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Masters of the Game

Jon Palace helping to feed the Christmas demand for Zork II, 1984

Jon Palace helping to feed the Christmas demand for Zork II, 1984.

I started my article on Infocom’s 1983 with an unsung hero, Dan Horn of the Micro Group. Let’s continue that tradition now that we’ve come to 1984 with another: Jon Palace.

As 1984 dawned, Palace was working as a textbook editor for McGraw-Hill Higher Education in New York City. Wanting to live pretty much anywhere else, he scoured the want ads for jobs as far away as Madison, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois. Then he stumbled across an advertisement in the Boston Globe Magazine from a company he had never heard of: Infocom. Palace had no real idea what Infocom did or what an adventure game was or what exactly they might expect him to do, but he duly applied and was granted an interview. He drove up to Boston one snowy day to sit down with Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn. He knew this was a different sort of operation than the staid, corporate McGraw-Hill when Blank asked him how old he was. “You can’t ask me that in an interview!” Palace replied, shocked, “… but I’m 27.” Blank seemed to like that answer; that was about the average age at Infocom, he noted.

Technology companies in those days still had a bit of a reputation. Palace remembered (almost certainly hyperbolic) accounts he’d read of life at Apple in the early days, where the board of directors would supposedly all share a joint or two before meetings. Thus when Stu Galley started to roll a cigarette in front of him that first day he thought the worst — but no, it was just tobacco. Palace went from the interview to the home of a friend of his in Brooklyn who had a computer and some of Infocom’s games to try to figure out what this company who might be about to hire him was actually all about.

If Palace didn’t quite know what Infocom wanted from him, Infocom didn’t really know either. They felt they needed someone who could serve as a sort of professional liaison for each game, to stand at the hub of the wheel and coordinate among the Imps that wrote the games, the Micro Group that deployed them onto the target platforms, G/R Copy and internal marketing who packaged and advertised them, and the logistics folks who scheduled them for release and got them to the customers. What they were really looking for was a producer, but they didn’t know that; in these early days of the games industry that role had yet to be defined. Then Mike Berlyn piped up to say that the sorts of things they were talking about sort of seemed like the stuff his editor used to do for him back when he was writing novels instead of games. And so Infocom was suddenly advertising for what had to be the strangest “editor” job that was ever offered. And Palace, who didn’t even own a computer, just stumbled into it. Infocom hired him to start that April.

Realizing he had lots of catching up to do if he even wanted to understand most of the conversations taking place around him, Palace took to returning to the office in the evening with his wife and some Chinese food to catch up on the Infocom back catalog. Soon he bought a used Apple IIe from Mike Berlyn so they could play at home. When his parents had trouble grasping just what it was he was now doing for a living, he pulled out The Witness to show them, Infocom-style — interactively. They then spent a fun evening trying to figure out who killed Freeman Linder.

Like Stu Galley, who also initially had no big interest in this whole adventure-game thing, Palace became one of the most idealistic Infocom employees about the potential and the worth of the work they were doing. That idealism, combined with his background in writing and publishing, proved to be invaluable. One might even say that Palace became the final piece of the Infocom puzzle. He filled his producer’s role admirably, but, perhaps even more importantly, he pushed everyone to take their craft that much more seriously. Palace served as a buffer between those ever-opposed forces of Creative and Business, making sure no game was released before its time. Indeed, he gently prodded the Imps to spend that little bit of extra time and effort making their worlds believable, making sure their stories made sense, and, most of all, polishing their prose. Steve Meretzky gave Palace one of his few public acknowledgements in the Leather Goddesses of Phobos hint book, using words which speak not just to the roles he played but to the way he was valued — even beloved — by the Imps for the way he went about it: “Thanks to Jon Palace for a host of things, but especially for his help in ‘sensualizing’ the text, and for being a front-line defense against scheming marketeers.” When Jason Scott began planning interviews for his Get Lamp film almost twenty years after Infocom’s demise, the former Imps were almost unanimous in naming Palace as the greatest of all the unknown contributors to Infocom’s success. In his own low-key way he was as important to all of the great work that came out of the company between 1984 and 1988 as anyone whose name actually appeared on the boxes. He became a key reason that the Imps refused to abandon their sense of craft and artistic integrity even as the circumstances around them, as I shall soon have to recount in all too much detail, made that more and more difficult.

But we don’t have to talk about that just yet. We’re just in 1984, after all, a very successful sales year for Infocom — in fact, the biggest such they would ever enjoy, the very apex of the bell curve that is their commercial history. It was also a year of consolidation and systemization; it was the year of the gray box.

Infocom’s trademark lavish packaging had been something of a sore point with retailers for some time now. Everyone loved creations like the Starcross saucer and the Suspended mask when the games were new; many owners hung the former from the ceiling all around their stores. The problem came after the initial hype had died down, when the games became catalog items to be stocked in quantities of just one or two and shelved toward the back of the store. Here the Starcross saucer tended to roll onto the floor, if it would fit on the rack at all, while the Suspended mask ran the risk of getting squashed flat between the other games on the rack. Moreover, such oddball injection-molded packages were expensive to make, particularly after they became catalog items and the quantities being made in each batch dropped dramatically. Infocom had thus already begun to scale things back; after Suspended all of the games were released in relatively more modest, conventional boxes. But even those were all essentially one-offs. By 1984 Infocom’s games ranged from the minimalist blister packs of the Zork games to the absurd flamboyance of Starcross and Suspended, with everything else somewhere in between. Any given game may have been beautifully packaged, but together on a shelf they kind of looked like a jumbled mess. You’d be hard pressed to realize they were all products of the same company. And, as dealers never ceased to tell them, this jumble was wasting space on the shelves that could be given over to stocking more Infocom games. Something needed to be done.

Infocom therefore did something they rarely did (and arguably could have done more often): they looked at what the competition was doing. The model for packaging in the industry at this time was the folio-style package used by Electronic Arts. It was a consistent look that immediately marked a game as a product of EA. Being deliberately evocative of a record sleeve, it also conjured exactly the image that EA, that would-be purveyor of hip, sophisticated entertainment crafted by a new generation of “electronic artists,” wanted to present to the world. Retailers absolutely loved it: it was slim and compact but still attractive, as easy to shelve onto racks spine-outward by the dozen as it was to open up, unfold, and stick in a display window. Infocom, driven particularly by head of marketing Mike Dornbrook, decided they needed something like that. What they came up with in association with the ever-essential G/R Copy was a veritable masterstroke.

The Witness gray box version

The box is, not coincidentally, of about the dimensions and thickness of a typical hardcover novel. With the era of bookware in full bloom and Infocom’s games now showing up on more and more bookstore racks thanks to a distribution deal with Addison Wesley, the packaging and all of its associated rhetoric emphasizes the game’s literary qualities. Said emphasis extends right down to the contents of the disk; you type, for instance, “LOAD ‘STORY’,8” to start a game on the Commodore 64. The cover, meanwhile, prominently displays Infocom’s official new name for their works: not “adventure game,” not “text adventure,” but “interactive fiction.” It also shows where the game fits in a matrix of genres (consisting in the beginning of “Fantasy,” “Science Fiction,” “Tales of Adventure,” and “Mystery”) and difficulties (“Interactive Fiction Junior,” “Standard,” “Advanced,” and “Expert”).

The Witness gray box version

The cover of the box flips open like a book for easy in-store browsing; it isn’t shrink-wrapped. Inside the left cover is a set of testimonials from happy customers. Most are the sort of thing you would expect, but, Infocom being Infocom, one or two bizarre remarks or complete non sequiturs were usually included in every game.

A bound-in booklet — called in-house the “browsie” because it was aimed as much at potential customers browsing in the store as at those same customers after they had brought the game home — begins with something to set the fictional stage: an issue of National Detective Gazette, a Stellar Patrol brochure, “The Great Underground Empire: A History.” The second half of the browsie is given over to a conventional instruction manual that incorporates everything Infocom had learned over the previous several years about teaching people how to play their games as quickly and painlessly as possible. The “Sample Transcript and Map,” an innovation which first appeared in Seastalker, the final pre-gray-box release, is a particular stroke of genius. It shows by example how to play and how to make a map via a fictional game made up just for the occasion by Infocom. Each title got its own sample transcript which takes place in a similar environment to the one found on the disk and demonstrates that title’s general style of play.

The new scheme was welcome not least in that it let Infocom separate each game’s fictional context from technical instructions on how to work it. Previously they had blended everything together, a conceit that must have seemed clever when they first did it for Deadline but that had grown very strained by 1984. (The original version of The Witness is a typical example. Its National Detective Gazette includes an article titled “Investigative Machines of the Future!” explaining this “Computer” that in the “early part of the next millennium” will be “the most important tool of the detective’s trade.”)

The Witness gray box version

After the browsie comes the portion of the package that is sealed, containing the various physical feelies as well the game disk itself, all peeking enticingly through a clear plastic cover for the benefit of in-store browsers.

The Witness gray box version

And finally there’s the back side of the box, which has the expected flavor text for the game as well as a shot of all the feelies on display. Then comes some standard text, a sort of mission statement for Infocom interactive fiction (“It’s like waking up inside a story!”; “You’re more than a passive reader!”), along with an explanation of the difficulty levels.

Converting the entire catalog to the new format was a huge task which consumed lots of resources during the first half of 1984. While much of the material that would go into the gray boxes already existed, it had to undergo considerable reworking in virtually every case to fit into the new format. Just untangling the fictional context from the technical instructions was a time-consuming, delicate task. And much had to be written from scratch, such as a suitably clever sample transcript for every single game. The three Zork games, which had previously shipped in blister packs containing only a disk and a slim manual telling how to play, demanded the most effort of all; a browsie and set of feelies that would be evocative enough to stand alongside those in the other games had to be designed for each from scratch.

Brilliant as the new packaging was, there was some inevitable sadness at Infocom over the loss of the likes of the Starcross saucer and the Suspended mask and a certain individual personality for each title that the old “anything goes” approach to packaging had represented. Certainly compromises — sometimes painful ones — had to be made. Steve Meretzky was particularly broken up about the loss of the infotater from the Sorcerer package; it was just too big to fit into the gray-box feelie tray, and so had to be replaced with a simple booklet.

The matrix of genres and difficulties was as useful to Infocom internally as it was to their customers. A diagram showing its current state — i.e., what current and upcoming games slotted in where — could generally be found on a whiteboard in the marketing department. This allowed them, as Jon Palace puts it, to “figure out where the holes were” in the current product line and not “put too many in one place.” In deciding what games to approve for development, big emphasis would be given to keeping the matrix balanced, making sure there were games for all fictional interests and all experience levels. After the beginning of the gray-box era you wouldn’t see unbalanced stretches like the one in late 1982 and early 1983 when three of five titles were science fiction — or for that matter Seastalker and Cutthroats, two titles released back to back just as the matrix was coming into force that were both nautical “Tales of Adventure” set in contemporary times.

The genres on the matrix were always much more defensible than the difficulty levels, which often seemed like little more than wishful thinking driven by the slot marketing would like for any given game to occupy. Zork I, while not quite so objectionable as Zork II, was a huge game with some very questionable puzzles that never would have made it into a later Infocom game. Just mapping its huge geography full of willfully inconsistent room connections could require hours of patient, dogged work with graph paper, pencil, and eraser. Yet Zork I also remained Infocom’s biggest seller by a country mile, selling more copies every year it remained on the market; it sold more than 150,000 copies in 1984 alone, an absolutely huge figure for the era and enough to account for more then 20% of Infocom’s total sales for the year. Many computer dealers still seemed to regard Zork I as an essential accessory to be taken home by the customer along with printer paper and some blank disks every time they sold a new computer system. Infocom simply couldn’t drive such customers away with an “Advanced” or “Expert” label on this evergreen. So, Zork I became a “Standard”-level game. Similar concerns would soon lead to Infocom’s adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the cruelest game they had released since the days of Zork, Deadline, and Suspended but also one with a potential mass appeal like nothing they had done before, also being given the “Standard” label.

Stranger, because less explicable, were the difficulty levels bestowed on other games. Starcross, by no means a trivial challenge but one full of logical puzzles in a relatively consistent environment, was nevertheless an “Expert” game, while Infidel, the most straightforward game Infocom had yet produced outside of the deliberately easy Seastalker, became an “Advanced” game. One can only presume that, with the “Standard”-level Cutthroats about to be released and Seastalker in the “Junior” slot, Infidel fit the matrix better as an “Advanced”-level “Tale of Adventure.” Ditto for Starcross with Planetfall and the forthcoming Hitchhiker’s, both of which were already crowded into the “Standard” science-fiction slot. In the end marketing likely did themselves few favors with this sort of wishful thinking. Any new player who bought Zork I or Hitchhiker’s and was completely baffled, then looked at the box to see this was only “Standard”-level interactive fiction, “a good introductory level for adults”… well, she probably wasn’t likely to buy another. No one likes to feel stupid. If Infocom couldn’t make the difficulty levels accurate (and, as noted, there were indeed legitimate commercial concerns that made this problematic), they would have been better served to leave them off entirely.

Be that as it may, times in general were good. Infocom was the main reason for the bookware craze that was the hot new trend in entertainment software in 1984, even though, ironically, their own first book adaptation would only appear at the end of the year in the form of Hitchhiker’s. And their reputation extended far beyond the software industry. They were in Mike Berlyn’s words “intellectual rock stars”; it seemed everyone wanted a piece of them. Christopher Cerf, a big wheel with the Children’s Television Workshop, took a few of them out to meet with Jim Henson to discuss creative opportunities. George Romero of horror-movie fame asked them about movie rights to Zork. Timothy Leary wrote Berlyn a gushing letter about Suspended, saying it had “changed his life” and revealed to him the potential of computers with its portrayal of split consciousness. He later visited Infocom in person to discuss a collaboration. He envisioned a “personality” that would live in the computer, observe what you did and how you liked to do it, and adjust the experience of using the computer accordingly. None of these talks ultimately came to anything, but for this bunch of hackers and refugees from academia, who had mostly been kids or teens when Night of the Living Dead was provoking shock and outrage at the Saturday matinees and the Moody Blues were serenading Leary on the radio, it was heady stuff indeed. (Leary did eventually find a willing collaborator in Electronic Arts. Timothy Leary’s Mind Mirror — “Tune in, turn on, boot up” — became one of the strangest products that company would ever release, one that would never have seen the light of day outside of the experimental mid-1980s.)

And then, to cap off a crazy year, Simon & Schuster came calling waving tens of millions in their faces.

The story of the Simon & Schuster negotiation, only recently fully known thanks to the Get Lamp project, begins with one of the most important and controversial figures in publishing of the late twentieth century: Richard E. Snyder. Snyder started at Simon & Schuster in 1960, and had risen to vice president by the time the massive conglomerate Gulf and Western (or, as Mel Brooks dubbed them in Silent Movie, Engulf and Devour) acquired the company in 1975; his biggest claim to fame during these early years was perhaps giving Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward the title for All the President’s Men. After years of chafing against the hidebound practices of Simon & Schuster’s original management, he at last got the chance he had been dreaming of from Gulf and Western, who made him president in 1975 and CEO in 1978. Determined to wrench the company out of the past and into the modern world of media and entertainment, Snyder unabashedly pursued celebrities and big, commercial projects whilst building a reputation as the meanest man in his field, the barbarian at the gate of the tweedy, traditional world of publishing. He took a special delight in firing people, setting aside a room for the purpose that came to be called the “executive departure lounge.” His reputation spread far and wide; he made Fortune magazine’s list of “America’s Toughest Bosses” in 1984 in an article which compared him to the Ayatollah Khomeini — only Snyder had more hostages, Fortune wrote, in the form of an entire company which supposedly quaked in fear of him. He also became known for, in the words of Washington Post columnist Jonathan Yardley, “his assiduous accumulation of executive perquisites unmatched since the heyday of William Randolph Hearst, if not Croesus.” But he got results: in fifteen years he took Simon & Schuster from a $40-million business to a $2-billion business, from a modest trade publisher to the biggest, most diversified publisher in the world.

Much of that growth was fueled by aggressive acquisitions that let Simon & Schuster capitalize on any hot trend that came down the pop-culture pipe. Thus they were only being true to form when they began nosing around Infocom, kicking the tires as it were, as early as late 1983. They were eager to point out (in Mike Dornbrook’s words) “all the wonderful things they could do” for Infocom, which included among other things the chance to make games in the Star Trek universe; Paramount Pictures was also a subsidiary of Gulf and Western, and Simon & Schuster already published the Star Trek line of novels on their Pocket Books imprint. Snyder got personally involved in the latter half of 1984. Like any good publisher, he talked often to people in the bookstore trade. Waldenbooks, the biggest chain in the United States at the time, continued to mention often how well they were doing with this company called Infocom and this thing they made called interactive fiction.

And so Snyder, who could be charming as hell when he wanted to be, decided to try to make a deal personally. He invited Marc Blank and Mike Dornbrook to visit him in his executive suite near the top of a skyscraper in Rockefeller Center. It made, to say the least, quite the contrast to Infocom’s comfortable little home on Wheeler Street back in Cambridge. Dornbrook recalls marveling at the restroom, which “used gold in ways I had never thought of using gold.” The three had lunch in Snyder’s executive dining room at a table big enough to seat thirty — Dover sole, prepared by Snyder’s personal chef and served by three liveried attendants. Snyder stroked them like a master. Dornbrook:

Marc said, “Mike, why don’t you tell Mr. Snyder a little bit about InvisiClues?”

So I described what I’d done. I mentioned the selling price and how many had sold. By that point, late 1984, we’d sold over half a million — the Zork I InvisiClues book alone had sold something like 200,000 copies.

Synder said, “You’ve sold 200,000 copies at $9.95? That’s trade-paperback prices! Do you realize you’re one of the bestselling authors on the planet?”

I said, “What?”

Snyder said, “In terms of dollars you’re at Stephen King level!”

I was totally blown away.

Shortly after, Snyder sent a Gulf and Western acquisitions negotiator and the Simon & Schuster manager he proposed to have oversee Infocom to visit them in Cambridge. They arrived in a limousine to take Blank, Stu Galley, and Al Vezza (who had replaced Joel Berez as planned as Infocom’s CEO in January of 1984) to another opulent lunch. When they got down to specifics at last and made their offer, it was extraordinary: $28 million. To put this in context, understand that Infocom’s board had recently estimated the company’s value at perhaps $10 million, $12 million at the outside.

Yet feelings were mixed on Infocom’s side. While Blank and Joel Berez were reportedly very interested, Galley had taken an immediate dislike to the would-be overseer, feeling certain within minutes that he “didn’t understand” Infocom and never would. And Vezza couldn’t help but feel that if a corporate titan like Snyder, who, say what you would about him, didn’t get where he was by being stupid, was offering that kind of money then in the big picture Infocom must be worth much more. The negotiator’s response to his hemming and hawing only reinforced the impression. In Dornbrook’s recollection, he said, “Look, if it’s just a matter of a few million dollars, I don’t care, I’ll pay you more. But are you or are you not interested in selling?” Still unable to elicit a clear answer to that question, he decided that Vezza was not. Simon & Schuster ended up starting a brief-lived interactive division of their own in lieu of Infocom. Their most high-profile releases became, yes, a few Star Trek adventures.

In light of the course Infocom’s fortunes would soon take, both the people who were there at the time and mere interested parties like you and me will inevitably continue to second-guess the decision — or, perhaps better said, non-decision — for years to come. Jon Palace notes, probably correctly, that there was a certain amount of hubris in Infocom’s rejection of Snyder’s millions, that they couldn’t help but let some of the glowing press go to their heads and really did suspect that Simon & Schuster might just be getting them too cheap at a mere three times their valuation by the company accountants. And certainly interactive-fiction fans who feel the genre died (commercially) far too young are always looking for viable counter-factuals that keep Infocom alive and thriving into the 1990s and hopefully beyond.

Still, it’s hard for me to see this deal turning out all that well for Infocom in the end. Friction almost always results when a small, creative company is bought by, as Dave Lebling describes Simon & Schuster, “a giant soulless corporation.” When the bookware craze died down, as it seems it must whether Infocom was acquired or not, Infocom would have been just an artifact of a trend, one of many that hadn’t taken off quite like Simon & Schuster hoped. You win some and you lose some in business, after all. Nor was Snyder, as famous in the business community as he was hated by Simon & Schuster’s management class for his micromanaging instinct, exactly known as a patient man. A Simon & Schuster Infocom may very well have given us fewer works than did the eventual Activision Infocom; certainly the much larger Simon & Schuster was much more likely to write off an acquisition quickly as a failed bet and move on than was Activision. Even the former Imps, most of whom would have done very well financially by the acquisition, will mostly wryly admit that they look on the Simon & Schuster negotiation wistfully not so much as the potential enabler of many more years of fruitful creativity as an opportunity to cash out on all their hard work, to walk away from Infocom in the end with something more than the salary they’d earned over the years to show for their entrepreneurial efforts. That’s not a feeling we should begrudge them; I’m sure every one of us with mortgages and car payments would look back the same way. But it’s also a long way from the more idealistic what-might-have-beens that tempt us.

And there was always an elephant in the room as the board discussed the merits of Simon & Schuster’s offer: the Business Products division and the Cornerstone database. What had started as a two-man research project in October of 1982 and been officially approved as a viable endeavor ten months later had, since Al Vezza’s arrival as CEO in January of 1984, become Infocom’s strategic priority, consuming all the money the games generated and millions more that they had to acquire through bank loans. Simon & Schuster had no interest in business software, and would have been more than happy just to take the games division for their $30 million. Problem was, Infocom needed the ongoing revenue from the games division to keep Business Products going. Somehow funneling some or all of Simon & Schuster’s millions back into a remade Infocom-as-business-developer would involve tricky, time-consuming accounting shenanigans for which Vezza just didn’t feel he had time; Cornerstone was now entering the final, expensive crunch time, with a planned release in January of 1985. And Cornerstone was the dream of Vezza and at least a few of the other old timers, the reason they had founded Infocom in the first place. If becoming a success in business software is a more prosaic dream than that of inventing a new way of sharing stories, well, hey, it takes the prosaic as well as the poetic to make a world. Who are we to judge?

But the full story of Cornerstone is a story for another article. For now let’s just note that, despite tensions and conflicts that inevitably arose from packing a bunch of game and business developers together in the same increasingly cramped office, things in the big picture were still looking pretty great to just about everyone as they celebrated Christmas 1984. They had sold about 725,000 games that year worth $10 million, up from 450,000 and $6 million the previous year. They were so successful in their field that a whole genre of bookware had sprung up to try to capture some of their success, that their company name risked becoming synonomous, Kleenex-style, with the adventure game — or okay, if you like, “interactive fiction” — itself. And they had some of the more interesting people on the planet coming to them to propose collaborations. Speaking of which: their collaboration with Douglas Adams on the Hitchhiker’s game had sold some 60,000 copies in its first six weeks or so, a pace out of the gate that none of their earlier releases had even approached. If anything had frustrated Infocom over the last couple of years, it had been their inability to field a title that would break beyond the label of just “very successful” to become a phenomenon like Zork I, which at four years old still outsold any of their other games by a factor of two and had in fact just had its biggest sales year ever. Now it looked at last like they had another Zork. With the next Hitchhiker’s game expected by next Christmas, 1985’s game sales were estimated — very conservatively, they thought — as likely to reach at least $13 million. Add to that the at least $5 million or so they expected from the first year of Cornerstone sales, and it looked likely to be one hell of a year.

Granted, a sober-minded accountant or financial analyst might have looked at things less optimistically. She might have noted that Infocom had managed to maintain their upward sales trajectory even as the home-computer industry in general suffered a disappointing year of slowing hardware and software sales, failed platform introductions, shrinking or disappearing magazines, and a mainstream media that was suddenly as cynical about home computers as they had been ecstatic about them a year before. It was of course great that Infocom was so far bucking the trends — but would it continue? She also might have wondered why this company that was so ridiculously good and successful at this one thing was so determined to branch out into this other thing. After all, every business student learned that a small company should do one thing and do it well, that trying to do too much too soon was usually a fatal mistake. And, most worrisome of all, she might have noted that Infocom’s board had, wittingly or unwittingly, effectively bet the company on this new thing by going millions into debt to finance it. There was no Plan B if Infocom didn’t become successful in business products like they were in games. Indeed, one fact must have glared out at her as soon as she peeked at the books: thanks to Business Products, Infocom had managed to lose $2.4 million in 1984 despite sales increases of some 67%.

But, Vezza and the board would have replied, that was just temporary, just the money Infocom had to spend to make even more money in an industry that dwarfed the one they currently all but dominated. Cornerstone was shaping up to be a great product. It couldn’t fail.

Could it?

(As usual for my Infocom pieces, my secret weapons for this article were Jason Scott’s Get Lamp project materials. Thanks again for sharing, Jason!)

 
 

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Bookware

Bookware

Suppose that in some alternate universe you are William Shakespeare. Strolling about London one day in the late sixteenth century, mulling over plans for your next novel, you come upon some workmen erecting a large wooden structure of peculiar shape. The design of the building strikes you as inappropriate for either a dwelling or a place of business.

A few questions gain you some information about a recent invention (this is an alternate universe, remember) called the “play.” Live people, sometimes costumed and in makeup, are getting up on a flat surface called a “stage” and acting out stories!

The clever people who have designed and built the first stages, as well as the inventors of acting, are right in there writing and directing the best plays they can come up with. (At least the best they can come up with in their spare time — each of these people necessarily has one or two active careers already going.)

In one of the earliest successful plays, dummies representing invading aliens (Frenchmen, perhaps, or Spaniards, from across the Channel) were lowered on ropes from concealed positions above the stage, while the actor (this play needed only one) ran back and forth, following shouted directions from the audience, trying to shoot all the dummies before they touched the floor. The audience liked this play a lot and cheered it enthusiastically.

In a somewhat more recent show, also very popular, the lead actor climbs about on a crazy scaffolding of planks and ladders, trying to accomplish some rather simple-minded tasks, while others costumed as fantastic creatures try to knock him off by throwing barrels. It’s good slapstick fun, and the audiences love it.

“Wait a minute,” you say to these eager people who have been proudly explaining how plays work. “Wait a minute. That all sounds amusing, yes. But l really think you’re on to something bigger. Let me go home and think about this for a while… How many people can you get onstage at once? How many lines can an actor memorize? Can you have it dark on one half of the stage and light on the other half?”

They look at each other. “We’re not really sure,” one replies at last. “Our stages are still pretty primitive. Our actors are all new at the job. Everybody is. Next year we’ll be able to do more. But what should we try to do?”

You don’t have any instant answers for them. A lot of vague ideas suddenly churning. Possibilities. …

“I hope you will go home and think about it, Will,” says one of the stage managers. “You’re good with words. Maybe we could have the man on the ladder say something more than ‘Ouch!’ and ‘Wow!'”

“Yes, something more,” you agree thoughtfully, turning away. The other stage people call good wishes after you. But you scarcely hear them. Your mind is involved with new ideas.

To work with — depend on — carpenters, actors, experts in stage machinery and lighting? Whatever story emerged would no longer be purely your own. But already you can see that the stage those others have created can capture the imagination and enthrall an audience, even with no more than a few clowns and ladders.

You head for home, for a place where you can sit down and think, and write. Your thoughts are on a story that you had planned to make into a book. The one to be called Hamlet…

The words above were written by science-fiction author and would-be gaming entrepreneur Fred Saberhagen in a feature article about the possibilities for interactive fiction (“Call Yourself Ishmael: Micros Get the Literary Itch”) in the September/October 1983 issue of Softline — the same article in fact that contained the first published discussion of Floyd’s death in Planetfall and what it portended. Saberhagen, whose own flirtations with interactivity would be considerable but commercially frustrating, was at the vanguard of an emerging conventional wisdom about the intersection of computers, games, and books. He and his fellow pundits that started to emerge during 1983 weren’t the first to begin to think along these lines. The editors of SoftSide magazine had first started writing about the literary potential of “compunovels” back in 1979, truly a leap of faith in light of the strangled prose and plots of the Scott Adams games and the other 16 K adventures that were pretty much the only ones available to PC owners at the time. But it took the efforts of not only Saberhagen but also, and probably more significantly, respectable folks writing for respectable mainstream publications like The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe Magazine, and Scientific American to make of it a full-fledged meme. The boldest pundits declared that we were on the cusp of nothing less than a whole new form of literature that could be as rich, meaningful, and aesthetically brilliant as anything put down by Shakespeare or Melville. Suddenly what had once been dismissed as mere “adventure games” were worth taking seriously.

All of the articles just mentioned focused primarily or entirely on Infocom, the only company in the field whose games could realistically stand up to any scrutiny at all as literary works. Seeing this, and seeing Infocom growing less and less afraid to lay claim to the mantle of literary artists under such persistent stroking, lots of other companies started asking how they could steal some of Infocom’s cultural thunder and get a piece of what the pundits said would be the literature of the future. The players who now started entering the field were a surprisingly motley lot. There were the expected startups as well as old dogs in the software game looking to learn some new tricks. Epyx, Brøderbund, and Electronic Arts amongst others all discovered a latent passion for text, as did of all people console developer Imagic, whose action games for first-generation consoles like the Atari VCS had been enormously successful but who were now floundering like everything else in that industry in the wake of the Great Videogame Crash. But technologists were not the only opportunists looking to jump on the bandwagon Infocom was driving. The huge publishing houses of Simon and Schuster, Addison-Wesley, and Random House also started software arms, as did smaller publishers like science-fiction paperback specialist Baen Books. On the other end of the distributional pipeline, the two biggest American bookstore chains, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, both set aside areas in their stores for entertainment software, as did the ubiquitous W.H. Smith in Britain. To complete the strange mixture and hedge the bets of their own software arm, Addison-Wesley signed a deal with Infocom in early 1984 to distribute their games to the bookselling trade, an important contract that got Infocom into thousands of bookstores populated with just the sort of literate customers they were trying to reach.

All of this forthright investment in the idea of interactive fiction as a serious literary force by such pillars of mainstream American business feels a bit unbelievable today. Nor is it without a certain note of tragic resonance as the great What Might Have Been for people like me who still unabashedly love the idea. We see here the culture and, at least as importantly, the culture’s business interests trying to work out just what computer games were, what they could be, and perhaps what they should be. It’s a fascinating process to watch, if also — again, for people with my sympathies — one with kind of a heartbreaking ending. Were computer games actually games in the way that, say, Monopoly was? Or were they more like books? Or movies? Or were they — and this was the most messy and complicated and also the most likely answer of all — like any or all or none of the above, depending on the particular title in question and its genre and target audience? The answer to these questions was essential to answer another, more practical one: how, where, and to whom should computer games be sold? The folks we’re concerned with today are those who decided to bet on computer games, or at least a segment of them, as the next iteration in the long history of the book. Even on the business side of the development equation their efforts mix the expected desire to shift a lot of units and make a lot of money with a genuine idealism about the artistic potential of the form in which they were working. It was, as should be more than clear by now, an odd time in media.

If computer games were or could be literature, and if they wanted to be taken seriously as such, said many people, the smartest thing to do was to get people who already knew how to write literature — or at least readable popular fiction — involved in their creation. Or, failing that, the next best thing must be to play in the rich fictional worlds they had created. Lots of people in lots of companies followed this chain of reasoning simultaneously. Thus began the era of what the British press pithily came to call “bookware,” the splicing of the new frontier of computer games with the old of books and their authors, who were sometimes (but not all that often) actively involved, sometimes disinterested but happy to be getting another royalty check, and sometimes dead and thus blissfully unaware of the whole exercise. A trend that had been presaged in 1982 by The Hobbit reached manic full flower in 1984.

The list of bookware that flooded the market in both the United States and Britain between 1984 and 1986 is long, and includes some of the biggest names in genre fiction of the era as well as some surprisingly high-brow figures. An incomplete list might include: The Robots of Dawn (Isaac Asimov); The Mist (Stephen King); Amnesia (Thomas M. Disch); Mindwheel (future American poet laureate Robert Pinsky); High Stakes and Twice Shy (Dick Francis); Wings Out of Shadow (Fred Saberhagen); The Fourth Protocol (Frederick Forsyth); The Dragonriders of Pern (Anne McCaffrey); The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World (Harry Harrison); The Pen and the Dark (Colin Kapp); The Saga of Erik the Viking (Terry Jones); The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 (Sue Townsend); The Width of the World (Ian Watson); The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett); and Infocom’s own The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams). Those whose tastes ran more to the classics could choose from Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen); The Time Machine (H.G. Wells); Sherlock (Arthur Conan Doyle); Macbeth (William Shakespeare); The Snow Queen (Hans Christian Andersen); Dante’s Inferno; and Dracula (Bram Stoker). The list of games for which contracts were signed but which went unreleased due to the bookware bubble’s bursting includes Glory Road (Robert Heinlein); another Inferno (this one by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle); Animal Lover (Stephen R. Donaldson); 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne); Special Deliverance (Clifford D. Simak); Soldier, Ask Not (Gordon R. Dickson); and The World Thinker (Jack Vance). The publishers involved with all these efforts largely abandoned the old labels of “adventure game” and “text adventure” in favor of ones that reflected their literary aspirations. Some shamelessly appropriated “interactive fiction” from Infocom (who had themselves, of course, shamelessly appropriated it from Robert Lafore). Others made “interactive novels” or “computer novels.” Bantam Software came up with a particularly catchy label: “living literature.” Mosaic in Britain just bowed to the inevitable and stuck “bookware” on their boxes.

But it was none of the companies or games already mentioned who made the biggest bet on bookware. That was in fact a rapidly growing publisher located ten minutes from Infocom in Cambridge which had heretofore specialized in educational software: Spinnaker. Spinnaker debuted not one but two new imprints for bookware in 1984: Trillium (later Telarium, for reasons we’ll get to shortly), for book adaptations aimed at adults and teenagers; and Windham Classics, aimed at a somewhat younger set. They released no fewer than seven games between the two lines in 1984 alone (two more than Infocom’s total output for the year), followed by another five in 1985 and a final straggler in 1986, the twilight of the brief bookware era.

The story of Trillium and Windham Classics begins with a remarkable young publishing mogul named Byron Preiss. Born in 1953 in New York City, Preiss was one of those characters like Steve Jobs who could seemingly talk anybody into anything, one who as a callow youth not yet out of his teens was already able to convince older and supposedly wiser businesspeople to back his many and varied schemes. Throughout his career, Preiss mixed business with an idealism that seems to have been anything but affected. He first made a mark at seventeen, when he wrote and distributed The Block, an anti-drug comic book written for a near-illiterate reading level and aimed at grade-school children growing up in inner cities. He traveled around the country relentlessly to promote it, and eventually won the official endorsement of the Children’s Television Workshop of Sesame Street fame, as well as the lifelong friendship of one of the most important figures there, Chris Cerf. That’s just the way it was with Preiss throughout his life. He seemed genuinely unaware of the barriers between him and the people of power who could realize his dreams, and in consequence they seemed to just melt away. His gifts for gab and inspiration were legendary, as recalled by Leigh Ronald Grossman, one of a stable of young writers he came to nurture:

He had to be the most passionate person I’ve ever known, able to visualize what was special and exciting about EVERYTHING. I remember going to lunch with Byron and another publisher, in which the discussion hinged on a tired project that the whole staff was sick of dealing with after years of development. By the end of the lunch I was thrilled to be working on such a visionary project… and I’m still not quite sure how he did it.

He founded his own publishing company, Byron Preiss Visual Publications, in 1974 while enrolled in the film program at Stanford University. Through it he designed and/or published a variety of interesting, often groundbreaking work: a line of paperbacks that tried to revive the pulp adventures of the 1930s more than five years before Raiders of the Lost Ark; adult comics that didn’t involve superheroes and were forerunners of what have come to be called “graphic novels” today; Dragonworld, a beautifully illustrated epic fantasy novel which he himself coauthored; The Illustrated Harlan Ellison, whose pictures were in 3D and could be viewed through a pair of 3D glasses bound into the volume; various profusely illustrated nonfiction volumes for children and adults, on subjects ranging from the Beach Boys to dinosaurs. Throughout he assiduously cultivated relationships. By the time he turned thirty, Preiss’s Christmas-card list included people like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, the aforementioned Harlan Ellison, and Ray Bradbury in addition to many of the biggest names in the business of publishing and, yes, the members of the Beach Boys as well. C. David Seuss (a man whose role in this story will become clear shortly) believes that his sheer likability was perhaps his biggest asset of all; “people just wanted to go along with his ideas because he was just so nice.”

Throughout his career Preiss pushed the boundaries of what a book could be — physically, formally, and aesthetically. It’s thus little surprise that he got involved when the idea of the interactive book began to emerge in earnest in the early 1980s. His first project was a unique series in the crowded field of Choose Your Own Adventure books and copycats that dominated the children’s sections of bookstores at the time. The Be an Interplanetary Spy series mostly replaces simple choices of the “what do you want to do next?” variety with visual and logic puzzles that have to be solved to advance the narrative. In keeping with the through-going theme of Preiss’s career, the books are also lavishly illustrated, to the point that they are more interactive comic book than conventional text; the illustrations are often more important than the words. He would later create two more traditional but also fondly remembered gamebook series, Time Machine and Explorer.

Preiss had been well aware of computers and computer games since the mid-1970s, when like so many other Stanford students he paid a visit to nearby Xerox PARC. By mid-1983, with home computers booming, he felt the time had come to get involved with them as yet another facet of what a book could be. Indeed, the Be an Interplanetary Spy books, which started to appear at just this time, show more than a hint of influence from games like those of Infocom in their many puzzles and their replacing the occasional choices of Choose Your Own Adventure with almost constant interaction. By packing three or four puzzles and narrative branches onto almost every page he was able to make the books feel less granular, more like a parser-based adventure game than a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Still, Preiss wanted to go further. He started shopping around an idea for a series of computer games based on works by established authors, many of whom he just happened to have personal relationships with and whose participation — or at least willingness to sign a licensing contract — he could thus all but assure. He found himself a dance partner in the aggressive young Spinnaker Software.

Founded in April of 1982 by two friends from Harvard Business School and the Boston Consulting Group, Bill Bowman and C. David Seuss, Spinnaker was, like Electronic Arts, one of the new guard of slicker, more conventionally professional software publishers that began popping up during 1982 and 1983. Neither Bowman nor Seuss had a hackerish bone in his body. For proof, one need look no further than the ties they insisted on wearing to work every day at Spinnaker, or Bowman’s habit of getting up at 5:30 every morning to attend mass, or his seven children that were often hovering around Spinnaker’s offices after school hours (a marked contrast to life at Infocom, populated mostly by childless twenty- and thirty-somethings). They were savvy businessmen who saw an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an emerging market after the arrival of the IBM PC (Bowman believes he has one of the first hundred ever built) and the wave of purpose-built home computers that was set off by the Commodore VIC-20. The legendary venture capitalist Jacqueline Morby funded a nationwide jaunt to talk to retailers and look for obvious holes in the market, which revealed an exploding demand for educational software that could not be met by under-capitalized semi-amateurs like Edu-Ware. They jumped at it, with the aid of millions in venture capital arranged by Morby and her company TA Associates. (Morby would also take a place on Spinnaker’s board, along with that of Sierra On-Line and several others, making her one of the most powerful hidden shapers of the software industry of the 1980s.)

Spinnaker released their first products just in time for the Christmas of 1982. Some were done in-house, some by outside developers like educational pioneer Tom Snyder Productions. Quality inevitably varied, but some, like Snyder’s In Search of the Most Amazing Thing, have become children’s classics. Still, Spinnaker was emblematic of the changes that swept the software industry with the the home-computer boom and the arrival of traditional big-business interests — and big-business money — looking to capitalize on it, yet another sign that the era Doug Carlston referred to as the software “Brotherhood” was well and truly ended. Their agenda plainly included driving older rivals like Edu-Ware out of the market entirely, a goal they soon accomplished. They placed all but unprecedented emphasis on licensing, branding, and advertising, a result of what Seuss calls his “First Law”: “Apply money at the point of resistance.” Spinnaker poured some 15% of their total earnings for 1983 back into huge advertising buys, much of it outside the trade press in places like Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, and Newsweek. They soon hit upon the scheme of releasing their software under a number of sub-brands, each of which would be as often as possible a licensed take on an already well-known consumer entity. By the end of 1983 their stable already included Fisher-Price (educational software for the very young; name licensed from the huge toy company), Nova (science education; name licensed from the long-running PBS television series), and Better Living (personal productivity software), as well as the flagship Spinnaker brand. Whatever its other merits, the approach was a clever sleight of hand for a company that aimed to do nothing less than own educational software, and in time and with luck to extend that dominance to home-computing software as a whole. Bowman:

“Shelf space is all that matters in this business. If everything is under the Spinnaker brand, the consumer feels he’s not getting much of a choice, but here he can choose any of six brands.”

Feel free to put your own scare quotes around “choose” there. Spinnaker drew analogies between themselves and General Motors, who had their Buick, Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, etc. — if nothing else an indication that Bowman and Seuss weren’t afraid to dream big. When Byron Preiss came along with his idea for a new line of bookware, it was both an opportunity to add yet more brands to the stable and to begin to make inroads into entertainment software (something that had been on their long-term agenda from the start), just as the Better Living brand represented their first explorations of the productivity market. Their internal industry studies showed adventure games to be a very good place to start. While they currently sold in less than one-third the numbers of action games, the segment was growing rapidly, while action games were doing just the opposite.

Shortly after Preiss came on the scene, one of Spinnaker’s best outside developers, Dale Disharoon, came to them with a bookware idea of his own: to make edutainment based on classic and contemporary children’s books. Disharoon’s educational titles sold in huge numbers for Spinnaker, so when he talked they tended to listen. Thus was born the Windham Classics line, brand number six for Spinnaker, as a companion to Trillium.

Preiss was most closely involved with the latter, and that’s also where we’ll be spending most of our time. As should be clear by now, Trillium owed its existence to a mixture of artistic idealism and commercial pragmatism — not that such strange bedfellows aren’t pretty much business as usual in any media industry. For Preiss, Trillium represented nothing less than the future — or a possible future — of fiction. For Spinnaker, it represented a bit of the same but also yet another branding opportunity, the chance to stamp the names of popular authors onto boxes and get in on the hot new trend in entertainment software. They placed a young marketer named Seth Godin in charge of Trillium’s image. (Godin has since gone on to a career as a prominent marketing guru.) Now it was time to start rounding up authors.

Here Preiss proved the value of all those connections to the world of written science fiction. He pulled out his thick phone list and started calling some of the name authors with whom he’d carefully built relationships over the last decade. He soon had Arthur C. Clarke signed for an adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama and Ray Bradbury for Fahrenheit 451. He also reached a tentative agreement with Robert Heinlein to adapt his juvenile classic Starman Jones, and initiated talks with Roger Zelazny, Philip JosĂ© Farmer, Harry Harrison, and Alfred Bester. As with most of the products of the era of bookware, the question of how involved these authors were actually willing to be was always a delicate one. Mostly they wound up doing little more than politely sitting through presentations of the latest versions, with their creative role amounting to little more than a never- or almost never-exercised veto power. And that was about it, beyond signing their name to an appropriately glowing endorsement for the back of the box. Only Ray Bradbury was willing to get somewhat more involved, actively drawing up plot ideas for and by reports even contributing some prose to the Fahrenheit 451 game.

Thus when Spinnaker approached Michael Crichton about adapting one of his books, they must have been thrilled to learn that Crichton had already been working on an original game with some associates for eighteen months, and was in fact looking for a publisher. More problematic was a game called Shadowkeep, a text-adventure/CRPG hybrid offered to Spinnaker by a small developer called Ultrasoft. A book or an author was nowhere in sight, but it was just too impressive a game to pass up, so Spinnaker simply flipped the process on its head by hiring Alan Dean Foster, the reigning king of media tie-in novels (he had made his name in the industry by ghost writing the novelization of the original Star Wars for George Lucas), to write a book based on the game. He would thus have his name displayed in huge letters on the box of a game he had had absolutely nothing to do with. For the Windham Classics line, Spinnaker took advantage of some blessedly out-of-copyright children’s classics like The Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz, but did sign a license for the recent Green Sky Trilogy, whose author, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, did heavily involve herself in the design of the resulting game. That game, Below the Root, is not a text adventure at all but is a lovely, lyrical classic in its own right.

Indeed, the games of Trillium and Windham Classics take a surprising variety of approaches, mixing illustrated text adventure with action and CRPG elements, sometimes in the same game. But the fundamental goal, particularly for the Trillium games, was to outdo Infocom at their own game. Largely at Seth Godin’s behest, Spinnaker put the Trillium games inside mouth-wateringly beautiful gatefold boxes that on aesthetic grounds might just outdo — dare I say it? — Infocom. They also started a newsletter in an effort to build a community of loyal customers in the same way Infocom had, although they were a bit stumped as to what to put in it beyond plugs and order forms for the games; Spinnaker’s offices weren’t filled with the same sort of inspired madness that made The New Zork Times such a constant delight. Infocom couldn’t help but feel the target Spinnaker had plainly painted on their back, couldn’t help but feel a bit unnerved by this big company — already much larger than them — with their big-name authors and their illustrations and other additional gimmicks that was determined to wrest away from them their comfortable niche in the industry. Spinnaker even negotiated a deal to get the Trillium games into every Waldenbooks in the country to sit side by side with the Infocom games that had also just arrived there thanks to Infocom’s deal with Addison Wesley. Various Infocom folks have quietly acknowledged that Spinnaker was the only competitor who ever really made them nervous in 1984, the year they sold more games than in any other.

They thus must have been quite pleased when the Trillium line hit a major snafu within weeks of launching in the fall of that year. It seemed there already existed a tiny publisher of educational books using the name of “Trillium.” Now the original Trillium’s lawyers came calling. Seuss feels they could have fought the suit and likely prevailed (the original Trillium had never actually registered their name as a trademark), but it would have been time consuming, disruptive, and expensive. Spinnaker chose instead to start the embarrassing process of re-branding the entire line with a new name. They chose “Telarium,” a name that, for what it’s worth, I like a lot better anyway. (To avoid confusion as we crisscross the Trillium/Telarium split in this and future articles, I’m just going to refer to the brand as “Telarium” from now on.)

The whole debacle was anathema to a company that was so focused on branding. And it was almost as frustrating when negotiations with the Heinlein people to release Starman Jones, previously considered a done deal to the extent that a huge amount of work had already been done on the game, reached an impasse from which they would never emerge despite months and months of Telarium’s optimistically announcing the nearly completed Starman Jones as “coming soon.”

The arrival of Telarium was greeted with hostility and even a certain amount of contempt, not only at Infocom but amongst their other peers as well. Jon Freeman, never one to pull his punches, delivered a withering takedown via his column in Computer Gaming World:

In the first place, the economics of the situation almost guaranteed that the programmers involved, despite the hype, would not be first-class. Big Name Authors and Best-Selling Books don’t come cheap. Although the draw of author and book is clearly a marketing advantage — and should therefore be paid out of the marketing/advertising budget — the cost is normally borne by R&D. A big chunk of the royalties that would otherwise go to the developers of the game is paid, instead, to the author of the book. What top-flight game designer or programmer would take that kind of a pay cut? Regardless of their deficiencies as game designers, most good programmers are still at work on their own ideas. Those who can’t come up with original subjects for games are busy making a lucrative living converting popular games to new computers. Therefore, the majority of programmers available for these book projects are either inexperienced or inadequate or both.

The worst part is that the SF people involved don’t know how little they know about the subject. Few of the authors involved in all these projects play games: most lack the time; many lack the inclination. Technophobes like Ray Bradbury, who admits that he cannot use the computer he owns, believe the apex of computer usage is to enter the text of a book and read it on the CRT. Would he know a good computer game if he fell over one?

Yes, Freeman’s logic is questionable at best. Still, many of the people who had been in the industry for years saw Telarium as calculated and soulless, and not without cause. There was an air of contrivance, even perhaps a note of disingenuousness about the whole enterprise. Seth Godin claimed, “We wanted to go to the people who could write [the games] the best. And that’s not programmers — it’s authors.” Which would be fine if only the authors in question were actually deeply involved; witness the particular absurdity of Shadowkeep as an “Alan Dean Foster” game. Meanwhile Telarium’s addition of graphics and music and even action sequences to the Infocom template just screamed of bullet points on some marketer’s demands for more, more, more than the competition. When the line ultimately proved commercially disappointing, few felt much sympathy. In fact, they cheered the failure as an object lesson that you can’t buy your way to success with big licenses and an overstuffed marketing budget. (A lesson subsequent gaming history has not, alas, always borne out.)

Yet there was also, as I’ve already noted, that idealistic side to Telarium that hasn’t been discussed enough. A genuine aesthetic vision drove Telarium — a vision for games as coherent lived fictional experiences. Byron Preiss:

“We’re trying to make a game that is based on plot and characterization, not puzzles — the way a book is. If you read Fahrenheit 451, you don’t get stuck on page 50. And if you play the game, you don’t get stuck on frame 50, because the whole idea is that you’re interested in the game because of the characters and the plot and what’s happening. You care about what’s going on.”

Or, as he put it another way: “When you’re reading a good book, say a Ludlum thriller, you’re really sweating because you believe you’re part of the story. Adventure games weren’t doing that because the puzzles kept bringing you back to reality.” People in and around Telarium expressed over and over this determination to get beyond arbitrary, often frustrating set-piece puzzle solving to something worthy of Infocom’s chosen label of interactive fiction. To what extent they succeeded is debatable; certainly the games have plenty of rough edges. Still, they’re also more than worthy of the sort of careful second look that too few of the non-Infocom works of the bookware era have heretofore received. We’ll begin the process of remedying that next time.

(Many thanks to C. David Seuss for answering questions and sharing his memories with me. A Harvard Business School case study on Spinnaker was also invaluable. Particularly good contemporary articles on Telarium and the bookware phenomenon are in: the September/October 1983 Softline; the December 1984 Compute!’s Gazette; the June/July 1985 Commodore Power Play; the February 1985 Compute!; the April 1985 Electronic Games; the June 18, 1984 InfoWorld; the July 30, 1984 InfoWorld; the August 13, 1984 InfoWorld; the August 1984 Computer Gaming World; the February 1985 Micro-Adventurer; and the May 1985 Commodore Microcomputers. All were used for this article and the ones on individual Telarium games that will follow, as were Jason Scott’s Get Lamp archives which he kindly shared with me. The great illustration that begins this article was taken from the April 1985 Electronic Games.)

 
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Posted by on September 10, 2013 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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From Automated Simulations to Epyx

When Robert Botch joined Automated Simulations as director of marketing just as 1982 expired, it wasn’t exactly the sexiest company in the industry. They were still flogging their Dunjonquest line, which now consisted of no less than eleven sequels, spinoffs, and expansions to Temple of Apshai. More than a year after co-founder Jon Freeman had left in frustration over partner Jim Connelley’s refusal to update Automated’s technology, the entire line was still derived from the same BASIC-based engine that had first been designed to run on a 16 K TRS-80 back in 1979. It was hard for anyone to articulate why someone would choose to play a Dunjonquest game in a world that contained Ultima and Wizardry. And, indeed, Automated’s sales numbers were not looking very good, and the company had stopped making money almost from the moment that the Ultima and Wizardry series debuted. Still, that hadn’t prevented them from benefiting from the torrents of venture capital that entered the young industry in 1982, courtesy of the pundits who were billing home computers as the next big thing to succeed the game consoles. But now the investors were getting worried, wondering if this stodgy company and their somewhat pedantic approach to gaming had really been such a good risk after all. Thus Botch, whom Connelley hired under pressure to remake Automated’s image.

Botch’s first assignment was to visit the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that January, with Dunjonquest titles in tow to display to the crowd on a big-screen television rented for the occasion. Botch, who knew nothing about computers or computer games, didn’t much understand the Dunjonquest concept. He could hardly be blamed, for just trying to figure out which one you could play was confusing as hell: you needed to already have Temple of Apshai to play these additional games, but needed Hellfire Warrior to play those, etc. He was therefore relieved when another employee handed him a disk containing a straightforward, standalone action/puzzle game for the Atari home-computer line called Jumpman, a sort of massively expanded version of the arcade classic Donkey Kong with thirty levels to explore. Unusually for Automated, who usually developed games in-house, its presence was the result of an unsolicited third-party submission from a hacker named Randy Glover.

Randy Glover, developer of Jumpman

Randy Glover, developer of Jumpman

Botch was such a computer novice that he couldn’t figure out how to boot the game; his colleague had to tell him to “put it in that little slot over by the computer.” But when he finally got it working he fell in love. The rest of the show turned into an extended battle of wills between Botch and Connelley. The latter, who was determined to showcase the Dunjonquest games, would “come over, yell a lot, and tell me to take the disk out. Whenever he left the room, I’d load the program in again.” The crowd seemed to agree with Botch: he left CES with a notebook full of orders for the as yet unreleased Jumpman, convinced that in it he had seen the only viable future for his new employers.

The embattled Connelley saw his power further eroded the following month, when the investors brought in Michael Katz, an unsentimental, hard-driving businessman with an eye for mainstream appeal. He had spent the past four years at Coleco, where he had masterminded the launch of some very successful handheld electronic games as well as the ColecoVision console, which had just sold more than 500,000 units in its first Christmas on the market. It was first agreed that Connelley and Katz would co-lead the company, but this was obviously impractical and untenable. In a scenario that could have easily happened to Ken Williams at Sierra if he had been less strong-willed and business-savvy, Connelley was being eased out of his own company by the monied interests he had welcomed with open arms. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, he left within months, taking a number of his loyalists with him to form a development studio he named The Connelley Group, which would release a couple of games through Automated before becoming free agents and eventually fading away quietly.

Katz, Botch, and the other newcomers were thus left alone to literally transform Automated Simulations into a new company. Automated had for some time now been branding many of their games with the label of “Epyx,” arrived at because their first choice, “Epic,” was already taken by a record label. No matter; “Epyx” was a better name anyway, proof that even a blind-to-PR squirrel like Connelley could find a nut every now and again. Katz and Botch now made it the official name of the reborn company, excising all trace of the stodgy old “Automated Simulations” name. Gone also would be the nerdy old Dunjonquest line which positively reeked of Dungeons and Dragons sessions in parents’ basements. They would instead strive to make Epyx synonymous with colorful, accessible games like Jumpman, aimed straight at the heart of the mass market. The old slogan of “Computer Games Thinkers Play” now became “Strategy Games for the Action-Game Player,” and they hired Chiat Day, Apple’s PR firm and the hottest such in Silicon Valley, to remake Epyx’s image entirely.

Epyx

Jumpman itself made a good start toward that goal. It was a huge hit, especially once ported to the Commodore 64. One of the first games to really take proper advantage of the 64’s audiovisual capabilities, it hit that platform like a nova at mid-year, topping the sales charts for months and probably becoming the bestselling single Commodore 64 game of 1983. It alone was enough to return Epyx to profitability. Unsurprisingly given commercial returns like that, from now on Epyx would develop first and most for the 64. They also hired Glover to work in-house. Before the end of the year he had already delivered a cartridge-based pseudo-sequel, Jumpman Junior, to reach ultra-low-end systems without a disk drive.

But now Katz had a problem. Other than Glover, he lacked the technical staff to make the Jumpmans of the future. Most of them had left with Connelley — and anyway games like their old Dunjonquests were exactly what the new Epyx didn’t want to be making. Then Starpath caught Katz’s eye.

Back in 1981, two former Atari engineers, Bob Brown and Craig Nelson, had founded Arcadia, Inc., eventually to be renamed Starpath after the release of the Arcadia 2001, an ill-conceived and short-lived games console from Emerson Radio Corporation. Drawing from friends, family, and former colleagues, Brown and Nelson put together a crack team of hardware and software hackers to make their mark in the Atari VCS market. Their flagship product was the marvelously Rube Goldberg-esque Supercharger, which plugged into the VCS’s cartridge port and added 6 K of memory (which may not sound like much until you remember that the VCS shipped with all of 128 bytes), new graphics routines in ROM, and a cable to connect the console to a cassette player. Starpath developed and released half a dozen games on cassette for use with the Supercharger, most of them apparently quite impressive indeed. But problems dogged Starpath. The company lived in constant fear of legal action by Atari, whom Brown and Nelson had not left on particularly good terms, in response to their unauthorized expansion. It did eventually become clear that Starpath had little to fear from Atari, but for the worst possible reason: the videogame market was collapsing, and Atari had far bigger problems than little Starpath. By late 1983 Starpath was floundering. Katz swooped, buying the entire company for a song and moving them lock, stock, and barrel from Santa Clara, California, into Epyx’s headquarters in nearby Sunnyvale.

Katz had no interest in any of Starpath’s extant products for a dead Atari VCS market. No, he wanted the programming talent and creative flair that had led to the Supercharger and its games in the first place. If they could do work like that on the Atari VCS, imagine what they could do with a Commodore 64. The Starpath folks would prove to be the final, most essential piece in his remaking of Epyx.

One of Starpath’s programmers, Dennis Caswell, had been playing around with ideas for a platforming action-adventure game before the acquisition. Indeed, he was already at work trying to animate the running man who would be the star. It was decided to let Caswell, who had three Supercharger games under his belt, run with his idea on the Commodore 64. He says his elation at the platform change was so great that “I unplugged my [Atari] 2600 and threw it out of my office and into the hall.” Working essentially alone, Caswell crafted one of the iconic Commodore 64 games and one of the bestselling in the history of Epyx: Impossible Mission.

Starpath had also been working on a decathlon simulation. In fact, it was far enough along to be basically playable. They discussed porting it to the 64, but the capabilities of that machine quickly led them to think about something more than just a simulation of track and field. Why not use the luxury of 64 K of memory and disk-based storage to simulate a broader cross-section of Summer Olympic events? With the 1984 Summer Olympics coming to Los Angeles, it seemed the perfect game for the zeitgeist, with exactly the sort of mass-market appeal Katz wanted from his new titles. He thought it a brilliant idea, and even went so far as to approach the Olympic Committee about making it an officially licensed product. He found, however, that Atari had long before sewn up the rights, back when they had been the fastest growing company in America. Epyx therefore decided to do everything possible to associate the game with the Olympics without outright declaring it to be an official Olympics simulation. They pushed the envelope pretty far: the game would be called Summer Games, would begin with an opening ceremony and a runner lighting a flame to the strains of “Bugler’s Dream,” would offer medals, would (as its advertising copy proclaimed) let you “go for the gold!” representing the country of your choice. Such legal boundary-pushing became something of a habit; witness Impossible Mission, which plainly hoped to benefit from an association with Mission: Impossible. (This in spite of the fact that Scott Adams had already been forced by the lawyers to change the name of his third adventure from Mission Impossible to Secret Mission.) In the case of Summer Games, Epyx likely got away with it because Atari was in no financial shape to press the issue and the Olympic Committee, never the most progressive institution, was barely aware of home-computer games’ existence. To this day many people are shocked to realize that Summer Games is not actually an official Olympics game. It all speaks to Katz’s determination to create games that felt up-to-date and relevant to the times. Yes, sometimes that could backfire, leading to trying-way-too-hard titles like Break Dance. Much of the time, however, it was commercial gold.

The original design brief for Summer Games called for ten events. The team also very much wished to include head-to-head, real-time competition wherever the nature of the sport being simulated allowed it. Beyond that, they would pretty much make it up on the fly; even the events themselves were largely chosen in the moment. The Starpath programmers’ talents were augmented by Randy Glover of Jumpman fame and Epyx’s first full-time artist, Erin Murphy. They were all under the gun from the start, for Katz wanted them to have something ready to show at the 1984 Winter CES, barely six weeks away when the project was officially green-lit. They worked through the holidays to deliver. Epyx arrived at CES with a very impressive albeit non-interactive opening-ceremonies sequence, fairly playable 4 X 400-meter relay and 100-meter dash races (both partially adapted from Starpath’s old decathlon project), and a diving event. At the show they learned that they had more competition in the (pseudo-)Olympics genre beyond Atari. HESWare, an aggressive up-and-comer not that dissimilar to Epyx who were about to sign Leonard Nimoy as their spokesman, showed HES Games. The prospect pushed Epyx to make sure Summer Games both met its planned pre-Summer Olympics release date and was as good as they could make it. To help with the former, the original plan for ten events was reduced to eight, principally via the sacrifice of weight lifting (fans of which sport would have to wait until 1986’s World Games to get their due). To help with the latter, more resources and personnel were poured into the project.

Even as this happened, attrition, a constant at Epyx, also became a concern. Katz’s new Epyx could be a rewarding place, but also an unrelentingly intense and competitive one, full of mathematical athletes convinced they were the smartest people in the room and all too happy to demonstrate it at their rivals’ expense. The spirit of competition extended beyond working hours; hundreds of dollars changed hands weekly in epic games of poker. Even some of Epyx’s brightest stars eventually found the company’s testosterone- and brainpower-fueled culture too much to take. Thus Starpath co-founder Bob Brown, finding Starpath’s new masters not to his liking, left quite soon after the acquisition, and Randy Glover, who had been assigned to the swimming events, abruptly left not long after CES. The swimming events were taken up by Stephen Landrum, the biggest single contributor to the project as a whole, who also did the opening ceremonies and the diving and pole-vaulting events.

It had been decided early on that Summer Games would let you compete as the representative of any of a variety of nations, complete with flags and national anthems to play during the medal ceremonies. Since it obviously would not be possible to include all of the 140 countries who would participate in the real Olympics, Epyx was left with the question of which ones should make the cut. Beyond the big, obvious powerhouses of the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, commercial considerations once again reigned supreme here. Katz had begun signing deals with foreign distributors, pushing hard to get Epyx’s games into the vibrant British and steadily emerging Western European software markets. Epyx reasoned that players in these countries would want the opportunity to represent their own nation. Thus relative Summer-Olympic non-factors like Norway and Denmark were included in the game, while potent teams from parts of the world that didn’t buy computer games, like East Germany, Romania, and Yugoslavia, were omitted. Most of the countries included had never been visited by anyone at Epyx. They sourced the flag designs from a world atlas, and called consulates and sales connections in Europe to drum up sheet music for the various anthems. Many of those anthems had never been heard by anyone working on the game; if some sound a bit “off” in tone or tempo, perhaps that’s the reason. For the coup de grâce, Epyx couldn’t resist including their own company as one of the “nations,” complete with a national anthem that was actually the Jumpman theme.

Summer Games was nearing the final crunch time on May 8, 1984, when the Soviet Union initiated a boycott of the Los Angeles Games in a rather petty quid pro quo for the West’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games. (The people who were really hurt by both gestures were not the governments of the boycottees but a generation of athletes on both sides of the political divide, who lost what was for many literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to compete against the true best of their peers on the biggest stage their sports could offer them.) Epyx quickly decided to leave the Soviet Union in their version of the Olympics. After the game’s release, they reached out a bit cheekily to the Soviets in real life. Botch:

We sent the Russian [read: Soviet] embassy (in Washington, D.C.) several copies of Summer Games for the Commodore 64. An enclosed letter stated since they would not be competing in the regular Olympics, at least they could participate in our version of the Games. This package was eventually returned to us with a thank-you note, because they only had access to Atari home computers. Our marketing people quickly replaced the Commodore software with Atari material and sent it back. I always wondered if they enjoyed the game, because we never heard from them again.

Epyx’s bigger concern was the same as that of everyone involved with the Los Angeles Games, whether directly or tangentially: what commercial impact would the boycott have? It seemed it must inevitably tarnish the Games’ luster somewhat. In the case of both Summer Games and the Olympic Games themselves, the impact would turn out to be less than expected. The latter has gone down in history as the most financially successful Olympics of modern times, while Summer Games would become — and this probably comes as anything but a spoiler to most of you — one of the bestselling computer games of the year, and the first entry of the bestselling series in the history of the Commodore 64.

Katz was determined to get Summer Games out in June, to beat HES Games to the market and to derive maximum advantage from the pre-Olympics media buildup. The team worked frantically to finish the final two events (gymnastics and skeet shooting) and swat bugs. They worked all but straight through the final 72 hours. Disks went into production right on schedule, the morning after the code they contained had been finalized.

Summer Games

Summer Games went on to sell in the hundreds of thousands across North America and Europe, thoroughly overshadowing the less impressive Olympian efforts of HESWare and Atari, the latter of whose games were at any rate only available on their own faltering lines of game consoles and home computers. It would be ported to a variety of platforms, although it would always remain at its best on the Commodore 64. Together with Impossible Mission and a racing game developed by the indefatigable Landrum and Caswell called Pitstop II, both also huge worldwide smashes, Summer Games completed the remaking of Epyx’s image and made of them a worldwide commercial powerhouse. Being for the most part conceptually simple games without much dependence on text, most of Epyx’s games were ideally suited to do well in non-English-speaking countries. Combined with Katz’s aggressive distributional push, this was key to making Epyx one of the first big entertainment-software publishers that could be said to be truly international. With so many potential customers to serve in emerging new markets and several new hits in addition to the still popular Jumpman, sales in 1984 soared as Epyx enjoyed almost exponential growth in earnings as the months passed.

We’ll continue the story of Epyx later, but for now I’m not quite done with Summer Games. Next time I’d like to do something I haven’t done in a while: dig into the technology a bit and explain how some of the magic that wowed so many back in 1984 actually works. It will also give us a chance to get to know the Commodore 64, a computer whose importance to gaming during the middle years of the 1980s can hardly be overstated, just a little bit better.

(The bulk of this article is drawn from two lengthy retrospectives published in the July 1988 and August 1989 issues of Commodore Magazine. The pictures of Randy Glover comes from the April 1984 K-Power.)

 
 

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Free Fall, Part 2: Murder on the Zinderneuf

Murder on the Zinderneuf

Mystery stories have been a staple of adventure gaming since 1978’s Mystery Mansion. That’s little surprise; no other form of traditional static literature so obviously sees itself as a form of game between reader and writer, and thus is so obviously amenable to adaptation into other ludic forms. Said adaptations existed well before the computer age, in such forms as the Baffle Books of the 1920s, the Dennis Wheatley Crime Dossiers of the 1930s, and the perennial board game Cluedo (Clue in North America) of 1949.

The early computerized mystery games had the superficial trappings of classic mystery literature but little of the substance. Games like Mystery Mansion and Mystery House were essentially standard Adventure-style treasure hunts, full of mazes and static puzzles, that happened to play out on the stage set of a mystery story. It really wasn’t possible to implement much else with, say, On-Line’s primitive Hi-Res Adventure engine.

That, of course, is why Infocom’s Deadline came as such a revelation. Unlike virtually everyone else making adventure games as of 1982, Infocom had the tools to do a mystery right, to capture the spirit and substance of classic mystery stories in addition to the window dressing. With such a proof of concept to examine (and one which proved to be a major hit at that), combined with a recent uptick in interest in the mystery genre within ludic culture in general following the republication of the old Dennis Wheatley dossiers and an elaborate new board game called Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, other developers started diving into mysteries with similar earnestness. Some of them worked in the text-adventure form, but others branched out into other paradigms. For instance, Spinnaker’s two child-oriented Snooper Troops games and CBS Software’s two adult-oriented Mystery Master games replaced parsers and a single complex story with a more casual form of crime solving. Each contains a series of shorter cases to solve by traveling around a graphical city map, ferreting out clues at each location using a menu-driven interface. A top rating is achieved by solving the crime quickly, using a minimum of clues.

And then there was the game that would become known mostly as that other Free Fall game after the huge success of Archon: Murder on the Zinderneuf. It’s that most interesting anomaly that pops up more than you might expect, an adventure game designed by someone who didn’t much like adventure games.

Jon Freeman laid out his objections to traditional adventure games in an article in the December 1980 issue of Byte, contrasting the form and its limitations with those of the CRPG form he was then working with in crafting Automated Simulations’s DunjonQuest games. An adventure game, he says, is so static that it’s hardly a game at all. It’s “really a puzzle that, once solved, is without further interest.” The former part of this claim became increasingly less true as more dynamic, responsive game worlds like that of Deadline were developed, but the latter part… well, it’s hard to deny that point. The real question is to what extent this bothers you. One remedy to this fundamental failing is perhaps to create longer, deeper works that take as long to play once as it might take you to exhaust the interest of another type of game over many, many plays. Another, of course, is to simply say so what, to note that no one ever criticizes other forms of art, like books, for not being infinitely re-readable (not that Shakespeare doesn’t come close). But still, a re-playable adventure (or for that matter re-readable book) would, all else being held equal, be superior to a non-re-playable version of the same game. Freeman, who still lists Cluedo amongst his favorite games of all time, recycled that game’s concept on the computer, but fleshed out the suspects, the setting, the randomly generated stories behind the murders themselves, to make something more in line with the expectations of adventure gamers.

The mystery may change, but the setting and the actors, the raw materials of these little computer-generated dramas, must inevitably remain the same. Luckily, they’re pretty inspired. The game takes place in 1936, the heyday of the rigid airship, surely one of the most romantic and just plain cool methods of travel ever invented. On a trans-Atlantic voyage aboard the fictional German airship Zinderneuf, a murder has been committed. Which of the sixteen passengers was killed, and which did the killing, and why… these are the elements that are generated anew each time. As a whole genre of pulp-action tabletop RPGs have taught us, the 1930s are a wonderful period for fans of intrigue and derring-do, and Zinderneuf uses that well. Freeman and Reiche work in a lot of the era’s touchstones: old Hollywood, action serials, the Berlin Olympics, the Spanish Civil War, the mob, Amelia Earhart, spiritualism, adventurous archaeologists (Raiders of the Lost Ark was still huge while they worked on the game), and of course Communists and Nazis. It’s an effervescent, pulpy version of history. (That said, our libertarian friend Freeman just can’t restrain himself from taking a political shot at Franklin Delano Roosevelt that strikes a weird sourpuss note amongst all the fun: “Roosevelt was still offering his own version of ‘bread and circuses’ as he ‘guided’ the United States through an unprecedented four terms of depression and war.”) The Zinderneuf itself, meanwhile, proves perfect for a Murder on the Orient Express-style whodunnit. Playing as one of eight detectives drawn from literature or television — including homages to Mike Hammer, Miss Marple, Columbo, and the inevitable Sherlock Holmes among others — you have twelve hours to solve the case before the Zinderneuf touches down in New York and the suspects all scatter to the winds.

Murder on the Zinderneuf

Those twelve hours translate to just 36 minutes of game time — yes, this is a real-time game. The idea here was to replace a 40-hour adventure game with a half-hour game that “can be replayed 100 times.” Also replaced are the text and parser, with a top-down graphical display and an entirely joystick-driven interface.

Murder on the Zinderneuf

Each game begins by telling you who has been murdered from among the cast of characters, each of whom receives a capsule bio in the manual. And then, as Holmes would say (and the manual happily quotes), the game is afoot. You collect evidence in two ways. First, you can search the cabins of the victim and any of the other passengers to see what connections you can discover.

Murder on the Zinderneuf

In the case above, I now know that the murderer of Oswald Stonemann is most likely someone with black hair; the victim is always assumed to have been killed in his cabin. This immediately narrows the suspect list down to five. A logical next step may be to search the cabins of those five suspects, to see what further connections I can turn up. Eventually, however, I will want to start questioning suspects. I can choose the approach I take to each. Various approaches are more or less favorable to different combinations of detective and suspect, something that must be deduced with play. If I choose wisely, perhaps I get a clue.

Murder on the Zinderneuf

Murder on the Zinderneuf

When I believe I have determined opportunity and motive (the game is oddly uninterested in the actual means of murder), I can accuse someone. A false accusation, or one based on insufficient evidence, doesn’t end the game, but does greatly affect your “detective rating” at the end, and prevents you from using that suspect as a source of information for the rest of the game. If you haven’t accused anyone by the time twelve hours (i.e., 36 minutes) have passed, you get one last chance to make an accusation, at some cost to your detective rating, before the game reveals the murderer for you.

There’s much that’s very impressive here. The randomly-generated cases go far beyond the likes of Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the pistol. Most of the cases don’t even involve that most reliable standby of the mystery writer, love triangles. One time I discovered that Phillip Wollcraft, the archaeologist, had killed the young Natalia Berenski because he was in thrall to certain nameless be-tentacled somethings and needed a handy virgin to sacrifice. (Yes, even the H.P. Lovecraft mythos makes an appearance in this giddy pastiche of a setting, marking what may just be its first appearance in a computer game.) Another time I discovered that the beautiful pilot and all-around adventuress Stephie Hart-Winston had killed the Reverend Jeremiah Folmuth after learning he had in turn killed her beloved brother in a hit-and-run car accident years before. Other cases involve espionage (a natural given the time period), blackmail, even vampires. Most manage to tie the crime back to the period and setting and the specific persona of the characters involved with impressive grace.

But for all that, and despite its superficially easy joystick-driven interface and bright and friendly onscreen graphics that actually look much nicer (at least on the Atari) than those of Archon, Zinderneuf doesn’t quite work for me. Part of the problem derives from all of that rich background information existing only in the manual, not on the screen. The first half-dozen times you play you’re frantically flipping through the pages trying to figure out just who is who as the clock steadily ticks down, an awkward experience a million miles away from Trip Hawkins’s ethos for a new, more casual sort of consumer software. By the time you get over that hump, some of the seams in the narrative generator are already starting to show. You learn what combinations of clues generally lead where, and start to see the same motives repeat themselves. For all the game’s narrative flexibility, there are just eight master stories into which all of the other elements must be slotted. The shock of Wollcraft doing the deed diminishes considerably after you see the same story repeat itself again, with only the name of his victim changed. All of these limitations are of course easily understandable in light of the 48 K of memory the game has at its disposal. Still, things started feeling very shopworn for me long before Freeman’s ideal of a hundred plays.

I also found other elements of the design problematic. When you get down to it, there just isn’t that much to really do, and what there is is often more frustrating than it needs to be. Searching a cabin requires wandering about it trying to cover every square inch until the game beeps to inform you that you discovered a clue — or did not. And talking to suspects can be just as off-putting. Most will only answer a question or two before wandering off again; you then aren’t allowed to speak to them again without speaking to someone else first. Thus the game quickly devolves into a lot of sifting through denials and non-committals, struggling to figure out the right approach to use, while only being able to field one or two questions to your star witness (or suspect) at a time. The memory limitations so strangle the dialog that it’s impossible to pick up clues, as you might in a real conversation, about whether or why your current interrogation approach is failing, or which one might better suit. Murder on the Zinderneuf is fascinating and groundbreaking as a concept, but ultimately a game should be fun in addition to any other virtues it might possess, and here I’m just not sure how well it succeeds. Reading the manual with its cast of exaggerated characters was for me almost more entertaining than actually playing.

Zinderneuf‘s ideal of a narrative that is new every time is neat, and certainly interesting for someone like me to write about as the road almost entirely not taken in adventure games. But are there perhaps good reasons for it to be the road not taken? Maybe for someone primarily interested in games as experiential fictions a 40-hour story, crafted by a person, is more satisfying than 100 30-minute stories generated by the computer. At risk of making Freeman a straw man for my argument, it’s tempting to think again about the flaws that he believed he saw in existing adventures. I believe that designers who see games as rules systems to be carefully crafted and tweaked are often put off by adventure games, which are ultimately all about the fictional context, the lived experience of playing the protagonist in a story. Perhaps having the system itself generate the story could be seen, consciously or unconsciously, as a way to fix this perceived imbalance, to return the art of game design (as opposed to fiction-authoring) to the center of the equation. Yes, Murder on the Zinderneuf‘s narrative generator is clever, but it’s not as clever as, say, Marc Blank, the author of Deadline — and arguably not clever enough to sustain a genre whose appeal is so deeply rooted in its fiction. Zinderneuf is more interesting as a system than as a playable story, in a genre whose appeal is so rooted in story. That, anyway, is how this story lover sees it. Which isn’t to discount Zinderneuf‘s verve in trying something so new. We need our flawed experiments just as much as we do our masterpieces, for they push boundaries and give grist for future designers’ mill. (In that spirit, check out Christopher Huang’s An Act of Murder sometime, which does in text much of what Zinderneuf does in graphics, with results I find more satisfying.)

For several years after 1983, their landmark year of Archon and Murder on the Zinderneuf, Free Fall remained a prominent presence in the growing games industry. In 1984 they released Adept, a sequel to Archon that didn’t quite attract the same love or sales, but was nonetheless a solid success. Soon after they were given an early prototype of the Amiga, thanks to an arrangement Trip Hawkins, a great booster of that machine, worked out with Commodore. Their superb port of Archon became one of the first games available for the Amiga, and they followed it shortly after with a port of Adept of similar quality. Many players still consider these the definitive versions of both games.

Freeman also became a prominent voice in the emerging field of game-design theory, which was separating itself at last by the mid-1980s from the very different art of game programming. He, a defiant non-programmer who had written three books and numerous articles about the art of board-game design before founding Free Fall, was ideally suited to push that process along. Like the last designer I profiled, Dan Bunten, Freeman was given a soapbox of sorts via a column (“The Name of the Game”) in Computer Gaming World. Its ostensible purpose was to tackle tough, controversial subjects head-on. Yet there’s a thin line between delivering hard-hitting, unvarnished reality as one sees it and, well, just kind of sounding like a jerk, and I’m not sure Freeman always stays on the right side of it. His hilarious rant about the Commodore 64 proves that, whatever else he may be, he is no Nostradamus: “software developers will jump off the bandwagon even faster than they got on”; buyers “will think all computers are horrible and throw the whole idea out the window along with their 64.” The Commodore 64 has always evoked special rage from Atari 8-bit loyalists like Freeman. The Atari machines were the 64’s most obvious competitor as fellow low-cost home computers with excellent graphics and sound after weaker sisters like Texas Instruments left the market. They were also arguably the ones the 64 most damaged commercially. “There but for the 64 could have gone the Atari 8-bits,” Atari fans think when they see the 64’s huge success, and not without some justification. But Freeman’s, shall we say, strongly held opinions extended beyond the platform wars. Arcade clones are not just uncreative but morally bankrupt, “illegitimate,” “nasty little pieces of trash.” Programmers doing ports are people “who can’t come up with original subjects for games.” More generally, phrases like “colossal stupidity” and “I almost certainly know more — probably a lot more — about this than you do” creep in a bit too often.

Following the Amiga Archon ports, Free Fall worked for several years on a project that marked a return to Freeman’s roots with Automated Simulations and Temple of Apshai: Swords of Twilight, an ambitious RPG for the Amiga that finally appeared in 1989. It had the unique feature of allowing up to three players to inhabit its world at the same time, each with her own controller, adventuring cooperatively. Despite being released once again by EA, the game seemed to suffer from a dearth of distribution or promotion, and came and went largely without a trace, and without ever being ported beyond the Amiga, a relative minority platform in North America. Another five years elapsed before Free Fall released Archon Ultra, this time on the SSI label. That game was poorly received as adding little to the original, and once again sank quickly into obscurity. And, a few casual card games and the like aside, that’s largely been that from Free Fall. They are still officially a going concern, but seem to exist today largely to license their intellectual property (i.e., Archon) to interested developers. If their output after 1986 or so seems meager given the extraordinary productivity and energy of their first few years, know that my impression — and I must emphasize that this is only an impression, with little data to back it up — is that life has thrown its share of difficulties at Freeman and Westfall since their heydays as stars of Hawkins’s stable of software artists, difficulties that go beyond just some games that performed disappointingly in the marketplace.

If you’d like to try Murder on the Zinderneuf for yourself, I’ve prepared the usual care package for you, with an Atari 8-bit disk image and the (essential) manual. Next time we’ll say goodbye to EA’s Software Artists for a while and catch up with some Implementors again.

(A good interview with Freeman and Westfall can be found online at Halcyon Days, and one with Freeman alone at Now Gamer. Contemporary articles about Free Fall are in the January 1983 Softline, the November 1984 A.N.A.L.O.G., the February 1985 Family Computing, the July/August 1987 Info, and the November 1984 Compute!’s Gazette (Freeman must have been gritting his teeth through that interview, given his opinion of the Commodore 64). Freeman’s Computer Gaming World column ran from the May/June 1983 issue through the April/May 1985 issue.)

 
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Posted by on February 26, 2013 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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Free Fall, Part 1: Archon

Jon Freeman and Anne Westfall

Jon Freeman and Anne Westfall

In the late 1970s Anne Westfall, a mother, housewife, and divorcee in her early thirties, started attending Santa Rosa Junior College. With her children “old enough to take care of themselves,” she was looking for a new direction in her life. She sampled a bit of everything on the college’s menu, but fell in love with computer programming via a course in BASIC. More programming courses followed. She became so good at it so quickly that when some members of the faculty were contacted by a local civil-engineering company that was looking to hire programmers for a new software division they hooked her up with a job. Just like that she had a career; she spent the next two years writing programs for surveyors and subdivision planners on the TRS-80.

At the West Coast Computer Faire of March 1980, fate placed her company’s booth next to that of Automated Simulations of Temple of Apshai and DunjonQuest fame. She got to talking with Automated’s co-founder and primary game designer, Jon Freeman, and a spark both creative and romantic was kindled. Before meeting Freeman computer games had never even occurred to her as an interest, much less a career. She vaguely knew of some housed on some large computer systems to which she had access, and had played Space Invaders a few times at a pizza parlor, but that was about it. Yet Freeman apparently made one hell of an advocate. Not only did she and he become an item, but just five months after meeting her he convinced her to quit her secure job to come program games for Automated Simulations. Soon after they were married.

The marriage has survived to this day, but the new job proved more problematic. Westfall was forced to work as a so-called “maintenance programmer,” tweaking and maintaining the DunjonQuest engine. She also found herself at the epicenter of a power struggle of sorts between Freeman and his founding partner, Jim Connelley. From the time of their first game, Starfleet Orion back in 1978, the two men had fallen into an equitable division of roles. Freeman, who had spent years studying and writing about tabletop-game design but did not program, designed the games; Connelley, a professional programmer for years before Automated’s founding, implemented them. Even as the company grew in the wake of Temple of Apshai‘s success and other designers and programmers came aboard, the basic division of labor remained: Freeman in charge of the creative, Connelley in charge of the technical. From the start Connelley had focused on developing a reusable engine for the DunjonQuest line, written in BASIC for maximum portability and maintainability and capable of running on virtually any computer with at least 16 K of memory. But now, inspired by Westfall’s talent, by newer machines like the Atari 400 and 800, and by newer iterations of the CRPG concept like Ultima and Wizardry, Freeman was getting antsy. Automated’s games were being left behind, he said. He pushed to abandon BASIC and rewrite everything from scratch in assembly language, and to stop targeting a one-size-fits-all lowest-common-denominator machine. Connelley flatly refused, preferring to continue churning out more scenarios using the same old engine. Finally, at the end of 1981, it all devolved into litigation, which ended with Freeman and Westfall, along with other partisans from their camp, walking away. (For what it’s worth, Freeman’s camp ultimately proved to be in the right. Plummeting sales of Automated’s increasingly archaic-looking games forced a major change in direction within a year of the split, including the adoption of the much catchier name Epyx and a new focus on flashy games for next-generation platforms like the Commodore 64. But that’s a story for another time…)

Freeman and Westfall decided to form their own little development group, the cleverly titled Free Fall Associates, to develop games and publish them through others. They would stay small to avoid a repeat of the power struggles at Automated, and write exactly the games they wanted for the platform they wanted: the Atari 800, the most audiovisually advanced 8-bit computer on the market. They would work as partners, as Freeman had in the beginning with Connelley — only now Westfall could assume the programmer’s role. Seeing a divide between slow-paced, ugly, off-putting strategy games and flashier but vapid action fare, they decided to try to make games that slotted in between: fast-paced and aesthetically pleasing but with an element of depth.

Tax Dodge

They took pride in making sure their first game was nothing like those Freeman had designed for Automated Simulations. Tax Dodge was a maze game that took advantage of the Atari’s graphics and sound — but don’t call it a Pac-Man clone or even variant lest Freeman, who railed against the unoriginal arcade clones that still littered the bestseller charts, get very huffy with you. The maze now spanned many screens, smoothly scrolling with the player, an effect that would have been very difficult to manage on the more limited hardware of, say, the Apple II. This gave a quality of exploration, of discovery as the player charted the maze. Rather than ghosts, the player must avoid five sinister IRS agents; rather than gobble pills, she collects cash. Finding an accountant in the maze yields a precious tax shelter. It was a theme near and dear to the heart of Freeman, whose capsule biographies in his games never failed to mention his belief in libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism. Indeed, Freeman was among if not the first designer to sneak political statements into his games. (You may remember his 1980 game Rescue at Rigel, which set players on a hostage-rescue mission against a thinly disguised Ayatollah Khomeini, from an earlier article on this site.)

Tax Dodge made little commercial impression, for which Freeman later blamed the fact that the Atari’s demographics skewed much younger than those of the Apple II and TRS-80, the machines on which Automated had largely concentrated their efforts. Most potential players, he argued, missed the satire that was so much of the fun. Still, it also couldn’t have helped that the game was distributed by a tiny publisher called Island Graphics, who lacked the wherewithal to get the game the sort of prominent advertising and feature reviews that were becoming increasingly important as the software industry steadily professionalized. Maybe this freelance-developer thing wasn’t going to be that easy after all. But then Trip Hawkins and Electronic Arts came calling.

Given that Freeman was one of the few prominent designers not bound by contract to another publisher at the moment, Free Fall was an obvious target for Hawkins in his quest for “software artists.” But they were also a good fit in other ways. If you were reminded of Hawkins’s mantra of “simple, hot, and deep” software when I mentioned Free Fall’s determination to bridge the gap between strategy and action, congratulations, you’ve been paying good attention to my recent articles. Clearly these people were all on the same page. Freeman and Westfall were so excited by Hawkins’s vision that they pitched him two radically different ideas for games. One was for a vaguely chess-like strategy game which would erupt into player-against-player action when two pieces met one another on the board; the other was for an infinitely replayable whodunnit mystery. Hawkins was in turn so impressed that he asked for them both for EA’s stable of launch titles, leaving Free Fall with barely six months to make two ambitious games from scratch.

Freeman and Westfall realized they would need some help. They hired a programmer with whom they had worked at Automated Simulations, Robert Leyland, to implement the mystery, freeing Westfall to just work on the strategy game. And they brought in another person they knew from their Automated days, Paul Reiche III, to work with Freeman on the design of both games.

Reiche was just 22, but had already had quite a career in both tabletop and computer games. While still teenagers, he and some friends had written and self-published a series of supplements for Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop RPGs. Soon after, TSR themselves came calling, to sweep him off to their Wisconsin headquarters to work for them, doing design, writing, illustrating, whatever was needed. He was undoubtedly talented, but it couldn’t have hurt that, being still a teenager at the time of his hiring, he was willing to work cheap. Regardless, it was a dream job for a young D&D nut; he got to share a byline with Gary Gygax himself on the first Gamma World adventure module while just 20 years old.

Reiche first met Freeman at a D&D convention in 1980, where Freeman was demonstrating the DunjonQuest line in an effort to attract the tabletop RPG crowd to this new computerized variant. The two hit it off, and Reiche soon agreed to design a DunjonQuest scenario for Automated, The Keys of Acheron. Then, around the time of Free Fall’s founding, Reiche got himself fired from TSR, according to his telling for raising a stink about the buying of a Porsche as company car for an executive; maybe working cheap was starting to seem less appetizing. He was back in California, studying geology at Berkeley, when Freeman offered him the chance to get back into game design, this time exclusively on the computerized side. He jumped at the chance. Amongst other advantages, it made good sense from a financial perspective. The tabletop RPG industry was already nearing its historical high-water mark by late 1982, but computer games were just getting started.

I’m going to talk in more detail about Archon, the strategy game, today; next time I’ll talk about Murder on the Zinderneuf, the mystery.

Like so much else, much of the fascination amongst gamers with more, shall we say, colorful variants of chess can be traced back to Star Wars — in this case, to the holographic game played between Chewbacca and R2-D2 aboard the Millennium Falcon. That scene, combined with the explosion in popularity of D&D and by extension fantasy of all stripes, led to a minor craze for new variants of chess. Sometimes that meant nothing more than standard chess sets which replaced pawns with goblins and bishops with dragons to give it all a bit of a different flavor. But other people were more ambitious. The movement reached a sort of absurd fruition when Gary Gygax published the rules for Dragonchess in Dragon magazine’s one-hundredth issue in 1985. It featured a three-level board filled with monsters drawn from D&D‘s Monster Manual, with all of the fiddly rules and exceptions you might expect from the man whose signature game (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons) filled three hardbound rulebooks and hundreds of closely typed pages.

At SCA events and similarly minded gatherings, meanwhile, living chess tournaments became more common. These replaced inanimate chess pieces with real people decked out in appropriate costumes, standing on a board that filled an auditorium floor. When two pieces met in one of these games they battled it out there on the board for the crowd’s delight. Sometimes these battles were purely for show, but in other cases players were assigned roles based on their understood talent at fencing, from pawn to queen and king. In these cases the battles were for real — or as real as fake swords allow. The inevitable result, of course, was a very different sort of game, as suddenly a lucky or dogged pawn, or a tired knight, could alter the balance and ruin the most refined of traditional chess strategies. Freeman participated in such a game as a pawn, experiencing the new spontaneity firsthand. (He acquitted himself well, managing to kill a fellow pawn and then fight a knight to a draw — i.e., a mutual kill.) The experience got him thinking about doing something similar on the computer. It seemed like just the sort of mix of strategy and action Free Fall was after.

Which is not to say that Freeman and Reiche simply recreated the living-chess experience on the computer. If anything Archon‘s relationship to chess is rather overblown, for Archon is both simpler and more complicated. Movement falls into the former category. Every piece has a maximum number of squares it can move in a turn, and either moves on the ground (meaning it can move only horizontally or vertically and cannot jump pieces) or in the air (meaning it can also move diagonally, and can jump pieces). There is nothing like the complications of, say, the knight in traditional chess. On the other hand, there are more pieces to deal with in Archon, and more places to put them. The board is now 9 X 9 rather than 8 X 8, with the requisite additional two units per side. The larger size was chosen because it fit most neatly on the screen, provided the optimum balance between visibility and strategic possibility, and allowed for three power points to be neatly spaced across the middle of the board. Controlling these three spaces, plus the additional power point located at each edge of the board, wins the game instantly. Alternately, if less strategically, one can win by simply killing all of the opposing player’s units.

The Archon game board. Note the three power points running down the center. Two more are hidden under the wizard and sorceress on the center-left and center-right squares.

The Archon game board. Note the three power points running down the center. Two more are hidden under the wizard and sorceress on the center-left and center-right squares.

The two opposing forces are no longer mirror images of each other. The game is subtitled The Light and the Dark; the Light side (presumably good) has different units with different combat abilities from the Dark side (presumably evil). Some units use a melee attack; others shoot missiles or fireballs; still others, like the banshee, have an area attack that spreads outward from their person; each side has one unit (the wizard or the sorceress) who can cast a handful of spells once each per game.

The board at the dark extreme of the luminosity cycle. Note the contrast with the picture above, which shows the cycle at its mid-point.

The board at the dark extreme of the luminosity cycle. Note the contrast with the picture above, which shows the cycle at its mid-point.

Of the squares on the board, 25 are always light, 25 always dark. However, the remaining 31, including the three central power points, constantly cycle from light to dark and back. This fact is critical to strategy, because light units gain a big advantage when fighting on light squares, and vice versa. Thus the wise player plans her attacks and retreats, her feints and thrusts, around the ever-changing board. Accidentally leaving a powerful piece exposed on the wrong color of square can lead to the worst sort of self-recrimination when your opponent pounces to take out your golem with her goblin. And yes, just as in the live chess match that inspired Freeman, double kills are possible.

A phoenix (Light) and dragon (Dark) battle. Because this fight is taking placing on a light square, the phoenix has a huge advantage; note the difference in the life bars at the edge of the screen.

A phoenix (Light) and basilisk (Dark) battle. Because this fight is taking placing on a light square, the phoenix has a huge advantage; note the difference in the life bars at the edge of the screen.

Still other elements of Archon would never have been possible on the tabletop. For instance, the health of each unit is tracked even outside of the combat screen. It takes a few turns to fully recover from a hard fight, meaning a stubborn opponent can kill your wizard just by throwing enough cannon fodder — i.e., goblins — at it turn after turn. The game clearly wants to be played more quickly, more urgently, even (dare I say it?) less strategically than a classic chess match. You find yourself tossing your units into the fray, not pausing to study every option and plan your next several turns in advance. What with the fast pace and the role that reflexes play, playing Archon with another human feels like really going at it, with little of the cool cerebral feel of chess. I have to believe this is intentional, and certainly it’s a more than valid design choice. Indeed, it’s the prime source of Archon‘s appeal in contrast to a game like chess.

That said, there’s one flaw in the strategic game that bothers me enough to really impact my appreciation for the game as a whole. When playing a relatively close game, it’s all too easy to find yourself in an ugly stalemate, in which each player has just a few units left and neither has any incentive to risk any of them by moving them off of favorably colored squares. At this point both sides are just stuck, until someone loses patience at last and attacks the enemy on one of her favorable squares in the face of long odds indeed, all but guaranteeing sacrificing that piece — and, eventually, losing the game — for the sake of just ending the damn thing already. I’m not sure I have any brilliant suggestion of how this could have been fixed — maybe begin to cycle more squares from light to dark as the number of pieces on the board is reduced, thus forcing more dynamism into the game?; maybe add conditions for a chess-style draw? — but I do know that it needed to have been for me to raise my judgment of Archon from “just” a fun and creative effort to the timeless classic many would have me label it. (Then again, it’s possible I’m just missing something strategically obvious. If you have a solution to this dilemma, by all means tell me about it.)

As you might imagine given the time constraints, Westfall, Freeman, and Reiche worked like dogs on Archon even as Freeman and Reiche also labored over Murder on the Zinderneuf. Free Fall had no offices; everything was done out of Freeman and Westfall’s home in Portola Valley, California. Westfall:

We had a tough schedule at first. For six months we didn’t even read a book or go to the movies, and that’s disaster in our house. We basically worked all the time. At meals we were always discussing the games. How to do this, and what to do about that. We worked from the time we got up until all hours of the night. Then we’d get up the next day, grab a cup of coffee, and go back to work.

Archon had been envisioned from the beginning as a two-player game. However, just a month before they had to turn over the game, EA begged them to add a single-player option, thus saddling Free Fall with the task of coding a complete AI, in addition to everything else that still had to be done, in one month. With so little time and eager to preserve the game’s fast-paced character, they focused on making an AI that was “fast and decent” rather than “slow and perfect.” As Ozark Softscape did for M.U.L.E., they also made it possible for the AI to play itself, a godsend for shop display windows. And then they added one additional groundbreaking feature that has been little remarked since the game’s release. Freeman:

There’s a built-in, self-adjusting difficulty factor in Archon so that if the computer keeps beating up on you, it will get easier and easier. But most people don’t know that because it goes in little tiny increments. By the time it really starts kicking in, players think, “Oh, I’m just getting better.” Well, they are, partly; but partly it’s because the computer is not being as good. But nobody knows that’s there. It’s not something we advertise, but we were aware of the problem.

Just like chess: how do two unequal players play chess? Well, not very well. And there’s not really a great deal you can do about it. If you start taking pieces away, you change the game so radically that you’re not playing chess anymore. Archon is the same way. So we said, we want to do a game in which we can do that without screwing it up.

This very likely marks the first example of adaptive AI in the commercial game industry, a radical step in the direction of friendlier, more accessible gameplay — and in the direction of Trip Hawkins’s vision of consumer software — that deserves to be celebrated more than it has been. It also kind of leaves you wondering whether any victory over the computer was truly earned, a dilemma familiar to many modern gamers. Ah, well… groundbreaking as Archon‘s adaptive AI is, the game is still best experienced with two players, where it all becomes moot anyway.

Released in a striking monochrome sleeve that beautifully presented the theme of Light and Dark, Archon struck a major chord with the public. It became the second-best-selling of those seven EA launch titles, behind only Pinball Construction Set. I strongly encourage you to play it, but I’m not going to provide a download here. Free Fall, you see, is still around as at least a semi-going concern and still licensing variants and remakes, and I don’t want to step on any toes. I’m sure you can find the original game on your own if you’re so inclined. The Atari 8-bit incarnation was the first developed and is thus the best reflection of the original vision for the game, although the Commodore 64 port does look nicer. If you do snag one of these versions from somewhere else, maybe think about buying the latest licensed incarnation as well, if for nothing else than to show your appreciation to Freeman and Westfall.

The other Free Fall game amongst those early titles, Murder on the Zinderneuf, didn’t attract anywhere near as much attention as Archon. Yet in its own way it’s every bit as interesting — perhaps even more so if, like me, you like a strong dose of story in your games. We’ll talk about that game, and wrap up the story of Free Fall, next time.

(I’ll include the main sources I used for researching Free Fall in the concluding article.)

 
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Posted by on February 20, 2013 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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