Planet Interactive Fiction

The Boston IF meetup for February will be Monday, February 24, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.  

“How do you make a small fortune in tabletop gaming?” runs an old joke.

The punchline, of course, is that you come to that market with a large one.

The tabletop truly is a brutally challenging place to try to earn money, one which you have to be either wildly deluded or unbelievably passionate to even contemplate entering. Nevertheless, people have been making a go of it there for quite some decades by now. We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that love rather than mental illness is the motivating force. For, whatever else you can say about these folks, nobody is more passionate about their hobby than old-school tabletoppers.

If you do dare to dream of making real money on the tabletop, there are two ways you might envision doing so. One is to strike gold with a once-in-a-blue-moon mass-market perennial of the sort that eventually winds up in every other family’s closet: a Monopoly, a Scrabble, a Clue, a Trivial Pursuit. Under this model, you sell that one game to tens if not hundreds of millions of people, the majority of whom might not buy another board game for five or ten years after buying yours.

The other pathway to profit — or at least to long-term survival — is to score a hit in the hobbyist market. Here your sales ceiling is much lower. But, because you’re selling to people who see tabletop gaming as a lifestyle rather than a gambit to divert the kids on a rainy afternoon, you can potentially keep selling them additions to the same basic game for years and years, turning it into not so much a single product as a whole ecosystem of same. It’s a tougher row to hoe in that it requires an ongoing effort on your part to come up with a steady stream of new content that appeals to your customers, but it’s marginally more achievable than winning the lottery that is the mass market.

That said, any given game need not be exclusively of the one sort or the other. Crossover hits are possible and even increasingly common. In recent decades, several hobbyist games — among them titles such as Catan, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride — have proved to possess the necessary blend of relatability, simplicity, and fun to be sold in supermarkets and greeting-card shops in addition to the scruffy hobbyist boutiques.

Way back in the early 1980s, Dungeons & Dragons was successful enough that its maker, the Lake Geneva, Wisconsin-based TSR, dared to wonder whether that game might be able to make the leap to the mainstream, however strange it may have seemed to imagine that an exercise in elaborate make-believe and tactical monster-fighting might have the same sort of legs as Monopoly. After all, despite its complexity and subject matter, Dungeons & Dragons was already far more culturally visible than Monopoly, a fixture of school cafeterias and anti-Satanic evangelical sermons alike.

Alas, it was not to be. The Dungeons & Dragons wave crested in 1982, after which the bandwagon jumpers began to jump off the wagon again. True mass-market success was probably never in the cards for a company whose acronym stood for “Tactical Studies Rules.” Luckily for TSR, they retained a core group of loyalists who were willing to splash out considerable sums of money on their hobby. Indeed, for a goodly while it seemed like they would snatch up as much new Dungeons & Dragons product as TSR cared to throw at them.

A new era of Dungeons & Dragons merchandising dawned in 1984, when TSR rolled out a trans-media property known as Dragonlance: twelve individual adventure modules, plus two source books and even a strategic board game, all meant to allow a group of players to interactively experience an epic tale of fantasy war that could also be read about in a trilogy of thick conventional novels, the first of their kind that TSR had ever published. It was a brilliant conception in its way, and it became hugely popular with the fan base, heralding a slow shift in TSR’s rhetoric around Dungeons & Dragons. In the past, it had been promoted as a game of free-flowing imagination, primarily a system for making up your own worlds and stories. In the future, the core rules would be marketed as a foundation that you built upon not so much with your own creativity as with other, more targeted TSR products: settings to inhabit, adventures to go through in those settings, new rule books to make a complicated game still more complicated.

The transaction was not so cynical as I might have made it sound. The products themselves were often excellent, thanks to TSR’s dedicated and imaginative staff, and many or most fans felt they got fair value for their ongoing investment. Yet the fact remained that this was also TSR’s only viable way of remaining solvent after the mainstream culture had dismissed Dungeons & Dragons as a weird, kitschy fad or a shorthand for abject nerdiness.

As it was, though, TSR coasted along fairly comfortably on these terms for quite some years. The Dungeons & Dragons supplements continued to sell, even after there were so many of them that it was difficult to see how even the most committed zealot could possibly find the time to get more than a tiny percentage of them to the table. (TSR doubtless benefited from the fact that a lot of fans could get pleasure out of the source books without ever using them for their intended purpose: a surprising number of people over the years have told me that they liked to read such books just to appreciate the meticulous world-building.) The release of a modestly revised “Second Edition” of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in 1989 sent the fans scrambling to re-buy a game they already owned, if for no other reason than to stay compatible with that fire hose of adventures and supplements. Meanwhile TSR found an unexpectedly rich new revenue stream in the many Dungeons & Dragons novels that followed in the wake of that first Dragonlance trilogy; the sales of virtually any of these dwarfed the unit sales of the typical gaming product, while the most popular of all among them, such as R.A. Salvatore’s tales of the dark-elf ranger Drizzt, climbed high on the New York Times bestseller charts. Add to this a deal with SSI to make Dungeons & Dragons-branded computer games, five of which sold more than 100,000 copies from 1988 to 1991. Between the novels and the computer games, Dungeons & Dragons had become as much an abstract lifestyle brand as a concrete tabletop game by the beginning of the 1990s.

It was at about this time that it all started to go wrong — subtly wrong at first, then obviously, and then disastrously. The root of the rot is hard to pinpoint precisely, as these things always are.

Some people point as far back as 1985, when Lorraine Williams, a wealthy heiress who owed her fortune primarily to the Buck Rogers character of comic-book, movie-serial, and television fame, ousted Gary Gygax and took over the company in a palace coup. She is not, to say the least, a highly regarded figure among old-school Dungeons & Dragons fandom. For our part, we need to tread cautiously here; there’s an ugly undertone of gatekeeping and/or misogyny that clings to many fan narratives about Williams’s tenure at the head of TSR. Nonetheless, it is true that she had little intrinsic interest in Dungeons & Dragons; in fact, she sometimes seemed to regard the game’s fans with something perilously close to contempt. In the beginning, TSR was in a strong enough position to overcome her estrangement from the market she served. Later on, this would no longer be the case.

Other people prefer to point to 1991, when a new publisher called White Wolf released a tabletop RPG called Vampire: The Masquerade, which portrayed its titular monsters not as blood-sucking horrors but as sexy lovers of the night straight out of an Anne Rice novel. That, combined with its rules-light approach, attracted a whole new demographic who wouldn’t have been caught dead battling hobgoblins in a fantasy dungeon: too-cool-for-school Goths, who gave free rein to their inner fiends around the gaming table in between Cure concerts. A raft of other new rules systems, also less rigid and fiddly than Dungeons & Dragons, rose to prominence in the wake of Vampire. (Among them was Steve Jackson Games’s GURPS, which was supposed to have powered the computer game Fallout.) Even in its allegedly streamlined second edition, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons looked stodgy and pedantic to the eyes of many gamers when compared with its younger, slicker competition. For arguably the only time in the entire history of the tabletop RPG, there was real reason to question whether Dungeons & Dragons would continue to be the unrivaled giant of the field going forward. Sales of TSR’s rules and supplements fell off gradually, while sales on the digital front fairly fell off a cliff: no other Dungeons & Dragons computer game from SSI would come anywhere close to sales of 100,000 units after Eye of the Beholder in 1991.

Then, just when it looked like Dungeons & Dragons was at risk of losing its position at the top of the tabletop-RPG pile, another sort of game entirely came along to kick the whole stack right out from under all of them. In August of 1993, a little card game called Magic: The Gathering, designed by a graduate student in combinatorics named Richard Garfield and bearing the logo of a heretofore unsuccessful publisher of tabletop-RPG material named Wizards of the Coast, was debuted at the Gen Con trade show in Wisconsin — a show which had been started by Gary Gygax all the way back in 1968, and which was still put on every year by TSR. At this 26th installment of Gen Con, however, the talk was all about Magic rather than Dungeons & Dragons. Allen Varney later wrote in TSR’s own house magazine Dragon how

people clustered three deep around the Wizards of the Coast table, craning to see the ongoing demonstrations of this game. Everywhere I went I saw someone playing it. In discussing it, some players showed reserved admiration, others enthusiasm, but body language told more than words. Everyone hunched forward intently, the way you do in deep discussions of politics or religion. Onlookers and devoted fans alike felt compelled to grapple with the idea of this game. It achieved more than just a commercial hit; it redefined gamers’ perspectives on their hobby.

The scenes that Varney witnessed were a microcosm of what was about to happen to hobbyist gaming in general, as tabletop fantasy, for so many years a relatively stable market, was hit by this new, profoundly destabilizing force.

We can point to any number of grounds for Magic’s enormous appeal. Many of them boil down to convenience: it was quick to set up and could be played in twenty minutes or so by just two people, without either of them having to read much in the way of rules beyond what was printed on the cards themselves. (Compare this with needing to assemble at least four or five friends to play Dungeons & Dragons, as well as with that game’s hundreds of pages of rules, the crushing weight of preparation and responsibility it put on the Dungeon Master who guided the session, and its equally extreme demands of time; many a Dungeons & Dragons party hadn’t yet decided what equipment to carry into the dungeon by the time twenty minutes had elapsed.) Then, too, the Magic cards were beautifully illustrated, such that collecting them could become an end unto itself. Finally, add to all of this a feeling that had  been setting in even before that pivotal Gen Con: that Dungeons & Dragons had become old hat, an artifact of the last two decades rather than this one. A new generation of gamers craved something fresh. For better or for worse, it seemed that Magic was that thing.

Magic became an unprecedented phenomenon in tabletop gaming, its astounding growth curve eclipsing by a veritable order of magnitude even the early days of Dungeons & Dragons. More than TSR ever had, Wizards of the Coast had well and truly mastered the art of making money in hobbyist gaming by selling the same group of people an infinite stream of content for the same basic game. They had mastered it so well, in fact, that there wasn’t much room left for TSR; a gamer who spent all of his allowance or paycheck on new Magic decks simply didn’t have any money left to give to Dungeons & Dragons.

Like many other shell-shocked publishers in the tabletop-RPG space, TSR tried to fight back by quite literally playing Wizards of the Coast’s own game. Already in 1994, they released a collectible card game of their own called Spellfire.  It’s doubtful whether it would have been able to overcome Magic’s first-mover advantage even if its use of recycled, clashing artwork from previous eras of Dungeons & Dragons hadn’t made it look so much like the rushed knockoff product it was. TSR mustered a modicum more creativity for 1995’s Dragon Dice, which replaced collectible cards with — you guessed it — collectible dice. But it too failed to attract the critical mass of players it needed in order to become self-sustaining. Collectible anything games writ large were a zero-sum game, one in which all of the cards seemed to belong to Wizards and Magic.

Any reasonably thoughtful observer who looked at TSR from the outside at mid-decade would have seen a deeply troubled company, whose flagship game was shrinking away before its eyes. Only one fact might have tended to disabuse our observer of that notion: the fact that TSR kept pumping out product for that same incredible shrinking game at a more furious pace than ever. And make no mistake: TSR’s tabletop Dungeons & Dragons products weren’t slapdash in the way of Spellfire. They were crafted with self-evident love and care, were beautifully illustrated and packaged. The mystery was how the company could afford to put out so darn much quality content in the face of so many financial headwinds. By 1995, TSR had no fewer than twelve separate Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings on the market, each of them taking the form of a mouth-wateringly lavish and rather pricey boxed set. J.R.R. Tolkien and Jack Vance were no longer the alpha and omega of Dungeons & Dragons. You could now play in a post-apocalyptic milieu, in a surrealistic alternate dimension worthy of a Salvador Dali painting, or in outer space. If you liked vampires and gothic horror, you could even play with them without having to jump ship to White Wolf, by picking up a copy of Ravenloft. Committing one’s regular gaming group to any one of these settings meant forgoing all of the others for months or years to come. Even if our observer recognized that a high percentage of customers bought the boxed sets just to browse them and dream about what they might do with them someday, the deluge of content still seemed out of all proportion to the shrinking market for Dungeons & Dragons in general.

Really: just who was buying up enough of this content so that TSR had the money to keep putting out still more of it? The answer to that question would have stunned our hypothetical mid-1990s observer.

In the book Slaying the Dragon, his 2022 “Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons,” Ben Riggs pulls back the curtain on the perverse incentives that were dictating much of TSR’s publication schedule by this point. Since the first incipient rumblings of a full-blown Dungeons & Dragons fad back in 1979, TSR had used the print-publishing mega-corporation Random House as their vehicle for getting product into bookstores. That is to say that TSR continued to act as their own publisher, but they used Random House as their distributor. In a normal arrangement of this sort, the publisher sends their products after they’ve been printed to their distributor, who stashes them in a warehouse and proceeds to take orders from retail stores. As orders come in, the distributor ships out the products, and sends back to the publisher the price of each order, minus the distributor’s own cut for services rendered. Many contracts do allow retailers to send back products that have sat on the shelf for a given span of time without selling, but we need not get into those complications here, because the contract that TSR had with Random House was a highly unusual one in another respect.

Instead of paying TSR as retail stores ordered their products, Random House paid for each shipment up-front, as soon as it arrived at their warehouse, and then tried to recoup that money by selling it on to retail. If we squint just right, we can see why Random House might have agreed to such a seemingly disadvantageous arrangement back in 1979. At that time, TSR might have looked to be a rising star, but they were still rather cash- and investment-poor. On the theory that it’s best to strike while the iron is hot, it might have made sense to someone at Random House to give TSR a way to produce more products more quickly, without having to wait for the revenues from the earlier ones to filter back into their coffers. But the inadvertent byproduct was to break the most fundamental laws of capitalism. “The printing of products was essentially the printing of money,” writes Ben Riggs. “The company had broken free of supply and demand. Perhaps this is why the company kept making settings, even though almost every new iteration sold less than the last one.” The logic was as simple as it was degenerate: if you weren’t making enough money on Dungeons & Dragons, the best remedy was to make more Dungeons & Dragons and send it to Random House. Let them worry about finding a way to unload the stuff.

There was just one problem with that formulation: the payment which Random House sent back to TSR upon receiving each truck-load of product was actually considered to be a loan, unless and until Random House recouped their costs through sales to retailers. The checks from Random House turned into an unpaid bar tab that just kept building and building while Dungeons & Dragons’s retail sales went south. Whether out of benevolence or just because they weren’t really paying attention, Random House was remarkably patient about demanding that TSR settle their tab. But by mid-1995 TSR owed Random House $12 million, with no realistic prospect at current sales volumes of paying off the debt. How long could the mega-corporation’s largess persist?

On every front, TSR was now scrabbling for traction. The digital realm was looking as ugly as that of the tabletop, as SSI’s latest computer games struggled to compete amidst a new fixation on fast-paced real-time as opposed to turn-based forms of gameplay and a more generalized CRPG downturn in the marketplace. After 1993’s Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, which was supposed to be something of a reboot for the Dungeons & Dragons brand on computers, sold fewer than 50,000 copies, TSR began looking for alternatives to SSI. In truth, while SSI had certainly done the license few favors of late — they had released too many games too quickly, with too many of them of workmanlike quality at best — the brand’s woes on the computer went well beyond one injudicious publisher. The malaise of the tabletop was no less prevalent on the digital side of the divide. Dungeons & Dragons just didn’t seem cool anymore — not even nerdy cool.

Nevertheless, TSR terminated their exclusive contract with SSI as soon as it was possible to do so. It came to an end on January 1, 1995, although SSI was given a grace period of six months to put out the last games they had in the pipeline on a non-exclusive basis. Instead of signing another all-encompassing deal like the one they had had with SSI, TSR opted for a bespoke approach, allowing individual publishers to come to them with proposals for individual games. In 1996, Acclaim Entertainment released a rather lame Dungeons & Dragons-branded action game called Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft (“NO 3-D FIGHTER CAN MATCH THE BRUTAL ACTION OF IRON & BLOOD!”). Blood & Magic, which Interplay published later that year, was a real-time-strategy game that Computer Gaming World magazine felt free to dismiss as “a poor man’s Warcraft — and mind you, I’m comparing it to the original, not the sequel.” In 1997, Sierra delivered a more conceptually interesting but poorly executed CRPG/strategy hybrid called Birthright: The Gorgon’s Alliance. These publishers were most definitely not trying to recreate the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop experience on computers, as SSI had so earnestly strained to do in the days of Pool of Radiance. They viewed the Dungeons & Dragons name, which was selling at a steep discount by now, merely as a way to squeeze a few extra unit sales out of the mediocre games to which they applied it.

By the time the aforementioned computer games appeared, TSR was well into its death spiral. At this point, even the Dungeons & Dragons novels, for years the company’s most stable income stream, weren’t selling like they used to. The market had become over-saturated with these things too — TSR published fourteen of them in 1994 alone — even as the brand’s innate cachet had declined and the most popular authors of the past, most notably R.A. Salvatore, had been lost to other book publishers who tended to pay far better.

Unsurprisingly, the beginning of the end came when Random House got serious at last about trying to get their money back. In the summer of 1995, they forced TSR to agree to a debt-repayment plan. TSR was to reduce their outstanding obligation from $12 million to $8.2 million by the end of the year, then pare it down to less than $1 million by the end of 1996. If TSR failed to do so, Random House said, they would initiate legal proceedings to recover the money they were owed.

To their credit, TSR did make an effort to meet Random House’s terms. They were able to reduce the debt to $9.5 million by early in 1996, largely on the strength of the novel Dragons of Summer Flame, a much-hyped continuation of the original Dragonlance saga by Margaret Weis and Tracey Hickman, the primary architects of the mid-1980s trans-media project that still stood as such a landmark in the history of Dungeons & Dragons. But a demonstration of good-faith effort was no longer good enough in the opinion of Random House; their forbearance had run out. In April of 1996, they sued TSR for the remaining millions, just as they had said they would. At the same time, they stopped accepting more product from TSR for distribution — a sensible policy under the circumstances, given that every book, supplement, or game that arrived at their warehouse only added to the debt they were trying to collect. Yet this move deprived TSR of the better half of their distribution network, making the prospect of another fluke hit like Dragons of Summer Flame that much more unlikely.

It was right about this time that TSR stopped paying the majority of their bills. Authors stopped receiving their royalty checks, and TSR’s printer too went uncompensated. Desperate to head off a lawsuit from the latter on top of the one they were facing from Random House, TSR resorted to giving them their offices, then leasing the premises back. In another delaying tactic, TSR pledged the Dungeons & Dragons trademark itself, the crown jewel of their intellectual property, as collateral on their debt to Random House. Needless to say, such last-ditch machinations could only put off the inevitable final reckoning.

The layoffs began in December of 1996. There was a poignancy to these that vastly exceeded the loss of any ordinary job. The people who worked at TSR, more often than not for shockingly low salaries, did it purely out of passion. All of the content they churned out may have made no economic sense, but one only has to glace through the books to see the amount of love and care that was put into them. There was literally no other job in the world like a job at TSR. I can’t help but be reminded of the 1989 shuttering of Infocom, another sui generis creative collective. Ben Riggs:

What do you do, what do you say, when someone is fired from TSR? What would their next job be? Teacher? Journalist? Marketing? Whatever it was, you wouldn’t be working on Dungeons & Dragons. You wouldn’t be paid to think about bugbears, beholders, or bladesingers. For some, leaving the company wasn’t just losing a job, it was leaving a life…

The annual Christmas party turned into a wake for the departed, who were toasted by surviving comrades who knew that their own turn must be coming soon. For it was hard for anyone at TSR to see how the company could possibly recover. Sure enough, within days of the Christmas party, TSR’s printer/landlord stopped printing anything at all for them and initiated eviction proceedings to claim their office space for paying tenants.

Few at TSR realized that a way out had been available to Lorraine Williams for a couple of years by this point. Peter Adkison, the founder and head of Wizards of the Coast, was in a rare position for a chief executive in the tabletop industry: that of running a company that was flush with cash. Despite having done so much to engineer TSR’s doom through Magic, he was very fond of Dungeons & Dragons, and believed that the game and the brand could be resuscitated and made (nerdy) cool again if it was just managed and marketed properly. And unlike TSR, he was in a position to pour serious resources into that task, thanks to his Magic money-printing machine. He let it be known that he would be very interested in doing a deal.

And yet his feelers were steadfastly ignored for two years. Lorraine Williams had an intensely personal loathing for Adkison and his company. Even as Magic had been devouring Dungeons & Dragons at the cash registers of hobby shops, Wizards had repeatedly upstaged TSR in other ways, making tabletop gaming’s lion in winter look stodgy and out of touch over and over again.

Take, for example, the respective reactions to the nascent World Wide Web. TSR saw the fans who flocked online to discuss their hobby and share their ideas, experiences, and creations mostly as a threat to their intellectual property. A set of “guidelines” issued by TSR in 1994 is breathtaking in its wrong-headedness; it essentially makes a “no Dungeons & Dragons allowed” zone out of the entire Internet, with the threat of legal action lurking not so subtly behind its words.

If the party encounters a hydra, let the game master look up the stats for the hydra in the game system he is using. Don’t set the adventures in a TSR world. Create your own or use one from history or legend. Don’t use monsters, spells, etc. that were created by TSR. Create and name your own. Draw on history, legend or reality. Even spell their actual names backward for uniqueness.

Threatening one’s most devoted customers is not a good way to inculcate trust and loyalty in them; nor is forcibly silencing them a good way to spread the word about one’s products. The fans decided that the TSR acronym must really stand for “They Sue Regularly.”

Peter Adkison, on the other hand, recognized the enormous potential of the new digital medium of instant worldwide communication whose rise coincided almost exactly with that of Magic. He made sure Wizard’s site was one of the most advanced on the young Web, granted lengthy interviews to the most prominent of the third-party sites that were soon springing up by the dozen each month, and made no move to interfere when fans began using the Internet to buy and sell Magic cards, at a time when e-commerce in general was still little more than a gleam in a few venture capitalists’ eyes. Such a grass-efforts grapevine was, he knew, better publicity than he could buy with millions of dollars of worth of traditional advertising. It’s no wonder that Lorraine Williams grew to hate him so. To her, he must have seemed bent on demonstrating to the world every single day how much cleverer and more clued-in he was. Even with her own company sinking beneath her feet, Williams refused to countenance climbing onboard her one available lifeboat.

The impasse was finally broken by a wily third party named Bob Abramowitz. Abramowitz was the CEO of yet another game publisher, an outfit called Five Rings Publishing whose flagship product was a collectable card game called Legend of the Five Rings. He met Lorraine Williams at the American International Toy Fair in February of 1997. (Incredibly, she was still attending such events at this late juncture, even though her company was now utterly paralyzed, thanks to their angry printer who refused to accept new jobs.) Being well acquainted with the rumors that were swirling around the industry about TSR’s dire straits, Abramowitz broached a visit to their Lake Geneva headquarters to kick the tires and discuss a possible purchase, even though he knew full well that he was possessed of nothing like the financing that would be necessary to pull off such a deal.

Luckily for him, Williams invited him to come on out without bothering to check his bona fides. Over the course of several days in Lake Geneva, he and a couple of associates pored over TSR’s books, learning to their shock that things there were actually much, much worse than they had ever dreamed they might be. Abramowitz would later describe how “in the halls that had produced the stuff of my childhood fantasies, and had fired my imagination and become unalterably intertwined with my own sense of self, I found echoes, empty desks, and the terrible depression of lost purpose.” At the end of the visit, Abramowitz and Williams signed a formal letter of intent, in which the latter stated that she was prepared to sell TSR to the former for $25 million. Because any such sale would come complete with $30 million in unpaid debts, the effective price tag would amount to about $55 million.

In reality, Abramowitz hadn’t a prayer of raising even $25 million. What he did have, however, was a plan. He finagled a meeting with Peter Adkison and showed him the letter of intent. It proved that Williams was willing and even eager to sell her company in principle. The sticking point was whether she could be convinced to sell it to Peter Adkison and Wizards of the Coast. Having gotten this far with her, Abramowitz thought he could talk her around to that distasteful prospect. He was prepared to try his hardest to do so — as long as Adkison agreed to also buy Five Rings, whose own collectible card game was struggling mightily to compete with Magic.

“But why not just let TSR go bankrupt, and then buy it without assuming all that debt?” Adkison asked.

“Because,” Abramowitz explained, “the trademarks are already mortgaged. What’s valuable here isn’t TSR itself. It’s Dungeons & Dragons. The only way you can be sure of getting it is to buy the whole company now, while it’s still intact.”

Adkison tried a bit more to play devil’s advocate, but his heart wasn’t really in it. Abramowitz had already seen his interlocutor’s eyes light up when he had first mentioned a deal involving TSR and Dungeons & Dragons. He had known then and there that he had hooked his whale.

His plan worked like a charm. He flew back to Lake Geneva, and, in the course of a tense 90-minute conversation, convinced Lorraine Williams to sell her company to the last person in the world she wanted to. Then he sold Five Rings as well to Wizards, walking away from the spate of deal-making rid of that money-losing albatross and with a substantial sum of cash for the pockets of him and his partners. Bravo for him.

The impending purchase was announced on April 10, 1997; the sale was finalized on June 2. By this point, Wizards was a far bigger, wealthier company than TSR had ever been. They were able to buy TSR and bulldoze away the mountain of debt without taking any new bank financing of their own — so much money were they bringing in through Magic.

Peter Adkison held an all-hands meeting with the understandably nervous remaining staff of TSR on June 3. At it, he told them that he had bought the company for two things: for Dungeons & Dragons, yes, but also for the very people who were gathered in that room, the ones who made the game. TSR’s Lake Geneva offices would be closed, marking the end of Wisconsin’s unlikely tenure as the center of the tabletop-RPG universe, but most employees would receive an offer to move to Seattle and work in Wizard’s headquarters. With Magic doing such gangbusters business, Wizards of the Coast had the time and money to rebuild the Dungeons & Dragons brand carefully and methodically, even if it took years. They would soon begin work on a third edition of the rules, the most sweeping revision ever, intended to make the game understandable and appealing to a whole new generation of players without losing the core of what had made it such a sensation in the first place. The future of Dungeons & Dragons was bright, Adkison insisted.

What Adkison couldn’t have envisioned on that day was that the resuscitation of Dungeons & Dragons would begin in the digital rather than the tabletop realm, courtesy of one of the most iconic CRPGs of all time — a Pool of Radiance for this new decade.

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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.

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Sources: The books Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs by David L. Craddock; Designers & Dragons: A History of the Roleplaying Game Industry, Volumes 1 and 3, by Shannon Appelcline; Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons by Ben Riggs; and Generation Decks: The Unofficial History of Magic: The Gathering by Titus Chalk; Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons by Jon Peterson. Dragon of January 1994; Computer Gaming World of April 1997.

Online sources include DM David’s blog, especially “TSR Declares War on the Internet’s D&D Fans” and “The Threat That Nearly Killed Dungeons & Dragons — Twice.”

I also made use of the SSI archive donated by Joel Billings to the Strong Museum of Play.

Got a bunch of hey-have-you-seen-this about the "Ink Console", a prototype tablet which plays choice-based IF. There's also a crowdfunding preview page.

Yep, I sure have have seen that. On several different forums.

The response from the IF community has been a mix of "That looks like fun!" and "Um, more market research needed? Maybe?"

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I have nothing against homebrew IF systems. They're a mighty and venerable tradition. Creating a new IF tool is fun! And good design practice! And some of them catch on! But most of them don't catch on -- precisely because it's easy and fun and a lot of people do it.

If nobody uses the IF authoring software you wrote, it's no big deal. It was a fun project. Add "unsupported" to the README, push to Github, move on.

If you're building hardware, the stakes are higher. You need people to buy the hardware. Even if you land a crowdfunding campaign for the initial run, you still need people to buy the mass-production release. Gotta convince authors to keep writing games for it! As a commercial platform, that means demonstrating revenue.

(See also v buckenham's post on why game platforms are hard.)

Thus, market research. What is the Ink Console's competition? Choice of Games, most obviously: meaty long-form choice-based games with an established audience and business model. But COG games don't require dedicated hardware. They run on anything -- mobile, desktop, browser. They certainly could run on a dedicated e-ink reader, but nobody's been beating down the door for one.

The Ink Console guy doesn't appear to have considered this. His headline game-design elements are illustrations, inventory, and a health meter -- features which the COG audience demonstratably doesn't care about at all.

(COG games have a numeric stat system, but it's flexible. Each game defines stats and resources which are meaningful for that specific story. "Health" might be one of them, but so could "teacher's pet" or "funky soul".)

This isn't to say that the Ink Console couldn't get a new audience off the ground. There's quite a few commercial text-game markets out there, all of which were started from scratch; the audiences mostly don't overlap. COG is just the one I know best. But again, my sense is that most of these platforms are mobile-centric -- you already have a phone. New hardware needs a hook.

So what does the Ink Console have over more portable formats? The e-ink display. E-ink is light-weight, low-power, way more readable outdoors than your phone. This is not nothing! E-ink is also monochrome and low-res, but it's adequate for text. Not beautiful, but adequate. Kindles have been proving this for years.

I can see a pitch for taking existing text games -- games which people are already playing -- and getting them onto an e-ink reader. Maybe these people should be pitching COG a licensing deal.

Or they could start with online-and-mobile play (same as all the existing markets) and pitch the hardware Ink Console as a luxury add-on. Like selling albums on vinyl -- expensive but the aficionado will love it. Could work! The risk, of course, is that the hardware never sells. Then you're stuck running a mobile game business when you very clearly want to be slinging circuit boards.

What the Ink Console has, really, is potential. And I mean that in the strict sense of "This device mostly doesn't exist yet." The web site is gung-ho about what's going to happen but what's happening now is breadboards and 3d-printed case tests. I don't want to come down on them for not solving all their product problems when there is no product.

Yes, I feel like they should have done another few design iterations before firing up the soldering irons. But eh, I'm a software guy in an old-school IF community; of course I'd say that.

---

Other stuff:

The name. It's called "Ink Console", which immediately confusing. My first response, and I'm not the only one, was: "Wow! A hardware reader for Ink games!" (That is, Ink the IF scripting language.) But no: the device's name seems to refer to its e-ink display. Again, audience research.

Speaking of languages. The web site doesn't say anything about the dev system. The FAQ says:

Ink Console runs on its own game engine, which is fully compatible with the SDK. However, we are working to include an option in the SDK that will allow users to import formats from other engines and adjust them to fit the Ink Console SDK format [...]

So maybe Ink-the-language comes later? The hardware spec is low-level (think "microcontroller", not "Raspberry Pi") but IF tools scale down well.

The creator doesn't have to figure this all out right away. Still, we'll want to see details on the roadmap. Especially if they pivot to getting existing games on board!

What are the specs? I'll just copy off the crowdfunding page in case that disappears: ESP32-D0WDQ6, dual-core 32-bit microprocessor; 4 MB of flash memory; 8 MB PSRAM; 520 KB SRAM; wifi; SD card slot; 7.5-inch e-ink screen, 800 x 480 resolution.

The AI concept art. There was a bunch of this on the web site. It was low-effort (the whole point of AI-generated art is that it's low-effort) and the creator seems to have yanked it down. So whatever. Not worth worrying about.

Oh, okay, one detail... There was an image titled "Zork V: The Lost Book". This provoked a certain amount of Internet howling. I regret to inform you that the trademark on "Zork" (as a game title) has been inactive for decades. Anybody could make a game called "Zork V", even a commercial one. (The Zork setting is another matter; please talk to your lawyer about copyrights.)

(Why Zork V? Well, I don't know what the Ink Console guy was thinking, but you can make an argument that Zork IV was Enchanter. Oh, not really, that was a working title, it was dropped long before release; but traces linger. Whereas nobody seriously called Sorcerer anything but Sorcerer... So the position of "Zork V" is open. Sort of. If that was the reasoning, I approve!)

---

And now, breaking news...

I was about to fire this post out this morning when I noticed that the Team page had been taken down. (Now says "Under construction".)

Last night, they posted this bsky thread:

(I think "Dana" is "Daniel Puchau", the creator listed on the original crowdfunding page.)

What does this mean? Did they sell the whole thing lock stock and lantern? Hard to say! We will keep an eye out.

---

Further update:

Jon Ingold adds:

Quick note from me about this: Dana reached out to me yesterday to discuss the project and its similarity to inkle's branding - one thing he told me is the name will change as part of moving forward in this new direction. So we're happy with that: and we hope it succeeds.

-- post, jon.inkle.co, Feb 20th

What is Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight made of?

update.

It’s been so long since my last post! That’s because I have been trying to get Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight ready for beta testing. It’s turned out to be a big job. The game is far more complex than anything I’ve done before, and for a while I wondered if I could ever get it into shape.

It looks like I’ve done it! I posted a call for testers last night. Since we’ve talked a lot about testing, I’ll share my post as an example of how I do things:

Hi everyone! I am working on a very short, dense game with a cat protagonist and could use some testing and feedback. It’s in Inform.

• • It is a thing meant for reading, with some long passages.
  • Ten unique cat actions, with many unique responses.
  • A tutorial system (WIP)
  • Inspired by the Zork CYOA books for young adults.
  • Hints that are only revealed once relevant.
  • For all ages.
  • For persons who want to read the story rather than play it, there is a story mode. I could use feedback on that, too!

I think the game can be completed in twenty minutes, but ideally players will spend some more time to experiment with various cat actions. There is just a lot for Marbles to do!

Very happy to reciprocate either now or in the future! If I haven’t updated this request, I’m still looking.

Thanks in advance.

I’ll let you know how things go.

back at it.

I hope you enjoyed the action processing refresher last time! Let’s continue the relations conversation.

In MDSS, there is a character named D. He occasionally talks about whatever thing happens to interest him at the time.

In Inform, I need a way to identify what interests D. If you’ve been keeping up, you’re probably thinking “this sounds like a relation!” It’s true, it certainly does. Still, there are other, familiar ways of doing things. We could easily come up with a kind. Kinds are like overarching categories. We could have a kind of vase, for instance, or a kind of value, like colors, sizes. In the latter case, we can really use anything that would be helpful or us to use to distinguish the contents of the world.

alternative to relations.

We could have a kind of thing called a curiosity. That would be a good start for a system that tracks and names things that D is interested in.

curiosity is a kind of thing.

Now that our kind is set up, we can declare which items are curiosities.

ball is a curiosity in lab.

or

ball is in lab.
ball is a curiosity.

A kind is a rather abstract thing, though, and we rarely act upon them directly. Instead, they get assigned to or associated with something. A variable, perhaps:

The hue is a color that varies.

or

a ball has a color called hue.

In our example, we might say

a person has a curiosity called the interest.

As a best practice, it is usually good to declare a default.

the interest of a person is usually ball.

We can add a definition to allow for readable phrases:

definition: a thing is fascinating if it is the interest of D.

OK! Working up a little more code…

instead of jumping:
	let L be a list of curiosities;
	say a random fascinating thing in the location;
	say line break;
	say the interest of D;
	say line break;
	repeat with t running through fascinating things:
		say t;
	say line break;
	if the ball is fascinating:
		say "yes.";
	now the interest of D is hat;
	say "now the interest of D is [interest of D].";
	repeat with C running through curiosities:
		add C to L;
	say "[L].";

gets us

>jump
ball
ball
ball
yes.
now the interest of D is hat.
ball, cat and hat.

There’s a lot we can do with this approach, and on the surface, this doesn’t seem so different from our relations example from last time. So why bother?

why bother.

As always, a good answer is “this option makes sense to me and does what I need it to do.” Some key differences:

The contents of a kind are static and have to be set when the project compiles. Relations, on the other hand, are more flexible. To recreate the static conditions of our kind, we could say something like:

interest relates one curiosity to one person.

We don’t have to do this, though.

interest relates one thing to one person.

perhaps a person has varied interests:

curiosity relates things to a person.

One answer, then, is flexibility and dynamism.

The other is answer is readability. Which is more readable to you, the author?

With definitions, we can do this either way:

if the ball is fascinating:

The relation allows us to say things like:

if the ball fascinates D:
---
if the interest of D is:

We have a way of dealing with these things with a kind (only one at a time, of course):

to decide if (fascinator - a thing) interests (fascinated - a thing):
	if fascinator is the interest of fascinated:
		decide yes.

But this is beginning to bring us back to a key point: relations are often more efficiently established and, out of the box, have readability advantages.

But “readability” is down to personal style, cognitive practices, and so forth. I can’t dictate to you what is most readable. Only you know what is best for you. So experiment!

I would like to go further, but it’s hard to say what I’m up to with relations in Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight without first getting into scenes.

i’ve gone on so long, there’s little time left for scenes today.

Like relations, a lot of what they do could be done with variables. Why use them at all? They offer a standard way of doing things, which is useful when reading documentation or sample source code. Scene changes occur outside of action processing, and, although that takes a bit of getting used to, it can have advantages.

What are scenes? They are a way for an Inform project to create temporal spaces. We can refer to those spaces in our action processing rules, or even use them as conditions in out texts. For one to exist, we only need to say it is so:

lunchtime is a scene.

We can’t do anything with it, though, because we haven’t said when it starts.

lunchtime begins when the player is in the diner booth.

There is no way to say something like

carry out entering the diner booth:
	now lunchtime is happening.

Scene changes happen between action-specific rules (called action-processing rules) and Every Turn rules. It’s useful to think of scene change as a follow up to player action.

This is different from what we are probably used to, right? If we changed a variable during a check rule, we could use it right away in the carry out rule that followed.

Philosophically, this is because scenes are largely a design molded by action rather than one triggered by action. This makes sense in our luchtime scene:

lunchtime ends when nothing is on the plate.

But this is all rather airy, isn’t it? I haven’t shown any practical uses for scenes, let alone explained how they might be used with a relation. Let’s try that next time!

Here’s a link to my scratch pad for today’s post.

next.

More on scenes and relations.

Two more, in a bit more depth this time.

I see that Stray Gods has a new DLC chapter. Definitely playing that next.

• Citizen Sleeper 2
• Caravan SandWitch

---

Citizen Sleeper 2

• by Jump Over the Age -- game site

A new Citizen Sleeper. It occurs to me that the original shipped less than three years ago. That's good schedule traction! Yes, they had a polished engine ready to go, but the sequel has new mechanics going on.

Lots new, in fact. New character, new setup. You're again a Sleeper -- a cheap disposable mind-state in a cheap disposable bot-frame -- but you're free of the stabilizer, the Sleepers' usual drug-leash. Unfortunately the guy who sprung you loose from that trap might have ulterior motives. Getting loose of him is going to cost you.

You have a scrappy little runabout, a pilot, and amnesia. You'll pick up memories and crew members as you go. The big new mechanic is missions: short-term tasks to complete in a specific area. Missions are time-limited and narrowly scripted, but you can bring along two crewfolk to add to your dice pool. This nicely breaks up CS's usual texture of open-world long-term goal management. (Spoiler: don't start a mission without a maxed-out supply bin!)

Interestingly, this game doesn't follow the CS1 model of multiple long-term goals leading to multiple story resolutions. CS2 focuses on a single plot arc. I'm not saying the story is on rails; you get many choices along the way, and they significantly influence the future of the Belt. Barrels of side quests, big and small. But everything leads to a final confrontation with Mr. Ulterior.

I hope that's not a spoiler. It's pretty well telegraphed, what with him chasing you all over the system.

(You might remember A Long Journey to an Uncertain End, which I described as "Citizen Sleeper by way of Firefly". CS2 is pretty much exactly the same setup, down to the crew management and the abusive ex. But it lands the story and the mechanics and the ending better. Apologies if you worked on Journey!)

Worldbuilding and writing are excellent, I hardly need say. Soundtrack is an instabuy. Go play it, oh look, it's already on your list, that's fine then.

Caravan SandWitch

• by Plane Toast -- game site

Scavenging adventure on a planet which has fallen into bucolic ruin since the Consortium pulled out. You return home from (space) school to reconnect with your family and track down your missing sister.

This is quite reminiscent of Sable, only with faces, and a van instead of a hoverbike. Cozy, inclusive, multicultural -- you're a village kid but there's also a Nomad tribe nearby -- "Nomad" means they have a mobile home instead of a van. There's also frog people and robots. Everybody gets along. There's no such thing as falling damage.

(Tangent: It's funny how "stand there stunned for 0.75 seconds" became the accepted substitute for plummet-death. Locking your controller, even briefly, is a visceral oh my god oh wait whew experience! A Mario game invented this, right?)

The gameplay is mostly climbing buildings and unlocking doors to find bits of old technology to rip out. The more parts you collect, the more you can upgrade the van and thus continue exploring. Only this mysterious Sand Witch is watching you. Maybe you're getting into places you shouldn't? (Says who?)

It's an oddly ambivalent theme. The story is aimed at "small people build community in the capitalist ruins," just like Sable and Citizen Sleeper and plenty of other recent games. Except what you do is purely parasitic. Life has nothing for you but the Consortium's trash. (Even "grow a garden" turns out to be scavenged computers and seed stock.) And sometimes you have to reactivate old tech instead -- whose side are we on? This turns out to be a plot dilemma, but the tension is out of focus until a Very Last Choice turns up.

I think what was missing was any concept of sustainability. The planet is mostly abandoned, and the folks sticking around felt like a last gasp. I dunno. Maybe the frog people will make it.

Theme aside, the only design hiccup is that sometimes you accept a mission and it puts you in the van and tells you to drive somewhere, and you can't get out of the van. Open-worldness is suspended for the mission. That hurts worse than the falling-stun. ("There's a purple tech right over there! Argh!") I can see why they did it -- if you could wander off, you could wander off indefinitely, and players would lose track of the hung mission. But it's not great.

(Maybe if you could wander freely but not interact with any NPCs? "I should get back to X first..." And flash the big map arrow.)

Don't mind me digging into the negatives, though. This is an entirely cheerful play experience and it's got lots of buildings to climb. I liked it.

I’ve finished the game. My previous post is needed for context.

This was mostly a matter of realizing the system this was going for, which is to use almost no verbs at all. The command list given in the game is essentially

GET, DROP, EXAMINE, INSERT (insert keys), SHOOT, READ

with a heavy, heavy reliance on DROP. DROP is essentially USE: it applies the object you put to whatever is nearby, and it may or may not display a helpful message as it does so.

The atmosphere is something a cross between Seek and Arkenstone. Seek in that having nearly everything happen with DROP (combined with sparse descriptions) makes for an almost board-game like feel, and Arkenstone in having all of the locations from the book jammed together in a way that doesn’t entirely make sense.

Continuing from last time, there was a warp transporter hanging out near Arthur Dent’s House that I was unable to activate with a crystal. Following my statement above, you just need to DROP the crystal and it works, but it works by opening a passage to the south with no fanfare.

This leads to a “Betelguese Spacedome” and I’ll mark the whole area in light purple. Not everything is accessible right away.

You’re first stopped by a “nutty Vogon guard” and you’re supposed to DROP some peanuts (ha ha, ha).

the Vogon jumps for jog and runs off
with a handful of peanuts

This is immediately adjacent to the Restaurant at the End of the Galaxy (see? it’s like Arkenstone geography) where you can buy a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster with money. (Or rather, you try to TAKE PAN, are told the bartender needs money, drop the right item, and then you are allowed to take the Gargle Blaster. Also, take the item you used to pay for it, since it just gets left right there.)

After that comes a fountain with a babel fish that is not cooperative about being picked up…

…and an “angry Arkelsiesure” blocking a hallway. (As usual, it isn’t clear the creature is blocking anything — you only find out after resolving the obstacle.)

Available also for nabbing are some matches, a Vogon mega-steak, and a galactic data card. There’s one locked door (keys are coming soon) and some whalemeat that you do nothing at all with.

We are on an undulating walkway

You can go North, East

That looks like
ten tons of whalemeat

Taking the matches, we can head back over to the hay monster that was stopping us before and set it on fire (again, DROP, not LIGHT MATCHES or anything like that). This opens up a Small Shop with a stun gun, which can then be toted over to the Vogon Captain and — astonishingly enough — used via the SHOOT verb rather than DROP. I guess here it seemed too implausible to activate a gun by dropping.

This opens up the third area, which is roughly “ship + outer space” but again things are very loosely connected to any real geography:

Some keys (told you they were coming) are easy to grab, as is a cheque signed by Zaphod Beeblebrox which is ripped directly from Supersoft Hitchhiker’s. Let’s save the cheque for now and go use the keys:

Poetry, my favorite, and it gets applied in exactly the same way as it does in the Supersoft game: to scare a way a tiger.

From here you can access a “beast of TRALL” who will take the mega-steak, opening passage to a white mouse that is too fast to take. Going east instead leads to an Engine Room described as having an improbable situation. I nabbed the Improbability Drive (just hanging out in town), plopped it down, and was mystified when nothing happened. This is the one part where EXAMINE was useful, as I could EXAMINE the engine.

Fortunately I had one of those; dropping both items activates the engine and new exits, leading to: a Vogon coin, a Vogon data machine, a robot control circuit, chocolates, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Deep Thought, and a mega-elephant blocking the way. Deep Thought is an item you can pick up and as far as I can tell (despite being the mega-computer that figured out “42” in the book) is entirely useless in the game.

To get past the mega-elephant, you need to go back to the market with the cheesecake, buy it with the Vogon coin, and drop it at the mouse, which suddenly gets described as sleepy. (There’s some text that doesn’t show in the game about it eating the cake up. The cake doesn’t actually disappear, though.) Then toting the mouse over to the elephant:

This opens up a Vortex where there’s a colorful poster; the poster is one of the artefacts. (We’ve already seen two other artefacts, the book of poetry and the Hitchhiker’s Guide. The only way to tell is to drop the items at the Inn and check if your score has increased.)

Toting the chocolate back over to the babel fish — look, this was just something you did in the Supersoft game, I have no idea what the motivation would be here — you can drop it, and the fish will eat the chocolate and get drunk, allowing you to pick it up and get the language-understanding from the book.

If you use the cheque (from way back a bit when we found keys) you can buy the Gargle Blaster and deliver it to the Arkleseizure; as long as you’re wearing the babel fish you will find out exits you can take. Again, this is entirely a ripoff of the Supersoft game, including the softlock that happens if you hand over the drink before wearing the babel fish.

This opens passages to a dirty towel (not a treasure), a bowel of petunias (treasure), Slartibartfast (who you can pick up for some reason), and Marvin the depressed robot.

Dropping the circuit board from back in the Vogon/space area over here doesn’t seem to work, but it’s just the game’s code being weird; once you have dropped the board, you are allowed to take Marvin, and the board will come along with him.

There’s a third game this all reminds me of, and that’s Eldorado Gold. That was a game which took a different game (Lost Dutchman’s Mine) and did sort of a parody version but was otherwise ripped quite directly, including I expect the code.

Here, there doesn’t seem to be any parody going on: this is just the author apparently being a fan of the Supersoft game and doing their own remix, including stolen puzzles. It still counts as its own game and the extra bugs (and intentional red herrings) mean you can have very strange object lists.

According to the walkthrough on CASA, there’s some unused text:

“The barman won’t let us”
“The barman says THAT’LL DO NICELY”
“The mouse swallows the cheesecake,burps and falls asleep”
“Marvin says LIFE’S TOTALLY BORING and wanders off”
“Great Idea Guys-nothing happened”
“Whoops!! A nasty Vogon just spotted us”
“Vogon has disintegrated us”
“Great Idea Guys,maybe the Megadonkey cancarry some stuff”
“jumping Gargle Blasters,the Megadonkey kicked everything off
and bolted”

which suggests the author got up to the point where the game was “working” and then decided it was good enough to put onto tape. Is Marvin wandering off a softlock or was there meant to be a mechanic where we can follow him around? Was the Vogon meant to be more aggressive? What was the real plan with the Megadonkey? The inventory limit is 3, so an increased capacity would have been welcome. Funnily enough, the presence of the Megadonkey means this game could even have gone to the same source as Eldorado Gold (Lost Dutchman’s Mine) as that game has a mule that you can use to carry inventory, and it isn’t a common attribute in games of this era at all.

Peter Smith will return soon with a Dr. Who-themed game. For now, coming up: two short games, and then the sequel to one of the most difficult games from 1981.

In the early 80s, Computer Concepts was a BBC Micro-focused company in the UK mostly known for applications and graphics software, like a Graphics Extension ROM and a LOGO package (LOGO being a beginner language specifically for making computer graphics).

However, just like any company getting their footing at the time, they threw out lots of products; this October 1982 ad emphasizes a word processor (Wordwise, we’ll come back to it) but also five games: Asteroid Belt, Chase, Chess, Reversi, and what the ad calls Hitch-Hiker’s Guide although the cassette box from the Museum of Computer Adventure Games just says Hitch-Hiker.

An adventure based on the characters of the book ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’. The aim of the game is to collect five specific objects that are located in such places as the ‘Restaurant at the End of the Universe’, Arthur Dent’s house and Betelgeuse Spacedome. The computer can understand plain English commands such as North, Shoot and Get. Clues (sometimes very subtle) are given that indicate the whereabouts of these objects or the method of getting to new areas or locations in the game.

Only £5.80 plus VAT!

You might think this is another one of those companies that’s disappeared after producing a handful of dodgy games, but no, they actually did quite well for themselves because of Wordwise. A 1984 ad that mentions a change of address:

That second address is not a normal house. It is a full estate, one built between 1768 and 1773 that has its own Wikipedia page and was used as the set for movies. It was bought by (and still owned by) Charles Moir, who became very rich from his company.

Before Computer Concepts, Moir had been interested in electronics and he’d belonged to computer clubs. After he had finished school, he avoided university and was tinkering with his dad’s business instead. But aged 17 fate took a hand: Moir met Acorn founders Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry. By the age of 21 he’d written Wordwise programming in his bedroom.

Demand for those early machines exceeded expectations and sometimes supply: the BBC’s target for the BBC Micro, for example, was 12,000 units but in the end 1.5 million went to eager young geeks. BBC Micros sat in 85 per cent of British schools.

Moir tells us: “The BBC Micro became huge and the product I did, Wordwise, became very popular on the back of that. All of a sudden I was making a fortune much to the amazement of my parents, because I was 21.”

The company is still around as Xara and owned by a German company.

As far as the author of today’s game goes, Peter Smith, I haven’t found any evidence he had a special relationship with Computer Concepts. He was a math teacher who eventually went full time into software development. His other 1982 text adventure which we will be getting to (Time Traveler) was published by an entirely different company, Software For All. He later did children’s software through BBC Soft (the BBC’s own software house), with titles like Picture Craft, Maths With a Story and Through the Dragon’s Eye.

All this (from two people who either create or land with very respectable companies) makes the content of Hitch-Hiker even more puzzling, as this not only is it a unlicensed product of the Douglas Adams book, it rips in a minor way of a different company’s version of Hitchhiker’s! (This is still two years away from Infocom’s game.)

To back up and explain, we’ve had so far a 1980 version of Hitchhiker’s with the serial numbers crossed out (Galactic Hitchhiker) but for the obscure UK101 where it wouldn’t cause a fuss. We also had a made-with-permission-from-Pan-Books 1981 text adventure by Bob Chappell and published by Supersoft. Supersoft made the mistake of trying to republish the game in 1983 when people were paying more attention to these “electronic game” things, getting themselves a knock on the door from literary agent Ed Victor and a lawsuit. It was settled out of court (despite the letter giving permission) and Supersoft had to rename their game Cosmic Capers.

You might think that a company with deep pockets would also be a target, but Computer Concepts seemed to shy away from games when 1983 rolled around and the sweet word processor money started to pour in, so nobody paid their game much attention. (Compare with how the VisiCalc folks initially published Zork.) The game seems to be rather rare besides.

Supersoft didn’t make a fuss either, even though the opening room seems to be taken directly from their game:

The Five Artefacts Inn is not some sort of Hitchhiker’s lore, but rather simply the location the treasures go in Bob Chappell’s game. (It had an interesting take on “treasure” in the Hitchhiker-verse; a high-value check was not considered a treasure, but a towel was.) There’s also a “rubbish tip” early which shows up in the Chappell game…

…but that’s it. Things go in rather a different direction. For example, the Vogon is not actively trying to kill you. You can try to GET him and the game will say “I’m not getting that villian.I’d shoot him” but there’s nothing in the starting locations that suggests a weapon:

While Supersoft Hitchhiker’s was weirdly laid out I still got the impression of different specific zones; here I have no idea why we’d start next to a small dog, improbability drive, cut price cheese-cake at a intergalactic market, sparkling crystal, strong cup of tea, and pack of galactic peanuts. The level of surrealism isn’t quite up to Fantasyland but it’s nearing that level.

The only real obstacles are a “horrible hay monster” (GET MONSTER: “Sorry I’ve gotten hay fever”) and a warp transporter which says it uses crystals. That means, you would think, the crystal would apply for teleport (and maybe get this game kicked off but I’ve tried many, many verbs with no luck.

USE CRYSTAL, ENTER TRANSPORTER, POWER WARP, ENTER WARP, BEAM UP, THROW CRYSTAL, INSERT CRYSTAL, PLACE CRYSTAL, etc.

INSERT CRYSTAL at least has a prompt about what I want to insert, but typing CRYSTAL just gives no reaction. The game takes the standpoint of simply refreshing the room description if a command isn’t understood, with no hint if it was a verb problem, noun problem, or it just is deciding to be fussy.

I do think this parser has more chinks in the armor than Windmere Estate did so I expect to be able to break through for my next post.

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It’s the ’90s! You’ve just moved to New York to chase your dreams of Broadway stardom. Every day you walk past the theaters where legendary shows debuted. Rent! Les Miserables! Phantom of the Opera! Smash hits bring audiences to their feet and launch the careers of people just like you. You’ve landed an audition for a new production of Alice in Wonderland, which could be your big break, but hitting it big is harder than you ever imagined.

Meanwhile, you’re trying to make another one of your dreams come true: to find love. Will it be with your neighbor Cris? He’s an award-winning photojournalist, daring enough to go into war zones, with luxurious long dark hair, strong tattooed arms, and very sexy dance moves.

Or will you fall for Ryan, a rising politician from a fabulously wealthy family, with sparkling sapphire eyes and movie-star good looks? He’s always looking to the future, full of ideas about how to make New York a better place: will you be part of the next political dynasty with him?

But then, you and your roommate accidentally summon a powerful demon. A very [i]handsome[/i] powerful demon named Davin, who instantly turns all of his infernal might towards helping you! With a wave of his hand, he can grant your every wish. Land that starring role? Take down your rival? Save your local bookstore from gentrification? Win the lottery? It’s done!…as long as you give him a bit of your soul.

The demon is always whispering in your ear. There’s a reason the phrase ‘handsome as sin’ exists—and it might be because of his flowing golden hair and supernaturally sharp suits. He’s enormously powerful, yes—but he’s got some metaphorical demons of his own haunting his past, and with your help, he just might be able to break free.

Become everything you’ve dreamed of in the glorious, glamorous, gritty concrete jungle of 1990s New York. Dance at a star-studded gala; sing your heart out at auditions; stroll through Central Park; dive deep into the graffiti-filled subways. Will you give in to temptation so that you can achieve stardom, or try to make it on your own and risk losing it all?

• Play as a woman romancing men.
• Find love with a daring photojournalist, a visionary politician, or a tempting demon.
• Preserve your soul, or spend it freely to gain effortless rewards!
• Try to land a starring role on Broadway: choose your performance style and charm the producers!
• Mingle with the poets, dreamers, and eccentrics of the East Village! Help them resist gentrification or make way for the next millennium.
• Join a political campaign to bring in a new era in New York City politics!
• Befriend your professional rival, or do whatever it takes to cut her down.
• Dig deeper into arcane mysteries to understand your demon’s mystic powers—or to break free of the bonds that tie you together.

How far will you go to see your name in lights?

We hope you enjoy playing Devil on Your Shoulder. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

The latest major update to Gamefic introduces some important structural and architectural changes. Some of them break backwards compatibility, but I felt they were important for long-term maintainability, extensibility, and developer experience. (Note: this post discusses a lot of technical details that explain the reasoning behind the design decisions, but hopefully they don't need much consideration when authoring games.) Read more

I have finished the game.

Before I get into the details, a few corrections on the history of distribution of the game.

There was briefly some “professional” distribution via Aresco. Based on the manual’s date (December 1979) it was simply distributed throughout 1980. They put in classified ads but not what one might call full professional advertising.

The “Ask Me About Kim-Venture” distribution happened after distribution had trailed off already at the end of summer, 1980, at the Personal Computing Show in Atlantic City. (Only the West Coast event gets described as a “faire” so I was getting the events confused.) Since Leedom himself is in the comments he can check me if I have this right now!

So last time I was stuck due to a dragon eating my bird, and none of my other objects seemingly getting any acknowledgement. The Original Adventure involved fisticuffs, where you ATTACK DRAGON and it asks you if you mean your bare hands and you say yes; this game had no equivalent (although I did test dropping all my items and applying Use, I mean Employ; there’s just no message that appears if you have no objects, though).

I finally peeked at the map which indicated the bird worked on the dragon after all. (??) Rather confused, I tried to drop the bird rather than employ it, and this time the bird scared the dragon off. I have no idea what the difference between the two is (does the game assume “employ” means I wanted to hurl it into the dragon’s mouth? I am failing to visualize what’s happening).

The remainder of the game was relatively straightforward, as I had already resolved the hard part (figuring out where the magic gets used so you can warp at the steps — you can’t bring one of the treasures up from the steps, so warping has to be used).

Mapping was the difficult part; as you can tell above, the directions start to twist more or less on every single step. Everything funnels down to a pair of three “pits” (north, east, south) and going down at the north and the east pit leads to a “hole” where the rope is needed to escape. I think the intent was to fool the player into not also testing going down at the south pit but that leads to an entirely new location, a blue den, and going down again leads to some pearls.

You still need a rope to get out, and it is definitely possible to get softlocked here (one of the ranks in the scoring system is “you got stuck”, accounting for this).

The other element is a Gully, where going west has the game prompt you how.

There’s no description but given there aren’t many objects to play with it isn’t tough to realize the so-far unused rod has to apply here.

This leads the way to some Gold, and just like original Adventure, you can’t get the Gold back up the steps. This is where the teleportation comes into play, and so you can drop the treasures off and win.

The game lets you try for a maximum-optimal time for higher score. This is far tighter than normal but keep in mind the context of this game (it’s already enormously tricky to get the game running in the first place) so I can see trying to squeeze out every ounce of potential interest.

The source code is extremely well-annotated if you’d like to see how the game works. It comes off as shockingly normal given the conditions.

By the way, there were no assemblers, at least I didn’t own an assembler back at this time. All of this was in machine language, and hand-assembled, and I created…I had messages in there…you know, on a 7-segment LED display, you can’t make a K or a W– there’s several letters that are just too complicated to put up there. I could make an S, I can make a lowercase N.

Just to reiterate, the calculator display wasn’t able to show a K or W letter, so the way Leedom worked around that is to simply avoid using words that had either letter. There could be a red room, or blue room, or purple room, but a white room or a black room simply weren’t possible with the technology.

So I was thinking about a text game idea where paragraphs of text change between a handful of possibilities as you make choices. Sort of a cycling choices effect.

But maybe instead of just replacing one block of text with another, I could do something visually neat. Like cross-fading. Or, how about this, maybe all the words could rearrange from one text into another. Some of them would move, some would appear, some would disappear...

= The    |  = The
         |  + rough
         |  + beast
         |  + ,
         |  + its
= hour   |  = hour
- is     | 
= come   |  = come
         |  + round
= at     |  = at
= last   |  = last
- ,      | 
- but    | 
- not    | 
- the    | 
- beast  | 
= ...    |  = ...

Well, that's just a diff function, right? Sure, you have to do all the animation work on top of that, which means text-layout work for the before-and-after. But the underlying logic is diff on two lists of words. Old-fashioned stuff. Same logic you see every day in version control systems.

("A diff command appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX," says my man page. That would have been 1975, if I'm reading the right timeline.)

---

Hang on. How does diff work anyway?

I don't think this problem ever came up in my undergrad CS classes. You'd think it would have. Digging into my undergrad algorithms textbook -- yes, I saved it, entirely as blog fodder -- I see some discussion of diff under the heading "The Longest Common Subsequence Problem". But I have no memory of it being discussed in class. I guess it's been a while.

(Aho/Hopcroft/Ullman 1983, p189-194. I took that algorithms class around 1991 -- from Danny Sleator, brother of William Sleator. Just one of those footnotes of history. I dimly recall finding the class annoying, but I passed.)

Anyhow. There must be a thousand sample diff implementations on the Net -- this is what stackoverflow is for. But in searching around, I ran across someone saying "Read Myers' 1986 paper, it's easy."

Funny idea, right? Go back to the source. 1986 postdates my textbook, if not my algo class, so I am half-justified in not remembering... Okay, let's take a look:

• An O(ND) Difference Algorithm and Its Variations, Eugene W. Myers, 1986

(The "official" doc reference link is to Springer, which of course is paywalled. It's a good thing people have saved accessible copies. Aaron Swartz's memory for a blessing.)

And then I sat down and wrote some Python, and now I have a simple diff function.

...I started to write up a blow-by-blow of the paper, but nah. That's not my point here. My point is simple: this wasn't that hard! The paper really is pretty simple; it has nice diagrams; it has some pseudocode. There's a lot of pages proving that the algorithm is optimal, but you don't need to follow the proof to implement the function.

You do have to follow the diagrams. The pseudocode is a bit shorthand; you have to know what's going on. I appreciate that, honestly. If I'd wanted a cut-and-paste solution, I would have stayed on stackoverflow. Instead, I have a rather messy chunk of code that I wrote and I know what all the pieces mean.

In a year of noisy AI shortcuts, it feels good to do the work.

---

If you want the cut-and-paste version anyhow, no shade. Check out this blog post by Robert Elder (2017). I may in fact wind up using his version, because it's got optimizations I'm missing.

Or I may strike out on my own. My text idea isn't quite a basic diff. Myers (and later VCS refinements) are trying to find a "shortest edit script", which is a sequence of deletes and inserts. See the chart at the top of this post.

But if I'm animating words moving around, then I really want a sequence of deletes, inserts, and moves. Again, look at that chart. The words "beast" and "," are deleted on the left and then inserted in a different position on the right. I'd really like those two words to stay on screen and just shift sideways.

I could fix up the Myers output to include moves, by finding words in common between the delete and insert lists. But that wouldn't be optimal. A move should count as cheaper than a delete-and-insert, and Myers doesn't account for that.

Upon further searching, I see references to:

• The String-to-String Correction Problem with Block Moves, Walter F. Tichy, 1983

But I have not yet read this paper!

As for the text game? Still just an idea.

---

Oh, speaking of footnotes. At the bottom of Myers page 1, and I swear I didn't mean to make this post topical:

* This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant MCS82-10096.

I'm trying to distract myself from the world, here, so let's just let that one sit.

---

Addendum, Feb 11

I thought about this some more and decided that the standard diff approach isn't what I want.

I mentioned the "include moves" problem above. But more than that: in general we'll be dealing with chunks of text that are mostly different. We need to identify the words that exist in each chunk, and decide where each one moves to. But this overlap won't generaly be large. It's not like source control, where the common case is changing a few lines in a big file.

We may reasonably expect a phrase (sequence of words) to appear in both chunks. However -- thinking down to the animation level -- even if a phrase remains on screen, it probably won't appear at the same place on the screen. Any wording change before the common phrase will re-wrap it. So the words will still move around.

(Unless the common phrase is at the start of the block. We can special-case that.)

Therefore, my representation of diff(seqA, seqB) will look like three lists:

• deletes (words in seqA which get deleted, because they're not in seqB)
• adds (words in seqB which get added, because they're not in seqA)
• moves (words shared between seqA and seqB which just change position)

Building the deletes and adds lists is easy; that's just set difference. For moves, a greedy algorithm seems workable. Say the word "foo" appears at positions [1, 3, 6] in seqA, and positions [2, 3] in seqB. The "foo" at 3 can stay at 3; knock the 3s from both lists. Now we have [1, 6] and [2]. It's cheaper to move the "foo" at 1 to 2. Then we're left with [6] and []; the "foo" at 6 is surplus so it becomes a delete.

You can do this index-list-matchup in O(N^2) time, where N is how many times a given word appears in the text -- exercise left to the reader. That's not going to be huge for passage-sized texts, so this should be workable.

As a concrete example: if seqA is XYXYXY and seqB is YXYXYX, this plan will cause each XY pair to swap places, which minimizes movement and also looks cool. A longest-common-substring plan will try to move the initial X to the end, and every other letter shifts back one place -- not as good.

If I want to really get into the weeds, I could minimize screen movement (in X,Y coordinates) rather than index-in-the-phrase movement. That might be fun.

Most histories of personal computing focus on devices resembling a modern computer, with a keyboard and screen — perhaps provided separate from the main product — and the main hardware hidden by a case. However, a full accounting of computers for personal use really ought to be more expansive. If you wanted a computer in the 1950s, you could go with the Geniac, made out of masonite disks and wires.

Options in the 1960s included using the book How to Build a Working Digital Computer; paperclips are a major component. For memory, the book suggests a literal food can; advice includes making sure to remove the paper label and any paint from the can before use.

Some kits from the 1970s involved literal exposed circuit boards. The TK-80, for example, was a kit sold in Japan; one of the earliest adaptations of anime to computers (Space Battleship Yamato) was made for the system.

The system for today’s game is a KIM-1, which first was sold by MOS Technology in 1976. By default it had room for displaying six characters of text at a time using a “calculator display”.

Based on source code from The First Book of KIM (1979) the six letters could go a long way, allowing for Blackjack games, Hunt the Wumpus, Lunar Lander, and an animal-recognition program called Farmer Brown.

As the symbols above imply, the calculator display can be used in unusual ways; letters and words required creative modifications.

Today’s author, Robert Leedom, started his experiences with computing in the hardscrabble 60s; while he didn’t build the paperclip computer, he did build an analog computer while in high school. He ran across the People’s Computing Company in their early days, and after attending college at Johns Hopkins (programming with punched cards) he got a job at Westinghouse and obtained experience with a Data General Nova, noodling with the programs from Ahl’s collection of BASIC computer games.

At some point he saw Adventure on a mainframe, as the author explains:

I had seen Colossal Cave Adventure running on an IBM mainframe, so I decided to see how much of a similar game I could cram into 1188 bytes–I think that’s the total on a virgin KIM-1, which was the only computer I had access to. I had no I/O capabilities other than the KIM-1 display and keyboard, plus a cassette tape recorder. Therefore, the program was assembled by hand, and then I typed (on a typewriter, of course) the “listing” of the source code.

Just like a common hack for modern machines is to see if it runs DOOM, programmers of the late-70s-early-80s tried to make every computer play a form of Adventure, even ones that were absurdly limited. Leedom cheekily explains in an interview he managed to fit “26 rooms, 2 treasures to take back, a magic rod, a magic word, a dragon, a bird, a whole bunch of stuff in there and I crammed it all into 1,185 bytes. I left 3 bytes over for user expansion.” In a different interview Leedom explains he used compression rather like the Z-Code of Infocom or the A-Code of Level 9.

He managed to find a local company to print copies and showed up to the 1979 Computer Faire in San Francisco Atlantic City wearing an “Ask me about KIM-Venture” shirt.

I had technical issues getting the game running (I tried roughly back when the game was first dumped) but there’s now a helpful Youtube guide accompanying an online emulator and the source code on Github. Due to the size limit the score can’t be known from the base game; after finishing you can upload the SCORER program to the right address (which copies atop the main program) and run it.

The limited keyboard of the KIM-1 means it has no parser but rather improvises using the buttons available. From the manual:

I love the fact that (due to the letters being restricted to A-F, as in hexadecimal) “E” for Employ becomes the Use button.

Our quest is to find the hidden caves of Nirdarf and its treasures.

Many, many years ago, before the Semi-Colossal Caverns of Nirdarf were the subject of whispered terror, a townsman found a scrap of paper wrapped up in an oak leaf, down in Least Valley. That’s a few miles north of here, and that’s where the last explorers were finally found … absolutely mad. Anyway, this scrap had some scribbling on it, and a little drawing, and lots of the local folks think the message has to do with the caves and the treasures.

The scrap of paper is not only provided in the manual…

…but also gets represented in the game itself. You get prompted to act by what vaguely looks like a question mark, and on the same display you also get shown the “current image” of the most recently seen symbol.

Here’s an animation of the opening of the game just to show what the game looks like to play; I enter a location described as having a 2-inch slit. (This is a larger GIF size than I normally use, but the experience here is so much different than a typical computer game I think it’s important.)

The game kicks off in a clearly-inspired-by-Adventure area. You’re at a stream, a house is to the north, and if you go down while in the house you can find a cellar with a file, cage, and rope.

The game deviates from Adventure upon heading south and arriving at a grate; employing the file (not keys!) turns it into an “open” grate. (The way using objects works is you press E to start the process, and then the game lists each of your objects in order; you press E again when the right object displays in order to use it.)

First off while inside is a “tunnel” with a rod, and a “bird room” based with a bird that can be caught in a cage. The usual behavior applies where you can’t pick up a bird while holding the rod (this is mentioned in the manual as a hint).

Next comes a “purple oracle” room, which I’ll show as actual screenshots. Keep in mind these appear slowly one at a time!

So the purple oracle has a sign that says the magic button is 0. This is hinting about an mention in the manual about the “F” key; if you press it, the game requests what the magic button is. To get the magic started, you need to press “0”. In most locations this will do nothing still (“no joy”) but if you are at the Stone Steps in the underground you get teleported to the Cellar, and vice versa. I don’t know if there are more teleport spots, because I’m stuck immediately after on a dragon.

The dragon blocks all directions except back to the steps. If you employ the bird (thinking perhaps this will work like the snake in Adventure) the dragon simply eats the bird. The rod, rope, file, and cage get “no joy”. I am honestly not sure what to do from here!

I have not tried every item in every place (maybe the bird wants to be free in the glen?) mainly because it is very slow trying to do anything in this game, but I find it fascinating to be stuck with such apparently limited options. I also have not investigated any of the glyphs that show up in the rooms (the symbols that show when the game prompts for an action) and if their significance needs to be gleaned for a puzzle.

There’s a longplay on an actual KIM-1 so I can fall back on that if I need to, but despite it being on such an unusual system I’m going to treat it like a regular adventure game and hold off from looking up hints for a while longer.

Thanks to Code Monkey King and Kevin Bunch, whose interviews with Robert Leedom I used for the history section of this post. Code Monkey King also made the emulator but note you should use the older version of his emulator if you want to play, as the newer one I’ve found has an error. (Specifically, when uploading the main code, it ends up resetting the variables to 0.)

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the second round of IFTF microgrants, after a successful pilot in 2024.

The grants program exists to disburse small-value grants to peer-reviewed projects that benefit a community of interactive fiction makers, players, researchers, or educators. An independent committee of Grant Advisors review each submission and provide recommendations for funding to the Grants Committee, who this year have selected four projects to fund.

We saw great diversity again this year in the projects submitted, including a higher number of submissions compared to our pilot year. Thanks to everyone who submitted proposals! Here are the list of grant recipients for 2025.

Critical Essays On Interactive Fiction - Grace Benfell Grace is a co-editor of The Imaginary Engine Review, an online games criticism journal. Grace will receive $500 to commission three articles for the journal on significant interactive fictions written in the 2010s, exploring how these works continue the medium’s tradition of experimentation and introducing modern IF to a broader gaming audience.

No-code IF platform for web using Ink - Mark Davis Mark Davis is developing a web-based tool for interactive fiction builders that allows creators without coding experience to create interactive stories incorporating images and animations, using Ink scripts under the hood. Mark will receive $600 for hosting and branding assets for the in-development platform, crucial steps towards opening it up to outside testers on its road to launch.

Interactive Fiction Workshop for London Games Week - Katy Naylor Katy will receive $716 to host a series of IF writing workshops and Twine mini-jams at the 2025 London Games Festival Fringe, and present resultant works online in a special edition of voidspace zine. The workshops are aimed at people interested in games or interactive writing but who have not coded or designed a piece of IF before, hoping to bring new voices into the community.

Atrament, an Ink-based IF engine - Serhii Serhii is working on an IF engine that combines Ink scripting with Javascript as an alternative to Inky, creating a more full-featured release platform for Ink stories comparable to the mature web deployments for languages like Twine and ChoiceScript. The core of the engine is already complete: Serhii will receive $1000 to fund dev time writing documentation, testing and debugging the engine, and adding improvements focused on easier development and deployment workflows for authors.

We’re thrilled to see so much passion for expanding the audience of IF writers and readers in this year’s awardees. We want to thank all applicants, as well as our Grant Advisors, who volunteered their time to review the projects and formulate a recommendation for IFTF: thank you very much to Grim Baccaris, Kate Compton, Emilia Lazer-Walker, Juhana Leinonen, Colin Post, and Kaitlin Tremblay.

Congrats again to this year’s grant recipients! Check back in the fall for information about next year’s grant cycle. An announcement of the 2024 grant recipients is also available.

And lastly: if you like the grants program and want to see it continue, please consider donating to IFTF! Our Paypal page allows you to specify the program you’d like to see your money fund - you can select the grants program in the dropdown menu if you are so inclined. Thank you to everyone who has been donating to IFTF and allowing us to continue furthering our mission!

See your name in lights on Broadway! Find fame, fortune, and true love! All it costs is your immortal soul.

Devil on Your Shoulder is an interactive urban fantasy romance novel by Lisa Fox, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 300,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

We’re excited to announce that Devil on Your Shoulder is releasing this Thursday, February 13th!

You can play the first three chapters for free today and read an interview with the author!

And don’t forget to wishlist it on Steam!

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

The general theme was room exits being ornery to find. That, and treasure. A lot of treasure.

I did not need to bop open the North Star version of the game after all, although I did hit a

I/O ERROR
BREAK IN 0

for no apparent reason once. My biggest breakthrough sounds kind of silly written out, so let me just give a map first. Yellow rooms are new.

Yes, I was foiled by diagonal directions. I had been testing them tediously nearly everywhere (YOU CANNOT MOVE IN THAT DIRECTION, YOU CANNOT MOVE IN THAT DIRECTION, YOU CANNOT MOVE IN THAT DIRECTION, etc.) but had apparently forgot to check in the West Upstairs Hall, one of the only rooms that has any! They’re technically in the room description, but given the presence of zero diagonals briefly, I hope you understand my issue.

THIS IS THE WEST ENO OF THE UPSTAIRS HALL. THERE ARE EXITS LEADING IN ALL DIRECTIONS.

After finding this I also noticed there’s exits up and down, again technically included in “all directions” more often not counted with that sort of statement.

The diagonal rooms technically speaking don’t yield much other than SILKS (just a treasure) and an IVORY CARVING (which we’ll need later). There’s an amusing music room scene which I think does nothing but might be a Cranston Manor reference.

Leading down goes to inside a (non-working) furnace in the basement with a GOLD EGG. I previously did not know the furnace was enterable; the EGG is just like the vase in Adventure where it breaks upon dropping (and you can’t LEAVE it to somehow indicate “set down more gently” like with the UK game Zodiac). I found the proper item essentially by luck, as I had all my stuff (including treasures, warehouse trips came later) in one room including the sawdust box so setting down the egg became safe by default.

Before going up, I should point to the other yellow spot on the upper floor: at the master bedroom, with the suspicious PORTRAIT, it turned out I was supposed to refer to it as a PICTURE, and TURN PICTURE. Just wonderful, game.

The skeleton now unlocks (with INSERT SKELETON) the door back at the well. It does not lead to a new area at all, but rather directly to the warehouse holding treasures.

Warping back to that UPSTAIRS HALL and going up leads to a rooftop with an observation tower holding KEYS. The keys unlock the trunk back at the garage I was having trouble with (getting STAMPS, just a treasure; the keys aren’t useful for anything else).

You might notice the weathervane being described as to the west. This baffled me for a long time, and for compactness I’ll give the resolution now: the weathervane is to the east rather than the west. (I did say “exits being ornery to find” was the theme!) I will also confess I did not “solve” this issue but rather found this on the CASA walkthrough; I suspected high bug shenanigans.

Turning the weathervane is strongly clued…

…and that drops you in a secret corner of the hedge maze with a dagger.

With the dagger it’s possible to deal with the mysterious STAB RATS message. The problem is the rats aren’t in the same room as the plaque.

One of the items I had been frustrated by was a SACK which stubbornly refused to be opened or have anything else done with it. The sack turns out to be a passive item; if you’re holding it, you can pick up the rats, will end up inside the sack. This lets the player safely cart the rats over to the plaque and finally STAB RATS.

I’ll show off the destination in a moment, because there’s another way in, involving something I already tried: swimming at the lake.

(The marked-corner spots are dark, which will be important.)

Note that swimming in the lake ends up hitting one of the few bits of world-model awareness in the game’s coding: getting the flashlight wet will fry it. You need to leave the flashlight behind, and you can then nab the DUBLOONS, a SPYGLASS (a treasure, but also useful for something) and a SWORD (not useful at all, even for stabbing rats).

From the map layout, the dubloons/spyglass area can only be reached via swimming. However, to see in the dark rooms, you need to bring the light, which requires taking the rat passage. (It’s possible to walk in the dark without dying for at least a few steps, so it’s fine to swim in first; this also gives a hint that there is, in fact, a secret passage at the STAR BATS room.)

The important dark room is a self-described “RIDDLE ROOM”. You are requested to drop “SOMETHING THAT IS PURE (OR ALMOST).”

This seemed to me like it had to be a treasure, but which one is “pure”? I got the right item first try but I’m not sure if I got lucky or not: I was thinking about the common advertisements (up to at least the 80s) for Ivory Soap.

The “OR ALMOST” in particular made me think of the weirdly exact “99 44/100” tagline for the soap.

You can normally just leave through the south, but the EMERALD can’t be taken that way; however, putting it in the opening sends it through an “ELEVATOR” which is clearly the dumbwaiter…

YOU PLACE THE EMERALD IN THE OPENING. THE MECHANISM WHIRRS AND THE STONE IS LIFTED AS IF IT WERE ON AN ELEVATOR.

…so all my struggle with that got resolved by simply using the dumbwaiter from the other side. (That is, the emerald can now be picked up at the Servant’s Quarters.)

That’s all of that section. The next section I was missing is almost entirely on me.

THE GARAGE HAS LONG SINCE BEEN EMPTY BUT THERE IS LAOOER LEADING UP

Almost entirely: there’s an undescribed exit to the west.

sigh The Nemesis returns.

YOU ARE ON A NARROW PATH

>NW

THIS IS WHERE THE WATER FOR THE ESTATE COMES FROM. THE PUMP NO LONGER WORKS BUT THE FLOOR IS WET FROM A SMALL TRICKLE OF WATER SEEPING FROM THE SEAL. NEXT TO THE PIPE IS A HOLE WHICH LEADS INTO DARKNESS. IT LOOKS LARGE ENOUGH TO SQUEEZE THROUGH BUT…

This area is relatively straightforward, except for:

a.) There’s some RUBIES that you need to be holding the SACK again to get.

b.) There’s a “doorless room” with a LAMP; you need to RUB LAMP to get out, which is almost reflex now for me and early 80s games.

c.) There’s a cufflink in a LOST CAVERN where leaving the room gets the message that something seems to be missing (the cufflink). This puzzle is meant to essentially waste your time since there’s nothing you can do (no elevator chutes or whatnot) and it turns out the cufflink teleported back to the WAREHOUSE where it belongs.

I will say there was a sense of atmosphere built up here; even though it wasn’t really a secret area, the fact it came up late in my gameplay gave the section an extra dose of mysticism.

From here I was really stuck and did a bunch of treasure-transfers back to the warehouse. It started getting fairly stuffed.

One item that seemed like it might be helpful is the GOLD SPYGLASS from the island. I tried GAZE SPYGLASS, LOOK THROUGH SPYGLASS (not a three-word parser but the game might have decided to be cruel here), USE SPYGLASS, etc., always getting the response

GAZE SPYGLASS???

This is a case which shows why bespoke actions at locations are a super-bad idea. The messages imply that all the syntaxes are wrong; even if you have awareness this might not be the case (as I did by this point) you essentially need to try every plausible syntax in every plausible room. The right room makes sense but it’s very easy given the circumstances to mess up.

I can easily see why from the perspective of Dennis Strong there wouldn’t be a problem here: the text does signal the observation tower is a helpful place for the spyglass. However, this is certainly an abductive reasoning moment and there are far too many circumstances where a player won’t find this because of the extra parser hurdle. (Quick definition recap: with deduction, we have fully known rules and circumstances that when together force some kind of conclusion. With abduction, we have circumstances where we have to infer the chain of events, but it’s a probabilistic guess.)

With the sighting from the spyglass, you can now go north from the “BREEZEWAY” which isn’t described as anything other than being a breezeway.

For the start of this final section, I hit a horrid moment where I thought I needed to restart the game.

Going down the hole causes you to break your neck, in a message reminiscent of trying to jump into the well at the start of the game. At the well, I had used a rope to go down (TIE ROPE) and it formed an odd second shortcut to the warehouse (since the bottom of the well had the skeleton-door leading straight to the warehouse). You’re supposed to use the rope here. I went back to the well to get the rope back:

UNTIE ROPE

UNTIE ROPE???

GET ROPE

THERE ISN’T ANY ROPE YOU CAN GET

??? Really? Fortunately, knowing how bad the parser is, I made a few more attempts, and hit upon TAKE ROPE.

Just to be clear, even though get and take are normally treated as synonyms, for the one specific case of getting the rope back, TAKE works and GET does not. Parsers keep finding new ways to disappoint me.

With the rope and hand we can get into the cave:

Just a bit farther is an unsteady subterranean lake.

The choice above (with the dam about to burst) is once again puzzling. I tried the most obvious thing of directions first (outrunning the event, maybe) but the game told me east and west weren’t exits. I kept going and found that NORTH brings you back to the lake but also floods the tunnel, while SOUTH somehow stops the flood.

YOU MANAGE TO SUCCESSFULLY STOP THE WATER FLOW BEFORE IT FILLED THE CAVERN.

Your guess is as good as mine. All these leads to a dead end and a PLATINUM PLATYPUS.

Just to be clear, I’m emphasizing the parts of the game I had trouble, but this isn’t generally intended as difficult (I think the RATS/BAG thing is the hardest, especially with the poison fake-out). When this was simply a game about exploring new areas and scooping up treasures it felt satisfying, and it is even possible some of the friction I suffered helped make the simple moments come across better.

That’s everything, I think? (There are so many treasures I might have missed mentioning one. I’ve covered all the puzzles, at least.) Once you drop the last treasure in the overfilling warehouse the endgame immediately starts.

This is a two-room endgame, just like Crowther/Woods Adventure.

It also has nearly the exact same solution as Adventure, albeit much more fairly clued. Not only do the room descriptions suggest the keg goes to the rubble, but there was a book long back that made the comment to BLAST those pirates.

This could have been a fun straightforward exploration game, but it was undercut by technical issues. Here is another case where I wish the author had a modern copy of Inform (or hell, even AGT) because so many of wobbly parts would be resolved.

There was some imagination and attempt and building a world full of shortcuts and niches. One room I skipped mentioning gives an idea:

FROM HERE YOU CAN SEE THE WESTERN PART OF THE ESTATE. YOU ARE SURROUNDED BY A THICK FOREST OF WALNUT AND OAK TREES. TO THE NORTH YOU CAN SEE A SMALL STREAM WINDING THROUGH THE FOREST. TO THE WEST ATOP A SMALL KNOLL IS SHALL BUILDING FROM WHICH A PIPE EXTENDS TO THE HOUSE. YOU CAN BARELY SEE SOMETHING TO THE NORTH BUT YOUR VIEW IS MOSTLY BLOCKED BY SOME LARGE TREES.

Sure, this isn’t artistic at a prose level, but — this indicates the garage-exit I had missed, and also the author really was thinking about the big-picture view of how everything is laid out. The extra area to the north is hinted at here (and can only be seen by the spyglass on the roof — it really would be a good puzzle if the parser didn’t keep screaming at the player). We’ve had authors that haven’t taken nearly that much care and seem to be just laying down one room after another. I hope even if Zodiac Castle turns out to be a worse game somehow the author keeps up his sense of architecture.

Coming up: a game for a computer with only a six-character display.

(Continued from my previous post.)

I have more of the map, but I feel like I’m getting trapped by parser nonsense.

Let’s start in the area we’ve already seen, at the room just east of the beginning:

This is the Main Entrance to the estate, although the gate is rusted shut. Through the gate is visible a large low building. South is the Gate House, north, a path runs along the wall, and east is a gravel path.

I was puzzled by this room description at first as it seemed to imply (via it being a Main Entrance) that we entered through that route, so why would it be rusted shut? Maybe we parachuted in, like Avventura nel castello.

A bit across the estate there’s a crowbar, and if you tote the crowbar back, you can PRY GATE to bust it open and reveal a WAREHOUSE. This is where the treasures go.

Let me give my meta-map before going any farther (this gives how things are connected in a general way):

I’m likely missing a fair chunk; the most likely candidate for missing geography is the strange door at the bottom of the well I gave a screenshot of last time. Just as an encore:

The DIARY found early unlocks with a KEY laying around the estate, and it contains the hint that THE SKELETON IS YOUR KEY TO SUCCESS. I don’t know if that means I’m supposed to make some horrid pun to open the door or if I just use something unusual like a bone; since I haven’t found any bones I can’t test that yet.

On to the main house proper:

It’s essentially one long central hall with some side rooms. To the north there’s a study with a map (“25L 40R 88L”) that we’ll use in a moment, and a book which I haven’t puzzled out yet (other than it does count as a treasure).

THIS BOOK APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN THE JOURNAL OF ONE OF THE ANCESTORS OF THE FAMILY. IT DESCRIBES BEING ROBBED BY PIRATES WHILE ON A SHIP FROM ENGLAND. THE MAN WAS OBVIOUSLY UNHAPPY SINCE THE LAST WORDS ARE ‘BLAST THE PIRATES’.

To the south are a candlestick (treasure) and a truly confusing room with a plaque I shared last time.

Thinking in terms of a mirror, this could be written as STAB RATS. Two rooms to the east there are, in fact, bats, and STAB does nothing as far as the parser goes, although KILL works as long as you are holding the poison from the groundskeeper’s house.

In some games this would mean simple victory, but seems to be absolutely no positive effect to killing the rats. I suspect I’m chasing down a blind alley somehow.

Oh, and speaking of parser issues, there’s a Servant’s Quarters with a DUMBWAITER that is resistant to any of my efforts of having it do anything at all. If there’s another giant set of rooms it probably is related to that.

On to the upstairs (map above)! There’s a gold watch, lighter, and pair of earrings just lying about. The earrings are in a MASTER BEDROOM with a truly suspicious portrait which is again resistant to my parser-shenanigans.

The upstairs also contains a room with a roll-top desk (no idea if it can be referred to) and a VAULT. The vault clearly was intended to have the code from the MAP downstairs applied, but I was truly baffled trying a set of commands like TURN DIAL, OPEN VAULT, ENTER CODE, etc. Rob and Roger in the comments let me know that 25L 40R 88L needed to be typed flat out, exactly like that.

Inside is some CURRENCY, and that’s that. (You’re forced to leave behind the MAP, but it seems to have no value.)

Finally, let’s visit the garage and docks:

Not much to speak of yet. There’s that crowbar used on the main gate, a box of sawdust, and a locked trunk I have been unable to open; there’s oars lying around and a boat you can ROW. Typing ROW BOAT, weirdly, leads you over to behind the caretaker’s house where there’s a treasure (a STATUETTE). I’m unclear the geography here, but given you’re supposed to be moving along a stream, I don’t think it’s meant to be a literal wrap-around map like The Hermit’s Secret.

Instead of jumping in the boat you can go west over to a pier, where there’s a lake and an island visible to the southwest. However, jumping the lake and typing SWIM just takes you back to the docks. The boat won’t move and I haven’t been able to steer it towards the island. I suspect this represents a third set of rooms I haven’t seen yet.

Maybe I’ll switch back to North Star for a while; even if it is buggier than the Apple II version, it might be buggy in different ways that will reveal potential puzzle solutions. Maybe just seeing the text without ALL CAPS will trigger my brain to move in new ways.

From the 1980s until well into the 1990s, the CRPG genre was typically dumped into the same broad bucket as the adventure game by the gaming press. Indeed, as late as the turn of the millennium, Computer Gaming World magazine had an “Adventure/RPG” department, complete with regular columnists whose beat encompassed both genres. Looking back, this lack of distinction might strike us as odd: CRPGs, which are to a greater or lesser extent simulations of an imaginary world with a considerable degree of emergent behavior, are far more procedurally intensive than traditional adventure games and provide a very different experience.

Back in the day, however, no one blinked an eye. For the one thing the genres did plainly have in common was sufficient to set them apart from all other sorts of games: their engagement with narrative. Whatever else they might happen to be, both an adventure game and a CRPG were a story that you engaged with much as you might a book — that is to say, you played through it once to completion, then set it aside. Contrast this with other kinds of games, which provided shorter-form experiences that you could repeat again and again.

As you are well aware if you’ve been reading my more recent articles, the adventure game suffered its own commercial slump in the 1990s. Said slump began a couple of years after the CRPG slid into the doldrums, but it proved vastly more sustained — so sustained, in fact, that the genre has been more or less consigned to niche status ever since. It’s frequently been argued that the adventure game didn’t so much die on the vine as get eaten alive by other gaming genres. Already at the very dawn of the 1990s, games like Wing Commander started to appropriate the adventure’s interest in telling a relatively complex story and to insert it into new gameplay contexts. That left set-piece puzzle-solving as the adventure’s only remaining unique attribute, and it soon turned out that most people had never been all that keen on that gameplay paradigm in the first place. Of course, this is a hopeless oversimplification of the adventure genre’s fall from grace — bad design and a more generalized drift toward more action-oriented forms of gameplay surely played major roles as well — but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to the argument.

I bring all of this up here because I think that we can see a variation of the Wing Commander syndrome afflicting the CRPG as well during its own years in the wilderness. That is to say that, even as the profile of games that explicitly called themselves CRPGs was waning during the mid-1990s, games of other types were starting to betray the genre’s unmistakable influence, via the rise of what we’ve come to call “RPG elements.” We see these especially in the strategy games of the era.

In MicroProse’s 1994 classic XCOM,^[1]The game was known as UFO: Enemy Unknown in its British homeland and elsewhere in Europe. you guide squads of soldiers who each have their own distinctive strengths, weaknesses, and personality traits, who can “level up” and improve their skills and equipment as they fight battles against alien invaders. Many players have described the tight bond they form with their soldiers as being at the heart of their love for the game as a whole, described feeling real bereavement and even guilt when one of their stalwart veterans gets killed in action after following their orders.

The same year as XCOM, SSI celebrated  their impending loss of the Dungeons & Dragons license by releasing Panzer General, a “beer and pretzels” wargame which casts you in the role of a Wehrmacht general during the Second World War, passing through campaigns and battles drawn from real and alternate history, bringing your most loyal units along with you and watching proudly as they too grow in effectiveness — and perhaps crying when your well-intentioned orders get them blown to Kingdom Come.

These trends have persisted down to today, when RPG elements are found in such far-flung genres as sports games that let you guide an athlete through a “career mode” and language-learning apps that deal in experience points and “daily quests.” The point of contrast between the adventure and CRPG genres in all of this lies in the fact that the latter has fully returned from its brush with death and retaken its old place as a recognized part of the mainstream gaming landscape. In the heyday of XCOM and Panzer General, however, it was by no means obvious that the CRPG was not destined to be looted for whatever ideas other genres found of use and then left high and dry, just as the adventure would shortly be.

If we’re looking for a poster child for the trend, it would be hard to find a better one than New World Computing, a studio and publisher that was located not that far from Interplay in Southern California. New World’s equivalent of Brian Fargo was one Jon Van Caneghem, who built his company on the back of a CRPG franchise known as Might and Magic, producing five installments of same between 1986 and 1993. Might and Magic’s commercial fortunes paralleled those of the genre writ large. Plotted on a grid, they would yield an almost perfectly symmetrical bell curve, rising to a peak with Might and Magic III in 1991 and then declining markedly again with the next two games.

By 1994, then, Van Caneghem had to face up to the reality that it might be time to take a break from the genre that had gotten New World this far. So, instead of jumping right into a Might and Magic VI, he came up with a simple fantasy strategy game that used CRPG-style character-building as its special sauce. Hoping to capitalize on the residual goodwill toward New World’s flagship series, he called it Heroes of Might and Magic, even though it had nothing to do with those games in terms of either its gameplay or its fiction, beyond their mutual use of the broadest archetypes of epic fantasy. In all honesty, the choice of a name for the new game probably didn’t make that much difference one way or the other. What did matter was that Heroes served up tons of accessible fun, being one of those rare gaming specimens that is equally appealing to both the hardcore and the more casual crowd. Upon its release in late 1995, it sold better than any of the CRPGs of which it had been positioned as a spinoff. Understandably enough under the circumstances, Van Caneghem and company left the mother series on the shelf for a while longer, concentrating instead on getting a Heroes of Might and Magic II ready to go in time for the following Christmas. Some might have called this another sign of the CRPG’s declining fortunes; Van Caneghem just called it a smart business decision.

In still another sign of the changing times in gaming, Van Caneghem began looking for a buyer for New World in early 1996, waving the success of Heroes around as his banner while he did so. The decision to surrender his independence wasn’t an easy one, but he felt compelled to make it nevertheless. As the gaming marketplace continued to expand in scope and revenues, it was getting harder and harder for boutique publishers like New World to secure space for themselves on the shelves of big-box retailers. They had managed to score a hit despite the headwinds with Heroes I, but Van Caneghem knew that he would need to harness his games to a bigger engine if he wanted the good times to keep on rolling. On July 10, 1996, New World was acquired by The 3DO Company, just in time for the latter to place the forthcoming Heroes II in more stores than ever that Christmas.

3DO had been spun out of Electronic Arts five years earlier, with EA’s own iconoclastic founder Trip Hawkins at its head. His vision at the time was to build a different kind of games console — different in at least two ways from Nintendo and Sega, who dominated that space during the first half of the 1990s. Rather than being a single chunk of hardware that was manufactured and sold from a single source, the 3DO console was to be a set of specifications that any hardware maker could license. On a similarly empowering note, 3DO would treat those who wished to make software for the platform like partners rather than hostages or supplicants, charging them significantly lower fees than Nintendo or Sega and encouraging more diverse content. Speaking of which: the 3DO was envisioned as much as a multimedia set-top box for the living room as it was a conventional games console. In addition to games, you’d be able to buy interactive encyclopedias, interactive road atlases, interactive documentaries. Even when it came to entertainment, “interactive movies” starring real actors would ideally predominate over the likes of Super Mario. All of this was expected to drive the age of the average 3DO user dramatically upward; it was to be the first console made for and widely adopted by adults.

Alas, none of it panned out as Trip Hawkins had hoped, for a variety of reasons. When the first units finally began to arrive in stores in late 1993, they were expensive in comparison to the competition from Nintendo and Sega. The consoles never gathered the halo of prestige that might have made their higher price survivable; despite Hawkins’s best efforts to talk up the multimedia revolution, most of the adults he had hoped to reach persisted in seeing the 3DO box as just another games console for the kiddies. When judged by this standard, the interactive movies and other highfalutin titles it boasted didn’t make it very appealing.

Thus the 3DO consoles were already under-performing expectations in late 1995, when Sony came along with the PlayStation. Sony did some of what Hawkins had tried to do, fostering a better relationship with developers and offering content that could appeal to a slightly older demographic than that of Nintendo and Sega. Yet they did it in a more judicious way, without completely abandoning the walled-garden approach that had dominated in the console space since the mid-1980s and without venturing too far afield from videogames as they were conventionally understood. Most importantly, they combined their blended approach with better hardware than 3DO had to offer, sold at a far cheaper price. 3DO’s attempt to remake the living-room console as a more open and diverse platform had been a noble experiment in its way, but after the PlayStation hit the scene it became abundantly clear that it had failed.

This failure left The 3DO Company with no obvious reason to exist. Yet the rump of Trip Hawkin’s original grand vision was still fairly flush with venture capital, and nobody there was prepared to just turn out the lights and go home. With his revolutionary agenda having failed him, Hawkins decided to pivot into conventional game publishing — in effect, to return to the business model of Electronic Arts, the very company he had walked away from to found 3DO. But much to his disappointment, he couldn’t make lightning strike twice in this way either; suffice to say that 3DO’s early software portfolio was nothing like the list of early games from EA, which included such future icons of the medium as M.U.L.E., Archon, Murder on the Zinderneuf, and Pinball Construction Set. The one clear exception to a general rule of derivative also-rans from 3DO was Meridian 59, a graphical MMORPG which beat the more celebrated Ultima Online to market by a year, only to be left to slowly die of neglect.

Against such underwhelming competition, the acquisition of New World stands out all the more as the wisest move ever made by 3DO as a publisher. For this deal would yield almost all of the other games to appear with the 3DO logo that have a legitimate claim to being remembered today.

In the beginning, the deal seemed equally beneficial to New World. Jon Van Caneghem was thrilled to be able to turn most of the details of finance and logistics over to 3DO and concentrate on the reason he had founded his company in the first place: to make great games. “I think we started to do our best work after I sold the company to 3DO,” he says, “because I could focus 100 percent on the game development.” The partnership hit the ground running with Heroes of Might and Magic II, which not only refined and expanded upon the gameplay template of its predecessor but added a slew of cutscenes and other audiovisual bells and whistles that were made possible only by the sudden injection of 3DO’s cash. Buoyed by the latter’s extensive distribution network, a happy outcome of ties to Electronic Arts that had still not been completely severed, Heroes II became an even bigger hit than the original.

3DO’s money made it possible for New World to take on multiple high-profile projects at one time. Thus before Heroes II was even released, Van Caneghem had already set some of his staff to work on Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven, his return to the core series of CRPGs. This might have seemed a risky decision on the face of it, given the current moribund state of the CRPG genre, but the relationship between Van Caneghem and 3DO was strong enough that his new bosses were willing to trust his instincts. Just as 1996 expired, those instincts seemed to be at least partially vindicated, when Blizzard’s Diablo appeared and promptly blew up to massive popularity.

Indeed, of all the games and series I’ll be discussing in these articles, the Might and Magic series was in some ways the closest in spirit to Diablo. This isn’t to say that the two were peas in a pod: just to begin the list of differences, those first five Might and Magic games were all turn-based rather than real-time, first-person rather than third-person, with hand-crafted rather than procedurally-generated dungeons and with far more complex and demanding systems to master, whilst quite possibly requiring an order of magnitude more hours for the average player to finish a single time. For all that, though, they did share with Diablo a strident ethic of fun as the final adjudicator. They had no interest in elaborate world-building or statement-making in the way of, say, the Ultima series. At heart, a Might and Magic game was a giant toy box, overflowing with challenges and affordances that could be engaged with in a nearly endless number of ways. Although a Might and Magic CRPG might not represent much of an argument for games as refined storytelling vehicles, much less as art, you were generally too busy messing with all the stuff you found inside it to care.

Being himself not a particularly artsy guy, Jon Van Caneghem saw no reason to alter this philosophy for Might and Magic VI. Still, he was keenly aware that some things would have to change if the new game was to fit comfortably into a post-DOOM, post-Quake world. Like its predecessors, Might and Magic VI would be a first-person “blobber”: an entire party of characters under your control would be “blobbed” together into a sort of lethal octopus, with you the player staring out from the center of the writhing mass. The big difference with the sixth installment would be that the amalgamation would move about freely — i.e., DOOM (or Ultima Underworld) style — rather than over a step-wise grid of possible locations on the map.

That said, the engine used for Might and Magic VI was not anything to leave shooter fans of its era overly impressed. New World decided not to require or even support the new breed of 3D-graphics cards that were taking gaming by storm just as work on it was beginning. In retrospect, this decision was perhaps a questionable one. For it left Might and Magic VI’s visuals lagging miles behind the state of the art by the time of its eventual release in the spring of 1998; comparisons with Unreal, the latest shooter wunderkind on the block, did not redound to its benefit.

This is not to say that the graphics aren’t endearing. A willingness to be goofy was always intrinsic to the series’s personality. The pixelated environments and the monsters that sometimes look like cut-out dolls that have been pasted on top of a picture of their surroundings are part and parcel of that. If it looked more refined, it wouldn’t look like Might and Magic.

As I mentioned when discussing Fallout, one of the hidden stumbling blocks for those who dreamed of resuscitating the CRPG was reconciling free-scrolling, real-time movement with the genre’s tradition of relatively complex, usually turn-based combat. I found Fallout’s approach more frustrating than satisfying; I’m therefore happy to say that I like what Might and Magic VI does much better. As with Fallout, there is a turn-based mode here that the game can slip in and out of. But there are two key differences. One is that you choose when to enter and exit the turn-based mode, by hitting — appropriately enough — the enter key. The other is that you can also fight in real-time mode if you like. In a lot of situations, doing so tends to get you killed in a hurry, but there are places, especially once you’ve built up your characters a bit, where you can run and gun almost as if you’re playing a first-person shooter. In turn-based mode, on the other hand, the game plays much like the Might and Magics of yore, except that your party is frozen in place; adjusting your position requires a quick trip in and out of real-time mode. It may sound a little wonky, but it all hangs together surprisingly well in practice. I find Might and Magic VI’s combat to be good fun, which is more than I can say for Fallout.

And it’s fortunate that I feel that way, because fighting monsters, preparing to fight monsters, and traveling to where monsters are waiting to be fought are what you spend most of your time doing. Might and Magic VI has none of Fallout’s ambitions to reinvent the CRPG as a more holistic sort of interactive narrative. It gives you a collection of blatantly artificial stage sets rather than a lived-in world, filled with non-player characters who function strictly as antagonists to slay, as irrelevant blank slates, or as quest-giving slot machines. Sure, there’s a story — in fact, a story that follows directly on from the main campaign in Heroes of Might and Magic II, representing an effort to integrate the two series in some other sense than their names, their bright and colorful visual aesthetics, and their epic-fantasy trappings. Evil forces are about to destroy the world of Enroth, and Archibald, the villain from Heroes II, is mixed up with them, but not in the way that you might think, and… You know what? I really can’t remember, even though I didn’t finish the game all that long ago. No, wait… I do remember that aliens turn out to be behind it all. This gives you the opportunity to run around shooting robots with lasers before all is said and done. As I mentioned, Might and Magic VI is never afraid to be goofy.

It’s weirdly freeing to play a game that so plainly answers only to the dictates of fun. Might and Magic VI is a monument to excess sufficient to make a Saudi prince blanch. Whenever I think about it, I remember Gary Gygax’s stern admonition against just this sort of thing in the first-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide, that staple work of literature of my generation’s nerdy youth.

Many campaigns are little more than a joke, something that better Dungeon Masters jape at and ridicule — rightly so on the surface — because of the foolishness of player characters with astronomically high levels of experience and no real playing skill. These godlike characters boast and strut about with retinues of ultra-powerful servants and scores of mighty magic items, artifacts, [and] relics adorning them as if they were Christmas trees decked out with tinsel and ornaments. Not only are such “Monty Haul” games a crashing bore for most participants, they are a headache for their Dungeon Masters as well…

Might and Magic VI is the perfect riposte for old Gary’s po-faced pronouncements. It lets you advance your characters to level 90 and beyond, by which time they pretty much are gods, able to teleport instantly from one side of a continent to the other and to cover shorter distances by flying high above the mountaintops, raining fiery death from the heavens upon any poor earthbound creatures who happen to be visible below. And you know what? It’s not boring at all. It’s actually kind of awesome. Like Diablo, Might and Magic VI zeroes in relentlessly on the lizard-brain appeal of its genre. We all like to watch the numbers associated with our characters go up and then go up some more, like to know that we’re more formidable today than we were yesterday. (If only real life worked like that…)

The world in which this progress narrative takes place may not be terribly believable even as fantasy goes, but it’s appropriately sprawling. The lovely, throwback cloth map that came in the original box contains no fewer than fifteen discrete regions that you can visit, each of them dauntingly large, full of towns and castles and roaming creatures and hidden and not-so-hidden curiosities, among them the entrances to multiple dungeons that are sometimes shockingly huge in themselves. Although I’m sure some of our modern DLC-fueled monstrosities have far surpassed it in size by now, Might and Magic VI might just be the biggest single CRPG that yours truly has ever played from start to finish.

The game was able to hold my interest for the 100 hours or more I spent with it by giving me so darn much to do. Every town has at least a few quests to see through. Sometimes these are related to the main story line, but more often they’re standalone,. Each of the character classes can evolve into two more advanced incarnations of itself; an archer, for example, can become a “battle mage” and then a “warrior mage.” Doing so entails hunting down the necessary trainer and completing a quest for him or her. Your characters’ more granular skills, which encompass the expected schools of magic and types of weaponry alongside miscellaneous talents ranging from “Bodybuilding” to “Repair Item,” also require trainers in order to be advanced to “Expert” and then “Master” status. There’s always something to do, some goal to pursue, whether it’s provided by the game or one you made up for yourself: collect every single spell; pray at every shrine during the one month of the year when you get something out of it. Because there’s no complex plot whose own needs have to act as a check on your wanderings, it’s always you rather than the game who gets to decide what you do next. This world is truly your oyster — as long as you’re tough enough to take on the many and varied monsters that infest every corner of it that you enter, that is.

The toy-box quality of Might and Magic VI lets it get away with things that less sanguine, more self-serious peers would get dinged for. The jank in the engine — and make no mistake, there’s a lot of jank here — feels more like a feature than a bug when, say, you find just the right angle to stand in a doorway, the one that lets you whale away on a group of monsters while they for some reason can’t hit you. Fairly early in my play-through, I found myself in a sewer filled with living oozes that were impervious to weaponry and shot blobs of slime that were corrosive to armor. The sensible thing to do would have been to go away and come back later. Instead of being sensible, I found a stairway from whose top I could throw my one effective spell at the oozes while they were unable to hit me at all. I spent several evenings luring oozes from all over the sewer back to that killing floor, harvesting huge quantities of experience points from them. Sure, it was kind of tedious, but it was kind of great at the same time. Finding exploits like this — exploits that would undermine a less gonzo, more finely calibrated game — is just another part of the fun of Might and Magic VI. Everyone who’s ever played it seems to come away with her own list of favorite ways to break it.

I’m not even all that bothered that the game feels a little bit unfinished. As you play, you’ll probably find yourself exploring Enroth in an eastward to westward direction, which is all too clearly also the direction in which New World built their world. The last couple of regions you’re likely to visit, along the western edge of the map, are deserts filled with hordes of deadly dragons and not much else. It’s plain as day that New World was running out of gas by the time they got this far. But, in light of all they had already put into their world by this point, it’s hard to begrudge them the threadbare westerly regions too much. I’m well aware that I’m not usually so kind toward such failures to stick the landing; this is the place where I usually start muttering about the need for a work to be complete in an “Aristotelian sense” and all the rest. Never fear; we’ll doubtless return to such pretensions in future articles. But in the case of a joyously goofy, loosey-goosey epic like Might and Magic VI… well, how much more of it do you really want? It’s just not a game to which Aristotelian symmetries apply.

Might and Magic VI was released on April 30, 1998. This places it at almost the exact midpoint between Fallout, that first exemplar of a new breed of CRPGs in the offing, and the CRPGS that Interplay would publish near the end of 1998, which would serve to cement and consolidate Fallout’s innovations. For its part, Might and Magic VI can be seen as a bridge between the old ways and the new. In spirit, it’s defiantly old-school. Yet there are enough new features and conveniences — including not just the free-scrolling movement and optional real-time combat, but also such niceties as a quest log, a superb auto-map, and a raft of other information-management functions — to mark it out as a product of 1998 rather than 1988 or even 1993. It sold 125,000 copies in the United States alone, enough to justify Jon Van Caneghem’s risky decision to take a chance on it in the midst of the driest period of the CRPG drought. And its success was well deserved. Few latter-day installments of any series have done as good a job of ratcheting up their accessibility whilst retaining the essence of what made their predecessors popular.

For all their vast differences in form and spirit, aesthetics and gameplay, Diablo, Fallout, and Might and Magic VI together left gamers more excited about the CRPG genre in general than they had been in years. Interplay was now preparing to seize that opportunity. Ten years after the much-celebrated Pool of Radiance, Brian Fargo and company, working in concert with a card-game publisher called Wizards of the Coast, were preparing Dungeons & Dragons for a brand-new star turn. The first mover of the RPG was about to get its mojo back.

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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.

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Sources: The book Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay and Advanced D&D: Dungeon Master’s Guide by Gary Gygax. Computer Gaming World of October 1997, June 1998, August 1998, and April 2004; Retro Gamer 49; XRDS: The ACM Magazine for Students of Summer 2017.

Online sources include Matt Barton’s interview with Jon Van Caneghem, the RPG Codex interview with Jon Van Caneghem, the Arcade Attack interview with Trip Hawkins, and “Trip’s Big Interactive Reset” by Ernie Smith at Tedium.

Where to Get It: The first six Might and Magic CRPGs are available as a single digital purchase from GOG.com. What a deal!

We wrap up this series of grant reports with this fourth and final blog post, on Felicity Banks’ project and how support from IFTF made her able to travel to Indonesia and spread the word about IF!

Felicity is a long-time IF author who lives in Australia but has ties to Indonesia, having travelled there over half a dozen times and learned the main language, Bahasa Indonesia. She applied for a microgrant to travel there for the Ubud Writers’ and Readers’ Festival, the largest writing festival in South-East Asia), hoping to offer an IF workshop as part of the official program track. However, after the festival declined the proposal, Felicity instead shifted the project’s focus to connecting with authors in Ubud around the time of the festival and giving a series of workshops. (Oh, and go to cat cafés and monkey forests.)

This proved to be very successful, with Felicity teaching 7 small workshops (focusing on the use of tools such as Twine) involving 18 Indonesian-speaking authors! The workshops went very well, as told by Felicity:

“It is wonderful to see people’s faces light up as they see their words transformed into a game at the touch of a few buttons. They are extremely impressed that volunteers on the other side of the world care so much about inviting Indonesian people into the community.”

Following these workshops, Felicity sought to keep the momentum going - as part of her application, she proposed to stay in touch with participants for two years after the workshops, to follow their progress. A WhatsApp group was created with over a dozen of Indonesian authors joining, and everyone keeps in touch and remains engaged with IF. Felicity also ran, in late 2024/early 2025, a small friendly comp for her students, with small cash prizes for the three best interactive stories.

We love this project - despite the fact that Indonesian is spoken by 200-250 million people, we are not aware of a Indonesian-speaking IF scene, and we would love for one to spring to life! Felicity’s familiarities and ties with Indonesia have allowed her to become an ambassador for IF there, and plant the seed among the community of authors; we are very happy the microgrants program was able to help make it happen!

“This was an incredible journey and I met lots of wonderful writers. Thank you so much.” -Felicity Banks

Can the power of music save the human race?

When you and the Raqullan regime descend upon Earth, the plan is to force all humans into submission. Otherwise, exterminate. But when you learn about this curious practice they call music, you realize the humans may be worth more than just labor.

Message in a Melody is 40% off until February 13th!

Music does not exist in Raqullan society, and your curiosity to learn more may be enough to keep the humans alive long enough to understand it. Is it an art? A tool? A weapon? You may have to come to a conclusion when the fate of the human race rests in your claws.

Message in a Melody is a 150,000-word interactive science fiction novel by Tyler S. Harris in which your choices control the story. It is entirely text-based—without graphics—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination. There are some opportunities to click a link and hear the song that inspires the scene. Open in a new tab to listen if you’d like.

• Play as male or female. You do not have to choose a sexual orientation and can play as straight, gay, bi, or aromantic. 
• Become a master of science, oration, weapons, or perhaps even a musical instrument.
• Build relationships in a manner similar to humans. Find a partner, a companion, or even a lover.
• Help a friend to research weapons, cure a disease, bring animals from your home planet to Earth, or become a musical prodigy.
• Be the first of your kind to perform music for a human audience.
• Gain enough power to become a member of the Raqullan High Council, or throw it all away to become a starving artist.
• Discover songs (achievements) as you play. Can you discover the entire playlist?

Will music be the bridge that crosses the divide between Raqullans and humans? Or will the troubled waters from the first contact be too much to overcome?

Tyler 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.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

When you arrive at your late Uncle Tanner’s secluded cabin by the lake, you’re seeking closure, a chance to sort through his belongings and your tangled emotions. But when your ex—and their alluring best friend—unexpectedly show up, the peaceful weekend you planned quickly spirals into anything but. 

It Takes Three to Tango is 25% off until February 13th!

It Takes Three to Tango is a 90,000-word dark romance interactive novel by C.C. Hill, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Trapped together by circumstance, old wounds are reopened, raw emotions flare, and buried secrets resurface.

Will you give your past love another chance, find solace in the arms of the best friend you never knew you wanted, or forge a new path on your own? In this cabin, it’s not just about uncovering the past—it’s about deciding your future. Love, lust, and life-changing decisions collide in a weekend that will test more than just your heart.

• Play as cis, trans, or nonbinary; gay, straight, bi, or polyamorous.
• Customize your character.
• Make your ex jealous.
• Win petty arguments.
• Flirt with your ex’s best friend.
• Confront your past.
• Experience a story where boundaries are pushed or crossed.
• Uncover the secret your ex has been hiding.
• Discover yourself.

A cabin, a weekend —will you choose love, lust, or solitude?

Content Warning: This game contains mature themes, mentions of toxic relationships, strong language, explicit sexual content, and emotionally intense situations. Please proceed with caution and sensitivity.

C. C. 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.

This is a continuation of the historical story from Uncle Harry’s Will and Whembly Castle, as today’s game was again sold by Dynacomp for North Star computers, but this time with a different author: Dennis N. Strong. Mr. Strong had two games (this one and Zodiac Castle) show up in the Dynacomp Winter Catalog as “late additions”.

As the disk above implies, there is an important difference between the Strong games and the Turner games: Strong’s were ported to Apple II.

Through the investigations of Roger Durrant, we know the Apple II version of Windmere Estate is preferred (the North Star is glitchier, and the Apple II has some extra ASCII graphics). The reverse is true of Zodiac Castle as the Apple II version of Zodiac Castle has a fatal bug.

The most notable early difference is that the Apple II port notes

THERE ARE OCCASIONALLY ‘HINTS’ AVAILABLE AT THE COMPLEX SPOTS.

which is not mentioned in the North Star version! HINT is a recognized command on North Star but it crashes the game.

Oddly, the Dynacomp catalog’s “ad” has instructions with more detail than either version. Specifically:

• Lights turn on with LIGHT ON or ON; given the light device is a FLASHLIGHT, this is rather difficult to discover (otherwise why not FLASHLIGHT ON?).
• There is a strong emphasis on hidden rooms.
• The inventory limit is seven unless you can place an item inside another item.
• There are deadly vampire bats although there’s “one sure repellant available somewhere out there.”

For the very first part of the game I’m going to give some clips from the North Star version before switching over entirely to Apple II.

You are in the Rose Garden.

You are standing in the middle of a Rose Garden. To the north a path leads to a small Building. To the south you can see a tall hedge row. A path leads east toward the Main Gate, and west is an old Well.

E

You are At the Main Gate

This is the Main Entrance to the estate, although the gate is rusted shut. Through the gate is visible a large low building South is the Gate House, north, a path runs along the wall, and east is a gravel path.

S

You are in the Gate House.

This is the Gate House for the old Estate. It has not been used for quite some time, and there is dust everywhere. The only remaining furniture is a small cabinet on the floor.

There is a locked leather DIARY here!

Opening the cabinet reveals the FLASHLIGHT where I tortured myself for a while trying to activate it before discovering the information from the catalog (again, despite it be referred to as a FLASHLIGHT in text, the parser wants it used by typing LIGHT ON; light is being used as a verb, there’s no way to light the flashlight by using flashlight as a noun).

Heading back to the start and going north:

You are standing in front of what appears to be the groundskeepers house. There are paths west, south, and east. There is a door and one window visible on the ground floor.

N
It is dark – You cannot see anything!

ON
That’s much better!

A devilish looking Vampire BAT swoops down and blocks the way

You are inside Groundskeeper’s House.

This building obviously has not been used recently, judging by the dust. There is a cupboard standing open in the corner.

There is a box of rat POISON here!
There is an old SHOVEL here!
There is a coil of ROPE here!
There is a Vampire BAT here!

Unfortunately, at trying to get something the bat swoops down and kills you. You need to get the “repellent” first before the items.

Well, most of them. The ROPE is not placed here in the Apple II version of the game, but rather past a hedge maze leading to the main house!

The vampire “repellent” was rather quick to find: you can go up past the bat room.

YOU ARE IN THE LIVING QUARTERS.
THIS IS WHERE THE GROUNDSKEEPER USE TO LIVE. IN THE ROOM ARE A BED, A DRESSER AND A CLOSET.

>OPEN DRESSER

YOU SEE A SMALL JEWELED ‘CROSS’

Entering a dark room without the cross results in the back coming back, so I expect the cross will be carried the entire game, meaning two of the seven allocated inventory slots have already been eaten up. Not great for a treasure collection game!

Fortunately, just in the closet (OPEN CLOSET) there is some relief, as in addition to a gold key it contains a sack; this presumably is what the catalog-instructions was referring to. Unfortunately, I have no idea what command makes the sack work!

I referenced a hedge maze already, so let me give the initial part of the game:

Getting down to the bottom of the well requires simply TIE ROPE (not ATTACH ROPE as the Dynacomp catalog implies)

YOU DEFTLY TIE THE ROPE TO THE CRANK SPINDLE ANO TOSS THE OTHER ENO DOWN THE WELL.

This leads to a waterless “well bottom” which also turns out to be underneath the house. It connects with a “wine cellar” and “furnace” and some stairs leading up to the main building.

Everything past this is very open so this is a good place to pause. I suspect the “hidden rooms” are going to cause the biggest pain. This is especially true because the parser is quite non-cooperative. Nearly every command that is not understood repeats the command back with question marks. So if you want to MOVE BED to check for something underneath, it responds with MOVE BED??? and no information is conveyed about if the verb is understood, or if the noun is something even meant to be referred to.

I’ll give the full tour next time.

Three months ago, I released two new entries in Jason Shiga's AdventureGame Comics series: Leviathan for iPhone/iPad and The Beyond for Mac/PC/Linux (on Steam).

I am happy to say that The Beyond for iPhone/iPad is now available!

(Leviathan appeared on Steam back in 2022, and of course Meanwhile has been out on both platforms for years. So the porting matrix is complete.)

(...For these books. Samurai vs Ninja? You'll just have to wait and see!)

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And now, a footnote.

One great thing about bringing Jason's comics to iOS is supporting VoiceOver. This makes the games accessible to people with visual problems. I mentioned this feature on social media last week and got quite a few responses! I'd forgotten how much of a draw it is.

I feel I should say more, though. The apps offer VoiceOver support, but I can't claim that it's perfectly supported.

Another great thing about Jason's comics (on screen or on paper!) is the sense of narrative context they provide. As you move through the story -- and the page -- other paths and panels drift through your peripheral vision. These aren't always related to your current state... but they often echo it, contrast with it, or even provide a subtle clue.

Unfortunately, I've never come up with a good way to represent this visual context in VoiceOver. The list of active VoiceOver controls includes the current panel ("review"), the next panel or panel choices, and the toolbar buttons. Adding "nearby" panels would bloat up the control list and make it harder to navigate.

Even worse: the narrative context sometimes includes pipes. (I don't want to give anything away, but The Beyond plays with this idea.) Pipes are never VoiceOver controls at all; they're purely visual decoration. Even if I had a VoiceOver representation of "nearby" panels, it would miss this bit out.

So I have a bit of a qualm recommending The Beyond for its VoiceOver support. Don't get me wrong; you can read the whole story and find all the endings. It's all there. But just as The Beyond is a slightly different experience on screen than in the original page-numbered book, it's a slightly different experience on VoiceOver than it is on screen. The adaptation isn't -- pardon the phrase -- perfectly transparent.

I just wanted to be clear about that. Footnote ends. I hope you enjoy The Beyond in whatever form you encounter it!

(And if you have any bright ideas about how to handle this narrative context business -- particularly if you have VoiceOver design experience -- feel free to drop me a line.)

Even the winged birds and the two-footed and four-footed, o silvery
Dawn, have set forth following your regulations of time, from the ends of heaven—
For, dawning forth with your rays, you illuminate the whole luminous realm.

— Rig Veda, I.49 Dawn

I was stalled by, once again, spelling. But in a different way this time! (For my previous antics, see my writeup of Circus.)

You see, I was somehow mentally shelving this game having as a three-letter parser, I think because of the spelling “albotross”; ALB was fine for me mentally, ALBO or ALBOTROSS slightly broke my brain. So I went through what turned out to be correct (KILL) but typed it as KILL ALB and not KILL ALBO (whereupon you must specify throwing the knife).

The manual’s hint specified flying; looking at the dead alb– grr, let’s say, “bird”, the game says it has a hole. Miraculously, probably form playing too many Sierra games, I quickly came up with

LIGHT MATCH

MELT WAX

WITH MATCH

which was sufficient to plug the hole.

THE WING IS NOW SUITABLE FOR FLIGHT.

So just to be clear, we’re toting around a dead bird and using it to fly. Sure? You can then go back to the cold lake and fly your way across, but before showing you the next spot, I should mention this is probably the part closest to the Vedas. The gods can “fly like birds” and get constantly compared to them. In a portion on the Maruts (storm deities):

With your chariots fitted with lightning bolts and with spears, whose wings are horses, accompanied by lovely chants, drive here, o Maruts.
Fly here like birds, with highest refreshment for us, you masters of artifice.

In the literature from this period generally there’s enough references to flying and magical Vimānas (flying palaces or chariots) that modern conspiracy theories have developed around them. The 20th century book Vaimānika Shāstra claims the magic is in reality advanced technology; UFO enthusiasts go on to make claims about ancient astronauts and/or aliens depending on their inclination.

My wondering about a random American in the Midwest picking this as a topic could be resolved by this mythology, as it is one of the most famous pieces of cultural lore to come out of the Vedas. It still easily could be by accident but the moment of grabbing a gigantic bird from the sky and using it to fly did feel just a little bit like a moment of the gods (fly, not glide, we’re launching from ground level).

Across the lake is a narrow island. In the middle a soldier blocks the way.

The soldier has armor so you can’t just use KILL; a quick item roll call:

cup with water, knife, matches, shovel, dead bird, two Vedas, coin

I didn’t have the water before, but while frustrated by the bird I tested TAKE WATER at the lake and it worked. The coin came from looking at one of the Vedas (a bookmark, I suppose) and can be given to the soldier who will take it as a bribe and leave. This is followed by the other end of the island, where you can fly yet again.

No more lake: you’ve landed in a desert, which is fairly empty except for a cactus in the center. I tried various attempts to apply the KNIFE to the cactus before simply attempting a DIG instead.

This leads to an underground chamber and the Yagur Veda.

A bit further is a locked door; the game lets you PICK LOCK and specify you want to use the knife. I appreciate the amount of item re-use this has had.

Then comes the last obstacle, a TOMB ENTRANCE with a zombie and some burning leaves. I didn’t have much to work with but I was still carrying water; pouring it led to the leaves being extinguished and the zombie disappearing with the leaves (??).

Finally the fourth book can be claimed.

The locations for all the Morgan games have generally lacked depth, including this one, although somehow the format of a quasi-mystical challenge made it more playable; I had an easier time than Miner 49’er, certainly, and only got stalled by the bird.

I finally made a breakthrough on the mysterious ASD&D. I was poking about in this catalog which has the RPG Wizard’s Domain mentioned, and the name Thomas Johnson. This ended up being a much better lead than Scott Morgan, and I eventually landed on a timeline page which supposedly has a full story:

A Third-Party software house owned by Tom Johnson and run out of P.O. Box 46 Cottage Grove, MN 55016. The company seems to have surfaced in 1981 and disappeared in 1984, shortly after the 99/4A was abandoned by Texas Instruments. Among the dozen or so BASIC and Extended BASIC educational and entertainment products the company manufactured, perhaps the most remembered were Wizard’s Dominion and Entrapment. Wizard’s Dominion was an extremely popular fantasy adventure type game written by Johnson himself. Entrapment, another Tom Johnson creation, was a Mini Memory assembly language coded game that was so well written Texas Instruments had decided in early 1983 to pick it up and market it. Unfortunately, the big “bailout” of October 28th, 1983 took place first and Entrapment never came to market under the TI banner. It did surface through Tenex Computer Express in 1986 however.

The October date is when the TI-99/4A was discontinued.

There’s no sourcing on the connection and I haven’t been able to unearth anything definitively saying Johnson owned the company, but I’ve found enough products with Johnson’s name attached I’m comfortable saying the paragraph is mostly accurate. Previously I speculated

Still, I get the vibe we’re dealing with a 2 or at most 3 person operation here.

which is right, it’s just there’s really only one person (Johnson) who published Morgan’s work.

Coming up: Windmere Estate, for Apple II.