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The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 4: Chainsaw Monday


This article tells part of the story of Sierra On-Line.

In 1825, in Paris, France, a man named Charles-Louis Havas set up an agency to translate foreign news reports into French for the benefit of local newspapers. At that time, his country along with the rest of the Western world stood on the cusp of far-reaching changes. Over the next few decades, the railroad and the telegraph remade travel and communications in their image. This led in turn to the rise of consumerism, as exemplified by the opening of Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche, the world’s first big-box department store, in Paris in 1852. And with consumerism came mass-market advertising, a practice which was to a large extent invented in France.

The Havas Agency rode this wave of change adroitly. Charles-Louis Havas’s two sons, who took over the company after their father’s death, reoriented it toward advertising, making it into the dominant power in the field in France. Havas went public in 1879. During the twentieth century, it expanded into tourism and magazine and book publishing, and eventually into cable television, via Canal+, by far the most popular paid television channel in France from 1984 until the arrival of Netflix in that market in 2014.

The creation of Canal+ marked the point where Havas first became intertwined with another many-tendriled French conglomerate: the Compagnie Générale des Eaux, or CGE. The name translates to “The General Water Company.” As it would imply, CGE had gotten its start when modern plumbing was first spreading across France, all the way back in 1853. It later expanded into other types of urban service, from garbage collection to parking to public transportation. Veering still further out of its original lane, CGE invested enough into Canal+ to be given a 15-percent stake in the nascent channel in 1983, marking the start of a new era for the formerly staid provider of utility services. Over the next fifteen years, its growth outstripped that of Havas dramatically, as it became a major player in cable television, in film and television production, in telecommunications and wired and cellular telephony.

By 1997, CGE had acquired a 29.3-percent stake in Havas as well. In May of the following year, it completed the process of absorption. The new entity abandoned the anachronistic reference to water and became known as Vivendi, a far catchier name that can be roughly translated as “Of Life” or “About Life.” Having expanded by now to the point that it was running out of obvious growth opportunities inside France, it looked beyond the borders of its homeland. In the next few years, it would buy up a wide cross-section of foreign media.

This impulse to grow put the software arm of Cendant Corporation on Vivendi’s hit list just as soon as Henry Silverman, that troubled American company’s boss, made it clear that said division was on the market. For, of all sectors of media, gaming seemed set for the most explosive growth of all, and Vivendi was eager to grab a chunk of that action. It was not alone in this: a deregulation of the French telecommunications industry that had been completed on January 1, 1998, was spawning a foreign feeding frenzy among actual and would-be French game publishers. Conglomerates like Ubisoft, Titus, and Infogrames would soon join Vivendi as new household words among American gamers. The days of the “French Touch” being the mark of games that were sometimes charmingly, sometimes infuriatingly off-kilter would fade into the past, as French publishers would come to stand behind some of the biggest mass-market hits in the field.

Seen through this prism, there can be no doubt about the main reason Vivendi chose to take Cendant’s games division off Henry Silverman’s hands: Blizzard Entertainment, whose games Warcraft 2Diablo, and Starcraft had combined with the Battle.net matchmaking service to become a literal modus vivendi for millions of loyal acolytes. For its part, Sierra was on the verge of scoring a massive, long overdue hit of its own with Half-Life, but that had not yet come to pass as negotiations were taking place. As matters currently stood, Sierra was merely the additional baggage which Vivendi had to accept in order to get its hands on Blizzard.

The deal was done with remarkable speed. On November 20, 1998 — one day after the release of Half-Life, four days before the release of King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, and eighteen days before that of Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire — it was announced that the now-former Cendant software division had become a new subsidiary of the Vivendi empire, under the name of Havas Interactive. The price? A cool $1 billion in cash — cash that was, needless to say, much-needed by the beleaguered Cendant. The current Cendant software head David Grenewetzki, who as far as the French financiers could see had done a pretty good job so far of cutting fat and improving efficiency, would be allowed to continue to do so as the first boss of Havas Interactive.

The folks in Oakhurst had been through such a roller-coaster ride already that they were by now almost numb to further surprises. First had come the acquisition by CUC and the sidelining of Ken Williams, who looked a lot less like a soulless fat cat in comparison to what came after him. Then the merger with HFS, then the shock and horror of the revelations of accounting fraud and the plummeting share price, which had cost some staffers dearly — especially the ones who had signed onto the plan to replace some of their salary with Cendant stock. Al Lowe of Leisure Suit Larry fame, for example, says that almost overnight he and his wife lost “the equivalent of a really nice home.” So, the news of this latest sale, to yet another company that no one had ever heard of, was greeted mostly with resigned shrugs. Everyone had long since learned just to take it day by day, to hope for the best and to try to ignore the little voice inside that was telling them that they probably ought to be expecting the worst.

For three months, sanguinity seemed justified; not much changed. Then came February 22, 1999.

The first sign the Oakhurst employees encountered that something was out of the ordinary on that Monday morning were a few Pinkerton Security vans that they saw parked in front of the building as they arrived at work. Not knowing what else to do, they shrugged and went about their usual start-of-the-week routines. An all-hands meeting was scheduled for that morning at the movie theater next door, the latest installment in a longstanding quarterly tradition of same. If anyone felt a premonition of danger — the mass layoff of 1994 had been announced at another of these meetings, at the same theater — no one voiced their concerns. Instead everyone shuffled in in the standard fashion, swapping stories about the weekend just passed and other inter-office scuttlebutt, a little impatient as always with this corporate rigamarole, eager to get back to their desks and get back to work making games.

They soon learned that they would not be making games in Oakhurst, today or ever again. The instant they had all taken their places, the axe fell — or rather the chainsaw, as it would later be dubbed by Scott Murphy, a designer of Sierra’s Space Quest series. The Oakhurst office was closing, the staffers were told matter-of-factly. While they were still struggling to process this piece of information, they were each handed an envelope with their name on it. Inside was a short note, telling them whether they had just lost their job entirely or whether they were being offered the opportunity to relocate to the Bellevue office, to continue making games there.

As of February of 1999, Yosemite Entertainment had three major projects in development; in an indubitable sign of the changing times in gaming, none was an adventure game. One was a “space simulator” in the mold of Wing Commander and TIE Fighter, based in this case on the Babylon 5 television series; one was an MMORPG, a far more ambitious successor to The Realm that was to take place in J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth; and one was a shooter powered by the Unreal engine that was being created in consultation with a former Navy SEAL commander. The first two projects were to resume production in Bellevue; the last was cancelled outright.

When all of the support staff who are needed to run an office like this one were added to the chopping block, the number of people who lost their jobs that day came to almost 100 — almost two-thirds of the total number of Sierra employees remaining in Oakhurst. The ranks of the newly jobless also included a small team that had been working with Corey and Lori Ann Cole to make an expansion pack for Quest for Glory V, which was to add to the base game some form of the multiplayer support that had once been the whole thrust of the project as well as some new single-player content.

Sierra’s new management had left nothing to chance. While the meeting had been taking place at the theater, the Pinkerton hired guns had been changing the security codes that employees used to access the office building. The victims of the layoff were now led inside in small groups under armed guard, where they were permitted just a few minutes to clean their personal belongings out of their desks.

The shock of it all can hardly be overstated. No one had seen this coming; even Craig Alexander, the manager of Yosemite Entertainment, had been given no more than a few minutes warning on the morning of the layoff itself. With cataclysmic suddenness, the largest employer in Oakhurst had simply ceased to be. Come the day after Chainsaw Monday, the old office building and its previously bustling parking lot looked like a movie set after hours. The only people left to roam the halls were a few support personnel for The Realm, whose servers were to remain in Oakhurst for lack of anyplace better to put them while Havas Interactive sought a buyer for the building and if possible the MMORPG as well. (The Realm had just enough players that its new mother corporation hesitated to piss them off by shutting it down, but neither did Havas Interactive want to invest any real money in a virtual world built around the creaky old SCI engine.)

As an ironic capstone to the brutal proceedings in Oakhurst, both the Babylon 5 game and the Middle-earth MMORPG were themselves cancelled just six months later in Bellevue, as part of another round of “reorganizing.” The folks who had relocated to a big city 1000 miles further up the coast to continue these projects learned that the joke was on them, as they were left high and dry there in Seattle. The emerging new business model for Sierra was that of a publisher and distributor of games only, not an active developer of them. In other words, Sierra was deemed by Vivendi to be of further use only as a recognizable brand name, not as a coherent ongoing creative enterprise. Had he been paying attention, Henry Silverman, Wall Street’s king of outsourcing and branding, would surely have approved.

In the years that followed, surprisingly few of the prominent names who had built Sierra’s original brand, that of the biggest adventure-games studio on the planet, continued to work in the industry. What with the diminished state of the adventure game in general, the skill sets of people like them just weren’t so much in demand anymore.

Corey and Lori Ann Cole did find employment in the industry at least intermittently, but did so in roles that no longer got their names featured on box covers. Corey worked as a consultant on such unlikely projects as Barbie: Fashion Pack Games (to which he contributed a Space Invaders clone that replaced spaceships and laser guns with hearts and lipstick). Both Corey and Lori Ann worked on a virtual world called Explorati, which, had it ever come to fruition, might have been the missing link between Habitat and Second Life. Later, Corey worked on online-poker sites. Eventually, the Coles did come home again, to make Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, which is Quest for Glory VI in all but name, and the more modestly scaled but equally warm-hearted Summer Daze: Tilly’s Tale. Corey told me recently that he and Lori Ann have some other ideas in the pipeline that might come to fruition someday, but he also told me that they “are pushing 70, and spending more time on ourselves.” Which is more than fair enough, of course.

Embracing the spirit of the late 1990s, when you couldn’t toss a dead rat into the air without hitting five different dot.com startups, Ken Williams initially envisioned a second act for his career, as an Internet entrepreneur. He passed up a chance to get in on the ground floor with Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.com in favor of a venture of his own called TalkSpot, which aimed to bring talk radio online. Born, one senses, largely out of Ken’s longstanding infatuation with Rush Limbaugh, a hard-right AM-radio provocateur of the old school, TalkSpot can nevertheless be read as prescient if you squint at it just right, a harbinger of the podcasts that were still to come. But it was just a little bit too far out in front of the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure; almost everyone was still accessing the Internet over dial-up at the time, which made even audio-only streaming a well-nigh insurmountable challenge. An attempted pivot from being a public-facing provider of online talk radio to providing streaming services to other companies, under the name of WorldStream, couldn’t overcome this reality, and the company closed up shop — ironically, not all that long before the DSL lines that might have made it sustainable started to roll out across the country.

Then again, it may be that Ken Williams’s heart was never really in it. Realizing that he had achieved his lifelong dream of becoming rich — he had all the money that he, Roberta, and their children could ever possibly need — he didn’t become a third-time entrepreneur. Instead he and Roberta threw themselves into an active and enviable early retirement. They sailed a boat all over the world, blogging about their travels to a whole new audience who often knew nothing about their previous lives. “We somehow achieved a second fifteen minutes of fame as world cruisers and explorers,” writes Ken in his memoir, exaggerating only slightly.

In 2023, they made a belated return to game development, via a graphical remake of the game that had started it all, for them as for so many others: Will Crowther and Don Woods’s original Adventure. It struck many as an odd choice, given the rich well of beloved Sierra intellectual property from which they might have drawn instead, but it seemed that they wanted above all to pay tribute to the game that had first prompted them to create their seminal Mystery House all those years ago, and to create Sierra On-Line in order to sell it. Having accomplished that mission, they have no plans to make more games.

And as for little Oakhurst, California, the strangest place at which anyone ever decided to found a games company: it weathered the turbulence of Sierra’s departure surprisingly well in the end, as it had so many changes before. There was a brief flicker of hope that game development might again become a linchpin of the town’s economy when, about six months after Chainsaw Monday, the British publisher Codemasters bought Sierra’s old facility, along with The Realm and its servers and the rights to the Navy SEAL game that had been cancelled when the chainsaw fell. Codemasters tried to assemble a team in Oakhurst to complete the SEAL game, which would seem to have been as prescient as Ken Williams’s TalkSpot in its way, anticipating the craze for military-themed shooters that would be ignited by Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in 2002. But most of the people who had once worked on the project had already left town, and Codemasters had trouble attracting more to such a rural location. The winds of corporate politics are fickle; within barely six months, the SEAL game was cancelled a second and final time, the Realm servers were finally moved out, and the now-empty building was put up for sale once again. These events marked the definitive end of game development in Oakhurst, barring the contracting jobs that the Coles did out of their house.

The loss was a serious blow to the local economy in the short term. But, luckily for Oakhurst, Yosemite National Park abides. After a brief-lived dip, the town started to grow again, thanks to the tourists who were now streaming through the “Gateway to Yosemite” in greater numbers than ever. Oakhurst’s population as of the 2020 American census was just shy of 6000 souls — twice the number counted by the 2000 census, when the community was still reeling from Sierra’s departure.

Today, then, Sierra On-Line’s sixteen-year stay in Oakhurst has gone down in local lore as just one more anecdote involving the eccentric outsiders who have always been drawn to the place. Still, among the hordes of families and hardcore hikers who pass through, one can sometimes spot a different breed of middle-aged tourist, who arrives brimming with nostalgia for a second-hand past he or she knew only through the pictures and articles in Sierra’s newsletters. Such is the nature of time. What is passed but remembered, if only by a few, becomes history.

Oakhurst in 2022. Life goes on…

I’d like to share with you a eulogy for Sierra — one that you may very well have seen before, written by someone far closer to all of this than I am. Josh Mandel was a writer and designer who worked at Sierra for several years. Just three days after Chainsaw Monday, he wrote the following.

On Monday, the last vestige of the original Sierra On-Line was laid to rest in Oakhurst, California. That branch, renamed “Yosemite Entertainment,” was shuttered on February 22nd, putting most of its 125-plus employees out of work.

You may not care for what Sierra has become since the days when dozens of unpretentious parser-driven graphic adventures flowed, seemingly effortlessly, out of Oakhurst. But there’s no denying that, back then, Sierra On-Line was the life’s blood of the adventure-game industry.

Maybe the games were a little more rough-hewn than those of its competitors — not that there were many competitors at that point. But Sierra kept adventure gamers happy and fed, gamers who would’ve otherwise starved to death on the arguably more polished, but frustratingly infrequent, releases of Lucasfilm Games (as they were once called).

Sierra alone grew the industry in other ways, too. It was Ken Williams who, almost single-handedly, created the market for PC sound hardware by vigorously educating the public [on] the AdLib card and, shortly thereafter, the breathtaking Roland MT-32. He supported those cards in style while other publishers wanted nothing to do with them. It was Corey and Lori Cole who invented the first true hybrid, replayable adventure/RPG. It was Christy Marx’s lump-in-the-throat ending to Conquests of Camelot that reminded us that not every computer game had to have a group hug at the end. It was Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy who made us want to kill off our onscreen alter ego, to see what inventive, gooey death had been anticipated for us. It was Roberta, before anyone else, who invented strong female heroines. It was Al Lowe, bringing up the rear (literally and figuratively) by creating Leisure Suit Larry, the most popular, pirated game of its decade. We knew this because we sold far more Larry hint books than we sold of the actual software.

It was the Sierra News Magazine (later InterAction) that let us feel like we knew the people making these games, that they were a family-run business, staffed by people who lived an isolated life, surrounded by idyllic, ageless beauty and creating games that were a labor of love. That was, at least for a while, an accurate picture. This was a family we wanted to feel a part of, for good reason, and people came from thousands of miles away to take a tour and see how real it all was…

Some may argue that Sierra lives on in Bellevue, Washington, where Al Lowe, Jane Jensen, Roberta Williams, Mark Seibert, and a handful of [other] Oakhurst refugees still labor diligently on games side-by-side with scores of newer talent. But games like King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity and Leisure Suit Larry 7 have a distinctly different flavor than the seat-of-the-pants, funny, touching adventures that Oakhurst once produced. They are commercial.

Invariably, in a company that grows the way Sierra grew, innovation gives way to emulation. Whereas Sierra’s management once strove to make it solid, profitable, and yet fun, they now strive to dominate other companies, force annual growth in the double digits, and (like so many other companies) cut jobs mercilessly to improve the bottom line and thrill the stockholders. Yet the Ghost of Sierra Past still walked the halls in Oakhurst. The rooms were adorned with the art of glories past, the artists and programmers who helped to create those glories were, in fair measure, still living and working there. Now that spirit has been exorcised by scrubbed, glad-handing executives who don’t know, or don’t care, what those artists and programmers could do when they were motivated and well-managed.

People, living and working closely together in the pursuit of shared joy, were what made Sierra games great. Thank you, Ken, for creating something utterly unique, something warm, fun, and beautiful. Damn you, Ken, for allowing others to tear it down.

Whether you were a Sierra fan or not, we are all diminished by the loss of history, talent, and continuity within the gaming industry. Rest in peace, Sierra On-Line.

The skeptical historian in me hastens to state that this eulogy is very sentimentalized; whatever else they may have been, Sierra’s games were always at least trying to be deeply commercial, as Ken Williams will happily tell you today if you ask him. On the other hand, though, it’s rather in the nature of eulogies to be sentimental, isn’t it? This one is not without plenty of wise truths as well. And among its truths is its willingness to acknowledge that Sierra’s games “were a little more rough-hewn than those of its competitors.”

I, for one, have definitely spent more time over the years complaining about the rough edges in Sierra’s adventure games than I have praising their strong points. I’ve occasionally been accused of ungraciousness in this regard, even of having it in personally for Ken and Roberta Williams. The latter has never been the case, but, looking back, I can understand why it might have seemed that way sometimes, especially in the early years of this site.

Throughout most of the 1980s, the yin and yang of adventure gaming were Infocom and Sierra, each manifesting a contrasting philosophy. As Ken Williams himself has put it, Infocom was “literary,” while Sierra was “mass-market.” One Infocom game looked exactly the same as any other; they were all made up of nothing but text, after all. But Sierra’s games were, right from the very start, the products of Ken’s “ten-foot rule”: meaning that they had to be so audiovisually striking that a shopper would notice them running on a demo machine from ten feet away and rush over to find out more. (It may seem impossible to imagine today that a game with graphics as rudimentary as those of, say, The Wizard and the Princess could have such an effect on anyone, but trust me when I say that, in a time when no other adventure game had any graphics at all, these graphics were more exciting than any ultra-HD wonder is to a jaded modern soul.) Infocom had to prioritize design and writing, because design and writing were all they had. Sierra had other charms with which to beguile their customers. It’s no great wonder that today, when those other charms have ceased to be so beguiling, Infocom’s games tend to hold up much better.

But I’m not here to play the part of an old Infocom fanboy with a bad case of sour grapes. (Whatever we can say about their respective games today, there’s no doubt which company won the fight for hearts and minds in the 1980s…) I actually think a comparison between the two is useful in another way. Infocom was always a collective enterprise, an amalgamation of equals that came into being behind an appropriately round conference table in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Strong personalities though the principals may have been, one cannot say that Infocom was ever Al Vezza’s company or Joel Berez’s company, nor Dave Lebling’s or Marc Blank’s. From first to last, it was a choir of voices, if sometimes a discordant one. Compare this to Sierra: there wasn’t ever an inch of daylight between that company and Ken and Roberta Williams. Sierra’s personality was theirs. Sierra’s strengths were theirs. And, yes, Sierra’s weaknesses, the same ones I’ve documented at so much length over the years, were theirs as well.

I’ll get to their strengths — no, really, I will, I promise — but permit me to dwell on their weaknesses just a little bit longer before I do so. I think that these mostly come down to one simple fact: that neither Ken nor Roberta Williams was ever really a gamer. Ken has admitted that the only Sierra game he ever sat down and played to completion for himself, the way that his customers did it, was SoftPorn — presumably because it was so short and easy (not to mention it being so in tune with where Ken’s head was at in the early 1980s). In his memoir, Ken writes that “to me, Sierra was a marketing company. Lots of people can design products, advertise products, and sell products. But what really lifted Sierra above the pack was our marketing.” Here we see his blasé attitude toward design laid out in stark black and white: “lots of people” can do it. A talent for marketing, it seems, is rarer, and thus apparently more precious. (As for the rest of that sentence: I’m afraid you’ll have to ask Ken how “marketing” is different from “advertising” and “selling…”)

Roberta has not made so explicit a statement on the subject, but it does strike me as telling that, when she was given her choice of any project in the world recently, she chose to remake Crowther and Woods’s Adventure. That game was, it would seem, a once-in-a-lifetime obsession for her.

Needless to say, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with not being a gamer; there are plenty of other hobbies in this world that are equally healthy and stimulating and satisfying, or quite possibly more so. Yet not being a gamer can become an issue when one is running a games company or designing games for a living. At some very fundamental level, neither Ken nor Roberta had any idea what it was like to experience the products Sierra made. And because they didn’t know this, they also didn’t know how important design is to that experience — didn’t understand that, while the ten-foot rule applies for only a limited window of time, writing and puzzles and systems are timeless. Infocom scheduled weekly lunches for everyone who wished to attend to discuss the nature of good and bad design at sometimes heated length, drafted documents full of guidelines about same, made design the cornerstone of their culture. As far as I can tell, discussions of this nature never took place at Sierra. Later, after Infocom was shuttered, LucasArts picked up the torch, publicizing Ron Gilbert’s famous manifesto on “Why Adventure Games Suck” — by “adventure games,” of course, he largely meant “Sierra adventure games” — and including a short description of its design philosophy in every single game manual. Again, such a chapter is unimaginable in a Sierra manual.

For, like everything else associated with the company, Sierra’s games reflected the personalities of Ken and Roberta Williams. They were better at the big picture than they were at the details; they were flashy, audacious, and technologically cutting-edge on the surface, and all too often badly flawed underneath. Those Sierra designers who were determined to make good games, by seeking the input of outside testers and following other best practices, had to swim against the tide of the company’s culture in order to do so. Not that many of them were willing or able to put in the effort when push came to shove, although I have no doubt that everyone had the best of intentions. The games did start to become a bit less egregiously unfair in the 1990s, by which time LucasArts’s crusade for “no deaths and no dead ends” had become enough of a cause célèbre to shame Sierra’s designers as well into ceasing to abuse their players so flagrantly. Nevertheless, even at this late date, Sierra’s games still tended to combine grand concepts with poor-to-middling execution at the level of the granular details. If I’m hard on them, this is the reason why: because they frustrate me to no end with the way they could have been so great, if only Ken Williams had instilled a modicum of process at his company to make them so.

Having said that, though, I have to admit as well that Ken and Roberta Williams are probably deserving of more praise than I’ve given them over the fifteen years I’ve been writing these histories; it’s not as if they were the only people in games with blind spots. Contrary to popular belief, Roberta was not the first female adventure-game designer — that honor goes to Alexis Adams, wife of Scott Adams, who beat her to the punch by a year — but she was by far the most prominent woman in the field of game design in general for the better part of two decades, an inspiration to countless other girls and women, some of whom are making games today because of her. That alone is more than enough to ensure her a respected place in gaming history.

Meanwhile Sierra itself was a beacon of diversity in an industry that sometimes seemed close to a mono-culture, the sole purview of a certain stripe of nerdy young white man with a sharply circumscribed range of cultural interests. The people behind Sierra’s most iconic games came from everywhere but the places and backgrounds you might expect. Al Lowe was a music teacher; Gano Haine was a social-studies teacher; Christy Marx was a cartoon scriptwriter; Jim Walls was a police officer; Jane Jensen and Lorelei Shannon were aspiring novelists; Mark Crowe was a visual artist; Scott Murphy was a short-order cook; Corey and Lori Ann Cole were newsletter editors and publishers and tabletop-RPG designers; Josh Mandel was a standup comedian; Roberta Williams, of course, was a homemaker. At one point in the early 1990s, fully half of Sierra’s active game-development projects were helmed by women. You would be hard-pressed to find a single one at any other studio.

This was the positive side of Ken Williams’s mass-market vision — the one which said that games were for everyone, and that they could be about absolutely anything. There was no gatekeeping at Sierra, in any sense of the word. For all of LucasArts’s thoughtfulness about design, it seldom strayed far from its comfort zone of cartoon-comedy graphic adventures. Sierra, by contrast, dared to be bold, thematically and aesthetically as well as technologically. I may have a long list of niggly complaints about a game like, say, Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within, but I’ll never forget it either. Despite all of its infelicities, it dares to engage with aspects of life that are raw and tragic and real, giving rise to emotions in this player at least that are the opposite of trite. How many of its contemporaries from companies other than Sierra can say the same?

And as went the production side of the business, so went the reception side. Perhaps ironically because he wasn’t a gamer himself, perhaps just because one doesn’t get to be Walt Disney by selling to a niche audience, Ken understood that computer games had to become more accessible if they were ever to make a sustained impact beyond the core demographic of technically proficient young men. He strove mightily on multiple fronts to make this happen. Very early in his time as the head of Sierra, he was instrumental in setting up distribution systems to ensure that computer games were readily available all over the United States, the way that a new form of consumer entertainment ought to be. (Few Sierra fans are aware that it was Ken who founded SoftSel, the dominant American consumer-software distributor of the 1980s and beyond, in order to ensure that Sierra’s games and those of others had a smoothly paved highway to retail stores. Doing so may have been his most important single contribution of all from a purely business perspective.) A little later, he put together easy-to-assemble “multimedia upgrade kits” for everyday computers, and made sure that Sierra’s software installers were the most user-friendly in the business, asking you for IRQ and DMA numbers only as a last resort. If some of his ideas about interactive movies as the future of mainstream entertainment proved a bit half-baked in the long run, other Sierra games like The Incredible Machine more directly anticipated the “Casual Revolution” to come. If his wide-angle vision of gaming seemed increasingly anachronistic in the latter 1990s, even if it was wrong-headed in a hundred particulars, the fact was that it would come roaring back and win the day in the broader strokes. His only real mistake was that of leaving the industry which he had done so much to build a little bit too early to be vindicated.

So, let us wave a fond farewell to Ken and Roberta Williams as they sail off into the sunset, and give them their full measure of absolution from the petty carping of critics like me as we do so. In every sense of the words, Ken and Roberta were pioneers and visionaries. Their absence from these histories will be keenly felt. Godspeed and bon voyage, you two. Your certainly made your presence felt while you were with us.



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Sources: The books Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line by Ken Williams and Vivendi: A Key Player in Global Entertainment and Media by Philippe Bouquillion.

Online sources include “How Sierra was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud” by Duncan Fyfe at Vice, “Chainsaw Monday (Sierra On-Line Shuts Down)” at Larry Laffer Dot Net, Ken Williams’s page of thoughts and rambles at Sierra Gamers, and an old TalkSpot interview with some of Sierra’s employees, done just after the second round of lay-offs hit Bellevue.

I also made use of the materials held in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play. And once again I owe a debt of gratitude to Corey Cole for answering my questions about this period at his usual thoughtful length.

 

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The CRPG Renaissance, Part 3: TSR is Dead…

“How do you make a small fortune in tabletop gaming?” runs an old joke.

The punchline, of course, is that you come to that market with a large one.

The tabletop truly is a brutally challenging place to try to earn money, one which you have to be either wildly deluded or unbelievably passionate to even contemplate entering. Nevertheless, people have been making a go of it there for quite some decades by now. We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that love rather than mental illness is the motivating force. For, whatever else you can say about these folks, nobody is more passionate about their hobby than old-school tabletoppers.

If you do dare to dream of making real money on the tabletop, there are two ways you might envision doing so. One is to strike gold with a once-in-a-blue-moon mass-market perennial of the sort that eventually winds up in every other family’s closet: a Monopoly, a Scrabble, a Clue, a Trivial Pursuit. Under this model, you sell that one game to tens if not hundreds of millions of people, the majority of whom might not buy another board game for five or ten years after buying yours.

The other pathway to profit — or at least to long-term survival — is to score a hit in the hobbyist market. Here your sales ceiling is much lower. But, because you’re selling to people who see tabletop gaming as a lifestyle rather than a gambit to divert the kids on a rainy afternoon, you can potentially keep selling them additions to the same basic game for years and years, turning it into not so much a single product as a whole ecosystem of same. It’s a tougher row to hoe in that it requires an ongoing effort on your part to come up with a steady stream of new content that appeals to your customers, but it’s marginally more achievable than winning the lottery that is the mass market.

That said, any given game need not be exclusively of the one sort or the other. Crossover hits are possible and even increasingly common. In recent decades, several hobbyist games — among them titles such as Catan, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride — have proved to possess the necessary blend of relatability, simplicity, and fun to be sold in supermarkets and greeting-card shops in addition to the scruffy hobbyist boutiques.

Way back in the early 1980s, Dungeons & Dragons was successful enough that its maker, the Lake Geneva, Wisconsin-based TSR, dared to wonder whether that game might be able to make the leap to the mainstream, however strange it may have seemed to imagine that an exercise in elaborate make-believe and tactical monster-fighting might have the same sort of legs as Monopoly. After all, despite its complexity and subject matter, Dungeons & Dragons was already far more culturally visible than Monopoly, a fixture of school cafeterias and anti-Satanic evangelical sermons alike.

Alas, it was not to be. The Dungeons & Dragons wave crested in 1982, after which the bandwagon jumpers began to jump off the wagon again. True mass-market success was probably never in the cards for a company whose acronym stood for “Tactical Studies Rules.” Luckily for TSR, they retained a core group of loyalists who were willing to splash out considerable sums of money on their hobby. Indeed, for a goodly while it seemed like they would snatch up as much new Dungeons & Dragons product as TSR cared to throw at them.

A new era of Dungeons & Dragons merchandising dawned in 1984, when TSR rolled out a trans-media property known as Dragonlance: twelve individual adventure modules, plus two source books and even a strategic board game, all meant to allow a group of players to interactively experience an epic tale of fantasy war that could also be read about in a trilogy of thick conventional novels, the first of their kind that TSR had ever published. It was a brilliant conception in its way, and it became hugely popular with the fan base, heralding a slow shift in TSR’s rhetoric around Dungeons & Dragons. In the past, it had been promoted as a game of free-flowing imagination, primarily a system for making up your own worlds and stories. In the future, the core rules would be marketed as a foundation that you built upon not so much with your own creativity as with other, more targeted TSR products: settings to inhabit, adventures to go through in those settings, new rule books to make a complicated game still more complicated.

The transaction was not so cynical as I might have made it sound. The products themselves were often excellent, thanks to TSR’s dedicated and imaginative staff, and many or most fans felt they got fair value for their ongoing investment. Yet the fact remained that this was also TSR’s only viable way of remaining solvent after the mainstream culture had dismissed Dungeons & Dragons as a weird, kitschy fad or a shorthand for abject nerdiness.

As it was, though, TSR coasted along fairly comfortably on these terms for quite some years. The Dungeons & Dragons supplements continued to sell, even after there were so many of them that it was difficult to see how even the most committed zealot could possibly find the time to get more than a tiny percentage of them to the table. (TSR doubtless benefited from the fact that a lot of fans could get pleasure out of the source books without ever using them for their intended purpose: a surprising number of people over the years have told me that they liked to read such books just to appreciate the meticulous world-building.) The release of a modestly revised “Second Edition” of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in 1989 sent the fans scrambling to re-buy a game they already owned, if for no other reason than to stay compatible with that fire hose of adventures and supplements. Meanwhile TSR found an unexpectedly rich new revenue stream in the many Dungeons & Dragons novels that followed in the wake of that first Dragonlance trilogy; the sales of virtually any of these dwarfed the unit sales of the typical gaming product, while the most popular of all among them, such as R.A. Salvatore’s tales of the dark-elf ranger Drizzt, climbed high on the New York Times bestseller charts. Add to this a deal with SSI to make Dungeons & Dragons-branded computer games, five of which sold more than 100,000 copies from 1988 to 1991. Between the novels and the computer games, Dungeons & Dragons had become as much an abstract lifestyle brand as a concrete tabletop game by the beginning of the 1990s.

It was at about this time that it all started to go wrong — subtly wrong at first, then obviously, and then disastrously. The root of the rot is hard to pinpoint precisely, as these things always are.

Some people point as far back as 1985, when Lorraine Williams, a wealthy heiress who owed her fortune primarily to the Buck Rogers character of comic-book, movie-serial, and television fame, ousted Gary Gygax and took over the company in a palace coup. She is not, to say the least, a highly regarded figure among old-school Dungeons & Dragons fandom. For our part, we need to tread cautiously here; there’s an ugly undertone of gatekeeping and/or misogyny that clings to many fan narratives about Williams’s tenure at the head of TSR. Nonetheless, it is true that she had little intrinsic interest in Dungeons & Dragons; in fact, she sometimes seemed to regard the game’s fans with something perilously close to contempt. In the beginning, TSR was in a strong enough position to overcome her estrangement from the market she served. Later on, this would no longer be the case.

Other people prefer to point to 1991, when a new publisher called White Wolf released a tabletop RPG called Vampire: The Masquerade, which portrayed its titular monsters not as blood-sucking horrors but as sexy lovers of the night straight out of an Anne Rice novel. That, combined with its rules-light approach, attracted a whole new demographic who wouldn’t have been caught dead battling hobgoblins in a fantasy dungeon: too-cool-for-school Goths, who gave free rein to their inner fiends around the gaming table in between Cure concerts. Even in its allegedly streamlined second edition, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons looked stodgy and pedantic to the eyes of many gamers when compared with its younger, slicker competition. For arguably the only time in the entire history of the tabletop RPG, there was real reason to question whether Dungeons & Dragons would continue to be the unrivaled giant of the field going forward. Sales of TSR’s rules and supplements fell off gradually, while sales on the digital front fairly fell off a cliff: no other Dungeons & Dragons computer game from SSI would come anywhere close to sales of 100,000 units after Eye of the Beholder in 1991.

Then, just when it looked like Dungeons & Dragons was at risk of losing its position at the top of the tabletop-RPG pile, another sort of game entirely came along to kick the whole stack right out from under all of them. In August of 1993, a little card game called Magic: The Gathering, designed by a graduate student in combinatorics named Richard Garfield and bearing the logo of a heretofore unsuccessful publisher of tabletop-RPG material named Wizards of the Coast, was debuted at the Gen Con trade show in Wisconsin — a show which had been started by Gary Gygax all the way back in 1968, and which was still put on every year by TSR. At this 26th installment of Gen Con, however, the talk was all about Magic rather than Dungeons & Dragons. Allen Varney later wrote in TSR’s own house magazine Dragon how

people clustered three deep around the Wizards of the Coast table, craning to see the ongoing demonstrations of this game. Everywhere I went I saw someone playing it. In discussing it, some players showed reserved admiration, others enthusiasm, but body language told more than words. Everyone hunched forward intently, the way you do in deep discussions of politics or religion. Onlookers and devoted fans alike felt compelled to grapple with the idea of this game. It achieved more than just a commercial hit; it redefined gamers’ perspectives on their hobby.

The scenes that Varney witnessed were a microcosm of what was about to happen to hobbyist gaming in general, as tabletop fantasy, for so many years a relatively stable market, was hit by this new, profoundly destabilizing force.

We can point to any number of grounds for Magic’s enormous appeal. Many of them boil down to convenience: it was quick to set up and could be played in twenty minutes or so by just two people, without either of them having to read much in the way of rules beyond what was printed on the cards themselves. (Compare this with needing to assemble at least four or five friends to play Dungeons & Dragons, as well as with that game’s hundreds of pages of rules, the crushing weight of preparation and responsibility it put on the Dungeon Master who guided the session, and its equally extreme demands of time; many a Dungeons & Dragons party hadn’t yet decided what equipment to carry into the dungeon by the time twenty minutes had elapsed.) Then, too, the Magic cards were beautifully illustrated, such that collecting them could become an end unto itself. Finally, add to all of this a feeling that had  been setting in even before that pivotal Gen Con: that Dungeons & Dragons had become old hat, an artifact of the last two decades rather than this one. A new generation of gamers craved something fresh. For better or for worse, it seemed that Magic was that thing.

Magic became an unprecedented phenomenon in tabletop gaming, its astounding growth curve eclipsing by a veritable order of magnitude even the early days of Dungeons & Dragons. More than TSR ever had, Wizards of the Coast had well and truly mastered the art of making money in hobbyist gaming by selling the same group of people an infinite stream of content for the same basic game. They had mastered it so well, in fact, that there wasn’t much room left for TSR; a gamer who spent all of his allowance or paycheck on new Magic decks simply didn’t have any money left to give to Dungeons & Dragons.

Like many other shell-shocked publishers in the tabletop-RPG space, TSR tried to fight back by quite literally playing Wizards of the Coast’s own game. Already in 1994, they released a collectible card game of their own called Spellfire.  It’s doubtful whether it would have been able to overcome Magic’s first-mover advantage even if its use of recycled, clashing artwork from previous eras of Dungeons & Dragons hadn’t made it look so much like the rushed knockoff product it was. TSR mustered a modicum more creativity for 1995’s Dragon Dice, which replaced collectible cards with — you guessed it — collectible dice. But it too failed to attract the critical mass of players it needed in order to become self-sustaining. Collectible anything games writ large were a zero-sum game, one in which all of the cards seemed to belong to Wizards and Magic.

Any reasonably thoughtful observer who looked at TSR from the outside at mid-decade would have seen a deeply troubled company, whose flagship game was shrinking away before its eyes. Only one fact might have tended to disabuse our observer of that notion: the fact that TSR kept pumping out product for that same incredible shrinking game at a more furious pace than ever. And make no mistake: TSR’s tabletop Dungeons & Dragons products weren’t slapdash in the way of Spellfire. They were crafted with self-evident love and care, were beautifully illustrated and packaged. The mystery was how the company could afford to put out so darn much quality content in the face of so many financial headwinds. By 1995, TSR had no fewer than twelve separate Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings on the market, each of them taking the form of a mouth-wateringly lavish and rather pricey boxed set. J.R.R. Tolkien and Jack Vance were no longer the alpha and omega of Dungeons & Dragons. You could now play in a post-apocalyptic milieu, in a surrealistic alternate dimension worthy of a Salvador Dali painting, or in outer space. If you liked vampires and gothic horror, you could even play with them without having to jump ship to White Wolf, by picking up a copy of Ravenloft. Committing one’s regular gaming group to any one of these settings meant forgoing all of the others for months or years to come. Even if our observer recognized that a high percentage of customers bought the boxed sets just to browse them and dream about what they might do with them someday, the deluge of content still seemed out of all proportion to the shrinking market for Dungeons & Dragons in general.

Really: just who was buying up enough of this content so that TSR had the money to keep putting out still more of it? The answer to that question would have stunned our hypothetical mid-1990s observer.

In the book Slaying the Dragon, his 2022 “Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons,” Ben Riggs pulls back the curtain on the perverse incentives that were dictating much of TSR’s publication schedule by this point. Since the first incipient rumblings of a full-blown Dungeons & Dragons fad back in 1979, TSR had used the print-publishing mega-corporation Random House as their vehicle for getting product into bookstores. That is to say that TSR continued to act as their own publisher, but they used Random House as their distributor. In a normal arrangement of this sort, the publisher sends their products after they’ve been printed to their distributor, who stashes them in a warehouse and proceeds to take orders from retail stores. As orders come in, the distributor ships out the products, and sends back to the publisher the price of each order, minus the distributor’s own cut for services rendered. Many contracts do allow retailers to send back products that have sat on the shelf for a given span of time without selling, but we need not get into those complications here, because the contract that TSR had with Random House was a highly unusual one in another respect.

Instead of paying TSR as retail stores ordered their products, Random House paid for each shipment up-front, as soon as it arrived at their warehouse, and then tried to recoup that money by selling it on to retail. If we squint just right, we can see why Random House might have agreed to such a seemingly disadvantageous arrangement back in 1979. At that time, TSR might have looked to be a rising star, but they were still rather cash- and investment-poor. On the theory that it’s best to strike while the iron is hot, it might have made sense to someone at Random House to give TSR a way to produce more products more quickly, without having to wait for the revenues from the earlier ones to filter back into their coffers. But the inadvertent byproduct was to break the most fundamental laws of capitalism. “The printing of products was essentially the printing of money,” writes Ben Riggs. “The company had broken free of supply and demand. Perhaps this is why the company kept making settings, even though almost every new iteration sold less than the last one.” The logic was as simple as it was degenerate: if you weren’t making enough money on Dungeons & Dragons, the best remedy was to make more Dungeons & Dragons and send it to Random House. Let them worry about finding a way to unload the stuff.

There was just one problem with that formulation: the payment which Random House sent back to TSR upon receiving each truck-load of product was actually considered to be a loan, unless and until Random House recouped their costs through sales to retailers. The checks from Random House turned into an unpaid bar tab that just kept building and building while Dungeons & Dragons’s retail sales went south. Whether out of benevolence or just because they weren’t really paying attention, Random House was remarkably patient about demanding that TSR settle their tab. But by mid-1995 TSR owed Random House $12 million, with no realistic prospect at current sales volumes of paying off the debt. How long could the mega-corporation’s largess persist?

On every front, TSR was now scrabbling for traction. The digital realm was looking as ugly as that of the tabletop, as SSI’s latest computer games struggled to compete amidst a new fixation on fast-paced real-time as opposed to turn-based forms of gameplay and a more generalized CRPG downturn in the marketplace. After 1993’s Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, which was supposed to be something of a reboot for the Dungeons & Dragons brand on computers, sold fewer than 50,000 copies, TSR began looking for alternatives to SSI. In truth, while SSI had certainly done the license few favors of late — they had released too many games too quickly, with too many of them of workmanlike quality at best — the brand’s woes on the computer went well beyond one injudicious publisher. The malaise of the tabletop was no less prevalent on the digital side of the divide. Dungeons & Dragons just didn’t seem cool anymore — not even nerdy cool.

Nevertheless, TSR terminated their exclusive contract with SSI as soon as it was possible to do so. It came to an end on January 1, 1995, although SSI was given a grace period of six months to put out the last games they had in the pipeline on a non-exclusive basis. Instead of signing another all-encompassing deal like the one they had had with SSI, TSR opted for a bespoke approach, allowing individual publishers to come to them with proposals for individual games. In 1996, Acclaim Entertainment released a rather lame Dungeons & Dragons-branded action game called Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft (“NO 3-D FIGHTER CAN MATCH THE BRUTAL ACTION OF IRON & BLOOD!”). Blood & Magic, which Interplay published later that year, was a real-time-strategy game that Computer Gaming World magazine felt free to dismiss as “a poor man’s Warcraft — and mind you, I’m comparing it to the original, not the sequel.” In 1997, Sierra delivered a more conceptually interesting but poorly executed CRPG/strategy hybrid called Birthright: The Gorgon’s Alliance. These publishers were most definitely not trying to recreate the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop experience on computers, as SSI had so earnestly strained to do in the days of Pool of Radiance. They viewed the Dungeons & Dragons name, which was selling at a steep discount by now, merely as a way to squeeze a few extra unit sales out of the mediocre games to which they applied it.

By the time the aforementioned computer games appeared, TSR was well into its death spiral. At this point, even the Dungeons & Dragons novels, for years the company’s most stable income stream, weren’t selling like they used to. The market had become over-saturated with these things too — TSR published fourteen of them in 1994 alone — even as the brand’s innate cachet had declined and the most popular authors of the past, most notably R.A. Salvatore, had been lost to other book publishers who tended to pay far better.

Unsurprisingly, the beginning of the end came when Random House got serious at last about trying to get their money back. In the summer of 1995, they forced TSR to agree to a debt-repayment plan. TSR was to reduce their outstanding obligation from $12 million to $8.2 million by the end of the year, then pare it down to less than $1 million by the end of 1996. If TSR failed to do so, Random House said, they would initiate legal proceedings to recover the money they were owed.

To their credit, TSR did make an effort to meet Random House’s terms. They were able to reduce the debt to $9.5 million by early in 1996, largely on the strength of the novel Dragons of Summer Flame, a much-hyped continuation of the original Dragonlance saga by Margaret Weis and Tracey Hickman, the primary architects of the mid-1980s trans-media project that still stood as such a landmark in the history of Dungeons & Dragons. But a demonstration of good-faith effort was no longer good enough in the opinion of Random House; their forbearance had run out. In April of 1996, they sued TSR for the remaining millions, just as they had said they would. At the same time, they stopped accepting more product from TSR for distribution — a sensible policy under the circumstances, given that every book, supplement, or game that arrived at their warehouse only added to the debt they were trying to collect. Yet this move deprived TSR of the better half of their distribution network, making the prospect of another fluke hit like Dragons of Summer Flame that much more unlikely.

It was right about this time that TSR stopped paying the majority of their bills. Authors stopped receiving their royalty checks, and TSR’s printer too went uncompensated. Desperate to head off a lawsuit from the latter on top of the one they were facing from Random House, TSR resorted to giving them their offices, then leasing the premises back. In another delaying tactic, TSR pledged the Dungeons & Dragons trademark itself, the crown jewel of their intellectual property, as collateral on their debt to Random House. Needless to say, such last-ditch machinations could only put off the inevitable final reckoning.

The layoffs began in December of 1996. There was a poignancy to these that vastly exceeded the loss of any ordinary job. The people who worked at TSR, more often than not for shockingly low salaries, did it purely out of passion. All of the content they churned out may have made no economic sense, but one only has to glance through the books to see the amount of love and care that was put into them. There was literally no other job in the world like a job at TSR. I can’t help but be reminded of the 1989 shuttering of Infocom, another sui generis creative collective. Ben Riggs:

What do you do, what do you say, when someone is fired from TSR? What would their next job be? Teacher? Journalist? Marketing? Whatever it was, you wouldn’t be working on Dungeons & Dragons. You wouldn’t be paid to think about bugbears, beholders, or bladesingers. For some, leaving the company wasn’t just losing a job, it was leaving a life…

The annual Christmas party turned into a wake for the departed, who were toasted by surviving comrades who knew that their own turn must be coming soon. For it was hard for anyone at TSR to see how the company could possibly recover. Sure enough, within days of the Christmas party, TSR’s printer/landlord stopped printing anything at all for them and initiated eviction proceedings to claim their office space for paying tenants.

Few at TSR realized that a way out had been available to Lorraine Williams for a couple of years by this point. Peter Adkison, the founder and head of Wizards of the Coast, was in a rare position for a chief executive in the tabletop industry: that of running a company that was flush with cash. Despite having done so much to engineer TSR’s doom through Magic, he was very fond of Dungeons & Dragons, and believed that the game and the brand could be resuscitated and made (nerdy) cool again if it was just managed and marketed properly. And unlike TSR, he was in a position to pour serious resources into that task, thanks to his Magic money-printing machine. He let it be known that he would be very interested in doing a deal.

And yet his feelers were steadfastly ignored for two years. Lorraine Williams had an intensely personal loathing for Adkison and his company. Even as Magic had been devouring Dungeons & Dragons at the cash registers of hobby shops, Wizards had repeatedly upstaged TSR in other ways, making tabletop gaming’s lion in winter look stodgy and out of touch over and over again.

Take, for example, the respective reactions to the nascent World Wide Web. TSR saw the fans who flocked online to discuss their hobby and share their ideas, experiences, and creations mostly as a threat to their intellectual property. A set of “guidelines” issued by TSR in 1994 is breathtaking in its wrong-headedness; it essentially makes a “no Dungeons & Dragons allowed” zone out of the entire Internet, with the threat of legal action lurking not so subtly behind its words.

If the party encounters a hydra, let the game master look up the stats for the hydra in the game system he is using. Don’t set the adventures in a TSR world. Create your own or use one from history or legend. Don’t use monsters, spells, etc. that were created by TSR. Create and name your own. Draw on history, legend or reality. Even spell their actual names backward for uniqueness.

Threatening one’s most devoted customers is not a good way to inculcate trust and loyalty in them; nor is forcibly silencing them a good way to spread the word about one’s products. The fans decided that the TSR acronym must really stand for “They Sue Regularly.”

Peter Adkison, on the other hand, recognized the enormous potential of the new digital medium of instant worldwide communication whose rise coincided almost exactly with that of Magic. He made sure Wizard’s site was one of the most advanced on the young Web, granted lengthy interviews to the most prominent of the third-party sites that were soon springing up by the dozen each month, and made no move to interfere when fans began using the Internet to buy and sell Magic cards, at a time when e-commerce in general was still little more than a gleam in a few venture capitalists’ eyes. Such a grass-efforts grapevine was, he knew, better publicity than he could buy with millions of dollars of worth of traditional advertising. It’s no wonder that Lorraine Williams grew to hate him so. To her, he must have seemed bent on demonstrating to the world every single day how much cleverer and more clued-in he was. Even with her own company sinking beneath her feet, Williams refused to countenance climbing onboard her one available lifeboat.

The impasse was finally broken by a wily third party named Bob Abramowitz. Abramowitz was the CEO of yet another game publisher, an outfit called Five Rings Publishing whose flagship product was a collectable card game called Legend of the Five Rings. He met Lorraine Williams at the American International Toy Fair in February of 1997. (Incredibly, she was still attending such events at this late juncture, even though her company was now utterly paralyzed, thanks to their angry printer who refused to accept new jobs.) Being well acquainted with the rumors that were swirling around the industry about TSR’s dire straits, Abramowitz broached a visit to their Lake Geneva headquarters to kick the tires and discuss a possible purchase, even though he knew full well that he was possessed of nothing like the financing that would be necessary to pull off such a deal.

Luckily for him, Williams invited him to come on out without bothering to check his bona fides. Over the course of several days in Lake Geneva, he and a couple of associates pored over TSR’s books, learning to their shock that things there were actually much, much worse than they had ever dreamed they might be. Abramowitz would later describe how “in the halls that had produced the stuff of my childhood fantasies, and had fired my imagination and become unalterably intertwined with my own sense of self, I found echoes, empty desks, and the terrible depression of lost purpose.” At the end of the visit, Abramowitz and Williams signed a formal letter of intent, in which the latter stated that she was prepared to sell TSR to the former for $25 million. Because any such sale would come complete with $30 million in unpaid debts, the effective price tag would amount to about $55 million.

In reality, Abramowitz hadn’t a prayer of raising even $25 million. What he did have, however, was a plan. He finagled a meeting with Peter Adkison and showed him the letter of intent. It proved that Williams was willing and even eager to sell her company in principle. The sticking point was whether she could be convinced to sell it to Peter Adkison and Wizards of the Coast. Having gotten this far with her, Abramowitz thought he could talk her around to that distasteful prospect. He was prepared to try his hardest to do so — as long as Adkison agreed to also buy Five Rings, whose own collectible card game was struggling mightily to compete with Magic.

“But why not just let TSR go bankrupt, and then buy it without assuming all that debt?” Adkison asked.

“Because,” Abramowitz explained, “the trademarks are already mortgaged. What’s valuable here isn’t TSR itself. It’s Dungeons & Dragons. The only way you can be sure of getting it is to buy the whole company now, while it’s still intact.”

Adkison tried a bit more to play devil’s advocate, but his heart wasn’t really in it. Abramowitz had already seen his interlocutor’s eyes light up when he had first mentioned a deal involving TSR and Dungeons & Dragons. He had known then and there that he had hooked his whale.

His plan worked like a charm. He flew back to Lake Geneva, and, in the course of a tense 90-minute conversation, convinced Lorraine Williams to sell her company to the last person in the world she wanted to. Then he sold Five Rings as well to Wizards, walking away from the spate of deal-making rid of that money-losing albatross and with a substantial sum of cash for the pockets of him and his partners. Bravo for him.

The impending purchase was announced on April 10, 1997; the sale was finalized on June 2. By this point, Wizards was a far bigger, wealthier company than TSR had ever been. They were able to buy TSR and bulldoze away the mountain of debt without taking any new bank financing of their own — so much money were they bringing in through Magic.

Peter Adkison held an all-hands meeting with the understandably nervous remaining staff of TSR on June 3. At it, he told them that he had bought the company for two things: for Dungeons & Dragons, yes, but also for the very people who were gathered in that room, the ones who made the game. TSR’s Lake Geneva offices would be closed, marking the end of Wisconsin’s unlikely tenure as the center of the tabletop-RPG universe, but most employees would receive an offer to move to Seattle and work in Wizard’s headquarters. With Magic doing such gangbusters business, Wizards of the Coast had the time and money to rebuild the Dungeons & Dragons brand carefully and methodically, even if it took years. They would soon begin work on a third edition of the rules, the most sweeping revision ever, intended to make the game understandable and appealing to a whole new generation of players without losing the core of what had made it such a sensation in the first place. The future of Dungeons & Dragons was bright, Adkison insisted.

What Adkison couldn’t have envisioned on that day was that the resuscitation of Dungeons & Dragons would begin in the digital rather than the tabletop realm, courtesy of one of the most iconic CRPGs of all time — a Pool of Radiance for this new decade.



Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.


Sources: The books Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs by David L. Craddock; Designers & Dragons: A History of the Roleplaying Game Industry, Volumes 1 and 3, by Shannon Appelcline; Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons by Ben Riggs; and Generation Decks: The Unofficial History of Magic: The Gathering by Titus Chalk; Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons by Jon Peterson. Dragon of January 1994; Computer Gaming World of April 1997.

Online sources include DM David’s blog, especially “TSR Declares War on the Internet’s D&D Fans” and “The Threat That Nearly Killed Dungeons & Dragons — Twice.”

I also made use of the SSI archive donated by Joel Billings to the Strong Museum of Play.

 
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Posted by on February 21, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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A Conversation with Andrew Plotkin

For some of you, Andrew Plotkin will need no introduction. The rest of you ought to know that he’s quite an amazing guy, easily one of the half-dozen most important figures in the history of post-Infocom interactive fiction. By my best reckoning, he’s written an even dozen fully realized, polished text adventures in all, from 1995’s A Change in the Weather, the co-winner of the very first IF Competition, to his 2014 Kickstarter-funded epic Hadean Lands. While he was about it, he made vital technical contributions to interactive fiction as well; perhaps most notably, he invented a new virtual machine called Glulx, which finally allowed games written with the Inform programming language to burst beyond the boundaries of Infocom’s old Z-Machine, while the accompanying Glk input-output library allowed then to make use of graphics, sound, and modern typography. Over the last ten years or so, Andrew — or “Zarf,” as his friends who know him just a little bit better than I do generally call him — has moved into more of an organizing role in the interactive-fiction community, taking steps to place it on a firm footing so that its most important institutions can outlive old-timers like him and me.

Andrew was kind enough to sit down with me recently for a wide-ranging conversation that started with his formative years as an Infocom superfan in the 1980s, went on to encompass some of his seminal games and other contributions of the 1990s and beyond, and wound up in the here and now. I hope you’ll enjoy reading this transcript of our discussion as much as I enjoyed chatting with Andrew screen to screen. He’s refreshingly honest about the sweet and the bitter of being a digital creator working mostly in niche forms.

One final note before we get started: Andrew is currently available for contract or full-time employment. If you have need of an experienced programmer, systems architect, writer, and/or game designer whose body of work speaks for itself, you can contact him through his website.


The munchkin Zarf, 1971.

Perhaps we should start with some very general background. Have you lived in the Boston area your whole life?

No, not at all! I only moved to Boston in 2005.

I was born in 1970 in Syracuse, New York, a place that I don’t remember at all because my family moved to New Jersey when I was about three. We lived there for a couple of years, then my father got a job in the Washington, D.C., area. I went to primary school through high school there.

And when and where did you first encounter interactive fiction?

It must have been around 1979. My father’s company had a “bring your family to work” day. A teletype there was running Adventure. My father plunked me down in front of it and explained what was going on. I thought it was the best thing in the universe. I banged on it for a couple of hours while everybody else was running around the office, although I didn’t get very far.

For the next few months, Dad was playing it at work, illicitly — that was how everybody played it. He would bring home these giant sheets of fan-fold printer paper showing his latest progress. As I recall, I suggested the solution to the troll-bridge puzzle: giving the golden eggs to the troll. That was great, the first adventure-game puzzle I solved.

When did you first get a computer at home?

Around 1980, we got an Apple II Plus. We acquired the first three Scott Adams games and Zork, which was newly available, plus Microsoft’s port of Adventure to the Apple II.

Andrew’s bar mitzvah cake took the form of an Apple II.

That started my lifelong attachment to Infocom. I played all the games as they came out. I begged my folks to buy them for me. Later, I spent my own money on them.

You played all of the Infocom games upon their first release?

Pretty much, up until I went off to college. I remember that I did not play Plundered Hearts when it came out.

That one was a hard sell for a lot of young men — although it’s a brilliant game.

Yeah. I didn’t play it because I was a seventeen-year-old boy.

I also didn’t play Zork Zero or the [illustrated] games that came after it because I had gone off to college and didn’t have the Apple II anymore. But I did catch up with all of them a few years later.

You mention that you did get some adventure games from other companies when you first got the Apple II. Did that continue, or were you exclusively loyal to Infocom?

Well, I was haunting the download BBSes and snarfing any pirated game I could. I played Wizardry and Ultima. I didn’t play too many other text adventures. I knew they existed — I had seen ads for Mike Berlyn’s pre-Infocom stuff — but I didn’t really hunt them down because I knew that Infocom was actually better at it. I remember that we had The Wizard and the Princess, which was just clunky and weird and not actually solvable.

I know that you also wrote some of your own text adventures on the Apple II in BASIC, as a lot of people were doing at this time.

Yes. The first one I did was a parody of Enchanter. I called it Enchanter II. It was a joke game that I could upload to the BBSes: “Look, it’s the sequel!” It was very silly. It started out pretending to be an Infocom game, then started throwing in Doctor Who jokes. The closing line was, “You may have lost, but we have gained,” the ending from the Apple II Prisoner game. It was terrible.

But I did write it and release it. Unfortunately, as far as I know it’s lost. I’ve never seen it archived anywhere.

I did Inhumane after that. That was another parody game, but it was meant to have actual puzzles. It was inspired by the Grimtooth’s Traps role-playing books. I liked the idea of people dying in funny ways.

Inhumane is obviously juvenilia, but at the same time it shows some of what was to come in your games. There’s a subversive angle to it: here’s a game full of traps where the objective is to hit all the traps. That’s the way I play a lot of games, but inadvertently. Here that’s the point.

Were you heavily into tabletop RPGs?

No. Tabletop role-playing I was never into. I get performance anxiety when I’m asked to come up with stories on the fly. I just don’t enjoy sitting at a table and being in that position. It’s not my thing.

But I was interested in role-playing scenarios and source books. First, because of the long-term connection to [computer] adventure games, second because they had so much creative world-building and storytelling, just to read. So, yeah. I was interested in tabletop role-playing games but not in actually playing them.

A surprising number of people have told me the same: they never played tabletop RPGs much but they liked the source books. For some people, the imagination that goes into those is enough, it seems.

So, you go off to university. Why did you choose Carnegie Mellon University?

I got rejected by MIT! It was second on the list.

Were you aware that Infocom was connected so closely to MIT?

No. I knew that they were in Cambridge because I subscribed to the Status Line newsletter. There was a running theme of them mentioning stuff around Cambridge. And I’d played The Lurking Horror. But I didn’t have the full context of “these were MIT students who made Zork at MIT.”

I guess it would have made the rejection even more painful if you’d known.

At university, you’re exposed to Unix and the Mac for the first time.

Yes. And to the Internet. And I started learning “real” programming languages like C.

Did you also play games at university?

Yes. I ran into roguelikes for the first time.

Which ones did you play?

I played a fair bit of Advanced Rogue, but I never got good at it. There were people playing NetHack, but it was clear that that was a game where you had to put in a lot of time to make any serious progress. Rogue was a little bit lighter.

Yeah. I never was willing to put in the hours and hours that it takes to get good at those games. Now especially, when I write about so many games, I just don’t have the time to devote 200 hours to NetHack.

You’ve since re-implemented one of your own programming experiments from university, Praser 5.

That was not originally a parser-based text adventure. It was a puzzle stuck inside the CMU filesystem. Every “room” was a directory, connected by symlinks. You literally CDed into the directory and typed “ls,” and the description would pop up in the file listing. Then you would type, “cd up,” “cd left,” whatever, to follow symlinks to other directories. It was an experiment in using the tools of a shared computer system to make an embedded game. The riddles were a matter of running a small executable which was linked in each directory. I used file permissions to give people access to more things as they solved more puzzles.

Much later, after I had learned Inform 6, I did the parser version.

What did you do right after university?

I graduated in 1992, but I wanted to stick around the Pittsburgh area because a lot of my friends hadn’t graduated yet. I got a job in the CMU computer-science department and shacked up with a couple of classmates in a rundown apartment.

That was great. I bought my first Macintosh and started writing stuff on it. That’s when I started working on System’s Twilight. I figured it was time for me to get into my games career. I decided to write a game and release it as shareware to make actual money. So, I bought a tremendous number of Macintosh programming manuals, which I still have.

System’s Twilight has the fingerprints of Cliff Johnson of Fool’s Errand fame all over it.

Yes. It was an homage.

When did you first play his games? Was that at university?

Yeah. Those came out between 1988 and 1992, when I was there. I had a campus job, so I could afford a couple of games. I played them on the campus Macintoshes.

I remember very well being in one of the computer clusters at two in the morning, solving the final meta-puzzle of The Fool’s Errand. I had written down all of the clues the game had fed me on papers that were spread out all over the desk. Every time I used one of the clues, I’d grab the piece of paper, crumple it up, and throw it over my shoulder. When I finished, the desk was empty and I was surrounded by paper.

We had an amazing experience with The Fool’s Errand as well. My wife fell in love with it. It was our obsession for two weeks. When I talked to Cliff Johnson years ago, my wife told me to tell him that he was the only man other than me that she could see herself marrying. I wasn’t sure how to take that.

What were your expectations for System’s Twilight?

I intended to make some money. I didn’t know how much would show up or whether it would lead to more things. It was just something I could do that would be a lot more fun than the programming I was doing in my day job.

Now that you had your own Macintosh and a steady income, I guess you started buying more commercial games again? I know you have a huge love for Myst, which came out around this time.

I was actually a little bit late to Myst. I didn’t play it until 1994, when everybody was already talking about it.

But when you did, it was love at first sight?

Yeah. The combination of the environment and the soundscape was great and the puzzles were fun. It felt like someone was finally doing the graphical adventure right. I’d never gotten into the LucasArts and Sierra versions of graphical adventures because they were sort of parodic, and the environments weren’t actually attractive. They were very pixelated. They just weren’t trying to be immersive. But Myst was doing it right.

As long as we’re on the subject: I guess Riven absolutely blew your mind?

Yes, it did. It was vastly larger and more interesting and more cohesively thought-through than Myst had been. I played it obsessively and solved it and was very happy.

At what point did you get involved with the people who would wind up being the founders of a post-Infocom interactive-fiction community?

In 1993 or 1994, someone pointed me to an open-source Infocom interpreter. I hadn’t really been aware of the technology stack behind Infocom’s games. But now you could pull all of the games off of the Lost Treasures disks and run them on Unix machines. That was kind of interesting.

I don’t remember how I encountered the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup. But when I did, people were talking about reverse-engineering the Infocom technology. I wrote an interpreter of my own for [Unix] X Windows that had proportional fonts, command-line editing, command history, scroll bars — all the stuff we take for granted nowadays. I released that, then ported it to the Macintosh. That was my first major interaction with rec.arts.int-fiction.

It must have been around this time that Kevin Wilson made a very historically significant post on Usenet, announcing the very first IF Competition. You submitted A Change in the Weather and won the Inform category. Did you write that game specifically for the Comp?

Let me back up a little bit. In early 1995, I got an offer from a game company in Washington, D.C, called Magnet Interactive, to port games from 3DO to Macintosh. So, I moved to Washington — I was very sad to leave Pittsburgh behind — and rented a terrible little rundown apartment there. I was also making some money from System’s Twilight, and had started working on a sequel, which was to be called Moondials. It was a slog. I had some ideas for puzzles, but the story was just not coming together.

So, when Kevin Wilson said, “Hey, let’s do this thing,” I said, “I’m going to take a break from Moondials and write a text adventure very fast.” The process started with downloading Inform 5 and the manual and reading it. I think I blasted through the manual five times in a week.

The start of the Competition was a little weird because we didn’t yet have the idea of all of the games being made available at the same time. Kevin just said, “Upload your games to the IF Archive.” So, all of the games trickled in at different times. For the second Comp, we settled very firmly on the idea of all games being released at the same time because the 1995 experience was not very satisfactory.

I know that it’s always frustrating to be asked where ideas come from. But sometimes it’s unavoidable, so I’m going to ask it about A Change in the Weather.

I think I was drawing on the general sense of being an introvert and not making friends easily — being separated from people and feeling alienated from my social group. My college experience wasn’t solidly that. I was an introvert, but I was at a computer college, and there were a lot of introverts and introvert-centered social groups. I had friends, had housemates after college, as I said. But I still struggled somewhat with social activities. It was a failure mode I was always aware of, that I might end up on the edge not really talking to people. I drew on that experience in general in creating the scenario of A Change in the Weather.

That’s interesting. From my outsider perspective, I can see that much more in So Far, your next game. It really dwells on this theme of alienation and connection, or the lack thereof. That also strikes me as the game of yours that’s most overtly influenced by Myst. Just from the nature of the environment and the magical-mechanical puzzles. It’s not deserted like Myst, but you can’t interact in any meaningful way with the people who are there — which goes back to this theme of alienation.

I wasn’t thinking of Myst specifically there, but it was part of my background by that point. The direct emotional line in So Far was breaking up with my college girlfriend. That was a couple of years in the past by this point. That had been in Pittsburgh. A lot of the energy for working on System’s Twilight came from suddenly being stuck at home after that relationship ended. I channeled my frustrations into programming.

But then I tried to drop it into So Far as a theme of people being separated. None of the specifics of what had happened were relevant to the game — just the feeling.

By the time of So Far, you were as big as names get in modern interactive fiction. Your next game Lists and Lists was arguably not a game at all. What made you decide to write a LISP tutorial as interactive fiction? Do you have a special relationship with LISP?

Yes! I hate it! I had taken functional-programming courses in college and learned LISP. But I just did not jibe with it at all.

That’s ironic because Infocom’s programming language ZIL was heavily based on LISP.

Right. It was an MIT thing, but it was not my thing. Nevertheless, the concept of building it into the Z-Machine with a practical limit of 64 K of RAM — or really less than that — seemed doable. And I had written a LISP interpreter as a programming exercise during my first or second year in college. So, I was aware of the basics. Doing it in Inform wasn’t a gigantic challenge, just a certain amount of work.

Were you already starting to feel restless with the traditional paradigm of interactive fiction? Right after Lists and Lists, you released The Space Under the Window, which might almost work better if it was implemented in hypertext. It’s almost interactive poetry.

I wasn’t bored with traditional games, but I did want to try different things and see what could be done. And writing in Inform was simple enough that I could just whip out an idea and see whether it worked. That was inspiring the whole community at this point. That was the lesson of the first IF Comp: you can just sit down and try an idea, and a month later people will be talking about it. There was a very rapid fermentation cycle.

Yes. It led to much more formal experimentation. Before the Comp came along, everybody was trying to follow the Infocom model and make big games. But if you have an idea that’s more conceptual or avant garde, it’s often better suited to a smaller game. The Comp created a space for that. If you do something and submit it to the Comp, even if it’s highly experimental, it will get played and noticed and discussed.

Now we come to The Big One of your games in many people’s eyes. And I must admit that this applies to me as well. Spider and Web is such a brilliantly conceived game. I’m in awe of this game. So, thank you for that.

You’re welcome. It’s always tricky to have a game which is so purely built out of a single idea because then, when you try to write another game, you think you have to come up with another idea that’s as good, and it’s never possible.

Was this idea born out of any particular experience, perhaps with other media?

I don’t think it was. I was prying into what we would now call the triangle of identities — prying into the idea that what the game’s text is telling you is a point of view that might have biases behind it. There is a dialog between what the player thinks about the world and what the game thinks about the world, and there can be cracks in between. That led to the idea of using the storytelling of the game to tell a lie, and that there is a truth behind it which can be discerned.

I started with that kernel and started coming up with puzzle scenarios. Here is an outcome that is verifiable. But there’s two different versions of what happened that could have led to that outcome. I’m going to tell one, but the other is going to be the truth. I strung together a few different versions of that. Then I said, okay, if we’re lying, then the introduction of the game has to introduce the lie. So I folded that in from the start. I knew that I wanted a two-part structure: you learn what’s going on, then you make use of all of the information.

The moment of transition between the two is often referred to as simply The Puzzle. It’s been called the best single text-adventure puzzle ever created. Did you realize how special it was at the time?

No. I figured it would be a puzzle. I didn’t understand how much of an impact it would have. I knew that I wanted to surprise players by having a possibility suddenly become available. Here’s a thing that I can do, and I will do it. Any kind of good puzzle solution is a surprise when you think of it. Afterward it seems obvious. I knew I had a good combination of elements to make it work, but I wasn’t thinking about the way that it would reorient the entire history of the game in the player’s head in one fell swoop. I don’t know. Maybe I had an inkling.

What I love is that the game is called Spider and Web. Suddenly when you solve that puzzle, those two categories get reversed. Who is really the spider and who is caught in the web?

The reason I called it Spider and Web was actually the old idiom “What a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive.” The notion of deception was meant to be part of the title, and the spider was there just to go with the web. But yes, it’s multi-valent.

I know you’re a big reader of science fiction and fantasy. I wouldn’t picture you reading a James Bond novel. What made you decide to go in the direction of spy fiction here?

Honestly, I thought of it as science fiction. The spy fiction was merely because the story was about deception, and somebody had to be fooling somebody. But conceptually, I had it pinned as a science-fiction scenario from some kind of dystopian cold war, but with magically advanced technology.

You entered Hunter, in Darkness into the 1999 IF Comp. It’s a riff on Hunt the Wumpus, which is about the most minimalist imaginable text adventure, if you can even call it that. Your game, by contrast, is a lushly atmospheric, viscerally horrifying fiction. Were you just being cheeky?

Yeah, I was. I just wanted to put in all the stuff that Wumpus didn’t have, without getting away from the core concept. I thought it would be a funny thing to do. I worked really hard on the claustrophobia and the creepy bats. I remember crawling under a chair to try to get the feel of being in a narrow passage and not being able to move around — just to get the bodily sense of that.

Then we have Shade from 2000, which is another of my favorites of your games. Even more than Hunter, in Darkness, it has a horror vibe.

Yes. I leaned into it harder in Shade.

There are all kinds of opinions about what is really going on in Shade. I know you like to let people draw their own conclusions about your games, so I won’t press you on that…

I don’t think there’s a lot of disagreement on the main point, that you’re dying and this is all a hallucination.

Yeah, that was absolutely my take on it, that you’re dying of thirst in the desert. I saw it pointed out in a review that everything you’re trying to do is the opposite of the real problem you have. You’re trying to get out of your apartment in the hallucination, but your real problem is that you are out, lost in the desert. Was that something you were consciously doing, or are we all reading too much into it?

Well, neither. I don’t think I was consciously thinking that way, but that doesn’t mean that you’re reading stuff into it. It’s deliberately ambiguous. I had a lot of images in my head that I threw out at random. I did have the notion that this environment in your apartment was from your past. You really had packed up your apartment and called a taxi and gotten out, and reiterating it was… inappropriate but real. It was in your head while you were having this terrible experience, and it was being replayed by your brain in a broken way. You’re in a place of blinding light — it’s very hot — and the experience you’re replaying is very dim and dark, except that when light occurs it’s painful.

A rare 1999 meeting in the flesh of interactive-fiction luminaries. From left: Andrew Plotkin, Chris Klimas, David Dyte, and Adam Cadre.

Although your games of the 1990s are fondly remembered and still played, you were also making major technical contributions. Probably most important was the Glulx — sorry, I can’t say that word! — virtual machine to let Inform games expand beyond the strictures of Infocom’s old Z-Machine. How did that come about?

No one knows how to pronounce it!

I started to think about it in probably 1996, when Graham [Nelson] came out with version 7 and 8 of the Z-Machine. Version 8 was big — big enough for Graham’s Jigsaw — but it was still just a stopgap. It was only twice as big as Infocom’s version 5. There were all kinds of things that didn’t scale. It seemed worthwhile to make a fresh design that would be 32-bit from the start. I just didn’t want to deal with more incremental changes. And being able to jettison all of the weird legacy stuff about the Z-Machine seemed like a win too — being able to rethink all of these decisions in a technological context that is not 1979.

One of the things I wanted to do was to separate out the input-output layer. I had already written Z-Machine interpreters for X Windows and Mac that used Mark Howell’s ZIP engine with different interface front-ends. When TADS went open-source around 1997, I made an interpreter for that. So, now I had this matrix, right? I’ve got an X Windows front-end and a Mac front-end, and they both slap onto the Z-Machine and the TADS virtual machine. In a pretty clear way, these things are just plug and play. All the virtual machine does is accept text input and generate text output. I mean, yes, there’s the status line, maybe sound and graphics, but fundamentally that’s what it’s doing. And the front-end presents that text in a way that suits the platform on which it’s running. I was doing the same thing that Infocom did, just slicing it into more layers. Infocom had an interpreter and a game file. I said, we’re going to have an interpreter engine and an interpreter front-end. Thus there will be more flexibility.

I designed the front-end first, the Glk library. I made an implementation for Mac and for X Windows and for the Unix command line. Then I started thinking about the virtual machine. I ripped apart the Inform 6 compiler so it could compile to Glulx from the same game source code.

As I recall, the Glulx virtual machine is bigger than the Z-Machine — for all practical purposes, its capacity is infinite — but also simpler. There’s less of the hard-coded stuff that Infocom included, like the object tables.

Yes, exactly. I figured the more generic and simple I could make it, the better. It would be simpler to design and simpler to implement. It adds complexity to the compiler, but the compiler already needs code to generate object tables in a specific format. It would still be doing that, but there wouldn’t be any hardware support for them. I’d just have to include veneer routines to handle object tables in this format. Then, if we ever need to change the format, no problem. We just change the compiler. We don’t need to change the virtual machine.

When did you publish the Glulx specification?

April 1, 1999.

Were you still living in Washington, D.C., at this time?

I had moved around a lot, actually. The job in D.C. only lasted about a year and a half. After the porting project I had been doing finished up, the company dropped me onto a project to do a Highlander licensed game, which we had absolutely no concept of how to do. This would have been like a 3D action game. That project got canned.

Then I worked for a document company in Maryland for a while. Then I moved back to Pittsburgh and worked for a startup. The startup got acquired by Red Hat, and they moved us down to North Carolina. That was from like 1999 to 2000. Then Red Hat fired us and I moved back to Pittsburgh. From 2000 to 2005 I worked for a filesystem company in Pittsburgh.

You took a break from writing interactive fiction for a few years after Shade. Then there was a little bit of a shift in focus when you did come back in 2004 with The Dreamhold. Your earlier games don’t try too hard to be accessible. When you returned, you seemed more interested in outreach and accessibility. What was the thought process there?

Only the obvious one. It’s true that all of my previous games were written very much for the community. They were written for people who knew how IF worked. But The Dreamhold was specifically an outreach game. I wanted to try to expand the community. We’d been doing this for about ten years at that point, and it was kind of the same crowd of people. I thought to create an outreach game as a total wild-ass experiment to try to bring in people from other parts of the gaming world. I didn’t know whether it would work, but I figured it was worth a try. So I designed a game specifically for that purpose, built around explaining how traditional interactive fiction worked to people who didn’t know how to play it.

That meant doing some wacky stuff. There are some rooms in The Dreamhold that you enter by going north, but to go back you have to go east, because I figured, this is really uncomfortable, but people are going to run into this if they get into IF, so they should be familiar with the concept. I’ll try to introduce it as smoothly as possible by putting messages like, “The corridor turns as you head to the north.” Then put in the [room] description, “You can go back the way you came, toward the east,” to try to make it more tangible. But I wanted to introduce complicated maps and darkness and all of the hardcore stuff that the community was used to. And also make it fun.

There were a number of these outreach efforts at the time. Some people were taking IF games to more conventional game jams. There were cheat sheets of “how to play IF” going around. My impression is that these efforts weren’t super successful. Is that your impression as well?

Yes, it is. None of it actually worked. It’s great that we made the on-ramps and it’s good that we still maintain them, but there was not a huge influx of new people coming onto the scene at that point.

My impression is that the community didn’t really start to grow until it opened itself up to non-parser-driven games: the Twine games and ChoiceScript games and so on. Presumably some percentage of those players became willing to try the parser games as well.

Yeah, but that was a little bit later, after 2010 or so. There was still a gap. I decided, well, The Dreamhold didn’t make an impact, so I’m just going to go back to writing wacky puzzle games.

Of course, in 2007 Inform 7 came out. I would say that drew people into creating games, because it was much more approachable for people who were not C programmers. There was a bit of a revolution there. It was just harder to see because it was new authors rather than new players.

The time around 2010 was an exciting one for you personally as well as the community. In addition to the ongoing buzz about Inform 7, Jason Scott released his Get Lamp documentary, and you launched a Kickstarter to make a game called Hadean Lands soon after.

Yes. In 2010, Jason Scott premiered Get Lamp at PAX East. He had interviewed me two or three years earlier — probably in 2007.

Yeah, he worked on that movie for almost ten years.

Exactly. It’s kind of funny to look back at 2007 and see me talking about releasing commercial interactive fiction.

But in 2010, all of the old Infocom guys showed up at PAX East. I was on that panel, sitting with Dave Lebling, Brian Moriarty, and Steve Meretzky. I was going… [genuflecting]

PAX East, 2010. From left: Dave Lebling, Don Woods, Brian Moriarty, Andrew Plotkin, Nick Montfort, Steve Meretzky, and Jason Scott. (Photo by Eric Havir.)

I’m not worthy!

Exactly.

Jason Scott brought Get Lamp to a game class at Tufts University a few weeks later. Since I was living about half a mile away, I came in and said, “Hi, I’m in this movie.” Afterward, I went up to Jason and said, “You know, people are talking about interactive fiction for the first time in fifteen years outside of our little community. Do you think I should do a Kickstarter for a giant IF game?” And Jason looks at me like I’ve got bananas growing out of my ears and says, “Yes, you should!”

He’s the most enthusiastic person in the world.

Yes. And of course, he’d just done a Kickstarter for the Get Lamp release. This was early for Kickstarter. There had been gaming Kickstarter projects before, but no really gigantic ones. So, getting $30,000 for an IF Kickstarter was kind of a big deal in 2010. So I went to the boss at my day job and said, “Well, I guess this is it for us. I’m quitting.” I knew that $30,000 wasn’t actually going to last me very long, living in Boston. But of course, I’d been in the software industry for decades by this point, so I had a fair amount of savings cushion built up. And I had a pile of Red Hat stock which was worth some money. I could live on it while I found my footing as an indie developer.

The Dreamhold had taken me nine months. I thought Hadean Lands would take me a year. Ha! It turned out that writer’s block is a hell of a thing. Hadean Lands kept getting sidelined. I got totally knocked over by the idea of doing a hypertext MUD. I spent a year writing that. That was Seltani, which was hugely popular for about two months in the Myst fan community; I did it as a Myst fan game and presented it at a Myst convention. Everybody loved it. But I wasn’t writing Hadean Lands, and eventually my KickStarter backers started to get upset about that.

I did slog through it. I got Hadean Lands done [in 2014]. I don’t feel like the story is hugely successful, but I’m very happy with the puzzle structure and the game layout.

As you know as well as I do, there’s a whole checkered history of people trying to monetize IF. A few years ago, Bob Bates of Infocom and Legend fame released Thaumistry. I was a beta-tester on that game. The game was very good, but these things just never work. It’s always a disappointment in the end. Nobody has ever cracked that code.

If you look at the Thaumistry Kickstarter and the Hadean Lands Kickstarter, you see that they made almost the same amount of money from almost the same number of backers. It’s the same crowd showing up: “Yeah, we still love ya!” But they’re not enough to make a living from…

The problem is getting outside of that crowd.

It’s no wonder that people like Emily Short have long since decamped, saying, “I have to work on different kinds of games with a larger reach.”

What about you? Do you think you will ever return to parser-based interactive fiction?

That’s a fair question. I’ve had a lot of starts toward things that I thought might be interesting. I started working on a framework for a kind of text game that’s not parser-based but also not hypertext in the sense that Twine is. It’s more combinatoric. I got two-thirds of the way done with building the engine and one-third of the way done with writing a game, then I kind of lost it. But I still think it’s interesting and I might go back to it. I don’t think it would go big the way Twine did, but it might reach a different audience. It’s a different way of thinking about the game structure.

Would you care to talk about your partnership with Jason Shiga to turn his interactive comic books into digital apps? I have played Meanwhile, the first of those.

Sure. I’d been aware of Jason Shiga ever since I started hanging out with Nick Montfort at MIT after I moved to Boston. Nick had a bunch of his early self-published stuff. He had the original printing of Meanwhile, as a black-and-white hand-cut book. I thought it was really neat.

Totally by coincidence, Meanwhile got picked up by a publisher just before that 2010 PAX East we talked about. A nice big hardback version of it was published. It was being sold at PAX East. I thought, man, this is great, I’d really love to do an iPhone version. This was 2010; iPhone games were big.

A little later, I did the Hadean Lands Kickstarter and quit my job. I needed to have more projects than just one text adventure, so I wrote to Jason Shiga and said, “Hey, I’m a big fan. I’d love to do an app version of your book.” Jason was amenable, so we had the usual conversations with lawyers and agents and signed a contract. I worked on that at the same time that I was planning out Hadean Lands. The iPhone app came out in 2011.

So, the finances of making a go of it as an independent creator of digital content without a day job didn’t quite pan out for you in the end. I feel your pain, believe me. It’s a hard row to hoe. What came next?

After Meanwhile and Hadean Lands, I felt very stuck. Jason [Shiga] was off working on non-interactive comics, so there wasn’t anything to do there. I bummed around for a while trying to find something that would make any kind of money at all, but I was not successful.

I’m skipping over huge chunks of time here, but in 2017 Emily Short and Aaron Reed were working on a project to do NPC dialog as a commercial product. It was essentially taking Emily’s old ideas about threaded dialog in parser games and turning them into a plugin which game designers could use in any game to have interesting multi-threaded conversations. I spent a couple of years working on that project with them. But it turned out that management at that company sucked and everybody bailed.

Since then until this year, I’ve been working for big and small games studios, working on the dialog parts of their games.

Coding dialog engines or writing dialog?

I’ve been a software engineer, working on the coding part, but working with the writers.

Also during this period, Jason Shiga started writing what he calls “Adventuregame Comics,” which are shorter Meanwhile-style books. I’ve started porting those. The Steam port of The Beyond and the iOS and Steam port of Leviathan are available now. The iOS port of The Beyond will be coming later.

Since Hadean Lands, you’ve stepped into more of an organizing role in the IF community.

Yes. I’m very proud to have transitioned from being a hotshot game writer to someone who is doing community support, building structures and traditions and conferences. I never wanted to be a person who was only famous for writing games, especially after I started writing fewer games. I really didn’t want to be a person who was famous for having been a big game writer in the 1990s. That’s a sucky position to be stuck in. There needs to be a second act.

It’s maybe a maturation process as well. When you get a little bit older, you realize that some things are important in a way you may not have when you were a young, hotshot game writer.

Yeah. I slowed down writing games because I started to second-guess myself too much. When you’ve written a lot of games that people got really excited about…

Then you’re competing with your own back catalog.

It doesn’t feel good. I’ve had trouble getting away from that.

You’ve done most of your organizational work in the context of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, so maybe we should talk about that more specifically. I’ll give you my impression of the reasons for its founding, and you can tell me if I’m right. You and some other people decided it would be wise to institutionalize things a little bit more, so that the community is no longer so dependent on individuals who come and go. With a foundation and a funding model and all of these institutional aspects, hopefully you set up the community for the long haul, so that it can survive if a server goes down or someone goes away.

Yeah, that’s exactly where it started. We’d been running for decades on people just setting up a server somewhere and saying, “Hey, I’ll run this thing!” That was the original IF Archive, the Usenet newsgroups, IF Comp, the Interactive Fiction Database, the IF Forum. It was workable, but everything was being paid out of somebody’s pocket. There wasn’t a lot of discussion about who was doing what or how much it cost. There was no fallback plan and no thinking about what would come next if somebody stopped doing something. Like, there was a long period when IFDB wasn’t getting any updates because Mike Roberts had a day job. Some things about it were clunky and hard to use, but you couldn’t fix them.

So, in 2015 or early 2016, Jason McIntosh, who was running the IF Comp at that point, had a conversation with somebody who said, “Why don’t you have a non-profit organization to support the IF Comp? Then you could get donations from people.” And Jason started running around in circles with a gleam in his eye, saying, “Yes! We should do this! We should do this! Whom do I know who can help?” He started talking to other people who were longtime supporters of things in the community. That included Chris Klimas, who had been supporting Twine for three or four years, and me — I’d been supporting the IF Archive for a while. Then Carolyn VanEseltine and Flourish Klink joined. Flourish was the only one who knew how to set up a non-profit. They had run a Harry Potter fan conference as a teenager, and, being excited and not knowing things were hard, had just done it.

We got into contact with the same lawyer Flourish had used. The lawyer told us what we needed: forms, bylaws, etc. Jason was the first president, I was the first treasurer. We went down to my bank and opened a business account for the organization. Then we wrote to the IRS to become a 501 C3 non-profit. We set up a website, found someone to give us a basic Web design and a logo. Then we announced it.

At the start, we just did the IF Comp; we collected about $8000 that first year for a prize pool. But over the course of the first couple of years, we added Twine and the IF Archive. The IF Forum was the next big addition. Then the IF Wiki and IFDB. Today each has its own steering group. And we have a grants committee now.

The NarraScope conference is another IFTF project. Would you like to tell a bit about that?

That was my idea. I’d always been keen on the idea of having a narrative-game-oriented conference. I’d been going to GDC for many years. GDC has a sub-track, a narrative-game summit, which is where people like Emily Short and Jon Ingold hang out. But it’s a very tiny slice of what GDC is. And of course GDC is expensive, so it’s hard to bring in the hobbyists and the indie people and the people who write IF Comp games. They just can’t afford GDC. I wanted to provide an alternative that was more approachable and affordable and friendly.

Once we as an organization had steady members and contributors and could bring in money, I said, “It’s time to think about a conference. Our first de novo project.” So, I talked to people I knew who had been involved in conferences, like the Myst fan conference, which is a very tiny thing that happens every year, like 100 people. But it’s been going for years and years. And of course Flourish had run a fan conference.

In 2017 or 2018, I went to GDC with a bunch of business cards that said, “We want to run an interactive-fiction, adventure, and narrative-oriented game conference. Want to help us?” I handed one to everybody I talked to. I found a bunch of people who were interested in helping. Nick Montfort said he could get us a space at MIT for the event relatively cheap. We put up a call for speakers, a website, etc. We were coordinating with the IFTF Education Committee, which is run by Judith Pintar, who goes all the way back to Shades of Gray.

Yeah, I had a great talk with Judith some years ago now.

I had strong opinions about how a friendly conference should feel. We had to bring in lunch so people would sit around and have conversations rather than splitting up and running all over Cambridge. I wanted long breaks between talks so people would have space to socially interact. I wanted badges that didn’t distinguish between speakers and attendees; we’re all here, and we’re not going to have superstars. I wanted an open and honest tone.

We made sure to have a keynote speaker who wasn’t an old fart. We didn’t want somebody like Scott Adams coming in and talking about what it was like back in the 1980s.

You didn’t want to become a retro-gaming conference.

Right. And we deliberately made the scope larger than just interactive fiction as found in the IF Comp or the IFDB. We didn’t want to limit the conference to those topics. We kept the admission price down to about $85.

That was 2019. We had about 250 people, and everything miraculously went perfectly. The worst disaster was when the Dunkin’ Donuts guy was dropping off coffee and hot cocoa. One of the urns blew its spout and dumped gallons of cocoa all over the floor. Someone said, “I know where there’s a mop,” and went and got the mop and cleaned it up. Great, let’s have the rest of the conference!

Local game companies made contributions, maybe $500 or $1000. Between that and the registration fees, the conference broke even. I admit that I threw in $2000 myself to make it balance, but that was because we splurged out and rented a bar on Sunday night. I said, okay, I’ll cover that, so that everybody can go out and have pizza and beer.

A dream achieved: Andrew closes the 2019 NarraScope conference in Boston. Time for pizza and beer!

It was a huge success. We said we would do it again next year. But of course next year was 2020. You know how that story goes.

But it was exciting enough that we wanted to keep going anyway, so we had an online event in 2020. We skipped 2021, then came back in 2022 with an online conference. Then we had a hybrid model for 2023 in Pittsburgh and 2024 in Rochester. And that’s the history of the thing in a nutshell. By now I’ve become just an advisor, which is a great relief.

How many people have attended the later conferences?

It’s very easy to attend an online conference, so about 500 or 600 people signed up for those. But in person in Pittsburgh, there were about 100, either because people didn’t want to travel in the pandemic era or because we were offering an online option, so a lot of people who could have showed up decided to stay home and watch the stream instead. This year was a little higher, like 120.

You were at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester this year?

Yeah. The space was spread out, which turned out to be a win, because we had to walk through the museum and walk past all the cool exhibits. People were jumping out between talks to explore the museum. It was a really neat space — but unfortunately more expensive than a university.

And there will be another conference in 2025?

There absolutely will. It’s going to be in Philadelphia at Drexel University. NarraScope has not yet become big enough to replace GDC, but we’re optimistic. [smile]

I don’t think you want that. It becomes very bureaucratic and soulless.

Yeah, obviously. But Justin Bortnick, who is the current IFTF president, has been talking to GDC about booth space to present IFTF on the show floor. The Video Game History Foundation had a booth there this year. We thought, we’re educational too! We could do that! It may actually happen.

Maybe we can wind up this conversation by talking about the current status of the IF community itself. For many years, it seemed to be quite stagnant in terms of numbers. We already talked about the outreach efforts that took place around 2005 and largely did not succeed. But about five years later, the hypertext systems started to come online. There was a big jump at that point. If you look at the number of games entered in the Comp, they actually trend down through the 2000s, then suddenly there’s a big spike around 2010 to 2012. They’ve stayed at quite a high level since then. Do you have a sense of whether these new, presumably younger people are jumping over to the parser-based stuff as well?

There are new faces on both sides. There is now an active group of retro-fans interested in parser games. That is, people who are excited about making new games and running them on Commodore 64s and the like. We had to update Inform to fix the support for the version 3 Z-Machine, which had been broken over time as everybody was writing bigger and bigger games. Now people want to write small games again.

And there is more interest in hybrid systems, intermediate models which are neither pure hypertext nor pure parser. For years and years, there were no new parser tools. I thought the last great parser development systems had already been implemented; people would stick with TADS 3 and Inform 7 forever. Then a parser system called Dialog appeared, which is a little bit different from them.

But there is certainly more energy on the hypertext side, especially because a lot of us old farts have drifted away. I’m not writing games anymore, Emily Short isn’t writing text games anymore, Jon Ingold and Aaron Reed went off and did their things, Adam Cadre went off to work on film scripts. There are new people writing new games, but I think the pool is going to shrink over time. But that’s okay. Everything that Jon Ingold has done at Inkle Studios is informed by the early text games he worked on and how he wanted to expand that to reach a bigger audience. Everything Sam Barlow has done — Her Story, Telling L!es, Immortality — is informed by his experience writing text games. The same goes for Emily Short. It’s still part of the conversation. It’s just not the center of it anymore.

Yeah. This is a discussion I’ve had from time to time since I started this site. My opinion is that when our generation dies that will probably mark the end of parser-based text adventures. You can say that’s tragic if you want to. At the same time, though, nobody’s writing plays like Shakespeare anymore, but Shakespeare’s plays are still out there.

And there’s still theater.

Yeah. Trends in interactive media, just the same as others forms of entertainment and art, come and go. They have their time, and then their time is over. I’m quite at peace with that.

I’m sort of handicapped by the fact that I haven’t played IF Comp games in quite a while.

I haven’t either. To be honest, I’ve played almost nothing made in the last ten years, just because I have so many old games on the syllabus for this site. Having too many games to play is not the worst problem to have, but it’s made me kind of a time traveler. I live in the past in that sense.

I do know that this year’s IF Comp winner was by Chandler Groover. I don’t think he’s our age. Ryan Veeder is younger than us.

I do look at the Comp website sometimes to see what’s going on. I’ve noticed that it still seems to be a parser-based game that actually wins the thing most of the time. That’s a sign of something, I guess.

Yeah. Maybe it’s a sign of old farts hanging on too long? But seriously, I think there is a new generation of parser-game authors. Whether it’s big enough to sustain itself after you and I are doddering in a nursing home, I don’t know.

There’s been so much progress with computer understanding of natural language. A lot of it is associated with large language models, of course, which is a fraught subject in itself. But I could imagine a system — a front-end — that could take natural language and translate that into something a traditional parser could more readily understand, then funnel it through even an old text adventure. I’m kind of surprised I haven’t heard of anything like that.

Someone did do that as an experiment and posted about it on the forum. Experimenting both with using LLMs on the input side to translate natural language into parserese, and also on the output side to translate generic room descriptions into more flowery, expanded text. I’m more interested in the input side because I like hand-crafted output, but that’s getting into the whole question of AI.

Yes, I have no interest whatsoever in reading AI-generated text in any context.

I think there wasn’t a lot of uptake on that idea just because the kind of people who are excited about AI aren’t excited about parser games in the first place. There have been several attempts to make an AI-generated text adventure, but they’ve all been by people who were not good at text adventures and didn’t know what they wanted out of it. There’s AI Dungeon, which uses an LLM to pretend to be a parser game. But because it’s all AI generated, it doesn’t really produce anything interesting.

The people who are interested in making parser games are mostly old-fashioned artisans who want to hand-craft everything and are not motivated to dive into AI as a shiny new pool. It might be different if someone who was an established parser-game author jumped in and wholeheartedly tried to make it happen. Revolutions are the result of one person getting involved and building something that takes off. Someone has to actually do the work. And to this point, nobody has done that. It’s very possible the whole AI thing will collapse in six months anyway.

I think that’s a very good possibility, but I think that if it does, it will leave behind some pieces in the rubble that are actually useful. Maybe a solution to our parsing problems can be one of them.

But I’ve kept you long enough. Thanks so much for the talk!

Thank you!



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Retro No More: Interactive Fiction of the Early Comp Era

In 2002, Paul O’Brian, a prolific author, reviewer, and commentator on the contemporary interactive-fiction scene, attempted to compile a list of those people who had done the most to help text adventures live on beyond the death of Infocom. Among the names he listed were those of Mike Roberts and Graham Nelson, the creators of TADS and Inform; Andrew Plotkin, who contributed crucial technical innovations of his own and authored a number of perplexing, intriguing games; and Adam Cadre, who wrote the single most-played text adventure of the post-Infocom era. None of these names will come as a surprise to anyone who has been even a casual tourist of the interactive-fiction scene over the years. But another of them very well might: that of Gerry Kevin “Whizzard” Wilson. And yet one can make an argument that his skill set was the most unique and thus the most essential of them all.

It will presumably come as a shock to no one when I write that those folks who were still happy to play games consisting of nothing but text in the era of multimedia and 3D tended to be as quiet and bookish as the games themselves. Such personality types are not overly known for their organizing or marketing acumen. The burgeoning interactive-fiction community was thus incredibly lucky to have Wilson, who was the exception to the rule of introversion. An Infocom superfan who just couldn’t bear to see text adventures go gentle into that good night, he became an activist and community organizer par excellence.

In May of 1994, when he was just eighteen years old, Wilson published the first issue of an electronic newsletter which he called SPAG: “Society for the Preservation of Adventure Games.” Later, when it was concluded that text adventures as a species were no longer actively endangered, the word “Preservation” was changed to “Promotion.” By whatever name, SPAG served as the journal of record of the community from 1994 until 2010, a clearinghouse for reviews of the latest games along with news, announcements, and commentary. (Yours truly was the last long-serving editor of SPAG, just before I became a digital antiquarian…)

It was Wilson as well who reached out to Activision, the corporate inheritor of the Infocom legacy. He found an ally there in one Laird Malamed, the project leader of Zork: Grand Inquisitor, Activision’s third and last graphical Zork adventure game. Together, Wilson and Malamed sneaked half a dozen recent amateur-authored text adventures onto the Masterpieces of Infocom shovelware collection. The writers of same even received actual, albeit small, royalty checks for their efforts, meaning that they were, technically speaking, amateurs no longer.

Then Wilson convinced the ex-Infocom authors Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn to write one last text-only Zork, which he himself implemented using Graham Nelson’s Inform programming language and which Activision officially released as a free taster for Grand Inquisitor. These efforts helped to inspire Berlyn to start a new company called Cascade Mountain Publishing; a commercial game from Kevin Wilson and one from Mike Berlyn and his wife Muffy became its only two digital releases. (I’ll have more to say about that ambitious if doomed effort in a later article.) It’s hard to imagine anyone else in the amateur community orchestrating such sweeping outreach to the world of games beyond the Usenet newsgroups where the Infocom diehards hung out.

But for all the other things he accomplished through his sheer energy, likability, and enthusiasm, the core of Wilson’s claim to being the Indispensable Man in the community will always come down to a single one of the hundreds of messages he posted to Usenet during the 1990s. On June 26, 1995, he announced “The First Annual Text Adventure Authorship Competition,” whose purpose was “to inspire authors to write something, however small, and make it available for people to play. Interactive fiction as a hobby cannot survive unless there are people out there writing and playing it. Hopefully, some of the people who enter the competition will enjoy it, and decide to write more on their own.”

Entrants had to be submitted by September 1 of that year, which in and of itself precluded them from being very long, assuming that each author began his game just for the competition. The entrants were divided into two categories, one for those created with TADS, the other for those created with Inform. The final tally was six entrants in each of the categories, for a dozen new games in all, a massive bounty by the standards of the time. The winners, determined by a popular community vote after a month in which to play the games had elapsed, were Magnus Olsson’s Uncle Zebulon’s Will on the TADS side and Andrew Plotkin’s A Change in the Weather on the Inform side.

Already in this very first year, the entrants bore many of the hallmarks of Comps to come. Some of them were unabashedly experimental in form: Gareth Rees’s The Magic Toyshop took place entirely within a single room; C.E. Forman’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 Presents “Detective” (say that three times fast!) was a meta-textual roasting of a really bad earlier game; Neil deMause’s Undo expected you the player to work around the bugs in another terrible, broken game, a (meta-)fictional one this time. Such games would almost certainly never have come to exist without a Comp to give their authors permission to work on a smaller scale, one that lent itself to such single-concept creations. It encouraged authors to pursue other goals than that of simply being as good as Infocom at the things which Infocom had done best. In this sense, the advent of the Comp marked the beginning of the end of what I referred to as the community’s “neoclassical” phase in an earlier article.

The next year, the same event, now known as The Interactive Fiction Competition, was held again, without the rather pointless division into TADS and Inform categories; authors could now freely choose to use either of those development systems or any other, knowing their games would be judged alongside their peers without favor or prejudice. Another significant change was that the Comp was now more explicitly branded as being for short games, ideally “playable in two hours or less.” This time, it attracted no fewer than 26 entrants, and was won by Graham Nelson’s The Meteor, the Stone, and a Long Glass of Sherbet.

Kevin Wilson unplugged himself from the community after 1998, to aim his prodigious energies in other directions. He became a prominent designer of hobbyist board games, ones that usually had a pronounced narrative thrust and that sometimes borrowed their names and themes from popular digital games like DOOM, Warcraft, and Civilization. Yet his legacy lives on in interactive fiction in the form of the IF Comp, whose 30th installment has been recently concluded as of this writing. Throughout the last three decades, it has remained the essential event on the community’s annual calendar, the sun around which everything else revolves. For community stalwarts, its arrival each year has become as indelible a marker of autumn as the changing color of the leaves, pumpkins on display on roadside stands, and the first nips of Old Man Winter on the breeze.

The positives and negatives of building a community around the IF Comp have been discussed and debated ad nauseam over the years. On the one hand, it surely did encourage many people to take a stab at writing a text adventure who would not have done so back in the days when these games were expected to be as big as one of Infocom’s if they were to be taken seriously. Then, too, as we’ve already seen, it actively encouraged experimentation and innovation. The late 1990s were chock-a-block with games that departed radically from the points-for-treasure model of Zork: self-consciously literary games, games written in bizarre forms of language, one-room games, even a very well received one-turn game.

On the other hand, however, the Comp came to suck up so much of the communal oxygen that some authors felt obligated to enter it in order to get their games noticed at all. And this in turn caused them to write to the specific set of constraints which it encouraged. Although games lasting longer than two hours were never outright disqualified in the official rules, they were guaranteed to provoke some degree of anger among harried judges for being “too long for the Comp,” with some voters giving them bad scores on principle for that sin alone. This produced a not-so-subtle pressure not to make bigger games at all anymore.

On the other other hand, though, the extent of that pressure was probably exaggerated by some. Certainly a steady dribble of big games did continue to appear outside the Comp throughout the latter half of the 1990s. Indeed, an article which I’m planning to write for this site next year will focus on the surprising number of absolutely huge games — most of them far bigger than any made by Infocom — that appeared in 1998 and 1999 alone.

Having said that, I must admit that I do have my fair share of issues with the sorts of games that the Comps of the late 1990s tended to produce. For all that this period may have been a necessary phase for the community to pass through if it was to begin to escape the long shadow of Infocom, a lot of the games themselves really haven’t aged all that well in my opinion. When works in any creative medium start to prioritize meta-textual cleverness — when they become primarily commentaries on the nature of the medium itself instead of the wider world around it — insularity tends to be the result. It’s hard to exempt the interactive-fiction community from this charge — not by the time it was releasing elaborate in-jokes like J. Robinson Wheeler’s Being Andrew Plotkin, which replaced the hero of the film Being John Malkovich with the titular author of modern text adventures. The cliquish — not to say incestuous — feel of games like this did nothing to welcome newcomers into the fold.

Of course, such complaints by no means apply to every single Comp entrant of this period. I’ve brought them up here mainly in order to explain why some types of games will not be much in evidence in the rest of this article, nor in any others on these subjects that might follow it in the future. The late 1990s also brought its share of fine games that are complete in themselves, with no knowledge of the community and its personalities or any of its raging debates about the theory and practice of interactive fiction required. In fact, 1998 can be reasonably called the interactive-fiction community’s best single year in all its history, in that it produced no fewer than three of the most widely played post-commercial text adventures of all time, all of which are included in the little roundup that follows. Each of the games below is possessed of its own authorial voice, distinct from that of any of the people who worked for Infocom. And yet each is as finely calibrated a marriage of plot, place, and puzzles as any of the best games of Infocom — with just one exception, that is, whose reasons for appearing on this list nevertheless will be made clear in due course.

In short, whether it’s your first text adventure or your thousandth, I do think you can enjoy any of the games on this roundup. In the former case, you will have to put in a bit of effort to familiarize yourself with the conventions of the form — but trust me, it’s not all that hard and it’s eminently worth it.

So, why not pick a game and give it a shot? What have you got to lose? Of all the virtues of the text adventures of the 1990s and beyond, the most undeniable is the fact that almost all of them are entirely free. You can try any of these games directly in your browser by clicking the “PLAY ONLINE” link. If you decide to stay with it, you may want to download an offline interpreter and the story file. For the former, I recommend an application called Gargoyle, which will play all of the games below. For the latter, you’ll want to look on the right side of the Interactive Fiction Database page for each game, which you get to by clicking on its title below. (You always want the latest release, generally the first on the list.) Trizbort is a handy application for making maps of the territory you explore. I find filling in a map to be a joy of its own.

I’ve included below a very rough guess as to how long it might take the typical person to play each game. But keep in mind that it’s only a guess. All of these games deserve to be savored for however long strikes you as appropriate.


She’s Got a Thing for a Spring by Brent VanFossen
Estimated Play Time: three hours
PLAY ONLINE

"This is it!" he says as he dodges the last pothole and brings the truck to a stop. After twenty miles of the worst washboard road the country has to offer, you're just happy to have arrived.

You place your sandaled feet on solid ground and take a deep breath. The smells of autumn are at once sweet and earthy and full of the aroma of moisture and living things. A cool breeze blows in your face, soft and gentle. What a nice change, what a welcome relief from the tension and hustle of all you've left behind this weekend. It's just you and your husband, as he promised over a month ago.

You look around. What passes for the road you just traveled ends abruptly here. Over the last hour, bad asphalt gave way to gravel, which gave way, in turn, to the rutted two-track you see beside you. Ahead, the ruts continue, but it'll be on foot if you're to go any further. The old beater truck stands here, engine off but still ticking from the trip. Your husband closes the driver's door and comes around the rear to join you.

"How's my pretty lady?" he asks as he wraps his arms around you and places a kiss on your cheek from behind. "Tired, huh? Come on. Let's get the stuff. We'll be able to relax better once the tent's up."

He takes the two packs from the back of the truck and helps you into yours, then leads the way through the brush to the north. You roll up on the balls of your feet and give your pack a nudge, then pull the waist strap tight. Without looking back, you follow.

That was last night, and you hiked a short trail to a campsite off in the woods. Together you set up the tent, fixed a quick dinner, and fell asleep in each other's arms...

You wake with a start, something's missing, and you notice the sleeping bag is empty beside you. On his pillow is a handwritten note, which you collect. He must have crawled out early, as the sky is only now beginning to lighten.

You dress quickly, slip out of the tent, and follow the trail to the east.

Aspen Grove
You stand in the middle of a grove of aspen, which extends in all directions. Slender white trunks reach for the sky with long thin fingers, stroking the clouds that blow in the autumn breeze. Leaves of gold rattle as the winds shift, and here and there one floats to the ground to join others that crackle underfoot when you move. A narrow path disappears east into the trees, and a camping area is visible through a small opening to the west. North is a wide meadow.

I was better equipped to appreciate She’s Got a Thing for a Spring when I played it fairly recently than I was when I first encountered it quite some years ago. For it seems that the older I get, the more I just want to be outside walking. In fact, I replayed this game while my wife and I were on a walking holiday in Tuscany, on a morning when the rain was coming down so heavily that there wasn’t anything for it but to stay at our hotel. I sat there on our covered balcony for several hours with my laptop and She’s Got a Thing for a Spring, while the rain pattered and the thunder boomed. I can’t imagine a more perfect soundtrack for this game. Then the storm blew itself out and we went walking again for real.

In She’s Got a Thing for a Spring, which took fourth place in the 1997 IF Comp, you play a wife whose husband has arranged a special treat for your fifth wedding anniversary: a visit to a hidden hot spring somewhere in Colorado or thereabouts. Just to keep it interesting — and to give us a game — he’s first challenged her to find the spring for herself. The stakes are no higher than that. Nor, it must be said, do they need to be.

There’s more personal experience behind this particular interactive fiction than is commonplace in the genre. Beginning one year before and continuing for fourteen years after he released it, our author Brent VanFossen lived full-time with his wife Lorelle in a motor home, exploring the natural wonders of the Americas. He wrote She’s Got a Thing for a Spring, he tells us in his “about” text, as a gift for Lorelle on her birthday. His love for nature and for his wife comes through in every word. There’s a distinct whiff of sensuality to his descriptions of both; said wife is, after all, trying to join him at a hot spring for a secret, skinny-dipping, midnight tryst. In some other games where a male author has tried to embody a female protagonist, it’s gone horribly wrong, coming across as handsy adolescent leering. But this is not that. It’s sexy but not raunchy, sensual but not exploitive. Just the way these things ought to be, in other words.

She’s Got a Thing for a Spring garnered a lot of attention back in the day for the one non-player character with whom you can interact extensively, who is actually not the husband. (He shows up in the flesh only for the last couple of turns.) Said character is rather a humble fellow named Bob, a grandfatherly sort who’s retired to a quiet life in a little cabin in the woods. You can talk to him about an impressive number of topics, both relevant and irrelevant to your quest, as he putters about his house, sweeping the porch, repairing an old rocking chair, picking lettuce and tomatoes and strawberries, making sandwiches for lunch and strawberry shortcake for dessert, fixing a loose plank and re-caulking his windows, painting a picture in watercolors. Throughout, he natters away pleasantly about his chores and about bigger subjects, such as the wife he lost (“Cancer got her, and we never even knew it until it was too late”) and the brother who is coming for a visit soon (“Joe’s an engineer, works on all those commercial jet airplanes in the Northwest”). This is a man who has clearly known pain and loss, yet also one who is completely at peace with himself and his life. Some of that serenity rubs off on the player who spends time with him — or it did on this player, at least. Plus, his strawberry shortcake really is excellent; I tried the recipe that is described step by step in the game after we came home from Italy.

But as special and technically impressive as Bob is, the real magic of this game is the immersion in nature that it provides, which is as complete as the protagonist’s eventual immersion in the spring of its title. You start off with a book — A Field Guide to the Natural History of the Mountainous Regions — already in your possession. You can look up in its pages any of the flora and fauna you encounter during your hiking, to learn a bit more about it from a scientific point of view. Or you can forget about science and its facts and figures for once in your life and just take in the natural world that’s all around you.

The puzzles here do their job by giving structure and motivation to your wanderings. They’re fun to solve whilst being very much in tune with the pastoral atmosphere of their surroundings. There are a few jarring deaths that might have been better elided — you can get yourself gored to death by a bull moose if you aren’t careful — but those are about the only places where the author puts a foot wrong. This is a game about the quiet moments, about peace and beauty and love rather than war and strife and hatred, about the best parts of us rather than the worst. It’s a pity that it’s the only piece of interactive fiction that Brent VanFossen ever wrote. We could use a lot more games like it.


Babel by Ian Finley
Estimated Play Time: four hours
PLAY ONLINE

Black.
White. Cold.
Dry.
The sun is just about to rise on latitude 74. In the darkness the last stars
pierce the air and the arctic wind is a dying songbird. Below the snow dunes,
you are waking. Something is wrong.

North End
One by one, your senses speak to you. There is one absolute: cold. The
hard surface you're lying on is cold, the thin gown thrown over your body is
cold, the disinfectant-tinged air is cold, the darkness around you is cold.
Even your mind is cold and empty. Where are you? Who are you? You feel the
warm edge of a memory, but it fades as you approach. Slowly, your joints
bulging with ache, you get to your feet and look around.

You're standing in a cold, dimly lit hall which runs south toward a feeble light and terminates at a door to the north, out of which juts a weird device. Next to the door, in the northeast corner, is a heavy bulkhead, and you can just make out a third door on the west wall.

Babel is the first of three games that were authored between 1997 and 2000 by Ian Finley, a professional playwright, actor, and theater instructor. As a game with points and puzzles and most of the other standard accoutrements of the traditional text adventure, it is by far the most conventional of the trio. It placed second in the 1997 IF Comp.

Babel’s setting and premise verge on the clichéd. It takes place in an isolated polar research complex where Horrible Things transpire, a staple premise for science fiction and horror stretching back many, many decades. Yet the game serves as proof that execution will always trump whole-cloth invention. Few works of narrative art have done claustrophobic dread better than this one.

There is an interesting twist to the premise here. The Horrible Things in question have already happened as the game begins, when you come to consciousness shivering in the frigid air inside a complex that is now inhabited only by the corpses of your former colleagues. (Yes, an amnesic protagonist is an even more hackneyed cliché than the isolated research complex gone wrong, but remember what I said about execution.) As you begin to explore, knowledge of what happened comes back to you in the form of sudden flashes of memory that are like psychotic breaks, so jarring and traumatic are they. The sense of foreboding — of dawning knowledge that you’d prefer not to have — mounts and mounts as you solve a series of quite simple, straightforward puzzles to gain access to more and more of the complex and unlock more and more of your own unconscious. At last, it all comes to a head in a hair-raisingly twisted ending.

Babel did garner some criticism in its day for taking the easy way out with its storytelling. Relying on the classic gambit of uncovering a backstory rather than participating in a full-blown drama in the here and now lets it sidestep most of the difficulties of doing elaborate plotting through the mechanisms of text and parser. Yet what another critic might call a cop-out, I call making smart use of the tools at one’s disposal; ironic though it is to say this about a medium that likes to go by the name of “interactive fiction,” novelistic storytelling isn’t what parser-driven games tend to do best. Tying Babel’s story so closely to exploration — something interactive fiction does do very well — strikes me as thoroughly sensible.

I certainly can’t argue with the results here. Babel is a masterclass in tension, dread, and atmosphere, the perfect game to play in front of the fire on some cold, dark winter night when the snow is piling up alarmingly high on the other side of the window.


Spider and Web by Andrew Plotkin
Estimated Play Time: four hours
PLAY ONLINE

On the whole, it was worth the trip. The plains really were broad and grain-gold, if scarred with fences and agricultural crawlers. The mountains were overwhelming. And however much of the capital city is crusted with squat brick and faceless concrete hulks, there are still flashes of its historic charm. You've seen spires above the streets -- tiny green parks below tenements -- hidden jewels of fountains beyond walls. Any bland alley can conceal balconies wrought into iron gardens, fiery mosaics, a tree or bed of flowers nurtured by who knows who.

This alley, however, is a total washout. It ends in flat bare dirty brick, and you've found nothing but a door which lacks even the courtesy of a handle. Maybe you should call it a day.

End of Alley
It's a narrow dead end here, with walls rising oppressively high in three directions. The alley is quite empty, bare even of trash. (Your guidebook warned you: the police are as efficient about litter laws as about everything else they do.) You can retreat to the south.

A plain metal door faces you to the east, near the alley's end. It's firmly shut.

Following the example of Paul O’Brian, I don’t hesitate for a moment to stand Andrew Plotkin up alongside Mike Roberts and Graham Nelson as one of the people who did the most to keep the humble text adventure alive during the 1990s and beyond. In addition to a whole raft of vital technical and administrative contributions, he has written more important and highly lauded games over a longer span of time than anyone else. Many of them are slyly subversive; he has a gift for translating the interior of his protagonists’ minds into landscapes that aren’t quite what they appear to be. If I was forced to point to a weakness in his work, however, I might say that he has sometimes made his player work a little too hard for her experience, especially during the early phase of his career. A minimalist by instinct, his early games don’t exactly bend over backward to welcome the player in. “Here I am,” they seem to say. “Come inside if you like. I don’t really care one way or the other.”

But Spider and Web doesn’t have that problem, if problem it be. The deft opening above, seemingly written from the point of view of an adventurous tourist on a visit to an unnamed Eastern European country during the Cold War era, definitely has no trouble capturing my interest. Coincidentally or not, this game, which Plotkin released in February of 1998, is still regarded by many or most text-adventure aficionados as his masterpiece. I count myself among their number.

Spider and Web is an exploration of the old fictional trope of the unreliable narrator, carried out in a way that would be impossible in a non-interactive medium. I can best explain some of what it’s doing by describing how its first handful of turns are likely play out for you. In the role of the tourist, you poke and fiddle with the inscrutably blank door in front of you for a while, until, seeing no way to get through it, you walk off to discover what else lies to the south. As soon as you do so, a “glaring light” appears before your eyes, and you find yourself in an interrogation chamber. “Don’t be absurd,” says your interrogator. “You’re no more a sightseer than the Old Tree in Capitol Square; and if you’d had enough sense to walk away from that door, you wouldn’t be here. You’re going to start by telling me how you got through that door.”

And then you’re thrown back to the start of the game. But this time the opening text is subtly different.

On the whole, it was worth the trip. The plains really were broad and grain-gold, if scarred with fences and agricultural crawlers. The mountains were overwhelming. And however much of the capital city is scarred with squat brick and faceless concrete hulks, there are still flashes of its historic charm.

This alley, however, has no time for charm. It ends in flat bare dirty brick, and a door which lacks even the courtesy of a handle. Not that you'll wait on courtesy.

End of Alley
It's a narrow dead end here, with walls rising oppressively high in three directions. The alley is quite empty, bare even of trash. (You're sure the police are as efficient about litter laws as about everything else they do.) You can retreat to the south.

A plain metal door faces you to the east, near the alley's end. It's firmly shut.

From here on, you keep trying to tell your interrogator a story that minimizes your exposure as a foreign agent and saboteur, and he keeps calling you out on it, forcing you to change the details.

Until, that is, deep into the game, when you arrive at the moment that changes everything. People tend to refer to this moment as simply The Puzzle. It’s not an enormously difficult puzzle, but it’s nonetheless been called, with no hyperbole whatsoever, the best text-adventure puzzle of all time, all of the games of Infocom included. It’s far too brilliant to spoil here, but suffice to say that, when the light bulb does goes off in your head and you feverishly type the necessary command and see that you were right, you’ll be jumping out of your chair and pumping your fist as if you’ve just defeated the last boss in Dark Souls. The roles of the spider and the insect trapped in its web will have reversed themselves, and it will feel amazing.

After that, Spider and Web is just a chase scene, albeit a very well-executed one. But my, what a genius conceit comes before it, and what a genius puzzle to bring the conceit to its perfect fruition. Epistemology was never so much fun.

(A quick programming note: an extended interview with Andrew Plotkin is coming to this site soon.)


Anchorhead by Michael Gentry
Estimated Play Time: ten hours
PLAY ONLINE

November, 1997.

You take a deep breath of salty air as the first raindrops begin to spatter the pavement, and the swollen, slate-colored clouds that blanket the sky mutter ominous portents amongst themselves over the little coastal town of Anchorhead.

Squinting up into the glowering storm, you wonder how everything managed to happen so fast. The strange phone call over a month ago, from a lawyer claiming to represent the estate of some distant branch of Michael's family, was bewildering enough in itself... but then the sudden whirlwind of planning and decisions, legal details and travel arrangements, the packing up and shipping away of your entire home, your entire life...

Now suddenly here you are, after driving for the past two days straight, over a thousand miles away from the familiar warmth of Texas, getting ready to move into the ancestral mansion of a clan of relatives so far removed that not even Michael has ever heard of them. And you've only been married since June and none of this was any of your idea in the first place, and already it's starting to rain.

These days, you often find yourself feeling confused and uprooted.

You shake yourself and force the melancholy thoughts from your head, trying to focus on the errand at hand. You're to meet with the real estate agent and pick up the keys to your new house while Michael runs across town to take care of some paperwork at the university. He'll be back to pick you up in a few minutes, and then the two of you can begin the long, precarious process of settling in.

A sullen belch emanates from the clouds, and the rain starts coming down harder -- fat, cold drops smacking loudly against the cobblestones. Shouldn't it be snowing in New England at this time of year? With a sigh, you open your umbrella.

Outside the Real Estate Office
A grim little cul-de-sac, tucked away in a corner of the claustrophobic tangle of narrow, twisting avenues that largely constitute the older portion of Anchorhead. Like most of the streets in this city, it is ancient, shadowy, and leads essentially nowhere. The lane ends here at the real estate agent's office, which lies to the east, and winds its way back toward the center of town to the west. A narrow, garbage-choked alley opens to the southeast.

“Anyone who had ever read anything by H.P. Lovecraft, or even stood downwind of someone who has, will immediately recognize his influence throughout this game,” writes Michael Gentry in his introductory notes for Anchorhead. And indeed, this sprawling game, which Gentry released in May of 1998, is to my mind the definitive work of digital Lovecraftia, easily outdoing the likes of The Lurking Horror and Alone in the Dark.

Like all of the best Lovecraft homages, Anchorhead succeeds by embracing the best parts of its inspiration and binning the worst. Our protagonist here is a strong, capable woman, something that was well beyond the most fevered imaginings of old Howard himself. Along with the rampant misogyny, gone too is the almost unbelievably virulent racism that is at the core of so much of the man’s output. And I’m almost equally happy to be able to say that Gentry is adept at capturing the flavor of Lovecraft’s prose without descending into the pseudo-eighteenth-century word salads for which his inspiration is so famous. Yet the horror at the heart of Anchorhead is the same existential dread, the same indelible product of the modern secular condition onto which Lovecraft stumbled. It isn’t the horror of malevolent godlike entities; it is the horror of godlike entities who care about human beings no more than we care about the ants we trample underfoot.

You play a young wife, married less than half a year, whose husband, a soft-spoken professor of history, has just received an unexpected inheritance from relatives he never knew he had in the New England harbor town of Anchorhead. So, the two of you have upped stakes to move halfway across the country, into a palatial if rather sinister-looking abode at the edge of town. But now your husband is starting to behave strangely, almost as if he’s fallen under some sort of spell.

The core of this game’s strange allure is the downtrodden town of Anchorhead itself. As you play, you can see its sad gray walls and cobblestones under its sad gray skies; hear the forlorn cawing of seagulls and the background hum of the waves; feel cold rain on your hair and wet moss on your hands; taste the sour sea breeze; smell the stale tobacco of the sulky old men who spend their days drinking up the gloom in the world’s least cozy tavern. Few places in interactive fiction have ever been as thoroughly realized as this one. It’s deliciously repulsive.

Add onto this geographical framework the plot, which is the definition of a slow burn. You spend the first half or more of the game mainly conducting research, uncovering more and more ominous details about your husband’s cursed heritage. Finally, your mounting forebodings explode into some frantic scenes of terror. Even in the game’s latter half, however, Gentry understands that effective horror is a matter of tension and release. He knows when to pour it on and when to ease the pressure, to let you catch your breath and recover your frazzled wits before your next peek into the abyss.

Anchorhead does a superb job of integrating its puzzles, if that’s what we wish to call them, into this vivid setting and unfolding plot. They’re never arbitrary, but consistently driven by your need to find out more. Then, once you’ve found out all too much, you have to find a way to survive the forces unleashed against you, to save your husband from a fate worse than death, and possibly to save the entire planet while you’re at it. If you read through the fruits of your research carefully and do the thing that seems most logical in some admittedly awful circumstances, you’ll find that that thing generally works about as well as can be expected.

Play it, live it, and learn to love its eldritch blasphemies. Scary text adventures — heck, ludic horror in general — simply don’t get any better than Anchorhead, folks.

(Do note that, in addition to the free version from 1998, Michael Gentry made available an enhanced twentieth-anniversary edition of this landmark game in 2018, with additional scenes, puzzles, and details, plus 50 illustrations to accompany the text. He’s also tinkered with the design to remove some unwinnable situations and added some features to make the game more newbie friendly in general. I haven’t played this version yet, but I have no reason to doubt that it makes a great game even better. If I was playing Anchorhead for the first time, this is definitely the version I’d go for. The price of $10 is very reasonable for a game of this size and scope.)


The Plant by Michael J. Roberts
Estimated Play Time: five hours
PLAY ONLINE

You're just starting to doze off when a jerking motion brings you back to
alertness. You look over to see your boss, Mr. Teeterwaller, struggling to
steer the car onto the shoulder as the engine dies. You can see that all of
the dashboard lights are on as the car jerks to a stop.


This is turning into a fine business trip. First Mr. Teeterwaller insists on
making the five-hour car trip in the middle of the night so the company won't
have to pay for a hotel, then you spend an hour stuck behind a convoy of slow
trucks on Teeterwaller's two-lane supposed short-cut, and now his aging
bargain-basement car strands you out in the middle of nowhere.

Teeterwaller turns off the headlights and turns on the hazard lights. "I just had this thing in the shop," he mumbles.

In the car
The Toyunchknisk Piglet was imported from Blottnya during the brief period
between the fall of the old iron-fisted regime and the ethnic unrest that
divided the tiny country into several even tinier countries whose names you
can't recall, since the press lost interest several years ago. The car is
almost comically spartan, so it's just like your boss to own one. The only
amenity the dashboard offers is a glove compartment; no radio, no air
conditioner, no console armrest, no cup-holders.

You're sitting in the rather uncomfortable passenger's seat. The driver's door is closed, and your door is closed.

Sitting on the back seat is a jacket, a map, a Project Tyche manual, and a magazine. The ignition seems to contain a car key.

Your boss Mr. Teeterwaller is here.

You're carrying your temporary ID card.

Mike Roberts’s The Plant, which took third place in the 1998 IF Competition in spite of a considerable number of complaints that it was “too big for the Comp,” is in some ways the most old-school game in this roundup, a sturdy puzzlefest without any overt agenda beyond that of entertaining you. In another sense, though, it’s the most inextricably bound to the late 1990s. For it positively radiates the influence of The X-Files, which was right at the zenith of its popularity at the time this game was released. In terms of plot and setting, The Plant plays like one of the show’s more comedic, postmodern episodes — perhaps one of those written by Darin Morgan or Vince Gilligan, the sort where you never quite know where earnestness ends and satire begins.

The plant of the title isn’t the kind that grows in dirt, but rather a strange factory complex that you stumble upon on a road trip with your boss, the skinflint Mr. Teeterwaller, in the latter’s Toyunchknisk Piglet, a car which makes a Yugo seem like a Mercedes. The tropes of 1990s conspiracy culture are rolled out one by one: desolate desert highways, convoys of unmarked trucks driving through the dead of night carrying who knows what, anonymous men in black, impossible technologies that seem unlikely to be of terrestrial origin, riddles piled upon mysteries piled upon enigmas. A ufologist magazine you find, demanding “an investigation into a previous investigation of an alleged coverup,” might easily have been found in the X-Files episode “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space.”

It’s all fodder for a well-crafted, good-natured, slightly goofy text adventure of the sort at which Mike Roberts excels. There are a lot of really enjoyable puzzles here, not too hard but not too trivial either, and always meticulously fair. The Plant breaks no new ground whatsoever, but it does provide a rollicking good time from start to finish. Its secret weapon is Mr. Teeterwaller, who follows you around over dune and dale, up ladders and elevators and scaffolds, mumbling and fretting all the while but never abandoning you. He seems useless — until suddenly he isn’t.

In his review of The Plant, Paul O’Brian recommended it most of all to those who were “a little impatient with all the growing that the medium of interactive fiction is doing, and long for a good old-fashioned Infocom-style thrill ride.” Although O’Brian’s overall review is very positive, that sentence is too dismissive by half; the sort of game we have here is exactly the one that the medium of text and parser was invented to provide, and is still the one for which it is most intrinsically suited. The Plant’s stolid old-school approach has aged better than that of many of the games that once thought they represented the future of the medium.


Photopia by Adam Cadre
Estimated Play Time: one hour
PLAY ONLINE

Speeding down Montgomery Boulevard
The streetlights are bright. Unbearably bright. You have to squint as hard as you can to keep your retinas from bursting into flame.

"Welcome back to the land of the LIVING, bud," Rob says. "You planning to stick around for a while or you gonna pass out again? Cause one thing I've learned about chicks is that they actually DON'T LIKE IT when you pass out on them in the middle of gettin' it on. You hear me? So if that's, like, your PLAN, then I'm droppin' you off and showin' up solo."

You don't exactly remember where the day went, but as you listen to Rob rant on, bits of it start to float back to you: a day on the slopes, the brisk February wind against your face; polishing off a keg back at the lodge; those two girls you and Rob had hit it off with, the ones who'd given you their address in town. "We all should get together sometime!" they'd said. Of course, Rob insisted that by "sometime" they'd meant "later tonight." You hadn't been so sure, but then you'd blacked out before you could argue the point.

How Rob came to be driving your car you're not exactly sure. Apparently he couldn't wait till you were sober enough to drive it yourself. From the way he's weaving all over the road, he also apparently couldn't wait till HE was sober enough to drive it, either.

Rob checks himself out in the rearview mirror. "Man, I am one handsome dude," he says approvingly.

And so we come to the smallest game on this list, which is nevertheless The Big One of 1998, even more so than Spider and Web or Anchorhead. In fact, Adam Cadre’s Photopia is without a doubt the best-known and most-played parser-based interactive fiction of the entire post-Infocom era. The winner of the 1998 IF Comp, it has today twice as many ratings as any other game on The Interactive Fiction Database, and has been written up countless times in magazines and websites that normally don’t cover this sort of thing. Thousands upon thousands of people over the years have found it a profoundly moving work of literature. I would never presume to tell these people that they’re wrong to feel as they do. Yet I do have to say that I’m somewhat less smitten.

Photopia is about a teenage girl named Alley, but you never inhabit her directly. Instead you see her from the perspectives of other people in her life. You spend the most time as Wendy, a much younger girl whom she babysits. The two make up stories together in which Wendy is an astronaut or an undersea explorer. As they do so, Alley effectively becomes the computer game with which you are interacting, a gimmick which hearkens to the text adventure’s origins in the shared story spaces of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons. “Read you a story?” asks Alley of her charge. “What fun would that be? I’ve got a better idea: let’s tell a story together.”

But there are also vignettes from the real world, in which you see Alley through the eyes of her mother, her father, and the boy at school who has a crush on her. Most searingly, you briefly inhabit Wendy’s father, who is driving Alley home from her babysitting gig when his car gets side-swiped by a drunk driver, killing his young passenger instantly.

Photopia is almost completely puzzle-less. That said, the one interaction that might be construed as a puzzle is the most transcendent moment in the game. As with The Puzzle in Spider and Web, the solution to this one comes in a dazzling rush of insight. It serves as the ideal therapy for anyone who’s tired to death of the boring, drop-em-and-map-em mazes that are found in so many old-school text adventures. To say any more would be to spoil another of the most magical moments in all of interactive fiction.

Otherwise, though, Photopia falls a little flat for me, no matter how hard I try to love it like so many other people do. Its one amazing puzzle and the meta-textual cleverness of the story you and Alley tell together can’t overcome the emotional immaturity of the fiction as a whole. This is the poison pill that comes with taking text adventures up-market. When you invite me to consider your piece as a game, I compare it with other games; when you invite me to consider it as deathless fiction, I start to compare it with truly deathless fictions.

At bottom, Alley is as much a male-adolescent fantasy as Lara Croft. She’s a nerd-friendly version of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl: “She’s beautiful and nice and she likes science!” We never learn a single bad or even ambivalent thing about her. She’s sweet and loving to her parents, the kind of girl who likes to do science projects in the garage and lie on a blanket at night beside her father cataloging the stars overhead. She navigates the savage politics of high school with preternatural aplomb, being friends with all and cruel to none. And, as we’ve seen, she’s never too tired or distracted to spin endlessly imaginative yarns for the little girl she babysits. Simply put, she’s too perfect to be real. Has she no discontents at all? Is she never in a bad mood? Has she any inner life at all? To mow down this Hallmark movie version of a teenage girl with a drunk driver at the end smacks more of bathos than pathos.

Adam Cadre was a very young man when he wrote Photopia. I fancy that it shows. Tellingly, the most successful part of the story is the one written from the point of view of a character who is, I suspect, the closest to the author himself: the boy in Alley’s school who’s crazy about her. I can remember seeing the girls I crushed on when I was his age in just the way he does: as magical creatures, as far above the mundane day-to-day of life as the angels painted on the ceiling of a cathedral. What I didn’t understand back then was that, in insisting on seeing them this way, I was refusing to see them as fully actualized flesh-and-blood human beings just like me. I don’t get the feeling that Cadre fully understood this yet at the time he wrote Photopia.

Still, stickily sentimental though I find Photopia to be, by no means do I want to discourage you from playing it. Even if you come away seeing it as a snapshot of a certain stage in male rather than female adolescence, as I tend to do, that too has a resonance all its own. (Ah, to be sixteen again… an age at which I would probably have adored this game, had it existed then.) Then, too, there’s no denying Photopia’s importance to the history of its medium. And it has the virtue of being short, with that one magical moment that’s well worth investing an hour of your life to experience. As for the rest of it… who knows? You might find that you unabashedly love it. Plenty of people whose opinions are every bit as valid as mine do.



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Posted by on November 22, 2024 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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Tex Murphy and the Coming of the DVD (A Shaggy-Dog Story)

In his expatriate memoir Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson describes what a false picture of the world’s geography you would end up with if you were to try to surmise it from British mass media. Britain, you would probably assume from the crazy amount of attention the United States gets in that country’s press, must lie somewhere just off the coast of North America, perhaps about where Cuba lies in reality. It would be the rest of Europe that is separated from Britain by a wide, daunting ocean.

The retro-gaming scene of today can give a similarly false picture of the geography of gaming’s past — one that is not so trivial to correct. Take the case of the fondly remembered studio Dynamix, a major name in gaming from 1984 until 2001. Do you know what Dynamix’s most profitable game of all was? It was not any of the ones that are still discussed today: not Arcticfox or Rise of the Dragon, not The Red Baron, not The Incredible Machine, not Betrayal at Krondor, definitely not Rama. No, it was a little something called Trophy Bass, which sold many more copies from the outdoor sections of Middle American Wal-Mart superstores than it did from computer and gaming stores. As of this writing, Trophy Bass has precisely zero reviews on the central fandom database MobyGames. And yet it was absolutely huge in its day — eclipsed, in fact, only by the unrivaled king of Wal-Mart software: Deer Hunter, the butt of a million hardcore-gamer jokes, whose publisher laughed all the way to the bank.

Indeed, Deer Hunter must be solidly in the running for the title of most profitable single computer game of the twentieth century, easily outdoing such hardcore contemporaries of the late 1990s as Quake, Diablo, and Starcraft in terms of the amount of money it cost to create versus the amount of money it brought in. Its only real challenger by this metric may be the unstoppable juggernaut that was Myst, another game that was made on a shoestring and then proceeded to sell and sell and sell some more, despite being widely scorned by the hardcore crowd. Then again, there is Barbie Fashion Designer to consider as well. Guess how many MobyGames reviews it has… Suffice to say that targeting the people who self-identify as “gamers” has seldom if ever been the best way to make a lot of money in games.

With that in mind, let me spin you a yarn about Access Software, which existed in or close to Salt Lake City, Utah, from 1983 until 1999, at which point it was acquired by that biggest whale of all in the software scene, Microsoft itself. Today, Access is remembered by retro-gamers mostly as the home of Tex Murphy, a trenchcoat-and-sneaker-clad detective of a noirish future who was played onscreen by Access’s chief financial officer Chris Jones in five installments spanning from 1989 to 1998. Yet it wasn’t Tex, whose commercial profile never exceeded the fair-to-middling range during his heyday, who convinced Microsoft that Access was an investment worth its time. That service was performed by Links, a long-running series of golf simulations that got slightly more attractive and sophisticated every year throughout the 1990s, and was rewarded by becoming a staple of another demographic that stayed far away from most computer games: the middle-aged corporate-executive set, the same people who could be seen out on the world’s real golf courses.

From first to last, Tex Murphy was an indulgence which Bruce Carver, the founder of Access, permitted to Chris Jones, his longest tenured and most valued employee, who had been with the company from its earliest days as a maker of Commodore 64 action games. This is not to say that Tex didn’t assemble a fan base of his own, most of them people who would never have touched a golf simulation. He really hit his stride with the third game of the series, 1994’s Under a Killing Moon, which earned its label of “interactive movie” by using live-action video clips of real actors rather than crudely digitized still photographs to carry its narrative water. This was also the point where a fellow named Aaron Conners came aboard as scriptwriter and Jones’s design partner, engendering a quantum leap forward on those fronts as well. Technologically innovative and yet thoroughly lovable in an enthusiastic community-theater sort of way, Under a Killing Moon became the most commercially successful Tex Murphy game ever, selling almost 500,000 copies. Such numbers may have paled beside those put up by Links, but they were sufficient to permit the series to continue to exist as a sideline to Access’s mainline in simulated golf.

Unfortunately, that equation got upended by 1996’s The Pandora Directive. The fourth Tex Murphy game and second full-fledged interactive movie pushed harder and farther along all the trails blazed by its immediate predecessor: its play time was longer, its plot more convoluted, and its formal storytelling ambitions more pronounced, with a welter of different endings on offer depending on how you chose to play the dubiously great detective. All that notwithstanding, once cast adrift in a changing marketplace where interactive movies were now a dime a dozen and already encountering the first worrying signs of a gamer backlash, it sold only about a third as many copies as Under a Killing Moon, not even enough to pay for its own production cost.

By all rights, that should have been that for Tex Murphy. Bruce Carver may have been an indulgent man, but he would have had to be a terrible businessman indeed to let his CFO’s passion project go on actively losing his company money. As it happened, though, Tex got thrown a lifeline from a most unexpected source. To understand the circumstances that led to his rescue, we need to take a quick look back at the history of, of all things, the storage media that were used to deliver software to consumers during the first quarter-century of the personal-computer era.



By the mid-1990s, the computer industry had already passed through two fairly earthshaking transitions in storage media: the linear medium of cassette tapes had been replaced by random-access floppy disks, which had in turn been largely superseded by CD-ROMs that could hold over 400 times as much information as what had come before. It’s interesting to note that the first and third links in this chain first came to prominence not in association with computers but as music-delivery technologies. While the application of cassette tapes to the very first personal computers of the late 1970s was a happy accident, the inventors of the CD took to heart from the start a brilliant insight of the early computing researcher and theorist Claude Shannon: that all data is ultimately just data; the difference exists only in the way you interpret it. Thus when the CD made its debut in 1983, Philips and Sony, the Dutch and Japanese electronics giants behind the new format, envisioned music delivery as only the first of a whole range of applications. For, being a digital storage medium, all a CD contained at bottom was a string of ones and zeroes, which could presumably be applied to whatever purpose you liked: computer code and data, video, you name it.

In the end, though, the proud parents’ hopes and schemes for the format were realized only partially. After an agonizingly long gestation period, CD-ROM drives for computers finally broke through to become a ubiquitous reality circa 1993. Yet the territory of home video remained resolutely unconquered by the little silver discs. In 1993, people were still buying and renting movies on VHS videotapes (and, in much smaller numbers, on laser discs, an almost equally aged storage medium despite its futuristic appearance). The principal problem holding the CD back was that of capacity. The 650 MB or so that could be stuffed onto a CD were enough to provide 75 to 80 minutes of high-fidelity music, more than enough for a symphony or even most double record albums. When it came to video, however, the numbers didn’t look so good. It just wasn’t possible to put enough decent-quality video onto a CD to compete with VHS. Not that people didn’t try: a number of initiatives sought to make up the difference through hyper-aggressive compression algorithms, but none of them were very satisfying and none of them went much of anywhere in the developed West.[1]Despite the many compromises inherent to the concept, video CDs did become quite popular in the still-developing regions of Asia and Africa, where they often took the form of bootleg discs sold at street markets and the like. On computers as well, video-centric games like Under a Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive were soon bumping into the limits of the CD; the latter shipped on no fewer than six discs, and yet the quality of its video snippets was far below what you would expect from an ordinary television broadcast.

It didn’t take a genius to see what was needed: a new optical storage medium much like the CD in form and spirit, but much more cavernous. It was so obvious, in fact, that by the end of 1994 two separate successor standards were in development, one from the old CD consortium of Philips and Sony, the other from Toshiba, each with more than half a dozen other major names in home electronics signed on as supporters. The stage seemed to be set for a repeat of the VHS-versus-Betamax format war of the early years of videotape. VHS had finally won that conflict to become the universal standard, but it hadn’t been quick, easy, or cheap. As with most wars, everyone involved would probably have been better off if it could have been avoided.

No one was more worried about the prospect of a Second Video Format War than the big players of the computer industry. They assumed that, just as they had adopted CD technology to their own use-case scenarios, they would do the same with this successor technology. Two dueling formats, however, would be a nightmare for them. They wanted — no, needed — a single standard; the alternative was too chaotic to contemplate. Apple, Compaq, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun therefore came together in April of 1995 to create a working group whose marching orders were to put pressure on the feuding parties in the adjacent home-electronics industry to join forces and come up with a single standard.

In a telling testament to the computer industry’s growing clout in this burgeoning new Internet Age, the pressure campaign was successful in relatively short order. On December 12, 1995, the basic specifications of the DVD were formally agreed upon by everyone concerned. The format inherited parts of both research projects to wind up with an optical disc capable of holding more than 8.5 GB of data, which could constitute up to four hours of crisp video and audio, compressed using the nearly lossless MPEG-2 standard — or, alternatively, the data on the disc could be used for whatever other purpose you had in mind, just as with a CD. The DVD would be slightly thicker than a CD, but would otherwise have the same form factor, such that it would even be possible to read CDs in DVD drives. Like the technology itself, the acronym was a classic product of corporate compromise. It wasn’t really an acronym at all: the parties couldn’t agree whether “DVD” stood for “Digital Video Disc” or “Digital Versatile Disc,” so they decided that a DVD would just be a DVD, full stop.

The standard’s progress from prototypes to products was almost derailed by the Hollywood film studios, who wanted a delivery medium that was, unlike VHS, secure against piracy. A variety of copy-protection mechanisms had to be implemented to placate the studios, including a system of regional locks whereby DVDs could only be played in that part of the world where they had been purchased. At last, on November 1, 1996, the very first DVD players from Matsushita and Toshiba, the honor guard for the hundreds of millions that would follow, went on sale in Tokyo’s legendary Akihabara electronics district. Americans had to wait until the following February for the first units from Panasonic and Pioneer to arrive. Within four months, 30,000 of them had been sold. From there, the numbers swelled exponentially. By the end of 1997, 340,000 standalone DVD players had already been sold in the United States alone, along with a million or more movies on disc to watch with them. It was just the beginning of what would soon be credibly labeled “the most successful consumer-electronics entertainment product of all time.”

On computers, however, the DVD’s forward march was more halting. Singapore’s Creative Labs, which had made its name and its fortune fueling the multimedia-computing revolution with sound cards and CD-ROM drives, introduced its first DVD-ROM upgrade kit in April of 1997, but it was rendered nearly unusable by a lack of driver support in Microsoft Windows. Oddly, considering how hard it had worked to ensure that the DVD standard was a standard, the computer industry seemed caught flat-footed by the actual presence of the technology it had shepherded out in the wild. It seemed not to have adequately considered the complications involved in combining DVDs with personal computers — especially when it came to using DVDs for their most obvious purpose of all, as repositories for high-quality video.

The embarrassing fact was that even most of the high-end microprocessors of the day didn’t have enough horsepower to be able to decompress the MPEG-2 video fast enough as it streamed off the disc. The only viable solution to this problem was the one used by standalone DVD players: another layer of hardware in addition to the interface between the computer and the DVD drive itself, a set of specialized circuits that could decompress the data coming off the DVD fast enough to get it to the screen in real time.

Enter Intel, the maker of most of those CPUs that weren’t quite up to the job of handling DVD video on their own. Although it hadn’t been part of the computer industry’s initial push to force a DVD standard, Intel had grown very bullish indeed on the format since then. During his keynote address at the January 1997 edition of Comdex, the industry’s biggest annual trade show, Intel’s CEO Andy Grove played snippets of Space Jam from a DVD drive connected to a computer. He and his associates envisioned a DVD player as the key component of a multimedia set-top box for the living room, sort of like a games console but also something more — an idea which never seemed to die, despite the failures of many previous entrants into this space, from Commodore to 3DO. As a first step toward this fondly imagined future, Intel set out to make a new line of upgrade kits for existing computers, to consist of a DVD drive and a new video card containing the hardware needed to get MPEG-2 video efficiently to the screen.

Strange though it may sound, these initiatives became Tex Murphy’s momentary savior.

It is a longstanding truism in computing that hardware is useless without software. Translated into the language of consumer electronics, this means that, if you want people to buy your shiny new gadget, you need to make sure they can also acquire compelling things to do with it. This was the reason that it was so important to win Hollywood’s acceptance of the DVD standard — important enough to delay the first DVD players’ release and to redesign the whole specification, just to ensure that exciting, sought-after movies arrived on store shelves alongside those first DVD players. Intel found itself in a similar bind when it considered its foray into interactive DVDs: there was currently no software out there to make use of them. What, any potential customer would ask very reasonably, am I supposed to actually do with this thing?

This was anything but a new problem for the computing and gaming industries. Luckily, it wasn’t an insoluble one either, as long as you had sufficient foresight and money. Two decades previously, Atari had solved it by having its own people make a range of fun games for the Atari VCS console before the latter ever went to market; then, when it did, Atari packed one of the best of those games — the soon-to-be-iconic Combat — right into the box with the console. A decade and a half later, third-party “pack-in” games became standard in the multimedia upgrade kits of companies like Creative, for the same reason Combat had shipped with the Atari VCS: to give people something to do with their new toy right away. When accelerator cards for 3D graphics became available a few years later, the purveyors of same paid game publishers a lot of money to make special versions of hit titles that were optimized for their particular cards. Activision, for example, programmed at least half a dozen separate versions of MechWarrior 2 for the different would-be graphics-accelerator “standards” that were floating around at the time. Such pack-ins could be of enormous importance to everyone concerned: the profits that Activision raked in from MechWarrior 2 helped to set one of gaming’s most venerable brand names back on the road to ubiquity after an ugly bankruptcy at the beginning of the decade.

Now, Intel wanted to prime the pump of interactive DVD with a showcase pack-in title that would demonstrate to everybody what the technology was capable of, and that would give customers something to do while everyone waited for a real software ecosystem to develop around the product. Somebody inside the mega-corporation was evidently a fan of Tex Murphy, thought that Chris Jones and Aaron Conners and their colleagues at Access Software were the perfect people to put interactive DVD through its paces. By no means was it an untenable deduction; no more credible stabs at interactive movies on CD existed than Under a Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive. What might Access be able to do with DVD-quality video?



Thus one day a lifeline for Tex Murphy fell out of the clear blue sky, when Intel came to Access with an offer that would have been difficult for anyone to refuse. Intel would pay all of the production costs of a third Tex Murphy interactive movie. The only requirements were that the finished game had to run from DVD and had to be given to Intel to include as a pack-in with any and all of its interactive-DVD products. Access, for its part, would be allowed to sell the game on its own in a conventional retail box, keeping whatever revenues it generated thereby; if it chose, it could also make a version that ran from CD and sell that as well. Intel wasn’t even all that worried one way or the other about how much the game would cost to make, given that, whatever the final budget wound up being, it was guaranteed to be chump change for the biggest maker of computer chips on the planet. There was just one sticking point: Intel needed the game within one year. Time, in other words, was more important than money.

Being in no position to look a gift horse like this one in the mouth, Jones and Conners accepted all these terms without a second thought. Only after they had signed the contract did they sit down to consider just what it was they had agreed to. The last two Tex Murphy games had each taken twice as long to make as the amount of time Intel was giving them to make this one. They had sketched out only a rough outline of a plot for a possible next game in the series. Their chances of turning this into a finished script and then turning that script into a finished game they could be proud of within a single year seemed nonexistent.

At this point, Chris Jones came with a suggestion. Why not remake Mean Streets, the very first game in the series from 1989? They could dust off the old design document, flesh it out here and there, and present it as the origin story of the current incarnation of Tex Murphy, Private Investigator. Aaron Conners, who had never even played Mean Streets, said it sounded fine to him.

He was less sanguine when he did try the game, an awkward melange of flight simulator and point-and-click adventure which made it abundantly clear why Jones had felt the need to find a proper writer to join him for Under a Killing Moon. The first no-brainer decision was to throw the flight simulator right out. And then, says Conners:

I went to [Chris] and I said, “We can’t redo this game. This is terrible. You’ve got more jokes from third grade in here than I’ve ever seen in a game.”

I took the basic thread of the story and rewrote everything around that. I rewrote the script from top to bottom. And so, when people say Tex Murphy: Overseer was just a redo of Mean Streets, I want to throttle them, because I worked harder on that than I did on Pandora.

Adrian Carr, who had directed the live-action video in The Pandora Directive, returned to do the same for Tex Murphy: Overseer. (The new name reflected Access’s belated realization that borrowing the title of one of Martin Scorsese’s most beloved films was a recipe for consumer confusion if not legal peril…) The casts of both of the previous games had been a blend of Salt Lake City locals with a handful of moderately recognizable film actors — people like Margot Kidder, Barry Corbin, Kevin McCarthy, Tanya Roberts; even James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader, had agreed to join Under a Killing Moon as the narrator. Overseer continued this tradition, leaning perhaps a little harder than before on the Hollywood crowd at the expense of the locals. (It was, after all, being made on Intel’s dime.) The big coup this time was the highly respected veteran of stage and screen Michael York, who even as the game was in production was making a splash with a whole new generation of moviegoers thanks to his role in the hit James Bond spoof Austin Powers. Here he played the villain, albeit an unusually complex and tortured one, whose final monologue might just be the best thing Aaron Conners ever wrote.

Everyone involved with Overseer speaks of it as a more regimented project than the ones before, a case of making a plan and sticking to it. With so little time to work with, there was hardly any other way to approach it. The filming in particular took on the rhythm of a conventional Hollywood shoot, with the actors cycling through like clockwork to do their scenes one after another over the course of about a month. (The only actor present throughout the shoot was the star of the production, the unlikely amateur Chris Jones.) In all facets of the project, the Access folks kept the faith and worked like dogs. And they got it done, delivering Tex Murphy: Overseer right on schedule in the first weeks of 1998.

The game’s fiction stays on familiar territory. The setup is pure film noir: Tex is visited in his office by a femme fatale named Sylvia Linsky, who will, as those of us who played the other games know, eventually become his wife and then his ex-wife. Right now, though, she explains that she is suspicious about her father’s recent untimely death; he is supposed to have thrown himself off the Golden Gate Bridge in a fit of despair, despite having never displayed any signs of depression or suicidal tendencies before. Tex’s investigation leads him down the standard rabbit hole of a world-spanning and potentially world-ending conspiracy, involving secret brain implants that can be used to control the minds of millions of people. All of this may be par for the course for a Tex Murphy game, but this is by no means a bad execution of the standard formula. As usual, comedy and drama sit side by side in a way that would be awkward in most storytelling situations, but something in the Tex Murphy special sauce allows it to work far better here than it has any right to. And then, as I already mentioned, there’s some real pathos and gravitas to the villain’s arc, qualities which are elevated that much further by the performance of Michael York, one of those Shakespearean-trained British actors who would sound pretty great reading the phone book aloud.

It is true that Overseer lacks the divergent paths and multiple endings of The Pandora Directive. That said, I must also say that I’m a bit of a curmudgeon about such formal experiments in otherwise traditional adventure games anyway, rarely finding them worth the additional disc space and development time they entail. I’m perfectly happy with one satisfying story line, which is plenty hard enough to offer up. Overseer manages that feat, and that’s good enough for me.

In lieu of a branching plot, there is one really interesting wrinkle in the game’s approach to its narrative. It’s explicitly framed as a story which the present-day Tex, a more jaded figure than his earlier incarnation, is telling to his current love interest Chelsee over the course of an evening out. If you screw up or get Tex killed — which are usually one and the same, come to think of it — you see a little clip of his present-day self telling Chelsee, “No, that’s not really how it happened!” In his review for Computer Gaming World magazine, Charles Ardai took exception to the approach, complaining that the existence of Tex in this later time means that “the outcome is not in doubt. Tex must prevail, or he wouldn’t be sitting here talking to Chelsee.” That’s true as far as it goes, but I must say that it doesn’t go all that far with me. Has anybody ever played any Tex Murphy game under the misapprehension that the hero might not win out in the end? Not since Infocom’s Infidel created a backlash in 1983 had anyone dared to make an adventure game with a non-telegraphed tragic ending. Personally, far from being dissatisfied with it, I only wish that Overseer leaned into its storytelling conceit a little more. It could, for example, automatically send you back to the juncture in the story where you messed up after you reach one of the bad endings, rather than dumping you back to the menu to manually load the saved state you hopefully remembered to create. This game is ultimately all about its story, so why not make it as effortless as possible for us to play with the stuff of the story?

The gameplay itself is tried and true for this series. Once again, you spend most of your time either interrogating suspects via a menu of conversation topics or exploring locations and solving puzzles from a free-roaming first-person perspective — no Myst-style fixed movement nodes here! Whether you’re alternately crouching and standing on tiptoes in order to search every hidden corner of a room for clues or dodging hit men or killer robots in a surprisingly dynamic possibility space, the stuff you do when you aren’t watching canned video clips is what elevates the Tex Murphy series above almost all of its interactive-movie peers. For these are interactive movies that truly work as games — as rich, generous adventure games, with challenging but meticulously fair puzzles and even a modicum of emergent qualities when the action starts to heat up.

Although Overseer doesn’t reinvent any of its predecessors’ wheels, the evolution of computer technology has made the presentation everywhere that much sharper and crisper in comparison to what came before, especially in the video snippets — only appropriately, given that they were the whole point of the endeavor from Intel’s point of view. Indeed, I find I want to say that Overseer is actually better than its rather middling reputation within modern Tex Murphy fandom. It’s a little shorter than Under a Killing Moon or especially The Pandora Directive, but it’s not all that short in the abstract; there are still a good five to eight hours of fun to be had here.

The worst thing I can say about Overseer is that it’s just a little bit less Tex Murphy than its predecessors in senses other than length. The more conventionally professional performances and even presentation can be a double-edged sword, detracting just slightly from that giddy community-theater quality that made the earlier games so ridiculously charming. There aren’t many games or game series about which I would make such a statement — camp is most emphatically not my thing in general — but Tex Murphy has always been special in that regard, simply because there’s so darn much amateurish “we’re making an (interactive) movie!” joy to be found there, because the whole thing is so darn open-hearted and guileless. With Overseer, though, there is just a hint of ennui threatening somewhere out there on the horizon.

Still, and for all that this isn’t the place I’d recommend that anyone start with Tex Murphy — you should definitely play the classic 1990s trilogy in release order, beginning with Under a Killing Moon — Overseer remains from first to last an entertaining, well-crafted, and thoroughly enjoyable adventure game, just like its companion pieces. I’m happy to give it a place alongside them in my personal Hall of Fame. If more 1990s interactive movies had been like these ones, the world may or may not have been a better place, but adventure-game fans would for sure have had a lot more fun in it.


Michael York plays the tortured, tragic villain, the wheelchair-bound billionaire J. Saint Gideon. Aaron Conner counts York saying to him out of the blue one day that the role of Gideon was a little bit “Shakespearean” as one of the great thrills of his life.

The journeyman Australian stuntman and martial artist Richard Norton played Big Jim Slade, a more hands-on sort of heavy than Gideon. Norton was a great find, portraying Slade with a humorous panache that Conner hadn’t really written into his script. Many of his best lines were ad-libbed on the spot.

The name of Delores Lightbody, the former fiancée of Sylvia Linsky’s deceased father, is a piece of third-grade humor from Mean Streets that somehow survived into Overseer. The tired fat-shaming tropes on display here are among the few aspects of the Tex Murphy series that have aged decidedly poorly. Ah, well… to her credit, actress Micaela Nelligan attacks the role with relish. “Incredible!” said Rick Barba, who wrote the strategy guide for the game. “I found myself attracted to this big woman!” (I’m sure you’re a downright Adonis yourself, right, Rick?)

Out and about in the world. The interface is notably less clunky than in the previous two games. Now you can access your inventory on the fly just by moving the cursor to the side of the screen, instead of having to freeze the view in place and enter a separate object-manipulation mode.

There are also occasional set-piece mini-games.

In marked contrast to his hard-boiled detective heroes, Tex never fails to look painfully awkward whenever the possibility of a seduction arises. Far from being a weakness, this is a big source of the series’s goofy Mormon lovability.



When the folks from Access delivered Tex Murphy: Overseer, a game of which they felt justifiably proud, they were brought up short by an ironic turn of events that would have amused Tex himself at his most cynical. To put it bluntly, Intel didn’t want the game anymore. While Access had been beavering away at it, Intel had belatedly begun to ask itself some hard questions about where — or rather whether — its vision for interactive DVD actually fit. In reality, standard DVD was already far more interactive than the linear medium of VHS. A new era of movie watching was dawning, in which viewers could jump to favorite scenes instantaneously, could listen to directors’ commentaries and alternative soundtracks while they watched, could enjoy additional interviews and “making of” featurettes included on the same disc as the movie, could switch up languages and subtitles on the fly. Some companies were even experimenting with making the direction of the movie itself interactive, the cinematic equivalent of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books. All of this was possible using the standard DVD specification running on any everyday DVD player. Did people want to pay for additional hardware in order to run a full-fledged video-based adventure game like Overseer? Intel had a dawning suspicion that they did not. Certainly there could be no denying now that CD-based games of this style were in marked commercial decline, having been trampled by the latest crazes for 3D action and real-time strategy, not to mention the Deer Hunters and Trophy Basses of the world.

And then, for the final irony, Intel’s custom DVD technology was fast becoming irrelevant even for the purpose of watching ordinary movies on your computer. It was a case of the corporation’s right hand not being fully aware of what its left was up to: Intel’s latest Pentium II CPUs had sufficient grunt to be able to handle MPEG decoding unaided, without requiring any other specialized circuitry in an add-on video card or a set-top multimedia box.

So, Intel decided to drop its most ambitious plans for DVD and focus on the chips that had gotten it this far. With the facility that is the luxury of a giant corporation, it wrote off its multi-million-dollar investment in Tex Murphy: Overseer as just another idea that had seemed good at the time but hadn’t panned out. Access, Intel said, could do whatever it liked with the game.

At first blush, this might have sounded like unbelievably good news to Chris Jones and Aaron Conners. Thanks to Intel, they had a new Tex Murphy game which had literally cost their own company nothing to make, which they could now go out and sell without sharing any of the revenue with anyone else. When you thought about it a little harder, though, the waters were quickly muddied. Access, a company more interested in golf simulations than adventure games for the very understandable reason that the former made it lots and lots of money while the latter did not, must now try to sell Overseer all by itself in a marketplace that was growing ever more prejudiced against this kind of game. There was ample cause to wonder whether the company’s marketers would really give it their all.

Alas, such concerns were amply justified when Access shipped Tex Murphy: Overseer in March of 1998, with both the DVD version and a version on five CDs filled with grainier video in the same box. Overseer was, as far as I’ve been able to determine, the first ever computer game to be made available from its day of release on DVD. (A number of older games of the multiple-CD stripe had been or soon would be repackaged for DVD, including Wing Commander IV, Riven, and Zork: Grand Inquisitor.) But that claim to fame wasn’t enough to overcome desultory promotion and, most of all, the overwhelming sense in gaming culture that games like this one had become painfully passé. Overseer sold considerably worse than The Pandora Directive. Although the money it did bring in was almost pure profit thanks to the largess of Intel, that happy accident did nothing to undermine the business case against making another game of this type, at least in the absence of another patsy to pay for it.

In a fit of optimism, when their heads were dancing with images of Tex Murphy reaching a whole new audience on Intel’s hardware and with Intel’s marketing machine behind him, Jones and Conners had decided to end Overseer on a cliffhanger. Having just finished telling the story of his first case to Chelsee, Tex flies away into the neon night in the back of an air taxi with her at his side — and then the driver turns and appears to shoot both of them at point-blank range. Needless to say, Jones and Conners would not have ended the game that way had they known that they weren’t going to be able to return to Tex Murphy for a long, long time — not until something called Kickstarter came along to offer an alternative way of funding games.

For the time being, the last nail seemed to have been hammered into Tex Murphy’s coffin in April of 1999, when Microsoft acquired Access in a deal whose details have remained secret. This latest mega-corp to come around flashing its money was, admits Aaron Conners, “oblivious to Tex Murphy. They bought us for Links.” Chris Jones was told by his new masters every time he broached the possibility of a revival that there was no place anymore for Tex: “It’s not really an Xbox product, and it’s way too big for casual gaming. Adventure games have died off. We don’t see where you fit.” And that was that.



But while Tex Murphy shambled off into an unwanted early retirement — or perhaps a worse fate, given the ending to Overseer —  the new technology to which he owed his final star turn was going from strength to strength. By the end of 1998, there were 1 million DVD players in American homes, and the format was beginning to make inroads in Europe as well. The American DVD market alone would be worth $4 billion in 2000, $8 billion in 2002, $12 billion in 2004, $16 billion in 2007. VHS would follow the opposite trajectory; the very last Hollywood film to be released on videotape was David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence in 2006.

Gaming platforms lagged behind, but not by that much. The latest generation of games, which tended to rely on 3D graphics that were rendered on the fly rather than lots of pre-rendered video, were ironically less demanding of storage space than those that had come before, making the need for an alternative to the CD seem somewhat less urgent for a while. Still, this “while” was fairly brief-lived; as 3D graphics grew in resolution and polygon count, and were supplemented by more and more ambitious soundscapes, the size of games in terms of raw data soon began to increase once again. In 2000, Sony’s decision to use a DVD instead of a CD drive in the PlayStation 2, the successor model to the most popular games console in the history of the world to that point, marked a watershed for games on DVD. Within a couple of years, the format ruled the games roost too.

The impact the shift from CD to DVD had on the nature of games was more subtle than that of the shift from floppy disk to CD; there was a difference of kind about going from 1.5 MB to 650 MB of storage space that was not present to the same degree when going from 650 MB to 8.5 GB. DVDs just helped games to become a little bit more: more aesthetically pleasing, more complex, more approachable. (No, these last two qualities are not in conflict with one another; in many cases, they go hand in hand.) It was, we might say as we strain nobly to bring this back around to Tex Murphy, the difference between Mean Streets and Under a Killing Moon versus the difference between The Pandora Directive and Tex Murphy: Overseer. The difference, that is to say, between a revolution and an evolution. Yet revolutions are often overrated, what with all the chaos and consternation they cause. Evolution can be just fine if it keeps us moving forward. And this the DVD most certainly did for gaming in general, if not for poor old Tex.



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Sources: The books Tex Murphy: Overseer: The Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba, DVD and the Study of Film: The Attainable Text by Mark Parker and Deborah Parker, and DVD Demystified (second edition) by Jim Taylor. Computer Gaming World of November 1995, August 1996, January 1997, February 1997, June 1997, October 1997, and January 1998; Retro Gamer 160.

Online sources include the archive of interviews at the old Unofficial Tex Murphy Web Site and a documentary film on the Tex Murphy series that was put together as part of the Kickstarter campaign for 2014’s Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure.

Tex Murphy: Overseer is available for digital purchase on GOG.com. Fortunately, this is the DVD version. Unfortunately, it’s temperamental on modern versions of Windows. PC Gaming Wiki offers some solutions and workarounds for common problems.

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 Despite the many compromises inherent to the concept, video CDs did become quite popular in the still-developing regions of Asia and Africa, where they often took the form of bootleg discs sold at street markets and the like.
 
 

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