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The Prisoner 2

The Prisoner was a big sales success, at least by the standards of a small software house like Edu-Ware. Enough people were eager to believe in a vision of games as Art to embrace it despite its almost aggressively off-putting personality — or, perhaps, they were just desperate enough for new adventures that they were ready to put up with artistic aspirations as long they also had puzzles to solve. Regardless, the game played a crucial role in the company’s idealistic core mission, to bring quality educational software to this new generation of personal computers. The steady flow of profits from The Prisoner gave Edu-Ware, supported by Apple’s own efforts to define the Apple II as “the education computer,” time and resources to build a customer base of schools and engaged parents for titles like their Compu-Math and Algebra series.

Yet times were changing fast in software, and particularly in entertainment software. Even by just eighteen months after its release The Prisoner — with its sluggish all-BASIC implementation, its blocky, monochrome text or low-resolution graphics displays, and its photocopy/Ziploc-bag-based packaging — was beginning to look sadly amateurish in comparison with the latest extravaganzas from the likes of On-Line and Brøderbund. Edu-Ware therefore decided to remake their cash cow in a more polished, slicker, faster edition, with color and more and better graphics. Confusingly, they decided to call the new game The Prisoner 2, even though it was very much a remake rather than a sequel. Marketing never was Edu-Ware’s strong suit.

The new project reflected changing models of development, not only within a growing Edu-Ware but also within a growing software industry. The original had been cranked out by David Mullich in a furious six weeks of hacking. There was no separate design process; he simply designed as he coded, adding in whatever seemed cool and appropriate as it struck his fancy. By the time of The Prisoner 2, however, Mullich had acquired the title of “development manager” at Edu-Ware, with a staff of several programmers working under him on the company’s various projects. Having gotten more adept at 6502 assembly language since the time of the first game, he himself programmed some speed-critical routines for graphics that were also used in other Edu-Ware titles, as well as a text parser. He also drew the game’s graphics on paper. But to translate those drawings onto the computer, and to code everything else, he employed one Mike St. Jean, who worked, once again in BASIC, from a detailed design document provided by Mullich. Mullich was, in other words, transitioning from the jack-of-all-trades hacker typical of the very early PC era to this new creature known as a “game designer.” Those aforementioned assembly-language routines would be, in Mullich’s own words, “among the last programs I actually coded myself” in a career in software that continues to this day.

The results of his efforts are, as is all too typical of remakes, mixed. While it may have had at least as much to do with lack of time, expertise, and resources as artistic intent, the original’s stark, Constructivist appearance did much to strengthen the atmosphere of oppression, coercion, and collectivist subjugation. The Prisoner 2, by contrast, looks at first glance like just another “hi-res adventure” of the sort that were flooding the market by 1982 in response to On-Line Systems’s success, and the maze section that opens the game bears a pronounced resemblance to, of all things, the Wizardry series.

Likewise, the variety of different interfaces found in the original game, which the player had to puzzle out on her own to succeed, is here replaced in almost all places by a two-word parser that is unusually balky even by the standards of the time. It’s tempting to read some of its obstinacy as another instance of the old Prisoner tactic of resisting consistent interface standards to keep the player always ill at ease. How else to read the fact that the parser sometimes demands that you navigate with “forward,” “back,” “right,” and “left,” and other times with traditional compass directions? Still, it just somehow doesn’t quite work as well as the first game’s interface smorgasbord.

The new, more professional presentation must inevitably also become more technically opaque, removing some of the possibility for winning through, um, other means like code-diving. This might be a good thing in any other game, but, as Steve Pederson wrote in response to my article on the original Prisoner, in this case “nothing could be more in the spirit of the game [than cheating].”

A comparison of the manuals also gives me conflicted feelings. The original shipped with only the most essential information on the game and some slightly pedantic “educational notes” penned by Edu-Ware founder Sherwin Steffin. For the sequel, this document was replaced with a slicker production which elaborates a mythology of sorts for The Island and even for the original Prisoner television series. The Island, we are told, was created in the 1960s in response to the agitations of the counterculture.

It was in this climate that The Island was created. Its purpose then was to silence dissenters and to perpetuate authoritarian rule. Leaders of various social movements and government operatives who learned too much of their employer’s plans both unwillingly found themselves a new home on The Island — until such time as they were absorbed back into the system or died. But, from the perspective of the rest of the world, they had vanished without a trace, presumably the victims of foreign or illegal organizations.

Towards the end of the decade came the first exposé of The Island. It was presented in the form of a television adventure series so that its producers could circumvent the problems of censorship. Its focus was as a psychological study and a political statement concerning the problem of keeping one’s individuality and personal freedom in a technological society. While it did gain a cult audience, its messages did not receive the recognition that they deserved.

So, the influence of The Island spread unchecked in the seventies. The “me” generation proved to be a perfect target not only for The Island’s sinister activities, but also for one of the most powerful weapons of mass enslavement ever created: the computer. Ever increasing meddling by computer networks, data bases, and information peddlers in our daily lives forced us close to the verge of becoming mere numbers within the memory banks of hundreds of machines across the country. More and more information about us became accessible to anyone who had a link into the proper data base. With the flip of a switch, instantly our reputations could be tarnished and our influence destroyed. Lives became statistics, and statistics could be altered.

In short, the computer was turning society into a vast collective prison.

In the debate that raged through the 1970s and 1980s (and to some extent still today) on whether the computer was a tool of liberation and creative possibility or a tool for dehumanization and subjugation, this narrative comes down on the latter side. Yet The Prisoner 2 is of course using a computer to make just the sort of creative, humanistic statement it says the computer will stamp out. As always where The Prisoner is involved, the contradictions bite deep.

Mullich has here totally abandoned the notion from the original game of merely being “inspired by” the television show. He is now explicitly playing in the same storyworld as the show — and doing it without any sort of licensing deal with The Prisoner‘s corporate parent ITC Entertainment, who were either unusually benevolent or very unobservant. Ironically, Mullich later in his career would join Disney, where he would spend some of his time stamping out just this sort of intellectual-property infringement.

Eternal debates over intellectual property aside, I’m still not sure how I feel about the sequel’s elaborate backstory. Part of me wants to say that Mullich and company say far, far too much here, that rooting The Island in such a specific historical and cultural context costs them much of the ominously enigmatic feel of both the original game and television series. On the other hand, this more detailed fictional context does enable the most notable new aspect of the sequel: a sharply satirical critique of the videogame craze that was just reaching its first-generational peak when The Prisoner 2 reached stores in mid-1982.

A more disturbing turn of events took place in the eighties, however. Instead of the public becoming cautious of computerization, they took the devices into their very homes. For hours at a time, people would sit blank-faced in front of television sets playing uninspired clones of Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man. An entire civilization was willing to waste their precious lives playing mindless games, relentlessly pursuing nursery-school melodies, high scores, and pointless goals.

In that spirit, the Rovers, the balloon-like guards who prevented escape from The Island in both the television series and the first game, are replaced in the sequel with… Pac-Man.

As good adventure gamers, we might be tempted to agree with Mullich’s criticism of these mindless arcade games, to assume that our more cerebral games are exempt from his criticisms. But then we come to a building he added just for the sequel: the Grail House. Inside is something that was already becoming a symbol of adventure games at their most banal by this time: an extended maze. The maze includes rooms which specifically reference Adventure, Mystery House, The Wizard and the Princess, and the Scott Adams games.

Whether these portrayals are fleshed-out enough to rise to the level of satire is perhaps debatable, but they don’t exactly feel like loving tributes either. The Mystery House room, which flags you as a murderer (presumably of Ken Williams himself) until you find “absolution” in the church, has a particularly abrasive edge to it. Indeed, and especially given the truly awful parser, one could almost read the entirety of The Prisoner 2 as a satire on the absurdities of contemporary adventure gaming. The ultimate goal of the game is after all to free yourself by “escaping” from pointless submission to this world inside your computer, as Edu-Ware’s Steve Pederson is doing in the striking box art.

Leaving aside both other adventure games and The Prisoner 2‘s more colorful but less effective appearance (prompted, ironically, by commercial considerations that required keeping up with those very same other adventure games), much of the subversive, anti-authoritarian message of the original game does remain in the sequel. In some places it is even strengthened. The Library in the original, for instance, contained a hopelessly inscrutable free-association scenario whose issue could be a vital clue or a book getting burned. The sequel tries to force you to actively burn books.

B.F. Skinner’s theories of education come in for even sharper criticism here than in the first game. Succeeding at a series of rote memory exercises leads to a diploma and a wicked pun. (And note the teacher’s apple shaped, once again, like Pac-Man…)

Sometimes the manipulations of truth and perceptions reach new heights of inspiration, such as in this genius re-purposing of a quote from Thomas Jefferson.

We’re tempted to want to add a “be” — or, better yet, a “be free” — to the end. For the record, however, here’s the full quote:

No government ought to be without censors, and where the press is free, no one ever will. If virtuous, it need not fear the fair operation of attack and defence. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting out the truth whether in religion, law or politics. I think it as honorable to the government neither to know nor notice its sycophants or censors, as it would be undignified and criminal to pamper the former and persecute the latter.

Jefferson is here using the word “censor” in an archaic way, as a term for a person who closely monitors and criticizes the actions of another, generally one in a position of power. (Some remnant of this usage persists in the adjective “censorious,” as in condemning an unnecessarily critical critic’s “censorious behavior.”) Thus, far from arguing for censorship in the modern sense, he is arguing for the very governmental openness and transparency that is anathema to the powers that be on The Island.

The Prisoner 2 continues to emphasize that it itself is your enemy. In addition to the established dirty tricks from its predecessor (that bogus error message that tries to trick you into entering your resignation code appears again), it has some new ways to be belligerent. At one point it even threatens to re-format the game disk.

No, it doesn’t go quite that far. If you lose this game of judicial hangman, the game tries to fake you out by grinding the disk just like it would during a format, but ultimately declines to actually do the deed.

Another amusing fake-out is the computerized “Free Information” booth.

Asking “why” in this section makes the computer go berserk, screen flashing gibberish and disk drives wildly blinking and grinding. In addition to several episodes of Star Trek, this sequence also evokes the climax to one of the classic episodes of The Prisoner television show, “The General.” It’s also, of course, the all-important question that B.F. Skinner’s theories of education don’t prepare students to answer.

So, yes, The Prisoner 2 does manage to get its lumps in. If it doesn’t feel quite as laser-focused in its presentation and rhetoric or, well, quite as necessary as its predecessor, it’s certainly not an embarrassment. Yet, and ironically given its more polished presentation, it was not the same sort of commercial success. Steve Pederson estimates that it only sold in the range of 3000 to 5000 units in total, pretty underwhelming figures in comparison to games I’ve covered recently like Choplifter (9000 copies in its first month) or Deadline (25,000 copies in its first eight months). This was in spite of being ported to the Atari 400 and 800 and the IBM PC in addition to the Apple II. The entertainment-software market was growing rapidly, but Edu-Ware’s share in it was not.

To begin to understand why that should be, we might look to tensions and contradictions within Edu-Ware itself. Edu-Ware’s president and founder, Sherwin Steffin, had no great investment in games. As his company’s name would imply, his passion, a product of his long and ongoing career in education, was educational software. The company’s two other important players, Mullich and Steve Pederson, were each a generation younger than Steffin, and much more interested in computers and games for their own sakes. Steffin was happy to allow them to indulge their interest as long as everyone also strove to develop the high-quality educational software that he had founded the company to create — and luckily so, as the first Prisoner turned out to be a gold mine that helped get his own projects off the ground. Yet by 1982 those projects were able to fly on their own, with programs like Algebra 1 selling in the tens of thousands. As Pederson has said, “As time went on, it became harder and harder to justify game development.” Edu-Ware didn’t need games anymore, and with a hungry market for their educational software and a president rather disinterested in the field, the company had begun the gradual process of abandoning the games market even as The Prisoner 2 was being released. As a retread (however well done) of an older game and with an unengaged corporate parent, The Prisoner 2‘s lackluster sales performance is not so surprising. Edu-Ware’s last big game release, the final, less than compelling installment of its Empire trilogy of science-fiction RPGs, appeared early the following year. And that was pretty much that for the Interactive Fantasies line to which The Prisoner games had belonged.

In July of 1983, Edu-Ware was purchased by a much larger company that had heretofore focused on software for big institutional machines, Management Sciences America. There are a couple of ways to see this development. On the one hand, plucky little Edu-Ware looked to already be facing an uncertain future in the educational market it had pioneered, as new companies like Spinnaker with established corporate parents entered with slick new products for the growing numbers of Apple II-devoted educators and parents. Perhaps finding a deep-pocketed parent of its own was the only way for Edu-Ware to have a hope of survival in this new, more crowded world. On the other hand, Sherwin Steffin told me recently via email that “marketing was an area in which I had neither skill nor interest,” and that this purchase was exactly the “exit strategy that I had planned from the beginning.”

What happened next, though, Steffin had most certainly not planned. He, Mullich, and Pederson were allowed to work without disruption for only a short time before relations collapsed in a pile of accusations, ultimatums, and, eventually, lawsuits. The Edu-Ware brand was largely merged into MSA’s Peachtree line of productivity software in 1984, and the last traces of the old company were obliterated by early 1985. By this time Steffin, Mullich, and Pederson were all long gone. It was an inglorious, anticlimactic end for a pioneering publisher, but not, alas, an atypical one.

As usual, I’ve prepared a copy of The Prisoner 2 for those of you who’d like to try it for yourselves. This time that’s especially important. Like its predecessor, The Prisoner 2 writes to the game disk during play, meaning that most of the copies archived on the Internet contain someone else’s half-finished game. I’ve prepared a zip with a clean copy of the Apple II disk, along with the manual (courtesy of the amazing Museum of Computer Adventure Game History). You might also want to have a look at a fascinating document at the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities: David Mullich’s original design document for the game.

Be seeing ewe!

8 Comments

Posted by Jimmy Maher on August 23, 2012 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

Tags: apple ii, edu-ware, the prisoner

Choplifter

15 Aug

Dan Gorlin was 27 years old in early 1981, and already possessed of the sort of multifarious resume that’s typical of so many we’ve met on this blog. He was just coming off a three-year stint with Rand Corporation, doing artificial-intelligence research, but before that he’d studied piano at the California Institute of the Arts, and also studied and taught African dance, music, and culture. Now the Rand gig was over, and he suddenly found himself with time on his hands and no great urgency to find another job right away; his wife was earning very well as an oil-industry executive. While staying home to show prospective buyers the Los Angeles house he and his wife had put up for sale, Gorlin started tinkering for the first time with a microcomputer, an Apple II Plus that belonged to his grandfather. Said grandfather, a hopeless gadget freak, loved the idea of a PC, but in actuality hardly knew how to turn the Apple II on; he called floppy disks “sloppy disks” out of genuine confusion. So, Gorlin had no difficulty keeping the machine at his house for weeks or months at a stretch.

He wasn’t using the Apple II to play games. Indeed, as he has repeatedly stated in interviews, Gorlin has never been much of a gamer. He was rather intrigued by what he might do with the Apple II as a programmer, what he might create on it. He started learning the vagaries of the Apple II’s hi-res graphics, the bitmapped display mode that many computers in 1981 still lacked. Amongst his other passions, Gorlin was fascinated by helicopters, so he started developing a program that would let a player fly a little helicopter around the screen using the joystick. At first he attempted to implement a pilot’s-eye view, showing the view from the cockpit in three dimensions, Flight Simulator-style, but eventually gave up on this as too taxing, settling for a third-person view of his little helicopter. Still, he tried, to the extent possible on a 48 K 8-bit computer, to make his program an accurate simulation of the rather odd and counter-intuitive physics of helicopter flight. Eventually he had a very acceptable little helicopter simulator running, if also one that was very tricky to fly.

He may have had the physics of flight in place, but Gorlin, who couldn’t help but notice by this point that others were making serious money selling Apple II games, needed a hook, a reason for flying the helicopter that could turn his simulator project into a real game with challenges and a goal. He tried adding some enemy tanks and planes to shoot at and be shot at in standard arcade fashion, but it somehow still didn’t feel right. Then one fateful afternoon a local kid whom Gorlin had hired to do some repairs on his car was playing around with the program. “You should have some men to pick up,” the kid said — like in one of his favorite arcade games, the mega-popular Defender. Gorlin, non-gamer that he was, knew nothing about Defender, so he walked over to the local laundromat to have a look.

Defender is in many ways a typical creation of its time, with the player tasked with shooting down wave after wave of enemy ships to increase her score and earn extra lives. It does, however, have one unique element, from whence derives its name. Little “astronauts” wander the planet’s surface at the bottom of the screen. In an unexpected injection of Close Encounters into Star Wars, certain enemy ships attempt to abduct these fellows. If they succeed in carrying one off, the player has one last chance to effect a rescue: she can shoot down the offending ship, scoop up the falling astronaut, and set him down safely back on the planet’s surface. If enough astronauts get abducted (or killed falling from their destroyed abductors), the planet explodes and an onslaught of particularly deadly enemies begins, until the player either dies (most likely) or manages to revert everything back to normal by killing them all.

Defender‘s astronauts function more as a mechanical gimmick to differentiate the game from its peers than an earnest attempt at ludic worldbuilding, but they were enough to get Gorlin thinking about a new and unique goal for his own game. What if, instead of making the goal to shoot down enemies for points, he instead made it to rescue unarmed hostages for, well, the sake of doing good? It was a scenario very much in step with the times. In April of 1980, President Jimmy Carter had authorized sending six helicopters to attempt to rescue the 52 Americans being held hostage in Tehran following the Iranian Revolution of the previous year. The mission turned into an infamous fiasco which cost eight Americans on the mission their lives without ever even making contact with a single hostage — or Iranian for that matter — and arguably cost Carter any hope he might have still held for reelection later that year. Oddly, Gorlin says that he never made the obvious connection between his developing idea and the recent event in Iran until he started showing his game in public and heard people talking about it. Still, it’s hard not to feel that the influence must have been at least subconsciously present from long before that point. It’s certainly safe to say that most of the people who eventually made Choplifter one of the biggest Apple II hits of 1982 saw it as a direct response to an humiliation that still smarted with patriotic souls two years later, a chance to re-stage the mission and this time get it right.

By late 1981 all of the basic concepts of Choplifter had been implemented. While the enemy tanks and planes remained, they were now mere hindrances to be destroyed or — often preferably, because it wasted less time — avoided. The real goal was to rescue as many of the 64 hostages wandering the surface below as possible. You did this by landing the chopper next to them — but not directly on them, lest you crush them — and letting them climb aboard before an enemy tank could kill them. Once you had a pretty good load of hostages (your helicopter could hold up to 16), you needed to drop them off safely back at your base. The only score was the number of hostages you could manage to rescue before you lost the last of your three lives, or ran out of living hostages to carry away. If a new player could end up with more living than dead she was doing pretty well, and rescuing all 64 remains to this day one of the truly herculean feats of gaming lore.

Convinced that he “could make some money” with the game, Gorlin sent his prototype to Brøderbund, who had followed Apple Galaxian/Alien Rain with a wave of other, thankfully mostly more original titles that had garnered them a reputation as a premier publisher of Apple II action games. They loved Choplifter from the moment they booted it, and immediately flew Gorlin out to their new San Rafael headquarters to help him to polish it and to talk contract. Like so many others, Gorlin expresses nothing but warmth for Brøderbund and the Carlston siblings: “So the way they did it was, they’d see something that was like, it’d have promise, and they’d sort of engulf you with family love. It was a very nurturing environment.”

Brøderbund’s enthusiasm proved to be justified. When they started showing Choplifter at AppleFest and other trade shows that spring, people lined up “around the block” to play it. And when released in May of 1982, the game sold 9000 copies in its first month on the market, excellent numbers in those times. But that was only the beginning. Over the months and years that followed Brøderbund funded ports to virtually every viable platform that came along. And, in a move that must have made people wonder whether the earth was about to start orbiting the moon, Sega even bought a license to make a standup-arcade incarnation in 1986, a reversal of the normal practice of bringing arcade games to home platforms.

Gorlin worked on and off in the games industry over the years that followed, but often with the lack of enthusiasm we might expect from such a defiant non-gamer. He never had another high-profile success to match Choplifter, and his most abiding passion remains African dance. Still, with Choplifter‘s huge sales and Brøderbund’s very generous royalty rates even for ports and translations with which he had no direct involvement, he did very well for many years off his one big moment of glory. Even today when his name is mentioned it tickles at the back of many a long-time gamer’s mind, where it’s been rattling around for years after appearing on all those Choplifter title screens and boxes.

But what was it that made Choplifter so compelling to so many people? And, you might be wondering as a corollary, why am I devoting time to it on a blog that’s usually all about games with strong narrative elements? One immediate answer, at least to the former question, is that Gorlin was fortunate enough to create something perfectly in step with the zeitgeist of the early 1980s, when helicopter-based rescue missions and hostages were so much on people’s minds. Indeed, Gorlin himself has always mentioned this good fortune as a key to the game’s success. But in addition, and more importantly for our purposes, Choplifter is not just another action game. It’s doing something different from most of its peers, something that makes it worth talking about here in the same sense that Castle Wolfenstein was. It marks a step toward story, or at least real, lived experience, in a game that is not an adventure or CRPG.

Mind you, you won’t find a compelling story in the conventional sense attached to Choplifter. The manual justifies the action by explaining that the Bungeling Empire, a group of generically evil baddies invented by the Carlston brothers who appear in many early Brøderbund games, have kidnapped the 64 delegates to the United Nations Conference on Peace and Child Rearing they were hosting. (What could be more evil than to use violence against that conference?) Luckily, the United States has for some reason been allowed to build a post office(!) within Bungeling territory, into which they’ve smuggled “an entire helicopter disguised as a mail sorting machine.” You can use the reassembled helicopter to rescue the hostages and return them to the post office. It’s a typically silly action-game premise, obviously not meant to be taken too seriously.

No, it’s other aspects of Choplifter that make it interesting for my purposes, that make it feel like it wants to be an experiential game in a way that its peers don’t. One immediately noticeable difference is the aforementioned rejection of a scoring mechanic or a leaderboard. Your success or failure are measured not by some abstract, extra-diegetic numbers, but rather by two figures that have heaps of meaning within the world of the game: how many hostages you rescued and how many you allowed to be killed. Further, there is a definite end-point to Choplifter that involves more than the three avatar lives you have at your disposal. In addition to (naturally) ending when these are exhausted, the game ends when the supply of hostages is exhausted — when all have been killed or rescued. Complete failures, disappointments, tragedies, mixed outcomes, relative successes — and, for the holy grail, the complete victory of rescuing all 64 innocents — are possible. Contrast that with the kamikaze run that was the standard arcade game of the time, where you simply played until you ran out of lives.

For the first run you make to rescue hostages, you don’t have to contend with any enemy aircraft, only some ground-bound tanks. Next time, the enemy jets start to show up. In one sense this is a standard arcade mechanic, of offering up tougher and tougher challenges as the player stays alive longer. In another, though, it’s a realistic simulation of the situation. The first time you fly out with your smuggled-in helicopter, you catch the Bungelings by surprise, and thus have a fairly easy time of it. Afterward, however, they know what you’re about, and are marshaling their forces to stop you. As you fly back again and again into ever-increasing danger, there’s a sense of a plot building to its climax.

The in-game presentation consistently enforces this sense of inhabiting a real storyworld. The graphics obviously cannot look too spectacular, given the limitations of their platform, but the behavior of the hostages in particular has a verisimilitude that can actually be kind of touching. When you first fly over a group, they stand and wave, desperately trying to attract your attention. When you fly closer, and it becomes clear that you’re trying to pick them up, they all rush frantically toward you. Should enemies get in the way, their behavior is almost as unpredictable as would be that of real civilians who suddenly find themselves on a battlefield. Some run away, figuring that remaining captive beats dying, while others dash madly toward the helicopter, and are often killed for their rashness. It takes those that do reach the helicopter a nail-biting moment to scramble inside. Hover just overhead and they jump frantically underneath you, trying to get aboard. Later, when you fly them back to the post office, they pile out of the helicopter and rush for the sanctuary of the building — but a few, just a few, pause for a moment to turn and wave back in thanks.

Other arcade games, like Donkey Kong, had brought a similar sense of characterization to their actors, but the emergent qualities and realistic strictures of Choplifter nevertheless make it feel real in a way that those games don’t. There’s the fact that you can, for example, only pack 16 hostages at a time into your helicopter. And of course there’s the already-mentioned gruesome possibility of crushing hostages if you land on top of them. Elements like this can make Choplifter feel off-putting at first if you approach it as just another classic arcade game. We don’t expect real-world logic to mix with game logic in quite that way, even though it would make perfect sense not to, you know, land on people’s heads if we were actually in that situation.

Another critical element is the behavior of the helicopter itself. Gorlin had originally envisioned Choplifter as a realistic simulation of actual helicopter flight, but a helicopter is about the most notoriously difficult type of aircraft there is to fly. Brøderbund convinced him that hewing too stubbornly to real helicopter physics would limit the appeal of the game far too much. Gorlin:

They taught me about playability. They helped me with control of the joystick.

The first Choplifter I showed Brøderbund was too realistic, too much of a helicopter simulation. De-emphasizing the weight of the calculations that simulated the vertical force control of the rotors made the chopper more flyable to the average player. I hated to see the realism go, but it did improve the game. In a lot of ways, Brøderbund helped me fine-tune and polish the presentation.

It’s important to note, however, that Brøderbund did not have Gorlin remove all of the realism. They just had him scale it back to a manageable level. What they achieved was — and this is important enough that I’m almost tempted to call it visionary — a sort of videogame hyper-realism. The helicopter’s motions are sloppy and unstable enough that you still feel like you’re really flying. It’s a very different experience from the clipped, precise controls of other arcade games, like Choplifter‘s partial inspiration Defender. Choplifter achieves the neat trick of making you feel like a real pilot without demanding that you acquire the skills of a real pilot first. That alone makes it an important step on the road to truly experiential action games. Choplifter consistently invites us to enter a storyworld, to play with our imaginations as well as our reflexes.

When a game of Choplifter is, one way or another, over, two simple, classic words appear on the screen: “The End,” reinforcing yet once more this sense of the game as a lived story. In a fascinating article in the July 1982 Softline, Jim Salmons heavily emphasized this and the other cinematic qualities of the game, marking it as an early case study in the long, fraught relationship between videogames and movies. Some of his conclusions do rather stretch the point, but the fact that Choplifter was inspiring people to see it in such a way is significant in itself. Salmons describes the game in a way that makes it sound at home with the ludic rhetoric of modern “serious games,” or for that matter some of the contemporary Edu-Ware simulations. On the player’s power to choose to what extent she goes after the enemy tanks and planes in lieu of simply trying to rescue the hostages:

Your temperament and values determine whether aggressive behavior is warranted. Sometimes, you can’t avoid it. On other occasions, it’s righteous reflex, as in retaliation for an enemy tank having just obliterated a huddled mass of frightened hostages.

No matter what heroics were involved, when all hostages are accounted for or all choppers lost, a transformation occurs. The eyes of the hero turn into the eyes of a general reading the dead and rescued statistics. What is the measure of success? Were three helicopters lost worth the return of six hostages? Though sixty returned, did four have to die?

Is Salmons going too far in turning Choplifter into a soul-searching exercise about the wages of war? Perhaps, at least a bit. But isn’t it interesting that the game managed to encourage such flights of fancy?

With its focus on rescue rather than destruction and its do-gooder plot, Choplifter today feels like a perfect symbol for Brøderbund themselves, about the nicest bunch who ever got filthy rich in business. We’ll hear more from them later, but next, as always, it’s on to something else. If you’d like to try Choplifter for yourself in the meantime, here’s the Apple II disk image for you.

20 Comments

Posted by Jimmy Maher on August 15, 2012 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

Tags: apple ii, brøderbund, choplifter

This Game Is Over

08 Apr

Before the famous Videogame Crash of 1983 there was the Videogame Crash of 1976. By that year Atari’s Pong had been in arcades for four years, along with countless ball-bouncing variants: Handball, Hockey, Pin Pong, Dr. Pong, and of course Breakout. The public was already growing bored of all of them, as well as with the equally simplistic driving and shooting games that made up the rest of arcade fare. As videogame revenues declined, pinball, the form they were supposed to have superseded, started to make a comeback. Even Atari themselves started a pinball division, as manufacturers began applying some of the techniques they’d learned in videogames to a new generation of electromechanical pinball tables that rewarded players with lots of sounds, flashing lights, and high-score leaderboards. When Atari introduced its VCS home-game console in October of 1977, sales were predictably sluggish. Then, exactly one year later, Space Invaders arrived.

Developed by the Japanese company Taito and manufactured and sold in North America under license by Midway, Space Invaders had the perfect theme for a generation of kids entranced with Star Wars and Close Encounters. Its constant, frenetic action and, yes, the violence of its scenario also made it stand out markedly from comparatively placid games like Pong and Breakout. Space Invaders became the exemplar of videogames in general, the first game the general public thought of when one mentioned the form. With coin-operated arcade games suddenly experiencing a dramatic revival, sales of the Atari VCS also began to steadily increase. Thanks to a very good holiday season, sales for 1979 hit 1 million.

However, the real tipping point that would eventually result in Atari VCSs in more than 15% of U.S. homes came when Manny Gerard and Ray Kassar, Atari’s vice president and president respectively, negotiated a deal with their ostensible rivals Taito and Midway to make a version of Space Invaders for the VCS. Kassar is known today as the man who stifled innovation at Atari and mistreated his programmers so badly that the best of them decided to form their own company, Activision. Still, his marketing instinct at this moment was perfect. Kassar predicted that Space Invaders would not only be a huge hit with the VCS’s existing owners, but that it would actually sell consoles to people who wanted to play their arcade favorite at home. He was proven exactly right upon the VCS Space Invaders‘s release in January of 1980. The VCS, dragged along in the wake of the game, doubled its sales in 1980, to 2 million units.

Atari took the lesson of Space Invaders to heart. Instead of investing energy into original games with innocuously descriptive titles like Basketball, Combat, and Air Sea Battle, as they had done for the first few years of the VCS, they now concentrated on licensing all of the big arcade hits. Atari had learned an important lesson: that the quantity and quality of available software is more important to a platform than the technical specifications of the platform itself. This fact would allow the Atari VCS to dominate the console field for years despite being absurdly primitive in comparison to competition like the Intellivision and the Vectrex.

Apple was learning a similar lesson at this time in the wake of the fortuitous decision that Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston made to first implement VisiCalc on the Apple II. Indeed, one could argue that the survivors from the early PC industry — companies like Apple and, most notably, Microsoft — were the ones that got the supreme importance of software, while those who didn’t — companies like Commodore, Radio Shack’s computer division, and eventually Atari itself — were the ones ultimately destined for the proverbial dustbin of history. Software like VisiCalc provided an answer to the question that had been tripping up computer hobbyists for years when issued from the mouths of wives, girlfriends, and parents: “But what can you really do with it?” A computer that didn’t have a good base of software, no matter how impressive its hardware, wasn’t much use to the vast majority of the public who weren’t interested in writing their own programs.

With all this in mind, let’s talk about computer games (as opposed to console games) again. We can divide entertainment software in these early years into two broad categories, only one of which I’ve so far concerned myself with in this blog. I’ve been writing about the cerebral branch of computer gaming, slow-paced works inspired by the tabletop-gaming and fiction traditions. These are the purest of computer games, in that they existed only on PCs and, indeed, would have been impossible on the game consoles of their day. They depend on a relatively large memory to hold their relatively sophisticated world models (and, increasingly, disk storage to increase the scope of possibility thanks to virtual memory); a keyboard to provide a wide range of input possibilities; and the ability to display text easily on the screen to communicate in relatively nuanced ways with their players.

The other category consists of arcade-style gameplay brought onto the PC. With the exception of the Atari 400 and 800, none of the earliest PCs were terribly suited to this style of game, lacking sprites and other fast-animation technologies and often even appropriate game controllers. Yet with the arcade craze in full bloom, these games became very, very popular. Even the Commodore PET, which lacked any bitmapped graphics mode at all, had a version of Breakout implemented entirely in “text” using the machine’s extended ASCII character set.

On a machine like the Apple II, which did have bitmapped graphics, such games were even more popular. Nasir Gebelli and Bill Budge were the kings of the Apple II action game, and as such were known by virtually every Apple II hobbyist. Even Richard Garriott, programmer of a very different sort of game, was so excited upon receiving that first call from California Pacific about Akalabeth because CP was, as everyone knew, the home of Budge. If Computer Gaming World is to be believed, it was not Zork or Temple of Apshai or Wizardry that was the bestselling Apple II game of all time in mid-1982, but rather K-Razy Shootout, a clone of the arcade game Berzerk. They may have sold in minuscule numbers compared to their console counterparts and may not have always looked or played quite as nicely, but arcade-style games were a big deal on PCs right from the start. When the Commodore VIC-20 arrived, perched as it was in some tenuous place between PC and game console, the trend only accelerated.

You may have noticed a theme in my discussion of these games in this post and in a previous post: many of these games were, um, heavily inspired by popular coin-operated arcade games. In the earliest days, when the PC-software industry was truly minuscule and copyright still a foreign concept to many programmers, many aspired to make unabashed clones of the latest arcade hits, down to the name itself. By 1980, however, this approach was being replaced by something at least a little more subtle, in which programmers duplicated the gameplay but changed the title and (sometimes, to some extent) the presentation. It should be noted that not all PC action-game programmers were cloners; Gebelli and Budge, for instance, generally wrote original games, and perhaps therein lies much of their reputation. Still, clones were more the rule than the exception, and by 1981 the PC software industry had grown enough for Atari to start to notice — and to get pissed off about it. They took out full-page advertisements in many of the big computer magazines announcing “PIRACY: THIS GAME IS OVER.”

Some companies and individuals have copied Atari games in an attempt to reap undeserved profits from games that they did not develop. Atari must protect its investment so that we can continue to invest in new and better games. According, Atari gives warning to both the intentional pirate and to the individuals simply unaware of the copyright laws that Atari registers the audiovisual works associated with its games with the Library of Congress and considers its game proprietary. Atari will protect its rights by vigorously enforcing these copyrights and by taking the appropriate action against unauthorized entities who reproduce or adapt substantial copies of Atari games, regardless of what computer or other apparatus is used in their performance.

In referring to cloning as “piracy,” Atari is conflating two very separate issues, but they aren’t doing so thoughtlessly — there’s a legal strategy at work here.

Literally from the dawn of the PC era, when Bill Gates wrote his famous “Open Letter to Hobbyists,” software piracy was recognized by many in the industry as a major problem, a problem that some even claimed could kill the whole industry before it got properly started. Gates considered his letter necessary because the very concept of commercial software was a new thing, as new as the microcomputer itself. Previously, programs had been included with hardware and support contracts taken out with companies like IBM and DEC, or traded about freely amongst students, hackers, and scientists on the big machines. In fact, it wasn’t at all clear that software even could be copyrighted. The 1909 Copyright Act that was still in effect when Gates wrote his letter in January of 1976 states that to be copyrightable a work must be “fixed in a tangible medium of expression.” One interpretation of this requirement holds that an executable computer program, since it lives only electronically within the computer’s memory, fails the tangibility test. The Copyright Act of 1976, a major amendment, failed to really clarify the situation. Astonishingly, it was only with the Computer Software Copyright Act of 1980 that it was made unambiguously clear that software was copyrightable in the same way as books and movies and that, yes, all those pirates were actually doing something illegal as well as immoral.

But there was still some confusion about exactly what aspect of a computer program was copyrightable. When we’re talking about copyright on a book, we’re obviously concerned with the printed words on the page. When we’re talking about copyright on a film, we’re concerned with the images that the viewer sees unspooling on the screen and the sounds that accompany them. A computer program, however, has both of these aspects. There’s the “literary” side, the code to be run by the computer, which in many cases takes two forms, the source code written by the programmer and the binary code that the computer actually executes after the source has been fed through an assembler or compiler. And then there’s the “filmic” side, the images that the viewer sees on the screen before her and the sounds she hears. The 1980 law defines a computer program as a “set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result.” Thus, it would seem to extend protection to source and executable code, but not to the end experience of the user.

Such protection was not quite enough for Atari. They therefore turned to a court case of 1980, Midway vs. Dirkschneider. Dirkschneider was a small company who essentially did in hardware what many PC programmers were doing in software, stamping out unauthorized clones of games from the big boys like Atari and Midway, then selling them to arcade operators at a substantial discount on the genuine article. When they started making their own version of Galaxian, one of Midway’s most popular games, under the name Galactic Invader, Midway sued them in a Nebraska court. The judge in that case ruled in favor of the plaintiff, on the basis of a new concept that quickly became known as the “ten-foot rule”: “If a reasonable person could not, at ten feet, tell the difference between two competitive products, then there was cause to believe an infringement was occurring.”

So, in conflating pirates who illegally copied and traded software with cloners who merely copied the ideas and appearance of others’ games, implementing them using entirely original code, Atari was attempting to dramatically expand the legal protections afforded to software. The advertisement is also, of course, a masterful piece of rhetoric meant to tar said cloners with the same brush of disrepute used for the pirates, who were criticized in countless hand-wringing editorials in the exact same magazines in which Atari’s advertisement appeared. All of this grandstanding moved out of the magazines and into the courts in late 1981, via the saga of Jawbreaker.

The big arcade hit of 1981 was Pac-Man. In fact, calling Pac-Man merely “big” is considerably underestimating the matter. The game was a full-fledged craze, dwarfing the popularity of even Space Invaders. Recent studies have shown Pac-Man to still be the most recognizable videogame character in the world, which by extension makes Pac-Man easily the most famous videogame ever created. Like Space Invaders, Pac-Man was an import from Japan, created there by Namco and distributed, again like Space Invaders, by Atari’s arch-rival of the standup-arcade world, Midway. Said rivalry did not, however, prevent the companies from working out a deal to get Pac-Man onto the Atari VCS. It was to be released just in time for Christmas 1981, and promised to be the huge VCS hit of the season. Kassar and his cronies rubbed their hands in anticipation, imagining the numbers it would sell — and the number of VCSs it would also move as those who had been resistant so far finally got on the bandwagon.

Yet long before the big release day came, John Harris, Ken Williams’s star Atari 400 and 800 programmer at On-Line Systems, had already written a virtually pixel-perfect clone of the game after obsessively studying it in action at the local arcade. Ken took one look and knew he didn’t dare release it. Even leaving aside Atari’s aggressive attempts to expand the definition of software “piracy,” the Pac-Man character himself was trademarked. Releasing the game as-is risked lawsuits from multiple quarters, all much larger and richer in lawyers than On-Line Systems. The result could very well be the destruction of everything he had built. Yet, the game was just so damn good. After discussing the problem with others, Ken told Harris to go home and redo the game’s graphics to preserve the gameplay but change the theme and appearance. Harris ended up delivering a bizarre tribute to the seemingly antithetical joys of candy and good dental hygiene. Pac-Man became a set of chomping teeth; the dots Life Savers; the ghosts jawbreakers. Every time the player finished a level, an animated toothbrush came out to brush her avatar’s teeth. None of it made a lot of sense, but then the original Pac-Man made if anything even less. Ken put it out there. It actually became On-Line’s second Pac-Man clone; another one called Gobbler was already available for the Apple II.

Meanwhile Atari, just as they had promised in that advertisement, started coming down hard on Pac-Man cloners. They “persuaded” Brøderbund Software to pull Snoggle for the Apple II off the market. They “convinced” a tiny publisher called Stoneware not to even release theirs, despite having already invested money in packaging and advertising. And they started calling Ken.

The situation between On-Line and Atari was more complicated than the others. Jawbreaker ran on Atari’s own 400 and 800 computers rather than the Apple II. On the one hand, this made Atari even more eager to stamp it out of existence, because they themselves had belatedly begun releasing many of their bestselling VCS titles (a group sure to include Pac-Man) in versions for the 400 and 800. On the other hand, though, this represented an opportunity. You see, Harris had naively given away some copies of his game back when it was still an unadulterated Pac-Man. Some of these (shades of Richard Garriott’s experience with California Pacific) had made it all the way to Atari’s headquarters. Thus their goals were twofold: to stamp out Jawbreaker, but also if possible to buy this superb version of Pac-Man to release under their own imprint. Unfortunately, Harris didn’t want to sell it to them. He loved the Atari computers, but he hated the company, famous by this time for their lack of respect for the programmers and engineers who actually built their products. (This lack of respect was such that the entire visionary team that had made the 400 and 800 had left the company by the time the machines made it into stores.)

At the center of all this was Ken, the very picture of a torn man. He wasn’t the sort who accepts being pushed around, and Atari were trying to do just that, threatening him with all kinds of legal hellfire. Yet he also knew that, well, they kind of had a point; if someone did to one of his games what On-Line was doing to Pac-Man, he’d be mad as hell. Whatever the remnants of the hippie lifestyle that hung around On-Line along with the occasional telltale whiff of marijuana smoke, Ken didn’t so much dream of overthrowing the man as joining him, of building On-Line into a publisher to rival Atari. He wasn’t sure he could get there by peddling knockoffs of other people’s designs, no matter how polished they were.

Thanks largely to Ken’s ambivalence, the final outcome of all this was, as tends to happen in real life, somewhat anticlimactic. On-Line defied Atari long enough to get dragged into court for a deposition, at which Atari tried to convince the judge to grant a preliminary injunction forcing On-Line to pull Jawbreaker off the market pending a full trial. The judge applied the legal precedent of the ten-foot rule, and, surprisingly, decided that Jawbreaker looked different enough from Pac-Man to refuse Atari’s motion. You can judge for yourself: below is a screenshot of the original arcade Pac-Man pair with one of Jawbreaker.

Atari’s lawyers were reportedly stunned at the rejection, but still, Ken had no real stomach for this fight. He walked out of the courtroom far from triumphant: “If this opens the door to other programmers ripping off my software, what happened here was a bad thing.” Shortly after, he called Atari to see if they couldn’t work something out to keep Jawbreaker on the market but share the wealth.

Right on schedule, Atari’s own infamously slapdash implementation of Pac-Man appeared just in time for Christmas. It moved well over 7 million units to consumers who didn’t seem to care a bit that the ghosts flickered horribly and the colors were all wrong. The following year, On-Line and Harris developed a version of the now authorized Jawbreaker for the Atari VCS, publishing it through a company called Tigervision. It didn’t sell a fraction of what its inferior predecessor had sold, of course, but it did represent a change in the mentality of Ken and his company. Much of the fun and craziness continued, but they were also becoming a “real” company ready to play with the big boys like Atari — with all the good and bad that entails.

Similar changes were coming to the industry as a whole. Thanks to Atari’s legal muscling, blatant clones of popular arcade games dried up. The industry was now big enough to attract attention from outside its own ranks, with the result that intellectual property was starting to become a big deal. Around this time Edu-Ware got sued for its Space games that were a little bit too inspired by Game Designers’ Workshop’s Traveller tabletop RPG; they replaced them with a new series in the same spirit called Empire. Scott Adams got threatened with a lawsuit of his own over Mission Impossible Adventure, and in response changed the name to Secret Mission.

Indeed, 1981 was the year when the microcomputer industry as a whole went fully and irrevocably professional, as punctuated by soaring sales of VisiCalc and the momentous if belated arrival of IBM on the scene. That’s another story we really have to talk about, but later. Next time, we’ll see how the two broad styles of computer gaming met one another in a single game for the first time.

(My most useful sources in writing this post were an article by Al Tommervik in the January 1982 Softline and Steven Levy’s Hackers.)

19 Comments

Posted by Jimmy Maher on April 8, 2012 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

Tags: apple ii, sierra

Summer Camp

19 Feb

When we left Ken and Roberta they were flush with more money than they’d ever had thanks to the huge success of Mystery House and especially The Wizard and the Princess, and they’d decided to go all-in on a new industry. They pulled up stakes and moved with their two young sons from smoggy Los Angeles to a town of perhaps 1300 called Coarsegold, situated on the periphery of Yosemite National Park, close to the home of Roberta’s parents. They purchased on the outskirts of Coarsegold a wooden mountain cabin connected via a dirt driveway to a twisting mountain road and pronounced it the new “headquarters” of On-Line Systems. It’s about the unlikeliest location imaginable for a major software publisher; neither Coarsegold nor its only slightly less sleepy neighbor Oakhurst had a proper supermarket, restaurant, or even a traffic light when the Williams moved there. Both towns were going through tough times. A local saw mill that provided much of the employment was closing down, leaving only the trade with Yosemite tourists to support the economy. Many of the young were going off to bigger cities for university or work, leaving behind an aging community, many of them already retirees. Yet over the next decade On-Line Systems would remake much of Coarsegold and Oakhurst in its own image.

In December of 1980 Ken and Roberta got started on that by leasing their first office space, a 10 foot by 10 foot room above a print shop in Oakhurst’s tiny downtown. They hired Ken’s little brother John as their first official employee to come work with them in it. Some of that work was the sort of thing you might expect. Ken helped Roberta to implement a third entry in the flagship line of “Hi-Res Adventures.” Mission Asteroid, a science-fiction scenario, was numbered Hi-Res Adventure #0 because it was for “beginners”; in other words, its puzzles were somewhat less flagrantly ridiculous than the norm. It hit the market just as the new year began, and turned into yet another solid hit.

Profitable as his and Roberta’s own programming efforts were, however, Ken had bigger ambitions. He saw an industry emerging, and he intended to grab a share of it. On-Line Systems began advertising almost as heavily to game programmers as it did to game players, as Ken worked to put together a stable of programmers to provide more, more, more for the company — more games, more software in general — to feed a rapidly growing microcomputer market that was positively starving for it. These advertisements promoted On-Line Systems as an alternative to the hassles of doing what Ken and Roberta had decided to do, going it alone. From the company’s first newsletter:

Should On-Line Systems market your product we will provide a tech-writer for the documentation, provide all packaging materials, copy protect the software, advertise the product, and help you find any hidden bugs. After you turn over a product to us you do nothing but wait for royalty checks.

Best of all, On-Line Systems offered what it claimed were the “highest royalties in the industry,” 16% of list price, and the chance for “financial independence! No need to ever work anyone else’s hours again…”

Ken also foraged around the trade-show circuit. At the West Coast Computer Faire in April of 1981, he found one of his stars, a gawky 19-year-old named John Harris with a love for Atari’s line of 8-bit machines equaled only by his loathing of all things Apple. (Platform jingoism was an even bigger deal in those days than it is today.) Ken may have had a burgeoning reputation as an Apple II wizard, but he was also a pragmatist. Eager to expand beyond the Apple II market, Ken asked John, “How would you like to program amongst the trees?” A few months later John delivered On-Line Systems’s first big hit on a platform other than the Apple II, Jawbreaker for the Atari 400 and 800. (Jawbreaker will also figure significantly in the story of On-Line Systems for another reason, but we’ll get to that down the road a bit.)

Ken tried to lure the best of his stable of freelancers out to Oakhurst to work for On-Line Systems full-time, even going so far as to purchase houses around the area which he rented out at cost to his programmers, who were often still in their teens, away from home for the first time, and not exactly savvy about basic life skills like negotiating a lease. A snowball effect began. As more money came in each month Ken signed more freelancers and hired more employees, whose work in turn brought in more revenue; only the real epics like Ultima, Zork, or Wizardry generally took more than a single programmer and two or three months in those days. This new revenue allowed him to sign yet more contracts. With the always aggressive Ken pushing hard all the time, On-Line Systems grew rapidly indeed. They absorbed the other offices on their floor one by one, then moved into a brand new building that the owner of the print shop built just for them. Oddly, the company retained Ken and Roberta’s house on Mudge Ranch Road as their official mailing address throughout these changes. The address had become synonymous with On-Line Systems, and in John Williams’s words created a certain image of the company as “a bunch of artisans living up in the woods — kind of a high tech artists commune — and in many ways that wasn’t far from wrong.”

While there were some stereotypically nerdy sorts to be found at On-Line Systems, not least among them the aforementioned John Harris, the company as a whole hewed to the standard set by its garrulous work-hard-play-hard founder Ken. Like any growing company On-Line Systems had to employ plenty of support personnel in addition to the technical staff: secretaries, warehouse workers, couriers, call-center personnel, etc. And anyway, this was the California of the early 1980s, a place where the embers of the hippie era were still being stoked by dedicated diehards who were rather disproportionately represented in the technology sector. There were plenty of parties (many hosted by Ken himself, and held in the On-Line Systems offices), and plenty of drinking and other forms of chemical indulgence. From Steven Levy’s Hackers:

Tuesday night was “Men’s Night,” with Ken out on a drinking excursion. Every Wednesday, most of the staff would take the day off to go skiing at Badger Pass in Yosemite. On Fridays at noon, On-Line would enact a ritual entitled “Breaking Out the Steel.” “Steel” was the clear but potent Steel’s peppermint schnapps which was On-Line Systems’s beverage of choice. In company vernacular, a lot of steel would get you “sledged.”

The townsfolk around them were not always so pleased by such carryings on. John Williams:

Our neighbors in this small town were not always so enthralled with us. We were young in a town of mostly retirees, and we were pretty prosperous in a town of fixed incomes. We drove sports cars not pick-up trucks, and didn’t have “real jobs like real people.” (Someone actually said that to me once.) Amongst the families that did live in town, we were seen as a corrupting influence.

With ever growing numbers of young employees of both sexes and few outside social opportunities, fraternization was not just permitted but the norm. At one point it was determined during a staff meeting that over 50% of the workforce was in a relationship with someone else at the company, a situation that could cause complications when the time came to let someone go. Even those inept in the ways of love were given hope; Hackers records in amusing detail the lengths Ken went to to get the shy and awkward John Harris laid, lengths that included arranging blind dates, taking him on a trip to Club Med, and finally, out of desperation, just paying a stripper to have sex with him already. (None of it — not even paying the stripper — worked). Levy calls this period of On-Line Systems’s history “summer camp,” a time when everyone loved what they were doing on and off the job and when the money just kept rolling in, in ever bigger amounts with each passing month.

At the head of it all, Ken seemed like he had been born for this moment. With the boundless energy and ambition that had always characterized him, he seemed to be involved in everything. In addition to all the day-to-day decisions involved in running a company, he continued to do much of the programming on the Hi-Res Adventure line that remained the company’s biggest moneymakers, while, as one of the most respected Apple II hackers in the industry, also serving as teacher and technical consultant to any and all of his stable of employees and freelancers. When advertising to prospective programmers, On-Line Systems even listed privileged access to Ken as one of its best perks: “I (Ken) will personally be available at any time for technical discussions, helping to debug, brainstorming, etc.”

Despite the reservations of the more conservative residents, Ken, head of a company that was becoming a bigger and bigger part of the economies of Coarsegold and Oakhurst, became an increasingly big man about town — soon enough, the big man. Ken threw himself into the role of “town father” with his usual abandon, splashing money liberally around town for causes such as the rebuilding of the needy local fire brigade. He also hired frequently from the local population, partly for the most practical of reasons: personnel like phone operators could be had for a third of what it would have cost in a big city. Still, he also offered ambitious locals the opportunity to build genuine careers for themselves. A boat sander eventually became a vice president in charge of product development; a hotel maid head of the accounting department; a plumber head of product acquisition. Ken hired Bob Davis out of a local liquor store. Soon Bob, a 27-year-old frustrated musician who had spent all of his previous working life as a cook or a cashier, had a Hi-Res Adventure of his own in stores, Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, built using the tools Ken had developed for Roberta’s early efforts.

Yet for all that, Ken made his most significant contributions outside of his own company and outside of the tiny society of Coarsegold and Oakhurst, to the industry at large. In fact, this figure, so known to a whole generation of gamers as the yin to Roberta’s adventure-gaming yang, is paradoxically under-credited for the role he played in shaping the software industry. Amongst the software industry at large, his contribution is perhaps exceeded only by that of Bill Gates, and when we talk about games… well, I’m not sure he has an equal. Faced with an emerging market of well-nigh limitless potential, this die-hard capitalist decided that a rising tide lifts all boats, and did much that aided his competitors as much as it did On-Line Systems.

I’ve already mentioned the most important of these initiatives: the founding of the first true software distributor, which Ken spun off to his friend Robert Leff for just $1300. Without a distribution network to get software easily and efficiently into stores across the country, publishers like On-Line Systems and its competitors could not have thrived as they did; nor, for that matter, could the computer industry as a whole. Distribution was in fact a constant obsession with Ken. During that hectic year of 1981 when he was building his own company from virtually nothing, he also found time to co-found Calsoft with an old colleague from his previous life as a computer consultant, Jay Sullivan. Calsoft was a mail-order software store, the first of its kind. While many early publishers, among them Adventure International and California Pacific, did much of their business via mail order, Calsoft became the first to offer a full selection of software from many different publishers, all sales-tax-free thanks to the peculiarities of interstate commerce in the U.S. and usually generously discounted from typical in-store prices. Calsoft was largely run by Sullivan out of Agoura, California, but On-Line Systems’s phone operators helped with order fulfillment and its art department with the design of the catalog and advertising materials. It was another way of giving buyers, especially those in rural areas or otherwise unable to make it into a brick-and-mortar store, easy access to the products of not only On-Line Systems but also their competitors. Soon the magazines were full of other mail-order firms that sprung up in Calsoft’s wake.

Moves like these were prompted by contrary currents moving through the computer industry in general. VisiCalc, along with other early business applications such as WordStar, had finally managed to establish microcomputers as tools possessed of real, practical usefulness. In general, that was of course a good thing, driving sales of both software and hardware and growing the industry. Problem was, most of the people buying Apple IIs and CP/M machines for their offices were not interested in superficial amusements like playing games or even hacking code. Many, in fact, wanted a machine of serious intent, one that did not want to play; being No Fun was an essential feature. Therefore many dealers, even of the Apple II, the machine that Steve Wozniak had partially designed around the features that would let it play a good game of Breakout, began to shy sharply away from any association with the gaming industry. ComputerLand, the largest computer retail chain and the place where Richard Garriott had begun his career by selling Akalabeth, tried to institute for a time a policy of not stocking games on its shelves. Even Apple themselves were ambivalent about games; they didn’t go out of their way to discourage them, and certainly played plenty of them internally, but preferred to promote the Apple II as a serious tool of business and education. (Ironically, and more foolishly, other manufacturers went in the opposite direction; Atari told companies that proposed developing business applications for its really very impressive computers that these machines were fundamentally “game machines,” and not a suitable market for such products.) Ken felt genuine fear that a new generation of be-suited bandwagon jumpers would succeed in squeezing games off of the Apple II and other machines, relegating them to much less capable game consoles like the Atari 2600. Thus initiatives like Calsoft, to bring his message directly to the people, as it were. He began another project, Softline magazine, for similar reasons.

In an effort to build customer loyalty as well as “build a base of gamers” in general, On-Line Systems had sent its first newsletter to every registered purchaser of their games in June of 1981. However, Ken, feeling far more threatened by those interests that would turn the Apple II into a boring business machine than by his own competitors in the games industry, dreamed of a way of reaching all gamers via a more generalized gaming and “casual computing” magazine. The need for such an organ seemed clear enough to Ken; even traditional hacker’s favorite Byte magazine was starting to focus more and more on business by this point. (I trust I need not belabor the irony of Ken, a guy who had founded On-Line Systems to create a FORTRAN compiler and who had been as dismissive of games as those ComputerLand executives barely a year before, becoming a computer-games evangelist.) Ken had already established a relationship with Margot and Al Tommervik, publishers of the most beloved of the early Apple II magazines, Softalk. Margot in particular was quite enamored with games. Even before founding Softalk, she had come to the attention of the Williams when she won a contest to become the first to solve Mystery House. Once Softalk had begun, Ken had supported it with generous ad buys, and encouraged others in the industry to do the same.

It was to Margot and Al that Ken turned with his idea for a new magazine that would concern itself mostly with games, that hidden driver of computer sales and dirty little secret of countless folks who ostensibly bought their machines for word processing or accounting. He felt the need for such a magazine so intensely that he was willing to underwrite it at a loss; the magazine would be entirely free, with the audacious if forlorn hope that it would at some point become self-sustaining through ad buys. Softline did not openly proclaim its association with On-Line Systems, appearing by all obvious evidence to be a spinoff of Softalk. Yet, and while Margot and Al served as editors and handled most of the day-to-day business, Ken’s fingerprints were everywhere. Ten of the 18 ads in the first issue — dated September 1981 — were from On-Line Systems, while the initial subscription roll consisted of the mailing list to which On-Line had been sending their in-house newsletter. On-Line Systems often penned reviews for the magazine, and Ken himself wrote a series of in-depth articles on graphics programming for the Apple II, the content of which was not too far removed from the lessons he gave inside On-Line Systems. Of course, even by the rather lackadaisical professional standards of modern videogame journalism it would be considered an outrage for a publisher to get so involved financially and editorially with an avowedly independent magazine today. However, as John Williams says: “Like a lot of things we did in the beginning, we did them because they needed to be done and stopped doing them when the industry grew up enough to develop the business.”

As it happened, some of Softline‘s thunder was stolen by another magazine that debuted a couple of months later, Computer Gaming World. CGW had links with wargame publisher Strategic Simulations that went almost as deep as those of Softline to On-Line Systems, leading to a somewhat stodgy publication that had a profound interest in military strategy games and often gave short shrift to just about everything else. Over time, however, its editorial interests broadened, and it went on to become a 25-year institution in gaming. With the success of CGW perhaps signalling that Softline no longer “needed to be done,” On-Line Systems gradually disentangled themselves from Softline, which in late 1982 went to a more traditional paid-subscription model like that of CGW. A couple of years later Softalk and Softline went out of business, but Softline‘s pioneering role should not be forgotten — nor Ken’s having been the one who got it all started.

One remarkable aspect of the early American software industry is how geographically dispersed it was. In 1981, Scott Adams was running Adventure International from a bedroom community near Miami; Muse had established their office and storefront in downtown Baltimore; Infocom was just leasing its first office space and beginning to look like a real company in Boston; Richard Garriott was coding his games from a bedroom in Houston and a dorm room in Austin; the folks working at The Computer Emporium in Des Moines had decided to stop just selling other people’s software and start making some of their own to sell; and from a suburb of Seattle Microsoft were adopting an earlier operating system called 86-DOS to suit the needs of IBM’s new PC, the project that would make the company, make history, and make just about everyone involved millionaires or billionaires. Still, a disproportionate part of the industry was concentrated, as you might expect, in California. In addition to companies we’ve already met — On-Line Systems, Edu-Ware, Automated Simulations, California Pacific, Personal Software — there were also plenty of others, such as Sirius Software, known for its series of fast-action games churned out by resident genius Nasir Gebelli on virtually a monthly basis. With all of his industry-wide initiatives and his outsized personality, Ken became the de facto leader and social guidance counselor of the entire California entertainment-software industry. With the market growing month-by-month, alleged competitors could, at least for the time being, afford to be friends.

Ken and Roberta hosted a Western-themed coming-out party of sorts for On-Line Systems on May 16, 1981, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Mystery House‘s release. (What a difference a year had made!) Coarsegold and Oakhurst offered only a handful of hotel rooms at the time, so — shades of the California computer industry’s hippie heritage — some guests drove up with camper vans or trailers, while others sacked out on whatever couches Ken could find for them amongst On-Line Systems’s employees. In the photo below, that’s Ken in the center, with Phil Knopp of Sirius Software to his left.

Al Remmers of California Pacific, the man who introduced Lord British and Ultima to the world, came with his wife.

As did plenty of others; Sherwin Steffin of Edu-Ware peeks out from the back right corner of the table in the photo below.

A good time was had by all, and a precedent was set. On-Line Systems’s parties became “must-attend” events for the California industry. That summer Ken’s brother John, On-Line’s marketing director at the tender age of 19, organized a river rafting trip for a big chunk of the industry, among them David Mullich, creator of The Prisoner for Edu-Ware. An article from, naturally, the first issue of Softline describes the results wrought by this combination of water, sun, camaraderie, and of course alcohol:

The party got rowdy near the trip’s end as paddlers prepared for one final brawl. Ken Williams took the last rapid standing up on the front rail of his craft, and Randy Hyde followed suit. With Ken perched on the rail’s edge like a kamikaze waterskier, his crew rammed and boarded the unsuspecting craft, throwing half of the surprised occupants overboard. Bob Christiansen (Quality Software) got a chance to test out his underwater camera when it wound up in the drink with him. Rafters who wound up in the water struggled to pull others overboard, while those still on board fended off the attackers with paddles. Water from paddles and buckets flew over the ten rafts.

Market consultant Diane Ascher was also on the trip, and spoke a bit about how it felt to be alive in this historical moment:

“This is a group of people that is always looking for an excuse to party. The river just provided us with a scenic backdrop. Basically we have a lot in common. We sort of feel like we beat the system: we got to microcomputers before IBM did.”

That last sentence reads as almost chilling today. Summer camp can’t last forever; Big Blue was in fact about to arrive on the scene at last, along with plenty of other new pressures. Most of the companies represented on the trip, so flush with cash and success, would be out of business within a few years.

But we’ll come to that soon enough. For now, let’s enjoy the halcyon days a bit more. Next time: the most controversial computer game of 1981, and one of the most successful.

(My huge thanks to John Williams, whose detailed recollections of these days informed much of this post.)

18 Comments

Posted by Jimmy Maher on February 19, 2012 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

Tags: apple ii, sierra

The Prisoner, Part 2

14 Nov

David Mullich’s original plan was to write a game inspired by The Prisoner, but not a direct adaptation — an eminently sensible move considering that Edu-Ware did not own the intellectual-property rights to the show and were hardly in a position to purchase them. But Steffin and Pederson, displaying the cavalier attitude toward IP that would soon get them sued for the Space games, not only insisted that the game be called The Prisoner but even planned to use the original series’s distinctive logo. Understandably concerned, Mullich asked them to at least contact ITC Entertainment about the matter. So Steffin and Pederson called ITC and asked them whether they would mind if they — of all things — opened a Prisoner-themed restaurant. When ITC said that was okay, Steffin and Pederson reported back to Mullich that they had “permission.” They got lucky. ITC was at just that instant busy committing institutional suicide via two ill-conceived feature films: Can’t Stop the Music, a disco extravaganza starring the Village People released just in time for the big anti-disco backlash; and Raise the Titanic, an ambitious thriller which went so far over budget that it prompted ITC head Lew Grade to remark that it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic instead. Not only were both films commercial flops, but both also had the honor of being nominated for the first ever Golden Raspberry for Worst Picture, with Can’t Stop the Music nudging out its stablemate for the prize. Against that calamitous backdrop, the plundering of a ten-year old television series by an obscure little company in the obscure little field of computer games was not much on ITC’s radar. Yes, the media landscape was very different in 1980…

With that problem “solved,” Mullich set to work designing and coding. He created the entire game completely on his own in “about six weeks time.” That doesn’t sound like much, but remember, this is the fellow who created and coded Network from scratch in three days. The Prisoner in fact represented by far the most ambitious and complex project that Edu-Ware or Mullich had yet worked on. It consists of some 30 individual BASIC programs which are shuffled in and out of memory as needed by a machine-language routine, the only non-BASIC part of the structure.

The conflict in the television series revolves around the question of why Number 6 resigned from the service — the forces that run the Village insist he tell them his reasons, and Number 6 stubbornly refuses to do so. (Of course, whether the answer to this question is really the main priority of the Village, or whether they merely want to get him to surrender this point on the assumption that once he does it will be easy to break him entirely is very much an open question.) It’s very difficult for a player to communicate such an abstract idea to a computer program even today, however, much less on a 48 K Apple II. Mullich therefore replaced the reason with a single randomly-generated three-digit “resignation code” which is presented to the player for the first and only time when she begins to play.

From here on, it will be the goal of the Island to get the player to reveal this code, whether accidentally or on purpose, while it will be the goal of the player to preserve the secret at all costs.

You may have noticed that I referred to the “Island” there rather than the “Village.” Perhaps in the interest of having a veneer of plausible deniability should ITC’s lawyers come calling, Mullich made a number of such changes. Rather than Number 6, for instance, the player is known as simply “#,” and the Island is run not by Number 2 but by the “Caretaker.” Even so, one never has to look hard for the source material; the player lives, as expected, in Building 6, and the Caretaker in Building 2. A bit of code diving even reveals that one of the component programs is named “Village”; apparently Mullich started with that name and never bothered to change the internal program name.

There are, however, also other influences at work here. George Orwell’s 1984 is referenced almost as prominently as The Prisoner television series. The three contradictory aphorisms of Orwell’s Oceania — “War is peace”; “Freedom is slavery”; “Ignorance is strength” — pop up over and over, singly or in tandem. The novel was also an important influence on the television show — “Questions are a burden to others; answers a prison to oneself,” reads a sign in the Village that could have come straight from Oceania — but here the debt is even more explicit. The game’s Wikipedia page currently also claims (without citation) a strong influence for Kafka’s Das Schloß (The Castle), but I’m not entirely convinced of this. While the player’s home on the Island is indeed called the Castle, there have certainly been many more surprising coincidences in literary and ludic history. I don’t really sense any other strong notes of Kafka here, and to my knowledge Mullich has never cited him as an influence. (If you know more about the validity or lack thereof of the Kafka claim, by all means chime in in the comments.)

Kafka homage or not, the game proper begins with us in our Castle, which we learn to our dismay is a big maze inside. Here we are introduced to the general tricksiness of the game. We can dutifully work our way through the maze until we come to the exit. However, we can also simply hit the ESC key (get it?) to get the same result. (ESC in fact gives unexpected results in several areas of the Island, as is obliquely hinted in a few places.) Whether we take the easy or the hard way out, we cannot exit until we answer the question, “Who are you?” The correct answer is of course “#,” but here we also see the first of many attempts the game will make to trick us into entering our resignation code. This time it’s pretty transparent, but never fear, the game will soon get much trickier.

Structurally the game is built around a central spine, a map of the Island through which the player can wander.

On this map are 20 individually numbered buildings, each housing a unique experience enabled by a BASIC mini-game all its own. Indeed, these games form a veritable catalog of BASIC game archetypes of the early microcomputer and late institutional computing era, the sort of concepts that in an alternative universe could have easily popped up on an HP-2000 system or the book BASIC Computer Games. In addition to the maze game in Building 6, we have a couple of ELIZA-like exercises in conversation and a game reminiscent of the early agricultural strategy game Hamurabi, albeit with the player manipulating the amount of power allotted to various Island systems rather than manipulating acres of land and bushels of crops.

In contrast to their friendly predecessors, however, this lot is an unforgiving bunch. Their messages are constantly off-putting. For example, two of the screenshots above show a famous John Donne quotation which the game twists into something sinister to join the 1984 sloganeering. If we win the Hamurabi-style game, we get a gold watch and a “place to retire,” the latter being of course the Island itself — a creepy commentary on the fate of those who are no longer considered economically useful to society. It all combines to create a constant sense of unease and paranoia. Instructions for play are often nonexistent and never complete, and the user interfaces are needlessly inconsistent. In some places, for instance, we can move an avatar using keys representing the three-dimensional compass directions of a real environment (“N,” “E,” “S,” “W”); in others, we must use the two-dimensional directions of the screen (“U,” “R,” “D,” “L”). There are hidden tricks everywhere, such that we sometimes feel it necessary to methodically tap every key on the keyboard looking for those commands the game hasn’t bothered to tell us about but which represent the only possible route to victory. And the games get tricky in other ways.

In the screenshot below, we’ve just been told to cross a pit (represented by the large white square) using “any means at our disposal.” Trouble is, all we can do is move our little avatar (represented, naturally, by the “#”) about — no jump command, no bridge-building command, nothing. What on earth to do?

Well, if we methodically move over every square that is available to us, we eventually find a piece of rope. “What do you want to do with the piece of rope?” the game asks us then. “Cross the pit,” we reply. “Sounds doubtful,” says the game. And sure enough, trying to cross still results in us falling into the pit and being returned to the Castle as punishment. So we return and try again. This time we learn that continuing to search after finding the rope yields a “bundle of sticks.” But no dice, we fall in again. Returning again, we find a third object, a “rusty old wash tub.” Into the pit we fall yet again. Finally, the fourth object, an “inflatable raft,” does the trick.

That’s frustrating, but the contents of other buildings are downright baffling. The library quizzes us on our preferences in reading material, then somehow uses that information to decide whether to award us a vital clue or burn a book in our honor. I still don’t have a clue how its algorithm actually works, and suspect that may be part of its rhetorical point.

Some buildings go beyond baffling to disturbing. Building 17 houses the Island’s version of the (in)famous Milgram Experiment, in which test subjects were told by an authority figure to continue shocking another person to the point of death, and to a disturbingly large degree complied. Here we get to do the shocking, if we choose.

Throughout all this the game is constantly trying to get us to reveal our resignation code, through ploys obvious and subtle. The most devious of all comes when we visit the Hospital. In the midst of an absurd free-association personality test, we are suddenly dropped to BASIC with an apparent error message.

The natural reaction to the above would be to LIST line 943 to see what the problem might be. If we do, however, we have just lost. The number 943 is of course our resignation code, and we have just been tricked into revealing it. There was never any real error at all; we are still in the program. We are still the Prisoner.

Just like in the television show, the game is constantly offering us a seeming chance for escape, then pulling the rug out from under us. We can in certain situations escape from the main complex to the wilderness around it. This is the only bit of the game to use the Apple II’s hi-res graphics mode; all other displays are built using low-resolution character graphics, which suit the game perfectly. The stark black-and-white displays have almost a Constructivist feel.

If we can dodge the Rovers, semi-sentient guardians that are lifted directly from the show, we might be able to escape via an improbably placed train station. We do. We return home. We call up the “Company” that employed us.

They ask for our resignation code, and when we refuse to give it we wind up right back where we started. This whole sequence is unusually direct about invoking television episodes like “The Chimes of Big Ben,” “Many Happy Returns,” and “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh, My Darling,” in which Number 6 seemingly returns to his home of London only to realize that his prison has followed him there as well.

Tricks like these leave us feeling a bit like Charlie Brown out for a rousing game of football with Lucy. When we meet a seeming resistance organization called the Brotherhood, we are therefore inclined to expect more of the same.

The questions they ask us when we meet them doesn’t exactly reassure us:

“Are you willing to give your life, commit murder, commit acts of sabotage which might cause the deaths of innocent people, cheat, forge, blackmail, distribute habit-forming drugs for the cause of freedom?”

In addition to illustrating how a totalitarian society has a way of corrupting even those who believe they fight against it, they also parallel a bit too closely the questions that Orwell’s Brotherhood ask Winston and Julia in 1984:

“You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases — to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?”

That Brotherhood turned out to be an elaborate trap concocted by the Party establishment to trap would-be rebels just like Winston and Julia. By this point we’re not expecting much better.

Surprisingly, the Brotherhood turns out to be what it says it is. The fact that we are so inclined to doubt them provides a nice illustration of the effect that constant suspicion and uncertainty has on would-be resistance in a totalitarian society; even those with the bravery and inclination to fight are ineffective for lack of others they feel they can trust. (This idea was beautifully illustrated on several occasions by the television series.) If we do eventually decide to trust, we can carry out a few modest missions of sabotage and culture jamming. For one of these we must change the headlines of the local newspaper.

The screenshot above shows one of the best a-ha moments in the game, a welcome respite from the constant sense of powerlessness and oppression — we need to enter each letter using its ASCII character code.

Carrying out these missions don’t let us do anything so grand as materially overthrow the island. They do, however, score points for us, and that’s very important, because various options only become available and events only occur when our score has reached a certain number. This adds yet another layer of obfuscation to the experience, as the whole world feels in constant flux due to our changing score. Thus we must constantly revisit locations and try things again and again to see if a higher score makes a difference in what we thought we knew. We can’t even use our score to judge how far into the game we really are. While the game gives the score as “XX” of “XX,” the latter value changes along with the former with no apparent rhyme or reason in yet another nasty psychological trick.

So, how does anyone other than a masochist with the patience of a saint ever beat this thing? The answer: you cheat. Here the fact that the whole game is written in BASIC is key. We can comb through the individual programs to figure out everything that is really going on in each one and, eventually, deduce the path to victory. If we’re impatient, we can even change some of the programs to give us a higher score or otherwise make things easier. In engaging in outright psychological warfare on us the game encourages us to break the rules on our side as well. I’m certainly not the first person to make the observation that “cheating” feels right here, entirely within the spirit of the game. Number 6 never got anywhere by behaving honorably to his oppressors; he twisted and lied and manipulated, just like they did, and we love him for it. Why not here as well? There’s a little thrill that comes when we ignore the supposed rules and start to hack. I don’t know whether Mullich imagined The Prisoner this way, but God does it work brilliantly in practice.

However we get there, we ultimately win by visiting the Caretaker and telling him that “the Island is just a computer game.” (We do need to have a sufficiently high score to be “ready for that realization,” contradicting Mullich’s claim in the Tea Leaves interview that it is possible to win instantly just by going to the Caretaker and telling him this.) With that realization behind us, we can unplug the computer and escape.

And after one final halfhearted bid for our resignation code, the game sets us free.

This final collapsing of the fourth wall is pretty brilliant. Just as some have argued that Number 6 was really a prisoner of himself (illustrated by the unmasking of Number 1 in the last episode), we have been voluntarily choosing to spend our time with this dystopian nightmare of a computer game. All along, we could “escape” simply by doing something else with our time. “To win is to lose,” the game tells us as its parting message, describing the feeling all gamers know of struggling with a game for days or weeks, longing for victory, only to wistfully realize… it’s all over now. Have we really won? Did Number 6 really escape?

The Prisoner is teeth grindingly, soul crushingly difficult, but there is an aesthetic point to its cruelty that is absent from other early adventure games. If the design sins of Scott Adams and Roberta Williams are those of inexperienced designers working in a new medium with primitive technology, those of The Prisoner serve a real artistic purpose. It’s the first work of its kind that the nascent computer-game industry produced, a sign of what this new medium could be used for, even (dare I say it) a striving for the claim of Art. Like much conceptual art it’s uncompromising, not really something to be casually recommended as a “fun game,” but fascinating in its commitment. Its approach, of being a sort of holistic computer game that makes the interface and the code used to build it and the fact that you are having this experience on an Apple II computer part of the experience of play rather than merely paths to same, has seldom if ever been duplicated. On today’s vastly more complex systems with less technically proficient users, that would probably not even be possible.

So The Prisoner is historically important, fascinating to talk about, and just brave as hell on the part of Mullich and Edu-Ware… but, no, I’m not sure I can precisely recommend it. In addition to all the usual challenges that games of its era present to the modern player, it requires either the patience of Job or a good subset of obsolete technical knowledge — or both — to beat it. If you do want to experiment, you should be aware that the game writes data to disk as you play; most of the disk images on the Internet therefore contain games already in progress. If you’d like a clean copy to start with on your real Apple II or emulator, I have one for you here. The zip also includes a 1983 SoftSide Selections magazine with instructions for play. (The Prisoner was re-released on the SoftSide disk magazine after the release of the enhanced The Prisoner II made it no longer viable for Edu-Ware to sell on its own.)

Be seeing you!

25 Comments

Posted by Jimmy Maher on November 14, 2011 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

Tags: apple ii, edu-ware, the prisoner

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