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Seven Cities of Gold

13 Aug

Seven Cities of Gold

Shortly after completing M.U.L.E., Ozark Softscape held a week-long brainstorming retreat with their producer from Electronic Arts, Joe Ybarra, inside the Little Rock house that served as their offices. Dan Bunten [1]Dan Bunten began living as the woman Danielle Bunten Berry in November of 1992. She died five years later.

In preparing this article, I of course reviewed what I had already written about Dani. I confess it made me cringe a bit. I have long been annoyed by the habit of people who know nothing of her games of using Dani as some generic representative of her sexuality, and wanted to move the focus firmly to her work as a game designer, to leave the politics of gender identity alone and focus on why she was a such a giant in her chosen field. I now realize that in doing so I seemed to dismiss and disrespect the other parts of her story, although I genuinely didn’t intend to do so. A couple of angry commenters who, it seemed to me, wanted to force me into the very narrative template I had been trying to avoid only hardened my position. I continue to want to avoid the standard structure of the genre of “Dani Bunten Berry stories” — but I also realize that they had some points as well. I particularly regret that I never referred to Dani by her female name even in my note at the end of the article. I literally never realized I had done this until my recent rereading, and now understand some objections about how I allegedly considered her unworthy of being referred to by her real name and the like a bit better. I won’t edit the article, as doing so could only make those who commented look unreasonable in ways they really weren’t. Anyway, it perhaps serves as a better lesson just as it is. Know, however, that if I was writing it today I would handle the issue somewhat differently.

That said, you’ve surely noticed that I continue to refer to Dani as “Dan” and “he” in the article above. I understand the logic of those who would say that Dani was always a woman, merely one who was by an accident of birth born into a man’s body. Certainly this is the argument most advocates for transsexual rights would make. For myself, I am all for transsexual rights, but also believe that gender and sexual identity may be more fluid than much transsexual rhetoric would have it. In the end, I have continued to opt for clarity and reality as all of Dani’s friends and colleagues knew it in the 1980s: of her being the man Dan Bunten. Referring to “Dani” and “she” in these articles would be confusing to the reader and at least at some level anachronistic, opposed to the consensus reality shared by everyone around her. I understand that this decision may not seem ideal to everyone, and even that it runs counter to some journalistic style guidelines. If you disagree with it, I can only ask you to believe me when I say it was made in good faith, with no intention to slight. For what it’s worth, reports are that Dani was never offended in the least by being referred to as a man when conversations came around to her years of living as Dan. arrived with a pretty good idea of the game he wanted to make next already in hand. He had recently become fascinated with a monster board game released by those famed purveyors of monster board games, Avalon Hill. Civilization places each player in charge of a single tribe at the dawn of history, about 8000 BCE, and lets her guide it down through the millennia as far as the time of the dawning of the glory that was Rome, about 230 BCE. Warfare plays a role, but Civilization isn’t really a traditional war game; equally important are exploration, culture, economics, and technological advancement. (Of course, all of these factors are inevitably interlinked.) With a scope like that, Civilization is just about as complicated and time consuming as board gaming gets. A full game generally consumes about eight hours even once you’ve learned how to play.

Dan’s colleagues dutifully set aside a day to play the game with him, to see what he was on about. They emerged blinking and befuddled, and not at all sure about the idea of a computerized version. How, after all, were they going to pack all of that complexity and grandeur into their little 48 K Atari 800s? Ybarra was likely motivated by another practical consideration: Civilization belonged to Avalon Hill, who were trying (with somewhat mixed results) to make a go of it in computer games, the place to which a dismaying quantity of their old customers were migrating. They weren’t likely to make it easy or cheap for a competitor to release a computer version of one of their big board-game titles. Better, Dan’s colleagues all argued, to make a more modest original game with some of the spirit of Civilization. This sort of conversation wasn’t that new to Ozark. Dan’s three partners, as well as Ybarra, freely acknowledged him to be a creative genius far beyond their own lights. Geniuses, however, occasionally need to be gently steered down practical roads, lest their Big Ideas overwhelm their sense of proportion; this they saw as part of their own modest contributions to Ozark.

Also in Ozark’s collection of board games was another Avalon Hill effort called Conquistador, a game of “The Age of Exploration: 1495-1600.” In it each player takes control of one of the great European powers as they explore, conquer, and eventually colonize the New World. Late in the game, wars among the players can develop as virgin territory gets harder to come by. It’s only slightly less daunting than Civilization; a complete game usually lasts five hours or so. Still, it felt like a concept that could be more readily pared down to something manageable on the Atari 800, and like one that could inspire a computer game original enough — particularly with a designer of Dan’s creativity on the project — that licensing wouldn’t become an issue. It also dealt with a subject that Dan and his brother Bill had found genuinely fascinating from an early age, when an uncle had given them their first book about the Conquistadors. And so Ozark’s next project was decided by the time the week was out.

Dan, still pining for Civilization, was initially not hugely enthusiastic. After he and Bill collected a tall stack of history books and dove in, however, he started to come around. Once again the Big Ideas started to come thick and fast. He envisioned a game played in three stages, like Conquistador. In the first, you would be exploring and dealing with the natives you encountered, which basically meant either trading and trying to establish peaceful alliances or doing a full-on Cortés and charging through their villages with swords swinging. The second stage would have you founding colonies, establishing permanent settlements and institutions in the New World rather than rushing back to Europe with each new shipful of gold. Finally, these emerging and expanding nations would have to deal with one another. Diplomacy and the results of its breakdown, wars, would ensue. Diplomacy being pretty difficult terrain for a computer opponent to navigate, Dan envisioned a game that, like M.U.L.E., would emphasize multiplayer play while offering computerized opponents merely as practice and fillers for empty human seats around the virtual table.

It was all very ambitious. Inevitably, the heartless hand of practicality — largely in the usual form of his partners — started to pare away at it pretty quickly. Stages two and three were excised entirely; this would be a game of exploration and conquest only, not politics or consolidation. You would also be restricted to playing as a representative of Spain and to exploring the lands of South and Central America that were historically conquered by Spain. The name Seven Cities of Gold was chosen as a reflection of this new emphasis on Conquistadors seeking after the wealth of exotic legends to bring home to Spain. Most painfully, it was decided to make the game single-player only, as it was ambitious enough as it was and no one knew quite how to make multiplayer work anyway. Besides, as Ybarra and everyone else at EA — not to mention the failure of M.U.L.E. — were able to attest, for whatever reason there just wasn’t a big market for multiplayer-focused strategy games. With EA and Ybarra sticking so loyally with Ozark despite M.U.L.E.‘s fate, there was perhaps a sense that Ozark owed them the best stab they could make at giving them a hit. At any rate, they owed it to themselves if they wanted to stay in this business; it was doubtful that even EA would continue to fund them if they delivered another under-performer like M.U.L.E. And so Seven Cities of Gold became the first single-player-only game Dan had ever made.

If that was a hard compromise to accept, there were consolations. The overarching Big Idea of Seven Cities, to be emphasized if necessary at the expense of everything else, would be Discovery. Dan had quickly realized when he first played Conquistador that it could not be a true recreation of the experience of exploring an uncharted continent for one very simple reason: the player came into it with a knowledge of the geography of the Americas, and with a bit of cursory outside research could know even the location of the capital of the Inca Empire. To remedy this, he proposed making a random map available in addition to the historical one. The historical map would be there out of obligation and for learning purposes; the real game would have you exploring New Worlds that were truly new to you.

The map generator turned into the most technically challenging element of the entire project. To be worthwhile, the random maps had to be as believable and logical as the historical. They couldn’t, in other words, just scatter landscape and natives about willy-nilly. From the manual:

There is a plate-tectonics model consulted for each creation. Mountain ranges are generated where the plates bump into each other. And secondary ranges (like the Allegheny Mountains on the historical map) may be created as well.

The program also consults a cultural dissemination model for its work. The influences of major civilizations are presumed to spread outward. Consequently, pueblo dwellers generally will be found between city-states and primitive agriculturalists. The model will allow for varying levels of this influence and can thus produce occasional continent arrangements which have no Incan-level civilizations. Alternately, it can make very rich and powerful arrangements, one which, like 16th-century Japan, are highly civilized from coast to coast.

The random-map generator was assigned to Jim Rushing, the purest coding mind at Ozark, who spent some four months struggling with it. It was quite a task for the little Atari; each map took a solid ten minutes of processing to generate. Frustratingly, the end result from early versions was always the same, a continent shaped like a giant peanut. Finally, Rushing found a bug in his random-number generator. Ybarra still recalls vividly the day that Dan called him to tell him that they had generated a believable alternate New World: “The energy and excitement was terrific. Dan was both elated and burnt out, but you could ‘hear’ him grinning on the other side of the phone.” Ybarra now firmly believed they were “creating another masterpiece.”

Seven Cities of Gold Seven Cities of Gold

Indeed, the game is nothing if not elegant. Like in M.U.L.E., you are always embodied in the game by an onscreen avatar who visits shipyards, the pub, and the royal palace, and of course wanders through the New World as your surrogate. This can make it feel as much adventure game as strategy game; Seven Cities is anything but dry or abstract. The overland exploration which forms the heart of the game was inspired as much by Dan’s own experiences hiking the backwoods of Arkansas as his readings in history. He had particularly vivid memories of getting himself lost on occasion, and the relief engendered by coming upon a road or other familiar landmark. Seven Cities can prompt similar feelings as you press ever deep into this vast, unknown continent. The feeling of relief at finding your trusty ship sitting right there where you left it as you stumble out of the jungle with food supplies dwindling is almost indescribable.

Seven Cities of Gold

But maybe the supreme achievement in verisimilitude is your interaction with the native tribes, as brilliant an abstraction of real-world experience into interface as the auctions of M.U.L.E. When you enter a new village, the inhabitants gather around you, surround you disconcertingly. You can give them gifts or try to “amaze” them by acting the part of one of their gods, but it’s always an uncertain, tentative communication that could erupt into violence at any time. Many times you will find yourself all but forced into massacring a village — or being massacred by them — by an inadvertent push of the joystick or a single panicked shot by a member of your own army who goes out of your control. It’s a superb simulation of how these encounters between two utterly alien cultures without a single word in common between them must have actually felt to the participants, and a lesson in just why they so often ended in violence even when both parties entered them with the best of intentions. Incredibly for a game of this vintage, the natives remember and communicate with one another. Attack one tribe in a region and the others will be much more suspicious. Try to “amaze” a group of natives too many times and it starts to become old hat — and they start to become suspicious.

For the desperately idealistic Dan, who was always eager to instil “a meaningful message,” the moral dimension of these encounters and the impact they would make on the player’s psyche were key not only to his game but to his very sense of his own worthiness as a person:

“The people I admire are the people who went to jail instead of Vietnam, or who go to India to do some good, or who are really committed to the environment. Those are the people who are really admirable. What I’m doing seems less important. I want to make a significant impact in a person’s life.”

Yet Seven Cities doesn’t preach; it leaves you to your conscience. Unquestionably, violence in Seven Cities often does pay, just as in real history, and the problematic nature of this was not lost on Dan:

“Many of the Conquistadors treated the natives horribly. Theirs was an arrogant and prideful approach to a society that had its own history and roots. But to be historically accurate required that we had to include violence. I don’t like the idea of players hurting other things, but there’s no alternative or you’re forcing your own moral decisions on an audience that ought to have a choice themselves.

“Bill and I were real Indian sympathizers when we were growing up. We always sided with the Indians instead of the cowboys. It just seems like such a neat, romantic culture to us, so in tune with the earth. Then to write a game where at least part of the game is wiping out Indians — that’s problematic.”

Seven Cities of Gold

Seven Cities comments on your behavior toward the natives in only one way: if you get truly savage, the king will eventually tell you to please stop killing so many of them. But these words are never backed by any action, and the priority always remains to keep the gold flowing. The crown refuses to acknowledge that the gold and the killing that produces it are often inseparable. Such halfhearted carping is, as Dan noted, lifted straight from history, where it provided a way for those back in Spain to feel morally absolved while still benefiting from the killing and plundering of their countrymen.

Brilliant as its individual elements are, I do tend to have a problem appreciating Seven Cities of Gold as a holistic game. There is no competitor to play against, unless you count the natives you encounter — and the power imbalance between you and them is ultimately so great that, even if you choose the warlike approach, it’s hard to think of them in that role. Nor is there any in-game way to really lose or win. There isn’t even a definite end-point; you begin in 1495 and receive a rank based on your performance in 1540, but can continue to play on after that as long as you like. After a while the thrill of filling in the map and adding to my counts of missions and ships and rivers and other landmarks discovered starts to fade, and I start wishing for some goals, some sort of more specific direction. Dan himself delivered the following answer to the question, “How do I win?”

However you want. Seven Cities is a process-type game. You go along like real life. Life doesn’t have ends and wins and things like that. It has processes that you go through, and at times you stand back and say, “Hey, I’ve done pretty good so far.” Set your own goals really high and say, “That’s how I win.” Then go for it.

All of which is fine on the face of it, but Seven Cities just doesn’t feel to me like an intentional sandbox game in the mold of the (much later) SimCity. It rather feels like a design which is missing something it was originally intended to have, a possible legacy of the process of paring it down to a manageable project. On the other hand, I’m also willing to accept that this may just be down to a failure of imagination on my part, as the game received stellar reviews in its day and is still loved by many today.

Be that as it may, it seems to me that Seven Cities of Gold is still not so significant as a game in itself as for the frontiers it opened and the new things it dared to try. Its custom worlds, randomly generated at heart but meticulously terra-formed to be as believable as our own, became a staple of grand strategy games to come. Its consistent prioritizing of friendliness and elegant playability — the entire game is controlled, simply and intuitively, with a single joystick, and its manual consumes a scant 8 pages that spend as much time on historical background as game mechanics — served as an object lesson to games that used every key on the keyboard. The random maps, the native-encounter sequences, and the way that the whole game is played in “real time” rather than discrete turns also demonstrated how to take advantage of the unique abilities of the computer, rather than just encoding the rules of what could otherwise be a board game. And of course the moral ambiguity of this whole exercise, in which even peaceful alliances are ultimately made for the purpose of conquer and plunder, is never swept under the rug. Seven Cities has something to teach us about politics and history and perhaps even human nature. It goes well beyond the equipment lists and purely tactical concerns of a typical war game of the sort being pumped out by companies like SSI by the handful by 1984. Trip Hawkins declared that Ozark had pioneered a whole new genre of computer software: “edutainment.”

M.U.L.E. offered many of the same design lessons, but few others were thinking on this level at the time of Seven Cities‘s mid-1984 release. Troy Goodfellow goes so far as to call it “the most influential strategy game ever made.” That’s a bold statement even if we assume he’s implicitly restricting the field to computerized strategy games, but just the fact that Seven Cities is in the running in a world that contains games like Civilization (the computer version) says volumes.

Speaking of Civilization: one of those entranced by Seven Cities‘s innovations was a 30-year-old programmer and designer named Sid Meier, co-owner of a small publisher called MicroProse. Seven Cities and its determination to make strategy and history attractive and approachable became the inspiration for his breakthrough title, 1987’s Pirates!. The embodied interface of that game, which blurred the lines between strategy, adventure, and RPG while always making you feel that you are there, is lifted straight from Seven Cities; even the fonts and whole visual looks of the two games are similar. If Pirates!, generally acknowledged as one of the best computer games ever created, is even better than Seven Cities of Gold, it’s also true that it never could have existed without it, as Meier himself would happily admit. Later still, of course, Meier would manage what Dan never quite could, bringing all the complexity and grandeur — and then some — of the board game Civilization to the computer in an amazingly accessible way. Again, the road to Sid Meier’s Civilization could only have passed through Seven Cities of Gold.

While it may be most notable for the games it influenced, it’s also possible to say something about Seven Cities of Gold that is all too unusual in Dan Bunten’s career: the game was a hit in its own right. EA’s faith in their backwoods savants paid off at last, as Seven Cities sold at least 150,000 copies, five times the numbers done by M.U.L.E. and enough to make it EA’s biggest new game of 1984, in versions for the Atari 8-bit (the original and always the one that Dan himself saw as definitive), Commodore 64, Apple II, IBM PC, and eventually the Macintosh and the Amiga. Most of these ports were done by Ozark themselves or people within their circle. The Apple II version, for instance, came courtesy of a young University of Arkansas student named Mark Botner who spent the summer of 1984 working with them. He makes those days in the big house by the lake sound like an idyllic summer romance:

“What fun we had that summer. We would take a walk every day around Broadmoore Lake while our programs assembled for 15 minutes or so. We flew model airplanes, floated model boats in the lake, and played many different games. And, we actually got Seven Cities Of Gold ported to the Apple II!”

They were good times indeed. Suddenly the world was onto Dan Bunten and Ozark Softscape, as they (and particularly he) found themselves in constant demand for interviews, mentioned among the elites of the game industry.

While we leave our friends to enjoy a welcome taste of fame and fortune, you might want to try Seven Cities of Gold for yourself. If so, feel free to download the definitive Atari 800 version for use in the emulator of your choice.

(Finally, sources, which are largely the same as that last article: Dan wrote a column for Computer Gaming World from the July/August 1982 issue through the September/October 1985 issue. Those are a gold mine for anyone interested in understanding his design process. Particularly wonderful is his detailed history of Seven Cities of Gold‘s development in the October 1984 issue. Other interesting articles and interviews were in the June 1984 Compute!’s Gazette, the November 1984 Electronic Games, and the January 1985 Antic. Online, you’ll find a ton of historical information on World of M.U.L.E. Salon also published a good article about Dani ten years ago. The sadly now defunct Dani Bunten Berry Memorial Site is full of anecdotes and tributes, including the quote from Mark Botner which I used above. And see the site of the (apparently stalled) remake Alpha Colony for some nice — albeit somewhat buried — historical tidbits.)

Footnotes

Footnotes
↑1 Dan Bunten began living as the woman Danielle Bunten Berry in November of 1992. She died five years later.

In preparing this article, I of course reviewed what I had already written about Dani. I confess it made me cringe a bit. I have long been annoyed by the habit of people who know nothing of her games of using Dani as some generic representative of her sexuality, and wanted to move the focus firmly to her work as a game designer, to leave the politics of gender identity alone and focus on why she was a such a giant in her chosen field. I now realize that in doing so I seemed to dismiss and disrespect the other parts of her story, although I genuinely didn’t intend to do so. A couple of angry commenters who, it seemed to me, wanted to force me into the very narrative template I had been trying to avoid only hardened my position. I continue to want to avoid the standard structure of the genre of “Dani Bunten Berry stories” — but I also realize that they had some points as well. I particularly regret that I never referred to Dani by her female name even in my note at the end of the article. I literally never realized I had done this until my recent rereading, and now understand some objections about how I allegedly considered her unworthy of being referred to by her real name and the like a bit better. I won’t edit the article, as doing so could only make those who commented look unreasonable in ways they really weren’t. Anyway, it perhaps serves as a better lesson just as it is. Know, however, that if I was writing it today I would handle the issue somewhat differently.

That said, you’ve surely noticed that I continue to refer to Dani as “Dan” and “he” in the article above. I understand the logic of those who would say that Dani was always a woman, merely one who was by an accident of birth born into a man’s body. Certainly this is the argument most advocates for transsexual rights would make. For myself, I am all for transsexual rights, but also believe that gender and sexual identity may be more fluid than much transsexual rhetoric would have it. In the end, I have continued to opt for clarity and reality as all of Dani’s friends and colleagues knew it in the 1980s: of her being the man Dan Bunten. Referring to “Dani” and “she” in these articles would be confusing to the reader and at least at some level anachronistic, opposed to the consensus reality shared by everyone around her. I understand that this decision may not seem ideal to everyone, and even that it runs counter to some journalistic style guidelines. If you disagree with it, I can only ask you to believe me when I say it was made in good faith, with no intention to slight. For what it’s worth, reports are that Dani was never offended in the least by being referred to as a man when conversations came around to her years of living as Dan.
 
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Posted by on August 13, 2013 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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Of Wizards and Bards

25 Jun

After debuting within a few months of one another in 1981, the Ultima and Wizardry franchises proceeded to dominate the CRPG genre for the next several years to such an extent that there seemed to be very little oxygen for anyone else; their serious competition during this period was largely limited to one another. Otherwise there were only experiments that usually didn’t work all that well, like the Wizardry-meets-Zork hybrid Shadowkeep, along with workmanlike derivatives that all but advertised themselves as “games to play while you wait for the next Ultima or Wizardry.” One of these latter, SSI’s first CRPG Questron, so blatantly cloned the Ultima approach that it prompted outraged protest and an implied threat of legal action from Origin Systems. SSI President Joel Billings ended up giving Origin a percentage of the game’s royalties and some fine print on the back of the box: “Game structure and style used under license of Richard Garriott.” It’s highly debatable whether Origin really had a legal leg to stand on here, but these were days when Atari in particular was aggressively threatening publishers with similar “look and feel” lawsuits, sending lots of them running scared. Faced with the choice between a protracted legal battle and lots of industry bad will, neither of which his small company could well afford, or just throwing Origin some cash, Billings opted, probably wisely, for the latter.

In the competition between the two 800-pound gorillas of the industry, Wizardry won the first round with both the critics and the public. Compared to Ultima I, Wizardry I garnered more attention and more superlative reviews, and engendered a more dedicated cult of players — and outsold its rival by at least a two to one margin. Wizardry‘s victory wasn’t undeserved; with its attention to balance and polish, its sophisticated technical underpinnings, and its extensive testing, Wizardry felt like a game created by and for grown-ups, in contrast to the admittedly charming-in-its-own-way Ultima, which felt like the improvised ramblings of a teenager. (A very bright teenager and one hell of a rambler, mind you, but still…) The first Wizardry sold over 200,000 copies in its first three years, an achievement made even more remarkable when we consider that almost all of those were sold for a single platform, the Apple II, along with a smattering of IBM PC sales. While Infocom’s Zork may have managed similar numbers, it had the luxury of running on virtually every computer in the industry.

As early as 1982, however, the tables were beginning to turn. Richard Garriott continued to push Ultima forward, making games that were not just bigger but richer, prettier, and gradually more accessible, reaping critical praise and commercial rewards. As for Wizardry… well, therein lies a tale of misplaced priorities and missed opportunities and plain old mismanagement sufficient to make an MBA weep. While Ultima turned outward to welcome ever more new players to its ranks, Wizardry turned inward to the players who had bought its first iteration, sticking obstinately to its roots and offering bigger and ever more difficult games, but otherwise hardly changing at all through its first four sequels. You can probably guess which approach ended up being the more artistically and commercially satisfying. One could say that Ultima did not so much win this competition as Wizardry forfeited somewhere around the third round. Robert Woodhead, Andrew Greenberg, and Sir-Tech did just about everything right through the release of the first two games; after that they did everything just as thoroughly wrong.

As I wrote earlier, the second Wizardry, Knight of Diamonds, was an acceptable effort, if little more than a modest expansion pack to the original. It let players advance their characters to just about the point where they were too powerful to really be fun to play anymore, while giving them six more devious dungeon levels to explore, complete with new monsters and new tactical challenges. However, when the next game in the series, 1983’s Legacy of Llylgamyn, again felt like a not terribly inspired expansion pack, the franchise really began to go off the rails. Greenberg and Woodhead hadn’t even bothered to design this one themselves, outsourcing it instead to the Wizardry Adventurers Research Group, apparently code for “some of Greenberg’s college buddies.” Llylgamyn had the player starting over again with level 1 characters. Yet, incredibly, it still required that she purchase the first game to create characters; they could then be transferred into the third game as the “descendents” of her Wizardry I party. It’s hard to even account for this as anything other than a suicidal impulse, or (only slightly more charitably) a congenital inability to get beyond the Dungeons and Dragons model of buying a base set and then additional adventure modules to play with it. As Richard Garriott has occasionally pointed out over the years, in hewing to these policies Sir-Tech was effectively guaranteeing that each game in their series would sell fewer copies than the previous, would be played only by a subset of those who had played the one before. We see here all too clearly an unpleasant pedantry that was always Wizardry‘s worst personality trait: “You will start at the beginning and play properly!” It must have been about this time that the first masses of players began to just sigh and go elsewhere.

Speaking of pedantry: as I also described in an earlier article, a variety of player aids and character editors began to appear within months of the first Wizardry itself. Woodhead and Greenberg stridently denounced these products, pronouncing them “sleazy” in interviews and inserting a condescending letter to players in their game boxes stating their use would “interfere with the subtle balance” of the game and “substantially reduce their playing pleasure.” This is made particularly rich because, while Woodhead and Greenberg deserve credit for attempting to balance the game at all, the “subtle balance” of their first Wizardry was, in some pretty fundamental ways, broken; thus the tweaks they instituted for Knight of Diamonds. Did they really think players should ignore these issues and agree to spend dozens or hundreds of hours laboriously rebuilding countless lost parties, all because they told them to? Would players with so little capability for independent thought be able to complete the game in the first place? All the scolding did was put a sour face on the Wizardry franchise, giving it a No Fun Allowed personality in contrast to the more welcoming Ultima and, soon, plenty of other games. Players are perfectly capable of deciding what way of playing is most fun for them, as shown by the increasing numbers who began to decide that they could have more fun playing some other CRPG.

Meanwhile the Apple II’s importance as a gaming platform was steadily fading in the face of the cheaper and more audiovisually capable Commodore 64 in particular. Yet Sir-Tech made no effort for literally years to port Wizardry beyond the Apple II and the even less gaming-centric IBM PC. Their disinterest is particularly flabbergasting when we remember that the game ran under the UCSD Pascal P-Machine, whose whole purpose was to facilitate running the same code on multiple platforms. When asked about the subject, Woodhead stated that ports to the Commodore and Atari machines were “not technically possible” because neither ran any version of the UCSD Pascal language and because their disk systems were inadequate — too small in the case of the Atari and too slow in the case of the Commodore. Countless other companies would have and, indeed, did solve such problems by writing their own UCSD Pascal run-times — the system’s specifications were open and well-understood — and finding ways around the disk problems by using data compression and fast-load drivers. Sir-Tech was content to sit on their hands and wait for someone else to provide them with the tools they claimed they needed.

And then came the fiasco of Wizardry IV, a game which embodies all of the worst tendencies of the Wizardry series and old-school adventure gaming in general. This time Greenberg and Woodhead turned the design over to Roe R. Adams III, a fount of adventure-game enthusiasm who broke into the industry as a reviewer for Softalk magazine, made his reputation as the alleged first person in the world to solve Sierra’s heartless Time Zone, and thereafter seemed to be everywhere: amassing “27 national gaming titles,” writing columns and reviews for seemingly every magazine on the newsstand, testing for every publisher who would have him, writing manuals for Ultima games, and, yes, designing Wizardry IV. Subtitled The Return of Werdna, Wizardry IV casts you as the arch-villain of the first Wizardry. To complete the inversion, you start at the bottom of a dungeon and must make your way up and out to reclaim the Amulet that was stolen from you by those pesky adventurers of the first game.

Wizardry IV doesn’t require you to import characters from the earlier games, but that’s its only saving grace. Adams wanted to write a Wizardry for people just as hardcore as he was. Robert Sirotek, one of the few people at Sir-Tech who seemed aware of just how wrong-headed the whole project was, had this to say about it in a recent interview with Matt Barton:

It was insanely difficult to win that game. I had such issues with that. I felt that it went way beyond what was necessary in terms of complexity, but the people that developed it felt strongly to leave a mark in the industry that they had the hardest game to play — period, bar none. That’s fine if you’re not worried about catering to a customer and making sales.

Return of Werdna was the worst-selling product we ever launched. People would buy it, and it was unplayable. So they’d put it down, and word spread around. There were other hard-core players in the market that loved it. They said, “Ah, why doesn’t everybody do this?” Well, we don’t because you guys are a minority. If you’re a glutton for punishment, you’re going to have to get your pleasure somewhere else because nobody can survive catering to such a small number of people.

So, it was controversial in that way. In the end, I think I was proven correct that making crazy impossible products in terms of difficulty was not the way forward.

But insane difficulty is only part of the tale of Wizardry IV. It has another dubious honor, that of being one of the first notable specimens of a species that gamers would get all too familiar with in the years to come: that hot game of the perpetually “just around the corner!” variety. Sir-Tech originally planned to release Wizardry IV for the 1984 holiday season, just about a year after Legacy of Llylgamyn and thus right on schedule by the standard of the time. They felt so confident of this that, what with the lengthy lead times of print journalism, they told inCider magazine to just announce the title as already available in their November 1984 issue. It didn’t make it. In fact it took a staggering three more years, until late 1987, for Wizardry IV to finally appear, at which time inCider dutifully reported that Sir-Tech had spent all that time “polishing” the game. Those expecting a mirror shine must have been disappointed to see the same old engine with the same old wire-frame graphics. In addition to being unspeakably difficult, it was also ugly, an anachronism from a different era. Any remaining claim that the Wizardry franchise might have had to standing shoulder to shoulder with Ultima either commercially or artistically was killed dead by The Return of Werdna. Beginning with Wizardry V and especially VI, Sir-Tech would repair some of the damage with the help of a new designer, D.W. Bradley, but the franchise would never again be as preeminent in North America as it had in those salad days of 1981 and 1982.

Wizardry I, 1981

Wizardry I, 1981

Wizardry IV, 1987. Not much has changed...

Wizardry IV, 1987. Not much has changed…

Those remaining fans who were underwhelmed by Wizardry IV were left asking just what Sir-Tech had been up to for all those years during the middle of the decade. Robert Woodhead at least hadn’t been completely idle. With Wizardry III Sir-Tech debuted a new interface they called “Window Wizardry,” which joined the likes of Pinball Construction Set in being among the first games to bring some of the lessons of Xerox PARC home to Apple II users even before the Macintosh’s debut; both earlier Wizardry games were also retrofitted to use the new system. In 1984 Woodhead improved the engine yet again, to take advantage of the new Apple II mouse should the player be lucky enough to have one. And a few months after that his port to the Macintosh arrived.

A Japanese edition of the first two Wizardry games, published by ASCII Corporation.

A Japanese edition of the first two Wizardry games, published by ASCII Corporation.

But Woodhead’s biggest distraction — and soon his greatest passion, one that would change his life forever — was Japan. After first marketing Wizardry in Japan through Starcraft, a Japanese company that specialized in localizing American software for the Japanese market and vice versa, Sir-Tech signed a blockbuster of a deal with another pioneering company, ASCII Corporation, publishers of the magazine Monthly ASCII that can be justifiably called the Japanese Byte and Creative Computing all rolled into one. Increasingly as the 1980s wore on, ASCII also became a very important software publisher. With Woodhead’s close support, ASCII turned Wizardry into a veritable phenomenon in Japan, huge even in comparison to the height of its popularity Stateside. By the latter half of the decade there were entire conventions in Japan dedicated to the franchise; when Woodhead visited them he was mobbed like a rock star. In the face of such profits and fame, he began to spend more and more of his time in Japan. After leaving Sir-Tech in 1988 he lived there full-time for a number of years, married a Japanese woman, and eventually founded a company with his old buddy Roe Adams which is dedicated to translating Japanese anime and other cinema into English and importing it to the West; it’s still going strong today. The Japanese Wizardry line also eventually spun off completely from Sir-Tech to go its own way; games are still being made today, and now far outnumber the eight Sir-Tech Wizardry games.

That explains what Woodhead was doing, but it doesn’t do much to otherwise explain Sir-Tech’s Stateside sloth until we consider this: incomprehensibly, Sir-Tech clung to Woodhead as their only technical architect, placing their entire future in the hands of this one idiosyncratic, mercurial hacker. (Greenberg filled mostly a designer’s as opposed to programmer’s role, and never worked full-time on Wizardry; after the second game his role was largely limited to that of an occasional consultant.) So, Woodhead was fascinated by the potential of the GUI and thought the Macintosh pretty neat; thus those projects got done. But he was dismissive of the cheap machines from Commodore and Atari, so those markets, many times the size of the Mac’s when it came to entertainment software, were roundly ignored. Only in 1987, with Woodhead all but emigrated to Japan, did Sir-Tech finally begin to look beyond him, funding a Commodore 64 port at last. But by then it was far too late.

Wizardry comes to the Commodore 64 at last. Predictably, not much has changed.

Wizardry comes to the Commodore 64 at last. Predictably, not much has changed.

For the reason why, we have to rewind to 1984, and move our wandering eyes from Sir-Tech’s Ogdensburg, New York, offices to a struggling little development company in the heart of Silicon Valley who called themselves Interplay. Interplay already had a couple of modestly successful illustrated adventure games to their credit when a friend of founder Brian Fargo named Michael Cranford suggested that he’d like to make a sort of next-generation Wizardry game in cooperation with them. They were all big fans of Wizardry and Dungeons and Dragons — Cranford had been Dungeon Master for Fargo’s D&D group back in high school — so everyone jumped aboard with enthusiasm. There’s been some controversy over the years as to exactly who did what on the game that would eventually become known as The Bard’s Tale, but it seems pretty clear that Cranford, who had already authored a proto-CRPG called Maze Master that was restricted in scope by its need to fit onto a 16 K cartridge, was the main driver. The most important other contributor was Bill “Burger” Heineman, who helped Cranford with some of the programming and did much of the work involved in porting the game to systems beyond its initial home on the Apple II. (Bill Heineman now lives as Rebecca Heineman. As per my usual editorial policy on these matters, I refer to her as “he” and by her original name only to avoid historical anachronisms and to stay true to the context of the times.) After Cranford parted ways with Interplay following The Bard’s Tale II, Heineman would take over his role of main programmer and designer for The Bard’s Tale III.

The Bard's Tale on the Commodore 64. Note that this predates the screenshot immediately above by two full years.

The Bard’s Tale on the Commodore 64. Note that this predates the screenshot immediately above by two full years.

In retrospect, the most surprising thing about the first Bard’s Tale, which was published through Electronic Arts in late 1985, is that nobody did it sooner. It was certainly no paragon of original design. If anything, it was even more derivative of Wizardry than Questron had been of Ultima, evincing not just the Wizardry template of play but almost the exact same screen layout and even most of the same command keys, right down to a bunch of spells that were cast by entering their four-letter codes found only in the manual (a useful form of copy protection). But Wizardry, thanks to Sir-Tech’s neglect, was vulnerable in ways that Ultima was not. Interplay did the commonsense upgrades to the Wizardry formula that Sir-Tech should have been doing, filling the game with colorful graphics, occasional dashes of spot animation, a bigger variety of monsters to fight, more equipment and spells and classes to experiment with. And, most importantly of all to its commercial success, they made sure a Commodore 64 version came out simultaneously with the Apple II. In the years that followed they funded loving ports to an almost Infocom-like variety of platforms, giving it further graphical facelifts for next-generation machines that the early Wizardry games would never reach, like the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, and Apple IIGS.

The Bard's Tale

The Bard’s Tale‘s original touches, while by no means entirely absent, tinker with the Wizardry formula more than revamp it. Instead of doing everything outside of the dungeons via a simple textual menu system, you now have an entire town with a serious monster infestation of its own to explore. In the town of Skara Brae you can find not only equipment shops and temples and all the other stops typical of the errand-running adventurer but also the entrances to the dungeons themselves — five of them, with a total of 16 levels between them, as opposed to the original Wizardry‘s single dungeon of 10 slightly smaller and generally simpler levels. But the most obvious way that The Bard’s Tale asserts its individuality is in the whimsical character class of the bard himself, who can perform magic by playing songs; you actually hear his songs playing on your computer, another flourish The Bard’s Tale has over its inspiration. More importantly, he lends the game some of his lovably roguish personality: “When the going gets tough, the bard goes drinking,” ran the headline of EA’s advertisements. The official name of the game is actually Tales of the Unknown, Volume 1: The Bard’s Tale; the rather white-bread Tales of the Unknown, in other words, was originally intended as the franchise’s name, The Bard’s Tale as the mere subtitle of this installment. Interplay originally planned to call the next game The Archmage’s Tale, next stop in a presumed cycling through many fantasy character archetypes. The bard proved so popular, however, such an indelible part of the game’s personality and public image, that those plans were quickly set aside. The next game was released as The Bard’s Tale II: The Destiny Knight, the Tales of the Unknown moniker quietly retired.

Commodore 64 owners especially, starved as they had been of the Wizardry experience for years, set upon The Bard’s Tale like a horde of the mad dogs who are some of the first monsters you encounter in its labyrinths. Combined with EA’s usual slick marketing, their pent-up desire was more than enough to make it a massive, massive success, the first CRPG not named Wizardry to be able to challenge the Ultima franchise head to head in terms of sales, if not quite critical respect (it was hard for even the forgiving gaming press of the 1980s to completely overlook just how derivative a game it was). The Bard’s Tale would wind up selling 407,000 copies by the end of 1990, becoming the best-selling single CRPG of the 1980s and single-handedly making Interplay a force to be reckoned with in the games industry. They would remain one of the major creative forces in gaming for the next decade and a half; we’ll have occasion to visit their story again and in more detail in future articles.

There is, however, a certain whiff of poetic justice to the way that Interplay allowed this particular franchise to go stale in much the same way that Sir-Tech had Wizardry. The Bard’s Tale II (1986) and III (1988) were each successful enough on their own terms, but a story all too familiar to Sir-Tech played out as each installment sold worse than the one before. The series then faded away quietly after The Bard’s Tale Construction Set (1991), for which Interplay polished up some of their internal authoring tools for public consumption. By then The Bard’s Tale was already long past its heyday, its position of yin to Ultima‘s yang taken up by yet another franchise, the officially licensed Advanced Dungeons and Dragons games from SSI. (At least two attempts at a Bard’s Tale IV never came to fruition, doomed by the IP Hell that resulted from Interplay parting company with EA; EA owned the name of the franchise, Interplay most of the content. Interplay’s attempt at a Bard’s Tale IV did eventually come to market as Dragon Wars, actually a far more ambitious game than any of its predecessors but one that was markedly unsuccessful commercially.)

The sequels did add some wrinkles to the formula. The Bard’s Tale II deployed a strangely grid-oriented wilderness to explore in addition to towns — six of them this time — and dungeons, and added range as a consideration to the combat engine. The Bard’s Tale III: The Thief of Fate offered more welcome improvements to the core engine, including a simple auto-mapping feature and, at long last, the ability to save the game even inside a dungeon. But mostly the sequels fell into a trap all too typical of CRPGs, of offering not so much new things to do as just ever larger amounts of the same interchangeably generic content to slog through and laboriously map; over the course of the trilogy we go from 16 to 25 to an absurd 84 dungeon levels. This despite the fact that there just aren’t that many permutations allowed by this simple dungeon-delving engine and its spinners, magical darknesses, teleporters, and traps. Long before the end of the first Bard’s Tale it’s starting to get a bit tedious; by the time you get to the sequels it’s just exhausting. It’s not hard to understand Interplay’s motivation for making the games ever huger. Gamers have always loved the idea of big games that give them more for their money, and by the third game Interplay’s in-house tools were sophisticated enough to allow them to slap together a gnarly dungeon level in probably much less time than it would take the average player to struggle through it. Still, the early Wizardry games stand up better as holistic designs today. The first Wizardry‘s ten modest dungeon levels were enough to consume quite some hours, but not too many; the game is over right about the time it threatens to get boring, a mark the latter Bard’s Tales in particular quite resoundingly overshoot.

So, I’m quite ambivalent about The Bard’s Tale franchise as a whole, as I admittedly am about many old-school CRPGs. To my mind, there are some time-consuming games, like Civilization or Master of Orion, that appeal to our better, more creative natures by offering endless possibilities to explore, endless interesting choices to make. They genuinely fascinate, tempting us to immerse ourselves in their mysteries for all the right reasons. And then there are some, like The Bard’s Tale or for that matter FarmVille, that somehow manage to worm their ways into our psyches and activate some perversely compulsive sense of puritanical duty. Does anyone really enjoy mapping her twentieth — not to mention eightieth! — dungeon inside a Bard’s Tale, wrestling all the while with spinners and teleporters and darkness squares that have long since gone from being intellectually challenging to just incredibly, endlessly annoying? The evidence of The Bard’s Tale‘s lingering fandom would seem to suggest that people do, but it’s a bit hard for me to understand why. Oh, I suppose one can enjoy the result, of having ultra-powerful characters or seeing chaos held at bay for another day via another page of graph paper neatly filled in, but is the process really that entertaining? And if not, why do so many of us feel so compelled to continue with it? Is there ultimately much point to a game that rewards not so much good play as just a willingness to put in lots and lots of time? I want to say yes, if the game has something to say to me or even just an interesting narrative to convey, but The Bard’s Tale, alas, has nothing of the sort. Ah, well… maybe it’s just down to my distaste for level grinding as an end in itself as opposed to as a byproduct of the interesting adventures you’re otherwise having — a distaste everyone obviously doesn’t share.

It can be oddly difficult to find a “clean” copy of this hugely popular game in its most popular incarnation, the Commodore 64 version. Most versions floating around on the Internet are played on, hacked, and/or, all too often, corrupted. If you want to experience The Bard’s Tale, a commercial and historical landmark of its genre despite any misgivings I may have about it, you may therefore want to download a virgin copy from this site. Alternately, all three games are included as a free bonus with a 2004 game of the same name that otherwise has very little to do with its predecessors. That’s available for various platforms from GOG.com, Steam, Google Play, and iTunes. Next time we’ll turn to a CRPG that does have something important to say, arguably the first of all too few examples of same in the history of the genre.

(Matt Barton has posted interviews with some of the folks I write about in this article on his YouTube channel: Rebecca Heineman, Brian Fargo, and Robert Sirotek. Interviews with Michael Cranford can be found on Lemon 64 and the RPG Codex. The Bard’s Tale Compendium has some background on the games and the people who made them. Now Gamer’s history of SSI includes details of the Questron tension with Origin Systems. The inCider magazine articles referenced above are in the November 1984 and November 1987 issues. See the August 1988 Computer Play for more on the Wizardry phenomenon in Japan, and the October 1983 Family Computing for Greenberg at his hectoring worst on the subject of third-party player aids and the necessity of playing Wizardry the “right” way. Finally, I located the Bard’s Tale sales figures in the March 1991 issue of Questbusters.)

 
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Posted by on June 25, 2014 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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Amnesia

29 Sep
Thomas M. Disch, circa 1985

Thomas M. Disch, circa 1985

I feel fairly confident in stating that Thomas M. Disch trails only Robert Pinsky as the second most respected literary figure to turn his hand to the humble text adventure — speaking in terms of his literary prestige at the time of his game’s release, that is. The need for that last qualifier says much about his troubled and ultimately tragic life and career.

Disch burst to prominence alongside Roger Zelazny and the rest of science fiction’s New Wave in the mid-1960s. Yet Disch’s art was always even more uncompromising — and usually more uncompromisingly bleak — than that of his peers. His first novel bears the cheery name of The Genocides, and tells the story of the annihilation of humanity by an alien race who remake the Earth into a hyper-efficient nutrient farm, apparently without ever even recognizing humans as sentient. In its final scenes the remnants of the human race crawl naked through the innards of the aliens’ giant plants, stripped of even a veneer of civilization, reduced to feeding and fucking and waiting to be eradicated like the unwanted animal infestations they are. Camp Concentration — sensing a theme? — another early novel that is perhaps his most read and most acclaimed today, tells of another ignominious end to the human race, this time due to an intelligence-boosting super-drug that slowly drives its experimental recipients insane and then gets loose to spread through the general population as a contagion.

The protagonist of the latter novel is a pompous overweight intellectual who struggles with a self-loathing born of his homosexual and gastronomic lusts, a man who can feel uncomfortably close to Disch himself — or, more sadly, to the way Disch, a gay man who grew up in an era when that was a profoundly shameful thing to be, thought others must see him. Perhaps in compensation, he became a classic “difficult” artiste; his reputation as a notable pain in the ass for agents, editors, and even fellow writers was soon well-established throughout the world of publishing. He seemed to crave a validation from science fiction which he never quite achieved — he would never win a Hugo or Nebula for his fiction — while at the same time often dismissing and belittling the genre when not picking pointless fights within it with the likes of Ursula Le Guin, whom he accused of being a fundamentally one-dimensional political writer concerned with advancing a “feminist agenda”; one suspects her real crime was that of selling far more books and collecting far more awards than Disch. Yet just when you might be tempted to dismiss him as an angry crank, Disch could write something extraordinary, like 334, an interwoven collection of vignettes and stories set in a rundown New York tenement of the near future that owes as much to James Joyce as it does to H.G. Wells; or On Wings of Song, both a sustained character study of a failed artist and a brutal work of satire in precise opposition to the rarefied promise of its title — these “Wings of Song,” it turns out, are a euphemism for a high-tech drug high. Disch wrote and wrote and wrote: high-brow criticism of theater and opera for periodicals like The New York Times and The Nation; reams of science-fiction commentary and criticism; copious amounts of poetry (always under the name “Tom Disch”), enough to fill several books; mainstream horror novels more accessible than most of his other efforts, which in 1991 yielded at last some of the commercial rewards that had eluded his science fiction and poetry when he published The M.D., his only bestseller; introductions and commentaries to the number of science-fiction anthologies he curated; two plays and an opera libretto; and, just to prove that the soul of this noted pessimist did house at least a modicum of sweetness and light, the children’s novel The Brave Little Toaster, later adapted into the cult classic of an animated film that is still the only Disch story ever to have made it to the screen.

The dawn of the brief bookware boom found Disch at a crossroads. On Wings of Song, published in 1979, would turn out to be his last major science-fiction novel, its poor commercial performance the final rejection that convinced him, the occasional short story or work of criticism aside, to write in other genres for the remaining quarter century of his life. He was just finishing his first horror novel, The Businessman, when his publisher Harper & Row came to him to ask if he might be interested in making his next novel interactive, in the form of the script for a computer game. Like just about every other book publisher in the United States, Harper & Row were in equal measure intrigued by the potential for interactive literature and terrified lest they be left out of a whole new field of literary endeavor. They were also, naturally, eager to leverage their existing stable of authors. Disch, a respected and established author of “literary” genre fiction who didn’t actually sell all that well as a rule, must have seemed an ideal choice; they’d get the cachet of his name without forgoing a bunch of guaranteed sales of a next traditional novel. For his part, Disch was intrigued, and jumped aboard with enthusiasm to write Amnesia.

We know quite a lot about Disch’s plans for the game thanks to a fellow historian named Stephane Racle, who in 2008 discovered his design script, an altogether fascinating document totaling almost 450 pages, along with a mock-up of Harper & Row’s planned packaging in a rare-books shop. The script evinces by its length and detail alone a major commitment to the project on Disch’s part. He later claimed to find it something of a philosophical revelation.

When you’re working on this kind of text, you’re operating in an entirely different mode from when you’re writing other forms of literature. You’re not writing in that trance state of entering a daydream and describing what’s to the left or right, marching forward, which is how most novels get written. Rather, you have to be always conscious of the ways the text can be deconstructed. In a very literal sense, any computer-interactive text deconstructs itself as you write because it’s always stopping and starting and branching off this way and that. You are constantly and overtly manifesting those decisions usually hidden in fiction because, of course, you don’t normally show choices that are ruled out — though in every novel the choices that are not made are really half the work, an invisible presence. With Amnesia, I found myself working with a form that allowed me to display these erasures, these unfollowed paths. It’s like a Diebenkorn painting, where you can see the lines that haven’t quite been covered over by a new layer of paint. There are elements of this same kind of structural candor in a good Youdunit.

Disch came to see the player’s need to figure out what to type next as a way to force her to engage more seriously with the text, to engage in deep reading and thereby come to better appreciate the nuances of language and style that were so important to him as a writer.

Readers who ordinarily skim past such graces wouldn’t be allowed to do that because they’d have to examine the text for clues as to how to respond; they’d have to read slowly and carefully. I thought that was theoretically appealing: a text whose form allowed me a measure of control over the readerly response in a way unavailable to a novelist or short-story writer. I’ve always been frustrated that genre readers are often addictive readers who will go through a novel in one night. I can’t read at that speed — and I don’t like to be read at that speed, either.

Philosophical flights aside, Disch didn’t shirk the nitty-gritty work that goes into crafting an interactive narrative. For instance, he painstakingly worked through how the protagonist should be described in the many possible states of dress he might assume. He even went so far as to author error messages to display if the player, say, tries to take off his pants without first removing his shoes. He also thought about ways to believably keep the story on track in the face of many possible player choices. One section of the story, for example, requires that the player be wearing a certain white tuxedo. Disch ensures this is the case by making sure the pair of jeans the player might otherwise choose to wear have a broken zipper which makes them untenable (this also offers an opportunity for some sly humor, an underrated part of Disch’s arsenal of writing talents). Even Douglas Adams, a much more technically aware writer who was very familiar with Infocom’s games before collaborating with Steve Meretzky on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, couldn’t be bothered with this kind of detail work; he essentially authored just the main path through his game and left all the side details up to Meretzky.

Amnesia‘s story is not, outside the presence of a drug capable of inducing sustained and ever-encroaching amnesia, science fiction. It’s rather a noirish mystery in which no character, including the amnesiac protagonist, is pure, everyone has multiple layers of secrets and motivations, and nothing is quite what it initially seems. Disch almost seems to have challenged himself to make use of every hoary old cliché he can think of from classic detective fiction, including not only the device of amnesia itself but also hayseed Texans who shoot first and ask questions later, multiple femme fatales, and even two men who look so alike they can pass as identical twins. It takes a very good writer to get away with such a rogues gallery of stereotypes. Luckily, Disch was a very good writer when he wanted to be. Amnesia is not, mind you, deserving of mention alongside Disch’s most important literary works. Nor, one senses, is it trying to be. But it is a cracker of a knotty detective story, far better constructed and written than the norm in adventure games then or now. Among its most striking features are frank and even moving depictions of physical love that are neither pornographic nor comedic, arguably the first such to appear in a major commercial game.

 

Cognetics -- Pat Reilly, Kevin Bentley, Lis Romanov, and Charlie Kreitzberg -- trying to be EA rock stars and, with the notable exception of Benley, failing miserably at it.

Cognetics — Pat Reilly, Kevin Bentley, Lis Romanov, and Charlie Kreitzberg — trying to be EA rock stars and, with the notable exception of Bentley, failing miserably at it.

To implement his script, Harper & Row chose a tiny New Jersey company called Cognetics who were engaged in two completely different lines of endeavor: developing the user interface for Citibank ATMs and developing edutainment software for Harper & Row, specifically a line of titles based on Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock television series. The owner of Cognetics, Charlie Kreitzberg, already had quite a long background in computing for both business and academia, having amongst other accomplishments authored a standard programming text called The Elements of FORTRAN Style a decade before. Working with Kreitzberg and others, a Cognetics coder named James Terry had developed an extendible version of the Forth programming language with a kernel of just 6 K or so to facilitate game development on the Apple II. He dubbed this micro-Forth “King Edward” for reasons known only to him. The actual programming of Amnesia he turned over to a local kid named Kevin Bentley; they had met through Kreitzberg’s wife, who shopped at the grocery store owned by Bentley’s family. And so it was poor young Kevin Bentley who had Disch’s doorstop of a script dropped on his desk — no one had apparently bothered to tell the untechnical Disch about the need to limit his text to fit into the computers of the time — with instructions to turn it into a working game. He had nothing to start with but the script itself and that 6 K implementation of Forth; he lacked even the luxury of an adventure-specific programming language like ZIL, SAL, AGI, or Comprehend.

It was of course a hopeless endeavor. Not only had Disch provided far, far too much text, but he’d provided it in a format that wasn’t very easy to work with. Disch, for understandable reasons, thought like a storyteller rather than a world builder. Therefore, and in the absence of other guidance, he’d written his story from the top down as essentially a hypertext narrative, a series of branching nodes, rather than from the bottom up, as a set of objects and rooms and people with descriptions of how they acted and reacted and how they could be manipulated by the player. Each part of his script begins with some text, followed by additional text passages to display if the player types this, that, or the other. Given the scope of possibility open to the player of a parser-driven game, that way lies madness. We’ve seen this phenomenon of text adventures that want to be hypertext narratives a surprising number of times already on this blog. Amnesia is perhaps the most painful victim of this fundamental confusion, born of an era when hypertext fiction didn’t yet exist outside of Choose Your Own Adventure books and any text- and story-driven game was assumed to necessarily be a parser-driven text adventure.

Harper & Row's original Amnesia box art

Harper & Row’s original Amnesia box art

In mid-1984, just as it was dawning on Cognetics what a mouthful of a project they’d bitten off, Harper & Row, the instigators of the whole thing, suddenly became the first of the big book publishers to realize that this software business was going to be more complicated than anticipated and, indeed, probably not worth the effort. (The depth of the blasé belief of which they were newly disabused that software publishing couldn’t be that hard is perhaps best measured by the fact that they had all of the box art for Amnesia prepared before Cognetics had really gotten started with the actual programming, evidently thinking that, what with Disch’s script delivered, it couldn’t be long now.) They abruptly pulled out, telling Kreitzberg he was welcome to do what he liked with Fraggle Rock and Amnesia. He found a home for the former with CBS, another old-media titan still making a go of software for the time being, and for the latter with Electronic Arts, eager to join many of their peers on the bookware bandwagon. EA producer Don Daglow was given the unenviable task of trying to mediate between Disch and Cognetics and come up with some sort of realizable design. He would have his hands full, to such an extent that EA must soon have started wondering why they’d signed the project at all.

In addition to being a noir mystery, Disch had conceived Amnesia as a sort of extended love letter to his adopted home of Manhattan. Telarium’s Fahrenheit 451, when released in late 1984, would also include a reasonably correct piece of Manhattan. Disch, however, wanted to go far beyond that game’s inclusion of twenty blocks or so of Fifth Avenue. He wanted to include almost all of the island, from Battery Park to the Upper West and East Side, with a functioning subway system to get around it. The resulting grid of cross-streets must add up to thousands of in-game locations. It was problematic on multiple levels; not only could Disch not possibly write enough text to properly describe this many locations, but the game couldn’t possibly contain it. Yet Disch, entranced by the idea of roaming free through a virtual Manhattan, refused to be disabused of the notion. No, EA and Cognetics had to admit, such a thing wasn’t technically impossible. It was just that this incarnation of Manhattan would have to be 99 percent empty, a grid of locations described only by their cross-streets, with only the occasional famous landmark or plot-relevant area poking out of the sea of nothingness. That’s exactly what the finished game would end up being, rivaling Level 9’s Snowball for the title of worst ratio of relevant to irrelevant locations in the history of the text adventure.

The previous paragraph underlines the most fundamental problem that dogged the various Amnesia teams. Disch never developed with Cognetics and EA the mutual respect and understanding that led to more successful bookware collaborations like Amazon, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Mindwheel. Given the personality at the center of Amnesia, that’s perhaps not surprising. I described Disch as “difficult” earlier in this article, and, indeed, that’s exactly the word that Kevin Bentley used to describe him to me. His frustration with the collaboration was still palpable when I recently corresponded with him.

The conclusion I reached was that Tom wanted to write a book and have it turned into a game by creating a sort of screenplay adapted from a book. The trouble was that a screenplay to my mind was the wrong metaphor for an adventure game. The missing piece of the puzzle seemed to be that Tom didn’t grasp that an adventure game was a matrix of possibilities and it was up to the user to discover the route, and the point was not to cram the user toward the “conclusion.” Tom was very unhappy with the notion that the player might not experience the conclusion of the story the way that he intended in the script, so he insisted that the user be directed toward the conclusion.

Bentley and Kreitzberg met with Disch just a handful of times at his apartment near Union Square to try to iron out difficulties. The former remembers “lots of herbal tea being offered,” and being enlisted to fix problems with Disch’s computer and printer from time to time, but it’s safe to say that the sort of warm camaraderie that makes, say, the Mindwheel story such a pleasure to relate never developed. Before 1984 was out, frustrated with the endless circular feedback loop that the project had become and uninterested in the technical constraints being constantly raised as issues by his colleagues, Disch effectively washed his hands of the whole thing.

His exit did allow EA and Cognetics a freer hand, but that wouldn’t necessarily turn out for the better. Feeling that the game “was lacking in the standard sorts of gaming experience (like a score, sleep, food, etc.)” and looking for some purpose for that huge empty map of Manhattan, EA requested that Bentley shoehorn all that and more into the game; the player would now have to eat and sleep and earn money by taking odd jobs whilst trying to come to grips with the central mystery. The result was a shotgun marriage of the comparatively richly implemented plot-focused sections from Disch’s original script — albeit with more than half of the text and design excised for reasons of capacity — with a boring pseudo-CRPG that forces you to spend most of your time on logistics — earning money by begging or washing windows or doing other odd jobs, buying food and eating it, avoiding certain sections of the city after dark, finding a place to sleep and returning there regularly, dealing with the vagaries of the subway system — all implemented in little better than a Scott Adams level of detail. Daglow came up with an incomprehensible scoring system that tries to unify all this cognitive dissonance by giving you separate scores as a “detective,” a “character,” and a “survivor.” And as the cherry on top of this tedious sundae, EA added pedestrians who come up to you every handful of moves to ask you to look up numbers on a code wheel, one of the most irritating copy-protection measures ever implemented (and that, of course, is saying something).

All of this confusion fell to poor Kevin Bentley to program. He did a fine job, all things considered, even managing a parser that was, if not up to Infocom’s standards, also not worse than its other peers. Nevertheless growing frustrated and impatient with the game’s progress, EA put him up in an “artist apartment” near their San Mateo, California, headquarters in February of 1985 so that he could work on-site on a game that was now being haphazardly designed by whoever happened to shout the loudest. He spent some nine months there dutifully implementing — and often de-implementing — idea after idea to somehow make the game playable and fun. Bentley turned in the final set of code in November of 1985, by which time “everyone was over it,” enthusiasm long since having given way to a desire just to get something up to some minimal standard out there and be done with it. Certainly Bentley himself was under no illusions: “as a game I thought it sorta bombed.” Impressed with his dogged persistence, EA offered him a job on staff: “But I was 20 and far from home. I knew if I left immediately and drove back to New Jersey I could be home for Thanksgiving.” Unsurprisingly given the nature of the experience, Amnesia would mark the beginning and the end of his career as a game developer. He would go on to a successful and still ongoing career in other forms of programming and computer engineering. Charlie Kreitzberg and Cognetics similarly put games behind them, but are still in business today as a consulting firm, their brief time in games just a footnote on their website.

EA's released Amnesia package

EA’s released Amnesia package. Note that it’s simply called a “text adventure,” a sure sign that the bookware boom with its living literature and electronic novels has come and gone.

Amnesia, a deeply flawed effort released at last only during the sunset of the bookware boom, surprised absolutely no one at EA by failing to sell very well. It marks the only game EA would ever release to contain not a single graphic. Contemporary reviews were notably lukewarm, an anomaly for a trade press that usually saw very little wrong with much of anything. Computer Gaming World‘s Scorpia, admittedly never a big fan of overtly literary or experimental games, issued a pithy summary that details the gist of the game’s problems.

Overall, Amnesia is an unsatisfying game. You can run around here, and run around there, and work up your triple scores as a detective, a character, and a survivor, but so what? Much of what you actually do in the game doesn’t get you very far towards the ultimate solution. Boiled down to the essentials, there are only three things you need to do here: follow up on the clue from TTTT, get and read the disk, and meet Bette. There are auxiliary actions associated with them, but those are the key points. So when you think back on the game as a whole, you don’t see yourself as having done, really, a whole lot, as having been the main character. It’s more as though you came to certain places in a book, and turned a page to get on with the story.

Bottom line: terrific prose, nice maps, too much novel, not enough adventure.

Disch, despite having walked away from the hard work of trying to make the game better over a year before its release and despite having probably never even played the version of Amnesia which arrived in stores, took such reviews predictably personally. Amnesia, he pronounced, had been “one of the quickest disillusionments of my life.” He went on to blame the audience.

The real problem is that there’s simply no audience for this material, no one who would respond enthusiastically to what I do well. Those who buy it, who are aficionados of the form, are basically those who want trivial pursuits; and to offer them something, however entertaining, that involved reading and imaginative skills they did not care to exercise while playing with their computers was foolish. I felt like de Soto, who journeyed to Tennessee looking for the Fountain of Youth — an interesting enough trip, but neither of us found what we were looking for.

People who want to play this sort of game are looking, I suppose, for something like Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker, where they can have their familiar experiences replayed. The computer-interactive games that have done well — like the Hitchhiker’s or Star Trek series — have been tied in with copyrighted materials that have already had success with the target audience in prior literary forms. I don’t think the quality of those scripts compares to what I did in Amnesia — Adams’s scripts, for example, are actually very good of a kind, but it’s a matter of one little joke after another. The notion of trying to superimpose over this structure a dramatic conception other than a puzzle was apparently too much for the audience. In the end, I just produced another literary curiosity.

There’s more than a grain of truth in all this if we can overlook the condescension toward Douglas Adams that would be more worthily applied to one of his derivatives like Space Quest. A computer-games audience more interested in the vital statistics of dragons and trolls than the emotional lives of the socially engaged humans around them undoubtedly did prove sadly unreceptive to games that tried to be about something. And reviewers like Scorpia did carry into their columns disconcertingly hidebound notions of what an “adventure game” could and should be, and seemed to lack even the language to talk about “a dramatic concept other than a puzzle,” to the extent that Scorpia’s columns on Infocom’s two most forthrightly literary works, A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity, are little more than technical rundowns and catalogs of puzzle hints — not to mention her reaction to one of Infocom’s first bold literary experiments, the ending to Infidel — and poor Brian Moriarty found himself actively playing down the thematic message of Trinity in interviews in the hope of actually, you know, selling some copies of this supposedly “depressing” game. It’s just that Amnesia, being well-nigh unplayable, is an exceedingly poor choice to advance this argument, and for that Disch deserves his due share of the responsibility. At some level, having just served up — or having at least allowed his name to be attached to — a bad game, he’s not entitled to this argument.

Disch one month before his death.

Disch one month before his death.

Disch’s ultimate fate was an exceedingly sad one. After the millennium, his world crashed around him brick by brick. First there was the shock of witnessing the September 11 attack on his beloved New York, a shock that seemed to break a circuit somewhere deep inside him; often open to charges of nihilism, extreme pessimism, even misanthropy during his earlier career, it wasn’t until after September 11 that his hatred for the people who had done this made him begin to sound like a bigot. Then in 2005 Charles Naylor, his partner of three decades, died. In the aftermath came an effort by his landlord to evict him from the rent-controlled apartment the two had shared, an effort which appeared destined for success. With his writing career decidedly on the wane, his books dropping out of print one by one, and his income correspondingly diminishing, he did most of his writing after Naylor’s death in his LiveJournal blog. Amidst the poorly spelled and punctuated screeds against Muslim terrorists and organized religions of all stripes, depressingly similar to those of a million other angry bloggers, would come the occasional pearl of wisdom or poetry to remind everyone that somewhere inside this bitter, suffering man was the old Thomas M. Disch. And suffer he did, from sciatica, arthritis, diabetes, and ever-creeping obesity that left him all but housebound, trapped alone in his squalid apartment with only his computer for company. On July 4, 2008, he ended the suffering with a shotgun. In 1984, for Amnesia, a younger Disch had written from that same apartment that “suicide is always a dumb idea.” Obviously the pain of his later years changed his mind.

One of the writers with whom Disch seemed to feel the greatest connection was another brilliant, difficult man who always seemed to carry an aura of doom with him, and another who died in tragically pathetic circumstances: Edgar Allen Poe. Disch once wrote a lovely article about Poe’s “appalling life,” the last year of which “seems a headlong, hell-bent rush to suicide.”  Like Disch, Poe also died largely forgotten and unappreciated. Perhaps someday Disch will enjoy a revival akin to that of Poe. In the meantime that Amnesia script sits there tantalizingly, ripe as ever to become a modern work of interactive fiction that need not leave out a single word, that could give us Disch’s original vision undiluted by scores and copy protection and money problems and hunger and sleep timers. Maybe he’d forgive us for trimming some of that ridiculous Manhattan. And maybe, just maybe, his estate would be willing to give its blessing. Any takers?

A Long Overdue Update, March 13, 2023: My old mentor Dene Grigar and the rest of the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver took up the challenge of bringing Amnesia into the 21st century, working from Disch’s original script! Also check out the book Amnesia Remembered: Reverse Engineering a Digital Artifact by John Aycock.

(First and foremost, huge thanks to Kevin Bentley for sharing with me much of the history of Cognetics and Amnesia. Disch himself talked about Amnesia at greatest length in an interview published in Larry McCaffery’s Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers. Disch’s writings on science fiction are best collected in the Hugo-winning The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of and On SF. Scorpia’s review of Amnesia appeared in the January/February 1987 Computer Gaming World.

I’ve made Amnesia available here for download in its MS-DOS incarnation with a DOSBox configuration file that works well with it. Note that you’ll need to use the file “ACODES.TXT” in place of the code wheel when the irritating pedestrians start harassing you.)

 
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Posted by on September 29, 2014 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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The Fractal Phenomenon

03 Oct

How long is the coast of Britain? Would you be surprised if I told you that it’s infinitely long? Infinite coastlines are just one of many byproducts of the strange mathematics of fractal geometry.

Why is geometry often described as “cold” and “dry?” One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline, or a tree. Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

For centuries mathematicians and philosophers were dogged by a nagging problem. Classic Euclidean geometry, with its regular lines and planes and solids, was elegant and useful, but fell down when it came to describing the natural world. It was ill-equipped to describe the seemingly endless spatial complexity of a leaf — or, for that matter, a section of coastline. Indeed, it’s largely the very presence or absence of such chaotic complexity that we subconsciously use when we decide whether something is natural or human-made. The world humanity has built is created in the image of our geometry, while the universe that birthed us, even the very forms that enclose us, is defined by its refusal to conform to our ideals of coordinates and shapes and angles. To believe that the universe is somehow corrupted or deformed because of this refusal would be the height of hubris. “These are not natural irregularities, but with respect to our fancy only; nor are they incommodious to the true uses of life and the design of man’s being on earth,” wrote Richard Bentley in the time of Swift and Pope. Yet how to reconcile the riot of natural beauty with the cooler constructions of Euclid? Until very recently we literally lacked a mathematical language to describe the world around us.

In 1975 the Polish/French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot provided such a language when he published his theory of fractal geometry. Mandelbrot discovered that certain solution sets to certain equations generate what he called “fractals” — patterns that are infinitely detailed. Such sets were much better suited to describe natural forms than anything heretofore present in the geometric arsenal.

It’s this seeming paradox of infinite detail that’s the thorniest conceptual part of natural forms and fractal geometry alike. To begin to get a handle on it, consider the “snowflake” curve, an idea first proposed by Helge von Koch in 1904. Imagine that you start with a line forming a simple geometric motif.

a "snowflake" curve

Now you replace every straight-line segment with another copy of the original motif.

a "snowflake" curve

You do it again…

a "snowflake" curve

And you keep on doing it over and over and over, to infinity.

a "snowflake" curve

As you look at a coastline or a leaf at ever greater levels of magnification, there are always more details, more curves and changes to discover. This continues forever — or at least until you hit the level of individual particles of matter, the sort of resolution limit of the universe itself. Thus that aforementioned infinite — or at any rate unmeasurable — coastline. “Coastline length turns out to be an elusive notion that slips between the fingers of one who tries to grasp it,” wrote Benoit Mandelbrot. “All measurement methods ultimately lead to the conclusion that the coastline’s length is very large and so ill-determined that it is best considered infinite.”  What to make of such a logical monstrosity?

Mandelbrot found a way out in some theories of dimensionality espoused by the controversial German mathematician Felix Hausdorff more than half a century before. The easiest way to describe conventional notions of dimensionality mathematically is to say that an object’s number of dimensions equates to the number of numbers needed to describe a single point on it. Thus a line (X) is one-dimensional; a plane (X and Y) two-dimensional; a solid (X, Y, and Z) three-dimensional. Hausdorff, however, floated the counter-intuitive notion that dimensions could be fractions as well as whole numbers. Consider a line. As it gets more wiggly, ever more complex in its gyrations, its dimensionality increases, until it becomes infinitely wiggly, and completely fills — or, perhaps better said, becomes — a plane. The pattern labelled 1a below, for example, is made up of infinite repetitions (within the bounds of the resolution of the picture) of the hook-like line segment labelled 1b. According to Hausdorff’s formulation, it has a dimensionality of 1.8687.

A line with a dimension of 1.8687

This idea of fractional dimensionality is a strange one, but seeing complex lines in terms of dimension rather than distance does allow us to dodge the paradox of infinite coastlines, restoring a mathematical order in which the coast of Britain is again longer than that of, say, the island where I live these days, Funen.

The most interesting fractal equations are not those like the ones shown above that simply repeat a pattern, but rather those that echo themselves but never exactly repeat, to infinity. The classic example is one of the first discovered by Mandelbrot himself, the appropriately named Mandelbrot set, consisting of all solutions to (z(n) ← z(n – 1)2 + c) which converge toward zero rather than expanding toward infinity. (Whilst trying to avoid getting too far down into the weeds here: this notation represents a potentially infinite series of iterations, in which n represents the current iteration. The result of the previous iteration — represented as z(n – 1) — is used as input for the next. The variable c is assumed to be a complex number, meaning it can be plotted onto the X and Y axes of a Cartesian coordinate system.)

The Mandelbrot set produces the most famous and immediately recognizable visual pattern in the field of fractals.

Mandelbrot set

At this point I’d like to give you a chance to explore the Mandelbrot set for yourself, via the little program embedded below. You can pan around by holding down the left mouse button and dragging in the desired direction; drill down deeper into the image by holding down the right button and dragging to select the region you’d like to magnify; and undo each step you’ve previously made by clicking the middle button. Notice how this infinite space is made up of similar patterns that are nevertheless never quite exactly the same.

Now for the caveats: as you zoom in to ever-greater levels of magnification, the picture begins to break down and lose detail. This is not a reflection of the pure mathematics of fractal geometry, but rather a byproduct of the computing reality of limited number precision and limited processing power, especially given that this is implemented in the relatively slow language of JavaScript. Any computerized exploration of fractals is inevitably bounded by such considerations, as well as by the resolution of the individual pixels that form the patterns. Eventually my program will not let you zoom in further at all, a concession to these realities; when you reach the point that your zooms don’t take anymore, you’ll have to zoom out by clicking the middle button to continue your explorations. Due to its processing demands, not to mention the lack of handy mouse buttons, I don’t recommend that you try to play with this program on your phones or tablets. (If these limitations smart, you might want to consider how far we’ve come; a typical 68000-based computer of the 1980s would have required hours to generate each new image.)

Update: as of January 10, 2023, the website which originally hosted this toy is no more. What you see below is an archived version. You can still play with it, but it may be a bit slow to load, and the source code is no longer available.

As useful and oddly beautiful as fractal lines like the ones produced by the Mandelbrot set can be, they’re only the beginning. Fractal planes are also possible, existing in some fractional limbo between two and three dimensions. Just as a plane is in this formulation an infinitely complicated line, a solid is an infinitely “wrinkled” plane. And just as fractal lines are perfect for representing coastlines and leaves, fractal planes can easily become mountains. The striking pictures shown below were computer-generated by Richard F. Voss in 1983 using only fractal equations.

Fractal mountains

It’s also possible — mathematically, that is — to go further, to produce fractals that strain toward a fourth (or higher) dimension. However, representing them becomes a problem given our three-dimensional world. We can only show a three-dimensional slice of these fractals. Doing so produces some strange shapes indeed, like the “dragons” of Alan Norton.

One of Alan Norton's "dragon" fractals

Benoit Mandelbrot published his magnum opus, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, in 1982; it still remains the definitive book on the subject. It’s a strange sort of mathematics text, in which Mandelbrot devotes at least as much space to philosophical digressions into the implications of his discoveries as he does to proofs and equations, and that much space again to lots of beautiful color slides of the fractals themselves. With the book’s publication, the theory of fractals became an example of a rare phenomenon indeed: a development in abstract higher mathematics that was taken up and trumpeted widely and excitedly by not just the likes of Scientific American (which devoted many, many articles to the subject) but also mainstream magazines, newspapers, even television broadcasts. As is all too typical of any new media plaything, fractals were hyped as useful for everything short of curing cancer — and I suspect that some wouldn’t put that past them either. Not only could physicists use them to understand the motions of molecules and biologists to understand the growth of plants, but some researchers claimed that fractal music was a possibility, while others claimed that they could help you get rich by revealing the “hidden patterns” that govern the stock market. In a 1984 article for Byte magazine, Peter R. Sørensen waxed effusive: “their uses range from physics, biology, and sociology, to art and even motion-picture scene simulation.” While I’m hardly qualified to speak to their uses in the former three scientific disciplines, I do feel fairly confident in claiming that they have had the greatest impact on those latter two, mushier categories, especially if we preface “art” with the word “computer” and allow computer games to slip in under that label.

Tellingly, Mandelbrot was employed at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center at the time he wrote The Fractal Geometry of Nature; all of the images found within it were generated by the computers there. Many fractal equations, including some of the most beautiful, aren’t complex at all in themselves, but the need to iterate through them so many times to produce their solution sets means that the science of fractals could exist only as a theory without the aid of computers. The first primitive computerized fractal visualizations had been produced by Robert W. Brooks and Peter Matelski in 1978, just three years after Mandelbrot first codified his theories. Virtually from that time forward fractals were inseparable from the computers needed to properly generate and study them.

Many people got their first glimpse of fractals before the hype started in earnest, in a remarkable sequence of computer-generated special effects included in 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.


The creators of the sequence were the Lucasfilm Graphics Group, a collection of software and hardware engineers whom George Lucas had started putting together in 1979. These folks, whose numbers included such soon-to-be computer-graphics legends as Alvy Ray Smith, designed and built all of the hardware and software used to create sequences like this one. In 1986, the Graphics Group would be spun off to become an independent company whose name you might know: Pixar.

When Lucasfilm elected to start a computer-games division shortly after the sequence shown above was created, it was natural for it to draw inspiration, technologies, and even personnel from the Graphics Group. One of Lucasfilm’s first two games, Rescue on Fractalus!, proudly bears its graphical underpinnings and its status as the first game to make significant use of fractals right there in its title. (By way of continuing the theme, the alien enemies you fight are called the “Jaggies,” a reference to the ugly pixelized artifacts that are one of a computer artist’s worst enemies.) The game sparked great interest from its first press preview in May of 1984, thanks to its endlessly varied mountainous terrain, generated on the fly using fractal algorithms.


In the wake of Rescue on Fractalus! fractals were suddenly everywhere in the computing press; I’m not sure there was a single magazine that didn’t publish at least one big feature article on the subject over the next few years. The appeal of fractals to programmers was obvious, and had little to do with Mandelbrot’s esoteric philosophies about geometry and nature. Irregular, natural-looking landscapes had previously been dauntingly hard to craft for games — hard not only because they were a pain to draw but also and predominately because they were so un-amenable to compression algorithms and, indeed, to virtually all of the many innovative techniques programmers had discovered to store graphics data using minimal memory. Thus the distinctly regular, blocky graphics that were the norm, and the shock that was Rescue on Fractalus! Much like the Fibonacci-derived galaxies of Elite, fractals let programmers create whole landscapes generatively, from only an equation and a few seed numbers. They had their limitations, not least the amount of processing power that had to be allocated to generating them — Rescue on Fractalus! runs at all of 5 or 6 frames per second — but for many applications they seemed like magic. It was not a coincidence that after 1984 virtual landscapes started to become markedly richer and more natural.

But fractals did more than just make games prettier; they opened up whole new realms of possibility for them. The bit of video below, from a remarkable game that will be the topic of another article I’ll be publishing soon, may not look like much in contrast to some of what you’ve already seen today. Yet consider that, thanks to the magic of fractals, the planet being landed on is one of thousands to be topographically mapped in its entirety, and that you can land on it absolutely anywhere you like, zooming in from space to touch down where you will just as you can zoom and pan and explore the Mandelbrot set via the toy embedded into this article. Each of these unique worlds is generated using just a few numbers, a bare handful of bytes of precious memory.


Fractals aren’t quite the media darlings they once were; many other shiny objects have come and gone since the 1980s. And while they remain a valuable tool in many branches of science, they’re no longer viewed there either as the revolution they once were. You certainly don’t hear much anymore about fractal music or using fractals to play the stock market. Likewise, they’re now just another item in a game programmer’s bag of tricks. Still, they retain a fascination and beauty all their own. In that spirit, have fun in any further explorations you undertake, and if you discover any interesting patterns using my little toy above, or if you create any enhancements on the Studio Sketchpad site that hosts it, by all means let me know.

(As noted in the article proper, old computer magazines are an embarrassment of riches when it comes to information on fractals. Particularly good articles are found in the Byte of March 1984, September 1984, and June 1986; the 80 Microcomputing of December 1984; the Ahoy! of April 1987; the Amazing of March 1989, July 1989, October 1989, January 1990, June 1990, and April 1991; the Compute! of January 1983; and the A.N.A.L.O.G. of January 1986.

And since we’re in a multimedia sort of mood today, check out this song about the Mandelbrot set, sent to me by reader Rick Reynolds.)

 
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Posted by on October 3, 2014 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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Starflight

28 Oct

Starflight

Fair warning: this article spoils the ending to Starflight, although it doesn’t spoil the things you need to know to get there.

Starflight, one of the grandest and most expansive games of the 1980s, was born in the cramped confines of a racquetball court. Rod McConnell, a businessman who had been kicking around Silicon Valley for some years, happened to have as his regular playing partner Joe Ybarra, a former Apple executive who in late 1982 had decamped to join Trip Hawkins’s fledgling new Electronic Arts as a game “producer.” Intrigued by Ybarra’s stories of “electronic artists” and an upcoming revolution in entertainment based on interactivity, McConnell wondered if he might somehow join the fun. He thus started discussing ideas with a programmer named Dave Boulton.

Boulton, who died in 2009, is the unsung hero of Starflight. His involvement with the project wouldn’t last very long, but his fingerprints are all over the finished game. He was, first and foremost, a zealot for the Forth programming language. He was one of the founding members of the Forth Interest Group, which was established just at the beginning of the PC era in 1977 and did stellar work to standardize the language and bring it to virtually every one of the bewildering variety of computers available by the early 1980s. More recently his hacking had led him to begin exploring the strange universe of Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractal sets fully eighteen months before Rescue on Fractalus! would make fractals a household name for gamers and programmers everywhere. Boulton enticed McConnell with an idea much bigger than Lucasfilm’s simple action game: an almost infinitely vast planet which, thanks to the miracle of fractals, the player could roam at will.

McConnell founded a company named Ambient Design and hired a couple of young programmers to help Boulton. One, Alec Kercso, was just finishing a degree in Linguistics in San Diego, but was more interested in his hobby of hacking. The other, Bob Gonsalves, was another dedicated Forther who wrote a monthly column on the language for Antic magazine. He was hired on the basis of this as well as his intimate familiarity with the Atari 8-bit platform, which thanks to its audiovisual capabilities was the great favorite around EA circles during that first year or so, until the Commodore 64 came online in earnest. On the strength of McConnell’s friendship with Ybarra and little else — the  whole group of them had among them neither any experience with game development nor any real plan for what their game would be beyond a vast environment created with fractals — EA signed them as one of the first of their second wave of contracts, following the premiere of the initial six, reputation-establishing EA games. Ybarra would be their producer, their main point of contact with and advocate within EA. He would have his work cut out for him in the years to come.

The idea soon evolved to encompass not just a single planet but many. The game, to be called Starquest, would let you fly in your starship across an entire galaxy of star systems, each with planets of its own, each of which would in turn be its own unique world, with unique terrain, weather, life forms, and natural resources. For Boulton, the man who had gotten this ball rolling in earnest in the first place, it was suddenly getting to be too much. You just couldn’t do all that on an 8-bit computer, he said, not even with the magic combination of Forth and fractals. He walked away. He would go on to develop early software for the Commodore Amiga and to join another unheralded founder, Jef Raskin of the original vision for the Apple Macintosh, to work on Raskin’s innovative but unsuccessful Canon Cat.

Left on their own with only Boulton’s prototype fractal code to guide them, Kercso and Gonsalves felt over their heads. They needed to be able to show each planet as a rotating globe from space, complete with the fractal terrain that the player would be able to explore more intimately if she elected to land, but didn’t know how to map the terrain onto a sphere. McConnell soon found another programmer, Tim Lee, who did. Lee had already written firmware for Texas Instruments calculators and written very complex policy-analysis applications for life-insurance companies. Yet another Forth fan, he’d just finished writing an actual game in the language, an IBM PC port of the Datasoft action game Genesis which Datasoft would never ship due to its incompatibility with the PCjr. With the graphics code he’d developed for that project, plus his own explorations of fractal programming, Lee was more than up to rendering those spinning terrain-mapped globes.

One of Tim Lee's spinning terrain-mapped planet. He was also responsible for most of the fundamental low-level architecrure of the game.

One of Tim Lee’s spinning terrain-mapped planets. He was also responsible for most of the fundamental low-level architecture of the game.

Lee also brought with him his programming expertise on the IBM PC. This prompted the team to take a big step: to abandon their little 8-bitters and move to the bigger 16-bit MS-DOS machines. They had recognized that Boulton had been right: their ideas were just too big to fit into 8 bits. MS-DOS was just finishing up its trouncing of CP/M to become undisputed king of the business-computing world, but had managed little penetration into homes, which were still dominated by the likes of the Apple II and Commodore 64. On the one hand, the IBM was a terrible gaming platform: its CGA graphics could show only four colors at a time in palettes that seemed deliberately chosen to clash as horribly with one another as possible and give artists nightmares; its single speaker was capable of little more than equally unpleasant bleeps and farts; even standard gaming equipment like joysticks were effectively non-existent due to a perceived lack of demand. But on the other hand, the IBM was an amazing gaming platform, with several times the raw processing power of the 8-bitters and at least twice the memory. Like so much in life, it all depended on how you looked at it. Ambient Design decided they needed the platform’s advantages to contain a galaxy that would eventually encompass 270 star systems with 811 planets between them, and they’d just have to take the bitter with the sweet. Still, it’s unlikely that EA would have gone along with the idea had it not been for the imminent release of the PCjr, which was widely expected to do in home computing what its big brother had in business computing.

Starflight

About this point the last and arguably biggest piece of the development puzzle arrived in the form of Greg Johnson, Kercso’s roommate. Not much of a programmer himself, Johnson had, like his roommate, also just finished a degree and wasn’t quite sure what to do next. He had listened avidly to Kercso’s reports on the game’s progress, and eventually started drawing pictures of imagined scenes on his Atari 800 just for fun. He was soon coming up with so many pictures and, more importantly, ideas that Kercso got him an interview and McConnell hired him. Just like that, Johnson became the much-needed lead designer. Until now the team had been focused entirely on the environment they were trying to create, giving little thought to what the player would be expected to actually do there. As Kercso would later put it, what had been an “open-ended game of exploration” now slowly began to evolve into “a complex story with interwoven plots and twists.” Johnson himself later said his job became to come up with what should happen, the others to come up with how it could happen. Or, as Lee put it, Johnson designed the scenario while the others designed “the game system that you could write the scenario for.” And indeed, he proved to be a boundless fount of creativity, coming up with seven unique and occasionally hilarious alien races for the player to fight, trade, and converse with during her travels.

Critical to those conversations became a designer we’ve met before on this blog, Paul Reiche III, who spent two important weeks helping Johnson and his colleagues to hash out a workable conversation engine which made use of the system of conversation “postures” from a game he had co-designed with Jon Freeman, Murder on the Zinderneuf. Reiche, an experienced designer of tabletop RPG rules and adventures as well computer games, continued to offer Johnson, who had heretofore thought of himself as a better artist than writer or designer, advice and ideas throughout the game’s protracted development.

The system of conversation "postures" from Murder on the Zinderneuf.

The system of conversation “postures” from Murder on the Zinderneuf.

Starflight's implementation of conversation postures.

Starflight’s implementation of conversation postures.

“Protracted” is perhaps putting it too mildly. The process just seemed to go on forever, so much so that it became something of a sick running joke inside EA. The project appeared on more than three years worth of weekly status reports, from the time that EA was mature enough to have weekly status reports until the game’s belated release in August of 1986. Over that time the arcades and home game consoles crashed and burned; the home-computer industry went through its own dramatic boom and bust and stabilization; countless platforms came and went, not least among them the PCjr; EA gave up on the dream of revolutionizing mainstream home-entertainment and accepted the status of big fish in the relatively small pond of computer gaming; IBM achieved business-computing domination and then ceded it almost as quickly thanks to the cloners; the bookware craze came and went; Infocom rose to dizzying heights and crashed to earth just as quickly; the Soviet Union went from an Evil Empire to a partner in nuclear-arms control. And still, ever and anon, there was Starflight, the much more elegant name chosen for Starquest after the release of Sierra’s King’s Quest. McConnell’s company name changed as well before all was said and done, from Ambient Design to Binary Systems (get it?).

EA very nearly lost patience several times; McConnell credits his old friend Joe Ybarra with personally rescuing the project from cancellation on a number of occasions. With the contract structured to provide payments only after milestones that were few and increasingly far between, McConnell himself took personal loans and worked other jobs so as to be able to pay his team a pittance. Throughout it all he never lost faith, despite ample evidence that they didn’t, to be painfully blunt, entirely know what they were doing. The team members lived on savings or loans when their meager salaries ran out. Many months were consumed by fruitless wheel-spinning. As Lee later admitted, they were so entranced with this model universe that they “spent a lot of time trying to model things that didn’t add to the play of the game.” Forth was never the most readable language nor an ideal choice for a large group project, and as the project wandered off in this or that direction and back again the code got nightmarishly gnarly. This just made trying to modify or add to it take still longer. With McConnell only able to afford a tiny office and most of the team thus working remotely most of the time, just keeping everyone on the same page was difficult. Given the situation and the personalities involved, a certain amount of freelancing was inevitable. “There was no master plan detailing each and every task to be done,” said Kercso later. “We had an idea of what the major modules had to be and we added a lot of final design as we got into programming each of the modules”; then they did their best to mash it all together.

Starflight was a prototypical runaway, mismanaged, overambitious project, the likes of which the industry has seen many times since. The difference was, instead of being ignominiously cancelled or shoved out the door incomplete, Starflight somehow ended up amazing. Call it serendipity, or credit it to a team that just wouldn’t give up. Once the core group was assembled, nobody thought of quitting; everyone was determined to finish the game — and on its own original, insanely ambitious terms at that — or die trying. “I remember saying that I didn’t care if I died after it came out,” said Johnson later, but “please, God, let me live until then.”

The hopeless combat screen.

The hopeless muddle of a combat engine.

Some of the confusion and occasional lack of direction is visible in the final game. Even the biggest Starflight fan would have trouble praising the arcade-style in-space combat engine, for instance, which manages to be both far too simplistic and far too baffling to actually control. There’s a disconnected feeling to certain elements, as of clever ideas that were never fully woven into the holistic design. You can gather flora and fauna from the planets you visit and return them to your base to study, for example, but you make so little money from doing so as opposed to mining minerals — and the controls for stunning and gathering your specimens are once again so awkward — that you’re left wondering what the point is. Ditto most of the intriguing alien artifacts you find, which you cart excitedly back to base only to find that they “reveal very little of interest” and are “totally useless to us.” And the game has what should be a fatal case of split personality, being half stately space opera and half silly romp filled with sci-fi alien caricatures.

And yet it really doesn’t matter. Starflight is that rare piece of work that actually justifies the critic’s cliché of being more than the sum of its parts. It’s not a tight design; appropriately given its theme, it sprawls everywhere, sometimes seemingly uselessly so. But even its blind alleys are fascinating to wander down once or twice. It’s the opposite of a minimalist masterpiece like M.U.L.E., whose every last note is carefully considered and exhaustively tested and blended carefully into the whole. And you know what? It’s every bit as awesome.

But for the benefit of those of you who haven’t played it it’s really high time that I tell what the game’s all about, isn’t it?

Your home starbase, where you outfit your ship, select and train your crew, buy and sell equipment and resources, etc.

Your home starbase, where you outfit your ship, select and train your crew, buy and sell equipment and resources, etc. It was largely the work of Alec Kercso.

Starflight starts you off at your base on your home planet of Arth — no, that’s not a typo — with a rather shabbily equipped ship and a little bit of seed capital. If you’re smart, you’ll spend most of the latter training a crew, which will include, in the tradition of a certain classic television series that went where no man has gone before, a Captain, a Science Officer, a Navigator, an Engineer, a Communications Officer, and a Doctor. You’ll also need to save enough to add a cargo pod or three to your ship, so you can begin to earn money by landing on nearby planets and scooping up minerals for sale back at Arth. You need money to upgrade your ship with better engines, weapons, and defenses, to train your crew, and to buy something called endurium, if you can’t find or mine enough of it. Endurium is Starflight‘s equivalent to dilithium crystals, the semi-magical fuel that enables faster-than-light travel.

As you build up your ship and your bank account, you can travel ever farther from Arth, exploring an algorithmically generated galaxy so vast that, like the Fibonacci galaxies of Elite, even Starflight‘s creators hadn’t seen all of it before the game’s release. And so you fly and land where you will, searching for mineral-rich planets you can mine and, even better, habitable planets you can recommend for colonization; you receive a substantial finder’s fee in return for each recommendation. Alien races inhabit various sectors of the galaxy. Some you may be able to befriend, or at least achieve a level of mutual toleration with; others you’ll have to fight. Thus the need to fit out your ship with the best possible weapons and defenses.

Exploring the surface of a planet. This module was largely the work of Bob Gonsalves.

Exploring the surface of a planet. This module was largely the work of Bob Gonsalves.

This, then, is Starflight the sandbox game. While it’s in no way derivative of Elite — Starflight‘s creators couldn’t have even been aware of the older game until quite late in their own development cycle, since Elite didn’t reach American shores until late 1985 — Starflight does generate a similar compulsion to explore, an addictive need to see what all is out there. But everything about Starflight is richer and more complex, with the exception only of the combat system that was the heart of Elite but a mere afterthought in Starflight (if you had to spend much time in Starflight actually fighting, it would be a very, very bad game). With so much more computing horsepower at their disposal, Binary Systems was able to add layer after intriguing layer: the ability to land on planets, and once there to engage in an exploring and mining mini-game that is as absurdly addictive as it is superficially simplistic; the chance to converse with the aliens you meet instead of just shooting at them; the whole CRPG angle of training a crew and keeping them healthy; sensor- and Navigator-confounding nebulae and wormholes to negotiate. Whereas Elite sessions soon settle down into a comfortable routine of trade-jump-fight-dock, rinse and repeat forever, Starflight always seems to have something new to throw at you.

But the most important difference is the plot that Starflight layers over its sandbox. I realize everyone is different on this point, but personally I always have a little bit of trouble with purely open-ended games (see my review of Seven Cities of Gold for another example). When I play Elite I eventually start to get bored for lack of any real narrative or goal to shoot for beyond the almost impossible one of actually becoming Elite. Ian Bell and David Braben originally wanted to include a real plot, but there just wasn’t room to contain it inside a 32 K BBC Micro. Starflight, however, has the sort of plot-driven direction that Elite so painfully lacks.

So, having told you what you can do in Starflight, let me now tell you why you do it. Evidence has recently turned up on Arth that the planet’s inhabitants did not evolve there; that it was colonized at some point in the distant past, that the colonists regressed into barbarism due to war or other pressures, and that only now has civilization recovered. A cache of old documents has also revealed the secrets of endurium and faster-than-light travel. All of which is great, except that Arth has even bigger fish to fry. A strange wave is spreading across the galaxy, causing stars to flare — with disastrous results for any orbiting planets — as it strikes them. Thus your mission is not just to explore and get rich, but to discover the source of the wave and to stop it before it reaches Arth.

Starflight has an unusually elaborate plot for its day, but unlike in so many more recent games it never straitjackets you to it. The plot is more backstory than story. The game is essentially a big scavenger hunt, sending you off to reconstruct quite a complicated galactic history. Follow the trail long enough and you should turn up the clues and objects you need to end the threat to Arth and the galaxy by blowing up a certain Crystal Planet that’s the source of all the trouble. There’s not all that much that you actually need to do to beat the game when you know how. In fact, you can do it in less than two game days. It’s the clue- and object-scavenging that’s all the fun, the process of putting the pieces of the backstory together. When you discover Earth, for example — yes, those original colonizers of Arth came, inevitably, from Earth — it gives a thrill when you first look down on those familiar continents from orbit. Other pieces of the puzzle are almost equally thrilling when they come to light. If you’re playing cold, sans walkthrough — which is honestly the only way to play; you’ll otherwise just be left wondering what all the fuss is about — you’ll need to look everywhere for clues: to the occasional emails you receive from your overseers on Arth; to messages and artifacts you find on the planets; to the map and other materials included in the game package. And, most importantly, you need to talk at length to all those aliens, a goofy and amusing rogue’s gallery of sci-fi clichés. They’re the silly part of this odd mixture of stately epic and silly romp — but they’re so much fun we’ll take them just as they are, cognitive dissonance be damned.

The Elowans, a race of plant-like hippies who evince peace and love along with passive aggression.

The Elowan, a race of plant-like hippies who evince peace and love along with passive aggression.

The Thrynn, who have such weird issues with the Elowan that they'll attack if you have one in your crew.

The Thrynn, who have such weird issues with the Elowan that they’ll attack if you have one in your crew.

The unforgettably loathsome Spemin, who lack backbone -- literally.

The unforgettably loathsome Spemin, who lack backbone — literally.

The Mechans, a group of robots who think you're just what they've been waiting for all these millennia.

The Mechans, a group of robots who think you’re just what they’ve been waiting for all these millennia.

Now, this plot-as-scavenger-hunt approach to gameplay is hardly an innovation of Starflight. The Ultima games in particular had long been trolling these waters by the time it appeared. The breadcrumb-following approach to game design always gives rise to the possibility of getting yourself stuck because you’ve missed that one little thing in this absurdly vast virtual world on which all further progress depends. Yet there is a difference between Starflight and Ultima in this respect, a difference not so much in kind as in quality. Starflight is a much more friendly, generous game. Whereas Ultima seems to relish making you fail by hiding vital clues in the most outlandish places or behind the most unlikely parser keywords, there’s a sense that Starflight really wants you to succeed, wants you to solve the mystery and save the galaxy. There are multiple ways to learn much of what you need to know, multiple copies of some vital artifacts hidden in completely different places, multiple solutions to most of the logistic and diplomatic puzzles it sets before you. Yes, there’s a time limit, what with Arth’s sun destined eventually to flare, but even that is very generous, operating more as a way to lend the game excitement and narrative urgency than a way to crush you for failing some hardcore gamer test. Its generosity is not absolute: in my own recent playthrough I had to turn to a walkthrough to learn that you need to be obsequious when you talk to the Velox or they’ll never share an absolutely vital piece of information that I don’t think you can glean anywhere else (remember that, would-be future players!). Still, even these few choke points feel more like accidents than deliberate cruelties strewn in your path by cackling designers. Starflight really does feel like a welcome step toward a more forgiving, inclusive sort of gaming.

Spoilers begin!

No discussion of Starflight‘s plot can be complete without the shocker of an ending. When you finally arrive at the Crystal Planet and are preparing to destroy it, everything suddenly gets deeply weird via a message from an earlier visitor:

I can hardly believe it! Those weird lumps are actually intelligent life. The Ancients are endurium! And we have spent hundreds of years hunting them to burn for fuel in our ships. Their metabolism is so much slower than ours that they live in an entirely different time framework. I don’t think they even know we are sentient. I believe it was only because of a link thru the Crystal Planet that contact was made at all. This Crystal Planet was their last defense. I can hardly blame them. Carbon-based life must have seemed something like a virus to them.

Despite this discovery, the only option — other than to simply stop playing — is to blow up the Crystal Planet anyway, thus annihilating the home planet of a race much more ancient and presumably more sophisticated than your own. It’s a strange, discordant sort of ending to say the least. Some have made much of it indeed; see for instance an earnest article in Envirogamer that would make of Starflight an elaborate allegory for our environmental problems of today, with endurium representing fossil fuels and the stellar wave standing in for global warming. I’m not really buying that. Not only does the article strike me as anachronistic, an argument born of 2009 rather than the mid-1980s, but I somehow have trouble seeing Starflight as a platform for such deliberate messaging; it strikes me as a grand escapist space opera, full stop, without any rhetorical axe to grind.

But is Starflight‘s ending a deliberate subversion of genre convention, like the controversial ending to Infidel? Maybe. It’s not as if the game is not without a certain melancholia in other places; for instance, you’ll occasionally meet a race of interstellar minstrels who roam the spacelanes singing sad songs about glories that used to be. Yet after you do the bloody deed on the Crystal Planet the game immediately leaps back to unabashed triumphalism, gifting you with medals and music and glory and a chance to roam the galaxy at your leisure with an extra 500,000 credits in your account, burning genocidal quantities of endurium as you do so with nary a moral qualm to dog your steps. What to make of this seeming obliviousness to the ramifications of what you’ve just done? You’ll have to decide for yourself whether it represents subtlety or just a muddle of mixed messages that got away from their creators. It’s just one more of the layers within layers that make Starflight so memorable for just about everyone who plays it.

Spoilers end!

In addition to its innovations in the softer arts of design and narrative, Starflight has one final, more concrete quality that sets it apart from what came before, one that can be very easy to overlook but is nevertheless of huge importance. It’s the first of these big open-world games that offers a truly persistent virtual world to explore. Due to the limitations of 8-bit floppy-disk drives, earlier games all fudge persistence in some way. The Wizardry and Bard’s Tale games, for instance, save only the state of your characters between sessions. Everything else resets to its original state as soon as you leave the game, or, indeed, just travel between dungeon levels or between the dungeon and the city. Amongst numerous other oddities, this means that you can actually “win” these games over and over with the same group of characters; the games literally forget you’ve done so almost immediately after showing you the victory screen. The 8-bit Ultimas do only a little better: the outdoor world map does persist along with the details of your characters, but cities and dungeons, again, reset themselves ad infinitum. You can go into a town, murder a dozen guards and rob every shop in town, then exit and return to find all restored to peace and tranquility again. Indeed, solving the early Ultimas is virtually dependent on you doing exactly this.

Starflight, however, is different. Its whole vast galaxy remembers what you have done, on both a macro- and micro-scale. If you discover a juicy new planet, name it, and recommend it for colonization, it goes by that name for the rest of the game. If you befriend or piss off a given alien race, they don’t forget you or what you’ve done. If you strip-mine a planet of all its minerals, they don’t reappear the next time you land on it. If you make notes in your “Captain’s Log” (a first in itself), they remain there until you delete them. If you blow up an alien race’s home planet thereby destroying their entire civilization, it stays blown up. This is a huge step forward for verisimilitude, one enabled by Binary Systems’s choice to throw caution to the wind and target the bigger, more capable MS-DOS machines. [1]This is not to say that all is smooth sailing. Starflight constantly saves updated versions of its data files to disk as you play. It then relies on you to “commit” all of these changes by cleanly exiting the game from the menu. If you ever exit without properly saving, or get killed, your game becomes unplayable until you reset it back to its original data — whereupon you have the joy of starting all over. My advice is to make backups of the files “STARA.COM” and “STARB.COM” after every successful session; then if you get killed or have some other problem you can just copy these back into the game’s directory to get back to a good state. Or, if you like, here’s a DOSBox startup script you can use to automatically keep a few generations of states. Just copy it into the “[autoexec]” section of the game’s “.conf” file, editing as needed to suit your directory names.

As Starflight neared release at last, it was very much an open question whether it would find an audience. By now the PCjr had come and gone — just as well given that the game’s memory requirements had ballooned past that machine’s standard 128 K to a full 256 K. No one had ever released such a major title exclusively on MS-DOS. Normally if that platform got games at all they were ports of titles that had already proved themselves on the more popular gaming machines, delivered months or years after their debuts elsewhere. Binary Systems and EA could only make sure Starflight supported the popular Tandy 1000’s enhanced graphics and hope for the best.

The best was far better than they had bargained for: initial sales far exceeded the most optimistic expectations, leaving EA scrambling to produce more copies to fill empty store shelves. It would eventually sell well over 100,000 copies on MS-DOS alone, a major hit by the standards of any platform. Starflight placed owners of other computers in the unaccustomed position of lusting after a game on MS-DOS of all places, a platform most had heretofore viewed with contempt. Appearing as it did even as owners of the new generation of 68000-based machines were reveling in their Macs, Amigas, and Atari STs, Starflight was an early sign of a sea change that would all but sweep those platforms into oblivion within five years or so. With it now clear that a market of eager MS-DOS gamers existed, the platform suddenly became a viable first-release choice for publishers and developers. Only years later would Starflight belatedly, and not without much pain given the unique Forthian nature of its underpinnings, be ported to the Amiga, ST, Macintosh, Sega Genesis, and even the little Commodore 64 — the latter of which would probably have been better bypassed. It would sell at least 200,000 more copies on those platforms, a nice instance of creativity and sheer hard work being amply rewarded for Rod McConnell’s idealistic little team of five.

Most of Binary Systems stayed together long enough to craft a fairly workmanlike sequel, Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula, released in 1989 for MS-DOS just as the first ports of the original game were reaching those other platforms. It was playable enough, but somehow lacked some of the magic of the original. Most then drifted away from the games industry, with only Greg Johnson continuing to work intermittently as a designer, most notably of the Toejam & Earl games for the Sega Genesis. Starflight had been such an all-consuming, exhausting labor of love that perhaps it was hard for the others to imagine starting all over again on another, inevitably less special project. Making Starflight had been the sort of experience that can come only once in a lifetime; anything else they did in games afterward would have been anticlimactic.

If we’re looking for something to which to attribute Starflight‘s success, both commercially and, more importantly, artistically, we’re fairly spoiled for choice. Alec Kercso credits the way that he and his colleagues were allowed to work “organically,” experimenting to see what worked and what didn’t. Credit also the odd idealism that clung to the team as a whole, which prompted them to never back away from their determination to make something bigger and qualitatively different than anything that had come before, no matter how long it took. Credit Joe Ybarra and the management of EA who, skeptical as they may sometimes have been, ultimately gave Binary Systems the time and space they needed to create a masterpiece. Credit Rod McConnell for giving his stable of talented youngsters the freedom to create whilst finding a way to keep the lights on through all those long years. And credit, almost paradoxically, the limited technology of the era. With their graphics capabilities sharply limited, the team was free to concentrate on building an interesting galaxy, full of interesting things to do, and to tweak it endlessly, without needing to employ dozens of artists and 3D modellers to represent every little idea; tellingly, the only artist on the team was Johnson, who was also the lead designer. And of course credit Johnson for giving the game a plot and an unforgettable, quirky personality all its own, without which all of its technical innovations would have added up to little.

There’s a stately dignity to Starflight even amidst all the goofy gags, a sense of something grand and fresh and new attempted and, even more remarkably, actually realized. Few games have ever captured that science-fictional sense of wonder quite this well. If you start playing it — and that’s very easy to do now; Starflight 1 and 2 are both available in one-click-installable form from GOG.com — you might just find yourself lost in its depths for a long, long time. This, my friends, is one of the great ones.

(Useful vintage articles on Starflight include an interview with Rod McConnell in the March 1987 Computer Gaming World and especially one with Tim Lee in the July/August 1987 Forth Dimensions. Alec Kercso wrote about the game in, of all places, Jonathan S. Harbour’s Microsoft Visual BASIC Programming with DirectX. Good recent articles include ones in The Escapist, Gamasutra, and Sega-16. Tim Lee gave part of the source code and many design documents to Ryan Lindeman. He once made even more source and documents available online, some of which can still be recovered via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Similarly available only via the Wayback Machine is Miguel Etto’s technical analysis of the game’s Forthian underpinnings. See The CRPG Addict for an experiential play-through of the game.)

Footnotes

Footnotes
↑1 This is not to say that all is smooth sailing. Starflight constantly saves updated versions of its data files to disk as you play. It then relies on you to “commit” all of these changes by cleanly exiting the game from the menu. If you ever exit without properly saving, or get killed, your game becomes unplayable until you reset it back to its original data — whereupon you have the joy of starting all over. My advice is to make backups of the files “STARA.COM” and “STARB.COM” after every successful session; then if you get killed or have some other problem you can just copy these back into the game’s directory to get back to a good state. Or, if you like, here’s a DOSBox startup script you can use to automatically keep a few generations of states. Just copy it into the “[autoexec]” section of the game’s “.conf” file, editing as needed to suit your directory names.
 
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Posted by on October 28, 2014 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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