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From Mechs to Mopar

The future is boring.
— Zack Norman


Prologue: Scenes from an Italian Restaurant

One day in the fall of 1995, two Activision game designers by the names of Sean Vesce and Zack Norman went out to lunch together at their favorite Italian joint. Both had just come off of MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat, an action-packed “simulation” of giant rock-em, sock-em robots that took place in the universe of the popular tabletop game BattleTech. They had done their jobs well: slick and explosive, MechWarrior 2 had become the game of the hour upon its release the previous August, the perfect alternative for players who had been entranced by the Pandora’s Box of 3D mayhem that had been cracked open by DOOM but who were growing a little bored with the recent onslaught of me-too DOOM clones.

There was only one cloud on the horizon: Activision knew already that they wouldn’t be allowed to make a MechWarrior 3. Their rights to BattleTech were soon to expire and were not going to be renewed, what with FASA, the company which owned the tabletop game, having decided to start a studio of its own, FASA Interactive, to produce digital incarnations of its tabletop properties. Activision’s owner Bobby Kotick, who was quickly making a name for himself as one of the savviest and most unsentimental minds in gaming, had accordingly issued orders to his people to milk MechWarrior 2 and its engine, which had required a great deal of time and expense to create, for all they were worth while the opportunity was still there. This would result in two expansion packs for the core game before the curtain fell on the license. Meanwhile Vesce and Norman were tasked with coming up with an idea for another “vehicular combat game” that could be developed relatively quickly and cheaply, to take advantage of the engine one last time before it became hopelessly out of date. They had gone to lunch together today to discuss the subject.

Or Vesce had, at any rate. Norman was still basking in the bonus he had earned from MechWarrior 2, the biggest check he had ever seen with his name on it. A diehard Mopar fanboy, he had just about decided to buy himself a vintage muscle car with his windfall. He had thus brought an Auto Trader magazine along with him to the restaurant, and kept flipping through the pages distractedly while Vesce threw out game ideas, none of which quite seemed right. (“What about a helicopter sim?”) But Norman suddenly stopped turning the pages when he came across a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda. “Is that the car?” asked Vesce, a little disinterestedly.

Then he saw the look on Norman’s face — the look of a man who had finally seen something that had been staring him in the face for most of the last hour. It was, after all, a vehicular combat game they had been tasked with making. “No,” said Norman. “That’s the game!” And so Interstate ’76, one of the freshest and cleverest mass-market computer games of the late 1990s, was born.


Part 1: I, Robot

The road to that memorable lunch stretches all the way back to 1980, when the excitement around Dungeons & Dragons was inspiring many tabletop gamers to start companies in the role-playing space which it had opened up. Among their number was a pair of Chicago boys named Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock. They formed FASA that year; the acronym was an elaborate high-school joke that owed a debt to the Marx Brothers, standing for “Freedonian Aeronautics and Space Administration.” They scrounged together $300 in seed capital, just enough to run off a bunch of copies of an adventure module they had created for Traveller, the most popular of the early science-fiction RPGs. Then they took their adventure to that year’s Gen Con to sell it, sleeping in their van in the parking lot for lack of the funds to pay for a hotel room.

From those humble beginnings, FASA scraped and clawed their way within two years to landing a stunner of a deal: to make a tabletop RPG based on Star Trek. It shipped in 1983, whereupon critics lauded the system for its simplicity and approachability, and for the way it captured the idealistic essence of Star Trek at its best, with its ethos of violence as a last rather than a first resort. (A comparison might be mooted with Call of Cthulhu, another tabletop RPG that turned the Dungeons & Dragons power-gaming approach on its head in the service of a very different mission statement.) “To make Star Trek: The RPG a Klingon shoot would be in violation of everything the series represented,” said Guy W. McLimore Jr., one of the game’s trio of core designers. “Man-to-man-combat and starship-combat systems were important, and had to be done right, but these were to take a backseat to the essential human adventure of space exploration.”

FASA supported their Star Trek RPG lavishly, with rules supplements, source books, and adventure modules galore during the seven years they were allowed to hang onto the license. Many a grizzled tabletop veteran will still tell you today that FASA’s Star Trek was as good as gaming on the Final Frontier ever got. When you did engage in spaceship combat, for example, the game did an uncanny job of putting you in the shoes of your character standing on the bridge, rather than relegating you to pushing cardboard counters around on a paper map in the style of Star Fleet Battles.

Still, if you were more interested in shooting things than wrestling with ethical dilemmas, FASA had you covered there as well. The same year as the Star Trek RPG, they published Combots. Inspired by Japanese anime productions that enjoyed no more than a tiny following in the United States as yet, it was a board game of, as the name would imply, combat between giant robots, co-designed by Jordan Weisman himself and one Bill Fawcett.

They refined and added to the concept the following year with a miniatures-based strategy game called Battledroids. A year after that, Battledroids became BattleTech in response to legal threats from Lucasfilm of Star Wars fame, who felt the term “droid” rightfully belonged to them alone. (“I politely wrote back,” says Weisman, “to point out that Isaac Asimov had been using the word ‘android’ since something like 1956. They wrote back to point out that they had a lot more lawyers than we did.”)

By now, the wave of Japanese giant robots had fully broken Stateside; the Saturday morning cartoon lineup showcased Transformers prominently, and that show’s associated line of action figures was flying off store shelves even faster than their Star Wars brethren. BattleTech was the right game at the right time, perfect for people who were too old to play with action figures that were intended as mere toys but still young enough at heart to appreciate duels between gargantuan armor-plated “mechs” bristling with laser cannons, missile launchers, and just about every other imaginable form of futuristic destruction.

From the beginning, BattleTech incorporated some RPG elements. It came complete with a detailed setting whose history was laid out in a timeline that spanned over a millennium of humanity’s future. Likewise, players were encouraged to keep and slowly improve the same mech over the course of many battles. At the same time, though, the game required no referee and was quick to pick up and play, keeping the focus squarely on the combat. In 1986, FASA released a supplement called MechWarrior that moved the system further into RPG territory, for those who so desired, adding the missing referee back into the equation. It placed players in the roles of individual mech pilots, a new breed of knights in shining armor who had much in common with their Medieval ancestors, being fixated on chivalry, noblesse oblige, and blood feuds. BattleTech and MechWarrior spawned a cottage industry, one which by the late 1980s rivaled the Star Trek RPG in terms of its contributions to FASA’s bottom line as well the sheer quantity of supplements that were available for it, full of background information, scenarios, and most of all cool new mechs and mech kit, things its fans could never seem to get enough of.

FASA had had the opportunity to study up close and personal the way that a huge property like Star Trek sprawled across the ecosystem of media: television, movies, books, comics, toys, tabletop and digital games. They saw no reason that BattleTech shouldn’t follow its example. Thus they commissioned a BattleTech comic, and hired the tabletop-gaming veteran Michael Stackpole to write a series of BattleTech novels. If the latter read like a blow-by-blow description of someone’s gaming session, so much so that you could almost hear the dice rolling in the background… well, that was perhaps a feature rather than a bug in the eyes of the target audience.

Only three of his hastily loosed missiles made their target, but those hit with a vengeance. One exploded into one of the Rifleman’s autocannon ejection ports, fusing the ejection mechanism. The other missiles both slammed into the radar wing whirling like a propeller above the ‘Mech’s hunched shoulders. The first explosion froze the mechanism in place. The second blast left the wing hanging by thick electrical cables…

Then, too, FASA didn’t neglect the digital space. From 1987, Jordan Weisman devoted most of his energy to the creation of “BattleTech Centers,” which played host to virtual-reality cockpits where players could take on the role of mech pilots far more directly and viscerally than any mere tabletop game would allow. A radically ambitious idea that wasn’t at all easy to bring to fruition, the first BattleTech Center didn’t open until 1990, in Chicago’s North Pier Mall. But it was very successful once it did, selling 300,000 tickets for time in one of its sixteen cockpits over its first two years. After a cash injection from the Walt Disney family, this proof of concept would lead to at least 25 more BattleTech Centers in the United States and Japan by the turn of the millennium.

And then there was also digital BattleTech for the home. FASA signed a deal with Activision in 1987, giving them the right to make BattleTech games for personal computers for the next ten years. The first fruit of that deal appeared in late 1988 under the name of BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception. It was published under the Infocom imprint, but that storied text-adventure specialist, a somewhat reluctant member of the Activision family since 1986, had little to do with it; the real developer was Westwood Associates. In its review, Computer Gaming World magazine called The Crescent Hawk’s Inception a cross between Ultima and the BattleTech board game, and this strikes me as a fair description. You wandered the world, following the bread-crumb trail of the story line, building up your finances and your skills, recruiting companions, and improving your collection of mechs, the better to fight battles which were quite faithful to the tabletop game, right down to being turn-based from an overhead perspective. It wasn’t a bad game, but it wasn’t an amazing one either, feeling more workmanlike than truly inspired. All indications are that it sold fairly modestly.

One year later, Activision returned with another BattleTech game. Developed by Dynamix, MechWarrior borrowed the name of FASA’s RPG expansion to the core tabletop game, yet was actually less of a CRPG than its predecessor had been. You still wandered from place to place chasing the plot and searching out battles, but the latter were now placed front and center, and had more in common with the still-in-the-works BattleTech Centers than the tabletop game, taking place in real time from a first-person perspective. MechWarrior sold much better than The Crescent Hawk’s Inception, proving that many others agreed with Computer Gaming World‘s Johnny L. Wilson when he said that this was the kind of BattleTech computer game “I was looking for.”

It was followed another year later by another Westwood game, a direct sequel to The Crescent Hawk’s Inception entitled The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge. In spite of its sequel status, it dispensed with the CRPG aspects entirely, in favor of a simple branching mission tree. These were shown once again from an overhead perspective, but played out in real time rather than in turns. These qualities make the game stand out as an interesting progenitor to the full-fledged real-time-strategy genre, which Westwood themselves would invent less than two years later with Dune II. In the meantime, Computer Gaming World declared it “the game every BattleTech devotee has been waiting for.”

Unfortunately for everyone, Activision imploded just weeks after publishing The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge in late 1990, brought down by an untimely patent-infringement lawsuit and a long string of bad decisions on the part of CEO Bruce Davis. The company was rescued from the brink of oblivion by the opportunistic young wheeler and dealer Bobby Kotick, who had been itching for a computer-game publisher of his very own for several years already. He declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, moved the whole operation from Silicon Valley to Los Angeles, cut its staff from 150 to eight, and kept it alive by digging deep into his capacious bag of tricks to wheedle just a little more patience out of its many creditors, a few months at a time.

It is one of the little-known ironies of modern gaming that Bobby Kotick’s Activision — the same Activision that brought in revenues of almost $9 billion in 2021 — owes its ongoing existence to the intellectual property of Infocom, a company which in its best year as an independent entity brought in $10 million in revenue. Casting about for a product he could release quickly to bring in some much-needed cash, Kotick hit upon Infocom’s 1980s text-adventure catalog. He published all 35 of the games in question in two shovelware collections, The Lost Treasures of Infocom I and II, the first of which alone sold at least 100,000 copies at $60 a pop and a profit margin to die for. He followed that triage operation up by going all-in on Return to Zork, a state-of-the-art graphic adventure that capitalized equally on the excitement over multimedia CD-ROM and older gamers’ nostalgia for the bygone days of a purely textual Great Underground Empire.

But if the Lost Treasures stopped the bleeding in 1992 and Return to Zork took the patient off life support in 1993, it was MechWarrior 2 in the summer of 1995 that announced Kotick’s Activision to be fully restored to rude health, once again a marquee publisher of top-shelf gamer’s games that didn’t need to shirk comparisons with anyone else’s.

That said, actually making MechWarrior 2 had been a rather tortured process. Knowing full well that the first MechWarrior had been the old Activision’s last real hit, Kotick would have preferred to have had the sequel well before 1995. However, Dynamix, the studio that had made the first game, had been bought by Activision’s competitor Sierra in 1990. Kotick thus decided to do the sequel in-house, initiating the project already by the end of 1992. It was ill-managed and under-funded by the still cash-strapped company. Artist Scott Goffman later summed up the problems as:

  1. Over-eager PR people hyping a game that was not even close to being done. This led to forced promises of release dates that were IMPOSSIBLE to make.
  2. Lack of a design. There was no clear direction for the first year and a half on the game, and no solid style.
  3. Featuritis. A disease that often afflicts game developers, causing them to want to keep adding more and more features to a game, rather than debugging and shipping what they already have.
  4. Morale. As they fell further and further behind schedule, the programmers and artists felt less and less inclined to produce. This led to departures.

By early 1994, the entire original team had left, forcing Activision to all but start over from scratch. The project now had such a bad odor about it that, when producer Josh Resnick was asked to take it over, his first instinct was to run the other way as fast as he could: “I actually thought this was a demotion and went so far as to ask if I had done something wrong.”

To his credit, though, it all started to come together after he bit the bullet and took control. He brought Sean Vesce and Zack Norman aboard to tighten up the design, combining elements of the last two licensed BattleTech computer games to arrive at a finished whole that was superbly suited to the post-DOOM market: the first-person action of MechWarrior 1 and the no-nonsense, straightforward mission tree of The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge. (Or rather missions trees in this case: MechWarrior 2 had two campaigns, each from the point of view of a different clan.) And everything was suitably updated to take advantage of the latest processors, graphics cards, and sound cards, of course.

It had now been almost five years since the last boxed BattleTech game for personal computers. In the interim, FASA, having lost their Star Trek license in 1989, had made the franchise their number-one priority. It was more popular than ever, encompassing more than 100 individual tabletop-gaming products, plus novels and comics, a line of toys, and even a televised cartoon series. Meanwhile a downloadable multi-player BattleTech computer game, developed by the online-gaming pioneer Kesmai, was doing very good business on the GEnie subscription service. So, there was a certain degree of pent-up demand among the FASA faithful for a new BattleTech computer game that you didn’t have to pay to play by the minute, even as there was also a fresh audience of rambunctious young men who had come to computer gaming through the likes of DOOM, who might not know BattleTech from Battle Isle, but who thought the idea of giant battling robots was hella cool in its own right.

MechWarrior 2 disappointed the expectations of neither its creators nor its consumers; it exploded out of the gate like a mech in its death throes, generating sales that made everything Bobby Kotick’s Activision had done before seem quaint. The party continued in 1996, when Activision released a free add-on that made online multiplayer games a possibility, thus destroying the Kesmai BattleTech‘s market at a stroke. When the first hardware-accelerated 3D graphics cards began to appear in the summer of 1996, MechWarrior 2 was there once again. With his customary savvy, Kotick went to the makers of these disparate, mutually incompatible cards one by one, offering them a special version of one of the most popular games of the era, optimized to look spectacular with their particular card, ripe for packing right into the box along with it. All they had to do was pay Activision to make it for them. And pay they did; MechWarrior 2 became the king of the 3D-card pack-in games, a strange species that would exist for only a sharply limited period of time, until the switch from MS-DOS to Windows 95 as computer gaming’s standard platform made the need for all these custom builds for incompatible hardware a thing of the past. But it was very, very good for Activision while it lasted.

And then there was that other game that was to be made using the MechWarrior 2 engine. I must confess that it’s with that game that my heart really lies, and so it’s there that we’ll turn now.


Part 2: Feel Like Funkin’ It Up

When Sean Vesce and Zack Norman stood up from what had proved to be an inordinately long lunch, they had a pretty good idea of what they wanted Interstate ’76 to be. It was to be “a game with soul,” as Vesce puts it — soul in more ways than one. They wanted to make a tribute to the television shows of the 1970s, in which irreverent two-fisted heroes with names like Rockford and Ponch had scoured the nation’s highways and byways of ne’er-do-wells, sharing top billing in the minds of the audience with the vehicles they drove. Children of the 1980s that the two friends were, those shows had been one of the entertainment staples of their youth, to be enjoyed along with a cold soda and a sandwich as afternoon reruns after a long day at school. “We wanted to make a game that could capture a mood in a way that goes beyond just lighting things on fire and blowing them up,” says Norman, in a not-so-oblique reference to the game he worked on just before Interstate ’76. The new game’s soul was to be found as much as anywhere in the soundtrack, which was to draw from the 1970s heyday of blaxploitation flicks in the theaters as well as television.

In short, Vesce and Norman wanted to steer clear of all the usual gaming clichés, even as they embraced a whole pile of older ones, like tires that inexplicably squealed on dirt roads. They were adamant that, although it would feature battling automobiles, this was not to be yet another post-apocalyptic exercise; surely games had milked The Road Warrior enough by now. No, in their dystopian wasteland the bad guys would be OPEC and their mobster cronies, who were starving the nation of the gasoline it needed to keep its Mopar Hemis humming. It was to be, in other words, an exaggerated version of what was really going on in 1976, when the last of the muscle cars were being strangled by federal fuel-economy standards and the mad scientist’s tangle of emissions dampeners that was now required under each and every American hood. Only in this timeline vintage American muscle might just be able to win out rather than shuffle quietly off to extinction.

All of this may not have been a recipe for high art, but it was as foreign a notion for the increasingly risk-averse, perpetually lily-white executives of the games industry as an avant-garde character study would be to Jerry Bruckheimer. Vesce and Norman had a damnably hard time selling it to the suits; Vesce admits that “the first pitch meeting was disastrous.” But slowly they made headway. After all, they noted, it wasn’t as if the young males who constituted the heart of the gaming demographic wouldn’t get where they were coming from; plenty of them had grown up with the same afternoon television as Vesce and Norman. And by reusing the MechWarrior 2 engine, keeping the scope modest, and avoiding such misbegotten indulgences as live-action cut scenes, they could get by with a relatively small development team, a compressed development cycle, and a reasonable development budget. Thanks to MechWarrior 2‘s success, Activision finally had a little bit of cash on hand to take a flier on something a little bit different, without the fate of the whole company hanging on the outcome. First the Director of Creative Affairs saw the light. Then, one by one, his colleagues in business suits fell into line. The game got the green light.

Making Interstate ’76 proved a happy experience for everyone involved. And in the end, they delivered exactly the game they had promised, more or less on time and on budget. It was released by Activision in the spring of 1997, garnering very favorable reviews and solid if not stupendous sales, despite graphics that were the state of the art of two years ago.

The only reason to play the game today is its story mode — or, the “T.R.I.P.” (“Total Recreational Interactive Production”), as it prefers to call it. This T.R.I.P. takes us to the desolated landscapes of West Texas and New Mexico (whose lack of such complications as trees makes them much easier for the engine to render). Your avatar is a white soul brother by the name of Groove Champion, with a rather glorious handlebar pornstache and a preference for huge collars and unbuttoned shirt fronts. His sister Jade — “Jade was always a better racer than me, man,” he confesses — has just been violently killed. Groove has inherited her car, a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda like the one Zack Norman stumbled across in that Auto Trader on that memorable day in an Italian restaurant. (Well, it’s actually called a “Picard Piranha” in the game; all of the cars were rebranded for legal reasons, but all are based on real-world models that the aficionado will readily recognize.) Groove is no natural-born killer, and it takes quite some cajoling from Jade’s best friend, a spiffy dude named Taurus, to convince him to hit the road to find her killer and avenge her death.

Groove Champion, proving that real men drink Slurpees.

Taurus is the funkiest cat ever to appear in a game. Vesce calls him “the embodiment of the attitude and soul we were trying to inject into the game. He was Shaft, Super Fly and Samuel L. Jackson all rolled into one. Plus, he was a poet.” Indeed, one of your options in your car is to “ask Taurus for a poem.” The verses he intones over the CB radio when you do so are… not too bad, actually.

Looking out the window of your room onto a wet rainy day
Main street under a slate grey afternoon sky
The light on your face is soft and dim under the lace curtain
And the streets are empty
In the distance, there is a flash and a rumble
Clouds sail the sky like giant wooden ships
On a blackened evergreen sea
Capped with foam

(All of the poems are the work of Zack Norman.)

Taurus, who takes his Slurpees red.

Soon after meeting Taurus, you meet the story’s third and final good guy, a seemingly slow-witted country bumpkin of a mechanic named Skeeter who, in one of the game’s best running gags, turns out to have a savant-like insight on the things that really matter. Add in Antonio Malochio, the oily Mafia don and OPEC stooge who eventually emerges as Jade’s murderer, and the cast of characters is complete. Interstate ’76 is a masterclass in tight, effective videogame storytelling, giving you exactly what you need to motivate you through its seventeen missions — or “scenes,” as it prefers to call them — and nothing that you don’t. (In this sense as in many others, it’s the polar opposite of Realms of the Haunting, the hilariously piebald everything-but-the-kitchen-sink “epic” I wrote about in my last article.)

From the moment you start the game, everything you see and hear draws you into its world; nothing jars with anything else. The soundtrack is credible 1970s funk, where the booty-shaking bass lines do the heavy lifting. It was a side gig for Arion Salazar, the bassist for Third Eye Blind, whose first hit single was climbing the music charts at the same time Interstate ’76 was on the games charts. As its pedigree would suggest, the music was recorded in a real studio on real instruments by a solid band of real pros.

A Gallery of Fine Motorized Transport


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If you can name all of the vehicles above, your gearhead credentials are impeccable.



In order to keep everything seamless, Vesce and Norman originally wanted to have the cut scenes run in the game engine itself, presaging the approach that Half-Life would employ to such revolutionary effect more than a year later. When this proved impractical, they deliberately made the cut scenes look like they were coming out of the same engine. Somehow the characters here, lacking though they may be such purportedly essential details as eyes and lips, have more character than the vast majority of photo-realistic gaming specimens, proof that good aesthetics and high resolutions are not one and the same. By keeping its visuals all of a piece, the game makes the standard loop of “play a level, watch a cut scene,” which was already becoming tedious in many contexts by 1997, feel much more organic, like it really is all one story you’re living through.

Everything else is fashioned in the same spirit. Everything is diegetic. You upgrade your car between missions by talking it over with Skeeter; your in-mission map had been scrawled on an empty bag of fast-food takeout; even the options menu appears as the check from a roadside restaurant.

Having given praise where it is richly due, I must acknowledge that the gameplay itself is rather less revelatory than that which surrounds it. Unsurprisingly given the origins of the gameplay engine, the cars themselves behave more like BattleTech mechs than real automobiles, even when making allowances for the machine guns and flame throwers that are bolted onto their chassis. Vehicles bounce off of one another and the terrain like Matchbox cars; collisions that ought to leave your Barracuda nothing put a pile of twisted wreckage result in no more more than an artfully crinkled fender. Likewise, the engine doesn’t entirely transcend MechWarrior 2‘s aspirations toward being a real simulation; the controls are a bit fiddly, more Wing Commander than WipEout, and this does clash somewhat with the easygoing immersion of the story line. The worst frustration is your inability to save within missions, some of which are fairly extended exercises. It isn’t much fun to play the first ten minutes of a mission over and over in order to get to the part that’s giving you trouble.

Asked in 1999 about what he would like to have done differently in Interstate ’76, Vesce expressed regrets with which I wholeheartedly agree.

If  I could turn back time and do it again, the first thing I would do is make the game more action-oriented, with easier controls, clearer mission objectives, and greater and more frequent rewards. I would greatly simplify the game’s shell, most importantly the vehicle repair screen that players accessed between missions. I talked to a lot of people who were completely baffled the first time they went through. It was far too complex and difficult to use without the manual. I would split some of the missions into multiple missions (especially the first one), and offer a way to save at any point in the game.

Like a number of games I’ve written about recently, Interstate ’76 could have benefited from being released in the era of digital distribution, when the marketplace would have allowed it to be its best self: a four to six hour romp, to be undertaken more for the joy of the thing than the challenge. As it is, the nature of the engine and bygone expectations about value for money and what boxed games “ought” to be gum up the works from time to time even if you play on “Wimp” level, as I was more than happy to do. We probably could have done entirely without the then-obligatory skirmish and multiplayer modes, which pretty clearly weren’t where the developers’ hearts were.

Yet the way that the game recognizes and even leans into its limitations does soften the blow. It makes an inside joke out of the fact that you can’t ever get out of your car, because the engine wasn’t designed for that sort of thing. Jade, Skeeter tells us, made one fatal mistake: “She got out of the car. Don’t ever get out of the car.” Needless to say, he doesn’t need to worry that Groove will do the same.

Interstate ’76 is a breath of fresh air for any 1990s gamer — or 21st-century digital antiquarian — who’s grown tired of the typical strictures of game fictions, of the endless procession of dragons and spaceships and fighter jets and zombies and, yes, even giant robots. In an article written in 1999, Ernest Adams noted that, two years after the release of Interstate ’76, “Taurus may be the only black character with a central role in any computer game today.” That of course speaks to a colossal failure on the part of the industry as a whole, but at least we have this welcome exception to point to.

If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to close this review with two personal anecdotes that might begin to explain why this game hits me right in my sweet spot.

Anecdote #1: I spent the early 1990s working in a record store, back when such places still existed. This was the heyday of grunge, and in the name of pleasing the customers I was forced to listen to way too much flannel-clad whinging, backed by pummeling rhythm sections who thought swinging was something you did on a playground. At the end of a long day of this, it was always a joy for me and my soul sister Lorrie to put on some Althea and Donna or some Spoonie Gee and the Sequence and groove for a while as we closed the store. Coming across this game whilst writing these histories brought the same sweet sense of vive la différence!

Anecdote #2: My second car was a 1965 Ford Mustang, which wound up costing me every bit as much money and trouble as my father told me it would when I bought it. Weirdo that I was, I graduated after selling it to weird foreign cars: a Volkswagen Beetle and camper van, a Datsun 280Z, a Volkswagen GTI. But I had friends who stayed wedded to American muscle, and I was always able to appreciate the basso profondo of a finely tuned V8. I stopped messing around with cars when I moved to Europe in 2009; today I confine my mechanical endeavors to keeping our lawn tractor in good working order. Yet a throaty exhaust note heard through an open window, or just the smell of gasoline in a dimly lit garage, can still take me back to those days of barked shins and grease under the fingernails as surely as a madeleine transported Proust. Add this game to that list as well. I realize now that I lived through the tail end of a period that can never return; we absolutely must wean ourselves off of our addiction to fossil fuels if we’re to continue to make a go of civilization on this long-suffering planet of ours. And that’s okay; change is the essence of existence, as Heraclitus knew more than 2500 years ago, when he wrote that one can never step into the same river twice. Still, there’s no harm in reminiscing sometimes, is there?

All that is just me, though. A more impersonal argument for Interstate ’76 might point to it as a case study in how the best games aren’t really about technology at all. A low-budget affair based on an aging and imperfectly repurposed engine, it was nevertheless all kinds of awesome. For it had that one magic ingredient that most of its wealthier, more attractive peers lacked: it had soul, baby.

Hot rubber eternally pressing against a blackened pavement
A wheel is forever
A car is infinity times four


Postscript: Yesterday, When I Was Young

MechWarrior 2 and Interstate ’76 both proved to be peaks that were impossible to scale a second time, each in its own way.

Activision was indeed forced to give the digital rights to BattleTech to FASA’s new computer-games division, but the latter never managed to thrust its own games into the central spotlight that MechWarrior 2 had enjoyed. FASA itself closed up shop in 2001. “The adventure-gaming world has changed much, and it is time for the founders of FASA to move on,” wrote the old friends Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock in a farewell letter to their fans. BattleTech, however, lives on, under the auspices of WizKids, a new company set up by Weisman. MechWarrior games and other BattleTech games with different titles have continued to appear on computers, but none has ever become quite the sensation that MechWarrior 2 was back in those heady days of the mid-1990s.

Interstate ’76 got one rushed-seeming expansion pack that added support for 3D hardware acceleration — a feature oddly missing from the base game, given its engine’s history — and 20 missions that weren’t tied together by any story line, an approach which the core gameplay arguably wasn’t strong enough to support. Then, in 1999, it got a full-fledged sequel, Interstate ’82, which tried to do for the synth-pop decade what its predecessor had for the decade of funk. But it just didn’t come together somehow, despite Zack Norman once again taking the design reins and despite a much prettier, faster engine. While Interstate ’76 lives on as a cult classic today, Interstate ’82 is all but forgotten. Chalk it up as yet more evidence that advanced technology does not automatically lead to a great game.

If you were to ask my advice, I would suggest that you enjoy Interstate ’76, the only computer game I’ve written about today that transcends the time and circumstances of its creation, and consign the rest to history. But remember: whatever you do, don’t get out of the car.


Where to Get Them: Due doubtless to the complications of licensing, all of the BattleTech and MechWarrior computer games described in this article are out of print. Interstate ’76, however, is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com. Unfortunately, it can be a frustrating game to get working properly on modern Windows, and the version that’s for sale does less than you might expect to help you. In many cases, it seems to degrade rather than fail outright, often in pernicious ways: missions are glitched so as to become impossible to complete, etc. There are solutions out there — I’d suggest starting on the GOG.com forums and the PC Gaming Wiki — but all require some technical expertise. Further, different solutions seem to work (and not work) on different computers, making it impossible for me to point you to a single foolproof set of instructions here. I wish it were otherwise, believe me — this game deserves to be played — but I thought it best to warn you right here. It breaks my heart to say this, but if you aren’t ready to roll up your sleeves, this may be one to just watch on YouTube.



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


Sources: The book Designers & Dragons: The 80s by Sheldon Appelcline. Next Generation of November 1996 and November 1998; Computer Gaming World of January 1989, December 1989, November 1990, February 1991, June 1992, July 1995, August 1996, June 1997, July 1997, July 1998, and January 1999; Space Gamer of July/August 1983; Dragon of March 1988. Online sources include Online Gaming Review‘s interview with Internet ’76 producer Scott Krager, an “overview” and “history” of MechWarrior 2 at Local Ditch Gaming, early MechWarrior 2 programmer Eric Peterson’s beginning of a history of his work on the game, Polygon‘s interview with Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock, and the Interstate ’76 wiki. Also Sarna.net’s surveys of The Crescent Hawk’s Inception, MechWarrior 1, the first would be MechWarrior 2, the finished MechWarrior 2, the MechWarrior 2 soundtrack, and the Mercenaries expansion for MechWarrior 2.

 
 

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Spycraft: The Great Game, Part 2

Warning: this article spoils the ending of Spycraft: The Great Game!

On January 6, 1994, Activision announced in a press release that it was “teaming up with William Colby, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, to develop and publish espionage-thriller videogames.” Soon after, Colby brought his good friend Oleg Kalugin into the mix as well. With the name-brand, front-of-the-box talent for Spycraft: The Great Game — and, if all went swimmingly, its sequels — thus secured, it was time to think about who should do the real work of making it.

Even as late as 1994, Activision’s resurrection from its near-death experience of 1991 was still very much a work in progress. The company was chronically understaffed in relation to its management’s ambitions. To make matters worse, much of the crew that had made Return to Zork, including that project’s mastermind William Volk, had just left. (On balance, this may not have been such a bad thing; that game is so unfair and obtuse as to come off almost as a satire of player-hostile adventure-game design.)

Luckily, Activision’s base in Los Angeles left it well situated, geographically speaking, to become a hotbed of interactive movie-making. Bobby Kotick hired Alan Gershenfeld, a former film critic and logistical enabler for Hollywood, to spearhead his efforts in that direction. Realizing that he still needed help with the interactive part of interactive movies, Gershenfeld in turn took the unusual step of reaching out to Bob Bates, co-founder of the Virginia-based rival studio and publisher Legend Entertainment, to see if he would be interested in designing Spycraft for Activision.

He was very interested. One reason for this was that Legend lived perpetually hand to mouth in a sea of bigger fish, and couldn’t afford to look askance at paying work of almost any description. But another, better one was that he was a child of the Washington Beltway with a father who had been employed by the National Security Agency. Bates had read his first spy novel before starting high school. Ever since, his literary consumption had included plenty of Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum, and John Le Carré. It was thus with no small excitement that he agreed to spend 600 hours creating a script and design document for an espionage game, which Legend’s programmers and artists might also end up playing a role in bringing to fruition if all went well.

At this time, writers of espionage fiction and techno-thrillers were still trying to figure out what the recent ending of the Cold War meant for their trade. Authors like those Bates had grown up reading were trying out international terrorist gangs, mafiosi, and drug runners as replacements for that handy all-purpose baddie the Soviet Union. Activision faced the same problem with Spycraft. One alternative — the most logical one in a way, given the time spans of its two star advisors’ intelligence careers — was to look to the past, to make the game a work of historical fiction. But the reality was that there was little appetite for re-fighting the Cold War in the popular culture of the mid-1990s; that would have to wait until a little later, until the passage of time had given those bygone days of backyard fallout shelters and duck-and-cover drills a glow of nostalgia to match that of radioactivity. In the meanwhile, Activision wanted something fresh, something with the sort of ripped-from-the-headlines relevance that Ken Williams liked to talk about.

Bates settled on a story line involving Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, that unstable fledgling democracy whose inheritance from the Soviet Union encompassed serious organized-crime and corruption problems along with the ongoing potential to initiate thermonuclear Armageddon any time it chose to do so. He prepared a 25,000-word walkthrough of a plot whose broad strokes would survive into the finished game. Changing the names of all of the real-world leaders involved in order to keep the lawyers at bay, it hinged around a race for the Russian presidency involving a moderate, Yeltsin-like incumbent and two right-wing opposition candidates. When one of the latter is assassinated, it redounds greatly to the benefit of his counterpart; the two right-wingers had otherwise looked likely to split the vote between themselves and hand the presidency back to the incumbent. So, there are reasons for suspicion from the get-go, and the surviving opposition candidate’s established ties with the Russian Mafia only gives more reasons. That said, it would presumably be a matter for Russia’s internal security police alone — if only the assassination hadn’t been carried out with an experimental CIA weapon, a new type of sniper rifle that can fire a deadly accurate and brutally lethal package of flechettes over long distances. It seems that there is a mole in the agency, possibly one with an agenda to incriminate the United States in the killing.

On the one hand, one can see in this story line some of the concerns that William Colby and Oleg Kalugin were expressing in the press at the time. On the other, they were hardly alone in identifying the instability of internal political Russia as a threat to the whole world, what with that country’s enormous nuclear arsenal. Bates himself says that he quickly realized that Activision was content to use Colby and Kalugin essentially as a commercial license, much like it would a hit movie or book. In the more than six months that he worked on Spycraft, he met Colby in person only one time, at his palatial Georgetown residence. (“It was clear that he was wealthy. He was very old-school. Circumspect, as you might imagine.”) Kalugin he never met at all. Fortunately, Legend’s niche in recent years had become the adaptation of commercial properties into games, and thus Bates had become very familiar with playing in other people’s universes, as it were. The milieu inhabited by Colby and Kalugin, as described by the two men in their memoirs, became in an odd sort of way just another of these pocket universes.

In other ways, however, Bates proved less suited to the game Activision was imagining. He was as traditionalist as adventure-game designers came, having originally founded Legend with the explicit goal of making it the heir to Infocom’s storied legacy. Activision’s leadership kept complaining that his design was not exciting enough, not “explosive” enough, too “tame.” To spice it up, they brought in an outside consultant named James Adams, a British immigrant to the United States who had written seven nonfiction books on the worlds of espionage and covert warfare along with three fictional thrillers. In the early fall of 1994, Bates, Adams, and some of Activision’s executives had a conversation which is seared on Bates’s memory like nothing else involving Spycraft.

They were saying it wasn’t intense or exciting enough. We were just kicking around ideas, and as a joke I said, “Well, we could always do a torture scene.”

And they said, “Yes! Yes!”

And I said, “No! No! I’m kidding. We’re not going to do that.”

And they said, “Yes, we really want to do that.”

And I said, “No. I am not putting the player in a position where they have to commit an act of torture. I just won’t do that.” At that point, the most violent thing I’d ever put into a game was having a boar charge onto a spear in Arthur

Shortly after this discussion, Bates accepted Activision’s polite thanks for his contributions along with his paycheck for 600 hours of his time, and bowed out to devote himself entirely to Legend’s own games once again. Neither he nor his company had any involvement with Spycraft after that. His name doesn’t even appear in the finished game’s credits.

James Adams now took over full responsibility for the convoluted script, wrestling it into shape for production to begin in earnest by the beginning of 1995. The final product was released on Leap Day, 1996. It isn’t the game Bates would have made, but neither is it the uniformly thoughtless, exploitive one he might have feared its becoming when he walked away. What appears for long stretches to be a rah-rah depiction of the CIA — exactly what you might expect from a game made in partnership with one of the agency’s former directors — betrays from time to time an understanding of the moral bankruptcy of the spy business that is more John Le Carré than Ian Fleming. In the end, it sends you away with a distinctly queasy feeling about the things you’ve done and the logic you’ve used to justify them. All due credit goes to James Adams for delivering a game that’s more subtle than the one Activision — and probably Colby and Kalugin as well — thought they were getting.

But let’s table that topic for the moment, while I first go over the ways in which Spycraft also succeeds in being an unusually fun interactive procedural, the digital equivalent of a page-turning airport read.

Being a product of its era, Spycraft relies heavily on canned video clips of real actors. It’s distinguished, however, by the unusual quality of same, thanks to what must have been a substantial budget and to the presence of movie-making veterans like Alan Gershenfeld on Activision’s payroll. It was Gershenfeld who hired Ken Berris, an experienced director of music videos and commercials, to run the video shoots; he may not have been Steven Spielberg, but he was a heck of a lot more qualified than most people who fancied themselves interactive-movie auteurs. Most of those other games were shot like the movies of the 1930s, with the actors speaking their lines on a static sound stage before a fixed camera. Berris, by contrast, has seen Citizen Kane; he mostly shoots on location rather than in front of green screens that are waiting to be filled in with computer graphics later, and his environments are alive, with a camera that moves through them. Spycraft‘s bravura opening sequence begins with a single long take shown from your point of view as you sign in at CIA headquarters and walk deeper into the building. I will go so far as to say that this painstakingly choreographed and shot high-wire act, involving several dozen extras moving through a space along with the camera and hitting their marks just so, might be the most technically impressive live-action video sequence I’ve ever seen in a game. It wouldn’t appear at all out of place in a prestige television show or a feature film. Suffice to say that it’s light years beyond the hammy amateurism of something like The 7th Guest, a sign of how far the industry had come in only a few years, just before the collapse of the adventure market put an end to the era of big-budget live-action interactive movies for better or for worse.


There are no stars among the journeyman cast of supporting players, but there are at least a few faces and voices that might ring a bell somewhere at the back of your memory, thanks to their regular appearances in commercials, television shows, and films. Although some of the actors are better than others, by the usual B-movie standards of the 1990s games industry the performances as a whole are first rate. Both William Colby and Oleg Kalugin also appear in the game, playing themselves. Colby becomes an advisor of sorts to you, popping up from time to time to offer insights on your investigations; Kalugin has only one short and rather pointless cameo, dropping into the office for a brief aside when you’re meeting with another agent of Russia’s state-security apparatus. Both men acquit themselves unexpectedly well in their roles, undemanding though they may be. I can only conclude that all those years of pretending to be other people while engaged in the espionage trade must have been good training for acting in front of a camera.

You play a rookie CIA agent who is identified only as “Thorn.” You never actually appear onscreen; everything is shown from your first-person perspective. Thus you can imagine yourself to be of any gender, race, or appearance that you like. Spycraft still shows traces of the fairly conventional adventure-game structure it would doubtless have had if Bob Bates had continued as its lead designer: you have an inventory that you need to dig into from time to time, and will occasionally find yourself searching rooms and the like, using an interface not out of keeping with that found in Legend’s own contemporaneous graphic adventures, albeit built from still photographs rather than hand-drawn pixel art.

A lock pick should do the trick here…

But those parts of the game take up a relatively small part of your time. Mostly, Thorn lives in digital rather than meat space, reading and responding to a steady stream of emails, poking around in countless public and private databases, and using a variety of computerized tools that have come along to transform the nature of spying since the Cold War heyday of Colby and Kalugin. These tools — read, “mini-games” — take the place of the typical adventure game’s set-piece puzzles. In the course of playing Spycraft, you’ll have to ferret out license-plate numbers and the like from grainy satellite images; trace the locations of gunmen by analyzing bullet trajectories (this requires the use of the aptly named “Kennedy Assassination Tool”); identify faces captured by surveillance cameras; listen to phone taps; decode secret messages hidden in Usenet post headers; doctor photographs; trace suspects’ travels using airline-reservation systems and Department of Treasury banknote databases; even run a live exfiltration operation over a digital link-up.

The tactical exfiltration mini-game is the most ambitious of them all, reminding me of a similar one in Sid Meier’s Covert Action, another espionage game whose design approach is otherwise the exact opposite of Spycraft‘s. It’s good enough that I kind of wish it was used more than once.

These mini-games serve their purpose well. If most of them are too simplistic to be very compelling in the long term, well, they don’t need to be; most of them only turn up once. Their purpose is to trip you up just long enough to give you a thrill of triumph when you figure them out and are rocketed onward to the next plot twist. Spycraft is meant to be an impressionistic thrill ride, what Rick Banks of Artech Digital Productions liked to call an “aesthetic simulation” back in the 1980s. If you find yourself complaining that you’re almost entirely on rails, you’re playing the wrong game; the whole point of Spycraft is the subjective experience of living out a spy movie, not presenting you with “interesting decisions” of the sort favored by more purist game designers like Sid Meier.

In Spycraft, you roam a simulated version of cyberspace using a Web-browser interface, complete with “Home,” “Back,” and “Forward” buttons — a rather remarkable inclusion, considering how new the very notion of browsing the Web still was when this game was released in February of 1996. The game even included a real online component: some of the sites you could access through the games received live updates if your computer was connected to the real Internet. Thankfully, nothing critical to completing the game was communicated in this way, for these sites are all, needless to say, long gone today.

As is par for the course with spy stories, the plot just keeps getting more and more tangled, perchance too much so for its own good. Just in case the murder of a Russian presidential candidate with a weapon stolen from the CIA isn’t enough for you, other threads eventually emerge, involving a gang of terrorists who are attempting to secure a live nuclear bomb and a plan to assassinate the president of the United States when he comes to Russia to sign a nuclear-arms-control agreement. You’re introduced to at least 50 different names, many of them with multiple aliases — again, this is a spy story — in the handful of hours it will take you to play the game. The fact that you spend most of your time at such a remove from them — shuffling through their personnel files and listening to them over phone taps rather than meeting them face to face — only makes it that much harder to keep them all straight, much less feel any real emotional investment in them. There are agents, double agents, triple agents, and, I’m tempted to say, quadruple agents around every corner.

I must confess that I really have no idea how well it all hangs together in the end. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt. I suppose it doesn’t really matter all that much; as I said, there’s only one path through the game, with minimal deviations allowed. Should you ever feel stuck, forward progress is just a matter of rummaging around until you find that email you haven’t read yet, that phone number you haven’t yet dialed, or that mini-game you haven’t yet completed successfully. Spycraft never demands that you understand its skein of conspiracies and conspirators, only that you jump through the series of hoops it sets before you in order to help your alter ego Thorn understand it. And that’s enough to deliver the impressionistic thrill ride it wants to give you.

The plot is as improbable as it is gnarly, making plenty of concessions to the need to entertain; it strains credibility to say the least that a rookie agent would be assigned to lead three separate critical investigations at the same time. And yet the game does demonstrate that it knows a thing or two about the state of the world. Indeed, it can come across as almost eerily prescient today, and not only for its recognition that a hollowed-out Russia with an aggressively revanchist leader could become every bit as great a threat to the democratic West as the Soviet Union once was. It also recognizes what an incredible tool for mass surveillance and oppression the Internet and other forms of networked digital technology were already becoming in 1996, seventeen years before the stunning revelations by Edward Snowden about the activities of the United States’s own National Security Agency. And then there is the torture so unwittingly proposed by Bob Bates, which did indeed make it into the game, some seven years before the first rumors began to emerge that the real CIA was engaging in what it called “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the name of winning the War on Terror.

Let’s take a moment now to look more closely at how Spycraft deals with this fraught subject in particular. Doing so should begin to show how this game is more morally conflicted than its gung-ho surface presentation might lead you to expect.

Let me first make one thing very clear: you don’t have to engage in torture to win Spycraft. This is one of the few places where you do have a measure of agency in choosing your path. The possibility of employing torture as a means to your ends is introduced about a third of the way into the game, after your colleagues have captured one Ying Chungwang, a former operative for North Korea, now a mercenary on the open market who has killed several CIA agents at the behest of various employers. She’s the Bonnie to another rogue operative’s Clyde. Your superiors suggest that you might be able to turn her by convincing her that her lover has also been captured and has betrayed her; this you can do by making a fake photograph of him looking relaxed and cooperative in custody. But there may also be another way to turn her, a special gadget hidden in the basement of the American embassy in Moscow, involving straps, electrodes, and high-voltage wiring. Most of your superiors strongly advise against using it: “There’s something called the Geneva Convention, Thorn, and we’d like to abide by it. Simply put, what you’re considering is illegal. Let’s not get dirty on this one.” Still, one does have to wonder why they keep it around if they’re so opposed to it…

Coincidentally or not, the photo-doctoring mini-game is easily the most frustrating of them all, an exercise in trial and error that’s made all the worse by the fact that you aren’t quite sure what you’re trying to create in the first place. You might therefore feel an extra temptation to just say screw it and head on down to the torture chamber. If you do, another, more chilling sort of mini-game ensues, in which you must pump enough electric current through your victim to get her to talk, without turning the dial so high that you kill her. “It burns!” she screams as you twist the knob. If you torture like Goldilocks — not too little, not too much — she breaks down eventually and tells you everything you want to know. And that’s that. Nobody ever mentions what happened in that basement again.

What are we to make of this? We might wish that the game would deliver Thorn some sort of comeuppance for this horrid deed. Maybe Ying could give you bad intelligence just to stop the pain, or you could get automatically hauled away to prison as soon as you leave the basement, as does happen if you kill her by using too much juice. But if there’s one thing we can learn from the lives of Colby and Kalugin, it’s that such an easy, cause-and-effect moral universe isn’t the one inhabited by spies. Yes, torture does often yield bad intelligence; in the 1970s, Colby claimed this was a reason the CIA was not in the habit of using it, a utilitarian argument which has been repeated again and again in the decades since to skeptics who aren’t convinced that the agency’s code of ethics alone would be enough to cause it to resist the temptation. Yet torture is not unique in being fallible; other interrogation techniques have weaknesses of their own, and can yield equally bad intelligence. The decision to torture or not to torture shouldn’t be based on its efficacy or lack thereof. Doing so just leads us back to the end-justifies-the-means utilitarianism that permitted the CIA and the KGB to commit so many outrages, with the full complicity of upstanding patriots like Colby and Kalugin who were fully convinced that everything they did was for the greater good. In the end, the decision not to torture must be a matter of moral principle if we are ever to trust the people making it.

Then again, if you had hold of an uncooperative member of a terrorist cell that was about to detonate an atomic bomb in a major population center, what would you do? This is where the slippery slope begins. The torture scene in Spycraft is deeply disturbing, but I don’t think that James Adams put it there strictly for the sake of sensationalism. Ditto the lack of consequences that follow. In the real world, virtue must often be its own reward, and the wages of sin are often a successful career. I think I’m glad that Spycraft recognizes this and fails to engage in any tit-for-tat vision of temporal justice — disturbed, yes, but oddly proud of the game at the same time. I’m not sure that I would have had the guts to put torture in there myself, but I’m convinced by some of the game’s other undercurrents that it was put there for purposes other than shock value. (Forgive the truly dreadful pun…)

Let’s turn the clock back to the very beginning of the game for an example. The first thing you see when you click the “New Game” button is the CIA’s official Boy Scout-esque values statement: “We conduct ourselves according to the highest standards of integrity, morality, and honor, and to the spirit and letter of our law and constitution.” Meanwhile a gruffer, more cynical voice is telling you how it really is: “Some things the president shouldn’t know. For a politician, ignorance can be the key to survival, so the facts might be… flexible. The best thing you can do is to treat your people right… and watch every move they make.” It’s a brilliant juxtaposition, culminating in the irony that is the agency’s hilariously overwrought Biblical motto: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” And then we’re walking into CIA headquarters, an antiseptic place filled with well-scrubbed, earnest-looking people, and that note of moral ambiguity is forgotten for the nonce as we “build the team” for a new “op.”


But as you play on, the curtain keeps wafting aside from time to time to reveal another glimpse of an underlying truth that you — or Thorn, at least — may not have signed on for. One who has seen this truth and not been set free is a spy known as Birdsong, a mole in the Russian defense establishment who first started leaking secrets to the CIA because he was alarmed by some of his more reactionary colleagues and genuinely thought it was the right thing to do. He gets chewed up and spit out by both sides. “I can tell the truth from lies no more,” he says in existential despair. “Everything is blurry. This has been hell. Everyone has betrayed me and I have betrayed everyone.” Many an initially well-meaning spy in the real world has wound up saying the same.

And then — and most of all — there’s the shocking, unsatisfying, but rather amazingly brave ending of the game. By this point, the plot has gone through more twists and turns than a Klein bottle, and the CIA has decided it would prefer for the surviving Russian opposition candidate to win the election after all, because only he now looks likely to sign the arms-control treaty that the American president whom the CIA serves so desperately desires. Unfortunately, one Yuri, a dedicated and incorruptible Russian FSB agent who has been helping you throughout your investigations, is still determined to bring the candidate down for his entanglements with the Russian Mafia. In the very last interactive scene of the game, you can choose to let Yuri take the candidate into custody and uphold the rule of law in a country not much known for it, which will also result in the arms-control agreement failing to go through and you getting drummed out of the CIA. Or you can shoot your friend Yuri in cold blood, allowing the candidate to become the new president of Russia and escape any sort of reckoning for his crimes — but also getting the arms-control agreement passed, and getting yourself a commendation.

As adventure-game endings go, it’s the biggest slap in the face to the player since Infocom’s Infidel, upending her moral universe at a stroke. It becomes obvious now, if we still doubted it, that James Adams appreciates very well the perils of trying to achieve worthy goals by unworthy means. Likewise, he appreciates the dangers that are presented to a free society by a secretive institution like the CIA — an arrogant institution, which too often throughout its history has been convinced that it is above the moral reckoning of tedious ground dwellers. Perhaps he even sees how a man like William Colby could become a reflection of the agency he served, could be morally and spiritually warped by it until it had cost him his family and his faith. “Uniquely in the American bureaucracy,” wrote Colby in his memoir, “the CIA understood the necessity to combine political, psychological, and paramilitary tools to carry out a strategic concept of pressure on an enemy or to strengthen an incumbent.” When you begin to believe that only you and “your” people are “uniquely” capable of understanding anything, you’ve started down a dangerous road indeed, one that before long will allow you to do almost anything in the name of some ineffable greater good, using euphemisms like “pressure” in place of “assassinate,” “strengthen an incumbent” in place of “interfere in a sovereign foreign country’s elections” — or, for that matter, “enhanced interrogation techniques” in place of “torture.”

Spycraft is a fascinating, self-contradictory piece of work, slick but subversive, escapist but politically aware, simultaneously carried away by the fantasy of being a high-tech spy with gadgets and secrets to burn and painfully aware of the yawning ethical abyss that lies at the end of that path. Like the trade it depicts, the game sucks you in, then it repulses you. Nevertheless, you should by all means play it. And as you do so, be on the lookout for the other points of friction where it seems to be at odds with its own box copy.

Spycraft wasn’t a commercial success. It arrived too late for that, at the beginning of the year that rather broke the back of interactive movies and adventure games in general. Thus the Spycraft II that is boldly promised during the end credits never appeared. Luckily, Activision was in a position to absorb the failure of their conflicted spy game. For the company was already changing with the times, riding high on the success of Mechwarrior 2, a 3D action game in which you drive a giant robot into combat. “How about a big mech with an order to fry?” ran its tagline; this was the very definition of pure escapism. Mainstream gaming, it turned out, was not destined to be such a ripped-from-the-headlines affair after all.



I do wonder sometimes whether Colby and Kalugin ever knew what a bleak note their one and only game ended on. Somehow I suspect not. It was, after all, just another business deal to them, another way of cashing in on the careers they had put behind them. Their respective memoirs tell us that both were very, very smart men, but neither comes across as overly introspective. I’m not sure they would even recognize what a telling commentary Spycraft‘s moral bleakness is on their own lives.

It was just two months after the game’s release that William Colby disappeared from his vacation home. When his body turned up on May 6, 1996, those few people who had both bought the game and been following the manhunt were confronted with an eyebrow-raising coincidence. For it just so happens that the CIA’s flechette gun isn’t the only experimental weapon you encounter in the course of the game. Later on, an even more devious one turns up, a sort of death ray that can kill its victims without leaving a mark on them — that causes them to die from what appears to be a massive coronary arrest. The coroner who examined Colby’s body insisted that he must have had a “cardiovascular incident,” despite having no previous history of heart disease. Hmm…

The case of Colby’s demise has never been officially reopened, but one more theory has been added to those of death by misadventure and death by murder since 1996. His son Carl Colby, who made a documentary film about his father in 2011, believes that he took his own life purposefully. “I think he’d had enough of this life,” he reveals at the end of his film. “He called me two weeks before he died, asking for my absolution for his not doing enough for my sister Catherine when she was so ill. When his body was found, he was carrying a picture of my sister.” In a strange way, it does seem consistent with this analytical, distant man, for whom brutal necessities were a stock in trade, to calmly eat his dinner, get into his canoe, paddle out from shore, and drown himself.

Oleg Kalugin, on the other hand, lived on. Russia’s new President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent himself, opened a legal case against Kalugin shortly after he took office, charging him with “disclosing sources and methods” in his 1994 memoir that he had sworn an oath to keep secret. Kalugin was already living in the United States at that time, and has not dared to return to his homeland since. From 2002, when a Russian court pronounced him guilty as charged, he has lived under the shadow of a lengthy prison sentence, or worse, should the Russian secret police ever succeed in taking him into custody. In light of the fate that has befallen so many other prominent critics of Russia’s current regime, one has to assume that he continues to watch his back carefully even today, at age 88. You can attempt to leave the great game, but the great game never leaves you.

(Sources: the book Game Plan by Alan Gershenfeld, Mark Loparco, and Cecilia Barajas; the documentary film The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby; Sierra On-Line’s newsletter InterAction of Summer 1993; Questbusters of February 1994; Electronic Entertainment of December 1995; Mac Addict of September 1996; Next Generation of February 1996; Computer Gaming World of July 1996; New York Times of January 6 1994 and June 27 2002. And thanks as always to Bob Bates for taking the time to talk to me about his long career in games.

Spycraft: The Great Game is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com.)

 
 

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

Police recover William Colby’s body on the coast of Maryland, May 6, 1996.

The last people known to have seen William Colby alive are a cottage caretaker and his sister. They bumped into the former head of the CIA early on the evening of April 27, 1996, watering the willow trees around his vacation home on Neale Sound in Maryland, about 60 miles south of Washington, D.C. The trio chatted together for a few minutes about the fine weather and about the repairs Colby had spent the day doing to his sailboat, which was moored in the marina on Cobb Island, just across the sound. Then the caretaker and his sister went on their way. Everything seemed perfectly normal to them.

The next morning, a local handyman, his wife, and their two children out on the water in their motorboat spotted a bright green canoe washed up against a spit of land that extended from the Maryland shore. The canoe appeared to be abandoned. Moving in to investigate, they found that it was full of sand. This was odd, thought the handyman; he had sailed past this same place the day before without seeing the canoe, and yet so much sand could hardly have collected in it naturally over the course of a single night. It was almost as if someone had deliberately tried to sink the canoe. Oh, well; finders keepers. It really was a nice little boat. He and his family spent several hours shoveling out the sand, then towed the canoe away with them.

In the meantime, Colby’s next-door neighbor was surprised not to see him out and about. The farthest thing from a layabout, the wiry 76-year-old was usually up early, puttering about with something or other around his cottage or out on the sound. Yet now he was nowhere to be seen outside and didn’t answer his door, even though his car was still in the driveway and the neighbor thought she could hear a radio playing inside the little house. Peeking around back, she saw that Colby’s green canoe was gone. At first, she thought the mystery was solved. But as the day wore on and he failed to return, she grew more and more concerned. At 7:00 that evening, she called the police.

When they arrived, the police found that both doors to the cottage were unlocked. The radio was indeed turned on, as was Colby’s computer. Even weirder, a half-eaten meal lay in the sink, surrounded by unwashed dishes and half a glass of white wine. It wasn’t at all like the man not to clean up after himself. And his wallet and keys were also lying there on the table. Why on earth would he go out paddling without them?

Inquiries among the locals soon turned up Colby’s canoe and the story of its discovery. Clearly something was very wrong here. The police ordered a search. Two helicopters, twelve divers, and 100 volunteers in boats pulling drag-lines behind them scoured the area, while CIA agents also arrived to assist the investigation into the disappearance of one of their own; their presence was nothing to be alarmed at, they assured everyone, just standard procedure. Despite the extent of the search effort, it wasn’t until the morning of May 6, nine days after he was last seen, that William Colby’s body was found washed up on the shore, just 130 feet from where the handyman had found his canoe, but on the other side of the same spit of land. It seemed that Colby must have gone canoeing on the lake, then fallen overboard and drowned. He was 76 years old, after all.

But the handyman who had found the canoe, who knew these waters and their currents as well as anyone, didn’t buy this. He was sure that the body could not have gotten so separated from the canoe as to wind up on the opposite side of the spit. And why had it taken it so long to wash up on shore? Someone must have gone out and planted it there later on, he thought. Knowing Colby’s background, and having seen enough spy movies to know what happened to inconvenient witnesses in cases like this one, he and his family left town and went into hiding.

The coroner noticed other oddities. Normally a body that has been in the water a week or more is an ugly, bloated sight. But Colby’s was bizarrely well-preserved, almost as if it had barely spent any time in the water at all. And how could the divers and boaters have missed it for so long, so close to shore as it was?

Nonetheless, the coroner concluded that Colby had probably suffered a “cardiovascular incident” while out in his canoe, fallen into the water, and drowned. This despite the fact that he had had no known heart problems, and was in general in a physical shape that would have made him the envy of many a man 30 years younger than he was. Nor could the coroner explain why he had chosen to go canoeing long after dark, something he was most definitely not wont to do. (It had been dusk already when the caretaker and his sister said goodbye to him, and he had presumably sat down to his dinner after that.) Why had he gone out in such a rush, leaving his dinner half-eaten and his wine half-drunk, leaving his radio and computer still turned on, leaving his keys and wallet lying there on the table? It just didn’t add up in the eyes of the locals and those who had known Colby best.

But that was that. Case closed. The people who lived around the sound couldn’t help but think about the CIA agents lurking around the police station and the morgue, and wonder at everyone’s sudden eagerness to put a bow on the case and be done with it…


Unusually for a septuagenarian retired agent of the security state, William Colby had also been a game developer, after a fashion at least. In fact, at the time of his death a major game from a major publisher that bore his name very prominently right on the front of the box had just reached store shelves. This article and the next will partly be the story of the making of that game. But they will also be the story of William Colby himself, and of another character who was surprisingly similar to him in many ways despite being his sworn enemy for 55 years — an enemy turned friend who consulted along with him on the game and appeared onscreen in it alongside him. Then, too, they will be an inquiry into some of the important questions the game raises but cannot possibly begin to answer.


Sierra’s Police Quest: Open Season, created with the help of controversial former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, was one of the few finished products to emerge from a brief-lived vision of games as up-to-the-minute, ripped-from-the-headlines affairs. Spycraft: The Great Game was another.

Activision’s Spycraft: The Great Game is the product of a very specific era of computer gaming, when “multimedia” and “interactive movies” were among the buzzwords of the zeitgeist. Most of us who are interested in gaming history today are well aware of the set of technical and aesthetic approaches these terms imply: namely, games built from snippets of captured digitized footage of real actors, with interactivity woven as best the creators can manage between these dauntingly large chunks of static content.

There was a certain ideology that sometimes sprang up in connection with this inclusion of real people in games, a belief that it would allow games to become relevant to the broader culture in a way they never had before, tackling stories, ideas, and controversies that ordinary folks were talking about around their kitchen tables. At the margins, gaming could almost become another form of journalism. Ken Williams, the founder and president of Sierra On-Line, was the most prominent public advocate for this point of view, as exemplified by his decision to make a game with Daryl F. Gates, the chief of police for Los Angeles during the riots that convulsed that city in the spring of 1992. Williams, writing during the summer of 1993, just as the Gates game was being released:

I want to find the top cop, lawyer, airline pilot, fireman, race-car driver, politician, military hero, schoolteacher, white-water rafter, mountain climber, etc., and have them work with us on a simulation of their world. Chief Gates gives us the cop game. We are working with Emerson Fittipaldi to simulate racing, and expect to announce soon that Vincent Bugliosi, the lawyer who locked up Charles Manson, will be working with us to do a courtroom simulation. My goal is that products in the Reality Role-Playing series will be viewed as serious simulations of real-world events, not games. If we do our jobs right, this will be the closest most of us will ever get to seeing the world through these people’s eyes.

It sounded good in theory, but would never get all that far in practice, for a whole host of reasons: a lack of intellectual bandwidth and sufficient diversity of background in the games industry to examine complex social questions in an appropriately multi-faceted way (the jingoistic Gates game is a prime case in point here); a lack of good ideas for turning such abstract themes into rewarding forms of interactivity, especially when forced to work with the canned video snippets that publishers like Sierra deemed an essential part of the overall vision; the expense of the games themselves, the expense of the computers needed to run them, and the technical challenges involved in getting them running, which in combination created a huge barrier to entry for newcomers from outside the traditional gamer demographics; and, last but not least, the fact that those existing gamers who did meet all the prerequisites were generally perfectly happy with more blatantly escapist entertainments, thank you very much. Tellingly, none of the game ideas Ken Williams mentions above ever got made. And I must admit that this failure does not strike me as any great loss for world culture.

That said, Williams, being the head of one of the two biggest American game publishers, had a lot of influence on the smaller ones when he prognosticated on the future of the industry. Among the latter group was Activision, a toppled giant which had been rescued from the dustbin of bankruptcy in 1991 by a young wheeler-dealer named Bobby Kotick. His version of the company got fully back onto its feet the same year that Williams wrote the words above, thanks largely to Return to Zork, a cutting-edge multimedia evocation of the Infocom text adventures of yore, released at the perfect time to capitalize on a generation of gamers’ nostalgia for those bygone days of text and parsers (whilst not actually asking them to read much or to type out their commands, of course).

With that success under their belts, Kotick and his cronies thought about what to do next. Adventure games were hot — Myst, the bestselling adventure of all time, was released at the end of 1993 — and Ken Williams’s ideas about famous-expert-driven “Reality Role-Playing” were in the air. What might they do with that? And whom could they get to help them do it?

They hit upon espionage, a theme that, in contrast to many of those outlined by Williams, seemed to promise a nice balance of ripped-from-the-headlines relevance with interesting gameplay potential. Then, when they went looking for the requisite famous experts, they hit the mother lode with William Colby, the head of the CIA from September of 1973 to January of 1976, and Oleg Kalugin, who had become the youngest general in the history of the First Central Directorate of the Soviet Committee for State Security, better known as the KGB, in 1974.

I’ll return to Spycraft itself in due course. But right now, I’d like to examine the lives of these two men, which parallel one another in some perhaps enlightening ways. Rest assured that in doing so I’m only following the lead of Activision’s marketers; they certainly wanted the public to focus first and foremost on the involvement of Colby and Kalugin in their game.


William Colby (center), looking every inch the dashing war hero in Norway just after the end of World War II.

William Colby was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on January 4, 1920. He was the only child of Elbridge Colby, a former soldier and current university professor who would soon rejoin the army as an officer and spend the next 40 years in the service. His family was deeply Catholic — his father thanks to a spiritual awakening and conversion while a student at university, his mother thanks to long family tradition. The son too absorbed the ethos of a stern but loving God and the necessity of serving Him in ways both heavenly and worldly.

The little family bounced around from place to place, as military families generally do. They wound up in China for three years starting in 1929, where young Bill learned a smattering of Chinese and was exposed for the first time to the often compromised ethics of real-world politics, in this case in the form of the United States’s support for the brutal dictatorship of Chiang Kei-shek. Colby’s biographer Randall Bennett Woods pronounces his time in China “one of the formative influences of his life.” It was, one might say, a sort of preparation for the many ugly but necessary alliances — necessary as Colby would see them, anyway — of the Cold War.

At the age of seventeen, Colby applied to West Point, but was rejected because of poor eyesight. He settled instead for Princeton, a university whose faculty included Albert Einstein among many other prominent thinkers. Colby spent the summer of 1939 holidaying in France, returning home just after the fateful declarations of war in early September, never imagining that the idyllic environs in which he had bicycled and picnicked and practiced his French on the local girls would be occupied by the Nazis well before another year had passed. Back at Princeton, he made the subject of his senior thesis the ways in which France’s weakness had allowed the Nazi threat on its doorstep to grow unchecked. This too was a lesson that would dominate his worldview throughout the decades to come. After graduating, Colby received his officer’s commission in the United States Army, under the looming shadow of a world war that seemed bound to engulf his own country sooner or later.

When war did come on December 7, 1941, he was working as an artillery instructor at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. To his immense frustration, the Army thought he was doing such a good job in that role that it was inclined to leave him there. “I was afraid the war would be over before I got a chance to fight,” he writes in his memoir. He therefore leaped at the opportunity when he saw an advertisement on a bulletin board for volunteers to become parachutists with the 82nd Airborne. He tried to pass the entrance physical by memorizing the eye chart. The doctor wasn’t fooled, but let him in anyway: “I guess your eyesight is good enough for you to see the ground.”

Unfortunately, he broke his ankle in a training jump, and was forced to watch, crestfallen, as his unit shipped out to Europe without him. Then opportunity came calling again, in a chance to join the new Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Just as the CIA would later on, the OSS had two primary missions: foreign intelligence gathering and active but covert interference. Colby was to be dropped behind enemy lines, whence he would radio back reports of enemy troop movements and organize resistance among the local population. It would be, needless to say, an astonishingly dangerous undertaking. But that was the way Colby wanted it.

William Colby finally left for Britain in December of 1943, aboard the British luxury liner Queen Elizabeth, now refitted to serve as a troop transport. It was in a London bookstore that he first encountered another formative influence, the book Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence — the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, who had convinced the peoples of the Middle East to rise up against their Turkish overlords during the last world war. Lawrence’s book was, Colby would later say, an invaluable example of “an outsider operat[ing] within the political framework of a foreign people.” It promptly joined the Catholic Bible as one of the two texts Colby carried with him everywhere he went.

As it happened, he had plenty of time for reading: the weeks and then months passed in Britain, and still there came no orders to go into action. There was some talk of using Colby and his fellow American commandos to sow chaos during the run-up to D-Day, but this role was given to British units in the end. Instead Colby watched from the sideline, seething, as the liberation of France began. Then, out of the blue, action orders came at last. On the night of August 14, 1944, Colby and two exiled French soldiers jumped out of a B-24 bomber flying over central France.

The drop was botched; the men landed fifteen miles away from the intended target, finding themselves smack dab in the middle of a French village instead of out in the woods. Luckily, there were no Germans about, and the villagers had no desire to betray them. There followed a hectic, doubtless nerve-wracking month, during which Colby and his friends made contact with the local resistance forces and sent back to the advancing Allied armies valuable information about German troop movements and dispositions. Once friendly armies reached their position, the commandos made their way back to the recently liberated Paris, thence to London. It had been a highly successful mission, with more than enough danger and derring-do to suffice for one lifetime in the eyes of most people. But for Colby it all felt a bit anticlimactic; he had never even discharged his weapon at the enemy. Knowing that his spoken German wasn’t good enough to carry out another such mission behind the rapidly advancing Western European front, Colby requested a transfer to China.

He got another offer instead. Being an accomplished skier, he was asked to lead 35 commandos into the subarctic region of occupied Norway, to interdict the German supply lines there. Naturally, he agreed.

The parachute drop that took place on the night of March 24, 1945, turned into another botched job. Only fifteen of the 35 commandos actually arrived; the other planes strayed far off course in the dark and foggy night, accidentally dropping their passengers over neutral Sweden, or giving up and not dropping them at all. But Colby was among the lucky (?) fifteen who made it to their intended destination. Living off the frigid land, he and his men set about dynamiting railroad tracks and tunnels. This time, he got to do plenty of shooting, as his actions frequently brought him face to face with the Wehrmacht.

On the morning of May 7, word came through on the radio that Adolf Hitler was dead and his government had capitulated; the war in Europe was over. Colby now set about accepting the surrender of the same German occupiers he had recently been harassing. While the operation he had led was perhaps of doubtful necessity in the big picture of a war that Germany had already been well along the path of losing, no one could deny that he had demonstrated enormous bravery and capability. He was awarded the Silver Star.

Gung ho as ever, Colby proposed to his superiors upon returning to London that he lead a similar operation into Francisco Franco’s Spain, to precipitate the downfall of that last bastion of fascism in Europe. Having been refused this request, he returned to the United States, still seeming a bit disappointed that it had all ended so quickly. Here he asked for and was granted a discharge from the Army, asked for and was granted the hand in marriage of his university sweetheart Barbara Heinzen, and asked for and was granted a scholarship to law school. He wrote on his application that he hoped to become a lawyer in the cause of organized labor. (Far from the fire-breathing right-wing extremist some of his later critics would characterize him to be, Colby would vote Democrat throughout his life, maintaining a center-left orientation when it came to domestic politics at least.)


Oleg Kalugin at age seventeen, a true believer in Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party.

While the war hero William Colby was seemingly settling into a more staid time of life, another boy was growing up in the heart of the nation that Colby and most other Americans would soon come to regard as their latest great enemy. Born on September 6, 1934, in Leningrad (the once and future Saint Petersburg), Oleg Kalugin was, like Colby, an only child of a couple with an ethic of service, the son of a secret-police agent and a former factory worker, both of whose loyalty to communism was unimpeachable; the boy’s grandmother caused much shouting and hand-wringing in the family when she spirited him away to have him baptized in a furtive Orthodox ceremony in a dark basement. That piece of deviancy notwithstanding, Little Oleg was raised to see Joseph Stalin as his god on earth, the one and only savior of his people.

On June 22, 1941, he was “hunting maybugs with a pretty girl,” as he writes, when he saw a formation of airplanes roar overhead and drop a load of bombs not far away. The war had come to his country, six months before it would reach that of William Colby. With the German armies nearing Leningrad, he and his mother fled to the Siberian city of Omsk while his father stayed behind to fight. They returned to a devastated hometown in the spring of 1944. Oleg’s father had survived the terrible siege, but the boy had lost all of his grandparents — including that gentle soul who had caused him to be baptized — along with four uncles to either starvation or enemy bullets.

Kalugin remained a true believer after the Great Patriotic War was over, joining the Young Communist League as soon as he was eligible at the age of fourteen. At seventeen, he decided to join the KGB; it “seemed like the logical place for a person with my academic abilities, language skills, and fervent desire to fight class enemies, capitalist parasites, and social injustice.” Surprisingly, his father, who had seen rather too much of what Soviet-style class struggle really meant over the last couple of decades, tried to dissuade him. But the boy’s mind was made up. He entered Leningrad’s Institute of Foreign Languages, a shallow front for the training of future foreign agents, in 1952.

When Stalin died in March of the following year, the young zealot wrote in his diary that “Stalin isn’t dead. He cannot die. His physical death is just a formality, one that needn’t deprive people of their faith in the future. The fact that Stalin is still alive will be proven by our country’s every new success, both domestically and internationally.” He was therefore shocked when Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, delivered a speech that roundly condemned the country’s erstwhile savior as a megalomaniac and a mass-murderer who had cynically corrupted the ideology of Marx and Lenin to serve his own selfish ends. It was Kalugin’s initiation into the reality that the state he so earnestly served was less than incorruptible and infallible.

Nevertheless, he kept the faith, moving to Moscow for advanced training in 1956. In 1958, he was selected on the basis of his aptitude for English to go to the United States as a graduate student. “Just lay the foundation for future work,” his superiors told him. “Buy yourself good maps. Improve your English. Find out about their way of life. Communicate with people and make as many friends as possible.” Kalugin’s joyous reaction to this assignment reflects the ambivalence with which young Soviets like him viewed the United States. It was, they fervently believed, the epicenter of the imperialism, capitalism, racism, and classism they hated, and must ultimately be destroyed for that reason. Yet it was also the land of jazz and rock and roll, of fast cars and beautiful women, with a standard of living so different from anything they had ever known that it might as well have been Shangri-La. “I daydreamed constantly about America,” Kalugin admits. “The skyscrapers of New York and Chicago, the cowboys of the West…” He couldn’t believe he was being sent there, and on a sort of paid vacation at that, with few concrete instructions other than to experience as much of the American way of life as he could. Even his sadness about leaving behind the nice Russian girl he had recently married couldn’t overwhelm his giddy excitement.


William Colby in Rome circa 1955, with his son Carl and daughter Catherine.

As Oleg Kalugin prepared to leave for the United States, William Colby was about to return to that same country, where he hadn’t been living for seven years. He had become a lawyer as planned and joined the National Labor Relations Board to forward the cause of organized labor, but his tenure there had proved brief. In 1950, he was convinced to join the new CIA, the counterweight to the KGB on the world stage. He loved his new “band of brothers,” filled as he found it to be with “adventuresome spirits who believed fervently that the communist threat had to be met aggressively, innovatively, and courageously.”

In April of 1951, he took his family with him on his first foreign assignment, under the cover identity of a mid-level diplomatic liaison in Stockholm, Sweden. His real purpose was to build and run an intelligence operation there. (All embassies were nests of espionage in those days, as they still are today.) “The perfect operator in such operations is the traditional gray man, so inconspicuous that he can never catch the waiter’s eye in a restaurant,” Colby wrote. He was — or could become — just such a man, belying his dashing commando past. Small wonder that he proved very adept at his job. The type of spying that William Colby did was, like all real-world espionage, more John Le Carré than Ian Fleming, an incrementalist milieu inhabited by just such quiet gray men as him. Dead-letter drops, secret codes, envelopes stuffed with cash, and the subtle art of recruitment without actually using that word — the vast majority of his intelligence contacts would have blanched at the label of “spy,” having all manner of other ways of defining what they did to themselves and others — were now his daily stock in trade.

In the summer of 1953, Colby and his family left Stockholm for Rome. Still riven by discontent and poverty that the Marshall Plan had never quite been able to quell, with a large and popular communist party that promised the people that it alone could make things better, Italy was considered by both the United States and the Soviet Union to be the European country most in danger of changing sides in the Cold War through the ballot box, making this assignment an unusually crucial one. Once again, Colby performed magnificently. Through means fair and occasionally slightly foul, he propped up Italy’s Christian Democratic Party, the one most friendly to American interests. His wife and five young children would remember these years as their happiest time together, with the Colosseum visible outside their snug little apartment’s windows, with the trapping of their Catholic faith all around them. The sons became altar boys, learning to say Mass in flawless Latin, and Barbara amazed guests with her voluble Italian, which was even better than her husband’s.

She and her children would gladly have stayed in Rome forever, but after five years there her husband was growing restless. The communist threat in Italy had largely dissipated by now, thanks to an improving economy that made free markets seem more of a promise than a threat, and Colby was itching to continue the shadowy struggle elsewhere. In 1958, he was recalled to the States to begin preparing for a new, more exotic assignment: to the tortured Southeast Asian country of Vietnam, which had recently won its independence from France, only to become a battleground between the Western-friendly government of Ngo Dinh Diem and a communist insurgency led by Ho Chi Minh.


Oleg Kalugin (center) at Columbia University, 1958.

While Colby was hitting the books at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in preparation for his latest assignment, Kalugin was doing the same as a philology student on a Fulbright scholarship to New York City’s Columbia University. (Fully half of the eighteen exchange students who traveled with him were also spies-in-training.) A natural charmer, he had no trouble ingratiating himself with the native residents of the Big Apple as he had been ordered to do.

He went home when his one-year scholarship expired, but returned to New York City one year after that, to work as a journalist for Radio Moscow. Now, however, his superiors expected a bit more from him. Despite the wife and young daughter he had left behind, he seduced a string of women who he believed could become valuable informants — so much so that American counter-espionage agents, who were highly suspicious of him, labeled him a “womanizer” and chalked it up as his most obvious weakness, should they ever be in need of one to exploit. (For his part, Kalugin writes that “I always told my officers, male and female, ‘Don’t be afraid of sex.’ If they found themselves in a situation where making love with a foreigner could help our work, I advised them to hop into bed.”)

Kalugin’s unlikely career as Radio Moscow’s foreign correspondent in New York City lasted almost four years in all. He covered — with a pro-Soviet spin, naturally — the election of President John F. Kennedy, the trauma of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassination of Kennedy by a man with Soviet ties. He was finally called home in early 1964, his superiors having decided he was now attracting too much scrutiny from the Americans. He found returning to the dingy streets of Moscow from the Technicolor excitement of New York City to be rather dispiriting. “Worshiping communism from afar was one thing. Living in it was another thing altogether,” he writes wryly, echoing sentiments shared by many an idealistic Western defector for the cause. Shortly after his return, the reform-minded Nikita Khrushchev was ousted in favor of Leonid Brezhnev, a man who looked as tired as the rest of the Soviet Union was beginning to feel. It was hard to remain committed to the communist cause in such an environment as this, but Kalugin continued to do his best.


William Colby, looking rather incongruous in his typical shoe salesman’s outfit in a Vietnamese jungle.

William Colby might have been feeling similar sentiments somewhere behind that chiseled granite façade of his. For he was up to his eyebrows in the quagmire that was Vietnam, the place where all of the world’s idealism seemed to go to die.

When he had arrived in the capital of Saigon in 1959, with his family in tow as usual, he had wanted to treat this job just as he had his previous foreign postings, to work quietly behind the scenes to support another basically friendly foreign government with a communist problem. But Southeast Asia was not Europe, as he learned to his regret — even if the Diem family were Catholic and talked among themselves in French. There were systems of hierarchy and patronage inside the leader’s palace that baffled Colby at every turn. Diem himself was aloof, isolated from the people he ruled, while Ho Chi Minh, who already controlled the northern half of the country completely and had designs on the rest of it, had enormous populist appeal. The type of espionage Colby had practiced in Sweden and Italy — all mimeographed documents and furtive meetings in the backs of anonymous cafés — would have been useless against such a guerilla insurgency even if it had been possible. Which it was not: the peasants fighting for and against the communists were mostly illiterate.

Colby’s thinking gradually evolved, to encompass the creation of a counter-insurgency force that could play the same game as the communists. His mission in the country became less an exercise in pure espionage and overt and covert influencing than one in paramilitary operations. He and his family left Vietnam for Langley in the summer of 1962, but the country was still to fill a huge portion of Colby’s time; he was leaving to become the head of all of the CIA’s Far Eastern operations, and there was no hotter spot in that hot spot of the world than Vietnam. Before departing, the entire Colby family had dinner with President Diem in his palace, whose continental cuisine, delicate furnishings, and manicured gardens almost could lead one to believe one was on the French Riviera rather than in a jungle in Southeast Asia. “We sat there with the president,” remembers Barbara. “There was really not much political talk. Yet there was a feeling that things were not going well in that country.”

Sixteen months later — in fact, just twenty days before President Kennedy was assassinated — Diem was murdered by the perpetrators of a military coup that had gone off with the tacit support of the Americans, who had grown tired of his ineffectual government and felt a change was needed. Colby was not involved in that decision, which came down directly from the Kennedy White House to its ambassador in the country. But, good soldier that he was, he accepted it after it had become a fait accompli. He even agreed to travel to Vietnam in the immediate aftermath, to meet with the Vietnamese generals who had perpetrated the coup and assure them that they had powerful friends in Washington. Did he realize in his Catholic heart of hearts that his nation had forever lost the moral high ground in Vietnam on the day of Diem’s murder? We cannot say.

The situation escalated quickly under the new President Lyndon Johnson, as more and more American troops were sent to fight a civil war on behalf of the South Vietnamese, a war which the latter didn’t seem overly inclined to fight for themselves. Colby hardly saw his family now, spending months at a stretch in the country. Lawrence of Arabia’s prescription for winning over a native population through ethical persuasion and cultural sensitivity was proving unexpectedly difficult to carry out in Vietnam, most of whose people seemed just to want the Americans to go away. It appeared that a stronger prescription was needed.

Determined to put down the Viet Cong — communist partisans in the south of the country who swarmed over the countryside, killing American soldiers and poisoning their relations with the locals — Colby introduced a “Phoenix Program” to eliminate them. It became without a doubt the biggest of all the moral stains on his career. The program’s rules of engagement were not pretty to begin with, allowing for the extra-judicial execution of anyone believed to be in the Viet Cong leadership in any case where arresting him was too “hard.” But it got entirely out of control in practice, as described by James S. Olsen and Randy W. Roberts in their history of the war: “The South Vietnamese implemented the program aggressively, but it was soon laced with corruption and political infighting. Some South Vietnamese politicians identified political enemies as Viet Cong and sent Phoenix hit men after them. The pressure to identify Viet Cong led to a quota system that incorrectly labeled many innocent people the enemy.” Despite these self-evident problems, the Americans kept the program going for years, saying that its benefits were worth the collateral damage. Olsen and Roberts estimate that at least 20,000 people lost their lives as a direct result of Colby’s Phoenix Program. A large proportion of them — possibly even a majority — were not really communist sympathizers at all.

In July of 1971, Colby was hauled before the House Committee on Government Operations by two prominent Phoenix critics, Ogden Reid and Pete McCloskey (both Republicans.) It is difficult to absolve him of guilt for the program’s worst abuses on the basis of his circuitous, lawyerly answers to their straightforward questions.

Reid: Can you state categorically that Phoenix has never perpetrated the premeditated killing of a civilian in a noncombat situation?

Colby: No, I could not say that, but I do not think it happens often. Individual members of it, subordinate people in it, may have done it. But as a program, it is not designed to do that.

McCloskey: Did Phoenix personnel resort to torture?

Colby: There were incidents, and they were treated as an unjustifiable offense. If you want to get bad intelligence, you use bad interrogation methods. If you want to get good intelligence, you had better use good interrogation methods.


Oleg Kalugin (right) receives from Bulgarian security minister Dimitri Stoyanov the Order of the Red Star, thanks largely to his handling of John Walker. The bespectacled man standing between and behind the two is Yuri Andropov, then the head of the KGB, who would later become the fifth supreme leader of the Soviet Union.

During the second half of the 1960s, Oleg Kalugin spent far more time in the United States than did William Colby. He returned to the nation that had begun to feel like more of a home than his own in July of 1965. This time, however, he went to Washington, D.C., instead of New York City. His new cover was that of a press officer for the Soviet Foreign Ministry; his real job was that of a deputy director in the KGB’s Washington operation. He was to be a spy in the enemy’s city of secrets. “By all means, don’t treat it as a desk job,” he was told.

Kalugin took the advice to heart. He had long since developed a nose for those who could be persuaded to share their country’s deepest secrets with him, long since recognized that the willingness to do so usually stemmed from weakness rather than strength. Like a lion on the hunt, he had learned to spot the weakest prey — the nursers of grudges and harborers of regrets; the sexually, socially, or professionally frustrated — and isolate them from the pack of their peers for one-on-one persuasion. At one point, he came upon a secret CIA document that purported to explain the psychology of those who chose to spy for that yin to his own service’s yang. He found it to be so “uncannily accurate” a description of the people he himself recruited that he squirreled it away in his private files, and quoted from it in his memoir decades later.

Acts of betrayal, whether in the form of espionage or defection, are almost in every case committed by morally or psychologically unsteady people. Normal, psychologically stable people — connected with their country by close ethnic, national, cultural, social, and family ties — cannot take such a step. This simple principle is confirmed by our experience of Soviet defectors. All of them were single. In every case, they had a serious vice or weakness: alcoholism, deep depression, psychopathy of various types. These factors were in most cases decisive in making traitors out of them. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that no [CIA] operative can consider himself an expert in Soviet affairs if he hasn’t had the horrible experience of holding a Soviet friend’s head over the sink as he poured out the contents of his stomach after a five-day drinking bout.

What follows from that is that our efforts must mostly be directed against weak, unsteady members of Soviet communities. Among normal people, we should pay special attention to the middle-aged. People that age are starting their descent from their psychological peak. They are no longer children, and they suddenly feel the acute realization that their life is passing, that their ambitions and youthful dreams have not come true in full or even in part. At this age comes the breaking point of a man’s career, when he faces the gloomy prospect of pending retirement and old age. The “stormy forties” are of great interest to an [intelligence] operative.

It’s great to be good, but it’s even better to be lucky. John Walker, the spy who made Kalugin’s career, shows the truth in this dictum. He was that rarest of all agents in the espionage trade: a walk-in. A Navy officer based in Norfolk, Virginia, he drove into Washington one day in late 1967 with a folder full of top-secret code ciphers on the seat of his car next to him, looked up the address of the Soviet embassy in the directory attached to a pay phone, strode through the front door, plunked his folder down on the front desk, and said matter-of-factly, “I want to see the security officer, or someone connected with intelligence. I’m a naval officer. I’d like to make some money, and I’ll give you some genuine stuff in return.” Walker was hastily handed a down payment, ushered out of the embassy, and told never under any circumstances to darken its doors again. He would be contacted in other ways if his information checked out.

Kalugin was fortunate enough to be ordered to vet the man. The picture he filled in was sordid, but it passed muster. Thirty years old when his career as a spy began, Walker had originally joined the Navy to escape being jailed for four burglaries he committed as a teenager. A born reprobate, he had once tried to convince his wife to become a prostitute in order to pay off the gambling debts he had racked up. Yet he could also be garrulous and charming, and had managed to thoroughly conceal his real self from his Navy superiors. A fitness report written in 1972, after he had already been selling his country’s secrets for almost five years, calls him “intensely loyal, taking great pride in himself and the naval service, fiercely supporting its principles and traditions. He possesses a fine sense of personal honor and integrity, coupled with a great sense of humor.” Although he was only a warrant officer in rank, he sat on the communications desk at Norfolk, handling radio traffic with submarines deployed all over the world. It was hard to imagine a more perfect posting for a spy. And this spy required no counseling, needed no one to pretend to be his friend, to talk him down from crises of conscience, or to justify himself to himself. Suffering from no delusions as to who and what he was, all he required was cold, hard cash. A loathsome human being, he was a spy handler’s dream.

Kalugin was Walker’s primary handler for two years, during which he raked in a wealth of almost unbelievably valuable information without ever meeting the man face to face. Walker was the sort of asset who turns up “once in a lifetime,” in the words of Kalugin himself. He became the most important of all the spies on the Kremlin’s payroll, even recruiting several of his family members and colleagues to join his ring. “K Mart has better security than the Navy,” he laughed. He would continue his work long after Kalugin’s time in Washington was through. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, Navy personnel wondered at how the Soviets always seemed to know where their ships and submarines were and where their latest exercises were planned to take place. Not until 1985 was Walker finally arrested. In a bit of poetic justice, the person who turned him in to the FBI was his wife, whom he had been physically and sexually abusing for almost 30 years.

The luster which this monster shed on Kalugin led to the awarding of the prestigious Order of the Red Star, and then, in 1974, his promotion to the rank of KGB general while still just shy of his 40th birthday, making him the youngest such in the post-World War II history of the service. By that time, he was back in Moscow again, having been recalled in January of 1970, once again because it was becoming common knowledge among the Americans that his primary work in their country was that of a spy. He was too hot now to be given any more long-term foreign postings. Instead he worked out of KGB headquarters in Moscow, dealing with strategic questions and occasionally jetting off to far-flung trouble spots to be the service’s eyes and ears on the ground. “I can honestly say that I loved my work,” he writes in his memoir. “My job was always challenging, placing me at the heart of the Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the United States.” As ideology faded, the struggle against imperialism had become more of an intellectual fascination — an intriguing game of chess — than a grand moral crusade.


William Colby testifies before Congress, 1975.

William Colby too was now back in his home country on a more permanent basis, having been promoted to executive director of the CIA — the third highest position on the agency’s totem pole — in July of 1971. Yet he was suffering through what must surely have been the most personally stressful period of his life since he had dodged Nazis as a young man behind enemy lines.

In April of 1973, his 23-year-old daughter Catherine died of anorexia. Her mental illness was complicated, as they always are, but many in the family believed it to have been aggravated by being the daughter of the architect of the Phoenix Program, a man who was in the eyes of much of her hippie generation Evil Incarnate. His marriage was now, in the opinion of his biographer Randall Bennett Woods, no more than a “shell.” Barbara blamed him not only for what he had done in Vietnam but for failing to be there with his family when his daughter needed him most, for forever skipping out on them with convenient excuses about duty and service on his lips.

Barely a month after Catherine’s death, Colby got a call from Alexander Haig, chief of staff in Richard Nixon’s White House: “The president wants you to take over as director of the CIA.” It ought to have been the apex of his professional life, but somehow it didn’t seem that way under current conditions. At the time, the slow-burning Watergate scandal was roiling the CIA almost more than the White House. Because all five of the men who had been arrested attempting to break into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters the previous year had connections to the CIA, much of the press was convinced it had all been an agency plot. Meanwhile accusations about the Phoenix Program and other CIA activities, in Vietnam and elsewhere, were also flying thick and fast. The CIA seemed to many in Congress to be an agency out of control, ripe only for dismantling. And of course Colby was still processing the loss of his daughter amidst it all. It was a thankless promotion if ever there was one. Nevertheless, he accepted it.

Colby would later claim that he knew nothing of the CIA’s many truly dirty secrets before stepping into the top job. These were the ones that other insiders referred to as the “family jewels”: its many bungled attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, before and after he became the leader of Cuba, as well as various other sovereign foreign leaders; the coups it had instigated against lawfully elected foreign governments; its experiments with mind control and psychedelic drugs on unwilling and unwitting human subjects; its unlawful wiretapping and surveillance of scores of Americans; its longstanding practice of opening mail passing between the United States and less-than-friendly nations. That Colby could have risen so high in the agency without knowing these secrets and many more seems dubious on the face of it, but it is just possible; the CIA was very compartmentalized, and Colby had the reputation of being a bit of a legal stickler, just the type who might raise awkward objections to such delicate necessities. “Colby never became a member of the CIA’s inner club of mandarins,” claims the agency’s historian Harold Ford. But whether he knew about the family jewels or not beforehand, he was stuck with them now.

Perhaps in the hope that he could make the agency’s persecutors go away if he threw them just a little red meat, Colby came clean about some of the dodgy surveillance programs. But that only whet the public’s appetite for more revelations. For as the Watergate scandal gradually engulfed the White House and finally brought down the president, as it became clear that the United States had invested more than $120 billion and almost 60,000 young American lives into South Vietnam only to see it go communist anyway, the public’s attitude toward institutions like the CIA was not positive; a 1975 poll placed the CIA’s approval rating at 14 percent. President Gerald Ford, the disgraced Nixon’s un-elected replacement, was weak and unable to protect the agency. Indeed, a commission chaired by none other than Vice President Nelson Rockefeller laid bare many of the family jewels, holding back only the most egregious incidents of meddling in foreign governments. But even those began to come out in time. Both major political parties had their sights set on future elections, and thus had a strong motivation to blame a rogue CIA for any and all abuses by previous administrations. (Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, for example, had personally ordered and supervised some of the attempts on Fidel Castro’s life during the early 1960s.)

It was a no-win situation for William Colby. He was called up to testify in Congress again and again, to answer questions in the mold of “When did you stop beating your wife?”, as he put it to colleagues afterward. Everybody seemed to hate him: right-wing hardliners because they thought he was giving away the store (“It is an act of insanity and national humiliation,” said Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, “to have a law prohibiting the president from ordering assassinations”), left-wingers and centrists because they were sure he was hiding everything he could get away with and confessing only to that which was doomed to come out anyway — which was probably true. Colby was preternaturally cool and unflappable at every single hearing, which somehow only made everyone dislike him that much more. Some of his few remaining friends wanted to say that his relative transparency was a product of Catholic guilt — over the Phoenix Program, over the death of his daughter, perchance over all of the CIA’s many sins — but it was hard to square that notion with the rigidly composed, lawyerly presence that spoke in clipped, minimalist phrases before the television cameras. He seemed more like a cold fish than a repentant soul.

On November 1, 1975 — exactly six months after Saigon had fallen, marking the humiliating final defeat of South Vietnam at the hands of the communists — William Colby was called into the White House by President Ford and fired. “There goes 25 years just like that,” he told Barbara when he came home in a rare display of bitterness. His replacement was George Herbert Walker Bush, an up-and-coming Republican politician who knew nothing about intelligence work. President Ford said such an outsider was the only viable choice, given the high crimes and misdemeanors with which all of the rank and file of the CIA were tarred. And who knows? Maybe he was right. Colby stayed on for three more months while his green replacement got up to speed, then left public service forever.


An Oleg Kalugin campaign poster from 1990, after he reinvented himself as a politician. “Let’s vote for Oleg Kalugin!” reads the caption.

Oleg Kalugin was about to suffer his own fall from grace. According to his account, his rising star flamed out when he ventured out on a limb to support a defector from the United States, one of his own first contacts as a spy handler, who was now accused of stealing secrets for the West. The alleged double agent was sent to a Siberian prison despite Kalugin’s advocacy. Suspected now of being a CIA mole himself, Kalugin was reassigned in January of 1980 to a dead-end job as deputy director of the KGB’s Leningrad branch, where he would be sure not to see too much valuable intelligence. You live by the sword, you die by the sword; duplicity begets suspicions of duplicity, such that spies always end up eating their own if they stay in the business long enough.

Again according to Kalugin himself, it was in Leningrad that his nagging doubts about the ethics and efficacy of the Soviet system — the same ones that had been whispering at the back of his mind since the early 1960s — rose to a roar which he could no longer ignore. “It was all an elaborately choreographed farce, and in my seven years in Leningrad I came to see that we had created not only the most extensive totalitarian state apparatus in history but also the most arcane,” he writes. “Indeed, the mind boggled that in the course of seven decades our communist leaders had managed to construct this absurd, stupendous, arcane ziggurat, this terrifyingly centralized machine, this religion that sought to control all aspects of life in our vast country.” We might justifiably wonder that it took him so long to realize this, and note with some cynicism that his decision to reject the system he had served all his life came only after that system had already rejected him. He even confesses that, when Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982 and was replaced by Yuri Andropov, a former head of the KGB who had always thought highly of Kalugin, he wasn’t above dreaming of a return to the heart of the action in the intelligence service. But it wasn’t to be. Andropov soon died, to be replaced by another tired old man named Konstantin Chernenko who died even more quickly, and then Mikhail Gorbachev came along to accidentally dismantle the Soviet Union in the name of saving it.

In January of 1987, Kalugin was given an even more dead-end job, as a security officer in the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. From here, he watched the extraordinary events of 1989, as country after country in the Soviet sphere rejected its communist government, until finally the Berlin Wall fell, taking the Iron Curtain down with it. Just like that, the Cold War was over, with the Soviet Union the undeniable loser. Kalugin must surely have regarded this development with mixed feelings, given what a loyal partisan he had once been for the losing side. Nevertheless, on February 26, 1990, he retired from the KGB. After picking up his severance check, he walked a few blocks to the Institute of History and Archives, where a group of democracy activists had set up shop. “I want to help the democratic movement,” he told them, in a matter-of-fact tone uncannily similar to that of John Walker in a Soviet embassy 22 years earlier. “I am sure that my knowledge and experience will be useful. You can use me in any capacity.”

And so Oleg Kalugin reinvented himself as an advocate for Russian democracy. A staunch supporter of Boris Yeltsin and his post-Soviet vision for Russia, he became an outspoken opponent of the KGB, which still harbored in its ranks many who wished to return the country to its old ways. He was elected to the Supreme Soviet in September of 1990, in the first wave of free and fair elections ever held in Russia. When some of his old KGB colleagues attempted a coup in August of 1991, he was out there manning the barricades for democracy. The coup was put down — just.


William Colby in his later years, enjoying his sailboat, one of his few sources of uncalculated joy.

William Colby too had to reinvent himself after the agency he served declared that it no longer needed him. He wrote a circumspect, slightly anodyne memoir about his career; its title of Honorable Men alone was enough to tell the world that it wasn’t the tell-all book from an angry spy spurned that it might have been hoping for. He consulted for the government on various issues for larger sums than he had ever earned as a regular federal employee, appeared from time to time as an expert commentator on television, and wrote occasional opinion pieces for the national press, most commonly about the ongoing dangers posed by nuclear weapons and the need for arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union.

In 1982, at the age of 62, this stiff-backed avatar of moral rectitude fell in love with a pretty, vivacious 37-year-old, a former American ambassador to Grenada named Sally Shelton. It struck those who knew him as almost a cliché of a mid-life crisis, of the sort that the intelligence services had been exploiting for decades — but then, clichés are clichés for a reason, aren’t they? “I thought Bill Colby had all the charisma of a shoe clerk,” said one family friend. “Sally is a very outgoing woman, even flamboyant. She found him a sex object, and with her he was.” The following year, Colby asked his wife Barbara for a divorce. She was taken aback, even if their marriage hadn’t been a particularly warm one in many years. “People like us don’t get a divorce!” she exclaimed — meaning, of course, upstanding Catholic couples of the Greatest Generation who were fast approaching their 40th wedding anniversary. But there it was. Whatever else was going on behind that granite façade, it seemed that Colby felt he still had some living to do.

None of Colby’s family attended the marriage ceremony, or had much to do with him thereafter. He lost not only his family but his faith: Sally Shelton had no truck with Catholicism, and he only went to church after he married her for weddings and funerals. Was the gain worth the loss? Only Colby knew the answer.


Old frenemies: Oleg Kalugin and William Colby flank Ken Berris, who directed the Spycraft video sequences.

Oleg Kalugin met William Colby for the first time in May of 1991, when both were attending the same seminar in Berlin — appropriately enough, on the subject of international terrorism, the threat destined to steal the attention of the CIA and the Russian FSB (the successor to the KGB) as the Cold War faded into history. The two men had dinner together, then agreed to be jointly interviewed on German television, a living symbol of bygones becoming bygones. “What do you think of Mr. Colby as a leading former figure in U.S. intelligence?” Kalugin was asked.

“Had I had a choice in my earlier life, I would have gladly worked under Mr. Colby,” he answered. The two became friends, meeting up whenever their paths happened to cross in the world.

And why shouldn’t they be friends? They had led similar lives in so many ways. Both were ambitious men who had justified their ambition as a call to service, then devoted their lives to it, swallowing any moral pangs they might have felt in the process, until the people they served had rejected them. In many ways, they had more in common with one another than with the wives and children they had barely seen for long stretches of their lives.

And how are we to judge these two odd, distant men, both so adept at the art of concealment as to seem hopelessly impenetrable? “I am not emotional,” Colby said to a reporter during his turbulent, controversy-plagued tenure as director of the CIA. “I admit it. Oh, don’t watch me like that. You’re looking for something underneath which isn’t there. It’s all here on the surface, believe me.”

Our first instinct might be to scoff at such a claim; surely everyone has an inner life, a tender core they dare reveal only to those they love best. But maybe we should take Colby at his word; maybe doing so helps to explain some things. As Colby and Kalugin spouted their high-minded ideals about duty and country, they forgot those closest to them, the ones who needed them most of all, apparently believing that they possessed some undefined special qualities of character or a special calling that exempted them from all that. Journalist Neil Sheehan once said of Colby that “he would have been perfect as a soldier of Christ in the Jesuit order.” There is something noble but also something horrible about such devotion to an abstract cause. One has to wonder whether it is a crutch, a compensation for some piece of a personality that is missing.

Certainly there was an ultimate venality, an amorality to these two men’s line of work, as captured in the subtitle of the computer game they came together to make: “The Great Game.” Was it all really just a game to them? It would seem so, at least at the end. How else could Kalugin blithely state that he would have “gladly” worked with Colby, forgetting the vast gulf of ideology that lay between them? Tragically, the ante in their great game was all too often human lives. Looking back on all they did, giving all due credit to their courage and capability, it seems clear to me that the world would have been better off without their meddling. The institutions they served were full of people like them, people who thought they knew best, who thought they were that much cleverer than the rest of the world and had a right to steer its course from the shadows. Alas, they weren’t clever enough to see how foolish and destructive their arrogance was.

“My father lived in a world of secrets,” says William’s eldest son Carl Colby. “Always watching, listening, his eye on the door. He was tougher, smarter, smoother, and could be crueler than anybody I ever knew. I’m not sure he ever loved anyone, and I never heard him say anything heartfelt.” Was William Colby made that way by the organization he served, or did he join the organization because he already was that way? It’s impossible to say. Yet we must be sure to keep these things in mind when we turn in earnest to the game on which Colby and Kalugin allowed their names to be stamped, and find out what it has to say about the ethical wages of being a spy.

(Sources: the books Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby by John Prados, Spymaster: My Thirty-Two Years in Intelligence and Espionage against the West by Oleg Kalugin, Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam, 1945-2010, sixth edition by James S. Olson and Randy Roberts, Shadow Warrior: William Egan Colby and the CIA by Randall B. Woods, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA by William Colby and Peter Forbath, and Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America’s Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam by William Colby and James McCargar; the documentary film The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby; Sierra On-Line’s newsletter InterAction of Summer 1993; Questbusters of February 1994. Online sources include “Who Murdered the CIA Chief?” by Zalin Grant at Pythia Press.)

 

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Myst (or, The Drawbacks to Success)

Robyn Miller, one half of the pair of brothers who created the adventure game known as Myst with their small studio Cyan, tells a story about its development that’s irresistible to a writer like me. When the game was nearly finished, he says, its publisher Brøderbund insisted that it be put through “focus-group testing” at their offices. Robyn and his brother Rand reluctantly agreed, and soon the first group of guinea pigs shuffled into Brøderbund’s conference room. Much to its creators’ dismay, they hated the game. But then, just as the Miller brothers were wondering whether they had wasted the past two years of their lives making it, the second group came in. Their reaction was the exact opposite: they loved the game.

So would it be forevermore. Myst would prove to be one of the most polarizing games in history, loved and hated in equal measure. Even today, everyone seems to have a strong opinion about it, whether they’ve actually played it or not.

Myst‘s admirers are numerous enough to have made it the best-selling single adventure game in history, as well as the best-selling 1990s computer game of any type in terms of physical units shifted at retail: over 6 million boxed copies sold between its release in 1993 and the dawn of the new millennium. In the years immediately after its release, it was trumpeted at every level of the mainstream press as the herald of a new, dawning age of maturity and aesthetic sophistication in games. Then, by the end of the decade, it was lamented as a symbol of what games might have become, if only the culture of gaming had chosen it rather than the near-simultaneously-released Doom as its model for the future. Whatever the merits of that argument, the hardcore Myst lovers remained numerous enough in later years to support five sequels, a series of novels, a tabletop role-playing game, and multiple remakes and remasters of the work which began it all. Their passion was such that, when Cyan gave up on an attempt to turn Myst into a massively-multiplayer game, the fans stepped in to set up their own servers and keep it alive themselves.

And yet, for all the love it’s inspired, the game’s detractors are if anything even more committed than its proponents. For a huge swath of gamers, Myst has become the poster child for a certain species of boring, minimally interactive snooze-fest created by people who have no business making games — and, runs the spoken or unspoken corollary, played by people who have no business playing them. Much of this vitriol comes from the crowd who hate any game that isn’t violent and visceral on principle.

But the more interesting and perhaps telling brand of hatred comes from self-acknowledged fans of the adventure-game genre. These folks were usually raised on the Sierra and LucasArts traditions of third-person adventures — games that were filled with other characters to interact with, objects to pick up and carry around and use to solve puzzles, and complicated plot arcs unfolding chapter by chapter. They have a decided aversion to the first-person, minimalist, deserted, austere Myst, sometimes going so far as to say that it isn’t really an adventure game at all. But, however they categorize it, they’re happy to credit it with all but killing the adventure genre dead by the end of the 1990s. Myst, so this narrative goes, prompted dozens of studios to abandon storytelling and characters in favor of yet more sterile, hermetically sealed worlds just like its. And when the people understandably rejected this airless vision, that was that for the adventure game writ large. Some of the hatred directed toward Myst by stalwart adventure fans — not only fans of third-person graphic adventures, but, going even further back, fans of text adventures — reaches an almost poetic fever pitch. A personal favorite of mine is the description deployed by Michael Bywater, who in previous lives was himself an author of textual interactive fiction. Myst, he says, is just “a post-hippie HyperCard stack with a rather good music loop.”

After listening to the cultural dialog — or shouting match! — which has so long surrounded Myst, one’s first encounter with the actual artifact that spurred it all can be more than a little anticlimactic. Seen strictly as a computer game, Myst is… okay. Maybe even pretty good. It strikes this critic at least as far from the best or worst game of its year, much less of its decade, still less of all gaming history. Its imagery is well-composited and occasionally striking, its sound and music design equally apt. The sense of desolate, immersive beauty it all conveys can be strangely affecting, and it’s married to puzzle-design instincts that are reasonable and fair. Myst‘s reputation in some quarters as impossible, illogical, or essentially unplayable is unearned; apart from some pixel hunts and perhaps the one extended maze, there’s little to really complain about on that front. On the contrary: there’s a definite logic to its mechanical puzzles, and figuring out how its machinery works through trial and error and careful note-taking, then putting your deductions into practice, is genuinely rewarding, assuming you enjoy that sort of thing.

At the same time, though, there’s just not a whole lot of there there. Certainly there’s no deeper meaning to be found; Myst never tries to be about more than exploring a striking environment and solving intricate puzzles. “When we started, we wanted to make a [thematic] statement, but the project was so big and took so much effort that we didn’t have the energy or time to put much into that part of it,” admits Robyn Miller. “So, we decided to just make a neat world, a neat adventure, and say important things another time.” And indeed, a “neat world” and “neat adventure” are fine ways of describing Myst.

Depending on your preconceptions going in, actually playing Myst for the first time is like going to meet your savior or the antichrist, only to find a pleasant middle-aged fellow who offers to pour you a cup of tea. It’s at this point that the questions begin. Why does such an inoffensive game offend so many people? Why did such a quietly non-controversial game become such a magnet for controversy? And the biggest question of all: why did such a simple little game, made by five people using only off-the-shelf consumer software, become one of the most (in)famous money spinners in the history of the computer-games industry?

We may not be able to answers all of these whys to our complete satisfaction; much of the story of Myst surely comes down to sheer happenstance, to the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings somewhere on the other side of the world. But we can at least do a reasonably good job with the whats and hows of Myst. So, let’s consider now what brought Myst about and how it became the unlikely success it did. After that, we can return once again to its proponents and its detractors, and try to split the difference between Myst as gaming’s savior and Myst as gaming’s antichrist.


Rand Miller

Robyn Miller

If nothing else, the origin story of Myst is enough to make one believe in karma. As I wrote in an earlier article, the Miller brothers and their company Cyan came out of the creative explosion which followed Apple’s 1987 release of HyperCard, a unique Macintosh authoring system which let countless people just like them experiment for the first time with interactive multimedia and hypertext. Cyan’s first finished project was The Manhole. Published in November of 1988 by Mediagenic, it was a goal-less software toy aimed at children, a virtual fairy-tale world to explore. Six months later, Mediagenic added music and sound effects and released it on CD-ROM, marking the first entertainment product ever to appear on that medium. The next couple of years brought two more interactive explorations for children from Cyan, published on floppy disk and CD-ROM.

Even as these were being published, however, the wheels were gradually coming off of Mediagenic, thanks to a massive patent-infringement lawsuit they lost to the Dutch electronics giant Philips and a whole string of other poor decisions and unfortunate events. In February of 1991, a young bright spark named Bobby Kotick seized Mediagenic in a hostile takeover, reverting the company to its older name of Activision. By this point, the Miller brothers were getting tired of making whimsical children’s toys; they were itching to make a real game, with a goal and puzzles. But when they asked Activision’s new management for permission to do so, they were ordered to “keep doing what you’ve been doing.” Shortly thereafter, Kotick announced that he was taking Activision into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. After he did so, Activision simply stopped paying Cyan the royalties on which they depended. The Miller brothers were lost at sea, with no income stream and no relationships with any other publishers.

But at the last minute, they were thrown an unexpected lifeline. Lo and behold, the Japanese publisher Sunsoft came along offering to pay Cyan $265,000 to make a CD-ROM-based adult adventure game in the same general style as their children’s creations — i.e., exactly what the Miller brothers had recently asked Activision for permission to do. Sunsoft was convinced that there would be major potential for such a game on the upcoming generation of CD-ROM-based videogame consoles and multimedia set-top boxes for the living room — so convinced, in fact, that they were willing to fund the development of the game on the Macintosh and take on the job of porting it to these non-computer platforms themselves, all whilst signing over the rights to the computer version(s) to Cyan for free. The Miller brothers, reduced by this point to a diet of “rice and beans and government cheese,” as Robyn puts it, knew deliverance when they saw it. They couldn’t sign the contract fast enough. Meanwhile Activision had just lost out on the chance to release what would turn out to be one of the games of the decade.

But of course the folks at Cyan were as blissfully unaware of that future as those at Activision. They simply breathed sighs of relief and started making their game. In time, Cyan signed a contract with Brøderbund to release the computer versions of their game, starting with the Macintosh original.

Myst certainly didn’t begin as any conscious attempt to re-imagine the adventure-game form. Those who later insisted on seeing it in almost ideological terms, as a sort of artistic manifesto, were often shocked when they first met the Miller brothers in person. This pair of plain-spoken, baseball-cap-wearing country boys were anything but ideologues, much less stereotypical artistes. Instead they seemed a perfect match for the environs in which they worked: an unassuming two-story garage in Spokane, Washington, far from any centers of culture or technology. Their game’s unique personality actually stemmed from two random happenstances rather than any messianic fervor.

One of these was — to put it bluntly — their sheer ignorance. Working on the minority platform that was the Macintosh, specializing up to this point in idiosyncratic children’s software, the Miller brothers were oddly disengaged from the computer-games industry whose story I’ve been telling in so many other articles here. By their own account, they had literally never even seen any of the contemporary adventure games from companies like LucasArts and Sierra before making Myst. In fact, Robyn Miller says today that he had only played one computer game in his life to that point: Infocom’s ten-year-old Zork II. Rand Miller, being the older brother, the first mover behind their endeavors, and the more technically adept of the pair, was perhaps a bit more plugged-in, but only a bit.

The other circumstance which shaped Myst was the technology employed to create it. This statement is true of any game, but it becomes even more salient here because the technology in question was so different from that employed by other adventure creators. Myst is indeed simply a HyperCard stack — the “hippie-dippy” is in the eye of the beholder — gluing together pictures generated by the 3D modeler StrataVision. During the second half of its development, a third everyday Macintosh software package made its mark: Apple’s QuickTime video system, which allowed Myst‘s creators to insert snippets of themselves playing the roles of the people who previously visited the semi-ruined worlds you spend the game exploring. All of these tools are presentation-level tools, not conventional game-building ones. Seen in this light, it’s little surprise that so much of Myst is surface. At bottom, it’s a giant hypertext done in pictures, with very little in the way of systems of any sort behind it, much less any pretense of world simulation. You wander through its nodes, in some of which you can click on something, which causes some arbitrary event to happen. The one place where the production does interest itself in a state which exists behind its visuals is in the handful of mechanical devices found scattered over each of its landscapes, whose repair and/or manipulation form the basis of the puzzles that turn Myst into a game rather than an unusually immersive slideshow.

In making Myst, each brother fell into the role he was used to from Cyan’s children’s projects. The brothers together came up with the story and world design, then Robyn went off to do the art and music while Rand did the technical plumbing in HyperCard. One Chuck Carter helped Robyn on the art side and Rich Watson helped Rand on the programming side, while Chris Brandkamp produced the intriguing, evocative environmental soundscape by all sorts of improvised means: banging a wrench against the wall or blowing bubbles in a toilet bowl, then manipulating the samples to yield something appropriately other-worldly. And that was the entire team. It was a shoestring operation, amateurish in the best sense. The only thing that distinguished the boys at Cyan from a hundred thousand other hobbyists playing with the latest creative tools on their own Macs was the fact that Cyan had a contract to do so — and a commensurate quantity of real, raw talent, of course.

Ironically given that Myst was treated as such a cutting-edge product at the time of its release, in terms of design it’s something of a throwback — a fact that does become less surprising when one considers that its creators’ experience with adventure games stopped in the early 1980s. A raging debate had once taken place in adventure circles over whether the ideal protagonist should be a blank slate, imprintable by the player herself, or a fully-fleshed-out role for the player to inhabit. The verdict had largely come down on the side of the latter as games’ plots had grown more ambitious, but the whole discussion had passed the Miller brothers by.

So, with Myst we were back to the old “nameless, faceless adventurer” paradigm which Sierra and LucasArts had long since abandoned. Myst actively encourages you to think of it as yourself there in its world. The story begins when you open a mysterious book here on our world, whereupon you get sucked into an alternate dimension and find yourself standing on the dock of a deserted island. You soon learn that you’re following a trail first blazed by a father and his two sons, all of whom had the ability to hop about between dimensions — or “ages,” as the game calls them — and alter them to their will. Unfortunately, the father is now said to be dead, while the two brothers have each been trapped in a separate interdimensional limbo, each blaming the other for their father’s death. (These themes of sibling rivalry have caused much comment over the years, especially in light of the fact that each brother in the game is played by one of the real Miller brothers. But said real brothers have always insisted that there are no deeper meanings to be gleaned here…)

You can access four more worlds from the central island just as soon as you solve the requisite puzzles. In each of them, you must find a page of a magical book. Putting the pages together, along with a fifth page found on the central island, allows you to free the brother of your choice, or to do… something else, which actually leads to the best ending. This last-minute branch to an otherwise unmalleable story is a technique we see in a fair number of other adventure games wishing to make a claim to the status of genuinely interactive fictions. (In practice, of course, players of those games and Myst alike simply save before the final choice and check out all of the endings.)

For all its emphasis on visuals, Myst is designed much like a vintage text adventure in many ways. Even setting aside its explicit maze, its network of discrete, mostly empty locations resembles the map from an old-school text adventure, where navigation is half the challenge. Similarly, its complex environmental puzzles, where something done in one location may have an effect on the other side of the map, smacks of one of Infocom’s more cerebral, austere games, such as Zork III or Spellbreaker.

This is not to say that Myst is a conscious throwback; the nature of the puzzles, like so much else about the game, is as much determined by the Miller brothers’ ignorance of contemporary trends in adventure design as by the technical constraints under which they labored. Among the latter was the impossibility of even letting the player pick things up and carry them around to use elsewhere. Utterly unfazed, Rand Miller coined an aphorism: “Turn your problems into features.” Thus Myst‘s many vaguely steam-punky mechanical puzzles, all switches to throw and ponderous wheels to set in motion, are dictated as much by its designers’ inability to implement a player inventory as by their acknowledged love for Jules Verne.

And yet, whatever the technological determinism that spawned it, this style of puzzle design truly was a breath of fresh air for gamers who had grown tired of the “use this object on that hotspot” puzzles of Sierra and LucasArts. To their eternal credit, the Miller brothers took this aspect of the design very seriously, giving their puzzles far more thought than Sierra at least tended to do. They went into Myst with no experience designing puzzles, and their insecurity  about this aspect of their craft was perhaps their ironic saving grace. Before they even had a computer game to show people, they spent hours walking outsiders through their scenario Dungeons & Dragons-style, telling them what they saw and listening to how they tried to progress. And once they did have a working world on the computer, they spent more hours sitting behind players, watching what they did. Robyn Miller, asked in an interview shortly after the game’s release whether there was anything he “hated,” summed up thusly their commitment to consistent, logical puzzle design and world-building (in Myst, the two are largely one and the same):

Seriously, we hate stuff without integrity. Supposed “art” that lacks attention to detail. That bothers me a lot. Done by people who are forced into doing it or who are doing it for formula reasons and monetary reasons. It’s great to see something that has integrity. It makes you feel good. The opposite of that is something I dislike.

We tried to create something — a fantastic world — in a very realistic way. Creating a fantasy world in an unrealistic way is the worst type of fantasy. In Jurassic Park, the idea of dinosaurs coming to life in the twentieth century is great. But it works in that movie because they also made it believable. That’s how the idea and the execution of that idea mix to create a truly great experience.

Taken as a whole, Myst is a master class in designing around constraints. Plenty of games have been ruined by designers whose reach exceeded their core technology’s grasp. We can see this phenomenon as far back as the time of Scott Adams: his earliest text adventures were compact marvels, but quickly spiraled into insoluble incoherence when he started pushing beyond what his simplistic parsers and world models could realistically present. Myst, then, is an artwork of the possible. Managing inventory, with the need for a separate inventory screen and all the complexities of coding this portable object interacting on that other thing in the world, would have stretched HyperCard past the breaking point. So, it’s gone. Interactive conversations would have been similarly prohibitive with the technology at the Millers’ fingertips. So, they devised a clever dodge, showing the few characters that exist only as recordings, or through one-way screens where you can see them, but they can’t see (or hear) you; that way, a single QuickTime video clip is enough to do the trick. In paring things back so dramatically, the Millers wound up with an adventure game unlike any that had been seen before. Their problems really did become their game’s features.

For the most part, anyway. The networks of nodes and pre-rendered static views that constitute the worlds of Myst can be needlessly frustrating to navigate, thanks to the way that the views prioritize aesthetics over consistency; rotating your view in place sometimes turns you 90 degrees, sometimes 180 degrees, sometimes somewhere in between, according to what the designers believed would provide the most striking image. Orienting yourself and moving about the landscape can thus be a confusing process. One might complain as well that it’s a slow one, what with all the empty nodes which you must move through to get pretty much anywhere — often just to see if something you’ve done on one side of the map has had any effect on something on its other side. Again, a comparison with the twisty little passages of an old-school text adventure, filled with mostly empty rooms, does strike me as thoroughly apt.

On the other hand, a certain glaciality of pacing seems part and parcel of what Myst fundamentally is. This is not a game for the impatient. It’s rather targeted at two broad types of player: the aesthete, who will be content just to wander the landscape taking in the views, perhaps turning to a walkthrough to be able to see all of the worlds; and the dedicated puzzle solver, willing to pull out paper and pencil and really dig into the task of understanding how all this strange machinery hangs together. Both groups have expressed their love for Myst over the years, albeit in terms which could almost convince you they’re talking about two entirely separate games.



So much for Myst the artifact. What of Myst the cultural phenomenon?

The origins of the latter can be traced to the Miller brothers’ wise decision to take their game to Brøderbund. Brøderbund tended to publish fewer products per year than their peers at Electronic Arts, Sierra, or the lost and unlamented Mediagenic, but they were masterful curators, with a talent for spotting software which ordinary Americans might want to buy and then packaging and marketing it perfectly to reach them. (Their insistence on focus testing, so confusing to the Millers, is proof of their competence; it’s hard to imagine any other publisher of the time even thinking of such a thing.) Brøderbund published a string of products over the course of a decade or more which became more than just hits; they became cultural icons of their time, getting significant attention in the mainstream press in addition to the computer magazines: The Print Shop, Carmen Sandiego, Lode Runner, Prince of Persia, SimCity. And now Myst was about to become the capstone to a rather extraordinary decade, their most successful and iconic release of all.

Brøderbund first published the game on the Macintosh in September of 1993, where it was greeted with rave reviews. Not a lot of games originated on the Mac at all, so a new and compelling one was always a big event. Mac users tended to conceive of themselves as the sophisticates of the computer world, wearing their minority status as a badge of pride. Myst hit the mark beautifully here; it was the Mac-iest of Mac games. MacWorld magazine’s review is a rather hilarious example of a homer call. “It’s been polished until it shines,” wrote the magazine. Then, in the next paragraph: “We did encounter a couple of glitches and frozen screens.” Oh, well.

Helped along by press like this, Myst came out of the gates strong. By one report, it sold 200,000 copies on the Macintosh alone in its first six months. If correct or even close to correct, those numbers are extraordinary; they’re the numbers of a hit even on the gaming Mecca that was the Wintel world, much less on the Mac, with its vastly smaller user base.

Still, Brøderbund knew that Myst‘s real opportunity lay with those selfsame plebeian Wintel machines which most Mac users, the Miller brothers included, disdained. Just as soon as Cyan delivered the Mac version, Brøderbund set up an internal team — larger than the Cyan team which had made the game in the first place — to do the port as quickly as possible. Importantly, Myst was ported not to bare MS-DOS, where almost all “hardcore” games still resided, but to Windows, where the new demographics which Brøderbund hoped to attract spent all of their time. Luckily, the game’s slideshow visuals were possible even under Windows’s sluggish graphics libraries, and Apple had recently ported their QuickTime video system to Microsoft’s platform. The Windows version of Myst shipped in March of 1994.

And now Brøderbund’s marketing got going in earnest, pushing the game as the one showcase product which every purchaser of a new multimedia PC simply had to have. At the time, most CD-ROM based games also shipped in a less impressive floppy-disk-based version, with the latter often still outselling the former. But Brøderbund and Cyan made the brave choice not to attempt a floppy-disk version at all. The gamble paid off beautifully, furthering the carefully cultivated aspirational quality which already clung to Myst, now billed as the game which simply couldn’t be done on floppy disk. Brøderbund’s lush advertisements had a refined, adult air about them which made them stand out from the dragons, spaceships, and scantily-clad babes that constituted the usual motifs of game advertising. As the crowning touch, Brøderbund devised a slick tagline: Myst was “the surrealistic adventure that will become your world.” The Miller brothers scoffed at this piece of marketing-speak — until they saw how Myst was flying off the shelves in the wake of it.

So, through a combination of lucky timing and precision marketing, Myst blew up huge. I say this not to diminish its merits as a puzzle-solving adventure game, which are substantial, but simply because I don’t believe those merits were terribly relevant to the vast majority of people who purchased it. A parallel can be drawn with Infocom’s game of Zork, which similarly surfed a techno-cultural wave a decade before Myst. It was on the scene just as home computers were first being promoted in the American media as the logical, more permanent successors to the videogame-console fad. For a time, Zork, with its ability to parse pseudo-natural-English sentences, was seen by computer salespeople as the best overall demonstration of what a computer could do; they therefore showed it to their customers as a matter of course. And so, when countless new computer systems went home with their new owners, there was also a copy of Zork in the bag. The result was Infocom’s best-selling game of all time, to the tune of almost 400,000 copies sold.

Myst now played the same role in a new home-computer boom. The difference was that, while the first boom had fizzled rather quickly when people realized of what limited practical utility those early machines actually were, this second boom would be a far more sustained affair. In fact, it would become the most sustained boom in the history of the consumer PC, stretching from approximately 1993 right through the balance of the decade, with every year breaking the sales records set by the previous one. The implications for Myst, which arrived just as the boom was beginning, were titanic. Even long after it ceased to be particularly cutting-edge, it continued to be regarded as an essential accessory for every PC, to be tossed into the bags carried home from computer stores by people who would never buy another game.

Myst had already established its status by the time the hype over the World Wide Web and Windows 95 really lit a fire under computer sales in 1995. It passed the 1 million copy mark in the spring of that year. By the same point, a quickie “strategy guide” published by Prima, ideal for the many players who just wanted to take in its sights without worrying about its puzzles, had passed an extraordinary 300,000 copies sold — thus making its co-authors, who’d spent all of three weeks working on it, the two luckiest walkthrough authors in history. Defying all of the games industry’s usual logic, which dictated that titles sold in big numbers for only a few months before fizzling out, Myst‘s sales just kept accelerating from there. It sold 850,000 copies in 1996 in the United States alone, then another 870,000 copies in 1997. Only in 1998 did it finally begin to flag, posting domestic sales of just 540,000 copies. Fortunately, the European market for multimedia PCs, which lagged a few years behind the American one, was now also burning bright, opening up whole new frontiers for Myst. Its total retail sales topped 6 million by 2000, at least 2 million of them outside of North America. Still more copies — it’s impossible to say how many — had shipped as pack-in bonuses with multimedia upgrade kits and the like. Meanwhile, under the terms of Sunsoft’s original agreement with Cyan, it was also ported by the former to the Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar, 3DO, and CD-I living-room consoles. Myst was so successful that another publisher came out with an elaborate parody of it as a full-fledged computer game in its own right, under the indelible title of Pyst. Considering that it featured the popular sitcom star John Goodman, Pyst must have cost far more to make than the shoestring production it mocked.

As we look at the staggering scale of Myst‘s success, we can’t avoid returning to that vexing question of why it all should have come to be. Yes, Brøderbund’s marketing campaign was brilliant, but there must be more to it than that. Certainly we’re far from the first to wonder about it all. As early as December of 1994, Newsweek magazine noted that “in the gimmick-dominated world of computer games, Myst should be the equivalent of an art film, destined to gather critical acclaim and then dust on the shelves.” So why was it selling better than guaranteed crowd-pleasers with names like Star Wars on their boxes?

It’s not that it’s that difficult to pinpoint some of the other reasons why Myst should have been reasonably successful. It was a good-looking game that took full advantage of CD-ROM, at a time when many computer users — non-gamers almost as much as gamers — were eager for such things to demonstrate the power of their new multimedia wundermachines. And its distribution medium undoubtedly helped its sales in another way: in this time before CD burners became commonplace, it was immune to the piracy that many publishers claimed was costing them at least half their sales of floppy-disk-based games.

Likewise, a possible explanation for Myst‘s longevity after it was no longer so cutting-edge might be the specific technological and aesthetic choices made by the Miller brothers. Many other products of the first gush of the CD-ROM revolution came to look painfully, irredeemably tacky just a couple of years after they had dazzled, thanks to their reliance on grainy video clips of terrible actors chewing up green-screened scenery. While Myst did make some use of this type of “full-motion video,” it was much more restrained in this respect than many of its competitors. As a result, it aged much better. By the end of the 1990s, its graphics resolution and color count might have been a bit lower than those of the latest games, and it might not have been quite as stunning at first glance as it once had been, but it remained an elegant, visually-appealing experience on the whole.

Yet even these proximate causes don’t come close to providing a full explanation of why this art film in game form sold like a blockbuster. There are plenty of other games of equal or even greater overall merit to which they apply equally well, but none of them sold in excess of 6 million copies. Perhaps all we can do in the end is chalk it up to the inexplicable vagaries of chance. Computer sellers and buyers, it seems, needed a go-to game to show what was possible when CD-ROM was combined with decent graphics and sound cards. Myst was lucky enough to become that game. Although its puzzles were complex, simply taking in its scenery was disarmingly simple, making it perfect for the role. The perfect product at the perfect time, perfectly marketed.

In a sense, Myst the phenomenon didn’t do that other MystMyst the actual artifact, the game we can still play today — any favors at all. The latter seems destined always to be judged in relation to the former, and destined always to be found lacking. Demanding that what is in reality a well-designed, aesthetically pleasing game live up to the earth-shaking standards implied by Myst‘s sales numbers is unfair on the face of it; it wasn’t the fault of the Miller brothers, humble craftsmen with the right attitude toward their work, that said work wound up selling 6 million copies. Nevertheless, we feel compelled to judge it, at least to some extent, with the knowledge of its commercial and cultural significance firmly in mind. And in this context especially, some of its detractors’ claims do have a ring of truth.

Arguably the truthiest of all of them is the oft-repeated old saw that no other game was bought by so many people and yet really, seriously played by so few of its purchasers. While such a hyperbolic claim is impossible to truly verify, there is a considerable amount of circumstantial evidence pointing in exactly that direction. The exceptional sales of the strategy guide are perhaps a wash; they can be as easily ascribed to serious players wanting to really dig into the game as they can to casual purchasers just wanting to see all the pretty pictures on the CD-ROM. Other factors, however, are harder to dismiss. The fact is, Myst is hard by casual-game standards — so hard that Brøderbund included a blank pad of paper in the box for the purpose of keeping notes. If we believe that all or most of its buyers made serious use of that notepad, we have to ask where these millions of people interested in such a cerebral, austere, logical experience were before it materialized, and where they went thereafter. Even the Miller brothers themselves — hardly an unbiased jury — admit that by their best estimates no more than 50 percent of the people who bought Myst ever got beyond the starting island. Personally, I tend to suspect that the number is much lower than that.

Perhaps the most telling evidence for Myst as the game which everyone had but hardly anyone played is found in a comparison with one of its contemporaries: id Software’s Doom, the other decade-dominating blockbuster of 1993 (a game about which I’ll be writing much more in a future article). Doom indisputably was played, and played extensively. While it wasn’t quite the first running-around-and-shooting-things-from-a-first-person-perspective game, it did become so popular that games of its type were codified as a new genre unto themselves. The first-person shooters which followed Doom in the 1990s were among the most popular games of their era. Many of their titles are known to gamers today who weren’t yet born when they debuted: titles like Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Half-Life, Unreal. Myst prompted just as many copycats, but these were markedly less popular and are markedly less remembered today: AMBER: Journeys Beyond, Zork Nemesis, Rama, Obsidian. Only Cyan’s own eventual sequel to Myst can be found among the decade’s bestsellers, and even it’s a definite case of diminishing commercial returns, despite being a rather brilliant game in its own right. In short, any game which sold as well as Myst, and which was seriously played by a proportionate number of people, ought to have left a bigger imprint on ludic culture than this one did.

But none of this should affect your decision about whether to play Myst today, assuming you haven’t yet gotten around to it. Stripped of all its weighty historical context, it’s a fine little adventure game if not an earth-shattering one, intriguing for anyone with the puzzle-solving gene, infuriating for anyone without it. You know what I mean… sort of a niche experience. One that just happened to sell 6 million copies.

(Sources: the books Myst: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba and Rusel DeMaria, Myst & Riven: The World of the D’ni by Mark J.P. Wolf, and The Secret History of Mac Gaming by Richard Moss; Computer Gaming World of December 1993; MacWorld of March 1994; CD-ROM Today of Winter 1993. Online sources include “Two Histories of Myst” by John-Gabriel Adkins, Ars Technica‘s interview with Rand Miller, Robyn Miller’s postmortem of Myst at the 2013 Game Developers Conference, GameSpot‘s old piece on Myst as one of the “15 Most Influential Games of All Time,” and Greg Lindsay’s Salon column on Myst as a “dead end.” Michael Bywater’s colorful comments about Myst come from Peter Verdi’s now-defunct Magnetic Scrolls fan site, a dump of which Stefan Meier dug up for me from his hard drive several years ago. Thanks again, Stefan!

The “Masterpiece Edition” of Myst is available for purchase from GOG.com.)

 
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Posted by on February 21, 2020 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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Return to Zork

Where should we mark the beginning of the full-motion-video era, that most extended of blind alleys in the history of the American games industry? The day in the spring of 1990 that Ken Williams, founder and president of Sierra On-Line, wrote his latest editorial for his company’s seasonal newsletter might be as good a point as any. In his editorial, Williams coined the term “talkies” in reference to an upcoming generation of games which would have “real character voices and no text.” The term was, of course, a callback to the Hollywood of circa 1930, when sound began to come to the heretofore silent medium of film. Computer games, Williams said, stood on the verge of a leap that would be every bit as transformative, in terms not only of creativity but of profitability: “How big would the film industry be today if not for this step?”

According to Williams, the voice-acted, CD-based version of Sierra’s King’s Quest V was to become the games industry’s The Jazz Singer. But voice acting wasn’t the only form of acting which the games of the next few years had in store. A second transformative leap, comparable to that made by Hollywood when film went from black and white to color, was also waiting in the wings to burst onto the stage just a little bit later than the first talkies. Soon, game players would be able to watch real, human actors right there on their monitor screens.

As regular readers of this site probably know already, the games industry’s Hollywood obsession goes back a long way. In 1982, Sierra was already advertising their text adventure Time Zone with what looked like a classic “coming attractions” poster; in 1986, Cinemaware was founded with the explicit goal of making “interactive movies.” Still, the conventional wisdom inside the industry by the early 1990s had shifted subtly away from such earlier attempts to make games that merely played like movies. The idea was now that the two forms of media would truly become one — that games and movies would literally merge. “Sierra is part of the entertainment industry — not the computer industry,” wrote Williams in his editorial. “I always think of books, records, films, and then interactive films.” These categories defined a continuum of increasingly “hot,” increasingly immersive forms of media. The last listed there, the most immersive medium of all, was now on the cusp of realization. How many people would choose to watch a non-interactive film when they had the opportunity to steer the course of the plot for themselves? Probably about as many as still preferred books to movies.

Not all that long after Williams’s editorial, the era of the full-motion-video game began in earnest. The first really prominent exemplar of the species was ICOM Simulations’s Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective series in 1992, which sent you wandering around Victorian London collecting clues to a mystery from the video snippets that played every time you visited a relevant location. The first volume of this series alone would eventually sell 1 million copies as an early CD-ROM showcase title. The following year brought Return to Zork, The 7th Guest, and Myst as three of the five biggest games of the year; all three of these used full-motion video to a greater or lesser extent. (Myst used it considerably less than the other two, and, perhaps not coincidentally, is the member of the trio that holds up by far the best today.) With success stories like those to look to, the floodgates truly opened in 1994. Suddenly every game-development project — by no means only adventure games — was looking for ways to shoehorn live actors into the proceedings.

But only a few of the full-motion-video games that followed would post anything like the numbers of the aforementioned four games. That hard fact, combined with a technological counter-revolution in the form of 3D graphics, would finally force a reckoning with the cognitive dissonance of trying to build a satisfying interactive experience by mixing and matching snippets of nonmalleable video. By 1997, the full-motion-video era was all but over. Today, few things date a game more instantly to a certain window of time than grainy video of terrible actors flickering over a background of computer-generated graphics. What on earth were people thinking?

Most full-motion-video games are indeed dire, but they’re going to be with us for quite some time to come as we continue to work our way through this history. I wish I could say that Activision’s Return to Zork, my real topic for today, was one of the exceptions to the rule of direness. Sadly, though, it isn’t.

In fact, let me be clear right now: Return to Zork is a terrible adventure game. Under no circumstances should you play it, unless to satisfy historical curiosity or as a source of ironic amusement in the grand tradition of Ed Wood. And even in these special cases, you should take care to play it with a walkthrough in hand. To do anything else is sheer masochism; you’re almost guaranteed to lock yourself out of victory within the first ten minutes, and almost guaranteed not to realize it until many hours later. There’s really no point in mincing words here: Return to Zork is one of the absolute worst adventure-game designs I’ve ever seen — and, believe me, I’ve seen quite a few bad ones.

Its one saving grace, however, is that it’s terrible in a somewhat different way from the majority of terrible full-motion-video adventure games. Most of them are utterly bereft of ideas beyond the questionable one at their core: that of somehow making a game out of static video snippets. You can almost see the wheels turning desperately in the designers’ heads as they’re suddenly confronted with the realization that, in addition to playing videos, they have to give the player something to actually do. Return to Zork, on the other hand, is chock full of ideas for improving upon the standard graphic-adventure interface in ways that, on the surface at any rate, allow more rather than less flexibility and interactivity. Likewise, even the trendy use of full-motion video, which dates it so indelibly to the mid-1990s, is much more calculated than the norm among its contemporaries.

Unfortunately, all of its ideas are undone by a complete disinterest in the fundamentals of game design on the part of the novelty-seeking technologists who created it. And so here we are, stuck with a terrible game in spite of it all. If I can’t quite call Return to Zork a noble failure — as we’ll see, one of its creators’ stated reasons for making it so callously unfair is anything but noble — I can at least convince myself to call it an interesting one.


When Activision decided to make their follow-up to the quickie cash-in Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2 a more earnest, better funded stab at a sequel to a beloved Infocom game, it seemed logical to find themselves a real Infocom Implementor to design the thing. They thus asked Steve Meretzky, whom they had just worked with on Leather Goddesses 2, if he’d like to design a new Zork game for them as well. But Meretzky hadn’t overly enjoyed trying to corral Activision’s opinionated in-house developers from a continent away last time around; this time, he turned them down flat.

Meretzky’s rejection left Activision without a lot of options to choose from when it came to former Imps. A number of them had left the games industry upon Infocom’s shuttering three years before, while, of those that remained, Marc Blank, Mike Berlyn, Brian Moriarty, and Bob Bates were all employed by one of Activison’s direct competitors. Activision therefore turned to Doug Barnett, a freelance artist and designer who had been active in the industry for the better part of a decade; his most high-profile design gig to date had been Cinemaware’s Lords of the Rising Sun. But he had never designed a traditional puzzle-oriented adventure game, as one can perhaps see all too well in the game that would result from his partnership with Activision. He also didn’t seem to have a great deal of natural affinity for Zork. In the lengthy set of notes and correspondence relating to the game’s development which has been put online by The Zork Library, a constant early theme on Activision’s part is the design’s lack of “Zorkiness.” “As it stands, the design constitutes more of a separate and unrelated story, rather than a sequel to the Zork series,” they wrote at one point. “It was noted that ‘Zork’ is the name of a vast ancient underground empire, yet Return to Zork takes place in a mostly above-ground environment.”

In fairness to Barnett, Zork had always been more of a state of mind than a coherent place. With the notable exception of Steve Meretzky, everyone at Infocom had been wary of overthinking a milieu that had originally been plucked out of the air more or less at random. In comparison to other shared worlds — even other early computer-game worlds, such as the Britannia of Richard Garriott’s Ultima series — there was surprisingly little there there when it came Zork: no well-established geography, no well-established history which everybody knew — and, most significantly of all, no really iconic characters which simply had to be included. At bottom, Zork boiled down to little more than a modest grab bag of tropes which lived largely in the eye of the beholder: the white house with a mailbox, grues, Flood Control Dam #3, Dimwit Flathead, the Great Underground Empire itself. And even most of these had their origin stories in the practical needs of an adventure game rather than any higher world-building purpose. (The Great Underground Empire, for example, was first conceived as an abandoned place not for any literary effect but because living characters are hard to implement in an adventure game, while the detritus they leave behind is relatively easy.)

That said, there was a distinct tone to Zork, which was easier to spot than it was to describe or to capture. Barnett’s design missed this tone, even as it began with the gleefully anachronistic, seemingly thoroughly Zorkian premise of casting the player as a sweepstakes winner on an all-expenses-paid trip to the idyllic Valley of the Sparrows, only to discover it has turned into the Valley of the Vultures under the influence of some pernicious, magical evil. Barnett and Activision would continue to labor mightily to make Return to Zork feel like Zork, but would never quite get there.

By the summer of 1992, Barnett’s design document had already gone through several revisions without entirely meeting Activision’s expectations. At this point, they hired one Eddie Dombrower to take personal charge of the project in the role of producer. Like Barnett, Dombrower had been working in the industry for quite some time, but had never worked on an adventure game; he was best known for World Series Major League Baseball on the old Intellivision console and Earl Weaver Baseball on computers. Dombrower gave the events of Return to Zork an explicit place in Zorkian history — some 700 years after Infocom’s Beyond Zork — and moved a big chunk of the game underground to remedy one of his boss’ most oft-repeated objections to the existing design.

More ominously, he also made a comprehensive effort to complicate Barnett’s puzzles, based on feedback from players and reviewers of Leather Goddesses 2, who were decidedly unimpressed with that game’s simple-almost-to-the-point-of-nonexistence puzzles. The result would be the mother of all over-corrections — a topic we’ll return to later.

Unlike Leather Goddess 2, whose multimedia ambitions had led it to fill a well-nigh absurd 17 floppy disks, Return to Zork had been planned almost from its inception as a product for CD-ROM, a technology which, after years of false promises and setbacks, finally seemed to be moving toward a critical mass of consumer uptake. In 1992, full-motion video, CD-ROM, and multimedia computing in general were all but inseparable concepts in the industry’s collective mind. Activision thus became one of the first studios to hire a director and actors and rent time on a sound stage; the business of making computer games had now come to involve making movies as well. They even hired a professional Hollywood screenwriter to punch up the dialog and make it more “cinematic.”

In general, though, while the computer-games industry was eager to pursue a merger with Hollywood, the latter was proving far more skeptical. There was still little money in computer games by comparison with movies, and there was very little prestige — rather the opposite, most would say — in “starring” in a game. The actors which games could manage to attract were therefore B-listers at best. Return to Zork actually collected a more accomplished — or at least more high-profile — cast than most. Among them were Ernie Lively, a veteran supporting player from television shows such as The Dukes of Hazzard; his daughter Robyn Lively, fresh off a six-episode stint as a minor character on David Lynch’s prestigious critics’ darling Twin Peaks; Jason Hervey, who was still playing older brother Wayne on the long-running coming-of-age sitcom The Wonder Years; and Sam Jones, whose big shot at leading-man status had come with the film Flash Gordon back in 1980 and gone with its mixed reception.

If the end result would prove less than Oscar-worthy, it’s for the most part not cringe-worthy either. After all, the cast did consist entirely of acting professionals, which is more than one can say for many productions of this ilk — and certainly more than one can say for the truly dreadful voice acting in Leather Goddess of Phobos 2, Activision’s previous attempt at a multimedia adventure game. While they were hampered by the sheer unfamiliarity of talking directly “to” the invisible player of the game — as Ernie Lively put it, “there’s no one to act off of” — they did a decent job with the slight material they had to work with.

The fact that they were talking to the player rather than acting out scenes with one another actually speaks to a degree of judiciousness in the use of full-motion video on Activision’s part. Rather than attempting to make an interactive movie in the most literal sense — by having a bunch of actors, one of them representing the protagonist, act out each of the player’s choices — Activision went for a more thoughtful mixed-media approach that could, theoretically anyway, eliminate most of the weaknesses of the typical full-motion-video adventure game. For the most part, only conversations involved the use of full-motion video; everything else was rendered by Activision’s pixel artists and 3D modelers in conventional computer graphics. The protagonist wasn’t shown at all: at a time when the third-person view that was the all but universal norm in adventure games, Activision opted for a first-person view.

The debate over whether an adventure-game protagonist ought to be a blank slate which the player can fill with her own personality or an established character which the player merely guides and empathizes with was a longstanding one even at the time when Return to Zork was being made. Certainly Infocom had held rousing internal debates on the subject, and had experimented fairly extensively with pre-established protagonists in some of their games. (These experiments sometimes led to rousing external debates among their fans, most notably in the case of the extensively characterized and tragically flawed protagonist of Infidel, who meets a nasty if richly deserved end no matter what the player does.) The Zork series, however, stemmed from an earlier, simpler time in adventure games than the rest of the Infocom catalog, and the “nameless, faceless adventurer,” functioning as a stand-in for the player herself, had always been its star. Thus Activision’s decision not to show the player’s character in Return to Zork, or indeed to characterize her in any way whatsoever, is a considered one, in keeping with everything that came before.

In fact, the protagonist of Return to Zork never actually says anything. To get around the need, Activision came up with a unique attitude-based conversation engine. As you “talk” to other characters, you choose from three stances — threatening, interested, or bored — and listen only to your interlocutors’ reactions. Not only does your own dialog go unvoiced, but you don’t even see the exact words you use; the game instead lets you imagine your own words. Specific questions you might wish to ask are cleverly turned into concrete physical interactions, something games do much better than abstract conversations. As you explore, you have a camera with which to take pictures of points of interest. During conversations, you can show the entries from your photo album to your interlocutor, perhaps prompting a reaction. You can do the same with objects in your inventory, locations on the auto-map you always carry with you, or even the tape recordings you automatically make of each interaction with each character.

So, whatever else you can say about it, Return to Zork is hardly bereft of ideas. William Volk, the technical leader of the project, was well up on the latest research into interface design being conducted inside universities like MIT and at companies like Apple. Many such studies had concluded that, in place of static onscreen menus and buttons, the interface should ideally pop into existence just where and when the user needed it. The result of such thinking in Return to Zork is a screen with no static interface at all; it instead pops up when you click on an object with which you can interact. Since it doesn’t need the onscreen menu of “verbs” typical of contemporaneous Sierra and LucasArts adventure games, Return to Zork can give over the entirety of the screen to its graphical portrayal of the world.

In addition to being a method of recapturing screen real estate, the interface was conceived as a way to recapture some of the sense of boundless freedom which is such a characteristic of parser-driven text adventures — a sense which can all too easily become lost amidst the more constrained interfaces of their graphical equivalent. William Volk liked to call Return to Zork‘s interface a “reverse parser”: clicking on a “noun” in the environment or in your inventory yields a pop-up menu of “verbs” that pertain to it. Taking an object in your “hand” and clicking it on another one yields still more options, the equivalent of commands to a parser involving indirect as well as direct objects. In the first screen of the game, for example, clicking the knife on a vulture gives options to “show knife to vulture,” “throw knife at vulture,” “stab vulture with knife,” or “hit vulture with knife.” There are limits to the sense of possibility: every action had to be anticipated and hand-coded by the development team, and most of them are the wrong approach to whatever you’re trying to accomplish. In fact, in the case of the example just mentioned as well as many others, most of the available options will get you killed; Return to Zork loves instant deaths even more than the average Sierra game. And there are many cases of that well-known adventure-game syndrome where a perfectly reasonable solution to a problem isn’t implemented, forcing you to devise some absurdly convoluted solution that is implemented in its stead. Still, in a world where adventure games were getting steadily less rather than more ambitious in their scope of interactive possibility — to a large extent due to the limitations of full-motion video — Return to Zork was a welcome departure from the norm, a graphic adventure that at least tried to recapture the sense of open-ended possibility of an Infocom game.

Indeed, there are enough good ideas in Return to Zork that one really, really wishes they all could have been tied to a better game. But sadly, I have to stop praising Return to Zork now and start condemning it.

The most obvious if perhaps most forgivable of its sins is that, as already noted, it never really manages to feel like Zork — not, at least, like the classic Zork of the original trilogy. (Steve Meretzky’s Zork Zero, Infocom’s final release to bear the name, actually does share some of the slapstick qualities of Return to Zork, but likewise rather misses the feel of the original.) The most effective homage comes at the very beginning, when the iconic opening text of Zork I appears onscreen and morphs into the new game’s splashy opening credits. It’s hard to imagine a better depiction circa 1993 of where computer gaming had been and where it was going — which was, of course, exactly the effect the designers intended.

Once the game proper gets under way, however, modernity begins to feel much less friendly to the Zorkian aesthetic of old. Most of Zork‘s limited selection of physical icons do show up here, from grues to Flood Control Dam #3, but none of it feels all that convincingly Zork-like. The dam is a particular disappointment; what was described in terms perfect for inspiring awed flights of the imagination in Zork I looks dull and underwhelming when portrayed in the cruder medium of graphics. Meanwhile the jokey, sitcom-style dialog that confronts you at every turn feels even less like the original trilogy’s slyer, subtler humor.

This isn’t to say that Return to Zork‘s humor doesn’t connect on occasion. It’s just… different from that of Dave Lebling and Marc Blank. By far the most memorable character, whose catchphrase has lived on to this day as a minor Internet meme, is the drunken miller named Boos Miller. (Again, subtlety isn’t this game’s trademark.) He plies you endlessly with whiskey, whilst repeating, “Want some rye? Course you do!” over and over and over in his cornpone accent. It’s completely stupid — but, I must admit, it’s also pretty darn funny; Boos Miller is the one thing everyone who ever played the game still seems to remember about Return to Zork. But, funny though he is, he would be unimaginable in any previous Zork.


Of course, a lack of sufficient Zorkiness need not have been the kiss of death for Return to Zork as an adventure game in the abstract. What really does it in is its thoroughly unfair puzzle design. This game plays like the fever dream of a person who hates and fears adventure games. It’s hard to know where to even start (or end) with this cornucopia of bad puzzles, but I’ll describe a few of them, ranked roughly in order of their objectionability.

The Questionable: At one point, you find yourself needing to milk a cow, but she won’t let you do so with cold hands. Do you need to do something sensible, like, say, find some gloves or wrap your hands in a blanket? Of course not! The solution is to light some of the hay that’s scattered all over the wooden barn on fire and warm your hands that way. For some reason, the whole place doesn’t go up in smoke. This solution is made still more difficult to discover by the way that the game usually kills you every time you look at it wrong. Why on earth would it not kill you for a monumentally stupid act like this one? To further complicate matters, for reasons that are obscure at best you can only light the hay on fire if you first pick it up and then drop it again. Thus even many players who are consciously attempting the correct solution will still get stuck here.

The Absurd: At another point, you find a bra. You have to throw it into an incinerator in order to get a wire out of it whose existence you were never aware of in the first place. How does the game expect you to guess that you should take such an action? Apparently some tenuous linkage with the 1960s tradition of bra burning and, as a justification after the fact, the verb “to hot-wire.” Needless to say, throwing anything else into the incinerator just destroys the object and, more likely than not, locks you out of victory.

The Incomprehensible: There’s a water wheel out back of Boos’s house with a chock holding it still. If you’ve taken the chock and thus the wheel is spinning, and you’ve solved another puzzle that involves drinking Boos under the table (see the video above), a trapdoor is revealed in the floor. But if the chock is in place, the trapdoor can’t be seen. Why? I have absolutely no idea.

Wait! Don’t do it!

The Brutal: In a way, everything you really need to know about Return to Zork can be summed up by its most infamous single puzzle. On the very first screen of the game, there’s a “bonding plant” growing. If you simply pull up the plant and take it with you, everything seems fine — until you get to the very end of the game many hours later. Here, you finally find a use for the plant you’ve been carting around all this time. Fair enough. But unfortunately, you need a living version of it. It turns out you were supposed to have used a knife to dig up the plant rather than pulling or cutting it. Guess what? You now get to play through the whole game again from the beginning.

All of the puzzles just described, and the many equally bad ones, are made still more complicated by the game’s general determination to be a right bastard to you every chance it gets. If, as Robb Sherwin once put it, the original Zork games hate their players, this game has found some existential realm beyond mere hatred. It will let you try to do many things to solve each puzzle, but, of those actions that don’t outright kill you, a fair percentage lock you out of victory in one way or another. Sometimes, as in the case of its most infamous puzzle, it lets you think you’ve solved them, only to pull the rug out from under you much later.

So, you’re perpetually on edge as you tiptoe through this minefield of instant deaths and unwinnable states; you’ll have a form of adventure-game post-traumatic-stress syndrome by the time you’re done, even if you’re largely playing from a walkthrough. The instant deaths are annoying, but nowhere near as bad as the unwinnable states; the problem there is that you never know whether you’ve already locked yourself out of victory, never know whether you can’t solve the puzzle in front of you because of something you did or didn’t do a long time ago.

It all combines to make Return to Zork one of the worst adventure games I’ve ever played. We’ve sunk to Time Zone levels of awful with this one. No human not willing to mount a methodical months-long assault on this game, trying every possibility everywhere, could possibly solve it unaided. Even the groundbreaking interface is made boring and annoying by the need to show everything to everyone and try every conversation stance on everyone, always with the lingering fear that the wrong stance could spoil your game. Adventure games are built on trust between player and designer, but you can’t trust Return to Zork any farther than you can throw it. Amidst all the hand-wringing at Activision over whether Return to Zork was or was not sufficiently Zorky, they forgot the most important single piece of the Infocom legacy: their thoroughgoing commitment to design, and the fundamental respect that commitment demonstrated to the players who spent their hard-earned money on Infocom games.  “Looking back at the classics might be a good idea for today’s game designers,” wrote Computer Gaming World‘s Scorpia at the conclusion of her mixed review of Return to Zork. “Good puzzle construction, logical development, and creative inspiration are in rich supply on those dusty disks.” None of these, alas, is in correspondingly good supply in Return to Zork.

The next logical question, then, is just how Return to Zork‘s puzzles wound up being so awful. After all, this game wasn’t the quickie cash grab that Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2 had been. The development team put serious thought and effort into the interface, and there were clearly a lot of people involved with this game who cared about it a great deal — among them Activision’s CEO Bobby Kotick, who was willing to invest almost $1 million to bring the whole project to fruition at a time when cash was desperately short and his creditors had him on a short leash indeed.

The answer to our question apparently comes down to the poor reception of Leather Goddesses 2, which had stung Activision badly. In an interview given shortly before Return to Zork‘s release, Eddie Dombrower said that, “based on feedback that the puzzles in Leather Goddesses of Phobos [2] were too simple,” the development team had “made the puzzles increasingly difficult just by reworking what Doug had already laid out for us.” That sounds innocent enough on the face of it. But, speaking to me recently, William Volk delivered a considerably darker variation on the same theme. “People hated Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2 — panned it,” he told me. “So, we decided to wreak revenge on the entire industry by making Return to Zork completely unfair. Everyone bitches about that title. There’s 4000 videos devoted to Return to Zork on YouTube, most of which are complaining because the title is so blatantly unfair. But, there you go. Something to pin my hat on. I made the most unfair game in history.”

For all that I appreciate Volk sharing his memories with me, I must confess that my initial reaction to this boast was shock, soon to be followed by genuine anger at the lack of empathy it demonstrates. Return to Zork didn’t “wreak revenge” on its industry, which really couldn’t have cared less. It rather wreaked “revenge,” if that’s the appropriate word, on the ordinary gamers who bought it in good faith at a substantial price, most of whom had neither bought nor commented on Leather Goddesses 2. I sincerely hope that Volk’s justification is merely a case of hyperbole after the fact. If not… well, I really don’t know what else to say about such juvenile pettiness, so symptomatic of the entitled tunnel vision of so many who are fortunate enough to work in technology, other than that it managed to leave me disliking Return to Zork even more. Some games are made out of an openhearted desire to bring people enjoyment. Others, like this one, are not.

I’d like to be able to say that Activision got their comeuppance for making Return to Zork such a bad game, demonstrating such contempt for their paying customers, and so soiling the storied Infocom name in the process. But exactly the opposite is the case. Released in late 1993, Return to Zork became one of the breakthrough titles that finally made the CD-ROM revolution a reality, whilst also carrying Activision a few more steps back from the abyss into which they’d been staring for the last few years. It reportedly sold 1 million copies in its first year — albeit the majority of them as a bundled title, included with CD-ROM drives and multimedia upgrade kits, rather than as a boxed standalone product. “Zork on a brick would sell 100,000 copies,” crowed Bobby Kotick in the aftermath.

Perhaps. But more likely not. Even within the established journals of computer gaming, whose readership probably didn’t constitute the majority of Return to Zork‘s purchasers, reviews of the game were driven more by enthusiasm for its graphics and sound, which really were impressive in their day, than by Zork nostalgia. Discussed in the euphoria following its release as the beginning of a full-blown Infocom revival, Return to Zork would instead go down in history as a vaguely embarrassing anticlimax to the real Infocom story. A sequel to Planetfall, planned as the next stage in the revival, would linger in Development Hell for years and ultimately never get finished. By the end of the 1990s, Zork as well would be a dead property in commercial terms.

Rather than having all that much to do with its Infocom heritage, Return to Zork‘s enormous commercial success came down to its catching the technological zeitgeist at just the right instant, joining Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, The 7th Guest, and Myst as the perfect flashy showpieces for CD-ROM. Its success conveyed all the wrong messages to game publishers like Activision: that multimedia glitz was everything, and that design really didn’t matter at all.

If it stings a bit that this of all games, arguably the worst one ever to bear the Infocom logo, should have sold better than any of the rest of them, we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that Quality does have a way of winning out in the end. Today, Return to Zork is a musty relic of its time, remembered if at all only for that “want some rye?” guy. The classic Infocom text adventures, on the other hand, remain just that — widely recognized as timeless classics, their clean text-only presentations ironically much less dated than all of Return to Zork‘s oh-so-1993 multimedia flash. Justice does have a way of being served in the long run.

(Sources: the book Return to Zork Adventurer’s Guide by Steve Schwartz; Computer Gaming World of February 1993, July 1993, November 1993, and January 1994; Questbusters of December 1993; Sierra News Magazine of Spring 1990; Electronic Games of January 1994; New Media of June 24 1994. Online sources include The Zork Library‘s archive of Return to Zork design documents and correspondence, Retro Games Master‘s interview with Doug Barnett, and Matt Barton’s interview with William Volk. Some of this article is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Finally, my huge thanks to William Volk for sharing his memories and impressions with me in a personal interview.)

 

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