more than the White House. Because all five of the men who had been arrested attempting to break into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters the previous year had connections to the CIA, much of the press was convinced it had all been an agency plot. Meanwhile accusations about the Phoenix Program and other CIA activities, in Vietnam and elsewhere, were also flying thick and fast. The CIA seemed to many in Congress to be an agency out of control, ripe only for dismantling. And of course Colby was still processing the loss of his daughter amidst it all. It was a thankless promotion if ever there was one. Nevertheless, he accepted it.

Colby would later claim that he knew nothing of the CIA’s many truly dirty secrets before stepping into the top job. These were the ones that other insiders referred to as the “family jewels”: its many bungled attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, before and after he became the leader of Cuba, as well as various other sovereign foreign leaders; the coups it had instigated against lawfully elected foreign governments; its experiments with mind control and psychedelic drugs on unwilling and unwitting human subjects; its unlawful wiretapping and surveillance of scores of Americans; its longstanding practice of opening mail passing between the United States and less-than-friendly nations. That Colby could have risen so high in the agency without knowing these secrets and many more seems dubious on the face of it, but it is just possible; the CIA was very compartmentalized, and Colby had the reputation of being a bit of a legal stickler, just the type who might raise awkward objections to such delicate necessities. “Colby never became a member of the CIA’s inner club of mandarins,” claims the agency’s historian Harold Ford. But whether he knew about the family jewels or not beforehand, he was stuck with them now.

Perhaps in the hope that he could make the agency’s persecutors go away if he threw them just a little red meat, Colby came clean about some of the dodgy surveillance programs. But that only whet the public’s appetite for more revelations. For as the Watergate scandal gradually engulfed the White House and finally brought down the president, as it became clear that the United States had invested more than $120 billion and almost 60,000 young American lives into South Vietnam only to see it go communist anyway, the public’s attitude toward institutions like the CIA was not positive; a 1975 poll placed the CIA’s approval rating at 14 percent. President Gerald Ford, the disgraced Nixon’s un-elected replacement, was weak and unable to protect the agency. Indeed, a commission chaired by none other than Vice President Nelson Rockefeller laid bare many of the family jewels, holding back only the most egregious incidents of meddling in foreign governments. But even those began to come out in time. Both major political parties had their sights set on future elections, and thus had a strong motivation to blame a rogue CIA for any and all abuses by previous administrations. (Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, for example, had personally ordered and supervised some of the attempts on Fidel Castro’s life during the early 1960s.)

It was a no-win situation for William Colby. He was called up to testify in Congress again and again, to answer questions in the mold of “When did you stop beating your wife?”, as he put it to colleagues afterward. Everybody seemed to hate him: right-wing hardliners because they thought he was giving away the store (“It is an act of insanity and national humiliation,” said Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, “to have a law prohibiting the president from ordering assassinations”), left-wingers and centrists because they were sure he was hiding everything he could get away with and confessing only to that which was doomed to come out anyway — which was probably true. Colby was preternaturally cool and unflappable at every single hearing, which somehow only made everyone dislike him that much more. Some of his few remaining friends wanted to say that his relative transparency was a product of Catholic guilt — over the Phoenix Program, over the death of his daughter, perchance over all of the CIA’s many sins — but it was hard to square that notion with the rigidly composed, lawyerly presence that spoke in clipped, minimalist phrases before the television cameras. He seemed more like a cold fish than a repentant soul.

On November 1, 1975 — exactly six months after Saigon had fallen, marking the humiliating final defeat of South Vietnam at the hands of the communists — William Colby was called into the White House by President Ford and fired. “There goes 25 years just like that,” he told Barbara when he came home in a rare display of bitterness. His replacement was George Herbert Walker Bush, an up-and-coming Republican politician who knew nothing about intelligence work. President Ford said such an outsider was the only viable choice, given the high crimes and misdemeanors with which all of the rank and file of the CIA were tarred. And who knows? Maybe he was right. Colby stayed on for three more months while his green replacement got up to speed, then left public service forever.

An Oleg Kalugin campaign poster from 1990, after he reinvented himself as a politician. “Let’s vote for Oleg Kalugin!” reads the caption.

Oleg Kalugin was about to suffer his own fall from grace. According to his account, his rising star flamed out when he ventured out on a limb to support a defector from the United States, one of his own first contacts as a spy handler, who was now accused of stealing secrets for the West. The alleged double agent was sent to a Siberian prison despite Kalugin’s advocacy. Suspected now of being a CIA mole himself, Kalugin was reassigned in January of 1980 to a dead-end job as deputy director of the KGB’s Leningrad branch, where he would be sure not to see too much valuable intelligence. You live by the sword, you die by the sword; duplicity begets suspicions of duplicity, such that spies always end up eating their own if they stay in the business long enough.

Again according to Kalugin himself, it was in Leningrad that his nagging doubts about the ethics and efficacy of the Soviet system — the same ones that had been whispering at the back of his mind since the early 1960s — rose to a roar which he could no longer ignore. “It was all an elaborately choreographed farce, and in my seven years in Leningrad I came to see that we had created not only the most extensive totalitarian state apparatus in history but also the most arcane,” he writes. “Indeed, the mind boggled that in the course of seven decades our communist leaders had managed to construct this absurd, stupendous, arcane ziggurat, this terrifyingly centralized machine, this religion that sought to control all aspects of life in our vast country.” We might justifiably wonder that it took him so long to realize this, and note with some cynicism that his decision to reject the system he had served all his life came only after that system had already rejected him. He even confesses that, when Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982 and was replaced by Yuri Andropov, a former head of the KGB who had always thought highly of Kalugin, he wasn’t above dreaming of a return to the heart of the action in the intelligence service. But it wasn’t to be. Andropov soon died, to be replaced by another tired old man named Konstantin Chernenko who died even more quickly, and then Mikhail Gorbachev came along to accidentally dismantle the Soviet Union in the name of saving it.

In January of 1987, Kalugin was given an even more dead-end job, as a security officer in the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. From here, he watched the extraordinary events of 1989, as country after country in the Soviet sphere rejected its communist government, until finally the Berlin Wall fell, taking the Iron Curtain down with it. Just like that, the Cold War was over, with the Soviet Union the undeniable loser. Kalugin must surely have regarded this development with mixed feelings, given what a loyal partisan he had once been for the losing side. Nevertheless, on February 26, 1990, he retired from the KGB. After picking up his severance check, he walked a few blocks to the Institute of History and Archives, where a group of democracy activists had set up shop. “I want to help the democratic movement,” he told them, in a matter-of-fact tone uncannily similar to that of John Walker in a Soviet embassy 22 years earlier. “I am sure that my knowledge and experience will be useful. You can use me in any capacity.”

And so Oleg Kalugin reinvented himself as an advocate for Russian democracy. A staunch supporter of Boris Yeltsin and his post-Soviet vision for Russia, he became an outspoken opponent of the KGB, which still harbored in its ranks many who wished to return the country to its old ways. He was elected to the Supreme Soviet in September of 1990, in the first wave of free and fair elections ever held in Russia. When some of his old KGB colleagues attempted a coup in August of 1991, he was out there manning the barricades for democracy. The coup was put down — just.

William Colby in his later years, enjoying his sailboat, one of his few sources of uncalculated joy.

William Colby too had to reinvent himself after the agency he served declared that it no longer needed him. He wrote a circumspect, slightly anodyne memoir about his career; its title of Honorable Men alone was enough to tell the world that it wasn’t the tell-all book from an angry spy spurned that it might have been hoping for. He consulted for the government on various issues for larger sums than he had ever earned as a regular federal employee, appeared from time to time as an expert commentator on television, and wrote occasional opinion pieces for the national press, most commonly about the ongoing dangers posed by nuclear weapons and the need for arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union.

In 1982, at the age of 62, this stiff-backed avatar of moral rectitude fell in love with a pretty, vivacious 37-year-old, a former American ambassador to Grenada named Sally Shelton. It struck those who knew him as almost a cliché of a mid-life crisis, of the sort that the intelligence services had been exploiting for decades — but then, clichés are clichés for a reason, aren’t they? “I thought Bill Colby had all the charisma of a shoe clerk,” said one family friend. “Sally is a very outgoing woman, even flamboyant. She found him a sex object, and with her he was.” The following year, Colby asked his wife Barbara for a divorce. She was taken aback, even if their marriage hadn’t been a particularly warm one in many years. “People like us don’t get a divorce!” she exclaimed — meaning, of course, upstanding Catholic couples of the Greatest Generation who were fast approaching their 40th wedding anniversary. But there it was. Whatever else was going on behind that granite façade, it seemed that Colby felt he still had some living to do.

None of Colby’s family attended the marriage ceremony, or had much to do with him thereafter. He lost not only his family but his faith: Sally Shelton had no truck with Catholicism, and he only went to church after he married her for weddings and funerals. Was the gain worth the loss? Only Colby knew the answer.

Old frenemies: Oleg Kalugin and William Colby flank Ken Berris, who directed the Spycraft video sequences.

Oleg Kalugin met William Colby for the first time in May of 1991, when both were attending the same seminar in Berlin — appropriately enough, on the subject of international terrorism, the threat destined to steal the attention of the CIA and the Russian FSB (the successor to the KGB) as the Cold War faded into history. The two men had dinner together, then agreed to be jointly interviewed on German television, a living symbol of bygones becoming bygones. “What do you think of Mr. Colby as a leading former figure in U.S. intelligence?” Kalugin was asked.

“Had I had a choice in my earlier life, I would have gladly worked under Mr. Colby,” he answered. The two became friends, meeting up whenever their paths happened to cross in the world.

And why shouldn’t they be friends? They had led similar lives in so many ways. Both were ambitious men who had justified their ambition as a call to service, then devoted their lives to it, swallowing any moral pangs they might have felt in the process, until the people they served had rejected them. In many ways, they had more in common with one another than with the wives and children they had barely seen for long stretches of their lives.

And how are we to judge these two odd, distant men, both so adept at the art of concealment as to seem hopelessly impenetrable? “I am not emotional,” Colby said to a reporter during his turbulent, controversy-plagued tenure as director of the CIA. “I admit it. Oh, don’t watch me like that. You’re looking for something underneath which isn’t there. It’s all here on the surface, believe me.”

Our first instinct might be to scoff at such a claim; surely everyone has an inner life, a tender core they dare reveal only to those they love best. But maybe we should take Colby at his word; maybe doing so helps to explain some things. As Colby and Kalugin spouted their high-minded ideals about duty and country, they forgot those closest to them, the ones who needed them most of all, apparently believing that they possessed some undefined special qualities of character or a special calling that exempted them from all that. Journalist Neil Sheehan once said of Colby that “he would have been perfect as a soldier of Christ in the Jesuit order.” There is something noble but also something horrible about such devotion to an abstract cause. One has to wonder whether it is a crutch, a compensation for some piece of a personality that is missing.

Certainly there was an ultimate venality, an amorality to these two men’s line of work, as captured in the subtitle of the computer game they came together to make: “The Great Game.” Was it all really just a game to them? It would seem so, at least at the end. How else could Kalugin blithely state that he would have “gladly” worked with Colby, forgetting the vast gulf of ideology that lay between them? Tragically, the ante in their great game was all too often human lives. Looking back on all they did, giving all due credit to their courage and capability, it seems clear to me that the world would have been better off without their meddling. The institutions they served were full of people like them, people who thought they knew best, who thought they were that much cleverer than the rest of the world and had a right to steer its course from the shadows. Alas, they weren’t clever enough to see how foolish and destructive their arrogance was.

“My father lived in a world of secrets,” says William’s eldest son Carl Colby. “Always watching, listening, his eye on the door. He was tougher, smarter, smoother, and could be crueler than anybody I ever knew. I’m not sure he ever loved anyone, and I never heard him say anything heartfelt.” Was William Colby made that way by the organization he served, or did he join the organization because he already was that way? It’s impossible to say. Yet we must be sure to keep these things in mind when we turn in earnest to the game on which Colby and Kalugin allowed their names to be stamped, and find out what it has to say about the ethical wages of being a spy.

(Sources: the books Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby by John Prados, Spymaster: My Thirty-Two Years in Intelligence and Espionage against the West by Oleg Kalugin, Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam, 1945-2010, sixth edition by James S. Olson and Randy Roberts, Shadow Warrior: William Egan Colby and the CIA by Randall B. Woods, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA by William Colby and Peter Forbath, and Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America’s Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam by William Colby and James McCargar; the documentary film The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby; Sierra On-Line’s newsletter InterAction of Summer 1993; Questbusters of February 1994. Online sources include “Who Murdered the CIA Chief?” by Zalin Grant at Pythia Press.)

Comments
36 Responses

- stepped pyramids

March 3, 2023 at 6:03 pm

Typo: “almost visbly twitching with frustration”. Also found myself distracted thinking about from whose perspective he was seen to be “almost visibly twitching”. It feels like a very physically present description to be applied to an abstract period of time.

- Jimmy Maher

March 3, 2023 at 7:39 pm

Thanks!

- Andrew Plotkin

March 3, 2023 at 6:19 pm

This is a hell of a sidebar, about a game that I know nothing about. Looking forward to part two.

> (Far from the fire-breathing right-wing extremist some of his later critics would characterize him to be, Colby would vote Democrat throughout his life, maintaining a center-left orientation when it came to domestic politics at least.)

Maybe it’s not worth explaining, but modern readers might not understand that “vote Democrat” wasn’t a simple shorthand for “politically liberal” in the 50s and 60s.

- Jimmy Maher

March 3, 2023 at 7:40 pm

And this one even had a Mac port. ;)

- morg

March 4, 2023 at 2:08 am

> Maybe it’s not worth explaining, but modern readers might not understand that “vote Democrat” wasn’t a simple shorthand for “politically liberal” in the 50s and 60s.

That’s an incredibly important detail which, especially framed as “center-left in domestic politics at least”, will fly right past just about everyone younger than you I think. Surely running a torture and assassination program overseas qualifies one for at least a “fire-breathing extremist” label even if you can’t decide on a direction?

- Phil B.

March 3, 2023 at 6:26 pm

Just want to say that this was a super interesting read. Thanks! No way the game is anywhere near as interesting, I fear.

- Sniffnoy

March 3, 2023 at 7:30 pm

Typo spotting: “ammorality” -> “amorality”

- Jimmy Maher

March 3, 2023 at 7:41 pm

Thanks!

- Jaina

March 3, 2023 at 8:25 pm

“William Colby might have feeling similar sentiments somewhere”

Very interesting article

- Jimmy Maher

March 3, 2023 at 8:35 pm

Thanks!

- Peter Olausson

March 3, 2023 at 10:33 pm

Typos: Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger.

(Thinking: Would the beginning have a greater impact if “The last people known to have seen …” was omitted?)

Great text, as always, on a game I’ve never heard of. Two names of that magnitude sounds almost impossible; I assumed it would be today.

- Jimmy Maher

March 4, 2023 at 6:54 am

Thanks!

I do think the opening sentence is a necessary framing device in this case…

- morg

March 4, 2023 at 1:49 am

You’re probably right about “Honorable Men” but it were a better world in which that’s a Shakespeare reference.

- Jimmy Maher

March 4, 2023 at 6:56 am

It would, wouldn’t it? But William Colby wasn’t know for such subtlety and introspection.

- David Boddie

March 4, 2023 at 11:45 am

Intriguing stuff!

A couple of things that slipped through: “marraige” and “one [of] his few sources of uncalculated joy”.

- Jimmy Maher

March 4, 2023 at 9:53 pm

Thanks!

- Supernaut

March 4, 2023 at 2:02 pm

Great article! Spotted a tautology: “dinner with President Diem in his palatial palace”.

- Jimmy Maher

March 4, 2023 at 9:54 pm

Thanks!

- glorkvorn

March 4, 2023 at 5:21 pm

Very interesting article, thanks! I would disagree with some parts of it, but that’s inevitable when writing about such complex and controversial issues.

I almost have a hard time believing that William Colby was a real person. Going from gung-ho war hero, to a charming spy recruiter, to a cold, calculating spy director, to a stoic public relations figure, and then retiring to cheerfully take up sailing, computer game development, and having an affair. It sounds more like the stories of a fictional character in a spy movie or game! But I guess truth is often stranger than fiction, and people do change as they get older.

- arthurdawg

March 10, 2023 at 7:51 pm

I can certainly attest to changing as you get older! Perspectives change greatly.

- Lee Hauser

March 4, 2023 at 9:39 pm

You know, Jimmy, I love your work, though I’m not a gamer; I am very interested in computing history, and your historical insight makes up for my relative lack of enthusiasm for the ostensible subject of this blog. And this is one of your best articles. The topic is worthy of a book; even though your bibliography shows this has been done multiple times already, none of them are by you!

- Knurek

March 6, 2023 at 11:29 am

“When war did come on December 7, 1941”
Uhh… that’d need some clarifying, I think. Maybe ‘when USA entered the war’ or something similar?

- Jimmy Maher

March 6, 2023 at 12:36 pm

In light of the preceding sentence, I think that’s amply implied already. ;)

- Michael

March 6, 2023 at 10:20 pm

“giving what a loyal partisan…”

Should read “given,” I think.

- Jimmy Maher

March 7, 2023 at 5:53 am

Thanks!

- Brian Bagnall

March 7, 2023 at 6:19 am

That is quite a cliffhanger intro. I’m wondering if I should read about William Colby’s mysterious demise or wait for part 2.

- f

March 7, 2023 at 9:42 am

Great read, thank you. Looking forward to the second part.

Typo: French Riveria = Riviera

- Jimmy Maher

March 7, 2023 at 9:52 am

Thanks!

- declain

March 8, 2023 at 10:25 am

debts he had wracked up -> debts he had racked up

- Jimmy Maher

March 8, 2023 at 2:51 pm

Thanks!

- Penguin in a hat

March 11, 2023 at 8:56 am

Great piece. Looking forward to part 2.

- Ben

March 11, 2023 at 11:04 pm

This is why I love this blog.

- Ubuntu Peronista

March 12, 2023 at 9:07 pm

William colby was parte of Majestic 12 group

- ZUrlocker

March 31, 2023 at 12:39 am

Jimmy this is maybe your best post ever. You went way beyond the usual level of research here. Super interesting backgrounds to these guys. I had Spycraft back-in-day but despite my fascination with the subject matter, the game felt somewhat plodding to me and I didn’t get very far.
–Zack

- S

April 25, 2023 at 3:08 pm

Not through with the article, but got to post this before I forget it:

“as his actions frequently brought him face to face with the last underfed, under-conditioned, under- or over-aged dregs of the strangled Wehrmacht” is a somewhat accurate statement about the clinically dead Wehrmacht at this point but likely not about its troops in theaters like norway.

Norway as a whole got through ww 2 without real famine, with even northern finmark holding its consumption largely steady until the end.
Combined with the fact german soldiers regulary ate better then occupied civilians, and there are plenty of anectdotes of finnish soldiers gorging themselves on comparetivly plentiful german stores in the ( geographically and timewise) close lappland war, those german troops were probably decently fed, at the very least better then the average german soldier somewhere in the east.

While also being generally composed of lesser quality ” Festungstruppen”, thats by the standard for 1941. By late 44, early 45, plain logistical reality made sure there was little of the seniors or schoolkids armed with museum pieces that were increasingly used on the mainland in norway, as troop transport had been reduced to a trickle not conductive to shipping around last-ditch militias.

In conclusion, germany ended up with an army groups worth of solidly “B- “Manpower doing not much of anything up north while large Formations rapidly approacing ” F” Status collaped where it mattered. Not that they could have transported those Norway Troops south even if they wanted ( or sustain their supply in combat, away from the norwegian surplus), and our dear colby would have faced those forgotten second-rates ( with a smattering of elites after Nordlicht).

But thats enough pedantic nitpicking for a day, I think.

- Jimmy Maher

April 25, 2023 at 3:30 pm

Thanks!

Spycraft: The Great Game, Part 2
March 17, 2023

Warning: this article spoils the ending of Spycraft: The Great Game!

On January 6, 1994, Activision announced in a press release that it was “teaming up with William Colby, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, to develop and publish espionage-thriller videogames.” Soon after, Colby brought his good friend Oleg Kalugin into the mix as well. With the name-brand, front-of-the-box talent for Spycraft: The Great Game — and, if all went swimmingly, its sequels — thus secured, it was time to think about who should do the real work of making it.

Even as late as 1994, Activision’s resurrection from its near-death experience of 1991 was still very much a work in progress. The company was chronically understaffed in relation to its management’s ambitions. To make matters worse, much of the crew that had made Return to Zork, including that project’s mastermind William Volk, had just left. (On balance, this may not have been such a bad thing; that game is so unfair and obtuse as to come off almost as a satire of player-hostile adventure-game design.)

Luckily, Activision’s base in Los Angeles left it well situated, geographically speaking, to become a hotbed of interactive movie-making. Bobby Kotick hired Alan Gershenfeld, a former film critic and logistical enabler for Hollywood, to spearhead his efforts in that direction. Realizing that he still needed help with the interactive part of interactive movies, Gershenfeld in turn took the unusual step of reaching out to Bob Bates, co-founder of the Virginia-based rival studio and publisher Legend Entertainment, to see if he would be interested in designing Spycraft for Activision.

He was very interested. One reason for this was that Legend lived perpetually hand to mouth in a sea of bigger fish, and couldn’t afford to look askance at paying work of almost any description. But another, better one was that he was a child of the Washington Beltway with a father who had been employed by the National Security Agency. Bates had read his first spy novel before starting high school. Ever since, his literary consumption had included plenty of Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum, and John Le Carré. It was thus with no small excitement that he agreed to spend 600 hours creating a script and design document for an espionage game, which Legend’s programmers and artists might also end up playing a role in bringing to fruition if all went well.

At this time, writers of espionage fiction and techno-thrillers were still trying to figure out what the recent ending of the Cold War meant for their trade. Authors like those Bates had grown up reading were trying out international terrorist gangs, mafiosi, and drug runners as replacements for that handy all-purpose baddie the Soviet Union. Activision faced the same problem with Spycraft. One alternative — the most logical one in a way, given the time spans of its two star advisors’ intelligence careers — was to look to the past, to make the game a work of historical fiction. But the reality was that there was little appetite for re-fighting the Cold War in the popular culture of the mid-1990s; that would have to wait until a little later, until the passage of time had given those bygone days of backyard fallout shelters and duck-and-cover drills a glow of nostalgia to match that of radioactivity. In the meanwhile, Activision wanted something fresh, something with the sort of ripped-from-the-headlines relevance that Ken Williams liked to talk about.

Bates settled on a story line involving Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, that unstable fledgling democracy whose inheritance from the Soviet Union encompassed serious organized-crime and corruption problems along with the ongoing potential to initiate thermonuclear Armageddon any time it chose to do so. He prepared a 25,000-word walkthrough of a plot whose broad strokes would survive into the finished game. Changing the names of all of the real-world leaders involved in order to keep the lawyers at bay, it hinged around a race for the Russian presidency involving a moderate, Yeltsin-like incumbent and two right-wing opposition candidates. When one of the latter is assassinated, it redounds greatly to the benefit of his counterpart; the two right-wingers had otherwise looked likely to split the vote between themselves and hand the presidency back to the incumbent. So, there are reasons for suspicion from the get-go, and the surviving opposition candidate’s established ties with the Russian Mafia only gives more reasons. That said, it would presumably be a matter for Russia’s internal security police alone — if only the assassination hadn’t been carried out with an experimental CIA weapon, a new type of sniper rifle that can fire a deadly accurate and brutally lethal package of flechettes over long distances. It seems that there is a mole in the agency, possibly one with an agenda to incriminate the United States in the killing.

On the one hand, one can see in this story line some of the concerns that William Colby and Oleg Kalugin were expressing in the press at the time. On the other, they were hardly alone in identifying the instability of internal political Russia as a threat to the whole world, what with that country’s enormous nuclear arsenal. Bates himself says that he quickly realized that Activision was content to use Colby and Kalugin essentially as a commercial license, much like it would a hit movie or book. In the more than six months that he worked on Spycraft, he met Colby in person only one time, at his palatial Georgetown residence. (“It was clear that he was wealthy. He was very old-school. Circumspect, as you might imagine.”) Kalugin he never met at all. Fortunately, Legend’s niche in recent years had become the adaptation of commercial properties into games, and thus Bates had become very familiar with playing in other people’s universes, as it were. The milieu inhabited by Colby and Kalugin, as described by the two men in their memoirs, became in an odd sort of way just another of these pocket universes.

In other ways, however, Bates proved less suited to the game Activision was imagining. He was as traditionalist as adventure-game designers came, having originally founded Legend with the explicit goal of making it the heir to Infocom’s storied legacy. Activision’s leadership kept complaining that his design was not exciting enough, not “explosive” enough, too “tame.” To spice it up, they brought in an outside consultant named James Adams, a British immigrant to the United States who had written seven nonfiction books on the worlds of espionage and covert warfare along with three fictional thrillers. In the early fall of 1994, Bates, Adams, and some of Activision’s executives had a conversation which is seared on Bates’s memory like nothing else involving Spycraft.

They were saying it wasn’t intense or exciting enough. We were just kicking around ideas, and as a joke I said, “Well, we could always do a torture scene.”

And they said, “Yes! Yes!”

And I said, “No! No! I’m kidding. We’re not going to do that.”

And they said, “Yes, we really want to do that.”

And I said, “No. I am not putting the player in a position where they have to commit an act of torture. I just won’t do that.” At that point, the most violent thing I’d ever put into a game was having a boar charge onto a spear in Arthur…

Shortly after this discussion, Bates accepted Activision’s polite thanks for his contributions along with his paycheck for 600 hours of his time, and bowed out to devote himself entirely to Legend’s own games once again. Neither he nor his company had any involvement with Spycraft after that. His name doesn’t even appear in the finished game’s credits.

James Adams now took over full responsibility for the convoluted script, wrestling it into shape for production to begin in earnest by the beginning of 1995. The final product was released on Leap Day, 1996. It isn’t the game Bates would have made, but neither is it the uniformly thoughtless, exploitive one he might have feared its becoming when he walked away. What appears for long stretches to be a rah-rah depiction of the CIA — exactly what you might expect from a game made in partnership with one of the agency’s former directors — betrays from time to time an understanding of the moral bankruptcy of the spy business that is more John Le Carré than Ian Fleming. In the end, it sends you away with a distinctly queasy feeling about the things you’ve done and the logic you’ve used to justify them. All due credit goes to James Adams for delivering a game that’s more subtle than the one Activision — and probably Colby and Kalugin as well — thought they were getting.

But let’s table that topic for the moment, while I first go over the ways in which Spycraft also succeeds in being an unusually fun interactive procedural, the digital equivalent of a page-turning airport read.

Being a product of its era, Spycraft relies heavily on canned video clips of real actors. It’s distinguished, however, by the unusual quality of same, thanks to what must have been a substantial budget and to the presence of movie-making veterans like Alan Gershenfeld on Activision’s payroll. It was Gershenfeld who hired Ken Berris, an experienced director of music videos and commercials, to run the video shoots; he may not have been Steven Spielberg, but he was a heck of a lot more qualified than most people who fancied themselves interactive-movie auteurs. Most of those other games were shot like the movies of the 1930s, with the actors speaking their lines on a static sound stage before a fixed camera. Berris, by contrast, has seen Citizen Kane; he mostly shoots on location rather than in front of green screens that are waiting to be filled in with computer graphics later, and his environments are alive, with a camera that moves through them. Spycraft’s bravura opening sequence begins with a single long take shown from your point of view as you sign in at CIA headquarters and walk deeper into the building. I will go so far as to say that this painstakingly choreographed and shot high-wire act, involving several dozen extras moving through a space along with the camera and hitting their marks just so, might be the most technically impressive live-action video sequence I’ve ever seen in a game. It wouldn’t appear at all out of place in a prestige television show or a feature film. Suffice to say that it’s light years beyond the hammy amateurism of something like The 7th Guest, a sign of how far the industry had come in only a few years, just before the collapse of the adventure market put an end to the era of big-budget live-action interactive movies for better or for worse.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/spy1.mp4

There are no stars among the journeyman cast of supporting players, but there are at least a few faces and voices that might ring a bell somewhere at the back of your memory, thanks to their regular appearances in commercials, television shows, and films. Although some of the actors are better than others, by the usual B-movie standards of the 1990s games industry the performances as a whole are first rate. Both William Colby and Oleg Kalugin also appear in the game, playing themselves. Colby becomes an advisor of sorts to you, popping up from time to time to offer insights on your investigations; Kalugin has only one short and rather pointless cameo, dropping into the office for a brief aside when you’re meeting with another agent of Russia’s state-security apparatus. Both men acquit themselves unexpectedly well in their roles, undemanding though they may be. I can only conclude that all those years of pretending to be other people while engaged in the espionage trade must have been good training for acting in front of a camera.

You play a rookie CIA agent who is identified only as “Thorn.” You never actually appear onscreen; everything is shown from your first-person perspective. Thus you can imagine yourself to be of any gender, race, or appearance that you like. Spycraft still shows traces of the fairly conventional adventure-game structure it would doubtless have had if Bob Bates had continued as its lead designer: you have an inventory that you need to dig into from time to time, and will occasionally find yourself searching rooms and the like, using an interface not out of keeping with that found in Legend’s own contemporaneous graphic adventures, albeit built from still photographs rather than hand-drawn pixel art.

A lock pick should do the trick here…

But those parts of the game take up a relatively small part of your time. Mostly, Thorn lives in digital rather than meat space, reading and responding to a steady stream of emails, poking around in countless public and private databases, and using a variety of computerized tools that have come along to transform the nature of spying since the Cold War heyday of Colby and Kalugin. These tools — read, “mini-games” — take the place of the typical adventure game’s set-piece puzzles. In the course of playing Spycraft, you’ll have to ferret out license-plate numbers and the like from grainy satellite images; trace the locations of gunmen by analyzing bullet trajectories (this requires the use of the aptly named “Kennedy Assassination Tool”); identify faces captured by surveillance cameras; listen to phone taps; decode secret messages hidden in Usenet post headers; doctor photographs; trace suspects’ travels using airline-reservation systems and Department of Treasury banknote databases; even run a live exfiltration operation over a digital link-up.

The tactical exfiltration mini-game is the most ambitious of them all, reminding me of a similar one in Sid Meier’s Covert Action, another espionage game whose design approach is otherwise the exact opposite of Spycraft’s. It’s good enough that I kind of wish it was used more than once.

These mini-games serve their purpose well. If most of them are too simplistic to be very compelling in the long term, well, they don’t need to be; most of them only turn up once. Their purpose is to trip you up just long enough to give you a thrill of triumph when you figure them out and are rocketed onward to the next plot twist. Spycraft is meant to be an impressionistic thrill ride, what Rick Banks of Artech Digital Productions liked to call an “aesthetic simulation” back in the 1980s. If you find yourself complaining that you’re almost entirely on rails, you’re playing the wrong game; the whole point of Spycraft is the subjective experience of living out a spy movie, not presenting you with “interesting decisions” of the sort favored by more purist game designers like Sid Meier.

In Spycraft, you roam a simulated version of cyberspace using a Web-browser interface, complete with “Home,” “Back,” and “Forward” buttons — a rather remarkable inclusion, considering how new the very notion of browsing the Web still was when this game was released in February of 1996. The game even included a real online component: some of the sites you could access through the games received live updates if your computer was connected to the real Internet. Thankfully, nothing critical to completing the game was communicated in this way, for these sites are all, needless to say, long gone today.

As is par for the course with spy stories, the plot just keeps getting more and more tangled, perchance too much so for its own good. Just in case the murder of a Russian presidential candidate with a weapon stolen from the CIA isn’t enough for you, other threads eventually emerge, involving a gang of terrorists who are attempting to secure a live nuclear bomb and a plan to assassinate the president of the United States when he comes to Russia to sign a nuclear-arms-control agreement. You’re introduced to at least 50 different names, many of them with multiple aliases — again, this is a spy story — in the handful of hours it will take you to play the game. The fact that you spend most of your time at such a remove from them — shuffling through their personnel files and listening to them over phone taps rather than meeting them face to face — only makes it that much harder to keep them all straight, much less feel any real emotional investment in them. There are agents, double agents, triple agents, and, I’m tempted to say, quadruple agents around every corner.

I must confess that I really have no idea how well it all hangs together in the end. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt. I suppose it doesn’t really matter all that much; as I said, there’s only one path through the game, with minimal deviations allowed. Should you ever feel stuck, forward progress is just a matter of rummaging around until you find that email you haven’t read yet, that phone number you haven’t yet dialed, or that mini-game you haven’t yet completed successfully. Spycraft never demands that you understand its skein of conspiracies and conspirators, only that you jump through the series of hoops it sets before you in order to help your alter ego Thorn understand it. And that’s enough to deliver the impressionistic thrill ride it wants to give you.

The plot is as improbable as it is gnarly, making plenty of concessions to the need to entertain; it strains credibility to say the least that a rookie agent would be assigned to lead three separate critical investigations at the same time. And yet the game does demonstrate that it knows a thing or two about the state of the world. Indeed, it can come across as almost eerily prescient today, and not only for its recognition that a hollowed-out Russia with an aggressively revanchist leader could become every bit as great a threat to the democratic West as the Soviet Union once was. It also recognizes what an incredible tool for mass surveillance and oppression the Internet and other forms of networked digital technology were already becoming in 1996, seventeen years before the stunning revelations by Edward Snowden about the activities of the United States’s own National Security Agency. And then there is the torture so unwittingly proposed by Bob Bates, which did indeed make it into the game, some seven years before the first rumors began to emerge that the real CIA was engaging in what it called “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the name of winning the War on Terror.

Let’s take a moment now to look more closely at how Spycraft deals with this fraught subject in particular. Doing so should begin to show how this game is more morally conflicted than its gung-ho surface presentation might lead you to expect.

Let me first make one thing very clear: you don’t have to engage in torture to win Spycraft. This is one of the few places where you do have a measure of agency in choosing your path. The possibility of employing torture as a means to your ends is introduced about a third of the way into the game, after your colleagues have captured one Ying Chungwang, a former operative for North Korea, now a mercenary on the open market who has killed several CIA agents at the behest of various employers. She’s the Bonnie to another rogue operative’s Clyde. Your superiors suggest that you might be able to turn her by convincing her that her lover has also been captured and has betrayed her; this you can do by making a fake photograph of him looking relaxed and cooperative in custody. But there may also be another way to turn her, a special gadget hidden in the basement of the American embassy in Moscow, involving straps, electrodes, and high-voltage wiring. Most of your superiors strongly advise against using it: “There’s something called the Geneva Convention, Thorn, and we’d like to abide by it. Simply put, what you’re considering is illegal. Let’s not get dirty on this one.” Still, one does have to wonder why they keep it around if they’re so opposed to it…

Coincidentally or not, the photo-doctoring mini-game is easily the most frustrating of them all, an exercise in trial and error that’s made all the worse by the fact that you aren’t quite sure what you’re trying to create in the first place. You might therefore feel an extra temptation to just say screw it and head on down to the torture chamber. If you do, another, more chilling sort of mini-game ensues, in which you must pump enough electric current through your victim to get her to talk, without turning the dial so high that you kill her. “It burns!” she screams as you twist the knob. If you torture like Goldilocks — not too little, not too much — she breaks down eventually and tells you everything you want to know. And that’s that. Nobody ever mentions what happened in that basement again.

What are we to make of this? We might wish that the game would deliver Thorn some sort of comeuppance for this horrid deed. Maybe Ying could give you bad intelligence just to stop the pain, or you could get automatically hauled away to prison as soon as you leave the basement, as does happen if you kill her by using too much juice. But if there’s one thing we can learn from the lives of Colby and Kalugin, it’s that such an easy, cause-and-effect moral universe isn’t the one inhabited by spies. Yes, torture does often yield bad intelligence; in the 1970s, Colby claimed this was a reason the CIA was not in the habit of using it, a utilitarian argument which has been repeated again and again in the decades since to skeptics who aren’t convinced that the agency’s code of ethics alone would be enough to cause it to resist the temptation. Yet torture is not unique in being fallible; other interrogation techniques have weaknesses of their own, and can yield equally bad intelligence. The decision to torture or not to torture shouldn’t be based on its efficacy or lack thereof. Doing so just leads us back to the end-justifies-the-means utilitarianism that permitted the CIA and the KGB to commit so many outrages, with the full complicity of upstanding patriots like Colby and Kalugin who were fully convinced that everything they did was for the greater good. In the end, the decision not to torture must be a matter of moral principle if we are ever to trust the people making it.

Then again, if you had hold of an uncooperative member of a terrorist cell that was about to detonate an atomic bomb in a major population center, what would you do? This is where the slippery slope begins. The torture scene in Spycraft is deeply disturbing, but I don’t think that James Adams put it there strictly for the sake of sensationalism. Ditto the lack of consequences that follow. In the real world, virtue must often be its own reward, and the wages of sin are often a successful career. I think I’m glad that Spycraft recognizes this and fails to engage in any tit-for-tat vision of temporal justice — disturbed, yes, but oddly proud of the game at the same time. I’m not sure that I would have had the guts to put torture in there myself, but I’m convinced by some of the game’s other undercurrents that it was put there for purposes other than shock value. (Forgive the truly dreadful pun…)

Let’s turn the clock back to the very beginning of the game for an example. The first thing you see when you click the “New Game” button is the CIA’s official Boy Scout-esque values statement: “We conduct ourselves according to the highest standards of integrity, morality, and honor, and to the spirit and letter of our law and constitution.” Meanwhile a gruffer, more cynical voice is telling you how it really is: “Some things the president shouldn’t know. For a politician, ignorance can be the key to survival, so the facts might be… flexible. The best thing you can do is to treat your people right… and watch every move they make.” It’s a brilliant juxtaposition, culminating in the irony that is the agency’s hilariously overwrought Biblical motto: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” And then we’re walking into CIA headquarters, an antiseptic place filled with well-scrubbed, earnest-looking people, and that note of moral ambiguity is forgotten for the nonce as we “build the team” for a new “op.”

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/spy2.mp4

But as you play on, the curtain keeps wafting aside from time to time to reveal another glimpse of an underlying truth that you — or Thorn, at least — may not have signed on for. One who has seen this truth and not been set free is a spy known as Birdsong, a mole in the Russian defense establishment who first started leaking secrets to the CIA because he was alarmed by some of his more reactionary colleagues and genuinely thought it was the right thing to do. He gets chewed up and spit out by both sides. “I can tell the truth from lies no more,” he says in existential despair. “Everything is blurry. This has been hell. Everyone has betrayed me and I have betrayed everyone.” Many an initially well-meaning spy in the real world has wound up saying the same.

And then — and most of all — there’s the shocking, unsatisfying, but rather amazingly brave ending of the game. By this point, the plot has gone through more twists and turns than a Klein bottle, and the CIA has decided it would prefer for the surviving Russian opposition candidate to win the election after all, because only he now looks likely to sign the arms-control treaty that the American president whom the CIA serves so desperately desires. Unfortunately, one Yuri, a dedicated and incorruptible Russian FSB agent who has been helping you throughout your investigations, is still determined to bring the candidate down for his entanglements with the Russian Mafia. In the very last interactive scene of the game, you can choose to let Yuri take the candidate into custody and uphold the rule of law in a country not much known for it, which will also result in the arms-control agreement failing to go through and you getting drummed out of the CIA. Or you can shoot your friend Yuri in cold blood, allowing the candidate to become the new president of Russia and escape any sort of reckoning for his crimes — but also getting the arms-control agreement passed, and getting yourself a commendation.

As adventure-game endings go, it’s the biggest slap in the face to the player since Infocom’s Infidel, upending her moral universe at a stroke. It becomes obvious now, if we still doubted it, that James Adams appreciates very well the perils of trying to achieve worthy goals by unworthy means. Likewise, he appreciates the dangers that are presented to a free society by a secretive institution like the CIA — an arrogant institution, which too often throughout its history has been convinced that it is above the moral reckoning of tedious ground dwellers. Perhaps he even sees how a man like William Colby could become a reflection of the agency he served, could be morally and spiritually warped by it until it had cost him his family and his faith. “Uniquely in the American bureaucracy,” wrote Colby in his memoir, “the CIA understood the necessity to combine political, psychological, and paramilitary tools to carry out a strategic concept of pressure on an enemy or to strengthen an incumbent.” When you begin to believe that only you and “your” people are “uniquely” capable of understanding anything, you’ve started down a dangerous road indeed, one that before long will allow you to do almost anything in the name of some ineffable greater good, using euphemisms like “pressure” in place of “assassinate,” “strengthen an incumbent” in place of “interfere in a sovereign foreign country’s elections” — or, for that matter, “enhanced interrogation techniques” in place of “torture.”

Spycraft is a fascinating, self-contradictory piece of work, slick but subversive, escapist but politically aware, simultaneously carried away by the fantasy of being a high-tech spy with gadgets and secrets to burn and painfully aware of the yawning ethical abyss that lies at the end of that path. Like the trade it depicts, the game sucks you in, then it repulses you. Nevertheless, you should by all means play it. And as you do so, be on the lookout for the other points of friction where it seems to be at odds with its own box copy.

Spycraft wasn’t a commercial success. It arrived too late for that, at the beginning of the year that rather broke the back of interactive movies and adventure games in general. Thus the Spycraft II that is boldly promised during the end credits never appeared. Luckily, Activision was in a position to absorb the failure of their conflicted spy game. For the company was already changing with the times, riding high on the success of Mechwarrior 2, a 3D action game in which you drive a giant robot into combat. “How about a big mech with an order to fry?” ran its tagline; this was the very definition of pure escapism. Mainstream gaming, it turned out, was not destined to be such a ripped-from-the-headlines affair after all.

I do wonder sometimes whether Colby and Kalugin ever knew what a bleak note their one and only game ended on. Somehow I suspect not. It was, after all, just another business deal to them, another way of cashing in on the careers they had put behind them. Their respective memoirs tell us that both were very, very smart men, but neither comes across as overly introspective. I’m not sure they would even recognize what a telling commentary Spycraft’s moral bleakness is on their own lives.

It was just two months after the game’s release that William Colby disappeared from his vacation home. When his body turned up on May 6, 1996, those few people who had both bought the game and been following the manhunt were confronted with an eyebrow-raising coincidence. For it just so happens that the CIA’s flechette gun isn’t the only experimental weapon you encounter in the course of the game. Later on, an even more devious one turns up, a sort of death ray that can kill its victims without leaving a mark on them — that causes them to die from what appears to be a massive coronary arrest. The coroner who examined Colby’s body insisted that he must have had a “cardiovascular incident,” despite having no previous history of heart disease. Hmm…

The case of Colby’s demise has never been officially reopened, but one more theory has been added to those of death by misadventure and death by murder since 1996. His son Carl Colby, who made a documentary film about his father in 2011, believes that he took his own life purposefully. “I think he’d had enough of this life,” he reveals at the end of his film. “He called me two weeks before he died, asking for my absolution for his not doing enough for my sister Catherine when she was so ill. When his body was found, he was carrying a picture of my sister.” In a strange way, it does seem consistent with this analytical, distant man, for whom brutal necessities were a stock in trade, to calmly eat his dinner, get into his canoe, paddle out from shore, and drown himself.

Oleg Kalugin, on the other hand, lived on. Russia’s new President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent himself, opened a legal case against Kalugin shortly after he took office, charging him with “disclosing sources and methods” in his 1994 memoir that he had sworn an oath to keep secret. Kalugin was already living in the United States at that time, and has not dared to return to his homeland since. From 2002, when a Russian court pronounced him guilty as charged, he has lived under the shadow of a lengthy prison sentence, or worse, should the Russian secret police ever succeed in taking him into custody. In light of the fate that has befallen so many other prominent critics of Russia’s current regime, one has to assume that he continues to watch his back carefully even today, at age 88. You can attempt to leave the great game, but the great game never leaves you.

(Sources: the book Game Plan by Alan Gershenfeld, Mark Loparco, and Cecilia Barajas; the documentary film The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby; Sierra On-Line’s newsletter InterAction of Summer 1993; Questbusters of February 1994; Electronic Entertainment of December 1995; Mac Addict of September 1996; Next Generation of February 1996; Computer Gaming World of July 1996; New York Times of January 6 1994 and June 27 2002. And thanks as always to Bob Bates for taking the time to talk to me about his long career in games.

Spycraft: The Great Game is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com.)

Comments
26 Responses

- Marco

March 17, 2023 at 7:13 pm

This is a good review and clearly identifies Spycraft’s strengths and weaknesses. The plot absolutely throws the kitchen sink at you, with an incredible amount of detail, yet at the same time is linear and quick to barrel through if you’ve played it before. It could have done with a bit more smelling-the-roses character development.

Having said that, there are a few branch points. The first time I played, the head of the CIA’s Moscow station ended up dead in a bath, but second time I couldn’t get that to happen, not matter what I tried.

I think I’ve said before that my criteria for a gold-medal adventure game puzzle are that it’s self-contained (not reliant on pixel hunts or unlikely object combinations), it feels like a plausible obstacle and solution within the game world, and that it has a twist which forces you to think outside the box. Finding Birdsong is one of the few puzzles in any game that meet those with distinction.

The rest of the puzzles are variable – some are almost as good, though I found the tactical exfiltration one extremely confusing and difficult, especially on the second playthrough.

I found the blending of fact and fiction to be so seamless as to feel unsettling – which for me is the hallmark of the best adventure games, that you feel partially within the game even when you’ve stepped away from the computer. You’ve rightly pointed out the coincidence between a weapon in the game and Colby’s death – there’s also a point where something that looks like a bit of promotion for Activision actually contains vital information.

- Ken Brubaker

March 17, 2023 at 8:02 pm

You’ve got a couple of extra ‘the’s in this sentence, I think:

Changing the names of the all of the real-world the leaders

- Jimmy Maher

March 17, 2023 at 8:36 pm

Thanks!

- John

March 17, 2023 at 8:11 pm

I played this some time around… I want to say 2000? During middle or high school. Sure enough, I ran aground at the “fake photo” stage; I remember the game unhelpfully throwing back “That photo won’t fly” at you over and over with no additional guidance. A lot of dimensions to fail that photo task on: you need to do some spycrafty reading of information to pick things like the right local newspaper, the right brand of cigarettes, but then also you need to do fiddly orientation, scaling, and positioning of all the elements you’re adding.

Much more recently I went back and actually finished it.

- Michael

June 3, 2023 at 3:11 am

Great pair of articles Jimmy :) I played Spycraft back when it came out and really loved it.

Funnily enough, I had no trouble at all with the fake photo puzzle, but I was never able to figure out how to do the torture scene properly. As a teenager (when I first played it) it freaked me out too bad to try properly. Then years later when I played through it again with a friend, we tried to figure out the torture scene, but no matter what we tried, Ying either just screamed and writhed in pain without saying anything, or else immediately died. After several tries we just gave up and went back to the fake photo option instead.

As a teenager I got stuck around 3/4 of the way through the game and ended up resorting to a walkthrough, and was dreadfully confused about shooting Yuri at the end. I figured maybe I had just missed something. Playing it again as an adult, I of course opted not to shoot him, only to be absolutely chewed out by the head of the CIA and fired in the ending.

There is an even worse ending though, where Washington DC ends up being blown up by a nuclear explosion. So at least I avoided that!

- Michael

March 17, 2023 at 8:38 pm

“them.Spycraft” missing space after the period.
“that yo need.” = “that you need.”

- Jimmy Maher

March 17, 2023 at 8:50 pm

Thanks!

- glorkvorn

March 19, 2023 at 3:13 am

I find it interesting how *common* this trope of “when the stakes are really high, sometimes good people must resort to terrible things like torture and murder” was during the fiction of the 90s. Offhand, I can think of at least 5 other examples from popular mainstream fiction, and I’m sure there’s many more I don’t know. One is the 4th Harry Potter book, where for some reason it’s necessary for 14-year-old Harry to learn an illegal dark magic spell that has no purpose except to torture people.

The funny thing is, this is *after* the Cold War and *before* the War on Terror. The world was relatively peaceful! I’ve heard it said that the mood of art tends to go the opposite way of world affairs. When society is suffering from war, art becomes more happy to give people an escape. When society is peaceful, art becomes darker to give them something to think about. I don’t know if that’s always true, but it does seem like popular fiction stopped this “our heroes are morally grey antiheroes who must resort to torture” plot after it became a real issue in the news (with the notable exception of “24”, but that show was thinly-veiled propaganda for the war itself).

- Jimmy Maher

March 20, 2023 at 6:55 am

On the other hand, there was a huge rise in more blatant anti-hero dramas after September 11. Often presented under the guise of acknowledging “nuance” or “shades of gray,” at some point it seemed to become more a matter of wallowing in our worst instincts for the sake of it.

(24 is a weird specimen, isn’t it? Has any hugely popular show ever disappeared from the zeitgeist more quickly? When it’s remembered at all today, it’s as a vaguely disreputable echo of a past most of us would rather forget. It’s become mostly of interest to historians and sociologists as a reflection of the toxic mixture of patriotism, prejudice, and sheer blood-thirstiness that marked the public discourse in the United States between 2001 and 2004.)

- fform

March 20, 2023 at 1:21 pm

Frankly the odder series to me is NCIS, the JAG spin-off that remains in production to this day. JAG was created by Belisario as a PR move for the navy after Tailhook, all clean-cut young American do-goodness. Then 9/11 happens and the spin-off full of warped patriotism and illegal violence lasts twice as long in production.

- Ross

March 20, 2023 at 1:21 pm

I believe in the 90s there was a lot of “dark government conspiracy”-type fiction in mass media (cough the X files cough) despite the relative peace largely as a kind of leftover anxiety from the cold war. I like to say that people whose formative mass media years were the 90s don’t really appreciate the extent to which the older generation was raised with ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY that the world was going to end in our lifetimes in an atomic holocaust, and without understanding that, nothing that happened in the 80s makes a lick of sense (For one thing, we definitely would not have dressed like that if we thought there would be a “thirty years later” for pictures to resurface). There was suddenly a lot of freed up nervous energy that turned, to simplify things an awful lot, into various forms of “If the government has been lying to us for decades about the Soviet Union being an evil empire of people who were nasty to the core, hypercompetent, and absolutely dedicated to our destruction with their vast and implacable ruthless efficiency and they are just waiting for even the smallest slip before they kill us all, what ELSE are they lying about?”

- Alianora La Canta

March 26, 2023 at 10:11 pm

Harry Potter doesn’t get taught to do any illegal magic in school (though during the series he figures out how to do some anyway, and by the time he is able to cast illegal spells “properly”, it has conveniently been legalised). Rather, in the 4th Harry Potter book, he and his classmates get taught the effect of the curses by having them used upon them (with the unconvincing excuse provided of learning to resist them). It is possible that the series being conceived in 1990 (the very end of the Cold War) may have been a factor, because this distinction still supports the gist of your post.

- Michael Z

March 19, 2023 at 6:22 pm

I must admit, as engrossed as I was in the story, seeing Questbusters listed as a source gave me a smile. My favorite underrated adventure game zine. Well done.

- Leo Vellés

March 19, 2023 at 6:23 pm

“…not presenting you with “interesting decisions” of the sort favored by by more purist game designers like Sid Meier”.
A double ‘by’ there Jimmy

- Jimmy Maher

March 19, 2023 at 6:29 pm

Thanks!

- Nate

March 20, 2023 at 7:52 pm

Interesting game that I never heard of. Some suggestions:

“replacements for that handy all-purpose baddie the Soviet Union”

-> “handy, all-purpose baddie, the Soviet Union”

“became in an odd sort of way just another of these pocket universes.”

-> “became, in an odd sort of way, just another of these pocket universes.”

“conversation which is seared on Bate’s memory like nothing else involving Spycraft.”

“the very notion of browsing the Web still was when this game”
Still was “new”?

“Kalugin was already living in the United States at that time, and has not dared to return”
No comma since it’s a compound verb

- Nate

March 20, 2023 at 7:56 pm

Interesting game that I never heard of. Some suggestions:

“replacements for that handy all-purpose baddie the Soviet Union”

-> “handy, all-purpose baddie, the Soviet Union”

“became in an odd sort of way just another of these pocket universes.”

-> “became, in an odd sort of way, just another of these pocket universes.”

“conversation which is seared on Bate’s memory like nothing else involving Spycraft.”

If you meant the conversation is his strongest memory out of every memory of his:
-> “conversation involving Spycraft, which is seared into Bate’s memory like nothing else.”

Or, if you meant the conversation is his strongest memory out of every memory of Spycraft only:
-> “conversation, which is seared into Bate’s memory like nothing else involving Spycraft.”

“the very notion of browsing the Web still was when this game”
-> Still was “new”?

“Kalugin was already living in the United States at that time, and has not dared to return”
-> No comma since it’s a compound verb

I accidentally posted a draft of this comment previously, so please delete it.

- f

March 21, 2023 at 8:02 am

Thank you for the conclusion to this two-parter.

I remember reading good things about the game years and years ago, and eventually bought it on GOG for next to nothing but still haven’t gotten around to giving it a spin. Might change that soon.

Two small typos: “exploitive” and “James Adam” (missing the final “s”)

- Jimmy Maher

March 21, 2023 at 8:19 am

Thanks! (“Exploitive” was as intended, unless I’m missing something.)

- f

March 21, 2023 at 4:35 pm

My bad – seems like both ways of spelling are correct (not a native English-speaker myself) :)

https://grammarist.com/spelling/exploitative-exploitive/

- Simon N Goodwin

March 24, 2023 at 2:41 pm

Great stuff as ever.

Tiny typo: “seared on Bate’s memory”

Favour Bates’ or Bates’s

- Jimmy Maher

March 24, 2023 at 2:58 pm

Thanks!

- Lava Ghost

April 24, 2023 at 6:24 am

The term “deep-fake” feels anachronistic in this article. The term “deepfake” (no hyphen) was coined in 2017 and generally refers only to faked media created with the help of artificial intelligence.

- Jimmy Maher

April 25, 2023 at 7:34 am

Good point. Thanks!

- Stephen

May 13, 2023 at 1:55 am

Great game literally, would love to see a remake, there is nothing quite like it in the gaming industry, the time is ni.

- Ibrahim Gucukoglu

June 17, 2023 at 1:45 pm

Thank you for writing about one of Activision’s finest games. I can’t help but feel a surge of excitement as I reflect on my own journey with this extraordinary game. Being visually impaired, I got to play this game with friends, but I never imagined I would have the opportunity to step into the shoes of a spy, but this game shattered all expectations and transported me into a world of boyish fantasy.

From the moment we bought the game, I knew I was in for a treat. What set this experience apart was the inclusion of videos that were not compressed into the game data. This meant that I got a chance to fully indulge in all the varying endings and witness the countless ways in which I could fail or meet an unfortunate demise. I found great amusement in exploring these different outcomes, each one leaving a lasting impression.

One character that left an indelible mark on me was the insidious Brit, Blake, a member of the PROCAT terrorist group. His charm and glib mannerisms masked his true intentions, and he was always ready to stab you in the back given the chance. I recall one of my favorite moments: the exploding laptop puzzle. The cleverness of the puzzle design and the satisfaction of solving it added an extra layer of excitement to the gameplay.

The game’s attention to detail was truly commendable. Although I never got to witness the nuclear devastation caused by the pit explosion in Washington, D.C., there was a chilling cameo in a news report. The shock and distress in the news reader’s voice sent shivers down my spine and made me truly feel the weight of failure should I reach that unfortunate conclusion. It was a stark reminder that every decision and action carried consequences.

What truly stood out for me was the game’s refusal to reward betrayal. Regardless of whether I chose to kill the President of the United States or not during his final speech, I would face the same fate—death. This consistency and unwavering commitment to storytelling drew me in even further, immersing me in a world where the stakes were high, and failure had tangible consequences.

I would be remiss not to mention that the same game engine was used for the Santa Fae mysteries, two other games that I hope you will cover in a future blog post.

These memories bring a smile to my face, reminding me of the power of gaming to transcend limitations and transport us to incredible realms. This game, with its immersive storytelling, captivating gameplay, and unforgettable moments, will forever hold a special place in my heart. Thank you again for such a well written and thoroughly researched article and keep up the good work.

Wing Commander IV
April 7, 2023

It’s tough to put a neat label on Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom. On the one hand, it was a colossally ambitious and expensive project — in fact, the first computer game in history with a budget exceeding $10 million. On the other, it was a somewhat rushed, workmanlike game, developed in half the time of Wing Commander III using the same engine and tools. That these two things can simultaneously be true is down to the strange economics of mid-1990s interactive movies.

Origin Systems and Chris Roberts, the Wing Commander franchise’s development studio and mastermind respectively, wasted very little time embarking on the fourth numbered game in the series after finishing up the third one in the fall of 1994. Within two weeks, Roberts was hard at work on his next story outline. Not long after the holiday season was over and it was clear that Wing Commander III had done very well indeed for itself, his managers gave him the green light to start production in earnest, on a scale of which even a dreamer like him could hardly have imagined a few years earlier.

Like its predecessor, Wing Commander IV was destined to be an oddly bifurcated project. The “game” part of the game — the missions you actually fly from the cockpit of a spaceborne fighter — was to be created in Origin’s Austin, Texas, offices by a self-contained and largely self-sufficient team of programmers and mission designers, using the existing flight engine with only modest tweaks, without a great deal of day-to-day communication with Roberts himself. Meanwhile the latter would spend the bulk of 1995 in Southern California, continuing his career as Hollywood’s most unlikely and under-qualified movie director, shooting a script created by Frank DePalma and Terry Borst from his own story outline. It was this endeavor that absorbed the vast majority of a vastly increased budget.

For there were two big, expensive changes on this side of the house. One was a shift away from the green-screen approach of filming real actors on empty sound stages, with the scenery painted in during post-production by pixel artists; instead Origin had its Hollywood partners Crocodille Productions build traditional sets, no fewer than 37 of them in all. The other was the decision to abandon videotape in favor of 35-millimeter stock, the same medium on which feature films were shot. This was a dubiously defensible decision on practical grounds, what with the sharply limited size and resolution of the computer-monitor screens on which Roberts’s movie would be seen, but it says much about where the young would-be auteur’s inspirations and aspirations lay. “My goal is to bring the superior production values of Hollywood movies to the interactive realm,” he said in an interview. Origin would wind up paying Crocodile $7.7 million in all in the pursuit of that lofty goal.

The hall of the Terran Assembly was one of the more elaborate of the Wing Commander IV sets, showing how far the series had come but also in a way how far it still had to go, what with its distinctly plastic, stage-like appearance. It will be seen on film in a clip later on in this article.

These changes served only to distance the movie part of Wing Commander from the game part that much more; now the folks in Austin didn’t even have to paint backgrounds for Roberts’s film shoot. More than ever, the two halves of the whole were water and oil rather than water and wine. All told, it’s doubtful whether the flying-and-shooting part of Wing Commander IV absorbed much more than 10 percent of the total budget.

Origin was able to hire most of the featured actors from last time out to return for Wing Commander IV. Once again, Mark Hamill, one of the most sensible people in Hollywood, agreed to head up the cast as Colonel Blair, the protagonist and the player’s avatar, for a salary of $419,100 for the 43-day shoot. (“A lot of actors spend their whole lives wanting to be known as anything,” he said when delicately asked if he ever dwelt upon his gradual, decade-long slide down through the ranks of the acting profession, from starring as Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars blockbusters to starring in videogames. “I always thought I should be happy for what I have instead of being unhappy for what I don’t have. So, you know, if things are going alright with your family… I don’t know, not really. I think it’s good.”) Likewise, Tom Wilson ($117,300) returned to play Blair’s fellow pilot and frenemy Maniac; Malcolm McDowell ($285,500) again played the stiffly starched Admiral Tolwyn; and John Rhys-Davies ($52,100) came back as the fighter jock turned statesman Paladin. After the rest of the cast and incidental expenses were factored in, the total bill for the actors came to just under $1.4 million.

Far from being taken aback by the numbers involved, Origin made them a point of pride. If anything, it inflated them; the total development cost of $12 million which was given to magazines like Computer Gaming World over the course of one of the most extensive pre-release hype campaigns the industry had ever seen would appear to be a million or two over the real figure, based on what I’ve been able to glean from the company’s internal budgeting documents. Intentionally or not, the new game’s subtitle made the journalists’ headlines almost too easy to write: clearly, the true “price of freedom” was $12 million. The award for the most impassioned preview must go to the British edition of PC Gamer, which proclaimed that the game’s eventual release would be “one of the most important events of the twentieth century.” On an only slightly more subdued note, Computer Gaming World noted that “if Wing Commander III was like Hollywood, this game is Hollywood.” The mainstream media got in on the excitement as well: CNN ran a segment on the work in progress, Newsweek wrote it up, and Daily Variety was correct in calling it “the most expensive CD-ROM production ever” — never mind a million or two here or there. Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell earned some more money by traveling the morning-radio and local-television circuit in the final weeks before the big release.

Wing Commander IV was advertised on television at a time when that was still a rarity for computer games. The advertisements blatantly spoiled what was intended to be a major revelation about the real villain of the story. (You have been warned!)See https://www.youtube.com/embed/VgE8KwpWhsI

The game was launched on February 8, 1996, in a gala affair at the Beverly Hills Planet Hollywood, with most of the important cast members in attendance to donate their costumes — “the first memorabilia from a CD-ROM game to be donated to the internationally famous restaurant,” as Origin announced proudly. (The restaurant itself appears to have been less enthused; the costumes were never put on display after the party, and seem to be lost now.) The assembled press included representatives of CNN, The Today Show, HBO, Delta Airlines’s in-flight magazine, and the Associated Press among others. In the weeks that followed, Chris Roberts and Mark Hamill did a box-signing tour in conjunction with Incredible Universe, a major big-box electronics chain of the time.

Tom Wilson, Malcolm McDowell, and Mark Hamill at the launch party.

The early reviews were positive, and not just those in the nerdy media. “The game skillfully integrates live-action video with computer-generated graphics and sophisticated gameplay. Has saving the universe ever been this much fun?” asked Newsweek, presumably rhetorically. Entertainment Weekly called Wing Commander IV “a movie game that takes CD-ROM warfare into the next generation,” giving it an A- on its final report card. The Salt Lake City Tribune said that it had “a cast that would make any TV-movie director jealous — and more than a few feature-film directors as well. While many games tout themselves as interactive movies, Wing Commander IV is truly deserving of the title — a pure joy to watch and play.” The Detroit Free Press said that “at times, it was like watching an episode of a science-fiction show.”

The organs of hardcore gaming were equally fulsome. Australia’s Hyper magazine lived up to its name (Hyperventilate? Hyperbole?) with the epistemologically questionable assertion that “if you don’t play this then you really don’t own a computer.” Computer Gaming World, still the United States’s journal of record, was almost as effusive, writing that “as good as the previous installment was, it served only as a rough prototype for the polished chrome that adorns Wing Commander IV. This truly is the vanguard of the next generation of electronic entertainment.”

Surprisingly, it was left to PC Gamer, the number-two periodical in the American market, normally more rather than less hype-prone than its older and somewhat stodgier competitor, to inject a note of caution into the critical discourse, by acknowledging how borderline absurd it was on the face of it to release a game in which 90 percent of the budget had gone into the cut scenes.

How you feel about Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom is going to depend a lot on how you felt about Wing Commander III and the direction the series seems to be headed in.

When the original Wing Commander came out, it was a series of incredible, state-of-the-art space-combat sequences, tied together with occasional animated cut scenes. Today, Wing Commander IV seems more like a series of incredible, full-motion-video cut scenes tied together with occasional space-combat sequences. You can see the shift away from gameplay and toward multimedia flash in one of the ads for Wing Commander IV; seven of the eight little “bullet points” that list the game’s impressive new features are devoted to improvements in the quality of the video. Only the last point says anything about actual gameplay. If the tail’s not wagging the dog yet, it’s getting close.

For all its cosmetic improvements, Wing Commander IV feels just a little hollow. I can’t help thinking about what the fourth Wing Commander game might be like if the series had moved in the opposite direction, making huge improvements in the actual gameplay, rather than spending more and more time and effort on the stuff in between.

Still, these concerns were only raised parenthetically; even PC Gamer’s reviewer saw fit to give the game a rating of 90 percent after unfurrowing his brow.

Today, however, the imbalance described above has become even more difficult to overlook, and seems even more absurd. As my regular readers know, narrative-oriented games are the ones I tend to be most passionate about; I’m the farthest thing from a Chris Crawford, insisting that the inclusion of any set-piece story line is a betrayal of interactive entertainment’s potential. My academic background is largely in literary studies, which perhaps explains why I tend to want to read games like others do books. And yet, with all that said, I also recognize that a game needs to give its player something interesting to do.

I’m reminded of an anecdote from Steve Diggle, a guitarist for the 1970s punk band Buzzcocks. He tells of seeing the keyboardist for the progressive-rock band Yes performing with “a telephone exchange of electronic things that nobody could afford or relate to. At the end, he brought an alpine horn out — because he was Swiss. It was a long way from Little Richard. I thought, ‘Something’s got to change.'” There’s some of the same quality to Wing Commander IV. Matters have gone so far out on a limb that one begins to suspect the only thing left to be done is just to burn it all down and start over.

But we do strive to be fair around here, so let’s try to evaluate the movie and the game of Wing Commander IV on their own merits before we address their imperfect union.

Chris Roberts is not a subtle storyteller; his influences are always close to the surface. The first three Wing Commander games were essentially a retelling of World War II in the Pacific, with the Terran Confederation for which Blair flies in the role of the United States and its allies and the evil feline Kilrathi in that of Japan. Now, with the alien space cats defeated once and for all, Roberts has moved on to the murkier ethical terrain of the Cold War, where battles are fought in the shadows and friend and foe are not so easy to distinguish. Instead of being lauded like the returning Greatest Generation were in the United States after World War II, Blair and his comrades who fought the good fight against the Kilrathi are treated more like the soldiers who came back from Vietnam. We learn that we’ve gone from rah-rah patriotism to something else the very first time we see Blair, when he meets a down-on-his-luck fellow veteran in a bar and can, at you the player’s discretion, give him a few coins to help him out. Shades of gray are not really Roberts’s forte; earnest guy that he is, he prefers the primary-color emotions. Still, he’s staked out his dramatic territory and now we have to go with it.

Having been relegated to the reserves after the end of the war with the Kilrathi, Blair has lately been running a planetside farm, but he’s called back to active duty to deal with a new problem on the frontiers of the Terran Confederation: a series of pirate raids in the region of the Border Worlds, a group of planets that is allied with the Confederation but has always preferred not to join it formally. Because the attacks are all against Confederation vessels rather than those of the Border Worlds, it is assumed that the free-spirited inhabitants of the latter are behind them. I trust that it won’t be too much a spoiler if I reveal here that the reality is far more sinister.

By all means, we should give props to Roberts for not just finding some way to bring the Kilrathi back as humanity’s existential threat. They are still around, and even make an appearance in Wing Commander IV, but they’ve seen the error of their ways with Confederation guidance and are busily rebuilding their society on more peaceful lines. (The parallels with World War II-era — and now postwar — Japan, in other words, still hold true.)

For all the improved production values, the Kilrathi in Wing Commander IV still look as ridiculous as ever, more cuddly than threatening.

The returns from Origin’s $9 million investment in the movie are front and center. An advantage of working with real sets instead of green screens is the way that the camera is suddenly allowed to move, making the end result look less like something filmed during the very earliest days of cinema and more like a product of the post-Citizen Kane era. One of the very first scenes is arguably the most impressive of them all. The camera starts on the ceiling of a meeting hall, looking directly down at the assembled dignitaries, then slowly sweeps to ground level, shifting as it moves from a vertical to a horizontal orientation. I’d set this scene up beside the opening of Activision’s Spycraft — released at almost the same time as Wing Commander IV, as it happens — as the most sophisticated that this generation of interactive movies ever got by the purely technical standards of film-making. (I do suspect that Wing Commander IV’s relative adroitness is not so much down to Chris Roberts as to its cinematographer, a 21-year Hollywood veteran named Eric Goldstein.)

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/wc4-1.mp4

The acting, by contrast, is on about the same level as Wing Commander III: professional if not quite passionate. Mark Hamill’s dour performance is actually among the least engaging. (This is made doubly odd by the fact that he had recently been reinventing himself as a voice actor, through a series of portrayals — including a memorable one in the game Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers — that are as giddy and uninhibited as his Colonel Blair isn’t.) On the other hand, it’s a pleasure to hear Malcolm McDowell and John Rhys-Davies deploy their dulcet Shakespearian-trained voices on even pedestrian (at best) dialog like this. But the happiest member of the cast must be Tom Wilson, whose agent’s phone hadn’t exactly been ringing off the hook in recent years; his traditional-cinema career had peaked with his role as the cretinous villain Biff in the Back to the Future films. Here he takes on the similarly over-the-top role of Maniac, a character who had become a surprise hit with the fans in Wing Commander III, and sees his screen time increased considerably in the fourth game as a result. As comic-relief sidekicks go, he’s no Sancho Panza, but he does provide a welcome respite from Blair’s always prattling on, a little listlessly and sleepy-eyed at times, about duty and honor and what hell war is (such hell that Chris Roberts can’t stop making games about it).

That said, the best humor in Wing Commander IV is of the unintentional kind. There’s a sort of Uncanny Valley in the midst of this business of interactive movies, as there is in so many creative fields. When the term was applied to games that merely took some inspiration from cinema, perhaps with a few (bad) actors mouthing some lines in front of green screens, it was easier to accept fairly uncritically. But the closer games like this one come to being real movies, the more their remaining shortcomings seem to stand out, and, paradoxically, the farther from their goal they seem to be. The reality is that 37 sets isn’t many by Hollywood standards — and most of these are cheap, sparse, painfully plastic-looking sets at that. Like in those old 1960s episodes of Star Trek, everybody onscreen visibly jumps — not in any particular unison, mind you — when the camera shakes to indicate an explosion and the party-supply-store smoke machines start up. The ray guns they shoot each other with look like gaudy plastic toys that Wal Mart would be ashamed to stock, while the accompanying sound effects would have been rejected as too cheesy by half by the producers of Battlestar Galactica.

All of this is understandable, even forgivable. A shooting budget of $9 million may have been enormous in game terms, but it was nothing by the standards of a Hollywood popcorn flick. (The 1996 film Star Trek: First Contact, for example, had five times the budget of Wing Commander IV, and it was not even an especially expensive example of its breed.) In the long run, interactive movies would find their Uncanny Valley impossible to bridge. Those who made them believed that they were uniquely capable of attracting a wider, more diverse audience than the people who typically played games in the mid-1990s. That proposition may have been debatable, but we’ll take it at face value. The problem was that, in order to attract these folks, they had to look like more than C-movies with aspirations of reaching B status. And the games industry’s current revenues simply didn’t give them any way to get from here to there. Wing Commander IV is a prime case in point: the most expensive game ever made still looked like a cheap joke by Hollywood standards.

The spaceships of the far future are controlled by a plastic steering wheel that looks like something you’d find hanging off of a Nintendo console. Pity the poor crew member whose only purpose in life seems to be to standing there holding on to it and fending off the advances of Major Todd “Maniac” “Sexual Harassment is Hilarious!” Marshall.

Other failings of Wing Commander IV, however, are less understandable and perchance less forgivable. It’s sometimes hard to believe that this script was the product of professional screenwriters, given the quantity of dialog which seems lifted from a Saturday Night Live sketch, which often had my wife and I rolling on the floor when we played the game together recently. (Or rather, when I played and she watched and laughed.) “Just because we operate in the void of space, is loyalty equally weightless?” Malcolm McDowell somehow manages to intone in that gorgeously honed accent of his without smirking. A young woman mourning the loss of her beau — as soon as you saw that these two had a thing going, you knew he was doomed, by the timeless logic of war movies — chooses the wrong horse as her metaphor and then just keeps on riding it out into the rhetorical sagebrush: “He’s out there along with my heart. Both no more than space dust. People fly through him every day and don’t even know it.”

Then there’s the way that everyone, excepting only Blair, is constantly referred to only by his or her call sign. This doesn’t do much to enhance the stateliness of a formal military funeral: “Some may think that Catscratch will be forgotten. They’re wrong. He’ll stay in our hearts always.” There’s the way that all of the men are constantly saluting each other at random moments, as if they’re channeling all of the feelings they don’t know how to express into that act — saluting to keep from crying, saluting as a way to avoid saying, “I love you, man!,” saluting whenever the screenwriters don’t know what the hell else to have them do. (Of course, they all do it so sloppily that anyone who really was in the military will be itching to jump through the monitor and smack them into shape.) And then there’s the ranks and titles, which sound like something children on a playground — or perhaps (ahem!) someone else? — came up with: Admiral Tolwyn gets promoted to “Space Marshal,” for Pete’s sake.

I do feel just a little bad to make fun of all this so much because Chris Roberts’s heart is clearly in the right place. As a time when an increasing number of games were appealing only to the worst sides of their players, Wing Commander IV at least gave lip service to the ties that bind, the thing things we owe to one another. It’s not precisely wrong in anything it says, even if it does become a bit one-note in that tedious John Wayne kind of way. Deep into the game, you discover that the sinister conspiracy you’ve been pursuing involves a new spin on the loathsome old arguments of eugenics, those beliefs that some of us have better genes than others and are thus more useful, valuable human beings, entitled to things that their inferior counterparts are not. Wing Commander IV knows precisely where it stands on this issue — on the right side. But boy, can its delivery be clumsy. And its handling of a more complex social issue like the plight of war veterans trying to integrate back into civilian society is about as nuanced as the old episodes of Magnum, P.I. that probably inspired it.

But betwixt and between all of the speechifying and saluting, there is still a game to play, consisting of about 25 to 30 missions worth of space-combat action, depending on the choices you make from the interactive movie’s occasional menus and how well you fly the missions themselves. The unsung hero of Wing Commander IV must surely be one Anthony Morone, who bore the thankless title of “Game Director,” meaning that he was the one who oversaw the creation of the far less glamorous game part of the game back in Austin while Chris Roberts was off in Hollywood shooting his movie. He did what he could with the limited time and resources at his disposal.

I noted above how the very way that this fourth game was made tended to pull the two halves of its personality even farther apart. That’s true on one level, but it’s also true that Morone made some not entirely unsuccessful efforts to push back against that centrifugal drift. Some of the storytelling now happens inside the missions themselves — something Wing Commander II, the first heavily plot-based entry in the series, did notably well, only to have Wing Commander III forget about it almost completely. Now, though, it’s back, such that your actions during the missions have a much greater impact on the direction of the movie. For example, at one point you’re sent to intercept some Confederation personnel who have apparently turned traitor. In the course of this mission, you learn what their real motivations are, and, if you think they’re good ones, you can change sides and become their escort rather than their attacker.

Indeed, there are quite a few possible paths through the story line and a handful of different endings, based on both the choices you take from those menus that pop up from time to time during the movie portions and your actions in the heat of battle. In this respect too, Wing Commander IV is more ambitious and more sophisticated than Wing Commander III.

A change in Wing Commander IV that feels very symbolic is the removal of any cockpit graphics. In the first game, seeing your pilot avatar manipulate the controls and seeing evidence of damage in your physical surroundings was extraordinarily verisimilitudious. Now, all that has been discarded without a second thought by a game with other priorities.

But it is enough? It’s hard to escape a creeping sense of ennui as you play this game. The flight engine and mission design still lag well behind LucasArts’s 1994 release TIE Fighter, a game that has aged much better than this one in all of its particulars. Roughly two out of every three missions here still don’t have much to do with the plot and aren’t much more than the usual “fly between these way points and shoot whatever you find there” — a product of the need to turn Roberts’s movie into a game that lasts longer than a few hours, in order to be sure that players feel like they have gotten their $50 worth. Worse, the missions are poorly balanced, being much more difficult than those in the previous game; enemy missiles are brutally overpowered, being now virtually guaranteed to kill you with one hit. The sharply increased difficulty feels more accidental than intentional, a product of the compressed development schedule and a resultant lack of play-testing. However it came about, it pulls directly against Origin’s urgent need to attract more — read, more casual — gamers to the series in order to justify its escalating budgets. Here as in so many other places in this game, the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing, to the detriment of both.

In the end, then, neither the movie nor the game of Wing Commander IV can fully stand up on its own, and in combination they tend to clash more than they create any scintillating synergy. One senses when playing through the complete package that Origin’s explorations in this direction have indeed reached a sort of natural limit akin to that alpine-horn-playing keyboard player, that the only thing left to do now is to back up and try something else.

The magazines may have been carried away by the hype around Wing Commander IV, but not all ordinary gamers were. For example, one by the name of Robert Fletcher sent Origin the following letter:

I have noticed that the game design used by Origin has stayed basically the same. Wing Commander IV is a good example of a game design that has shown little growth. If one were to strip away the film clips, there would be a bare-bones game. The game would look and play like a game from the early 1980s. A very simple branching story line, with a little arcade action.

With all the muscle and talent at Origin’s command, it makes me wonder if Origin is really trying to push the frontier of game design. I know a little of what it takes to develop a game, from all the articles I have read (and I have read many). Many writers and developers are calling for their peers to get back to pushing the frontier of game design, over the development of better graphics.

Wing Commander IV has the best graphics I have seen, and it will be a while before anyone will match this work of art. But as a game, Wing Commander IV makes a better movie.

In its April 1996 issue — notice that date! — Computer Gaming World published an alleged preview of Origin’s plans for Wing Commander V. Silly though the article is, it says something about the reputation that Chris Roberts and his franchise were garnering among gamers like our Mr. Fletcher for pushing the envelope of money and technology past the boundaries of common sense, traveling far out on a limb that was in serious danger of being cut off behind them.

With Wing Commander IV barely a month old, Origin has already announced incredible plans for the next game in the highly successful series. In another first for a computer-game company, Origin says it will design small working models of highly maneuverable drones which can be launched into space, piloted remotely, and filmed. The craft will enable Wing V to have “unprecedented spaceflight realism and true ‘star appeal,'” said a company spokesman.

Although the next game in the science-fiction series sounds more like fiction than science, Origin’s Chris Roberts says it’s the next logical step for his six-year-old creation. “If you think about it,” he says, “Wing Commander [I] was the game where we learned the mechanics of space fighting. We made lots of changes and improvements in Wing II. With Wing III, we raised the bar considerably with better graphics, more realistic action, full-motion video, and big-name stars in video segments. In Wing IV, we upped the ante again with real sets, more video, and, in my opinion, a much better story. We’ve reached the point of using real stars and real sets — now it’s time to take our act on location: real space.”

Analysts say it’s nearly impossible to estimate the cost of such an undertaking. Some put figures at between $100 million and $10 billion, just to deploy a small number of remotely pilotable vehicles beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Despite this, Origin’s Lord British (Richard Garriott) claims that he has much of the necessary financial support from investors. Says Garriott, “When we told [investors] what we wanted to do for Wing Commander V, they were amazed. We’re talking about one of man’s deepest desires — to break free of the bonds of Earth. We know it seems costly in comparison with other games, but this is unlike anything that’s ever been done. I don’t see any problem getting the financial backing for this project, and we expect to recoup the investment in the first week. You’re going to see a worldwide release on eight platforms in 36 countries. It’s going to be a huge event. It’ll dwarf even Windows 95.”

Tellingly, some fans believed the announcement was real, writing Origin concerned letters about whether this was really such a good use of its resources.

Still, the sense of unease about Origin’s direction was far from universal. In a sidebar that accompanied its glowing review of Wing Commander IV in that same April 1996 issue, Computer Gaming World asked on a less satirical note, “Is it time to take interactive movies seriously?” The answer according to the magazine was yes: “Some will continue to mock the concept of ‘Siliwood,’ but the marriage of Hollywood and Silicon Valley is definitely real and here to stay. In this regard, no current game charts a more optimistic path to the future of multimedia entertainment than Wing Commander IV.” Alas, the magazine’s satire would prove more prescient than this straightforward opinion piece. Rather than the end of the beginning of the era of interactive movies, Wing Commander IV would go down in history as the beginning of the end, a limit of grandiosity beyond which further progress was impossible.

The reason came down to the cold, hard logic of dollars and cents, working off of a single data point: Wing Commander IV sold less than half as many copies as Wing Commander III. Despite the increased budget and improved production values, despite all the mainstream press coverage, despite the gala premiere at Planet Hollywood, it just barely managed to break even, long after its initial release. I believe the reason why had everything to with that Uncanny Valley I described for you. Those excited enough by the potential of the medium to give these interactive movies the benefit of the doubt had already done so, and even many of these folks were now losing interest. Meanwhile the rest of the world was, at best, waiting for such productions to mature enough that they could sit comfortably beside real movies, or even television. But this was a leap that even Origin Systems, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, the biggest game publisher in the country, was financially incapable of making. And as things currently stood, the return on investment on productions even the size of Wing Commander IV — much less still larger — simply wasn’t there.

During this period, a group of enterprising Netizens took it upon themselves to compile a weekly “Internet PC Games Chart” by polling thousands of their fellow gamers on what they were playing just at that moment. Wing Commander IV is present on the lists they published during the spring of 1996, rising as high as number four for a couple of weeks. But the list of games that consistently place above it is telling: Command & Conquer, Warcraft II, DOOM II, Descent, Civilization II. Although some of them do have some elements of story to bind their campaigns together and deliver a long-form single-player experience, none of them aspires to full-blown interactive movie-dom (not even Command & Conquer, which does feature real human actors onscreen giving its mission briefings). In fact, no games meeting that description are ever to be found anywhere in the top ten at the same time as Wing Commander IV.

Thanks to data like this, it was slowly beginning to dawn on the industry’s movers and shakers that the existing hardcore gamers — the people actually buying games today, and thereby sustaining their companies — were less interested in a merger of Silicon Valley and Hollywood than they were. “I don’t think it’s necessary to spend that much money to suspend disbelief and entertain the gamer,” said Jim Namestka of Dreamforge Intertainment by way of articulating the emerging new conventional wisdom. “It’s alright to spend a lot of money on enhancing the game experience, but a large portion spent instead on huge salaries for big-name actors… I question whether that’s really necessary.”

I’ve written quite a lot in recent articles about 1996 as the year that essentially erased the point-and-click adventure game as one of the industry’s marquee genres. Wing Commander IV isn’t one of those, of course, even if it does look a bit like one at times, when you’re wandering around a ship talking to your crew mates. Still, the Venn diagram of the interactive movie does encompass games like Wing Commander IV, just as it does games like, say, Phantasmagoria, the biggest adventure hit of 1995, which sold even more copies than Wing Commander III. In 1996, however, no game inside that Venn diagram became a million-selling breakout hit. The best any could manage was a middling performance relative to expectations, as was the case for Wing Commander IV. And so the retrenchment began.

It would have been financially foolish to do anything else. The titles that accompanied and often bested Wing Commander IV on those Internet PC Games Charts had all cost vastly less money to make and yet sold as well or better. id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, the games that had started the shift away from overblown storytelling and extended multimedia cut scenes and back to the nuts and bolts of gameplay, had been built by a tiny team of scruffy outsiders working on a shoestring; call this the games industry’s own version of Buzzcocks versus Yes.

The shift away from interactive movies didn’t happen overnight. At Origin, the process of bargaining with financial realities would lead to one more Wing Commander game before the franchise was put out to pasture, still incorporating real actors in live-action cut scenes, but on a less lavish, more sustainable — read, cheaper — scale. The proof was right there in the box: Wing Commander: Prophecy, which but for a last-minute decision by marketing would have been known as Wing Commander V, shipped on three CDs in early 1997 rather than the six of Wing Commander IV. By that time, the whole franchise was looking hopelessly passé in a sea of real-time strategy and first-person shooters whose ethic was to get you into the action fast and keep you there, without any clichéd meditations about the hell that is war. Wing Commander IV had proved to be the peak of the interactive-movie mountain rather than the next base camp which Chris Roberts had imagined it to be.

This is not to say that digital interactive storytelling as a whole died in 1996. It just needed to find other, more practical and ultimately more satisfying ways to move forward. Some of those would take shape in the long-moribund CRPG genre, which enjoyed an unexpected revival close to the decade’s end. Adventure games too would soldier on, but on a smaller scale more appropriate to their reduced commercial circumstances, driven now by passion for the medium rather than hype, painted once again in lovely pixel art instead of grainy digitized video. For that matter, even space simulators would enjoy a golden twilight before falling out of fashion for good, thanks to several titles that kicked against what Wing Commander had become by returning the focus to what happened in the cockpit.

All of these development have left Wing Commander IV standing alone and exposed, its obvious faults only magnified that much more by its splendid isolation. It isn’t a great game, nor even all that good a game, but it isn’t a cynical or unlikable one either. Call it a true child of Chris Roberts: a gawky chip off the old block, with too much money and talent and yet not quite enough.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

(Sources: the book Origin’s Official Guide to Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom by Melissa Tyler; Computer Gaming World of February 1995, May 1995, December 1995, April 1996, and July 1997; Strategy Plus of December 1995; the American PC Gamer of September 1995 and May 1996; Origin’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of September 8 1995, January 12 1996, February 12 1996, April 5 1996, and May 17 1996; Retro Gamer 59. Online sources include the various other internal Origin documents, video clips, pictures, and more hosted at Wing Commander News and Mark Asher’s CNET GameCenter columns from March 24 1999 and October 29 1999. And, for something completely different, Buzzcocks being interview at the British Library in 2016. RIP Pete Shelley.

Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom is available from GOG.com as a digital purchase.)

Comments
37 Responses

- andreas

April 7, 2023 at 10:22 pm

” A young woman mourning the lost [loss] of her beau … ”

The background infos are much appreciated, especially the money mechanics, I had been wondering why the sheer scope of WCIV was never really followed up on… even though game – and movie – budgets kept inflating.

You are entirely correct in your litany of criticisms.

However, there is a case to be made also for redeeming features of WCIV that in my book make it at least an interesting example of interactive video at the time.

Gameplay:

While I can’t compete against the sound of “verisimilitudious”, I found space combat much more interesting than in part III. Here I do think the decision to largely re-use their previous engine paid off: one of the main drawbacks of part III was that it effectively required a high-end machine to play not even smoothly at the time it came out (even though it was directed as mass market).

It has been a while but I seem to remember that the difficulty level could be set from easy to impossible to accommodate serious space combat gamers vs people who wanted to advance to the next cutscene / story decision point?

Design-wise I found especially the Border Worlds ships to be fresh and quirky for the series.

Crucially leech guns were included for the Border World fighters allowing the pilot to stun and not kill enemy vessels. At the time I felt quite strongly that this did provide a link to the story/movie scenes as this was the first (and only) mature WC game: exploding a ship meant doing something akin to actual violence to virtual people who had been of the protagonist’s tribe until recently, especially big ships, squared for the mega space station. This could – and sometimes had to be – avoided at cost. This tangibly went against the instincts that games like the WC series have inculcated in players.

Movie and Ethics:

At least compared to part III where the player is meant to effectively commit genocide against another race and be celebrated for this, part IV actually featured ethical decisions that did impact the course of the movie.

With hindsight, there is certainly nothing special anymore to cast the player’s side as the actual bad guys even Nazis: all major action franchises from Star Wars to James Bond have felt compelled to go there in some fashion in an effort to stay with the times. However, we are talking 1996 here: a time when “history had ended” before the dot com crash, 9/11, and so on. Back then it still was a fascinating concept to explore especially for an otherwise unfailingly gung-ho space sim.

And (spoiler alert):

In this installment and in this installment only all the fighting in a space shooter / military glorification movie literally came down to a chance to argue ethics in front of the Senate. ;-)

And while movies about the military always surround the protagonists with extras, Malcolm McDowell and Jason Bernard especially, but also Hamill and Tom Wilson really carried the movie / cutscenes in a way they didn’t in WCIII, which really helped with the suspension of disbelief.

I’m sure I would downgrade all these aspects were I to play this again today, which I won’t for this very reason ;-)

- Jimmy Maher

April 8, 2023 at 6:02 am

Thanks for the correction!

You’re right about the difficulty setting, but I don’t think its presence excuses the imbalance regarding missiles. Even if you’re playing on Easy — and no shame in that; I find myself doing it with more and more games, when I just want to enjoy the experience and don’t want a death struggle — missiles are way more powerful than anything else, in a way that just doesn’t make sense. It’s still, in other words, an imbalance, which I would be bet dollars to doughnuts is more of a mistake than a premeditated shift.

You aren’t wrong in your other points either, especially the uniqueness of the ending. We’ve never seen a final boss fight quite like it. ;)

- Rowan Lipkovits

April 9, 2023 at 9:17 am

“one of the main drawbacks of part III was that it effectively required a high-end machine to play not even smoothly at the time it came out (even though it was directed as mass market).”

Origin in the ’90s was notorious for targeting bleeding-edge hardware at release (and, presumably, taking a gamble on anticipating what said specs would look like during development). This limited their target market at release time to the moneybags whales gaming on brand new supercomputers, but also ensured that their games would continue looking relatively contemporary even months and years after being released.

- Whomever

April 9, 2023 at 12:59 pm

Origin games in the 90s were ALSO notorious for being extremely buggy at release, so maybe waiting until they caught up to your hardware let them get fixed :-)
(I kid, I used to buy them when they came out. By WC4 I was at University playing with Unix and stuff and never did play it)

- Tom

April 20, 2023 at 1:45 pm

WC3 paired nicely with my parents’ brand new Pentium 75. However, it was nigh unplayable on my 486/33.

- Michael

April 7, 2023 at 10:46 pm

“A shooting budget of $9 million may have been enormous in game terms, but it was nothing by the standards of a Hollywood popcorn flick. (The 1996 film Star Trek: First Contact, for example, had five times the budget of Wing Commander IV, and it was not even an especially expensive example of its breed.)”

I’m having a bit of a problem with the math, here, though this may be in part because I’ve never played Wing Commander IV (or any Wing Commander). It seems to me that a feature-length film would be AT LEAST five times as long as the total cut scenes from a video game, so the per-minute expense might be one-to-one, or even better. Similarly, 37 sets sounds pretty generous for the amount of time I’m imagining they were used.

But, if the cut scenes do amount to 90-100 minutes worth of screen time, then I concede your points here completely.

- Jimmy Maher

April 8, 2023 at 5:53 am

Taken together, the cut scenes actually add up to considerably more than the average feature film. I believe there are three and a half to four hours of video in the game, of which the typical user on the typical playthrough might see two and a half to three hours.

- Sean Curtin

April 8, 2023 at 7:37 am

The intended point of reference here would be Wolfenstein 3D, not Castle Wolfenstein, I think.

- Jimmy Maher

April 8, 2023 at 10:06 am

Yes. Thanks!

- Alex

April 8, 2023 at 9:07 am

This article brought me back straight into the middle of the 90s. I never played Wing Commander, but of course cutscenes like the ones shown above were used in quite a lot of the games I was playing at the time. In fact, the only flight simulator I ever bought was a Top Gun-Game full of video cut-scenes that featured James Tolkan in the part he played in the original movie. I loved this game because of it and I didn´t think that these video-sequences didn´t look too bad in general, no matter what game. Of course, today I don´t need to watch this things again and I never had the urge to do so after the 90s ended. I never missed this technology .

Good call on the Buzzcocks versus Yes. For many years I was a stereotypical vinyl-collecting Prog-Listener (so of course I know who that keyboarder was), but finally I got myself to confess that this music didn´t say anything about my life or anything that´s going on around me, so I gave up on it. So I can relate totally to this sentence you are refering to.

On a last note, according to Wikipedia, Malcom McDowell is still quite active. I sometimes ask myself what he thinks about his career-downslide, but maye he is fine with his life.

- Buck

April 8, 2023 at 3:08 pm

Yes, that must have been Patrick Moraz who was only with Yes for the Relayer album. I can see the point about the live shows, but the album is still highly regarded today (and not that excessive, especially compared to its predecessor).

- Michael Russo

April 11, 2023 at 1:01 pm

Hey, I like Yes! And progressive rock in general. But also punk rock. There’s room for everyone!

- John

April 8, 2023 at 5:31 pm

Wing Commander IV is far from alone in reducing or removing cockpit graphics. Tie Fighter, for example, lets you toggle them on or off by hitting, I believe, the period key. Freespace never had any to begin with. While extensive cockpit graphics may be immersive, they also reduce visibility and make the game harder to play. You cannot track or shoot what you cannot see, and when over a half of the screen is taken up by instruments or, worse, somebody’s knees you cannot see a lot. I personally like cockpit graphics, but I confess I prefer implementations that allow for good visibility. In Tie Fighter, I’d rather fly the titular Tie Fighter than the Assault Gunboat. The Gunboat’s a much more powerful ship, but it’s much less fun to fly in part because the visibility from the cockpit is so much worse.

Incidentally, I have always suspected (on the basis of admittedly no evidence whatsoever) that the real reason for the extensive cockpit graphics in the early Wing Commander games is not immersion but rather performance. The more space the player can see, the more calculations the game has to do to determine what to draw and how to draw it.

As for the cheap props in Wing Commander IV, all I can say is that big-budget movies aren’t necessarily any better. There’s a Star Trek movie–Generations, I believe–in which Commander Riker pilots the Enterprise with what is clearly a Logitech flight stick.

- Tim Kaiser

April 8, 2023 at 7:18 pm

The Star Trek movie where Riker pilots the enterprise with an off the shelf looking joystick was Insurrection.

- Jimmy Maher

April 8, 2023 at 7:28 pm

Yes, the cockpit graphics in Wing Commander at least absolutely served as a performance hedge, whatever other purpose they might have served. Still very cleverly done, though, showing the cockpit getting damaged as your ship does, and showing the controls actually moving as the pilot pushes them around.

- John

April 8, 2023 at 10:22 pm

I confess that I personally find on-screen hands and flight controls a little uncanny and counter-immersive. When I’m playing a space sim, I like to imagine that I’m sitting in a real spaceship and that my monitor is not a monitor but my window into space. I can already see my real hands on a real joystick. I don’t need to see a second pair of virtual hands on a virtual joystick too. Not only is that two hands too many, it’s also a constant reminder that my monitor is in fact just a monitor.

- Zed Banville

April 9, 2023 at 3:37 am

That sort of diegetic interface, complete with the character’s hands moving the controls, was already present in Arcticfox in 1986, though in a futuristic tank rather than a spaceship, and a sufficient amount of cumulative damage would become visibly apparent (as well as disrupting the vehicle’s capabilities).

- stepped pyramids

April 8, 2023 at 8:52 pm

This was definitely an era where the tradeoff between viewport size and performance was visible to consumers, and having less HUD on the screen was a selling point. Ultima VII touts its “full-screen view” on the back of the box. A distant forerunner to today’s “60fps at 4k” boasts. I personally find the HUD in the earlier WC games makes it harder to me to understand what’s going on, but I’m extremely bad at keeping oriented in 3D flying games in general.

- Ross

April 10, 2023 at 1:17 pm

While I always loved and now miss the intricate UI elements in games in general, now that such things are mininalistic if present at all, games presented in the first person have always been a big struggle for me in this regard. I’ve got unusually sensitive peripheral vision (Probably due to childhood strabismus), and while I’m sure it serves me well in avoiding predators, it makes me prone to getting disoriented when playing a first-person game. My field of vision cutting off at the monitor’s edge is something I’ve never been able to overcome. I’m curious if I’d adapt to VR, but so far, I haven’t used a VR headset that can accomodate my glasses without inducing intense pain.

- Tim Kaiser

April 8, 2023 at 6:04 pm

The interactive movie genre didn’t completely die out. It inadvertently was continued on by some modern games which have long series of cut scenes, puntuated by short gameplay sequences. The later games in the Metal Gear Solid series are often like this, even though the “movies” in that game are done in engine rather than with live action actors. But the feeling is the same where it seems like the actual gameplay is subservient to the story told in the cut scenes.

- Adamantyr

April 9, 2023 at 5:40 am

I remember when WC4 came out well, as at the time I had been collecting the video game novel tie-ins for Wing Commander. Most of the best ones were written by William Forstchen who continued and expanded the World War II similarities. His novelization of WC4 though is curiously out of alignment with the game itself on many levels, suggesting he had an early script to work off of that was changed later.

What struck me with the cut scene material is how linear it is. There’s only a few places you can pivot and still win the game.

If you eject from your ship in ANY mission you get yelled at and ridiculed by your commanding officer. If you do so too many times prior to turning sides, you get this funny scene with Tolwyn and Blair where Tolwyn is shocked and embarrassed by Blair’s loss of skill and all Blair can say is “Maybe… some more time in the simulator sir?” and Tolwyn has to quietly retire him back to his farm world to avoid the bad press of the “Heart of the Tiger” losing his edge.

If you resist turning sides the first time it comes up, you end up seeing a lot of cut scenes that reinforce you screwed up and made the wrong decision. You’re not given a choice the second time to turn sides. Plus that route means you miss some pivotal cut-scenes explaining the background of the Border Worlds and seeing a major character’s death. (In fact, when you arrive on their ship they are cool and officious with you, rather than friendly.)

Another pivot is when you’re given the choice to either seek out military resources to aid the Border Worlds or to help save a planet under attack. Doing the former gives you the chance to get new missile types to play with, while the latter is the “ethically right choice” even though you gain nothing from it materially.

The final pivot is whether or not to destroy the huge enemy capital ship with the same mine that they’ve been using to cook and destroy ships from the inside out, or to take it out with conventional weapons. (The point being there are many innocent techs and personnel on the ship that aren’t part of the conspiracy.) That one has an impact on what path Blair takes after his victory in the Senate.

- andreas

April 12, 2023 at 8:04 am

“What struck me with the cut scene material is how linear it is. There’s only a few places you can pivot and still win the game.”

As Jimmy said in a reply above “I believe there are three and a half to four hours of video in the game, of which the typical user on the typical playthrough might see two and a half to three hours.”

So it is the old problem of combinatorial explosion – only worse since the relative high quality or at least budget they were aiming at.

Instead, I think what they mostly tried to do was to explore how decisions played out on largely the same material. This is why they chose a story where the agenda is set by the antagonists’ plot.

Sometimes this was a bit on the nose as the “pivotal” decision whether or not to free the captured Tolwyn: freeing him will result in a cutscene of Blair rationalizing his decision to a skeptical Maniac; if you choose to keep him, Maniac will free him instead – resulting in a cutscene of Maniac rationalizing his decision to Blair along the exact same lines but quickly admitting his error.

I found the more subtle consequences to be more satisfying story-telling wise. Case in point is the opening where Blair can or cannot spare a space-dime for a – as Jimmy outlined, Vietnam war like – vet down on his luck. Out of options, he will “volunteer” for the Confeds once again only to be captured by your side and interrogated. Having helped him before helps to build rapport for him to turn sides. Small galaxy I guess – still, nice touch.

“Another pivot is when you’re given the choice to either seek out military resources to aid the Border Worlds or to help save a planet under attack. Doing the former gives you the chance to get new missile types to play with, while the latter is the “ethically right choice” even though you gain nothing from it materially.”

I believe that was the one time where you decide on which chapter – star system – to explore, rather than merely following the antagonists’ lead. Not gaining anything materially yourself is precisely what makes this a case of utilitarian vs compassionate choice.

Here the choice is strategic rather than tactical: how do you deal with the space station and super-carrier that the story throws in your way as obstacles to be removed with or without war crimes / “collateral damage”. Also, failing to assist civilians will not get you prosecuted whereas actively killing military(-adjacent) people will.

- Gnoman

April 9, 2023 at 5:43 pm

I realize how tangential the genre is to your main thrust, but this article makes me very much want one on 1998’s Descent: Freespace, which took largely a totally opposite approach to storytelling while still having a fairly in-depth one. Nearly everything is told in written codex entries, briefings/debriefing and in-mission dialogue, and there’s very few “filler” missions.

Not only is the fusion of game and story much better executed, but both are far stronger than WC4’s in my memories. Though after an extra two years you’d expect much more.

- Jimmy Maher

April 9, 2023 at 7:33 pm

That one actually is on my list. I’m going to give it a shot at some point, and if I enjoy it and have something to say, I’ll write about it. I do have a bit of a soft spot for space sims.

- Fform

April 10, 2023 at 1:00 pm

I came to the comments with exactly this suggestion in mind.

It’s tempting to look back on freespace as a direct response to WC, in everything from the storytelling to the very physics model itself.

- John

April 11, 2023 at 2:14 pm

I played Freespace for the first time just last year. I only made it about a third of the way through the game before I encountered a bug that prevented further progress, but I have to say that I was not impressed by the portion of the story that I got to see. The game is going for a certain tone that, frankly, just isn’t supported in the gameplay at all, at least not on the default difficulty. Some of the cutscenes have also aged very poorly. I would have preferred static images or even the campiest of FMV to the crude and awkwardly animated 3D character models that they contained.

To be clear, I don’t think that Freespace is a bad game. It’s thoroughly competent, mechanically speaking. In terms of mission design, I think it’s comparable to Tie Fighter–that’s a good thing–and better than Wing Commander. It’s just the story that left me cold. I’m told that Freespace 2, which seems to be the game that most people have in mind when they gush about the series, is much better.

- Alex

April 10, 2023 at 4:59 am

Yes, that was a great game! I found it in a compilation and tried it out just because it was there. Although I didn´t finish it, I was hooked right from the beginning because of its perfect balancing between gameplay and story. Definitely a game I remember very fondly.

- Leo Vellés

April 11, 2023 at 2:52 am

I think the swang song of the adventure genre in the 90’s was Jordan Mechner’s The Last Express, more even so than Grim Fandango. The lavishly and ambitious period recreation for that game, the excesive money lost on that gem is really heartbreaking

- April Ryan

April 11, 2023 at 5:30 am

What about the Longest Journey in 2000?

- Michael Russo

April 11, 2023 at 1:05 pm

Every time you mention the coming “death” of the adventure game, I must put in my request for your own analysis of the famous Gabriel Knight 3 puzzle covered in the Old Man Murray article (https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html). I can’t help but agree completely with it but I think a more detailed or thoughtful “how we got here” would be nice to see.

- Jimmy Maher

April 11, 2023 at 3:19 pm

We’ll get there… ;)

- Destron

April 11, 2023 at 8:11 pm

Weirdly, I kind of liked the way WC4 treated missiles. What was most likely to frustrate me in earlier games was the tendency for some dogfights to just drag on and on. Missiles provided a fast way of ending the fight, one way or another. And from what I remember, a missile was just as fatal to an opponent as it was to you, so it seemed pretty fair.

I’d liken it to the thrill of TIE Fighter’s early stages, where you’re flying a very fragile craft. For me, at least, this sort of thing creates a tension that just isn’t there when you’re protected by energy shields.

Beyond that, your review is spot-on. While I enjoyed WC4, there’s no denying that the movie elements clash badly with the gameplay in spite of the two being separated. It’s like a particularly cheesy SciFi channel movie with a game attached.

I also wonder if some of the folks who’d later form BioWare played this game. Many of the player’s decisions in WC4 seem like early versions of the Paragon/Renegade decisions of Mass Effect.

- Lord Gloom

April 12, 2023 at 8:26 am

Excellent write-up, as per. Though I take issue with your Yes vs. Buzzcocks thing, and not just because I much, much prefer the music of Yes.

Game developers in general have more in common with Yes than The Buzzcocks: Intensely nerdy, devoted to telling sprawling, colourful wonderous stories, and with a deep fascination with technology and its potential. And if they lack technical ability, such is their enthusiasm that they’ll play around until they’ve mastered it. Do you think that Yes keyboard player had formal training in using that “telephone exchange of electronic things”? Or did he just think it looked cool, and thus it became essential to his sound?

By contrast, Mr. Diggle’s comment betrays a narrow-minded, uncurious, conservative, and almost anti-intellectual view of the world. He comes across as less interested in what’s possible, and more concerned with how things SHOULD be. “I thought, ‘Something’s got to change.'” Has it? Why? Because you don’t like new things, Steve?

If Steve were a game designer, he’d be using Twine to make very short “slice of life” narratives. No hope, no colour, no wonder – no graphics, in fact. But it’s cheap, accessible, and anyone can do it. But what do I get? Nothing. I might find the whole thing mildly enjoyable the first time, but will I still be thinking about it five years from now? Or even five minutes from now?

Alright, it “says something” about life. But these developers – and musicians – who use tools and techniques “that nobody could afford or relate to”? Dream-weavers. They give us something to think about, something to care about, and something to love.

I know I’m missing the point – which was that Wing Commander IV was too much of one thing, and perhaps people were hungry for something simpler and more immediate. But I repeat: Game development is INHERENTLY prog rock. If it were punk rock, it wouldn’t exist.

…or, if game developers aren’t prog rockers, they’re metalheads. Maybe that would be a more apposite comparison? Rather than stroking their chins throughout a long Yes keyboard solo, gamers were itching to return to Slayer’s circle pit?

- dmdr

May 3, 2023 at 2:29 am

Good comment. Speaking as a metalhead who dabbles in prog a bit, I’d like to add that metal definitely draws on prog a lot more than it does punk (although there are more punkish bands like Slayer). Many bands have a fair bit of proggish pompousity/showmanship (black metal in general), there’s a strong focus on virtuosity regardless of subgenre (guitar solos!), or just bands making weird/’challenging’ music.

Would also add that punk is now one of the most moribund, backward looking, and boring of all genres. Even worse than modern prog, which I admit isn’t particularly progressive!
So yeah, Steve Diggle, something did change, but it sucks. Well done.

(That said, I had a look at the wiki pages of most of Yes’ keyboard players and they did all have some kind of formal training. Rick Wakeman was a conservatory drop-out, but hey, he still went!)

- Adamantyr

April 12, 2023 at 5:59 pm

I’ll be interested to see if you cover Privateer and Privateer 2 as part of your Wing Commander series.

- Jimmy Maher

April 13, 2023 at 7:28 am

I have a little bit of guilt about skimming past Privateer 1, which I’ve been told corrects my biggest complaints about the series in general by being much more player-directed. Maybe I can find somewhere to shoehorn it in yet. (Privateer 2 I’ve heard less good about…)

- SammyV

April 12, 2023 at 7:48 pm

The missile thing is what made me quit this game even though I love the series … it just didn’t FEEL like Wing Commander. Even Prophecy, which feels way different from the other games, for some reason worked better for me than WC4.

Great article!

The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 1: Three Dimensions in Software (or, Quake and Its Discontents)
April 21, 2023

“Mathematics,” wrote the historian of science Carl Benjamin Boyer many years ago, “is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.” The same might be said about the mathematical algorithms we choose to prioritize — especially in these modern times, when the right set of formulas can be worth many millions of dollars, can be trade secrets as jealously guarded as the recipes for Coca-Cola or McDonald’s Special Sauce.

We can learn much about the tech zeitgeist from those algorithms the conventional wisdom thinks are most valuable. At the very beginning of the 1990s, when “multimedia” was the buzzword of the age and the future of games was believed to lie with “interactive movies” made out of video clips of real actors, the race was on to develop video codecs: libraries of code able to digitize footage from the analog world and compress it to a fraction of its natural size, thereby making it possible to fit a reasonable quantity of it on CDs and hard drives. This was a period when Apple’s QuickTime was regarded as a killer app in itself, when Philips’s ill-fated CD-i console could be delayed for years by the lack of a way to get video to its screen quickly and attractively.

It is a rule in almost all kinds of engineering that, the more specialized a device is, the more efficiently it can perform the tasks that lie within its limited sphere. This rule holds true as much in computing as anywhere else. So, when software proved able to stretch only so far in the face of the limited general-purpose computing power of the day, some started to build their video codecs into specialized hardware add-ons.

Just a few years later, after the zeitgeist in games had shifted, the whole process repeated itself in a different context.

By the middle years of the decade, with the limitations of working with canned video clips becoming all too plain, interactive movies were beginning to look like a severe case of the emperor’s new clothes. The games industry therefore shifted its hopeful gaze to another approach, one that would prove a much more lasting transformation in the way games were made. This 3D Revolution did have one point of similarity with the mooted and then abandoned meeting of Silicon Valley and Hollywood: it too was driven by algorithms, implemented first in software and then in hardware.

It was different, however, in that the entire industry looked to one man to lead it into its algorithmic 3D future. That man’s name was John Carmack.

Whether they happen to be pixel art hand-drawn by human artists or video footage captured by cameras, 2D graphics already exist on disk before they appear on the monitor screen. And therein lies the source of their limitations. Clever programmers can manipulate them to some extent — pixel art generally more so than digitized video — but the possibilities are bounded by the fundamentally static nature of the source material. 3D graphics, however, are literally drawn by the computer. They can go anywhere and do just about anything. For, while 2D graphics are stored as a concrete grid of pixels, 3D graphics are described using only the abstract language of mathematics — a language able to describe not just a scene but an entire world, assuming you have a powerful enough computer running a good enough algorithm.

Like so many things that get really complicated really quickly, the basic concepts of 3D graphics are disarmingly simple. The process behind them can be divided into two phases: the modeling phase and the rendering, or rasterization, phase.

It all begins with simple two-dimensional shapes of the sort we all remember from middle-school geometry, each defined as a collection of points on a plane and straight lines connecting them together. By combining and arranging these two-dimensional shapes, or surfaces, together in three-dimensional space, we can make solids — or, in the language of computerized 3D graphics, objects.

Here we see how 3D objects can be made ever more more complex by building them out of ever more surfaces. The trade-off is that more complex objects require more computing power to render in a timely fashion.

Once we have a collection of objects, we can put them into a world space, wherever we like and at whatever angle of orientation we like. This world space is laid out as a three-dimensional grid, with its point of origin — i.e., the point where X, Y, and Z are all zero — wherever we wish it to be. In addition to our objects, we also place within it a camera — or, if you like, an observer in our world — at whatever position and angle of orientation we wish. At their simplest, 3D graphics require nothing more at the modeling phase.

We sometimes call the second phase the “rasterization” phase in reference to the orderly two-dimensional grid of pixels which make up the image seen on a monitor screen, which in computer-science parlance is known as a raster. The whole point of this rasterization phase, then, is to make our computer’s monitor a window into our imaginary world from the point of view of our imaginary camera. This entails converting said world’s three dimensions back into our two-dimensional raster of pixels, using the rules of perspective that have been understood by human artists since the Renaissance.

We can think of rasterizing as observing a scene through a window screen. Each square in the mesh is one pixel, which can be exactly one color. The whole process of 3D rendering ultimately comes down to figuring out what each of those colors should be.

The most basic of all 3D graphics are of the “wire-frame” stripe, which attempt to draw only the lines that form the edges of their surfaces. They were seen fairly frequently on microcomputers as far back as the early 1980s, the most iconic example undoubtedly being the classic 1984 space-trading game Elite.

Even in something as simple as Elite, we can begin to see how 3D graphics blur the lines between a purely presentation-level technology and a full-blown world simulation. When we have one enemy spaceship in our sights in Elite, there might be several others above, behind, or below us, which the 3D engine “knows” about but which we may not. Combined with a physics engine and some player and computer agency in the model world (taking here the form of lasers and thrusters), it provides the raw materials for a game. Small wonder that so many game developers came to see 3D graphics as such a natural fit.

But, for all that those wire frames in Elite might have had their novel charm in their day, programmers realized that the aesthetics of 3D graphics had to get better for them to become a viable proposition over the long haul. This realization touched off an algorithmic arms race that is still ongoing to this day. The obvious first step was to paint in the surfaces of each solid in single blocks of color, as the later versions of Elite that were written for 16-bit rather than 8-bit machines often did. It was an improvement in a way, but it still looked jarringly artificial, even against a spartan star field in outer space.

The next way station on the road to a semi-realistic-looking computer-generated world was light sources of varying strengths, positioned in the world with X, Y, and Z coordinates of their own, casting their illumination and shadows realistically on the objects to be found there.

A 3D scene with light sources.

The final step was to add textures, small pictures that were painted onto surfaces in place of uniform blocks of color; think of the pitted paint job of a tired X-Wing fighter or the camouflage of a Sherman tank. Textures introduced an enormous degree of complication at the rasterization stage; it wasn’t easy for 3D engines to make them look believable from a multitude of different lines of sight. That said, believable lighting was almost as complicated. Textures or lighting, or both, were already the fodder for many an academic thesis before microcomputers even existed.

A 3D scene with light sources and textures.

In the more results-focused milieu of commercial game development, where what was possible was determined largely by which types of microprocessors Intel and Motorola were selling the most of in any given year, programmers were forced to choose between compromised visions of the academic ideal. These broke down into two categories, neatly exemplified by the two most profitable computer games of the 1990s. Those games that followed in one or the other’s footsteps came to be known as the “Myst clones” and the “DOOM clones.” They could hardly have been more dissimilar in personality, yet they were both symbols of a burgeoning 3D revolution.

The Myst clones got their name from a game developed by Cyan Studios and published by Brøderbund in September of 1993, which went on to sell at least 6 million copies as a boxed retail product and quite likely millions more as a pack-in of one description or another. Myst and the many games that copied its approach tended to be, as even their most strident detractors had to admit, rather beautiful to look at. This was because they didn’t attempt to render their 3D imagery in real time; their rendering was instead done beforehand, often on beefy workstation-class machines, then captured as finished rasters of pixels on disk. Given that they worked with graphics that needed to be rendered only once and could be allowed to take hours to do so if necessary, the creators of games like this could pull out all the stops in terms of textures, lighting, and the sheer number and complexity of the 3D solids that made up their worlds.

These games’ disadvantage — a pretty darn massive one in the opinion of many players — was that their scope of interactive potential was as sharply limited in its way as that of all those interactive movies built around canned video clips that the industry was slowly giving up on. They could present their worlds to their players only as a collection of pre-rendered nodes to be jumped between, could do nothing on the fly. These limitations led most of their designers to build their gameplay around set-piece puzzles found in otherwise static, non-interactive environments, which most players soon started to find a bit boring. Although the genre had its contemplative pleasures and its dedicated aficionados who appreciated them, its appeal as anything other than a tech demo — the basis on which the original Myst was primarily sold — turned out to be the very definition of niche, as the publishers of Myst clones belatedly learned to their dismay. The harsh reality became undeniable once Riven, the much-anticipated, sumptuously beautiful sequel to Myst, under-performed expectations by “only” selling 1 million copies when it finally appeared four years after its hallowed predecessor. With the exception only of Titanic: Adventure out of Time, which owed its fluke success to a certain James Cameron movie with which it happened to share a name and a setting, no other game of this style ever cracked half a million in unit sales. The genre has been off the mainstream radar for decades now.

The DOOM clones, on the other hand, have proved a far more enduring fixture of mainstream gaming. They took their name, of course, from the landmark game of first-person carnage which the energetic young men of id Software released just a couple of months after Myst reached store shelves. John Carmack, the mastermind of the DOOM engine, managed to present a dynamic, seamless, apparently 3D world in place of the static nodes of Myst, and managed to do it in real time, even on a fairly plebeian consumer-grade computer. He did so first of all by being a genius programmer, able to squeeze every last drop out of the limited hardware at his disposal. And then, when even that wasn’t enough to get the job done, he threw out feature after feature that the academics whose papers he had pored over insisted was essential for any “real” 3D engine. His motto was, if you can’t get it done honestly, cheat, by hard-coding assumptions about the world into your algorithms and simply not letting the player — or the level designer — violate them. The end result was no Myst-like archetype of beauty in still screenshots. It pasted 2D sprites into its world whenever there wasn’t horsepower enough to do real modeling, had an understanding of light and its properties that is most kindly described as rudimentary, and couldn’t even handle sloping floors or ceilings, or walls that weren’t perfectly vertical. Heck, it didn’t even let you look up or down.

And absolutely none of that mattered. DOOM may have looked a bit crude in freeze-frame, but millions of gamers found it awe-inspiring to behold in motion. Indeed, many of them thought that Carmack’s engine, combined with John Romero and Sandy Petersen’s devious level designs, gave them the most fun they’d ever had sitting behind a computer. This was immersion of a level they’d barely imagined possible, the perfect demonstration of the real potential of 3D graphics — even if it actually was, as John Carmack would be the first to admit, only 2.5D at best. No matter; DOOM felt like real 3D, and that was enough.

A hit game will always attract imitators, and a massive hit will attract legions of them. Accordingly, the market was soon flooded with, if anything, even more DOOM clones than Myst clones, all running in similar 2.5D engines, the product of both intense reverse engineering of DOOM itself and Carmack’s habit of talking freely about how he made the magic happen to pretty much anyone who asked him, no matter how much his colleagues at id begged him not to. “Programming is not a zero-sum game,” he said. “Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn’t take it away from you. I’m happy to share what I can because I’m in it for the love of programming.” Carmack was elevated to veritable godhood, the prophet on the 3D mountaintop passing down whatever scraps of wisdom he deigned to share with the lesser mortals below.

Seen in retrospect, the DOOM clones are, like the Myst clones, a fairly anonymous lot for the most part, doubling down on transgressive ultra-violence instead of majestic isolation, but equally failing to capture a certain ineffable something that lay beyond the nuts and bolts of their inspiration’s technology. The most important difference between the Myst and DOOM clones came down to the filthy lucre of dollar and unit sales: whereas Myst’s coattails proved largely illusory, producing few other hits, DOOM’s were anything but. Most people who had bought Myst, it seemed, were satisfied with that single purchase; people who bought DOOM were left wanting more first-person mayhem, even if it wasn’t quite up to the same standard.

The one DOOM clone that came closest to replacing DOOM itself in the hearts of gamers was known as Duke Nukem 3D. Perhaps that isn’t surprising, given its pedigree: it was a product of 3D Realms, the rebranded incarnation of Scott Miller’s Apogee Software. Whilst trading under the earlier name, Miller had pioneered the episodic shareware model of game distribution, a way of escaping the heavy-handed group-think of the major boxed-game publishers and their tediously high-concept interactive movies in favor of games that were exponentially cheaper to develop, but also rawer, more visceral, more in line with what the teenage and twenty-something males who still constituted the large majority of dedicated gamers were actually jonesing to play. Miller had discovered the young men of id when they were still working for a disk magazine in Shreveport, Louisiana. He had then convinced them to move to his own glossier, better-connected hometown of Dallas, Texas, and distributed their proto-DOOM shooter Wolfenstein 3D to great success. His protégées had elected to strike out on their own when the time came to release DOOM, but it’s fair to say that that game would probably never have come to exist at all if not for their shareware Svengali. And even if it had, it probably wouldn’t have made them so much money; Jay Wilbur, id’s own tireless guerilla marketer, learned most of his tricks from watching Scott Miller.

Still a man with a keen sense of what his customers really wanted, Miller re-branded Apogee as 3D Realms as a way of signifying its continuing relevance amidst the 3D revolution that took the games industry by storm after DOOM. Then he, his junior partner George Broussard, and 3D Realms’s technical mastermind Ken Silverman set about making a DOOM-like engine of their own, known as Build, which they could sell to other developers who wanted to get up and running quickly. And they used the same engine to make a game of their own, which would turn out to be the most memorable of all those built with Build.

Duke Nukem 3D’s secret weapon was one of the few boxes in the rubric of mainstream gaming success that DOOM had failed to tick off: a memorable character to serve as both star and mascot. First conceived several years earlier for a pair of Apogee 2D platformers, Duke Nukem was Joseph Lieberman’s worst nightmare, an unrepentant gangster with equally insatiable appetites for bombs and boobies, a fellow who “thinks the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is a convenience store,” as his advertising trumpeted. His latest game combined some of the best, tightest level design yet seen outside of DOOM with a festival of adolescent transgression, from toilet water that served as health potions to strippers who would flash their pixelated breasts at you for the price of a dollar bill. The whole thing was topped off with the truly over-the-top quips of Duke himself: “I’m gonna rip off your head and shit down your neck!”; “Your face? Your ass? What’s the difference?” It was an unbeatable combination, proof positive that Miller’s ability to read his market was undimmed. Released in January of 1996, relatively late in the day for this generation of 3D — or rather 2.5D — technology, Duke Nukem 3D became by some reports the best-selling single computer game of that entire year. It is still remembered with warm nostalgia today by countless middle-aged men who would never want their own children to play a game like this. And so the cycle of life continues…

In a porno shop, shooting it out with policemen who are literally pigs…

Duke Nukem 3D was a triumph of design and attitude rather than technology; in keeping with most of the DOOM clones, the Build engine’s technical innovations over its inspiration were fairly modest. John Carmack scoffed that his old friends’ creation looked like it was “held together with bubble gum.”

The game that did push the technology envelope farthest, albeit without quite managing to escape the ghetto of the DOOM clones, was also a sign in another way of how quickly DOOM was changing the industry: rather than stemming from scruffy veterans of the shareware scene like id and 3D Realms, it came from the heart of the industry’s old-money establishment — from no less respectable and well-financed an entity than George Lucas’s very own games studio.

LucasArts’s Dark Forces was a shooter set in the Star Wars universe, which disappointed everyone right out of the gate with the news that it was not going to let you fight with a light saber. The developers had taken a hard look at it, they said, but concluded in the end that it just wasn’t possible to pull off satisfactorily within the hardware specifications they had to meet. This failing was especially ironic in light of the fact that they had chosen to name their new 2.5D engine “Jedi.” But they partially atoned for it by making the Jedi engine capable of hosting unprecedentedly enormous levels — not just horizontally so, but vertically as well. Dark Forces was full of yawning drop-offs and cavernous open spaces, the likes which you never saw in DOOM — or Duke Nukem 3D, for that matter, despite its release date of almost a year after Dark Forces. Even more importantly, Dark Forces felt like Star Wars, right from the moment that John Williams’s stirring theme song played over stage-setting text which scrolled away into the frame rather than across it. Although they weren’t allowed to make any of the movies’ characters their game’s star, LucasArts created a serviceable if slightly generic stand-in named Kyle Katarn, then sent him off on vertigo-inducing chases through huge levels stuffed to the gills with storm troopers in urgent need of remedial gunnery training, just like in the movies. Although Dark Forces toned down the violence that so many other DOOM clones were making such a selling point out of — there was no blood whatsoever on display here, just as there had not been in the movies — it compensated by giving gamers the chance to live out some of their most treasured childhood media memories, at a time when there were no new non-interactive Star Wars experiences to be had.

Unfortunately, LucasArts’s design instincts weren’t quite on a par with their presentation and technology. Dark Forces’s levels were horribly confusing, providing little guidance about what to do or where to go in spaces whose sheer three-dimensional size and scope made the two-dimensional auto-map all but useless. Almost everyone who goes back to play the game today tends to agree that it just isn’t as much fun as it ought to be. At the time, though, the Star Wars connection and its technical innovations were enough to make Dark Forces a hit almost the equal of DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D. Even John Carmack made a point of praising LucasArts for what they had managed to pull off on hardware not much better than that demanded by DOOM.

Yet everyone seemed to be waiting on Carmack himself, the industry’s anointed Master of 3D Algorithms, to initiate the real technological paradigm shift. It was obvious what that must entail: an actual, totally non-fake rendered-on-the-fly first-person 3D engine, without all of the compromises that had marked DOOM and its imitators. Such engines weren’t entirely unheard of; the Boston studio Looking Glass Technologies had been working with them for five years, employing them in such innovative, immersive games as Ultima Underworld and System Shock. But those games were qualitatively different from DOOM and its clones: slower, more complex, more cerebral. The mainstream wanted a game that played just as quickly and violently and viscerally as DOOM, but that did it in uncompromising real 3D. With computers getting faster every year and with a genius like John Carmack to hand, it ought to be possible.

And so Carmack duly went to work on just such an engine, for a game that was to be called Quake. His ever-excitable level designer John Romero, who had the looks and personality to be the rock star gaming had been craving for years, was all in with bells on. “The next game is going to blow DOOM all to hell,” he told his legions of adoring fans. “DOOM totally sucks in comparison to our next game! Quake is going to be a bigger step over DOOM than DOOM was over Wolf 3D.” Drunk on success and adulation, he said that Quake would be more than just a game: “It will be a movement.” (Whatever that meant!) The drumbeat of excitement building outside of id almost seemed to justify his hyperbole; from all the way across the Atlantic, the British magazine PC Zone declared that the upcoming Quake would be “the most important PC game ever made.” The soundtrack alone was to be a significant milestone in the incorporation of gaming into mainstream pop culture, being the work of Trent Reznor and his enormously popular industrial-rock band Nine Inch Nails. Such a collaboration would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier.

While Romero was enjoying life as gaming’s own preeminent rock star and waiting for Carmack to get far enough along on the Quake engine to give him something to do, Carmack was living like a monk, working from 4 PM to 4 AM every day. In another sign of just how quickly id had moved up in the world, he had found himself an unexpectedly well-credentialed programming partner. Michael Abrash was one of the establishment’s star programmers, who had written a ton of magazine articles and two highly regarded technical tomes on assembly-language and graphics programming and was now a part of Microsoft’s Windows NT team. When Carmack, who had cut his teeth on Abrash’s writings, invited him out of the blue to come to Dallas and do Quake with him, Bill Gates himself tried to dissuade his employee. “You might not like it down there,” he warned. Abrash was, after all, pushing 40, a staid sort with an almost academic demeanor, while id was a nest of hyperactive arrested adolescence on a permanent sugar high. But he went anyway, because he was pretty sure Carmack was a genius, and because Carmack seemed to Abrash a bit lonely, working all night every night with only his computer for company. Abrash thought he saw in Quake a first glimmer of a new form of virtual existence that companies like Meta are still chasing eagerly today: “a pretty complicated, online, networked universe,” all in glorious embodied 3D. “We do Quake, other companies do other games, people start building worlds with our format and engine and tools, and these worlds can be glommed together via doorways from one to another. To me this sounds like a recipe for the first real cyberspace, which I believe will happen the way a real space station or habitat probably would — by accretion.”

He may not have come down if he had known precisely what he was getting into; he would later compare making Quake to “being strapped onto a rocket during takeoff in the middle of a hurricane.” The project proved a tumultuous, exhausting struggle that very nearly broke id as a cohesive company, even as the money from DOOM was continuing to roll in. (id’s annual revenues reached $15.6 million in 1995, a very impressive figure for what was still a relatively tiny company, with a staff numbering only a few dozen.)

Romero envisioned a game that would be as innovative in terms of gameplay as technology, that would be built largely around sword-fighting and other forms of hand-to-hand combat rather than gun play — the same style of combat that LucasArts had decided was too impractical for Dark Forces. Some of his early descriptions make Quake sound more like a full-fledged CRPG in the offing than another straightforward action game. But it just wouldn’t come together, according to some of Romero’s colleagues because he failed to communicate his expectations to them, rather leading them to suspect that even he wasn’t quite sure what he was trying to make.

Carmack finally stepped in and ordered his design team to make Quake essentially a more graphically impressive DOOM. Romero accepted the decision outwardly, but seethed inwardly at this breach of longstanding id etiquette; Carmack had always made the engines, then given Romero free rein to turn them into games. Romero largely checked out, opening a door that ambitious newcomers like American McGee and Tim Willits, who had come up through the thriving DOOM modding community, didn’t hesitate to push through. The offices of id had always been as hyper-competitive as a DOOM deathmatch, but now the atmosphere was becoming a toxic stew of buried resentments.

In a misguided attempt to fix the bad vibes, Carmack, whose understanding of human nature was as shallow as his understanding of computer graphics was deep, announced one day that he had ordered a construction crew in to knock down all of the walls, so that everybody could work together from a single “war room.” One for all and all for one, and all that. The offices of the most profitable games studio in the world were transformed into a dystopian setting perfect for a DOOM clone, as described by a wide-eyed reporter from Wired magazine who came for a visit: “a maze of drywall and plastic sheeting, with plaster dust everywhere, loose acoustic tiles, and cables dangling from the ceiling. Almost every item not directly related to the completion of Quake was gone. The only privacy to be found was between the padded earpieces of headphones.”

Wired magazine’s August 1996 cover, showing John Carmack flanked by John Romero and Adrian Carmack, marked the end of an era. By the time it appeared on newsstands, Romero had already been fired.

Needless to say, it didn’t have the effect Carmack had hoped for. In his book-length history of id’s early life and times, journalist David Kushner paints a jittery, unnerving picture of the final months of Quake’s development: they “became a blur of silent and intense all-nighters, punctuated by the occasional crash of a keyboard against a wall. The construction crew had turned the office into a heap. The guys were taking their frustrations out by hurling computer parts into the drywall like knives.” Michael Abrash is more succinct: “A month before shipping, we were sick to death of working on Quake.” And level designer Sandy Petersen, the old man of the group, who did his best to keep his head down and stay out of the intra-office cold war, is even more so: “[Quake] was not fun to do.”

Quake was finally finished in June of 1996. It would prove a transitional game in more ways than one, caught between where games had recently been and where they were going. Still staying true to that odd spirit of hacker idealism that coexisted with his lust for ever faster Ferraris, Carmack insisted that Quake be made available as shareware, so that people could try it out before plunking down its full price. The game accordingly got a confusing, staggered release, much to the chagrin of its official publisher GT Interactive. To kick things off, the first eight levels went up online. Shortly after, there appeared in stores a $10 CD of the full game that had to be unlocked by paying id an additional $50 in order to play beyond the eighth level. Only after that, in August of 1996, did the game appear in a conventional retail edition.

Predictably enough, it all turned into a bit of a fiasco. Crackers quickly reverse-engineered the algorithms used for generating the unlocking codes, which were markedly less sophisticated than the ones used to generate the 3D graphics on the disc. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people were able to get the entirety of the most hotly anticipated game of the year for $10. Meanwhile even many of those unwilling or unable to crack their shareware copies decided that eight levels was enough for them, especially given that the unregistered version could be used for multiplayer deathmatches. Carmack’s misplaced idealism cost id and GT Interactive millions, poisoning relations between them; the two companies soon parted ways.

So, the era of shareware as an underground pipeline of cutting-edge games came to an end with Quake. From now on, id would concentrate on boxed games selling for full price, as would all of their fellow survivors from that wild and woolly time. Gaming’s underground had become its establishment.

But its distribution model wasn’t the only sense in which Quake was as much a throwback as a step forward. It held fast as well to Carmack’s disinterest in the fictional context of id’s games, as illustrated by his famous claim that the story behind a game was no more important than the story behind a porn movie. It would be blatantly incorrect to claim that the DOOM clones which flooded the market between 1994 and 1996 represented some great exploding of the potential of interactive narrative, but they had begun to show some interest, if not precisely in elaborate set-piece storytelling in the way of adventure games, at least in the appeal of setting and texture. Dark Forces had been a pioneer in this respect, what with its between-levels cut scenes, its relatively fleshed-out main character, and most of all its environments that really did look and feel like the Star Wars films, from their brutalist architecture to John Williams’s unmistakable score. Even Duke Nukem 3D had the character of Duke, plus a distinctively seedy, neon-soaked post-apocalyptic Los Angeles for him to run around in. No one would accuse it of being an overly mature aesthetic vision, but it certainly was a unified one.

Quake, on the other hand,  displayed all the signs of its fractious process of creation, of half a dozen wayward designers all pulling in different directions. From a central hub, you took “slipgates” into alternate dimensions that contained a little bit of everything on the designers’ not-overly-discriminating pop-culture radar, from zombie flicks to Dungeons & Dragons, from Jaws to H.P. Lovecraft, from The Terminator to heavy-metal music, and so wound up not making much of a distinct impression at all.

Most creative works are stamped with the mood of the people who created them, no matter how hard the project managers try to separate the art from the artists. With its color palette dominated by shocks of orange and red, DOOM had almost literally burst off the monitor screen with the edgy joie de vivre of a group of young men whom nobody had expected to amount to much of anything, who suddenly found themselves on the verge of remaking the business of games in their own unkempt image. Quake felt tired by contrast. Even its attempts to blow past the barriers of good taste seemed more obligatory than inspired; the Satanic symbolism, elaborate torture devices, severed heads, and other forms of gore were outdone by other games that were already pushing the envelope even further. This game felt almost somber — not an emotion anyone had ever before associated with id. Its levels were slower and emptier than those of DOOM, with a color palette full of mournful browns and other earth tones. Even the much-vaunted soundtrack wound up rather underwhelming. It was bereft of the melodic hooks that had made Nine Inch Nails’s previous output more palatable for radio listeners than that of most other “extreme” bands; it was more an exercise in sound design than music composition. One couldn’t help but suspect that Trent Reznor had held back all of his good material for his band’s next real record.

At its worst, Quake felt like a tech demo waiting for someone to turn it into an actual game, proving that John Carmack needed John Romero as badly as Romero needed him. But that once-fruitful relationship was never to be rehabilitated: Carmack fired Romero within days of finishing Quake. The two would never work together again.

It was truly the end of an era at id. Sandy Petersen was soon let go as well, Michael Abrash went back to the comfortable bosom of Microsoft, and Jay Wilbur quit for the best of all possible reasons: because his son asked him, “How come all the other daddies go to the baseball games and you never do?” All of them left as exhausted as Quake looks and feels.

Of course, there was nary a hint of Quake’s infelicities to be found in the press coverage that greeted its release. Even more so than most media industries, the games industry has always run on enthusiasm, and it had no desire at this particular juncture to eat its own by pointing out the flaws in the most important PC game ever made. The coverage in the magazines was marked by a cloying fan-boy fawning that was becoming ever more sadly prominent in gamer culture. “We are not even worthy to lick your toenails free of grit and fluffy sock detritus,” PC Zone wrote in a public letter to id. “We genuflect deeply and offer our bare chests for you to stab with a pair of scissors.” (Eww! A sense of proportion is as badly lacking as a sense of self-respect…) Even the usually sober-minded (by gaming-journalism standards) Computer Gaming World got a little bit creepy: “Describing Quake is like talking about sex. It must be experienced to be fully appreciated.”

Still, I would be a poor historian indeed if I called all the hyperbole of 1996 entirely unjustified. The fact is that the passage of time has tended to emphasize Quake’s weaknesses, which are mostly in the realm of design and aesthetics, whilst obscuring its contemporary strengths, which were in the realm of technology. Although not quite the first game to graft a true 3D engine onto ultra-fast-action gameplay — Interplay’s Descent beat it to the market by more than a year — it certainly did so more flexibly and credibly than anything else to date, even if Carmack still wasn’t above cheating a bit when push came to shove. (By no means is the Quake engine entirely free of tricksy 2D sprites in places where proper 3D models are just too expensive to render.)

Nevertheless, it’s difficult to fully convey today just how revolutionary the granular details of Quake seemed in 1996: the way you could look up and down and all around you with complete freedom; the way its physics engine made guns kick so that you could almost feel it in your mouse hand; the way you could dive into water and experience the visceral sensation of actually swimming; the way the wood paneling of its walls glinted realistically under the overhead lighting. Such things are commonplace today, but Quake paved the way. Most of the complaints I’ve raised about it could be mitigated by the simple expedient of not even bothering with the lackluster single-player campaign, of just playing it with your mates in deathmatch.

But even if you preferred to play alone, Quake was a sign of better things to come. “It goes beyond the game and more into the engine and the possibilities,” says Rob Smith, who watched the Quake mania come and go as the editor of PC Gamer magazine. “Quake presented options to countless designers. The game itself doesn’t make many ‘all-time’ lists, but its impact [was] as a game changer for 3D gaming, [an] engine that allowed other game makers to express themselves.” For with the industry’s Master of 3D Algorithms John Carmack having shown what was possible and talking as freely as ever about how he had achieved it, with Michael Abrash soon to write an entire book about how he and Carmack had made the magic happen, more games of this type, ready and able to harness the technology of true 3D to more exciting designs, couldn’t be far behind. “We’ve pretty much decided that our niche is in first-person futuristic action games,” said John Carmack. “We stumble when we get away from the techno stuff.” The industry was settling into a model that would remain in place for years to come: id would show what was possible with the technology of 3D graphics, then leave it to other developers to bend it in more interesting directions.

Soon enough, then, titles like Jedi Knight and Half-Life would push the genre once known as DOOM clones, now trading under the more sustainable name of the first-person shooter, in more sophisticated directions in terms of storytelling and atmosphere, without losing the essence of what made their progenitors so much fun. They will doubtless feature in future articles.

Next time, however, I want to continue to focus on the technology, as we turn to another way in which Quake was a rough draft for a better gaming future: months after its initial release, it became one of the first games to display the potential of hardware acceleration for 3D graphics, marking the beginning of a whole new segment of the microcomputer industry, one worth many billions of dollars today.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

(Sources: the books Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters by David L. Craddock, The Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash, Masters of DOOM: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner, Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic by Brad King and John Borland, Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation by Michael O’Rourke, and Computer Graphics from Scratch: A Programmer’s Introduction by Gabriel Gambetta. PC Zone of May 1996; Computer Gaming World of July 1996 and October 1996; Wired of August 1996 and January 2010. Online sources include Michael Abrash’s “Ramblings in Realtime” for Blue’s News.

Quake is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com, as is Star Wars: Dark Forces. Duke Nukem 3D can be found on Steam.)

Comments
89 Responses

- Paul Dunne

April 21, 2023 at 3:32 pm

McDonald’s calls it “Special Sauce”

- Jimmy Maher

April 21, 2023 at 3:39 pm

Thanks!

- Lord Gloom

April 26, 2023 at 4:05 pm

I’m convinced that it’s simply a blend of ketchup and mayonnaise. Mix them together and the taste is identical.

- PlayHistory

April 21, 2023 at 3:45 pm

Quake is a game that doesn’t have the pieces come together to make for a satisfyingly cohesive experience. I would never call it a bad game though. Some of the level designs are clever even by the standards of the modern shooters that have gone back to its style. It’s a game that struggled with its own scope as much as because it was new as anything, much like Super Mario 64 does (though that game is fully cohesive).

I have wanted to look deep into the subject of 3D games on computers in the 1980s. You haven’t touched too much on them because there’s little in terms of narrative expansion in those games, but from a technological perspective it’s something I wish was written more about. Getting the most out of hardware was a long process and clearly showcases that some game creators knew about these early experiments, or at the very least read technical discussions from places like SIGGRAPH.

On that, I’m interested to see how you will frame the GPU wars. I came into PC gaming at the tail end of that so it’s one of the first video game “stories” that I have some personal memory of. And how these advances reflect in your view of 3D games within the complexity of narrative experiences will be the real indication for where this blog will be going in the future.

- Jimmy Maher

April 21, 2023 at 3:52 pm

I think you’ll like the next couple of articles, which do exactly what you suggest. As far as where we go in the (more distant) future: I played Jedi Knight recently from first to last and actually enjoyed it. Maybe there’s hope for me yet. ;)

- Leo Vellés

April 21, 2023 at 7:15 pm

Jimmy, since you mentioned it along with Jedi Knight, I wonder if you ever played Half Life yet. I was for more than 20 years an almost only player of point & click adventures, but that game rocked my gaming beliefs, and Half Life 2 directly blown away my mind, to the point that it is for me the greatest game I’ve ever played.

- Jimmy Maher

April 21, 2023 at 7:38 pm

I played some of it, but a long, long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away?) on a far from optimal computer. It’s one I’m looking forward to revisiting. Half-Life 2, on the other hand, I’ve never played.

- Ian Webb

April 21, 2023 at 9:29 pm

Looking forward to that. I still think it’s one of the great narrative experiences in video games, despite the weak third act. It is deeply committed to “show, don’t tell” in way few games that aspire to movie level story telling are.

- Captain Kal

April 26, 2023 at 10:57 am

You may want to try Black Mesa, the Valve endorsed Half Like remake/remaster (https://store.steampowered.com/app/362890/Black_Mesa/).

Even though, I ‘ve twice completed the original campaign of HL (and both of the expansions at least once), I still haven’t finished the HL2 campaign!! I think they went a little to far with experimenting with different genres in this game!!! (Case in study: The Ravenholm Level. Although the Gravity Gun was a clear stroke of genius)!!!

On the subject of 3D games on computers in the 1980s and early nineties, two companies come to my mind, at the moment:

Realtime Games Software
(https://www.mobygames.com/company/1203/realtime-games-software-ltd/)

and

Argonaut Games
(https://www.mobygames.com/company/1151/argonaut-games-plc/games/)

with Digital Image Design
(https://www.mobygames.com/company/84/digital-image-design-ltd/)

and

Bethesda Softworks
(https://www.mobygames.com/company/171/bethesda-softworks-llc/),

very close.

And finally on 3D acceleration, one company springs to my mind, without even thinking: 3Dfx.

Yes, we also had 3D solutions from ATI, nVidia, or even S3, but Voodoo cards created the same kind of dedication that I hadn’t seen since the Amiga days!!

(And as a matter of complete irony, in early 00’s you could combine a 60040/PPC equipped Amiga with a Voodoo card, to play games like Descent or Freespace!! Even though both companies were defunct by that time!!)

- Ido Yehieli

April 21, 2023 at 4:01 pm

Even though I didn’t enjoy it as much when it was new (my computer was not fast enough to render it at full speed), I’ve returned to Quake several times in later years and on modern hardware it is quite enjoyable from a level design stand point! It’s indeed a very simple game and the visuals are drab but I still quite enjoy playing it & its levels feel more 3d than many modern FPSs!

- Sarah Walker

April 21, 2023 at 3:48 pm

>Then he and his junior partner George Broussard set about making a DOOM-like engine of their own, known as Build, which they could sell to other developers who wanted to get up and running quickly.

Might be worth mentioning Ken Silverman here, who actually wrote Build?

I very much agree with Quake’s single player game being pretty lacklustre (the multiplayer genuinely was excellent, but not very accessible in the 90s). The technology was good enough for me not to notice this for a few months though.

- Jimmy Maher

April 21, 2023 at 3:58 pm

Good catch. Added.

- Matthew P

May 2, 2023 at 6:02 am

Additionally, Silverman wasn’t part of 3DRealms, they just licensed his engine. I remember reading how it was mostly “tossed over the wall” with little documentation, but I can’t find those details.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/build-engine-duke-nukem-blood-shadow-warrior has a bit

- Jimmy Maher

May 2, 2023 at 2:13 pm

Thanks, but my understanding, which is actually supported by the link you cite, is that Silverman made the Build Engine for 3D Realms as a contractor. This is very different from a licensing deal; the finished engine after Silverman had been paid for his services belonged to 3D Realms outright, who could and did then license it to others. The fact that he was a contractor rather than a permanent employee isn’t really germane to the discussion.

- Infinitron

April 21, 2023 at 3:54 pm

I’m sure you’ll mention Quake’s modding scene in your next article as well, which gave us the first iteration of Team Fortress among other things.

- PlayHistory

April 22, 2023 at 4:01 pm

It goes even well beyond that. Ahoy’s video on Quake does a great job encapsulating the myriad of legacies that the fan community around Quake had, from machinima to WASD keybinding to the very concept of “total conversions”.

- Lhexa

April 21, 2023 at 4:22 pm

“But it would do so: as of this writing, just short of DOOM‘s 30th anniversary, that game still enjoys a devoted following who continue to make new maps and tinker with its engine. Quake, on the other hand, has long since been consigned to the status of just another old game that nobody but people like me plays anymore.”

The site Quaddicted.com gathers custom maps for Quake. There were 92 new maps and map packs released in 2022. That’s small in comparison to the fan output for Doom, but still larger than you suggest.

- Jimmy Maher

April 21, 2023 at 4:54 pm

Fair enough. Thanks!

- James Schend

April 21, 2023 at 4:37 pm

I have to be That Guy and name-drop Marathon as a visionary early 2.5d game. Since it’s a Mac game, it feels almost entirely forgotten (and I bet would be if Bungie hadn’t gone on to make Halo and Destiny).

In December of 1994 Marathon had a compelling, mature story, the ability to look up/down (requiring you to actually aim at the enemies, unlike Doom which fudges it), LAN play with several different game modes (and built-in voice chat!). And it ran with a pretty good framerate on some pretty awful CPUs, compared to PCs at the time.

I have now been That Guy and will leave everybody alone.

- Keith Palmer

April 21, 2023 at 10:32 pm

I brought up Marathon here myself back when Doom was being discussed, but did get some “its general design isn’t quite as well-tuned as Doom’s” responses. Afterwards I played through Marathon again using a recent version for its evolved “Aleph One” engine, and wondered if I could see the point that had been made, such that I felt cautious about what I might say now. Still, I appreciate you bringing it up. (I have played Quake, and see the point of finding it “drab.” I’ve also played Dark Forces, and some of Duke Nukem 3D… After that, though, my experiences with these kinds of games may amount to Portal, and a tiny bit of the original Half-Life as a years-after-the-fact port on Steam.)

- xxx

April 23, 2023 at 10:12 pm

Given that Marathon gets very little recognition for how revolutionary it was in 1994, it is vitally important that someone should be That Guy. We thank you for your service.

Keith is quite right that the level design wasn’t as good as DOOM’s, but it put a lot of effort into a dark, broody atmosphere (Marathon was the Alien to DOOM’s Aliens, for a facile comparison) and it and the contemporaneous System Shock were the earliest first-person shooters to use the medium for storytelling.

- Destron

April 25, 2023 at 8:39 pm

I owned a Mac as a kid, so Marathon felt like a godsend.

What makes Marathon a bit of a tougher sell these days is that so many of the elements it pioneered were later refined by later, better-known games. It let the player look up and down, and the maps had cells on top of each other (or at least a convincing illusion of this). Some of the level design was intended to show off this quality.

Unfortunately, verticality in FPS games is such a given that the technology no longer impresses, and what you’re left with are bizarre and cumbersome levels. DOOM levels were typically fairly small and direct, so it didn’t really matter that they had weird layouts. Marathon’s levels tend to be bigger which no longer serves them well. Fans probably remember the bizarro map “The Rose”, or the aggravating “Colony Ship for Sale, Cheap!”

Of course, the tech wasn’t Marathon’s only selling point. While I’m not sure it can claim to be the first game with alternate fire modes (it seems like Marathon did it contemporaneously with Rise of the Triad), it was one of the earliest. I believe it was the first to have ammo on a clip-based system instead of an ammo pool.

Plus it did have an actual storyline which was quite abstract but interesting enough to keep people debating it for over a decade afterward. In fact, Marathon’s story is strangely Dark Souls-esque in that it seems to expect the player to piece it together through various computer logs. That was the impetus behind Marathon’s Story Page, which sought to compile all of the various journals and AI chatter to figure out what the hell was going on (particularly in the bizarre final game).

- James Hofmann

April 27, 2023 at 11:55 am

There are parallels between what Bungie was doing and what the Looking Glass games were doing at the start: In Pathways into Darkness and Ultima Underworld, the model was all the previous first-person dungeon crawl games, with technical upgrades to give it some more action, but still kind of in the paradigm of a Dungeon Master clone.

With Marathon and System Shock they found the refinements, and they looked like Doom: smoother action, less HUD and inventory, more environmental storytelling. Bungie moved more in the direction of blockbuster set-pieces (culminating in Halo) while Looking Glass refined first-person dungeon crawling with Thief and System Shock 2.

Bethesda also warrants mention in their incremental refinement to what has basically been the same kind of open world design: the first Elder Scrolls game is a procedurally generated dungeon crawl with an overworld. Later games shrink the world and add detail repeatedly, but basically preserve the idea of letting players sample a buffet of experiences rather than railroading a main questline.

- Anonymous Bungie Alum

May 3, 2023 at 7:00 pm

I worked at Bungie during the development of Halo, and it really was not an extension or culmination of Marathon as is so widely believed. It’s more accurate to call it an extension of Myth. Halo was built as a third person RTS (yes really) and was only converted to an FPS as part of the Microsoft acquisition. They needed an FPS for their new (as yet unannounced) Xbox console so they had us make Halo into that.

- Pat

April 21, 2023 at 5:10 pm

Yeah, I didn’t find Dark Forces much fun when I played it on GOG, though I blamed that on its archaic control scheme. Quake, on the other hand, was much better, even if nowhere near the level of Duke Nukem 3D.

- The Wargaming Scribe

April 21, 2023 at 8:56 pm

I recently (some 4-5 years ago) replayed some of the FPS classics, and some less classic I had not played before like Strife, Outlaw or Hexen II. Doom aged perfectly, as we all know, and I played all the levels and more I had never played. I found out that Dark Forces aged extremely well, and I finished it again.

After that, a few games had aged OK : Duke Nukem, Hexen were among these. I did not finish them, but I had fun.

I found out that Quake had aged poorly, and so did Half-Life I. Of all the classics I had played back then, I found out that only Heretic had aged worse, for reasons I don’t understand and are of course totally subjective.

- Not Fenimore

April 21, 2023 at 5:52 pm

It’s sorta funny that Reznor soundtracked this one game, apparently not so well, and then took fifteen years off to come back as an actually pretty great film composer.

- Lord Gloom

April 26, 2023 at 10:18 am

Trent Reznor admired Quake for its creepy atmosphere. He created a fitting ambient soundtrack, which a few years ago got reissued on vinyl. There’s a picture of the nightmarish open-plan iD office on the back. It’s a fantastic listen.

The idea that his soundtrack is lacking, or that he was “holding back songs for the next NIN album”, is very misguided. He made exactly the soundtrack he wanted to created – dark ambience to suit the game’s haunted atmosphere. He wasn’t thinking in turns of songs. He was thinking in terms of mood, and succeeded in creating one of dank, unremitting dread.

The reason he didn’t return for the sequel? Because he didn’t admire the atmosphere so much.

So I disagree – it isn’t “sorta funny” that he went on to compose for films having composed for Quake. Here lies the roots of his later soundtrack work!

- Ishkur

April 21, 2023 at 6:28 pm

My favorite 2.5Doom-clone from this era was a unheralded Japanese game called Shogo: Mobile Armor Division.

It had a unique gimmick where you piloted a mech like MechWarrior, fighting other mechs in a large urban environment, but you could also exit the mech and run around on foot, where it then became an FPS. You could even enter buildings (and some levels required you to clear out some buildings before returning to your mech).

Most levels were one or the other but a few levels were both, in that the game suggests you use the mech to assault enemy bases, destroy their defenses, then once you get there, climb out and go inside, run down human-sized corridors and root out the bad guys.

But you don’t have to play it this way. If you truly wanted to up the difficulty level, you could abandon your mech at the start of the level and fight the giant enemy mechs on foot. Not recommended.

It had a decent storyline for the time, too (with lots of twists and revelations). I had a lot of fun playing it and I did not understand why it wasn’t more popular. Bad marketing, I guess.

Jimmy do you plan on doing anything on MechWarrior?

- Sarah Walker

April 21, 2023 at 7:35 pm

Shogo is a. fully 3D and b. American ;)

- Jimmy Maher

April 21, 2023 at 7:47 pm

I have to confess that I find the whole giant robots thing kind of irredeemably silly, even by the standards of most game fictions. I do want to write about Interstate ’76, a wonderfully unique little game that used the MechWarrior 2 engine, so maybe we get a bit of background there.

- IJCM

April 25, 2023 at 5:54 pm

I remember asking years ago about any forthcoming BattleTech coverage, and I’ve tried to be very careful not to ask again. Heck, I’m still surprised you ‘broke down’ and covered DOOM.

- Peter Olausson

April 21, 2023 at 9:54 pm

Remember very well when Quake came. It was very good, certainly. But it did lack a certain something. Puzzling.

Historical note: The wire-frame graphics of Elite is almost the most basic of all 3D graphics. In an even simpler one you draw all the lines, whether they ought to be visible or not. Battlezone (1980) in the arcades is the most prominent example.

- Steve Metzler

April 21, 2023 at 10:24 pm

I’ve been around a while, having programmed computers for about 50 years, from the time of punch cards.

Doom was groundbreaking for its time, and I skipped Quake, but Half-Life just totally blew me away. Although I’m generally more into cerebral stuff like adventure games and RPGs, Half-Life remains my fav shooter of all time, mostly because it was so far ahead of its time considering both story and game play. You simply can’t imagine what’s around the next corner.

And Deus Ex, which came just a few years later, is my fav ‘sneaker’, for the same reasons.

- Peter Olausson

April 21, 2023 at 11:22 pm

I’m already looking forward to a big nice article on Deus Ex. Now that’s a new level of FPS.

- Andy

April 24, 2023 at 5:10 pm

I played Half-Life a couple of years after it came out, at a time when I was mostly playing things like Dungeon Keeper and The Sims and Civ. I was impressed by Wolf 3d and DOOM and Quake, but I agree: Half-Life blew me away for the exact same reasons. Yes, all the scientists at the base are clones of the same two guys and they only have a limited number of things to say and sometimes they say them at very weird times, BUT you could just walk up to them and they’d tell you what they were thinking and they could do stuff for you and react to what you were doing and…. It might have been all pre-scripted, but that world felt more real than anything else I’d experienced in a game back then. It’s old hat now, of course, but my thinking at the time was that this was a massive leap forward. (At the very least, it’s similar to what Quake could have been if they hadn’t fired Tom Hall…)

- FeepingCreature

April 27, 2023 at 8:00 am

Half-Life is even distantly based on the Quake engine! Deus Ex, however, uses the Unreal engine, which was written from scratch. Between them, these two engines basically carried 3D gaming for half a decade.

- Sam Barlow

April 22, 2023 at 3:56 am

I revisited Quake fairly recently and had a wonderful time. This may be my particular tastes, but the purity & intensity of its mood (comparable to, say, Sega arcade titles, but rather than blue skies and speed; it’s dank dungeons and misery) and the Trent Reznor soundscape were unlike much else that has been seen since. The bosses and minimal story (entirely delivered by slowly printing single screens of text!) were minor hairs in the soup.

- Brent Ellison

April 22, 2023 at 10:48 am

I fully agree on the soundtrack. If people were expecting Nine Inch Nails songs of course they’d be disappointed, but that wasn’t really the goal. Reznor delivered excellent ambience that defines the setting almost as much as the graphics themselves.

- Alex

April 22, 2023 at 6:32 am

I never played Quake 1, but I read a lot about it´s technical wizardry back in the day. Somehow you just couldn´t escape the terms “Romero, Carmack, Doom and Quake” if you were interested in PC-Games. But this is the first article that really let me appreciate the technology behind it all. After reading so many times about the engine and all its features, this says a lot.

Speaking about the narrative: I stopped playing games for good circa a decade ago and got back into it just one and a half years ago. I have to say, I´m more than thrilled about the narrative progression in action games during my abscence (Tomb Raider, Batman, Call of Juarez, Fallout New Vegas as well). These are old games by now, of course, but I´m discovering them just as new. It´s a fullfilment of an old dream of mine: Playing action games with a narrative depth. Regarding Deus Ex: In my book, it´s the best game ever made and a piece of art actually.

- John

April 22, 2023 at 6:26 pm

I respected Quake more than I enjoyed it. It’s a very impressive game that I am very bad at. My aim is terrible. Perhaps more importantly, however, I have a terrible time navigating unfamiliar virtual spaces in first-person. It’s deeply frustrating, all the more so because I have no trouble at all navigating most unfamiliar real spaces. Most real spaces have an underlying and comprehensible logic to them. Far too many game spaces do not, and that problem is compounded in games with a first-person view. It’s relatively easy to remember where all the doors are and which way you’re facing in, say, a top-down or isometric game. It’s much harder to do in a game where all you can see is what’s right in front of you.

That’s one of the reasons that I liked Lucas Arts’ western-themed shooter Outlaws so much more than many of its contemporaries. Several of the levels in Outlaws, including the second level, which also served as the game’s demo, resemble actual, plausible western-themed locations. There’s a small town, a series of train cars, a ranch, etc. In those levels, I could tell where I was, what other spaces I could access, and how the other spaces I could access related to the space I was in. Unfortunately, some of the levels in Outlaws were twisted, nonsensical nightmares, worse than any Doom or Quake level I ever played. The sawmill level is downright sadistic. Outlaws uses the Dark Forces engine and levels like the sawmill level make me afraid to try Dark Forces. I don’t want to see what Lucas Arts’ designers would do with the free reign a sci-fi theme would give them.

- Jimmy Maher

April 22, 2023 at 7:57 pm

I tend to have the same problem, although to be honest I’m pretty bad with orientation in real life as well. I’d say you were wise to skip Dark Forces. I found it hopelessly confusing. (Jedi Knight, on the other hand, gave me very little trouble. Although the levels are equally sprawling, there’s a definite through line to each of them that was missing in Dark Forces.)

- Captain Kal

April 26, 2023 at 11:12 am

Jedi Outcast, is even better, IMHO!!!

- Kaj Sotala

April 22, 2023 at 7:06 pm

Maybe it was just my social bubble, and you do kind of hint at this, but my recollection is that after Quake turned out to be pretty uninteresting as a single-player game, it established itself as the most popular game for an FPS deathmatch for quite a while. And e.g. Team Fortress was originally a Quake mod. So even though it failed in what people might originally have thought it was going for, it was ultimately very successful. (But again I don’t know if this more generally the case, or if it just happened to be a super-popular multiplayer game among the people that I happened to know.)

- Gnoman

April 22, 2023 at 10:00 pm

“Duke Nukem 3D was a triumph of design and attitude rather than technology; in keeping with most of the DOOM clones, the Build engine’s technical innovations over its inspiration were fairly modest. ”

I think you might be selling Duke3D a little short in the technical department here. Despite being 2.5d with some annoying limitations, the Build engine allowed several things that weren’t implemented in other games until Quake – the concept of “underwater” was a big one, as was the closely related flight.

Probably the biggest one is full free-aim. It is clunky with the default controls (which are a Doom-style arrow key front/back/turn with autoaim, but with the ability to aim up and down with the number pad), but it is not only possible but fairly necessary to aim up and down to complete the game – many levels have you shooting switches well above or below you). Perhaps more interestingly, if you pull out an original copy (not any of the modern rereleases, not the Atomic Edition, not even a later patch) and play it in DOS, you can very easily turn on Mouselook and rebind the controls to make it play identically to a modern shooter.

In the 90s and early 00s, I didn’t have a computer capable of playing the latest Quake-engine shooters of the time, and I have strong memories of configuring Duke3D as a “poor man’s substitute”, even though I only had the shareware version at the time.

- The Wargaming Scribe

April 23, 2023 at 5:35 pm

Duke Nukem 3Dwas to my knowledge the first game managing underwater, I believe you are right about that.

Both Dark Forces and Heretic had free aim, better implemented in DF which made perfect use of verticality. Heretic also allowed you to fly with a power-up (same as Duke Nukem 3D).

- Gnoman

April 24, 2023 at 7:55 am

I only played Dark Forces on console, but my memory (supported by every video I can find that isn’t an upgraded version, has it as a straight Doom-style flat perspective.

I know nothing of Heretic or Hexen (I didn’t even know it existed until relatively recently), but a search says you’re right about it having the ability to look up and down.

- Lt. Nitpicker

April 24, 2023 at 4:17 pm

Every version of Dark Forces, including the PS1 version, can look up or down. On the PS1, there’s auto aim so you don’t need it to hit enemies, but it’s still there.

https://youtu.be/IiWnaFUEYEk?t=974 (video of the PS1 version looking up and down)

https://archive.org/details/dark-forces-manual/page/n5/mode/2up (PC game manual listing look up and down keys)

- Josh Martin

May 17, 2023 at 6:57 pm

ShadowCaster actually had both underwater areas and flight—curiously so considering that John Carmack developed it before the Doom engine, which in its initial form had neither. It also had slopes, something else that didn’t make it into Doom.

Truthfully flight wasn’t a rare feature in FPS titles by the time DN3D came out; besides Heretic it was also in Rise of the Triad, Witchaven (one of two games Capstone made before DN3D’s release using earlier iterations of the Build engine), and CyberMage; I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting. There’s also the odd Radix: Beyond the Void, which put the player in the hovercraft that could move up and down but otherwise controlled like a standard FPS of the time, at least until a later patch added Descent-style controls. And then there’s Bethesda’s Future Shock, which not only had flight and underwater areas but full 3D environments and objects courtesy of the comically buggy XnGine.

- Bogdanow

April 24, 2023 at 5:33 pm

At my high school, the Duke Nukem 3D was THE_GAME, the default for multiplayer. I am trying to remember the exact reasons for that. It might be due to lower technical requirements. And for shooters, multiplayer is like sex – more people, more excitement.

- Gnoman

April 22, 2023 at 10:05 pm

The melding of 2D and 3D in the 90s is pretty interesting, and even more so is that two completely opposite approaches were used. Games like Doom built a 3D world with 2d character sprites.

Meanwhile, there were a whole lot of games that went in the complete opposite direction – many 90s-era games, particularly on console, built the world in 2d (either in the literal sense of still being a sidescroller or similar, or in the Resident Evil/Final Fantasy approach of a pre-rendered background painted and barriered to give the illusion of a 3D space) with the characters being 3D.

- minusf

April 23, 2023 at 9:35 am

Sadly this piece reads more to me like an opinion piece than game journalism.

- GeoX

April 25, 2023 at 12:27 pm

Egads! Opinions! Run for the hills!

- Get your opinions here

April 26, 2023 at 9:21 pm

You’re reading a blog and complaining that it’s got… opinions?

- Bmp

May 10, 2023 at 9:36 pm

While I don’t know exactly what minusf means, I tend to agree with the general direction. I want to express some criticism that I’ve thought about for a while now, though it has to be said that I’m not a Patreon supporter, so I’m kind of looking a gift horse in the mouth.

I think it would be nice if historic facts, inferences and opinions were a bit more clearly distinguishable. After all, this is a historian’s blog. Often I’m thinking, “Is this actually true?” In your articles about games I know a lot about, I find factual statements that I consider false. Not the end of the world, everyone makes mistakes — but it also seems that you’re trying to find a general thrust, or theme, for each article, and I get the impression that this theme has a too strong influence on the selection and commentary of the facts. Facts sometimes seem to get squished into the shape required by the commentary.

Also, almost all statements are stated without qualifications like “from what I’ve read about this, it seems that…” or “I haven’t found any solid confirmation, but from fact X I infer that…” This seems suspicious to me — are all these statements really that well-sourced?

Then I’m wondering whether the situation is similar in your articles for games that I know little about. (The Gell-Mann amnesia effect.) For example, the articles about Doom and Quake really benefit from the disagreements in the comments, such as the great comment by Eden below, and I think the articles are a bit too tendentious to really give an accurate impression about the games by themselves. If all I knew about these games was the information in your articles, I’d say that I’d have gotten an inaccurate impression. Now do I unwittingly get inaccurate impressions about some games from your other articles, where I don’t know the game in question and there are only a few comments?

As a counterexample, I get the impression that the CRPG Addict always lets the themes and the commentary naturally follow from the nitty-gritty details. I find that his articles are both very accurate regarding the objective facts, and the opposite of tendentious, yet still interestingly opinionated. Statements are often supplemented with appropriate qualifications regarding their certainty. That is, he says when he is not sure. Of course his articles are very different, with a huge focus on plain reporting of his personal experience in his playthroughs. But wouldn’t it be possible to leave those parts out (after all, you do play the games you’re writing on, without reporting on every level) yet arrive at conclusions in a similar way?

Well, maybe this is not this blog’s intention — I’ve written about my personal preferences, but it seems pretty obvious that your preferences are different.

- Nikolai Kondrashov

April 23, 2023 at 11:20 am

I feel somewhat justified in my lack of love for Quake after reading this. Still, I would prefer it over Quake 2, for its atmosphere.

Quake was the first game I saw with 3D acceleration. I can still remember where and how exactly it happened, and how the level looked, I was so impressed and excited.

- Steve Nicholson

April 23, 2023 at 3:23 pm

I’m guessing “notes and bolts” should be “nuts and bolts”.

- Jimmy Maher

April 23, 2023 at 3:31 pm

Yes. Thanks!

- Alex Freeman

April 23, 2023 at 4:42 pm

I hope you elaborate on the Build Engine. It’s based on voxels, which I’d like to read more about. Voxels have certain advantages, such as the potential for destructible environments. I wonder why voxels never caught on.

- xxx

April 23, 2023 at 10:23 pm

Good question! Two words: “hardware acceleration”. Static polygonal meshes were much cheaper and easier to render in hardware than voxel environments.

- feldspar

April 24, 2023 at 6:42 am

Well, I suppose voxels did make a big comeback a few decades later with Minecraft becoming one of the most popular games in the world at least.

- Josh Martin

May 17, 2023 at 8:32 pm

Minecraft uses voxels to represent the underlying map data, but the objects and environments are rendered as conventional polygons. True volume rendering has been used in games for certain objects, as in some later Build games and Westwood’s Tiberian Sun engine, but the number of games using it as their primary approach is vanishingly tiny and limited mostly (entirely?) to the indie scene. Even the “Voxel Space” engine that NovaLogic trumpeted for years rendered terrain via raycasting with heightmaps and had major limitations attached, like the inability to do rooms over rooms without incorporating separate polygonal structures.

- Joshua Barrett

April 29, 2023 at 7:35 pm

The Build Engine wasn’t based on voxels at all. It was similar to Doom in some respects, although it used a portal renderer and generally a portal system for adjacency, allowing for non-euclidean geometry (which aided greatly in mimicking the truely 3D geometry the engine did not support). Build allowed for voxel objects to exist in the world, at least in later versions, so voxels could be used instead of sprites for weapons, ammo, or small bits of detailing, as seen in Blood.

Voxels were actually used quite a bit because they were easy to render: in particular, Westwood really liked Voxels. But 3D acceleration ate away at the advantages and made voxels a liability because they weren’t accelerated.

- Josh Martin

May 17, 2023 at 8:10 pm

Interestingly, John Carmack was convinced into the late ’90s that voxel engines were the next big thing and that voxel accelerators were just around the corner. Ken Silverman spent a lot of time working on a voxel engine after Build until it became clear that this technique wasn’t the way of the future after all.

- Alex

April 23, 2023 at 5:30 pm

Since someone mentioned that he can still remember the beginning of 3D-Acceleration: I can still quite clearly remember when Soundcards and CD-Rom Drives happened, but I cant´t remember my first 3D-Card nor my first 3D-accelerated game (Could have been Quake 2). I don´t think it was such a big thing for me. Of course it doesn´t help that the majority of 3D-Action games were quite unremarkable affairs gameplay-wise. Of all the action-games I played back in the 90s, only Resident Evil and Tomb Raider got stuck in my brain permanently for their long-time fun-factor. And of course Duke 3D, which I already mentioned.

Besides that, high performance-cards were quite expensive already back then and totally out of reach for me. To this day I never owned a really expensive card, so I never got addicted on the “Wow-factor” of optical presentations and never cared to spend big money on the cards.

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- Mabfred

April 24, 2023 at 3:35 pm

I vividly remember being blown away by two demos running on computer screens in our local PC shop in late 1996/ early 1997. It was Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and Quake. When the “player” in the demo went down a dimly lit staircase, entering a large cavern and suddenly the flying ghost-like creatures attacked FROM ABOVE, and he shot them with the nail gun… It was an essential wow moment – the future is here! Being a non-English-speaking kid well familiar with doom and Wolf3D, the narrative emptiness never bothered me.

And how about Bethesda’s Terminator games? They were also true 3d and contemporaries.

- Eden

April 25, 2023 at 11:20 am

I hate to say it, but this article’s conclusion feels like a rare swing-and-miss for this blog, insofar as it seems out of touch with not just Quake’s legacy but the nuances of Doom’s. Doom after all has been “rebooted” into a second-wind franchise that continues to command sales and attention; naturally and crucially, this sustains interest in its open-sourced engine, which by virtue of its simplicity is appealing for mappers, modders, and developers to work with. Modern Doom engines like GZDoom now allow developers to script & code their way into making new games that are “Doom” on some primal level, but are otherwise very much their own thing. (Some, like Hedon Bloodrite, are even being sold commercially.) With its daunting model-and-brush-based world, Quake could never offer this level of accessibility, but such popularity has very little to do with historical factors like, say, Doom’s sharper level design, or John Romero’s lack of enthusiasm, or the prominence of brown in Quake’s palette. As touched on here, some of the Build games were perhaps “better” than Doom in gameplay and level design, and Duke3D even could be called a successful “Doom-killer” for its own time: yet for similar technical reasons, the Build engine did not supplant the Doom engine for hobbyists either.

And that brings around to Quake’s legacy, which is inexplicably depicted here as a forgotten game, a technical footnote. This reads like a “hunch” to me: I am not sure on what metric this is held to be so. A quick search for “Quake” on YouTube immediately turns up a six-year-old playthrough that boasts 3.5 million views, a suggestion of a general interest that can hardly be shared by many other 1990s PC games. One Quake speedrunning video from September 2019 has 1.69 million views; Digital Foundry’s two-part video series on the dry technical details of the Quake engine has attracted almost a million views combined. Also omitted from the article is the 2021 remaster by Nightdive Studios, which is estimated by one website (vginsights) to have since sold 400k units on Steam and raked in a revenue of two million dollars! This all strongly suggests that consumers (even young consumers!) are still purchasing, playing, streaming, and viewing the game even today… proving it not only memorable, but profitable. You can after all immediately purchase and play a revamped, controller-driven, high-fidelity port of Quake for a current-generation game console: certainly not something that could be said for, say Ultima Underworld.

And it’s not all just about money and clicks! Quake is alive in less crude ways too: a substantial “official” new episode, Dimensions of the Machine, was released by the studio Machine Games in 2021 to accompany the remaster; several breakout modern FPS, like Dusk, Amid Evil, and Devil Daggers, have prospered as self-styled disciples of Quake rather than Doom (one in-development game, WRATH, is even using the Quake engine); a cutting-edge source port, Ironwail, has recently been released out of a necessity to meet the hungry ambitions of the current wave of mappers. Precious few games covered on this blog can claim anything like this level of ongoing-attention. Yes, Quake never has risen to the height of its predecessor, but when that predecessor is potentially the most influential PC game of all time…

Also, tangential, but I personally did and always have enjoyed Quake very much. Can you tell?

- Jimmy Maher

April 25, 2023 at 11:49 am

Fair enough. I suspect some of the cognitive dissonance here might be that I tend to evaluate these games on the basis of their single-player campaigns, but that’s not really the heart of their appeal for many or most hardcore players. I did acknowledge that to some extent, but perhaps not enough.

Anyway, I’ve removed the short paragraph about Quake’s modern standing in comparison to DOOM, which didn’t really need to be there anyway. Thanks!

- Eden

April 25, 2023 at 12:15 pm

It certainly is unfortunate that Quake’s original offerings were so disjointed and dreary. I appreciate them as weird abstract spaces, but by-and-large, the levels are only as appealing as one’s appetite for adrenaline. That said, creating (and compiling!) such levels was also much more cumbersome than the usage of those quicker tools that helped Sandy Petersen almost single-handedly map out Doom II, so in many ways Quake was damned by its own precocity.

Happily, powerful third-party tools have since transformed the environmental narratives to be found in modern Quake maps, allowing for memorable single-player experiences even while running on the same engine, with the same roster, and the same underwhelming weapon-set… but it’s of course this is too little, too late for those who went on to find similar and better experiences in other games. (Or who vanished forever into the labyrinths of Hexen II, never to be seen again.)

Once again, much appreciation for your thoughtful writing and courteous engagement!

- Joshua Barrett

April 29, 2023 at 7:38 pm

I’m not sure I’d agree about accessibility in level design. At the time absolutely not, but nowadays Quake’s tooling rivals or exceeds Dooms in accessibility.

Seriously, Trenchbroom is an absolutely fantastic level editor.

- Michael

April 26, 2023 at 10:24 pm

“now trading under the most sustainable name”

more sustainable? Or is the superlative intentional?

- Jimmy Maher

April 27, 2023 at 4:47 am

Nope. ;) Thanks!

- Jeff Thomas

April 27, 2023 at 5:06 pm

I was fortunate enough to work at a small game developer that was invited to bid on the Quake Macintosh port months before Quake was released (we had done the Hexen Mac port). Part of the bidding process was submitting an actual working copy of the game on the Mac (such was ids clout they could demand such a thing), it didn’t have to be perfect but it had to run. This meant we got a full copy of the game code at in its current state, about 95% complete.

I think one thing worth mentioning about Quake is that, unlike many multiplayer games of the time, you didn’t just have the option to play deathmatch, you could play cooperatively and fight side-by-side through the standard campaign. As soon as we got the game up and running with networking that’s what we did, staying up until dawn as we entered the final battle which hadn’t been implemented yet so the boss was frozen in time.

But my main memory of it was stepping through the rendering engine. I was not a college educated programmer, nor had I done any research into 3d rendering. I had no idea what a binary space partitioning algorithm was or how it worked, stepping through the code was a revelation, not just how it worked but that I could understand it because it was so cleanly and simply written. Making complex algorithms seem simple is HARD. For whatever faults Carmack may have, his reputation as a highly skilled programmer is well earned.

- Kevin Higgins

April 27, 2023 at 7:25 pm

Thanks for the piece! Some comments from a Quake fan who has thought about the game far too much.

Quake was all about modding. As the modder Kell commented, the unfinished, implicit quality of the game content invited creativity.

But it was the robust tech that made modding enjoyable. In particular I’d celebrate Carmack’s movement physics: idiosyncratic (sliding down gentle inclines? bunny-hopping?) yet solid as a rock, unglitchable.

An interesting case study in digital culture would be to compare the Quake and Doom scenes.

Quake was more prominent in the solidifying of an online gamer identity via news sites and forums. The early mods focused on multiplayer gameplay (Team Fortress for example), stupidly OTT weapons and rather conventional level design. But creators interested in pushing technical limits graduated to other games and those gamer sites began to die off in the 2000s.

Whereas the technically simpler Doom seems to have always attracted a broader base of modders, often experimenting with gameplay or theme, often explicitly artistic. The endless stream of Doom ports has kept it in programmers’ consciousness too. I think the wider audience resulted in a thoughtful, tolerant scene.

Quake modding, even in its currently ongoing second wave, is not arty. The most highly-worked levels (such as can be seen in the massive Arcane Dimensions mod) are about fun gameplay and attractive representations of standard pulp visuals: temples, space bases, lost cities, castles. It’s a less introspective scene, but again a friendly one.

Rather amazingly, as the commenter Lhexa mentions, it’s growing, perhaps in part due to advocacy from the likes of NYU design professor Robert Yang, perhaps riding the retro shooter cultural wave, but I think mostly because the base game was good enough, and – helped by a suite of freeware tools and upgrades – it’s just plain fun to make or play a custom level.

- Jaina

April 28, 2023 at 12:58 am

interactive movies built around canned video clips that the industry was slowing giving up on.” Slowly?

Quake as a game is, as you mentioned, just ok. I’m not super interested in FPS in general, but Quake as an experience could be amazing. There wasn’t anything quite like flying through those corridors blasting your teenage or college buddies.

- Jimmy Maher

April 28, 2023 at 5:59 am

Yes. Thanks!

- Joshua Barrett

April 28, 2023 at 10:10 pm

The Quake singleplayer campaign is actually rather solid, if not particularly special or exciting. I found it to be rather more enjoyable to Unreal, which was considerably more ambitious in its storytelling and design but suffered with level and enemy design that was very impressive but didn’t feel all that fun to me. But then, Unreal goes against Quake 2, which is a whole other ballgame. id games always just feel good to move and shoot in, and Quake really helped to define what FPS movement should feel like to me. It also had bugs in its movement code that raised the skill ceiling on what you could do with it.

However, I think this article really, really misses the ball on Quake’s technological and cultural importance and impact in quite a few ways, which I am going to list off now because I couldn’t figure out how to compress them down very well.

– Quake’s bytecode and scripting language expanded what was possible for modders to do in the engine, resulting in an explosion of inventiveness. Quake was the first FPS to have a (now-standard) Capture the Flag mode, created by David Kirsch as a mod. Class-based FPSes were experimented with through projects like the very first Team Fortress (later commercialized by Valve with alterations as Team Fortress Classic), as were game modes like Rocket Arena, an even odder mods like QuakeChess and QuakeRally. Also notable were the mods that implemented bots to compete with players in deathmatch, another soon-to-be must-have feature.

– In an age where online video was impractical, Quake’s demo feature (taken from Doom and improved on) was used to create short films, the first instances of what would become known as Machinima. Diary of a Camper (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq4Ks4Z_NGY) is widely reported to be the first such film.

– Quake hosted a notable speedrunning community, which was carried over from Doom, but grew quite a bit, and put attention on speedrunning as a whole with efforts like Quake Done Quick, a segmented run that was spliced together as a single long demo and released online (and subsequently distributed by many gaming magazines). The primary speedrunning sites for Quake would eventually merge together to become Speed Demos Archive, and when it opened the floodgates to other games it became a central hosting site for many speedrunning communities in the mid 2000s (most of which have now moved on to other sites). SDA also hosted the very first GDQ events, although they were eventually spun out into their own organization.

– And of course the impact of QuakeWorld cannot be overlooked. Quakeworld, a separate client and overhaul to the game engine that changed the way network play worked, made Quake play well over the internet. It wasn’t the first game to use client-side prediction (I believe Descent did it earlier?) but it was among the first FPSes. Suddenly, Quake played better over the internet then just about anything else. This, combined the way that Quake’s gameplay felt viscerally good and a strong community pumping out multiplayer maps, is really what defined Quake’s legacy more than anything.

It’s also worth noting that, like Doom, Quake has a modding community still going strong to this day, focusing heavily on good single player content, but that isn’t as important to its historical relevance.

- nisroc

April 29, 2023 at 1:45 pm

A fun fact: the very first iteration of Quake’s networking code designed to be played locally over IPX didn’t have the client-side prediction and was thus much *better* since it was more accurate. But adding the csp made it possible to play over the internet, and that was more important obviously.

- Joshua Barrett

April 29, 2023 at 7:41 pm

NetQuake was the retronym for Quake multiplayer prior to QW, and it remains the protocol largely used for playing singleplayer Quake today.

I would dispute the idea that not having CSP makes a protocol better. If you’re on a connection so fast that you don’t need prediction, prediction doesn’t matter. It just directly makes the game more versatile.

- nisroc

April 30, 2023 at 11:51 am

That is not what we observed playing for hours and hours every day. :D

Playing Quake over IPX on our local LAN all of us could catch the slight glitches with the CSP when it was added.

Now, after playing with it for a few weeks and realizing that there was no going back, we all got used to it. But everyone I played DM with initially was like this is terrible can’t we turn this off? :D

- nisroc

April 29, 2023 at 1:40 pm

Quake Reply

To echo a few of Joshua’s points:

1. quakec: not only did it allow for big mods like the ones mentioned (you haven’t lived until you’ve played Rocket Arena), but for smaller toys. A guy in our clan (more on clans later) made a quakec script that rotated amongst various taunts to be used when you fragged someone. Much like talking trash in a sports game, you would be amazed how annoyed, mad, and put off their game an opponent would get when every time you killed him he instantly saw a long taunt and then you killed him again instantly whilst he was trying to reply and taunted again with a different one. Which leads me to:
2. QuakeWorld and ClanRing. I see from the comments that the author focuses on single-player, which misses — IMHO — the most revolutionary thing Quake did: it introduced gamers to playing FPS games with and against each other, one-on-one or in teams, **online** not just at a LAN party or using one of the few dialup services that existed to let people DOOM DM each other via modem. With iD sponsoring the ClanRing tournaments, a large community of clans (teams of players, like the Brotherhood of the Rocket) formed that would fight other clans to top the online leaderboard. And with online, global rankings of individual players, you had a proto-version of Esports, allowing for fun spectacles like thresh (the guy who taught us all how to rocket jump) winning Carmack’s Ferrari at E3 in Atlanta.
3. The idea for a game “engine” complete with its own scripting language that could be licensed to make other games and sell them, or just to make mods like Team Fortress.
4. bots, aka, AI (to use today’s big buzzword): there was an active group of people writing all sorts of bots, which led to better NPC opponents in games and ofc cheaters (anyone who has been in a ClanRing DM and seen a weak opponent turn on Stooge Bot and start playing like a god will know what I mean), which made the earlier online game designers realize that they were going to have to provide better NPCs and deal with cheaters.
5. And yes, the Machinima. “Diary of a Camper” from Ranger was indeed the first major one, and it launched a whole separate community and then lead to an industry.

Those are just a few points off the top of my head. I think it is hard to explain to someone who is discovering historical games like Quake now after having first played modern games (and don’t get me wrong, that’s great that people are interested in history) what is was like to experience it at that time. Fingering carmack’s iD account daily to see his .plan detailing his progress (or just hitting one of the websites that did it for you) and discussing things with baited breath — “oh, a lightning gun? what is that gonna be?!” — grabbing QTest instantly, arranging your friends to page you with code 666 (people didn’t have cell phones, they had pagers back then), 24-hour deathmatches on day 1 of the game being out… ahh fun times.

I played my first FPS in a Mac lab at Duke back in the mid 80’s. It was Maze Wars (support for 31 players that just ran around a maze killing each other) and caught the bug early, which led all the way to Quake, which literally blew me away. :D

- nisroc

April 29, 2023 at 1:46 pm

[oops, I double-posted this comment]
Echoing a few of Joshua’s points:

1. quakec: not only did it allow for big mods like the ones mentioned (you haven’t lived until you’ve played Rocket Arena), but for smaller toys. A guy in our clan (more on clans later) made a quakec script that rotated amongst various taunts to be used when you fragged someone. Much like talking trash in a sports game, you would be amazed how annoyed, mad, and put off their game an opponent would get when every time you killed him he instantly saw a long taunt and then you killed him again instantly whilst he was trying to reply and taunted again with a different one. Which leads me to:
2. QuakeWorld and ClanRing. I see from the comments that the author focuses on single-player, which misses — IMHO — the most revolutionary thing Quake did: it introduced gamers to playing FPS games with and against each other, one-on-one or in teams, **online** not just at a LAN party or using one of the few dialup services that existed to let people DOOM DM each other via modem. With iD sponsoring the ClanRing tournaments, a large community of clans (teams of players, like the Brotherhood of the Rocket) formed that would fight other clans to top the online leaderboard. And with online, global rankings of individual players, you had a proto-version of Esports, allowing for fun spectacles like thresh (the guy who taught us all how to rocket jump) winning Carmack’s Ferrari at E3 in Atlanta.
3. The idea for a game “engine” complete with its own scripting language that could be licensed to make other games and sell them, or just to make mods like Team Fortress.
4. bots, aka, AI (to use today’s big buzzword): there was an active group of people writing all sorts of bots, which led to better NPC opponents in games and ofc cheaters (anyone who has been in a ClanRing DM and seen a weak opponent turn on Stooge Bot and start playing like a god will know what I mean), which made the earlier online game designers realize that they were going to have to provide better NPCs and deal with cheaters.
5. And yes, the Machinima. “Diary of a Camper” from Ranger was indeed the first major one, and it launched a whole separate community and then lead to an industry.

Those are just a few points off the top of my head. I think it is hard to explain to someone who is discovering historical games like Quake now after having first played modern games (and don’t get me wrong, that’s great that people are interested in history) what is was like to experience it at that time. Fingering carmack’s iD account daily to see his .plan detailing his progress (or just hitting one of the websites that did it for you) and discussing things with baited breath — “oh, a lightning gun? what is that gonna be?!” — grabbing QTest instantly, arranging your friends to page you with code 666 (people didn’t have cell phones, they had pagers back then), 24-hour deathmatches on day 1 of the game being out… ahh fun times.

I played my first FPS in a Mac lab at Duke back in the mid 80’s. It was Maze Wars (support for 31 players that just ran around a maze killing each other) and caught the bug early, which led all the way to Quake, which literally blew me away. :D

- Jake

April 29, 2023 at 3:20 pm

“[but] could do nothing on the fly”

- Sebastian Gerstl

May 6, 2023 at 6:50 am

One thing I kind of missed in this article (though maybe it may come up at another junction) was GLQuake: John Carmack’s free patch to Quake to include support of 3D acceleration cards, opening the way for the OpenGL standard. Back when I first got Quake I had a (for the time) low-end Pentium PC, not really able to play at the higher resolutions, and the only software-rendered Quake, though exiting for its time, was a very drab and dark (and brown – very brown) affair. The I got a Miro Hiscore 3D acceleration add-on card and the GL patch – and not only did the resolution improve, the lighting, the effects, everything suddenly leagues more impressive and visceral! Playing online Multiplayer this way almost felt like having a cheat mode on, because not only did everything move more fluently, you could see weapon effects from farther away and even see a distinct glow when someone under the influence of a Quad Damage power up was about to come around the corner – it was breathtaking. And all it took for that was a really small-sized patch that, allegedly, John Carmack wrote on his own overnight because he was disappointed with the software support for these 3D cards not living up to their potential. Arguably, GLQuake was essential for the later success of 3D graphics cards from then on out.

- Paul Demarty

May 8, 2023 at 12:13 pm

A nitpick: Despite the ubiquity of strippers etc, Duke 3D is set in LA, not Vegas.

- Jimmy Maher

May 8, 2023 at 12:22 pm

Thanks!

- Josh Martin

May 17, 2023 at 8:03 pm

I think Quake actually has a better reputation today than it did at the time of its release, at least as an actual game. The disjointed style of its levels—the mishmash of sci-fi, medieval, Lovecraftian, and even Mesoamerican influences that clearly point to the developers’ conflicting visions and that the “plot” makes no attempt to tie together—has proved more memorable than the more unified but conventional settings of most of its contemporaries. Any hint of a possible Doom-style reboot/revival brings calls for a return to the original aesthetic and not the more straightforward space opera of parts 2 and 4, and while new levels and mods for the first game are still constantly popping up, the number of Quake II mods released on an annual basis can be counted on two hands.

But what I find more interesting are the changes in how the game is played. On the game’s initial release I came away with the impression described here, of a great technical showcase that felt slow and lifeless compared to Doom. There’s certainly a lot of truth to that, given the monochromatic look and the more expansive but less populated levels. But now I also think myself and just about everyone else hadn’t come to grips with the different play style the game invited, if not demanded. At that point, mouse + keyboard controls for most FPS games meant using the mouse for turning and fine movements forward and backwards. Marathon and Descent had mouselook, but the former was still restricted to pretty basic “2.5D” environments, and the latter was an idiosyncratic FPS/flight sim hybrid. Mouselook was a non-default option in Duke 3D and Future Shock didn’t exactly light the world on fire.

In other words, most players of Quake in 1996 weren’t accustomed to what are now considered the mandatory controls for a full 3D FPS, and even if they were, there are some major differences in its physics—particularly with jumping, which in earlier FPS games was either absent or clunky—and the concordant emphasis on verticality. The level design also lends itself well to multiple routes, and once players figured out how to exploit movement techniques like bunny-hopping and rocket/grenade jumps, they started to blaze through levels at speeds that would’ve been unimaginable in Doom. Even as a more casual player, I’m struck every time I go back to Quake by the sort of things I can pull off, even if just by accident. It’s less immediately satisfying than Doom, but I feel there’s more to do at higher levels of play.

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The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 2: Three Dimensions in Hardware
May 5, 2023

Most of the academic papers about 3D graphics that John Carmack so assiduously studied during the 1990s stemmed from, of all times and places, the Salt Lake City, Utah, of the 1970s. This state of affairs was a credit to one man by the name of Dave Evans.

Born in Salt Lake City in 1924, Evans was a physicist by training and an electrical engineer by inclination, who found his way to the highest rungs of computing research by way of the aviation industry. By the early 1960s, he was at the University of California, Berkeley, where he did important work in the field of time-sharing, taking the first step toward the democratization of computing by making it possible for multiple people to use one of the ultra-expensive big computers of the day at the same time, each of them accessing it through a separate dumb terminal. During this same period, Evans befriended one Ivan Sutherland, who deserves perhaps more than any other person the title of Father of Computer Graphics as we know them today.

For, in the course of earning his PhD at MIT, Sutherland developed a landmark software application known as Sketchpad, the first interactive computer-based drawing program of any stripe. Sketchpad did not do 3D graphics. It did, however, record its user’s drawings as points and lines on a two-dimensional plane. The potential for adding a third dimension to its Flatland-esque world — a Z coordinate to go along with X and Y — was lost on no one, least of all Sutherland himself. His 1963 thesis on Sketchpad rocketed him into the academic stratosphere.

Sketchpad in action.

In 1964, at the ripe old age of 26, Sutherland succeeded J.C.R. Licklider as head of the computer division of the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the most remarkable technology incubator in computing history. Alas, he proved ill-suited to the role of administrator: he was too young, too introverted — just too nerdy, as a later generation would have put it. But during the unhappy year he spent there before getting back to the pure research that was his real passion, he put the University of Utah on the computing map, largely as a favor to his friend Dave Evans.

Evans may have left Salt Lake City more than a decade ago, but he remained a devout Mormon, who found the counterculture values of the Berkeley of the 1960s rather uncongenial. So, he had decided to take his old alma mater up on an offer to come home and build a computer-science department there. Sutherland now awarded said department a small ARPA contract, one fairly insignificant in itself. What was significant was that it brought the University of Utah into the ARPA club of elite research institutions that were otherwise clustered on the coasts. An early place on the ARPANET, the predecessor to the modern Internet, was not the least of the perks which would come its way as a result.

Evans looked for a niche for his university amidst the august company it was suddenly joining. The territory of time-sharing was pretty much staked; extensive research in that field was already going full steam ahead at places like MIT and Berkeley. Ditto networking and artificial intelligence and the nuts and bolts of hardware design. Computer graphics, though… that was something else. There were smart minds here and there working on them — count Ivan Sutherland as Exhibit Number One — but no real research hubs dedicated to them. So, it was settled: computer graphics would become the University of Utah’s specialty. In what can only be described as a fantastic coup, in 1968 Evans convinced Sutherland himself to abandon the East Coast prestige of Harvard, where he had gone after leaving his post as the head of ARPA, in favor of the Mormon badlands of Utah.

Things just snowballed from there. Evans and Sutherland assembled around them an incredible constellation of bright young sparks, who over the course of the next decade defined the terms and mapped the geography of the field of 3D graphics as we still know it today, writing papers that remain as relevant today as they were half a century ago — or perchance more so, given the rise of 3D games. For example, the two most commonly used algorithms for calculating the vagaries of light and shade in 3D games stem directly from the University of Utah: Gouraud shading was invented by a Utah student named Henri Gouraud in 1971, while Phong shading was invented by another named Bui Tuong Phong in 1973.

But of course, lots of other students passed through the university without leaving so indelible a mark. One of these was Jim Clark, who would still be semi-anonymous today if he hadn’t gone on to become an entrepreneur who co-founded two of the most important tech companies of the late twentieth century.

When you’ve written as many capsule biographies as I have, you come to realize that the idea of the truly self-made person is for the most part a myth. Certainly almost all of the famous names in computing history were, long before any of their other qualities entered into the equation, lucky: lucky in their time and place of birth, in their familial circumstances, perhaps in (sad as it is to say) their race and gender, definitely in the opportunities that were offered to them. This isn’t to disparage their accomplishments; they did, after all, still need to have the vision to grasp the brass ring of opportunity and the talent to make the most of it. Suffice to say, then, that luck is a prerequisite but the farthest thing from a guarantee.

Every once in a while, however, I come across someone who really did almost literally make something out of nothing. One of these folks is Jim Clark. If today as a soon-to-be octogenarian he indulges as enthusiastically as any of his Old White Guy peers in the clichéd trappings of obscene wealth, from the mansions, yachts, cars, and wine to the Victoria’s Secret model he has taken for a fourth wife, he can at least credibly claim to have pulled himself up to his current station in life entirely by his own bootstraps.

Clark was born in 1944, in a place that made Salt Lake City seem like a cosmopolitan metropolis by comparison: the small Texas Panhandle town of Plainview. He grew up dirt poor, the son of a single mother living well below the poverty line. Nobody expected much of anything from him, and he obliged their lack of expectations. “I thought the whole world was shit and I was living in the middle of it,” he recalls.

An indifferent student at best, he was expelled from high school his junior year for telling a teacher to go to hell. At loose ends, he opted for the classic gambit of running away to sea: he joined the Navy at age seventeen. It was only when the Navy gave him a standardized math test, and he scored the highest in his group of recruits on it, that it began to dawn on him that he might actually be good at something. Encouraged by a few instructors to pursue his aptitude, he enrolled in correspondence courses to fill his free time when out plying the world’s oceans as a crewman on a destroyer.

Ten years later, in 1971, the high-school dropout, now six years out of the Navy and married with children, found himself working on a physics PhD at Louisiana State University. Clark:

I noticed in Physics Today an article that observed that physicists getting PhDs from places like Harvard, MIT, Yale, and so on didn’t like the jobs they were getting. And I thought, well, what am I doing — I’m getting a PhD in physics from Louisiana State University! And I kept thinking, well, I’m married, and I’ve got these obligations. By this time, I had a second child, so I was real eager to get a good job, and I just got discouraged about physics. And a friend of mine pointed to the University of Utah as having a computer-graphics specialty. I didn’t know much about it, but I was good with geometry and physics, which involves a lot of geometry.

So, Clark applied for a spot at the University of Utah and was accepted.

But, as I already implied, he didn’t become a star there. His 1974 thesis was entitled “3D Design of Free-Form B-Spline Surfaces”; it was a solid piece of work addressing a practical problem, but not anything to really get the juices flowing. Afterward, he spent half a decade bouncing around from campus to campus as an adjunct professor: the Universities of California at Santa Cruz and Berkeley, the New York Institute of Technology, Stanford. He was fairly miserable throughout. As an academic of no special note, he was hired primarily as an instructor rather than a researcher, and he wasn’t at all cut out for the job, being too impatient, too irascible. Proving the old adage that the child is the father of the man, he was fired from at least one post for insubordination, just like that angry teenager who had once told off his high-school teacher. Meanwhile he went through not one but two wives. “I was in this kind of downbeat funk,” he says. “Dark, dark, dark.”

It was now early 1979. At Stanford, Clark was working right next door to Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which was inventing much of the modern paradigm of computing, from mice and menus to laser printers and local-area networking. Some of the colleagues Clark had known at the University of Utah were happily ensconced over there. But he was still on the outside looking in. It was infuriating — and yet he was about to find a way to make his mark at last.

Hardware engineering at the time was in the throes of a revolution and its backlash, over a technology that went by the mild-mannered name of “Very Large Scale Integration” (VLSI). The integrated circuit, which packed multiple transistors onto a single microchip, had been invented at Texas Instruments at the end of the 1950s, and had become a staple of computer design already during the following decade. Yet those early implementations often put only a relative handful of transistors on a chip, meaning that they still required lots of chips to accomplish anything useful. A turning point came in 1971 with the Intel 4004, the world’s first microprocessor — i.e., the first time that anyone put the entire brain of a computer on a single chip. Barely remarked at the time, that leap would result in the first kit computers being made available for home users in 1975, followed by the Trinity of 1977, the first three plug-em-in-and-go personal computers suitable for the home. Even then, though, there were many in the academic establishment who scoffed at the idea of VLSI, which required a new, in some ways uglier approach to designing circuitry. In a vivid illustration that being a visionary in some areas doesn’t preclude one from being a reactionary in others, many of the folks at PARC were among the scoffers. Look how far we’ve come doing things one way, they said. Why change?

A PARC researcher named Lynn Conway was enraged by such hidebound thinking. A rare female hardware engineer, she had made scant progress to date getting her point of view through to the old boy’s club that surrounded her at PARC. So, broadening her line of attack, she wrote a paper about the basic techniques of modern chip design, and sent it out to a dozen or so universities along with a tempting offer: if any students or faculty wished to draw up schematics for a chip of their own and send them to her, she would arrange to have the chip fabricated in real silicon and sent back to its proud parent. The point of it all was just to get people to see the potential of VLSI, not to push forward the state of the art. And indeed, just as she had expected, almost all of the designs she received were trivially simple by the standards of even the microchip industry of 1979: digital time keepers, adding machines, and the like. But one was unexpectedly, even crazily complex. Alone among the submissions, it bore a precautionary notice of copyright, from one James Clark. He called his creation the Geometry Engine.

The Geometry Engine was the first and, it seems likely, only microchip that Jim Clark ever personally attempted to design in his life. It was created in response to a fundamental problem that had been vexing 3D modelers since the very beginning: that 3D graphics required shocking quantities of mathematical calculations to bring to life, scaling almost exponentially with the complexity of the scene to be depicted. And worse, the type of math they required was not the type that the researchers’ computers were especially good at.

Wait a moment, some of you might be saying. Isn’t math the very thing that computers do? It’s right there in the name: they compute things. Well, yes, but not all types of math are created equal. Modern computers are also digital devices, meaning they are naturally equipped to deal only with discrete things. Like the game of DOOM, theirs is a universe of stair steps rather than smooth slopes. They like integer numbers, not decimals. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, they could approximate the latter through a storage format known as floating point, but they dealt with these floating-point numbers at least an order of magnitude slower than they did whole numbers, as well as requiring a lot more memory to store them. For this reason, programmers avoided them whenever possible.

And it actually was possible to do so a surprisingly large amount of the time. Most of what computers were commonly used for could be accomplished using only whole numbers — for example, by using Euclidean division that yields a quotient and a remainder in place of decimal division. Even financial software could be built using integers only to count the total number of cents rather than floating-point values to represent dollars and cents. 3D-graphics software, however, was one place where you just couldn’t get around them. Creating a reasonably accurate mathematical representation of an analog 3D space forced you to use floating-point numbers. And this in turn made 3D graphics slow.

Jim Clark certainly wasn’t the first person to think about designing a specialized piece of hardware to lift some of the burden from general-purpose computer designs, an add-on optimized for doing the sorts of mathematical operations that 3D graphics required and nothing else. Various gadgets along these lines had been built already, starting a decade or more before his Geometry Engine. Clark was the first, however, to think of packing it all onto a single chip — or at worst a small collection of them — that could live on a microcomputer’s motherboard or on a card mounted in a slot, that could be mass-produced and sold in the thousands or millions. His description of his “slave processor” sounded disarmingly modest (not, it must be said, a quality for which Clark is typically noted): “It is a four-component vector, floating-point processor for accomplishing three basic operations in computer graphics: matrix transformations, clipping, and mapping to output-device coordinates [i.e., going from an analog world space to pixels in a digital raster].” Yet it was a truly revolutionary idea, the genesis of the graphical processing units (GPUs) of today, which are in some ways more technically complex than the CPUs they serve. The Geometry Engine still needed to use floating-point numbers — it was, after all, still a digital device — but the old engineering doctrine that specialization yields efficiency came into play: it was optimized to do only floating-point calculations, and only a tiny subset of all the ones possible at that, just as quickly as it could.

The Geometry Engine changed Clark’s life. At last, he had something exciting and uniquely his. “All of these people started coming up and wanting to be part of my project,” he remembers. Always an awkward fit in academia, he turned his thinking in a different direction, adopting the mindset of an entrepreneur. “He reinvented his relationship to the world in a way that is considered normal only in California,” writes journalist Michael Lewis in a book about Clark. “No one who had been in his life to that point would be in it ten years later. His wife, his friends, his colleagues, even his casual acquaintances — they’d all be new.” Clark himself wouldn’t hesitate to blast his former profession in later years with all the fury of a professor scorned.

I love the metric of business. It’s money. It’s real simple. You either make money or you don’t. The metric of the university is politics. Does that person like you? Do all these people like you enough to say, “Yeah, he’s worthy?”

But by whatever metric, success didn’t come easy. The Geometry Engine and all it entailed proved a harder sell with the movers and shakers in commercial computing than it had with his colleagues at Stanford. It wasn’t until 1982 that he was able to scrape together the funding to found a company called Silicon Graphics, Incorporated (SGI), and even then he was forced to give 85 percent of his company’s shares to others in order to make it a reality. Then it took another two years after that to actually ship the first hardware.

The market segment SGI was targeting is one that no longer really exists. The machines it made were technically microcomputers, being built around microprocessors, but they were not intended for the homes of ordinary consumers, nor even for the cubicles of ordinary office workers. These were much higher-end, more expensive machines than those, even if they could fit under a desk like one of them. They were called workstation computers. The typical customer spent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on them in the service of some highly demanding task or another.

In the case of the SGI machines, of course, that task was almost always related to graphics, usually 3D graphics. Their expense wasn’t bound up with their CPUs; in the beginning, these were fairly plebeian chips from the Motorola 68000 series, the same line used in such consumer-grade personal computers as the Apple Macintosh and the Commodore Amiga. No, the justification of their high price tags rather lay with their custom GPUs, which even in 1984 already went far beyond the likes of Clark’s old Geometry Engine. An SGI GPU was a sort of black box for 3D graphics: feed it all of the data that constituted a scene on one side, and watch a glorious visual representation emerge at the other, thanks to an array of specialized circuitry designed for that purpose and no other.

Now that it had finally gotten off the ground, SGI became very successful very quickly. Its machines were widely used in staple 3D applications like computer-aided industrial design (CAD) and flight simulation, whilst also opening up new vistas in video and film production. They drove the shift in Hollywood from special effects made using miniature models and stop-motion techniques dating back to the era of King Kong to the extensive use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) that we see even in the purportedly live-action films of today. (Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were among SGI’s first and best customers.) “When a moviegoer rubbed his eyes and said, ‘What’ll they think of next?’,” writes Michael Lewis, “it was usually because SGI had upgraded its machines.”

The company peaked in the early 1990s, when its graphics workstations were the key to CGI-driven blockbusters like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. Never mind the names that flashed by in the opening credits; everyone could agree that the computer-generated dinosaurs were the real stars of Jurassic Park. SGI was bringing in over $3 billion in annual revenue and had close to 15,000 employees by 1993, the year that movie was released. That same year, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore came out personally to SGI’s offices in Silicon Valley to celebrate this American success story.

SGI’s hardware subsystem for graphics, the beating heart of its business model, was known in 1993 as the RealityEngine^2. This latest GPU was, wrote Byte magazine in a contemporary article, “richly parallel,” meaning that it could do many calculations simultaneously, in contrast to a traditional CPU, which could only execute one instruction at a time. (Such parallelism is the reason that modern GPUs are so often used for some math-intensive non-graphical applications, such as crypto-currency mining and neural networking.) To support this black box and deliver to its well-heeled customers a complete turnkey solution for all their graphics needs, SGI had also spearheaded an open-source software library for 3D applications, known as the Open Graphics Library, or OpenGL. Even the CPUs in its latest machines were SGI’s own; it had purchased a maker of same called MIPS Technologies in 1990.

But all of this success did not imply a harmonious corporation. Jim Clark was convinced that he had been hard done by back in 1982, when he was forced to give up 85 percent of his brainchild in order to secure the funding he needed, then screwed over again when he was compelled by his board to give up the CEO post to a former Hewlett Packard executive named Ed McCracken in 1984. The two men had been at vicious loggerheads for years; Clark, who could be downright mean when the mood struck him, reduced McCracken to public tears on at least one occasion. At one memorable corporate retreat intended to repair the toxic atmosphere in the board room, recalls Clark, “the psychologist determined that everyone else on the executive committee was passive aggressive. I was just aggressive.”

Clark claims that the most substantive bone of contention was McCracken’s blasé indifference to the so-called low-end market, meaning all of those non-workstation-class personal computers that were proliferating in the millions during the 1980s and early 1990s. If SGI’s machines were advancing by leaps and bounds, these consumer-grade computers were hopscotching on a rocket. “You could see a time when the PC would be able to do the sort of graphics that [our] machines did,” says Clark. But McCracken, for one, couldn’t see it, was content to live fat and happy off of the high prices and high profit margins of SGI’s current machines.

He did authorize some experiments at the lower end, but his heart was never in it. In 1990, SGI deigned to put a limited subset of the RealityEngine smorgasbord onto an add-on card for Intel-based personal computers. Calling it IrisVision, it hopefully talked up its price of “under $5000,” which really was absurdly low by the company’s usual standards. What with its complete lack of software support and its way-too-high price for this marketplace, IrisVision went nowhere, whereupon McCracken took the failure as a vindication of his position. “This is a low-margin business, and we’re a high-margin company, so we’re going to stop doing that,” he said.

Despite McCracken’s indifference, Clark eventually managed to broker a deal with Nintendo to make a MIPS microprocessor and an SGI GPU the heart of the latter’s Nintendo 64 videogame console. But he quit after yet another shouting match with McCracken in 1994, two years before it hit the street.

He had been right all along about the inevitable course of the industry, however undiplomatically he may have stated his case over the years. Personal computers did indeed start to swallow the workstation market almost at the exact point in time that Clark bailed. The profits from the Nintendo deal were rich, but they were largely erased by another of McCracken’s pet projects, an ill-advised acquisition of the struggling supercomputer maker Cray. Meanwhile, with McCracken so obviously more interested in selling a handful of supercomputers for millions of dollars each than millions upon millions of consoles for a few hundred dollars each, a group of frustrated SGI employees left the company to help Nintendo make the GameCube, the followup to the Nintendo 64, on their own. It was all downhill for SGI after that, bottoming out in a 2009 bankruptcy and liquidation.

As for Clark, he would go on to a second entrepreneurial act as remarkable as his first, abandoning 3D graphics to make a World Wide Web browser with Marc Andreessen. We will say farewell to him here, but you can read the story of his second company Netscape’s meteoric rise and fall elsewhere on this site.

Now, though, I’d like to return to the scene of SGI’s glory days, introducing in the process three new starring players. Gary Tarolli and Scott Sellers were talented young engineers who were recruited to SGI in the 1980s; Ross Smith was a marketing and business-development type who initially worked for MIPS Technologies, then ended up at SGI when it acquired that company in 1990. The three became fast friends. Being of a younger generation, they didn’t share the contempt for everyday personal computers that dominated among their company’s upper management. Whereas the latter laughed at the primitiveness of games like Wolfenstein 3D and Ultima Underworld, if they bothered to notice them at all, our trio saw a brewing revolution in gaming, and thought about how much it could be helped along by hardware-accelerated 3D graphics.

Convinced that there was a huge opportunity here, they begged their managers to get into the gaming space. But, still smarting from the recent failure of IrisVision, McCracken and his cronies rejected their pleas out of hand. (One of the small mysteries in this story is why their efforts never came to the attention of Jim Clark, why an alliance was never formed. The likely answer is that Clark had, by his own admission, largely removed himself from the day-to-day running of SGI by this time, being more commonly seen on his boat than in his office.) At last, Tarolli, Sellers, Smith, and some like-minded colleagues ran another offer up the flagpole. You aren’t doing anything with IrisVision, they said. Let us form a spinoff company of our own to try to sell it. And much to their own astonishment, this time management agreed.

They decided to call their new company Pellucid — not the best name in the world, sounding as it did rather like a medicine of some sort, but then they were still green at all this. The technology they had to peddle was a couple of years old, but it still blew just about anything else in the MS-DOS/Windows space out of the water, being able to display 16 million colors at a resolution of 1024 X 768, with 3D acceleration built-in. (Contrast this with the SVGA card found in the typical home computer of the time, which could do 256 colors at 640 X 480, with no 3D affordances). Pellucid rebranded the old IrisVision the ProGraphics 1024. Thanks to the relentless march of chip-fabrication technology, they found that they could now manufacture it cheaply enough to be able to sell it for as little as $1000 — still pricey, to be sure, but a price that some hardcore gamers, as well as others with a strong interest in having the best graphics possible, might just be willing to pay.

The problem, the folks at Pellucid soon came to realize, was a well-nigh intractable deadlock between the chicken and the egg. Without software written to take advantage of its more advanced capabilities, the ProGraphics 1024 was just another SVGA graphics card, selling for a ridiculously high price. So, consumers waited for said software to arrive. Meanwhile software developers, seeing the as-yet non-existent installed base, saw no reason to begin supporting the card. Breaking this logjam must require a concentrated public-relations and developer-outreach effort, the likes of which the shoestring spinoff couldn’t possibly afford.

They thought they had done an end-run around the problem in May of 1993, when they agreed, with the blessing of SGI, to sell Pellucid kit and caboodle to a major up-and-comer in consumer computing known as Media Vision, which currently sold “multimedia upgrade kits” consisting of CD-ROM drives and sound cards. But Media Vision’s ambitions knew no bounds: they intended to branch out into many other kinds of hardware and software. With proven people like Stan Cornyn, a legendary hit-maker from the music industry, on their management rolls and with millions and millions of dollars on hand to fund their efforts, Media Vision looked poised to dominate.

It seemed the perfect landing place for Pellucid; Media Vision had all the enthusiasm for the consumer market that SGI had lacked. The new parent company’s management said, correctly, that the ProGraphics 1024 was too old by now and too expensive to ever become a volume product, but that 3D acceleration’s time would come as soon as the current wave of excitement over CD-ROM and multimedia began to ebb and people started looking for the next big thing. When that happened, Media Vision would be there with a newer, more reasonably priced 3D card, thanks to the people who had once called themselves Pellucid. It sounded pretty good, even if in the here and now it did seem to entail more waiting around than anything else.

The ProGraphics 1024 board in Media Vision livery.

There was just one stumbling block: “Media Vision was run by crooks,” as Scott Sellers puts it. In April of 1994, a scandal erupted in the business pages of the nation’s newspapers. It turned out that Media Vision had been an experiment in “fake it until you make it” on a gigantic scale. Its founders had engaged in just about every form of malfeasance imaginable, creating a financial house of cards whose honest revenues were a minuscule fraction of what everyone had assumed them to be. By mid-summer, the company had blown away like so much dust in the wind, still providing income only for the lawyers who were left to pick over the corpse. (At least two people would eventually be sent to prison for their roles in the conspiracy.) The former Pellucid folks were left as high and dry as everyone else who had gotten into bed with Media Vision. All of their efforts to date had led to the sale of no more than 2000 graphics cards.

That same summer of 1994, a prominent Silicon Valley figure named Gordon Campbell was looking for interesting projects in which to invest. Campbell had earned his reputation as one of the Valley’s wise men through a company called Chips and Technologies (C&T), which he had co-founded in 1984. One of those hidden movers in the computer industry, C&T had largely invented the concept of the chipset: chips or small collections of them that could be integrated directly into a computer’s motherboard to perform functions that used to be placed on add-on cards. C&T had first made a name for itself by reducing IBM’s bulky nineteen-chip EGA graphics card to just four chips that were cheaper to make and consumed less power. Campbell’s firm thrived alongside the cost-conscious PC clone industry, which by the beginning of the 1990s was rendering IBM itself, the very company whose products it had once so unabashedly copied, all but irrelevant. Onboard video, onboard sound, disk controllers, basic firmware… you name it, C&T had a cheap, good-enough-for-the-average-consumer chipset to handle it.

But now Campbell had left C&T “in pursuit of new opportunities,” as they say in Valley speak. Looking for a marketing person for one of the startups in which he had invested a stake, he interviewed a young man named Ross Smith who had SGI on his résumé — always a plus. But the interview didn’t go well. Campbell:

It was the worst interview I think I’ve ever had. And so finally, I just turned to him and I said, “Okay, your heart’s not in this interview. What do you really want to do?”

And he kind of looks surprised and says, well, there are these two other guys, and we want to start a 3D-graphics company. And the next thing I know, we had set up a meeting. And we had, over a lot of beers, a discussion which led these guys to all come and work at my office. And that set up the start of 3Dfx.

It seemed to all of them that, after all of the delays and blind alleys, it truly was now or never to make a mark. For hardware-accelerated 3D graphics were already beginning to trickle down into the consumer space. In standup arcades, games like Daytona USA and Virtua Fighter were using rudimentary GPUs. Ditto the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation, the latest in home-videogame consoles, both which were on the verge of release in Japan, with American debuts expected in 1995. Meanwhile the software-only, 2.5D graphics of DOOM were taking the world of hardcore computer gamers by storm. The men behind 3Dfx felt that the next move must surely seem obvious to many other people besides themselves. The only reason the masses of computer-game players and developers weren’t clamoring for 3D graphics cards already was that they didn’t yet realize what such gadgets could do for them.

Still, they were all wary of getting back into the add-on board market, where they had been burned so badly before. Selling products directly to consumers required retail access and marketing muscle that they still lacked. Instead, following in the footsteps of C&T, they decided to sell a 3D chipset only to other companies, who could then build it into add-on boards for personal computers, standup-arcade machines, whatever they wished.

At the same time, though, they wanted their technology to be known, in exactly the way that the anonymous chipsets made by C&T were not. In the pursuit of this aspiration, Gordon Campbell found inspiration from another company that had become a household name despite selling very little directly to consumers. Intel had launched the “Intel Inside” campaign in 1990, just as the era of the PC clone was giving way to a more amorphous commodity architecture. The company introduced a requirement that the makers of computers which used its CPUs include the Intel Inside logo on their packaging and on the cases of the computers themselves, even as it made the same logo the centerpiece of a standalone advertising campaign in print and on television. The effort paid off; Intel became almost as identified with the Second Home Computer Revolution in the minds of consumers as was Microsoft, whose own logo showed up on their screens every time they booted into Windows. People took to calling the emerging duopoly the “Wintel” juggernaut, a name which has stuck around to this day.

So, it was decided: a requirement to display a similarly snazzy 3Dfx logo would be written into that company’s contracts as well. The 3Dfx name itself was a vast improvement over Pellucid. As time went on, 3Dfx would continue to display a near-genius for catchy branding: “Voodoo” for the chipset itself, “GLide” for the software library that controlled it. All of this reflected a business savvy the likes of which hadn’t been seen from Pellucid, that was a credit both to Campbell’s steady hand and the accumulating experience of the other three partners.

But none of it would have mattered without the right product. Campbell told his trio of protégés in no uncertain terms that they were never going to make a dent in computer gaming with a $1000 video card; they needed to get the price down to a third of that at the most, which meant the chipset itself could cost the manufacturers who used it in their products not much more than $100 a pop. That was a tall order, especially considering that gamers’ expectations of graphical fidelity weren’t diminishing. On the contrary: the old Pellucid card hadn’t even been able to do 3D texture mapping, a failing that gamers would never accept post-DOOM.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[1]A resolution of 800 X 600 was technically possible using the Voodoo chipset, but using this resolution meant that the programmer could not use a vital affordance known as Z-buffering. For this reason, it was almost never seen in the wild.

Sellers had another epiphany soon after. Intel’s latest CPU, to which gamers were quickly migrating, was the Pentium. It had a built-in floating-point co-processor which was… not too shabby, actually. It should therefore be possible to take the first phase of the 3D-graphics pipeline — the modeling phase — out of the GPU entirely and just let the CPU handle it. And so another crucial decision was made: they would concern themselves only with the rendering or rasterization phase, which was a much greater challenge to tackle in software alone, even with a Pentium. Another huge piece of the puzzle was thus neatly excised — or rather outsourced back to the place where it was already being done in current games. This would have been heresy at SGI, whose ethic had always been to do it all in the GPU. But then, they were no longer at SGI, were they?

Undoubtedly their bravest decision of all was to throw out any and all 2D-graphics capabilities — i.e., the neat rasters of pixels used to display Windows desktops and word processors and all of those earlier, less exciting games. Makers of Voodoo boards would have to include a cable to connect the existing, everyday graphics cards inside their customers’ machines to their new 3D ones. When you ran non-3D applications, the Voodoo card would simply pass the video signal on to the monitor unchanged. But when you fired up a 3D game, it would take over from the other board. A relay inside made a distinctly audible click when this happened. Far from a bug, gamers would soon come to consider the noise a feature.”Because you knew it was time to have fun,” as Ross Smith puts it.

It was a radical plan, to be sure. These new cards would be useful only for games, would have no other purpose whatsoever; there would be no justifying this hardware purchase to the parents or the spouse with talk of productivity or educational applications. Nevertheless, the cost savings seemed worth it. After all, almost everyone who initially went out to buy the new cards would already have a perfectly good 2D video card in their computer. Why make them pay extra to duplicate those functions?

The final design used just two custom chips. One of them, internally known as the T-Rex (Jurassic Park was still in the air), was dedicated exclusively to the texture mapping that had been so conspicuously missing from the Pellucid board. Another, called the FBI (“Frame Buffer Interface”), did everything else required in the rendering phase. Add to this pair a few less exciting off-the-shelf chips and four megabytes worth of RAM chips, put it on a board with the appropriate connectors, and you had yourself a 3Dfx Voodoo GPU.

Needless to say, getting this far took some time. Tarolli, Sellers, and Smith spent the last half of 1994 camped out in Campbell’s office, deciding what they wanted to do and how they wanted to do it and securing the funding they needed to make it happen. Then they spent all of 1995 in offices of their own, hiring about a dozen people to help them, praying all the time that no other killer product would emerge to make all of their efforts moot. While they worked, the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation did indeed arrive on American shores, becoming the first gaming devices equpped with 3D GPUs to reach American homes in quantity. The 3Dfx crew were not overly impressed by either console — and yet they found the public’s warm reception of the PlayStation in particular oddly encouraging. “That showed, at a very rudimentary level, what could be done with 3D graphics with very crude texture mapping,” says Scott Sellers. “And it was pretty abysmal quality. But the consumers were just eating it up.”

They got their first finished chipsets back from their Taiwanese fabricator at the end of January 1996, then spent Super Bowl weekend soldering them into place and testing them. There were a few teething problems, but in the end everything came together as expected. They had their 3D chipset, at the beginning of a year destined to be dominated by the likes of Duke Nukem 3D and Quake. It seemed the perfect product for a time when gamers couldn’t get enough 3D mayhem. “If it had been a couple of years earlier,” says Gary Tarolli, “it would have been too early. If it had been a couple of years later, it would have been too late.” As it was, they were ready to go at the Goldilocks moment. Now they just had to sell their chipset to gamers — which meant they first had to sell it to game developers and board makers.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

(Sources: the books The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael A. Hiltzik, and The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis; Byte of May 1992 and November 1993; InfoWorld of April 22 1991 and May 31 1993; Next Generation of October 1997; ACM’s Computer Graphics journal of July 1982; Wired of January 1994 and October 1994. Online sources include the Computer History Museum’s “oral histories” with Jim Clark, Forest Baskett, and the founders of 3Dfx; Wayne Carlson’s “Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation”; “Fall of Voodoo” by Ernie Smith at Tedium; Fabian Sanglard’s reconstruction of the workings of the Voodoo 1 chips; “Famous Graphics Chips: 3Dfx’s Voodoo” by Dr. Jon Peddie at the IEEE Computer Society’s site; an internal technical description of the Voodoo technology archived at bitsavers.org.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

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A resolution of 800 X 600 was technically possible using the Voodoo chipset, but using this resolution meant that the programmer could not use a vital affordance known as Z-buffering. For this reason, it was almost never seen in the wild.

Comments
48 Responses

- Andrew Pam

May 5, 2023 at 4:17 pm

I spotted two name misspellings: One “Gouraaud” and one “McCrackon”.

- Jimmy Maher

May 5, 2023 at 7:24 pm

Thanks!

- PlayHistory

May 5, 2023 at 4:27 pm

A stray “McCrackon” there.

Very good balancing of the topics. I attempted to do some digging on this back when I was looking at SGI to do my N64 article but there’s a fair bit new to me here. Tracing the story of how the “hardcore” became the “mainstream” in the PC market is such a fun topic, running against the idea that the only way to make things for the masses is to make it all-in-one and cheap as dirt. We do live in a different paradigm of computing than in the 90s, entirely because of what happened in that decade.

The only real thing missing is a little more about the IBM PC existing graphics board standards, without which the entire GPU market idea wouldn’t have been feasible. I feel like a paragraph or so on that would make this a fairly complete overview.

- LeeH

May 5, 2023 at 4:30 pm

I would say that buying that first 3dfx voodoo card (a Diamond Monster 3d!) back some time in 1997 was the most significant PC upgrade I’ve ever had. The only thing that even comes close, imo, is the much more recent shift from HDD to SSD.

It’s difficult to describe just how transformative it was, and those pack-in GLide games (especially Mechwarrior 2!) were absolutely brain-rearranging. I’d never seen consistently smooth graphics like that before.

What a wild time.

- Bogdanow

May 5, 2023 at 4:42 pm

Excellent, I will be impatiently waiting for the next part. For the Polish folks here (I’m sure there are some), there is an exciting book from Marek Hołyński, about his time in Silicon Valley, “E-mailem z doliny krzemowej” – sharing some details about both Silicon Graphics (he spent eight years there) and 3dfx. Bit old, it is possible to find it for cheap.

- Sarah Walker

May 5, 2023 at 4:49 pm

Couple of minor notes on the branding. 3dfx was originally styled as 3Dfx, with one of the highly unfashionable capital letters. Also, while you haven’t stated that the 3dfx logo on this page is the original one (so I don’t know if this was a mistake or not), it is the one from the 1999 (IIRC) rebranding. The original logo from their glory years is a tad more “90s”.

- Peter Olausson

May 5, 2023 at 6:28 pm

Is it the first 3Dfx-logo on the chip in the very first picture?

- Jimmy Maher

May 5, 2023 at 7:33 pm

No, both were mistakes. Thanks! (And now I have to change “3dfx” to “3Dfx” everywhere in the article. Pity; the former looks a lot nicer in my opinion.)

- Ross

May 7, 2023 at 3:24 am

I’m not sure what happened culturally, but it does totally feel like in the ’90s, the occasional unexpected capital letter was considered veRy coOl, whereas at some point it became even cooler to forsake capital letters altogether even when the normal rules of english usage called for them.

- Andrew Plotkin

May 5, 2023 at 4:58 pm

> The market segment SGI was targeting is one that no longer really exists.

Hm, would you say? When Apple sells a “Mac Pro” for $6000 (or up as high as you want), I’d say it’s exactly that market segment. The only difference is that it’s the top end of a home computer line that uses the same OS and software down to the laptop level.

Matter of semantics, I guess.

This is all right up against my adult life, of course. I graduated in 1992, and several of my classmates took their newly-minted CS degrees straight to SGI.

- Jimmy Maher

May 5, 2023 at 7:39 pm

It’s still a different category, I think. An SGI workstation would cost you $15,000 to $20,000 minimum, at late 1980s/early 1990s prices. Further, there’s a difference in the way the machines were sold. You can walk into an Apple store today as an ordinary Jane or Jim and walk out with a Mac Pro. (I suppose you might have to order it, but still…) SGI didn’t sell at retail, only to institutional customers. For a while at least, you couldn’t even run one of their machines without a high-voltage outlet of a sort not found in most homes. Of course, if you really wanted one as just somebody off the street, they presumably wouldn’t tell you no. But it really was a very different sales and support model.

- sam

May 5, 2023 at 5:40 pm

‘Sullivan’ should be ‘Sutherland’, right?

- Jimmy Maher

May 5, 2023 at 7:41 pm

Yes. Thanks!

- Ken Brubaker

May 5, 2023 at 6:08 pm

You have “the the” in the first paragraph below the horizontal line.

- Jimmy Maher

May 5, 2023 at 7:42 pm

Thanks!

- Peter Olausson

May 5, 2023 at 6:38 pm

I remember reading about the 3dfx limitations much later, and immediately understood them: As pioneers, they had to sacrifice. With 16 bit colour (which isn’t that big a problem really) and 640×480 resolution only the stuff got cheaper, which was vital to break through in the consumer market (the stuff was pretty expensive as it was). Those limits would only be problematic later on, when the market for 3d graphics cards had been well established.

I’ll never forget my first experience with a 3d graphics card. It was with Unreal, a game I suspect will be covered in future posts. (Which will no doubt be as excellent as this, as they always are.)

- Gordon Cameron

May 6, 2023 at 2:48 am

The first accelerated game I played on my PC was Heretic 2. I was a little late to the party, getting a Voodoo 3 around New Year’s, 2000. I remember admiring the beautifully rendered crates (of course it had to be crates) in the opening level… it was a heady time.

- Sniffnoy

May 5, 2023 at 7:00 pm

Likewise, they threw out the capability of handling any polygons except for the simplest of them all, the humble triangle. For, they realized, you could make almost any solid you liked by combining triangular surfaces together. With enough triangles in your world — and their chipset would let you have up to 1 million of them — you needn’t lament the absence of the other polygons all that much.

Huh, the paradigm of 3D graphics where “polygons” always means “triangles” has been so dominant for the past few decades that I had no idea that at one point they could actually be arbitrary polygons! I was aware of the weird case of the Sega Saturn, which used quadrilaterals instead of triangles (as a result of the 3D being a late feature that had to be built on top of the already-designed hardware for handling rectangular 2D sprites), but had no idea that systems built out of truly general polygons had ever been a thing…

- Sniffnoy

May 5, 2023 at 7:42 pm

Even financial software could be built using integer pairs for dollars and cents rather than single floating-point values.

I think typically here one would use fixed-point (i.e., storing a single number representing the total number of cents (or mills or whatever)), rather than separately storing dollars and cents. And you wouldn’t want to use floating-point for this anyway (or at least, not binary floating point).

Now I think a lot of your comments about using integers are already alluding to the use of fixed-point, but since you never mention it explicitly, I feel like I should take a moment to explain for people.

Sticking to decimal for now — fixed-point representation means representing fraction with the decimal point remaining fixed in its usual place, and you get a fixed number of decimal places after it. It’s contrasted with floating point, where you also only get a fixed number of decimal places after the decimal point, but the decimal point moves around; it “floats”.

Thus, in fixed-point with 2 decimal places, you might have 5.99, or 600.67, or 1356.88, but never 0.0055, because that’s 4 decimal places. By contrast, if you had floating-point with 2 decimal places (horribly limited I know), you could say, instead of thinking of it as 0.0055, let’s think of it as 0.55 * 10^-2. (This is not the usual representation, I know, but I feel like this illustrates my point more easily.) So it allows one to represent smaller numbers without having to add more decimal places. And large numbers too, because one could similarly represent 55,000,000 as 0.55 * 10^8. Etc.

The thing about fixed-point is that computer hardware and computer languages don’t come with fixed-point capability built-in… because they don’t need to! Fixed-point doesn’t need any special support. Imagine for instance that we wanted to store quantities of American money — dollars and cents. So, we only need 2 decimal places. Well… why not just store the total number of cents? That’s all fixed-point is! If we have a fixed-point number x with k decimal places, then the number x*10^k is always an integer, so just store that in place of x. So storing fixed-point numbers only requires storing integers, and doing fixed-point math just requires some tweaks to integer operations.

(Of course here I’ve been describing decimal fixed-point for ease of understanding, and it is farily common, but binary fixed-point is also; and notionally you could use other bases as well. One nice thing about fixed-point is that, because you’re just storing integers, which can be represented perfectly fine in any base, the base you’re using doesn’t have to match the base the computer is using; you can perfectly well do decimal fixed-point even though the computer stores numbers in binary.)

So, a lot of things that you describe as doing “integer math” can be alternately thought of as doing fixed-point math, and likely was thought of that way by its designers; they were not thinking only in integers, they did have fractions! Just not floating-point ones. But because fixed-point math consists of integer operations, whether you think of it as integer math or fixed-point math is largely a matter of interpretation. Still, in many cases thinking of it as fixed-point math, with fractional values, can clarify what’s going on. E.g., if you see quantities of cents being stored, you likely want to think of it as quantities of dollars being stored, just in fixed point.

Now with floating-point, the base really matters; you can do decimal fixed-point with binary integers, but you can’t do decimal floating-point with binary floating-point. So you wouldn’t want to use binary floating-point for money, because binary floating-point can’t represent exactly a fraction like 1/100 (for a single cent). 1/128, sure, but not 1/100. That said, decimal floating-point does also exist, and some programming languages have support for it; but I’m not sure that you’d want to use that for money even so, as floating-point operations necessarily involve approximations in places where fixed-point operations can be exact (although yes there’s always the problem of overflow).

Regardless, you wouldn’t store money as dollars and cents separately; you’d probably use fixed-point. And fixed-point is also what a lot of that integer math probably actually was — fractions weren’t off-limits! Their fractional nature was just implicit.

- Jimmy Maher

May 5, 2023 at 7:50 pm

Yes, that is a far more logical way to do it. Thanks! (The only exception would be in the case of a computer that doesn’t easily handle integers of at least 32 bits.)

And thanks for the explanation of fixed-point as well. A little more complex than I wanted to get in the article proper, but definitely a worthy addendum.

- Joe Vincent

May 5, 2023 at 9:16 pm

Jimmy, thanks for taking us through the fascinating evolution of 3D graphics and CGI. As someone who shared funds with 5 other college room-mates to buy a PC with a Creative Media Sound blaster and a Pentium chip in late-90s pre-internet India, this is also an incredible hit of nostalgia. Spent a phenomenal amount of time exploring free 3D game demos which came with PC mags of that era – including Shadow Warrior, Descent Freespace, & Comanche to name a few.

Minor edit – ‘Makers of Voodoo boards would have to include a cable to connect the existing, everyday graphics cards insider their customers’ machines to their new 3D one.’ Insider needs to be edited to inside.

- Jimmy Maher

May 6, 2023 at 6:05 am

Thanks!

- cobbpg

May 6, 2023 at 5:49 am

Around the same time Commodore were working on the Amiga Hombre chipset amidst their death throes. There are so many interesting ways history could have gone differently.

- Alex

May 6, 2023 at 5:59 am

Oh boy, the brand of 3dfx trigger so many memories. In fact in such a way that this name and the second era of the 1990s are inextricable connected in my memory as a PC-“Gamer”. Regarding the Playstation: It was quite clear that its 3D-Technology had some problems even back then. Textures would vanish and re-appear quite regularly, many objects were blurry, the quality of sharpness would never be constant. Yes, it was quite strange that the console was marketed as such a powerhouse with this shortcomings, but I think there was some kind of mainstream “Hipness” to it that the Computer did not reach at this point. The hardware industry was just learning how to market their new gadgets to a wider spectrum of consumers.

- fform

May 6, 2023 at 9:09 am

The amusing thing about the Playstation (and other consoles of that generation) that was discovered years later was how much their graphics quality relied on the inherent fuzziness of a CRT TV display. Plugging a PSX, N64 or Saturn into an LCD TV in the early 2000s was frankly shocking, because the clarity of the digital display revealed just how janky the graphical work had been.

I was lucky enough to grow up in this period, my first 3d card being a Voodoo Banshee (a Voodoo 1 with integrated 2d graphics). I always looked down on the graphics of console games in comparison with my crisp computer CRT with the high resolution, and felt a little vindicated when everyone realized just how smudged they really were – literally.

- John

May 6, 2023 at 6:49 pm

Older console games had art optimized for the displays on which they were played. That is the exact opposite of “janky”.

- Gnoman

May 6, 2023 at 7:05 pm

That’s as much a problem with connection to LCD than fundamental problems with the graphics design – taking the raw input and having the monitor upscale it has some ugly side effects.

Using dedicated upscaler hardware instead of just plugging the thing in shows that the systems did rely a lot on CRT bleed and even poor cable quality – connecting something like Silent Hill even to a CRT with a high-quality cable breaks the dithering – but it isn’t nearly as bad as you’d get from just plugging it in to the monitor directly.

- Jimmy Maher

May 7, 2023 at 7:32 am

This is nothing unique to the PlayStation. Going back to the Commodore 64, programmers were able to create the illusion of more than 16 colors by arranging their pixels so that their colors bled into one another — an effect totally lost on our crisp digital displays where every pixel is absolutely discrete. It’s not entirely down to nostalgia, in other words, that so many games look better in our memories than they do in our emulators. (I suppose our screens are dense enough by now that it would be possible to simulate the effect of this analog bleed, what with the sheer number of discrete pixels at our disposal, but I don’t know if any emulators do so.)

- John

May 7, 2023 at 4:34 pm

DOSBox offers filters called “scan”, “tv”, and “rgb”, which are intended to replicate the visual characteristics of old CRT monitors and televisions. (See https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Scaler for sample images.) My understanding is that many other emulators offer similar filters. How well these filters work I couldn’t say. I’ve never used them. Most of the games I’ve emulated have been in 640×480 VGA and I don’t think they’d benefit from fake scan lines.

- Gnoman

May 8, 2023 at 12:18 am

Not only do a lot of emulators provide that feature, at least some sourceports do as well. OpenXcom has an absolutely fantastic set, for example. There’s at least one modern “retraux” game (Super Amazing Wagon Adventure Turbo, which is designed with 4-bit aesthetics) that has a surprisingly good (optional) CRT filter.

It is also built into the higher-quality versions of the dedicated upscaler hardware I mentioned – devices you plug your low-res analog hardware into and get a crisp lag-free output in a modern digital format.

- Nate

May 7, 2023 at 6:12 am

Good article. SGI also had an amazingly customized operating system in IRIX, as well as the various tools they sold for 3D modeling.

Ed: I noticed you used the term “neural networking”, but that doesn’t seem quite right. “Neural network” (or “neural net”) is the commonly used noun form.

- Jimmy Maher

May 7, 2023 at 7:25 am

I looked at that too, but “neural network” doesn’t fit there, referring as it does to a single example of the form rather than the endeavor as a whole. “Neural networking” is the logical noun.

- Alex Smith

May 7, 2023 at 3:46 pm

While I understand it is tangential to this excellent article, I am a little surprised the N64 does not rate a mention alongside the PlayStations and Saturns of the world seeing it was an SGI creation and Clark’s one successful attempt to push the company into the consumer market. This push ultimately failed after he left, when I presume McCracken’s lack of interest helped push the most important minds behind the system to leave and form ArtX to do the Gamecube with Nintendo.

- Sarah Walker

May 7, 2023 at 7:19 pm

The N64 was strictly speaking a MIPS project that SGI inherited via their acquisition of the former.

- Alex Smith

May 7, 2023 at 7:55 pm

Not quite. While the tech was MIPS, SGI drove the entry into video games. Tim Van Hook, who developed the Multimedia Engine at the core of the project, was a MIPS guy and the project was based on MIPS technology, but Clark personally approached first Sega and then Nintendo about a video game collaboration, and the deal with Nintendo was negotiated and consummated by SGI. This was all several years after SGI bought MIPS, and turning the tech into the N64 was done by the MIPS folks wholly while under SGI ownership.

- Jimmy Maher

May 8, 2023 at 4:14 pm

Good catch. Not being much of a console guy, I’m afraid I overlooked that history. I added a paragraph to the article. Thanks!

- Whomever

May 7, 2023 at 4:03 pm

Fun article. For those who remember the original Jurassic Park, the “It’s a Unix System!” was in fact an actual demo that SGI shipped with their OS.

- Ralph Unger

May 8, 2023 at 2:24 am

Michael Creighton also had that in one of his novels. Using virtual reality you could walk down a row of file cabinets and open them to find what you are looking for. That is nuts. CD (Change Directory) works a lot faster, and it works in a terminal. No VR or the VR walking pad that he described would be needed. I wanna see a video of the the SGI demo of such a silly thing!

- rocco

May 7, 2023 at 5:19 pm

Curious that you take “old white guy” as synonymous with millionaire or maybe nobility. If only!

- Ralph Unger

May 8, 2023 at 1:50 am

Back in about 1998 I got two Voodoo2 Cards with sli and played mostly Decent for months. My monitors were 1024 X 768 but I never noticed that my card only ran games at 640 X 480. The motion was so fluid! $300 per card in 1998. A total of about $1,111.00 in today’s money. It was the last time I ran at the bleeding edge of PCs. My wife bought me a 386 running at 40 MHz when even my work computers were running at 25 MHz. My work computers cost about $10,000, but that was because I had to store audio files in RAM so they would play on cue.RAM was very expensive back then. I wonder what was the cost for the 368 40 MHz was at the time? A lot I would guess. She came home from work and found the new computer in small bits on the dining room table and I think she almost passed out. I put it all back together and it worked just fine. I think for a minute there, I was seriously flirting with divorce. My newest computer that I built 6 months ago only cost $350, but that was just CPU (Ryzen 5600) and Mem (32 G) and SSD (2 T) costs. I had a lot of old parts to start with, my case is from 2007.One of the early ATX cases. My keyboard is the same IBM PS2 keyboard that my wife bought me back in 1998.

- Ralph Unger

May 8, 2023 at 1:59 am

How old am I? the first program I wrote, a simple Tank game, was stored on a paper tape roll that ran on a terminal that was connected to the local power companies mainframe. :-)

- Jeff Thomas

May 8, 2023 at 10:16 pm

Heh, you’re in good company here, there are a lot of us industry dinosaurs. The first program I wrote was in HP-BASIC on a terminal at my dads desk at HP. I don’t know what kind of system it was attached to but he ‘saved’ my program to punchcards :-).

- Peter Johnson

May 11, 2023 at 5:18 pm

My dad worked on electric forklifts and one of the customers was Evans and Sutherland. Around 1990 he brought home a big box with a strange display and a bunch of circuit boards they’d let him take. He wanted to see if the two of us could make something appear on the display, but it was really unusual and beyond our ability to reverse engineer the interface. We still had fun trying.

- SierraVista

May 13, 2023 at 12:24 pm

Et tu, mind virus?

I love your blog, but this sort of disparagement (and it is disparagement) benefits neither the substance nor the flavor (as it ultimately reads as acrid on the palate) of your otherwise vibrant storytelling:

“… (sad as it is to say) their race and gender, definitely in the opportunities that were offered to them. This isn’t to disparage their accomplishments; they did, after all, still need to have the vision to grasp the brass ring of opportunity and the talent to make the most of it. Suffice to say, then, that luck is a prerequisite but the farthest thing from a guarantee.

Every once in a while, however, I come across someone who really did almost literally make something out of nothing. One of these folks is Jim Clark. If today as a soon-to-be octogenarian he indulges as enthusiastically as any of his Old White Guy… ”

Respectfully, please consider that people of all backgrounds, philosophical inclinations, appearances, and even those from the dusty desert southwest have contributed to the tapestry of stories you usually so eloquently weave here.

- Lt. Nitpicker

May 18, 2023 at 2:41 am

Two nitpicks:

I wouldn’t consider the processors used in the 1977 Trinity VLSI. VLSI is a vague term that can be defined in several different ways, but it’s almost always defined as a chip containing (what was then) a large number of transistors, namely at least 100,000. None of these early 8 bit CPU designs came close to that number.

The Voodoo 1 supports 800×600, but it effectively wasn’t used by software because of memory limitations on non-professional versions. (The mode was technically usable in on normal cards, but only without the key 3D feature of Z-buffering, which made it unusable for almost all software. Some professional versions of the Voodoo 1 had additional frame buffer memory and could use this mode with Z-buffering) Even then, I feel that 800×600 was supported as more of a, “because they could”, than as a primary design goal from the beginning, so I would probably mention this support as a footnote to the “640×480” comment.

- Lt. Nitpicker

May 18, 2023 at 3:07 am

If you want a reference for the 800×600 support, here’s a 3DFX document that mentions it.

http://www.o3one.org/hwdocs/video/voodoo_graphics.pdf

- Jimmy Maher

May 18, 2023 at 11:07 am

Thanks! Footnote added.

- Stu

June 6, 2023 at 10:39 am

It’s actually possible to upgrade the VRAM on some Voodoo 1 cards to 6MB, which allows the use of 800×600 without loss of features.

The “Bits und Bolts” YouTube channel demonstrates the process and offers a PCB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwGdw0eZVCQ

The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 3: Software Meets Hardware
May 19, 2023

The first finished devices to ship with the 3Dfx Voodoo chipset inside them were not add-on boards for personal computers, but rather standup arcade machines. That venerable segment of the videogames industry was enjoying its last lease on life in the mid-1990s; this was the last era when the graphics of the arcade machines were sufficiently better than those which home computers and consoles could generate as to make it worth getting up off the couch, driving into town, and dropping a quarter or two into a slot to see them. The Voodoo chips now became part and parcel of that, ironically just before they would do much to destroy the arcade market by bringing equally high-quality 3D graphics into homes. For now, though, they wowed players of arcade games like San Francisco Rush: Extreme Racing, Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey, and NFL Blitz.

Still, Gary Tarolli, Scott Sellers, and Ross Smith were most excited by the potential of the add-on-board market. All too well aware of how the chicken-or-the-egg deadlock between game makers and players had doomed their earlier efforts with Pellucid and Media Vision, they launched an all-out charm offensive among game developers long before they had any actual hardware to show them. Smith goes so far as to call “connecting with the developers early on and evangelizing them” the “single most important thing we ever did” — more important, that is to say, than designing the Voodoo chips themselves, impressive as they were. Throughout 1995, somebody from 3Dfx was guaranteed to be present wherever developers got together to talk among themselves. While these evangelizers had no hardware as yet, they did have software simulations running on SGI workstations — simulations which, they promised, duplicated exactly the capabilities the real chips would have when they started arriving in quantity from Taiwan.

Our core trio realized early on that their task must involve software as much as hardware in another, more enduring sense: they had to make it as easy as possible to support the Voodoo chipset. In my previous article, I mentioned how their old employer SGI had created an open-source software library for 3D graphics, known as OpenGL. A team of programmers from 3Dfx now took this as the starting point of a slimmed-down, ultra-optimized MS-DOS library they called GLide; whereas OpenGL sported well over 300 individual function calls, GLide had less than 100. It was fast, it was lightweight, and it was easy to program. They had good reason to be proud of it. Its only drawback was that it would only work with the Voodoo chips — which was not necessarily a drawback at all in the eyes of its creators, given that they hoped and planned to dominate a thriving future market for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics on personal computers.

Yet that domination was by no means assured, for they were far from the only ones developing consumer-oriented 3D chipsets. One other company in particular gave every indication of being on the inside track to widespread acceptance. That company was Rendition, another small, venture-capital-funded startup that was doing all of the same things 3Dfx was doing — only Rendition had gotten started even earlier. It had actually been Rendition who announced a 3D chipset first, and they had been evangelizing it ever since every bit as tirelessly as 3Dfx.

The Voodoo chipset was technologically baroque in comparison to Rendition’s chips, which went under the name of Vérité. This meant that Voodoo should easily outperform them — eventually, once all of the logistics of East Asian chip fabricating had been dealt with and deals had been signed with board makers. In June of 1996, when the first Vérité-powered boards shipped, the Voodoo chipset quite literally didn’t exist as far as consumers were concerned. Those first Vérité boards were made by none other than Creative Labs, the 800-pound gorilla of the home-computer add-on market, maker of the ubiquitous Sound Blaster sound cards and many a “multimedia upgrade kit.” Such a partner must be counted as yet another early coup for Rendition.

The Vérité cards were followed by a flood of others whose slickly aggressive names belied their somewhat workmanlike designs: 3D Labs Permedia, S3 Virge, ATI 3D Rage, Matrox Mystique. And still Voodoo was nowhere.

What was everywhere was confusion; it was all but impossible for the poor, benighted gamer to make heads or tails of the situation. None of these chipsets were compatible with one another at the hardware level in the way that 2D graphics cards were; there were no hardware standards for 3D graphics akin to VGA, that last legacy of IBM’s era of dominance, much less the various SVGA standards defined by the Video Electronic Standards Association (VESA). Given that most action-oriented computer games still ran on MS-DOS, this was a serious problem.

For, being more of a collection of basic function calls than a proper operating system, MS-DOS was not known for its hardware agnosticism. Most of the folks making 3D chips did provide an MS-DOS software package for steering them, similar in concept to 3Dfx’s GLide, if seldom as optimized and elegant. But, just like GLide, such libraries worked only with the chipset for which they had been created. What was sorely needed was an intermediate layer of software to sit between games and the chipset-manufacturer-provided libraries, to automatically translate generic function calls into forms suitable for whatever particular chipset happened to exist on that particular computer. This alone could make it possible for one build of one game to run on multiple 3D chipsets. Yet such a level of hardware abstraction was far beyond the capabilities of bare-bones MS-DOS.

Absent a more reasonable solution, the only choice was to make separate versions of games for each of the various 3D chipsets. And so began the brief-lived, unlamented era of the 3D pack-in game. All of the 3D-hardware manufacturers courted the developers and publishers of popular software-rendered 3D games, dangling before them all sorts of enticements to create special versions that took advantage of their cards, more often than not to be included right in the box with them. Activision’s hugely successful giant-robot-fighting game MechWarrior 2 became the king of the pack-ins, with at least half a dozen different chipset-specific versions floating around, all paid for upfront by the board makers in cold, hard cash. (Whatever else can be said about him, Bobby Kotick has always been able to spot the seams in the gaming market where gold is waiting to be mined.)

It was an absurd, untenable situation; the game or games that came in the box were the only ones that the purchasers of some of the also-ran 3D contenders ever got a chance to play with their new toys. Gamers and chipset makers alike could only hope that, once Windows replaced MS-DOS as the gaming standard, their pain would go away.

In the meanwhile, the games studio that everyone with an interest in the 3D-acceleration sweepstakes was courting most of all was id Software — more specifically, id’s founder and tech guru, gaming’s anointed Master of 3D Algorithms, John Carmack. They all begged him for a version of Quake for their chipset.

And once again, it was Rendition that scored the early coup here. Carmack actually shared some of the Quake source code with them well before either the finished game or the finished Vérité chipset was available for purchase. Programmed by a pair of Rendition’s own staffers working with the advice and support of Carmack and Michael Abrash, the Vérité-rendered version of the game, commonly known as vQuake, came out very shortly after the software-rendered version. Carmack called it “the premier platform for Quake” — truly marketing copy to die for. Gamers too agreed that 3D acceleration made the original’s amazing graphics that much more amazing, while the makers of other 3D chipsets gnashed their teeth and seethed.

Quake with software rendering.

vQuake

Among these, of course, was the tardy 3Dfx. The first Voodoo cards appeared late, seemingly hopelessly so: well into the fall of 1996. Nor did they have the prestige and distribution muscle of a partner like Creative Labs behind them: the first two Voodoo boards rather came from smaller firms by the names of Diamond and Orchid. They sold for $300, putting them well up at the pricey end of the market —  and, unlike all of the competition’s cards, these required you to have another, 2D-graphics card in your computer as well. For all of these reasons, they seemed easy enough to dismiss as overpriced white elephants at first blush. But that impression lasted only until you got a look at them in action. The Voodoo cards came complete with a list of features that none of the competition could come close to matching in the aggregate: bilinear filtering, trilinear MIP-mapping, alpha blending, fog effects, accelerated light sources. If you don’t know what those terms mean, rest assured that they made games look better and play faster than anything else on the market. This was amply demonstrated by those first Voodoo boards’ pack-in title, an otherwise rather undistinguished, typical-of-its-time shooter called Hellbender. In its new incarnation, it suddenly looked stunning.

The Orchid Righteous 3D card, one of the first two to use the Voodoo chipset. (The only consumer category as fond of bro-dude phraseology like “extreme” and “righteous” as the makers of 3D cards was men’s razors.)

The battle lines were drawn between Rendition and 3Dfx. But sadly for the former, it quickly emerged that their chipset had one especially devastating weakness in comparison to its rival: its Z-buffering support left much to be desired. And what, you ask, is Z-buffering? Read on!

One of the non-obvious problems that 3D-graphics systems must solve is the need for objects in the foreground of a scene to realistically obscure those behind them. If, at the rendering stage, we were to simply draw the objects in whatever random order they came to us, we would wind up with a dog’s breakfast of overlapping shapes. We need to have a way of depth-sorting the objects if we want to end up with a coherent, correctly rendered scene.

The most straightforward way of depth-sorting is called the Painter’s Algorithm, because it duplicates the process a human artist usually goes through to paint a picture. Let’s say our artist wants to paint a still life of an apple sitting in front of a basket of other fruits. First she will paint the basket to her satisfaction, then paint the apple right over the top of it. Similarly, when we use a Painter’s Algorithm on the computer, we first sort the whole collection of objects into a hierarchy that begins with those that are farthest from our virtual camera and ends with those closest to it. Only after this has been done do we set about the task of actually drawing them to the screen, in our sorted order from the farthest away to the closest. And so we end up with a correctly rendered image.

But, as so often happens in matters like this, the most logically straightforward way is far from the most efficient way of depth-sorting a 3D scene. When the number of objects involved is few, the Painter’s Algorithm works reasonably well. When the numbers get into the hundreds or thousands, however, it results in much wasted effort, as the computer ends up drawing objects that are completely obscured by other objects in front of them — i.e., objects that don’t really need to be drawn at all. Even more importantly, the process of sorting all of the objects by depth beforehand is painfully time-consuming, a speed bump that stops the rendering process dead until it is completed. Even in the 1990s, when their technology was in a laughably primitive stage compared to today, GPUs tended to emphasize parallel processing — i.e., staying constantly busy with multiple tasks at the same time. The necessity of sorting every object in a scene by depth before even getting properly started on rendering it rather threw all that out the window.

Enter the Z-buffer. Under this approach, every object is rendered right away as soon as it comes down the pipeline, used to build the appropriate part of the raster of colored pixels that, once completed, will be sent to the monitor screen as a single frame. But there comes an additional wrinkle in the form of the Z-buffer itself: a separate, parallel raster containing not the color of each pixel but its distance from the camera. Before the GPU adds an entry to the raster of pixel colors, it compares the distance of that pixel from the camera with the number in that location in the Z-buffer. If the current distance is less than the one already found there, it knows that the pixel in question should be overwritten in the main raster and that the Z-buffer raster should be updated with that pixel’s new distance from the camera. Ditto if the Z-buffer contains a null value, indicating no object has yet been drawn at that pixel. But if the current distance is larger than the (non-null) number already found there, the GPU simply moves on without doing anything more, confident in the knowledge that what it had wanted to draw should actually be hidden by what it has already drawn.

There are plenty of occasions when the same pixel is drawn over twice — or many times — before reaching the screen even under this scheme, but it is nevertheless still vastly more efficient than the Painter’s Algorithm, because it keeps objects flowing through the pipeline steadily, with no hiccups caused by lengthy sorting operations. Z-buffering support was reportedly a last-minute addition to the Vérité chipset, and it showed. Turning depth-sorting on for 100-percent realistic rendering on these chips cut their throughput almost in half; the Voodoo chipset, by contrast, just said, “No worries!,” and kept right on trucking. This was an advantage of titanic proportions. It eventually emerged that the programmers at Rendition had been able to get Quake running acceptably on the Vérité chips only by kludging together their own depth-sorting algorithms in software. With Voodoo, programmers wouldn’t have to waste time with stuff like that.

But surprisingly, the game that blew open the doors for the Voodoo chipset wasn’t Quake or anything else from id. It was rather a little something called Tomb Raider, from the British studio Core Design, a game which used a behind-the-back third-person perspective rather than the more typical first-person view — the better to appreciate its protagonist, the buxom and acrobatic female archaeologist Lara Croft. In addition to Lara’s considerable assets, Tomb Raider attracted gamers with its unprecedentedly huge and wide-open 3D environments. (It will be the subject of my next article, for those interested in reading more about its massive commercial profile and somewhat controversial legacy.)

In November of 1996, when Tomb Raider been out for less than a month, Core put a  Voodoo patch for it up on their website. Gamers were blown away. “It’s a totally new game!” gushed one on Usenet. “It was playable but a little jerky without the patch, but silky smooth to play and beautiful to look at with the patch.” “The level of detail you get with the Voodoo chip is amazing!” enthused another. Or how about this for a ringing testimonial?

I had been playing the regular Tomb Raider on my PC for about two weeks
before I got the patch, with about ten people seeing the game, and not
really saying anything regarding how amazing it was. When I got the
accelerated patch, after about four days, every single person who has
seen the game has been in awe watching the graphics and how
smooth [and] lifelike the movement is. The feel is different, you can see
things much more clearly, it’s just a more enjoyable game now.

Tomb Raider became the biggest hit of the 1996 holiday season, and tens if not hundreds of thousands of Voodoo-based 3D cards joined it under Christmas trees.

Tomb Raider with software rendering.

Tomb Raider with a Voodoo card.

In January of 1997, id released GLQuake, a new version of that game that supported the Voodoo chipset. In telling contrast to the Vérité-powered vQuake, which had been coded by Rendition’s programmers, GLQuake had been taken on by John Carmack as a personal project. The proof was in the pudding; this Quake ran faster and looked better than either of the previous ones. Running on a machine with a 200 MHz Intel Pentium processor and a Voodoo card, GLQuake could manage 70 frames per second, compared to 41 frames for the software-rendered version, whilst appearing much more realistic and less pixelated.

GLQuake

One last stroke of luck put the finishing touch on 3Dfx’s destiny of world domination: the price of memory dropped precipitously, thanks to a number of new RAM-chip factories that came online all at once in East Asia. (The factories had been built largely to feed the memory demands of Windows 95, the straw that was stirring the drink of the entire computer industry.) The Voodoo chipset required 4 MB of memory to operate effectively — an appreciable quantity in those days, and a big reason why the cards that used it tended to cost almost as twice as much as those based on the Vérité chips, despite lacking the added complications and expense of 2D support. But with the drop in memory prices, it suddenly became practical to sell a Voodoo card for under $200. Rendition could also lower their prices somewhat thanks to the memory windfall, of course, but at these lower price points the dollar difference wasn’t as damaging to 3Dfx. After all, the Voodoo cards were universally acknowledged to be the class of the industry. They were surely worth paying a little bit of a premium for. By the middle of 1997, the Voodoo chipset was everywhere, the Vérité one left dead at the side of the road. “If you want full support for a gamut of games, you need to get a 3Dfx card,” wrote Computer Gaming World.

These were heady times at 3Dfx, which had become almost overnight the most hallowed name in hardcore action gaming outside of id Software, all whilst making an order of magnitude more money than id, whose business model under John Carmack was hardly fine-tuned to maximize revenues. In a comment he left recently on this site, reader Captain Kal said that, when it comes to 3D gaming in the late 1990s, “one company springs to my mind without even thinking: 3Dfx. Yes, we also had 3D solutions from ATI, NVIDIA, or even S3, but Voodoo cards created the kind of dedication that I hadn’t seen since the Amiga days.” The comparison strikes me as thoroughly apropos.

3Dfx brought in a high-profile CEO named Greg Ballard, formerly of Warner Music and the videogame giant Capcom, to oversee a smashingly successful initial public offering in June of 1997. He and the three thirty-something founders were the oldest people at the company. “Most of the software engineers were [in their] early twenties, gamers through and through, loved games,” says Scott Sellers. “Would code during the day and play games at night. It was a culture of fun.” Their offices stood at the eighth hole of a golf course in Sunnyvale, California. “We’d sit out there and drink beer,” says Ross Smith. “And you’d have to dodge incoming golf balls a bit. But the culture was great.” Every time he came down for a visit, says their investing angel Gordon Campbell,

they’d show you something new, a new demo, a new mapping technique. There was always something. It was a very creative environment. The work hard and play hard thing, that to me kind of was Silicon Valley. You went out and socialized with your crew and had beer fests and did all that kind of stuff. And a friendly environment where everybody knew everybody and everybody was not in a hierarchy so much as part of the group or the team.

I think the thing that was added here was, it’s the gaming industry. And that was a whole new twist on it. I mean, if you go to the trade shows, you’d have guys that would show up at our booth with Dracula capes and pointed teeth. I mean, it was just crazy.

Gary Tarolli, Scott Sellers, and Greg Ballard do battle with a dangerous houseplant. The 1990s were wild and crazy times, kids…

While the folks at 3Dfx were working hard and playing hard, an enormously consequential advancement in the field of software was on the verge of transforming the computer-games industry. As I noted previously, in 1996 most hardcore action games were still being released for MS-DOS. In 1997, however, that changed in a big way. With the exception of only a few straggling Luddites, game developers switched over to Windows 95 en masse. Quake had been an MS-DOS game; Quake II, which would ship at the end of 1997, ran under Windows. The same held true for the original Tomb Raider and its 1997 sequel, as it did for countless others.

Gaming was made possible on Windows 95 by Microsoft’s DirectX libraries, which finally let programmers do everything in Windows that they had once done in MS-DOS, with only a slight speed penalty if any, all while giving them the welcome luxury of hardware independence. That is to say, all of the fiddly details of disparate video and sound cards and all the rest were abstracted away into Windows device drivers that communicated automatically with DirectX to do the needful. It was an enormous burden lifted off of developers’ shoulders. Ditto gamers, who no longer had to futz about for hours with cryptic “autoexec.bat” and “config.sys” files, searching out the exact combination of arcane incantations that would allow each game they bought to run optimally on their precise machine. One no longer needed to be a tech-head simply to install a game.

In its original release of September 1995, the full DirectX suite consisted of DirectDraw for 2D pixel graphics, DirectSound for sound and music, DirectInput for managing joysticks and other game-centric input devices, and DirectPlay for networked multiplayer gaming. It provided no support for doing 3D graphics. But never fear, Microsoft said: 3D support was coming. Already in February of 1995, they had purchased a British company called RenderMorphics, the creator of Reality Lab, a hardware-agnostic 3D library. As promised, Microsoft added Direct3D to the DirectX collection with the latter’s 2.0 release, in June of 1996.

But, as the noted computer scientist Andrew Tanenbaum once said, “the nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.” For the next several years, Direct3D would compete with another library serving the same purpose: a complete, hardware-agnostic Windows port of SGI’s OpenGL, whose most prominent booster was no less leading a light than John Carmack. Direct3D would largely win out in the end among game developers despite Carmack’s endorsement of its rival, but we need not concern ourselves overmuch with the details of that tempest in a teacup here. Suffice to say that even the most bitter partisans on one side of the divide or the other could usually agree that both Direct3D and OpenGL were vastly preferable to the bad old days of chipset-specific 3D games.

Unfortunately for them, 3Dfx, rather feeling their oats after all of their success, made in response to these developments the first of a series of bad decisions that would cause their time at the top of the 3D-graphics heap to be a relatively short one.

Like all of the others, the Voodoo chipset could be used under Windows with either Direct3D or OpenGL. But there were some features on the Voodoo chips that the current implementations of those libraries didn’t support. 3Dfx was worried, reasonably enough on the face of it, about a “least-common-denominator effect” which would cancel out the very real advantages of their 3D chipset and make one example of the breed more or less as good as any other. However, instead of working with the folks behind Direct3D and OpenGL to get support for the Voodoo chips’ special features into those libraries, they opted to release a Windows version of GLide, and to strongly encourage game developers to keep working with it instead of either of the more hardware-agnostic alternatives. “You don’t want to just have a title 80 percent as good as it could be because your competitors are all going to be at 100 percent,” they said pointedly. They went so far as to start speaking of Voodoo-equipped machines as a whole new platform unto themselves, separate from more plebeian personal computers.

It was the talk and actions of a company that had begun to take its own press releases a bit too much to heart. But for a time 3Dfx got away with it. Developers coded for GLide in addition to or instead of Direct3D or OpenGL, because you really could do a lot more with it and because the cachet of the “certified” 3Dfx logo that using GLide allowed them to put on their boxes really was huge.

In March of 1998, the first cards with a new 3Dfx chipset, known as Voodoo2, began to appear. Voodoo2 boasted twice the overall throughput of its predecessor, and could handle a screen resolution of 800 X 600 instead of just 640 X 480; you could even join two of the new cards together to get even better performance and higher resolutions. This latest chipset only seemed to cement 3Dfx’s position as the class of their field.

The bottom line reflected this. 3Dfx was, in the words of their new CEO Greg Ballard, “a rocket ship.” In 1995, they earned $4 million in revenue; in 1996, $44 million; in 1997, $210 million; and in 1998, their peak year, $450 million. And yet their laser focus on selling the Ferraris of 3D acceleration was blinding Ballard and his colleagues to the potential of 3D Toyotas, where the biggest money of all was waiting to be made.

Over the course of the second half of the 1990s, 3D GPUs went from being exotic pieces of kit known only to hardcore gamers to being just another piece of commodity hardware found in almost all computers. 3Dfx had nothing to do with this significant shift. Instead they all but ignored this so-called “OEM” (“Original Equipment Manufacturer”) side of the GPU equation: chipsets that weren’t the hottest or the sexiest on the market, but that were cheap and easy to solder right onto the motherboards of low-end and mid-range machines bearing such unsexy name plates as Compaq and Packard Bell. Ironically, Gordon Campbell had made a fortune with Chips & Technologies selling just such commodity-grade 2D graphics chipsets. But 3Dfx was obstinately determined to fly above the OEM segment, determined to offer “premium” products only. “It doesn’t matter if 20 million people have one of our competitors’ chips,” said Scott Sellers in 1997. “How many of those people are hardcore gamers? How many of those people are buying games?” “I can guarantee that 100 percent of 3Dfx owners are buying games,” chimed in a self-satisfied-sounding Gary Tarolli.

The obvious question to ask in response was why it should matter to 3Dfx how many games — or what types of games — the users of their chips were buying, as long as they were buying gadgets that contained their chips. While 3Dfx basked in their status as the hardcore gamer’s favorite, other companies were selling many more 3D chips, admittedly at much less of a profit on a chip-per-chip basis, at the OEM end of the market. Among these was a firm known as NVIDIA, which had been founded on the back of a napkin in a Denny’s diner in 1993. NVIDIA’s first attempt to compete head to head with 3Dfx at the high end was underwhelming at best: released well after the Voodoo2 chipset, the RIVA TNT ran so hot that it required a noisy onboard cooling fan, and yet still couldn’t match the Voodoo2’s performance. By that time, however, NVIDIA was already building a lucrative business out of cheaper, simpler chips on the OEM side, even as they were gaining the wisdom they would need to mount a more credible assault on the hardcore-gamer market. In late 1998, 3Dfx finally seemed to be waking up to the fact that they would need to reach beyond the hardcore to continue their rise, when they released a new chipset called Voodoo Banshee which wasn’t quite as powerful as the Voodoo2 chips but could do conventional 2D as well as 3D graphics, meaning its owners would not be forced to buy a second video card just in order to use their computers.

But sadly, they followed this step forward with an absolutely disastrous mistake. You’ll remember that prior to this point 3Dfx had sold their chips only to other companies, who then incorporated them into add-on boards of their own design, in the same way that Intel sold microprocessors to computer makers rather than directly to consumers (aside from the build-your-own-rig hobbyists, that is). This business model had made sense for 3Dfx when they were cash-strapped and hadn’t a hope of building retail-distribution channels equal to those of the established board makers. Now, though, they were flush with cash, and enjoyed far better name recognition than the companies that made the boards which used their chips; even the likes of Creative Labs, who had long since dropped Rendition and were now selling plenty of 3Dfx boards, couldn’t touch them in terms of prestige. Why not cut out all these middlemen by manufacturing their own boards using their own chips and selling them directly to consumers with only the 3Dfx name on the box? They decided to do exactly that with their third state-of-the-art 3D chipset, the predictably named Voodoo3, which was ready in the spring of 1999.

Those famous last words apply: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” With the benefit of hindsight, we can see all too clearly what a terrible decision it actually was. The move into the board market became, says Scott Sellers, the “anchor” that would drag down the whole company in a rather breathtakingly short span of time: “We started competing with what used to be our own customers” — i.e., the makers of all those earlier Voodoo boards. Then, too, 3Dfx found that the logistics of selling a polished consumer product at retail, from manufacturing to distribution to advertising, were much more complex than they had reckoned with.

Still, they might — just might — have been able to figure it all out and make it work, if only the Voodoo3 chipset had been a bit better. As it was, it was an upgrade to be sure, but not quite as much of one as everyone had been expecting. In fact, some began to point out now that even the Voodoo2 chips hadn’t been that great a leap: they too were better than their predecessors, yes, but that was more down to ever-falling memory prices and ever-improving chip-fabrication technologies than any groundbreaking innovations in their fundamental designs. It seemed that 3Dfx had started to grow complacent some time ago.

NVIDIA saw their opening and made the most of it. They introduced a new line of their own, called the TNT2, which outdid its 3Dfx competitor in at least one key metric: it could do 24-bit color, giving it almost 17 million shades of onscreen nuance, compared to just over 65,000 in the case of Voodoo3. For the first time, 3Dfx’s chips were not the unqualified, undisputed technological leaders. To make matters worse, NVIDIA had been working closely with Microsoft in exactly the way that 3Dfx had never found it in their hearts to do, ensuring that every last feature of their chips was well-supported by the increasingly dominant Direct3D libraries.

And then, as the final nail in the coffin, there were all those third-party board makers 3Dfx had so rudely jilted when they decided to take over that side of the business themselves. These had nowhere left to go but into NVIDIA’s welcoming arms. And needless to say, these business partners spurned were highly motivated to make 3Dfx pay for their betrayal.

NVIDIA was on a roll now. They soon came out with yet another new chipset, the GeForce 256, which had a “Transform & Lighting” (T&L) engine built in, a major conceptual advance. And again, the new technology was accessible right from the start through Direct3D, thanks to NVIDIA’s tight relationship with Microsoft. Meanwhile the 3Dfx chips still needed GLide to perform at their best. With those chips’ sales now plummeting, more and more game developers decided the oddball library just wasn’t worth the trouble anymore. By the end of 1999, a 3Dfx death spiral that absolutely no one had seen coming at the start of the year was already well along. NVIDIA was rapidly sewing up both the high end and the low end, leaving 3Dfx with nothing.

In 2000, NVIDIA continued to go from strength to strength. Their biggest challenger at the hardcore-gamer level that year was not 3Dfx, but rather ATI, who arrived on the scene with a new architecture known as Radeon. 3Dfx attempted to right the ship with a two-pronged approach: a Voodoo4 chipset aimed at the long-neglected budget market, and a Voodoo5 aimed at the high end. Both had potential, but the company was badly strapped for cash by now, and couldn’t afford to give them the launch they deserved. In December of 2000, 3Dfx announced that they had agreed to sell out to NVIDIA, who thought they had spotted some bits and bobs in their more recent chips that they might be able to make use of. And that, as they say, was that.

3Dfx was a brief-burning comet by any standard, a company which did everything right up to the instant when someone somewhere flipped a switch and it suddenly started doing everything wrong instead. But whatever regrets Gary Tarolli, Scott Sellers, and Ross Smith may have about the way it all turned out, they can rest secure in the knowledge that they changed not just gaming but computing in general forever. Their vanquisher NVIDIA had revenues of almost $27 billion last year, on the strength of GPUs which are as far beyond the original Voodoo chips as an F-35 is beyond the Wright Brothers’ flier, which are at the forefront not just of 3D graphics but a whole new trend toward “massively parallel” computing.

And yet even today, the 3Dfx name and logo can still send a little tingle of excitement running down the spines of gamers of a certain age, just as that of the Amiga can among some just slightly older. For a brief few years there, over the course of one of most febrile, chaotic, and yet exciting periods in all of gaming history, having a Voodoo card in your computer meant that you had the best graphics money could buy. Most of us wouldn’t want to go back to the days of needing to constantly tinker with the innards of our computers, of dropping hundreds of dollars on the latest and the greatest and hoping that publishers would still be supporting it in six months, of poring over magazines trying to make sense of long lists of arcane bullet points that seemed like fragments of a particularly esoteric PhD thesis (largely because they originally were). No, we wouldn’t want to go back; those days were kind of ridiculous. But that doesn’t mean we can’t look back and smile at the extraordinary technological progression we were privileged to witness over such a disarmingly short period of time.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

(Sources: the books Renegades of the Empire: How Three Software Warriors Started a Revolution Behind the Walls of Fortress Microsoft by Michael Drummond, Masters of DOOM: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner, and Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation by Michael O’Rourke. Computer Gaming World of November 1995, January 1996, July 1996, November 1996, December 1996, September 1997, October 1997, November 1997, and April 1998; Next Generation of October 1997 and January 1998; Atomic of June 2003; Game Developer of December 1996/January 1997 and February/March 1997. Online sources include “3Dfx and Voodoo Graphics — The Technologies Within” at The Overclocker, former 3Dfx CEO Greg Ballard’s lecture for Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series, the Computer History Museum’s “oral history” with the founders of 3Dfx, Fabian Sanglard’s reconstruction of the workings of the Vérité chipset and the Voodoo 1 chipset, “Famous Graphics Chips: 3Dfx’s Voodoo” by Dr. Jon Peddie at the IEEE Computer Society’s site, and “A Fallen Titan’s Final Glory” by Joel Hruska at the long-defunct Sudhian Media. Also, the Usenet discussions that followed the release of the 3Dfx patch for Tomb Raider and Nicol Bolas’s crazily detailed reply to the Stack Exchange question “Why Do Game Developer Prefer Windows?”.)

Comments
43 Responses

- lee

May 19, 2023 at 5:10 pm

Missing a word – “…a 3dfx death spiral that absolutely no had seen coming …”

One quibble—I remember the Voodoo 2 being a _tremendous_ jump in performance over the V1, at lest going by the gushing copy at VoodooExtreme.com and Operation 3dfx. Though perhaps it’s just those damned rose-tinted lenses again.

(At one point when the cards were on their way out, I acquired a second Voodoo 2 and got to experience the face-meltingness of the original SLI implementation, back when it still stood for “scanline interleave.” Though it was long enough after the V2’s debut that single-card solutions like the Geforce 256 had eclipsed it, I still remember the tremendous sense of satisfaction at slotting that second Voodoo2 in and hooking up the SLI cable. Good times, man. good times.)

- Sarah Walker

May 19, 2023 at 5:14 pm

V2 was particularly effective in games that supported multitexturing; it was sold in a configuration that included a second texture unit chip & memory, something that was possible on Voodoo 1 but was never implemented on the consumer boards. On games that supported this – mostly Quake 2 and Unreal in 1998 – it doubled performance _again_, giving you nearly 4x Voodoo 1 performance on a single Voodoo 2.

- lee

May 19, 2023 at 5:23 pm

Thanks Sarah—good details, and that jives with what I remember. Cheers!!

- Jimmy Maher

May 19, 2023 at 7:07 pm

Thanks! The Voodoo2 chipset was certainly an advance, but I think there was a fair amount of hyperbole going around about it. It was, as you say, a very heady time.

- Sarah Walker

May 19, 2023 at 5:12 pm

> Throughout 1995, somebody from 3dx was guaranteed

3dfx

>The battle lines were drawn between Rendition and 3dfx. But sadly for the former, it quickly
>emerged that their chipset had one especially devastating weakness in comparison to its rival: it
>didn’t provide hardware support for Z-buffering

As best as I can tell (I started writing an emulator for the Verite a while ago, but never finished it), the Rendition 1000 chip _does_ have Z-buffering in hardware. It’s just that, in common with most of the other early 3D chips, it’s pretty sluggish. Z-buffering roughly doubles the required memory bandwidth for a given rendering performance point, and the 64-bit EDO memory buses on most of these cards weren’t up to the job.

3Dfx had two advantages here – texturing was moved to a second 64-bit bus, so that didn’t impact (much) on overall rendering performance, and Voodoo also used the fastest EDO memory available at the time; 35ns as opposed to the more common 60 or 70ns chips. Hence they were essentially able to outspend their way out of this common bottleneck.

Rendition failed due to their second generation chip being late to market – allegedly due to a design failure from their silicon partner that took months to track down. By the time it was released it was okay but unexceptional and didn’t sell well enough for their subsequent designs to hit production.

>3dfx had nothing to do with this significant shift. Instead they all but ignored this so-called
>“OEM” (“Original Equipment Manufacturer”) side of the GPU equation

They didn’t totally ignore this – Banshee was intended as an OEM product. It just got to production too late for the late 1998 OEM refresh and ended up pushed to retail instead. Voodoo 3 did get some OEM use, and I believe the “Velocity” brand was also intended for OEMs.

>a Voodoo4 chipset aimed at the long-neglected budget market, and a Voodoo5 aimed at the high end

These are the same chip, the VSA-100 – Voodoo 4 was a single chip configuration, Voodoo 5 was a dual chip configuration. A noticeable improvement, but they arrived 6 months too late to be truly relevant.

Maybe there should be some mention of Rampage, their long term next gen project that was first announced in 1997 but never hit the market (though it was probably about 6 months off when they closed)? It’s probably the main reason their post-V2 designs were so underwhelming.

I can ramble on about 3Dfx and the early 3D card designs and market for days :)

- Lt. Nitpicker

May 19, 2023 at 6:15 pm

A quote from a Rendition engineer in a Fabien Sanglard article says Z-Buffering was done in software.

https://fabiensanglard.net/vquake/

- Sarah Walker

May 19, 2023 at 6:20 pm

That doesn’t match what I discovered emulating the thing. I suspect he is misremembering.

- Jimmy Maher

May 19, 2023 at 7:40 pm

It looks like this was indeed a rare mistake on the part of Fabien Sanglard. Based on an article at Vintage 3D (https://vintage3d.org/verite1.php), it seems that the Rendition chips did have support for Z-buffering, but it was something of a last-minute addition and wasn’t very efficient. Edits made. Thanks!

I do appreciate the added information, but I think I’m fairly comfortable eliding those other details in the interest of readability. I did place 3dfx’s haughtiness about the OEM market in the context of 1997 rather than 1998, and, since Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 were different combinations of chips, one can call them separate chipsets without being wrong, strictly speaking. ;)

- Lt. Nitpicker

May 19, 2023 at 7:58 pm

Technically, the implementation of Z-Buffering on the V1000 is software, but it’s done with software running on the card as microcode (like most 3D operations on the card). When you say software, however, most people think “on the (host) CPU” instead of on the graphics card’s processor. I feel that going deep into that is not worth it IMO, because for your narrative it doesn’t matter why the Verite is slower than Voodoo, only that it is slower.

- Sarah Walker

May 19, 2023 at 8:22 pm

I’ve just had a quick scan over the V1000 microcode for both the generic Speedy3D API and the custom Quake port. Quake doesn’t touch the pixel engine’s Z buffer related registers other than to turn them off, matching Stefan Podell’s testimony that vQuake doesn’t use any hardware Z buffering. Speedy3D on the other hand does have code to write to the Z buffer registers, suggesting that using hardware Z buffering is supported (if slow) and therefore that it is in fact supported by hardware.

Agree that none of this really changes the narrative!

- Jeff Thomas

June 1, 2023 at 6:30 pm

If I remember correctly Quake was written with a software Z buffer by Carmack. If the Vérité buffer used slow memory and an 8 bit bus it’s entirely possible that Carmack’s buffer was faster.

- Sarah Walker

May 20, 2023 at 8:18 am

Fair enough on the 1997 OEM front, though one could consider the ill thought out Voodoo Rush disaster as at least partly aimed at that sector.

The other factor which had a knock on effect on 3dfx in 1997 and beyond was the aborted deal with Sega for what became the Dreamcast. 3dfx did benefit monetarily from an out of court settlement, but it would be a major distraction for them which most likely did impact on future product development.

- Andy Bailey

May 22, 2023 at 1:44 pm

The Dreamcast deal is possibly the only significant note that’s missing from the article.

Whilst that wouldn’t have necessarily changed their fortunes in the end, there’s a certain amount of kudos and free marketing that can be gained by having your brand on a box (or even on a console itself).

I’d wager that someone seeing some of the great graphics of something like the Gamecube, then noticing the ATI sticker on the console, would bear the brand in mind when they came to buy a new video card for their PC.

- Lisa H.

May 19, 2023 at 6:57 pm

And yet even today, the 3dfx name and logo can still send a little prickle of excitement running down the spines of gamers of a certain age, just as that of the Amiga can among some just slightly older.

I’m in this Amiga age group, but I know what you mean about Voodoo/3dfx. The first Voodoo card we got was Golly That’s Sure Pretty Sexy at the time.

such unsexy marquees as Compaq and Packard Bell.

Should this be “marques” with one E?

- Jimmy Maher

May 19, 2023 at 7:44 pm

Yes, but I don’t think it was the right word anyway on second thought. ;) Thanks!

- Lt. Nitpicker

May 19, 2023 at 8:54 pm

>released at the same time as the Voodoo2 chipset, the RIVA 128ZX filled two slots in a computer, had a fan that sounded like a lawnmower, and still couldn’t match the Voodoo2’s performance.

I think you mixed up the RIVA 128ZX with the much later Geforce FX 5800, which had a noisy and at the time unusual dual slot cooler and couldn’t outperform its competitor, the Radeon 9700. The RIVA 128ZX was basically a normal OEM refresh of their already fairly successful RIVA 128 and had no notable issues over its predecessor. I’d cut the mention or mention the RIVA TNT instead, which shipped many months (Wikipedia says June 1998, but nVIDIA’s press releases and most media sources say September) after the Voodoo 2, ran hot enough that many cards using it included a fan, (which was unusual for a consumer graphics card at the time) and even then, it was slightly slower than a single Voodoo 2.

- Salvation122

May 22, 2023 at 1:32 pm

I’m probably one of very few people that would say this but I have nearly as much affection for the Radeon 9700 as anything 3dfx put out. That thing was an absolute monster of a card.

- Dan V.

May 23, 2023 at 12:05 pm

I think more would agree with you than you realize. The Radeon 9700 put the Radeon brand on the map for a lot of people.

- Erik

May 19, 2023 at 10:02 pm

vQuake just uses the same span-sorting that the software renderer of quake uses, and draws the output of that stage. It does exactly what software quake does, z-buffer writes for world geometry, and z-buffer writes+compares for objects rendered on top of the world geometry.

I wouldn’t exactly call it a kludge, but it is a workaround for the poor z-compare performance fo the V1000.

- Alex

May 20, 2023 at 5:46 am

The last sentence is so spot on! I remember every single name in this article as well as the not-impressed-reviews for the late 3dfx-cards, at least I think I do. What a mess this all was. The shadows of those times can even reach over today, when certain games from that period refuse to run properly on modern chipsets without some fiddling around. No, I certainly don´t wanna live through that time again as a customer, but from a technical point of view, it was magical, for the lack of better words.

- John

May 20, 2023 at 11:31 am

Somehow I have spent decades believing that the “gl” in glQuake was a reference to OpenGL. In my defense, I spent most of the Voodoo era without either a 3D accelerator card or a PC. I’m not even sure where or why I heard about glQuake.

In my head, the introduction of the 3D accelerator is the beginning of The Bad Times for PC gaming. The games themselves are fine for the most part. Rather, it’s the necessity and the expense of buying a discrete GPU that I resent. I would happily play older games capable of running on integrated graphics, but games don’t always render properly on integrated graphics. I’ve seen more than one game with incorrectly translucent or even invisible textures when run on a GPU-less machine.

I do not claim that my resentment is entirely rational. It has always been expensive to play the latest games. It just seems strange and counter-intuitive to me that I can build or buy a thoroughly functional computer for what amounts to a pittance but that the computer cannot play contemporary games unless I also buy an expansion card that costs double or triple what the rest of the computer did.

- Sarah Walker

May 20, 2023 at 1:26 pm

The “gl” in glQuake _is_ a reference to OpenGL. glQuake ran on 3dfx hardware via an OpenGL minidriver, basically a wrapper around Glide.

- John

May 20, 2023 at 10:19 pm

Ah. When Jimmy said “In January of 1997, id released GLQuake, a new version of that game that used the Voodoo chipset,” I got the impression that the “gl” was a reference to Glide rather than OpenGL. In retrospect, it makes sense that Carmack would favor proper OpenGL.

- Supernaut

May 20, 2023 at 12:00 pm

Another great article! I spotted one typo: “It’s only drawback”

- Jimmy Maher

May 20, 2023 at 3:23 pm

Thanks!

- Richard

May 20, 2023 at 12:34 pm

Very enjoyable. Some typos:
No, we wouldn’t to go back -> we wouldn’t want to
and sound cards and the all the rest -> and all the rest
was the verge of transforming the computer-games industry -> was on the verge
Quake ran faster and look better -> looked better
more typical-first person -> more typical first-person
number of objects involved are few -> is few
when it comes to 3D gaming in the late 1990s -> when it came to

- Jimmy Maher

May 20, 2023 at 3:26 pm

Thanks!

- Leo Vellés

May 20, 2023 at 2:17 pm

“That is to say, all of the fiddly details of disparate video and sound cards and the all the rest were abstracted…”.
A double “the” there Jimmy

- William Hern

May 20, 2023 at 6:34 pm

Another fascinating and information article Jimmy.

However I must mildly chide you for writing the following:

‘… as a wag once said, “the nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.” ‘

The “wag” you quote is noted computer scientist Andrew Tanenbaum and there is much more to him than just his sense of humour! Professor Tanenbaum has written many books, most of them regarded as seminal texts in Computer Science. He also wrote the MINIX operating system – that and his book “Operating Systems: Design and Implementation” were two of the key inspirations for Linus Torvalds to create the Linux kernel.

The quote you used comes from his “Computer Networks” book. The full quotation reads: “The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from; furthermore, if you do not like any of them, you can just wait for next year’s model.”

- Jimmy Maher

May 20, 2023 at 7:22 pm

I didn’t know whom that old chestnut originated with. Thanks!

- Kim S.

May 21, 2023 at 4:40 am

The Voodoo series had the speed and the 3D features, but they did not have good image quality. Upon “upgrading” my Matrox Mystique with a Voodoo 2 in 1998 I was shocked by the image downgrade.

The external, analog pass-through solution made colors noticeably duller and introduced artifacts, even on 2D images like the Windows desktop.

In early 3D games, much of the charm was in the clearly visible pixels with their strong, distinct colors. By comparison, the washed-out, blurry, filtered mess the Voodoo generated looked awful, in my opinion.

I returned the Voodoo “downgrade” and looked elsewhere.

The Matrox G200, also in 1998, with its 32-bit vibrant colors, was a significant upgrade in 3D image quality. It became my 3D jaw-dropping moment, unlike the Voodoo.

For the record, I used a Sony Trinitron 19-inch CRT monitor. I guess on some “lesser” screens the image quality differences on these cards might not have been as visible.

- Fform

May 22, 2023 at 3:45 am

The voodoo2 had a max resolution of 800×600, so on 19” it would definitely look terrible.

My first real 3d card was a TNT2, on a 19” Trinitron with a max resolution of 1600×1200 in 1999. It was amazing.

- Gnoman

May 21, 2023 at 1:06 pm

The perspective in this article is interesting to me, because economic circumstances made me miss this little sub-area entirely – my computer experience of this era was primarily with a succession of machines built from parts handed down from acquaintances or literally found in the garbage, and an expensive 3D card was so far beyond my reach that it might not have existed.

This means that my very strong feelings for 3Dfx are entirely negative. In the late stages of the era, I was constantly annoyed that the game I was playing (in software mode) often looked nothing like the pictures on the back of the box (which were using 3Dfx), which only got worse as Glide was increasingly deprecated and the 3D cards I then had remained largely incompatible because neither DirectX or even OpenGL fully interfaced properly.

IIRC, Glide also has a lot to do with why so many excellent titles remain locked to Windows 9X unless somebody like GOG manages to get the rights, or people like Sarah Walker are willing to put the effort into providing emulation solutions.

- Alex

May 22, 2023 at 5:08 am

Well, I don´t know if this is something you are looking for or already aware of, but the little tool “DgVoodoo2” can sometimes be helpful when it comes to incompatibilities:
http://dege.freeweb.hu/dgVoodoo2/

Speaking of GOG, I´m wondering time and time again how they are managing to upgrade the compatibility of (certain) older games to new hardware and new versions of Windows. I really appreciate their technical competence.

- Tim Kaiser

May 25, 2023 at 3:24 pm

“would need mount a more credible assault” -> “would need to mount a more credible assault”

Also, I got waves of nostalgia when you mentioned autoexec.bat and config.sys. I remember having to fiddle with those all the time to get games to run on my old 386 computer.

- Jimmy Maher

May 25, 2023 at 3:56 pm

Thanks!

- Olof

May 25, 2023 at 6:57 pm

Great article. I often say that the two biggest leaps in computers during my lifetime was the CD-ROM and the 3Dfx cards. The former immediately gave you 450x more storage than the 3.5″ discs they replaced. The latter made games (Quake is the one I specifically remember) run at 4x the resolution, with 256x the colors, transparent water and dynamic light sources, and all that running it twice as fast as before. The difference was absolutely unbelievable at the time.

Of course neither CD and the 3Dfx are primitive compared to today’s technology, but the progress has been much more incremental. 2x improvements rather than these 100x improvements. Perhaps the only thing I can think of that comes close to this would be the iPhone

- Chris D

May 28, 2023 at 4:34 pm

Great article! I found a typo in this sentence:

“Z-buffering support was reportedly a last-minute edition to the Vérité chipset, and it showed.”

- Jimmy Maher

May 28, 2023 at 8:51 pm

Thanks!

- Tim Kaiser

May 28, 2023 at 6:07 pm

FYI: I get an error when trying to submit a comment on this week’s Analog Antiquarian article. Maybe that’s why there are no comments yet?

Anyway, I found two typos on that article:

of the of the two renowned writers’ output today. -> of the two renowned writers’ output today.

called for Fifth Crusade to another novel target -> called for a Fifth Crusade to another novel target

Cheers!

- Jimmy Maher

May 28, 2023 at 8:50 pm

Thanks, corrected. Do you recall what kind of error message you got?

- Joshua Barrett

June 3, 2023 at 12:21 am

Two minor technical corrections:

> In January of 1997, id released GLQuake, a new version of that game that used the Voodoo chipset.

GLQuake ran on Voodoo, but wasn’t designed specifically for 3DFX cards. As other commenters have noted, the GL in GLQuake was in reference to OpenGL: after vquake, Carmack had resolved not to do any single-card ports, and strongly pushed OpenGL as the standard for hardware-independent 3D graphics over Direct3D (largely because early versions of Direct3D were not very pleasant to work with). Voodoo support was enabled with the OpenGL minidriver, which implemented just enough of OpenGL on top of GLide to make Quake run.

> Direct3D would finally win out despite Carmack’s endorsement of its rival…

This is true, but somewhat misleading, in that it implies OpenGL stopped being a going concern. Direct3D was and remains popular with developers, arguably more popular than OpenGL, but OpenGL remains relevant: on Mac and Linux systems, it was the only way to do 3D graphics for years, with its variants OpenGL ES and WebGL being the way that 3D graphics are done on mobile and the web respectively. The advent of Vulkan and WebGPU (as well as Apple’s proprietary Metal API) have changed this, but OpenGL is still definitely something people use. id themselves have never used Direct3D on PCs.

- Jimmy Maher

June 3, 2023 at 4:06 pm

I’m reluctant to include too many messy details of these things in the interests of readability, but I made some modest edits. Thanks!

Tomb Raider
June 2, 2023

If you have to stare at someone’s bum, it’s far better to look at a nice female bum than a bloke’s bum!

— Adrian Smith of Core Design

There was something refreshing about looking at the screen and seeing myself as a woman. Even if I was performing tasks that were a bit unrealistic… I still felt like, hey, this is a representation of me, as myself, as a woman. In a game. How long have we waited for that?

— gamer Nikki Douglas

Sure, she’s powerful and assertive. She takes care of herself, and she knows how to handle a gun. She’s a great role model for girls. But how many copies of Tomb Raider do you think they’d have sold if they’d made Lara Croft flat-chested?

— Charles Ardai, Computer Gaming World

It strikes me that Lara Croft must be the most famous videogame character in history if you take the word “character” literally. Her only obvious competition comes from the Nintendo stable — from Super Mario and Pac-Man and all the rest. But they aren’t so much characters as eternal mascots, archetypes out of time in the way of Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny. Lara, on the other hand, has a home, a reasonably coherent personal chronology, a reasonably fleshed-out personality — heck, she even has a last name!

Of course, Lara is by no means alone in any of these things among videogame stars. Nevertheless, for all the cultural inroads that gaming has made in recent decades, most people who don’t play games will still give you a blank stare if you try to talk to them about any of our similarly well-rounded videogame characters. Mention Solid Snake, Cloud, or Gordon Freeman to them and you’ll get nothing. But Lara is another story. After twenty games that have sold almost 100 million copies combined and three feature films whose box-office receipts approach $1 billion, everybody not living under a proverbial rock has heard of Lara Croft. Love her or hate her, she has become one of us in a way that none of her peers can match.

Lara’s roots reach back to the first wave of computer gaming in Britain, to the era when Sinclair Spectrums and Commodore 64s were the hottest machines on the market. In 1984, in the midst of this boom, Ian Stewart and Kevin Norburn founded the publisher Gremlin Graphics — later Gremlin Interactive — in the back room of a Sheffield software shop. Gremlin went on to become the Kevin Bacon of British game development: seemingly everybody who was anybody over the ensuing decades was associated with them at one time or another, or at the very least worked with someone who had been. This applies not least to Lara Croft, that most iconic woman in the history of British gaming.

Core Design, the studio that made her, was formed in 1986 as Gremlin Derby, around the talents of four young men from the same town who had just created the hit game Bounder using the Commodore 64s in their bedrooms. But not long after giving the four a real office to work in, the folks at Gremlin’s Sheffield headquarters began to realize that they should have looked before they leaped — that they couldn’t actually afford to be funding outside studios with their current revenue stream. (Such was the way of things in the topsy-turvy world of early British game development, when sober business expertise was not an overly plentiful commodity.) Rather than close the Derby branch they had barely had time to open, three Gremlin insiders — a sales executive named Jeremy Heath-Smith, the current manager of the Derby studio Greg Holmes, and the original Gremlin co-founder Kevin Norburn — cooked up a deal to take it over and run it themselves as an independent entity. They set up shop under the name of Core Design in 1988.

Over the year that followed, Core had its ups and downs: Heath-Smith bought out Holmes in 1990 and Norburn in 1992, both under circumstances that weren’t entirely amicable. But the little studio had a knack for squeezing out a solid seller whenever one was really needed, such as Rick Dangerous and Chuck Rock. Although most of these games were made available for MS-DOS among other platforms, few of them had much in common with the high-concept adventure games, CRPGs, and strategy games that dominated among American developers at the time. They were rather direct descendants of 8-bit games like Bounder: fast-paced, colorful, modest in size and ambition, and shot through with laddish humor. By 1991, Core had begun porting their games to consoles like the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, with whose sensibilities they were perhaps a more natural fit. And indeed, the consoles soon accounted for the majority of their sales.

In late 1994, Jeremy Heath-Smith was invited to fly out to Japan to check out the two latest and greatest consoles from that country, both of which were due for a domestic Japanese release before the end of that year and an international rollout during the following one. The Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation were groundbreaking in a number of ways: not only did they use capacious CDs instead of cramped cartridges as their standard storage media, but they each included a graphics processing unit (GPU) for doing 3D graphics. At the time, id Software’s DOOM was in the vanguard of a 3D insurgency on personal computers, one that was sweeping away older, slower games like so much chaff in the breeze. The current generation of consoles, however, just didn’t have the horsepower to do a credible job of running games like that; they had been designed for another paradigm, that of 2D sprites moving across pixel-graphic backgrounds. The Saturn and the PlayStation would change all that, allowing the console games that constituted 80 to 90 percent of the total sales of digital games to join the 3D revolution as well. Needless to say, the potential payoff was huge.

Back at Core Design in Derby, Heath-Smith told everyone what he had seen in Japan, then asked for ideas for making maximum use of the new consoles’ capabilities. A quiet 22-year-old artist and designer named Toby Gard raised his hand: “I’ve got this idea of pyramids.” You would play a dashing archaeologist, he explained, dodging traps and enemies on the trail of ancient relics in a glorious 3D-rendered environment.

It must be said that it wasn’t an especially fresh or unexpected idea in the broad strokes. Raiders of the Lost Ark had been a constant gaming touchstone almost from the moment it had first reached cinemas in 1981. Core’s own Rick Dangerous had been essentially the same game as the one that Gard was now proposing, albeit implemented using 2D sprites rather than 3D graphics. (Its titular hero there was a veritable clone of the Raiders’s hero Indiana Jones, right down to his trademark whip and fedora; if you didn’t read the box copy, you would assume it was a licensed game.)

Still, Gard was enthusiastic, and possessed of “immense talent” in the opinion of Heath-Smith. His idea certainly had the potential to yield an exciting 3D experience, and Heath-Smith had been around long enough to know that originality in the abstract was often overrated when it came to making games that sold. He gave Tomb Raider the green light to become Core’s cutting-edge showcase for the next-generation consoles, Core’s biggest, most expensive game to date. Which isn’t to say that he could afford to make it all that big or expensive by the standards of the American and Japanese studios: a team of just half a dozen people created Tomb Raider.

The Tomb Raider team. Toby Gard is third from left, Jeremy Heath-Smith second from right. Heather Gibson was the sole woman to work on the game — which, to be fair, was one more woman than worked on most games from this period.

The game would depart in a significant way from the many run-and-gun DOOM clones on personal computers by being a bit less bloody-minded, emphasizing puzzle-solving and platforming as much as combat. The developers quickly decided that the style of gameplay they had in mind demanded that they show the player’s avatar onscreen from a behind-the-back view rather than going with the first-person viewpoint of DOOM — an innovative choice at the time, albeit one that several other studios were making simultaneously, with such diverse eventual results as Fade to Black, Die Hard Trilogy, Super Mario 64, and MDK. In the beginning, though, they had no inkling that it would be Lara Croft’s bum the player would be staring at for hours. The star was to be Rick Dangerous or another of his ilk — i.e., just another blatant clone of Indiana Jones.

But Heath-Smith was seasoned enough to know that that sort of thing wouldn’t fly anymore in a world in which games were becoming an ever bigger and more visible mass-media phenomenon. “You must be insane,” he said to Toby Gard as soon as he heard about his intended Indiana clone. “We’ll get sued from here to kingdom come!” He told him to go back to the drawing board — literally; he was an artist, after all — and create a more clearly differentiated character.

So, Gard sat down at his desk to see what he could do. He soon produced the first sketches of Lara — Lara Cruz, as he called her in the beginning. Gard:

Lara was based on Indiana Jones, Tank Girl, and, people always say, my sister. Maybe subconsciously she was my sister. Anyway, she was supposed to be this strong woman, this upper-class adventurer. The rules at the time were, if you’re going to make a game, make sure the main character is male and make sure he’s American; otherwise it won’t sell in America. Those were the rules coming down from the marketing men. So I thought, “Ah, I know how to fix this. I’ll make the bad guys all American and the lead character female and as British as I can make her.”

She wasn’t a tits-out-for-the-lads type of character in any way. Quite the opposite, in fact. I thought that what was interesting about her was, she was this unattainable, austere, dangerous sort of person.

Sex appeal aside, Lara was in tune with the larger zeitgeist around her in a way that few videogames characters before her could match. Gard first sketched her during the fall of 1995, when Cool Britannia and Britpop were the rages of the age in his homeland, when Oasis and Blur were trash-talking one another and vying for the top position on the charts. It was suddenly hip to be British in a way it hadn’t been since the Swinging Sixties. Bands like the aforementioned made a great point of singing in their natural accents — or, some would say, an exaggerated version of same — and addressing distinctly British concerns rather than lapsing into the typical Americanisms of rock and pop music. Lara was cut from the same cloth. Gard changed her last name to “Croft” when he decided “Cruz” just wasn’t British enough, and created a defiantly blue-blooded lineage for her, making her the daughter of a Lord Henshingly Croft, complete with a posh public-school accent.

Jeremy Heath-Smith was not initially impressed. “Are you insane?” he asked Gard for the second time in a month. “We don’t do girls in videogames!” But Gard could be deceptively stubborn when he felt strongly about something, and this was one of those occasions. Heath-Smith remembers Gard telling him that “she’d be bendy. She’d do things that blokes couldn’t do.” Finally, he relented. “There was this whole movement of, females can really be cool, particularly from Japan,” he says.

And indeed, Lara was first drawn with a distinctly manga sensibility. Only gradually, as Gard worked her into the actual game, did she take on a more realistic style. Comparatively speaking, of course. We’ll come back to that…

An early concept sketch of Lara Croft.

Tomb Raider was becoming ever more important for Core. In the wake of the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation, the videogames industry was changing quickly, in tandem with its customers’ expectations of what a new game ought to look like; there was a lot of space on one of those shiny new CDs, and games were expected to fill it. The pressures prompted a wave of consolidations in Britain, a pooling of a previously diffuse industry’s resources in the service of fewer but bigger, slicker, more expensive games. Core actually merged twice in just a couple of years: first with the US Gold publishing label (its name came from its original business model, that of importing American games into Britain) and then with Domark, another veteran of the 1980s 8-bit scene. Domark began trading under the name of Eidos shortly after making the deal, with Core in the role of its premier studio.

Eidos had as chairman of its board Ian Livingstone, a legend of British gaming in analog spaces, the mastermind of the Warhammer tabletop game and the Fighting Fantasy line of paperback gamebooks that enthralled millions of youth during the 1980s. He went out to have a look at what Core had in the works. “I remember it was snowing,” he says. “I almost didn’t go over to Derby.” But he did, and “I guess you could say it was love at first sight when I stepped through the door. Seeing Lara on screen.”

With such a powerful advocate, Tomb Raider was elevated to the status of Eidos’s showcase game for the Christmas of 1996, with a commensurate marketing budget. But that meant that it simply had to be a hit, a bigger one by far than anything Core had ever done before. And Core was getting some worrisome push-back from Eidos’s American arm, expressing all the same conventional wisdom that Toby Gard had so carefully created Lara to defy: that she was too British, that the pronunciation of her first name didn’t come naturally to American lips, that she was a girl, for Pete’s sake. Cool Britannia wasn’t really a thing in the United States; despite widespread predictions of a second muscial British Invasion in the States to supersede the clapped-out Seattle grunge scene, Oasis had only partially broken through, Blur not at all, and Spice Girls — the latest Britpop sensation — had yet to see their music even released Stateside. Eidos needed another way to sell Lara Croft to Americans.

It may have been around this time that an incident which Toby Gard would tell of frequently in the years immediately after Tomb Raider’s release occurred. He was, so the story goes, sitting at his computer tweaking his latest model of Lara when his mouse hand slipped, and her chest suddenly doubled or tripled in size. When a laughing Gard showed it to his co-workers in a “look what a silly thing I did!” sort of way, their eyes lit up and they told him to leave it that way. “The technology didn’t allow us to make her [look] visually as we wanted, so it was more of a way of heightening certain things so it would give her some shape,” claims Core’s Adrian Smith.

Be that as it may, Eidos’s marketing team, eying that all-important American market that would make or break this game that would make or break their company, saw an obvious angle to take. They plastered Lara, complete with improbably huge breasts and an almost equally bulbous rear end, all over their advertising. “Sometimes, having a killer body just isn’t enough,” ran a typical tagline. “Hey, what’s a little temptation? Especially when everything looks this good. In the game, we mean.” As for the enemies Lara would have to kill, “Not everyone sees a bright light just before dying. Lucky stiffs.” (The innuendo around Lara was never subtle…)

This, then, was the way that Lara Croft greeted the public when her game dropped in September of 1996. And Toby Gard hated it. Giving every indication of having half fallen in love with his creation, he took the tarting up she was receiving under the hands of Eidos’s marketers badly. He saw them rather as a young man might the underworld impresario who had convinced his girlfriend — or his sister? — to become a stripper. A suggestion that reached Core’s offices to include a cheat code to remove Lara’s clothing entirely was, needless to say, not well-received by Gard. “It’s really weird when you see a character of yours doing these things,” he says. “I’ve spent my life drawing pictures of things — and they’re mine, you know?”

But of course they weren’t his. As is par for the course in the games industry, Gard automatically signed over all of the rights to everything he made at Core just as soon as he made it. He was not the final arbiter of what Lara did — or what was done to her – from here on out. So, he protested the only way he knew how: he quit.

Jeremy Heath-Smith, whose hardheaded businessman’s view of the world was the polar opposite of Gard’s artistic temperament, was gobsmacked by the decision.

I just couldn’t believe it. I remember saying, “Listen, Toby, this game’s going to be huge. You’re on a commission for this, you’re on a bonus scheme, you’re going to make a fortune. Don’t leave. Just sit here for the next two years. Don’t do anything. You’ll make more money than you’ve ever seen in your life.” I’m not arty, I’m commercial. I couldn’t understand his rationale for giving up millions of pounds for some artistic bloody stand. I just thought it was insanity.

Heath-Smith’s predictions of Tomb Raider’s success — and with them the amount of money Gard was leaving on the table — came true in spades.

Suspecting every bit as strongly as Heath-Smith that they had a winner on their hands, Eidos had already flown a lucky flock of reporters all the way to Egypt in August of 1996 to see Tomb Raider in action for the first time, with the real Pyramids of Giza as a backdrop. By now, the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation had been out for a year in North America and Europe, with the PlayStation turning into by far the bigger success, thanks both to Sony’s superior marketing and a series of horrific unforced errors on Sega’s part. Nevertheless, Tomb Raider appeared first on the Saturn, thanks to a deal Eidos had inked which promised Sega one precious month of exclusivity in return for a substantial cash payment. Rather than reviving the fortunes of Sega’s moribund console, Tomb Raider on the Saturn wound up serving mostly as a teaser for the PlayStation and MS-DOS versions that everyone knew were waiting in the wings.

The game still has qualities to recommend it today, although it certainly does show its age in some senses as well. The plot is barely comprehensible, a sort of Mad Libs of Raiders of the Lost Ark, conveyed in fifteen minutes of cut scenes worth of pseudo-mystical claptrap. The environments themselves, however, are possessed of a windy grandeur that requires no exposition, with vistas that can still cause you to pull up short from time to time. If nothing else, Tomb Raider makes a nice change of pace from the blood-splattered killing fields of the DOOM clones. In the first half of the game, combat is mostly with wildlife, and is relatively infrequent. You’ll spend more of your time working out the straightforward but satisfying puzzles — locked doors and hidden keys, movable boulders waiting to be turned into staircases, that sort of thing — and navigating vertigo-inducing jumps. In this sense and many others, Tomb Raider is more of an heir to the fine old British tradition of 8-bit action-adventures than it is to the likes of DOOM. Lara is quite an acrobat, able to crouch and spring, flip forward and backward and sideways, swim, climb walls, grab ledges, and when necessary shoot an arsenal of weapons that expands in time to include shotguns and Uzis alongside her iconic twin thigh-holstered pistols.

Amidst all the discussion of Lara Croft’s appearance, a lot of people failed to notice the swath she cuts through some of the world’s most endangered species of wildlife. “The problem is that any animal that’s dangerous to humans we’ve already hunted to near extinction,” said Toby Gard. “Maybe we should have used non-endangered, harmless animals. Then you’d be asking me, ‘Why was Lara shooting all those nice bunnies and squirrels?’ You can’t win, can you?”

Unfortunately, Tomb Raider increasingly falls prey to its designers’ less worthy instincts in its second half. As the story ups the stakes from just a treasure-hunting romp to yet another world-threatening videogame conspiracy, the environments grow less coherent and more nonsensical in rhythm, until Lara is battling hordes of mutant zombies inside what appears for all the world to be a pyramid made out of flesh and blood. And the difficulty increases to match, until gameplay becomes a matter of die-and-die-again until you figure out how to get that one step further, then rinse and repeat. This is particularly excruciating on the console versions, which strictly ration their save points. (The MS-DOS version, on the other hand, lets you save any time you like, which eases the pain considerably.) The final gauntlet you must run to escape from the last of the fifteen levels is absolutely brutal, a long series of tricky, non-intuitive moves that you have to time exactly right to avoid instant death, an exercise in rote yet split-second button mashing to rival the old Dragon’s Lair game. It’s no mystery why Tomb Raider ended up like this: its amount of content is limited, and it needed to stretch its playing time to justify a price tag of $50 or more. Still, it’s hard not to think wistfully about what a wonderful little six or seven hour game it might have become under other circumstances, if it hadn’t needed to fill fifteen or twenty hours instead.

Tomb Raider’s other weaknesses are also in the predictable places for a game of this vintage, a time when designers were still trying to figure out how to make this style of game playable. (“Everyone is sitting down and realizing that it’s bloody hard to design games for 3D,” said Peter Molyneux in a contemporaneous interview.) The controls can be a little awkward, what with the way they keep changing depending on what Lara’s actually up to. Ditto the distractingly flighty camera through which you view Lara and her environs, which can be uncannily good at finding exactly the angle you don’t want it to at times. Then, too, in the absence of a good auto-map or clear line of progression through each level, you might sometimes find orientation to be at least as much a challenge as any of the other, more deliberately placed obstacles to progress.

Games would slowly get better at this sort of thing, but it would take time, and it’s not really fair to scold Tomb Raider overmuch for failings shared by virtually all of the 3D action games of 1996. Tomb Raider is never less than a solidly executed game, and occasionally it becomes an inspired one; your first encounter with a Tyrannosaurus Rex (!) in a lost Peruvian valley straight out of Arthur Conan Doyle remains as shocking and terrifying today as it ever was.

As a purely technical feat, meanwhile, Tomb Raider was amazing in its day from first to last. The levels were bigger than any that had yet been seen outside the 2.5D Star Wars shooter Dark Forces. In contrast to DOOM and its many clones, in contrast even to id’s latest 3D extravaganza Quake, Tomb Raider stood out as its own unique thing, and not just because of its third-person behind-the-back perspective. It just had a bit more finesse about it all the way around. Those other games all relied on big bazooka-toting lunks with physiques that put Arnold Schwarzenegger to shame. Even with those overgrown balloons on her chest, Lara managed to be lithe, nimble, potentially deadly in a completely different way. DOOM and Quake were a carpet-bombing attack; she was a precision-guide missile.

Sex appeal and genuinely innovative gameplay and technology all combined to make Lara Croft famous. Shelley Blond, who voiced Lara’s sharply limited amount of dialog in the game, tells of wandering into a department store on a visit to Los Angeles, and seeing “an enormous cutout of Lara Croft. Larger than live-size.” She made the mistake of telling one of the staff who she was, whereupon she was mobbed like a Beatle in 1964: “I was bright red and shaking. They all wanted pictures, and that was when I thought, ‘Shit, this is huge!'”

In a landmark moment for the coming out of videogames as a force in mainstream pop culture, id Software had recently convinced the hugely popular industrial-rock band Nine Inch Nails to score Quake. But that was nothing compared to the journey that Lara Croft now made in the opposite direction, from the gaming ghetto into the mainstream. She appeared on the cover of the fashion magazine The Face: “Occasionally the camera angle allows you a glimpse of her slanted brown eyes and luscious lips, but otherwise Lara’s always out ahead, out of reach, like the perfect girl who passes in the street.” She was the subject of feature articles in Time, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone. Her name got dropped in the most unlikely places. David James, the star goalkeeper for the Liverpool football club, said he was having trouble practicing because he’d rather be playing Tomb Raider. Rave-scene sensations The Prodigy used their addiction to the game as an excuse for delaying their new album. U2 commissioned huge images of her to show on the Jumbotron during their $120 million Popmart tour. She became a spokeswoman for the soft drink Lucozade and for Fiat cars, was plastered across mouse pads, CD-wallets, and lunch boxes. She became a kids’ action figure and the star of her own comic book. It really was as if people thought she was an actual person; journalists clamored to “interview” her, and Eidos was buried in fan mail addressed to her. “This was like the golden goose,” says Heath-Smith. “You don’t think it’s ever going to stop laying. Everything we touched turned gold. It was just a phenomenon.” Already in 1997, negotiations began for an eventual Tomb Raider feature film.

Most of all, Lara was the perfect mascot for the PlayStation. Sony’s most brilliant marketing stroke of all had been to pitch their console toward folks in their late teens and early twenties rather than children and adolescents, thereby legitimizing gaming as an adult pursuit, something for urban hipsters to do before and/or after an evening out at the clubs. (It certainly wasn’t lost on Sony that this older demographic tended to have a lot more disposable income than the younger ones…) Lara may have come along a year too late for the PlayStation launch, but better late than never. What hipster videogaming had been missing was its very own It Girl. And now it had her. Tomb Raider sold seven and a half million copies, at least 80 percent of them on the PlayStation.

That said, it did very well for itself on computers as well, especially after Core posted on their website a patch to make the game work with the new 3Dfx Voodoo chipset for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics on that platform. Tomb Raider drove the first wave of Voodoo adoption; countless folks woke up to find a copy of the game alongside a shiny new graphics card under the tree that Christmas morning. Eidos turned a £2.6 million loss in 1996 into a £14.5 million profit in 1997, thanks entirely to Lara. “Eidos is now the house that Lara built,” wrote Newsweek magazine.

There followed the inevitable sequels, which kept Lara front and center through the balance of the 1990s and beyond: Tomb Raider II in 1997, Tomb Raider III in 1998, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation in 1999, Tomb Raider: Chronicles in 2000. These games were competently done for the most part, but didn’t stretch overmuch the template laid down by the first one; even the forthrightly non-arty Jeremy Heath-Smith admits that “we sold our soul” to keep the gravy train running, to make sure a new Tomb Raider game was waiting in stores each Christmas. Just as the franchise was starting to look a bit tired, with each successive game posting slowly but steadily declining sales numbers, the long-in-the-works feature film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider arrived in 2001 to bring her to a whole new audience and ensure that she became one of those rare pop-culture perennials.

By this time, a strong negative counter-melody had long been detectable underneath the symphony of commercial success. A lot of people — particularly those who weren’t quite ready to admit videogames into the same halls of culture occupied by music, movies, and books — had an all too clear image of who played Tomb Raider and why. They pictured a pimply teenage boy or a socially stunted adult man sitting on the couch in his parents’ basement with one hand on a controller and another in his pants, gazing in slack-jawed fascination at Lara’s gyrating backside, perhaps with just a trace of drool running down his spotty chin. And it must be admitted that some of Lara’s biggest fans didn’t do much to combat this image: the site called Nude Raider, which did what Toby Gard had refused to do by patching a naked version of Lara into the game, may just have been the most pathetic thing on the Internet circa 1997.

But other fans leaped to Lara’s defense as something more than just the world’s saddest masturbation aid. She was smart, she was strong, she was empowered, they said, everything feminist critics had been complaining for years that most women in games were not.

The problem, answered Lara’s detractors, was that she was still all too obviously crafted for the male gaze. She was, in other words, still a male fantasy at bottom, and not a terribly mature one at that, looking as she did like something a horny teenager who had yet to lay hands on a real girl might draw in his notebook. Her proportions — proudly announced by Eidos as 34D-24-35 — were obtainable by virtually no real woman, at least absent the services of a plastic surgeon. “If you genetically engineered a Lara-shaped woman,” noted PC Gaming World’s (female) reviews editor Cal Jones, “she would die within around fifteen seconds, since there’s no way her tiny abdomen could house all her vital organs.” Violet Berlin, a popular technology commentator on British television, called Lara “a ’70s throwback from the days when pouting lovelies were always to be found propped up against any consumer icon advertised for men.”

Everyone was right in her or his own way, of course. Lara Croft truly was different from the videogame bimbos of the past, and the fact that millions of boys were lining up to become her — or at least to control her — was progress of some sort. But still… as soon as you looked at her, you knew which gender had drawn her. Even Toby Gard, who had given up millions in a purely symbolic protest against the way his managers wished to exploit her, talked about her in ways that were far from free of male gazing — that could start to sound, if we’re being honest, just a little bit creepy.

Lara was designed to be a tough, self-reliant, intelligent woman. She confounds all the sexist clichés apart from the fact that she’s got an unbelievable figure. Strong, independent women are the perfect fantasy girls — the untouchable is always the most desirable.

Some feminist linguists would doubtless make much of the unconscious slip from “women” to “girls” in this comment…

The Lara in the games was rather a cipher in terms of personality, which worked for her benefit in the mass media. She could easily be re-purposed to serve as anything from a feminist hero to a sex kitten, depending on what was needed at that juncture.

For every point there was a counterpoint. Some girls and women saw Lara as a sign of progress, even as an aspirational figure. Others saw her only as one more stereotype of female perfection created by and for males, one to which they could never hope to measure up. “It’s a well-known fact that most [male] youngsters get their first good look at the female anatomy through porn mags, and come away thinking women have jutting bosoms, airbrushed skin, and neatly trimmed body hair,” said Cal Jones. “Now, thanks to Lara, they also think women are super fit, agile gymnasts with enough stamina to run several marathons back to back. Cheers.”

On the other hand, the same male gamers had for years been seeing images of almost equally unattainable masculine perfection on their screens, all bulging biceps and chiseled abs. How was this different? Many sensed that it was different, somehow, but few could articulate why. Michelle Goulet of the website Game Girlz perhaps said it best: Lara was “the man’s ideal image of a girl, not a girl’s ideal image of a girl.” The inverse was not true of all those warrior hunks: they were “based on the body image that is ideal to a lot of guys, not girls. They are nowhere near my ideal man.” The male gaze, that is to say, was the arbiter in both cases. What to do about it? Goulet had some interesting suggestions:

My thoughts on this matter are pretty straightforward. Include females in making female characters. Find out what the ideal female would be for both a man and a woman and work with that. Respect the females the same as you would the males.

Respecting the female characters is hard when they look like strippers with guns and seem to be nothing more than an erection waiting to happen. Believing that the industry in general respects females is hard when you see ads with women tied up on beds. In my opinion, respect is what most girls are after, and I feel that if the gaming community had more respect for their female characters they would attract the heretofore elusive female market. This doesn’t mean that girls in games have to be some kind of new butch race. Femininity is a big part of being female. This means that girls should be girls. Ideal body images and character aspects that are ideal for females, from a female point of view. I would be willing to bet that guys would find these females more attractive than the souped-up bimbos we are used to seeing. If sexuality is a major selling point, and a major attraction for the male gamer, then, fine, throw in all the sexuality you want, but doing so should not preclude respect for females.

To sum up, I have to say I think the gaming industry should give guys a little more credit, and girls a lot more respect, and I hope this will move the tide in that direction.

I’m happy to say that the tide has indeed moved in that direction for Lara Croft at least since Michelle Goulet wrote those words in the late 1990s. It began in a modest way with that first Tomb Raider movie in 2001. Although Angeline Jolie wore prosthetic breasts when she played Lara, it was impossible to recreate the videogame character’s outlandish proportions in their entirety. In order to maintain continuity with that film and a second one that came out in 2003, the Tomb Raider games of the aughts modeled their Laras on Jolie, resulting in a slightly more realistic figure. Then, too, Toby Gard returned to the franchise to work on 2007’s Tomb Raider: Anniversary and 2008’s Tomb Raider: Underworld, bringing some of his original vision of Lara with him.

But the real shift came when the franchise, which was once again fading in popularity by the end of the aughts, was rebooted in 2013, with a game that called itself simply Tomb Raider. Instead of pendulous breasts and booty mounted on spaghetti-thin legs and torso, it gave us a fit, toned, proportional Lara, a woman who looked like she had spent a lot of time and money at the local fitness center instead of the plastic surgeon’s office. If you ask this dirty old male gazer, she’s a thousand times more attractive than the old Lara, even as she’s a healthy, theoretically attainable ideal for a young woman who’s willing to put in some hard hours at the gym. This was proved by Alicia Vikander, the star of a 2018 Tomb Raider movie, the third and last to date; she looked uncannily like the latest videogame Lara up there on the big screen, with no prosthetics required.

Bravo, I say. If the original Lara Croft was a sign of progress in her way, the latest Lara is a sign that progress continued. If you were to say the new Lara is the one we should have had all along — within the limits of what the technology of the time would allow, of course — I wouldn’t argue with you. But still… better late than never.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

(Sources: The books Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders: How British Video Games Conquered the World by Magnus Anderson and Rebecca Levene; From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins; Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming, edited by Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Y. Sun; Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market by Sheri Graner Ray; The Making of Tomb Raider by Daryl Baxter; 20 Years of Tomb Raider: Digging Up the Past, Defining the Future by Meagan Marie; and A Gremlin in the Works by Mark James Hardisty. Computer Gaming World of August 1996, October 1996, January 1997, March 1997, and November 1997; PC Powerplay of July 1997; Next Generation of May 1996, October 1996, and June 1998; The Independent of April 18 2004; Retro Gamer 20, 147, 163, and 245. Online sources include three pieces for the Game Studies journal, by Helen W. Kennedy, Janine Engelbrecht, and Esther MacCallum-Stewart. Plus two interview with Toby Gard, by The Guardian’s Greg Howson and Game Developer’s David Jenkins.

The first three Tomb Raider games are available as digital purchases at GOG.com, as are the many games that followed those three.)

Comments
37 Responses

- SamLL

June 2, 2023 at 5:08 pm

Is Pac-Man in the Nintendo stable?

- Jimmy Maher

June 2, 2023 at 6:03 pm

He is now. We play a Wii game with the neighbors in which he features quite prominently. ;)

- Gordon Cameron

June 3, 2023 at 12:27 am

I still think of it as a Bandai/Namco character, and the rights are there though I guess he has been loaned out sometimes? Anyway, the ‘Nintendo’ line threw me a bit.

https://pacman.com/en/

- Sebastian Gerstl

June 2, 2023 at 5:14 pm

“These were rather direct descendants of 8-bit games like Bounder: fast-paced, colorful, modest in size and ambition […]”

Whoa… I could call “Corporation ” many things… a proto-FPS, a quasi-RPG, a precursory attempt at something like System Shock… But it definitely wasn’t your typical run-of-the-mill platformer or standard action title. It may have failed at what it set out to do, but it definitely was very ambitious!

- Jimmy Maher

June 2, 2023 at 6:12 pm

Fair enough. I don’t think it was much of a bit either, so… edits made! Thanks!

- Rowan Lipkovits

June 2, 2023 at 7:29 pm

“best known as the mastermind of the Fighting Fantasy line of paperback gamebooks”

When I think of Ian Livingstone’s career triumphs, I rather fancy putting Games Workshop and his related work with White Dwarf and Citadel ahead of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, but I really have no idea which one is the bigger concern.

“a legend of British gaming in both analog and digital spaces”

He got on board with Domark prior to the incredible roller coaster ride taking it through Eidos and Square, but is he known for any actual contributions to the world of digital gaming? His most notable digital game made prior to joining the board of Domark seems to be the rather unremarkable Eureka!

- Jimmy Maher

June 2, 2023 at 7:51 pm

I’ll give you the second, but I’m going to hold fast on the first. ;) My feeling is that Games Workship was a pretty niche, nerdy thing compared to Fighting Fantasy, which was all over when I was in junior high in the mid-1980s. On the other hand, I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t into Warhammer. This is of course only one American perspective…

Thanks!

- Rowan Lipkovits

June 2, 2023 at 9:42 pm

My reckoning simply has it that there were entire shops (apparently over 500 of them worldwide?) exclusively dedicated to Warhammer and its spin-offs, while there was never any such thing as a Fighting Fantasy store — they’d just quietly get a corner or a shelf at your neighbourhood bookstore. But absolutely it’s still possible to humbly rack up dozens of millions of sales through conventional retail avenues…

(Just while doing a little Googling to substantiate my previous comment here I stumbled across a Facebook chatbot adaptation of Livingstone’s FF book Freeway Fighter, and had to go nip off to document it on Mobygames…)

- Jimmy Maher

June 3, 2023 at 6:05 am

Okay, we can include it. ;)

- Ross

June 3, 2023 at 9:46 pm

It was utterly bizarre to me the first time I saw one that there were entire Warhammer stores, rather than “general gaming store with a large warhammer section”. And this was as far back as the ’90s, when gamer culture was a lot less visible.

- turn

June 4, 2023 at 4:35 am

Those little figures sure do have a massive profit margin.

- FincasKhalmoril

June 8, 2023 at 4:54 am

Hello Jimmy and Rowan,

long time reader (mostly a lurker, though) of this site and fan of pushing little painted model soldiers over the table reenacting historical and fantastical battles. Warhammer is part of thr latter, and I also am very fond of the early to middle phase of the Warhammer universe(s).

As much as I love the inclusion of Warhammer into an article on one of my favorite blogs, it’s not Ian Livingstone who created the Warhammer hobby and set up the stores. Livingstone (not to be confused with the American game designer of the same time who is quite famous for his game Car Wars).

Actually this credit goes to Bryan Ansell who took over Games Workshop in the mid (?) 80s and developed it from a „normal“ games publisher who made its living by republishing American RPGs for the British and Continental markets.

Games Workshop at the time of Livingstone sold D&D, Runequest, Elric and many more RPGs, didn’t have iirc special stores and developed a small range of card and board games. Iirc they did already have tin soldiers at that time (under the Citadel label), but these were meant as collector pieces or to represent characters and monsters while playing D&D and its likes. Even the early White Dwarfs were just a normal magazine for nerdy gamers and only featured Warhammer (that only reached a stage somehow similar to its modern iteration in 1983) as some kind of battle simulation for rather general fantasy worlds.

- Gordon Cameron

June 4, 2023 at 4:36 am

My main exposure to Games Workship (in the U.S.) during the mid-’80s was Talisman. I loved that game…

- Alex Smith

June 2, 2023 at 7:43 pm

“Domark began trading under the name of Eidos shortly after making the deal, with Core in the role of its premier studio.”

This is technically true, but maybe not quite right in the realm of corporate shenanigans. Eidos Plc was founded in 1990 by a former British Ministry of Defence software engineer named Simon Streater to market a video compression algorithm he developed called Optima. In 1994, financier Charles Cornwall, the Rhodesian-born, South-African-bred son of a mining executive who began amassing his own personal fortune through savvy stock trading while in college, bought a stake in the company and became the chairman and CEO.

In it’s first years, Eidos dealt primarily with the research community, but Cornwall recognized that there were great commercial possibilities for Optima. He saw a move into the game space as an optimal path to promote the technology. He forged a partnership with Domark, which used Optima in the game Tank Commander. The success of this venture spurred Cornwall to buy Domark in September 1995 to bring Eidos directly into video games. Eidos changed the name of Domark to Eidos Interactive in May 1996.

In one sense, you could say that Domark changed it’s name to Eidos since that indeed happened, but it does leave the impression that this was just a name change and not a buyout by a new parent that provided said name. Certainly little old Domark would not have been able to pull off a purchase of British computer game titan CentreGold and its Core Design subsidiary itself; that deal was made possible by the financial muscle of publicly traded Eidos Plc and was all part of Cornwall’s ambition to turn Eidos into a leading multimedia technology company.

- Jimmy Maher

June 3, 2023 at 6:00 am

In this case, I think I’m comfortable eliding those details in the article proper for the sake of readability. I actually phrased it as “trading under the name of,” which is a little more ambiguous. But as always, thanks for being such a fount of information about things I don’t know. ;)

- Keith Palmer

June 2, 2023 at 10:14 pm

My own recollections of playing Tomb Raider only go so far as a demo (and that was just because the end of the 1990s were a time of relative plenty when it came to Macintosh ports of big games). So far as the “Tomb Raider phenomenon” went, though, I am thinking back to a particular work of fanfiction. It featured the fourteen-year-old son of Lara Croft, fruit of a one-night stand with the X-Files’s Fox Mulder, who just happened to have replaced the less confident and competent giant robot pilot protagonist of the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion (relocated for this story from “Tokyo-3” to the central Massachusetts city its authors had gone to university in). You could perhaps determine whether the authors liked or disliked the remaining characters of the anime from whether those characters were immediately charmed or just frustrated and irritated by the way Lara’s son swaggered around with an automatic in a shoulder holster, tore around on a Corley motorcycle, tossed back cans of Guinness, already knew the story’s secret backstory involved X-COM (it did sort of indicate how much that game’s characters could grow on someone by who had replaced one other character from the anime), saved SHODAN from being hacked with the aid of his desktop-class HAL computer, generally overpowered every challenge of the original anime without much effort, and crossed the Atlantic by ocean liner to receive a title from the grateful and casual King of England (and Ireland again). There were other 1990s computer and video games mashed into the story too, but somehow all of this didn’t charm a certain number of vocal fans of the original Evangelion… I have to admit I just might be among them, too.

- Jimmy Maher

June 3, 2023 at 6:06 am

Or maybe it was written by a time traveler who spent way too much time in this site?

- Emily Fox

June 4, 2023 at 9:19 pm

Haha, we used to call those “crack fics” back in the day, that were just so over the top with their crossovers and ludicrous events that you felt like the ronald mcdonald meme. We all have a few that have stuck with us through the years, taking up brain space that could be put to much better uses.

- doctorcasino

June 7, 2023 at 1:57 pm

Delighted I’m not the only one who remembers this unabashedly fannish magnum opus. At least in my memory, it made up for its absurdity with a brisk, chewy, pulpy kind of style. Real airport bookshop, beach-read stuff, in a good way.

Lara herself eventually showed up to join the supporting cast and was treated with considerable reverence — though now encumbered with filial devotion to every other character who had fallen in love with the rakish young “DJ.” At least she was still raising tombs, scaling boulders, rappelling into secret government bunkers, etc.

- Anonymous Coward

June 3, 2023 at 3:55 am

Jimmy, I love most of the writing you’ve done on this blog over the years, and there’s some good stuff in this post – I’ve been a Tomb Raider fan since I was born and didn’t really know about Ian Livingstone’s past in the British tabletop scene – but I respectfully (and strongly) disagree with your conclusion that the “new” Lara is a sign that “progress continued” over Core Design’s Lara:

1. A correction: Tomb Raider 2013 was the second reboot, not the first. That happened in 2006 with Tomb Raider: Legend, the first game in the series that Crystal Dynamics developed after Eidos took the series away from Core following Angel of Darkness, which was a long, messy story that multiple people have covered by now and it was probably worth more than a passing mention. Toby Gard also came back to the series with Legend, not Anniversary (Core was doing their own anniversary remake that Eidos and Crystal snubbed them on, the entire history of this series is messy) and vanished again after Underworld.

2. You touched on this a little bit by including Toby’s comments, but there are still plenty of us who actually *like* the original Lara and feel like the newer versions of her character are a regression, not an improvement. Yeah, the old Lara had big tits and a revealing outfit, but she was a surprisingly compelling character even if Tomb Raider never exactly had Shakespearean writing. Core’s Lara was this cool, collected ice queen who stunned her stuffy aristocratic British upbringing so she could risk everything going alone on deadly tomb raiding expeditions because she genuinely believed it was the only way of life for her – her wittiness, sass and resourcefulness was what made her so enthralling. She may have been distant, mysterious, and morally questionable as well, but I honestly think this just made her character even more interesting and she usually did the right thing anyway.

Compare this to the “new” Lara (or “survivor” Lara, as fans call her). Core’s Lara was shunned by her parents and ran off so she could go do her own thing, the new one obsesses over them and can’t get over her daddy issues. The old Lara killed out of necessity and didn’t dwell on it, while this Lara was portrayed as a survivor who can’t bear the thought of killing a person, even though she ends up gunning down hundreds of men on a small island anyway. The old Lara died in a lot of gruesome ways too, except that was usually entertaining – Tomb Raider 2013 has its Lara getting impaled and maimed in scenes that should honestly be fatal, but they aren’t and it’s almost like it’s glorifying this kind of gore… in a game that was allegedly supposed to be a more respectful interpretation of the character? They made two sequels to that game under the pretense that Lara would start as a scrappy survivor chick who doesn’t know how to raid tombs yet, and 10 years later she’s… still a survivor and not a “proper” adventurer. She never even got her dual pistols! :(

This rant’s already gone on for long enough so hopefully you get my point. The discussion about Lara’s sexualization was always missing the point and the new Lara sucks, not because she isn’t well-endowed, but because she’s genuinely more boring, unlikable and poorly written than a character from a game that came out 25 years ago. I can’t speak for actual women (even though I’ve seen some of them express this), but to me the old Lara is still one of the best examples of a female character in any game even to this day, and it’s a shame you glanced over most of that in favor of saying “well the new Lara has smaller breasts, so she must be a better character I guess” like most mainstream gaming journalists did a decade ago. Good work on the rest of the post, but man this annoyed me

- Jimmy Maher

June 3, 2023 at 6:33 am

Well, you’re of course absolutely free to like what you like, but a counterargument might be that a “cool, collected ice queen” is a one-dimensional male sexual fantasy, not a well-rounded (no, not in that way) personality. Plenty of girls and women did strongly sense this about the old Lara and found it off-putting. From this perspective, any attempt to humanize Lara, by giving a more complete picture of her background and motivations and insecurities as well as her bad-assery, might be counted as progress toward making gaming more inclusive and wiser about the world. The question of whether that was done well or poorly is a bit orthogonal to the argument.

- Cereal Killer

June 7, 2023 at 12:05 am

Fair points on some of the issues with the remake, but arguing the original was anything more the a poorly sketched porn star is ridiculous. She had no personality, and was in no way remotely human – she was just a giant pair of tits with a British accent. I was firmly in the target demographic, but I felt embarrassed to be a gamer anytime one of those ridiculous commercials showed up on the TV.

- stepped pyramids

June 3, 2023 at 4:51 am

“[Unlike] Oasis… Spice Girls [had broken through in the US] barely at all”

A bit of a chronological quibble here: The Spice Girls debut was in mid-1996, Tomb Raider was released in October 1996, and “Wannabe” wasn’t released in the US until January 1997, at which point it was #1 on the Hot 100 for a month. The album was the top-selling album in the US for 1997. So it’s technically true that Spice Girls hadn’t broken through in the US at the time Tomb Raider was released but literally from lack of trying.

I think it’d be clearer to say they had “yet to break through”.

- Jimmy Maher

June 3, 2023 at 6:16 am

Good catch. Thanks!

- Alex

June 3, 2023 at 5:38 am

I consider Tomb Raider 2 as THE Game of the 90s-Generation, which was my Generation. Not only was it a really good game on its own right, everything you wrote about these times I also consider true. A perfect figure for a wild time in entertainment culture. In the new millenium, I left Tomb Raider (and playing games) behind me for good, but it seems that Lara never left me completely. After a long period of hesitation, I took the plunge and bought the 2013 Tomb Raider on a sale. The new mature tone was a really positive surprise to me.

I also had to discover that I still like these kind of games and that I´m still a fan of the series. Consequently, I also bought the newer games and I´m glad I did. Now I don´t know how much of an impact these games made on the contemporary gaming market, but I definitely know that the younger generation will never be able to experience the impact that the original two games had on entertainment culture.

- ces

June 3, 2023 at 9:54 am

>> If you ask this dirty old male gazer, she’s a thousand times more attractive than the old Lara

lmao ok? no one cares. really interesting and seemingly feminist article until you felt the need to let us know what makes your dick hard.

- Mike russo

June 5, 2023 at 12:25 am

That’s rather all in how you choose to read it. I didn’t at all get that idea.

- Martin

June 5, 2023 at 12:21 pm

Are there any mainstream games out there where the main character is old, over weight or ugly (by any accepted standard) woman? If not, then it’s just levels of who thinks a particular character is OK and who thinks they are gender exploitative.

- Leo Vellès

June 5, 2023 at 2:36 pm

I suggest to anyone wanting to try the original Tomb Raider but is put off by the graphics to try the Anniversary edition. It is basically the same game but it still looks very good by today’s standards

- Steve Metzler

June 7, 2023 at 10:51 pm

Leo, hi,

Like Jimmy, I’ve been around a long time, and have been programming computers for [redacted] years. I managed to get Tomb Raider running, in my own words from many, many years ago:

“It’s possible to get this game running in its original glory, with a Glide wrapper that emulates an old 3DFX Voodoo card. The set-up is a bit complicated and involves VDMSound too, so…”

But I’ll spare you that. On your advice, I just purchased the Anniversary edition from Steam. Should make for a nostalgic romp.

- Leo Vellès

June 8, 2023 at 11:15 am

Hi Steve, I’m pretty sure you will enjoy it. I played it once when it was released, and again one more time a couple of years ago and it was still a very fun experience

- Kate Lynch

June 5, 2023 at 8:51 pm

a little addendum to lara croft and gender: for a lot of trans women trying to work on gender stuff, femininity is so stigmatized that playing women in video games is one of the few opportunities we have to explore gender. that said, i don’t really know a lot of trans women who connected with lara croft particularly. i’ve seen samus aran cited as an influence _far_ more often.

personally croft was after my time – i never got into 3d games. for me it was alis landale of the original phantasy star.

- Marco

June 5, 2023 at 9:45 pm

I remember playing Tomb Raider through soon after it came out. What was very noticeable, compared with Doom and the similar games that were around beforehand, was the slower pace. While there certainly was combat, the primary foe to conquer was the terrain, by seeking out weak points and refining to the correct sequence of moves. This made it a bit like the 3D equivalent of The Lost Vikings (another of my old favourites).

Over the past few months, I’ve been greatly enjoying working through that later trilogy – Legend, Anniversary, and the more ambitious if less successful Underworld. These are still very playable today in a way the originals aren’t, and Keeley Hawes’s voice acting did a lot to expand the fantasy cipher into a convincing character.

- Glorkvorn

June 7, 2023 at 9:00 am

“A lot of people — particularly those who weren’t quite ready to admit videogames into the same halls of culture occupied by music, movies, and books — had an all too clear image of who played Tomb Raider and why. They pictured a pimply teenage boy or a socially stunted adult man sitting on the couch in his parents’ basement with one hand on a controller and another in his pants, gazing in slack-jawed fascination at Lara’s gyrating backside, perhaps with just a trace of drool running down his spotty chin.”

Who are these people? You didn’t quote anyone for this so it seems like it’s just your personal opinion. “Many people are saying…”

Even if the game was just porn- and it really, really isn’t- what’s the harm in that? I just don’t understand the feminist thinking that anything that appeals to men’s sexuality is automatically bad and dirty. It just seems like neo-puritanism.

Anyway, the unrealistic design of Lara just seems like a product of the technology limits of the time. She’s basically just a blob of triangles and spheres. They wanted “hot sexy babe” but the graphics weren’t nearly high-res enough for a realistic figure. If they had made here more realistic, it would have fallen into the uncanny valley. Better to be cartoonish and exaggerated. It’s like the original Mario, who’s face is all nose and mustache to make sure you know he’s “fat, goofy Italian” in the limits of a tiny 8-bit sprite.

- xxx

June 10, 2023 at 10:15 pm

If you’re looking for anecdotal evidence, I was a gamer in the 1990s and that was my impression of Tomb Raider’s target audience, based on the advertisements, screenshots, and embarrassing lad mag pinups.

As for the rest of this post, if you don’t understand why sexual objectification can be hurtful to people, you’ve got some learning to do.

- Horkthane

August 4, 2023 at 6:46 pm

> I just don’t understand the feminist thinking that anything that appeals to men’s sexuality is automatically bad and dirty. It just seems like neo-puritanism.

You and me both.

Although I will say, as a fairly stereotypical red blooded male who unabashedly likes what I like, when I was 13 or so the emphasis in the advertising for Tomb Raider put me off. Hard to say why. I spent my share of time, perhaps too much time, eyeing PC Accelerator’s pin up girls. I was no stranger to sexy girls in print, with the profound fondness for them like a young boy with little hands on knowledge of the opposite sex does. But something about the marketing trying so hard to claim this Picasso like collection of polygons was “sexy” made even my hormone addled teenage self feel talked down to.

- Olof Kindgren

June 14, 2023 at 7:02 pm

Never played any of the Tomb raider games, although I actually own the first one for Dreamcast. That one is technically interesting since I think it’s actually using Windows CE, so likely ported from a Windows version for PCs.

Anyway, I’m surprised no one makes the comparison to Modesty Blaise. From what I hear here, she very much sounds like a dressed down 90s version of Modesty. Her traits and the conflict between male gaze and strong character is very similar to my ears.

A Dialog in Real Time (Strategy)
June 23, 2023

At the end of the 1990s, the two most popular genres in computer gaming were the first-person shooter and the real-time strategy game. They were so dominant that most of the industry’s executives seemed to want to publish little else. And yet at the beginning of the decade neither genre even existed.

The stories of how the two rose to such heady heights are a fascinating study in contrasts, of how influences in media can either go off like an explosion in a TNT factory or like the slow burn of a long fuse. Sometimes something appears and everyone knows instantly that it’s just changed everything; when the Beatles dropped Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, there was no doubt that the proverbial goalposts in rock music had just been shifted. Other times, though, influence can take years to make itself felt, as was the case for another album of 1967, The Velvet Underground & Nico, about which Brian Eno would later famously say that it “only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”

Games are the same. Gaming’s Sgt. Pepper was DOOM, which came roaring up out of the shareware underground at the tail end of 1993 to sweep everything from its path, blowing away all of the industry’s extant conventional wisdom about what games would become and what role they would play in the broader culture. Gaming’s Velvet Underground, on the other hand, was the avatar of real-time strategy, which came to the world in the deceptive guise of a sequel in the fall of 1992. Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty sported its Roman numeral because its transnational publisher had gotten its transatlantic cables crossed and accidentally wound up with two separate games based on Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 science-fiction novel — one made in Paris, the other in Las Vegas. The former turned out to be a surprisingly evocative and playable fusion of adventure and strategy game, but it was the latter that would quietly — oh, so quietly in the beginning! — shift the tectonic plates of gaming.

For Dune II, which was developed by Westwood Studios and published by Virgin Games, really was the first recognizable implementation of the genre of real-time strategy as we have come to know it since. You chose one of three warring trading houses to play, then moved through a campaign made up of a series of set-piece scenarios, in which your first goal was always to make yourself an army by gathering resources and using them to build structures that could churn out soldiers, tanks, aircraft, and missiles, all of which you controlled by issuing them fairly high-level orders: “go here,” “harvest there,” “defend this building,” “attack that enemy unit.” Once you thought you were strong enough, you could launch your full-on assault on the enemy — or, if you weren’t quick enough, you might find yourself trying to fend off his attack. What made it so different from most of the strategy games of yore was right there in the name: in the fact that it all played out in real time, at a pace that ranged from the brisk to the frantic, making it a test of your rapid-fire mousemanship and your ability to think on your feet. Bits and pieces of all this had been seen before — perhaps most notably in Peter Molyneux and Bullfrog’s Populous and the Sega Genesis game Herzog Zwei — but Dune II was where it all came together to create a gaming paradigm for the ages.

That said, Dune II was very much a diamond in the rough, a game whose groundbreaking aspirations frequently ran up against the brick wall of its limitations. It’s likely to leave anyone who has ever played almost any other real-time-strategy game seething with frustration. It runs at a resolution of just 320 X 200, giving only the tiniest window into the battlefield; it only lets you select and control one unit at a time, making coordinated attacks and defenses hard to pull off; its scenarios are somewhat rote exercises, differing mainly in the number of enemy hordes they throw against you as you advance through the campaign rather than the nature of the terrain or your objectives. Even its fog of war is wonky: the whole battlefield is blank blackness until one of your units gets within visual range, after which you can see everything that goes on there forevermore, whether any of your units can still lay eyes on it or not. And it has no support whatsoever for the multiplayer free-for-alls that are for many or most players the biggest draw of the genre.

Certainly Virgin had no inkling that they had a nascent ludic revolution on their hands. They released Dune II with more of a disinterested shrug than a fulsome fanfare, having expended most of their promotional energies on the other Dune, which had come out just a few months earlier. It’s a testimony to the novelty of the gameplay experience that it did as well as it did. It didn’t become a massive hit, but it sold well enough to earn its budget back and then some on the strength of reasonably positive reviews — although, again, no reviewer had the slightest notion that he was witnessing the birth of what would be one of the two hottest genres in gaming six years in the future. Even Westwood seemed initially to regard Dune II as a one-and-done. They wouldn’t release another game in the genre they had just invented for almost three years.

But the gaming equivalent of all those budding bedroom musicians who listened to that Velvet Underground record was also out there in the case of Dune II. One hungry, up-and-coming studio in particular decided there was much more to be done with the approach it had pioneered. And then Westwood themselves belatedly jumped back into the fray. Thanks to the snowball that these two studios got rolling in earnest during the mid-1990s, the field of real-time strategy would be well and truly saturated by the end of the decade, the yin to DOOM’s yang. This, then, is the tale of those first few years of these two studios’ competitive dialog, over the course of which they turned the real-time strategy genre from a promising archetype into one of gaming’s two biggest, slickest crowd pleasers.

Blizzard Studios is one of the most successful in the history of gaming, so much so that it now lends its name to the Activision Blizzard conglomerate, with annual revenues in the range of $7.5 billion. In 1993, however, it was Westwood, flying high off the hit dungeon crawlers Eye of the Beholder and Lands of Lore, that was by far the more recognizable name. In fact, Blizzard wasn’t even known yet as Blizzard.

The company had been founded in late 1990 by Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime, a couple of kids fresh out of university, on the back of a $15,000 loan from Morhaime’s grandmother. They called their venture Silicon & Synapse, setting it up in a hole-in-the-wall office in Costa Mesa, California. They kept the lights on initially by porting existing games from one platform to another for publishers like Interplay — the same way, as it happened, that Westwood had gotten off the ground almost a decade before. And just as had happened for Westwood, Silicon & Synapse gradually won opportunities to make their own games once they had proven themselves by porting those of others. First there was a little auto-racing game for the Super Nintendo called RPM Racing, then a pseudo-sequel to it called Rock ‘n’ Roll Racing, and then a puzzle platformer called The Lost Vikings, which appeared for the Sega Genesis, MS-DOS, and the Commodore Amiga in addition to the Super Nintendo. None of these titles took the world by storm, but they taught Silicon & Synapse what it took to create refined, playable, mass-market videogames from scratch. All three of those adjectives have continued to define the studio’s output for the past 30 years.

It was now mid-1993; Silicon & Synapse had been in business for more than two and a half years already. Adham and Morhaime wanted to do something different — something bigger, something that would be suitable for computers only rather than the less capable consoles, a real event game that would get their studio’s name out there alongside the Westwoods of the world. And here there emerged another of their company’s future trademarks: rather than invent something new from whole or even partial cloth, they decided to start with something that already existed, but make it better than ever before, polishing it until it gleamed. The source material they chose was none other than Westwood’s Dune II, now relegated to the bargain bins of last year’s releases, but a perennial after-hours favorite at the Silicon & Synapse offices. They all agreed as to the feature they most missed in Dune II: a way to play it against other people, like you could its ancestor Populous. The bane of most multiplayer strategy games was their turn-based nature, which left you waiting around half the time while your buddy was playing. Real-time strategy wouldn’t have this problem of downtime.

That became the design brief for Warcraft: Orcs & Humans: remake Dune II but make it even better, and then add a multiplayer feature. And then, of course, actually try to sell the thing in all the ways Virgin had not really tried to sell its inspiration.

To say that Warcraft was heavily influenced by Dune II hardly captures the reality. Most of the units and buildings to hand have a direct correspondent in Westwood’s game. Even the menu of icons on the side of the screen is a virtual carbon copy — or at least a mirror image. “I defensively joked that, while Warcraft was certainly inspired by Dune II, [our] game was radically different,” laughs Patrick Wyatt, the lead programmer and producer on the project. “Our radar mini-map was in the upper left corner of the screen, whereas theirs was in the bottom right corner.”

In the same spirit of change, Silicon & Synapse replaced the desert planet of Arrakis with a fantasy milieu pitting, as the subtitle would suggest, orcs against humans. The setting and the overall look of Warcraft owe almost as much to the tabletop miniatures game Warhammer as the gameplay does to Dune II; a Warhammer license was seriously considered, but ultimately rejected as too costly and potentially too restrictive. Years later, Wyatt’s father would give him a set of Warhammer miniatures he’d noticed in a shop: “I found these cool toys and they reminded me a lot of your game. You might want to have your legal department contact them because I think they’re ripping you off.”

Suffice to say, then, that Warcraft was even more derivative than most computer games. The saving grace was the same that it would ever be for this studio: that they executed their mishmash of influences so well. The squishy, squint-eyed art is stylized like a cartoon, a wise choice given that the game is still limited to a resolution of just 320 X 200, so that photo-realism is simply not on the cards. The overall look of Warcraft has more in common with contemporary console games than the dark, gritty aesthetic that was becoming so popular on computers. The guttural exclamations of the orcs and the exaggerated Monty Python and the Holy Grail-esque accents of the humans, all courtesy of regular studio staffers rather than outside voice actors, become a chorus line as you order them hither and yon, making Dune II seem rather stodgy and dull by comparison. “We felt too many games took themselves too seriously,” says Patrick Wyatt. “We just wanted to entertain people.”

Slavishly indebted though it is to Dune II in all the broad strokes, Warcraft doesn’t neglect to improve on its inspiration in those nitty-gritty details that can make the difference between satisfaction and frustration for the player. It lets you select up to four units and give them orders at the same time by simply dragging a box around them, a quality-of-life addition whose importance is difficult to overstate, one so fundamental that no real-time-strategy game from this point forward would dare not to include it. Many more keyboard shortcuts are added, a less technically impressive addition but one no less vital to the cause of playability when the action starts to heat up. There are now two resources you need to harvest, lumber and gold, in places of Dune II’s all-purpose spice. Units are now a little more intelligent about interpreting your orders, such that they no longer blithely ignore targets of opportunity, or let themselves get mauled to death without counterattacking just because you haven’t explicitly told them to. Scenario design is another area of marked improvement: whereas every Dune II scenario is basically the same drill, just with ever more formidable enemies to defeat, Warcraft’s are more varied and arise more logically out of the story of the campaign, including a couple of special scenarios with no building or gathering at all, where you must return a runaway princess to the fold (as the orcs) or rescue a stranded explorer (as the humans).

The orc on the right who’s stroking his “sword” looks so very, very wrong — and this screenshot doesn’t even show the animation…

And, as the cherry on top, there was multiplayer support. Patrick Wyatt finished his first, experimental implementation of it in June of 1994, then rounded up a colleague in the next cubicle over so that they could became the first two people ever to play a full-fledged real-time-strategy game online. “As we started the game, I felt a greater sense of excitement than I’d ever known playing any other game,” he says.

It was just this magic moment, because it was so invigorating to play against a human and know that it wasn’t some stupid AI. It was a player who was smart and doing his absolute best to crush you. I knew we were making a game that would be fun, but at that moment I knew the game would absolutely kick ass.

While work continued on Warcraft, the company behind it was going through a whirlwind of changes. Recognizing at long last that “Silicon & Synapse” was actually a pretty terrible name, Adham and Morhaime changed it to Chaos Studios, which admittedly wasn’t all that much better, in December of 1993. Two months later, they got an offer they couldn’t refuse: Davidson & Associates, a well-capitalized publisher of educational software that was looking to break into the gaming market, offered to buy the freshly christened Chaos for the princely sum of $6.75 million. It was a massive over-payment for what was in all truth a middling studio at best, such that Adham and Morhaime felt they had no choice but to accept, especially after Davidson vowed to give them complete creative freedom. Three months after the acquisition, the founders decided they simply had to find a decent name for their studio before releasing Warcraft, their hoped-for ticket to the big leagues. Adham picked up a dictionary and started leafing through it. He hit pay dirt when his eyes flitted over the word “blizzard.” “It’s a cool name! Get it?” he asked excitedly. And that was that.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Warcraft hit stores in time for the Christmas of 1994, with the name of “Blizzard Entertainment” on the box as both its developer and its publisher — the wheels of the latter role being greased by the distributional muscle of Davidson & Associates. It was not immediately heralded as a game that would change everything, any more than Dune II had been; real-time strategy continued to be more of a slowly growing snowball than the ton of bricks to the side of the head that the first-person shooter had been. Computer Gaming World magazine gave Warcraft a cautious four stars out of five, saying that “if you enjoy frantic real-time games and if you don’t mind a linear structure in your strategic challenges, Warcraft is a good buy.” At the same time, the extent of the game’s debt to Dune II was hardly lost on the reviewer: “It’s a good thing for Blizzard that there’s no precedent for ‘look and feel’ lawsuits in computer entertainment.”[1]This statement was actually not correct; makers of standup arcade games of the classic era and the makers of Tetris had successfully cowed the cloning competition in the courts.

Warcraft would eventually sell 400,000 units, bettering Dune II’s numbers by a factor of four or more. As soon as it became clear that it was doing reasonably well, Blizzard started on a sequel.

Out of everyone who looked at Warcraft, no one did so with more interest — or with more consternation at its close kinship with Dune II — than the folks at Westwood. “When I played Warcraft, the similarities between it and Dune II were pretty… blatant, so I didn’t know what to think,” says the Westwood designer Adam Isgreen. Patrick Wyatt of Blizzard got the impression that his counterparts “weren’t exactly happy” at the slavish copying when they met up at trade shows, though he “reckoned they should have been pleased that we’d taken their game as a base for ours.” Only gradually did it become clear why Warcraft’s existence was a matter of such concern for Westwood: because they themselves had finally decided to make another game in the style of Dune II.

The game that Westwood was making could easily have wound up looking even more like the one that Blizzard had just released. The original plan was to call it Command & Conquer: Fortress of Stone and to set it in a fantasy world. (Westwood had been calling their real-time-strategy engine “Command & Conquer” since the days of promoting Dune II.) “It was going to have goldmines and wood for building things. Sound familiar?” chuckles Westwood’s co-founder Louis Castle. “There were going to be two factions, humans and faerie folk… pretty fricking close to orcs versus humans.”

Some months into development, however, Westwood decided to change directions, to return to a science-fictional setting closer to that of Dune II. For they wanted their game to be a hit, and it seemed to them that fantasy wasn’t the best guarantee of such a thing: CRPGs were in the doldrums, and the most recent big strategy release with a fantasy theme, MicroProse’s cult-classic-to-be Master of Magic, hadn’t done all that well either. Foreboding near-future stories, however, were all the rage; witness the stellar sales of X-COM, another MicroProse strategy game of 1994. “We felt that if we were going to make something that was massive,” says Castle, “it had to be something that anybody and everybody could relate to. Everybody understands a tank; everybody understands a guy with a machine gun. I don’t have to explain to them what this spell is.” Westwood concluded that they had made the right decision as soon as they began making the switch in software: “Tanks and vehicles just felt better.” The game lost its subtitle to become simply Command & Conquer.

While the folks at Blizzard were plundering Warhammer for their units and buildings, those at Westwood were trolling the Jane’s catalogs of current military hardware and Soldier of Fortune magazine. “We assumed that anything that was talked about as possibly coming was already here,” says Castle, “and that was what inspired the units.” The analogue of Dune II’s spice — the resource around which everything else revolved — became an awesomely powerful space-born element come to earth known as tiberium.

Westwood included most of the shortcuts and conveniences that Blizzard had built into Warcraft, but went one or two steps further more often than not. For example, they also made it possible to select multiple units by dragging a box around them, but in their game there was no limit to the number of units that could be selected in this way. The keyboard shortcuts they added not only let you quickly issue commands to units and buildings, but also jump around the map instantly to custom viewpoints you could define. And up to four players rather than just two could now play together at once over a local network or the Internet, for some true mayhem. Then, too, scenario design was not only more varied than in Dune II but was even more so than in Warcraft, with a number of “guerilla” missions in the campaigns that involved no resource gathering or construction. It’s difficult to say to what extent these were cases of parallel innovation and to what extent they were deliberate attempts to one-up what Warcraft had done. It was probably a bit of both, given that Warcraft was released a good nine months before Command & Conquer, giving Westwood plenty of time to study it.

But other innovations in Command & Conquer were without any precedent. The onscreen menus could now be toggled on and off, for instance, a brilliant stroke that gave you a better view of the battlefield when you really needed it. Likewise, Westwood differentiated the factions in the game in a way that had never been done before. Whereas the different houses in Dune II and the orcs and humans in Warcraft corresponded almost unit for unit, the factions in Command & Conquer reflected sharply opposing military philosophies, demanding markedly different styles of play: the establishment Global Defense Initiative had slow, strong, and expensive units, encouraging a methodical approach to building up and husbanding your forces, while the terroristic Brotherhood of Nod had weaker but faster and cheaper minions better suited to madcap kamikaze rushes than carefully orchestrated combined-arms operations.

Yet the most immediately obvious difference between Command & Conquer and Warcraft was all the stuff around the game. Warcraft had been made on a relatively small budget with floppy disks in mind. It sported only a brief opening cinematic, after which scenario briefings consisted of nothing but scrolling text and a single voice over a static image. Command & Conquer, by contrast, was made for CD-ROM from the outset, by a studio with deeper pockets that had invested a great deal of time and energy into both 3D animation and full-motion video, that trendy art of incorporating real-world actors and imagery into games. The much more developed story line of Command & Conquer is forwarded by little between-mission movies that, if not likely to make Steven Spielberg nervous, are quite well-done for what they are, featuring as they do mostly professional performers — such as a local Las Vegas weatherman playing a television-news anchorman — who were shot by a real film crew in Westwood’s custom-built blue-screen studio. Westwood’s secret weapon here was Joseph Kucan, a veteran theater director and actor who oversaw the film shoots and personally played the charismatic Nod leader Kane so well that he became the very face of Command & Conquer in the eyes of most gamers, arguably the most memorable actual character ever associated with a genre better known for its hordes of generic little automatons. Louis Castle reckons that at least half of Command & Conquer’s considerable budget went into the cut scenes.

The game was released with high hopes in August of 1995. Computer Gaming World gave it a pretty good review, four stars out of five: “The entertainment factor is high enough and the action fast enough to please all but the most jaded wargamers.”

The gaming public would take to it even more than that review might imply. But in the meantime…

As I noted in an earlier article, numbered sequels weren’t really commonplace for strategy games prior to the mid-1990s. Blizzard had originally imagined Warcraft as a strategy franchise of a different stripe: each game bearing the name would take the same real-time approach into a completely different milieu, as SSI was doing at the time with their “5-Star General” series of turn-based strategy games that had begun with Panzer General and continued with the likes of Fantasy General and Star General. But Blizzard soon decided to make their sequel a straight continuation of the first game, an approach to which real-time strategy lent itself much more naturally than more traditional styles of strategy game; the set-piece story of a campaign could, after all, always be continued using all the ways that Hollywood had long since discovered for keeping a good thing going. The only snafu was that either the orcs or the humans could presumably have won the war in the first game, depending on which side the player chose. No matter: Blizzard decided the sequel would be more interesting if the orcs had been the victors and ran with that.

Which isn’t to say that building upon its predecessor’s deathless fiction was ever the real point of Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. Blizzard knew now that they had a competitor in Westwood, and were in any case eager to add to the sequel all of the features and ideas that time had not allowed them to include in the first game. There would be waterways and boats to sail on them, along with oil, a third resource, one that could only be mined at sea. Both sides would get new units to play with, while elves, dwarves, trolls, ogres, and goblins would join the fray as allies of one of the two main racial factions. The interface would be tweaked with another welcome shortcut: selecting a unit and right-clicking somewhere would cause it to carry out the most logical action there without having to waste time choosing from a menu. (After all, if you selected a worker unit and sent him to a goldmine, you almost certainly wanted him to start collecting gold. Why should you have to tell the game the obvious in some more convoluted fashion?)

But perhaps the most vital improvement was in the fog of war. The simplistic implementations of same seen in the first Warcraft and Command & Conquer were inherited from Dune II: areas of the map that had been seen once by any of your units were revealed permanently, even if said units went away or were destroyed. Blizzard now made it so that you would see only a back-dated snapshot of areas currently out of your units’ line of sight, reflecting what was there the last time one of your units had eyes on them. This innovation, no mean feat of programming on the part of Patrick Wyatt, brought a whole new strategic layer to the game. Reconnaissance suddenly became something you had to think about all the time, not just once.

Other improvements were not so conceptually groundbreaking, but no less essential for keeping ahead of the Joneses (or rather the Westwoods). For example, Blizzard raised the screen-resolution stakes, from 320 X 200 to 640 X 480, even as they raised the number of people who could play together online from Command & Conquer’s four to eight. And, while there was still a limit on the number of units you could select at one time using Blizzard’s engine, that limit at least got raised from the first Warcraft’s four to nine.

The story and its presentation, however, didn’t get much more elaborate than last time out. While Westwood was hedging its bets by keeping one foot in the “interactive movie” space of games like Wing Commander III, Blizzard was happy to “just” make Warcraft a game. The two series were coming to evince very distinct personalities and philosophies, just as gamers were sorting themselves into opposing groups of fans — with a large overlap of less partisan souls in between them, of course.

Released in December of 1995, Warcraft II managed to shake Computer Gaming World free of some of its last reservations about the burgeoning genre of real-time strategy, garnering four and a half stars out of five: “If you enjoy fantasy gaming, then this is a sure bet for you.” It joined Command & Conquer near the top of the bestseller lists, becoming the game that well and truly made Blizzard a name to be reckoned with, a peer in every sense with Westwood.

Meanwhile, and despite the sometimes bitter rivalry between the two studios and their fans, Command & Conquer and Warcraft II together made real-time strategy into a commercial juggernaut. Both games became sensations, with no need to shirk from comparison to even DOOM in terms of their sales and impact on the culture of gaming. Each eventually sold more than 3 million copies, numbers that even the established Westwood, much less the upstart Blizzard, had never dreamed of reaching before, enough to enshrine both games among the dozen or so most popular computer games of the entire 1990s. More than three years after real-time strategy’s first trial run in Dune II, the genre had arrived for good and all. Both Westwood and Blizzard rushed to get expansion packs of additional scenarios for their latest entries in the genre to market, even as dozens of other developers dropped whatever else they were doing in order to make real-time-strategy games of their own. Within a couple of years, store shelves would be positively buckling under the weight of their creations — some good, some bad, some more imaginative, some less so, but all rendered just a bit anonymous by the sheer scale of the deluge. And yet even the most also-ran of the also-rans sold surprisingly well, which explained why they just kept right on coming. Not until well into the new millennium would the tide begin to slacken.

With Command & Conquer and Warcraft II, Westwood and Blizzard had arrived at an implementation of real-time strategy that even the modern player can probably get on with. Yet there is one more game that I just have to mention here because it’s so loaded with a quality that the genre is known for even less than its characters: that of humor. Command & Conquer: Red Alert is as hilarious as it is unexpected, the only game of this style that’s ever made me laugh out loud.

Red Alert was first envisioned as a scenario pack that would move the action of its parent game to World War II. But two things happened as work progressed on it: Westwood decided it was different enough from the first game that it really ought to stand alone, and, as designer Adam Isgreen says, “we found straight-up history really boring for a game.” What they gave us instead of straight-up history is bat-guano insane, even by the standards of videogame fictions.

We’re in World War II, but in a parallel timeline, because Albert Einstein — why him? I have no idea! — chose to travel back in time on the day of the Trinity test of the atomic bomb and kill Adolf Hitler. Unfortunately, all that’s accomplished is to make world conquest easier for Joseph Stalin. Now Einstein is trying to save the democratic world order by building ever more powerful gadgets for its military. Meanwhile the Soviet Union is experimenting with the more fantastical ideas of Nikola Tesla, which in this timeline actually work. So, the battles just keep getting crazier and crazier as the game wears on, with teleporters sending units jumping instantly from one end of the map to the other, Tesla coils zapping them with lightning, and a fetching commando named Tanya taking out entire cities all by herself when she isn’t chewing the scenery in the cut scenes. Those actually display even better production values than the ones in the first game, but the script has become pure, unadulterated camp worthy of Mel Brooks, complete with a Stalin who ought to be up there singing and dancing alongside Der Führer in Springtime for Hitler. Even our old friend Kane shows up for a cameo. It’s one of the most excessive spectacles of stupidity I’ve ever seen in a game… and one of the funniest.

Joseph Stalin gets rough with an underling. When you don’t have the Darth Vader force grip, you have to do things the old-fashioned way…

Up there at the top is the killer commando Tanya, who struts across the battlefield with no regard for proportion.

Released in the dying days of 1996, Red Alert didn’t add that much that was new to the real-time-strategy template, technically speaking; in some areas such as fog of war, it still lagged behind the year-old Warcraft II. Nonetheless, it exudes so much joy that it’s by far my favorite of the games I’ve written about today. If you ask me, it would have been a better gaming world had the makers of at least a few of the po-faced real-time-strategy games that followed looked here for inspiration. Why not? Red Alert too sold in the multiple millions.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

(Sources: the book Stay Awhile and Listen, Book I by David L. Craddock; Computer Gaming World of January 1995, March 1995, December 1995, March 1996, June 1996, September 1996, December 1996, March 1997, June 1997, and July 1997; Retro Gamer 48, 111, 128, and 148; The One of January 1993; the short film included with the Command & Conquer: The First Decade game collection. Online sources include Patrick Wyatt’s recollections at his blog Code of Honor, Dan Griliopoulos’s collection of interviews with Westwood alumni at Funambulism, Soren Johnson’s interview with Louis Castle for his Designer’s Notes podcast, and Richard Moss’s real-time-strategy retrospective for Ars Technica.

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, are available as digital purchases at GOG.com. The first Command & Conquer and Red Alert are available in remastered versions as a bundle from Steam.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

This statement was actually not correct; makers of standup arcade games of the classic era and the makers of Tetris had successfully cowed the cloning competition in the courts.

Comments
36 Responses

- Infinitron

June 23, 2023 at 3:09 pm

Tesla isn’t actually a character in Red Alert (unlike Einstein), even though the Soviet technology is apparently based on his.

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2023 at 3:20 pm

True. Thanks!

- Jaina

June 23, 2023 at 4:09 pm

Monty and the Holy Grail-esque

Monty Python

For good and all seems to be technically correct, but perhaps a colloquialism. I’ve never heard it in the US South lol. Oh English.

And yes, Red Alert isn’t perfect but it’s definitely a fun replay to this day.

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2023 at 8:28 pm

Thanks!

- Not Fenimore

June 23, 2023 at 4:43 pm

Ah man, I’m sad Ensemble studios don’t get a look in, since Age of Empires was my jam back in the day. But they were definitely a bit later on the RTS curve.

Also, much later, but very much my thing: Red Alert 2, which is even sillier than RA1, but less so than RA3, and has pretty good-feeling gameplay, a nice sweet spot, I think. (And whenever I see poor Ray Wise in anything, anything at all, I still think “Oh look! It’s President Dugan!”)

- Sarah Walker

June 23, 2023 at 4:43 pm

>The graphics resolution got a bump as well to suit the changing times in the world outside the game, going from 320 X 200 to 640 X 400, much to the benefit of gameplay as well as aesthetics.

IIRC the original 1995 release of C&C only supported 320×200. 640×400 came in the Windows 95 version of Red Alert, then in a 1997 re-release of the original.

Red Alert is excellent; a wonderful B-movie of a game. I don’t believe I’ve ever played any of the others in this article. It’s interesting that Warcraft II sold so well; I don’t remember Blizzard’s games getting anything like as much attention back then as C&C, at least in the UK.

While I’m aware that RTS games aren’t your favourite genre, I hope there’ll be at least some mention again in the future; Age of Empires is good enough to be remembered, and Total Annihilation slightly oddly is a Ron Gilbert production.

- Vlad

June 23, 2023 at 5:23 pm

In my circles (myself, my friends, my father even) Warcraft was never a thing. My dad, his friends and me – we all played Dune 2 first, C&C next. For some reason Dune’s sci-fi and C&C sort-of-futurism resonated much better with most people around me.

I was really surprised to find out that Warcraft was bigger than Dune back then!

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2023 at 8:39 pm

I had thought the MS-DOS version of Command & Conquer was patched quite quickly to raise the resolution to 640 X 400, which is why I elided those details in the article. There are quite a number of screenshots on the Internet at that resolution which state they are from the MS-DOS rather than the Windows version.

Age of Empires is on my list as an interesting attempt to embed some real history and some CIvilization-like gameplay into the genre. (I’m not sure it really succeeds on this level — but it’s interesting, nonetheless.)

- John Harwood

June 24, 2023 at 3:53 am

I’d never heard the term “on the cards” before, but an incredibly brief bit of Googling confirms that’s fine and apparently “on” is more common in Britain and “in” more common in America. Learn something new every day!

- Michael

June 23, 2023 at 8:35 pm

“photo-realism is simply not on the cards”

I think you may mean “in the cards” here, although it almost seems to make sense this way also.

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2023 at 8:41 pm

I believe “on the cards” and “in the cards” are both commonly used to mean the same thing.

- Doug Orleans

June 29, 2023 at 6:37 pm

I’d never heard “on the cards”; seems to be UK-only: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/be-on-the-cards

- Thorsten

June 23, 2023 at 8:55 pm

House Ordos wasn’t in the novels, it was added to the game by Westwood.

Having gotten this from my chest, I can continue reading the article.

- Jimmy Maher

June 24, 2023 at 6:43 am

Thanks!

- Jeremy Harris

June 25, 2023 at 3:32 am

House Ordos was first mentioned in “The Dune Encyclopedia” (1984), by Willis E. McNelly; but you are correct, it was not in the novels and isn’t canon. Westwood didn’t make it up out of whole cloth, at least. :)

- John

June 23, 2023 at 11:44 pm

One of the “little” improvements I remember fondly from Warcraft II was the sound effects units made. Someone in the team had obviously got annoyed at someone else in the team doing something noisy over and over and written in an “annoyance” value to each unit. Click on a unit and it responded politely, Click on it 5 times or so in a row and it started sounding sullen. Eventually they’d start getting angry and even making threats. The death knights, for instance, would proclaim “When this is all over I will come back and GET you!”
This even extended to the usual sound card setup check. Click the test and eventually it would proclaim “It doesn’t get any better than this”
Small featues but we loved it at the time.

- gamer indreams

June 24, 2023 at 12:59 pm

I still say “Zug zug” under my breath when my wife pats my shoulder, a sure sign she’s going to ask me to do something

- Francisco

July 3, 2023 at 4:40 pm

You probably know this but that feature became a mainstay of Blizzard games and many of it’s competitors. I know Wacraft 3 and Starcraft 2 have it and so do Company of Heroes games, Dawn of War games, and Armies of Exigo, I think.

I remember that there’s a hero in WC3 (Demon Hunter or Dreadlord talking about each other, I think) tells you a story about how he got prank called the other night and one laughs, the other is angry about it. The footman has a Monty Python line about how ‘he didn’t vote for you’ if you click him enough times. They are great!

- Glorkvorn

June 24, 2023 at 5:47 am

Great article, thanks for doing the research and writing this up!

“(After all, if you selected a worker unit and sent him to a goldmine, you almost certainly wanted him to start collecting gold. Why should you have to tell the game the obvious in some more convoluted fashion?)”

Surprisingly, this is still something of a controversial subject among RTS fans. In Warcraft 2, the newly built workers still have to be manually clicked to go to the goldmine. This means, when you’re playing competitively, the game becomes a never-ending loop of building workers and telling them to go mine, which takes up a lot of your time and attention. On the one hand, it’s kind of monotonous, and potentially carpal-tunnel inducing. But it opens up some interesting strategies too. As a player gets bigger, instead of just cruising to an easy win like you’d expect with exponential growth, it becomes harder and harder for them to control everything, so there’s a lot of potential for the smaller player to make a comeback. You can often raid them with small groups or even just one unit, and do outsized damage because they’re too focused on managing everything and don’t have time to react. Complex, brilliant strategies would usually lose to something simple and well-executed.

My feeling is that most of the later 90s RTS games went too far in streamlining/automating, to the point where the games largely played themselves. Just an interesting example of how limitations in the software could make things more interesting.

- Ahmet Elginoz

June 28, 2023 at 7:04 pm

Starcraft 2 auto assigns newly created workers to minerals and first you think this a brilliant idea until you make your first online match. Players has automated everything with shortcuts to an extent that an old casual gamer like me has no chance and I used to play a lot of starcraft in the day. Now they count mouse clicks per minute as way to rank players among other things.

RTS’s became more of a high reflex game than strategy unfortunately for me.

- A Third Distinct John

June 24, 2023 at 11:29 am

Command & Conquer and Red Alert mark the high point of the RTS genre for me, though I must admit that this statement says more about me than it does about the genre. I played Dune II on, of all platforms, the Sega Genesis. It was a compelling but unfortunately clunky experience. I played the Warcraft demo but found the controls a little fiddly. Command & Conquer, however, was a revelation. Unlimited mouse select! Unit groups! Hotkeys! Suddenly RTS was easy to play. I loved it as I have loved no RTS since. Red Alert was essentially Command & Conquer but better. Better resolution, better air units, and best of all a skirmish mode. The game’s fiction doesn’t really support its resource gathering mechanics the way the fiction in Dune II and Command & Conquer does, but it hardly matters. Harvesters were practically a genre convention by that point and it was ages before I thought to question it. I played a few later RTS games, most notably Warcraft II and StarCraft, but for whatever reasons they didn’t grab me the way the Westwood games did. Perhaps the genre’s novelty had simply worn off. I do know that I found the genre’s increasing focus on multiplayer and actions-per-minute off-putting. I’m a turtler at heart.

While there were patches for C&C, Jimmy, as far as I know none of them upgraded the resolution of the original DOS version to 640×400, so I fear that the screenshots you saw were most likely mislabeled. However, Red Alert shipped with both a Windows 95 installer and a DOS installer as did, I believe, the Windows 95 version of C&C. Unless I’m mistaken, both games shipped with two sets of assets, a high-res set for Windows 95 and a low-res set for DOS. I do not believe that it is possible to play with the high-res assets on DOS (at least not without some kind of mod) but this may be the source of the confusion. I occasionally think about installing the DOS version of Red Alert on my laptop because DOSBox emulation is excellent and the Windows 95 version can behave in undesirable ways on more recent versions of Windows.

- Jimmy Maher

June 24, 2023 at 5:19 pm

Fair enough. Thanks!

- Sebastian Redl

June 27, 2023 at 5:50 pm

The remastered versions of the c&c games are excellent

- Gnoman

June 25, 2023 at 3:33 am

I’m not super familiar with the original Command and Conquer (I’ve spent much more time with Red Alert), but there’s another significant difference between Red Alert and the -Craft series.

Where in -Craft games you select a unit-producing building, order it to build a unit, and then click another building to build another unit, C&C:RA at least does it differently. You have all the units and buildings you can build on a panel to the side, and operate purely from there. More buildings that allow a given unit merely shorten the production timer rather than letting you build in parallel.

If this seems a bit too nuts-and-bolts for the stance you’re taking here, you have a point. But it does shift the -Craft games further into the micromanagement side of things and the C&C games into the macromanagement side. Couple that with the much greater ability to move large numbers of units in the C&C games, you get a very different “philosophy” of play.

- Alex

June 25, 2023 at 5:39 am

I cant´t remember my first RTS-Game, but in the rivalry between Warcraft and C&C, I always was a big fan of the latter. Red Alert was definitely of the games of the 90s that I remember very fondly. I never finished a campaign, but I loved everything about it, from the cutscenes and the characters to the general gameplay. Because of my country I played the german version, which was famously censored, so I always commanded robot soldiers, which was just fine to me. Still the only RTS-game where every unit has some kind of personality for me, Tanya of course being the standout.

Unfortunately, C&C 3 was mildly disappointing and Red Alert 2 was the maybe the only game I bought but never even bothered to install (spontanous buy just because of old times sake). I never cared much for the Warcraft-Series, but I quite enjoyed Warcraft 3. Of all the other games of that kind that I played until the end of the 90s, I loved Ground Control. It was published by Sierra and it stood out for me because of the interesting story line, the compelling main character and the action-based concept which completely ignored base building. Bought it again on GOG and it didn´t loose any of its magic.

- Bogdanow

June 25, 2023 at 9:52 am

When I bought my first PC (AMD 386 40MHz/4GB of RAM/VGA) with the first color screen – one of the first games I played was Warcraft.
It was huge.
I recall having difficulty going through the first game – it was easy, but not knowing English then, I hadn’t grasped that I needed to build 6 buildings to win the game.
Concerning the RTS – I am waiting for the Starcraft. The Settlers shall also get at least the honorable mention.

- Joshua Barrett

June 25, 2023 at 7:52 pm

Ahh, RTS.

I came to both of these games late (they came out before I was born), and at this point I think prefer C&C over early Warcraft. The absolutely amazing and astonishingly faithful remaster of TD and RA also can’t hurt. But then everything changes with Starcraft, which really feels like the tipping point. For as good as TS and RA2 were, It feels like that was the moment when Blizzard really pulled ahead, and it’s a game that I absolutely love, despite my profound distaste for Blizzard as a company.

- killias2

June 25, 2023 at 10:57 pm

One thing I want to say about Warcraft 2: while the CG cutscenes mostly didn’t add much to the narrative, and haven’t aged well, they were a big deal at time and were seen as very impressive.

- Krsto

June 26, 2023 at 12:18 am

Thank you Jimmy for another excellent retrospective, since Blizzard is now introduced, I strongly suspect that the next article will be about Diablo.
RTS was never my cup of tea, in the early days I tried C&C and Warcraft II, but they never managed to keep me interested enough to give them much more playing time.
For me it’s interesting how some iconic RTS gameplay features (strategic real-time combat, fog of war, multiple unit selection, etc.) would later become cleverly (re)used in Infinity engine games, helping in the revival of a “serious” CRPG, and possibly making it the best era for a genre.

- Jason Dyer

June 26, 2023 at 4:30 am

You’re not up to it (yet?), but this is so ridiculously niche I need to point it out: the history of That One Famous Line from Red Alert 3:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjkv9q/an-oral-history-of-tim-currys-escape-to-the-one-place-uncorrupted-by-capitalism

- Tim Kaiser

June 26, 2023 at 11:35 am

I was always big on the Warcraft series. It was the bright graphics and fantasy setting that appealed to me. I loved Age of Empires as well. I remember playing a bit of C&C but it just didn’t click with me.

- Brent

June 26, 2023 at 11:10 pm

I played a lot of C&C, Warcraft 2 (I didn’t like 1 because of the interface), and KKND. I’m sure KKND was just a cheap knock off of C&C in retrospect, but I was ten or something at the time and I preferred it.

And then Starcraft came out and just blew everything away, especially with its incredible multiplayer mode and custom maps (I remember spending hours on tower defense and proto MMORPG custom maps).

- Sebastian Gerstl

June 27, 2023 at 6:07 am

“Even Westwood seemed initially to regard Dune II as a one-and-done. They wouldn’t release another game in the genre they had just invented for almost three years.”

I absolutely do *NOT* agree with that sentiment. It’s just that the development of C&C took them about three years. Westwood definitely thought they had come up with a good idea with the RTS because they started with developing a new game in this newly created genre right away – it just took them a while to get it finished!

Quote:
“The fall of 1995 was the culmination of work at Westwood–work that had been in progress for several years. According to Sperry, “The ideas for Command & Conquer were developing even as we were finishing Dune II. We learned a lot while we were making Dune II, just as it is with every game. You always get to the end of a project and think, ‘Next time, we’d love to do this and this and this.’ Command & Conquer was the net result of the Dune II wish list.””

I knew this quote from elsewhere as well, but right now this is the only source I can find.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010405144531/http://www.zdnet.com/gamespot/features/all/real_time/p3_02.html

- Jimmy Maher

June 27, 2023 at 6:59 am

You want to be careful of promotional spin in sources like this. I don’t believe that Command & Conquer was in full-on, active development for anything close to three years; this would have been *very* unusual in the context of the mid-1990s, when the vast majority of projects wrapped up in a year or less. Nor do I see any obvious reason why Command & Conquer would have needed that much time, being based upon an established engine and gameplay concept. Tellingly, most of the people who worked on both Dune II and Command & Conquer worked on either Lands of Lore or The Legend of Kyrandia, both 1993 releases, in between.

This doesn’t mean that Westwood didn’t think, “We’d like to do more with these ideas and technology at some point,” just after finishing Dune II. Nevertheless, they went onto the back burner for at least a year, probably a little more, while other projects took precedence. Had Dune II sold in the numbers of Eye of the Beholder or Lands of Lore, the timetable would doubtless have been accelerated.

- Sebastian Gerstl

June 27, 2023 at 6:41 am

Oh,and one of the best ideas Westwood had for their multiplayer mode was that you could use any of the original discs to play multiplayer matches in the local LAN. During our LAN party Sessions in the mid-to-late 90s C&C (and especially Red Alert) were a mainstay, and one major reason for that was because one who owned the game could just pass the second disc on to another player and still launch it into local multiplayer. It was the best way to get another player hooked and get them to go out and get the game for themselves! :D

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Going Rogue
July 7, 2023

When a beleaguered Netscape announced in January of 1998 that it would release the source code to its browser for everyone to tinker with and improve upon, the news shook the worlds of technology and business to their foundations. This open-source “revolution,” as even many in the mainstream press took to calling it, had sprung up seemingly out of nowhere to challenge the conventional wisdom and perhaps the very livelihood of traditional tech giants like Microsoft. For the next several years, you couldn’t open a trade journal or a newspaper’s business section without seeing some mention of the open-source movement and its leading exemplar, the robust and yet totally free — in all senses of the word — operating system Linux. Linux and other software like it was, an eye-opening number of people said, destined to destroy Microsoft’s vaunted Windows monopoly any day now.

The movement’s Little Red Book came in the form of Eric S. Raymond’s 1997 essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” Originally presented as a comparison of a top-down versus a bottom-up methodology in the context of open-source projects, the central metaphor quickly got blurred in the minds of the public into a broader comparison of closed source versus open source, with Raymond’s tacit acquiescence. In this telling, the cathedral was Microsoft’s software-development model, in which a closeted priesthood bestowed programs upon a grateful populace on its own terms and on its own schedule. The bazaar was the hacker way, in which the people came together in a spirit of delightfully chaotic egalitarianism to make software for themselves, sharing their source code in the name of the greater good. “No closed-source developer can match the pool of talent the Linux community can bring to bear on a problem,” wrote Raymond. “The closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem.” Thanks to Linux and the other open-source tools it enabled, he predicted elsewhere, Microsoft’s eagerly anticipated Windows 2000, the latest incarnation of its server-grade NT operating system, would “be either cancelled or dead on arrival. Either way, it will turn into a horrendous train wreck, the worst strategic disaster in Microsoft’s history.”

Alas, Raymond proved a less effective prophet than pundit. Not only was it not a failure upon its eventual release, but Windows 2000 evolved in 2001 into the consumer-grade Windows XP, by many standards the most successful single version of Windows in history.

Like that of all revolutions that have passed their heyday of strident ideology, the most extreme rhetoric of the late 1990s open-source movement can seem overheated if not downright silly today, the blinkered product of a tiny strata of metaphorical inside cats who have concluded, rather conveniently for themselves, that the most important social-justice campaign of their age is one that can be waged from behind their keyboards and monitors, just the place where they happen to feel most comfortable. As for the ideas they introduced into the public discourse: they were real, valid, and in many ways incredibly valuable, but in the end they would be woven into the fabric of existing corporate-software production practices rather than burning down the old ways wholesale.

For rigid ideology seldom makes a good fit with the real world; pragmatically mixed national economies, for example, succeed vastly better than dogmatically capitalist or communist ones. Similarly, instead of continuing to sort itself into two opposing camps at eternal loggerheads, the modern software ecosystem has learned to take the best from both sides to wind up with a sort of mixed economy of its own. The cleverest actors have learned to combine the cathedral and the bazaar in ways that maximize the strengths of each: Google builds its proprietary Web browser Chrome atop an open-source engine known as Chromium; Apple constructed the OS X desktop on the solid foundation of an open-source operating system known as Darwin; Android mobile phones and tablets have Linux at their core. Even Microsoft now embeds an optional “Linux subsystem” into Windows, as the cats lie down with the dogs.

The reasons for open source’s failure to more comprehensively conquer the world aren’t that hard to divine; they’re actually front and center in some of the movement’s founding principles. The editors of the grandiosely titled 1999 anthology Open Sources: Voices from the Revolution — one of those books whose very name clues you into the window of time in which it was published — wrote that “most open-source projects began with frustration: looking for a tool to do a job and finding none, or finding one that was broken or poorly maintained. Eric Raymond began fetchmail this way; Larry Wall began Perl this way; Linus Torvalds began Linux this way.” The latter two of these projects at least have remained among the most essential of the workhorses that make the Internet function, strong arguments for the superiority of the open-source model for developing some types of software.

But it appears that the same is not true for all types of software. A model in which programmers create only the programs that they most want to have threatens to yield a universe of software which is interesting and attractive only to programmers. Even Eric Raymond had to acknowledge that the production of software with mass appeal is only partially a “technical problem.”

It’s [also] a problem in ergonomic design and interface psychology, and hackers have historically been poor at it. That is, while hackers can be very good at designing interfaces for other hackers, they tend to be poor at modeling the thought processes of the other 95 percent of the population well enough to write interfaces that J. Random End-User and his Aunt Tillie will pay to buy. Computers are tools for human beings. Ultimately, therefore, the challenges of designing hardware and software must come back to designing for human beings — all human beings.

Open source has never entirely made this leap. It’s for this reason that its biggest success stories have come in the realm of back-end software rather than user-facing applications. Witness the long, frustrating history of “Linux on the desktop,” which, in an echo of the old hacker joke about strong artificial intelligence, has been perpetually just a few years away from world domination ever since the late 1990s. There is no theoretical bar to visual designers and experts in ergonomic psychology joining open-source projects, and in some times and places this has even happened. And yet the broad field of open source is still dominated by programmers writing software for themselves and for one another.

Game development joins graphical user interfaces as another notable area where the bazaar model doesn’t quite seem to do the trick. The open-source methodology excels at solving purely technical problems, but the making of a great game is a technical problem only in part — usually, not even the most important part. Consider the case of one of the most critically lauded games of the late 1990s, Valve’s Half-Life. It was a triumph of design and aesthetics, not of technology; its engine was borrowed from id Software’s two-and-a-half-year-old Quake, a technological showstopper in its day which has aged far less gracefully. It would seem that the best way — or perhaps the only way – to create a great game from whole cloth is through a priesthood with a strong and distinctive design and aesthetic vision.

Those open-source games which have become relatively popular have tended to build upon previous game designers’ visions in much the same way that Chrome is built on Chromium: think FreeCiv or Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe, worthy projects that are nevertheless more interested in making workmanlike technical improvements to their inspirations than bold fundamental leaps in design. The open-source movement has had the most pronounced impact on gaming in the form of tools, both for making games and for playing them. I could never have embarked with you on this journey through history that we’ve been on for over a decade now without the likes of DOSBox, ScummVM, UAE, VICE, and many, many other open-source emulators and utilities of all descriptions. I am deeply grateful to the many talented programmers who have given their time to them in order to keep our digital past accessible. Still, they do remain purely technical projects, not creative ones in the sense of the games which they enable to run on modern hardware.

The one ghetto of gaming where open-source projects have been able to forge a strong design and aesthetic sensibility all their own — a sensibility with no obvious antecedents in commercial, closed-source games — turns out upon examination to be not quite the anomaly it might first appear. The “roguelike” sub-genre of the CRPG dates all the way back to 1980, well before the modern open-source movement came to be. But, like that movement, it was a product of an institutional-computing hacker culture that had been around since the 1950s, in which proprietary software was regarded as not so much immoral as simply unheard of. It stands today as a fine example of open source at its best — and equally of what it does less well. Call it the exception that proves the rule.

In Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, his classic chronicle of the first few decades of institutional hackerdom, Steven Levy writes about the appeal that Adventure, a game that would lend its name to an entire genre, held for the first people to play it on the big multi-user DEC computers of the late 1970s.

In a sense, Adventure was a metaphor for computer programming itself — the deep recesses you explored in the Adventure world were akin to the basic, most obscure levels of the machine that you’d be traveling in when you hacked assembly code. You could get dizzy trying to remember where you were in both activities. Indeed, Adventure proved as addicting as programming…

Rogue, a game which would lend its name to a sub-genre that had even more appeal to the programming mindset, was itself a direct outgrowth of Adventure, with a couple of key elements added to the mix.

Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman were undergraduates at the University of California, Santa Cruz when they first encountered Adventure. Like so many others, they were absolutely entranced. The only drawback was that, once they finally beat the game for the first time, there wasn’t much more to be done; the puzzles were always the same, meaning that beating it again became a rote exercise. And there weren’t yet any other games like it. So, the pair started to talk about creating a game of their own, one that would play a little bit differently. What if, rather than building their game around a collection of pre-crafted set-piece puzzles, they made one that would offer up a new world to the player every single time through the magic of random procedural generation? That way, you could keep playing it forever, even after beating it once or twice or a dozen times. Even Toy and Wichman themselves would be able to have fun with it, given that they too would never know what sort of world they would be entering next.

But what exactly might such a game look like in practice? It wasn’t at all clear; the problem of describing a procedurally generated world in English prose like that used by Adventure was effectively insoluble in the context of the time. Then Toy stumbled upon a new programming library for the Unix operating system (the predecessor to and inspiration of Linux). The brainchild of a University of California, Berkeley student named Ken Arnold, “curses” let you arrange text however you wanted on a terminal screen, letting you change the contents of any one of the 1920 cells that made up a typical 80-character by 24-line display any time you wanted to; this made it possible to reserve different regions of the display for different sorts of information. Earlier games which hadn’t had access to curses, such as Adventure, had had to content themselves with teletype-like interactions: a continuous scrolling stream of text which, once fired at the screen, could only be forgotten. But curses changed all that at a stroke. You could use it to put up menus, maps, charts, and just about anything else you could write or draw using the ASCII character set, updating them all independently of one another.

It gave Toy and Wichman a viable path forward with their fondly imagined infinitely replayable game. For, while textual descriptions of a procedurally generated world were a nonstarter, showing a symbolic, visual representation of one using curses was another matter.

Avid players of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, Toy and Wichman tried to recreate on the computer the dungeon-delving expeditions they enjoyed with their friends, exploring a network of rooms and tunnels filled with monsters to fight, traps and other hindrances to defuse, and treasures to collect. Whereas the main dish of Adventure had been set-piece puzzles, with only a side dish of dynamic logistical challenges — an expiring light source, an inventory limit, a pesky wandering thief with a sharp sword — the nature of their game meant that it would have to be all logistics. In making this switch, they half-accidentally invented not just the first roguelike but one of the first CRPGs, full stop. We cannot give them complete credit for that genre, mind you: other proto-CRPGs were being created at the same time on the PLATO system at the University of Illinois and on the earliest home microcomputers as well, as other Dungeons & Dragons fanatics also tried to bring the tabletop experience to the computer. Still, by all indications Toy and Wichman made the leap without knowing what anyone else was up to.

It was Wichman who came up with the name of Rogue:

I think the name just came to me. Names needed to be short because you invoked a program by typing its name in a command line. I liked the idea of a rogue. We were coming from a Dungeons & Dragons background, but we were creating a single-player game. You weren’t going down into the dungeon with a party. The idea was that this is a person going off on his or her own. It captured the theme very succinctly.

To depict their world, Toy and Wichman invented the iconography (textography?) that has remained the standard for roguelikes to this day. The walls of rooms were made from horizontal and vertical dashes (“-” and “|”), the tunnels between them from hash marks (“#”), doors from plus signs (“+”), treasure from dollar signs (“$”), monsters of varius types from any and all letters and symbols that weren’t already being used for something else. The focus of it all was your titular rogue, depicted as a forlorn little at-sign (“@”) adrift in this sea of promise and danger. The textual austerity of it all could become weirdly atmospheric. “You’d see a letter ‘T’ on the screen and it would startle you, because you knew it was a troll,” says Wichman.

Rogue

The goal of the game was to find a MacGuffin called the Amulet of Yendor, hidden 25 dungeon levels or so deep, and return it to the surface. Doing so would require fighting ever more dangerous monsters, building up your character as you did so in classic RPG fashion, both through the experience points you gained from killing them and the equipment you collected. From the first, Rogue was intended to be hard — hard enough to challenge the very people who had made it. This is another quality that has remained a core value of the sub-genre which Rogue invented.

You didn’t know what the stuff you found actually did. Would that yellow potion restore your health, or would it kill you instantly? The safest way to know for sure was to use an “identification” scroll on your new finds, but such things were rare and precious, and ironically had to be themselves identified first. In a pinch, you might just have to try on that new ring or armor and see what happened, praying as you did so that it wasn’t cursed.

Food was the most essential resource of all; while you could eat the corpses of many monsters, some of them would make you sick and some of them would get their posthumous revenge by outright killing you. (Roguelikes are a bit like the old saw about the Australian Outback: everything in them seems to be able to kill you.) The only way to have a chance of winning was to play the game over and over again, slowly ferreting out its secrets and devising optimal strategies in the course of dying again and again and again. Even once you got really good, the difference between success and failure could still come down to sheer dumb luck, as “CRPG Addict” Chet Bolingbroke noted in his articles about the game: “Sometimes you might find a two-handed sword +1 on the first level; other times, you’ll find three poison potions and a cursed dagger.” Rogue’s own co-creator Glenn Wichman admits that he has never legitimately won it.

Rogue, in other words, flagrantly violated almost all of the modern rules of progressive game design: it was unfair in countless ways and about as unwelcoming to newcomers as a game can be. It was a comedian telling jokes at the poor player’s expense, its later levels stocked with rust monsters that instantly destroyed her hard-won magical armor (until she learned to take it off before fighting them) and rattlesnakes that poisoned her (until she learned that the only practical way to combat them was to chuck whatever junk was to hand at them from a distance). And death was an irrevocable state. Although you could save a game of Rogue and come back to it later, this was intended only for the purpose of resuming an interrupted session: the save file was deleted as soon as you restored it. There were no second chances in Rogue; a single ill-considered move, or a single errant key press, or just a simple stroke of random bad luck, could and usually did erase hours of careful, steady progress.

And yet people found it strangely compelling. This was doubtless partially down to the times; there weren’t a lot of games available to play, which meant that the amount of time and energy required to get good at this one could seem more like an advantage than a disadvantage. But there was also more to it than that, as is indicated by the survival of the roguelike sub-genre right down to the present day, with all of its legendary difficulty intact. Rogue seemed to scratch a different itch than most games, a rash from which hackers seemed particularly prone to suffer. Very few successfully retrieved the Amulet of Yendor, but that only made the prospect of doing so that much more tempting. In the hyper-competitive culture of hackerdom, beating Rogue became a badge of honor almost on a par with writing some super-useful, super-elegant program that made everyone else jealous.

All of this didn’t happen instantly. Like most games on the big institutional computers, Rogue was a work in progress for years after the first version of it went up at UC Santa Cruz, probably in 1980. In 1982, Michael Toy got kicked out of the university for spending too much time tinkering with Rogue and not enough keeping up with his classwork. He took a job in UC Berkeley’s computer lab instead, splintering the partnership that had taken Rogue this far. Wichman now dropped off the scene, to be replaced at Berkeley by, of all people, Ken Arnold, the very hacker whose curses library had inspired the initial creation of Rogue. Toy and Arnold continued to expand and refine the game until they left Berkeley in 1984.

It was during this period that Rogue got really popular, spreading far and wide with the Unix operating system on which it ran, by now the overwhelming hacker favorite. Rogue became an almost equivalent touchstone of hacker culture, being played obsessively everywhere from Bell Labs to the Nevada National Security Site. The game’s creators were thrilled when they learned that both Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie — living gods among hackers, the creators of Unix itself — were major fans of the game; Ritchie jokingly called it the biggest single waster of CPU cycles in computing history. When Toy attempted to commercialize Rogue in 1984 by releasing an MS-DOS port through the publisher Epyx, he felt justified in advertising it as “the most popular game running on Unix” and “the most popular game on college campuses.”

By the time Rogue hit microcomputers, its partial inspiration Adventure had spawned its own thriving corner of the home-computer-games market, where companies like Infocom sold hundreds of thousands of slickly packaged parser-driven text adventures. But home users proved markedly less receptive to Rogue after its belated arrival. Even after Wichman came back on the scene to help Toy make prettier, semi-graphical versions of the game for the Apple Macintosh, Atari ST, and Commodore Amiga, Rogue didn’t sell all that many copies. Wichman could only conclude that the audience that had made it such a hit on the big computers “wasn’t the audience that was looking for games in software stores.” It was a fair assessment: roguelikes would remain staples of hacker culture, but would never make inroads into the flashier commercial-games market.

Epyx’s Rogue was one of the last artifacts of that company’s original, cerebral “Automated Simulations” identity, appearing the same year that Summer Games and Impossible Mission cemented its new image as a purveyor of slick, audiovisually polished, action-oriented titles. Small wonder that Rogue seemed to get lost in the marketing shuffle.

The Amiga Rogue was a graphical affair, but that didn’t do much for its sales.

In this as in so many other respects, Rogue laid down the template for all of the roguelikes to come as thoroughly as Adventure did for its progeny. But there was one important exception, albeit one external to the game itself: Toy, Wichman, and Arnold didn’t release their source code to the public, clinging to the role of the high priests of a cathedral rather than embracing the bazaar model of software development. “In retrospect, it would have been better to share,” admits Arnold. Yet it isn’t that surprising that they didn’t. Open source had yet to become an ideological movement, even among the hardcore hacker contingent to which Rogue’s fathers belonged. And they did, after all, have hopes of commercializing the game, even if those hopes ultimately failed to come to complete fruition.

As it was, the lack of source code meant that those who dreamed of building a better Rogue had no choice but to start from scratch. Among the first to do so was a group of boys who hung out together in the computer lab at Lincoln-Sudbury High School in Sudbury, Massachusetts, at the dawn of the 1980s. The school’s single modest DEC PDP-11 minicomputer wasn’t wired to the Internet, but the gang nevertheless encountered Rogue early in its history: in the summer of 1981, when their mentor, a young teacher named Brian Harvey, finagled an invitation for them to go out to Berkeley for a few weeks, to see what life was like in the big leagues of institutional computing. One of the kids who went was named Jay Fenlason. He fell in love with Rogue at first sight, managing to play it for about eight hours by his own estimate during the visit. He returned to Massachusetts determined to make a game just like it. He corralled his buddies into an unlikely game-development team, and over the course of the next year they made Hack, working strictly from their memories of the game they had seen at Berkeley.

That initial version of Hack has been lost, leaving behind only scattered anecdotes. However, all indications are that it wasn’t any remarkable advance over Rogue in itself. What made it important — indeed, what changed everything for the nascent roguelike sub-genre — was the decision Fenlason and his friends made to give away not just their executable but their source code as well.

To celebrate their graduation in 1982, the computer-lab gang packaged up the source code to all of the programs they had written, Hack among them, and sent it to an organization called USENIX, a computing-research nonprofit that maintained a file archive for its members. The source bore a simple notice at the top, saying that anyone who wished to was free to make improvements to the software and distribute them, as long as due credit was given to the original creators as well and as long as they shared the updated source. Having done that, the youngsters who had made Hack went their separate ways, having no idea what the game they had loosed upon the world would someday grow into.

At first, their lack of expectations seemed more than justified; while Rogue went everywhere in hackerdom, Hack went nowhere. Then, in early 1984, a thirty-something Dutch mathematician and programmer named Andries Brouwer, who worked at the Amsterdam research center Mathematisch Centrum, chanced to troll through USENIX’s file archive, looking for interesting software. Just as Don Woods had rescued Will Crowther’s incomplete game of Adventure from oblivion back in 1977, Brouwer now stumbled across Hack and did it the same service. He tightened up the code and the gameplay, and then started adding new features, which he tested on his colleagues at Mathematisch Centrum, most of whom became certifiable Hack addicts. Beginning on December 17, 1984, he uploaded each new version to the Internet as well.

Brouwer added the concept of character classes to the game, introducing six of them; no rogue was to be found among them, but they did include the likes of a tourist and an archeologist, evidence of a quirky sense of humor that would continue to mark the game forevermore. He added shops in the dungeon for buying and selling equipment, and made the dungeon deeper; it now went down 40 levels, the last ten a special region called Hell that demanded magical protection from fire and a teleport spell to even enter. No longer did you find the Amulet of Yendor just lying around somewhere down there in the depths; now you had to defeat a Wizard of Yendor to get your mitts on it. To these big enhancements he added a wealth of smaller details that were likewise destined to remain indelible parts of the game, such as a dog or cat companion to accompany you on your expedition and the ability to write messages on the floor for various purposes.

For years, players of Rogue had been sharing their tips and travails on the Usenet group net.games.rogue. It was here that Brouwer now announced his new roguelike. The community there pounced upon Hack, which, if not clearly better than Rogue, did have the virtue of being subtly different from a game which most of them had already played to death. The volume of Hack-related traffic grew so extreme that, just one month after Brouwer had uploaded his game for the first time, the group net.games.hack came into being to accommodate it. “Please stop posting articles about Hack to net.games.rogue and use this new group instead,” wrote a Usenet administrator pointedly.

Brouwer kept his fire hose of additions and improvements spurting until July of 1985, when he pronounced himself satisfied with the game and moved on to other things. But, thanks to the fact that he had honored the wishes of Jay Fenlason and company and publicly released his source code, Hack could continue to morph and grow after his departure in a way that Rogue had not been able to after Michael Toy and Ken Arnold left Berkeley. Ports and modified versions were soon popping up everywhere. It was exciting in a way, but it became a bit too much like the babble of a bazaar. Three hackers, by the names of Mike Stephenson, Izchak Miller, and Janet Walz, decided that a little bureaucracy wouldn’t be amiss. They decided to create a sort of curated version of the game, incorporating changes from anyone who wished to contribute to the project, as long as they were well-coded, worthwhile, and not game-breaking. Because their home base was net.games.hack, they named their version of the game NetHack. Its first official release came in July of 1987; its most recent one as of this writing came out in February of 2023. I suspect that there will be many, many more before NetHack’s full history can be written.

NetHack is an answer for every player of traditional adventure games who has ever asked why she can’t just bash a door open instead of searching hither and yon for the key.

The semi-anonymous wizards behind the NetHack curtain are known simply as the DevTeam. For 36 years, this rotating cast of characters has maintained and added to the game, making it one of if not the most systemically complex ever created, even as it retains in its canonical version an entirely textual display focused around a little wandering at-sign. Experienced players delight in ferreting out the emergent possibilities provided by the sheer depth of NetHack’s systems. “The DevTeam thinks of everything,” goes a saying among players.

To wit: use a pair of gloves to pick up a dead cockatrice, a creature which turns any living thing it touches to stone, then bash your enemies with it to turn them to stone. (This technique is known among the NetHack cognoscenti as “wielding the rubber chicken.”) Of course, you’ll need to use a pick axe afterward to separate the statues of your enemies that are left behind from the loot they were carrying…

Or combine a Wand of Polymorph with a Ring of Polymorph Control to eliminate the middleman, as it were, turning yourself into a cockatrice. You can lay eggs in this form, which you can pick up and carry around once you revert to your natural form, throwing them at your enemies like grenades while you gleefully sing “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35.”

The possibilities are endless. NetHack even keeps track of the phases of the moon in the real world and uses them to influence your luck; this leads to devotees clearing their calendars once per month in order to maximize their chances when the moon is full.

NetHack has become an institution of old-school hacker culture, and with it an icon of the open-source movement. None other than Eric Raymond was the first to create an optional graphical skin for the game (a move that prompted considerable controversy). And well before he wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar, he wrote the first manual for NetHack. Small wonder that it joined Rogue and Adventure as one of the very few games memorialized in 1996’s New Hacker’s Dictionary — edited by, you guessed it, Eric S. Raymond. DevTeam founding member Mike Stephenson has no doubts about NetHack’s importance, not only as a standalone game but as a model for software development: “We predated open source [as a movement], but I do think we helped to promote the idea of making software available for public use without cost. I think the other thing that really contributed to the concept of open source is that NetHack has, and still does, accept bug reports and feature ideas from anyone.”

NetHack became the standard bearer of the roguelike sub-genre almost from the moment of its first release, and has never had its status in this regard seriously challenged. That said, hundreds of other roguelikes were made after it, and some even before it. The most important among them are arguably Moria and Angband. The former arrived at a complete form already in 1983, when it became the first game of this type to offer an above-ground town to serve as a base for your dungeon expeditions; this gave it a significantly different feel, more like, to put things in the terms of Dungeons & Dragons, an ongoing campaign than a single adventure module. Moria directly inspired 1990’s Angband, a much more complex implementation of the same approach, which, like NetHack, is still in active development today. Some players prefer NetHack’s relentlessly escalating challenge, others Angband’s somewhat more relaxed pacing and more free-form structure — but make no mistake, Angband too will kill you in a heartbeat if you let your guard down. And in it as well, dead is dead, permanently.

This roguelike “family tree” shows how the most historically and currently popular games in the sub-genre relate to one another.

This brings us back around to a statement I made at the outset: that roguelikes are the exception that proves the rule of open-source game development — and just possibly of open-source software development in general. The cast of thousands who contribute to them do so in order to make exactly the games that they want to play, which in the abstract is the best of all possible reasons to make a game. The experience they end up with is, unsurprisingly, much like high-wire programming at its most advanced, presenting players with an immense, multi-faceted system to be explored and mastered. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with this.

Still, it does seem to me that roguelikes tend to bring out some of the worst as well as the best of the hacker ethic, what with their insistence that they’re only for the “hardcore” and their lack of empathy for the newcomer. Few things in this world are less attractive than a nerd beating his chest. Robert Koeneke, the creator of Moria, admits that while he was working on it, “if anyone managed to win, I immediately found out how, and ‘enhanced’ the game to make it harder.” Likewise, for every cool interaction to be discovered in NetHack, there’s a cheap, heartless death in store, like stumbling down a staircase whilst carrying a cockatrice and turning yourself to stone, or missing a stirrup whilst trying to mount a horse and breaking your neck, or incinerating yourself by firing off your Wand of Lightning too close to a wall, or getting killed by your own pet dog when you attempt to use your Ring of Conflict to get that nearby band of orcs fighting one another. NetHack is the sort of game that likes to give you a fake Amulet of Yendor, than laugh at you when you scurry all the way back to the surface with it and think you’re about to win.

As with so much in life, one’s relationship to roguelikes comes down to questions of priorities. As someone who likes to play a variety of games, I’ve never done more than dabble in these ones. For the time required to get even minimally competent at them is more than I’m willing to invest in any single game — or that I can invest, if I want to keep doing what I do on this site.

Meanwhile the amount of time and effort required to get good at a game like NetHack is staggering, even if you’re far smarter and more diligent than I am. It took Chet Bolingbroke 262 hours of trying to win at NetHack for the first time — and that was playing in a fashion that many purists would consider illegitimate, by looking up spoilers on the game’s many interconnected components rather than learning strictly through experience, not to mention playing an old version that is much less complex than the current ones. Was it worth the time investment? He has his doubts. “Permadeath just sucks,” he concludes. Even Eric Raymond feels today that NetHack may have gone too far: “There was a natural tendency for the devs to see the game from the point of view of someone who played it constantly and obsessively. Thus, over time, their notion of not making it ‘too easy’ gradually ratcheted up the difficulty level to the point where you really couldn’t enjoy it casually anymore.” NetHack displays, in other words, open-source software’s usual Achilles heel, its developers’ inability to put themselves in the shoes of people who aren’t just like them.

Then again, it isn’t as if this represents some deep moral failing; there’s nothing wrong with being niche. Many or most lovers of NetHack and other roguelikes have never won them and quite probably never will, finding satisfaction merely in the trying, in hoping to get a little further than last time and walk away with some entertaining stories to share. Far be it from me to begrudge them their pleasures. Although I doubt that I will ever become a big fan of roguelikes, I do derive a quiet sort of satisfaction from knowing that things so implacably committed to being their own idiosyncratic selves exist in this world.

And if roguelikes will never go mainstream, that doesn’t mean they haven’t influenced the mainstream. Next time, we’ll learn how one of the most popular of all the slick commercial games of the late 1990s grew out of this odd little corner of hackerdom…

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

(Sources: I highly recommend David L. Craddock’s book Dungeon H@acks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games, a treasure trove of information that I have only touched upon here. The CRPG Addict blog is full of stories about what it’s like to actually play Rogue, Hack, 1987-vintage NetHack, 1989-vintage NetHack,  Moria, and Angband among other roguelikes, along with some more historical notes. I’m immensely indebted to David for all of his original research and to Chet for spending the hundreds of hours on these games that I couldn’t spare.

Other print sources include the books Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary by Eric S. Raymond, and Open Sources: Voices from the Revolution edited by Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, and Mark Stone; Byte of March 1984 and February 1987; Acorn User of February 1997; Computer Power User of March 2008. Other online sources include Glenn Wichman’s “Brief History of Rogue,” “The Best Game Ever” by Wagner James Au at Salon, “Playing the Open Source Game” by Shawn Hargreaves, “Freeing an Old Game” by Ben Asselstine at Free Software Magazine, and a retrospective on NetHack by Dave “Fargo” Kosak of GameSpy.

Much more information about all of the games mentioned in this article, and roguelikes in general, can be found at RogueBasin, as can download links for all of them.)

Comments
74 Responses

- Andrew Plotkin

July 7, 2023 at 4:10 pm

> Whereas the main dish of Adventure had been set-piece puzzles, with only a side dish of dynamic logistical challenges — an expiring light source, an inventory limit, a pesky wandering thief with a sharp sword

Now you’re just trolling me. :)

- PlayHistory

July 7, 2023 at 4:17 pm

This was an interesting place to put this story! It is often easy to forget how much of our modern digital ecosystem rests on top of open source. A great shame of mine is to never be a good enough programmer to contribute to these projects which have given me so much.

Roguelikes and the community around them are both deep fascinations of mine, having lived to see the rise of the roguelike genre in recent years. I really enjoy both the hardcore roguelikes and the modern interpretations, probably stemming from my endless reloading of maps in Diablo II.

I believe that variants of this game do represent the most plausible path to building “systemic” games in a larger context. Hades showed that you can very effectively build non-linear storytelling from a roguelike base. Hell, even Starfield is adopting the idea of populating pre-built areas procedurally as roguelikes already do.

I think there’s so much to learn from this genre in terms of engaging player storytelling, despite the bevies of complexities to both development and player entry. The more modern games take from roguelikes, the closer they get to my ideal of a game that truly defies past narrative conventions. That may be an unpopular belief, but I think that’s the way.

My favorite roguelike is Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. Would be interested to hear what others people here enjoy.

- Dave Rolsky

July 8, 2023 at 12:01 am

I have played C:DDA for so many many hours. I even made a CLI tool to download dev releases of C:DDA and launch them on Linux (https://github.com/houseabsolute/catalauncher). Note that it’s probably broken because I haven’t played the game for a while (I tend to play in spurts every few years).

- Andrew Plotkin

July 7, 2023 at 4:29 pm

> The one ghetto of gaming where open-source projects have been able to forge a strong design and aesthetic sensibility all their own…

I’m going to split a hair and say that parser IF shares this distinction. Adventure was passed around, picked up by a new developer, ported — it was part of the open-source culture of its time, even though (like Nethack) it precedes the label. The MIT version of Dungeon was treated the same after Infocom took themselves off to chase sales.

It’s fair to say that Nethack was the big example of an open-source project that stayed at the center of its genre. (Parser IF went commercial, then shareware, then free, but never adopted open-source licenses as a default for game releases.) But if you want an open-source origin *defining its genre’s sensibility*, that’s Adventure in spades.

- Jimmy Maher

July 7, 2023 at 8:07 pm

I think the waters here are too thoroughly muddied by Infocom. Adventure was first, but the IF Renaissance of the 1990s was really focused on the Infocom aesthetic: “interactive fiction” with a degree of literary ambition to go along with the puzzles and neat environments to explore. I don’t really see this as Adventure’s aesthetic at all; whatever literary qualities it has — and it does have a certain minimalist beauty about it — strike me as somewhat accidental. It’s perhaps telling that a lot of people in the mid-1990s were still trying to sell text adventures via the shareware model, trying to recreate the Infocom distribution model in some form or fashion. This was not the case with roguelikes; it just wasn’t done in those communities.

Put another way: you can recount the history of classical roguelikes without mentioning commercial software at all. You can’t do that in the case of IF. Or, put still another way: the Epyx Rogue was an oddity rather than the game changer and re-focuser (for lack of a real word) that Zork I was.

And then IF has retained a very book-like authorship model, with one or at most a few authors prominently credited. Roguelikes are far more anonymous, community-driven efforts.

IF *tools* are a different story, of course…

- dissolved

July 8, 2023 at 10:25 am

But wouldn’t “classical IF” in this context be the mainframe games that birthed commercial games? You could still recount the history of mainframe Zork or the Phoenix games without mentioning their respective commercial iterations, and you could, say, draw a line between mainframe Zork and MUDs while ignoring Infocom entirely.

- Jimmy Maher

July 9, 2023 at 7:07 am

Well, sure, you can draw lines anywhere you want to in the end. But my point is that you can write a pretty solid, comprehensive history of Berlin-interpretation (https://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Berlin_Interpretation_ roguelikes without mentioning commercial software at all. The IF history you describe, on the other hand, would strike just about everyone who knows anything about the genre as idiosyncratic and incomplete. (Which doesn’t mean it would be bad…)

- Ugh

July 7, 2023 at 5:29 pm

I’ve been reading for a long time and wow is this ever not what I came here for. “Social justice”? I get plenty of holier-than-thou capitalism shoved at me by Elon already, thanks.

Typed on a device with a glued-in battery and a proprietary OS. Still read via “the internet,” but Meta and Twitter are finishing that off rapidly.

What a disappointment.

- IJMC

July 7, 2023 at 8:13 pm

I’m not quite sure what @Ugh above was getting at — but if it was a sense of disappointment in the article’s tone toward open-source software (to say nothing of ignoring the key distinctions between OSS and free/libre software), then I for one share it.

- Ugh

July 8, 2023 at 12:51 am

That was it.

- Jason Hutchens

July 10, 2023 at 7:52 am

Me three. Was a length anti-open-source diatribe really the best lead-in to a history of rogue? Especially when it’s first mentioned over halfway through the article to make the point that rogue was not open-source, but probably should have been?

Then again, I suppose that the article is itself an open-source work, and suffers from similar failings, so perhaps this was all a clever, multi-layered joke.

- Brent

July 8, 2023 at 11:39 am

As a layman I very much appreciated Jimmy’s well-reasoned explanation. As a counter argument you’ve offered nothing but an extremely off putting, holier-than-thou dismissal of the entire article, ironically proving Jimmy’s point about open-source’s defenders being unable to bring the majority of people on blowers.

- xxx

July 9, 2023 at 8:02 pm

Amen, Brent. As a software developer who’s been part of various open-source communities since the 1990s, I entirely agree with Jimmy’s impression of the open-source “revolution”. It never became what we hoped and didn’t realize that open source approaches were only good for solving certain kinds of problems rather than a universal panacea for fixing software development.

While the concept of open source is a beautiful thing, it’s always been one of open-source’s great tragedies that so many of its most vocal proponents are awful people. A few examples: operating system creators Linus Torvalds and Theo de Raadt, who belittled and mocked anyone who disagreed with them or failed to appear smart enough; open-source advocate Eric Raymond, a misogynist, homophobic, racist, libertarian wingnut; and GNU founder Richard Stallman, a man completely disconnected from reality who publicly defends pedophilia. (None of this is libel; it’s all a matter of public record.)

I think that open source succeeded more in spite of these people than because of them. The traits that make someone an effective leader of an open-source project are entirely orthogonal to the traits that make someone a non-awful human being.

- Vladimir Kazanov

July 7, 2023 at 5:38 pm

Probably worth mentioning that about 10-12 years ago a Renaissance of roguelikes happened. I remember how Brogue, yet another clone of the original game, became a cult of its own. I wasted numerous hours on it! and then indie game scene started looking for inspiration in elements of the genre: Spelunky, Darkest dungeon, Hades to name a few top sellers.

- Ido Yehieli

July 7, 2023 at 6:14 pm

A bunch of minor points/nitpicks:
* You once misspelled Wichman’s name as “Bechman”.
* 80×25 is DOS/Windows standard terminal size, on UNIX the standard size is 80×24 (based on DEC’s VT100 terminal).
* Among classic traditional roguelikes one of the most dominant is *Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup* (better known by its acronym DCSS), whose design-focus is perhaps more “clerical” than NetHack and Angband’s.
* In the meanwhile the name “Roguelike” has penetrated the mainstream (see for example the sheer amount of games tagged as such on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Roguelike/), albeit the meaning has incrementally drifted with time.
* A very interesting relative/offshoot which started a sub-genre of its own is *Dwarf Fortress*.

- PlayHistory

July 7, 2023 at 6:31 pm

I have to imagine Jimmy will at least touch upon the particularity of the “roguelike” term in the following Diablo post.

- Paul

July 9, 2023 at 6:22 am

That was my thought immediately upon reading this: “roguelikes would remain staples of hacker culture, but would never make inroads into the flashier commercial-games market.”

Friggin’ Diablo is basically just a geaphically pleasing roguelike w/o permadeath. Roguelite? That the term? Similar games such as Children of Morta have come out over the years and enjoyed commercial success. To say the genre has completely missed the mainstream is beside the point.

- Jimmy Maher

July 9, 2023 at 7:01 am

Cultural taxonomy is always difficult, but I hew in this article to the Berlin Interpretation of a roguelike: https://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Berlin_Interpretation. Diablo scores no more than 50 percent on this metric, qualifying it for “heavily influenced by” but not *of* the roguelike sub-genre. (There are actually some pretty huge differences beyond the lack of perma-death that are every bit as notable as the similarities: while roguelikes are known for their difficulty and their hardcore nature, Diablo emphasizes frictionless ease of play above all else. I’d almost go so far as to argue that it’s basically a casual game dressed up in hardcore-gamer clothing.)

I do suspect the term “roguelike” has gotten especially badly diluted in the context of Steam. That said, I probably should have made these things clearer in the article itself. The nature of this site means that I sometimes assume an old-school perspective by default. Hopefully I’ll have time tomorrow to add a well-considered sentence or two.

- Jack Brounstein

July 9, 2023 at 8:23 pm

This blog, with its video game history focus, might be an exception, but in general I don’t like the term “roguelite” or the insistence that a “roguelike” game has to be a turn-based, tile-based dungeon crawl. Orders of magnitude more people play Spelunky, The Binding of Isaac, and Hades than NetHack, ADOM, or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and it feels wrong to insist that the latter get exclusive use of the term. (None of this is a knock on old-school/classic roguelikes! I’ve played and enjoyed a lot of NetHack. But it’s worth acknowledging that it’s a very niche genre.)

- Jimmy Maher

July 7, 2023 at 8:12 pm

Thanks! Corrections made on the first two points. The others are just a bit out of scope for what I wanted to cover here…

- Ido Yehieli

July 8, 2023 at 10:20 am

Very fair! I meant these more as addendum/comments than corrections :)

- Anony Maus

July 7, 2023 at 6:32 pm

“Open Source” failed to do any good because it was specifically designed not to. Raymond and O’Reilly specifically crafted the narrative of it as an engineering concept rather than one of moral or ethical policy, in contrast to the earlier Free Software movement.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/article_246jsp/

https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/tim/articles/orabooks_os.html

Everything after that was entirely predictable.

- IJMC

July 7, 2023 at 8:16 pm

Yes. There’s an excellent recent article on the morality of free/libre software (vs. megacorp “open source”) at https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html

- Jonathan Badger

July 7, 2023 at 7:19 pm

I realize that it is a minor point compared to what you are actually talking about, but it is incorrect to say “In his telling, the cathedral was Microsoft’s software-development model, in which a closeted priesthood bestowed programs upon a grateful populace on its own terms and on its own schedule”. Both the cathedral and the bazaar were referring to open-source projects and weren’t talking about closed software from Microsoft and the like.

The difference was projects in the bazaar model (like Linux) accepted contributions from the general public (if the maintainers agreed that the contribution was good), where the “cathedral” projects were things like GCC and Emacs, where the code was developed by a small team, and while they released their code, they weren’t very open to outside contributions.

- Jimmy Maher

July 7, 2023 at 8:23 pm

Good catch! In my defense, I don’t think that Raymond himself wasn’t always clear on the distinction after he became known as the spokesman for open source. Edit made. Thanks!

- Pedro Timoteo

July 8, 2023 at 6:32 pm

Yeah, I was going to stay the same. At least in the context of the late 90s, “the cathedral” typically referred to open source programs that were developed by a relatively small team of “priests” who, while they released the code as a tar.gz, developed their software in a closed (almost mysterious) way, with relatively sporadic releases (sometimes with years between them), instead of the most current source being available as it’s being developed. In other words, if the latest version is two years old, that’s the most recent code available to the public.

Another classic example (though this may have changed since the 90s, I haven’t kept up) is mentioned in this very post: NetHack.

- UIUCAlum

July 7, 2023 at 7:26 pm

This is a neat and informative article. Minor correction: You seem to have confused the University of Chicago with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when discussing the PLATO system.

- Jimmy Maher

July 7, 2023 at 8:25 pm

Thanks!

- stepped pyramids

July 7, 2023 at 7:32 pm

For what it’s worth, the newer generation of roguelike fans and devs (and there’s a great deal of crossover there still) are not totally dedicated to “hardcore” game design. Smaller and/or easier and/or fairer takes on the genre are all over the place these days. And even a difficult game like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is winnable by an average player; I think I got my first win in a month or so. (I’ve never won NetHack legitimately and I’ve been playing it for two decades.)

- Nate

July 7, 2023 at 9:08 pm

Eric Raymond is a very problematic individual who has said racist and batshit things. I don’t think he’s qualified to speak for open source software and was always only a self-nominated spokesperson.

https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816447812661551108
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7608563
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15513086

Typo: “grahical”

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2023 at 7:28 am

Thanks!

- Michael

July 7, 2023 at 9:24 pm

“Game development joins grahical user interfaces”

>>”graphical”

- Keith Palmer

July 7, 2023 at 10:50 pm

Epyx’s Rogue was available on the Tandy Color Computer 3, so I did experience it relatively early on. I have to admit, though, to figuring out that if I put a write-protect tag on the diskette at just the right moment, I wouldn’t be affected by “permadeath…” (So far as the game not selling well as a commercial product went, I also have to admit to the impression my family’s copy just might have been handed along from my uncle…) I fear my final admissions might have to be that my dabbling in more complicated “roguelikes” haven’t gone that far, and that I was a bit more inclined to nod along at this piece’s comments on “open source” than some of the earlier commentators.

- Andrew McCarthy

July 7, 2023 at 11:23 pm

Great article, though I must confess I’ve never played any roguelikes, having no interest in the genre whatsoever. I’ve experienced enough arbitrary cruelty in video games from vintage Sierra and (I have to say it) Infocom adventures to last a lifetime, thank you. ;)

The respective difference in genre terminology when referring to the progeny of Adventure and Rogue always amuses me. I like to joke that in a parallel universe, instead of “adventure games” and “roguelikes”, we’d be playing “rogue games” and “adventurelikes”.

The “cathedral” metaphor for Windows proved unusually apt in one respect: the “XP” of Windows XP bears a resemblance to the Christogram “Chi-Rho” symbol (☧) of early Roman and later Byzantine Christianity, made up of the first two letters of Christ’s name in Greek, Chi (Χ) and Rho (Ρ). And of course the code name for XP while in development was “Windows Cairo”. Perhaps somebody at Microsoft was having a laugh about it…

- Vince

July 31, 2023 at 5:20 am

There is a fundamental difference between the “cruelty” in adventure games and roguelikes, though.

In the former, if you are stuck at a particular unfair puzzle, the game literally stops happening. You might put additional hours in the game trying to get unstuck, but you won’t become “better” at the game, you’ll just increase the chanches of solving that particular puzzle, while having a thoroughly miserable time.

In (good) roguelikes every failed run slowly builds towards a winning one, and there is an instrinsic satisfaction in seeing your progress over time. Bosses that once seemed unbeatable are now easy, levels that seemed unreachable are now familiar.

Modern roguelikes/lites are maybe not part of the “mainstream” but definitely they managed to carve a big niche for themselves as some of thf modern games offering an actual challenge.

- Brett Coulstock

July 7, 2023 at 11:31 pm

A thoughtful article that really puts IF and Roguelikes into perspective as reflections of a culture and philosophy and time and place. I can imagine some people bristling a little at this, but I think you’ve made your points and justified them expertly.

Another spelling error: “… combat them was to chunk whatever junk was to hand … ”

Should have been “chuck”?

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2023 at 7:32 am

In the American South, it’s common to say “chunk.” But I’m not sure how much of the Texas country boy is left in me after all these years away, and “chuck” is more classy. ;) Thanks!

- Alex Freeman

July 7, 2023 at 11:38 pm

I would add that, generally speaking, the open-source approach seems better suited for programs under a certain size and complexity. Once you get to operating systems, it becomes a real trade off. Linux and Windows have certain advantages over each other with neither consistently better. MacOS is probably the best designed, building on the open-source BSD OS, but it lacks the software support of Windows.

- Dave Rolsky

July 8, 2023 at 12:08 am

Besides Cataclysm:Dark Days Ahead, which PlayHistory noted, my other favorite old school rogue-like game is definitely ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery). I probably played hundreds of hours of this around 20 years ago.

It’s a really interesting game with an overworld, multiple dungeons, multiple victory conditions (some are insanely complex), many classes _and_ races, and very deep systems (you can farm stuff, dip things in potions, etc. which I think comes from NetHack). It also has some non-random areas mixed in, like specific levels in dungeons or towns. But I’ll admit I save-scummed because I just don’t have the patience to play the first few hours of the game a hundred times over.

There’s a graphical version on Steam these days which I haven’t tried.

- Martin

July 8, 2023 at 12:41 am

So where do games like Temple of Apshai intersect with these games, or are they just two separate things? Apshai came out in 1979, I think.

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2023 at 7:41 am

Apshai does bear a lot of surface similarities to Rogue in terms of presentation and interface, as do the early Dungeons & Dragons-style games on PLATO. But it’s pretty clearly a case of parallel development rather than influence. There are some major differences when it comes to Apshai in particular: pre-crafted rather than procedurally generated dungeons, and a much stronger interest in storytelling, to the point that Apshai came with a book of paragraphs to be read at the appropriate times. I wouldn’t place Apshai in the roguelike category.

- John

July 8, 2023 at 2:34 am

At some point circa 1989 I played Rogue on a friend’s Amiga for perhaps five to ten minutes. It was, I’m sorry to say, the least compelling Amiga game he ever showed me. I’m older and wiser now of course, so I’d like to think that if I knew then what I know now I’d be able to look beyond the graphics and appreciate the gameplay. Alas, I have my doubts. That ten minutes remains to this day the sum total of my old-school Rogue-like experience. I’m not too good for text-based games. I spent a lot of time on MUDs when I was in college. Nor am I too good for Rogue-likes or Rogue-lites. In the last week I’ve played both Crypt of the NecroDancer and Streets of Rogue. But old school Rogue-likes have a certain reputation for difficulty for difficulty’s sake and for complexity for complexity’s sake that I find off-putting. I think, looking back, that I could have been very into Rogue or some other Rogue-like if there had ever been a period where it was the only game I could get my hands on. The reason I got so into MUDs in college is that I didn’t own a computer or a video game console. I could, however, to the computer lab, sit down at a terminal, and Telnet to my favorite MUD. If Rogue or Nethack had been available on the school’s Vax I might have gotten absorbed in one of them instead.

- gabriel

July 8, 2023 at 3:04 am

almost all your guesses to history are wrong. nothing of it was natural or organic. most companies openly spent millions on lawyers and culture pushes to convince a new generation that just making money out of someone’s browser engine was ethical… and also to convince the authors of that browser engine that licensing on non-gpl was better for humanity and themselves because having some big corporation that don’t do evil using your project will bring fame and fortune to you and professional contributors to your project… heh.

the fact you gladly parrot their very false arguments from the time as some historical truth is a testament to how effective is to control the narrative.

- Nate

July 8, 2023 at 5:06 am

Roguelikes had a second spurt of growth as Unix shell accounts for Internet access (and then Linux on PCs) proliferated in the 1990s.

A few minor nits:

No comma needed here
“, and made the dungeon deeper”

It took me a long time to realize “chunk” meant “throw” here. Since “to hand” is a verb in other contexts (i.e. to pass an object), maybe the simpler “throw” would be clearer?
“only practical way to combat them was to chunk whatever junk was to hand at them”

- Nate

July 8, 2023 at 5:19 am

Oh and also it was interesting to me that “archeologist” is a less preferred spelling in most English-speaking countries.

https://sapling.ai/usage/archeologist-vs-archaeologist

- Sean Curtin

July 8, 2023 at 6:21 am

I think the word you were looking for might have been “cloistered” rather than “closeted.”

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2023 at 7:51 am

While either will work in a pinch, I think “closeted” is the better choice, actually. “Closeted” means “functioning in secret,” while “cloistered” means “secluded from the world.”

- Jaina

July 8, 2023 at 7:10 am

Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman were undergraduates at the University of California, Santa Cruz when they encountered Adventure for the time. Like so many others, they were absolutely entranced. ”

For the first time?

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2023 at 7:53 am

Thanks!

- Laertes

July 8, 2023 at 10:12 am

One of the most epic sessions I’ve ever had on any computer game whatsoever was in Dungeon crawl stone soup some years ago. After several days and plenty of hours I was killed in the swamp by a large slime creature. The death was totally my fault as I disregarded all caution believing my character was almost invincible. I found out the hard way that was not the case. I should have known better by then.

Anyway, I ended sweating and with my heart beating as if I had just run a marathon. And that in a turn game in which you can think each movement for as long as you please.
I still keep the character file, it was and still is my best game ever:

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup version 0.10.3-5-gf0cc9df character file.

144242 Tpit2s XI the Executioner (level 18, -5/162 HPs)
Began as a Hill Orc Berserker on Sept 25, 2012.
Was the Champion of Trog.
Slain by a large slime creature (14 damage)
… on Level 5 of the Swamp on Oct 5, 2012.
The game lasted 11:41:48 (43357 turns).

Roguelikes are really something special.

- J

July 8, 2023 at 2:05 pm

> roguelikes would remain staples of hacker culture, but would never make inroads into the flashier commercial-games market.

In the US and Europe maybe, but Japan has plenty of proper (by whatever definition) roguelikes on consoles that did middling-to-well. Koichi Nakamura, founder of Chunsoft and creator of the Dragon Quest franchise, was a big Rogue fan leading to the Mystery Dungeon series. The first game sold well and and spawned multiple subfranchises continuing to this day. There are also several unrelated roguelikes that did relatively well like Azure Dreams.

- Sniffnoy

July 9, 2023 at 5:15 pm

Oh, yeah, this is important; they weren’t just commercial, they were on consoles even! And eventually these started getting localized for the US as well, even if they were never nearly as big here.

- Robert

July 8, 2023 at 3:01 pm

I highly enjoyed the article, but I’m not sure you’ve proven your central tenant vis-a-vis Open Source being related to the success of roguelikes.

* The massive success of of Rogue and its clones/next generations pre-dated the publication of any code.

* The roguelike “family tree” include major entries such as ADOM and Omega which either never released their code or released it very late.

* Hack/Nethack/etc… are very successful due to the “rotating cast of characters” who are updating the code, but I’m not sure that it wouldn’t be just as successful (or rather, still successful but in a different way) with a different licensing model which was less open.

So, just going by the material in this article, I don’t see why Roguelikes are particular examples or exemplars of anything open-source-y.

- stepped pyramids

July 9, 2023 at 7:52 pm

Angband is the more effective example here (and NetHack vs. Angband represent their own cathedral vs. bazaar comparison). Its design is very friendly to the development of variants and cross-pollination of ideas between said variants.

I think without Angband and NetHack you wouldn’t have a concept of a “roguelike”, just a handful of games that cited this old game Rogue as an influence. I’m also skeptical that closed-source roguelikes like ADOM and Dwarf Fortress (adventure mode) would have caught on without an existing community of roguelike fans.

- Bog

July 8, 2023 at 3:31 pm

“Google builds its proprietary Web browser Chrome atop an open-source engine known as Chromium; Apple constructed the OS X desktop on the solid foundation of an open-source operating system known as Darwin”

I’m hopelessly unqualified to speak to either of these points, but this part reads as if Chromium and Darwin were initially developed independently of Google and Apple.

Chromium is the open-source codebase for Chrome, but the engine is the open-source Blink, which was forked from Apple’s open sourced WebKit engine, which is a fork of KDE.

Likewise, the note about Darwin seems to suggest that it was an independent project that Apple took off of the shelf and built OS X on top of, but Darwin was the platform developed by Apple specifically for OS X and based on NeXTSTEP, so the real open-source precursors would be BSD and Mach.

I’m afraid it’s a bit misleading to present the relationship between Chrome and Chromium as Google making workman like improvements on an open-source base. The truth is much less charitable: Chrome’s market share a Google’s involvement in Chromium basically ensures that Google has an extremely outsized role in web standards. W3C or any other standards body can do what they want, but if Google doesn’t include a feature (or even just includes it, but disabled and hidden in a settings panel), then it’s DOA.

Apple almost certainly open-sourced WebKit and Darwin with a similar intent (although given their market share at the time both were developed, it was probably more of a survival strategy; Jobs named Darwin, so genetic fitness is seemed to be a concern for Apple), but once their portable devices started printing money and eating market share, open source pretensions to Darwin basically evaporated.

- Bogdanov

July 8, 2023 at 3:51 pm

“For rigid ideology seldom makes a good fit with the real world; pragmatically mixed national economies, for example, succeed vastly better than dogmatically capitalist or communist ones.”
“there’s nothing wrong with being niche”

These two sentences shall be painted in every parliamentary chamber :D

- Rowan Lipkovits

July 9, 2023 at 1:35 am

Realising you were going to be discussing Rogue I was primed to expect mention of BSD and felt a little robbed when you mentioned that OSX was built on Darwin and not looking a little further back to its NeXTSTEP or BSD ancestors, as Bog notes. Also while pointing out how popular Rogue was among Unix users I felt mention might have been warranted that given the Berkeley employment arrangement of its author, Rogue was actually included with BSD distributions for five years starting with v4.2 in 1982. Having source code available is one way to be “spread far and wide” among Unix users, but having the game actually be a pack-in title sure can’t hurt!

The Half-Life example, while correct, feels a little odd in context given id Software’s historical commitment to eventually opensourcing their engines, but granted you are making a different point there.

The list of excellent open source game tools seems incomplete without acknowledging MAME, but I appreciate that the list could go on for pages.

Reference to The CRPG Addict’s experience of Rogue also seems incomplete without noting (ok, it’s worth a footnote at most) that his experience of playing that specific old game through to completion was a primary factor in the establishment of his long and rigorous project of CRPG scholarship.

“why she can’t just bash a door open” Hey, that looks familiar! I submitted that screenshot to MobyGames 15 years ago. You’re all very welcome!

Making ESR such a central part of your article is certainly a way to lure out wildly polarized reader responses in 2023! We’re just lucky that RMS didn’t have a role to play in this particular story…

- Glorkvorn

July 9, 2023 at 9:14 am

NetHack seems like a “you had to be there” experience. I could see it being fun when played cooperatively in a computer lab with a group of friends: sharing knowledge, commiserating over deaths, and laughing together at the dumb jokes late at night. It doesn’t feel fun at all when you try to play it now by yourself, as an adult. Either you go into it blind, in which case it’s just an endless series of inexplicable deaths, or you look up some spoilers/walkthroughs on the internet and you lose all the process of exploration. Also, yes, it’s just too complex and bloated now. Learning it now feels like… well, it feels like trying to learn Linux administration for the first time, and getting up to speed on code that was once simple and elegant but has since been growing nonstop for decades.

Rogue I think still holds up today. It’s relatively short, simple, and self-contained. It’s hard, but at least it fights fair- you can pretty much discover everything by playing normally, you don’t have to read the developer’s minds. And a lot of the challenge is just randomness. On the one hand, even with perfect play you’re still probably going to die. On the other hand, you can play impulsively and still make it pretty far just by luck. It works surprisingly well as a casual mobile game that you can play to relax without putting in much effort. Just roll with the punches and keep restarting until everything goes your way. It also helps that Rogue doesn’t try to cram in too much of the wacky 80s nerd humor like NetHack does.

- Ronald Record

July 9, 2023 at 3:15 pm

When evaluating the success or failure of Open Source software I think it is important to realize that most of the phones in the world run on open source software, much of the Internet is based on open source software, most of the backend servers and cloud systems are based on open source software, and Linux is everywhere embedded in devices of all kinds.

I would assert that proprietary software has failed to capture the majority of markets and is now a niche endeavor by the few large corporations who adhere to the false belief that secrecy has value.

Other than maybe a difference of view on the success of open source software, I found this article to be extremely well written, of great interest, and quite informative. Thanks!

- Jack Brounstein

July 9, 2023 at 8:15 pm

Without getting too far afield of the blog’s topics, but the line about “a tiny strata of metaphorical inside cats who have concluded, rather conveniently for themselves, that the most important social-justice campaign of their age is one that can be waged from behind their keyboards and monitors, just the place where they happen to feel most comfortable,” feels incredibly relevant to the people today, on all sides of the spectrum, who seem to seem to view getting into arguments online as the most important political act.

The last paragraph is of course setting up the story of beloved Sega Genesis game ToeJam & Earl, right? I joke, but I played the game as a child, many years before experiencing NetHack and learning more about classic roguelikes, and was surprised when I revisited it how much of the genre it kept despite the graphics and real-time gameplay. (Also, it was designed by Greg Johnson, who previously worked on Starflight.)

- Jack Brounstein

July 9, 2023 at 8:26 pm

Sorry, one more thought: Does setting up Diablo mean that the blog’s about to move into coverage of 1997? I was still looking forward to the Battlecruiser 3000 AD and Her Interactive articles (although looking now, I guess Her Interactive’s Nancy Drew series didn’t start until 1998).

- Jimmy Maher

July 10, 2023 at 8:05 am

Diablo sits splayed neatly on the border between 1996 and 1997. Although I believe its official release date was January 3, 1997, there are many credible reports of it being available in stores in some regions at least between Christmas and New Years. I think I’m going to consider it a 1996 game, mainly because it will fit nicely with the two articles that precede it in an eventual ebook. But it will mark the end of 1996 coverage. I should have a “state of the blog” post with ebooks, etc., within a month or so.

I’m still planning to write on Her Interactive; in fact, I was at the Strong Museum in Rochester in January, and returned with a treasure grove of documents. But I decided to push that to 1998, to tell the story from the beginning until the first Nancy Drew game, the point at which the company really found its footing after a lot of flailing around, in one article.

I’m afraid I did decide to pass on Battlecruiser in the end. It’s an amusing story, but not much more than that in the bigger context of gaming, and I’m afraid the final article would just become an exercise in making fun of the game and its rather, shall we say, *eccentric* maker. I think it’s better to focus on more positive topics. (But if I ever put together a rogue’s gallery of tacky 1990s game advertisements — something I’ve mused about doing from time to time — *that* ad will definitely be included.)

- Tom Dolezal

July 10, 2023 at 4:52 pm

Hi Jimmy… near the top of this article, under the graphic of Epyx’ Rogue game box cover, “Automated Systems” is referenced. The actual name of the company pre-Epyx was “Automated Simulations”.

See the first sentence in this entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Apshai

I think I had most of Automated Simulations’ games for the Apple II early on. Temple of Apshai and Hellfire Warrior were favorites that burned up way too much of what should have been more college study time.

- Jimmy Maher

July 10, 2023 at 5:41 pm

Good catch. Thanks!

- DDG Ahab

July 11, 2023 at 12:59 pm

I’ve understood that 1982 was when Fenlason began developing Hack, and that he released it to USENIX around 1984. Nethack Wiki says as much.

The extant DOS port “hack121” probably stays close to Fenlason’s design, though it’s impossible to know for sure. The main differences from Rogue are addition of stores, being able to ascend to previously explored levels (whose state persists, unlike Moria where levels are regenerated each time), and just having more monster types and more types of treasures. This takes off a lot of the time pressure that Rogue’s hunger meter forces on you, but also slows the pace down and makes death costs you a lot more time.

- Jimmy Maher

July 11, 2023 at 1:45 pm

I’m going to defer to David Craddock’s book, which correlates the submission of Hack to USENIX with some pretty significant life events of the principle players: graduation from high school, and also the departure of Brian Harvey, the computer-lab gang’s mentor, from his teaching position at Lincoln-Sudbury. But I did just learn that Jay Fenlason works with an acquaintance of mine — small world, huh? — so I’ll try to confirm, and update the article if necessary.

- Adam Sampson

July 12, 2023 at 12:25 am

The earliest Brouwer sources for hack published on Usenet on 17th December 1984 include Jay Fenlason’s Original_READ_ME file, which starts: “This is export hack, my first semester programming project.”

- Adam Sampson

July 12, 2023 at 12:41 am

“1996’s New Hacker’s Dictionary — compiled by, you guessed it, Eric S. Raymond”

It might be better to say “edited by” or “revised by”, given that much of the content is from the Jargon File, originally compiled by a large cast of characters at MIT, Stanford, and other research centres – many of whom you’ve already mentioned, e.g. Don Woods. Guy Steele was the primary editor of the first print edition in 1983, and Eric Raymond’s 1991 and 1996 editions were substantial revisions of that. The 1991 edition already mentions nethack.

- Jimmy Maher

July 12, 2023 at 12:23 pm

Fair enough. Thanks!

- Doug Orleans

July 12, 2023 at 2:13 am

It’s a pleasant surprise to see Brian Harvey’s name pop up here. He was a beloved lecturer at UC Berkeley and taught the intro CS class for several decades. I did an independent project for him when I was an undergrad circa 1991, and I also got into the PC version of Hack (and later nethack) around that time, but I never knew about his involvement (however indirect). As part of that intro CS class I learned to use JOVE, which was a stripped-down version of Emacs written by another of his former high school students. I continued to use it for several years after college until eventually moving up to full Emacs. That same CS intro class also had an extended exercise that involved building a small text adventure game in Scheme, based on a similar curriculum from MIT, but modified to use Berkeley landmarks and in-jokes.

- Alianora La Canta

July 14, 2023 at 10:40 pm

I’m very happy to see Rogue get mentioned; having gone well past the point where it was originally released, I’d resigned myself to thinking it was never going to be covered by the blog. There is a certain amount of nostalgia from remembering playing it quite a bit when I was a child (even though I never got past level 10). I still enjoy Nethack (my record there is level 18), but it is notably more difficult because of the combinatorial explosion.

Nethack is in the Museum of Modern Art, resulting on DevTeam member Jean-Christophe Collet providing one of my favourite quotes in software design, “You should always write clean code that you won’t be embarrassed by, 35 years later, when it ends up in a museum.”

It also reminded me of when I saw a review for Nethack in the British edition of PC Gaming World in March 2000, presented as if it was a new game, complete with a technical specification box including “3D Graphics: Don’t be silly”. For anyone wondering, the only other game in that issue that got five stars was The Sims by Maxis. Now that’s a diametrically opposite approach to game development philosophy…

- Anthony Noel

July 30, 2023 at 3:48 pm

Once more poor Beneath Apple Manor is unmentioned in the history of the rouge like. It does most of what rouge did and did it two years earlier and as a commercial release.

- Busca

July 30, 2023 at 7:18 pm

If you haven’t already read it, maybe check out the 2012 coverage of BAM by the CRPGAddict who mentions the similarities with Rogue and had an exchange with creator Don Worth – with the latter also showing up in the comments.

- Jimmy Maher

July 31, 2023 at 12:45 pm

While its similarities to later roguelikes are certainly interesting, there is no sign that Beneath Apple Manor directly influenced them. This makes it a bit hard to shoehorn into an article like this one, which is concerned specifically with the roguelike tradition in institutional computing. A similar complaint to yours could be made on behalf of the early PLATO CRPGs, which also bore some distinct similarities to Rogue; one always has to draw a line somewhere in order to craft readable articles. That said, you might want to have a look at David Craddock’s book Dungeon Hacks, which devotes its whole first chapter to Beneath Apple Manor, based upon a lengthy interview with its creator.

Diablo
July 21, 2023

All of us had become disappointed with computer RPGs because they were going in the opposite direction of where we thought they should be going. They were becoming story- and stat-laden, really appealing to a super-small niche of super RPG geeks — which we were in a way, but that wasn’t really our style.

So, when [David] Brevik mentioned these roguelike games, it was kind of a natural. “Yeah, let’s take that cool, addictive structure and modernize it. Let’s strip away the stuff that’s turning off a lot of game fans from RPGs.”

— Max Schaefer of Blizzard North

A palpable sense of ennui dogged the Consumer Electronics Shows of 1994. The venerable semiannual expo where such landmark gaming hardware as the Atari VCS, the Commodore 64 and Amiga, the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Entertainment System, and the Sega Genesis had been seen for the first time seemed somehow past its sell-by date now. Attendance at the Summer CES in particular was down in a big way, so much so that the organizers would move the event out of its long-standing home in Chicago’s McCormick Place the following year and turn it into a traveling exhibition in the hope of drumming up some much-needed excitement. In the meantime, the makers of gaming software had an especially underwhelming time of it in Chicago that year: as usual, they were treated as second-class citizens by the organizers, relegated to the hall’s basement so that the choicer spaces were kept free for cutting-edge toasters, refrigerators, and microwave ovens.

Among the games people who were having the worst time of it of all were the folks behind a tiny San Mateo, California, studio called Condor, Incorporated. David Brevik and his co-founders, the brothers Max and Erich Schaefer, were ostensibly at the show to demonstrate their very first finished original game, a Genesis title called Justice League: Task Force. But they knew the game was no great shakes. They had made exactly what their publisher, the financially troubled Japanese giant Sunsoft, had ordered them to make in rather pedantic detail: a blatant clone of yesteryear’s massive hit Street Fighter II, with DC Comics superheroes inserted in place of its inspiration’s pugilists. They felt it was competently executed, but knew as well as anyone that it was no more than a quickie placeholder product for a five-year-old console that was soon due to be superseded by the next-generation Sega Saturn.

Their ulterior motive for being at CES was something else entirely. Brevik had an idea for a computer game called Diablo, which he had been slowly expanding upon ever since he had lived with his family at the foot of the California mountain of that name back in the mid-1980s. Now, he felt its time had come; he desperately wanted to interest a publisher in it. But every executive he talked to at the show starting shaking his head as soon as he saw the first line of the pitch document, stating that it was “a proposal for a role-playing game.” For CRPGs were dead and buried according to the industry’s conventional wisdom, having nothing to offer in an era when multimedia flash and 3D mayhem reigned supreme. They were quaint at best, deadly boring at worst, as their recent sales figures reflected.

Thoroughly disheartened by his proposal’s reception, Brevik duly turned up with the Schaefer brothers at the appointed time to show Justice League to the assembled press. And here they all got a shock. They learned only minutes before taking the stage that Sunsoft had actually arranged to make a second version of the game for the Super Nintendo, sending the same design brief to another little studio, Blizzard Entertainment of Costa Mesa, California. Both development teams could immediately see that the other had done a pretty solid, professional job with a less than inspiring project. Indeed, they were struck by how similar the two end results were to one another.

They soon learned that they had much more in common. Blizzard too had been founded on a shoestring by three games-obsessed kids just out of university, in this case by the names of Allen Adham, Mike Morhaime, and Frank Pearce. And they too had become all too familiar with workaday projects like Justice League, which they too saw as a way for their new, unproven studio to pay its dues on the way to bigger, better things to come. The big difference was that Blizzard was a few years older, and thus that much further along the road to becoming a marquee studio. They had recently been acquired by the educational-software giant Davidson & Associates, whose distributional pipeline they would be able to use to publish their own games under their own imprint. Now, they were hard at work finishing up the project that they hoped would change everything for them: a game for computers only called Warcraft. They took the Condor boys into a cramped back room and showed it to them. “I had no idea at that point that Warcraft would become an historically important game,” says Max Schaefer. “It just looked cool.” A relationship was forged. The Blizzard folks said they were just too busy to think about anything else just then, but they promised to listen to Condor’s pitch for Diablo once Warcraft was out the door.

They were true to their word. In January of 1995, with Warcraft on store shelves and selling well, everyone came together again in Blizzard’s conference room to talk about Diablo. No one in that room was unaware of the concerns that had caused publisher after publisher to walk away from the proposal; in fact, in many ways they shared them. CRPGs had glutted the market just a few years earlier, a bewildering procession of elves and dwarves and dragons. For the hardcore aficionados, all of the different games and series were (and still are) possessed of their own distinctive personalities and intricate subtleties, but it was hard for everybody else to keep Dungeons & Dragons separate from Dungeon Master, Might and Magic separate from The Magic Candle. I have a friend who likes to say that there are only two blues songs: “the fast one and the slow one.” Likewise, one might go so far as to say that for most gamers there were only two CRPGs, the first-person Wizardry style and the overhead Ultima style. As computers had gotten more capable, games of the former type had gotten ever more complex in terms of rules, while those of the latter type had threatened to collapse under the sheer weight of their lore and verbiage, which minuscule computer memories no longer restricted. Those sorts of things were not what the Condor guys were into at all. Sure, they had all played tabletop Dungeons & Dragons as kids, but world-building and storytelling hadn’t been their primary interest. “It was all about killing monsters and finding good stuff,” says Max Schaefer.

And so that was what Diablo was to be about as well. “As games today substitute gameplay with multimedia extravaganzas and strive toward needless scale and complexity,” read the pitch document, “we seek to reinvigorate the hack-and-slash, feel-good gaming audience. Emphasis will be on exploration, conflict, and character development.”

Diablo’s most direct influence by far was the roguelike games, which David Brevik had played for hundreds upon hundreds of hours while a student at university. From roguelikes it inherited its minimalist narrative — amounting to little more than “make it to the last level and kill the boss of bosses Diablo” — as well as randomized dungeons that would be new with every playthrough, along with the randomized “good stuff” they contained. Brevik’s favorite roguelike of all was Angband, which distinguished itself from the likes of the original Rogue and its spiritual successor NetHack by having a town to serve as the player’s base of operations for her expeditions into the nearby dungeon, resulting in a slightly more relaxed pacing and introducing an economic element. Diablo was to duplicate this structure exactly: “Forays into the dungeon will be broken up by trips to the town located above. In the town, a general store will provide standard equipment and repairs, and will also purchase extra equipment from the player. A temple will provide healing for injured and sick characters. Training and other facilities may also be available.”

In Brevik’s initial vision, Diablo was even to have roguelike perma-death: if the player’s character was killed, “that character will be erased completely from the hard drive, and the player must start over from scratch.” Combat would be turn-based like in a roguelike, but heavily influenced by the game’s secondary inspiration, Julian Gollop’s 1994 strategy classic X-COM; Diablo would use a similar interface and action-points system. If it strikes you as strange that a game that would later be so commonly dismissed as nothing more than a mindless, frantic click-fest could have two such cerebral inspirations as these… well, such are the paradoxes of game development.

At any rate, Blizzard was suitably impressed, and agreed to fund and publish the game described in the pitch document. But several of the Blizzard folks who were present at the meeting have since claimed that they were already thinking about a major change: to make Diablo run in real time. Not long after work began on the game in earnest down in San Mateo, Blizzard began slowly but relentlessly to apply pressure to Condor — more specifically, to David Brevik — to make the switch.

Brevik was appalled. There was a certain kind of moment, familiar to every roguelike player, that he considered essential to recreate in Diablo. It’s that moment when you’re down to your last few hit points and are staring down the maw of a mind flayer or a wyvern, knowing that it’s about to hit you and kill you on its next turn unless you do something really clever and/or get really lucky on your own last turn before it can do so. Do you pull out that potion that you have no idea what it does and drink it down, hoping against hope that it’s a Potion of Protection? Or do you take one last swipe at the monster with your sword, hoping it’s as close to death as you are? Or do you try to get away by running down that nearby staircase, hoping against hope that it misses with its last lunge against your vulnerable backside? Most of the time, of course, you choose wrong and/or don’t get lucky, and another character goes to the graveyard. But every once in a while, it works out, your character lives to fight another day, and you shout and dance around the room and rush to tell your friends about it. That dopamine release is what keeps people coming back to roguelikes again and again. Brevik was understandably loath to lose it.

But the slow drip, drip, drip from Blizzard continued, seeping even into Condor’s own ranks. Knowing this, Allen Adham made a suggestion to Brevik in or around May of 1995: Why not ask your own people? Why not take a vote on whether just to try real time? If it doesn’t work, you can always go back to turn-based.

It was too reasonable a suggestion to refuse. Brevik asked for a show of hands among his own people of those interested in exploring real time, and was dismayed to see almost every hand in the room go up. Acceding to the will of the majority, he retreated into his office to have a good-faith go at something he was sure would never fit with the game he wanted to make. The quicker it was demonstrated to everyone that real time wasn’t a practical possibility, he thought, the quicker they could all get back to more productive endeavors. What followed instead was the project’s kairos moment.

I can remember the moment like it was yesterday. I was sitting and I was coding the game, and I had a warrior with a sword, and there was a skeleton on the other side of the screen. I’d been working on this code to make characters move smoothly, doing a whole bunch of testing, and we’d talked about how the controls would work.

We wanted it to be visceral. Click and swing, click and swing. We wanted it to automatically happen: if you clicked on the monster, your character would go over there and swing.

I remember very vividly: I clicked on the monster, the guy walked over, and he smashed this skeleton, and it fell apart onto the ground.

The light from heaven shone through the office down onto the keyboard. I said, “Oh, my God, this is so amazing!” I knew it was not only the right decision, but that Diablo was just going to be massive. It was really the most defining moment of my career, as well as for that genre of gaming.

A new genre was born in that moment, and it was really quite incredible to be the person coding it and creating it. I was just there by myself coding it up. It was pretty incredible.

Diablo may have lost that suspended instant of supreme tension that Brevik had always seen as essential, but it had gained something else, something that would make it a different sort of game entirely. Kelly Johnson, an artist who worked on the game:

In a turn-based game, when you win, you say, “Cool, my plan worked. I took time, I deliberated, I made a plan, and it worked out.” But in a real-time [game], it’s, “Wow! I won!” It’s visceral. You’re in the moment.

Everyone at Condor, including Brevik, was soon marveling that they had ever imagined Diablo being anything other than a real-time game. Millions of players would eventually feel the same way, as the game’s real-time nature became the core of its very identity.

The Diablo team with Diablo himself. We must hope that the keytar is intended ironically.

But before that could happen, Diablo had to be finished. In their excitement over not being rejected yet again, Condor had secured less than half a million dollars in funding from Blizzard, to support a team that numbered a dozen or more. By the beginning of 1996, that money was running out. The founders dipped deep into their personal bank accounts just to cover payroll, and their employees started racing one another to the bank on payday, knowing that the last checks deposited had a tendency to bounce. Meanwhile Blizzard was soaring. That Christmas, they had released Warcraft II, a refinement of its predecessor that blew up massively; it would sell 3 million copies before all was said and done.

The Schaefer brothers and David Brevik were stunned when their publisher came to them and asked whether they would be interested in being acquired; Blizzard was suddenly flush with cash, and the brain trust there was very, very excited about Diablo’s prospects, such that they wanted to have it all for themselves. For the people making Diablo, the unexpected offer was a lifeline materializing out of thin air in front of a drowning man. In March of 1996, Condor became Blizzard North.

It was Blizzard that had pushed the erstwhile Condor to make Diablo run in real time. Now, it would be Blizzard South that drove another core feature into being. The initial pitch document had included “two-player and multiplayer game sessions via modem or network.” Since actual work had begun on the game, however, that aspiration had been all but forgotten. Yet Blizzard South knew how important multiplayer could be for a game in this new era of widespread network connectivity. They knew that multiplayer deathmatches had made DOOM what it was, and they knew that, long after players had finished Warcraft II’s single-player campaign, it was multiplayer that kept them going there as well, turning the game into a veritable institution. They wanted all that for Diablo, so much so that they made their only significant technical intervention into its development, sending programmers up to San Mateo to apply their Warcraft II expertise to Diablo’s multiplayer mode.

For Blizzard had huge plans for multiplayer games in general. Everyone could sense that a large percentage of future gaming would take place between real people on the Internet, that the “LAN parties” of the current age were just a temporary stopgap. Yet gaming over long distances was still technically challenging for the user, even as sessions had to be pre-planned with buddies who had bought the same game you had; spontaneous, pick-up-and-play matches were impossible. Various third-party companies were experimenting with ways to change both of these things, but everything was in a nascent, febrile state. Having money to spend as they did, Blizzard decided to introduce a game hosting and matchmaking service for their customers, under the name (and the Internet URL) of Battle.net. And they decided to offer it to buyers of their games for the low, low price of free, on the logic that the boxed-game sales it would generate would easily pay for its upkeep. It was a revolutionary idea, one that would prove as important to Blizzard’s rise into gaming’s stratosphere as any of their individual titles, iconic as they were. Thanks to Battle.net, you would always be able to find someone to play with, then be in a game with them within seconds. Patches would download automatically when you logged onto the service, a first step toward the always-online mentality that has taken over since. And Diablo was the very first Battle.net-enabled game. If it had achieved nothing else, it would be historically notable for this fact alone.

With Diablo being refined into an ever more effortless, frictionless experience, it was inevitable that another legacy of the roguelikes would fall away. The Southerners told the Northerners that perma-death just wouldn’t fly in the modern commercial market. David Brevik kvetched, but there was no way he was going to win this argument. Even if it hadn’t started out that way, Diablo was evolving into a lean-back rather than a lean-forward sort of game, designed to be more fun than it was demanding. Mistakes would happen in a game like that, and nobody wanted to lose a character he had spent eight hours building because he got distracted by the pizza guy ringing the doorbell. By way of compromise, the Southerners did agree to allow only one save slot, which fit in nicely with the game’s ethic of simplicity anyway. And of course, if anyone really wanted to play Diablo like a roguelike, there was nothing but the temptation of that extant last save file preventing it.

Warcraft II had made Blizzard one of the biggest names in mainstream gaming, on a level with id Software of DOOM and Quake fame and Westwood Studios, the makers of Command & Conquer, Blizzard’s great rival in the real-time-strategy space. Everything Blizzard did was now of interest to obsessive gamers. Diablo was to be their first game that ran under Windows 95 rather than MS-DOS; like Battle.net, this was another outcome of the company’s guiding principle of frictionless ease in all things. In the summer of 1996, Blizzard arranged to have a two-level demo of Diablo included on a Microsoft DirectX sampler disc. Interest in the game exploded. It became easily the most anticipated title of the 1996 holiday season.

That fact makes the next bit that much more remarkable. When the last possible instant to send the game out to be burned onto hundreds of thousands of CDs and shipped to stores all over the country in time for the Christmas buying season arrived, Blizzard took a long, hard look at its current state. It wasn’t in terrible shape, but it still had its fair share of minor niggles here and there. The vast majority of publishers would have said it was good enough and shipped it at this point — after all, they could always patch it later, right? (Wasn’t that one of the points of Battle.net?) But Blizzard decided to wait, resigning themselves to letting Christmas slip by without a major new release from them. It was better, they judged, to make sure Diablo was just exactly perfect when it did ship. More than anything else, it would be this thoroughgoing focus on quality — quality at almost any cost — that would make Blizzard one of the most extraordinary success stories in the entire history of gaming. From the beginning, their tender-aged founders understood something that eluded a bizarre number of their more grizzled peers: that one’s reputation is one’s most precious business asset of all, being laborious to build up and disconcertingly easy to lose. In an industry fueled by short-term hype, they took the long view. “If you truly put the game first,” says Allen Adham, “then decisions like holding a product an extra couple of months, even if it means missing Christmas, become fairly clear.” Gamers came to know that Blizzard would never let them down, and this knowledge fueled the company’s rise. The sacrificing of tens of thousands of sales the following month led to millions and millions of sales over the following decade.

So, Diablo missed the Christmas deadline, but not by much: the first copies wended their way onto store shelves between Christmas and New Years, when lots of younger gamers had gift checks from uncles and aunts and grandparents burning holes in their pockets. Others trotted down to their local software store and traded some less desirable Christmas present for Diablo. Retailers fended off the return-season blues by turning Diablo’s release into an event, plastering posters all over their walls and filling their display windows with mannequins of the devil on the cover. All told, it’s questionable whether the belated release really hurt Diablo very much at all, even in the shortest of terms. By spring, it was clear both from the sales reports and from the level of activity on Battle.net that Diablo was the hottest computer game in the world. It was blowing up huge, even by comparison with Warcraft II. Diablo’s sales surpassed 1 million units within months.

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Diablo’s eventual impact on the culture and practices of computer gaming was arguably more pronounced than that of any individual title since DOOM. It introduced phrases like “loot drop” into the gamer lexicon; it was the pioneer of a new era of easy online multiplayer gaming, between friends and strangers alike; it single-handedly dragged the entire genre of the CRPG back into public favor. This long shadow can make it oddly difficult to discuss as just a game. When I went back to play it recently for the first time in a quarter of century — boy, I’m getting old! — I was impressed if not blown away by the experience. And yet, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t quite avoid allowing my opinions to be colored by some of what Diablo has wrought. We’ll get to that in due course. But first, Diablo the game…[1]The commentary in this article deals only with the original Diablo. An expansion pack to the game called Hellfire, created out-of-house by the Sierra subsidiary Synergistic Software, was released in late 1997. The relationship between Blizzard North and Synergistic was plagued with discord from first to last, and David Brevik and many of his colleagues have since disowned many elements of Hellfire as fatal dilutions of their vision. So, we’ll honor Blizzard North’s original intentions here and stick to the base game.

When you start a new adventure in the world of Diablo, you first choose your character from three fantasy archetypes: the warrior, who is best at bashing things with his big old sword; the rogue, who fights a little more surgically, preferring the bow and arrow; or the mage, who unlike his counterparts is pretty good with spells from the outset. But you don’t spend any time fussing about with statistics. You’re dropped into the hardscrabble village of Tristram, which has had the misfortune to be built over a demon’s not-so-final resting place, as soon as you’ve given your character a name. In Tristram, you can buy and sell in a few different shops and talk to a handful of villagers, but it’s all kept very short and sweet. Before you know it, you’ll be in the first dungeon, which is found beneath the graveyard of the local church.

You’ll have to fight your way through sixteen dungeon levels in all, divided into four sets of four that open up one after another, presenting ever more powerful monsters for your ever more powerful character to battle. In keeping with the game’s roguelike heritage, each level is procedurally generated. There is a modicum of story, even a cut scene here and there, but nothing you ever need to think too much about. (Although a fairly elaborate backstory does appear in the manual, it too is nothing you need to concern yourself with if you don’t want to. It was tacked on very late in development by Blizzard South, who realized that some gamers at least still liked to see such things.) There are also some pre-scripted quests to carry out, selected randomly from a pool of possibilities each time you start a new game. Most of these are given to you by the townspeople when you talk to them — but, again, all are extremely basic, coming down to “kill this monster” or “collect this object” (which, come to think of it, always involves killing the monster guarding it).

In practice, playing Diablo is a very simple loop. You go into the depths and make as much progress as you can against the hordes of enemies that await you there. Then you return topside to sell off the stuff you’ve collected that you don’t need, heal up and buy any potions or other equipment you think you’re going to need, and go downstairs again. Rinse and repeat, until you meet and hopefully kill Diablo himself. Unlike the typical epic CRPG, Diablo is intended to be a game you play over and over again. Thus the average playthrough takes only ten hours or so, as opposed to the hundred or more of its weightier brethren.

Blizzard North’s stated goal was to make Diablo “so easy your mom could play it.” Setting aside the condescension of their choice of words, they certainly achieved their goal in spirit. Fighting monsters is simply a matter of clicking on them, which causes your character to whack them with his melee weapon or fire off an arrow or spell at them. Tactics in the dungeons come down to common sense: whittling away at the edges of large groups of monsters instead of charging right into the middle of them, using doorways and narrow corridors to your advantage, keeping a healthy distance and using ranged attacks if you’re playing a rogue or a mage. That said, it does pay to learn the monsters’ strengths and weaknesses and tailor your attacks to them: skeletons, for example, are more vulnerable to attacks by blunt weapons such as maces than edged weapons such as swords.

The biggest source of tension is the question of when you should leave off in the dungeon and return to the town for succor. Usually when you die, it’s because you’ve pressed your luck just a bit too much. On the whole, though — and ironically given its line of descent through one of the most infamously unforgiving sub-genres in all of gaming — Diablo is one of the less intrinsically challenging games I’ve played in the course of writing these histories. If you do find yourself feeling under-powered and over-matched — perhaps because you made poor choices about where to allocate the ability points your character is awarded every time she levels up — you can always restart the game whilst retaining your existing character, complete with her current statistics and all of her current kit. Poor character-building choices or a general lack of skill can, in other words, always be compensated for with patient grinding.

Notice the auto-map overlaid onto the standard display…

In lieu of challenge, Diablo thrives on its polished addictiveness. Vanishingly few of its contemporaries can even begin to touch it in terms of intuitive playability. It’s clear that every last detail — every last window, every last hotkey, every last mouse click — was fussed over for hours and hours, until it was just what it ought to be. The auto-map is a thing of wonder that I have to call out for special praise. In CRPGs of the 1990s, such things are usually found in a separate window on the main display that is always too small for comfort and yet takes up too much precious screen real estate — or the auto-map can only be accessed on a separate screen, leaving you constantly flipping back and forth between the two views as you try to get somewhere. Diablo’s auto-map, on the other hand, appears as a transparent overlay right on top of the usual display, toggled on and off by pressing the TAB key. Like everything else here, it’s elegant and perfect, a brilliant stroke that could only have come about through dedicated, dogged iteration. You have to be in awe of the craftsmanship of this game. It knows precisely what it wants to be, and it achieves its best self in every respect.

This statement applies equally to the game’s aesthetics, which are nothing short of masterful; whatever Diablo lacks in set-piece storytelling, it makes up for in atmosphere. If I had to describe that atmosphere in one word, it would be “Gothic.” Diablo captures the side of the Middle Ages that all of those Tolkienesque CRPGs cheerfully ignore in the midst of all their elves and halflings romping merrily through the forest: the all-encompassing religion of Christianity, the almost tangible reality of another life that awaits after this one, which is as much a source of fear as comfort in the minds of the people. Diablo taps into something deep and almost primal in the human psyche, having more in common with The Exorcist than The Lord of the Rings, more in common with Hieronymus Bosch than Boris Vallejo. The shocking ending, which I won’t spoil here, is likewise more horror than fantasy. Diablo is lucky it wasn’t released during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, given that it sports much of what all those concerned parents were looking for in Dungeons & Dragons and not quite finding.

The lair of the Butcher, one of the gorier locations in Diablo. “Fresh meat!”

Matt Uelmen’s amazingly sophisticated soundtrack, recorded partially on real instruments at a time when many games were still relying entirely on tinny MIDI sound fonts, could easily have played behind a big-budget horror movie. The “Town” theme, featuring the best use of a twelve-string guitar since the heyday of the Byrds, is especially unforgettable; it took me back instantly when I heard it again after 25 years away.

Link to audio:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Diablo-Tristram-Village.mp3

All that said, I won’t go so far as to say that Diablo itself is scary. It seems to me that gameplay that revolves around killing hundreds of monsters is incompatible with true horror. Horror depends on a feeling of powerlessness, whereas Diablo is, like almost all CRPGs, a power fantasy at bottom. Nevertheless, it’s as audiovisually focused and accomplished as any game I’ve ever seen. I say this even as I freely acknowledge that its unrelentingly dark atmosphere tends to wear thin with me pretty quickly. (For me, a bit of light and joy brings out the shadows that much more effectively.)

And sadly, that statement pretty much sums up my response to Diablo as a whole, which is the same today as it was 25 years ago. It does what it does brilliantly. I just wish I liked what it does a bit more. Let me tell you how I got on with it when I played it for this article…

Given its titanic importance, my first plan was to play through it three times, once for each of the character classes. I first bashed my way to the finish line as a warrior. As I did so, I admired all of the qualities described above, but I also found the experience a little hollow; I didn’t dread sitting down with the game on the couch after dinner each evening for an hour or two, but neither did I look forward to it all that much — and nor did my wife have to tell me twice that it was time for bed, as she has to when I’m playing some games. I came to regard my Diablo sessions much as I might, say, an old episode of Law & Order: a low-effort something to pass the time, which I could do while chatting intermittently with my wife about completely different things. When I finished the game, I put it on the shelf for several months, intending always to get back to it but never feeling all that excited about doing so. Finally, knowing I had to write this article soon, I forced myself to start a new game as a rogue, hoping that character might be more interesting to play. But this time I found myself actively bored; “been there, done that” was the dominant note. Halfway through, I just couldn’t muster the will to continue. I could admire Diablo for its craftsmanship, but I couldn’t love it.

What am I to make of this? Obviously, I’m in the group of people who just aren’t really in the market for what Diablo is selling — a group who tend to be as vocal in their criticisms as the game’s fans are in their praise. But I’m not eager to join the chest-beating grognards who call Diablo dumbed down, or who shout that it’s not even a real CRPG at all. (Is there anything more tedious than a semantic debate between intractably biased parties?) It’s actually not Diablo’s simplicity that puts me off; I’m much more likely to scold a game for being too complicated than for being too simple. And then too, over the years I’ve been writing these histories, I’ve found many — perhaps most — games from the 1980s and 1990s to be more rather than less difficult than I really need them to be, so it’s not precisely the lack of challenge that bothers me about Diablo either. Too easy is far, far better in my book than too hard.

On the other hand, I do tend to prefer human-crafted to procedurally-generated content in general, and Diablo doesn’t do anything to disabuse me of that notion. Its randomized nature means that its dungeons can only be a collection of rooms, corridors, and monsters, without the guileful tricks and traps and drama of the best dungeon crawlers of yore. Beyond that, and beyond an aesthetic presentation that isn’t quite to my taste, I think my lack of receptivity to Diablo is to do with the passivity of the experience. I’ve seen it described as a good “hangover game,” what with how little it actually asks of you. Even more tellingly, I’ve seen it called the gaming equivalent of candy: you can eat an awful lot of it without thinking much about it, but it doesn’t leave you feeling all that great afterward.

One nice thing about getting older is that you learn what makes you feel good and bad. I’ve long since learned, for instance, that I’m happiest if I don’t play games for more than a couple of hours per day, even on those rare occasions when I have time for more. But I want those hours to have substance — to yield fun stories to tell, interesting decisions to remember, strategies or puzzle solutions to muse about while I’m cooking dinner or working out or taking a walk, accomplishments to feel good about. For me, Diablo is peculiarly flat; I went, I saw, I clicked on monsters. For me, it feels less like a time waster than a waste of time. I almost find myself wishing the game wasn’t so superbly polished in every particular, just to relieve the monotony.

More substantively, I do see one aspect of Diablo as vaguely ominous in the larger context of gaming history: the way it uses stuff to do the heavy lifting of player motivation. As I mentioned above, “loot drops” became a thing in gaming with this game. Although CRPGs had been tempting and teasing players with the prospect of a new magic sword or armor as long as they had existed, Diablo put that temptation front and center, making it the main driver of its gameplay loop. In doing so, David Brevik and company consciously tapped into something besides the allure of the Gothic that is primal in human psychology. They liked to use the analogy of a slot machine: you clicked endlessly on monsters in the hope that eventually something really good would drop out of one of them. When I hear these anecdotes, I can’t help but think of the glassy-eyed zombies to be found in casinos from Shreveport to Macau, pulling the handles of the one-armed bandits again and again for hours, likewise waiting for something good to drop into their laps. Pat Wyatt, Blizzard’s vice president of research and development at the time of Diablo’s creation, proffers an even more disturbing metaphor: “Positive reinforcement is one of the hardest types of conditioning to break, which is why pets beg at the table: rewards may not happen very often, but every once in a while you get a scrap, so they keep begging.” In the decades after Diablo, this Pavlovian loop would be exploited mercilessly by cynical game makers, trapping players in unsatisfying cycles of addiction that drained their time and their wallet, leaving them with nothing but a few virtual trinkets to their names in a virtual world that would be gone in a year or two anyway.

In the late 1990s, the dangerous addictiveness of loot drops was most in evidence in multi-player Diablo, as played on Battle.net, which in its early years was a fascinating if ofttimes toxic social laboratory in its own right. I do have more to say about it, but I think I’ll reserve it for a future article which will look at this formative period of online gaming in a more holistic way.

Instead, let me say in conclusion today what I often say when I end a review on a downer note: that no game is for everyone, and no way of having fun is wrong, as long as you aren’t hurting anyone else or yourself. If you love Diablo, you’re in good company. It’s a fine, fine game by any objective measure. Whatever cynicism it might have inspired is on the conscience of the folks who displayed it; this game was made for all the right reasons. It’s a triumph of care and dedication from which many another studio could learn, then and now. Just be sure to remember that there’s a beautiful world out there with plenty of cloudless blue skies to contrast with Diablo’s perpetually sooty ones, and you’ll be just fine. Click away, my friends, click away!

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

(Sources: As was the case with my last article, I’m hugely indebted to David L. Craddock for Stay Awhile and Listen Book I and Book II, which I plundered for quotes with all the enthusiasm of a Diablo loot hunter. By all means, check out these books if you’re interested in learning more about the Blizzard story.

Magazine sources include Computer Gaming World of August 1996, December 1996, March 1997, April 1997, and May 1997; Retro Gamer 43 and 103. Online sources include Lee Hutchison’s interview with David Brevik for Ars Technica, the Dev Game Club interview with Brevik, and Brevik’s Diablo post-mortem at the 1996 Game Developers Conference.

Diablo and its controversial expansion Hellfire are available as a single digital purchase at GOG.com.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

The commentary in this article deals only with the original Diablo. An expansion pack to the game called Hellfire, created out-of-house by the Sierra subsidiary Synergistic Software, was released in late 1997. The relationship between Blizzard North and Synergistic was plagued with discord from first to last, and David Brevik and many of his colleagues have since disowned many elements of Hellfire as fatal dilutions of their vision. So, we’ll honor Blizzard North’s original intentions here and stick to the base game.

Comments
39 Responses

- Jason Dyer

July 21, 2023 at 4:36 pm

>Obviously, I’m in the group of people who just aren’t really in the market for what Diablo is selling

I’m not sure, given we’re talking about the very original Diablo here, that I’d take for granted all the logic that follows here. I find original Diablo impossibly grindy (and have no disagreement with how you’ve characterized it) but enjoy the sequel quite a bit; there’s a true matter of there being too much monotony in the design in 1, and it is easy for the Diablo-likes to fall into this trap too. I’ve never been able to always concretely nail down the difference, but Diablo 1 I could mostly play on autopilot (except for certain bosses) whereas I always felt in Diablo 2 that I was making choices.

In other words, it isn’t procedural generation in itself causing the issue as much as the procedural generation not fulfilling its promise (creating on-the-fly rich tactical experiences).

- Jimmy Maher

July 21, 2023 at 9:50 pm

There are procedurally generated games I’ve really enjoyed — Master of Orion and Master of Magic leap immediately to mind, as does the partially procedurally generated Pirates! — so it’s by no means a hard and fast rule with me. I’ve actually never played Diablo II or any of the other later ones. I’ll definitely give them a fair shake when the time comes, and hope they add enough to the formula to be a bit more interesting to me.

- WellTemperedClavier

July 24, 2023 at 4:01 pm

Diablo 2 is the only CRPG of its type that I actually recall enjoying, though I’m not sure exactly why.

I share many of your reservations on the genre as a whole. While they’re engaging at the moment, and bring a certain sort of visceral satisfaction, very little of it sticks. I know I’ve played a great game when the memory of a particular episode or moment comes to me, unbidden, years after I finished. A great game (or any type of media) should haunt you, a little bit.

While I’m sure plenty of people have had such moments with the Diablo series, I’m not one of them. As you mentioned in the article, it’s a lot like candy. And that’s how I feel about loot-based games in general.

- PlayHistory

July 21, 2023 at 4:39 pm

Loving the 60s rock references.

I believe Frank Pearce is also a Blizzard co-founder.

Diablo is an absolutely vital game in looking at both online incentivization and the payment structures of that online model today. Calling it a “laboratory” I think is perfectly accurate. Almost everything that can be criticized about gamification is in Diablo.

That being said, I think just because there are these psychological cycles that keep people playing, that doesn’t make the game devoid of value in itself. Art does not only have value for the specific stories it can tell. Emotional response, the place of a world in storytelling (which Diablo has a striking one of), player-driven freedom.

I come at this from a perspective of someone who was really into Diablo (II specifically) and has disliked iterations on the formula like the “looter shooter” trend. Diablo is incredibly special for its many distinct parts, not just that pernicious loop. I think it has a world to rival the best CRPGs, if not the writing or variety.

Looking forward to getting deep into the online trend here. So many social histories tied in with the industry, there’s about a million ways you can sum it up. Always eager to see what you have to say!

- Jimmy Maher

July 21, 2023 at 10:04 pm

Good catch on Frank Pearce. Thanks!

- Pedro Timoteo

July 21, 2023 at 8:51 pm

About Diablo being boring: back in the day, I thought the same as well… when played alone. To me, it only comes alive when playing with a friend or two, which I was fortunate enough to be able to do soon after release; I think (I could be wrong about this, it’s been a while) the game still supported local networking (without using Battle.net), so me and my brother (or sometimes a friend in place of either of us) played through the entire game in co-op using two PCs and a null-modem cable. Voice chat wasn’t really a thing back then, so being in the same room was a big advantage, and made it much more fun. :)

I fully realize that Diablo grew from rogue-like games such as Angband and NetHack (both of which I played a lot in the early 90s), but to me it always felt more like a more complex Gauntlet (instead of, say, a simpler, real-time Angband). Opinions may vary, but IMO Gauntlet’s fun comes from interacting with your friends, helping them when they get in trouble (and vice-versa), complementing each other because you’re playing different classes, etc.; when played alone, the game is repetitive (after the first 8 or so levels, you know that everything else will just be variants of what you’ve already seen), and gets boring quickly. But, then again, I think the same about every game with a co-op option: if it has that option, it’s meant for co-op, and single-player mode is a practice mode at best, that you’re not supposed to spend a lot of time with. I felt this in my ZX Spectrum days, and still do so now. YMMV, of course.

- Jimmy Maher

July 21, 2023 at 9:57 pm

I agree in the abstract. My favorite way to play games is side by side in the same room; my wife and I still fire up Mule from time to time. I did want to give Diablo a try in multiplayer with my wife, but it just wasn’t happening; the whole laddish dark and violent aesthetic just isn’t for her. She’s more of a Heroes of Might and Magic sort of gal. We did try Baldur’s Gate together, a game that’s more to her taste. Unfortunately the multiplayer there was just too unrefined and confusing to be much fun, so we wound up playing together single-player, taking turns at the wheel. One of these days, I’ll reach the first CRPG that gets it right.

- John

July 21, 2023 at 9:55 pm

I liked Diablo. I played all three character classes and beat it at least once. It’s a supremely well crafted game. I’ve never gone back to the game, however, nor have I ever been tempted to play any of the sequels. Once you’ve beaten the game and seen all the set pieces it has to offer, I don’t see what another playthrough has to offer besides a different set of random equipment drops. Jimmy alludes to allocating stat points upon leveling-up, but I have no memory of that whatsoever. Jimmy’s played the game far more recently than I have so I don’t doubt him. Before reading this article, however, I would have told you, completely straight-faced, that the only difference between two characters of the same class in Diablo was the equipment.

The sequels, as I understand it, are significantly more interesting, mechanically speaking. Unfortunately, by the time Diablo II rolled around, my primary source of gaming news was internet forum comments. While I liked hearing people talking about their character builds, judging from those comments the real point of Diablo II was to play the game forever on the hardest difficulties until you had all the rarest items or the heat death of the universe, whichever came first. The grind, originally a thing you could do if you needed to, had apparently become the only thing that mattered. While I’m sure in retrospect that it’s entirely possible to play Diablo II like a normal person, the impression I got from the enthusiasts was more than enough to put me off the game. I had little time or money for gaming in those days. I’m in a better place now, but the recent Diablos still seem to be designed around the grind. Between that and the always online nonsense–not to mention everything else about Blizzard–I have no intention of returning to the series.

Finally, for what it may be worth, I never really considered Diablo an RPG. I’m not trying to be prescriptive. What I mean is that it did not occur to me that Diablo was supposed to be an RPG until I heard other people arguing about it. My reference for RPGs at that time would have been something like The Bard’s Tale, Dungeon Master, or maybe Chrono Trigger. Diablo, for all its fantasy trappings, seemed distinctly unlike those games to me. I can see the points of commonality more easily now. While I admit that I sympathized with the “Diablo is not an RPG” camp back in the day, I am proud to say that The Great Diablo Debate is one early internet flame war that I managed to stay out of.

- Eriorg

July 22, 2023 at 1:18 am

“I’ve seen it called the gaming equivalent of candy: you can eat an awful lot of it without thinking much about it, but it doesn’t leave you feeling all that great afterward.”

“For me, it feels less like a time waster than a waste of time.”

I never played Diablo, but funnily, your comments made me think of my feelings when I played Tetris, of all things — even if it’s not the same game genre at all!

- nxv

July 22, 2023 at 2:24 am

Minor spelling error, it’s “Matt Uelmen”.

- Jimmy Maher

July 22, 2023 at 7:23 am

Thanks!

- Jaina

July 22, 2023 at 3:35 am

Diablo‘s eventual impact on the culture and practices of computer gaming was arguably more pronounced that than of any individual title since DOOM. ” Than that?

The commentary is this article deals only with the original Diablo.” In

Much like the game itself, the article seems like a setup for a much more interesting future discussion… Looking back, Diablo feels very minimalist. I too prefer a little more meat to my games, more story to my quests. I played a reasonable amount of 1, and a less reasonable time on 2, and they both have atmosphere galore. Just not any surprises

- Jimmy Maher

July 22, 2023 at 7:27 am

Thanks!

- Alex

July 22, 2023 at 6:13 am

Since so much has been written about the pros and cons of Diablo, it really seems to be the best to say “Live and let die”. While I also got also quite sick of Action-RPGs over the years (they feel very samey to me), so many people got so much fun out of them and this is all that counts. Maybe I would like these types of games much more if I were interested in playing cooperative or online, which I never was.

- Alex

July 22, 2023 at 6:14 am

Sorry, “Live and let live” of course :)

- Sir Harrok

July 22, 2023 at 7:03 am

It did sound pretty hard core :-)

- Jimmy Maher

July 22, 2023 at 7:28 am

When you were young and your heart
Was an open book
You used to say live and let live
(You know you did)
(You know you did)
(You know you did)
But if this ever changin’ world
In which we live in
Makes you give in and cry
Say live and let die
Live and let die

- Richard Haynes

July 27, 2023 at 3:20 pm

What does it matter to ya? When you got a job to do, you gotta do it well; you gotta give the other fella HELL…

- Brelf Tuggterry

July 22, 2023 at 8:52 am

Great article. I agree with your points on the gothic atmosphere; att I was more keen on cyclopean vistas of chthonic natures. I did enjoy the interface.

- Infinitron

July 22, 2023 at 2:04 pm

Regarding Diablo’s status as a “real CRPG”, you may be interested in this ancient newsgroup discussion between Max Schaefer and Josh Sawyer, then a designer at Interplay’s RPG division Black Isle Studios, today design director at well-known “real CRPG” studio Obsidian Entertainment.

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/digging-through-old-posts-on-comp-sys-ibm-pc-games-rpg.92017/#post-3305680

(I’m not sure if the original discussion is still stored on Google Groups)

- Jimmy Maher

July 22, 2023 at 2:39 pm

That is interesting. As I said, I don’t find semantic debates like this all that worthwhile in general, but I personally have no problem calling Diablo a CRPG. Max Schaefer doesn’t do himself or his company any favors with his aggressive, belittling tone, however. It’s kind of weird that he sounds so insecure there. Sometimes it’s best just to count the money and keep your mouth shut.

- Paul

July 22, 2023 at 4:10 pm

The link for “the all-encompassing religion of Christianity” is broken.

- Jimmy Maher

July 22, 2023 at 5:21 pm

Hmm… working for me.

- Leo Vellés

July 23, 2023 at 5:20 pm

Last friday, for 30 minutes or so, your page was broken. I almost wrote that the link was broken, but every link was broken. Even if I refresh this page, it get me an error and couldn’t reload it. But it was just a matter of waiting, after a while everything returned to work just fine. I am sure that was what was happening to Paul

- Jimmy Maher

July 24, 2023 at 6:05 am

Yes, the server went down because of too much traffic. (Diablo is a very popular game.) I’ve upgraded to a beefier VPS. I hope such problems are now in the past.

- Simon N Goodwin

July 22, 2023 at 6:17 pm

Great stuff as ever. One typo:

“monsters of varius types” -> “monsters of various types”

…though placeholder terms like ‘various’ and ‘several’ were sensibly banned from reviews, when I worked for Crash. I think you just mean “monsters”. If the variations deserve mention, call them out. It’s not as if you’ve a hard word-limit, thankfully.

- Ishkur

July 23, 2023 at 9:00 am

While it’s appropriate to call Diablo a Roguelike, it’s also appropriate to call it a new genre where you could call everything that came after a Diablolike.

Included among this list is Dungeon Siege, Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, Path of Exile, Sacred, Torchlight, Emberheart, Divinity. Not all of these franchises had procedurally generated maps and dungeons, but they all contain that slot-machine addictiveness of grinding for rare/epic/legendary loot drops and killing everything that moves to advance in level.

Diablo marks the arrival of the Action RPG, where real-time click spamming replaced careful turn-based strategery. While it did not invent the concept (it arguably goes all the way back to the NES’ Zelda franchise), it basically spelled the death knell of the classic CRPG as it existed before then, and which carries on today in titles like The Witcher and Elder Scrolls. Less stats, more combat.

- IJMC

July 24, 2023 at 4:14 pm

> slot-machine addictiveness of grinding for rare/epic/legendary loot drops

… but that aspect is already present in Rogue, Hack, etc. Not really new in Diablo.

- Nate

July 23, 2023 at 4:17 pm

Interesting, I had a friend really into this and it was a short excursion on his laptop during business trips. Sort of a precursor to the FtP mobile games today.

I haven’t heard of this gaming system. Maybe another name for the SNES?

“the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Entertainment System”

- Nikolai Kondrashov

July 23, 2023 at 9:18 pm

I have encountered Diablo randomly on a friend’s computer, and played it late into the night, unable to stop. But since I didn’t have my own PC for a while yet, it didn’t stick.

Later I got to play Divine Divinity together with my future wife, and enjoyed it greatly (ignoring the boring ending). Afterwards I found it was considered to be a Diablo-like, which I think doesn’t do it justice, as it has more character overall – in art, music, NPCs, and story. No random levels either, which makes it better (and I love me a good rogue-like).

Still later I played Diablo III for a while, and indeed it was very well made too, but ultimately seemed pointless to me.

- Alex

July 24, 2023 at 5:09 am

Strangely, Divine Divinity is a game I never grow tired of. There is something special to it that I never felt in any other Action-RPG before. This is especially remarkable when you watch this documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZF_cP_oLH4. It is clearly stated that the gameplay was only implemented because of the publishers wish. I suppose a lot of the Diablo-Clones that followed the original were just made out of commercial reasons.

Regarding the old story “Diablo killed the classical RPG”. I first wanted to argue this, but then there is something true to it in the long run when observing the development of the mainstream for the last 10 years or so, especially when it comes to playing online.

- gamer indreams

July 25, 2023 at 12:30 am

Diablo didn’t kill the classical RPG as a popular game genre. It’s just that, at the beginning of computers, the kind of person who owned a computer liked that sort of game. As computers became more common, more accessible RPGs (real time, pretty, pickup and play) became more popular than the classical ones. As games became more expensive to make, it became too risky to spend 1 million dollars! (ultima vii) on a classical RPG that could sell 10k units than a FPS which could sell 100k.
Ironically, it feels like every single game in the world is now a RPG with real time combat including the most popular F2P ones.

- CdrJameson

August 2, 2023 at 12:07 pm

The classical RPG was already fatally struggling, but perhaps Diablo’s success actually enabled Baldur’s Gate to resurrected it shortly afterwards.

- Jeff M Thomas

July 24, 2023 at 8:26 pm

I too tried to play the original Diablo again some years ago and got quickly bored. It’s no fault of the game, it’s as polished as the article says, but the Action RPG genre which it helped (if not singlehandedly) created has improved itself through the generations. Neverwinter Nights, Titan Quest, Torchlight, and so on. It’s just hard to go back to the basics again.

- Alex

July 25, 2023 at 4:38 am

Good comment! When playing a game like “Shadow of Mordor”, where adding stats seems totally artificial to me, I think somebody took a wrong turn in game development.

- Adamantyr

July 26, 2023 at 3:07 am

I remember picking this up at Costco. (Back when they actually carried PC games)

At the time, a large group of us were impatiently waiting for the Ultima Online beta, so Diablo was a welcome distraction to keep us busy. We didn’t even mind the visceral mindless endless combat, instead it even had us wondering if UO would measure up in terms of fun.

I haven’t played any of the Diablo’s past the 2nd one, though. All of them are always the most fun when playing with other people, and I agree that the relentless darkness and gothic dreariness of the story and setting wears on you.

- f2bnp

July 26, 2023 at 12:08 pm

Had a lot of fun reading this one Jimmy! Just a small correction, Warcraft II Battle.net Edition shipped in 1999, after Starcraft and perhaps even after Brood War (Starcraft’s expansion pack), so it’s definitely not the second game to feature Battle.net!

- Jimmy Maher

July 26, 2023 at 1:11 pm

Thanks!

- Thomas

July 29, 2023 at 10:09 pm

Diablo 3 abandons the horror tone in favor of an action movie romp, although a few creepy things still happen. The villains are a little goofy and ham it up. Belial and Azmodan kind of remind me of Skeletor and Cobra Commander. This direction was very unpopular with the fan base and Diablo 4 has gone back to grim-dark.

Realms of the Haunting
August 4, 2023

I like to imagine that Realms of the Haunting, Gremlin Interactive’s bizarre 1996 mélange of first-person shooter, point-and-click adventure, and interactive movie, was the brainchild of Ian and Nigel, students at Thomas Hughes Secondary School in Stow-on-the-Water.

Ian was sitting in a sheltered nook after school one day, sketching notes for a Call of Cthulhu scenario, when Nigel, the local football star, came barreling down the lane on his bicycle. Spotting his nerdy classmate, he dismounted in his customary way, by leaping off the still-moving bike, whose forward progress would have been arrested by Ian’s legs if he hadn’t swung them hastily aside. Nigel then joined his mode of transportation in marching up to see what Ian was up to, not without provoking some consternation from the latter, who wasn’t at all sure how this exchange was going to go. “What’cha up to, dude?”

Ian pushed his spectacles further up his nose. Even under the best of circumstances, he never quite knew how to respond to Nigel’s mix of Americanisms and Cockney, which he found almost incomprehensible at times. But he rallied. “Well, it’s sort of a scenario for a game…”

“A game? What kind of game?”

“Call of Cthulhu. It’s sort of a horror game. You get together with some mates, and one of you is sort of the referee. The others are all investigators who learn about this creepy old mystery. First they find this old bunch of letters — letters between some sort of cultist and his girlfriend…” Ian trailed off. He could sense that this was already going horribly wrong.

But it appeared that Nigel had heard only the words “horror” and “girlfriend.” “Dude, I know what you mean!” he cried. “Like Duke Nukem! You know that one? You can shoot blokes in the head with a shotgun, and the blood goes everywhere! And you meet strippers! You can pay’em to get out their titties for you.”

Ian did not know Duke Nukem. His father, a line engineer for British Telecom, was possessed of a streak of patriotism that precluded the purchase of any American personal computer. He insisted the family could get by perfectly well with their homegrown Acorn Archimedes, which advertised its stolid Britishness by means of its incompatibility with everything else. Still, Ian dearly wanted this conversation not to get onto the wrong track, so he nodded, whilst pushing his glasses up once again. “Yes… sort of…”

Any sign of hesitation was lost on Nigel. “Dude, we could work together on it!”

“Um, okay…”

“So, maybe you start in a haunted house — you’ve got to start somewhere, right? — but then it just keeps getting bigger and bigger! You find, like, one of those snakehole thingies and go to other dimensions and stuff, with wickeder and wickeder monsters to fight. And there’ll be a bunch of bosses to fight too. A bloke who’s dressed up like a doctor, like he wants to do human experimentation on you and all, and a creepy evil priest in sunglasses –”

“Wait… why sunglasses?”

“Why not?” shrugged Nigel. He was in the habit of dwelling on the abstract cool in life, not on the details.

Ian felt his blood stirring despite himself. Maybe he should think bigger for once. “Maybe you could sort of go to ancient Egypt,” he piped up cautiously. He’d always loved those ancient-archaelogy picture books his dad collected, so much so that he’d been begging for a trip to Egypt for years. “Just imagine the sort of interesting puzzles we could have around the pyramids…”

“Sure, sure, dude,” said Nigel. All things were possible in his world. “But it’s got to be bigger than that even, you know? I know… maybe in the end you’ve got to go right down into Hell and kill Satan! That would be awesome! I’m sure no one’s ever made a game where you’ve got to kill Satan.”

Again, his words set Ian thinking. They were reading Paradise Lost in his honors literature course this semester, and The Divine Comedy was waiting in the wings. And then he’d read this less respectable thing called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail last summer. “We could sort of pull a lot of the story right out of the Bible and Milton and Dante,” he said. “Sort of build on them. Even have the Garden of Eden in there. And Knights Templar. You’ve always got to have Knights Templar.”

Nigel looked unusually pensive for a moment, so much so that Ian almost thought he was giving serious consideration to the advantages and pitfalls of building a new mythology on the scaffolding of older ones. But he was soon disabused of that notion. “We’re going to need a chick,” said Nigel contemplatively.

“Sure, alright,” said Ian. “She can be sort of your companion, who’ll know a lot more than you do about all the mythology, and can sort of help to explain…”

But again, Nigel had only caught a word or two. “Companion, what?” he leered. “I like the sound of that.”

“Say,” said Ian suddenly, “have you been in the computer lab lately?” When Nigel unsurprisingly shook his head no, he rushed on. “They’ve got this computer version of Connections there. Have you seen that one on the telly?” Another shake of the head. “It’s a show about how everything in history is interrelated –”

“Inter- what? Dude, what are you on about?”

Ian decided to elide further details. “Anyway, the point is that they put the host of the show right in the computer game. I mean, the real host. We could do the same — have real actors in the game.”

Nigel looked dubious. “How will that make it cooler?”

“Well, it would make it seem more real… sort of more believable with real people.” Nigel still looked doubtful. So Ian tried another tack. “Just think how cool all those bosses would look as real people, sort of like they’re in a real horror movie. And then to play your companion we can get a real chick,” he said, pronouncing the word as naturally as he could, like an earnest foreigner trying out his French on the natives.

Nigel was sold. “Right, then, we gotta have that too,” he said. “We’ll look like wankers if we don’t.”

And so it went. Through the sylvan afternoon, Ian and Nigel raised their castle in the air to ever loftier heights, adding battlements and wings and dungeons until the whole edifice teetered in the merest hint of a breeze. When they were finally winding down, Nigel got unexpectedly thoughtful again. “Maybe it’s a bit much,” he mused, expressing a sense of moderation which neither Ian nor any of the adults in his life had ever suspected might lurk within him. “Maybe you shouldn’t actually kill Satan after all…”

Ian nodded. They had gotten rather carried away, hadn’t they? Obviously they would have to rein things in a little. Or a lot.

“We’re gonna need some material for the sequel, right, mate?” Nigel grinned. “And anyway, we got to leave Marilyn Manson a Satan to sing about. Am I right, what?” he queried with a friendly fist jab.

Ian wasn’t sure whether he was right or not, but he could always see the wisdom in restraint; his whole life to date had been a study in it. “Okay, we have enough already without Satan. Maybe too much. But if it does get to be too much, we could always just sort of say it was all in someone’s imagination at the end, like in the last episode of St. Elsewhere.” That last reference spoke to how comfortable he was beginning to feel with his rambunctious design partner. His mother had an eccentric fondness for soapy American television which she’d imparted to her son, but normally he would die before sharing this passion with any of his peers.

Nigel was unfazed, if also uninterested. “Sure, dude. Truth.” He held out his hand for a fist bump, which Ian navigated with only a little awkwardness. It seemed they were now fast friends, but it was also time for Ian to get home for dinner; his mother did scold so when he was late. Nigel nodded his acquiescence, digging his bicycle out of the bushes where it had landed a couple of hours before. “Check you later, mate,” he said as he swung one leg over the saddle.

“Yes… mate” said Ian. “Our game’s going to be… awesome.” He smiled to himself as Nigel rode off into the sunset. He rather liked the feel of the word on his tongue.

One week later, the boys sent their design document to Gremlin Interactive.

Fair warning: this article spoils the “shocking” denouement of Realms of the Haunting as well as some other plot details.

Alas, the real origin story of Realms of the Haunting is somewhat more prosaic. The game’s individual pieces mark it as a thoroughgoing product of its time; it’s only their amalgamation in one place that makes it so bat-guano insane.

The project began when Gremlin Interactive joined three-quarters of the other games studios on the planet in beating the bushes for a DOOM-like 2.5D engine in the wake of that game’s extraordinary success. They wound up sourcing the “True3D” engine — which was actually no more true 3D than DOOM had been — from Tony Crowther, a legendary British games programmer whose career’s beginning predated Gremlin’s own 1984 founding. Crowther also offered Gremlin two ideas for a game to make with his engine. One was a “generic monster game,” as he puts it, while the other had a “devil theme.” Gremlin chose the latter. So far, so DOOM-like, in theme as well as technology.

But here’s where it starts to get weird. Gremlin, virtually alone among the many studios working with engines like this one, thought that theirs could be twisted to suit the needs of a puzzle-based adventure game instead of being strictly a vehicle for first-person carnage. And the odd thing is, they were kind of right. After production had already started on Realms of the Haunting, another team at Gremlin used the True3D engine to create a non-violent comedy adventure in the LucasArts tradition, to surprisingly good effect. Normality’s ramshackle 2.5D visual aesthetic proved a good fit with its cock-eyed protagonist’s stoner-dude perspective on the world, while its puzzle design was as buttoned down as the rest of the affair was comfortably casual. Despite being started after Realms of the Haunting, it came out months before it in 1996. Unfortunately, it garnered few sales. One senses that, in addition to being confused by the look of the thing, gamers just didn’t quite get its jokes. Nor did it help that the market was flooded with bigger, more expensive adventures from American studios that year, the last in which the adventure genre was still widely perceived as one of the industry’s AAA standard bearers.

Through it all, the Realms project trundled on, determined to be both a kick-ass first-person shooter and a brain-tickling adventure game. Writer Paul Green wanted the story to be “epic.” And indeed, it just kept growing and growing. Then someone got the bright idea to jump on yet another indelibly mid-1990s trend: the “full-motion-video” game, incorporating clips of real actors filmed in front of green screens, which backgrounds were filled in after the fact with conventional computer graphics. Gremlin hired Bright Light Studios, an outside video-production house, to cast and carry out the shoots, then spent much time and money massaging the end results into their Frankenstein’s monster of a game. By the time it came out in Britain, about a week before the Christmas of 1996, Realms of the Haunting had spent a good two and a half years in development — one year longer than had been intended — and had become by far the most expensive game Gremlin had ever made.

Programmer Greg Staples, engine architect Tony Crowther, and writer and designer Paul Green.

And what did they get for their money? Oh, my… where to begin? With the beginning, I suppose…

The very first impression Realms of the Haunting gives is of reaches exceeding grasps, establishing a leitmotif that will persist throughout. It opens with an epigraph that’s attributed only to “anonymous”: “Goodness reflects the light and evil bears the seed of all darkness. These are mirrors of the soul, reflections of the mind. Choose well.” This reads like pieces of other, better epigraphs cut and pasted together into a meaningless word salad. Yet it actually serves its purpose of being a harbinger of what is to come in two separate ways. Realms of the Haunting itself will play like chunks of other, better games cut and pasted together. And everyone you meet in the game will talk just like that epigraph is written.

Next we have the bravura eight-minute opening movie, in which we meet our protagonist Adam Randall, in the back of a taxi on his way to answer a mysterious summons to a deserted house out in the middle of nowhere — a visit he’s decided to make in the middle of a dark and stormy night, of course, as you do in these situations. When I first heard Adam speak, I thought it strange that Gremlin had opted to cast an American actor in the role, given that the actual text of the script shows every indication he ought to be British; the summons to the haunted house came from a self-purported colleague of his recently deceased father, who we’re told was “the pastor in a Cornish village.” But then I started noticing oddities in Adam’s vowels and in his “Ts” that didn’t fit with an American accent either. In the end, I decided he must be Canadian. (Hey, at least that puts him inside the Commonwealth!) But then, after I was finished with the game, I watched Gremlin’s short “making of” video, and all became clear: the actor was a Brit putting on an American accent. But… why, especially when it doesn’t make any sense in the context of the plot? I can only conclude that Gremlin believed they’d have a better chance of cracking the all-important American market with an American-sounding protagonist — plot fidelity be damned. Anyway, not much else about the plot will wind up making much sense. Why should this?

The actor in question is one David Tuomi, who has managed the neat trick of leaving no digital footprint whatsoever in all the years since. It’s as if he was immaculately created just to play Adam Randall, then returned to the dust from which he had been made as soon as shooting wrapped. To this day, his profile on The Internet Movie Database has exactly one entry: Realms of the Haunting. He doesn’t even enjoy the cult celebrity of someone like Dean Erickson, whose acting résumé is almost as scanty and similar long-abandoned, but who still pops up to give an interview from time to time about that one time he got to play Gabriel Knight. No, David Tuomi is just… gone. It seems he took his right to be forgotten seriously.

This is made still weirder by the fact that he really isn’t that bad here. He may not be Laurence Olivier, but he’s a good-looking, likable young man who doesn’t palpitate with nervousness when he speaks his lines, which puts him well ahead of Dean Erickson and many of his other peers in the full-motion-video field. The problems with this game’s storytelling aren’t down to him.

In fact, for all of its haunted-house clichés, the opening movie as a whole strikes a pensive note that raises the hopes of a writerly type like me. The Adam we meet in the back of that taxi is haunted by metaphorical rather than literal demons; he’s filled with regrets about all of the things he never said to his father, all of the times he could have picked up the phone to call him but didn’t. This sense of guilt is joined by other, bitterer sentiments: “He was well-liked. Had time for everyone. Except his son.” (Those might just be the most cogent lines in a script with very few of them.) You can almost begin to believe that, like all the best classic horror, this story will really be about the fears and worries and secret shames that are part and parcel of being a human being, those occasional dark nights of the soul that keep even those of us who don’t believe in ghosts wide awake from time to time. But never fear, would-be demon blasters: the game will never strike a note like this one again, and Adam will never again betray any sign of having an inner life that goes beyond the exigencies of the moment.

Adam pays the taxi driver and enters the house. As he does so, the doors shut behind him with a crash, like the sealing of a tomb. He doesn’t so much as twitch in response to this event. On the one hand, this is a typical discordance of these sorts of productions: the David Tuomi acting in front of a green screen had no slamming doors to react to, because both the sight and the sound of them were painted in later. But it also establishes a precedent in another way. Adam will stumble through everything to come comically unfazed by it all. Even now, at the outset, he just shrugs as he wanders the corridors of a house with glowing pentagrams splashed over the walls and doors, portraits that blink at him with livid red eyes, a fly-encrusted suit of armor that appears to contain a human corpse, decapitated animal bodies strewn randomly about the place, and a typewriter that’s typing “We live!” over and over again of its own accord. Unflappable doesn’t begin to describe this guy. “A rat. No head,” he mutters to himself, and moves on. In the case of the typewriter, he confines his observations to, “Ink ribbon’s missing.” Right. Better buy a new one in the morning, once I’m through with all this tedious business of demon blasting. Which Adam will soon be doing with laconic aplomb, mowing through his enemies like Duke Nukem — until it’s time for a cut scene, at which point he reverts to being the slim, harmless-looking guy we met in the taxi.

Could this library look any more Lovecraftian?

The aforementioned demons show up only after you’ve solved a puzzle or two and found your way into the house’s library, that natural repository of secrets. In the best tradition of a Call of Cthulhu scenario, you find a clutch of 70-year-old letters between a cultist and his paramour, talking about some ominous ritual they’re attempting to enact. And, even more disconcertingly, you meet Adam’s father’s ghost, entwined in chains that make him look like a parody of Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol.

Then you open the inevitable secret door that’s hidden behind the bookcase, and the first demon comes running at you. With head-snapping speed, we’ve gone from pensive psychological horror to Gothic horror to a vaguely Lovecraftian story to a B-grade zombie flick.

And so it will go for the next couple of dozen hours. The designers’ response to any and all suggestions seems to have been, “Sure! Put it in there!” Realms of the Haunting is a study in excess, a game that wants so very badly to be all things to all people, evincing all of the sweaty desperation in pursuit of that goal that Adam so noticeably fails to display. It just goes on and on and on and on. Most games that tell pre-scripted, set-piece stories have around four or five chapters; this one has twenty.

Sometimes, however, less is more. Perhaps more so than any other game I’ve played, Realms of the Haunting descends linearly in quality — in all measures of quality, from writing to production values to gameplay — as it unspools from beginning to end.

That said, the descent doesn’t happen at the same pace along these different vectors. It’s the story that goes off the rails first. The central problem here is all too typical in videogames: stakes inflation. It’s not enough for this to be a tale of a father and son’s sins and redemption, not even enough for the fate of a family or a town or even a nation to hinge on Adam’s actions. No, the fate of the entire world — no, make that the fate of the entire universe! — has to be borne on the fashionably padded shoulders of Adam Randall.

The flames of Hell are so bright, Florentine’s got to wear shades.

It soon becomes clear that Paul Green has no idea how storytelling works at the most fundamental level. Instead of giving us one central villain to hate, he dilutes the impact with a whole rogue’s gallery of weirdos whose relationships to one another are almost impossible to keep track of: the creepy priest who seems to have been modeled on Rasputin, the guy who runs around in a doctor’s outfit, the guy dressed up like he’s auditioning for a Sam Spade flick who’s always flipping through a deck of cards and giggling like a low-rent Joker. If this was a Nintendo-style level-based videogame, these folks might work as a series of bosses. But as an interactive story told primarily through about 90 minutes of live-action video, it never gives anybody enough screen time to make you care. It’s not a problem of the acting; like David Tuomi, all of the actors perform what’s being asked of them serviceably enough, intoning their lines like the Shakespearean creatures of the British theater scene they probably were. It’s a problem of the writing.

This fellow looks like an evil Tex Murphy.

Your allies are no better. Again, there’s just too many angels and archangels and God knows what else running around, all talking in symbolic gibberish that brings to mind the game’s horrid opening “quotation” and never telling you what you actually want to know. At one point, one of them apologizes for “speaking in metaphors” — which is hilarious because absolutely everybody in this game speaks in nothing but metaphors, and terrible mixed ones at that, until you want to pull out your big old shotgun, point it at their foreheads, and demand a straight fricking answer, for once. The would-be drama has a way of shooting its gravitas in the foot at every turn. Your guardian angel Hawk, for example, runs around in an artfully crumpled tee-shirt that makes him look like a model in a Gap circular. Another character, one who has something or other to do with the Knights Templar, is named “Aelf” — pronounced as far as I can tell just like “Alf,” which always sets me giggling to myself about cat-loving anthropomorphic aliens.

The character you spend the most time with is Rebecca, a fetching lass in a chic pantsuit more appropriate for a day behind a desk in the City than a night in a haunted house. (She’s played by one Emma Powell, who unlike David Tuomi went on to a long and fruitful career as a supporting and voice actress in movies, television, and videogames.) Our avatar of indifference Adam comes across her in the library at the end of Chapter 2, inexplicably just sitting there, and, true to form, never bothers to ask her how she ended up there. For the bulk of the game thereafter, she serves as his sounding board and advisor as he wanders about, offering hints and commentary on the environment and adding a little spark of life to what would otherwise be a decidedly lonely experience. In that sense, she’s not a bad addition at all.

Emma Powell and David Tuomi

Indeed, the gameplay generally declines less precipitously than the writing — with one caveat. That comes in form of the interface, which will first flabbergast you with its inscrutability and then annoy you like a dull foot ache for all the hours to come. Some of this game’s confusions for the modern player exist in many first-person shooters that came out between 1993 and 1998, including to some extent even (un-modded) DOOM itself. These were the years before the control schemes that have been the standard for the last quarter-century had quite stabilized.

Still, Realms of the Haunting’s problems in this department extend well beyond the lack of mouse-look or the unfamiliar default key mappings. The adventuring interface is fiddly almost beyond belief; everything you try to do is ten times harder than it would be if you were doing it in real life. Using or examining an object entails pressing “I” to bring up the inventory screen, then finding its stamp-sized icon among the four separately sorted categories of junk you’re carrying: “general items,” “weapons,” “mysterious or magical items,” or “documents.” (No, it isn’t always immediately obvious what the game considers to belong in what category.) For some reason, all of this is allowed to fill no more than a quarter of the screen. So, if it’s a document you’re interested in reading, you get to do so by dragging it around inside a small window; it’s like reading a book through a telescope. If you want to try to use an object on something in the world, you first have to place it in Adam’s left hand — his left hand, mind you; the right is reserved for weapons — then exit the inventory system completely before you can click on the target. This is so annoyingly convoluted a process that I’m going to tarnish my cred as a hardcore adventurer by strongly suggesting that you play this game, if you choose to do so, in “easy” adventuring mode, where it automatically uses the correct object in the correct place, as long as you have it in your inventory. What’s truly bizarre about all this is that Normality, the other Gremlin game that was built with the True3D engine, has a fast, elegant popup radial menu for examining and using objects. What on earth were these developers thinking?

You can almost always tell whether the makers of any given game have given it to anyone to actually play before they released it. These ones most definitively did not, as evidenced by the constant unnecessary niggles. When you find a new key, for example, you never know where it will appear among the twenty others you’re already carrying around with you. Why not dispose of the ones that have already served their purpose?

Still, if you can get past the torturous interface, the first chapters, when you’re still exploring the house itself, acquit themselves fairly well. The shooting parts serve their purpose well enough, while the puzzling parts can be surprisingly satisfying, revolving mostly around finding keys that let you open up more and more of the house for exploration. Realms of the Haunting is at its best at this stage, just about making you believe that its chocolate-and-peanut-butter combination of genres has something to recommend it after all. And, while I would by no means call it scary in a “I don’t want to play this alone” kind of way, its aesthetic does qualify as enjoyably creepy.

It’s only after you leave the house to start dimension-hopping about seven chapters in that things begin to fall apart on the gameplay front as well. An engine that can portray shadowy hallways to fairly good effect is less suited to conveying the splendor of ancient Egypt, the beauty of the Garden of Eden (yes, you really do travel there), or the horrors of Hell (yes, you really do travel there as well). All of these environments are much bigger, sprawling places than the house, with unfortunately less inside of them to see and do, a sure sign that constraints of budget and time were catching up with the designers’ ambitions. Even the normal spaces become hard to find your way around in; you are provided with helpful maps of most of them, but consulting them involves scrolling them around in that absurd little inventory window, a process so excruciating that you won’t want to bother until you’re truly at wit’s end. And then there are the deliberate mazes… oh, Lord, save us from the mazes in this game, which are scarier than any of its demons. There are three of them, extended, hair-pulling monstrosities all.

The game gives you maps of most of the larger areas, which is very kind and progressive of it. But then it makes you peer at them through a pointlessly tiny window. And every time you bring a map up again, it resets the view to the top left. The cruel irony here is that the full document seems very close to the size of your monitor screen. This is not rocket science, Gremlin.

As the game wears on, the puzzles become increasingly surreal, to say the least. For example, you run through one of the mazes collecting little brains to shove into a giant brain machine, apropos of nothing that comes before or after. And you’ll spend an inordinate amount of time constructing a bong so one of the angelic beings you meet can toke up properly. (I assume that all of the obvious jokes about what the folks at Gremlin were doing when they made this game have already been told, so I won’t bother.) If you’ve made it this far without ragequitting, you must long since have adopted Adam’s attitude. Just shrug your shoulders and go with it.

It gradually becomes clear that significant chunks of the story are simply missing in action, presumably due to budget shortfalls or space limitations; Realms of the Haunting shipped on four CDs as it was. At one point, Adam and Rebecca stand on the verge of a dramatic showdown with one of the ceaselessly rotating lazy Susan of villains. After everyone has engaged in the usual speechifying that precedes such things, the screen fades to black, a scream sounds, and you flex your mouse hand and get ready for battle… and suddenly Adam is in a prison cell, while Rebecca has somehow escaped and is trying to rescue him from outside the door. The game never explains how any of this happened. Just go with it.

At long last, you get to the very end and save the universe/multiverse/whatever. And then… you join a straitjacketed Adam in a mental hospital, as he finishes telling his tale to a skeptical doctor and a nurse with a syringe at the ready. Oh, my. You can almost hear the writers slapping one another on the back for being so clever. At least now we know why one of the villains was dressed up like a doctor. And perhaps, come to think of it, why we’ve never heard another peep from David Tuomi…

The dominant impression Realms of the Haunting leaves you with is that of bits that don’t fit together. This applies as much at the most granular levels of detail — as in the way that Adam’s reactions never quite seem to be in line with what is actually happening to him — as it is in the big picture. Rebecca, for instance, shows up in the movie bits, and is on-hand to offer commentary in the adventure-game bits, but simply doesn’t exist in the shooter bits. Likewise, we never see the veritable Fort Knox of weaponry Adam is carrying around with him when we see David Tuomi portraying him in the movie bits. Of course, Realms of the Haunting is hardly the first or the last game to hand-wave away inconvenient details like these. If it succeeded on at least one of its three levels — whether as a shooter, a puzzle-driven adventure game, or a well-scripted interactive movie — I’d be more inclined to overlook such inconsistencies. As it is, though, it’s failing everywhere by the time you make it halfway through: the shooter bits have become samey and janky, the adventure bits samey and illogical, the story samey and flat-out incomprehensible. This game is the inversion of the reviewer’s cliché about the creation under review being “more than the sum of its parts.” As bad as these parts are, the whole manages to be less than their sum. Every part of the game actively diminishes every other part.

And yet as hot messes go, this one is as intriguing as they come. Whatever else you can say about Realms of the Haunting, there’s never been another game like it. It’s amazing to think that a purportedly responsible management team ever approved such an outlandish monstrosity as this one. In fact, there’s a melancholy aspect to that: long shot that it was to get made even in 1996, it’s even harder to imagine this game appearing any later in the decade. For as gaming moved into the last third of the 1990s, genres were calcifying into fixed categories with inviolate sets of expectations. Soon absolutely no one would be taking fliers on crazy cross-genre experiments like this one anymore.

To know why, we need only look to Realms of the Haunting’s commercial performance. Its British release date was not ideal, coming too late to reap the proper benefit of the Christmas buying season. And the circumstances of its American release, in the dog days of March of 1997 under the imprint of an unenthusiastic Interplay Entertainment, were no more auspicious. Yet a game with true mass appeal can overcome such factors — as, for example, Diablo did when it was shipped to American stores between the Christmas and New Years of 1996. Unfortunately, Realms of the Haunting was the antithesis of Diablo, being as clunky, fiddly, and scattered as Blizzard’s juggernaut was frictionless, polished, and laser-targeted. As Computer Gaming World put it in an (overly) generous 4.5 star review, Gremlin’s game had natural appeal to “action gamers looking for some adventure” and “adventure gamers looking for some action.” But just how many people meeting these descriptions were there? Not very many at all, it would appear. Realms of the Haunting was dead on arrival, selling less than 500 units in its first week on the market in Britain. Its high cost combined with its abject commercial failure had much to do with Gremlin’s subsequent collapse, which resulted in the company being bought out by the burgeoning French giant Infogrames in 1999.

Even today, however, some of the delusions of grandeur that allowed this game to be made still persist. Steve McKevitt, Gremlin’s former communications chief, blames its failure on “a backlash against full-motion video.” He claims that the developers “got just about everything right: the script, subject matter, story line, pacing. It was years ahead of its time. More The Last of Us than Quake.” Uh, no, Steve. Just no.

Yet, easy though it is to make fun of, Realms of the Haunting is a hard game to totally hate. It’s just so earnest in pursuit of its lofty ambitions, so fixated on being epic, man. How can you hate something that’s trying this hard to be the best game ever? Chalk it up as a last artifact of an older games industry that frequently had more vision than competence, of a time when budgets were small enough to take a chance on something crazy and just see what happened. In the years to come, both of those equations would be reversed. The result would be tighter, more polished experiences, but very few games that dared to throw out all the rules, whether wisely or unwisely. Instead of logical shorthands to bracket discussions, genres would begin to look like the straitjacket Adam Randall is wearing when we catch our last glimpse of him.

And it’s for that reason really that I’ve chosen to write about this game, even though I’m not at all in the habit of writing about bad games that didn’t sell well and didn’t have much influence on the field. There’s something kind of beautiful about Realms of the Haunting’s passionate incompetence. I’m not usually an adherent of the “so bad it’s good” school of criticism, but I can almost make an exception in the case of this game. Many critics before me have argued that it would have been a far better game if it had been content to stay inside the haunted mansion and leave off with the apocalyptic fever dreams. They’re almost certainly right, but at the same time I’m not sure I would be talking about it today had anyone involved with it understood the virtues of restraint. Realms of the Haunting is a final holdover from a messier, more freewheeling time, when everyone was still making it all up as they went along. And so, having paid our last respects to the old ways, we can now march onward, into a future that could never give us anything as amateurish, ill-considered, excessive, and lovable as this.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

(Sources: the book A Gremlin in the Works by Mark James Hardisty; Retro Gamer 24 and 108; Computer Gaming World of January 1997 and May 1997; Edge of July 1996; PC Format of December 1996; PC Power of December 1996. Online sources include Sascha Kimmel’s Realms of the Haunting fan site, Jdanddiet’s interview with the aforementioned Sascha Kimmel, Retro Video Gamer’s interview with Tony Crowther, and a retrospective of the game at The Genesis Temple.

Realms of the Haunting is available as a digital download from GOG.com.)

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- Whomever

August 4, 2023 at 5:14 pm

You know, I figured Infogrames was a typo, but no that really was their name apparently, complete with the “m”. Just for everyone else who googles :-)

- Busca

August 4, 2023 at 6:50 pm

And that’s the G-rated end result of their name-finding process. According to Wikipedia:

“The founders wanted to christen the company Zboub Système (which can be approximately translated to Dick System in English), but were dissuaded by their legal counsel. According to Bonnell in a TV interview, they then used a mix-and-match computer program to suggest other names, one of which was “Infogramme”: a portmanteau of the French words “informatique” (information technology) and “programme” (computer program). The final choice, Infogrames, was a slightly modified version of that suggestion.”

- Peter Golgo

August 4, 2023 at 5:29 pm

Fun article about a game I desperately wanted to play back in the day, due to ads that were awesome to my still not fully-formed brain, but luckily my fervent wish was never fulfilled.

Two suggestions:

1) Anyway, not much else about the plot will winding up making much sense. -> …will wind up making…

2) He may not be Lawrence Olivier, -> Laurence, not Lawrence

- Jimmy Maher

August 4, 2023 at 5:38 pm

Thanks!

- Jason Lefkowitz

August 4, 2023 at 7:41 pm

One of my very first jobs was doing QA for the CD-ROM version of Connections, which was published by the Discovery Channel’s then-new-ish interactive unit, Discovery Multimedia. I spent a lot of time staring at heavily compressed video of James Burke for that project. (Never got to meet the man in person, though. Sigh.)

I had no idea that long-forgotten CD-ROM provided any inspiration for something as legendary as Realms of the Haunting. I feel like I owe the world an apology.

- Jimmy Maher

August 4, 2023 at 8:05 pm

No need. I made that bit up. ;)

Connections was interesting game. I considered writing an article about it, but found it just a bit too awkward to be really fun, and ultimately didn’t know that I had that much beyond that to really say about it.

- Ross

August 6, 2023 at 2:44 am

I know your pain. He was giving a talk in DC when I was 17 and me and some friends were on our way there when the older brother who was driving rear ended a Porsche.
About 20 years later, he gave a talk at the facility where I work, but as I was a contractor rather than an employee, I wasn’t allowed to go.

- Jaina

August 4, 2023 at 8:32 pm

oh, Lord, save us from the the mazes ”

Too many mazes, too many the

- Jimmy Maher

August 5, 2023 at 7:23 am

Thanks!

- ZUrlocker

August 5, 2023 at 12:00 am

Great reporting on this game. The concept does sound intriguing (I’m a sucker for Lovecraft-style stories) but combining a shooter with all these other things does seem like a bridge too far.

- Sarah Walker

August 5, 2023 at 7:20 am

Sad how quickly Gremlin went off the boil following a very successful 1995. Maybe they should have stuck to the sports games?

(I still can’t figure out what they were doing buying DMA Design around this time)

- Steve Metzler

August 5, 2023 at 3:20 pm

Hmm. I think because I really like some B movies if they have an interesting premise, like Phantom of the Paradise, that I was somehow able to overlook most of the flaws that Jimmy mentioned and gave it a 4.5-star rating in my review.

Yes, the battles did get tedious towards the end, and that maze with the brains was dreadful. But I thought it was a pretty good mix of tough adventure puzzles mixed with decent fighting. Most of the tough bosses could only be taken out with magical weapons, You had to save and restore A LOT though, because ammo was very scarce and so you had to replay some battles if you thought you used more than you needed to.

Overall, this is one of my fav action/adventure games of all time. As Jimmy says, your mileage may vary :-)

- Asaf

August 5, 2023 at 11:08 pm

“Why not?” shrugged Ian. He was in the habit of dwelling on the abstract cool in life, not on the details.

I may have got your characters mixed here, but shouldn’t this be Nigel speaking?

Anyway, I really loved this game, warts and all. It’s obviously flawed in so many ways, but it’s so over the top bat shit crazy, that I find it really endearing. It’s kind of like the bastard love child of Phantasmagoria 2 and Gabriel Knight 3, in that manner.

- Jimmy Maher

August 6, 2023 at 9:04 am

My mistake. ;) Thanks!

- P-Tux7

August 6, 2023 at 3:53 am

Is it incorrect to call the “Zelda” games (starting with Ocarina of Time ib 1998) action-adventure, in that they have both fighting and “use item x on object y” puzzles such as finding the Hookshot and using it to grapple on a tree to cross a gap? Of course, they’re still rather different than this game because they mostly eschew ranged weapons. And you know, I don’t really know if I’m even disproving your thesis about how “action-adventure games largely died off” because I don’t think a lot of games actually did copy the Zelda item-usage-on-world model. Of course, if one wants to be lax about the definition of “adventure” and “puzzles,” games like Minecraft and Terraria mix both fighting and problem-solving via a learnable, consistent set of item-object physics interactions.

- Sean Curtin

August 6, 2023 at 9:23 pm

“Adventure game” already has a different connotation in the context of console games and Japanese games, due to the use of the term there being derived from the influence of Atari’s Adventure rather than that of the original text-based Adventure. Both kinds of adventure games share the base elements of exploration, collection, and interaction, but the similarities beyond that are pretty tenuous.

- Matt J.

August 6, 2023 at 3:48 pm

Great article. I always love these gaming articles, but I especially enjoy reading about the games I never had the opportunity to play back in the day.

For those of you who are still morbidly curious to experience this game first-hand even after reading this article, it is currently on sale for 59 US pennies on Steam as of the time of this comment.

- John Witte

August 7, 2023 at 1:41 am

Jimmy, I actually bought the game back in 1999 when it was discounted and I actually thought it was a pretty decent game. Granted, I was in my late 20’s, and the PC market wasn’t quite as robust as it is now, so I suppose my choices were more limited back in the day. Believe it or not, I still have the 4 CD game sitting somewhere up in my attic.

I liked it enough that I eventually broke down and picked it up on GOG when they had it on sale for 79 cents a few years back. I actually installed it recently and tried to play around with it, but unfortunately the interface doesn’t seem very intuitive anymore.

Jimmy, thanks for your continual work on PC gaming history. You’re now getting a time period that is still very vivid in my memory and I appreciate all of the work that you do.

- WellTemperedClavier

August 10, 2023 at 1:19 am

This does seem like a really fascinating oddity. I remember being a teen in the late ’90s and reading about this whack-a-doodle Atari and NES games from the ’80s, marveling at how weird they were in comparison to the current crop of the industry.

But even though I didn’t quite appreciate it at the time, you still saw that kind of off-the-wall creativity in the industry of the ’90s, for the very reasons you say. I suppose it still exists in the indie scene, though I must confess I’m not terribly familiar with the games being released there.

Also, I really liked your alternate take on the game’s origins. I’d read an entire story about Ian and Nigel.