Planet Interactive Fiction

By 1892, the Dalton Gang — only formed a year before — had gotten a reputation for outrunning the law while performing a string of train robberies.

Of the founders Bob and Emmett Dalton, Bob previously had filled his father’s shoes becoming a lawman, and was familiar with the issues in Oklahoma: a fragmented group of sheriff services with only the U.S. Marshals having jurisdiction over the whole. They recruited a group based mostly on people they grew up with, and the gang ended up having a rotating roster with the brothers at the core. The two other brothers, Bill and Grat Dalton, were imprisoned at the time but Grat later managed to escape and join the group and Bill was acquitted.

Their exploits included a near-miss at Red Rock. The gang was eight strong at the time and they planned a heist on June 1 at the arrival of the Santa Fe, with the train scheduled for 10:00.

A train did arrive, but the lights were out. The station agent went inside and Bob sensed something was off, telling the gang to hold off and wait. Indeed there was a trap, as deputy marshals awaited inside. The plan of the heist had been learned of, but Bob’s sense of danger meant the gang waited for the first train to leave and the next train — the expected one — to arrive. The haul ended up not being much for the size of crew (at most around $10,000) but that’s because the first train was carrying the majority of the money, at 6 times that amount.

The famous end of the Dalton Gang came upon an attempt in October (with Bill Powers, Bob Dalton, Grat Dalton, Dick Broadwell, and Emmett Dalton) to enter the history books by robbing two Kansas banks simultaneously in daylight. This is the event most dramatized in media, not only for the wild gunfight with marshals and the citizens of Coffeyville, but because Emmett Dalton (the only survivor) survived to write two books and spread the mythos about the group, re-painting them in a Robin Hood light.

Today’s game is essentially a revised version of that pitched battle, where you fight against the brothers solo, although the “slippery between the hands of the law” aspect that the brothers held comes into play.

Softside Magazine, November 1982.

Peter Kirsch returns! No prologue this time like The Deadly Game: you’re got 0 DOLLARS OF CASH and a SIX-SHOOTER to your name, you’re on a street, and there’s a sign telling you about a vacant job as sheriff.

As usual with Softside, there are Atari, Apple II, and TRS-80 versions of the game. I picked TRS-80 straight off the bat this time given my experience with The Deadly Game. Yet again that’s no guarantee it is the best version, and for reasons I’ll get into later there are some advantages and disadvantages to the Atari version.

However, by random chance, I started exploring the opposite way, forestalling the encounter. The town is laid out roughly west-east with a turn in the middle, and the mayor is on the far west side.

To speed things along, though, let’s imagine I followed the author’s script and went to the mayor first (even though there’s no way of knowing the mayor is there until you map out and find the office).

The $200 on a “PERFORMANCE BASIS” turns out to be a huge pain for me later.

With a STAR in hand I wandered and checked out the rest of the town. The sheriff’s office has a cell but no keys; you’re supposed to apply your six-shooter to the desk and shoot out a lock, revealing the keys (they won’t get used until later).

I guess this makes it feel more like a Western.

Adjacent is a saloon (we’ll save that for later) and a general store that is closed (which we’ll also save for later).

Yet further is a stable with a BLACK STALLION (ours, but it needs a saddle) followed by a newspaper office.

I immediately guessed (correctly) this was a clue to a maze.

Next along the row is a rain barrel (empty) followed by a bank (also nothing there for the moment); at the end of the line is a “golden rattler” blocking the way.

You can try to shoot the rattler but you’ll get stopped by an Indian.

I wandered a bit in this state, also finding a path leading to a “creek” going to the west side, before I finally went to visit the saloon last (I had already seen it once before becoming law enforcement).

Kirsch is essentially combining an open style with triggered events, like his game Robin Hood. This is a location-and-condition trigger; you have to be the sheriff and have entered the saloon for the bank robbery to start. Sometimes this works well, but for my game it was awkward to explore a town all the way over twice before anything kicked off.

Heading back to the bank…

…the robbery has ended but there is a shootout. (Your gun, by default, is holstered, so you need to either TAKE GUN or DRAW GUN; be sure to holster it again before entering a store or they’ll kick you out.) Waiting too long here is lethal; Emmett and Bob aren’t in shooting range. The one Dalton that you can get a bead on is Grat.

Back to the west a little there’s a rope ladder leading to the roof of the newspaper office. You can backtrack and climb up to get a different angle on the scene:

If you head back to the Mayor’s Office, the clerk reports to you the mayor has been kidnapped. I did not find out this way — more on that later.

After the shootout, the general store is now open:

The mayor gave us $200 to spend (remember another $200 comes later). You cannot buy everything at once; I had to reload my game multiple times to figure things out, and while there are technically multiple options, you at least need to get the CANTEEN and the SADDLE. (AMMUNITION is good too. The six-shooter needs reloading after 6 bullets.)

The food and pouch of tobacco, incidentally, go to the east side of town where there’s the GOLDEN RATTLER. You can give the food to make the snake happy, and then past that there is an Indian with a pipe. Trading the tobacco:

According to Dale Dobson there’s some part of the code that indicates it works as a dowsing rod, but the water in the game is quite easy to find and I was never able to get the stick to work. Neither puzzle gives any points.

(I should mention, as an aside, there are 8 points total in the game revealed by typing SCORE. Taking down the first two Dalton brothers led to 1 point each. This will be important later.)

With the saddle you can put it on the STALLION and ride it around (just using normal directions, you don’t have to RIDE SOUTH every time or whatnot).

The horse doesn’t make you go “faster” and you have to get off every time you go in a building (DROP HORSE). I still found it gratifying to ride around in an atmospheric sense.

I was stuck from here for a while before I realized back at the CREEK on the far west side of town it was possible to GO CREEK, moving past to a new area. (It is unclear why there wouldn’t be a compass direction for that.)

Just past the creek. As the message implies, you can’t go farther from here without using the horse.

Past the creek is a pasture (see above) and then a desert.

The desert is a maze but the “SEEN NEWS” message from the newspaper office is intended to indicate directions. While in the desert, you start getting thirsty quite quickly (be sure to GET WATER from the creek before entering the desert; this is why the canteen is the other necessary purchase) and there are rattlesnakes that randomly appear.

You need your gun out and loaded, and you can shoot the rattlesnakes as they appear. Following the SEENNEWS route and using the gun several times on the way, a “dusty trail” comes up next.

This is where the Daltons are hiding, but once again I didn’t quite do things in the right order; first I went south and found a “dusty trail” with a “hill” and a “mine”. Alert because of my creek issue, I treated both as possible directions, and tried GO HILL first:

This is how I found out the mayor was the extra person the Daltons was getting away with (never mind the mayor was all the way on the other side of town at the time of the bank robbery). I also realized I was softlocked and needed to bring the ladder in for a rescue; this got me a point, for 3 points out of 8.

There’s a “secret” path that loops back directly to the mayor’s office so you don’t have to do the desert route back.

The “mines” are a maze, this time not one with a gimmick.

I thought Kirsch had shaken off doing such things, but alas.

The only room of interest had a wooden floor:

The game decide to be annoyingly resistant to my attempts to refer to any of the nouns described, so I decided to move on. Instead of heading to the hill/mine area, I went northwest to a CABIN; this is where the Daltons lurk.

Oops! So, if you hang out at the cabin for long enough, or go in some bushes to hide (which requires dismounting the horse) the Daltons spot you and gun you down. The visible horse here is the problem. (According to Dale Dobson’s walkthrough I checked later, in the Atari version you can ride the horse into the bushes; that doesn’t work here.) You might think to go elsewhere, ditch the horse, and then walk over to the cabin, but the horse will take off if you leave it somewhere and it happens to resurface right at the cabin. (There is no explanation why the cabin serves as, er, horse catnip. What’s a thing that attracts a horse?)

To the south of the cabin is a small tree. The idea is you can dismount here without the horse taking off right away (for some reason) which gives you time to TIE HORSE. Given the other non-cabin locations have the horse make a bolt for it, this was tricky but not impossible to figure out.

With the horse tied away — presumably not making suspicious horse noises outside the cabin causing the outlaws to notice — you can head back to the cabin and hide in the bushes.

No matter which brother you aim for, they both scatter to different locations. Emmett goes to town and Bob goes to the mines. The cabin itself is completely undescribed on the inside other than it has a crowbar you can pick up.

Taking down Bob first, he’s lurking at the room with the wooden floor.

Occasionally Bob would fire a shot; my shots back always missed. I realized — upon needing to reload — that I might be able to heed the words of Dirty Harry.

“I know what you’re thinking. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ To tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I lost track myself.

“But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

Bob did not fire every turn, but I waited (rather, typed LOOK) until Bob had fired exactly six shots, then dived in the room safely. With a clear shot, SHOOT BOB worked, and then the crowbar worked (after many attempts) via the command GET BOARDS. (Note for Atari version: it uses GET BOARD, singular, instead.)

The sack of cash is able to go back to the bank for another single point, bringing the score to 4. Shooting Bob did not give any points (ominous music).

Emmett turns out to be out back in town hanging by the bank. If you just try to walk (or ride) down the street to him he’ll take off.

The key here is the second paycheck from the Mayor. I admit I was baffled for a while discovering this, but it turns out that the moment where the Daltons scatter from the cabin is also the moment the powers that be decide you can get an extra $200. Curious how that works.

The extra money is enough to buy all the remaining items from the general store, including the disguise kit (which normally was too expensive after buying just the saddle and canteen). If you dump your lawman badge and wear the disguise, you’ll be able to safely make it up to Emmett without him getting spooked.

You can then shoot him dead, and I admit this is where I started to think something was fishy. I was able to get return the bank’s cash but I was otherwise stuck with nothing to do and two dead bodies — the Dalton gang are taken care of, where are the fireworks? I had incidentally tried ARREST and was not understood, and I didn’t have any handcuff-items either, so I still assumed that violence was the answer, but no: you can GET EMMETT. I guess the player is holding rope in their inventory that doesn’t get mentioned? (Atari version again: ARREST actually works as a verb.)

You can cart each Dalton back over to the jail, and use the keys from the gun-blasted desk to lock them in (if you don’t lock the door they won’t stay). Each Dalton captured is 2 points.

In my “winning run” — I had to restart to fix the softlock — I ended up dealing with the mayor last, meaning the game ended while still in a pit:

Once again I find myself appreciating what kind of ambition Kirsch had in exploring all the genres — and different iterations of event-based gameplay — while being frustrated by technical limitations. The game anticipates more than you might expect, with the horse mechanics and is-your-gun-holstered check, but I still had moments like applying the crowbar which give a reminder this is still a monthly series of games rapidly cranked out in BASIC.

I also appreciated the alternate routes in terms of either shooting arresting the last two Dalton brothers, even given the unfair implementation. I would very much have preferred some extra indication the game goes to an unwinnable state if either brother is a corpse!

(For books, I used Daltons! The Raid on Coffeyville, Kansas by Robert Barr Smith via University of Oklahoma Press, and Into the Sunset: Emmett Dalton and the End of the Dalton Gang by Ian Shaw via the University Press of Kansas. The former aims to dispel the Robin Hood mythos and expose the Daltons as gang mostly interested in stealing and giving the money to themselves; the latter establishes a little sympathy or at least understanding to their situation.)

As we learned in the earlier articles in this series, Interplay celebrated the Christmas of 1997 with two new CRPGs. One of them, the striking post-apocalyptic exercise called Fallout, was greeted with largely rave reviews. The other, of course, was the far less well-received licensed Dungeons & Dragons game called Descent to Undermountain. The company intended to repeat the pattern in 1998, with another Fallout and another Dungeons & Dragons game. This time, however, the public’s reception of the two efforts would be nearly the polar opposite of last time.

It’s perhaps indicative of the muddled nature of the project that Interplay couldn’t come up with any plot-relevant subtitle for Fallout 2. It’s just another “Post-Nuclear Role-Playing Game.”

Tim Cain claims that he never gave much of a thought to any sequels to Fallout during the three and a half years he spent working on the first game. Brian Fargo, on the other hand, started to think “franchise” as soon as he woke up to Fallout’s commercial potential circa the summer of 1997. Fallout 2 was added to Interplay’s list of active projects a couple of months before the original game even shipped.

Interplay’s sorry shape as a business made the idea of a quick sequel even more appealing than it might otherwise have been. For it should be possible to do it relatively cheaply; the engine and the core rules were already built. It would just be a matter of generating a new story and design, ones that would reuse as many audiovisual assets as possible.

Yet Fargo was not pleased by the initial design proposals that reached his desk. So, just days after Fallout 1 had shipped, he asked Tim Cain to get together with his principal partners Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson and come up with a proposal of their own for the sequel. The three were dismayed by this request; exhausted as they were by months of crunch on Fallout 1, they had anticipated enjoying a relaxing holiday season, not jumping right back into the fray on Fallout 2. Their proposal reflected their mental exhaustion. It spring-boarded off of a joking aside in the original game’s manual, a satirical advertisement which Jason Anderson had drawn up in an afternoon when he was told by Interplay’s printer that there would be an unsightly blank page in the booklet as matters currently stood. The result was the “Garden of Eden Creation Kit”: “When all clear sounds on your radio, you don’t want to be caught without one!” Elaborating on this thin shred of a premise, the sequel would cast you as a descendant of the star of the first game, sent out into the dangerous wastelands to recover one of these Garden of Eden Kits in lieu of a water chip. This apple did not fall far from the tree.

But as it turned out, that suited Brian Fargo just fine. Within a month of Fallout 1′s release, Cain, Boyarsky, and Anderson had been officially assigned to the Fallout 2 project. None of them was terribly happy about it; what all three of them really wanted were a break, a bonus check, and the chance to work on something else, roughly in that order of priority. In January of 1998, feeling under-appreciated and physically incapable of withstanding the solid ten months of crunch that he knew lay before him, Cain turned in his resignation. Boyarsky and Anderson quit the same day in a show of solidarity. (The three would go on to found Troika Studios, whose games we will be meeting in future articles on this site, God willing and the creek don’t rise.)

Following their exodus, Fallout 2 fell to Feargus Urquhart and the rest of his new Black Isle CRPG division to turn into a finished product. Actually, to use the word “division” is to badly overstate Black Isle’s degree of separation from the rest of Interplay. Black Isle was more a marketing label and a polite fiction than a lived reality; the boundaries between it and the mother ship were, shall we say, rather porous. Employees tended to drift back and forth across the border without anyone much noticing.

This was certainly the case for most of those who worked on Fallout 2, a group which came to encompass about a third of the company at one time or another. Returning to the development approach that had yielded Wasteland a decade earlier, Fargo and Urquhart parceled the game out to whoever they thought might have the time to contribute a piece of it. Designer and writer Chris Avellone, who was drafted onto the Fallout 2 team for a few months while he was supposed to be working on another forthcoming CRPG called Planescape: Torment, has little positive to say about the experience: “I do feel like the heart of the team had gone. And all that was left were a bunch of developers working on different aspects of the game like a big patchwork beast. But there wasn’t a good spine or heart to the game. We were just making content as fast as we could. Fallout 2 was a slapdash product without a lot of oversight.”

Still, the programmers did fix some of what annoyed me about Fallout 1, by cleaning up some of the countless little niggles in the interface. Companions were reworked, such that they now behave more or less as you’d expect: they’re no longer so likely to shoot you in the back, are happy to trade items with you, and don’t force you to kill them just to get around them in narrow spaces. Although the game as a whole still strikes me as more clunky and cumbersome than it needs to be — the turn-based combat system is as molasses-slow as ever — the developers clearly did make an effort to unkink as many bottlenecks as they could in the time they had.

But sadly, Fallout 2 is a case of one step forward, one step back: although it’s a modestly smoother-playing game, it lacks its predecessor’s thematic clarity and unified aesthetic vision. Its world is one of disparate parts, slapped together with no rhyme, reason, or editorial oversight. It wants to be funny — always the last resort of a game that lacks the courage of its fictional convictions — but it doesn’t have any surfeit of true wit to hand. It tries to make up for the deficit the same way as many a game of this era, by transgressing boundaries of taste and throwing out lazy references to other pop culture as a substitute for making up its own jokes. This game is very nerdy male, very adolescent-to-twenty-something, and very late 1990s — so much so that anyone who didn’t live through that period as part of the same clique will have trouble figuring out what it’s on about much of the time. I do understand most of the spaghetti it throws at the walls — lucky me! — but that doesn’t keep me from finding it fairly insufferable.

Fallout 2 shipped in October of 1998, just when it was supposed to. But its reception in the gaming press was noticeably more muted than that of its predecessor. Reviewers found it hard to overlook the bugs and glitches that were everywhere, the inevitable result of its rushed and chaotic development cycle, even as the more discerning among them made note of the jarring change in tone and the lack of overall cohesion to the story and design. The game under-performed expectations commercially as well, spending only one week in the American top ten. In the aftermath, Brian Fargo’s would-be CRPG franchise looked like it had already run its course; no serious plans for a Fallout 3 would be mooted at Interplay for quite some time to come.

Yet Fallout 2 did do Interplay’s other big CRPG for that Christmas an ironic service. When BioWare told Fargo that they would like a couple of extra months to finish Baldur’s Gate up properly, the prospect of another Interplay CRPG on store shelves that October made it easier for him to grant their request. So, instead of taking full advantage of the Christmas buying season, Baldur’s Gate didn’t finally ship until a scant four days before the holiday. Never mind: the decision not to ship it before its time paid dividends that some quantity of ephemeral Christmas sales could never have matched. Plenty of gamers proved ready to hand over their holiday cash and gift cards in the days right after Christmas for the most hotly anticipated Dungeons & Dragons computer game since Pool of Radiance. Baldur’s Gate sold 175,000 units before 1998 was over. (Just to put that figure in perspective, this was more copies than Fallout 1 had sold in fifteen months.) Its sales figures would go on to top 1 million units in less than a year, making it the bestselling CRPG to date that wasn’t named Diablo. The cover provided by Fallout 2 helped to ensure that Dr. Muzyka and Dr. Zeschuk would never have to see another patient again.

I’m not someone who places a great deal of sentimental value on physical things. But despite my lack of pack-rattery, some bits of flotsam from my early years have managed to follow me through countless changes of address on both sides of a very big ocean. Playing Baldur’s Gate prompted me to rummage around in the storage room until I came up with one of them. It goes by the name of In Search of Adventure. This rather generically titled little book is, as it says on the front cover, a “campaign adventure” for tabletop Dungeons & Dragons. Note the absence of the “Advanced” prefix; this adventure is for the non-advanced version of the game, the one that was sold in those iconic red and blue boxes that conquered the cafeteria lunch tables of Middle America during the first few years of the 1980s, when TSR dared to dream that their flagship game might become the next Monopoly. If we’re being honest, I always preferred to play this version of the game even after its heyday passed away. It seemed to me more easy-going, more fun-focused, less stuffily, pedantically Gygaxian.

Anyway, the campaign adventure in question came out in 1987, well after my preferred version of Dungeons & Dragons had become the weak sister to its advanced, hardcore sibling — unsurprisingly so, given that pretty much the only people still playing the game by that point were hardcore by definition.

In Search of Adventure is actually a compilation of nine earlier adventure modules that TSR published for beginning-level characters, crammed together into one book with a new stub of a plot to serve as a connecting tissue. I dug it out of storage and have proceeded to talk about it here because it reminds me inordinately of Baldur’s Gate, which works on exactly the same set of principles. There’s an overarching story to it, sure, but it too is mostly just a big grab bag of geography to explore and monsters to fight, in whatever order you prefer. In this sense and many others, it’s defiantly traditionalist. It has more to do with Dungeons & Dragons as it was played around those aforementioned school lunch tables than it does with the avant-garde posturings of TSR’s latter days. As I noted in my last article, the Forgotten Realms in which Baldur’s Gate is set — and in which In Search of Adventure might as well be set, for all that it matters — is so appealing to players precisely because it’s so uninterested in challenging them. The Forgotten Realms is the archetypal place to play Dungeons & Dragons. Likewise, Baldur’s Gate is an archetypal Dungeons & Dragons computer game, the essence of the “a group of adventurers meet in a bar…” school of role-playing. (You really do meet some of your most important companions in Baldur’s Gate in a bar…)

Luke Kristjanson, the BioWare writer responsible for most of the dialog in Baldur’s Gate, says that he never saw the computer game as “a simulation of a fully-realized Medieval world”: “It was a simulation of playing [tabletop] Dungeons & Dragons.” This statement is, I think, the key to understanding where BioWare was coming from and what still makes their game so appealing today, more than a quarter-century on.

Opening with a Nietzsche quote leads one to fear that Baldur’s Gate is going to try to punch way, way above its weight. Thankfully, it gets the pretentiousness out of its system early and settles down to meat-and-potatoes fare. BioWare’s intention was never, says Luke Kristjanson, to make “a serious fantasy for serious people.” Thank God for that!

But here’s the brilliant twist: in order to conjure up the spirit of those cafeteria gatherings of yore, Baldur’s Gate uses every affordance of late-1990s computer technology that it can lay its hands on. It wants to give you that 1980s vibe, but it wants to do it better — more painlessly, more intuitively, more prettily — than any computer of that decade could possibly have managed. Call it neoclassical digital Dungeons & Dragons.

The game begins in a walled cloister known as Candlekeep, which has a bit of a Name of the Rose vibe, being full of monks who have dedicated their lives to gathering and preserving the world’s knowledge. The character you play is an orphan who has grown up in Candlekeep as the ward of a kindly mage named Gorion. This bucolic opening act gives you the opportunity to learn the ropes, via a tutorial and a few simple, low-stakes quests. But soon enough, a fearsome figure in armor shatters the peace of the cloister, killing Gorion and forcing you to take to the road in search of adventure (to coin a phrase). The game does suggest at the outset that you visit a certain tavern where you might find some useful companions, but it never insists that you do this or anything else. Instead you’re allowed to go wherever you want and to do exactly that thing which pleases you most once you get there. When you do achieve milestones in the main plot, whether deliberately or inadvertently, they’re heralded with onscreen chapter breaks which demonstrate that the story is progressing, because of or despite your antics. In this way, the game tries to create a balance between player freedom and the equally bracing sense of being caught up in an epic plot, one in which you will come to play the pivotal role — being, as you eventually learn, the “Chosen One” who has been marked by destiny. Have I mentioned that Baldur’s Gate is not a game that shirks from fantasy clichés?

The inclusion of a tutorial heralds the dawning of a more user-friendly era of the CRPG.

Of course, there’s an unavoidable tension between the set-piece plot of the chapter-based structure and the open-world aspect of the game — a tension which we’ve encountered in other games I’ve written about. The main plot is constantly urging you forward, insisting that the fate of the world is at stake and time is of the essence. Meanwhile the many side quests are asking you to rescue a lost housecat or collect wolf pelts for a merchant. If you take the game at its word and rush forward with a sense of urgency, you’ll not only come to the climax under-leveled but will have missed most of the fun. All of which is to say that Baldur’s Gate is best approached like that In Search of Adventure module: just start walking around. Go see what is to be found in those parts of your map that are still blank. Sooner or later, you’ll trigger the next chunk of the main plot anyway.

It’s amazing how enduring some of what is to be found in those blank spaces has proved. My wife likes to read graphic novels. I was surprised recently to see that she’d started on a Dungeons & Dragons-branded one called Days of Endless Adventure, with a copyright date of 2021. I was even more surprised when I flipped it open idly and came face to face with the simple-minded ranger Minsc and his precious pet hamster Boo, both of whom were introduced to the world in Baldur’s Gate.

A congenital visual blurriness dogs this game, the result of a little bit too much detail being crammed into a relatively low resolution of 640 X 480, combined with a subdued, brown- and gray-heavy color palette. My middle-aged eyes weren’t always so happy about it, especially when I played on a television in the living room.

As it happened, I had had quite a time with Minsc when I played the game. He joined my party fairly early on, on the condition that we would try to rescue his friend, a magic user named Dynaheir who was being imprisoned in a gnoll stronghold. Unfortunately, I applied the same logic to his principal desire that I did to the main quest line; I’d get to it when I got to it. I maintained this attitude even as he nagged me about it with increasing urgency. One day the dude just flipped out on me, went nuts and started to attack me and my other companions. What’s a person to do in such a situation? Reader, I killed him and his pet hamster.

I was playing a ranger myself, so I didn’t think losing his services would be any big problem. I didn’t notice until days later that killing him — even though, I rush to stipulate again, he attacked me first — had turned me into a “fallen ranger.” I’m told by people who know about such things that this is far from ideal, because it means that you’ve essentially been reduced to the status of a vanilla fighter, albeit one who craves a lot more experience points than usual to advance a level. Oh, well. I didn’t feel like going back so many hours, and I was in more of a “roll with the punches” than a “try and try again” frame of mind anyway. (I’m also told that there will be a way to reverse my fallen condition when I get around to playing Baldur’s Gate II with the same party. So that’s something to look forward to, I guess.) By way of completing the black comedy, I later did rescue Dynaheir and took her into my party. But I was careful not to mention that I had ever met her mysteriously vanished friend…

“Minsc? Uh, no, never heard the name. Shall we talk about something else?”

Any given play-through of Baldur’s Gate is guaranteed to generate dozens of such anecdotes, which combine to make its story your story, even if the text of the chapter breaks is the same for everyone. You don’t have to walk on eggshells, afraid that you’re going to break some necessary piece of plot machinery. Again, it’s you who gets to choose where you go, what you do there, and who travels with you on your quest. Any mistake you make along the way that doesn’t get you and all your friends killed can generally be recovered from or at least lived with, as I did my fallen-ranger status. Tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, says Luke Kristjanson, is about “[being with] your friends [and] doing something fun. And occasionally one’s a jackass and does something weird and you roll with it.” It does seem to me that rolling with it is the only good way to play this second-order simulation of that social experience.

The first companion to join you will probably be Imoen, a spunky female thief. The personalities of your companions are all firmly archetypal, but most of them are likeable enough that it’s hard to complain. Sometimes fantasy comfort food goes down just fine.

Baldur’s Gate’s specific methods of presenting its world of freedom and opportunity have proved as influential as the design philosophies that undergird it. The Infinity Engine provided the presentational blueprint for a whole school of CRPGs that are still with us to this day. You look down on the environment and the characters in it from a free-scrolling isometric point of view. You can move the “camera” anywhere you like in the current area, independent of the locations of your characters. That said, a fog-of-war is implemented: places your characters have not yet seen are completely blacked out, and you can’t know what other people or monsters are getting up to if they’re out of your characters’ line of sight.

The interface proper surrounds this view on three sides. Portraits of the members of your party — up to five of them, in addition to the character you create and embody from the outset — run down the right side of the screen. Command icons — some pertaining to the individual party members and some to the group as a whole or to the computer on which you’re running the game — stretch across the left side and bottom of the screen. An area just above the bottom line of icons can expand to display text, of which there is an awful lot in this game, mostly in the form of menu-driven conversations. (In 1998, we were still far from the era when it would be practical and cost-effective to have full voice-acting in a game with this much yammering. Instead just the occasional line of dialog is voiced, to establish personalities and set tones.) The interface is perhaps a bit more obscure and initially daunting than it might be in a modern game, but the contrast with the old keyboard-driven SSI Gold Box games could hardly be more stark. And thankfully, unlike Fallout’s, Baldur’s Gate’s interface doesn’t make the mistake of prioritizing aesthetics over utility.

In short, Baldur’s Gate tries really, really hard to be approachable in the way that modern players have come to expect, even if it doesn’t always make it all the way there. Take, for instance, its journal, an exhaustive chronicle of the personal story that you are generating as you play. That’s great. But what’s less great is that it can be inordinately difficult to sift through the huge mass of text to find the details of a quest you’re pretty sure you accepted sometime last week. Most of us would love to have a simple bullet list of quests to go along with the verbose diary, however much that may cause the hardcore immersion-seekers to howl in protest at the gameyness of it all. Later Infinity Engine games corrected oversights like this one.

The most oft-discussed and controversial aspect of the Infinity Engine, back in the day and to some extent even today, is its implementation of combat. As we’ve learned, makers of CRPGs in the late 1990s faced a real conundrum when it came to combat. They wanted to preserve a measure of tactical complexity, but they also had to reckon with the reality of a marketplace that showed a clear preference for fast-paced, fluid gameplay over turn-based models. Fallout tried to square that circle by running in real-time until a fight began, at which point it forced you back into a turn-based framework; Might and Magic VI did a little better in my opinion by letting you decide when you wanted to go turn-based. In a way, BioWare was even more constrained than the designers of either of those two games, because they were explicitly making a digital implementation of a turn-based set of tabletop rules.

Their solution to the conundrum was real-time-with-pause, in which the computer automatically acts out the combat, adhering to the rules of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons but, critically, without advertising the breaks between rounds and turns. The player can assert her will at any point in the proceedings by tapping the space bar to pause the action, issuing new commands to her charges, and then tapping it again to let the battle resume.

Clever though the scheme is, not everyone loves it. And, to be sure, there are valid complaints to levy against it. Big fights can all too quickly degenerate into a blob of intersecting sprites, with spells going off everywhere and everyone screaming at once; it’s like watching twenty Tasmanian Devils — the Looney Tunes version, that is — in a fur-flying free-for-all. Yet there are ways to alleviate the confusion by making judicious use of the option to “auto-pause,” a hugely important capability that is mentioned only in oblique passing in the game’s 160-page manual, presumably because that document was sent to the printing press before the software it described had been finalized. Auto-pause will let you stop the action automatically whenever certain conditions of your choice are met — or even at the end of every single action taken by every single member of your party, if you choose to go that far. Doing so lets you effectively turn Baldur’s Gate into a purely turn-based game, if that’s your preference. Or you can go fully turn-based only for the really big fights that you know will require careful micro-management. This is what I do. The rest of the time, I just use a few judicious break points — a character is critically wounded, a spell caster has finished casting a spell, etc. — and otherwise rely on the good old space bar.

Another option — the best one for those most determined to turn the game into a simulation of playing tabletop Dungeons & Dragons with your mates — is to turn on artificial intelligence for every member of your party but the one you created. Then you just let them all do their things while you do yours. You may find yourself less enamored with this approach, however, after you become part of the collateral damage of one of Dynaheir’s Fireball spells for the first time. (Shades of the stone-stupid and deadly companions in Fallout…)

Baldur’s Gate’s combat definitely isn’t perfect, but in its day it was a good-faith attempt to deliver an experience that was recognizably Dungeons & Dragons while also catering to the demands of the contemporary marketplace. I think it holds up okay today, especially when placed in the context of the rest of the game that houses it, which has ambitions for its world and its fiction that transcend the tactical-combat simulations that the latter-day Gold Box games especially lapsed into. It is true that your companions’ artificial intelligence could be better, as it is true that it’s sometimes harder than it ought to be to figure out what’s really going on, a byproduct of graphics that are somewhat muddy even at the best of times and of having way too many character sprites in way too small a space. But your fighters, who don’t usually require too much micro-management, are the most affected by this latter problem, while your spell casters ought to be standing well back from the fray anyway, if they know what’s good for them. Another not-terrible approach, then, is to control your spell casters yourself, since they’re the ones who can most easily ruin their companions’ day, and leave your fighters to their own devices. But you’ll doubtless figure out what works best for you within the first few hours.

Indeed, Baldur’s Gate feels disarmingly modern in the way that it bends over backward to adjust itself to your preferred style of play. This encompasses not only the myriad of auto-pause and artificial-intelligence options but an adjustable global difficulty slider for combat. All of this allows you to breeze through the fights with minimal effort or hunker down for a long series of intricate tactical struggles, just as you choose. Giving your player as many ways to play as possible is seldom a bad choice in commercial game design. Not everyone had yet figured that out in the late 1990s.

If you want the ultimate simulation of playing tabletop Dungeons & Dragons with your friends, you can turn on an option to watch the actual die rolls scrolling past during combat.

BioWare and Interplay released an expansion pack to Baldur’s Gate called Tales of the Sword Coast just six months after the base game. Rather than serving as a sequel to the main plot, it’s content merely to add some new ancillary areas to explore betwixt and between fulfilling your destiny as The Chosen One. Given that I definitely don’t consider the main plot the most interesting part of Baldur’s Gate, I have no problem with this approach in theory. Nevertheless, the expansion pack strikes me as underwhelming and kind of superfluous — like a collection of all the leftover bits that failed to make the cut the first time around, which I suspect is exactly what it is. The biggest addition is an elaborate dungeon known as Durlag’s Tower, created to partially address one of the principal ironies of the base game: the fact that it contains surprisingly little in the way of dungeons and no dragons whatsoever. The latter failing would have to wait for the proper sequel to be corrected, but BioWare did try to shore up the former aspect by presenting an old-school, tactically complex dungeon crawl of the sort that Gary Gygax would have loved, a maze rife not only with tough monsters but with secret doors, illusions, traps, and all manner of other subtle trickery. Personally, I tend to find this sort of thing more tedious than exciting at this stage of my life, at least when it’s implemented in this particular game engine. I decided pretty quickly after venturing inside to let old Durlag keep his tower, since he seemed to be having a much better time there than I was.

Durlag’s Tower. The Infinity Engine doesn’t do so well in such narrow, trap-filled spaces. It’s hard to keep your characters from blundering into places that they shouldn’t.

While your reaction to the über-dungeon may be a matter of taste, a more objective ground for concern is all of the new sources of experience points the expansion adds, whilst raising the experience and level caps on your characters only modestly. As a result, it becomes that much easier to max out your characters before you finish the game, a state of affairs which is no fun at all. In my eyes, then, Baldur’s Gate is a better, tighter game without the expansion. For better or for worse, though, Tales of the Sword Coast has become impossible to extricate from the base game, being automatically incorporated into all of the modern downloadable editions. So, I’ll content myself with telling you to feel free to skip Durlag’s Tower and/or any of the other additional content if it’s not your thing. There’s nothing essential to the rest of the game to be found there.

Whatever its infelicities and niggles, it’s almost impossible to overstate the importance and influence of Baldur’s Gate in the broader context of gaming history. Forget the comparisons I’ve been making again and again in these articles to Pool of Radiance: one can actually make a case for Baldur’s Gate as the most important single-player CRPG released between 1981, the landmark year of the first Wizardry and Ultima, and the date of this very article that you’re reading.

Baldur’s Gate’s unprecedented level of commercial success transformed the intersection between tabletop Dungeons & Dragons and its digital incarnations from a one-way avenue into a two-way street; all of the future editions of the tabletop rules that would emerge under Wizards of the Coast’s watch would be explicitly crafted with an eye to what worked on the computer as well. At the same time, Baldur’s Gate cemented one of the more enduring abstract design templates in digital gaming history; witness the extraordinary success of 2023’s belated Baldur’s Gate 3. The CRPGs that more immediately followed Baldur’s Gate I, both those that were powered by the Infinity Engine and those that only borrowed some of its ideas, found ways to improve on the template in countless granular details, but they were all equally the heirs to this very first Infinity Engine game. Yes, Fallout got there first, and in some respects did it even better, with a less clichéd, more striking setting and an even deeper-seated commitment to acknowledging and responding to its player’s choices. And there’s more than a little something to be said for the role played by the goofy, janky, uninhibited Monty Haul fun of Might and Magic VI in the rehabilitation of the CRPG genre as well. Yet the fact remains that it was Baldur’s Gate that truly led the big, meaty CRPG out of the wilderness and back into the mainstream.

Then again, gaming history is not a zero-sum game. The note on which I’d prefer to end this series of articles is simply that the CRPG genre was back by 1999. Increasingly, it would be the computer games that drove sales of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons rather than the other way around. Meanwhile a whole lot of other CRPGs, including some of the most interesting ones of all, would be given permission to blaze their own trails without benefit of a license. I look forward to visiting or revisiting some of them with you in the years to come, as we explore this genre’s second golden age.

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: For Baldur’s Gate, see my last article, with the addition of the book BioWare: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development, which commenter Infinitron was kind enough to tell me about.

For Fallout 2: the book Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs by David L. Craddock. Computer Gaming World of February 1999; Retro Gamer 72 and 188. Also Chris Avellone’s appearance on Soren Johnson’s Designer Notes podcast and Tim Cain’s YouTube channel.

Where to Get Them: Fallout 2 and Baldur’s Gate are both available as digital purchases at GOG.com, the latter in an “enhanced edition” that sports some welcome quality-of-life improvements alongside some additional characters and quests that don’t sit as well with everyone. Note that it buying it does give you access to the original game as well.

This morning, Cyan updated Myst (the 2020 release) to include the Age of Rime. This is a free update on Steam (Mac/Win) and Quest; the Xbox update is in progress.

Do I need to say more than that? Sure, why not. Context is life.

Rime originally appeared as a bonus Age in RealMyst (2000), the 3D-engine remake of Myst (1993). Rime was meant to provide some connective tissue between the stories of Myst and Riven. The Rime journals revealed a bit of Atrus and Catherine's backstory. They also alluded to the book-enhancing geodes which had appeared in Riven. Solving Rime's crystal-matching puzzle gave a glimpse of Riven as a reward.

(The crystal puzzle was then reiterated in Myst 4 (2004), providing even more series continuity. Yay continuity.)

For all that, the big draw of Rime was its beauty: an Age of ice, stars, and colorful auroras. We all hoped for a visit to Rime in the snazzed-up Unreal-based Myst 2020. Sadly, it wasn't there. Cyan mentioned it in 2022 and 2023, but without any real news of progress. Riven came and went; still no Rime.

But! A week ago Cyan dropped a tantalizing post on their social media:

The quoted link no longer exists, but for a few days it led to an ARG-style web-hacking game. The fans went nuts.

Cyan likes to drop these mini-ARGs occasionally as treats for their hardcore fans. They never contain serious announcements, and they never get much notice outside the Cyan Discord. (If you are on the Discord, check out the #🤔-ciphers channel for exhaustive discussion.) The endpoint was a bunch of glitched images -- I think this link is still viewable -- which alluded to the Rime journals.

Fun times, but, as I said, not a serious announcement. That came Tuesday in the form of a press release and social post.

[...] Fans can look forward to exploring Rime when the new Age becomes available for the Meta Quest platform as well as Windows and Mac systems this Thursday, March 20th at 10am Pacific, with an update for the Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S versions of the game to follow.

Only one problem: I'm at GDC this week. I had the extra fun of downloading eight gigabytes of Myst app to my laptop over hotel wifi. And then a four-megabyte update today. I fully expect to see a room-service charge for bandwidth when I check out.

Context, schmontext. How was the Age?

It's gorgeous! Ice! Stars! Auroras! I am satisfied. No spoilers beyond that.

The puzzles, journals, and geography have all been expanded a bit. Just as with Riven, it's the Rime you remember, but rethought and with added detail.

I admit that I was hoping for a bit of connective tissue between the Myst series and Cyan's next project. This is a "new game in the D'ni-verse", unconnected to the Atrus family saga. That's all they've said about it.

(Except that one of Cyan's recent merch pages contains "PREFALL" as an acrostic. As in, before the fall of the D'ni civilization. The fans went nuts, I tell you.)

Anyway, sneaking some clues into this Rime release would have been structurally apt. But they didn't do it. Or if they did, it was too subtle for me. Ah well.

I guess we'll have to wait for Mysterium. Check back in August!

A few weeks ago someone quietly posted a link to Invisiclues.org, a new Infocom fan archive.

The site is dedicated to (1) archiving historical Infocom-related artifacts -- InvisiClues, of course, but also magazine articles, marketing material, packaging, artwork, literature, and the games themselves -- and (2) making the archives available in an enjoyable format.

-- About Invisiclues.org

The Net has a lot of Infocom fan archives (including my own, of course). And the Infocom Invisiclues themselves are well-preserved.

Where this new site excels, though, is its collection of articles about Infocom. These are gathered from contemporary game magazines (Softline, Computer Gaming World, ...), general computing magazines (Byte, Softalk, Compute!, ...), and mainstream sources (Time, NYT, ...). There were 250 articles when the Invisiclues site launched, and it's over 300 now.

This collection way, way outstrips our existing collection of Infocom articles at the IF Archive. I imagine that the material is mostly filtered from Archive.org. But it represents an intense curatorial effort, and I'm happy to see it show up. My congratulations and gratitude to the site maintainer.

(As to the "enjoyable" part, check out the working status line in the top right corner. Cute!)

My previous post is needed for context.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the game but the panel is cool. From Doctor Who Magazine.

I’ve observed before that sci-fi has often fared better than fantasy when it comes to early adventure games (the opposite is true of CRPGs). Fantasy objects tend to be designed without any kind of rules, meaning that the magic pendant that needs to be waved somewhere needs to be waved everywhere since there’s no method to work out what’s going on. Science fiction tends to be better-behaved in that respect, and even with interdimensional teleportation etc. the authors seem to feel more obliged to make it clear how various gizmos operate.

That’s not the case here.

To continue where I left off, I had a locked door I couldn’t get by and a box I couldn’t open. It turns out the lake (that I filled the flask from) was the culprit.

I had tried a number of ways to “dive” into the lake with no joy. I tried taking the heavy gold brick and jumping in the lake while holding it before using it on the wall (there’s a puzzle like this in Sunset over Savannah). I thought maybe that’d have an effect since jumping into water with the powder causes them to explode so maybe this was tracked as well? … but no, that wasn’t it. Despite the game insisting repeatedly it doesn’t know the word DOWN, it does, in that exact spot: you can SWIM DOWN.

The silver key is sufficient to both open the box (crystals full of energy) and unlock the door.

To the east here is a Store Room with a lever where I struggled for a while trying to push or pull it, when you’re just supposed to TAKE it. I don’t know what it does; I carried it the rest of the game, and I assume it got used passively somewhere. The note will be useful shortly, but the next leap is to realize that the beam of light is not some sort of functional thing you’re supposed to interrupt to cause an effect; instead it means there’s another exit you can take, that is, GO BEAM.

Typing INSERT CRYSTALS will cause THE WHIRR OF MACHINES SOMEWHERE. Somewhere is just back in the storage room (with the mysterious lever) where an opening appeared; past that is a wire fence.

CUT FENCE (or SNIP FENCE) works here — it turns out SNIFF was really SNIP, which I think is a new one. Then there’s a room with a safe, and the safe has a dial that turns from 01 to 20. 0519 backwards can’t be 9-1-5-0 (there’s no 0 on the dial) so the appropriate way to read it is DIAL 19 followed by DIAL 05:

That’s essentially it except for one last parser struggle. Taking the key all the way back to the HOLE at the start, I tried INSERT KEY, PUT KEY, etc. with no luck; it turns out I needed REPLACE KEY.

I have no idea what the lever was for, or what the button on the bracelet that we’d been toting around the entire game was for. The whole romp was only loosely connected and only made sense as some sort of challenge delivered by an Evil Entity (maybe Human Resources thought we’d been slacking on the whole Time Warden job thing).

This almost could have been a satisfying game still, but the time I spent with parser troubles — especially the game deceptively claiming it didn’t know the word DOWN — really knocked it out of proportion. I can ignore parser issues if they’re light as a percentage of gameplay; say I spend only 2% of my time thinking about the parser (maybe it’s a long game, so there’s still somewhere I get stuck a while, but it doesn’t linger as the main gameplay). Here, the overarching puzzles were simple enough that the majority of my time was spent on parser trouble.

The biggest issue is the violation of trust: the first time the parser does a horrible hiccup, I start to have my doubts about if patience is worthwhile: should I treat the puzzles as puzzles, or is the next one I get stuck on going to be equally more the fault of the game than myself?

Still, this game was unpublished; would some of these elements have been tweaked on their way to market? At the very least the bottom bar would have been changed to read BUG-BYTE (like The Scepter did); maybe the person responsible for checking if the tape loaded correctly would have fixed a typo or two while they were at it. Since Bug-Byte rejected the game outright it’s impossible to know. One certainly gets the impression of the cheaper-end cassettes of this period that the goal was to do as little testing as possible.

If nothing else, when we see Wadsworth again he’ll be with an entirely different company on an entirely different computer. Certainly his later games feel like much slicker productions, so maybe the technical freedom helped.

Wadsworth had already hopped over to Artic by the end of 1982 as they published his game Invasion Force for ZX Spectrum. This is essentially a variant of the “boss fight” stage in the arcade game Phoenix. Screenshot via Mobygames.

The Boston IF meetup for March will be Tuesday, March 25, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting. 

After he wrote and published The Scepter with Bug-Byte, Simon Wadsworth went on to write a second game (today’s selection) and sent it in.

From Personal Computer World, November 1982.

Time Warden never was published:

It was written using the same source code structure [as The Scepter]. I’d forgotten all about this game until sorting through a pile of old cassette tapes looking for my copy of The Scepter.

In this adventure you play the Time Warden. While you have been away on vacation and the Key of Time has been lost on the planet Syrius 5. You have 250 turns to recover the key before the end of the Universe.

Wadsworth went on after this to publish with Artic (Adventure E: The Golden Apple and Adventure F: The Eye of Bain), taking over the series from Charles Cecil, so this game has some historical importance despite falling into the author’s own memory hole.

DVD cover of the last of the Key to Time serials, via IMDB.

The Key of Time reference makes it clear this is an offshoot of the Dr. Who universe. There is such a thing as a Time Warden in Dr. Who lore but you have to jump up to 1988 and the comics to see it; the Warden shows up in the same comic as one of the foes of the Transformers (Death’s Head) so is only roughly canonical.

From Doctor Who Magazine 135. That’s Death’s Head holding the Seventh Doctor. Death’s Head later had a run-in with the Fantastic Four.

While Time Warden doesn’t stick to canon like Dr. Who Adventure (at least so far, I’m not done yet), “Syrius 5” is a reference, as Sirius IV showed up in the television show during Frontier in Space (Third Doctor, 1973).

Prison Governor: I’m releasing you into the custody of this commissioner. He will fly you back to Sirius IV to stand trial.
Dr. Who: And may I ask what I am supposed to have done there?
The Master: Defrauding the Sirius IV Dominion Bank, evasion of planetary income tax, assault and battery committed on the person of a Sirius IV police commissioner, taking a spaceship without authority, and piloting said spaceship without payment of tax and insurance. Landing said spaceship on an unauthorized area on Sirius III, need I go on?
Dr. Who: I seem to be quite the master criminal, don’t I? You don’t really say the you believe all this nonsense do you, Governor? Whatever credentials he’s shown you are forged.
The Master: Oh come Doctor, you know the game’s up. Why not admit defeat? You know, this man always works with an accomplice. A girl. I’ve got her under lock and key in my ship. Well Doctor, are you coming quietly?

You start, as the author already indicated, returning from a “vacation” finding things have gone horribly wrong. You’d think there’d be a special line for this sort of thing, but I guess we were out-of-dimension.

The “STABALISER” has a small hole where I assume the key is suppose to go. If you try to drop an item here the game says “NOT HERE” as “VIBRATIONS ARE NOT GOOD FOR TIME STABALISERS.”

I did get to inadvertently test out the time limit early because the very start is easy to get stuck in. There’s the “wardens room”, a “grand room” with a “teleporter”, and the teleporter itself, which has a control panel that needs an I.D. CARD which we don’t have. All we start the game with is a BRACELET that has a button on it (I have yet to get the button to do anything).

I ended up having to go into Patience Mode and dutifully made my verb list; fortunately, the game is quite clear about if a verb is understood or not.

The parser only understands the first three letters of each word, so SWING is actually SWITCH and UNLIGHT is really just UNLOCK. I’m unclear if SNIFF is really that word or something else (surely SMELL would be more likely if that was important?)

In the process of doing all that and starting to apply every verb on every item, the countdown to doom started to close in so I waited for the axe to fall.

After enough brute force I realized that you can MOVE TELEPORTER. I was clearly visualizing it wrong.

The PASSAGEWAY is then revealed. Behind it is a store room with a shovel and ID card.

(Even with the “bigger on the inside” aspect, is the TARDIS really the sort of thing that can be shoved around? And if it isn’t the TARDIS — and the Dr. Who references are very approximate so that’s fair — wouldn’t a smaller version not be able to hide a passage?)

No reason to linger more, I suppose; using INSERT CARD while in the teleporter causes an “odd feeling” and upon leaving you find yourself somewhere else.

The planet consists (so far) of a mostly linear set of puzzles. To the south there are some bricks on a road, and if you LOOK you find a GOLD one.

Given this is probably a Wizard of Oz reference, I can again assert the author was just not worrying about canon. Mind you, the extended Dr. Who canon technically has the Time Lord in the same universe as Star Trek and the Transformers.

Going a bit farther south there is an unfinished wall. My verb list helpfully had BUILD on it so I tried BUILD WALL, finding out the gold brick was too heavy and caused the whole thing to fall over. This made a hole, allowing entrance to a swamp.

The swamp forms a very minor maze of sorts (not really, but I still had to drop objects to map it); the important thing is that you can DIG in two spots to reveal some BLUE POWDER and YELLOW POWDER.

Taking the prizes and heading back to the road, there’s a branch leading to a field. The field has a lake and also has a branch going up to a mountain with a cave.

Jumping into the lake with the powder is deadly:

This is intended as a hint, rather than as a punishment to the player.

The cave has a flask and a boulder. The boulder is described as having something behind it but MOVE is ineffective.

This is where the powder comes into play. You need to

a.) drop both powders off — you can do it right at the boulder
b.) go back to the lake and FILL FLASK
c.) return with the full flask and EMPTY FLASK (again, the verb list was helpful in making it so I didn’t have to hunt for the right syntax)

As long as both powders are in place an explosion will destroy the boulder and you can go in further. (If only one of the powders is there, it will just dissolve.)

The box does not want to OPEN (“I CANT DO THAT…YET.”) and going farther south leads to a locked door.

I am now stuck here, with no key (time-linked or otherwise). I assume I missed something with the bracelet/button combo possibly? Or I forgot to dig in a spot. Given the opening with moving the teleporter I don’t want to assume it will be easy to make progress, but I certainly don’t want hints yet.

I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts are needed for context.

Via the Internet Archive. The “Back-Up Program Certificate” is intended for getting one (1) copy for back-up use in case the original disk gets busted.

It’s hard to give a “narrative” of everything that happened because I had found most of the map already; progressing to the end involved finding the extra hidden pieces, plus one extra annoyance at the end which we’ll get to.

Let’s talk about the mansion (or at the game sometimes switches to, house) first. The new rooms are marked in red:

I spent a significant amount of time eye-balling the verb list I had made and trying every action I thought was reasonable on every object I thought was reasonable.

DIG, CLIMB, READ, BREAK, OPEN, DRINK, EAT, LIGHT, UNLOCK, LOCK, SIT, FEED, JUMP, PRESS, PUT, PUSH, PULL, TURN, ROTATE, MOVE, SLEEP, CLOSE, EXAMINE, LEAVE, KICK, KNOCK, STAND, PLAY, ENTER, PICK, LIFT, EMPTY, MELT, PRY

For example, upstairs there is a globe, and I realized I hadn’t tried to ROTATE it, which seems a reasonable thing to apply to a globe.

You can BREAK GLOBE (putting a “SMALL HOLE” in the bottom) and then do ROTATE GLOBE again to get a RUBY to fall out, yielding one of the glorious treasures.

Downstairs, at the statue I was having trouble with, I had tried PUSH but apparently not PULL:

This opens a secret room with a bracelet (more treasure) plus a stool. I already knew the picture in the study had been described as out of reach, so I decided to try to drop it there and STAND ON STOOL. While the picture still can’t be taken, I went back to the verb list and hit paydirt with MOVE.

This yields a SILVER CANDLEABRA and is the last treasure just lying about the house where things get stored.

Up next comes the parachute. I had theorized two posts ago that while the parachute is fatal from the opening chasm, it might still work elsewhere, but I hadn’t systematically tried it out yet. The parachute was next to message about “following in my footsteps” and I realized a cave near a fissure had footsteps leading to it, so it was a very good candidate to try:

Oho! The area this lands in includes a bottle of rare wine (treasure) a message (“hot or cold, warm or cool, the sapphires free if you can find the tool”) which is supposed to be a hint. You go via one-way exit back up to the “random exits” room.

I say “supposed to” be a hint because it led me astray for a while. I did realize where they were: you see them if you examine the icicle in the ice room. However, I thought the hint meant I just need to apply the right tool directly to the icicle (or rather, because tools sometimes get used passively, apply all the possible verbs while holding as many tools as possible).

I was looking in the wrong direction. I needed to go back to the furnace, with a dial I had attempted to TURN but was denied. Just like the FLOOR BOARDS, this was a case with a deceptive parser message; TURN DIAL is right, it just can only be done while holding the PLIERS (which I thought I was holding but I had apparently juggled them to my storage pile while testing other things).

With this done, you can go back to where the icicle was and nab the treasure.

The melting ice also reveals an exit to the north, leading to yet another treasure (a goblet). I did not catch this at first because I had already thoroughly done mapping via testing exits, and that route didn’t occur to me as a “future exit” that I should mark down.

Back at where the furnace was, another path led up to a Venus flytrap. As Matt W. guessed in the comments, the burger back at the house works to satiate it; it drops a rare stamp when you do so and opens a path by.

Before showing what is just past, I should highlight an item I’ve mentioned already but given no detail on: a magazine you can find by digging into some sand. The contents seem cryptic and I originally thought they could be an Easter egg style reference akin to the magazine in Crowther/Woods.

Just past the flytrap is a computer room (the door is locked, but the key that unlocked the main gate also unlocks this door). While this game is “modern” so it doesn’t feel comparatively jarring, I’m still reminded of Microsoft Adventure tossing a hacker’s den in the game for some reason.

I also got stumped for a very strange reason. Here was my initial conception of the map:

To be clear, this is WRONG.

Take a look at the room description and see if you can spot my mistake:

My brain, zeroing in on “the only exit lies to the north”, assumed the other directional references (“disk drive” to the east, “printer” to the west, “computer” to the south) were positional references and not actual directions that you can take. I’m going to blame myself for this one, mostly — except the parser’s non-responsiveness was such that I could refer to the printer and computer and disk drive in such a way it wasn’t obvious they were far away!

With the extra rooms filled in, the computer wasn’t difficult to get started. First, the disk from outdoors needs to go into a drive that has two buttons (push red button to start, blue button to open, PUT DISK IN DRIVE, blue button to close). Then the computer has a LOAD button that must be pressed, and three prompts must be given responses based on the magazine buried in the sand:

Without the magazine this would be a hassle, since there wasn’t a way to realize where to hunt for the missing information.

The printer then gives a PRINTOUT which I showed in my last post: a map of a maze.

Let’s jump ahead to that — remember from last time you need to pry the FLOOR BOARDS / FLOORBOARDS, causing you to fall down into a new area. Heading north goes past a bridge over lava and into a maze.

Inside the maze is a violin and a power pack. (I never used the power pack. I assume it recharges the lamp, but I never got low enough during normal play to worry; I only had it start to flicker when I was first making my map and testing every single exit in every single room to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Ha. Ha ha.)

Leaving then goes through the iron panel I was puzzled about:

As I suspected, I was essentially done with everything here. I had in fact found all the treasures:

I was short some points, and completely baffled as to why. I went through the walkthrough on CASA and combed through “drop” messages looking for the list of treasures, double-confirming I wasn’t missing anything. I eventually resorted to just restarting the game and running through the walkthrough wholesale, before realizing I had missed passing over the quicksand.

GET BOULDER and the like (which tried before) failed. I might assume PICK here means “apply pickaxe” except this action works even if you aren’t holding the pickaxe. I have no idea how to visualize what is happening.

I bestow the title of Second Worst Spot in the Game. Passing through is otherwise completely optional since there’s another way around.

I think, based on what Roger Durrant was alluding to in my comments, if you are short the points here but then take care of the boulder, you win the game right on the spot. This feels rather more unsatisfying than dropping off the final treasures, but since I was just repeating the walkthrough I took it all the way to the end.

Despite the hiccups already mentioned I did enjoy myself overall; there was a sense of combing for clues that other Treasure Hunt crawlers from this era tend not to have (with notable exception: some of the additions made to Crowther/Woods, like in Adventure 430, but most of those aren’t consistent with the rest of the game). I could see leaning in the direction of Mansion Adventure and making a Columbo Goes on a Dungeon Crawl game with lots of backtracking and cross-checking details.

Other than the obvious follow-up of Crime Stopper, I don’t see a clear link with the rest of Dan Kitchen’s output. Garry’s reverse engineering eventually led to him getting hired by Activision; Dan Kitchen went to Activision as well. Dan did still work on some Apple II games, most notably on the ports of Little Computer People and (Activision’s) Gamemaker.

I’ve combed over Dan Kitchen’s credits and the closest he gets to another adventure game is much later in life where he is the designer on a 2010 “casual” adventure titled Romancing the Seven Wonders: Taj Mahal (think hidden object puzzles, tangrams, etc.)

Via Mobygames.

At least in a business sense, the fact Garry and Dan founded a company early is important; it granted the independence to outlast Activision imploding after its transformation into Mediagenic, such that Dan’s credits are given to over 150 games, and he still remains active in the industry, with a recent release of a new Atari 2600 game, Casey’s Gold.

Coming up: Dr. Who, followed by a Western, followed by some naughty games courtesy a company in Ohio (with ads saucy enough to kick up an angry letter to a magazine editor).

(My previous posts on this game are needed for context.)

I’m hovering near the ending, but I think it will be better for me to finish before I give all the discoveries. I wanted here to focus on something I found relatively late — so late I suspect I might only have one or two puzzles to go — and it ended up being a uniquely horrendous parser moment that’s worth close attention.

Title screen from the Commodore 64 version of the game.

This goes back to the above-ground part of the game around the mansion. I had by then discovered a few secrets inside, but I had already discarded the shed outside as being a mere container of objects and not of secrets. This is for good reason:

The only thing that seemed somewhat suspicious, the FLOOR BOARDS, did not even exist as a noun.

Here’s the issue: while the game does not let you refer to BOARDS or FLOOR BOARDS (following the exact spelling of the game), it does let you refer to FLOORBOARDS.

The “nothing under” is already pretty deceptive but at least the noun her is acknowledged (note this problem wouldn’t have occurred had it been a five-letter parser rather than a six-letter parser!) But wait, there’s more! … if you try to LIFT FLOORBOARDS the game simply says

YOU CAN’T DO THAT.

which the game normally does anyway for any other use of the verb! However, if you happen to also be holding the crowbar from underground, the game passively uses the crowbar and you can get inside (using either LIFT or PRY).

To recap, this is spectacularly bad in multiple layers:

a.) first off, the noun conveyed in the text is not the same spelling as what the parser is required

b.) even if you have the right spelling, the verb LOOK UNDER acts as if it doesn’t hide anything

c.) even if you have the right action, if you aren’t holding the crowbar you get a deceptive message

I’ve seen instances of each of these three (noun mismatch, deceptive response to a descriptive action, deceptive response to an action the game doesn’t consider valid) but I’m failing to remember a case where I had all three at once.

I needed a walkthrough. If this was one of a restricted number of rooms I might have persisted a bit longer with at least my noun troubles, but keep in mind this is one location of many, and in many cases room description elements are just there for color.

The only thing that saves the moment slightly is the roaring sound. That’s supposed to indicate that this is very close a lava flow river that is below. Heading north leads to…

YOU ARE NOW IN A TREMENDOUS UNDERGROUND CHAMBER THROUGH WHICH A RAGING LAVA RIVER FLOWS. THE RIVER ORIGINATES FROM A LARGE CRACK IN THE EASTERN WALL OF THE CHAMBER ANO DISAPPEARS INTO A LARGE ABYSS IN THE FLOOR TO THE WEST. TO THE NORTH, A RICKETY WOODEN FOOTBRIDGE SPANS THE LAVA RIVER ABOUT 10′ ABOVE ITS SURFACE. STEAM RISES FROM THE RIVER ANO FILLS THE CHAMBER. A PATH LEADS SOUTH.

…which is vivid but wasn’t quite worth it.

Past the bridge is a maze. At least stalling on the “floor boards” puzzle gave me enough time I already had this printout from another puzzle by the time I arrived at the maze.

Likely my finale in my next post!

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

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.

April 5 (Saturday) Both co-editors on a panel about the anthology at Baltimore’s CityLit Festival, Lord Baltimore Hotel, Hanover Suite A Mezzanine, 11:30am-12:30pm.

Previous Events

November 11 (Monday): Both editors spoke at the University of Virginia 5 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, register on Zoom. 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.

This continues from my previous post.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure games.

I’ve revealed enough of the map that it is time for an update. Last time I left off on entering the mansion depicted on the title screen.

Unlike, say, Windmere Estate, there’s not many rooms at the house itself; the underground is where most of the rooms are. The game also seems to keep up a fairly high room-to-important-object number, and I have to add the “seems to” because there’s details in the room description that the parser technically recognizes. That doesn’t mean anything will happen with them, though!

Just to illustrate the inherent issue, here’s me attempting to get something to happen in the hallway with stairs and a statue:

On the map I marked a chandelier in a drawing room just because it was the only item in the room of importance, and in the parlor I zeroed in on the picture (GET PICTURE: “I CAN’T REACH IT”) but I’m just guessing here. This is the inherent problem with having a game where manipulatable objects fall in the room description; because the parser isn’t going to handle any of the “non-working” objects with more than default messages the amount of effort it takes to find a secret gets multiplied.

Also, there’s a burger in the abandoned kitchen full of cobwebs. It is safe to eat (“THANK YOU! IT WAS DELICIOUS!”) although it might need to be used on an obstacle.

Upstairs there’s a “small bedroom” (SLEEP BED: “I HOPE YOU’RE RESTED NOW!”) and a study with a ladder that can be climbed.

The ladder leads to a trap door with rusted hinges; the oil can from out in the shed can be used to OIL HINGES and go inside.

The cupola is where the treasures go. Once again we have a scenario with a “Treasure Hunt” where it feels more like the player is redecorating rather than scarfing for profit. (The type-in Spelunker from 1979 remains the only case I’ve come across that does actual currency conversion even though treasure gets hawked in CRPGs all the time.)

In order to get underground you need to visit that suspicious stump outside I mentioned last time, but first, an attempt at using the parachute, back at that elaborately-described chasm.

I don’t know if we’re intended to fix the parachute — no verbs I tried had any effect — or if this is all a big red herring. (Or, alternately, there’s a place later where the parachute will open properly.) While I’m at it, here’s the verb list as I have it so far:

DIG, CLIMB, READ, BREAK, OPEN, DRINK, EAT, LIGHT, UNLOCK, LOCK, SIT, FEED, JUMP, PRESS, PUT, PUSH, PULL, TURN, ROTATE, MOVE, SLEEP, CLOSE, EXAMINE, LEAVE, KICK, KNOCK, STAND, PLAY, ENTER, PICK, LIFT, EMPTY, MELT, PRY

Noteworthy, KICK but no other method of hitting things (no SMASH or KILL or ATTACK), both SIT and STAND, LIFT (which is often its own isolated thing to find secrets), and MELT. None of these suggest repairing a parachute even with the right items.

Back in the forest there was a stump that didn’t react to any of my commands, but I hadn’t tried it on the shovel yet. DIG does not work on its own; it needs a target. It also isn’t a single-use item because I’ve already used it twice more, so I’m now keeping constant lookout for sandy and/or unstable ground.

The underground is designed along the lines of long tunnels rather than dense interconnections. Starting from the bottom of a long hole, headed north there is an intersection, and essentially three different routes:

a.) east past some GOLD TOOTHPICKS to a Quarry. The quarry has a pickaxe (which I haven’t put to use yet) and a large boulder, but it is possible to push the boulder out of the way…

…revealing another room with treasure (a small chamber with a necklace) which appears to be a dead-end.

b.) down to a place with many passages where you are invited to “choose at random”; this does the Crowther/Woods trick of sometimes having an exit loop you back to the room you’re in rather than a secondary destination.

From here, one side passage just leads to a “cubbyhole” with a rare painting, but three others are or seem to relate to puzzles.

To the northwest, there is a compass on the floor. With it in hand, you see it start spinning as you get closer to an electric generator and a computer. The HARD DRIVE found outdoors is suggestive but I haven’t been able to find any verbs that use the two together.

To the southwest, there’s a furnace with a red dial. I have not found any way of interacting with the dial.

To the west, there’s a venus flytrap. Not much to say here; I probably need to feed it.

Backtracking to the junction near the start, going north isn’t a full-fledged route because of some quicksand in the way. It could be a puzzle but there’s a room later that might just be the other side. I’ll still keep it in mind if any obvious traversal methods arise.

c.) Going west from the starting junction first passes through a “frozen ice” room with a giant icicle (I’m guessing MELT comes into player there followed by a “jade ring” and a long hall of ugly art.

Is this purely for atmosphere? I have found no way to refer to the body of the artist.

Heading farther in, there’s a bearskin rug in a “fur trapper” room, and two curious rooms dedicated to a “music student”.

The piano can be played (“IT IS VERY OUT OF TUNE”) but I haven’t otherwise been able to interact with either room past picking up the platinum record (a treasure). The iron panel to the northwest is particularly curious as it seems like it ought to be hiding another exit but again none of my verbs have been much use. Out of anywhere I’ve seen so far here I’d expect it to be a magical effect (playing some sort of instrument? … but not the piano, which can’t be moved).

Also near this route is a “white sand” room which can be dug into using the shovel, revealing a magazine. The magazine’s description is esoteric enough I think it might be intended to mirror the magazine in Crowther/Woods (which was intended for use with the “last lousy point”).

Moving on to the last area I’ve explored:

The most memorable room here (for me, in terms of description) is of a dead explorer in a corner with a crowbar. I have yet to find a use for the crowbar although PRY is a verb.

This is followed by a mostly linear sequence of rooms, although off one branch is a “wall of lava” which may or may not be traversable, and there’s two more fissures where you can jump to your death if you feel so inclined.

Following all the way down there’s a dead end and a pit. You can dig into the pit and find a tusk, which counts as another treasure.

I think this is the end of the line here.

That was a big chunk, so to summarize:

I have, gathering from above and below-ground, a CAN OF OIL, RUSTY SHOVEL, BRASS LAMP, HARD DISK, RUSTED PLIERS, SMALL PARACHUTE, SMALL METAL CROWBAR, and COMPASS. I now have a variety of treasures (including some GOLD DOUBLOONS in a CHEST I neglected to mention) and none seem like the sort of item to be used a puzzle; I should still test them for magical effects. (However, there’s no WAVE or other verb that would naturally seem to apply! Maybe everything is “realistic” barring the giant Venus flytrap.) As far as obstacles or at least rooms of interest go, there’s the just-mentioned Venus flytrap, the computer with generator, the furnace, a weirdly decorated corridor, some quicksand, a cold room with an icicle, and a couple places that can be jumped into (currently resulting in doom, but I need to test the parachute out more). I also should do another pass on the mansion as surely something like the picture will shake loose a secret.

The game’s manual implies this is a game about finding hidden things, perhaps more than overcoming outright blatant obstacles.

CRYSTAL CAVERNS is subtle, complex, and devious. Imagination and persistence are your most valuable tools. Pick up anything that looks vaguely useful. Move, dig under or open anything that appears suspicious…or rattles.

The Steam Spring Sale is here, and you can find all of our games discounted until March 20th, including the Nebula finalist games!

We are thrilled to announce that The Ghost and the Golem, by Benjamin Rosenbaum, and Restore, Reflect, Retry by Natalia Theodoridou are finalists for Best Game Writing in the 60th Annual Nebula Awards, and both games are on sale for 40% off until March 20th!

The Ghost and the Golem is a 450,000 word historical fantasy novel by Benjamin Rosenbaum. Can your magic amulet save your Jewish village from destruction? Uncover the truth and forge alliances with soldiers, bandits, anarchists, and demons!

Restore, Reflect, Retry is a 90,000 word interactive horror novel by Natalia Theodoridou. You’ve played this game before. It’s a haunted game about a haunted game. You may not remember, but the game remembers you. I remember you.

To celebrate, we are also putting every previous Nebula Finalist game on sale:

The Bread Must Rise
Vampire: The Masquerade—Sins of the Sires
The Luminous Underground
The Road to Canterbury
The Magician’s Workshop
Rent-A-Vice
The Martian Job

Check out our Nebula Finalists bundle on Steam for an even bigger discount!

This is the seventh year that there has been a Nebula award for game writing—and the sixth year that Choice of Games authors have been finalists. Past Choice of Games Nebula finalists are: James Beamon and Stewart C. Baker for The Bread Must Rise, Natalia Theodoridou for Vampire: The Masquerade—Sins of the Sires and Rent-A-Vice, Phoebe Barton for The Luminous Underground, Kate Heartfield for The Road to Canterbury and The Magician’s Workshop, and M. Darusha Wehm for The Martian Job.

We also want to congratulate Choice of Games authors Stewart C. Baker, Phoebe Barton, James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Naca Rat, Natalia Theodoridou, and M. Darusha Wehm for being finalists this year for their writing on the game A Death in Hyperspace.

Since 1965, the Nebula Awards have been given annually to the best works of science fiction and fantasy published that year, as voted on by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). The 60th Annual Nebula Awards ceremony will be streamed live during the 2025 Nebula Conference, June 7, 2025. Stay tuned for more!

Daniel Kitchen published two adventure games in 1982 through Hayden Books. One of them, Crime Stopper (written with Barry Marx), I’ve already covered here. While I’ve discussed Hayden before, I haven’t really talked about Dan Kitchen himself. To do things properly I should discuss the whole trio of Kitchen brothers: Steve, Garry, and Dan. So before we start looking for caverns, let’s go back to the late 60s–

The Kitchen brothers lived in New Jersey with a father who loved electronics; enough supplies were lying around that Steve (the oldest) built a home-made computer from parts in the basement. Steve went on to work for Wickstead Design, an electronics design firm; Garry (the next oldest) followed. Garry had inclination more as an artist and

I had no engineering experience so I joined the company as low man on the totem pole, getting lunch for people, running errands and learning how to solder and build electronic prototypes.

He started attending college the same time with a major in art, but became engrossed enough in the electronics side he switched to electronics engineering in his sophomore year.

Wickstead as a company became interested in electronic games in 1977 due to the release of the mega-hit Mattel Football.

Via eBay, $1499.99 or Best Offer.

Wickstead bid on — and won — a project from Parker Brothers to develop the product Wildfire, an electronic pinball game. Wildfire was originally invented by Bob and Holly Doyle using a microcomputer but the Wickstead’s commission was to turn it into an inexpensive toy going for $7. While the Wickstead had software expertise they didn’t have hardware, so they hired a contractor for the code:

The engineers started working on the hardware while the software consultant (who had a full-time job) wrote code on paper by hand, dropping it off at our office in the evening. My task was to type his code into the microprocessor development system. As the deadline approached, we still did not have running software, though the contractor assured us that the program was almost complete. Finally, he came to our office one night announcing that he had the last hand-written sheets, which he gave them to me to type in the system. We programmed a chip with the program, plugged it into our circuit board and nothing happened. No lights, no sound, no flippers, no ball. He pronounced that he knew what was wrong (Eureka!), changed a few lines of code, and we tried again. Still nothing. This went on for hours and hours and then days and days and we began to wonder if this guy had any idea how to write software.

Garry ended up having to step in and learn how to code and Wildfire managed to be finished on schedule.

Dan followed his brothers to the company in 1979, and was also there while Garry designed his next product (Bank Shot), an electronic pool game which seemed like the next logical step after pinball.

Around this time the oldest brother (Steve) left for California, and Garry obtained an interest in the Atari 2600. He reverse-engineered the system, and using an Apple II, made the game Space Jockey as a test in 1980. (This game was eventually published in 1982, but that’s ahead of our story.)

A few months later, in the basement of Garry’s home, Dan and Garry founded a company: Imaginative Systems Software. They wanted to focus on the Apple II, but their first paying job (through Hayden) was a port of Reversal (an Othello clone) to the Atari 400. This led to a more lucrative contract after for six Apple II games, which ended up being Crystal Caverns, Crime Stopper, Laser Bounce, Bellhop, Shuttle Intercept and Kamikaze.

Dan had gotten an Apple II the same year he joined Wickstead (1979) and was able to help crank out the games in assembly language. He was a “big fan of Microsoft Adventure and all of Scott Adams’ games”, hence the text adventures. Crystal Caverns earned him $6000, and one of Garry’s friends (Barry Marx) came up with the concept and story for the follow-up game, Crime Stopper.

Softalk, November 1982.

Crystal Caverns is more of a classical Crowther/Woods style romp. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; while the originality of Crime Stopper was refreshing, the complex series of events ended up breaking and not only was I unable to finish the game, the walkthrough I was using (via The Book of Adventure Games) only was able to trigger the ending on two out of six tries. A classical Treasure Hunt (find the valuable objects, drop them in the right room) is less likely to break.

CRYSTAL CAVERNS is an adventure game for the sleuth with an appetite for mystery, danger and buried treasure. Somewhere buried in a deserted old mansion lie treasures of priceless value. But to find them you must embark on a perilous journey riddled with pitfalls, dead ends, and deadly surprises.

In order to complete the adventure you must seek out the treasures hidden throughout the mansion and caverns below and stash them in just the right spot in the mansion.

While the Kitchen original was for Apple II a port was eventually made for Commodore 64. I am sticking with the original.

While the very original Apple II had only a very tiny amount of memory (4k) it tended to be expanded to 48k, that is, 3 times the capacity of a TRS-80. So while Dan Kitchen liked both Scott Adams and Adventure, the capabilities of the Apple meant he didn’t have to stick with super-minimalism, and in fact the start of the game has a bunch of rooms just for scenery which revels in long descriptions.

For example, heading straight north from the starting point leads to a vivid room description which could represent a hint of sorts but mostly is an opportunity to drop some long prose along the lines of the volcano room in Adventure.

It’s a nice contrast after playing a VIC-20 game! The starting outdoors map is the sort where the author is loathe to have some exits get blocked off (because why would they be blocked off outdoors?) but the general effect is a lot of confusing one-way exits:

I’m keeping my map with these in case the exits become important later (for optimizing moves, maybe) but here’s a simplified version:

The only important parts (so far) are a room with a “hard disk”, a parachute in a room with a message…

…and a path ending at an “odd shaped key”.

The stump in the screenshot looks like it might be important, but it has rebuffed my attempts to interact with it.

The key can then be taken to the front gate to unlock in, revealing the inner area by the mansion.

Most of this seems to be just meant to build atmosphere. In the environs you can scoop up a busted pair of pliers, as well as a can of oil and shovel from a shed.

The boarded up back door has a carving; I don’t know if it is intended to be busted through later (if so, probably from the other side).

The hint indicates you can knock at the front door.

From here the map gets fairly expansive so this is a good place to pause until I’ve got the lay of the land. Despite bog-standard gameplay I’m enjoying myself a little more than Crime Stoppers so far; I’m not being paranoid about a time limit or softlocking my game early and there’s no need to wait for a subway to pass. It’s less of a “regular story” but pure exploration still can hold my interest in games that put effort into their atmosphere.

 When it comes to limits in Hugo, authors are most familiar with the static limits that can be viewed or modifiable ones that can be set at compilation time.  If a game needs more arrays or routines than the system default, great, we change a value and we're good to go.

There are other limits in Hugo to be aware of, though, as discovered by Robb Sherwin.  More than a year ago, he noticed that some rooms defined late in the code in his WIP were not accessible.  I had a chance to use the Hugo Debugger on it and could see how, for no discernible reason, the code execution would just go off the rails once it reached the applicable object.  Changing the order of file inclusion made this object accessible while presumably breaking something else.

We figured at the time that some limit (besides the ones already mentioned) was being overwritten, resulting in a pocket of a corrupted code.  We couldn't deduce which limit we were running into, though.   It was time to consult either Kent Tessman himself or someone else well-versed with the Hugo file format.   We try to not bother Kent too much, though, as creating Hugo shouldn't be a CURSE OF ENDLESS QUESTIONS.  He has more important, family-providing things to attend to (buy Fade In Professional Screenwriting Software today!).   Similarly, we didn't want to bother others who have already done so much for Hugo, so the issue just kind of sat for a while.

Recently, it came up again and we tried to look at the problem with fresh eyes.  I pointed Robb to  Juhana Leinonen's Hugo .hex file inspector page, which verified that objects were redirecting to other things.

He also brought the issue up to Kent around this time, and Kent suggested that either the dictionary or properties table was the culprit.  Robb took out some words and things, and voila, everything works now.

So, the problem was solved, but I still wanted to find out what tools Hugo authors have to check for this.    The issues comes down to the design of the Hugo .hex file, which allocates 64K to the dictionary, special words, array space, events, properties, and objects each.  Hugo was designed to make games playable on 16-bit devices and these limits reflect that.  In Robb's case, he was surpassing that 64K dictionary limit.

One of the quirky things about Hugo is that it has a lot of great features that the documentation doesn't fully explain- either their usage or the situations in which something is especially useful.  Despite the fact that the compiler didn't complain about a too-big dictionary table, I figured that there must be something in there since, in my opinion, Kent really did a great job in planning for a lot of scenarios.

So before I wrote this post, I thought I'd look over the compiler switch options again (since there are several that most Hugo authors rarely use), and indeed, there is a -u switch that shows the memory usage of a compiled game.

Here is an example of a memory usage readout:

          (Top:  $013F44)

+-----------------+---------------+

| Text bank       | $001054 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Dictionary      |   $0B60 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Special words   |   $0080 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Array space     |   $0CE0 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Event table     |   $0010 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Property table  |   $0680 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Object table    |   $0700 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Executable code | $00FB60 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Grammar table   |   $0D00 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Header          |   $0040 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

        (Bottom:  $000000)  

So, the values are in hex so authors have the extra step of converting them to decimal, but hey, it can give us a general idea if we're approaching any of those table size limits.

At some point, I will probably take a look at the compiler source and see if it's within my simple capabilities to check for these limits.   In the meantime, I'll probably add a page to Hugo By Example drawing attention to this.   Of course, this whole issue only happens in a game with a lot of stuff so it's possible that Robb will be the only one to ever run into it!

Our new game, EXPELLED!, launches on iOS, Switch, and PC and Mac today!

You play as Verity Amersham, a scholarship girl at a top boarding school in England, 1922.

A School Prefect has been pushed out of a window, and everyone's blaming you. You have one day to clear your name, find the true culprit - or find someone else to take the blame for you.

Building off 2021's Overboard!, Expelled! drops you into the shoes of your protagonist and lets you go. Explore anyway. Sneak around, steal, lie, blackmail, befriend -- approach things however you want.

But be warned: the other characters have feelings, opinions and memories, and they're watching you right back. This is a detective game - but it's also a living, breathing world.

Meet the characters

Verity Amersham

Verity was born in a factory town in the North of England, but she dreams of being an actress in the West End. If she's kicked out of school that dream will die - especially when she's innocent. Time, then, to stop at nothing.

Natasha Vronskaya

Nattie is Verity's roommate, a Russian with a dark and mysterious past. She definitely has something hidden in her slippers - but otherwise, she's loyal to a fault. She'll stick up for you, won't she?

Fifi Vaudeville

Fifi is Verity's nemesis - after all, who ever heard of a Sixth Former losing the lead role in the school play to a Fourth Former?

Louisa Hardcastle

Louisa is on track to be Head Girl - not from academic prowess, but from her skill on the hockey field. But now she's fallen out of a window, will she ever play hockey again?

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Rabbit Software is another case in the UK of a computer shop having a game company as a spin-off. (Previously: Program Power, A & F.) In this case, the shop was Cream Computers from Harrow (part of London), which “started to sell games by mail order” in 1982 with VIC-20 product, having

…very basic packaging — cream colored paper with a rabbit stamped on it and hand written details.

— John Willan, Sales Manager for Rabbit

The rabbit name and logo came from the company’s “mascot”, Roland.

Heather Lamont, company director, posing with Roland in Crash February 1984. (By this time they had started selling Spectrum software on top of Commodore.) The other founder (not pictured) was Alan Savage.

Their early software was all written in-house but they eventually took to publishing works sent by outside authors. In the article I’ve been referring to the software director (Terry Grant) refers to “several programs a week sent in”.

Via Retrogames.

For today’s selection (The Colonel’s House) I’m fairly sure it was one of the out-of house games. An ad in the April 1982 issue of the bimonthly publication VIC Computing already mentions soliciting games from authors, and despite giving a “top 10” and list of new releases it doesn’t mention the existence of The Colonel’s House. The February ’84 Crash article claims the company as being “close to two years old” giving it a start month of roughly February 1982.

Thus, today’s author (Robert Davis) likely did not know the people of Rabbit Software personally. The game touts itself as being the first of the seven-part Knives of Eternity series. The follow-up, according to the game’s ending description, was supposed to be called Escape from Detra 5. It does not seem to exist.

This is not quite as super-minimal like some VIC-20 games but rather uses the 16K expansion, giving the author a “normal” memory size to work with. Still, I got the strong impression I was working with a “reduced” parser as I was playing along, and I suspect Davis had exposure to Bruce Hansen’s games which were super-minimal. Rabbit Software even republished Moon Base Alpha and Computer Adventure.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

The games above were officially from the company (Victory Software); there was allegedly some kerfuffle with faulty tapes and Alan Savage supposedly loaded a van with 4000 tapes and dumped them at Victory’s solicitor in London.

Enough stalling, let’s get on with the game! The lore has us working for FREEDOM INTERNATIONAL as Agent 371 where we need to retrieve the knife in the title from the house of an “old colonel” who as an “electronics expert”, where the house is fitted with “advanced safety equipment”. While the “year” is 1990 it is otherwise unclear what the story behind the knife is, and why there are seven special ones. Do they combine to form the Megaknife of Power, perhaps? Alas, we’ll never know.

I’ve been “normalizing” my VIC-20 screens but just this once, here’s what the original aspect ratio looks like. I find this incredibly hard to read and play with so my apologies if the giant wide text gives off any nostalgia.

You start outside the house with a hammer and ladder nearby. I find it interesting how FREEDOM INTERNATIONAL has decided to outfit the agent on supposedly a vital task with almost nothing.

The door is locked but there is no alarm that triggers if you BREAK WINDOW followed by GO WINDOW to get inside.

Each action in the game (including, it appears, invalid commands the parser doesn’t understand) eats up one minute of time, and the colonel arrives at 10:00 (giving a game over).

The house consists of two floors and is not large.

On the ground floor, right away you can access a wardrobe (with a “protective suit”) and a kitchen (with a “protective lense” and a locked cupboard). One door is closed off due to a card-reader, and another blinds you if you try to enter.

Back where the clock was there’s a “shelf” described as being high up. I admit it did not occur to me to think of a shelf as a location you can put your entire body into, but that’s the right action: GO SHELF (which only works if you’re holding the ladder).

If you examine the card, it says it has writing. If you read the writing, it informs you that you just wasted a minute.

With the card in hand you can swipe your way over to a living room that has a cassette player (which will be usable later) and a projector (which is not terribly useful). While holding the “lense” you can push a button on the projector to use it, but it just warns you about the perils of missing other games by Robert Davis.

Taking care of the blinding hall requires an item from upstairs, so let’s visit up there next:

There’s a book in a bedroom that states “Book 97 is a revealing book”, a room with strange sounds (LISTEN reveals a computer voice repeating TELL ME ACCESS), a hallway with fatal gamma radiation (which we’ll get by in a moment), and a bathroom with dark glasses (guess where they go!) and a medicine bottle which only has “medicine” in a exaggerated sense.

That’s one way to stop having to worry about diseases.

Before we go dark, let’s take out the gamma radiation puzzle. I originally had the protection suit (it gets used “passively”, there’s no WEAR command) but I was baffled at there being no effect. The issue is that while you can EXAMINE some things (like the card with the useless words) there are many items where EXAMINE just repeats the room description. This was irritating me enough it through me off my normal routine so it took me a while before I thought to use EXAMINE on the suit. There’s a dial that needs to be turned, and then the protection is active.

I don’t think that’s how this is supposed to work in real life, but we’ll see some more extreme science later so I guess it fits in with the setting.

Past the radiation room (a “science lab”) there’s a Room (just “Room”) with a china doll, and smashing the doll with the hammer reveals a key.

We’re still not done with the odd computer voice, but going back downstairs, we can use the key and the glasses. First, the key, applied to the locked cupboard in the kitchen:

Again, item use is essentially passive. You can only OPEN the cupboard and the key gets used along the way. Moments like these are what remind me of the Robinson games, that did that because they had to (they used a tiny unexpanded VIC-20) whereas The Colonel’s House required a 16K expansion meaning it ought to be a little more expansive.

Inside the cupboard is a cassette; playing it with the player reveals a voice repeating THIS IS THE COLONEL over and over. This will be useful shortly.

Donning the dark glasses (via doing absolutely nothing, just holding them implies you’re wearing them), it is now safe to enter the hall that causes blinding. To the west is a library with 100 convinently numbered books; taking number 97 reveals a lever, and pulling the lever reveals a secret room.

The secret room contains a message which has the word LOCARI on it (you have to take off, er, drop the glasses first, because it is otherwise too hard to read). If you go back up and say LOCARI at the computer voice room, you’ll be informed the safe combination is “39,4”.

Back to the blinding room, heading north requires getting past a voice recognition door; the tape recorder playing I AM THE COLONEL on loop is enough to get by and find a study with a piano and a time capsule. The piano is on wheels and can roll to reveal a safe.

The time capsule incidentally says RUB ME and if you do that before dealing with the safe, you lose the game.

While you warp back home — convenient this item’s here — the game then informs you that you should have gotten the knife first!

You need to TURN 39 followed by TURN 4 on the safe to bust it open, and get what appears to be a completely unremarkable knife with no special properties whatsoever. Now rubbing the time capsule wins the game.

Alas. I’m sure the pleasure dome would’ve been fun to visit.

The Colonel’s House wasn’t terrible to cope with — most of the difficulty was in making sure to EXAMINE absolutely everything and cope with a passive parser where items get used implicitly. (I neglected to mention another bizarre feature — no room descriptions are given on navigation. You have to LOOK in every new room.)

While this ended up with a C64 port (one that clearly is ported directly enough from the VIC-20 there are word wrap errors) I have found nothing else by this author. The name is unfortunately too common for me to gather any more information. Robert Davis might be this one in Your Sinclair selling his computer in December 1990 but that’s a stretch.

I do have a little more to say about Rabbit Software, but just a little more. While they did well for themselves in the cassette-king heyday despite odd bootleg Frogger (see below) and games like The Colonel’s House, starting 1984 with ~25 members of staff, by the end of the year they had fallen apart. Alan Savage (the co-founder) got into a car accident in May and committed suicide soon after. He had 49% of the company while Heather Lamont had 51%; Ms. Lamont “vowed” that the company “will carry on”; however, by August, Rabbit went into liquidation and was later revealed to have debts exceeding £220,000. The next year they were bought by Virgin Software, leaving two unfinished projects (Jolly Roger and The Pit) dead in progress.

Somehow I’m guessing this isn’t Konami or Sega approved art. Via The Big Gift Shop.

(Perma outcome update: This prize was chosen by Vance Chance, and I developed the Roblox platforming adventure game River Rescue Obby as a spinoff from their Spring Thing 2024 game Dragon of Steelthorne. River Rescue Obby was released in August 2024.)

I'm listing here the details and conditions of a prize I'll be offering for Spring Thing 2024: a custom Roblox game based on your Spring Thing entry.

If you choose this prize, here's what happens:

I'll try your Spring Thing game. If I decide it's possible for your game, I (maybe with help from my nephew) will build a simple Roblox game based on your entry, or at least the first room or a prominent thing from it. We have a lot of Roblox building experience between us.

Qualifiers for this prize: I say "game" loosely! It will probably be an environmental toy you can walk around in. But you never know, it might have an objective to reach, or health, or a time limit, or a baddie chasing you, or a physics joke. It might be a reproduction of a location. We'll try to make something of charm based on your game, spending a week max to do so.

If you don't know Roblox, it's free to join, and the game will be pretty G-rated and explorable by anyone on Roblox at any time (which, there being millions of Roblox games, will mostly be you and people you let know about it. Plus the odd random visitor.) You'l be able to share a link to the game wherever/however you like. People only need to have a Roblox account to visit it.

* If you pick the prize, and I try your game and decide I can't produce something satisfying based on it within a week, don't be offended. Roblox suits some things and some subject matter a lot more than others. I'd let you know my decision quickly so you can pick another prize instead.

I’m calling it here. My previous posts on Keys of the Wizard are needed for context.

The main issue I ran across: what probably are serious bugs. Why “probably”: the nature of this game makes it hard to tell what is a bug or not. Let me explain in context–

Via World of Dragon.

–so I booted up difficulty 3, saved my game, and started by systematically annotating my map with the locations of enemies and items. Both can move around (the Jester, for instance, moves items) but not significantly. This let me decide on an action plan.

I tried some “clever” methods but in the end the easiest thing to do was to scrawl upon my existing map with Microsoft Paint.

I noticed, while I was going through the process above, that difficulty 3 had more traps to deal with. One room starts shrinking, one has poison darts…

…and the room that had a statue I previously thought might have some sort of secret, turned out to also be a trap; if you enter the room from below it attacks you and takes out a chunk of damage.

This turns out to be much more worrisome at difficulty 3 than 1, as the monsters … well, they don’t hit for more per hit, but they last for longer, meaning they have more time to get hits in. The overall effect of combat really is like a typing game and since you can do more damage when healthy, if you can very quickly type in many hits at the start you’ll be at an advantage.

Notice how I was in the middle of typing “BASH ORC” but got interrupted at “BA”. No, you can’t keep going and type “SH ORC”, you have to start over from the beginning. I got good at typing CYCLOPS fast.

The game features a REST mechanic, with the catch that monsters will wander while you are resting and might whale upon you if they come across you. If you go to the Sanctuary at the start, this normally isn’t a problem, with one exception: the Wizard can teleport in.

This means, theoretically, if you could kill the Wizard, you’d be safe the rest of the game. You might think that means the game has locked the means of killing the wizard behind a whole sequence of events. Certainly the unicorn hints are more lengthy to deal with this time:

lantern + mask + feather -> deathring
dagger + feather + rope -> machete
plectrum + dagger + lantern -> manacle
spoon + plectrum + rope -> map
tome + rope + feather -> lance
tome + lantern + mask -> dragonsword
rope + lantern + feather -> jug
dagger + feather + rope -> machete
lantern + feather + rope -> scroll

(The same trick that works on Minotaur works here. When you find a unicorn, save, step east, go north X times, go west, and RUB HORN. You will get a hint. Repeat for X+1, you will get a different hint. Repeat for X+2 etc. until all hints are obtained.)

However, I realized the PISTOL and the BULLET that goes with it were pretty easy to get through the way my map was generated…

Bullet is the star on the left, pistol is the star on the right. This isn’t quite as straight a shot as it looks because the first one-way door requires having used the PLECTRUM on the ZITHER in order to open it, but it still isn’t hard to grab both items.

…so I decided to make a beeline for those items first, then try the pistol out on various enemies to see which ones I could insta-assassinate. The answer is none of them. I did between either 0 or 3 points of damage (out of 255).

The orc is the easiest enemy to fight in the game. Here I did 1 point of damage.

The fact that two items need to be united for all this to work makes the effect seem baffling and was one of the points that I suspect might be a bug. (Or maybe the pistol is only super-effective if you’re holding other item X at the same time?)

I decided to switch to the old reliable, the mace. That did work although it does somewhere 30 damage max (when you aren’t hurt) down to 10 (when you’re just a little hurt). So it requires chipping away at enemies, but all the enemies do roughly the same damage back no matter if they’re an orc or a dragon. Or a wizard.

With the wizard dead, things worked as I expected: going back to the Sanctuary and using REST let me wait out my health rising all the way back to 255 with no opposition. Based on the manual, there’s no particular limit to how often you can use REST (there’s items that protect you from enemy attack with a limit, but that’s not the same thing as just trying to use the action). The problem is, even though I could restore essentially an unlimited number of health points, I could only do it once; going back to the Sanctuary later and using REST again had my health go up 0. This feels more like a bug than intentional to me.

(Aside: going north from the Sanctuary on difficulty 3 works differently than on 1. On east mode it teleports you back to the starting cabin; on difficulty 3 it teleports you to some random spot on the top floor. I found that the hedge maze area was not available in the route I had taken before, and the only way I could get in was via Sanctuary teleportation.)

I next tried making the JUG my initial priority. The JUG is on the list of items where you need other items first to do pickup (rope + lantern + feather); the items are in the open although it was a pain to wrangle all three and get to the right spot. Finally:

The jug has rum which heals you, but alas, it only works once; subsequent drinks are poison. Oh well.

Thinking some more, I decided to go for the DRAGONSWORD instead. Surely that’s a good weapon and will be more efficient than the mace?

tome + lantern + mask -> dragonsword

This is a more elaborate combination to get than the jug, because the mask is held by the cyclops. So I had to nab the mace, then club the cyclops, and then get the mask, tome and lantern together. Holding four inventory objects at the same time also requires some good health so I had to avail myself of the options I had (teleports still do healing, so I used one of those, plus I got zapped to the hedge maze once with a food ration and I used that). Finally:

I was excited to see at least the dragon fall before me in a flurry of blows, but no: the sword does zero damage, no matter what enemy I used it on or attack verb I tried.

Surely this is a bug?

Hence, that complicated sequence was for nothing: the best thing to do was to grab the mace which was already out in the open and use that for braining services instead. I suspect something went awry with the game’s tables.

I tried fiddling with the keys in lots of places, but never got them to do anything, sorry. I also found one of the unicorn’s hints told me objects I needed to pick up the Cyclops’s eye (which it drops upon dying) but I was able to pick it up just fine without any extra help.

I never even saw the dust.

If I had faith the game was behaving like it was supposed to I might try a little bit longer, but no, this is a good stopping point. I think I’ve extracted most of the “wisdom” anyway, so let me segue into a discussion of the adventure-roguelike.

It has been tried quite a few times now, and never with great success. In historical terms, I think the main issue was (unlike Adventure itself, or RPGs glomming onto Wizardry/Ultima) there wasn’t a good model to copy. I don’t think any of the authors even heard of each other, so they were all re-inventing their own personal wheels with their strengths and weaknesses. Mines to kick things off had very tight logic in terms of object and puzzle placement, but given that was the only real element to the game it became mechanical as a story. Lugi seemed promising, but puzzle solving was hard to do systematically. Minotaur did a good job making the map seem varied even when it was fixed but had to go a route frustrating design to even work (when Keys of the Wizard tried to tone down the frustrating design — most especially by ditching the magic system — it created a gaping hole where gameplay was supposed to go).

The Queen of Phobos got the closest I’ve seen to what might be the “ideal”, except it had too much fixed to really count as a full adventure-roguelike. Still:

a.) the game has four thieves you have to deal with

b.) each thief has a weakness that can be used to defeat it (like beer for one)

c.) alternately, there’s a grenade you can throw to take down any thief…

d.) …or even better, if two thieves are in the same room, you can take down two at the same time.

e.) If all else fails, you can cross your fingers and try your best to evade them.

I don’t think the key here is just multiple options, but multiple options which have different natures than just “solving the puzzle”. The beer option works well as long as you give it to the right enemy…

THE LOOTER IS HIGHLY INSULTED AND KILLS YOU. THEY MUST NOT DRINK BEER WHERE HE COMES FROM.

…but because the grenade can hit two enemies at once, it isn’t precisely symmetrical to using the beer (compare with solving a puzzle vs. using a wish in Wishbringer). Evading also results in a much different gameplay effect than either of the other two options.

So I’ll say a good adventure-roguelike will offer multiple solutions to puzzles but do it in such a way that the ramifications of how the solve is enacted results in different world-states. One solution to a problem might involve explosives but cause damage elsewhere (and a brand-new problem) while a subtler approach might avoid structural damage but corrupt the player’s mind with dark power which comes into play later. With enough “ramification effects” two playthroughs would end up being very different; the player themselves would be used as a source of chaos. While this isn’t the only thing needed to make such a game work, I’ve never seen it used systematically in combination with full randomization and I suspect it might make the genre a little more plausible.

In December of 1997, Interplay Entertainment released Descent to Undermountain, the latest licensed Dungeons & Dragons computer game. It’s remembered today, to whatever extent it’s remembered at all, as one of the more infamous turkeys of an era with more than its share of over-hyped and half-baked creations, a fiasco almost on par with Battlecruiser 3000AD or Daikatana. The game was predicated on the dodgy premise that Dungeons & Dragons would make a good fit with the engine from Descent, Interplay’s last world-beating hit — and also a hit that was, rather distressingly for Brian Fargo and his colleagues, more than two years in the past by this point.

Simply put, Undermountain was a mess, the kind of career-killing disaster that no self-respecting game developer wants on his CV. The graphics, which had been crudely up-scaled from the absurdly low resolution of 320 X 240 to a slightly more respectable 640 X 480 at the last minute, still didn’t look notably better than those of the five-year-old Ultima Underworld. The physics were weirdly floaty and disembodied, perhaps because the engine had been designed without any innate notion of gravity; rats could occasionally fly, while the corpses of bats continued to hover in midair long after shaking off their mortal coil. In design terms as well, Undermountain was trite and rote, just another dungeon crawl in the decade-old tradition of Dungeon Master, albeit not executed nearly so well as that venerable classic.

Computer Gaming World, hot on the heels of giving a demo of Undermountain a splashy, breathless write-up (“This game looks like a winner…”), couldn’t even muster up the heart to print a proper review of the underwhelming finished product. The six-sentence blurb the magazine did deign to publish said little more than that “the search for a good Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game continues, because Descent to Undermountain is certainly not it.” The website GameSpot was less inclined to pull its punches: after running through a damning litany of the game’s problems, it told its readers bluntly that “if you buy Descent to Undermountain after reading this, you get what you deserve.” The critical consensus has not changed over the decades since. On the clearinghouse site MobyGames, Undermountain ranks today as the thirteenth worst digital RPG ever released, out of 9085 candidates in all. Back in 1997, reviewers and gamers alike marveled that Interplay, the same company that had released the groundbreaking and aesthetically striking Fallout just weeks earlier, could follow it up so quickly with something so awful.

In its way, then, Descent to Undermountain‘s name was accidentally appropriate. For it represented the absolute nadir of Dungeons & Dragons on computers, the depth of ignominy to which all of the cookie-cutter products from SSI and others had been inexorably descending over the last five years.

Then again, as a wise person once said, there does come a point where there’s nowhere left to go but up. Less than one year after Undermountain was so roundly scorned wherever it wasn’t ignored, another Dungeons & Dragons CRPG was released amidst an atmosphere of excitement and expectation that put even the reception of Pool of Radiance to shame. Almost as surprisingly, it too bore on its box the name of Interplay, a publisher whose highs and lows in the CRPG genre were equally without parallel. So, our goal for today is to understand how Interplay went from Descent to Undermountain to Baldur’s Gate. It’s an unlikely tale in the extreme, not least in the place and manner in which it begins.

Edmonton, Alberta, is no one’s idea of a high-tech incubator. “The Gateway to the North,” as the city styles itself, was built on oil and farming. These two things have remained core to its identity, alongside its beloved Edmonton Oilers hockey team and its somewhat less beloved but stoically tolerated sub-zero winter temperatures. The frontier ethic has never entirely left Edmonton; it has more in common with Billings, Montana, than it does with coastal Canadian cities like Montreal and Vancouver.

Into this milieu, insert three young men who were neither roughnecks nor farmers. Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip didn’t know one another when they were growing up in different quarters of Edmonton in the 1980s, but they were already possessed of some noteworthy similarities. Although all three had computers in their homes and enjoyed experimenting with the machines and the games they could play from an early age — Muzyka has recorded his first two games ever as Pirate Adventure and Wizardry on the Apple II — they directed their main energies toward getting into medical school and becoming doctors. “We never conceived of the possibility that you could have a career in videogames,” says Zeschuk. “You know, we’re from Edmonton, Canada. There were no companies that did that. There were some in Vancouver, but they were just starting out, like the Distinctive Software guys who would join Electronic Arts.”

The three men finally met in medical school — more specifically, at the University of Alberta during the late 1980s. Even here, though, they didn’t become fast friends right away. Only gradually did they come to realize that they had a set of shared interests that were anything but commonplace among their classmates: all three continued to play computer games avidly whenever the pressure of their studies allowed it. Witnessing the rapid evolution of personal computers, each began to ask himself whether he might be able to combine medicine with the technology in some satisfying and potentially profitable way. Then they began to have these conversations with each other. It seemed to them that there were huge opportunities in software for educating doctors. Already in 1990, a couple of years before they graduated from medical school, they started looking for technology projects as moonlighting gigs.

They kept at it after they graduated and became family practitioners. The projects got more complex, and they hired contractors to help them out. Their two most ambitious software creations were an “Acid-Base Simulator,” which they finished in 1994, and a “Gastroenterology Patient Simulator,” which they finished the following year. As their titles will attest, these products were a long, long way from a mainstream computer game, but the good doctors would cover the intervening distance with astonishing speed.

Wanting to set themselves on a firmer professional footing in software, Muzyka, Zeschuk, and Yip founded a proper corporation on February 1, 1995. They called it BioWare, a name that reflected a certain amount of bets-hedging. On the one hand, “BioWare” sounded fine as a name for a maker of medical software like the gastroenterology simulator they were still finishing up. On the other, they thought it was just catchy and all-purpose enough to let them branch out into other sorts of products, if doing so should prove feasible. In particular, they had become very interested in testing the waters of mainstream game development. “I liked medicine a lot,” says Muzyka. “I really liked it. I’m glad I was able to help people’s lives for the years that I did practice. I did a lot of emergency medicine in under-served areas in rural Alberta. It was really hard work, but really fun, really engaging, really exciting. [But] I love videogames.”

Their medical degrees were a safety net of a sort that most first-time entrepreneurs could only wish they had; they knew they could always go back to doctoring full-time if BioWare didn’t work out. “We maxed out our debt and our credit cards,” Muzyka says. “We just kind of went for it. It was like, whatever it took, this is what we’re doing. It never occurred to us [that] there would be risk in that. For me, it was a fun hobby at that point.”

Yet some differences soon became apparent between Muzyka and Zeschuk and their third partner Augustine Yip. Although the first two were willing and able to practice medicine only on the side while they devoted more and more time and energy to BioWare, the last had moved into another stage of life. He already had children to support, and didn’t feel he could scale back his medical career to the same degree for this other, far chancier venture. Muzyka and Zeschuk would wind up buying out his share of BioWare in mid-1996.

Well before this event, in the spring of 1995, Activision’s MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat hit the gaming world with all the force of the giant killer robot on its box. Thanks not least to Activision’s work in creating bespoke versions of MechWarrior 2 for the many incompatible 3D-accelerator cards that appeared that year, it became by many metrics the game of 1995. Suddenly every publisher wanted a giant-mech game of their own. Muzyka and Zeschuk saw the craze as their most surefire on-ramp to the industry as a new, unproven studio without even an office to their name. They paid a few contractors to help them make a demo, sent it to ten publishers, and started cold-calling them one after another. Their secret weapon, says Muzyka, was “sheer stubbornness and persistence. We just kept calling.” Amazingly, they were eventually offered a development deal by nine out of the ten publishers; suffice to say that mechs were very much in favor that year. Interplay came with the most favorable terms, so the partners signed with them. Just like that, BioWare was a real games studio. Now they had to deliver a real game.

They found themselves some cut-price office space not far from the University of Alberta. Ray Muzyka:

There were only four plugs on the wall. We had a power-up sequence for the computers in the office so that we didn’t blow the circuit breaker for the whole building. Everybody would be like, “I’m on. I’m on. I’m on.” We had found by trial and error that if you turned them on in a certain order, it wouldn’t create a power overload. If you turned on the computers in the wrong order, for sure, it would just flip the switch and you had to run downstairs, get the key, and open up the electrical box. It was an interesting space.

During the first year or so, about a dozen employees worked in the office in addition to the founders. Half of these were the folks who had helped to put together the demo that had won BioWare the contract with Interplay. The other half were a group of friends who had until recently hung out together at a comic-book and tabletop-gaming shop in Grande Prairie, Alberta, some 300 miles northwest of Edmonton; one of their number, a fellow named James Ohlen, actually owned the store. This group had vague dreams of making a CRPG; they tinkered around with designs and code there in the basement. Unfortunately, the shop wasn’t doing very well. Even in the heyday of Magic: The Gathering, it was difficult to keep such a niche boutique solvent in a prairie town of just 30,000 people. Having heard about BioWare through a friend of a friend, the basement gang all applied for jobs there, and Muzyka and Zeschuk hired them en masse. So, they all came down to Edmonton, adopting various shared living arrangements in the cheap student-friendly housing that surrounded the university. Although they would have to make the mech game first, they were promised that there was nothing precluding Bioware from making the CRPG of their dreams at some point down the road if this initial project went well.

Shattered Steel, BioWare’s first and most atypical game ever, was published by Interplay in October of 1996. It was not greeted as a sign that any major new talent had entered the industry. It wasn’t terrible; it just wasn’t all that good. Damning it with faint praise, Computer Gaming World called it “a decent first effort. But if Interplay wants to provide serious competition for the MechWarrior series, the company needs to provide more freedom and variety.” Sales hovered in the low tens of thousands of units. That wasn’t nothing, but BioWare’s next game would need to do considerably better if they were to stay in business. Luckily, they already had something in the offing that seemed to have a lot of potential.

A BioWare programmer named Scott Greig  had been tinkering lately with a third-person, isometric, real-time graphics engine of his own devising. He called it the Infinity Engine. Muzyka and Zeschuk had an idea about what they might use it for.

A low background hum was just beginning to build about the possibilities for a whole new sort of CRPG, where hundreds or thousands of people could play together in a shared persistent world, thanks to the magic of the Internet. 3DO’s Meridian 59, the first of the new breed, was officially open for business already, even as Sierra’s The Realm was in beta and Origin’s Ultima Online, the most ambitious of the shared virtual worlds by far, was gearing up for its first large-scale public test. Muzyka and Zeschuk, who prided themselves on keeping up with the latest trends in gaming, saw an opportunity here. Even before Shattered Steel shipped, it had been fairly clear to them that they had jumped on the MechWarrior train just a little bit too late. Perhaps they could do better with this nascent genre-in-the-offing, which looked likely to be more enduring than a passing fancy for giant robots.

They decided to show the Infinity Engine to their friends at Interplay, accompanied by the suggestion that it might be well-suited for powering an Ultima Online competitor. They booked a meeting with one Feargus Urquhart, who had started at Interplay six years earlier as a humble tester and moved up through the ranks with alacrity to become a producer while still in his mid-twenties. Urquhart was skeptical of these massively-multiplayer schemes, which struck him as a bit too far out in front of the state of the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure. When he saw the Infinity Engine, he thought it would make a great fit for a more traditional style of CRPG. Further, he knew well that the Dungeons & Dragons brand was currently selling at a discount.  Muzyka and Zeschuk, who were looking for any way at all to get their studio established well enough that they could stop taking weekend shifts at local clinics, were happy to let Urquhart pitch the Infinity Engine to his colleagues in this other context.

Said colleagues were for the most part less enthused than Urquhart was; as we’ve learned all too well by now, the single-player CRPG wasn’t exactly thriving circa 1996. Nor was the Dungeons & Dragons name on a computer game any guarantee of better sales than the norm in these latter days of TSR. Yet Urquhart felt strongly that the brand was less worthless than mismanaged. There had been a lot of Dungeons & Dragons computer games in recent years — way too many of them from any intelligent marketer’s point of view — but they had almost all presumed that what their potential buyers wanted was novelty: novel approaches, novel mechanics, novel settings. As they had pursued those goals, they had drifted further and further from the core appeal of the tabletop game.

Despite TSR’s fire hose of strikingly original, sometimes borderline avant-garde boxed settings, the most popular world by far in which to actually play tabletop Dungeons & Dragons remained the Forgotten Realms, an unchallenging mishmash of classic epic-fantasy tropes. The Forgotten Realms was widely and stridently criticized by the leading edge of the hobby for being fantasy-by-the-numbers, and such criticisms were amply justified in the abstract. But those making them failed to reckon with the reality that, for most of the people who still played tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, it wasn’t so much a vehicle for improvisational thespians to explore the farthest realms of the imagination as it was a cozy exercise in dungeon delving and monster bashing among friends; the essence of the game was right there in its name. For better or for worse, most people still preferred good old orcs and kobolds to the mind-bending extra-dimensional inhabitants of a setting like Planescape or the weird Buck Rogers vibe of something like Spelljammer. The Forgotten Realms were gaming comfort food, a heaping dish of tropey, predictable fun. And the people who played there wouldn’t have had it any other way.

And yet fewer and fewer Dungeons & Dragons computer games had been set in the Forgotten Realms since the end of the Gold Box line. (Descent to Undermountain would be set there, but it had too many other problems for that to do it much good.) SSI and their successors had also showed less and less fidelity to the actual rules of Dungeons & Dragons over the years. The name had become nothing more than a brand, to be applied willy-nilly to whatever struck a publisher’s fancy: action games, real-time-strategy games, you name it. In no real sense were you playing TSR’s game of Dungeons & Dragons when you played one of these computer games; their designers had made no attempt to implement the actual rules found in the Player’s Handbook and Dungeons Master’s Guide. It wasn’t clear anymore what the brand was even meant to stand for. It had been diluted to the verge of meaninglessness.

But Feargus Urquhart was convinced that it was not yet beyond salvation. In fact, he believed that the market was ready for a neoclassical Dungeons & Dragons CRPG, if you will: a digital game that earnestly strove to implement the rules and to recreate the experience of playing its tabletop inspiration, in the same way that the Gold Box line had done. Naturally, such a game would need to take place in the tried-and-true Forgotten Realms. This was not the time to try to push gamers out of their comfort zone.

At the same time, though, Urquhart recognized that it wouldn’t do to simply re-implement the Gold Box engine and call it a day. Computer gaming had moved on from the late 1980s; people expected a certain level of audiovisual razzle-dazzle, wanted intuitive and transparent interfaces that didn’t require reading a manual to learn how to use, and generally preferred the fast-paced immediacy of real-time to turn-based models. If it was to avoid seeming like a relic from another age, the new CRPG would have to walk a thin line, remaining conservative in spirit but embracing innovation with gusto in all of its granular approaches. The ultimate goal would not be to recreate the Gold Box experience. It must rather be to recreate the same tabletop Dungeons & Dragons experience that the Gold Box games had pursued, but to embrace all of the affordances of late-1990s computers in order to do it even better — more accurately, more enjoyably, with far less friction. Enter the Infinity Engine.

But Urquhart’s gut feeling was about more than just a cool piece of technology. He had served as the producer on Shattered Steel, in which role he had visited BioWare several times and spent a fair amount of time with the people there. Thus he knew there were people in that Edmonton office who still played tabletop Dungeons & Dragons regularly, who had forged their friendships in the basement of a tabletop-gaming shop. He thought that a traditionalist CRPG like the one he had in mind might be more in their wheelhouse than any giant-robot action game or cutting-edge shared virtual world.

He felt this so strongly that he arranged a meeting with Brian Fargo, the Big Boss himself, whose soft spot for the genre that had put Interplay on the map a decade earlier was well known. When he was shown the Infinity Engine, Fargo’s reaction was everything Urquhart had hoped it would be. What sprang to his mind first was The Faery Tale Adventure, an old Amiga game whose aesthetics he had always admired. “It didn’t look like a bunch of building blocks,” says Fargo today of the engine that Urquhart showed him in 1996. “It looked like somebody had free-hand-drawn every single screen.”

As Urquhart had anticipated would be the case, it wasn’t hard for Fargo to secure a license from the drowning TSR to make yet another computer game with the name of Dungeons & Dragons on it. The bean counters on his staff were not excited at the prospect; they didn’t hesitate to point out that Interplay already had Fallout and Descent to Undermountain in development. Just how many titles did they need in such a moribund genre? They needed at least one more, insisted Fargo.

BioWare’s employees were astonished and overjoyed when they were informed that a chance to work on a Dungeons & Dragons CRPG had fallen into their laps out of the clear blue sky. James Ohlen and his little gang from Grande Prairie could scarcely have imagined a project more congenial to their sensibilities. Ohlen had been running tabletop Dungeons & Dragons campaigns for his friends since he was barely ten years old. Now he was to be given the chance to invent one on the computer, one that could be enjoyed by the whole world. It was as obvious to Urquhart as it was to everyone at BioWare that the title of Lead Designer must be his. He called his initial design document The Iron Throne. When a cascade of toilet jokes rained down on his head in response, Urquhart suggested the more distinctive name of Baldur’s Gate, after the city in the Forgotten Realms where its plot line would come to a climax.

The staff of BioWare, circa 1997. (Note the Edmonton Oilers jersey at front and center.) “It’s 38 kids I barely recognize, myself included,” says Lukas Kristjanson, who along with James Ohlen wrote most of the text in the game. “I look at that face and think, ‘Man, you did not know what you were doing.'”

BioWare eagerly embraced Urquhart’s philosophy of being traditionalist in spirit but modern in execution. The poster child for the ethic must surely be Baldur’s Gate’s approach to combat. BioWare faithfully implemented almost every detail of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules, complete with all of the less intuitive legacies of Gary Gygax, such as the armor-class statistic that goes down rather than up as it gets better. But, knowing that a purely turn-based system would be a very hard sell in the current market, they adopted a method of implementing them that became known as “real-time-with-pause.” Like much in Baldur’s Gate, it was borrowed from another game, a relatively obscure 1992 CRPG called Darklands, which was unique for being set in Medieval Germany rather than a made-up fantasy world.

Real-time-with-pause means that, although the usual tabletop rounds and turns are going on in the background, along with the expected initiative rolls and to-hit rolls and all the rest, it all takes place seamlessly on the computer — that’s to say, without pausing between turns, unless and until the player stops the action manually to issue new orders to her party. James Ohlen:

Ray [Muzyka] was a big fan of turn-based games, the Gold Box games, and my favorite genre was real-time strategy; I played Warcraft and Starcraft more than you can imagine. So, [real-time-with-pause] came from having to have a real-time game that satisfied fans of that genre, but also satisfied turn-based fans. Maybe I shouldn’t say it, but I was never a fan of Fallout. I liked the story and the world, but the fact it paused and took turns for moving, I never liked that. RPGs are about immersing you in their world, so the closer you get to the feeling of real the better.

The project was still in its earliest stages when Diablo dropped. “I remember when Diablo came out, the whole office shut down for a week,” says James Ohlen. Needless to say, many another games studio could tell the same tale.

The popularity of Blizzard Entertainment’s game was the first really positive sign for the CRPG genre as a whole in several years. In this sense, it was a validation for Baldur’s Gate, but it was also a risk. On a superficial level, the Diablo engine didn’t look that different from the Infinity Engine; both displayed free-scrolling, real-time environments from an isometric point of view. Blizzard’s game, however, was so simplified and streamlined that it prompted endless screaming rows on the Internet over whether it ought to qualify as a “real” CRPG at all. There was certainly no real-time-with-pause compromise in evidence here; Diablo was real-time, full stop. Given its massive success, someone at Interplay or BioWare — or more likely both — must surely have mused about dropping most of the old-school complexity from Baldur’s Gate and adopting Diablo as the new paradigm; the Infinity Engine would have been perfectly capable of bringing that off. But, rather remarkably on the face of it, no serious pressure was ever brought to bear in that direction. Baldur’s Gate would hew faithfully to its heavier, more traditionalist vision of itself, even as the people who were making it were happily blowing off steam in Diablo. The one place where Diablo did clearly influence Baldur’s Gate was a networked multiplayer mode that was added quite late in the development cycle, allowing up to six people to play the game together. Although BioWare deserves some kudos  for managing to make that work at all, it remains an awkward fit with such a text- and exposition-heavy game as this one.

As James Ohlen mentions above, the BioWare folks were playing a lot of Blizzard’s Warcraft II as well, and borrowing freely from it whenever it seemed appropriate. Anyone who has played a real-time-strategy game from the era will see many traces of that genre in Baldur’s Gate: the isometric graphics, the icons running around the edges of the main display, your ability to scroll the view independently of the characters you control, even the way that active characters are highlighted with colored circles. The Infinity Engine could probably have powered a fine RTS game as well, if BioWare had chosen to go that route.

Even more so than most games, then, Baldur’s Gate was an amalgamation of influences, borrowing equally from James Ohlen’s long-running tabletop Dungeons & Dragons campaign and the latest hit computer games, along with older CRPGs ranging from Pool of Radiance to Darklands. I hate to use the critic’s cliché of “more than the sum of its parts,” but in this case it may be unavoidable. “If you’re a Dungeons & Dragons fan, you feel like you’re playing Dungeons & Dragons, but at the same time it felt like a modern game,” says James Ohlen. “It was comparable to Warcraft and Diablo in terms of the smoothness of the interface, the responsiveness.”

Baldur’s Gate started to receive significant press coverage well over a year before its eventual release in December of 1998. Right from the first previews, there was a sense that this Dungeons & Dragons computer game was different from all of the others of recent years; there was a sense that this game mattered, that it was an event. The feeling was in keeping with — and to some extent fed off of — the buzz around Wizards of the Coast’s acquisition of TSR, which held out the prospect of a rebirth for a style of play that tabletop gamers may not have fully recognized how much they’d missed. Magic: The Gathering was all well and good, but at some point its zero-sum duels must begin to wear a little thin. A portion of tabletop gamers were feeling the first inklings of a desire to return to shared adventures over a long afternoon or evening, adventures in which everyone got to win or lose together and nobody had to go home feeling angry or disappointed.

A similar sentiment was perhaps taking hold among some digital gamers: a feeling that, for all that Diablo could be hella fun when you didn’t feel like thinking too much, a CRPG with a bit more meat on its bones might not go amiss. Witness the relative success of Fallout in late 1997 and early 1998; it wasn’t a hit on the order of Diablo, no, but it was a solid seller just the same. Even the miserable fiasco that was Descent to Undermountain wasn’t enough to quell the swelling enthusiasm around Baldur’s Gate. Partially to ensure that nothing like Undermountain could happen again, Brian Fargo set up a new division at Interplay to specialize in CRPGs. He placed it in the care of Feargus Urquhart, who named the division and the label Black Isle, after the Black Isle Peninsula in his homeland of Scotland.

Interplay was already running full-page advertisements like this one in the major magazines before 1997 was out. Note the emphasis on “true role-playing on a grand scale” — i.e., not like that other game everyone was playing, the one called Diablo.

The buzz around Baldur’s Gate continued to build through 1998, even as a planned spring release was pushed back to the very end of the year. A game whose initial sales projections had been on the order of 100,000 units at the outside was taking on more and more importance inside the executive suites at Interplay. For the fact was that Interplay as a whole wasn’t doing very well — not doing very well at all. Brian Fargo’s strategy of scatter-bombing the market with wildly diverse products, hoping to hit the zeitgeist in its sweet spot with at least a few of them, was no longer paying off for him. As I mentioned at the opening of this article, Interplay’s last real hit at this stage had been Descent in 1995. Not coincidentally, that had also been their last profitable year. The river of red ink for 1998 would add up to almost $30 million, a figure one-quarter the size of the company’s total annual revenues. In October of 1998, Fargo cut about 10 percent of Interplay’s staff, amounting to some 50 people. (Most of them had been working on Star Trek: The Secret of Vulcan Fury, a modernized follow-up to the company’s classic Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and Judgment Rites adventure games. Its demise is still lamented in some corners of Star Trek and gaming fandom.)

Fargo was increasingly seeing Baldur’s Gate as his Hail Mary. If the game did as well as the buzz said it might, it would not be able to rescue his sinking ship on its own, but it would serve as much-needed evidence that Interplay hadn’t completely lost its mojo as its chief executive pursued his only real hope of getting out of his fix: finding someone willing to buy the company. The parallels with the sinking ship that had so recently been TSR doubtless went unremarked by Fargo, but are nonetheless ironically notable.

BioWare’s future as well was riding on what was destined to be just their second finished game. The studio in the hinterlands had grown from 15 to 50 people over Baldur’s Gate’s two-year development cycle, leaving behind as it did so its electrically-challenged hovel of an office for bigger, modestly more respectable-looking digs. Yet appearances can be deceiving; BioWare was still an unproven, unprofitable studio that needed its second game to be a hit if it was ever to make a third one. It was make-or-break-time for everyone, not least Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk. If Baldur’s Gate was a hit, they might never have to take up their stethoscopes again. And if it wasn’t… well, they supposed it would be back to the clinic for them, with nothing to show for their foray into game development beyond a really strange story to tell their grandchildren.

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 Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs by David L. Craddock, Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay, and Online Game Pioneers at Work by Morgan Ramsay. Computer Gaming World of December 1996, January 1997, October 1997, January 1998, April 1998, January 1999, and June 1999; Retro Gamer 110 and 188; PC Zone of December 1998.

Online sources include BioWare’s current home page, “How Bioware revolutionised the CRPG” by Graeme Mason at EuroGamer, “IGN Presents the History of BioWare” by Travis Fahs, “The long, strange journey of BioWare’s doctor, developer, beer enthusiast” by Brian Crecente at Polygon, Jeremy Peel’s interview with James Ohlen for Rock Paper Shotgun, and GameSpot’s vintage review of Descent to Undermountain.

I also made use of the Interplay archive donated by Brian Fargo to the Strong Museum of Play.

(My previous posts on this game are needed for context.)

I think I’ve squeezed most of the juice out of Easy difficulty level, even though I haven’t finished; I’m going to try upping to Hard and make at least one more post.

I did manage to fix the main thing that was bothering me, the empty gap on the top level map. I’ll show that off first:

There was no puzzle involved: in the room leading to that area, I simply missed an exit. The bizarre constantly-changing exit descriptions really do make it hard to keep track. The main feature to the area is a hedge maze, which is “classical” Adventure-style; that is, it is the kind of maze where I needed to drop items to map it out and a node-based representation (as above). The only extra twist is that upon going through the maze’s exit, sometimes it teleports the player back into the maze; this is just like the maze area on the middle floor.

The maze leads to three rooms representing a library, and a one-way exit back to the regular portion of the map I was at before.

I have not caused anything special to happen here. It may be just decoration.

There was one other a gap, a single-room missing chunk on the bottom floor…

…but I think I have that one accounted for as well. The top and middle floors are now all filled, and the Sanctuary — the room that you go up from the top floor to in order to drop treasures — needs to be placed somewhere amongst the three floors according to the game’s logic. So I’m fairly confident the Sanctuary is filling that gap (meaning I can stop trying to dig down, hit the adjacent walls with a mattock, etc.)

Just like Minotaur, if you’re holding too many items you can’t go up, and the game communicates this by just repeating the room description.

Other than that, the game has been mostly tedious. The problem is that most of the mechanics are ripped out. Getting hints from the unicorn, I found

you need a ROPE to get a SCROLL
you need a FOOD to get a MACHETE
you need a TOME to get the DRAGONSWORD
you need FOOD to get the DEATHRING

and I even got a screenshot of both the hint and its ramification right next to each other, by luck:

However, on Easy none of those items seem to be important. You do not need the DRAGONSWORD to kill the DRAGON. In fact, the MACE (one of the first weapons I found, just out in the open) kills everything including both the dragon and wizard in three hits.

No special item from the Wizard, the map sometimes is out on the open on the top floor.

The only enemy I left standing was the Jester, who appears, laughs a bit, and disappears before I can finish typing BASH JESTER. It sometimes randomly picks up items and moves them elsewhere but doesn’t attack. I can say I reached the same state I “won” Minotaur at last time (killing all the imminent threats) so let’s see what Hard has to offer.

The gaps in Easy really did undercut the game mechanics significantly; the whole idea of chains of objects needed from Minotaur is gone. As far as I can tell there are no magic spells either like in Minotaur (even on Hard!) It may be just the author decided the original game was too fiddly (which is, to be honest, fair) but the fiddly parts are what made the game work.

Even if I don’t have any significant difference playing on Hard (just making something up: now instead of 1 teleport spot there are 3 of them) I’ll spend one more post on Keys as I want to do wrap-up on the adventure-roguelike concept as a whole. This represents more or less the last game in the category from 1982 (barring a certain famous game from Australia, but it gets its own long discussion) and my impression is the genre starts to peter out starting in 1983. (Not completely! But enthusiasm for games like Madness and the Minotaur starts to wane.) There’s been some recent interest trying to use “AI” to generate maps but people attempting to do so run into the same problems that people in 1982 were running into, so I think it’s a useful discussion both for historical study and modern design.

L. Curtis Boyle, Rob, and Strident all helped with finding an earlier ad for the game than in my first post. From 80 Micro, May 1982.

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After making a dangerous discovery, you are sent on a mission by your Den that unfolds into an adventure that will unearth more than expected, and more than you alone can handle.

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Leas: City of the Sun is a 400,000-word interactive novel by Jax Ivy where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based — without graphics or sound effects — and fuelled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination!

• Play as female, male, or nonbinary — with options to be straight, gay, bisexual, or pansexual.
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• Set your personality through choices.
• Brave the wilds and face off with fae, friendly and dangerous alike.
• Tour the city of Leas, from dancing at festivals to infiltrating warehouses.
• Choose your skillset: focus on combat and stealth, magic, or charisma to complete missions.
• Solve a magical mystery – and step into the world’s next cycle.

Jax developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.

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You’ve risen to the highest office in the land—the Presidency. The campaign was grueling, but the next four years promise to be even more daunting.

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The People’s House is an interactive novel by R. F. Kramer where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—over 400,000 words, without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

When you take the oath of office, your life will change forever. As the Leader of the Free World, every decision you make will shape the nation—and define your legacy. With the stroke of a pen, you can alter the course of history, but power is never absolute.

Your Vice President, Cabinet, and advisors claim to have your back—but ambition is a dangerous thing. The press is hungry for a scandal, and your political enemies are eager for a shot at the White House. Can you protect your own family from the pressures of power, or will they become collateral damage in your rise to greatness?

You entered office with a strong sense of morals and a determination to cement your vision into history. Now, it’s up to you to decide if you’ll hold on to them, even if it costs you everything.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, or bi.
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Rob developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.