RSS

The Quill

05 Jul

The Quill

Let’s begin today by stepping back in time to the dawn of the PC era (and the early days of this blog): 1978. The debut of Scott Adams’s Adventureland that year also marked the debut of the world’s first reuseable adventure-gaming engine, in which a single interpreter program runs a variety of different games by being fed different databases. And reuse the system Adams did, to the tune of six titles released in 1979 alone, while the rest of the computing world set to work figuring out how the system was put together. Two TRS-80 hackers, Allan Moluf and Bruce Hanson, were particularly dedicated. By January of 1980 they were distributing to select buddies a text file which described Adams’s database format in careful detail along with a set of utilities for examining existing games. By 1981 they had written the Adventure Executor, a new interpreter capable of playing any of Adams’s games; just provide it with the database file. And their efforts culminated at the end of that year in The Adventure System, a complete authoring package that let you create new games in the Scott Adams database format as well as dissect existing ones to your heart’s content for the low, low price of $40.

The Adventure System as advertised in the March 1982 80 Microcomputing

The Adventure System as advertised in the March 1982 80 Microcomputing

For various reasons, starting with the TRS-80 platform on which it ran being rather isolated from the rest of the computing world and ending with the small print that demanded a $200 license fee to use The Adventure System to create commercial adventures, it never caught on. Moluf and Hanson, however, were not alone in their inquisitiveness. Others across the pond were also looking hard at the Scott Adams games. Their efforts would have much more lasting repercussions.

During the earliest days of personal computing in Britain, when practitioners consisted of just a few tens of thousands of soldering-iron-wielding dreamers, one Ken Reed managed to get hold of an imported TRS-80 along with some of the Scott Adams games. Like Moluf and Hanson, Reed was as interested in figuring out how they worked as he was in playing them. He doggedly pulled the system apart, and published his findings in the August 1980 Practical Computing magazine, the nearest equivalent British hobbyists had to the American hackers’ favorite Byte. Reed’s article wasn’t so obviously practical as the work of Moluf and Hanson. It didn’t provide exact specifications of the Scott Adams database format, nor tools for hacking on the games, nor even a complete original game or a complete interpreter for running a game. No, it provided something that in the long run would prove to be much more empowering: a detailed proposal for making an engine similar to Adams’s for yourself, complete with pseudo-code listings that could be applied to virtually any platform you had handy and knew how to program.

The impact the article had on British gaming over the following decade can hardly be overstated. Richard Turner and Chris Thornton, two university students, formed Artic Computing and used the article as the basis for their own line of Adams-like adventures that began with Planet of Death, likely the first commercial text adventure written in Britain, in June of 1981. Many variations on the article’s approach were soon appearing in other games. But its most important descendent was not a standalone game at all but a complete adventure-writing system similar in spirit to The Adventure System. This system, however, got several things right that the older system had gotten so wrong. It was called The Quill, and it was the brainchild of a Welshman in his late twenties named Graeme Yeandle.

When Yeandle analyzed those early Artic games and found them to be put together in a way suspiciously similar to Reed’s system, his first reaction was to think that he could do that just as well as Turner and Thornton. He went so far as to write to Artic to offer his services, but never got a reply to his letter. Whilst messing about with adventure-game databases and interpreters on his new Spectrum, he noticed an advertisement for a local publisher called Gilsoft, located just twelve miles from his Cardiff home — in fact, in the town where he had been born, Barry. He decided to pay their office a visit. On doing so, he learned that “they” were a single teenager named Tim Gilberts, and the “office” was Gilberts’s bedroom in the family home. Still, Gilberts was bright and ambitious, and the two hit it off. (Gilberts thought Yeandle “looked just like Clive Sinclair.”) When Yeandle told him about his adventure-game experiments, Gilberts encouraged him to make a real game for him to market. He ended up writing two, Time-Line and Magic Castle, which Gilberts sold through modest classified ads in the magazines for £5 each (the former, the smaller and simpler of the pair, as the companion to another game on the same tape).

About this time Yeandle realized, like many a programmer before him, that he could save a great deal of time in the long run if he spent some time now improving his development tools. While he was using a variation of the design scheme from Reed’s article, he was still constructing the database files laboriously by hand. He discussed with Gilberts his idea for a menu-driven data-entry system to automate the process. If it worked out it could become a sort of house adventure-authoring system which Gilberts could share with other prospective authors. Gilberts enthusiastically agreed, and Yeandle spent most of his nights and weekends during 1983 — this was still very much a sideline; he was employed full-time as a systems analyst — working on what would become The Quill. As the program grew more refined, Gilberts made a new proposal: instead of just using it in-house to make more adventures, why not sell it as a product in its own right, and open adventure authorship to anyone with a Speccy? And so was the adventure-game scene in Britain changed forever.

The Quill was greeted rapturously when it debuted just in time for the 1983 Christmas season. Micro-Adventurer magazine, which appropriately enough debuted at almost the same instant, called it a “revolution” in their very first issue: “Once in a while, a product comes along to revolutionize the whole microcomputer scene. The Quill is one such, and will change the face of the microcomputer adventure.” The Quill sold for just £15, and — and this is absolutely key to everything that followed — Gilsoft asked for no cash royalty for commercial works created with it, only that you insert a little “Made with The Quill!” blurb somewhere in the final work. Most other commercial systems for creating adventure and CRPG games, both before and after The Quill, didn’t offer such convenient terms, sharply limiting their appeal.

Sales were so brisk that Gilsoft soon gave up bothering to sell much of anything else; Gilberts was more than content to run the house that The Quill had built. Within weeks of its release so-called “Quilled adventures” were everywhere. By a year or so after that at least half of the adventures on the British market were Quilled — and that’s not even considering all of the less ambitious creators who just toyed around making games for family and friends, or released their games for free into public-domain channels.

About a year after The Quill, Gilsoft released The Illustrator, which let users add graphics to their games. It ended up selling almost as well as The Quill itself, and soon the requisite illustrated Quilled games were flooding the market. Gilsoft also funded ports of the system to most of the other viable British platforms, although sadly there was no easy way of moving an adventure database created on, say, a Spectrum to the BBC Micro or Commodore 64 short of reentering the whole by hand. As the system spread across Europe, now catching onto the PC revolution at last, countless souls used it to create games in their native languages.

Quilled games in Swedish, Italian, Spanish, and Czech

Quilled games in Swedish, Italian, Spanish, and Slovenian

Many of the earliest adventures in German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and the Scandinavian and Eastern European languages were Quilled. An attempt was also made to market The Quill in North America as The Adventure Writer, but without much success. It was entrusted there to a tiny company called Codewriter who lacked the resources to make it known and widely distributed in that more intimidating and elitist marketplace. And so, like so much else in the bifurcated computing culture of the 1980s, The Quill remained an exclusively European phenomenon.

The Quill's menu system, where thousands of adventure authors spent thousands of hours

The Quill’s menu system, where thousands of adventure authors spent thousands of hours

Given the sorts of tools available to adventure writers today, The Quill is bound to seem underwhelming when we load it up on our Speccy emulator. One doesn’t really program a game at all using The Quill; one simply enters its data, menu by menu, filling in its rooms, its objects, its text. The logic available to the author is hard-coded into the interpreter, and not very complex at that. Nor is the process of creation a very intuitive one. It’s very difficult to get any sense of the big picture from all of these granular menu views. One is best served by planning one’s game out entirely on paper, using The Quill itself very much as the simple data-entry front-end it was originally conceived as. Even on those terms many trivial tasks are painfully tedious. The parser doesn’t really parse at all. There’s just a simple pattern matcher, which the author must micro-manage to the finest detail. One cannot simply define an object as takeable, for example, but must hand-enter the command that will allow it to be taken and dropped — and must do this separately for every single takeable object in the game. (Much of this tedium was removed in later versions of The Quill. See John Elliott’s comment below.)

Amidst all of the excitement following the system’s debut, some did voice a concern that it would lead to a rash of games that were not only primitive but all primitive in the same idiosyncratic way. Such fears were by no means entirely baseless. To some extent this is a problem with any authoring system; I wouldn’t be the first to note that Graham Nelson’s droll English diction has become the voice of contemporary interactive fiction thanks to the default messages of Inform, the most widely used development system today. The Quill’s limitations and lack of flexibility merely make it even more immediately obvious to any experienced adventurer that she is playing a Quilled game. That said, The Quill’s relatively long life gave plenty of people plenty of time to dig deep, to learn to push it and to learn to hack it. Much better, more complex works could be created with it than you might expect after a few minutes of fiddling around in its menus. Given the limitations of the 48 K Spectrum on which it runs, The Quill is put together in a very smart way. The average Quilled game is not only easier to create but more pleasant to play than (at the least) the average BASIC game. Tellingly, no one managed to come up with a system notably better for the Spectrum and equivalent machines despite the obvious commercial potential of such a beast.

Until Yeandle himself, that is: in late 1986 Gilsoft released his second-generation system, the Professional Adventure Writer (PAW). Arriving fairly late in the day for text adventures as a mainstream gaming staple, at least in Britain, it didn’t become quite the phenomenon that The Quill had been, but did power many more games throughout Europe well into the 1990s.

Indeed, it’s for that legacy of empowerment that PAW and (especially) The Quill deserve to be remembered today. It’s not that established software houses didn’t use The Quill; they did, to a surprising degree. Even Artic Computing, who had ignored Yeandle earlier, started using the Quill to create some of their new adventures. So did no less a light than Melbourne House of The Hobbit fame. But it’s mostly for all the little guys that The Quill seemed a minor miracle. North America had nothing comparable, and, presumably in consequence, far fewer independent voices making and selling text adventures. Europe, by contrast, was blessed in having not only The Quill but a marketplace willing to accept and buy works by the inspired amateurs who used it. Gilberts himself was well aware of the democratizing effect of The Quill:

Anyone who wants to write can produce a novel without technical knowledge. You may not create great art but there’s nothing to stop you trying. The Quill has opened up the same kind of opportunity to those who enjoy adventuring. We’ve tried to provide the computer equivalent of pen and paper.

No, most Quilled adventures are not great art or even great games, and they’re not likely to get as much attention on this blog as they may deserve given that I have so many other titles that qualify at least as the latter to sort through. Yet many are personal, idiosyncratic works of the sort gaming could always use more of. The best of them have a real writerly personality, another thing always in short supply in gaming fictions. Some of the most fun, and arguably the most culturally useful, Quilled adventures are the ones that satirize the solemn pretensions (especially of the high-fantasy stripe) of mainstream gaming culture then and now — titles like Bored of the Rings, The Boggit, Loads of Midnight, The Big Sleaze, or the immortal Dildo and the Dark Lord (did I mention that Quilled adventures were also more liable to traffic in sex than the titles from bigger publishers?).

The person with the most amazing Quill story of all might just be John Wilson, the founder of Zenobi Software. After publishing a few of his own Quilled games on the label in the mid-1980s and seeing them do fairly well, Wilson began soliciting games from outside authors. Even as the bigger publishers gradually got out of text adventures, Wilson built a successful if modest business out of selling the games via mail order, communicating with customers via a newsletter and whatever magazine advertising he could afford that month. Zenobi alone published almost 250 games, the vast majority of them created with The Quill or PAW, before hanging it up at last in the shockingly late year of 1997, by which time Gilsoft and the rest of the gaming milieu that had birthed Zenobi were long gone. All of which is enough to qualify Zenobi as the most prolific of commercial text-adventure publishers, the most long-lived, and the last to give it up, and all by a wide margin.

As you’ve probably gathered by now, The Quill and PAW were easily the most widely used adventure-creation systems of the 1980s. In the whole of computing history they’re rivaled only by Graham Nelson’s various Inform incarnations, which may have powered a comparable number of games by now but have taken some twenty years to do it. The architect of this creative explosion, Graeme Yeandle, never gave up his day job and never made as much money from it as you might expect. He recalls that in the wake of The Quill’s first gush of popularity in 1984 his royalty checks from Gilsoft actually amounted to more than his regular pay check — but “that didn’t last long.” The Quill was, even more so than most software, widely pirated. It’s safe to say that many of those Quilled games being sold in magazine adverts were themselves made with pirated copies; Gilsoft didn’t have any practical way to keep tabs on who had bought and who hadn’t. Even their modest request that users include a mention of The Quill in their Quilled games also went unenforced and widely ignored. And consumers will always outnumber creators in any time and place, meaning that even an insanely popular engine of creation like The Quill will never sell more than a fraction of the copies of a hit game. Gilsoft and Yeandle could probably have made considerably more money from The Quill by pricing it higher and being more aggressive about asserting their rights in various areas. But Gilsoft wasn’t Microsoft and young Gilberts was no Bill Gates; he was happy if the business just paid for “my beer and a car.” Anyway, The Quill was so successful precisely because it was so cheap and easy; changes to Gilsoft’s business model could likely only have diminished its impact.

As a consolation prize for fame and fortune, Yeandle and Gilberts got to see their creation getting used all around them, the most satisfying validation any programmer or engineer (or artist?) can enjoy. And they got to know that their work was allowing people to be creative in a medium that would otherwise have been inaccessible to them. At least in retrospect, that seems like more than enough.

(Much of this article was sourced from an old interview with Yeandle from The Solution Archive. Yeandle’s now-defunct home page was also invaluable. And see also the Gilsoft features in Sinclair User #28 and #37. I discovered much of Moluf and Hanson’s work while digging through old TRS-80 file archives, an often productive if exhausting way of researching.)

 
61 Comments

Posted by on July 5, 2013 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

Tags: , , ,

Snowball

30 Jun
Mike and Pete Austin, Level 9's first two full-time employees

Mike and Pete Austin, Level 9’s first two full-time employees

The first weeks of 1983 brought the last gasp of Level 9 as a publisher of generalized software in the form of an implementation of the Forth programming language (a Great White Hope for programming in the early 1980s that never quite caught on as anticipated) for the BBC Micro. The disappointing sales of that product, contrasted with the ever-quickening sales of their three adventures, guaranteed that Level 9 would live or die by their adventure games from here on. Thus, over the course of 1983 the Austin family transformed Level 9 from a hobby into the company that has gone down in history as the “British Infocom,” the most long-lived, dedicated, and arguably most important British publisher of the text adventure’s relatively brief lifespan as a viable commercial proposition.

Unable to keep up with rising demand by duplicating each cassette by hand, they signed contracts to begin churning out their games in bulk, the way the pros did it. At the same time they replaced their Ziploc baggies and mimeographed cassette inserts with real boxes which included real instruction manuals. With their beloved Nascoms fading in importance in a computing milieu now dominated by the likes of Sinclair and Acorn, the brothers began doing their development work on the BBC Micro. However, the two younger Austin brothers, Mike and Nick, continued to develop A-Code interpreters for many other platforms, bringing Level 9’s games to an ever-widening slice of the British microcomputer market. By fall their games were available for the Nascom, the BBC Micro, the Sinclair Spectrum, the Atari 8-bit line, the Commodore 64, the Camputers Lynx, and the Oric-1, with yet more platforms soon to follow. Meanwhile the lone Austin sister, Margaret, took over marketing. With sales now substantial enough to pay for them, full-page spreads began appearing around this time in the major magazines in lieu of the little classified ads with which Level 9 had made do in earlier years.

At the center of this web of activity was the eldest brother, Pete, who quit his day job in June of 1983 to become Level 9’s first full-time employee, soon to be joined by the youngest Austin, Mike, who took a year off from his education before starting university to help with the company. It was Pete who actually designed the games, as well as being the de facto leader and day-to-day manager of the family business. What with being so busy with the logistics of getting Level 9 up and running in earnest, Pete found time to design just one game for Level 9 in 1983, which in turn became the company’s only new adventure of the year. Still, that game, an exercise in hard science fiction which he called Snowball, was an important one, first fruit of a deepening determination to create adventures that were coherent fictional experiences. That determination would set Level 9 apart from most of their peers in the time to come, and would provide, even more so than their reliance on a cross-platform virtual machine or their impressive technical standards, a good reason to call them the British Infocom.

Snowball advertisement

A comparison of Snowball to Peter Killworth’s science-fiction game of the same year, Countdown to Doom, might help to illustrate how Level 9 was now diverging from the Cambridge/Acornsoft nexus. The planet of Doomawangara makes absolutely no sense as a piece of world-building. Glaciers sit next to deserts next to jungles; it’s enough to make even a Star Trek writer blush. The game’s fictional context, like the world, like the conceit of needing to finish your work and get away before your ship disappears in 215 turns, exists merely as a frame for the devious, clever, surreal, inspiring, occasionally infuriating puzzles (including, of course, the meta-puzzle of solving all of those other puzzles within the time limit). There’s nothing wrong with such an approach; Countdown to Doom can provide quite a compelling experience for hardcore puzzle fans. Still, Pete Austin was aiming at something quite different in Snowball, something more demanding and perhaps ultimately more rewarding.

Level 9’s first trilogy of games had made occasional nods in the direction Snowball would now travel with determination. All three otherwise traditional fantasy puzzlefests are occasionally interrupted by odd, lumpy bits of exposition and plot that seem dropped in from some other creative endeavor entirely, as in the climax of Colossal Adventure when Crowther and Woods’s Adventure suddenly turns into a desperate mission to rescue 300 elves being held prisoner by a nation of evil dwarfs that apparently lives below Kentucky. But with Snowball the world-building really comes to the fore. A fan of the intellectual rigorousness of hard science fiction like that of Larry Niven (he listed The Mote in God’s Eye as a particular inspiration), Pete Austin strove with Snowball to craft a fictional environment that actually makes sense, that could make a coherent setting for a novel. As described in a detailed background section in the manual (shades of Infocom yet again), the game takes place aboard the eponymous Snowball 9, a massive colony ship carrying 1.8 million people, all in cryogenic sleep, on a journey of over a hundred years to the planet of Eden. The ship gets its name from the shell of ice which is constructed around it at the beginning of the voyage:

The chain of accelerators beyond Pluto burst erratically into life throughout the following three years, firing ten-tonne blocks of ammonia ice at precise speeds after the receding craft. Once reeled in by the Snowball’s skyhooks, the ice was built into a huge hollow shell around the linked passenger disks. When complete, this shielded the disks during the voyage, until the ice was finally needed as fuel for the ravening fusion drives.

As the above excerpt may illustrate, Snowball offers Big Ideas, and can inspire in the player the awe-inspiring, almost religious epiphany of coming face to face with wonders on a scale bigger than we as individual 21st-century humans can entirely fathom. And, as the above excerpt should also illustrate, the environment of Snowball is worked out with impressive care. In addition to its descriptions of the Snowball itself, the manual also includes the circumstances of her birth in the form of a history of humanity until the launch of Snowball and her 49 sister colony ships in the 2190s. None of this history bears all that directly on the game itself, but it does do much to make Snowball a holistic fictional experience, in a way that really only Infocom was also attempting to do at this date.

Surprisingly, all of this emphasis on coherence and (science-fictional) realism leads quite naturally to the most remembered, most mocked, and perhaps most misunderstood attribute of the game today: its geography of “over 7000 locations.”

Snowball

When it comes up today, this data point is always followed by the same punch line: the fact that over 6800 of these rooms are essentially identical. Snowball is used in this context as the ultimate illustration of the absurdities of old-school adventures, with their mazes and sprawling geographies full of corridors and empty rooms. Still, it’s not really a fair portrayal of Snowball. Let’s remember that Pete Austin was trying to present a realistic depiction of this massive colony ship. Let’s further remember that such a ship will inevitably consist of endless identical rooms and corridors full of the 1.8 million sleeping colonists and the apparatus to maintain them. Snowball doesn’t indulge in mazes for the sake of them, and doesn’t ever demand that we map or visit any but the barest fraction of these rooms. Instead, a central puzzle is that of learning to use the ship’s manifest to identify and find the couple of rooms amongst this menagerie that you do need to visit. In this sense Snowball is anti-old-school: someone who tries to dutifully visit and map every single room in classic adventurer fashion, ignoring her role as a fictional actor in this world, is simply playing with the wrong mindset entirely. (That said, less defensible was Level 9’s decision to use the “over 7000 rooms” tagline as their centerpiece for marketing this “massive adventure.” For that they were roundly mocked even in the computer press of the time, and with good reason.)

In trying to make the leap from text adventure to interactive fiction, Pete Austin faced many of the same questions with which the Infocom authors were wrestling. In particular: to what extent could or should the author define the protagonist? Would players insist on playing “themselves” in adventure games, or would they be willing to play a role assigned to them, as it were, by the needs of the fiction? Pete created a detailed profile of the protagonist, Kim Kimberly, and included it in the manual. Kim’s gender, however, he left unspecified. When asked about his reasons for doing so, he often noted that as many as one-third of the people who played Level 9 games regularly were female. In deference to them, he made the decision to try to make all of his games “non-sexist.” It’s of course problematic in the extreme to assert that a game which merely features a male — or female, for that matter — protagonist is automatically sexist. Nor is it entirely clear that players, male or female, otherwise willing to accept inhabiting a role very different from themselves would determine that playing someone of the opposite sex would be the deal-breaker. In an interview for Micro-Adventurer, Pete went on to make the more straighforwardly sexist — or at least condescending — assertion that “adventure games offer many women, trapped at home by children, a more intellectual alternative to Mills and Boon.” Ah, well, at least the fellow was trying, which is more than could be said for most of his peers.

Progressive as it is in so many ways, Snowball still has its full share of problems and questionable elements. Like the three fantasy games that preceded it, it’s just much too hard, and too often for the wrong reasons. The most infamously awful puzzle involves a computer screen which is operated by looking at desired entries in a menu and then BLINKing, a completely unclued combination of the design sin of read-the-author’s-mind with just a dash of guess-the-verb. Just to really salt the wound, the first entry you read after — let’s be honest — looking the answer up in a walkthrough is… instructions on how to operate the computer. Grr…

Snowball

The parser, while it does understand phrases of more than two words to an extent, is very unrefined compared to that of Infocom. You see, the parser here lies — or, if you like, cheats. When it encounters a phrase it doesn’t entirely understand, it attempts to guess the meaning from those words it does. This is a fraught approach, with huge potential to result in misunderstandings. You’re thus likely to see a lot of weird non-sequitur responses in your time with Snowball.

And then the actual plot that develops in the game itself, involving a hijacker who is attempting to crash the Snowball into the Eden system’s star for reasons that are never really explained just as it will soon be time to begin reviving the colonists and sending them down to their new lives at last, is oddly sparse in comparison to the meticulous back story.

All of these weaknesses can largely be attributed to the draconian technical constraints of the 32 K, cassette-based machines that represented the lowest common denominator for which Level 9 had to develop. I mention them here only so you won’t think that Snowball is possessed of quite the same sophistication and polish of a contemporaneous Infocom game. By comparison Infocom, with the luxuries of an extra 16 K of memory and floppy-disk-enabled virtual memory, had it easy. Still, Snowball packs a staggering amount of content into 32 K, and is in that light if anything even more technically impressive than Infocom’s games.

Indeed, when compared with the most obviously similar game in the Infocom canon, Starcross, Snowball acquits itself pretty darn well. While Starcross owes a hell of a debt to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, Snowball is braver, more audacious in proposing a more original science-fictional concept and working it out so carefully. If its plot is ultimately a bit slight, well, plenty of science-fiction novels are also more interesting for their worldbuilding than their plot. I would even say that Snowball gets the sense of wonder of the best science fiction across better than Starcross. There are a few moments, such as when you exit the ship proper to the interior of the globe of snow and see this huge man-made wonder stretching out around you, that approach the transcendent even given the bare few sentences Pete Austin can spare to describe the scene. Anyone playing along at the time had to recognize the audacity that was lacking in most of Level 9’s peers, and had to be excited to see where it would take them. That’s a journey I’ll be continuing to follow here with relish.

For anyone playing along with these articles, I’ve prepared a zip file which includes Snowball in its BBC Micro disk incarnation as well as the original manual and a hints sheet, which, once again, you’re likely to need. Next time we’ll wrap up 1983 in Britain with the most important adventuring development of the year — which wasn’t even a game per se.

 
14 Comments

Posted by on June 30, 2013 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

Tags: ,

Peter Killworth’s 1983

27 Jun

Peter Killworth always found time for a wide array of hobbies and activities, ranging from anthropology to stage magic, to supplement his significant career in oceanographic research, but one suspects that he must have been even busier than usual during 1983. Inspired by the unexpected success of Philosopher’s Quest, he published two original games that year with Acornsoft, and ported a third to the BBC Micro for them.

The two originals were Castle of Riddles and Countdown to Doom. The former feels very much like Philosopher’s Quest II, although it is a completely original effort and not, as is sometimes reported, derived à la Zork II and III from yet-unused sections of Philosopher’s Quest‘s mainframe source, Brand X. The plot, such as it is, casts you as a down-on-your-luck adventurer who is hired by a wizard to recover a certain Ring of Power (where have we heard of that before?) from an evil warlock with a penchant for riddle games. Acornsoft had a good reason to want Castle of Riddles to be particularly difficult even by the rather heartless standards of the time: they made solving it into a national contest. Working in conjunction with Your Computer magazine, the company collected orders during the first weeks of 1983, then shipped out copies to all would-be participants on February 15. First to solve it would get a voucher good for £1500 worth of Acorn hardware and software of his choice, along with a magnificently nerdy “£700 hallmarked silver ring-shaped trophy mounted on a presentation plinth and inscribed ‘King of the Ring.'”

Castle of Riddles contest announcement

When several weeks went by without a winner, there was some concern that Killworth had made the game too difficult, that no one would manage to solve it before the contest’s expiry date of March 31. Thus a 34-year-old businessman named Colin Bignell thought he had an excellent chance when he finished the game at last late one night in March. He immediately dashed to his car and drove through the dawn from his home in Littlehampton, Sussex, to Your Computer‘s offices in London to deliver the code word that the game reveals upon completion. But alas, as he pulled up outside one Peter Voke was already inside doing the same thing; Bignell had to settle for runner-up status.

Contest winner Peter Voke stands third from left; runner-up Colin Bignell first from left.

Contest winner Peter Voke stands third from left; runner-up Colin Bignell first from left.

The Castle of Riddles contest was something of a landmark. Many other publishers would launch similar efforts in the years to come. It proved to be an excellent way to build buzz around a new title in the British software industry, which much more than the American thrived on just this kind of hype and excitement. Perhaps less fortunate was the effect it had on the designs involved. They simply had to be damnably, absurdly difficult to prevent a stampede of players beating down the publishers’ doors hours after release. Thus what could already be a stubbornly intractable genre had some of its worst tendencies elevated to the realm of virtual necessity. Indeed, Castle of Riddles itself is the least of Killworth’s games. Even he regarded it with little fondness; it’s the only one of his Acornsoft games that he did not choose to revive for the company with which he later became associated, Topologika.

Much more impressive, and a significant step forward for Killworth as a designer, is Countdown to Doom, a science-fiction scenario. Your spaceship has just crash-landed on the planet of Doomawangara. You have all of about 215 turns to repair your ship — accomplished by gathering the spare parts that are conveniently lying about the planet and dropping them into the ship’s hold — and escape, after which the ship “collapses” for reasons that aren’t entirely clear (beyond the wish for an in-game turn limit, that is). As that tight turn limit suggests, Doom is an extremely difficult game laced with the usual sudden, blameless player deaths that are such a staple of the Cambridge approach to adventure games. This game, like its stablemates, sends the dial smashing right through the top of the Zarfian Cruelty Scale and just keeps on going. With only 215 turns to hand, getting everything done makes for quite an exercise in planning even once you know the solution to each individual puzzle. Yet its puzzles, while hard as nails, mostly stay just on the right side of fairness, only dipping a toe or two occasionally over the line. They reward intellectual leaps as much or more than dogged persistence (not that the latter isn’t required as well). Let me give a quick example of how heartless yet kind of magical these puzzles are.

In your initial explorations you come upon a bunch of gibberish written on a wall.

Countdown to Doom

Anyone who’s ever played an adventure game can guess that this must be an encoded message, but how to crack it? Well, later in the game you come upon another strange message on a wall.

Countdown to Doom

This is all the information the game provides for cracking the code. Want to have a go at it? Go ahead; I’ll wait…

So, the solution is to take every fifth letter after the first, cycling around and around until every letter is used. This yields “Say ‘flezz’ to disable the robot.” Sure enough, there’s an annoying little thief of a robot elsewhere in the game.

Even if you cracked the code, don’t feel too smug; you had an advantage. In the actual game there is nothing to connect these two messages together, nothing to indicate the second provides the key for the first. I needed a nudge to make that connection myself when I played, but thereafter doing the rest myself was so satisfying that I kind of love the game for it.

Countdown to Doom is easier to love than many games of the Cambridge tradition. For all its cruelty, it does display some hints of mercy. You’re expected to gather six needed spare parts to solve the most pressing problem, that of escape, but a full score also requires satisfying your greedy inner adventurer by gathering six treasures. These, which are generally the more challenging to collect, are actually optional; it’s possible to escape and thus ostensibly win the game (apart from a chiding message telling you you could have done even better) without collecting a single one. This choice adds a welcome dose of positive reinforcement. It’s more satisfying to win the game with a less-than-optimal score and then go back in to improve it than it is to simply fail over and over.

In contrast to Castle of Riddles, Countdown to Doom remained always one of Killworth’s favorite children. Its design is tight and perfect in its own uncompromising way, its puzzles often brilliant. Games from this tradition will always be a minority taste even amongst the minority that can still stomach old-school text adventures in this day and age, but Countdown to Doom is just about as perfect an exemplar as you’ll find of said tradition.

Killworth’s final effort for 1983 was another minor landmark. Kingdom of Hamil was a loving port of the Phoenix game Hamil, the first to be solely authored by Phoenix stalwart Jonathan Partington, to the BBC Micro. Thus it became the first Phoenix game not authored by Killworth to make it into homes, and the first to retain its original title and to remain basically complete in its new form. The story, embellished a bit over the original on the Acornsoft box copy, has you the displaced heir to the throne of Hamil, needing to prove your worth to prove your identity. This being an old-school adventure game, “worth” is meant literally here: you must collect valuable treasures and drop them in the castle vault. As usual, none of this makes a whole lot of sense. No one would ever accuse the Phoenix games of even storybook realism.

But then you don’t play these games for their stories, and Hamil has some wonderful elements. Partington always had a certain fondness for large-scale, dynamic puzzles that often span multiple rooms while requiring precise timing, the sort of thing that demands to be worked out carefully with pen and paper. His talents are much in evidence here. There’s a chase scene with a dinosaur that spans more than 30 turns yet has to be planned and executed perfectly down to the last move, and a similar sequence in which the terrain literally explodes behind you. Much of Hamil is so fun to solve that you can almost forgive it its few puzzles that cross the line. The last of these, however, does a good job of crushing any spirit of generosity you might still have. It’s one of the classic what-the-fuck moments in adventure gaming, reading like a caricature of the brainy, mathematical Phoenix tradition.

Early in Hamil, you find yet another encoded message on a wall.

Kingdom of Hamil

This is actually easier than the similar puzzle in Countdown to Doom. When a certain locked door starts asking you for a password, it’s not too difficult to figure out that it must be a simple transcription cypher, with the first three words representing “The password is…” By the time you get to the climax of the game, then, you feel pretty confident in deciphering the messages that appear.

Kingdom of Hamil

Cracking the code yields:

WHAT ARE THEIR ORDERS?
WHAT WAS THE PHRASE?
WHAT IS THE SET, SORTED?

But your difficulties are only beginning. I’ve actually now given you everything the game does, so have at it if you like.

Ready to continue? Okay! In the words of the anonymous writer of a walkthrough from long ago:

You must obtain the set of letters from THE PASSWORD IS, which is THEPASWORDI. Then you must sort the letters, resulting in ADEHIOPRSTW. Finally you must encode this string. You do this in the opposite way in which you decoded messages. Thus, if, for example TPM was decoded to THE, THE is encoded as TPM. ADEHIOPRSTW encodes to NYMPHSWALTZ. To finish the game you must type NYMPHS WALTZ. (SAY NYMPHS WALTZ or NYMPHSWALTZ do not work.)

Really, what could be more clear? Again, solving this here and now, while ridiculously difficult, is actually much easier than it would be for someone encountering it in the game. There you are given no more indication than what you see of what “the phrase” is referring to amongst a big game full of phrases (it’s a text adventure, after all). Thus we come to the hate in my love-hate relationship with Phoenix.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. I’ve prepared a zip file for those of you interested in exploring Killworth’s 1983 for yourselves. It includes each of the three games as a BBC Micro tape image, the way they were first distributed. (To start one of the games on a BBC Micro emulator, mount the tape image, then type *TAPE followed by CH.””. Note also that at least some of the disk images of these games floating around ROM archives and abandonware sites are corrupted and uncompleteable.) I’ve also included some hint sheets, which you’ll likely need. For what it’s worth, when I play I give myself unfettered access to the first level of hints. This usually provides the sort of little nudges that the games so painfully lack, the likes of which Infocom would have provided within the games themselves as a matter of course by this time. I find this lets me appreciate the games’ qualities and enjoy solving them without the whole thing devolving into an exercise in masochism.

Next time we’ll check in with our other special friends in British adventuring, Level 9, to see how 1983 treated them.

 
20 Comments

Posted by on June 27, 2013 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

Tags: , , , ,

1983 in British Computing

18 Jun

1983 in British Computing

Like its American counterpart, the British PC industry was untenably fragmented by the beginning of 1983. The previous year had been deemed Information Technology Year by the government. Unlike so many government initiatives, this one had succeeded swimmingly in its goal of drumming up excitement and enthusiasm amongst the public for microcomputers. Where excitement and enthusiasm go in a market economy, of course, also go products. Thus the new computers had come thick and fast throughout 1982. In addition to the BBC Micro and the Sinclair Spectrum which I’ve already written about, there were heaps of other machines whose names sound like something spewed by a beta version of Google Translate: the Dragon 32, the Grundy NewBrain, the Jupiter Ace, the Camputers Lynx, the Oric-1. Throw in a spate of knockoffs and clones from the Far East, and the situation was truly chaos; most of these machines were incompatible with one another. Something had to give. If the lines of battle had been drawn up in 1982, the war would begin in earnest in 1983, just as it had in North America.

Even if you aren’t that familiar with British computing history, you probably aren’t exactly in suspense about who won in the British theater of the Home Computer Wars of 1983. The fact that I chose to feature the BBC Micro and the Sinclair Spectrum on this blog in preference to all those other oddball models pretty much says it all. The BBC Micro found a home in virtually every school in Britain, and, even at a street price of £400 or so, also became a favorite of researchers and hardcore hobbyists, who loved its sturdy construction and expandability. The Spectrum had none of these things going for it, but it did have a £130 price tag and a bright color graphics display for games. Neither machine was perfect, but each was a good fit for its niche. And in addition to hardware specifications both had considerable soft power working in their favor. The BBC Micro had been blessed with the imprimatur of the British government, and thus stood in effect as the official computer of the British nation. And the Speccy came from Uncle Clive, the man who had first brought low-cost computing to the British masses. Sure, he was a bit eccentric and a bit prickly, but that was just a manifestation of his impatience with the bureaucrats and business concerns that delayed his inventions reaching the masses. It was an image that Sinclair, who had begun to read his own positive press notices when said notices existed only in his head, positively reveled in. Throughout the year Sinclair struggled to keep up with demand, as seemingly every kid in Britain begged for a Speccy. Meanwhile those other computers straggled on as best they could before bowing to the inevitable one by one during this year and the next. Kids wanted what their friends had, and their friends all had Speccys.

Put crudely, then, the BBC Micro came to occupy the space in British computing held by the Apple II in North America, the Establishment choice for education and home computing. The Speccy, meanwhile, was the Commodore 64, the cheaper, ruder, funner model that the kids adored. Just to keep us from getting too neat with our analogies, it should be noted that the Commodore 64 itself also began arriving in numbers in Britain during 1983. However, the vagaries of economics and exchange rates being what they were, its initial price there was closer to that of the BBC Micro than the Spectrum, limiting its sales. The Commodore 64 became the computer for the posh public-school kids, while the Speccy remained the choice of the masses. The former was unquestionably a much more capable machine than the latter by any objective measure, but even in later years, when the price dropped and the 64’s popularity grew, it never quite got the same sort of love that accrued to the Spectrum. Like driving on the wrong side of the road and eating baked beans for breakfast, there was just something indelibly British about the Speccy’s peculiar BASIC and weird keyboard, something that made a generation of British gamers and game programmers fall in love with it as their machine.

To work this comparison one last time, Clive Sinclair’s 1983 in Britain was like Jack Tramiel’s in North America — the best, most unblemished, most triumphant year of a long, chequered career. It must have felt like vindication itself when he received an invitation to attend the Queen’s Birthday Honors in June to receive a knighthood. Suddenly Uncle Clive had become Sir Clive. Given Sinclair’s relationship with the British bureaucracy the honor might have seemed a surprising one. Indeed, at the time that he received it his company was still embroiled in various government investigations for its failure to ship its products in a timely fashion to customers as well as a rash of complaints about shoddy workmanship. (Sinclair was still desperately trying to recall some 28,000 Spectrum power packs that had the potential to shock a person into unconsciousness — shades of the exploding watches of yore.) Luckily, he was a huge favorite of Margaret Thatcher, no friend of entrenched bureaucratic forces herself, who saw him as exactly the kind of entrepreneur that her new, more freedom-loving and capitalism-friendly Britain needed. And Thatcher, who was riding a tide of personal popularity and renewed patriotism of her own in the wake of the Falklands War, generally got what she wanted. The press gushed with praise in the wake of Sinclair’s honor, some justified, some somewhat, shall we say, overblown. Popular Computing Weekly credited him with “transforming Britain from a nation of shopkeepers to a nation of micro users.” Sinclair User simply announced that he had “invented the home micro,” conveniently forgetting about some folks on the other side of the Atlantic.

Clive still being Clive regardless of his honorific, he sunk his cash and his reputation into projects that were of debatable wisdom at best. In lieu of a floppy-disk drive for the Spectrum, he invested in a strange piece of technology called the Microdrive, a tape-based system that looked and operated rather like an old 8-track audio tape. Announced simultaneously with the Spectrum itself back in April of 1982, the Microdrive didn’t finally arrive until the summer of 1983. When it did it was like a caricature of a Sinclair product: cheaper than the competition but also slow and balky and horribly unreliable. A computer crash at the wrong moment could erase an entire tape in seconds. Users may have partially embraced the Speccy because of its eccentricities, but this was taking things too far. Rather than being charming the Microdrive was just sort of terrifying. It never got much love from Speccy users, who chose to stick with the even slower but more trustworthy medium of the cassette tape. In his choosing to develop such a white elephant rather than investing in the plebeian, well-proven technology of the floppy disk we see the most exasperating side of Clive Sinclair, who was always trying to prove how much more clever he was than the conventional wisdom of his competitors, even though conventional wisdom is often conventional for a reason. The Microdrive in turn shows the dangers of a company that is absolutely controlled by a single mercurial individualist. Sinclair’s backers and fans would learn much more about that in the time to come.

Then again, at least the Microdrive was a computer product. Sir Clive, who always harbored a deep skepticism about how long this computer thing was really going to last, also sunk energy and resources into his twin white whales, a miniature, portable television set and an electric car. Both projects would provoke much hilarity in the British press in later years when his star as a captain of industry had faded. But instead of going on any more about any of that today let’s just leave Sir Clive to enjoy his big year. His road will get bumpier soon enough.

Criticisms aside, Sinclair did play a huge role in turning Britain into the most computer-mad nation on Earth. Despite the American industry’s considerable head start, a greater percentage of British than American homes had computers by the end of 1983. Already by April total British microcomputer sales had passed the one-million mark. By December the Speccy alone was flirting with that figure.

All those computers in private hands meant a software marketplace that was if anything growing even faster than the hardware side. And since the computers selling in biggest numbers were the Speccys being installed in bedrooms and living rooms across Britain, software in this context meant mostly games. By 1983 a hit game could make you, at least for the time being, rich, as was demonstrated by a flood of brash young game publishers populated by brash young men just a year or two (at most) removed from bicycling to school. Now they drove Porsches and Ferraris to posh offices in the most fashionable parts of town. A company called Imagine Software, publishers of such Speccy hits as Arcadia, was amongst the most spectacular of the success stories. When a BBC film crew visited their office for a documentary feature in early 1984 they found “huge, luxurious offices, acres of carpet, computer terminals by the ton load, lots of young programmers, secretaries in abundance, young ‘gophers’ acting as runners for the management, and a company garage packed with a fleet of Ferrari Boxers, BMWs for the lesser executives, and the famous Mark Butler custom hand-built Harris motorbike.” Clearly a certain sector of British society had another very good reason to love Sir Clive: his creation was making them rich.

Just as in America, established media forces were also eager to get a piece of the action. Virgin Records launched Virgin Games, and of all people K-tel, those purveyors of cheesy TV-peddled hits compilations, also jumped in, attending the Midland Computer Fair with a well-publicized £1 million burning a hole in their pockets for deal-making with eager programmers.

Yet even with the arrival of Big Money on the scene the British industry remained wilder, woolier, and more democratic than its American counterpart. The games themselves remained much less expensive. Whereas a big release like Ultima III could exceed $50 in America, games in Britain rarely exceeded £10, and most sold for around £5 or even less. With less invested in any particular title, both publishers and buyers were more willing to take chances on crazy ideas, and individual programmers had a better chance of seeing their creations on store shelves and actually making them some money. Even if no one wanted to give them a chance they could just start their own little company in the hope of becoming the next Imagine; distribution was also comparatively wide open, making it relatively easy to get your game to the public on your own. It all added up to a market that had a lot of product that for very good reasons would never have passed muster in the United States. Yet it also had a spirit of wild-eyed, devil-may-care creativity about it that was sometimes lacking amongst the more staid, polished American publishers.

My special interest, adventure games, were a big part of the industry, amongst if not the most popular genre out there. As with other kinds of games, adventure seemed to be multiplying exponentially from month to month. Britain was not just computer mad but also adventure mad. Well before the end of the year production of new British adventure games far outstripped that of American, and the disparity would only continue to grow over the next few years. In November Micro-Adventurer debuted, the first magazine anywhere in the world dedicated not just to games in general but to this particular genre.

To survey this explosion of titles in any real depth would bog us down for months; that will have to remain a task for some other, even more esoteric blog than this one. But I will try to convey some sense of the times by continuing to follow the careers of some friends we met earlier. We’ll do that next time.

(This survey of the scene is drawn mainly from the Your Computer and Sinclair User issues of 1983, with occasional forays into Home Computing Weekly and Popular Computing Weekly. The image is taken from the 1984 Sinclair User annual’s cover.)

 
16 Comments

Posted by on June 18, 2013 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

Tags: ,

Amiga Magazines Free (Plus Shipping…) for the Asking

16 Jun

Just before we left the U.S. for Denmark almost four years ago, I bought a cache of old Amiga magazines on eBay to help with the book I was planning to write there. By the time we moved to Norway almost two years ago, the book was finished, and so I deposited the magazines at my in-laws’ house near Flensburg, Germany. (There are a lot of different countries in my life these days.) Now said in-laws are hoping to move soon, so I need to do something with them. I just don’t have the space to keep them, especially as we’re likely to be moving yet again quite soon. Nor do I need them anymore in hard-copy form, because they’re all now archived on my computer. So, I’m wondering if anyone wants them.

What they are, specifically, is almost every issue of AmigaWorld and Amazing Computing from the first issue until just shortly after Commodore’s 1994 bankruptcy, in (relatively) gently used condition. I say “almost every” for the sake of caution, as there may be just one or two issues of either or both magazines missing, but no more than that. There’s also some sales catalogs, a few issues of an early desktop-video magazine, and some other loose bits.

So, I’m willing to give the whole collection to anyone who can arrange for their transportation. That, alas, could be the sticking point. They fill at least eight or ten boxes (maybe more), and they aren’t light. Shipping would likely be expensive within Europe, very expensive internationally. The ideal scenario would be someone willing to pick them up in Flensburg. I’ll be there this Friday and Saturday only, but I could arrange for one of my in-laws to be there most days in the near future.

If you want them, send me an email using the link at the right and tell me how you propose to get them. Should there be a rush I’ll decide based on some combination of first come first serve and practicality. And if you know anyone else who might be interested, please tell them about it. If I can’t find them a home I’ll probably have to take the magazines to the recycler, much as that would pain me. Hundreds of magazines just aren’t compatible with the Traveling Scandinavian Roadshow that is our lives at the moment.

More proper Digital Antiquaria for ya soon…

 
6 Comments

Posted by on June 16, 2013 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction, Modern Times, My So-Called Life

 
← Older Posts
Newer Posts →