Planet Interactive Fiction

A few days ago, Kate Willaert wrote:

Kicking at fuzzy genre boundaries is one of my favorite things in the world, and indeed I had some thoughts there! Let me expand them into a blog post.

First up: genre boundaries aren't defined. I mean, they're not created by definitions. It's a "what I mean when I say X" game. No, worse: it's a "what this community means when they say X" game, and who's the community, anyhow? But I'll lay my own tracks; you can decide whether to follow.

I did not play Metroid or Castlevania because I didn't have Nintendo. My first console was a Playstation. Okay, PS1 had Symphony of the Night, but I didn't play that. I played Soul Reaver, which is where I encountered the gameplay model that people would later start calling "metroidvania".

I wrote (in 2001!):

I didn't specify "going back to an earlier area to discover new paths, using that ability." That was a vital aspect though. I loved the feeling of having to think about the game world as a whole. Gained swimming powers? Gotta remember that lake you crossed earlier! You couldn't just think about the current location, because the key to progress might not be in the current area.

So yes: this is absolutely a model drawn from adventure games. The most basic trope of adventure games is "find a thing, then go find where to use it." THE LITTLE BIRD ATTACKS THE GREEN SNAKE, AND IN AN ASTOUNDING FLURRY DRIVES THE SNAKE AWAY! The world must be open and freely explorable so you can make these connections.

Let's extend this concept. Instead of locations and things, track the set of locations you can reach and the set of things you've found. We're no longer interested in where you are, only where you can get to. Every time you open a locked door, your set-of-locations grows larger.

See what this means? A game with no backtracking is a game where you never lose progress or get stuck. That's exactly the Loom/Myst adventure model! To revisit an "earlier state", you'd have to make a move that destroys an item or blocks access to a location. Infocom games and the early point-and-clicks were full of such situations -- but that kind of design fell out of vogue in the 90s.

...It sure sounds like the older, "cruel" adventure style is the real open-world game, while the newer "merciful" style is narrower and doesn't make you think about the whole game. Isn't that what I'm saying?

Kind of! There is a quality I miss about the old games. Not just because I was young in the old days... My pocket example is the Dispel Magic scroll in Enchanter. You could solve several puzzles with it, but it was a one-shot spell. Where to spend it? Figuring this out meant -- yep -- considering all the possible world states you could get into by using up the spell. A world where the guarded door was unlocked? A world where the tangled box was open? What other solutions would work in these worlds? A meta-open-world game!

But of course with Infocom's primitive play system, exploring these worlds meant a lot of save-file juggling. Not fun -- especially on floppy disk. But that was life in the 1980s. See this post for a deeper exploration of that era and what those "you can lose" games brought to the table.

How do we keep that sense of exploring alternatives, but avoid the frustration of juggling save files? (Or even the guilt -- you save-scummer!) Obviously, you make resetting the world a game mechanic, complete with an in-story explanation and a convenient UI for managing state. Which is how I got to Hadean Lands, of course.

And that brings us back to "metroidbrainia" land. You don't need a time loop for a metroidbrainia game; Hadean Lands isn't really a time loop. But it sure is easy to think of the metroidbrainia genre as "time loop puzzles".

Let's unpick this. We got to the metroidbrainia by taking the metroidvania idea -- "go back to an earlier area with a new tool or ability" -- and substituting "new knowledge". You don't have to defeat the swim-demon or buy a shovel or pick up a spell scroll; you just have to know what to do. You could have done it at any time, if only you'd known. That's the key.

A problem that you can solve only if you know how? We call that a "puzzle;" that's what the word means. This is what Kate Willaert is getting at above, and she's quite right.

And yet, Outer Wilds really did feel electrically new. It wasn't a retread of that Myst fireplace puzzle. (Which, to repeat the original comment, you could solve right off the bat if you knew the combination. Bypass all four puzzle Ages and go straight to Atrus.) So what was different about Outer Wilds?

It isn't the time loop. The time loop is a way to emphasize the pure-knowledge nature of the puzzles. The game wipes out all mechanical progress every loop, so you only have your accumulated understanding. And, of course, the time loop means that the game can let you get lost, get stuck, blow up your spaceship, crash into the sun (oh, so much crashing into the sun) -- no biggie, just reset. All the "unwinnability" annoyances get swept away with a single broom.

But, strictly, none of those knowledge puzzles have to do with the time loop. You could imagine doing the same kinds of puzzles in a game which had other workarounds for death and unwinnability. Tougher spaceship, tougher skin, whatever. You'd fly around and try things multiple times, instead of resetting the world on each try.

(Obviously the story of Outer Wilds is all about the time loop. That's not what I'm talking about here.)

It isn't the idea of going back to an earlier location and doing something different. That's been a popular adventure trope since, oh, Zork 1. (When you put all the treasures in the trophy case, you discover a map that shows a new path from the very first location.) "Back to the beginning" is simply good narrative closure. It doesn't give that sense of if only you'd known -- after all, Zork's map isn't an information puzzle. The hidden path is genuinely not accessible until you solve the rest of the game.

(Jason Dyer had to remind me about The Prisoner. O the embarrassment! The layout is a lot like Zork 1. You reach the finale by going back to the Caretaker -- #2, one of the first characters you encounter -- and saying a specific thing. But again, this ending move isn't available until you've gotten at least 850 points by playing other parts of the game.)

No, the division I want to draw between Myst and Outer Wilds is about the intended play experience. That's always shaky ground; people play the game in front of them, not the game the author wants them to play. But the assumption of Myst is that your play-through is a story, your personal exploration story. You begin at the beginning, explore, take notes, solve puzzles, and eventually (since there are no dead ends) reach the end. If you were writing a journal (popular!) then you might omit some of the repetitive fruitless wandering, but you'd write down every single clue, right? Same goes for the published strategy guide, which is inevitably presented as a journal. Shortcutting the puzzles is possible but the notional protagonist didn't do that! That's speedrun-fodder, and speedruns are a glitch aesthetic.

Yeah, the bad endings are a hitch in this seamless-narrative picture. But you only reach them late in the game, by which time you almost certainly have a save file. Or a bank of save files if you're an adventure-game fanatic. Almost nobody would have reached a bad ending and then started over from the beginning! And these days, Myst has autosave. So you can effectively UNDO with a couple of clicks. This very much reads as "how the game should always have been", even for us old-timers.

The other hitch is that the older '80s adventures are anything but a seamless narrative. You die constantly! You waste critical items on stupid ideas! You have to keep a bank of save files! We just discussed this.

We wanted to believe in a narrative through-line. Graham Nelson's seminal "Bill of Player's Rights" (May 1993) talks up the implicit assumption of continuous narrative:

But Graham immediately has to hedge. In an expanded version (Jan 1995), he notes "This rule [3] is very hard to abide by." He gives three examples of puzzles that break the rule, but which still might be considered "fair" by contemporary adventurers. You just can't get through the Infocom era without a reckless attitude: try everything, see what fails horribly, restore an earlier game and try again.

Outer Wilds unquestionably calls for the same attitude; except the "restore" is a diegetic time loop. It's a game of trying wild stuff and dying. And yet, Outer Wilds feels nothing like Zork either! What am I trying to get at?

I think this: solving a puzzle in Zork or Myst feels like, well, solving a puzzle. It's right in front of you. You have a machine or a giant mirror or a row of buttons, and you mess with them. The puzzle responds. You might realize that another part of the puzzle is elsewhere (Myst loves pipes!) and then you run over there to mess with that, but it's still stuff that's right in front of you.

Solving a puzzle in Outer Wilds always happens elsewhere. Is "puzzle" even the right word? It's research; it's discovering secrets. You go out and try things and make discoveries and let them ferment in your brain. Then there's a moment of synthesis, and you shout "Holy crap! The secret was right there in front of me!" And then you go back and apply what you've learned.

...You know, that moment did exist in '80s adventures. It wasn't solving a puzzle; it was solving a puzzle in the shower. (For me that was the Elvish-runes door in Journey.) It was when you said "argh" and walked away from the game, took a walk, ate dinner... and then the lightning struck.

Every classic-adventure fan has experienced that moment -- but it's a rarity. You solve most puzzles by sitting in front of them. The metroidbrainia model ensures that every puzzle you solve feels like that thunderbolt. That's the genre keynote.

This lets us pry open another confusion: why games like Animal Well and Tunic regularly get labelled as "metroidbrainias". (Not to mention Blue Prince, the game that you don't need another review of so I'm writing this post instead.) In these games, you do go out and gather items and powers and treasures. (And put them in the trophy case.) But the game is careful to put more weight on what you do with the power than on the power itself. You may have to do a lot of platforming (Animal Well) or combat (Tunic, if you don't disable it) but the knowledge-based "brania" gameplay remains at least as important.

So there's my account. The Nature of the Metroidbrania Revealed. Does this help us create new and better games? I dunno, maybe. I'm describing a feeling rather than a strict definition. Much less a recipe -- you don't get recipes for better games; you have to do the work. But maybe it's a way to talk about that work. Let me know.

Progress! I think have most of the rooms, but that doesn’t mean I’m through yet. My prior post is needed for context.

Victor Lamba II HR, one of the French offshoots of the Interact. Notice the AZERTY keyboard. Every time I boot my emulator (which is French) I have to remap a few keys to turn it into QWERTY configuration. Via Retro Ordenadores Orty.

I flailed at nothing for a while before checking a hint Gus Brasil dropped; he suggested I MOVE the bed. I’m pretty sure I tried PUSH with no luck, ugh.

This opens up a HOLE, although it isn’t clear from the description the orientation, so I was a bit surprised when I tried GO HOLE and plummeted to my doom. Oops.

I had worked out the ROPE / SHORT ROPE business earlier — and I could see how that could be a huge hassle for someone who didn’t visualize the fact they weren’t reaching high enough to cut the rope — so fortunately TIE ROPE / CLIMB ROPE was now easy to come by. The landing place is dark.

I also had the MATCH from up in the high cupboard and the TORCH still, so I took these too back to the dark room to find a HOLE with a CROSS and nothing else of note.

Where things get interesting (in the “may you live in interesting times” sense) is upon trying to leave. This requires passing through the hallway with the cobwebs I found no use for.

Dropping the torch before entering is possible, but carrying over my knowledge from Troll Hole, I remembered the dark rooms in this parser allow moving around and dealing with items with no penalty. That is, you can go in the dark room, GET CROSS, and leave with CLIMB ROPE without ever turning on a light. So for my current run I still have a preserved match and torch in case I need it later (which might evade solving some puzzle involving clearing out the cobwebs first, and clearing out the cobwebs might reveal an item, so I can’t forget this entirely).

With the CROSS in hand the most immediately obvious next step was to try it on the vampire.

The vampire drops a ring, and just past the vampire is a skeleton with a missing skull. I figured I needed the skull from the witch, but the witch not only prevents passing through but also prevents taking the skull.

Fortunately, the ring that was just dropped presents a solution to this. I tried WEAR RING in case I could do a magic spell or some such (even though there’s no feedback given) and it turns out there’s a spell at work the whole time.

That is, the ring has turned us invisible! The skull can now be grabbed. The cat with two mouse holes is still hanging out in the same room but doesn’t present an immediate obstacle or threat so I’m guessing we’ll deal with that later.

Before showing off the skull, I should mention that going into the PASSAGE the witch was guarding leads to a CUBBYHOLE with a LEVER. Pulling the lever drops the player into a maze.

This took a bit of work to map at first, and I had to run the clock out once just trying out directions.

I still had the “turn, turn, turn” hint in mind, and thought it might apply here, since rather than the verb TURN it could apply to simple directional movement. The layout finally dawned on me, and the hint indeed helped:

Unfortunately, this doesn’t help me at all; the route here lets you go from the witch area down to the pantry next to the kitchen, but there’s no treasures in between. In Troll Hole, there was a maze where if you hadn’t found the gold nugget yet (too large to take out the normal way) the maze would also seem similarly useless, so that’s what I suspect here: this is intended as an alternate route later in the game.

Returning to that skull I mentioned, and doing PUT SKULL while at the headless skeleton in the vampire section:

The portal leads to a laboratory which is a dead end, with an APPARATUS, LOOSE WIRE, and BEAKER that has LIQUID.

The apparatus is described as having a loose wire and doing TIE WIRE gives the message

IT IS NOW FIXED
BUT NEEDS JUICE

but I’m unclear how to work things past that. I tried POUR LIQUID and the game said O.K. but with no apparent result. I’m worried that the parser is wanting something very specific, here (although it is also faintly possible it wants something other than the liquid). I did incidentally try drinking it…

…with little surprise as to the result. To summarize everything that’s a blatant loose end:

• There’s an angry cat at some mouse holes (this likely won’t come into play later)
• I can traverse a maze but didn’t find anything (this likely is meant as a through-route, but maybe I missed a secret)
• I still can’t get at the small key in the crystal ball, in order to unlock the door in the clock
• I need to operate the apparatus in the laboratory somehow
• There’s a chimney too narrow to enter

This is leaving out the possibility of more secrets (like from clearing cobwebs; there’s also an apparently empty closet but maybe something happens there?) I don’t know how close I am to when Gus Brasil got stuck but I’ll take any hints or spectulation whatsoever.

Updated map, with new rooms marked.

This is, as the manual notes, the “spine-tingling successor” to the Troll Hole Adventure, the game we played recently for the rare Interact computer from Michigan (and the less-rare-but-still-unusual Hector computer in France). The historical background is over at that link, so I’ll just dive in.

Well, maybe one piece of history. There’s a story in a 1983 edition of the Micro Video newsletter which talks about a Don Stockton of Ft. Lauderdale who modified his Corvette using an Interact computer. “Besides monitoring the car’s basic electrical functions, the Interact uses a ‘simple BASIC program’ to display a series of menus which Don uses to control gear shifting and other operations when driving.” As Don points out, the chunky character screen ends up being an asset for car visbility.

This game is published by Micro Video, rather than the Long Playing Software label I theorized was just an imaginary “subsidiary” which only used the name once.

There’s no treasure: this one’s just an escape from the spooky house, and with a time limit of 240 moves, ending at midnight. The time limit is emphasized enough the game gives warnings at 180, 120, and 60 moves from midnight. Aardvark’s Haunted House we just played had exactly the same trick (running to midnight with a minute per action) but it ended up being a fairly generous limit (only pushed closer to the limit because of the weird bug that forced me to take out treasures one at a time). However, that was just due to the straightforward nature of the actions. Based on Troll Hole and the parts of the game I’ve seen so far, this one will still have a tight map but might have lots of backtracking, so turn optimization may come into play later.

Not until I’ve solved more puzzles, though!

The layout is the typical multi-floor house with rooms like “kitchen” and “library” and “hallway” and etc.

The text is still chunky. Behold.

This is one step in, after doing LOOK ORGAN and finding the PIPE, which can be taken.

The sign is a warning (“DANGER DO NOT PLAY THE ORGAN”) and if you try that right away without taking away the pipe first, this happens:

NICE LITTLE TUNE
LOOSE PIPE FALLS
ON TOP OF ME
I AM DEAD WITH 236 MOVES TILL MIDNIGHT

The fireplace can be entered; there is a BIG KEY (which can be taken) and a CHIMNEY which is too narrow to enter.

Back at the drawing room, the clock is said (via LOOK CLOCK) to HAVE A BIG DOOR. OPEN CLOCK gets the response

DONT HAVE A KEY

but if you grab the big key from the fireplace first, it will open, revealing a second, smaller door.

I’ll talk later about the small key corresponding to the second door, so let’s visit other places, east first:

THERE IS A SEASON made me immediately think of the following “TURN, TURN, TURN”, so I assume something somewhere needs to be TURNed, but nothing I’ve tried the verb on so far (including the book) has had an effect.

(I went with their Ed Sullivan appearance since The Byrds already made an appearance with Deathmaze 5000.)

Further there’s a WINE CELLAR (with nothing) and stairs down lead to a VAMPIRE who is HUNGRY FOR BLOOD. He prevents going up the stairs or entering an ARCH. The Dracula in Aardvark Haunted House technically doesn’t “kill” you, he just softlocks the game if you don’t have the sledgehammer/stick handy since he prevents you from leaving, whereas here the difference is a death scene.

UNSAFE FOR CHILDREN.

Heading back to the drawing room, there’s a dining room to the north with a TABLE, TORCH, and BELL CORD. You can just pick up the torch, the table doesn’t do anything (?? not a safe assumption given this company’s last game) and the BELL CORD makes noise if you pull it.

We’ll come back to the cord later, and also to the room to the east, which has a kitchen with a cupboard that is out of reach.

For now, heading back to the start and going up:

You can’t take the cobwebs, and TURNing them has no effect either.

Here’s my map for now, but I’m sure it is incomplete:

To the south is a bedroom with bed; trying to TURN it gave me the cryptic message.

DONT SEE IT

After experimenting more, it seems like “fixed” objects give this message, but it’s possible the parser is leaking here in such a way I can figure out which objects are important and which are not. That is, trying to TURN COBWEBS gives a message of O.K. while TURN BED has the odd DONT SEE IT which might imply the cobwebs are important but the bed is not.

To the west of the hallway there’s a crystal ball…

…where LOOKing at it shows the small key (THERE IS A SMALL KEY INSIDE). However, you can’t get it (DONT SEE IT). In other circumstances I’d call that message a bug, but the layer of enigma makes it work. Trying to break the ball is unhelpful…

BREAKS INTO TINY PIECES

…so let’s try EAST of the hallway instead, with a bathroom that has a SINK, STOOL, and MIRROR.

The mirror and stool are both portable, and I assume we can fill something with water from the sink later (like Troll Hole). There is nothing behind the mirror, unlike Troll Hole.

The stool can go downstairs and be used to reach the cupboard in the kitchen. There is a match inside the cupboard which I haven’t used yet, so let’s go north of the hallway to a MASTER BEDROOM with a CANOPY BED. LOOKing notes there is something inside, and going in you find a DAGGER.

It’s a structural dagger! Taking the dagger causes the bed to collapse, and if you’re holding the pipe it lets you survive.

In a game design sense it is likely the player will have found the pipe by now, but it’s possible they won’t be holding it on their current loop through the game.

The collapse reveals a new exit, to an attic with “2 mouse holes”, “passage”, “cat”, “witch”, and “skull”, as well as a passage the witch prevents the player from entering.

The mouse holes are described as being across from each other, the cat is described as mean, and the witch is described as ugly. I tried bringing the mirror in just in case the witch’s ugliness was somehow “magical” but no luck.

One more thing! The stool works to get a match from the high cupboard, but it’s also useful with the ringing cord. If you take the dagger over to the cord you can try to CUT it and get a SHORT ROPE.

Trying to TIE ROPE after gets the message it is too short; the game here is broken. If you take the stool from earlier, drop it, and stand on it before cutting the cord, the result is now a ROPE (rather than a SHORT ROPE) evading the problem.

This feels much denser to describe than is typical for a game this size; the style here has not only any object potentially come into play (multiple times) but the possibility of using an item wrong (so while playing I have to keep track of items from the past and not just what I happen to be holding). There is no walkthrough or video available of this game and even Gus Brasil (who defeated Troll Hole before me) hasn’t been able to beat this game. I’ll take any suggestions people have!

I’ve finished the game (previous post here), but the actual gameplay was made horribly intense due to a bug, and a very obnoxious final puzzle. Not a difficult-to-find-bug either — it is one that everyone playing the game and trying to win is guaranteed to hit. I think this was a victim of the Aardvark bug-fixing philosophy as mentioned by Bob Anderson:

After 15 revisions of my “Time Trek” game, Rodger took to tossing the cassettes with the new revisions in the trash, rather than fix the production “masters” to quash the bugs.

I don’t know how this particular game would have shipped with this particular bug without the level of apathy Rodger Olson displayed. (Maybe this was a bug not in the Ohio Scientific that got introduced on the Coco?)

From last time, I went back over every room carefully, only finding a handful of extra messages. I did realize the ANTIQUE CHAIR from the den was considered a treasure (I didn’t realize I could carry it, but I was referring to it as a CHAIR, not an ANTIQUE as the game was wanting. Silly me.)

I went back to the desk and drawer that gave me trouble last time, did OPEN DRAWER to receive an empty prompt, and then did LOOK to find there was now a KEY and some SILVER BULLETS visible. I think I did LOOK DRAWER (which just gives A DRAWER, both before and after opening it) and didn’t think to LOOK at the room as a whole again.

The silver bullets and the gun, when both held, mean the GUN is now able to be used on the WOLFMAN. The game decides to spin a random roll to find out if you hit or not, and as I’ve hammered at many times with RNG, this means a player might get in a situation with 10+ rolls where they miss their shot; most adventure games this would mean they’re doing something wrong. (I did have this happen during one of my loops … and I’ll explain why I needed to do some loops in a moment.)

Also, his description is WOLFMAN (WEREWOLF) but you have to use WOLFMAN instead of WEREWOLF, otherwise the parser gets confused.

Killing the wolfman opens the remainder of the top floor.

Going up, straightforwardly, leads to an attic. The attic has an AX and a TRUNK with a BAR OF GOLD, and if a vampire bat comes by and filches a treasure at random (it works like the Pirate of Crowther/Woods, but completely random and you can’t stop it) it ends up here.

North of the wolfman is a bedroom with an extra DOOR. Doing OPEN on the DOOR reveals a skeleton blocking the way.

You can open the jewelry box to find diamonds (treasure) and a watch (not, although I had to test it to find out). The furniture is meaningless other than atmosphere.

You can just GET SKELETON and it will fall out of the way (leaving a SKULL and PILE OF BONES, again useless).

The package of money is another treasure, the flashlight is the method of getting light to the cellar (well, “CELLER”) without having wind blow it out. We’ll go down there in a second, but first south of the WOLFMAN.

The RARE STAMPS makes for a treasure, but it is hooked up to cause the front door to slam and be jammed permanently. The only way out is now through the cellar. (This is the one moment of Aardvark-style geographic interest for the game.) The BLACK BOOK has a combination for the safe (36, 27, 45) which has a KEY (needed to get out of the cellar door) and GOLD COINS (another treasure).

Taking the flashlight down to the cellar, the huge thing blocking our way is FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER. You can KILL FRANK but have to specify AXE (if you try the knife from the kitchen, it turns into a bent knife).

It was around this time I decided to start depositing treasures, and around this time I made a horrid discovery. The DROP command of the game is broken. If you drop any item, it drops all items in inventory, and not only that, it doesn’t properly reset the item count. So if you’re holding 6 items, and drop one, your inventory capacity just went down by five. Again, I have no idea how this slipped by given even a minor attempt at playing through will reveal this issue.

Arms full with only two items in inventory.

After a few loops where I fully deciphered what was going on, I ended up only winning by starting out via taking treasures to the entrance one at a time. If you are holding one item, and drop it, no damage is done to your inventory capacity. The ANTIQUE CHAIR, VAN GOUGH PAINTING, GOLD COINS (from the desk) and CRYSTAL BOWL are all available this way. Getting more requires killing the Wolfman which requires both a gun and bullets, so I did that next while only holding those items, then dropping them off after; this damaged my inventory by 1 but this was workable. (This game is for children, eh?)

I then decided to go more gung-ho and tried to carry the rest I needed all at once: PACKAGE OF MONEY, DIAMONDS, BAR OF GOLD, RARE STAMPS, KEY, AXE, FLASHLIGHT. Grabbing the stamps blocks off the front door, but the flashlight + axe can be used to bust through Frankenstein, and then past the monster is the NORTH CELLER with an exit.

The problem is this is still only nine out of ten treasures. I thought maybe the watch or jewelry box itself would count, but no. The items in the NORTH CELLAR come into play here: specifically the shovel, sledgehammer, and stick.

I knew already DIG was a verb and so I tested it dutifully outside and kept getting rebuffed. It turns out digging only works in the south cellar:

Two more DIGs gets the message “AHA!”, and looking reveals a coffin. Opening it up:

I already knew POUND was a verb (yes, this is another one I’ve never seen in an adventure before, I lucked out from the prefix PO being on my list as POKE) and I found via a lot of trial and error that POUND STICK worked. The game asked me “INTO WHAT” so I assumed this was a “make” kind of command and tried STAKE, but no dice.

The stick is already considered a stake. You’re supposed to POUND STICK / DRACULA.

Fortunately I hadn’t broken my inventory too much during this loop and was able to bring the ring over to victory.

I can see why the “for children” tag landed, just considering the puzzles from a bird’s-eye level: kill a wolfman with silver bullets, open a safe with a clearly-visible combination, kill a monster with an axe, kill Dracula with stick and hammer. The actual implementation (especially with the broken DROP command) makes it highly unlikely to be beaten by children or adults without some source-diving.

Dropping the “for children” part, and just considering this as a game, it comes tantalizingly close again to some interesting choices; having the items that don’t get used like the lunch and knife and fire actually work for the atmosphere. This is combined with such an obstinate parser that all value here is nullified, and of course the very last act requires a giant leap of parser finesse.

Source.

There’s one more Aardvark game to go but it lands pretty late in 1983; maybe they’ll have finally tweaked their parser by then? In the meantime, coming up: the other mysterious and mostly-undocumented game for the Interact computer, the appropriately titled Mysterious Mansion.

Aardvark has been with us for a while; they started cranking out games in 1980 for the Ohio Scientific line of computers, with ports to the others made fairly straightforward by every game being in basic. The OSI computer was basic enough that there was limited memory capacity and so the parser system they used only went up to two letters each word. That is,

KILL DRAGON

and

KICK DRAGON

and

KISS DRAGON

and

KICKBOX DRIVESHAFT

are all interpreted as the exact same command, because the command is read by the computer as KI DR. Whether they really needed to do this is another matter, given the existence of games like Troll Hole Adventure with even more stringent requirements.

Unfortunately, even given we are nearly at the end of the line, there still hasn’t been advancement; today’s game even keeps the “feature” of sometimes giving a blank prompt on a action (successful or not).

Haunted House is by Bob Anderson, who we last saw with Derelict (good ideas, hampered by the parser) and Earthquake (really good ideas, almost good enough to not be hampered by the parser). This game — at least so far — doesn’t quite reach up to either. It’s a straight by-the-numbers haunted house Treasure Hunt, with a ghost, vampire bat, and werewolf.

Source.

The ad copy talks about it being “for children”…

It’s a real adventure — with ghosts and ghouls and goblins and treasures and problems but it is for kids. Designed for the 8 to 12 year old population and those who haven’t tried Adventure before and want to start out real easy.

…but while that was somewhat a stretch for Earthquake, it’s really a stretch here. I wonder if this is meant to excuse the fact the map layout seems to be fairly simple, as even the messiest of Aardvark games have had some interesting structure to their maps.

While advertised for a variety of platforms, the only version I’ve been able to find is for Tandy Color Computer.

The objective is to find the treasures and bring them back to the start before time runs out.

Already: why would the time limit be added in a game for children? There are so many games with frozen time, there’s no need for this. There could even be an in-game plot reason for an endless night while exploring a haunted house.

BONUS SIDE RANT

Look, I realize I’m perhaps getting grumpy out of proportion. The thing is, for this era, seeing an adventure marked “for children” is a good thing. I realize a random children’s product from this time might normally and rightfully be thought of as dross…

Oh boy, math drills! From a 1981 Intellivision catalog.

…but in the case of adventure games, a product normally for adults, thinking of children has so far led to innovation; Nellan is Thirsty had an automap, and Dragon’s Keep tried map navigation with menus.

Sierra later (1984) experimented with menu controls including full commands in Mickey’s Space Adventure. Designer Roberta Williams.

This was an era when user convenience was unusual, so thinking about “how do we accommodate younger players?” led to innovations that only became standard years away. In the case of Haunted House, clearly the company thought the map and/or the puzzles were simplistic in a way they didn’t want to endorse as “for adults” yet it has the same terrible parser along with the other Aardvark products and I wouldn’t dare put in front of an 8 year old. Even 8 year old me — who had already written a text adventure in BASIC — wouldn’t know what to do with it.

RANT OVER

You start at the typical house-represented-by-four-locations where going one direction loops around the faces. The south face has an extremely heavy rock; the north face has a CELLER DOOR which is locked from the inside.

Heading to the porch, OPEN DOOR gives a blank prompt and it was unclear to me until I fiddled for a while that this meant it was possible to now go EAST and inside the house.

The inside looks to be rich with objects, but a fair number of them give a blank response to LOOK. It is hard to tell if they are filler or not.

To the south is a DEN. The GUN can be taken, at least. LOOK DESK mentions a drawer, and while OPEN DRAWER gives a blank prompt, and LOOK DRAWER says nothing, if you think to UNLOCK DRAWER it says:

NO KEY

However, I’m still not sure if that’s really the problem, because that’s the response to any command of unlock on any item, even nonsensical ones.

LOOK GUN also is unhelpful and it took me trying to shoot something (and getting the response NO BULLETS) to find out for certain it was unloaded. (I am 99% sure there is a silver bullet somewhere.)

Regarding verbs, I should jump in and mention what I have found by dragging through my standard list:

DIG, READ, OPEN, DROP, EAT, LIGHT, UNLOCK, SHOOT, KILL, FEED, POUND, OF(? offer?)

Remember, only the first two letters are understood, so DIP is considered the same as DIG. I had to use some subterfuge to get all of them. PO when applied to a target in inventory says NO HAMMER, and that’s the only verb that makes sense to me (I previously had it as POUR). FEED will say NO LUNCH if you don’t have a particular food item in inventory.

I still am unclear if OF is OFFER but I’m not sure what else it would be.

The fact PO isn’t POUR was a surprise to me because of this room. I assumed I needed to get water (and WATER — or at least WA — is a recognized noun) and put out the fire, but now I’m not so sure. The painting is at least a treasure out in the open and I was able to confirm after depositing it at the start, the game’s score turns into 10 out of 100 (meaning we’re likely hunting for ten treasures total).

I remember this trick from Trek Adventure. LOOK at anything else gives no message.

To the east is a DINING ROOM with a CRYSTAL BOWL (treasure) and a TABLE AND CHAIRS; next to that is a KITCHEN.

The candle, lighter, knife, and lunch are all able to be taken. OPEN OVEN and OPEN REFRIGERATOR give blank prompts (maybe they worked and I’m doing something wrong as a follow-up?)

Going down the stairs leads into darkness. If you have the candle lit (via lighter) a gust of wind blows it out, so I don’t know yet what is down there.

Instead going up, there’s a BEDROOM (with a BED I can’t interact with) and a BATHROOM (with a SINK and TUB, likewise). Trying to go farther past these two rooms, I am blocked by a werewolf.

Trying to feed him the lunch.

The vampire bat and ghost I alluded to earlier appear at random. The vampire bat will swipe treasures and take them to the attic (which I have yet to reach) and the ghost … looks spooky?

There’s zero walkthroughs or videos I can find for this one but fortunately the source code is BASIC. I’m going to hang on a little longer for the sake of all those 8 year olds out there from the 80s that somehow found themselves trying this game.

You can use the months of the Softside Adventure of the Month as a sort of progress tracker of All the Adventure’s trek through 1982. Alaska Adventure is from December.

Source.

Once again, it is from Peter Kirsch, and once again, it has an experiment in structure. This time it didn’t seem like it ought to due to the premise (get 15 treasures). Rather than using that as a prompt for open-world exploration, the player gets sent through a series of small areas in sequence. It is quite possible (very likely, even) to miss a treasure, but you eventually start looping through the areas visited. Essentially Kirsch’s vignette-style is being combined here with a Treasure Hunt.

I have procured versions of the game for Apple II and Atari, but not TRS-80 this time. I went with Atari since it’s been a while and I’ve had previous attempts at trying to get the “best” version of a game go awry.

Before getting too deep in, I should give mention that the term “Eskimo” gets used in the game extensively. It is generally considered offensive now (not to Westerners in ’82); it most likely comes from a word meaning “netter of snowshoes.” Since we’re on mainland Alaska for this game I’m going to go with Yupik generally (as the indigenous people of Alaska prefer) but will still quote the game’s text when appropriate.

The room description for nearly every outdoor room is YOU ARE SOMEWHERE IN SNOWY, COLD ALASKA. I guess that’s one way to save on text space.

The game insistently repeats you are cold and hints you might die…

…but even after many turns (due to having trouble making the map) I managed to get through, so either the turn count value is super high or the constant “B-R-R-R-R-R-R” messages are just meant for atmosphere. The reason I had trouble making the map was the lack of items.

The sled isn’t takable. The shovel, in the trading post, requires that I trade something for the shovel. Trying LOOK SNOW on a couple rooms (the wrong ones) I thought I needed the shovel so I could DIG SNOW and neglected checking the command on the eastmost rooms, one which reveals an antique plate and the other a golden idol. The plate is not a treasure and is meant to be traded for the shovel; when trying to pick up the golden idol the game asks for a container to put it in. The golden idol cannot be collected yet but only can be taken after at least one full loop of the various locations.

Randomly a “huskie” will show up, as shown above. It took me a while to realize what was going on because of the sheer strangeness of the act: you need to GET HUSKIE and then they will land in your inventory. Then more huskies show up, and you can GET them too. You can end with with 6 of them; I imagine the author wasn’t literally imagining them tucked in the player’s back pocket, but even dragging them around snow while leashed seemed a bit extreme. The only reason I even came up with this is the opening mentions the word MUSH, and if you hop on the sled and try to SAY MUSH, the game is fairly explicit about what you need.

Drop the set of dogs while standing at the sled, and it turns into a DOG SLED and then MUSHing will work. (If you drop the dogs anywhere else, you get the message DOGS KLING ON TO YOU which is beautiful. But also confusing since it isn’t obvious doing it at the sled will work.) I think the missing narrative here is that we had a full dog sled and then something went wrong and the dogs scattered (and we lost our cold-weather gear in the process), which is why gathering the dogs up works in the first place.

At the next stop…

This map is wrong. I’ll explain the issue in a moment.

…straightaway you can LOOK SNOW to find an ALARM CLOCK. There’s also some WOOD TWIGS nearby (in the open) and an igloo with a MATCHBOOK, PARKA, and a FROZEN ESKIMO.

The parka allows finally taking care of the constant “cold” messages; for the poor Yupik, if you drop the twigs and light them on fire they will warm up, handing over a RARE COIN, our first treasure.

From there (my first time playing) I went on further, but I actually missed a area. The “every room is snowy, and also you can always go N/S/E/W” aspect to the game makes it easy to think rooms are duplicates that are actually different; there is a second igloo! Here is the correct map:

The extra igloo contains a sleeping Yupik. You can set the alarm clock here, walk out, wait for them to run to work…

…and then go back in and filch a PEARL and a PILLOW left behind, the former being a treasure and the latter being needed for a puzzle. I admit I’m somewhat glad I missed this on a first loop because it seems like one of the more mean-natured of the acts in the game; you’re literally tricking someone and stealing their treasure. Despite the absolute mania for Treasure Hunt style adventures still happening, they often had some thread of “this was being held by a monster” or “this was left behind by the eccentric prior owner” or even just “it belongs in a museum” but this is filching along the lines of It Takes a Thief, but without the early-established amoral character.

I realize the author probably was thinking more along the lines of “this is a sequence of things that can happen” and “here’s a puzzle that works given the setup” without any deeper intent. It just feels jarring given how many Kirsch games have tried to jog some sort of narrative out of the sequence-of-vignettes format.

Stop #3 on the trip involves the our first crisis. The dogs are thirsty, and won’t move without getting some water.

I know I’m missing exits now as every outdoor room still lets you go N/S/E/W, but I found trying to get them all on the map made things harder rather than easier.

We find some Yupik inside a lodge having dinner except they’re complaining about their salad not having dressing. To the west you can find some dressing and then hand it to them. (Again, the author seems to be just throwing out what works without deep message or intent.)

Taking care of this lack of proper salad accompaniment leads to getting an empty water bottle. Also nearby is an empty water dish. The trick here then is to take the SNOW from outside, put it in the bottle, let it melt by the fire, and pour it into the bowl. The dogs will now have water to drink and be happy (until their next crisis).

Also, when you get the snow the game says “you find something else too” which turns out to be a WEDDING RING, not a treasure, although it won’t be used until a later scene.

Onward, I mean, MUSH!

The next crisis: now they’re hungry! Nearby outside there is a room that looks like all the others but not only with SNOW, but also a SNOWBANK. DIG SNOWBANK reveals an igloo to the north.

The igloo has a dead Yupik and a tin of food. The body has a key on it, and we’d have enough for the dogs except we have no way to open the tin. (I missed the key the first time I played through here.)

Further on is a mountain with one of the tricky attributes games from this era sometime have, where the mountain represents two “alternate exits”. First, you can simply CLIMB MOUNTAIN and find a can opener on the top (??) and second, you can LOOK MOUNTAIN to find a cave, and ENTER CAVE.

The cave has a locked door — this is what the key from the body is for — and inside further it is dark. You can light a match to briefly see an ALASKA DIAMOND (a treasure). There is no way to turn on the lights permanently, but you can fortunately nab the diamond in the dark and make a getaway.

MUSH! (You can even just type MUSH on its own rather than SAY MUSH.)

Coming outside, there’s a polar bear (fortunately not one with an immediate hunger for our flesh). A few steps in, there’s an IGLOO with a crying bride, but that wedding ring found lost in the snow now comes in handy.

Now we reach a spot where I absolutely did not get it on the first loop and only found out what to do from the walkthrough. To the east there are some STICKY SHOES you can wear (fair enough) but it turns out the use of them is that with this igloo — this igloo in particular, which looks nothing different than the others — you can climb on top of it.

Oof. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a Kirsch puzzle this unfair.

The speargun goes to the bear (that part was straightforward at least)…

…and then you can GET BEAR — yes, the whole bear — and head over to a trading post in this area that wants to trade furs. DROP BEAR results in you receiving a GOLD KNIFE.

(In case you’re curious, yes, the game has an inventory limit, it’s just very large.)

MUSH and … another crisis!

There are two igloos nearby. One (fortuitously) has a VET and a RADIO. The radio is just playing music; the vet tells you they can’t help without their black bag. The other has a telephone, which oddly asks you to name the radio station calling. You can go back to the vet, listen to the radio, and find out it is radio station KOOL.

This magically gets a mailman over fast enough to land a GOLDEN RECORD (a treasure) into your inventory.

That was straightforward enough, but where is the black bag? This was again call for a walkthrough. Back where you “parked” you need to MOVE DOG, which reveals the black bag (!?!?).

After delivering the bag, you can GET VET (it’s “metaphorical” get, ok?) and drop for service:

It’s not MUSH-time yet! It was my first time through, but there’s a treasure findable via more sticky fingers. You can go over to the telephone-room to find the vet sleeping; then, LOOK VET, and this will reveal a tiny key. This key will open the black bag, revealing a GOLD FILLING, which we abscond with.

I think even the protagonist of It Takes a Thief might start to have qualms at this point.

MUSHing farther, we’re getting closer to the loop; this area, plus one more new one, and we’ll be back at the start.

You remember that Yupik where we used the alarm clock and then stole a pearl and pillow?

At least the game knows our hero is less than heroic.

With the Yupik asleep, you can now LOOK ESKIMO to find a GOLD NECKLACE and then take it. At least by this point in the game I was catching on.

To the north there’s a lake with a DEAD WHALE. You can hop in and get some leaking oil from the whale.

In a different direction there’s a TOTEM POLE. You can LOOK POLE to find a hole, try to GO HOLE to find a treasure chest, and with the aid of the oil helping with rust on the chest, you can OPEN CHEST.

You can also climb the totem pole and look at the face to see an OPAL. You drop the opal but you can get it again by going down and typing LOOK SNOW. Also, there’s a BOX you can nab nearby that’s just hanging out in the snow (this is what’s needed for the gold idol way back at the start).

MUSH on to the last new section:

This is always the screen on a new area, and it always takes testing the N/S/E/W in order to avoid missing rooms. I missed the box from the last area just by missing an exit.

I should mention, first, there’s a SEAGULL that appears randomly in this area. As long as you kept your speargun (I didn’t, once) you can SHOOT it and feed it to a HUNGRY ESKIMO.

To the north is an igloo, and an unfortunate encounter if you just try to enter.

For reasons? … you can CLOSE EYES, head in the IGLOO, nab the VASE, and get out without the negative reaction.

Moving on, there’s a KAYAK with a POOR OLD ESKIMO.

You can drop a treasure (yes, one of the ones you need, you might see where this puzzle is going) and he’ll lend you the kayak. This lets you paddle to a new area, which has an igloo with a MAD ESKIMO who wants your matchbook for some reason.

This yields a BAR OF SILVER.

With the bar of silver safely in hand you can kayak back. Since the treasure is one you need, you need to steal it back. It’s with the naked person, so you need to go through the whole CLOSE EYES routine again (if you can’t see them, they can’t see you stealing!)

The next MUSH loops around. So with the BOX in hand it should be possible get the IDOL and win, right?

…no, not quite. I counted, and found I only had 14 treasures. I missed a treasure, but I just had to MUSH to the next stop to get it, and I’m just going to give screenshots with no commentary.

Despite having 15 treasures now, the game refused to register a win, but perhaps that’s for the best. All the game says is

This adventure
is over

Believe it or not, this isn’t the last Kirsch game of 1982. On the special disk version of Softside there was an extra game of Kirsch’s that uses graphics. After we play that one I’ll do a round-up and some vague amount of comparative rating. I will say while I appreciate the structural experimentation, this game lands near the bottom; there were enough annoyingly hidden parts to drag the overall gameplay down, not even considering having to repeatedly steal from the same person.

Coming up: a haunted house game “for children”.

When Apple shipped the first ARM ("Apple Silicon") Macs, they came with Rosetta 2: a tool which allowed existing Intel apps to run on ARM.

One day, Rosetta 2 will go away, and Intel apps will die. (Just like 32-bit apps died in 2019.) When?

This is a boring question. You don't need to read this post. I'm only writing it because I've put together this chart at least twice. Maybe three times. Next time I wonder, I'll just re-read this post.

TLDR: The answer is probably 2028 or 2029.

The common rag is that Apple doesn't do backwards compatibility, but that's wrong. They do backwards compatibility. They just consider it a time-limited phenomenon. They're surprisingly consistent about it.

Here's what I mean. I was most active in iOS development in the early years -- iOS 3 to 10-ish. That's when iOS was changing most rapidly. (Particularly the big UI redesign of iOS 7.) It was notable that Apple kept old apps working, with the old UI, when you upgraded iOS on a device.

Once you recompiled the app (with the latest Xcode), you were in the new world. That was the time to redesign your app UI to match the new OS.

Yes, that was extra work for developers. But I'm making a point: Apple put in a lot of work to ensure that OS upgrades didn't break apps for users. Not even visually. (It goes without saying that Apple considers visual design part of an app's functionality.) The toolkit continued to support old APIs, and it also secretly retained the old UI style for every widget.

But, as I said, this was a time-limited thing. After a few years, Apple started to drop the old UI style from the toolkit. Old apps got weird mis-sized buttons and so on. I particularly noticed this with My Secret Hideout, which I never recompiled beyond iOS 5. When iOS 10 came around, Apple started to drop old apps from the store (including Hideout) because they looked like ass. You can debate whether booting them was a good policy, but my app did look like ass. I hadn't touched the code in five or six years.

Five years is, as it turns out, Apple's unspoken time limit.

Here's Apple's first architecture transition:

• Last 68k Mac discontinued: 1996 (PowerBook 190, Performa 630)
• OS support for 68k Macs discontinued: 1998 (MacOS 8.5)

In other words, you might have bought a 68040 PowerBook in 1996. It got two years of OS support; then it was orphaned in 1998. That's way under the five-year limit I mentioned. Early days.

(EDIT: I originally wrote "discontinued in 1999", but it turns out it was 1998.)

On the other hand, the software support lasted longer:

• First PPC Macs: 1994
• 68k emulator discontinued: 2001 (MacOS X 10.0)

Developers started building apps with PPC support in 1994. (Those were the CodeWarrior years.) But non-updated 68k apps were supported via an emulator. That was retained through the Classic MacOS era; it was dropped when OSX hit. So seven years of backwards support.

(EDIT: I am corrected; the "Classic environment" kept supporting 68k Classic apps through MacOS 10.4 "Tiger", at least for PPC hardware. So more like twelve years.)

Moving on to Intel, the window is exactly five years:

• Last PPC Mac discontinued: 2006 (Power Mac G5)
• Xcode support for building PPC apps discontinued: 2011 (Xcode 4)
• Rosetta discontinued: 2011 (MacOS 10.7 "Lion")

What about the 32-bit software cutoff? That's the one everybody screamed about (in 2019). It's a bit difficult to nail down how long the transition was, though. 32-bit Mac hardware was only sold for a couple of years: 2005-2007, the "Core Solo" and "Core Duo" processors. After 2007, all Macs sold had 64-bit CPUs. Thus:

• Xcode support for building 64-bit Mac software added: 2006 (Xcode 2.4)
• Last 32-bit Mac discontinued: 2007 (2006 Mac Mini)
• Xcode support for building 32-bit Mac software discontinued: 2018 (Xcode 10)
• 32-bit Mac software support discontinued: 2019 (MacOS 10.15 "Catalina")

Twelve years! That's longer than Microsoft supported Windows 7.

Looking at it, I'm surprised that there still was 32-bit-only software out there. I don't mean "software left over from 2006"; obviously there was some but you knew it was ancient. I mean developers who had just kept on building 32-bit versions of their apps -- never shifting to "fat" (32/64) builds.

You can get into a deep well of reasons why adding 64-bit support was hard. Most of them boil down to dependencies: old libraries, frameworks, game engines. (I'm not even getting into the Carbon-Cocoa business.) I guess the real question is why this transition was slower than the PPC-to-Intel transition, which was nailed down in five years.

Some of that was Apple's own transition, which itself took a few years. The MacOS kernel jumped from 32-bit to 64-bit around 2010. Then there was the Finder, iTunes, and other Mac first-party apps. If Apple is behind, they can't really put pressure on third-party developers.

I suppose there was a lot written on the subject circa 2012 or so. I don't recall any specific articles, though, so I'll let it go.

I'm not providing much support for my "exactly five years" claim, am I? Sorry! It's easier to see in the year-to-year OS updates.

• I buy a 21-inch iMac (Intel Core i5): 2011
  • MacOS 10.13 "High Sierra" is the last OS that supports it: 2017
• I buy a first-gen iPad Pro: 2015
  • iPadOS 16 is the last OS that supports it: 2022
• I buy a 13-inch MacBook Pro (Intel Core i5): 2016
  • MacOS 12 "Monterey" is the last OS that supports it: 2021

I'm cherry-picking devices that I owned, because I kept a list. But the general pattern is consistent: five to seven years.

I don't think Apple is arbitrarily applying a five-year cutoff. (If they did, it would be exactly five years!) I feel like there's generally a hardware requirement, whether that's RAM or a GPU feature or some other motherboard element. But since Apple doesn't advertise hardware details, you have to dig into third-party sites to draw a complete chart. I'm not doing that.

The point is: Apple does the compatibility work for a five-year horizon. Maybe that winds up covering a six- or seven-year-old model; if so, great. If not, oh well.

Thus we can return to the original question:

• Last Intel Mac discontinued: 2023 (2018 Mac Mini, Mac Pro)
• Rosetta 2 discontinued: probably 2028 or 2029

They'll announce the deprecation at a WWDC in May (2028 or '29), then ship the de-Rosetta'd MacOS in the fall. Don't wait for the news, of course. Get your ARM builds in gear right now if you haven't.

Footnote: Obviously this post assumes "business as usual" over the next five years, which is, you know, a hell of an assumption. If Apple stops making computers in three months because there are no more CPUs, forget this whole post.

We’re excited to announce new content for Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names!  “Seek and Destroy” is the latest DLC addition to the sprawling epic.

“Seek and Destroy” is on sale, along with the “Book of Hungry Names” base game, the “Wardens and Furies” DLC and “Those Who Refuse to Die” DLC, until April 17th!

“Seek and Destroy” unlocks the options to play as a member of the Red Talons tribe and the nomadic Silent Striders tribe.

And, in a special mission, 175,000 words long, hunt down a vampire who feeds off the weak and the helpless. Along the way, you’ll uncover his connection to forgotten secrets of the Three Families and the bloodstained legacies they left behind.

Finally, at no additional charge, we’ve added support for poly relationships in The Book of Hungry Names. You asked for it, and you can now form a throuple with any two of Elton, Nin, Melodie, or Podge. That’s six variations in all, all with unique dating and romantic experiences.

The whole game including all DLC now comes to a whopping 2.1 million words! Enjoy!

Stone Age is the last game from Scott Morgan for TIAdventures, and in some senses the simplest one. I may simply have gotten used to his parser quirks, but I beat it in roughly 10 minutes flat.

My guess, if you look at the ad that was published in the ASD&D catalog…

Source.

…that reading from left to right, these were still written in the order shown: that is, Haunted House, Stone Age, Fun House, 007: Aqua Base, Miner ’49er, and Vedas, especially since last two felt “denser” than the other games. In terms of the chain-of-recommendations the games have made, it goes in a different order, but it is quite possible all of these were written as one set and the suggestion about getting the next game from ASD&D was made only after a publisher was secured. (On the other hand, Aqua Base was released for cassette only, which suggests special status.)

Source.

In all honestly this is just a guess. The simplicity didn’t bother me so much just because it meant that none of the puzzles stopped me horribly (for long) due to parser troubles, and while the game does rip a puzzle directly from Roberta Williams, this version might be considered an improvement.

This one’s a “biome journey”, with the meta-map shown.

As the front cover indicates, we’re a victim of time travel to the past, to “5000 B.C.” Given the presence of dinosaurs, I think we’re a little further back than that, but this is the same author who turned acid into water with some lichen.

The game starts with a reasonably clever in medias res moment as we find ourselves in a cavern with no clothes, and the only real clue to what’s going in is found by typing INV or INVENTORY and realizing we have a “driver’s license”.

Doing LOOK LOG reveals a SPEAR and KNIFE; you can also TAKE LOG. To get further along the stream, you need to USE LOG which will invoke it as a water vessel of sorts. (The only hard part is figuring out the right parser command.)

The bear fortunately succumbs to violence; with KILL BEAR the game asks you with what, so you need to type WITH SPEAR. Just like with Fun House, the two-part aspect to this is fakery; in reality the game is searching for “WITH SPEAR” on its own, and you don’t have to say anything about killing the bear first.

The bear leaves behind a skin, “FLESH&MUSCLE”, and a bone, two which will be useful.

Moving on to the south there is a EUCALYPTUS TREE, and typing LOOK TREE reveals some EUCALYPTUS LEAVES. Doing it again, even after picking up the leaves, reveals more LEAVES.

Further south there’s a BRONTOSAURUS in the way, but you can distract it via the newly acquired leaves.

Also, I know this isn’t a big deal, but we’re off chronologically. (I do know one of my readers is a professional paleontologist, so feel free to chime in here.) Brontosaurus was in the ~150 mya (million years ago) era, whereas Eucalyptus was in the ~52 mya territory. We’re additionally going to be tossing in a T. Rex later which was in the Cretaceous (~75 mya). I really would like to find a game, any game, which treats deep time accurately and we can visit the Eocene or something like that with animals totally outside the normal pop culture. I think a lot of misconceptions about evolution come from the ludicrous time jumps authors seem to put on anything pre-human.

A Phenacodus, an Eocene-era herbivore. 55 million to 38 million years ago. They could have eaten Eucalyptus leaves. C’mon, wouldn’t you love a game full of creatures like this? Picture via Wikipedia.

Moving on, there’s a desert and the bit where I warned Roberta Williams was getting ripped off. Wizard and the Princess had a maze at the very start where there were many rocks and nearly all of them had a scorpion, except for one. That one rock was the one you could pick up without dying. It was such trouble that later printings of the game put a hint card in the package just for that one puzzle.

This game simply has a bunch of rooms described as “desert” not really in a maze, and LOOK ROCK in most cases reveals a scorpion, but there is just one which says you see nothing special. The map is quite simple…

…and you don’t need to spot any subtle graphical differences: so, superior to the original, in a way.

Moving on, there’s a snake blocking the way, just like Roberta Williams, and (again just like Wizard and the Princess) you can THROW ROCK to drive the snake away.

Unlike Roberta Williams (unless you’re jumping over to Time Zone) there’s a T-Rex immediately after. It’s happy with the flesh from the cave bear that was speared earlier.

Next comes a beach, and a boat with a hole. Trying to FIX BOAT has the game prompt you WITH what, but running through my inventory led to all items being ineffective (fair enough, plugging a hole in a boat with a bone seems awkward). This was the only moment that gave me pause.

You’re supposed to go back to the tree and get more leaves. The leaves then can be used to fix the boat via WITH LEAVES.

That’s almost everything! The ocean is a very minor maze (unclear why you’re blocked off from any direction in particular, let’s assume strong currents) and that leads you to another beach and eventually a shack.

Trying to go into the shack, I found myself kicked out for “indecent exposure”.

Confused, I checked my inventory and found I could WEAR SKIN from the ever-useful bear. This allows entering the shack and finding a PROFESSOR with a TIME MACHINE.

If you just try to GO MACHINE, the professor stops you. It took a beat for me to realize I needed to prove I belonged inside, so I did SHOW LICENSE (the driver’s license that starts in our inventory) and got jumped immediately to the end. So fast that even when I recorded in OBS I couldn’t capture the screen, so here’s the text:

ZAP!!!!
YOU MADE IT BACK!!
BUT CAN YOU MAKE IT THROUGH
THE NEXT ADVENTURE?

“The next adventure”, not an ASD&D game. We’ve broken the time loop!

In all seriousness, for its short span the game wasn’t bad; it clearly was intended as a romp, and the ending made me laugh. A bad parser and dodgy writing and minimal world-model all can still sustain an adventure game as long as you don’t spend long in the universe.

In fact, if I were to go back and rate the Morgan games, the only two I’d say are worth playing are this one and Four Vedas (with the albatross puzzle, except that gets spelled wrong). I hesitate to say for certain but I’m guessing the author was young and these were produced at great speed. However, for the end user looking at the company catalog that doesn’t matter: they got advertised along with everything else. This sort of game with this sort of parser — bespoke elements and all — was part of the texture of the age.

The six adventures plus Entrapment, the game picked up by Texas Instruments for official publishing. Via TI-99ers.

Coming up: the final Softside Adventure of the Month for 1982, followed by the final next-to-last Aardvark game we’ll see (ever), followed by the sequel to Troll Hole Adventure.

Hello, fellow authors! I’ve been neck deep in my own work for this year’s Spring Thing festival, which has left me little time for anything else, IF or otherwise. But the submission date has come and gone, and I am once again free to work on my other projects, including Let’s Make IF!

You should check out some Spring Thing games! Not necessarily mine, but a great way to be involved with IF is to be… involved with it! You can find the games here.

Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction

Spring Thing 2025 – Details

Find something you like? Consider telling your friends, or writing a review, or rating games on IFDB. Or sending a nice note! Consider supporting creators who make content you value.

where were we.

Let’s ease back into scenes. Consider this rather bare scenario:

diner is a room.

the lunch counter is a supporter in diner.

a sandwich is a kind of thing.
a sandwich is edible.

the grilled cheese is a sandwich on the lunch counter.

the description of the grilled cheese is "Buttery, gooey, with a delightfully crisp exterior."

What is time in such a place? There is no code to govern the temperature of the sandwich. In the real world, it would become less gooey as it cooled. We’ve talked about this kind of thing before: we could use values or global counters to simulate the temperature of the sandwich.

temperature is a kind of value.
the temperatures are volcanic, warm, cellar, cold.
a sandwich has a temperature.
the temperature of a sandwich is usually cellar.

alternately:

a sandwich has a number called temperature.
the temperature of a sandwich is usually 1.

This hopefully looks familiar! Inform is built to do this kind of thing right out of the box. As values change, the in-game sandwich cools. Just throwing something together…

a sandwich has a number called timer.
the timer of a sandwich is usually 3.

the grilled cheese is volcanic.

every turn when the temperature of grilled cheese is not cellar:
	if the timer of grilled cheese is 0:
		now timer of grilled cheese is 3;
		now temperature of grilled cheese is the temperature after the temperature of the grilled cheese;
	otherwise:
		decrement timer of grilled cheese;
	say the temperature of grilled cheese;

This kind of thing is a bit fiddly, isn’t it? We have a thing–the sandwich–with a timer, and the timer leads to a value we call “temperature.” I’d call this “thing-centered” design. Whether we’re talking about lamp batteries in Zork or the broken dishes in Repeat the Ending, timers and properties have always had a place in parser games.

You might be waiting patiently for me to rework this little snapshot, substituting Inform’s built-in scenes for my from-scratch values, but I won’t. In truth, scenes are themselves values with some nice hooks into Inform’s indexing and syntax. There probably isn’t a huge benefit to just doing the exact same thing with scenes rather than global variables. If I show just the start of the road, you’ll probably see that it doesn’t lead anyplace better.

volcanic sandwich is a scene.
volcanic sandwich begins when play begins.
volcanic sandwich ends when time since volcanic sandwich began is three minutes.
warm sandwich begins when volcanic sandwich ends.

when warm sandwich begins:
	say "Eat your sandwich while it's still warm!";

Using scenes to simulate time is really beside the point. Scenes are meant to make games feel dynamic; they are not, per se, simulation tools. Let’s try to think about scenes differently. When last we convened, I created a scene called “lunchtime.” Let’s go back to that.

lunchtime is a scene.

If a “thing-centered” design spins from the state of the sandwich, what would a player-centered design do? In this game, lunchtime starts whenever the player shows up for it.

lunchtime begins when the player is in the diner for the first time.

In other words, what is this part of the game about? Our choices will make it easier or harder to emphasis certain elements. The sandwich timer might presage a puzzle. Lunchtime seems more like an ambiance. These two aren’t exclusive, of course. We could have ambiance and timers all at once. But it can’t hurt to have an idea about intent.

the description of the diner is "[if lunchtime is happening]The lively diner is in the midst of the lunch rush.[otherwise]A cashier slumps against the register, clearly bored."

next.

Using scenes and relations to print variable texts in Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight.

Rather like how things went with Scott Morgan’s Haunted House, I only had one puzzle left to go, the pit of acid. My previous post is needed for context.

Source.

I admit I simply had to pull open the source to figure this one out. I had tried the right object out, but the game needs a very very specific phrasing, and it makes me wonder where the author was getting his science knowledge from.

Here’s the basic gameplay loop section; after an action happens, most of the time the game does the command GOTO 410:

410 CALL CLEAR
420 IF W$=”N” OR W$=”S” OR W$=”E” OR W$=”W” OR W$=”D” OR W$=”U” OR W$=”O” OR SEG$(W$,1,2)=”GO” THEN CALL WALK
430 IF M$”” THEN DISPLAY AT(17,1):M$ ELSE M$=”OK” :: GOTO 430
440 DISPLAY AT(1,1):”LOCATION:”;L$(LOC)
450 DISPLAY AT(3,1):”YOU SEE:”;

You might think the different directions call some kind of subroutine which then refers to a data chart where locations are cross-referenced (something like ROOM, 5, 6, 0, 0, 0, 0, where North goes to room 5 and South goes to room 6), but CALL WALK is simply a routine that adds sound effects to the player walking around.

1880 CALL SOUND(5,-3,5) :: CALL SOUND(30,-7,20) :: CALL SOUND(500,-7,30) :: N=N+1

There is a data line that gives directions to the various rooms…

1770 DATA U,DN,S,,N,D,UEW,W,E,SWE,SE,N,NSE,NWE,NE,SE,W,NWE,NW,SW,EW,SD,U,N,O

…but this doesn’t get referred to at all in order to move the player around, just in order to fill the top display under DIRECTIONS. Basically the author is cheating; a normal parser would interpret the data and display directions based on the data, but here he’s listing the exits out manually as a text string. How does the movement actually happen, you might then ask? Manually for every single room. Here’s some of the hedge maze:

1150 IF W$=”N” AND LOC=15 THEN LOC=16 :: GOTO 410
1160 IF W$=”E” AND LOC=15 THEN LOC=14 :: GOTO 410
1170 IF W$=”S” AND LOC=16 THEN LOC=15 :: GOTO 410
1180 IF W$=”E” AND LOC=16 THEN LOC=17 :: GOTO 410
1190 IF W$=”W” AND LOC=17 THEN LOC=16 :: GOTO 410
1200 IF W$=”E” AND LOC=18 THEN LOC=19 :: GOTO 410
1210 IF W$=”W” AND LOC=18 THEN LOC=14 :: GOTO 410
1220 IF W$=”N” AND LOC=18 THEN LOC=22 :: GOTO 410

No other commands are understood, which is why the game is so unresponsive to bad commands.

This does have the odd side-effect of making the mirror room that required a scream being given more synonyms than typical…

730 IF W$=”SCREAM” OR W$=”SHOUT” OR W$=”HOWL” OR W$=”SCREECH” OR W$=”HOLLER” OR W$=”SING” OR W$=”YODEL” THEN 740 ELSE 750

…(that is, pitching an extra OR W$=”VERB” in the line is easy, adding cross-referenced verbs as data is hard) but generally speaking, everything is worse as you can’t tell from the game if a verb is wrong, a noun is wrong, an action is impossible, or the author just happened to fishing for a different phrasing of a command.

Now, here’s the whole section starting with the card-in-sewer leading up to the acid pit:

1320 IF W$=”LOOK SEWER” AND LOC=23 THEN M$=”YOU SEE A CARD.” :: GOTO 410
1330 IF W$=”TAKE CARD” AND LOC=23 AND O(17)=-1 THEN M$=”I CANNOT REACH THE CARD,WITH WHAT?” :: GOTO 410
1340 IF W$=”STICK GUM” AND LOC=23 THEN M$=”TO WHAT?” :: GOTO 410
1350 IF W$=”TO STICK” AND LOC=23 AND O(13)=0 THEN OT=1 :: GOTO 410
1360 IF W$=”WITH STICK” AND LOC=23 AND OT=1 AND O(17)=-1 THEN O(17)=0 :: M$=”I HAVE MANAGED TO GET IT!” :: GOTO 410
1370 IF W$=”LOOK DOOR” AND LOC=23 THEN M$=”IT READS:’EXIT'” :: GOTO 410
1380 IF W$=”GO DOOR” AND LOC=23 AND OPN=0 THEN M$=”CAN’T, IT’S CLOSED.” :: GOTO 410
1390 IF W$=”PUT CARD” AND LOC=23 AND O(17)=0 THEN M$=”INTO WHAT?” :: GOTO 410
1400 IF W$=”INTO SLOT” AND LOC=23 AND O(17)=0 THEN OPN=1 :: M$=”DOOR OPENS.” :: GOTO 410
1410 IF W$=”GO DOOR” AND LOC=23 AND OPN=1 THEN LOC=24 :: GOTO 410
1420 IF W$=”U” AND LOC=23 THEN LOC=22 :: GOTO 410
1430 IF W$=”N” AND LOC=24 THEN LOC=23 :: GOTO 410
1440 IF W$=”GO PIT” AND UN=0 AND LOC=24 THEN M$=”YOU WANT TO LIVE!” :: GOTO 410
1450 IF W$=”NEUTRALIZE ACID” AND LOC=24 AND UN=0 THEN M$=”WITH WHAT?” :: GOTO 410
1460 IF W$=”WITH LICHENS” AND LOC=24 AND UN=0 THEN O$(19)=”WATER PIT” :: UN=1 :: M$=”ACID TURNS TO WATER!” :: GOTO 410

The way through is to NEUTRALIZE ACID, and then say WITH LICHENS when the game asks. I did try THROW LICHENS (even before writing my last post) but that’s because I thought it’d have some interesting side effect, not that it would turn the substance into water somehow.

Anyone have an idea what he’s thinking of here? Some searching led to papers where the acid from lichen was removed via some process, but that’s the exact opposite of using lichen to remove external acid.

The source is a grand total of 219 lines, most of the sort shown above. The author seemed to be more concerned with utilizing the speaker of the TI-99/4A than consistent parser and world modeling.

2010 SUB CAROUSEL
2020 FOR A=1 TO 10 :: L=-99 :: CALL SOUND(L,523,0) :: CALL SOUND(L,659,0) :: CALL SOUND(L,659,0) :: CALL SOUND(L,523,0)
2030 CALL SOUND(L,440,0) :: CALL SOUND(L,440,0)
2040 NEXT A

We’re nearing the end of the trail with the TIVentures as this game says to play Stone Age, meaning we have finally learned what the full sequence is!

007 Aqua Base, Haunted House, Miner 49’er, In Search of the Four Vedas, Fun House, Stone Age

Coming up next: Stone Age, which hopefully will not recommend Aqua Base and put us into an infinite loop.

This marks the fifth game I’ve played by Scott Morgan, who had all of his work published by American Software Design and Distribution (ASD&D) as run by Thomas Johnson. (Previously: 007: Aqua Base, Haunted House, Miner 49er, In Search of the Four Vedas.)

I haven’t unearthed much more on ASD&D than last time: they were short lived, mostly focused on Texas Instruments, and their downfall matched that of the TI-99/4A getting taken down by Commodore. Their game Entrapment was slated to be released by Texas Instruments themselves in July and even was shown off at the Chicago Consumer Electronics Show but it never made it out under that label, because Texas Instruments dropped support for their personal computer line first.

Source. At this same event Texas Instruments was threatening legal action against companies thinking of making cartridges for the TI-99/4A, truly putting a high note on their terrible year.

One other tidbit, though: ASD&D’s most successful game was Wizard’s Dominion, and that happened to be advertised for both the TI-99/4A and the Commodore 64. For a while it was thought the Commodore version may have never existed, until one was unearthed in Europe. The game somehow ended up with the Swedish reseller Computer Boss International.

Source.

This doesn’t have much to do with Fun House other than indicating that a random software house out of Cottage Grove, Minnesota (population in 1980, roughly 19,000) can still have some international reach. (Well, maybe a little bit of the “thought to be lost” part. I had the Fun House listed as lost until LanHawk found a copy in a file helpfully entitled SINGLEFILE.dsk.)

Via Pixelpedant.

Fun House has a perfectly normal opening where you start, with no context, in a pit with only chewing gum in your inventory. The pit also has a plastic bucket. When you climb out, there’s a clown there, and if you try to walk past the clown, it pushes you back into the pit. You need to find the shaver from the plastic bucket and shave the clown, whereupon it will become your friend.

No, really:

Past that is a slide with some matches to scoop up, with a room of mirrors on the bottom.

From here the game was highly resistant to essentially everything, so I thought it was time to check the manual. It gives a fairly normal list of sample verbs (UNLOCK, BREAK, KILL, PUSH, PULL, EAT, DIG, TIE) but also an explicit hint:

Scream and yell if you will,
when the mirrors make you nil.

SCREAM, then?

This opens the way to a carousel, a scene I don’t fully understand.

The carousel is first stopped; pushing a button gets a message about how IT TURNS, STOPS, AND TURNS AGAIN. Getting on the carousel (RIDE CAROUSEL, not GO CAROUSEL) gets a curious message:

IT TURNS, SHOVES YOU OFF, AND DISAPPEARS.

Leading to another ROOM with some MOVING STAIRS. Trying to climb the stairs gets the response that

YOU FALL TO THE LEFT, AND TO THE RIGHT, AND YOU DISCOVER THAT YOU CAN’T MAKE IT.

Typing LOOK UP shows “YOU SEE SOMETHING VERY USEFUL” and a rope hanging. While I’ve had this command occur enough times I will sometimes test it out of reflex, the reason this occurred to me here was the Scott Adams game Mystery Fun House, which has a similar situation; a merry-go-round has “hemp” falling on your head, and you can LOOK CEILING in order to see a rope. (There’s a moment you’ll see later also taken from Mystery Fun House, so it is clear Morgan had that game in mind.)

The rope doesn’t let you climb, so working my way through the logical choices I found SWING.

This leads to a new small area of three rooms.

At the landing dark room with some LICHEN you can take, there’s an exit leading up, but this is still the spinning stairs and it just knocks you off. My guess is that the path is one-way and not a puzzle you’re intended to solve, but the interesting aspect is once you knock your head, the border of the game goes permanently red.

To the east there’s a vat of water; to the west there’s a fire.

Getting through the fire is a matter of simply re-using the plastic bucket and splashing the fire with water. (Simple when finding the right parser combination. THROW WATER or EMPTY BUCKET or POUR BUCKET don’t work, you need to POUR WATER.)

Past the fire is a hedge maze.

The hedge maze has a stick you can pick up just out in the open, and a “green slime” blocking one of the exits. You can just go around a different way so I’m unclear if the green slime is meant to be a minor plot moment or some kind of puzzle.

The end of the maze has a “room” with a “closed sewer”, a “slot” and a closed door. The sewer has a card but it is out of reach.

This is the other Mystery Fun House moment. You have the gum from the start, and just obtained a stick. You can put the gum on the stick in order to extract the card (STICK GUM / TO STICK / TAKE CARD / WITH STICK — TAKE prompts you with what, which the game normally doesn’t do, so you just have to trust the command is overloaded with a special variant.) The card then goes in the slot, opening the way to a vat with acid.

I have yet to be able to do anything with the acid. FILL BUCKET just has the game respond “WHAT?” The game doesn’t even allow GO PIT:

YOU WANT TO LIVE!

I’ve gotten lucky so far, but the parser has been fairly hyper-specific so it’s going to be harder to run across a command if I’m not sure it’s the command I should be using in the first place.

Dustborn is a queer punk-band secret-agent road trip with campfire singalongs plus beating up fascist cops with an electric baseball bat. What else is there to say? C'mon.

About twenty years ago, a mysterious Broadcast freaked out most of North America and gave a few people vocal superpowers. Now it's 2030. You've just stolen a Macguffin from the Puritans (Silicon Valley fascists); you have two weeks to cart it across the American territories ('Murrican-style fascists) to Nova Scotia (Canadian librarians, therefore the good guys). "You" are Pax, rowdy (super-)trash-talker and lead singer. Then there's Sai (your best friend, a brick) and Noam (your ex, a snot) and Theo (notional grownup, the boss but not of you). You've each been dragged into this heist because -- well, the money's good. But each of you has their own motivations as well. Time and campfire dialogue will tell.

(The "lesbian road trip" genre is so strong that I had to count protagonists to verify there weren't any. The cast list is variously queer, black, trans, Latino, robot, Asian, disabled, and Muslim; but no lesbians per se.) (As main characters, I mean. No disrespect to Pax's moms in chapter 2.)

Oh, I didn't even mention "comic book". The presentation is comic book, with an expressive spare line-art style and lovely coloring.

Dustborn turns out to be from Red Thread Games. Looks like I never wrote up Draugen but I thought it was a nice bit of Norwegian farm-noir. But Dustborn is much more ambitious. It's published by way of Quantic Dreams' "Spotlight" label, and it fits there well: big meaty interactive cinema with lots of dialogue choices, quicktime reactions, and -- yes -- Rock-Band-style musical numbers. Also fight scenes (electric bat plus superpowers!) but you can skip those. Or set them to easy mode, which I found tolerably easy.

It's really a narrative designer's narrative design. Gameplay is commentary. Dustborn leans into its this-is-a-choice, Theo-will-remember-that mechanics -- precisely because words are spells and dialogue is divine power. That's the whole thematic gimmick! (Someone's been reading Julian Jaynes.) Pax has a tendency to treat dialogue transactionally -- like you do, playing a narrative game. Happily for the narrative progression, her friends are willing to call her on it.

Consequences are all. The dialogue is stuffed with callbacks to previous choices. And each of your road companions has a narrative state which shifts as you talk to them. Over the course of the game, this leads each character to one of three personal outcomes. (Someone's been meditating on Emily Short's triangles.) Not just at the end: based on their current state, each character can react one of three ways in pretty much every story beat. And of course you, as Pax, have your own ending to consider. When you get to the final chapter, the game isn't shy about announcing "Here are the consequences of your accumulated choices" in 24-point Lampshade Bold.

But I'm not writing about Dustborn because of the narrative structure. (Intensively worked-through but not particularly innovative.) I'm writing about it because, look, lesbian queer road trip! Found family! Besties having arguments and making up! Estranged sisters having arguments and making up! More besties being adopted every chapter and adding their quirky talents to the tour bus! Taking as much time as you want to talk out problems with your exasperating but good-hearted friends!

It's a comedy of emotional intelligence, is what I want to call it. All enthusiastically voice-acted in what must have a dumptruck-sized screenplay of line variations. Top notch stuff. (Ziggy's actor, in particular, knocks it out of the park.)

If there's a flaw, it's that the background worldbuilding doesn't quite hook up to the story. I said the Broadcast "freaked out" the world, which is vague because... I wasn't entirely sure what it did. Beyond the superpowers thing. "Echoes of misinformation" are a story point, which ought to be a commentary on real-world politics and the Internet; but the game doesn't go there. Fascist cops are bad, that's pretty much it. Nor is the world supposed to be a result of the Broadcast and the Echoes. The game world is an alternate history going back to the 1960s. Fascism is the fault of... Marilyn Monroe? I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take from that.

But I'm not writing about Dustborn because of the worldbuilding either. It's a tight story -- all about the characters and their road trip together. It's a ridiculously feel-good experience. You may think the highway singalong is corny the first time (it is), but by the farewell reprise, you will sing along out loud in your computer chair. As you push the quicktime buttons.

I'm not saying you have to sing. But if you're not willing to entertain the possibility, well, you'll probably think Dustborn is corny. That's okay. But don't complain to me about it. Commit to the bit or go home, and Dustborn absolutely commits.

I’ve finished the game, and it turned out to be much more elaborate than I expected for a tiny-space computer. I also have more history to report; this continues directly from my last post.

Via Jeux & stratégie, August 1981.

First off, a little more history. Remember that Micro Video took over from Interact once they went under, right at the end of 1979. In Micro Video’s own newsletter, I found an article from Cori Walker from 1981 supposedly giving more of an inside story on the rise and fall of the original company Interact Electronics. I say “allegedly” because right away there’s some description of Lochner that seems a bit off (I would call him more a developer on the Dartmouth time-sharing system rather than one on BASIC, even though interfacing with BASIC was involved), and it also doesn’t match with the story as told by Barnich, the engineer at the company who developed the system. Walker specifically claims development started in 1976 only to finish in 1978. Barninch gives the development date starting at 1978. Both have “receipts”, Barnich in form of the actual master board design (with dated photograph) and Walker in the form of a prototype that landed with Micro Video.

You’ll notice no keyboard! According to Walker the system originally had 4K of ram and was meant to be a “console/computer” more along the lines of the Bally Astrocade.

Post-launch, Walker blames “marketing” and “quality control” as issues leading to the company’s downfall. They provided “virtually no support for the machines once sold”; essentially, they were a hardware company with very little experience with manufacturing or marketing (speaking of the CEO, this matches with Lochner’s past experience focused on services for corporate machines).

New products were, announced when they were in little more than the “idea” stage, months before they realistically could be delivered. A user newsletter was talked about, but never produced. Customer letters, inquiries, and phone calls went unanswered, promises were made that were not kept, and Interact came to be viewed as completely unresponsive to the users needs.

(Note she’s not blaming anything about inadequacy of the hardware — trying for too much capability at too low a cost, as I mentioned last time — but she’s also with the company still trying to sell it.)

I think the two stories (development as early as ’76, or only starting in ’78) can be reconciled, given Walker’s reference to new products talked up while in the “idea” phase. My guess is Interact was in some kind of development phase during at least ’77, but spinning their wheels with “idea” meetings trying to land a perfect cost-effective product, resulting in “prototype box” shown earlier. By ’78 they were needing to get something just out the door so landed an experienced engineer (Barnich) to get what was now a “computer” done fast, keeping the same external design.

Micro Video was originally founded in June 1979 looking for ways to use the Interact for promotional displays and businesses. Interact’s slow fall led to their essentially taking over mid-stream; Walker even mentions completing “the software Interact had left unfinished”.

Dave Ross, president of Micro Video (shown above), discusses the software process in the same newsletter as the history capsule.

Some programs, like EZEDIT, were started at Interact before it went out of business, and Micro Video finished them. Some, like Earth Outpost, are patterned after popular arcade games. In this case, it’s a space war type game. Some, like STAR TRACK or our new Troll Hole Adventure, were inspired by games popular on other, larger computer systems. The best source, however, is user requests. The MONITOR, for example, was developed because many people asked to have machine language access.

Regarding Troll Hole specifically: he later mentions programs “submitted by outside programmers must meet certain criteria” so not everything was internal, but his particular phrasing from the long quote above implies Troll Hole was made internally, and there’s something from the content of the game itself (which I’ll get to later) which implies the same. So I think “Long Playing Software” was an attempt at a “company sub-name” for a particular branch of game, leveraging the common ads for adventure games that tout how many hours they take to play. If so, they only used the name once, and when published Mysterious Mansion in 1982 (made by what seems to be the same programmer) it just is given as being by Micro Video.

Heading back to the content, I really did not have many rooms left to find, but I still found the game tough to crack, as the density of object use (and re-use, and the ability to use something the wrong way) was high. I also didn’t have a conception of just how much physical modeling the game was using.

Marked rooms are new.

This is only missing the maze, which I’ll show later but turns out to be a simple grid (and manages to bump up the room count for the ads).

I’ll describe puzzles in more or less the order I solved them, although this involves jumping around the map quite a bit. To start, I had some VITAMINS that were TOO DRY to eat, and while the jug of milk was described as TOO SOUR I still thought it had to apply somehow. I realized the game lets you simply empty the milk and re-fill it back at the pond with water, making the vitamins edible.

With the increased strength I was able to pick up the “stone chair” from the living room, freeing up the Persian rug to get moved over to the treasures. Also, as I suspected, it allowed for dropping the “fragile” treasure (the orb) without it breaking.

I also incidentally realized that the jug of water used for the vitamins had a second use and could be poured at the greenhouse, but I was told that it needed nutrients. I figured (at the time) I needed to wait for an object later.

I also managed to work out the both the ELF and the “singing sword” which was giving electric shocks. The ELF, for mysterious reasons, will be happy if (while holding the cereal, the TROLL CRUNCHIES) if you FEED ELF and drop an animal call. The WELCOME MAT that was hiding the key will COVER THE FLOOR if you drop it…

…and you are safely able to pull out the sword, turning it from a SINGING SWORD into a SILENT SWORD (but still at treasure).

The mat is not described as rubber, so this requires a leap of abductive reasoning both in terms of the composition of the mat and the mechanics behind the sword (not just “magic”).

Poking at the various obstacles left, I was stuck for a while. I managed to realize I could LOOK (CEREAL) BOX again in order to find some PIECES OF GLASS (trying to eat straight out of the box is the only way in the game I’ve found to die, so at least it gets hinted) and they are described as lenses.

I had a paper tube and had been itching to find somewhere to use my BUILD command, so I tried BUILD TELESCOPE and it somehow worked.

Unfortunately, that still didn’t get anywhere on the parts I was stuck: the cobra, the nutrients, the screwed-in cover, the orc, the gold nugget that doesn’t fit through the door. I had vague suspicion perhaps I was softlocked, and in fact I was: every single puzzle I listed was now unsolvable.

Thinking in these terms (what items did I have in the past where maybe I burned something I shouldn’t have?) I realized the screw might be the kind where a dime would work just as well as a screwdriver. The dime I had spent on the pay toilet (in order to get the paper tube) but what if I used it to UNSCREW first?

Indeed this works, and it reveals a button leading to a new room, a DEN.

Now it is safe to spend the dime.

The ANIMAL CALL I had from the ELF I had tried in every single room (BLOW CALL) with no luck, but since this was a new room I tried it here.

Taking this hint back over to the piano that I couldn’t open, I tried not PLAY PIANO but PLAY MISTY. It unlocked the piano, revealing a GOLDEN FLUTE.

Already suspecting I needed a flute for the cobra, I went and played the flute and found that the COBRA DANCES.

That isn’t helpful by itself, but the game is tricky with its item use again: if you take the SILVER BASKET from back at the greenhouse and drop it before playing, the cobra will crawl inside, snake-charmer style.

The cobra can then be toted over to the ORC and released, where it will chase the orc away, sort of a sideways variant of bird-vs-snake from Crowther/Woods.

This allows grabbing the crown for another treasure ticked off, plus access to the cave. The cave only leads to one place, though, a canyon view with a BILLBOARD. I had the telescope already (trying to use it everywhere to no effect) but I instantly knew here is where it applied.

Remember the fertilizer? Now is when that part stops our progress. Using the same logic as with the dime, I realized I had dumped the milk somewhere random, but maybe sour milk could potentially be helpful in gardening? (Can anyone confirm or deny this one? Sounds suspicious.)

This causes flowers to pop up that can be thrown at the canyon rim. (By the way, if you’re keeping track, yes, this involves a fair number of game-restarts. Fortunately the whole area is small.)

The bat that takes the flowers straightforwardly drops a PEARL, one of the treasures.

That’s still not everything yet! Back by the den there was a rope with a balloon, where I found by popping the balloon I could get the rope. Having gotten this far with no use for a rope (including at the canyon) I was starting to get suspicious, and keeping my eye on my verb list, tested out UNTIE ROPE (fortunately this one didn’t need a game restart because I was already in a restart after a restart and I hadn’t bothered to deal with the balloon yet).

The rubber glove let me pick up the frog, which I had noted long back was described as being too slippery, but I had no use for it. I ended up needing to refer to a hint left by Gus Brasil in the comments (thanks!) about how there’s a secret passage from the living room. That had to refer to the picture, but the picture was highly resistant to my efforts to MOVE PICTURE and PUSH PICTURE and so forth. The description is 2 EVIL EYES STARE BACK AT YOU and that message the mirror revealed from long back said PICK 2. I guess they’re supposed to go together, because you can PUSH or POKE the eyes specifically.

This is a second-level noun. I’ve referred to this concept before (see Inca Curse), but just to recap, this is a noun that’s mentioned inside the description of another noun. When game prepares ahead for this, it makes for richer interaction (or in the case of Earthquake San Francisco 1906, a shaggy dog joke). With Troll Hole this is the only place the trick occurs, but I’ll give it a little forgiveness in that

a.) nearly every item is important, so it’s curious for the picture not to be, meaning I had an eye on it still

b.) it has the PICK 2 hint

The SOMETHING that is THERE is a new passage leading to a new room: a spider with a golden web.

Being low on resources — just the frog really — it wasn’t hard to put the two together.

While the GOLDEN WEB counts as a treasure, taking it also opens another passage to a maze. Every room in the maze allows you to go N/S/E/W/U/D and there are 16 of them, but realizing the gimmick makes things go faster:

The edges of the grid wrap around; I have not marked up/down exits as they are more irregular, but the only one that is important is the one that escapes, going down to the POND. It is in a room with a NOTE.

The note also says YOU PROBABLY THOUGHT THIS WAS A MAP BUT IT ISN’T! It’s just a “thank you for playing” type note, but it solely gives credit to MICRO VIDEO. This suggests to me it was written for Micro Video and the LONG PLAYING SOFTWARE name that shows at the start was added as an afterthought meant for marketing.

The maze route is what’s needed to get out the gold nugget (otherwise there are no treasures / useful items). And that’s all ten!

This turned out to be far more satisfying than I expected. I wasn’t originally playing with “rich object properties” in mind due to the 8K memory space, but everything is modeled properly as opposed to being faked (unlike, ahem, certain recent games we’ve seen on more capable systems). The softlocks are irritating but they are also part of what makes the difficulty of the game work; having a DIME immediately where it gets used makes it quite likely a player will use it up quickly and not even think about it for the other obstacle (unscrewing a cover). In other words, the old-school design finesse at least has a rationale, and creates a puzzle that is hard to duplicate otherwise.

The ad in a French magazine at the top of this post starting selling the game in English before it was even translated; it did get a translation in 1982, which was notable just for the sheer scarcity of adventure games translated into French available. Tilt from January 1983 calls out the shortage and mentions La caverne des lutins in a multi-page spread about the format, but because it doesn’t have enough text adventures, it talks about things like Atari 2600 Adventure and the Intellivision game Swords and Serpents.

So this game ended up being wildly obscure in the United States (rare computer, even rarer cassette, only dumped quite recently and found thanks to Gus Brasil) but still ended up being seminal elsewhere due to the happenstance of Mr. Coll’s purchase of Interact’s design. (At the Computer Adventure Solution Archive, while La caverne des lutins has had an entry since 2011, as of this writing The Troll Hole Adventure isn’t mentioned at all.)

Unfortunately, this didn’t happen with Micro Video’s 1982 game (Mysterious Mansion). I don’t know the circumstances of why, but I think it may be even more obscure than Troll Hole; I will investigate when I return to the Interact soon.

I feel very comfortable working in a company where you can’t touch anything.

— Walter Forbes

At the beginning of 1996, Sierra On-Line was still basking in the success of the previous summer’s Phantasmagoria, the best-selling game it had ever published. With revenues of $158.1 million and profits of $16 million in 1995, the company was bigger and richer than it had ever been. In light of all this, absolutely nobody anticipated the press release that went out from Sierra’s new headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, on February 20. It announced that Sierra would soon “merge with CUC International, Inc., a technology-driven retail and membership-services company that provides access to travel, shopping, auto, dining, home-improvement, financial, and other services to 40 million consumers worldwide. Sierra stockholders will receive 1.225 shares of CUC common stock for each share of Sierra common stock. The transaction is valued at approximately $1.06 billion. The merger is subject to stockholder approval and other customary closing conditions.”

As this bombshell filtered down to the gaming sites that were popping up all over the young Web, and eventually to the laggardly print magazines, one question was first on the lips of every gamer who read about it. Just who or what was this CUC International anyway? Or, to frame the question differently: if CUC was such a big wheel, why had no one ever heard of it, and why did CUC itself seem to have such a hard time explaining what it actually did?

Time would show the answers to both of those questions to be more complicated and fraught than anyone could have expected. Still, it was clear from the outset that the path to understanding must pass through CUC’s CEO, a sprightly, dapper-looking man of business named Walter Forbes. This particular Forbes was not a member of the wealthy family who owned and operated Forbes magazine, one of the business and investment world’s primary journals of record. That fact notwithstanding, he had been born into decidedly privileged circumstances, and would certainly not have looked out of place with that other Forbes family at a blue-blood country club. Walter Forbes was a titan of industry straight out of Central Casting, from his artfully arranged salt-and-pepper coiffure to the gleaming Gucci loafers he donned on “casual” days. He was as convincing a figure as has ever walked into a corporate boardroom. In a milieu where looking the part of a General Patton of business was a prerequisite to joining the war for hearts, minds, and wallets, Forbes had the role down pat. With a guy like this at its head, how could CUC be anything but amazing? And how could little Sierra count itself anything but fortunate to become a part of his burgeoning empire?

As Forbes himself told the story to a wide-eyed journalist from Wired magazine in 1997, it had all begun for him back in 1973, when, having recently graduated from Harvard Business School, he was eating dinner one evening with some friends and some of his former professors. Somehow the discussion turned to the future of shopping. “Wouldn’t it be neat if we could bypass stores and send products from the manufacturer to the home, and people would use computers to shop?” Forbes recalled “someone” at the table saying. “Everyone forgot about what we talked about that night. Except me.”

Forbes envisioned a scenario in which brick-and-mortar retailers, those traditional middlemen of the chain of commerce, would be replaced by digital storefronts operated by his own company, which was founded in 1973 under the name of Comp-U-Card. According to his own testimony, he mooted various impractical schemes for priming the e-commerce pump before the technology of telecommunications finally showed signs of catching up with at least some of his aspirations circa 1979, the year that the pre-Web commercial online services The Source and CompuServe made their debut. Now favoring the acronym CUC over the “Comp-U-Card” appellation — needless to say, nobody would rush to embrace that name today; the evolution of language can be a dangerous thing for corporate branders — Forbes took his company public in 1983, with an IPO that came in at $100 million. His business plan at the time, at least as he explained it fourteen years later, rings almost eerily prescient.

Manufacturers would simply send information about their products to [Forbes’s] database company, which would aggregate the data, organize it, and then present it to consumers in an engaging way. When a shopper ordered something, the manufacturer would be notified to ship it directly to the consumer’s home. Since no retailer would be involved, the customer would simply pay the wholesale price, plus shipping charges. The database company would make almost no money on the transactions. Rather, it would make its money by charging the consumer a flat annual membership fee — typically $49 — for access to the data and the chance to buy at such low prices.

Apart from a few details here and there, this is the way that Amazon, the 800-pound gorilla of modern online retail, operates today, right down to the “buyers club” where it makes most of its real money.

But here’s where the waters surrounding Walter Forbes and CUC start to get muddy. (I do hope you packed your diving goggles, because there are a lot of such waters ahead.) For the first ten years after the IPO, CUC actually took very little in the way of concrete steps in pursuit of the proto-Amazonian dream that Forbes had supposedly been nursing since 1973. Instead it administered offline shopping clubs that were marketed via bulk-rate post and telephone cold-calling. This was a sector of the consumer economy that thrived mostly on fine print and the failure of its often elderly customers to do their due diligence, being just one step removed from timeshares on the continuum of shady business models that never turn out to deliver quite what their customers think they are getting; in fact, timeshares soon became a part of CUC’s portfolio too. CUC sold its shopping clubs and other services as turnkey packages that could be purchased and branded by other corporations, thus partially explaining why so few people had ever heard of the company even fourteen years after its IPO. It wasn’t above using guile to retain customers, such as quietly signing them up for automatic recurring billing plans — charges that, it hoped, some portion of its customers who thought they were just making a one-time payment would fail to notice on their credit-card statements. Even the fawning profile in Wired had to acknowledge how close to the ethical edge CUC was prepared to fly.

If a customer takes the trouble to call and quit, the CUC telephone operator goes into what any football fan would recognize as a prevent defense. The operator frantically starts explaining the value of the service, then often sacrifices a $20 coupon or check as a bribe to stick around. They will give up ground, but [will] do anything to keep you from reaching that goal line.

As late as the year that CUC acquired Sierra On-Line, it was the offline shopping clubs that were still the heart of its revenue stream, the subject that its annual report for the year chose to open with and to return to again and again.

CUC International is a leading technology-driven, membership-based consumer services company, providing approximately 66.3 million members with access to a variety of goods and services. The Company provides these services as individual, wholesale, or discount program memberships. These memberships include such components as shopping, travel, auto, dining, home improvement, lifestyle, vacation-exchange [i.e., timeshares], credit-card and checking-account enhancement packages, financial products and discount programs. The Company also administers insurance-package programs which are generally combined with discount shopping and travel for credit-union members, distributes welcoming packages which provide new homeowners with discounts for local merchants, and provides travelers with value-added tax refunds. The Company believes it is the leading provider of membership-based consumer services of these types in the United States.

The Company solicits members for many of its programs by direct marketing and by using a direct sales force calling on financial institutions, fund-raising charitable institutions and associations…

The Company offers Shoppers Advantage, Travelers Advantage, AutoVantage, Dinner on Us Club, PrivacyGuard, Buyers Advantage, Credit Card Guardian, and other membership services. These benefits are offered as individual memberships, as components of wholesale membership enhancement packages and insurance products, and as components of discount-program memberships. For the fiscal year ended January 31, 1997, approximately 536 million solicitation pieces were mailed, followed up by approximately 70 million telephone calls.

Walter Forbes’s digital aspirations that got Wired so hot and bothered are mentioned only in passing in the report: “Some of the Company’s individual memberships are available online to interactive computer users via major online services and the Internet’s World Wide Web.”

Forbes first became associated with Sierra in 1991, when he agreed to join the company’s board. Ken Williams, Sierra’s co-founder and CEO, considered this a major coup, a sign that his little publisher of computer games was really going places in this new decade of multimedia and cyber-everything. He was excited even though, as he admits in his recent memoir, he “never completely understood Walter’s business. To this day, I can’t completely tell you what it was. There were components of it that made sense — for instance, they owned a company called RCI that facilitated timeshare swapping. They also operated a series of discount shopping clubs, where customers would pay an annual subscription fee, allowing them to buy products at near-wholesale prices. Whatever it was, they were certainly doing something right. They had $2 billion in revenue and over $200 million in profit.”

The voice of Forbes whispering in Ken Williams’s ear was a hidden motivator behind the spate of acquisitions that the latter pursued during the first half of the 1990s, which saw the American educational-software developer Bright Star, the French adventure-games maker Coktel Visions, the British strategy house Impressions, and the American sim specialists Papyrus and subLOGIC all entering the Sierra tent. Having thus hunted down and captured so much smaller prey with Forbes at his side, Williams perhaps shouldn’t have been surprised when his trusted advisor started eying his own company with a hungry look. Nevertheless, when Forbes broached the subject with Ken’s wife Roberta Williams, the designer of Sierra’s flagship King’s Quest series as well as Phantasmagoria and many other adventure and children’s games, she at least was taken aback.

“Have you and Ken ever thought about selling Sierra?” he asked her out of the blue one day in the lobby of the Paris hotel where they happened to be attending a board-of-directors meeting. (An insatiable connoisseur of French food and wine, Forbes had had enough sway with Ken to convince him to hold the meeting at this distant and expensive location.)

“No,” Roberta answered shortly. “We’re not interested.”

“But if you ever were, what sort of price would you be looking at?”

“A lot,” Roberta replied, then walked away as quickly as decorum allowed. She had the discomfiting feeling that Forbes was a predator probing for a flock’s weak link, and she was determined that it wouldn’t be her.

But when Forbes brought the subject up in a more formal way, at another Sierra board meeting closer to home on February 2, 1996, Roberta’s husband proved far more receptive than she had been.

The only detailed insider account of what happened next and why is the one written by Ken Williams. Needless to say, this must raise automatic red flags for any historian worth his salt. And yet his memoir does appear to be about as even-handed as anyone could possibly expect under the circumstances. To his credit, he owns up to many of his own mistakes with no hesitation whatsoever. While we would be foolish to take his account as the unvarnished gospel truth, he doesn’t strike me as a completely unreliable witness by any means. I think we can afford to take much if not all of what he writes at face value as we ask ourselves what led him to the most monumental decision of his life, excepting only the decision to found Sierra in the first place all the way back in 1980.

To begin with, Williams admits forthrightly that he was quite simply tired at this juncture of his life, and that his sense of exhaustion made the prospect of selling out and taking a step back more appealing than it might have been just a few years earlier. His fatigue is eminently understandable: Sierra had consumed almost his every waking hour for over fifteen years by this point. He tells us that people had been telling him for ages that he “needed to delegate more, but it just wasn’t in my personality to do so.” More and more as the games got more expensive and the stakes for every new release higher, Williams had felt forced to play the role of the corporate heavy.

My visits to Sierra’s development teams were occasionally liked, but not very often. Left to their own devices, the teams would agonize over the games forever. Asking an artist to compromise quality in order to bring the art in on budget is not a win-win for either of us, but it’s something I had to do every day. Shutting down projects, ruining dreams, staring endlessly at spreadsheets, riding on airplanes. That was my life.

Sierra had become rather notorious these last few years for shipping games before they were ready. At the end of the day, the decision to do so was Ken Williams’s, but he often believed he had no real choice in the matter at all. For Sierra was now a publicly traded company, and he felt it couldn’t afford the hit to the stock price that would result from not having Game X on the shelves in time for some given Christmas shopping season. Now, the skeptical reader might argue that there were surely ways to improve internal processes such that games weren’t continually falling behind schedule, going over budget, and winding up caught in the “ship it now or die” trap — and such a reader would be absolutely right. But that doesn’t change the state of play on the ground from the perspective of Ken Williams, who was not a good delegater and seemed to lack the turn of mind that was required to implement more rigorous methodologies of game development. This situation being what it was, he hoped that the (apparently) deep pockets of CUC would insulate Sierra somewhat from the vagaries of stock prices and holiday seasons, would give him more leeway to grant a promising game the six more months in the oven it needed to become a great one.

In addition to all of the above, Williams leans heavily on his “fiduciary duty” to his shareholders to explain why he was so willing and even eager to embrace Forbes’s offer. As CEO, he says, he was obliged to maximize his shareholders’ return on their investment, regardless of his personal feelings: “To state it simply, the decision wasn’t mine to make. I had a responsibility to the company’s true owners.” Alas, it’s here that I do have to part ways somewhat with the idea of Ken Williams as a completely reliable witness; this statement does begin to veer into self-serving territory.

The majority of Sierra’s shareholders were of the passive stripe, who had little understanding of the company’s business and were thus very ready to listen when the CEO who had just delivered a record profit told them what he thought they ought to do. And Ken Williams made it abundantly clear to these shareholders that he thought they ought to take the deal.

Yet he did so over the objections of virtually everyone he talked to who did understand Sierra’s business reasonably well. His board of directors was unanimous in its opposition, with the exception only of the member named Walter Forbes. Mike Brochu, Sierra’s hard-nosed president and chief operating officer, who was in many ways the architect of the company’s last couple of years of solid growth and profitability, saw no reason for it to surrender its independence now, just when things were going so swimmingly for it.

Likewise, Jerry Bowerman, a former investment banker who was now vice president for product development, says today that he “pleaded” with Williams to at the very least take a longer, harder look at Forbes and his “company that sells coupons” than he had shown any interest in doing prior to this point; something about CUC, Bowerman says, “made [the] hair stand up on the back of my neck.” In particular, he saw a communist convention worth of red flags in CUC’s habit of just beating its earnings expectations on Wall Street every single quarter: “That’s categorically impossible. Does not happen.” But somehow with CUC it did. “He has a fiduciary responsibility, and the board has a fiduciary responsibility, to take the offer seriously,” acknowledges Bowerman. “What [Williams] never did do was, like, hire an investment bank to say, is this actually a fair offer?”

Even Ken’s own wife Roberta was dead-set against the acquisition: “When Walter asked me, did we ever think of selling the company, and I said no, I meant it. I always had a little bit of intuition about Walter. Not that he was a crook or anything like that. Just… take him with a grain of salt.”

Ken Williams normally listened to his wife. As lots of people knew then and will happily tell you today, Roberta was often the final arbiter of what did and didn’t happen at Sierra, in discussions that took place around the Williams family dinner table long after the lights in the boardroom and executive suites had been extinguished. In this case, however, he ignored her advice, as he did that of so many of his professional colleagues. Instead of taking Walter Forbes with a grain of salt, he took his deal — signed on the dotted line, with no questions asked, selling the company that had been his life’s work to another one whose business model and revenue streams were almost entirely opaque to him.

Doing so was without a doubt the worst decision Ken Williams ever made in his business career, but it wasn’t totally out of character for the man. There’s a theory in pop psychology that every alpha male is really looking to become the beta to an even bigger cock-of-the-walk. Be that as it may, Ken Williams — this man’s man who had the chutzpah to imagine becoming a transformative mogul of mass media, a Walt Disney-like figure — could be weirdly quick to fall under the sway of other men who seemed to embody the same qualities he cherished in himself. Sometimes that worked out okay, as when he met the furloughed police officer Jim Walls through his hairdresser and asked that man who knew nothing of computers or the games they played to join Sierra as a game designer. The three Police Quest games that resulted were… well, it’s hard to really call them good in any fundamental sense, but they were good enough for the times, whilst being fresh and unique in their subject matter when compared with all those other adventure games about dragons and spaceships. At other junctures, however, Williams’s gut instinct led him badly astray, as when he asked the police brutalist Daryl F. Gates to replace Walls as the personality behind Police Quest, a decision which appalled and outraged most of his own employees and left a stain on Sierra’s legacy that can never be fully expunged.

Just as the aforementioned two men walked and talked the part of the hard-edged, no-nonsense cop in a way that profoundly impressed Ken Williams, Walter Forbes was the very picture of the suave and sophisticated financier, making monumental deals next to a crackling fire in his elegant parlor, a glass of Chianti in hand, before rushing off to Europe in his private jet to take in an opera. For Ken, a working-class striver without any university degree to his name, much less one from Harvard, the idea that a man like this would be so interested in him and his company must have been a very alluring one indeed.

Had Ken Williams followed the advice of Jerry Bowerman and dug a little deeper into Walter Forbes and CUC, he might have learned some things to give him pause. He might have discovered, for example, that Forbes hadn’t founded CUC himself to pursue his grand vision of e-commerce, as the interview in Wired implies; he had rather bought himself a seat on an existing company’s board with a cash investment from his familial store of same, then fomented from that perch a revolt that led to the real founder being defenestrated and Forbes himself taking his place. If nothing else, this did cast Forbes’s willingness to join Sierra’s board and his early chat with Roberta Williams on the subject of an acquisition, as if he was nosing around for a weak link, in rather a different light.

Of course, there’s been an elephant in the room through all of the foregoing paragraphs, one which we can no longer continue to ignore. Once more to his credit, Ken Williams doesn’t fail to mention the elephant in his book: “Personally speaking, it would be a nice payday.”

Ken Williams had grown up with just one dream. It wasn’t to make great games or to revolutionize entertainment or even to become the next Walt Disney, although all of those things were eventually folded into it as the means to an end. It was to become rich — nothing more, nothing less. “Somewhere along the way, I developed an aggressive personality,” he writes of his boyhood and adolescence. “All that I could think about was becoming rich. Note that I said ‘rich,’ not ’employed’ or ‘successful.’ Amongst the few memories I have from that time is the constant thought of wanting to live a different life than the one I grew up in. I read books about business executives who owned yachts and jets, and who hung out with beautiful models in fancy mansions. I knew that was my future and I couldn’t wait to claim it.”

By most people’s standards, Ken and Roberta Williams were rich by the mid-1990s. But most of their wealth was illiquid, being bound up in their company — an arrangement which entailed duties and obligations that were becoming, for Ken at least, increasingly onerous. “It seemed like everyone associated with Sierra except me was having fun,” he says.

I just wrote that the decision to sell to Walter Forbes was the worst business decision Ken Williams ever made. Ironically, though, it was his best decision ever in terms of his private finances. For he sold Sierra when the “Siliwood” craze of which he had been the industry’s most outspoken and articulate proponent — that peculiar melding of computer games with Hollywood movies, complete with live actors and unabashedly cinematic audiovisual aesthetics — was at its absolute zenith; he sold when Phantasmagoria, the latest poster child for the trend, had just become Sierra’s best-selling game ever. The remainder of 1996 — a year which produced no more Siliwood hits on the scale of Phantasmagoria, from Sierra or anyone else — would show that there was only one way forward for “interactive movies” from here, and that way was down. They were doomed to be replaced by a very different vision of gaming’s future, emphasizing visceral action, emergent behavior, and player empowerment over the elaborate set-piece storytelling that had been Sierra’s bread and butter for so long.

Over the last few decades, signing Walter Forbes’s contract has allowed Ken and Roberta Williams to enjoy that enviable lifestyle that is the preserve of the ultra-wealthy alone, with multiple homes in multiple countries and a boat in which they have cruised around the world several times. Mind you, I don’t say that such a lifestyle was foremost on Ken Williams’s mind when he made the decision to sell; on the contrary, he had every expectation at the time of continuing to manage Sierra for the foreseeable future. I merely say — as if it needs to be said yet again! — that life is seldom black and white.

But we’ve belabored these points enough: Ken secured the preliminary approval of Sierra’s shareholders, signed on the dotted line on their behalf, sent out the press release, then secured their final approval to complete the transaction a few months later. On the face of it, it was indeed a great deal for them: they got to trade in their Sierra stock for 22 percent more shares in CUC, a far bigger, even faster-growing company.

Once all that was behind them, Walter Forbes and Ken Williams and all of their closest associates flew off to Paris in Forbes’s jet to celebrate the acquisition. Some members of the entourage were happier than others. At an expensive Parisian restaurant, Forbes ordered a $5000 bottle of wine, saying it was on him. “I [found] out after the fact, digging around in the accounting system, that he’d expensed it,” says Jerry Bowerman. “So he was just a liar. Just a very fat liar.”

Amazingly, Sierra On-Line wasn’t the only software publisher that Walter Forbes and CUC agreed to purchased during February of 1996. In a way, the other major acquisition turned out to be even more of a plum prize than this one. It was a publisher and distributor of educational software and games called Davidson and Associates. If that name fails to set any bells a-ringing, know that Davidson was itself the proud owner of Blizzard Entertainment, whose Warcraft 2, Diablo, and Starcraft, combined with its innovative Battle.net service for online multiplayer play, would make it the hottest brand in gaming over the course of the next few years, a veritable way of life for millions of (mostly) young men. CUC, this company nobody had ever heard of, was suddenly in possession of a gaming empire with few peers.

But for Ken Williams, the time to come would be filled with far less pleasant surprises than the meteoric ascent of Blizzard. After the acquisitions of Sierra and Davidson were finalized in June of 1996, it slowly and agonizingly dawned on him that he had made a terrible mistake. He learned that Walter Forbes had given the exact same promise of ultimate superiority in the new software arm of CUC to both him and Bob Davidson, the co-founder of Davidson and Associates. Forbes obviously couldn’t honor his promise to both men. Worse, it soon became clear that he favored Davidson whenever push came to shove. Davidson’s people took over most of the marketing and distribution of Sierra’s games, with Williams’s own people being sidelined or laid off. Williams chafed at his newfound beta status, and feuded bitterly if futilely with his de-facto superior. When Sierra failed to come up with another hit to rival Phantasmagoria’s sales in 1996 — a failure which further reduced his standing in the conglomerate as a whole, what with the numbers Blizzard was shifting — he blamed it on Davidson’s logistics and marketing.

Yet he did manage to do Sierra and CUC one great service that year, despite the constraints that were being laid upon him. Late in 1996, he agreed to hear a pitch from a new studio called Valve Corporation, founded by a couple of former Microsoft employees who had never made a game before and who were therefore having trouble gaining inroads with the other major publishers. With his background in adventure games, Williams was intrigued by Valve’s proposal for Half-Life, a first-person shooter which, so he was told, would place an unusual emphasis on its story. Even when setting that element of the equation aside, Williams knew all too well that Sierra really, really needed to become a player in the shooter space if it was to survive the popping of the Siliwood bubble. Listening to his gut, he signed Valve to a publishing contract. Well after he left Sierra, Half-Life would become by most metrics the most successful single shooter in history, by a literal order of magnitude the best-selling game that Ken Williams was ever involved with. The landscape of gaming might look vastly different today had he not made that deal; Steam, for instance, was able to come to be only thanks to Half-Life’s publication and success. Not all of Ken Williams’s gut decisions were bad ones. Far from it.

Half-Life aside, though, life under the new regime had little to offer him beyond constraints and warning signs. One of the other perks he had been promised, and that in this case was delivered, was a seat on CUC’s board. His first board meeting only reinforced his sense of the cloud of obscurity hanging around CUC’s operations. He realized that he wasn’t the only person sitting at the table who didn’t entirely understand what the company they were all supposed to be overseeing actually did. The other board members, however, didn’t much seem to care. As long as the stock price kept climbing, they were happy to leave it all in the evidently capable hands of Walter Forbes. Ken Williams:

By the end of the first hour, we had covered everyone’s golf scores and favorite wines. I was not a golfer and was left out of the discussion. I avoided the game, and was disappointed that these pillars of the business world thought it was important enough to disrupt a board meeting. We finally sat at the table, and vacations were discussed. Walter was asked at some point, “How’s business?” He answered that all was good, followed by hardly anything more. I was waiting patiently for the lights to dim and the projector to light up. It never happened. Instead we were back to conversations having nothing to do with CUC. And then the meeting ended.

Feeling out of place among the old-money scions gathered around tables such as this one, tired of having his decisions in the software space countermanded by Bob Davidson, Williams started casting about for someplace else within CUC where he could rule the roost as he had once done at Sierra. He dove deep into another recently acquired company, the e-commerce facilitator NetMarket, which had scored a prominent write-up in The New York Times two years earlier for enabling the first encrypted credit-card transaction — for a Sting CD — ever to take place on the Internet. Yet he was never quite sure of his ground there, and never felt that NetMarket was much of a priority for Forbes — a strange thing in itself, given the way the latter was always rattling on about e-commerce in interviews. Williams had become an executive without a clear role or any clearly delineated scope of authority. It was not a comfortable situation for a man of his personality and predilections.

It might therefore have seemed like good news when Bob Davidson abruptly quit in January of 1997. And yet the circumstances of his resignation were just odd enough that it was hard for even his primary internal rival to feel too sanguine about it. Davidson had had a dream job, running a software empire that had just shipped Blizzard’s Diablo to a rapturous reception. Why had he thrown it away? Williams heard through the grapevine that Davidson had come to Forbes with an ultimatum, demanding that the software arm be spun out from the CUC mother ship to become its own company as the condition of his staying on there. Why had he been so strident about this? Had he discovered something that other people hadn’t? It was almost as if he felt he had to protect the software business from whatever was coming for the rest of the company.

As it happened, Williams was never offered Davidson’s job anyway. It was given instead to one Chris McLeod, a “member of the office of the president and executive vice-president” of CUC with no background in technology, software, or gaming, although he did sport a rather impressive golf handicap.

In May of 1997, Walter Forbes announced his latest deal. CUC was to merge with another company that nobody other than Wall Street investment bankers had ever heard of, one that went by another anonymous-sounding three-letter acronym. But it turned out that HFS (“Hospitality Franchise Systems”) owned a considerable number of brands that actually were household names: Avis Rental Cars, the real-estate chains Century 21, ERA, and Coldwell Banker, and the hotel chains Days Inn, Ramada, Super 8, Howard Johnson’s, and Travelodge. The New York Times diplomatically described CUC, by contrast, as “a powerful but less known force in telemarketing, home-shopping clubs, and travel information.” HFS was far too big for CUC to gobble up like it had Sierra On-Line and Davidson and Associates. This was to be a “merger of equals.”

HFS had been founded in 1990 by an infamously ruthless, hard-charging Wall Street money man named Henry Silverman, who had grown tired of playing “second banana” to the moguls and investors he stood in between. His business plan was deceptively simple: HFS bought brands, then rented them out to others under the franchising model. Said model allowed the company to accrue most of the benefits of running a chain of real-estate firms or rental-car offices or hotels without getting bogged down in most of the responsibilities. Anyone who wished to open a branch of one of these businesses could apply to HFS for a license to use one of its brands. If approved, they would pay a lump sum up-front, followed by ongoing “subscription” fees. In return for their money, they would receive, in addition to the brand itself, guidance on best practices and access to proprietary computer systems. On the stick side of the ledger, they would also need to pass regular inspections, to assure that they didn’t dilute the cachet of the brand they leased. It would be an overstatement to claim that administering such a franchising system was trivial for HFS, but it was much less financially and logistically fraught than actually owning and running thousands of properties all over the country. The Wall Street portfolio managers who had so recently been Silverman’s colleagues ate it up. And why shouldn’t they? An investor who got in on the ground floor with HFS in 1992, when it first went public, would have gotten her money back twenty-fold by the time of the merger with CUC.

HFS was a larger company than CUC in 1997, with a more transparent and more obviously sustainable business model. Although both stock prices were overvalued by any objective measure, sporting fairly outrageous price-to-earnings ratios, you could go out into Main Street, USA, and see the sources of HFS’s revenues right there in bricks and mortar. This was not true of CUC.

Given this reality, those who knew Henry Silverman well would continue to ask themselves for years to come why he had wanted to make this deal in the first place, and why he had failed to look harder into CUC’s business before consummating it. For Silverman, unlike Ken Williams, was not in the habit of letting the gravitational pull of charm, power, and ostentatious displays of wealth trump sober-minded judgment. On the contrary, Silverman was a numbers guy to the core, a classic cold fish who seemed immune to personal charisma when he considered his potential business partners. And yet he allowed Walter Forbes to reel him in almost as easily as Ken Williams had. The player got played: “A master deal-maker bought a pig in a poke,” as Fortune magazine would be writing in the not-too-distant future.

Still, the terms of this deal quite clearly left Silverman rather than Forbes in the catbird seat. The merger agreement stipulated that Silverman would be the CEO of the conjoined venture and Forbes only the chairman of the board until January 1, 2000, after which date the two would swap roles. They would then continue to trade places, in two-year cycles, for as long as they both wanted to keep at it. That said, many of those who knew Henry Silverman best suspected that he never intended to relinquish the position of CEO, that he would find some way to freeze Forbes out when the time came to trade places. In the end, though — and as we’ll see in my next article — other developments would make all of that a moot point. In the meanwhile, Wall Street was all-in; one investment analyst said that it would take “mismanagement for this deal not to work.” She had no idea what a soothsayer she was…

Any merger as big as this one, valued at $14 billion, takes some time to effectuate. It wouldn’t go through until the very end of 1997, by which point Ken Williams would be gone from CUC and from Sierra.

In August of 1997 — “one miserable year after Sierra’s acquisition had been completed,” as he puts it — Williams decided that he had had enough. A proud man, he felt disrespected, even “humiliated,” at that month’s board meeting, where his proposals and all of his attempts to steer the conversation around to actual matters of business had not gone down well. As soon as the meeting adjourned, he sat down at the computer in his office and typed out a letter of resignation. Walter Forbes, this fellow whom Williams had once thought he shared a special bond with as a fellow dynamic man of business, accepted the letter without much comment or expression of regret. It took some time to finalize Williams’s departure with Human Resources, but it was agreed in the end that his last day would be November 1.

So, Ken Williams’s association with Sierra On-Line, the company he had founded and built from the ground up over almost eighteen years, officially ended on November 1, 1997. There was no public or private fanfare — no going-away party, no line of colleagues awaiting a last handshake. Nothing like that. “I just packed my stuff and went home,” he says. Both coincidentally and not so coincidentally, Mike Brochu and Jerry Bowerman, Williams’s right-hand men who had argued so fruitlessly against the acquisition, likewise decided they had had enough at around the same time. This left Sierra as little more than another of Henry Silverman’s brands, in the hands of people who had bought their way into it rather than growing it from the grass roots. They would deign to fund and release a few more games that played in the old Sierra’s worlds, would even employ a few of the old designers to make them. Nevertheless, one can make a compelling argument that the main story of the Sierra that is still so fondly remembered by adventure-game fans today ended on that November 1, 1997, when Ken Williams walked out of his office for the last time, with no one even bothering to tell him goodbye. What followed — and will follow, in the next two articles of this series — was merely the epilogue, or perhaps the hangover; you can pick your own metaphor.

It beggars belief that something so huge — something that touched the lives of so many people who worked for Sierra or played the many, many games of its golden years — could end so anticlimactically, with one unremarkable-looking 43-year-old office worker quietly switching off his computer and driving home. But such is life in the real world. Concluding whimpers are more common than bangs.

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

Sources: The books Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line by Ken Williams, Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports by Howard Schilit, Stay Awhile and Listen, Book II: Heaven, Hell, and Secret Cow Levels by David L. Craddock, and Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay. Wired of November 1997; Los Angeles Times of February 21 1996; New York Times of August 12 1994 and May 27 1997; Wall Street Journal of July 29 1998; Fortune of November 1998.

I owe a big debt to Duncan Fyfe, whose 2020 article on this subject for Vice is a goldmine of direct quotations and inside information. I also made use of CUC’s last annual report before the merger with HFS, and of the materials held in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play.

When Kenneth Lochner was hired by Dartmouth away from Montana State College as a programmer in 1964, he had been working in computers for four years. Lochner in particular had been teaching FORTRAN and had been having a miserable time, not due to FORTRAN itself, but due to student experiences in using punch cards:

Returning to the motivation for this system, let it be noted that anyone who has taught a symbolic system to beginning programmers is aware that syntax and logical errors abound in the programs they produce. One can visualize the standard scene in a [IBM] 1620 installation: a group of students loading the assembler, loading and unloading the punch hopper, entering the object deck, watching the typewriter anxiously, and then staring in increasing bewilderment at a machine which has halted, cleared or is in an infinite loop.

Lochner was integral to helping develop Dartmouth’s legendary time-sharing system, where a large computer could have its time divided into slices, and multiple users could then access the same machine simultaneously using terminals (as opposed to slow batch punch cards and their resulting infinite loops). Notably he developed “communication files” which were essentially an early version of UNIX pipes, gluing together the output of one operation/command to become the input of another.

The two computers involved in the Dartmouth system were a GE-235 which executed programs and a GE DN-30 which handled communications. Image source.

As Lochner wrote in an article describing Dartmouth’s progress, “The main purpose for developing the System was to provide for teaching computing to almost all Dartmouth students, including those concentrating in the Social Sciences and Humanities. A second purpose was to tap the hitherto unrealized wealth of small computer problems related to the everyday research activities of a college faculty, small problems that would never be initiated if the turn-around time were as long as a single day.”

The explosion of computing at Dartmouth that followed led to a fair number of important early programs that later showed up in David Ahl’s books like ANIMAL, but for our story today we need to keep following Ken Lochner, as he became restless at Dartmouth, first helping Ford develop their own time-sharing system using a Philco 212…

Picture of internals of a Philco 212. Source.

…and then in 1969 he went over to the newly founded Cyphernetics in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a company focused on commercial time-sharing services. They were successful enough to be bought by Automatic Data Processing in 1975, and two years later Lochner left to found Interact Electronics to work on an entirely new project: the design of a personal computer.

Master Artwork, Interact Model One Home Computer, April 10, 1978. Source.

The Interact Model One aka Interact Home Computer aka Interact Family Computer was designed during 1978 in Lochner’s now-home turf of Michigan. Lochner hired Rick Barnich as the lead engineer (the picture above is his) and was keen on keeping the price tag low, or as Barnich later bluntly stated, “Cost targets dictated the design.” The price managed to stay under $500, making it cheaper than any of the Trinity (PET, TRS-80, Apple II) and even capable of color.

Source.

I haven’t seen any interview with Lochner specifically about the restrictions given, but it seems like the goals for the base model were:

a.) cheaper than the three major competitors
b.) color graphics
c.) enough memory to handle a reasonable-sized program (8K RAM, 2K ROM, not dropping to, say, 1K like the initial ZX80)

maybe with the same populist goals in mind as the Dartmouth Time Sharing system had, making something capable enough for both programmers and artists. The sacrifice led to a “chiclet” keyboard, low-res graphics, and a very chunky text mode.

Compilation of some screens via Steve’s Old Computer Museum.

Unfortunately, putting the three main goals together without compromise flew too close to the sun. Interact tried to be generous with their software line (they gave thirteen tapes away on new units; tapes of course were super-cheap) and at the time, Lochner was quoted as saying:

Software is the pivotal point in the mass marketing of a personal computer.

Apparently, it wasn’t, as the machine more or less flopped in a year, selling only a few thousand units (compare to the Commodore PET breaking 200,000). The only reason it became notable is because of Michel Henric Coll, who picked up the technology and re-tooled it for the French market (switching, for example, to an AZERTY keyboard). Letting him take over the story:

I discovered the Interact Model 1 during a trip to the United States in July 1979. It was as simple as can be. I had read a description of it in an American technical magazine. Upon arriving in Ann Arbor, I called Interact and explained that I wanted to sell their product in France. James Scotton, Interact’s general manager, sent a white Cadillac to pick me up at my hotel and devoted the entire day to me. The deal was quickly concluded.

He signed an agreement in September (not long before Interact collapsed and the stock was liquidated), and then:

Having obtained the right to sell Interact under my own brand, I immediately renamed it Victor Lambda. It was during a group brainstorming session organized during a business development internship I attended at the Toulouse business school from January to July 1979 that I discovered the name. We had already decided on the first name, Victor, thanks to the computer’s help. We were looking for the name. Tired, someone blurted out: is it really important to spend so much time on this research to sell a standard computer to a standard customer? [“Standard” or “typical” being “lambda” in French.] It clicked. We had found it.

The Victor Lambda was renamed in a later iteration the Hector. Rather unusually for a program on an obscure system, today’s game has a French translation, and the reason why is the success of the Hector (which took a lot of its software line from the already-existing US line).

Coll showing off disk drives for the Victor II in 1983, a peripheral not available with the Interact base model.

When Interact Electronics folded a year after their hardware launch, they had their stock bought and product continued via Micro Video (a company technically started when Interact was still alive, but only by a few months) and NCE/CHC (a mail order house). While the number of units sold never passed “thousands”, they kept the flame alive for die-hard fans all the way through the 80s.

With die-hard fans come fan groups, one of them being based on out Detroit; from 1980 and 1982 they distributed their Interaction newsletter. The December 1980 issue mentions two adventure games.

This first is a port of Chaffee’s Quest done by Dave Schwab; not trivial due to the font size, and the fact the Interact uses one-dimensional arrays and the original Quest used a two-dimensional array. It is notable mostly in that Schwab got permission from Chaffee for distribution; most of the authors we’ve seen do ports didn’t bother to ask.

The second is a brand-new game specifically for the Interact. It is by “Long Playing Software” with no author given.

The “at last” suggests this is another manifestation of the strong desire for authors to put some form of Adventure on absolutely every system. Despite the enlarged text size, this manages to feel like a “normal” adventure game, just with highly clipped text. Since the memory capacity is higher than the VIC-20, there’s a bit more depth in description than, say, Hospital adventure.

Interact graphics remind me a lot of the “imaginary console” Pico-8.

The ad copy inquires

Can you get the priceless ruby from the King Cobra? What does that strange inscription say? Why do evil eyes watch your every move? Can you solve these and the many other mysteries of THE TROLL HOLE ADVENTURE??? Will you come out rich? Will you come out at all?

and as it implies, this is another Treasure Hunt where we gather all the treasures in the world and put them in a central location. (The line about being “rich” implies we are absconding away with the treasures this time. The troll probably is smelly and deserves it.)

The sign is here just to inform us this is where the treasures go.

To the east there is a pond with a frog (ITS SLIPPERY)…

…and otherwise that’s all of the above-ground. Heading down into the titular Hole leads to an ENTRY WAY.

The front door is locked, but the ENTRY MAT hides a key so that is a quickly-resolved problem. The issue for me starting was the lamp, which refused to light. Mucking about with the shovel I found that DIG back in the starting location revealed a BIC LIGHTER, but even with the lighter in hand I was unable to get the game to understand any permutation of LIGHT LAMP I could think of.

This game does let you plunge ahead and interact with things in the dark — there’s no grues — but you need the light first to know what the items are.

I resorted to making my verb list; fortunately, the game was fairly polite, giving one response (H U H ! ! !) for when it understood a verb but was otherwise confused…

…and a different response (WHAT?) for when the verb is missing from the game’s vocabulary altogether. This let me use my usual list, which was a relief given the number of games lately I’ve been playing with broken bespoke parsers.

However, this still wasn’t enough! Not every verb available is on the list, and I finally found FLICK LIGHTER is what the game wanted (this will be the first time I’ve used FLICK in an adventure game). Just for completeness, I have also found UNS(CREW) but have not been able to apply it yet.

I’ve only found 15 rooms and there’s allegedly 30, so there’s still a fair amount of game to go. At the start there’s a LIVING ROOM with a STONE CHAIR (too heavy to move), a PICTURE, and a PERSIAN RUG (a treasure). The rug has the stone chair on it, so I have been unable so far to retrieve that particular treasure.

Further west is a CEREAL BOX with some CEREAL (TROLL TOASTIES), and a jug of milk that is described as SOUR if you try to chug it.

Turning south, there’s an ARMS ROOM that has an ELF and a SINGING SWORD. I have been unable to interact with the elf; the sword gives a shock when trying to take it, and is described as being stuck in a stone.

Nearby is a BATHROOM with a PAY TOILET and a MIRROR. You can take the MIRROR revealing VITAMINS and a DIME, then INSERT DIME to get into the toilet and find a PAPER TUBE. I have not found a use for the tube. Upon trying to eat the vitamins the game says they are TOO DRY. If you try to BREAK MIRROR you die from it shattering.

Further on to the east is a Vault with a ORC GUARD, CROWN (treasure), and CAVE. The orc prevents taking the treasure or entering the cave. I assume the sword gets used here.

Returning back to the sword and turning south, there’s a TEA ROOM with a CRYSTAL ORB (glowing softly) and an INSCRIPTION. The inscription seems to be written “backwards” and you can read it if you are holding the mirror from the bathroom. (IT SAYS PICK 2, and I have no idea what this is referring to yet.)

No idea if breaking the mirror here is bad, but there’s an inventory limit so I need to keep juggling.

Adjacent is a closet with a BALLOON ON ROPE and a COVER; the balloon has “GOT BUMPS” and the cover is “SCREWED IN”. You can break the balloon leaving a rope but I haven’t found a use for the rope, and it is possible the balloon needs to be used first.

Back where the TEA ROOM was there’s one last branch leading down to an ALTAR with a cobra and a ruby. I have not managed to defeat the cobra but the game does recognize FLUTE as a noun. (I should also note from the verb list that MAKE and BUILD are both verbs, so we may just need to gather supplies and make our own, that is, MAKE FLUTE. The paper tube was suggestive but just holding that wasn’t enough to cause it to work.)

Rewinding back to the kitchen with the sour milk, heading west leads to a room that is too bright to see if you’re holding the lamp. If you’re not holding the lamp, the room is totally dark. The solution is to drop the lamp off before entering and bring in the orb instead, which will give a light enough glow to be visible.

There’s a gold nugget in the room but it is too big to bring up the troll hole. There must be another route to the start.

The are rooms past this, so after noting the HALLWAY on the object list, the right procedure is to grab the lamp, step back into the room with it being too bright, but GO HALLWAY anyway since you’ll keep moving forward.

Not much of note in either room yet. You can pick up a HANDFUL OF DIRT in the greenhouse.

This turned out to be surprisingly complicated and dense. None of the treasures are giveaways; even the crystal orb I haven’t scored yet (dropping it smashes the orb, just like the mirror). To recap the obstacles…

• there’s an orc guarding a cave and a crown
• a cobra guards a ruby
• a gold nugget can’t be brought up the hole to where the treasures go
• the rug can’t be removed from under the stone chair yet
• the crystal orb can’t be dropped (probably getting the rug will fix this)
• the singing sword can’t be pulled
• the cover can’t be unscrewed

…on top of objects like the sour milk currently remaining unused. I’ve been finding myself thinking more in terms of a standard adventure rather than a minimalist 8K effort. I’m tempted to try the French version (La caverne des lutins, released 1982) to see if the changed text gives any different textual hints that might help me out. I will take any suggestions people have, and I’ll even take spoilers if someone has beaten the game (in ROT13 format only, though, please).

(The second part of this post is here.)

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I’ve finished the game entirely without hints. It was decidedly easier than Masquerade. My previous post is needed for context.

I don’t think my success had anything to do with getting better at figuring out Dale Johnson’s logic; even with some intentional softlock (aka “walking dead”) points, everything is genuinely clued better here than his other games.

Via the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities.

Last time I was puzzled by a boulder I couldn’t move and a cave blasting wind. I had neglected to LOOK BOULDER, having “CARVINGS” on the side:

After some contemplation, I decided “total” strength was referring to not having your strength be split by holding items in inventory, as the “single” man is alone. Dropping everything and pushing the boulder worked.

With the wind stopped, while it meant the cave couldn’t be entered from this direction, over by the cliff it mentions you might be able to “jump” down and there no longer is any wind interfering.

Giving a full map from here:

The slope you land on goes a long way down, with a lifejacket, an ax, and a crank findable along the way. At the very bottom is a boulder (the same boulder you pushed earlier) and when trying to push it from the other side the game indicates you need some leverage. It also has some extra writing.

Going back up, I didn’t have much to noodle with other than the catapult, so I tried INSERT CRANK on catapult and found that it fit. I was then able to TURN CRANK before pushing the button again, leading to landing in a different (safer) spot.

I had already tried using the ax in various places with no luck, but at the bottom of the tree it clearly is intended to be used except the game says it isn’t sharp enough. Oho, so that was what the grinder is for! One restored save game later and re-creating the catapult jump:

The hole lets you jump back in the long sloping passage, but obnoxiously, the pole can’t come up as it is too big. However, it gets used specifically for going down and getting leverage on the boulder. This results in what would normally be a fatal plunge into water except we’ve got the lifejacket now:

SWIM a few times and a trading ship will appear.

I tried walking away and got thrown off the ship, with a message that indicated I could have traded something (on the trading ship, d’oh). You lose everything but the lifejacket when plunging into the water, so that’s the only thing you have to trade. It fortunately works:

The thread left over from sewing up the green uniform works to STRING LUTE (…pretty sure that wouldn’t work in real life, but I’ll accept the cartoon logic in a toon-game). I then took the lute over to the stage with the merry men, and found singing a song put them to sleep.

I was stuck a bit until I remembered that doing DANCE earlier changed their description to ROWDY (also, LOOK ME indicates we are covered with tomatoes). Doing the rowdy-dance first and then playing lute was the right sequence to keep the crowd from falling asleep prematurely:

Marion had indicated we weren’t charming enough, so the charm was clearly the right item to get to her next. (Except she doesn’t like the tomatoes; you need to go back to the POOL and CLEAN ME first.)

From here I was very stuck trying to work out she went; everything including the wedding chapel was empty. Of course Tuck had left prematurely when I gave the penny, so I re-did the sequence while holding on to the penny and found both Marion and Tuck at the chapel once I finished. (For a beginner player, this still seems like the thing mostly like to stump them, because it’s a softlock that can happen from an action long before the final result.)

Marion disappears, and the only obstacle left seems to be the Sherriff of Nottingham. The telescope clearly was pointing the way through, though, and the description mentions a mounting bracket. The only thing complicated enough to hold a mounting bracket was the catapult.

With the telescope mounted, you can TURN CRANK again to get the catapult to zero in on a different target. (This feels vaguely off since you could have technically turned the crank a second time before, but I think the implication is you are implicitly using the telescope to help aim, and otherwise it would be too exact a shot.)

I did PUSH BUTTON expecting some kind of dramatic showdown, but that turned out to be the very last action of the game.

Honestly, it worked for me? I liked the idea of taking a classic story but telling a story about the story, rather than what everyone would normally be expecting. The fact regular characters could be used allows for the “fan fiction shortcut” (like we saw with Trek Adventure) where a complex character can be painted with broad strokes, meaning Friar Tuck walking off with money isn’t surprising, nor the Merry Men being a bit temperamental about what constitutes a good performance. The textual hints were quite good at nudging actions the right direction and if it weren’t for the softlocks I’d be perfectly chipper handing this game off to an absolute beginner; as things stand, I’d probably start them with something like Transylvania but this would land early on the list.

At least the graphics were good while they lasted Dav Halle had developed his own system called Zoom Grafix which partly explains why they somehow lept ahead of Sierra to be alongside Polarware in terms of quality. I’ve been having trouble articulating what artistic direction I’d give to Sierra (assuming I could be alongside their past-artists). Consider an average shot from Time Zone.

The face is bizarre in a way that never gets glanced upon in Sherwood. Depth is particularly flat (notice the bricks). I do wonder if this was partly a technical restriction; if you go back to the finale screen of Sherwood, you’ll notice both characters are made up almost entirely of curves, while the vector-line aspect of the Time Zone thief above is hard to avoid.

In the end it was likely just about professionalization and technical issues. Both Sherwood Forest and Masquerade dealt with real artists, while Time Zone had most of its art cranked at speed by a fresh teenager. Sierra did what they could with their resources, and both Polarware and Phoenix represented the next level of advancement in the software. The combination was enough to cause a vast gulf in the look between the games (not even bringing up how Mask of the Sun had a dedicated team of artists at work).

Phoenix incidentally didn’t last much longer after Masquerade. Quoting the founder Ron Unrath:

By 1984, the software world has changed significantly. Very large companies such as Disney and Hasbro were starting to get involved in publishing, and advertising rates were going up. It was difficult for a small company like Phoenix to compete.

They did make it a little longer under the name American Eagle, even publishing another Dale Johnson game, FrakTured FaebLes, with art by fan favorite Rick Incrocci. Unless some new information is unearthed we’ll need to wait until 1985 to get there.

My prediction is still even looking ahead to just 1983 the art will be on the higher-quality side, but we need to make it there first. So coming up: a computer that failed completely in the United States, only to be given a second life in France.

I’m delighted that after more than four years of work by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and myself — we’re co-editors of this book — the MIT Press and Counterpath have jointly published

Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023

Book launch events are posted here and will be updated as new ones are scheduled!

This anthology spans seven decades of computer-generated text, beginning before the term “artificial intelligence” was even coined. While not restricted to poetry, fiction, and other creative projects, it reveals the rich work that has been done by artists, poets, and other sorts of writers who have taken computing and code into their own hands. The anthology includes examples of powerful and principled rhetorical generation along with story generation systems based on cognitive research. There are examples of “real news” generation that has already been informing us — along with hoaxes and humor.

It’s all contextualized by brief introductions to each excerpt, longer introductions to each fine-grained genre of text generation, and an overall introduction that Lillian-Yvonne and I wrote. There are 200 selections in the 500-page book, which we hope will be a valuable sourcebook for academics and students — but also a way for general readers to learn about innovations in computing and writing.

You can buy Output now from several sources. I suggest your favorite independent bookseller! If you’re in the Boston area, stop by the MIT Press Bookstore which as of this writing, has 21 on hand as of actually publishing this post, has 14 copies!

Upcoming Book Launches, Talks, and Events

April 5 (Saturday) Both co-editors on the panel The Literary Life of AI: Output through the Years at Baltimore’s CityLit Festival. Free & open to the public, Lord Baltimore Hotel, Hanover Suite A Mezzanine, 11:30am-12:30pm.

Previous Events

November 11 (Monday): Both editors spoke at the University of Virginia, Bryan Hall, Faculty Lounge, Floor 2. Free & open to the public. 5pm.

November 20 (Wednesday): Online book launch for Output, hosted by the University of Maryland. Both editors in conversation with Matt Kirschenbaum. Free, please register. 12noon Eastern Time.

November 21 (Thursday) Book launch at WordHack with me, David Gissen, Sasha Stiles, Andrew Yoon, and open mic presenters. Wonderville, 1186 Broadway, Brooklyn, 7pm. $15. Book sales.

December 6 (Friday) Output will be available for sale and I’ll be at the Bad Quarto / Nick Montfort table at Center for Book Arts Winter Market, 28 W 27th St Floor 3, 4pm–8pm.

December 9 (Monday) Book launch at Book Club Bar with the editors, Charles Bernstein, Robin Hill, Stephanie Strickland, and Leonard Richardson. 197 E 3rd St (at Ave B), New York City’s East Village. Free, RSVP required. 8pm. Book sales thanks to Book Club.

December 13 (Friday) European book launch with the editors, Scott Rettberg, and Tegan Pyke. University of Bergen’s Center for Digital Narrative, Langesgaten 1-2, 3:30pm. Free & open to the public, book sales thanks to Akedemika. This event was streamed & recorded and is available to view on YouTube.

January 13 (Monday) “The Output Anthology at Computer-Generated Text’s Cultural Crux”, a talk of mine at the UCSC Computational Media Colloquium, Engineering 2 Room 280, 12:30pm–1:30pm. Free & open to the public.

January 20 (Monday) Toronto book launch with me, Matt Nish-Lapidus, & Kavi Duvvoori, at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture & Technology (previously Marshall McLuhan’s seminar room), 6pm–7:30pm.

February 24 (Monday) Carnegie Mellon University workshop “Ars Combinatoria: A Generative Poetics” with the editors, CFA 215, 2pm–4pm. Registration required, limited to 15.

February 24 (Monday) Carnegie Mellon University book launch with the editors, CFA, STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (CFA 111), 5:30pm–7pm. Free & open to the public, please RSVP.

March 11 (Tuesday) Massachusetts Institute of Technology book launch with the editors, MIT’s Room 32-155, 5pm-6:30pm. Free & open to the public. Book sales thanks to the MIT Press Bookstore.

March 17 (Monday) Montréal book launch with Erín Mouré, Darren Wershler, Bill Kennedy, and Sofian Audry. Free & open to the public. Book sales thanks to Argo Bookshop. Concordia University, 1515, Saint-Catherine St. W, EV 11.705, 4pm-6pm.

March 25 (Tuesday) New School book launch for both Output and All the Way for the Win. CaLC (Code at Lang Colloquium) series. Free & open to the public, registration required. Hirshon Suite, 55 W 13th St, Floor 2, 5-6:30pm.

March 29 (Saturday) AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference, on the panel “Making a Literary Future with Artificial Intelligence,” Concourse Hall 151, 1:45pm–3pm.

Sherwood Forest is from Phoenix Software. We last saw them with The Queen of Phobos and Masquerade; the latter was written by today’s author (Dale Johnson) before Sherwood Forest but wasn’t published with final art until much later (1984). Today’s game has a different artist, Dav Holle (he is in the “thanks to” credits of Queen of Phobos).

This is the last time we’ll see Phoenix for this blog.

Unlike the Robin Hood game we’ve looked at already (or Sierra On-Line’s take) we’re not re-creating all of Robin Hood’s adventures in his battle with the Sheriff of Nottingham, but rather just trying to get married.

Welcome to Sherwood Forest. Robin needs your help. He doesn’t seem to remember who he is or that he was supposed to marry the beautiful Maid Marion today. It must have been that nasty bump on the head he took while fighting the Sheriff of Nottingham the other day.

From what I have gathered so far, the famous elements of Robin Hood are in but they are getting used in a much sillier way (Little John guards a log bridge, but rather than wanting a quarterstaff fight, he is looking for Robin Hood, since somehow he doesn’t recognize you, and you need to make a green uniform first … look, we’ll get there).

From the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities. There was no Sof-toon #2.

The game is in machine code; quoting Dav Holle about the process:

I did the drawings, and the image compression and decompression, the disk bootloader, and animation and data input code. Dale would get the text strings from my data input, and would parse the text and come up with the text response. His code would also tell me what location should be drawn and what objects or characters should be drawn in the scene, and my code would draw that stuff as needed. All of Sherwood Forest was written in assembler.

The difficulty of Masquerade was listed as Class 5; this is Class 3 so is allegedly easier. I say allegedly because Johnson games always tilted fairly hard; at least the opening was reasonable to do.

Regarding the graphics, notice how the title screen refers to animation. The screen above animates the eyes. The first room has an owl which also has animated eyes.

There’s nothing as extensive here as Sands of Egypt with screen scrolling or Temple of the Sun of a complete motion; it’s all small spots like a banner moving, but it complements the overall cartoon style.

You start out in a quite open area where you’re free to wander. To the immediate west is a pond that has a “grindstone”. To the east there’s a haystack where the text suggest it can be burned to find something inside.

Giving out the full starting map…

…let’s start our tour by going west to the Castle. There’s a taxman on the way, where Robin Hood can do his thing and ROB him.

Robbing the taxman yields a bag of gold dust we’ll be using shortly.

The Sheriff of Nottingham at the castle is pointing at the poster as shown above. It’s supposed to be “you’re going to land in jail” but it’s curious in how it could simultaneously refer to the (future) couple being royalty somehow.

Turning north, down a “well traveled road”, up next comes a Faire.

The gold dust goes to the beggar at the entrance (probably, Johnson isn’t above using “wrong” routes for items).

HE SAYS, “THANKS! HERE’S SOMETHING YOU MIGHT NEED.” HE TAKES THE GOLD, DROPS A SMALL FLINT, AND DISAPPEARS.

The west there’s a dock with no boats (I assume this is for a story event later)…

…and to the north is Maid Marion at a kissing booth.

If you go for KISS MARION, though, she says “SORRY HONEY, BUT YOU JUST AREN’T CHARMING ENOUGH.” (It’s like an amnesia plot, except everyone except the main character has forgotten who he is.) I’m not sure how to deal with her yet, but I’m guessing I won’t have the item(s) needed until the end of the game.

One of the main mechanics to try in every room is LOOK, because it seems to be fairly well behaved about telling you what is genuinely interactable; it may not always be obvious from the initial room description and picture. Here, LOOK reveals and awning — the green awning above the booth — that you should take.

One last place at the Faire I haven’t figured out yet is a stage, with some “Merry Men” watching. You can hop on to the stage and DANCE or SING and get some tomatoes thrown in your direction but I don’t know yet the use of this, other than the MERRY MEN change to ROWDY MERRY MEN.

Circling around the map some more, there’s a tailor and a blacksmith in the center of town. The blacksmith has a broken grinder but while holding the grindstone you can FIX GRINDER. I don’t know the use of this yet. Rather more helpfully it has some STEEL you can pick up.

Before doing the tailor, let’s do a quick stop back at the haystack, because flint + steel means we can now MAKE FIRE.

(The smoke is animated.) In addition to finding the needle in the haystack, if you LOOK ASHES twice you can find some THREAD followed by a penny. Take the thread, needle, and green awning back over to the tailor.

The tailor is out but there’s a note indicating you can drop things off if you want. Dropping off the green awning, thread, and needle, and then leaving and coming back:

This happens immediately, there’s no realistic time passing. I had left the penny for payment but it turned out not to be needed. I guess we have an account.

Circling around our tour further, there’s a wedding chapel with Friar Tuck who talks about “quickie service”.

I gave the penny over and he said he would “put it in the offering plate next Sunday” then left. I assume there’s some important ramification to all this later (either that or I did something wrong).

Little John next! (Again, sort of a “reverse amnesia” plot.) The green uniform is enough to convince him to leave opening the way through…

…although I should point out if you just try to attack him, it results in a death (my first of the game; I thought maybe we needed to wrestle rather than use quarterstaffs).

On to the cave he mentioned! Here I am mostly stuck. First off comes a catapult:

There’s a button on the catapult. If you push it the game automatically assumes you are climbing on before pushing, and it launches you to death. I don’t know if there’s some syntax for launching an item, but I’m guessing the game is fishing for the player providing a method of safe landing.

Further on, there’s one branch over to a “cliff” with heavy winds, where jumping also leads to death.

Finally, there’s the warned-about cave with heavy winds, in addition to a boulder too heavy to be moved.

Trying to GO CAVE results in “A TREMENDOUS WIND” catching you and blowing you to a “ROCKY GRAVE”.

To summarize, I have as open problems the Sheriff, the boat dock, kissing Maid Marion, the merry men at the stage, the catapult, the cliff, and the cave. I don’t have any unused items other than the grinding wheel (which can’t be moved). Unlike Time Adventure, Johnson is the sort of author willing to re-use items, but I get the intuition I’m missing something simple here with what I have. No hints though, please, this has been enjoyable to play so far!

I managed to finish the game, and my previous post is needed for context.

Since nobody has a picture of Time Adventure’s cover as of this writing, here’s another game by the company from the same year. Zombie Island is a top-down game in the style of Robots/Chase, the same style that eventually inspired Deadly Rooms of Death. Source.

To recap, I had (but hadn’t used yet) a sack of coal, a frog, a glowworm, some cheese soup, some matches, and a life boat. I was facing a tiger, a prickly bush, and a “lazer beam” (what turns out to be the only place you can die in the game!)

The general theme of the parts I was stuck on last time can be summed as two parts confusion with the parser and one part personal blindness. Tackling the face-palm first:

I missed entirely — despite it being clearly listed — an exit to the south here. This leads to a “rubbish tip” with a “small white mouse” that will take the cheese soup. The mouse could be considered another Hitch-Hiker cameo.

The key doesn’t get used until later (and it is fairly obvious when it comes up) so I was still flailing. I went back and tested the frog some more; I had tried KISS FROG both while having the frog on the ground and while holding it, and neither seemed to have an effect. The word “seemed” is applicable, as KISS FROG while holding it turns it into a princess, but with no message whatsoever. The only way to find out is to take inventory afterwards. Here’s three screenshots with the whole sequence:

This is doubly tricky in that the response of nothing also tends to happen with other special commands that do nothing (like if you PUSH or PULL or USE where it doesn’t apply, which is most places) so the player has to just guess something happened.

That still doesn’t give progress though! (The princess is used much later.) The last issue was halfway between my fault and the game’s, because I had definitely tested burning the prickly bush with the matches, but I had tried it with USE MATCHES. In general, despite DROP being used for many things, it has always been used in way it still makes sense (giving the whiskey over to the doorman is DROP WHISKY, but you could visualize the act of handing it over being like dropping it). I had no such visualization with matches so I didn’t try the obvious thing of DROP MATCHES. (Implicitly, they’re being lit first, then you drop them.)

This opens a large new area with rooms described as a mixture of “small dark cave”, “dark smelly cave”, and “large underground cavern”.

Within are Terry Wogan’s smelly socks…

Mainly known as an interviewers for the BBC. I don’t know if this is a reference or just being goofy.

…a can opener, a golden statue, and a hungry dragon.

Gameplay is mostly a matter of testing DROP THING with all the various objects, although there’s a few wrinkles. The dragon responds well to the sack of coal.

Further on is some whalemeat, suggesting again this is something of a cross-over from Hitch-Hiker; there’s also a rockfall blocking the way, and a “nasty dwarf”.

The nasty dwarf runs away from the smelly socks. (This would annoy me in other contexts, but given the game’s setup, it isn’t too annoying to test and experimentation comes across as part of the point, as opposed to being moon logic.) This opens up a room to some mirrors, which can then be dropped at the lazer beam in order to go past safely. There’s no message saying the way is now safe, you just have to take the leap of faith; this is one way a wrinkle gets tossed into the usual “drop object to solve” scheme.

We don’t have the right item yet to handle Maxa Merlin. Keep in mind the enemies are all passive so you can hang out and try dropping every item laboriously just to see if, say, a glowworm causes an adverse reaction. (It does not. As far as I can tell the glowworm is useful for nothing, unless it passively activated in the cave somewhere I didn’t notice.)

While out of the cave, it’s a good time to use the whalemeat:

This opens the path to a “cinema” containing some “shrink spray” for no clear reason. This can be applied back at the rockfall (USE SPRAY, not DROP)…

…opening the way to Dracula.

The golden statue which I referenced briefly earlier comes into play here. It is not a statue you can pick up (unlike the game we just played). It is one that PULL works on instead:

This opens a route to a tin of canned blood, and given we just saw Dracula, it’s pretty clear where it goes:

Somehow the can opener gets used here but I’m not sure the setup (there’s no specific command to open it, so it just gets used passively). This opens a route to a locked door, but that key from way back at the mouse who wanted cheese soup can open it (“The door opens with an eerie creak”) leading to a “hallmarked golden ring”.

There’s one more route leading to an “angry prince” but I didn’t find it until later (personal map confusion again) so let’s save that for later, and take the ring over to the magician.

Again, found via random experimentation, and again I wasn’t as annoyed as I might be in a traditional game. The one-to-one mechanic (where each object gets used only once) is so well-established it doesn’t feel as gameplay-breaking to have less-intuitive connections between item and puzzle.

Past that the lifeboat finally gets used, where we can board the passenger ship known as Queen Elizabeth 2. This leads to a small area with a radio and the final location (a time transporter).

From here I needed to comb back over things before finding the cave section I missed, where the princess could finally be happily delivered.

The ruby is what drops at the teleporter to activate it, winning the game. The Brit-games love to play Rule Britannia in chiptune form and this game is no exception; it even does it twice (“and once again”).

I was reminded a bit of Seek; in that game, the particular design decision of putting puzzles in between rooms made the gameplay almost seem like a board game. With Time Adventure the design was tilted so heavily in one direction — one item to one puzzle, most of them dropped to be used — it started to feel like a different style of game than a regular adventure, opening the route in particular to making it seem not so absurd to defeat a dwarf with smelly socks or defeat a magician by dropping a gold ring.

I don’t think the style would sustain for too many games, but Peter Smith isn’t going to return here until much later, when he’s working for BBC Games (the first-party games arm of the public broadcaster BBC). While he has no more adventures listed on CASA, some of his educational games look like they might cross over, so they’ll need some checking out when we reach those future years. For now, coming up: let’s visit the last graphical Apple II game of 1982!

This is one of those unfortunate cases where the developer of a game can’t decide what the name of a game is; the advertising and cassette cover both say Time Traveller, the BBC Micro information screen upon boot-up uses Time Travel Adventure, and the actual title screen says Time Adventure. I’m going to assume the author Peter Smith wanted what was on the title screen (Time Adventure).

Acorn User, November 1982.

This is another Software for All game like Danger Island which was just featured here; Peter Smith’s other 1982 game Hitch-hiker was published by a different company.

Both of those contain the historical background so we can dive right in the game itself, with the open question: does this game borrow specific elements from obscure games just like the other two games did?

The game is mostly new. One of the characters that went from Supersoft Hitchhiker to Peter Smith Hitch-Hiker lands in this game; otherwise everything else seems “original”, following two style points that carry over:

a.) the map is laid out on a grid, without any turning exits, extended-length skips of room connections, or overlapping

b.) the “enemies” are “passive” and block the way, but don’t actively attack while you’re in a room with them

Point a.) turns out to be very important for an innovation this game includes. It isn’t visible from the very start…

…but it is visible as soon as you start moving around.

An automap is very rare at this time. The television show The Adventure Game had one on their high-end computer meant for TV display, not as a product for customers. Nellan is Thirsty had one, likely due to it being designed to teach children. I don’t know where Smith got the inspiration, but it certainly helped he already was using a grid-style, and keep in mind he was also a teacher so may have been thinking pedagogically.

It isn’t quite as lovely as you might think because the map extends past the north-south area available to be displayed, and as soon as you step “off screen” the map reset. If you go back again, the map needs to be redrawn; there is no map memory. It still ends up making navigation faster than normal, even though I had to also make a regular map.

The plot, as shown on an earlier screen, has the player caught in a time warp we need to escape by searching 110 rooms. They start blocked in a castle by a drawbridge, but fortunately there’s a lever nearby so it’s not too hard to bypass.

This opens up to the outside, but you quickly get blocked by a tyrannosaurus rex. In case you were wondering, “time warp” doesn’t seem to mean you get sent to a particular time, but rather things from all times (including you) get sent to the same place.

Here’s my own map of the opening area, with blue marking everything before bypassing the Rex:

The difficult part — not difficult so much in figuring out what to do, but wrangling with the parser — was in a raging fireplace.

Trying to go north.

Elsewhere there’s a bucket and a rusty tap, so it seemed like a natural thing to try to FILL BUCKET. Unfortunately, the game just gives a blank prompt and it isn’t clear the rust needs to be cleared up.

Past the drawbridge is a candle-maker shop with some grease which you can take back to the tap and DROP to take care of the rust problem, but even then the parser is finicky; you need to DROP BUCKET, then FILL BUCKET. However, I had to restart my game the first time around because it wasn’t letting me drop the bucket! (I assume I hit a bug in one of my attempts to fill it that caused it to stick to my inventory.)

With the bucket full of water you can extinguish the fire and get to a new set of rooms.

The object list from here (in addition to bucket & grease) now has a large crossbow (must be called a “bow” in the parser), bottle of whisky, and a bundle of arrows. Before taking out Rex, I should note there’s still a “prickly bush” I haven’t dealt with; I think the game might be fishing for shears, but the object selection starts to get esoteric enough I might be missing something else.

Moving on:

This opens a new area with a “bubbling fountain” next to a “narrow alley” containing a glow worm (hasn’t used yet) and a path to a zoo containing a coin followed by a suntiger. The tiger is the same one from Hitch-hiker; it was defeated in both versions via reading a book of Vogon poetry, but my guess is there’s no bad poetry in this game so it requires a different action.

To the north of the fountain there’s a doorman that appears thirsty, so I dropped the whisky (just like Hitch-hiker, giving is done with DROP).

This opens up the last area I’ve managed to reach so far.

Immediately after is a frog, and despite KISS being on the verb list, KISS FROG doesn’t work.

The room selection tends to the truly random — story-wise I find it best to imagine a bunch of rooms from various time periods got zapped in — like a coal mine with a sack of coal, a Hypermarket with a drinks dispenser (the coin from the zoo path works to get cheese soup)…

…a workshop with a “life boat”, and finally a mad scientist’s workshop with a “lazer beam”. Heading north kills the player, and this is the first time I realized this game even had death.

The inventory limit is stuck at three, and the rooms also have a maximum limit of three, so it’s been irritating to tote things around and test possibilities. I tried shooting the tiger (no luck) and dropping the cheese soup in various places (no reaction). I have the feeling there is only one (1) puzzle available for me to solve right now and whatever comes from that will lead to a chain reaction, but I’m not clear where that puzzle is. I will take suggestions in the comments for anyone who hasn’t played or looked at a walkthrough.

Layoffs at a game studio aren't news any more, but I guess I'm on this beat. If nothing else, this blog has a longer searchable history of Cyan history than Cyan does.

Yesterday Cyan posted one of those all-too-familiar dark-mode press releases:

(Cyan people confirmed on Discord that this was discussed in advance within the company.)

The Bluesky thread goes on to link a list of ten of the affected people. The only name I recognize is Ryan "Greydragon" Warzecha, who's been a producer and animator at Cyan going back to the Uru days. I recall Ryan telling me in 2018 that he'd been laid off by Cyan three times! I guess now it's four.

This news comes right after their announcement that Firmament has entered Playstation certification, and a week after they released Rime for the new Myst. In retrospect, it looks like they've been clearing the backlog of dev work before the planned layoff.

Why did this happen? Cyan hasn't given any more detail, but the only possible answer is "Myst and Riven didn't sell as well as we'd hoped." And whoever they called to get financing hasn't come through.

Note that Cyan is an independent studio which is still owned by its original founders. A lot of these layoff announcements happen when a corporate megalith controls a studio and decides to slash it for the sake of their quarterly earning calls. But that's not what's happening here.

The "next project" Cyan mentions is the "new game in the D'ni-verse" -- that is, the Myst setting but not a direct sequel to the Myst series. We recall that they snuck the word "PREFALL" into a store page, so that's what fans have been calling it.

(Cyan has never ever called this game "Myst 6". Then again, around 2022 CDPR was insisting that the next Witcher game would never be called "The Witcher 4". Sometimes Marketing wins the argument.)

Whatever the title, Cyan has a game planned, and they still have enough people to make progress on it while they hunt for funding. Presumably if they get money they'll hire back up.

What about Kickstarter?

Cyan bootstrapped themselves out of their post-Uru slump by running Kickstarters for Obduction and Firmament. (Also some stuff in 2018 celebrating Myst's 25th anniversary; but that was primarily aimed at long-time fans.)

However, it's notable that neither Obduction nor Firmament was fully funded by those Kickstarters. Crowdfunding brought in seed money and an estimate of audience interest that Cyan could use to secure platform funding. Once those games shipped -- in fact, even before Firmament -- Cyan was able to leverage their track record to get financing directly. At that point they didn't need Kickstarter any more.

I guess it's not impossible that they'd try again, but it seems unlikely to work. Crowdfunding is depressed in the current economy just like everything else. And even if a campaign succeeded, Cyan would still need to go out looking for full funding. Which is what they're doing now.

Historical context

Cyan has been up and down, size-wise, since Riven shipped. For a few weeks in 2005 they shut down completely! That was after the original Myst Online launch was cancelled; they spent a year putting Myst 5 together out of leftover pieces, got it out the door, and laid off everybody.

Three weeks later Gametap agreed to fund Myst Online, and Cyan started back up. Except the relaunch didn't go great, and they wound up laying off a bunch of people again in 2008.

Then they went through the Kickstarter stuff I just mentioned. They scaled up again for Obduction, and then scaled back down after that shipped. ("About ten developers" in 2018.) Then Firmament was funded, and they were back up again. Myst got platform funding in 2019 (Facebook by all reports), which carried Cyan through Riven. But no farther, it seems.

So this is just another loop on the roller coaster. We hope! The badness of 2025 is really unprecedented. (You can talk about 1983 but the industry was so much smaller then.) Maybe the investment industry will decide to diversify and start putting money into smaller studios. Maybe the entire US economy will tank. Really no point making predictions at this stage.

Like I said last week: check back in August for the news from Mysterium.

So far on All the Adventures we’ve seen a wide variety of “borrowings” between games both extreme and mild.

At the most egregious end are people who try to repackage someone else’s game as their own (Example 1, Example 2) but it doesn’t need to be that extreme; an author might start with someone else’s code — or at least initial layout — and remix it to be its own thing. In the case of Eldorado Gold, the remix may have been done directly on the original source code; in other cases like PLATO Adventure it is clear a total rewrite was needed. With derivatives from mainframe Adventure or Zork, the games can be clearly considered “tributes”, and even Woods himself made one of the “derivative” versions of Adventure. When the game being borrowed from is a less well-known commercial product, ethics get hazier.

Hitch-Hiker by Peter Smith, which we looked at recently, bizarrely did a partial rip-off of the Supersoft version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Some (but not all) items and puzzles were seeded from the game.

With that opening, perhaps you should sense danger. Perhaps.

Via World of Dragon.

The Romford, Essex mail order house later known as Software for All started as Syntax Software in 1981, selling ZX80/81 software and books.

Via Your Computer magazine, August 1981.

The J. Gibbons mentioned in the ad above is Jack Gibbons, and in an issue of Format Magazine he recollects his experiences with them. I’m going to quote a little longer than necessary because he gives a delightful capsule into the UK coding experience in the ZX80/81 period.

In the summer of 1980 I was attracted by this advertisement in one of the ‘dailies’ for a home computer costing less than £100 that was so powerful that it could run a power station. Well, I didn’t have a power station handy but I was suitably impressed — particularly as you had 14 days to get your money back if dissatisfied. So I thought that I could try and see if I was clever enough to be able to drive the thing, without risking a 100 notes (it was worth a lot more then!) …

Not to be put off by size as they say, I quickly powered up my new acquisition and started pressing a few keys to see what it does. I say ‘keys’ although I meant that I pressed pictures of keys on the circuit board. Having burnt the midnight oil for two weeks and managed to type in example programs and make them run, if not understand them, I was convinced I was making headway, the beast was to stay.

Gibbons gets the “16K ram pack” that expands the base unit from the miniscule 1K, noting “it was renowned for wobbling around the back of the ZX80 and now and then forgetting everything it was supposed to be storing”.

He realized, after balancing his checks (and noting how he “always makes mistakes with arithmetic”) that he wanted to write a Bank Account program, and after finishing tried to get it published.

I tried the computer groups and also a few software companies (there were only a few then). Eventually, by March 1981 I had a call from Syntax Software in Essex.

Syntax Software then went “silent” before finally throwing up the ad shown earlier, and this led to Gibbons eventually getting an invite from Mike Johnstone to the first of multiple legendary ZX Microfairs (September 1981).

Pictures of the second Microfair in winter 1982. Mike Johnston is the person in the foreground of the bottom right picture.

But back to Syntax Software! Their name change to Software for All happened a year later and they expanded their line to include BBC, Dragon, and Commodore.

That same year they absorbed Epsilon Software which had a BBC Micro line. They lasted well into the late 80s being renamed somewhere in the middle as Trybridge.

Source.

The first ad I’ve found for Danger Island is from a Your Computer dated January 1983; based on the at-least-one-month delay of print magazines, that places the game’s publication right at the end of 1982.

This game clearly takes elements from the 1981 game Pirate Island by Paul Shave in order to make a “new” Dragon 32 game. The Shave game was not on my radar originally as the premise here is simply to find a treasure chest and escape; Pirate Island has multiple treasures. Still, as soon as I took one step from the initial room, I had an uncanny feeling.

The well/ladder is meant to be a gag. “WHAT A WASTE OF A GOOD LADDER. THE WELL IS 500 FEET DEEP.”

Just south of the start.

The antidote being 2 gold coins in particular set off my memory. Here’s a shot from Pirate Island:

Just like Pirate Island, the natives throw you in a pot if you try to take the idol/statue, and just to the south there is a monolith with a magic word that helps you escape.

YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT THE MEMORIAL STONE. ENGRAVED ON THE BASE IS THE WORD ‘-SABU-‘ WHICH MEANS HELP IN THE NATIVE TONGUE.

The word in the original teleports you to the monolith (and can be used to escape from multiple situations); in Danger Island it can only be used at the pot scene, and it teleports you to the north part of the island in a Sandy Cove.

The Forest has some randomness to its exits so it isn’t fully mapped out.

There’s plenty of aspects that are different or missing, so it resembles Hitch-hiker in that style, but it is deeply odd the author felt obliged at all to do this kind of copying. Maybe they saw the Acorn Atom game and tried to recreate it on their own machine (since they didn’t have an Atom), and sometime later decided to sell it?

Moving on, in order to obtain the antidote, there are two gold coins laying about just to the west next to some quicksand (more on that shortly). Playing requires buying the antidote right away because you are constantly bitten by snakes while on the island. (As opposed to being hit by poison darts in the Shave game. One fortunate difference here is that there are unlimited applications of the antidote.)

Just past the quicksand is the treasure we need. You can cross right away as long as you don’t have any inventory. The treasure is too heavy to carry back so you need a different way across.

I like how we can see our main treasure objective almost immediately, even if we can’t take it away yet; that’s more of a modern design move.

Wandering around, it isn’t too hard to find: some cheese, a gold ring, an empty bottle, a knife, a box of matches, a lamp (in a forest), some oil (in a broken paraffin heater). The latter three can be combined together to make a light source.

I first used the light source to explore some caves to the south (again just like Pirate Island, but slightly different contents).

To the west of the second location above is “WHAT USED TO BE A PLACE OF WORSHIP” which has a plank. If you try to take the plank and get out, sometimes the thing making the noise reveals itself:

But only sometimes; once through I didn’t see it at all (bug?) If you do get confronted you need to give it the cheese (killing it is fatal because the monster screams and causes the cave to collapse).

THE MONSTER GOBBLES THE CHEESE AND GOES AWAY.

With the plank you can go back and PUT PLANK OVER QUICKSAND. By some miracle I figured this out without checking the source code, especially given a.) the parser is otherwise two-word and b.) just typing PUT PLANK merely gets the response YOU CAN’T. (This wouldn’t be the first parser to veer away from an apparent two-word parser, but still, guess-the-phrase is extraordinarily difficult.)

With the plank in place you can safely nab the TREASURE (call it TREASURE, not CHEST) although now there’s the matter of escape. Down at the beach there’s a boat just sitting there but some magic is keeping it from moving:

YOU CANNOT TAKE THE BOAT.IT IS HELD BY SOME MAGIC SPELL.

I tried some “logical” actions but had no luck (I don’t think the gold ring is used for anything):

There’s one other item back at the north of the island; a building has a “aerosol can” in a dark room (fortunately you can give the lamp a refill with the oil — another difference with Shave’s game).

THERE IS A LABLE ON THE CAN IT SAYS ‘SLEEP INDUCER’

This can be used to knock out the natives and take their golden statue. Assuming that breaks the magic, I made a beeline down to the beach but found the natives waiting.

So that solves the problem: GIVE STATUE will make it so you can GET BOAT and then LAUNCH BOAT and then (if you’re me) get horribly stuck.

Any subsequent attempt to enter the boat resulted in I CAN’T. I assume either this is a guess-the-phrase moment or a bug (would not be out of bounds, remember the non-appearing monster; also, there was a bug at the plank once where I couldn’t go west for no reason at all and had to restore a game). I went with the ultimate strategy:

That’s me manually setting the location variable to the last room of the game.

I’m going to count that as a win, although if someone wants to poke around the source and figure out what’s going on they are welcome to.

ADD: Thanks to Matt W. doing an astute analysis in the comments, we now know the missing command was GET IN. Everything works exactly as shown in my screenshots otherwise. Earlier in the game just the word IN worked to enter a building, but the game decided here to go for an extremely specific phrasing that reuses another standard verb (GET) for a different purpose.

While I’m not sure what Mr. Shave’s opinion would be, I wasn’t terribly grumpy about the re-purposing here; the puzzles ended up going in different directions, and it was especially different to have the sleep-can scene followed by returning the statue in order to break a spell. (The original involves distracting the natives with a clock from a crocodile. The statue is then one of the treasures for points. This version treats the natives a little less naively.)

What I find especially curious is the relation to Peter Smith’s Hitch-Hiker. It isn’t just that Hitch-Hiker’s also does re-purposing, but that the second 1982 game by Peter Smith was published by Software for All! This makes me wonder not only if the people involved were all part of the same friend group, but also if the game we’ll be playing next (Time Adventure) does the same schtick of adapting another game.