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Planet Interactive Fiction

Wednesday, 28. May 2025

Renga in Blue

Nosferatu: TREES ARE RESERVED FOR COFFINS

I have finished the game, and my previous post is needed for context. Solving turned out not to be a matter of thinking about objects or puzzles or places, but thinking about verbs. cut, dig, climb, read, open, drink, wait, light, throw, tie, say, give, leave, scream, chop While we’ve had games with excess verbs […]

I have finished the game, and my previous post is needed for context.

Solving turned out not to be a matter of thinking about objects or puzzles or places, but thinking about verbs.

cut, dig, climb, read, open, drink, wait, light, throw, tie, say, give, leave, scream, chop

While we’ve had games with excess verbs that don’t do anything in the game, this didn’t seem like the sort of game to do that. I might normally say such verbs “put space to waste”, but it isn’t necessarily a waste; Countdown to Doom at least accepted EAT and SWIM to let the player know they weren’t going to be doing this on an alien planet, and sometimes in a modern Inform game it comes off as restrictive and awkward not to be able to THROW something even if it turns out throwing isn’t useful.

Speaking of throwing, that is one verb (other than wait) that hasn’t been used yet! I had already found the axe worked last time and went through all the other objects in the game and found none of them wanted to be thrown: “I can’t throw (insert item here)”.

The message in the forest about TREES ARE RESERVED FOR COFFINS seems to be here to explain why CHOP only works on the thicket but not here.

So what could we throw an axe at? The locked door had resisted my attempts at violence with CHOP DOOR — which you think would be the right way to bust in (especially given the lack of being able to HIT / SMASH / etc. even though the player has a mallet) — but I hadn’t tried THROW AXE.

Not “moon logic” exactly but the game should have accepted some alternate hitting methods. Limited space on a 8K VIC-20, though!

The inside has a sharp stick and a spade.

We now have and mallet and a wooden cross in addition to a sharp stick, but it doesn’t seem like there’s any “stake a vampire” verb in the set; what’s going on here? You’ll see in a moment. To recap, we also have the magic word unused (OVYEZ) as well as the lamp and the gold coins.

The spade, as I suspected, goes over to the sunny field.

I was storing my items here because of the “Crusifix”.

DIG is a little hard to operate; you can’t DIG CRUSIFIX but rather need to DIG HOLE, at which point a pit will appear you can go in.

Going out requires the ladder, but be careful because the ladder follows similar rules to the rope and will collapse if you have too much in your inventory.

The tunnel leads to a “subterranean cavern” and a seeming dead-end…

…but the THROW AXE is useful again (at least this time throwing seems the most natural thing!) This opens up a cave and nearly the last part of the game.

I had the lamp lit by this point; I don’t know the exact threshold it is needed.

Nosferatu! If I hadn’t spent my time investigating my verb list beforehand, I would have spent a while here uselessly trying to stake the vampire; he’s active rather than fully asleep and if you don’t have the wooden cross, he “rises from the altar, and bites my neck!”

The stick and mallet are complete red herrings. (The presence of a red kipper earlier at least hinted at the possibility.) The right thing to do here is to use magic.

According to the author’s web page, this doesn’t kill Nosferatu, it just gets him out of the way.

We can then grab the Bloodstone and retreat (being careful to drop most everything but the Bloodstone to climb up the ladder without it breaking).

This still isn’t quite the end of the game. The gold coins come in handy, as well as the very last unused verb: wait. You can go over to the bus stop and wait for a bus, and then pay for a ride in gold (!!). I guess he didn’t need exact change.

The author seemed somewhat down on this game…

If all of this leaves you with the impression that I don’t think much of the game, I suppose that’s true. But I still regard it with affection because, well, I was fourteen. Cut me some slack.

…and yes, there were a fair number of irregularities I already pointed out. I enjoyed myself more than some of our other games marked “haunted house” just because it did feel incredibly earnest; also, the fact we were not here to defeat the big bad racked up a few points on my imaginary scoreboard. I will say I could see a player getting incredibly frustrated by the ending and the useless mallet and stake. Although it makes perfect sense to me in a narrative sense why they wouldn’t work, it still would be better a design to acknowledge attempts at using them (along with textual hints suggesting that they’ll never work). This would have made a better overarching theme — sometimes the goal shouldn’t be destruction — that would go along with what happened to the witch (who we didn’t have to beware at all).

Some questions to the author, since he’s been in the comments:

1. What was the logic behind the fake-out with the stick and mallet?

2. Which puzzles were from Myles Kelvin, in the previous co-written game? (Also, was it such that you feel like you should both be on the credits?) What elements carried over and what changed?

3. What happened to the “HIDDEN GROVE” from your original working map?

…we [Myles Kelvin and Mike Taylor] went together to a conference in Manchester organised by Terminal Software. That made us feel very grown up at the age of fourteen or fifteen! Ah, the thrill of being allowed to drink beer!

This will be the last we’ll see of Taylor for 1983. He did have another game (The Final Challenge, aka Cornucopia) but it is lost:

Unlike the other games in this series, it required a VIC-20 with not 8k but 16k expansion – and since I didn’t own a 16k board, I had to borrow one from a school-friend, Richard Monk, in order to write it. Seems strange in these days when 4M of memory is considered woefully inadequate. [Meta-note: I wrote that last sentence in 1997 or ’98. As I write now, in 2001, 4M is truly laughable – most people now consider 64M unusable. No doubt by the time you read this, people will look sniffily on any computer whose memory is so tiny as to be measured in something as piddly as megabytes. Plus ca change.]

Of all my games that have been lost to posterity, this is the one that I would most like a chance to play again. I remember it somehow being invested with a strong sense of atmosphere, and having more-interesting-than-average puzzles. I have often tried to recapture elements of the plot to Cornucopia, as it rather bizzarrely ended up being called, but I have never succeeded to my own satisfaction. I particularly remember a tricky initial portion, necessary to get into the caves where the game took place, and a huge underground cavern with trees growing in it.

He’ll return in 1985 with the ambitious multi-player adventure Causes of Chaos.

Tuesday, 27. May 2025

Key & Compass Blog

New walkthroughs for May 2025

On Tuesday, May 27, 2025, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive fiction at Patreon and Ko-fi. The Time Crystals of Cythii (2025) by Garry […]

On Tuesday, May 27, 2025, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive fiction at Patreon and Ko-fi.


The Time Crystals of Cythii (2025) by Garry Francis

In this adventure, you play as a young guardian of the Time Crystals of Cythii and the unthinkable has happened. Someone stole the Crystals and now time warps are appearing everywhere. Explore five historical disasters and get the Crystals back before your parents come home!

This game was an entry in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam (TALP) of 2025, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps


Eurydice (2012) by Anonymous

In this game inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, you play as a young Oxford man mourning Celine, your friend and housemate. Friends are downstairs, if you feel brave enough to socialize. Or, if you’d rather, take the mysterious lyre from your room to nearby Hinksey Park.

This game was an entry for IF Comp 2012 where it took 2nd place. At the 2012 XYZZY Awards, it was a finalist in two categories (Best Writing and Best Story).

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Crash (2022) by Phil Riley

In this sci-fi adventure, you play as a member of the repair corps of Space Station Omicron-5. Your last job of the day is on the SS Usagi, a Space Marines fighting ship. You just need to fix their microwave and a jammed locker door. But soon after you board the ship, the space station explodes, knocking you painfully to the floor and sending the ship adrift. And now the ship’s computer wants a full reboot. Your To-Do list just got a bit longer.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2022 where it tied for 22nd place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps


Iceweb (2016) by Gil Williamson

In this espionage game, you play as an experienced agent of the Department. Your mission is to retrieve an iceweb device from Pol, a spy in enemy territory. The sub drops you off in a Rigid Inflatable Boat (RIB) with an assortment of gadgets and a can of shaving foam.

This game was written for the e-zine Mythaxis (issue 17 Feb 2016).

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps


A D R I F T (2022) by Pinkunz

In this short survival game, you play as a cosmonaut and a victim of accidental explosive decompression. By good fortune, you were wearing your spacesuit at the time. But now you’re adrift in the void, facing a sun, unable to even turn around. Find a way back to the space shuttle or you’re going to die out here.

This game was an entry in Spring Thing 2022’s Back Garden.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


The Crew (2021) by Olaf Nowacki

In this short horror story, you’re the captain of a spaceship. You had to ration the last of the supplies, but soon you and your crew will reach Nostreperes, the pale planet, and you’ll have the last laugh.

This story was an entry in Le Grand Guignol (English) division of Ectocomp 2021 where it took 4th place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Mammal (2012) by Joey Jones

In this game, you play as a lowly human slave, suffering beneath the squamous toes of your new lizard overlords. Patrisnake Kssshsss has charged you with getting rid of all trace of mammals in the back rooms of the Don Quixote Memorial Museum.

This game was track 5 in the Apollo 18+20 IF Tribute Album event.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Witch Hedwig and The Magic Berries Brew (2025) by Robert Szacki

In this minimalist fantasy game, you play as Witch Hedwig. You need to brew a magic berries brew for your ill son. First, find the brew recipe.

This game was written in AdvSys. This was an entry in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam (TALP) of 2025, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Renga in Blue

Nosferatu (1982/1983)

Terminal Software was started, in a sense, by accident. RW Stevens, aka Reg Stevens, was working at ICL in Manchester (the business computer company, home of Quest). He had started writing games for the VIC-20 over Christmas 1981: …I wrote my first game, which was a computer version of [the tabletop game] Connect 4. I […]

Terminal Software was started, in a sense, by accident.

RW Stevens, aka Reg Stevens, was working at ICL in Manchester (the business computer company, home of Quest). He had started writing games for the VIC-20 over Christmas 1981:

…I wrote my first game, which was a computer version of [the tabletop game] Connect 4. I wrote it in BASIC and I made it look at the board and work out every possible combination and choose the best move from the criteria I’d coded in… which meant it could take five minutes to make a single move! Any player would get fed up waiting so I did the algorithm which worked out the computer’s next move in machine code. That made it as immediate as a human opponent.

He took it to show a colleague of his at work, Andy Hieke. Hieke thought the game was good and that Stevens should sell it, but Stevens replied he couldn’t be bothered; Hieke offered to do it instead. This would become what was published as “Line-up 4”, and it had only very modest success, Stevens at first getting a check for 20 pounds. However, Hieke got interviewed for a piece that landed in The Times and as part of the interview he mentioned an upcoming version of Scramble for the VIC-20.

There was no upcoming version of Scramble for the VIC-20, or at least not yet. Hieke called Stevens and said he needed to write one. This is the first he’d heard of the game’s existence (Stevens was 40 of the time and did not frequent arcades).

I did have my little computer, though, and was finding it fun to program, so I suppose I saw it as an intellectual challenge and rose to the bait. I said I’d have a go, so I took the kids to Blackpool one day to do some research and see what the arcade game looked like.

The game was successful enough to be well-remembered after; the author wrote that

Skramble! was probably my finest moment, although Super Gridder on C64 was probably at least as addictive. The amazing thing about that VIC20 Skramble! was that it was entirely hand assembled.

I wrote it in machine language, but had no assembler or machine language monitor- so I converted the instruction codes into numbers (using the data book for a 6502 CPU) and ‘poked’ them into memory from Basic!

The game got licensed by MicroDigital out of Webster, NY…

…although I’m not seeing the company at New York’s corporation registration site and I don’t have any information how that licensing agreement worked. Stevens did write a text adventure later for Terminal (Rescue from Castle Dread) so we’ll see him again, but today’s game involves a different author, Mike Taylor, who we previously saw here with Magic Mirror.

Nosferatu was written a different process; Taylor had based it on an “unnamed and unpublished game” he’d written with a friend (Myles Kelvin) the year before. Nosferatu was written from scratch with some of the same puzzles as the previous game, and was originally, like Magic Mirror, a “private” game. Once Magic Mirror was published he offered it Terminal and it became his second published game.

He was familiar with (but had not yet played) The Count by Scott Adams, and had not heard of any of the other vampire games we’ve seen here already. The goal is much different than the usual “kill Dracula” goal, as the printed instructions just say we need to “get home from Nosferatu’s castle with the precious bloodstone.”

I made my usual verb list, and none of them suggest we are killing the vampire, although I may be missing some special case.

cut, dig, climb, read, open, drink, wait, light, throw, tie, say, give, leave, scream, thread, chop

Kill, stab, stake, and hammer are not included. (Note, no violence at all! Although there’s an axe you can THROW.) As my ambiguity above suggests, I’m not done with the game yet, although as a VIC-20 game (using the 8k expansion) it surely can’t be too much larger than what I’ve seen?

It starts with a mysterious in medias res moment:

How did end up here? Did we somehow get smuggled into Nosferatu’s castle this way? Did we get attacked and deposited here? I thought briefly (before checking the manual’s objective) that we were playing as the vampire, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The opening areas yield up a “bottle of whisky”, a “rope”, and a “7-pound mallet”. In the same room as the rope there is a locked door. A bit farther is a Graveyard with a “newly dug grave” and a warning about needing to BEWARE THE WITCH…

I’m unclear why it turns from a grave to a cave.

…followed by a … bus stop? Hey, there was one in Haunt. Turning south, there’s a sarcophagus that is too heavy to open, although drinking the whisky will give a boost of strength and allows the player to open it.

Inside is a corpse that turns to dust if you touch it (no idea if the dust is helpful) and a wooden cross (which I haven’t used yet).

Heading east from there is a library, with an Atlas, book of Magic, and book of Games.

The book of Magic has a word that seems like it’d be helpful (see above) but I’ve tried it in every accessible room so far to no effect. The atlas mentions a cesspit near a oak forest (which you find anyway even without the atlas) and the book of Games just says:

Bored with this game already, huh?

I mean, it could have booted up Skramble? On an 16K VIC-20?

Moving on, heading north there is a rail at a balcony, and you can tie the rope to go down, finding a brass key and a red kipper. The author is sheepish that a similar puzzle shows up in The Count, and indeed two other vampire games also have this moment, but it almost doesn’t seem like a puzzle as much as a natural action; at least I didn’t feel like there was anything stale going on.

If you carry too much down the rope it snaps and you die.

With the brass key you can unlock the door back up north and open a large new area.

Up first are a “sharp axe” and a “ladder”; this is followed by a pond with a shark and I have no idea if you can do anything with the shark. I’m not even sure how to die from the shark.

What I am sure you can die from is a little farther where there is a “flimsy bridge” and it will collapse if you have too many items. Past the bridge is a hut that is locked and the brass key doesn’t work; I have yet to get in the hut.

I guess it’s implied the shark gets us?

Past that is a “sunny field” with a “crucifix” on the ground (spelled wrong) and I suspect the DIG command goes here but I don’t have any digging tool yet (which might be in the hut! which I haven’t gotten in yet!) What I can do is go around to a “cesspit” which has some gold coins, and use the ladder from earlier to climb out.

An easy softlock. This doesn’t have a save game feature.

There’s a “cliff” with a backwards sign….

…which indicates you’re supposed to use the axe to chop the thicket.

Past this are two rooms at the edge of a chasm, a “safety match”, and a “fountain of youth”. You can use the bottle from earlier (with the strength boost) to scoop up the water from the fountain of youth and take it back to the witch, trading it for a lamp.

(I kind of like how I was expecting some sort of battle confrontation but this was just a trade puzzle!) The match works to light the lamp but I haven’t found anything dark enough for it to have an effect. To recap:

a.) I’ve got a hut I can’t get in

b.) I don’t have a way of digging

c.) I don’t have a way past the chasm (if that’s even supposed to be a thing)

I’ve already visited both sides of the brick wall so I’m not sure if it’s really meant to be a puzzle.

I get the intuition this is going to be the sort of game where I just have to resolve one puzzle and then the rest will be a straightforward progression. But I have to find that one puzzle first!

Saturday, 24. May 2025

Renga in Blue

Cauchemard-House: VOUS AVEZ GAGNE

(Continued from my last post.) I have won the game, by some relativistic value of “won” — I needed to check the walkthrough a few times due to communication issues, but also one wildly unfair spot. I will try my best to convey first what any future potential players might need to have a better […]

(Continued from my last post.)

I have won the game, by some relativistic value of “won” — I needed to check the walkthrough a few times due to communication issues, but also one wildly unfair spot.

I will try my best to convey first what any future potential players might need to have a better chance before getting deep into spoilers. Before any of that, a little more detail on how the game was discovered:

Specifically, this happened on the Sinclair ZX World forums. A user named “willinliv” posted about a set of his father’s collection of “about 30” ZX81 tapes, some of them commercial and some of them hand-made.

One of the tapes from the collection, “GMSave”.

Our tape of particular interest was marked “Jeux 16k” (Games 16k).

I have been trying to get a better capture of the tape ‘Jeux 16k’, which seems to be a collection of software that my Dad traded with a ‘pen pal’ from France. Some of these are pirated copies of mainstream releases but some I kind find any info about or copies online. Unfortunately there are audio drop-outs recorded into the tape, particularly on Side B, and also my expertise is minimal.

Nightmare House was on the side B and did suffer damage. As XavSnap writes…

The wav file is broken and i had to rebuild the Basic file in binary (Bits rotations, bad basic length…).

…also pointing out the source code was explicitly based on the Trevor Toms code.

All objects, conditions and moves are located in the VARs memory segment, but this part don’t match in the P file [that’s the file used by the emulator]

After some significant work after the code was reconstructed. This is important in that it is faintly possible one of the odd behaviors you are about to see was related to the reconstruction, but after thorough enough testing I don’t think so: the game is really meant to be very linear with lots of death options.

If you plan on playing the game yourself, note that:

a.) On the two occasions where there are multiple things — the buttons on the recorder and the three trains — you’re supposed to refer to them by digit. So PUSH 1 or PUSH 2 or ENTER 1 and so forth.

b.) INSERT is used for both putting a thing in another thing as well as for typing.

c.) The way to wait is NOTHING. This might seem rather cryptic from the Apple version which just says “Command?” but the original more explicitly asks “what do you do?” As a conversational response, NOTHING (RIEN) makes sense, but I’ve almost never seen this before in an adventure game, where quite typically there’s an implicit “I WANT TO…” placed before the command; this gets fiddled with on rare occasion (DON’T PANIC from Hitchhiker’s Guide, for instance). The “almost” never is because this command also shows up in Folibus, which I think makes it pretty clear the author was deriving their code directly from Brégeon’s magazine article rather than from the Trevor Toms book.

With that out of the way, here’s the entire map.

Not large, yet somehow it manages many many ways to die. From where I left off last time, I had trouble with an acid bottle (just ignore it) and some trains. As I hinted at earlier, you’re supposed to ENTER one of them; trains 1 and 3 kill you (either by explosion or electrocution). This is hinted at in the previous room, which had an unplugged speaker; if you PLUG SOCKET (not the speaker, and no, the socket isn’t in the room description, even in the French version) you’ll get a hint about “always taking the second”.

With ENTER 2 you enter into darkness and where I got stuck again:

The train here has stopped in darkness. You can’t go any of the cardinal directions, and going down kills you (falling down). This is the moment where you need to do NOTHING.

The train moves along farther and ejects you into the room seen above. There is a beam going from north to south (the little squares in a column), an “electronic eye” next to a door to the west, a “black box”, and exits otherwise to the north and south. Trying to exit either way — at least my first time through — disintegrated me. I checked the verb list and there was nothing along the lines of sliding under the beam or jumping over it (like I did recently in the German game Geheimagent XP-05).

This was the part that I wasn’t stuck on due to the parser, but just being generally unfair. At the very start, there were some tools and a laser gun; you’re not supposed to pick up the gun.

That’s the only difference! You can’t even drop the gun once you’ve arrived at the beam room, you have to have left it behind. There is no indication that the weapon is the issue.

From here, you can go north into a room that looks fairly tantalizing, which has a “hole with a riveted ladder”, and a “window overlooking the sea with a lever”.

You’re supposed to ignore both those things (unless you want to die) and instead pick up the bottle (GOURDE) and cassette (CASSETTE). The bottle can be drunk but there’s a fun death later if you don’t drink it so let’s save that, and take the cassette back to the player at the intersection.

Putting the cassette in the player and using PUSH 2 (again I had to look up the interaction mode here) causes the previously-closed door to the west to open.

Inside is a lamp and a door with a keypad.

There’s also UNE MACHINE QUI RONRONNE, where “ronronne” can be either purring or a hum. I think purring is funnier.

You can’t open the door yet, but you can grab the lamp, turn it on, and jump back on the 2nd train. You will see a code for the keypad in the darkness.

It doesn’t give an explicit number, it just says there is one.

Circling back to the intersection you can then INSERT CODE (or rather, INTRODUIRE CODE) and reach the final room of the game.

There’s a mummy, a lever, a button, and a screen; there’s also a “controller” (or as the Apple game says, “stick”) to the west. The lever, button, and screen are all tantalizing, but again, death maze: push the button and the mummy wakes up and murders you.

If you haven’t drunk the bottle before entering:

You catch the plague. You die.

If you are holding the black box from the room with the beam.

The bomb explodes. You too.

You should ignore everything except for the stick, and pull it:

x

This gives the message

UNE TRAPPE S’OURVRE

VOUS VOUS RETROUVEZ DEHORS. VOUS AVEZ GAGNE.

which translates to

A TRAPDOOR OPENS

YOU FIND YOURSELF OUTSIDE. YOU HAVE WON.

I do want to emphasize that this exact style is fairly specific; we’ve had plenty of games with multiple options to die, but the sheer overwhelming preponderance of death-options here is high enough to form its own mood, akin to a Choose Your Own Adventure where more than half the options lead to a BAD END.

Be an Interplanetary Spy: The Red Rocket, from 1985. Source.

Eventually in 1983 we’ll reach The Manor of Dr. Genius for the Oric, by a known company (Loriciels) but with the same general flavor as Folibus.


Cauchemard-House (1982/1983?)

We’re back in France with this game; the most relevant prior game to read about is La maison du professeur Folibus. As observed in my posts on Folibus, the ZX81 had a stronger impact in France than in its country of origin (the UK); while the competition landscape was one likely factor, a major one […]

We’re back in France with this game; the most relevant prior game to read about is La maison du professeur Folibus.

As observed in my posts on Folibus, the ZX81 had a stronger impact in France than in its country of origin (the UK); while the competition landscape was one likely factor, a major one was the French SECAM format for televisions worked with the UK’s hardware in black and white (ZX81) but was a pain for color (ZX Spectrum). (SECAM’s main difference from PAL and NTSC is that PAL and NTSC have color signals sent by amplitude modulation — how “tall” the electromagnetic waves are — whereas SECAM uses frequency modulation — the “width” of the waves.)

This ramification of this was that the French-translated version of the The ZX81 Pocket Book by Trevor Toms had more an impact than the English original, and La maison du professeur Folibus became the “origin adventure” of France even though it literally wasn’t the first.

Interior of a French ZX81 box, via Sinclair Collection Site; the two tapes came with the set.

Just like how Omotesando’s early status led to further Japanese adventures in building break-ins, the “death-maze house” design of Folibus had a little cloning. By death-maze I am not just meaning a game with lots of ways to die (like, say, Time Zone) but rather that the plot follows a restricted path where one action is right and most others lead to death.

Today’s game is such a clone, and we don’t have a year or even an author.

Via the ZX81 France Facebook group. See the fourth game in column B.

It was rescued by French ZX81 enthusiast XavSnap off an old tape and may have been a “private game” originally meant for family and friends. It seems extremely likely is was made somewhere within a year of Folibus but there’s no way to be certain.

Plot: the protagonist has been kidnapped by a maniac and put in a house full of traps.

The title, as shown above, is Cauchemard-House (Nightmare-House) so that’s what I’m using, but the “d” is a typo; when the good folks at Brutal Deluxe Software ported the game recently to Apple II they not only added an English version, they also changed the title to Cauchemar House.

While this is a Folibus offshoot, there’s one innovation straight away:

That’s a top down view! That’s us (the “o”) with two arms (“(” and “)”). The text just says

YOU ARE IN AN EMPTY ROOM

THERE’S ALSO:
– LASER GUN
– TOOLS

WHAT DO YOU DO?

Scooping up the items and heading north, er, NORD:

No death yet! But soon. There’s no “room description” (I suppose the image is the description.)

THERE IS AN UNPLUGGED SPEAKER
A TROLL APPEARS.
TO THE EAST THERE IS A DOOR WITH A TAPE RECORDER WITH TWO BUTTONS AND TO THE SOUTH THERE IS A RED BUTTON

THERE’S ALSO:
– SUIT

Trying to go NORD results in

UNE FLECHE VOUS TRAVERSE

that is, “an arrow goes through you”; the same result happens in any other direction (other than west, where you just get stopped). You can push the button and the game says it’s just a “projection”; push it again and then the arrows stop happening, although only east is available.

This is a mini train station with three wagons, and an acid flask. Guess what happens if you pick up the acid?

The bottle was leaking, your hands are eaten away, you immediately catch leprosy (LA LEPRE).

For a game to be a death maze it needs death with this kind of frequency. Catching leprosy somehow from a flask of acid is optional.

And … now I’m stuck because of the parser. I’ve been alternating between the French ZX81 version and the translated Apple version (both are on Github) and I haven’t been able to refer to any of the wagons, and I’m still puzzled by the room with the tape recorder (it refers to the recorder having buttons, but I haven’t been able to press either). I also can’t find a way to refer to the troll (although the troll is gone if you go in the wagon room and then come back).

There’s a walkthrough provided by the Apple version so I can certainly muscle through but I’d like to try to puzzle things out a bit longer. While I suspect this is more a parser battle than an object-based one, I’ll still take suggestions in the comments if anyone has one.

Friday, 23. May 2025

Choice of Games LLC

The 2025 Spy Video Game Rendezvous starts today!

Choice of Games is participating in this year’s Spy Video Game Rendezvous, hosted on Steam by Sunny Demeanor Games! Four of our most suspenseful thrillers are on sale as part of the festival! Get them on Steam for up to 40% off until May 30th!

Choice of Games is participating in this year’s Spy Video Game Rendezvous, hosted on Steam by Sunny Demeanor Games! Four of our most suspenseful thrillers are on sale as part of the festival!

Get them on Steam for up to 40% off until May 30th!


Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian

The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 4: Chainsaw Monday

This article tells part of the story of Sierra On-Line. In 1825, in Paris, France, a man named Charles-Louis Havas set up an agency to translate foreign news reports into French for the benefit of local newspapers. At that time, his country along with the rest of the Western world stood on the cusp of […]


This article tells part of the story of Sierra On-Line.

In 1825, in Paris, France, a man named Charles-Louis Havas set up an agency to translate foreign news reports into French for the benefit of local newspapers. At that time, his country along with the rest of the Western world stood on the cusp of far-reaching changes. Over the next few decades, the railroad and the telegraph remade travel and communications in their image. This led in turn to the rise of consumerism, as exemplified by the opening of Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche, the world’s first big-box department store, in Paris in 1852. And with consumerism came mass-market advertising, a practice which was to a large extent invented in France.

The Havas Agency rode this wave of change adroitly. Charles-Louis Havas’s two sons, who took over the company after their father’s death, reoriented it toward advertising, making it into the dominant power in the field in France. Havas went public in 1879. During the twentieth century, it expanded into tourism and magazine and book publishing, and eventually into cable television, via Canal+, by far the most popular paid television channel in France from 1984 until the arrival of Netflix in that market in 2014.

The creation of Canal+ marked the point where Havas first became intertwined with another many-tendriled French conglomerate: the Compagnie Générale des Eaux, or CGE. The name translates to “The General Water Company.” As it would imply, CGE had gotten its start when modern plumbing was first spreading across France, all the way back in 1853. It later expanded into other types of urban service, from garbage collection to parking to public transportation. Veering still further out of its original lane, CGE invested enough into Canal+ to be given a 15-percent stake in the nascent channel in 1983, marking the start of a new era for the formerly staid provider of utility services. Over the next fifteen years, its growth outstripped that of Havas dramatically, as it became a major player in cable television, in film and television production, in telecommunications and wired and cellular telephony.

By 1997, CGE had acquired a 29.3-percent stake in Havas as well. In May of the following year, it completed the process of absorption. The new entity abandoned the anachronistic reference to water and became known as Vivendi, a far catchier name that can be roughly translated as “Of Life” or “About Life.” Having expanded by now to the point that it was running out of obvious growth opportunities inside France, it looked beyond the borders of its homeland. In the next few years, it would buy up a wide cross-section of foreign media.

This impulse to grow put the software arm of Cendant Corporation on Vivendi’s hit list just as soon as Henry Silverman, that troubled American company’s boss, made it clear that said division was on the market. For, of all sectors of media, gaming seemed set for the most explosive growth of all, and Vivendi was eager to grab a chunk of that action. It was not alone in this: a deregulation of the French telecommunications industry that had been completed on January 1, 1998, was spawning a foreign feeding frenzy among actual and would-be French game publishers. Conglomerates like Ubisoft, Titus, and Infogrames would soon join Vivendi as new household words among American gamers. The days of the “French Touch” being the mark of games that were sometimes charmingly, sometimes infuriatingly off-kilter would fade into the past, as French publishers would come to stand behind some of the biggest mass-market hits in the field.

Seen through this prism, there can be no doubt about the main reason Vivendi chose to take Cendant’s games division off Henry Silverman’s hands: Blizzard Entertainment, whose games Warcraft 2Diablo, and Starcraft had combined with the Battle.net matchmaking service to become a literal modus vivendi for millions of loyal acolytes. For its part, Sierra was on the verge of scoring a massive, long overdue hit of its own with Half-Life, but that had not yet come to pass as negotiations were taking place. As matters currently stood, Sierra was merely the additional baggage which Vivendi had to accept in order to get its hands on Blizzard.

The deal was done with remarkable speed. On November 20, 1998 — one day after the release of Half-Life, four days before the release of King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, and eighteen days before that of Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire — it was announced that the now-former Cendant software division had become a new subsidiary of the Vivendi empire, under the name of Havas Interactive. The price? A cool $1 billion in cash — cash that was, needless to say, much-needed by the beleaguered Cendant. The current Cendant software head David Grenewetzki, who as far as the French financiers could see had done a pretty good job so far of cutting fat and improving efficiency, would be allowed to continue to do so as the first boss of Havas Interactive.

The folks in Oakhurst had been through such a roller-coaster ride already that they were by now almost numb to further surprises. First had come the acquisition by CUC and the sidelining of Ken Williams, who looked a lot less like a soulless fat cat in comparison to what came after him. Then the merger with HFS, then the shock and horror of the revelations of accounting fraud and the plummeting share price, which had cost some staffers dearly — especially the ones who had signed onto the plan to replace some of their salary with Cendant stock. Al Lowe of Leisure Suit Larry fame, for example, says that almost overnight he and his wife lost “the equivalent of a really nice home.” So, the news of this latest sale, to yet another company that no one had ever heard of, was greeted mostly with resigned shrugs. Everyone had long since learned just to take it day by day, to hope for the best and to try to ignore the little voice inside that was telling them that they probably ought to be expecting the worst.

For three months, sanguinity seemed justified; not much changed. Then came February 22, 1999.

The first sign the Oakhurst employees encountered that something was out of the ordinary on that Monday morning were a few Pinkerton Security vans that they saw parked in front of the building as they arrived at work. Not knowing what else to do, they shrugged and went about their usual start-of-the-week routines. An all-hands meeting was scheduled for that morning at the movie theater next door, the latest installment in a longstanding quarterly tradition of same. If anyone felt a premonition of danger — the mass layoff of 1994 had been announced at another of these meetings, at the same theater — no one voiced their concerns. Instead everyone shuffled in in the standard fashion, swapping stories about the weekend just passed and other inter-office scuttlebutt, a little impatient as always with this corporate rigamarole, eager to get back to their desks and get back to work making games.

They soon learned that they would not be making games in Oakhurst, today or ever again. The instant they had all taken their places, the axe fell — or rather the chainsaw, as it would later be dubbed by Scott Murphy, a designer of Sierra’s Space Quest series. The Oakhurst office was closing, the staffers were told matter-of-factly. While they were still struggling to process this piece of information, they were each handed an envelope with their name on it. Inside was a short note, telling them whether they had just lost their job entirely or whether they were being offered the opportunity to relocate to the Bellevue office, to continue making games there.

As of February of 1999, Yosemite Entertainment had three major projects in development; in an indubitable sign of the changing times in gaming, none was an adventure game. One was a “space simulator” in the mold of Wing Commander and TIE Fighter, based in this case on the Babylon 5 television series; one was an MMORPG, a far more ambitious successor to The Realm that was to take place in J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth; and one was a shooter powered by the Unreal engine that was being created in consultation with a former Navy SEAL commander. The first two projects were to resume production in Bellevue; the last was cancelled outright.

When all of the support staff who are needed to run an office like this one were added to the chopping block, the number of people who lost their jobs that day came to almost 100 — almost two-thirds of the total number of Sierra employees remaining in Oakhurst. The ranks of the newly jobless also included a small team that had been working with Corey and Lori Ann Cole to make an expansion pack for Quest for Glory V, which was to add to the base game some form of the multiplayer support that had once been the whole thrust of the project as well as some new single-player content.

Sierra’s new management had left nothing to chance. While the meeting had been taking place at the theater, the Pinkerton hired guns had been changing the security codes that employees used to access the office building. The victims of the layoff were now led inside in small groups under armed guard, where they were permitted just a few minutes to clean their personal belongings out of their desks.

The shock of it all can hardly be overstated. No one had seen this coming; even Craig Alexander, the manager of Yosemite Entertainment, had been given no more than a few minutes warning on the morning of the layoff itself. With cataclysmic suddenness, the largest employer in Oakhurst had simply ceased to be. Come the day after Chainsaw Monday, the old office building and its previously bustling parking lot looked like a movie set after hours. The only people left to roam the halls were a few support personnel for The Realm, whose servers were to remain in Oakhurst for lack of anyplace better to put them while Havas Interactive sought a buyer for the building and if possible the MMORPG as well. (The Realm had just enough players that its new mother corporation hesitated to piss them off by shutting it down, but neither did Havas Interactive want to invest any real money in a virtual world built around the creaky old SCI engine.)

As an ironic capstone to the brutal proceedings in Oakhurst, both the Babylon 5 game and the Middle-earth MMORPG were themselves cancelled just six months later in Bellevue, as part of another round of “reorganizing.” The folks who had relocated to a big city 1000 miles further up the coast to continue these projects learned that the joke was on them, as they were left high and dry there in Seattle. The emerging new business model for Sierra was that of a publisher and distributor of games only, not an active developer of them. In other words, Sierra was deemed by Vivendi to be of further use only as a recognizable brand name, not as a coherent ongoing creative enterprise. Had he been paying attention, Henry Silverman, Wall Street’s king of outsourcing and branding, would surely have approved.

In the years that followed, surprisingly few of the prominent names who had built Sierra’s original brand, that of the biggest adventure-games studio on the planet, continued to work in the industry. What with the diminished state of the adventure game in general, the skill sets of people like them just weren’t so much in demand anymore.

Corey and Lori Ann Cole did find employment in the industry at least intermittently, but did so in roles that no longer got their names featured on box covers. Corey worked as a consultant on such unlikely projects as Barbie: Fashion Pack Games (to which he contributed a Space Invaders clone that replaced spaceships and laser guns with hearts and lipstick). Both Corey and Lori Ann worked on a virtual world called Explorati, which, had it ever come to fruition, might have been the missing link between Habitat and Second Life. Later, Corey worked on online-poker sites. Eventually, the Coles did come home again, to make Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, which is Quest for Glory VI in all but name, and the more modestly scaled but equally warm-hearted Summer Daze: Tilly’s Tale. Corey told me recently that he and Lori Ann have some other ideas in the pipeline that might come to fruition someday, but he also told me that they “are pushing 70, and spending more time on ourselves.” Which is more than fair enough, of course.

Embracing the spirit of the late 1990s, when you couldn’t toss a dead rat into the air without hitting five different dot.com startups, Ken Williams initially envisioned a second act for his career, as an Internet entrepreneur. He passed up a chance to get in on the ground floor with Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.com in favor of a venture of his own called TalkSpot, which aimed to bring talk radio online. Born, one senses, largely out of Ken’s longstanding infatuation with Rush Limbaugh, a hard-right AM-radio provocateur of the old school, TalkSpot can nevertheless be read as prescient if you squint at it just right, a harbinger of the podcasts that were still to come. But it was just a little bit too far out in front of the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure; almost everyone was still accessing the Internet over dial-up at the time, which made even audio-only streaming a well-nigh insurmountable challenge. An attempted pivot from being a public-facing provider of online talk radio to providing streaming services to other companies, under the name of WorldStream, couldn’t overcome this reality, and the company closed up shop — ironically, not all that long before the DSL lines that might have made it sustainable started to roll out across the country.

Then again, it may be that Ken Williams’s heart was never really in it. Realizing that he had achieved his lifelong dream of becoming rich — he had all the money that he, Roberta, and their children could ever possibly need — he didn’t become a third-time entrepreneur. Instead he and Roberta threw themselves into an active and enviable early retirement. They sailed a boat all over the world, blogging about their travels to a whole new audience who often knew nothing about their previous lives. “We somehow achieved a second fifteen minutes of fame as world cruisers and explorers,” writes Ken in his memoir, exaggerating only slightly.

In 2023, they made a belated return to game development, via a graphical remake of the game that had started it all, for them as for so many others: Will Crowther and Don Woods’s original Adventure. It struck many as an odd choice, given the rich well of beloved Sierra intellectual property from which they might have drawn instead, but it seemed that they wanted above all to pay tribute to the game that had first prompted them to create their seminal Mystery House all those years ago, and to create Sierra On-Line in order to sell it. Having accomplished that mission, they have no plans to make more games.

And as for little Oakhurst, California, the strangest place at which anyone ever decided to found a games company: it weathered the turbulence of Sierra’s departure surprisingly well in the end, as it had so many changes before. There was a brief flicker of hope that game development might again become a linchpin of the town’s economy when, about six months after Chainsaw Monday, the British publisher Codemasters bought Sierra’s old facility, along with The Realm and its servers and the rights to the Navy SEAL game that had been cancelled when the chainsaw fell. Codemasters tried to assemble a team in Oakhurst to complete the SEAL game, which would seem to have been as prescient as Ken Williams’s TalkSpot in its way, anticipating the craze for military-themed shooters that would be ignited by Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in 2002. But most of the people who had once worked on the project had already left town, and Codemasters had trouble attracting more to such a rural location. The winds of corporate politics are fickle; within barely six months, the SEAL game was cancelled a second and final time, the Realm servers were finally moved out, and the now-empty building was put up for sale once again. These events marked the definitive end of game development in Oakhurst, barring the contracting jobs that the Coles did out of their house.

The loss was a serious blow to the local economy in the short term. But, luckily for Oakhurst, Yosemite National Park abides. After a brief-lived dip, the town started to grow again, thanks to the tourists who were now streaming through the “Gateway to Yosemite” in greater numbers than ever. Oakhurst’s population as of the 2020 American census was just shy of 6000 souls — twice the number counted by the 2000 census, when the community was still reeling from Sierra’s departure.

Today, then, Sierra On-Line’s sixteen-year stay in Oakhurst has gone down in local lore as just one more anecdote involving the eccentric outsiders who have always been drawn to the place. Still, among the hordes of families and hardcore hikers who pass through, one can sometimes spot a different breed of middle-aged tourist, who arrives brimming with nostalgia for a second-hand past he or she knew only through the pictures and articles in Sierra’s newsletters. Such is the nature of time. What is passed but remembered, if only by a few, becomes history.

Oakhurst in 2022. Life goes on…

I’d like to share with you a eulogy for Sierra — one that you may very well have seen before, written by someone far closer to all of this than I am. Josh Mandel was a writer and designer who worked at Sierra for several years. Just three days after Chainsaw Monday, he wrote the following.

On Monday, the last vestige of the original Sierra On-Line was laid to rest in Oakhurst, California. That branch, renamed “Yosemite Entertainment,” was shuttered on February 22nd, putting most of its 125-plus employees out of work.

You may not care for what Sierra has become since the days when dozens of unpretentious parser-driven graphic adventures flowed, seemingly effortlessly, out of Oakhurst. But there’s no denying that, back then, Sierra On-Line was the life’s blood of the adventure-game industry.

Maybe the games were a little more rough-hewn than those of its competitors — not that there were many competitors at that point. But Sierra kept adventure gamers happy and fed, gamers who would’ve otherwise starved to death on the arguably more polished, but frustratingly infrequent, releases of Lucasfilm Games (as they were once called).

Sierra alone grew the industry in other ways, too. It was Ken Williams who, almost single-handedly, created the market for PC sound hardware by vigorously educating the public [on] the AdLib card and, shortly thereafter, the breathtaking Roland MT-32. He supported those cards in style while other publishers wanted nothing to do with them. It was Corey and Lori Cole who invented the first true hybrid, replayable adventure/RPG. It was Christy Marx’s lump-in-the-throat ending to Conquests of Camelot that reminded us that not every computer game had to have a group hug at the end. It was Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy who made us want to kill off our onscreen alter ego, to see what inventive, gooey death had been anticipated for us. It was Roberta, before anyone else, who invented strong female heroines. It was Al Lowe, bringing up the rear (literally and figuratively) by creating Leisure Suit Larry, the most popular, pirated game of its decade. We knew this because we sold far more Larry hint books than we sold of the actual software.

It was the Sierra News Magazine (later InterAction) that let us feel like we knew the people making these games, that they were a family-run business, staffed by people who lived an isolated life, surrounding by idyllic, ageless beauty and creating games that were a labor of love. That was, at least for a while, an accurate picture. This was a family we wanted to feel a part of, for good reason, and people came from thousands of miles away to take a tour and see how real it all was…

Some may argue that Sierra lives on in Bellevue, Washington, where Al Lowe, Jane Jensen, Roberta Williams, Mark Seibert, and a handful of [other] Oakhurst refugees still labor diligently on games side-by-side with scores of newer talent. But games like King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity and Leisure Suit Larry 7 have a distinctly different flavor than the seat-of-the-pants, funny, touching adventures that Oakhurst once produced. They are commercial.

Invariably, in a company that grows the way Sierra grew, innovation gives way to emulation. Whereas Sierra’s management once strove to make it solid, profitable, and yet fun, they now strive to dominate other companies, force annual growth in the double digits, and (like so many other companies) cut jobs mercilessly to improve the bottom line and thrill the stockholders. Yet the Ghost of Sierra Past still walked the halls in Oakhurst. The rooms were adorned with the art of glories past, the artists and programmers who helped to create those glories were, in fair measure, still living and working there. Now that spirit has been exorcised by scrubbed, glad-handing executives who don’t know, or don’t care, what those artists and programmers could do when they were motivated and well-managed.

People, living and working closely together in the pursuit of shared joy, were what made Sierra games great. Thank you, Ken, for creating something utterly unique, something warm, fun, and beautiful. Damn you, Ken, for allowing others to tear it down.

Whether you were a Sierra fan or not, we are all diminished by the loss of history, talent, and continuity within the gaming industry. Rest in peace, Sierra On-Line.

The skeptical historian in me hastens to state that this eulogy is very sentimentalized; whatever else they may have been, Sierra’s games were always at least trying to be deeply commercial, as Ken Williams will happily tell you today if you ask him. On the other hand, though, it’s rather in the nature of eulogies to be sentimental, isn’t it? This one is not without plenty of wise truths as well. And among its truths is its willingness to acknowledge that Sierra’s games “were a little more rough-hewn than those of its competitors.”

I, for one, have definitely spent more time over the years complaining about the rough edges in Sierra’s adventure games than I have praising their strong points. I’ve occasionally been accused of ungraciousness in this regard, even of having it in personally for Ken and Roberta Williams. The latter has never been the case, but, looking back, I can understand why it might have seemed that way sometimes, especially in the early years of this site.

Throughout most of the 1980s, the yin and yang of adventure gaming were Infocom and Sierra, each manifesting a contrasting philosophy. As Ken Williams himself has put it, Infocom was “literary,” while Sierra was “mass-market.” One Infocom game looked exactly the same as any other; they were all made up of nothing but text, after all. But Sierra’s games were, right from the very start, the products of Ken’s “ten-foot rule”: meaning that they had to be so audiovisually striking that a shopper would notice them running on a demo machine from ten feet away and rush over to find out more. (It may seem impossible to imagine today that a game with graphics as rudimentary as those of, say, The Wizard and the Princess could have such an effect on anyone, but trust me when I say that, in a time when no other adventure game had any graphics at all, these graphics were more exciting than any ultra-HD wonder is to a jaded modern soul.) Infocom had to prioritize design and writing, because design and writing were all they had. Sierra had other charms with which to beguile their customers. It’s no great wonder that today, when those other charms have ceased to be so beguiling, Infocom’s games tend to hold up much better.

But I’m not here to play the part of an old Infocom fanboy with a bad case of sour grapes. (Whatever we can say about their respective games today, there’s no doubt which company won the fight for hearts and minds in the 1980s…) I actually think a comparison between the two is useful in another way. Infocom was always a collective enterprise, an amalgamation of equals that came into being behind an appropriately round conference table in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Strong personalities though the principals may have been, one cannot say that Infocom was ever Al Vezza’s company or Joel Berez’s company, nor Dave Lebling’s or Marc Blank’s. From first to last, it was a choir of voices, if sometimes a discordant one. Compare this to Sierra: there wasn’t ever an inch of daylight between that company and Ken and Roberta Williams. Sierra’s personality was theirs. Sierra’s strengths were theirs. And, yes, Sierra’s weaknesses, the same ones I’ve documented at so much length over the years, were theirs as well.

I’ll get to their strengths — no, really, I will, I promise — but permit me to dwell on their weaknesses just a little bit longer before I do so. I think that these mostly come down to one simple fact: that neither Ken nor Roberta Williams was ever really a gamer. Ken has admitted that the only Sierra game he ever sat down and played to completion for himself, the way that his customers did it, was SoftPorn — presumably because it was so short and easy (not to mention it being so in tune with where Ken’s head was at in the early 1980s). In his memoir, Ken writes that “to me, Sierra was a marketing company. Lots of people can design products, advertise products, and sell products. But what really lifted Sierra above the pack was our marketing.” Here we see his blasé attitude toward design laid out in stark black and white: “lots of people” can do it. A talent for marketing, it seems, is rarer, and thus apparently more precious. (As for the rest of that sentence: I’m afraid you’ll have to ask Ken how “marketing” is different from “advertising” and “selling…”)

Roberta has not made so explicit a statement on the subject, but it does strike me as telling that, when she was given her choice of any project in the world recently, she chose to remake Crowther and Woods’s Adventure. That game was, it would seem, a once-in-a-lifetime obsession for her.

Needless to say, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with not being a gamer; there are plenty of other hobbies in this world that are equally healthy and stimulating and satisfying, or quite possibly more so. Yet not being a gamer can become an issue when one is running a games company or designing games for a living. At some very fundamental level, neither Ken nor Roberta had any idea what it was like to experience the products Sierra made. And because they didn’t know this, they also didn’t know how important design is to that experience — didn’t understand that, while the ten-foot rule applies for only a limited window of time, writing and puzzles and systems are timeless. Infocom scheduled weekly lunches for everyone who wished to attend to discuss the nature of good and bad design at sometimes heated length, drafted documents full of guidelines about same, made design the cornerstone of their culture. As far as I can tell, discussions of this nature never took place at Sierra. Later, after Infocom was shuttered, LucasArts picked up the torch, publicizing Ron Gilbert’s famous manifesto on “Why Adventure Games Suck” — by “adventure games,” of course, he largely meant “Sierra adventure games” — and including a short description of its design philosophy in every single game manual. Again, such a chapter is unimaginable in a Sierra manual.

For, like everything else associated with the company, Sierra’s games reflected the personalities of Ken and Roberta Williams. They were better at the big picture than they were at the details; they were flashy, audacious, and technologically cutting-edge on the surface, and all too often badly flawed underneath. Those Sierra designers who were determined to make good games, by seeking the input of outside testers and following other best practices, had to swim against the tide of the company’s culture in order to do so. Not that many of them were willing or able to put in the effort when push came to shove, although I have no doubt that everyone had the best of intentions. The games did start to become a bit less egregiously unfair in the 1990s, by which time LucasArts’s crusade for “no deaths and no dead ends” had become enough of a cause célèbre to shame Sierra’s designers as well into ceasing to abuse their players so flagrantly. Nevertheless, even at this late date, Sierra’s games still tended to combine grand concepts with poor-to-middling execution at the level of the granular details. If I’m hard on them, this is the reason why: because they frustrate me to no end with the way they could have been so great, if only Ken Williams had instilled a modicum of process at his company to make them so.

Having said that, though, I have to admit as well that Ken and Roberta Williams are probably deserving of more praise than I’ve given them over the fifteen years I’ve been writing these histories; it’s not as if they were the only people in games with blind spots. Contrary to popular belief, Roberta was not the first female adventure-game designer — that honor goes to Alexis Adams, wife of Scott Adams, who beat her to the punch by a year — but she was by far the most prominent woman in the field of game design in general for the better part of two decades, an inspiration to countless other girls and women, some of whom are making games today because of her. That alone is more than enough to ensure her a respected place in gaming history.

Meanwhile Sierra itself was a beacon of diversity in an industry that sometimes seemed close to a mono-culture, the sole purview of a certain stripe of nerdy young white man with a sharply circumscribed range of cultural interests. The people behind Sierra’s most iconic games came from everywhere but the places and backgrounds you might expect. Al Lowe was a music teacher; Gano Haine was a social-studies teacher; Christy Marx was a cartoon scriptwriter; Jim Walls was a police officer; Jane Jensen and Lorelei Shannon were aspiring novelists; Mark Crowe was a visual artist; Scott Murphy was a short-order cook; Corey and Lori Ann Cole were newsletter editors and publishers and tabletop-RPG designers; Josh Mandel was a standup comedian; Roberta Williams, of course, was a homemaker. At one point in the early 1990s, fully half of Sierra’s active game-development projects were helmed by women. You would be hard-pressed to find a single one at any other studio.

This was the positive side of Ken Williams’s mass-market vision — the one which said that games were for everyone, and that they could be about absolutely anything. There was no gatekeeping at Sierra, in any sense of the word. For all of LucasArts’s thoughtfulness about design, it seldom strayed far from its comfort zone of cartoon-comedy graphic adventures. Sierra, by contrast, dared to be bold, thematically and aesthetically as well as technologically. I may have a long list of niggly complaints about a game like, say, Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within, but I’ll never forget it either. Despite all of its infelicities, it dares to engage with aspects of life that are raw and tragic and real, giving rise to emotions in this player at least that are the opposite of trite. How many of its contemporaries from companies other than Sierra can say the same?

And as went the production side of the business, so went the reception side. Perhaps ironically because he wasn’t a gamer himself, perhaps just because one doesn’t get to be Walt Disney by selling to a niche audience, Ken understood that computer games had to become more accessible if they were ever to make a sustained impact beyond the core demographic of technically proficient young men. He strove mightily on multiple fronts to make this happen. For example, he put together easy-to-assemble “multimedia upgrade kits” for everyday computers, and made sure that Sierra’s software installers were the most user-friendly in the business, asking you for IRQ and DMA numbers only as a last resort. If some of his ideas about interactive movies as the future of mainstream entertainment proved a bit half-baked in the long run, other Sierra games like The Incredible Machine more directly anticipated the “Casual Revolution” to come. If his wide-angle vision of gaming seemed increasingly anachronistic in the latter 1990s, even if it was wrong-headed in a hundred particulars, the fact was that it would come roaring back and win the day in the broader strokes. His only real mistake was that of leaving the industry a little bit too early to be vindicated.

So, let us wave a fond farewell to Ken and Roberta Williams as they sail off into the sunset, and give them their full measure of absolution from the petty carping of critics like me as we do so. In every sense of the words, Ken and Roberta were pioneers and visionaries. Their absence from these histories will be keenly felt. Godspeed and bon voyage, you two. Your certainly made your presence felt while you were with us.



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Sources: The books Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line by Ken Williams and Vivendi: A Key Player in Global Entertainment and Media by Philippe Bouquillion.

Online sources include “How Sierra was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud” by Duncan Fyfe at Vice, “Chainsaw Monday (Sierra On-Line Shuts Down)” at Larry Laffer Dot Net, Ken Williams’s page of thoughts and rambles at Sierra Gamers, and an old TalkSpot interview with some of Sierra’s employees, done just after the second round of lay-offs hit Bellevue.

I also made use of the materials held in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play. And once again I owe a debt of gratitude to Corey Cole for answering my questions about this period at his usual thoughtful length.


Zarf Updates

Last day for in-person NarraScope registration

A quick reminder: today is is the last day to register for NarraScope 2025 if you want to attend in person. (Remote attendance will be open until June 18th.) If you want the conference rate at the University City Study hotel, you need to grab ...

A quick reminder: today is is the last day to register for NarraScope 2025 if you want to attend in person. (Remote attendance will be open until June 18th.) If you want the conference rate at the University City Study hotel, you need to grab that today also.

Friday workshops are up on the schedule, too. As always, workshops are free, but you must be registered for the conference (remote or in person) to sign up for the workshops.

See you in Philadelphia in, yikes, four weeks!


Renga in Blue

The Final Countdown (1982/1983)

(This continues, more or less, from my previous post.) In 1974, Donald Sherman ordered a pizza on the phone, making history. Not that it was the first delivery pizza ordered by phone — pizza delivery had been around for many years by then and Domino’s had popularized it — but Donald Sherman couldn’t talk, having […]

(This continues, more or less, from my previous post.)

In 1974, Donald Sherman ordered a pizza on the phone, making history.

Not that it was the first delivery pizza ordered by phone — pizza delivery had been around for many years by then and Domino’s had popularized it — but Donald Sherman couldn’t talk, having a type of facial paralysis from Moebius syndrome. He used a system at Michigan State University which pronounced words for him, and we have the moment caught on camera.

His first call (Domino’s) hung up, thinking this was a prank call, but he finally got cooperation on his fifth call, this time to Mike’s Pizza, ordering a large with pepperoni and mushrooms.

For this to work, a Control Data 6500 computer nicknamed “Alexander” was paired with a Votrax synthesizer. The Votrax was originally developed by Richard Gagnon of Troy, Michigan (about an hour east of Michigan State) in 1970. He was working for Federal Screw Works at the time but had developed a talking chip in his basement, and when he showed his prototype to his bosses the put him in charge of a new Vocal Interface Division (eventually spinning off to its own company). Just like Sherman he used it for accessibility, having it dictate words from a computer monitor as his eyesight had trouble.

This all resulted in the commercial SC-01 chip unveiling by the end of the decade from the newly dubbed Votrax, and you might have heard one before if you’ve played Gorf or Q*Bert. While Gorf used the chip for taunting the player with a well-timed “got you, space cadet”…

…Q*Bert used it for its own unique language.

The SC-01 was licensed out to companies to make voice synthesis hardware in the early 80s like the Mockingboard, the Alien Group Voice Box, and — relevant for today — the Spectrum Voice Pak for TRS-80 Color Computer.

The Spectrum Voice Pak ($70 for CoCo 1 and $80 for CoCo 2) does not seem to have made much a splash as I have found very little software that’s used it, but page 16 of the catalog for Spectrum Projects — in addition to the Spectrum Adventure Generator and a bingo game — has The Final Countdown. While The Final Countdown had the same JARB Software and Dragon Data releases as S.S. Poseidon, it also had an extra one later specially designed for the Votrax.

From World of Dragon.

I unfortunately do not have a copy of the talking version of the game, nor do I have an emulator that supports the chip. Here’s one more video to give an idea what it sounded like, applying a table of 64 phonemes encompassing units like “the oa sound of board” or “the tt sound of butter”.

Hence, I’m just going to load up the Dragon version again, which like last time, has easy, medium, and hard difficulties (affecting the turn limit).

The JARB ad also credits both Bill and Debbie Cook but I do have an early 1982 version of the game with no difficulty levels that just mentions Bill Cook, and the Talking version of the game also only mentions him in the credits.

Also like last time, the game is relatively straightforward, but with two curveballs thrown in.

There is an insane general who wants to launch a nuclear missile, and your job is to stop him from destroying the world.

You start near a van with a 2-way radio and a uniform; examining the uniform also reveals a stun gun and some PAPERS.

Heading south gets you in a desert with a rattlesnake and there’s no point in going there (it doesn’t have a puzzle this time, but just like Poseidon it feels like a “side scene” rather than a typical red herring).

To get inside you go by a camera at the front gate and show the papers from the uniform.

You’d think they could detect a fake general. Maybe we’re a real general and this is our actual uniform and we’re here to slap some sense into the wayward lower-star upstart.

Once inside, if you veer left into the C.O. Office, you can have one of those “side scenes” I just mentioned but this time with a minor puzzle. There are monitors and three buttons; if you press the second one it starts showing I Love Lucy, and if you press the third it sets everything on fire.

A “fire bottle” is in the room next door but you need to have picked it up first. This essentially identical to the Poseidon scene, and there’s no reason to press any of the buttons.

I wandered around the map after that. There’s a BULLETIN BOARD warning about tripping on stairs, and a message about an evacuation being complete, and a direct phone to the White House that’s very unhelpful…

…but other than that I was unclear. To the northeast there’s a cabinet that’s locked — no key yet — and intuition struck me given the mention of stairs so I tried moving it.

I have no concrete logic here but I did ratiocinate myself into doing this rather than hitting the interaction via brute force, like I did with Time Warden.

This leads to the second (and only other) part of the game.

The passage goes through a “command center”, “radar tracking” (with wire cutters), and a “strategy room” before arriving at a “maze of hallways”.

In the meantime, THE GENERAL starts showing up, kind of like the dwarves in Crowther/Woods, and you can use a charge from your stun gun to chase him off. This is clearly on the Dr. Strangelove end of the spectrum.

It’s not really a maze, though, because going through a loop enough times eventually reveals a secret passage.

Heading west from here goes to an elevator that you can take as a one-way trip back to the first floor (this is very much like Poseidon’s structure) whereas going south leads to a LAUNCH CONTROL CENTER.

Of the three buttons, ONE does just a click, TWO is not recognized by the parser even though it gets mentioned, and THREE is described as doing nothing. It does something, just not yet. (I was expecting an accidental premature launch, but apparently not; the rocket countdown is already happening).

The way to win is slightly cryptic. To the north, where there’s the observation window, you can BREAK WINDOW using the FIRE BOTTLE (the same one that was used before in the “scene” — interesting moment of intercross there!)

For reasons I’m unclear about, if you now go south and press THREE this reveals a panel.

This reveals a wire, and while CUT WIRE doesn’t work, USE CUTTERS does and you can win the game.

I regret not being able to find out how the voice sound gets used. Does the wandering general taunt you, perhaps? I’ll get another chance to find out when I get to 1984 as that’s the release year of the Spectrum Adventure Generator which also uses the same chip.

Unfortunately that’s the last we’ll see of the Cooks; they didn’t drop off the map as Bill Cook later wrote wrote the application Write III for the CoCo 3, but this was their only experiment with adventures. They do feel like they were written from an outsider perspective, and I am especially wondering why they had the “scenes” with very light puzzles as part of their games.

Thursday, 22. May 2025

Zarf Updates

Counting the wreckage

It happened that I was looking back on my old game reviews, and I hit a link to a game web site, and the site was gone. Not a shock. Web sites vanish. It made me sad, though. I like those single-game, single-message web sites! I doubt anybody ...

It happened that I was looking back on my old game reviews, and I hit a link to a game web site, and the site was gone.

Not a shock. Web sites vanish. It made me sad, though. I like those single-game, single-message web sites!

I doubt anybody loves building them. There's this sense of capitalist obligation. If you're shipping a game, you need to grab a vaguely suited domain name and put up (a) screenshots and (b) links to all the store platforms and (d) a press kit in case a journalist notices. Once the game ships, you go back and fill in (c) adulatory press quotes. That's how you get any google juice there is to get.

I did this for Hadean Lands, and now every time I mention Hadean Lands on my blog I can link to hadeanlands.com. That's great. Search engines dig it.

But of course I am on board with keeping my web site alive over decades. I registered eblong.com in 1997, I believe. It will run as long as I pay the bills. When I registered hadeanlands.com in 2010, I put it on the same hosting service and the same bill. No extra effort.

(Yes, my will allows my beneficiaries to keep my web sites running. I said decades, I meant decades.)

Not everyone can; not everyone does. How many sites have we lost?

You might ask whether these single-game sites are meant to last. (Leaving aside weirdos like me.) They exist solely for rando gamers to google. Commercial games media sites never ever link to them. I suppose I should put that in past tense, since there may not be any commercial games media left soon, but even nu-indie rags like Aftermath are inconsistent about linking to the developer site.

Weirdos like me will do it, though! Since 2019 or so, I've been using a standard tag for my game reviews:

Hadean Lands • by Zarfhome Software -- game site

But what is the "game site"? I don't want to link to the Steam page! Why should Valve get my precious link energy? I should support the developer, right?

So every time I post a review, I try to hunt down the real game site. My order of preference:

  • A dedicated game site domain -- the kind I've been describing.
  • A game page on the developer's web site.
  • A game page on the publisher's web site.
  • The Steam page.
  • The Itch page.

(Sorry, Steam is above Itch -- for this purpose. I love Itch. But if a game is on both platforms, then Steam is where they're making their money, and I want to support that. Obviously, if a game chooses to fly Itch-only, then I'll link there.)

Therefore, I have a good five-year history of links to game sites, game developer sites, and so on. I can poll them and count!


This is of course an extremely unscientific sample. It is almost entirely indie narrative, adventure, and puzzle games. A lot of it comes from the IGF lists, so it's relatively timely -- but I play some games a year or two after they come out. For IGF judging, I review some games before they come out.

I am testing whether the original URL, which I found for my review page, still works. No fair re-googling! This is about maintaining old links. An old URL is "alive" if it still shows you good game info, or redirects to a site that does. (Sometimes a developer takes down the game-specific site but keeps the domain as a redirect to their company site. That's fine.) A URL is "dead" if the server is down, or shows an error, or the domain has been taken over by an ad squatter. (Rearranged your studio site and the original URLs are 404? Sorry, that's a dead link.)

The links are categorized as dedicated game pages, company game pages, and platform (Steam/Itch) pages. This is fewer buckets than my list above, but it roughly describes how much effort goes into the upkeep.

This logic bakes in some assumptions about how web pages die. It's rare for someone to explicitly withdraw a game from circulation. (I don't think any of the games on my list did that.) Almost always the problem is an expired domain. Sometimes it's broken server tech (expired SSL cert, web framework busted, etc.) That's why it's useful to distinguish between "game-specific site" and "company site". If you have a lot of domains, your company site is probably worth keeping up, but you might stop thinking about old long-tail games.

And now, the numbers. Rotate the board!

Year Game-specific Studio Platform
2024 22 — 2 dead 15 6
2023 15 — 2 dead 19 7
2022 21 — 2 dead 15 11
2021 21 — 5 dead 19 — 2 dead 1
2020 17 — 7 dead 21 — 6 dead 7

(Totals are links in my review blog posts. Counted by hand; mistakes are likely. I didn't try to track 2019 or earlier years because I didn't have enough greppable links.)


I thought the wrap on this post would be "Don't make game-specific sites; they die quick. Create a studio site instead." But the numbers don't really support that conclusion. Yeah, game-specific sites die a bit faster, but only by couple excess deaths per year.

What this looks like is that indie studios have a death rate. When they go, the game page dies, whether it's a separate domain or part of the studio site. But the Steam/Itch page stays up -- presumably because it brings in a bit of money, and somebody is still happy to collect that.

(And you don't have to renew anything to keep the Steam/Itch listing up. Apple is its own can of worms, obviously, but let's not go there today.)

The death rate is low for studios that released something (that I played) in 2022, but heats up beyond that point. I don't have enough data for a real curve, but you can see the bump.

Also, for some reason, in 2021 everybody had a game or studio page. I only had to go to the Steam link once. Why? Say "COVID", why not.

Anyhow. I still think studio sites are easier to maintain than game-specific sites. When I registered hadeanlands.com, that was a fit of optimism! All my later games (Meanwhile, Leviathan, etc) have been pages on zarfhome.com.

(HL will never have a sequel, but... I'm holding the hermeticlands.com domain. You know. Just to have it handy.)

But then, I'm a tiny solo outfit, and I have to watch my action points like a hawk. If you're any larger -- even a smallish indie -- you probably want the extra visibility of the dedicated game site. Just remember that it does take effort, over the years. Budget accordingly.


Renga in Blue

S. S. Poseidon (1982/1983)

By 1980 in the United States, the TRS-80 had still vastly outsold the Apple II, with 200,000 units to 35,000. The Apple II was the outlier expensive machine while TRS-80 was “for the people”. There was no strong indicator at the time that by the late-80s the Apple II would form the “Oregon Trail Generation” […]

By 1980 in the United States, the TRS-80 had still vastly outsold the Apple II, with 200,000 units to 35,000. The Apple II was the outlier expensive machine while TRS-80 was “for the people”. There was no strong indicator at the time that by the late-80s the Apple II would form the “Oregon Trail Generation” and become a bond gluing together an entire group of children growing up in the United States.

(Side note: Commodore, Tandy, and Apple originally all had the chance to be joined up rather than battling rivals. Tramiel of Commodore originally went to Tandy for selling the PET but he also demanded a calculator purchase on top of that which caused Tandy to balk. When Jobs of Apple was looking for initial funding — $300,000 — he went to Tramiel, who only offered $50,000; Jobs found the money he wanted elsewhere.)

Tandy Color Computer 2, via Reddit.

Tandy’s follow-up machines — the MC-10 followed by the Color Computer series, 1 to 3 — are even more elusive in general historical memory. Tandy unfortunately never disclosed sales numbers, with only vague statements like

Each year, Christmas sales of the Color Computer break the previous year’s record.

— Ed Juge, head of Tandy marketing, 1984

to go on. Rather than making up a number, let’s go with ones we know: The Rainbow (a Tandy Color Computer magazine I’ll discuss shortly) hit their peak subscription number of “over 50,000” in 1984, the year of the quote above. I searched for a comparison number and found Antic (for Atari 8-bit machines) hit “over 100,000” readers in 1986. That Atari number comes from after Atari as a company imploded so the comparison isn’t perfect, but it still gives a ballpark proportional estimate in terms of community reach.

(ADD: From the comments, L. Curtis Boyle points out some more exact data, and to compare the same year as Antic’s number, they had 31,789 subscriptions in December 1986.)

As I’ve already mentioned in regards to the TRS-80, Tandy was fairly insular and didn’t make strong connections with other companies. You could buy mainstream games for the Color Computer — Sierra On-Line put out their AGI games, so they got the Kings Quests up through IV — but oftentimes they had an air of second-hand-ness to them.

The community was (again like the TRS-80) its own ecosystem. What I want to emphasize is that while we’ll see more Tandy Color Computer starting in 1983, and despite the machine not making lasting connections with the wider gaming community, in terms of reach and popularity it also isn’t just an obscure sidenote. In a way, because Tandy became no longer dominant, the Color Computer community was even more outsider than before; Softside, the magazine we’ve featured here many times before, eventually had monthly disks for Apple II, TRS-80, Atari, and IBM compatibles, but never Color Computer.

The magazine center of this ecosystem was The Rainbow. The founder, Lawrence “Lonnie” C. Falk, was originally a journalist who had (by 1980) switched to working public relations at the University of Louisville. When the TRS-80 Color Computer came out became fascinated with it and started printing his own newsletter, with The Rainbow Volume 1 Number 1 being marked as July 1981.

Most of us are among the first to be the proud owners of a TRS-80 Color Computer. And, if you are like we were, you were attracted to TRS-80 in the first place by all those great programs available for the Models I, II and III.

But, where did that leave us? Except for some programs in the manuals — and the e-x-p-e-n-s-i-v-e ROM Packs offered by the Shack — there just isn’t a great deal out there right now. Oh, it is coming. But the wait seems long and there are a lot of things the COLOR computer can do that its big brothers can’t.

The comparable CoCo specialist magazines were Hot CoCo and Color Computer Magazine, but The Rainbow outlived them both.

Lonnie Falk, when The Rainbow — and the company Falsoft — were a bit larger. From CoCo: The Colorful History of Tandy’s Underdog Computer.

Nearly from the start — not issue 1 but issue 2 — JARB Software (Imperial Beach, California, just south of San Diego) gets a mention, in a review of JARBCODE. The review has “Joe Bennet, chief programmer” working along with H.D. Stow; the product is for code-making (cryptograms, it seems). JARB started put in advertisements and sending in source code soon after and became one of the main independent publishers for the Color Computer.

We saw them before as they published Eno, Stalag, and Mansion of Doom by the mysterious — but local — PAL Creations out of San Diego. In the January 1983 issue of The Rainbow they offer two games by Bill and Debbie Cook.

The title screens give Poseidon a date of 1982 and Final Countdown a date of 1983; we could normally use the one-month-difference rule to put both games in December of 1982 but the Rainbow’s newsletter origins makes this ambiguous; direct mail would more typically land on the month on the cover. JARB’s December 1982 ad has “COMING ATTRACTIONS” that are “all available by December 1982” but without Poseidon listed. As another example of breaking the one-month rule, Commander magazine started off sending issues on the marked month, but right when they switched to newsstand they skipped a month in order to do the usual off-by-one arrangement — that is, they had one issue marked December 1983/January 1984 even though they were a monthly.

Commander Magazine died in 1984, so the increase in demand apparently didn’t last long.

(ADD: L. Curtis Boyle confirms that printing by The Rainbow happened on the month printed until they skipped May 1983 so they could be a month off for newsstands.)

I haven’t been able to unearth anything about Bill and Debbie Cook specifically, although I should highlight something I don’t always linger on: one of the authors is a woman. That hasn’t been common; I’ve counted about 4% of the games we’ve had so far have had at least one identifiable woman. Mind you, this doesn’t account for people with initials as first names, or people who aren’t named in credits at all, or people who transitioned, but it’s still a low percentage. At least in the US, about 30% Computer Science degrees were going to women at this time, so it doesn’t match the general population.

I’m still not sure as to why. I don’t think sexism quite explains it, although computer science had/has it as a problem. Even in 1983 there was strong awareness of women getting pushed out of the field; to quote some examples from a 1983 paper:

Following a technical discussion over lunch with a faculty member. I was asked for a dinner date. I was left wondering whether the faculty member went to lunch for the intended technical discussion or for personal reasons.

When I was a teaching assistant, one of my students missed the lecture and saw me later. He said, “Will you come sit on my lap sometime and tell me what I missed?”

“Why do you need a degree for marriage?” — a male colleague.

For my question — why less women making adventure games — I’m referring here to a comparative proportion, that is, double-digits in computer science versus single-digits making games. My current suspicion is that games were not thought of as “serious” work; Veronika Megler, who we just read about with The Hobbit, only passed by games on her way to a database-focused job with IBM. That is, sexism was involved, but in a lateral way: the women getting expertise at this time leaned to more “secure” areas like business and finance and large mainframes; they felt less able to experiment in a field more likely to have companies go bankrupt.

I still feel like the story is incomplete, just because so many of the games we’ve played have been pure hobby endeavors.

Enough theorizing, let’s flip a boat:

Just like Eno/Stalag/House of Doom, the Cook games were picked up by Dragon Data to publish in the UK. Picture from World of Dragon.

S.S. Poseidon is yet another game based on the movie The Poseidon Adventure, involving a cruise ship that gets flipped upside down at sea and the attempt from survivors to escape.

I couldn’t find this game in Tandy CoCo form so I’m playing the Dragon version.

There are three difficulty levels but they seem to only affect the time limit. I picked easy because I was not interested in optimizing. The game is straightforward enough it likely doesn’t matter.

You start with a three-room vignette:

The starting ballroom (similar to the movie, but only barely) has just a singular chair; to the west there’s an entrance blocked by DEBRIS and doing LOOK DEBRIS reveals a FLASHLIGHT.

To the east there is an entrance with a sign indicating SOME OBJECTS MAY BE USED. Being that there are no other exits and the only items are a chair and flashlight, I tried USE FLASHLIGHT, revealing a CABLE.

This is wildly unusual; most flashlight use has been in explicitly dark rooms, but here the flashlight finds a hidden object in an otherwise lit room. The only other adventure I can think of offhand that does this is Espionage Island but that still explicitly has a “dark corner” in the room.

The cable is incidentally out of reach, but you can drop the chair and use it to get extra height, and then CLIMB CABLE. This exits the introduction.

Many of these rooms aren’t “useful” but they’re not all exactly “red herrings” either. For example, to the south there’s a COMMUNICATION CENTER with a broken ham radio and a message saying SOS. The player is blocked by a fire trying to escape; you can get by the fire with an EXTINGUISHER from a nearby room.

Although if you don’t have the extinguisher first this is a softlock.

Despite this seeming like a small “puzzle”, it is entirely unnecessary! It’s just a “scene” essentially.

Why is this here? Conceptually it’s interesting.

Elsewhere, there’s a hatch where if you open it, sea water blasts in. If you are wearing a life jacket (again just lying around) you can survive the encounter, so again it counts as a small puzzle, and again there is no “reason” for it other than having a colorful scene.

I never found a use for the razor.

The only item that will become important shortly (but not this very moment) is a LOCKED CABINET in a TOOL ROOM.

Otherwise, to escape further: up in the Dispensary, in addition to an upside-down picture (again just for color, no safe behind or anything) there’s a beaker with vitamins. You can drink the vitamins to get stronger, and open an otherwise stubborn metal door to get to the next level.

The third level is the last section of the game.

It kicks off with three directions leading down shafts that deposit you back in level two; going east leads to a pool of oil on fire.

There’s a rope in the room where you can TIE ROPE. It asks “TO WHAT?” and despite it not being obviously an “object”, I tried “TO LEDGE” and it worked.

The rope stays tied in the room just past; you can drop it and grab the crowbar to find a “metal plate” which is the escape spot for the ship, except it is bolted in such a way it needs a wrench, not a crowbar.

You can fortunately take the crowbar and swing back on the rope back across the flaming oil, then slide a shaft to the second level and find that LOCKED CABINET I mentioned offhand earlier. The crowbar is sufficient to bust it open and get the wrench that’s inside.

The wrench then can be carted back over to the plate at the hull of the ship and to victory.

Related to the puzzle-augmented scene style, one last novelty: there’s JEWELS in one of the rooms…

…which you are welcome to take with you, but the game never acknowledges in the end if you have them, either by rewarding or punishing you. It’s simply a personal plot choice.

The game was not substantial or difficult, so in the modern context of me simply loading up and playing it I don’t have much to complain about. I’m not sure how I would have felt spending $14.95 on a 20-minute game, though. (About $48 in 2025 money accounting for inflation.) It fits together enough with the style in Eno I do wonder if the two games influenced each other (at the very least, they were sold on the same page together).

Next up: The other game by the Cooks, The Final Countdown.

Wednesday, 21. May 2025

Gold Machine

Leather Goddesses of Phobos: Is There Life on Mars?

Puzzles and jokes. The Wait Is Over A common criticism (or accolade) of Infocom’s original Zork is that the setting lacks coherence. One might more charitably say that they are coherently incoherent. Trolls, swords, wizards, robots, time machines, and flood control dams populate a shared geography. It’s probably true that, in the time of Zork‘s […] The post Leather Goddesses

Puzzles and jokes.

The Wait Is Over

A common criticism (or accolade) of Infocom’s original Zork is that the setting lacks coherence. One might more charitably say that they are coherently incoherent. Trolls, swords, wizards, robots, time machines, and flood control dams populate a shared geography. It’s probably true that, in the time of Zork‘s genesis at MIT, many locations seemed primarily places to put puzzles and tell jokes, but that didn’t seem to harm its later commercial reception. In fact, by the time 1986 rolled around, many long-suffering Infocom games were likely wondering what had happened to all the puzzles and jokes that had initially drew them in. A Mind Forever Voyaging had neither in quantity. Trinity‘s jokes could be hard to hear, as they were often critical of the naive optimism of many adventure games (and, it must said, their players). Dave Lebling’s Suspect, on the other hand, was Suspect. While Lebling’s Spellbreaker is one of my favorite parser games (classic or modern), those who loved the silliness of Sorcerer will not get the same charge out of it.

The lone bright spot for a specific sort of Infocom traditionalist was Wishbringer, a humorous game filled with less-than-difficult puzzles. There is an old and probably only intermittently true joke about the prospects of entries in the annual Interactive Fiction competition: judges tend to prefer humorous puzzle games that are not especially difficult. This isn’t always true, of course, and it doesn’t really reflect my own rating practices, but there is no doubt that audiences craved these experiences in the 1980s and that many still do. Wishbringer was also, by coincidence, set in a different sort of Zorkian setting, and it takes place long after–some say long before–the events of the Zork trilogy.

I’ve said–repeatedly–that Brian Moriarty’s Trinity is the ultimate expression of the “cave game” prototyped by Adventure and Zork. I make that assessment according to my own aesthetics and hopes for the text adventure form. I admire its ambition, its unrelenting pessimism, and its fine language. Combined with its treasure-hunt plot and head-scratching challenges, Trinity fully realizes that Infocom promise of game-as-literature.

Another view might be that Trinity is in over its head, that its surreal misanthropy is perhaps less tolerable than AMFV‘s dearth of puzzles. Where are the puzzles and jokes, and what has happened to our Infocom? Leather Goddesses of Phobos is Steve Meretzky’s answer: the puzzle and jokes are in a sendup of 1930’s comic strips like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. That’s an oversimplification. More humor can be found in its decidedly PG-rated “sexual” content. While most contemporary readers will find this content tame compared to, say, a typical Game of Thrones episode, it nevertheless feels transgressive for a computer game from a large publisher like Infocom.

This mixture of innuendo and genre zaniness infuses a geography that takes cues from–and improves upon–the modular geography of Meretzky’s design for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Thanks to a system of black circles (reminiscent of the disks in Starcross), the player travels between distinct geographies: spaceships, a Sultan(ess)’s palace, Cleveland, and so forth. It isn’t worldbuilding that unifies this geography. Rather, it is a pervasive sense of silliness informed by an understanding that sometimes, a good game is just a place to put puzzles and jokes.

The Treasure Hunt

Soon after play begins, the protagonist (let’s call them “Lane”) is kidnapped by tentacled aliens, servants of the titular Leather Goddesses of Phobos:

>exit
Joe's Bar
A brilliant flash of green light seems less unusual when followed by the appearance of tentacled aliens, as is the case with the current flash of green light. The tentacles wrap roughly around you as you faint.

After an unknown amount of time... Well, let's cut the bullshit. 7.3 hours later, you wake. Your head feels as if it's been run over by several locomotives, or at least one very large locomotive, and your clothes are now unrecognizable...

The narrative voice, a key source of LGoP‘s humor, features metafictive intrusions like “Well, let’s cut the bullshit. 7.3 hours later, you wake.” While some players have found this passage jarring, overexercised, or even hostile, it is an intentional disruption of narrative expectation and only the first instance of ironic vulgarity to be found in Leather Goddesses of Phobos. These techniques have been a feature of Meretzky’s work since Planetfall. Recall, for instance, Floyd’s comments regarding metacommands like SAVE: “Floyd’s eyes light up. “Oh boy! Are we gonna try something dangerous now?”

Speaking of Floyd: Lane has a sidekick, too. They are the same gender as the protagonist and named either “Tiffany” or “Trent.”

As you enter, a woman sitting limply in the shadows stiffens and rises to her feet. "A human! They got you too? I've been here a week. When you opened the door, I figured it was a guard! Was it unlocked? I never thought of trying it. By the way, my name's Tiffany. From Alaska. I'm not too bright, but I'm strong as an ox, and I'm great with my hands. Maybe we can lick these Leather Goddesses together."

Tiffany does not seem to be as reactive as Floyd, which makes her feel less present. However, with a game size of 129,022 bytes, it is very unlikely that the Commodore 64 could accommodate an even slightly more vocal sidekick. On the other hand, Tiffany has a few ridiculous “death” scenes that preface an even more ridiculous tale of escape:


A sickening explosion splatters Tiffany all around the room! As you struggle to control your shock and nausea, your eyes fill with tears. You hang your head in sorrow for a moment to honor your brave, loyal companion who gave her life that humanity might be safe from the terrible scourge of the Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

...

You hear panting as Tiffany dashes up behind you, somewhat out of breath. "Good, you're still here! Thank God that time traveller who wandered by the hold had a matter reconstituter!"

Naturally, these humorous vignettes also serve a narrative purpose, as they deliberately remove the sidekick from play for specific settings or scenes.

Tiffany isn’t just there for the ambiance. In fact, it is Tiffany that establishes the primary objective for players: collect eight components for a machine that might defeat the Leather Goddesses once and for all:

  Tiffany trots over to you. "I've got a plan to bring these Leather Goddess jokers to their knees," she says, flipping you a matchbook. The cover of the matchbook is filled with scrawled notations. "If we can scrape up these items, I can whip up something that'll knock 'em cold! A Super-Duper Anti-Leather Goddesses of Phobos Attack Machine!!!"

>examine matchbook
The cover of the matchbook is filled with scrawled notations. You briefly open the matchbook and see that there are no matches left.

>read it
Most of the scrawlings are a "blueprint" for a vastly complicated device. Below that is a parts list:
1. a common household blender
2. six feet of rubber hose
3. a pair of cotton balls
4. an eighty-two degree angle
5. a headlight from any 1933 Ford
6. a white mouse
7. any size photo of Douglas Fairbanks
8. a copy of the Cleveland phone book

The treasures are suitably nonsensical, and Meretzky makes no especial effort to place them credibly. The Cleveland phone book, for instance, is not in Cleveland. Instead, it festers at the bottom of Infocom’s most obnoxious copy protection effort, a maze beneath the palace of a Martian Sultan(ess). The photo of Douglas Fairbanks is on a Venusian Spaceship.

Many of the puzzles have an unreal quality to them. There is an overlap, I believe, between a certain type of slapstick humor and the surreal. Perhaps the puzzles belong there. Kissing a frog will remind many players of the Babel fish puzzle in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as both feature a humorous escalation. The reward is a common household blender:

>read blender
[taking the common household blender first]
"Dearest,
Sorry to leave so abruptly; perhaps some day we will meet again, and finish what we began. Please accept this token of my gratitude for delivering me from enchantment."

Thrilling, Pulsating Action!

Leather Goddesses of Phobos contains a few compelling set pieces using timers to create forward momentum. While these scenes can be frustrating when the timing is off, they do offer a welcome sense of dramatic tension often missing from parser games then or now. In an unusually heroic moment, Lane rides a white stallion down the length of a warship before confronting “Thorbala, the Chief Assassin for the Leather Goddesses of Phobos.” Things cannot get too serious, naturally, so a bug-eyed alien monster harasses (the right verb depends on the lewdness settings) a young noble in the background.

Elsewhere, Lane confronts the Sultan(ess) in their palace, where they are posed a riddle with life-or-death stakes. If successful, they are rewarded with a tryst with a member of the royal harem before descending into perhaps an hour of copy protection. A more detailed explanation follows later, but timers play a central role in the catacombs episode.

Venus offers a goofball scene with a mad scientist, mind transferal, and apes. It is a sequence puzzle in which chocolate, scientist, hose, and experiment table must be manipulated at appropriate moments while a clock runs down. Some mild ape humor is optional.

Laboratory
The scientist's madness is finally evident by his lab, filled with many expressions of insane genius, such as the two caged gorillas, one male and one female, the two slabs for strapping down human victims, and the huge red power switch. A closed door leads north; at the foot of the winding stone stairs is a black circle.

It seems that the cage contains a rubber hose.

Tiffany follows you.

The mad scientist bounds down from the first floor, activating a (guaranteed 100% effective) Vaporo-Zap Energy Barrier across the foot of the stairs.

The climax of the game also has a pleasantly propulsive activity, since “danger” increases as Tiffany constructs the Super-Duper Anti-Leather Goddesses of Phobos Attack Machine.

>give headlight to tiffany
Tiffany grabs the headlight and quickly incorporates it into her contraption.

A Phobosian Chomper is faster than a cheetah, meaner than a Tyrannosaurus Rex, bigger than a sperm whale, and as hungry as the state of Texas. We mention this because fifty of them just entered the plaza and spotted you.

Tiffany, hammering and twiddling madly at the growing machine, yells, "Okay, things are going teriff! Hand me a mouse."

Visit Scenic Cleveland!

Most of Leather Goddesses of Phobos‘s geography is located in a fanciful version of Mars with a breathable atmosphere, liquid water, and human-like inhabitants. These locations are initially gated behind puzzles, but eventually the player can travel freely across this geography using a system of black circles (or “holes”) that serve as teleporters.

Besides the already-mentioned Sultan’s palace, there are several pun-inspired docks along Martian canal to facilitate transportation. They have names like “Hickory & Dickory Dock” and “Wattz-Upp Dock.” Figuring out how to navigate the length of the canal is a major concern of the game, as the available barge only permits one-way trips.

Eventually, the player will get off-planet to Venus, home of not only the mad scientist and his apes, but also a curious salesman.

Back Door
You're near the rear entrance of a house, to the south. Trails enter the jungle to the east and the west.

An extraordinary number of door-to-door salesmen are camped out here, having been booted away from the front door, but still hopeful of making a sale.

Tiffany trails along.

A salesman approaches you. "You look like a doll who can spot a good deal. One of my machines could change your life! Let's barter; offer me something as an even-up trade."

Via a process of trial and error, we discover that the salesman will accept a flashlight in return for something called a “TEE remover.” Players of Emily Short’s Counterfeit Monkey will already know what this is, which is a bit of a loss: making the intuitive leap and guessing for oneself is very satisfying. Removing the “t” from a jar of “detangling cream” is such a bizarre and inventive solution that there is a dream logic to it.

This puzzle is radically unlike anything in Counterfeit Monkey, a game in which word magic is essential to the world. A letter remover in that game is part of a coherent system of play; it’s a game mechanic. The problems to be solved are word problems. The problem in Leather Goddesses of Phobos is “what the hell is this thing?” While I don’t personally enjoy word games or word puzzles, the TEE remover is my favorite puzzle in LGoP.

I think it’s likely that, because of Counterfeit Monkey, the TEE remover might tie with the Babel Fish as most famous Infocom puzzle, though in truth “Infocom fans” and “People who love 2012 parser games” are not a perfectly overlapping group. Who knows? The Babel Fish was honored with a T-Shirt, and I believe it was the only Infocom game to be distinguished in this way. Of the two, my personal favorite is the TEE remover.

So far as Cleveland goes: it is likely all one expects, if only moreso.

A Brief Note Regarding the Worst Copy Protection That I Have Personally Experienced in Over Four Decades of Playing Computer Games.

I have noted several times that Steve Meretzky seemed far more interested in copy protection feelies than the rest of the Implementers were. Sometimes, this turned out well. Sorcerer‘s Infotater, for instance, is a delightful widget (folio edition) or booklet (gray box). It has charming artwork and humorous text. It exemplifies the appeal of the physical editions of Infocom games.

Then again, there is the stark unpleasantness of the “code wheel” packed in with A Mind Forever Voyaging. It’s ugly, contains far more factors than necessary, and serves no worldbuilding purpose. The diagetic rationale for this wheel, if I can recall, is that PRISM needs to log in… to himself. Presumably he locks himself out, too. This code mechanic was part of Meretzky’s initial design notes!

One feelie would be a print-out of codes. These codes are built into the simulation process to prevent outside tampering. You would need to supply an appropriate code to run a given simulation. This would be an anti-piracy device.

This curious fascination reaches its eye-watering nadir in Leather Goddesses of Phobos. An unmappable maze (things dropped disappear immediately) can only be navigated with the help of a packed-in map. This is acceptable copy protection, isn’t it? Even with the map, though, nobody’s going to have a good time. Some of these paths are cave-ins, so the provided map isn’t completely accurate:

A drawing of a map with curving paths and dead-ends. It is confusing to understand because of many crossover paths.

That isn’t all. An otherwise likable 3d comic book has been dragged into this nonsense. The comic is great. The retro-style artwork is a perfect fit. The story is fittingly ridiculous. The 3D effect is a great detail (provided you have the glasses). However

Two comics panels meant to ve read while wearing 3D glasses. On the left, a middle aged man gives advice to a young woman: "Clap your hands at least once every five minutes to scare away canal beetles! Hop every nine minutes to frighten any bottom-crawling sand crabs, and make the distinctive "kweepa" sound of a martian hawk every eleven minutes to take care of any 'gators!"

Without the comic, players would never know that traversing the maze requires hopping every five turns, clapping every nine turns, and typing “kweepa” every eleven turns. Tracking the intervals might prove difficult, so some players prefer entering every command after two turns or so. For an idea of what this might involve, the transcript of my catacombs experience was 6,823 words long in Verbose mode.

While Jimmy Maher calls this experience “polarizing,” he is the only critic I’ve found with something nice to say about it. I find it incredible that something this unpleasant escaped Infocom’s well-regarded quality assurance. I couldn’t have mistaken the catacombs for fun in the dark. Someone at Infocom must have had second thoughts, too, as the Solid Gold edition includes more comprehensive hinting and even a cheat:

[3 hints left.] -> If you don't want to type all those directions we've put in something special for those of you who are fed up with clapping, etc.
[2 hints left.] -> The turn after you've gone down into the catacombs (but haven't moved) type $CATACOMB to cheat your way through. You'll end up at the Ladder Room with the raft and the Cleveland telephone directory.
[1 hint left.] -> You're welcome.

So far as I know, this is the only time Infocom added a bypass like this. Extreme times, extreme measures, and whatnot. Still, it has to be said: it’s impressive that so many of us persisted! Few games could get away with half as much.

The Big Finish

At the conclusion of Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Tiffany constructs the Super-Duper Anti-Leather Goddesses of Phobos Attack Machine, and the enemy is vanquished in the nick of time.

Through the smoke of battle, you see a banana peel squirt from the Super-Duper Anti-Leather Goddesses of Phobos Attack Machine.
The peel lands a few feet away, as the Super-Duper Anti-Leather Goddesses of Phobos Attack Machine gives one final shudder and self-destructs in an orgy of flames and shrapnel!
The attacking forces continue to close, and certain death is only seconds away when one of the Chompers, loping toward you at nearly Mach One, steps on the banana peel, and slips a few inches to one side before righting itself. This is enough, however, to nudge a tank into a crater, tripping one of the samurai robots!
More and more of the attacking forces plow into the mess in the crater, like some improbably fantastical football tackle. A stray grenade lands right in its midst, and the resulting plume of debris shears the fins off the leading warship. Your heart leaps as the entire Main Attack Fleet of the Leather Goddesses of Phobos plummets toward the ground. The mass of flaming metal strikes the ground, and a tremendous explosion knocks you senseless!

In its own way, this writing is as good as anything in Trinity, in that it perfectly suits its artistic aims. Its blend of overheated language, high camp, and slapstick pratfalling is just what Leather Goddesses of Phobos requires. It’s a shame that the desired sequel never came. That isn’t to say there wasn’t a sequel; there was. Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X (1992) was a graphical adventure game written and designed by Steve Meretzky and published by Activision.

In the interregnum between Zork Zero and Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X, Meretzky made the Spellcasting 101 games for Legend entertainment. I didn’t buy those games, because I was a single college student and didn’t want “fantasy bikini game” boxes lying around when dates came over. LGoP2 looks more like a Spellcasting 101 game than an Infocom one, so I’ve never been interested. Before it begins to seem that I’m kicking post-Infocom Meretzky around, let me clarify. An important and vital element of the “lewd” fun in Leather Goddess of Phobos is how artfully it avoids the fraught toxicity of so many “sex games.” There is no real exploitation, no demeaning gaze, no weird objectification. Leather Goddesses of Phobos is a work of comic sexual mischief, and its chief pleasure is harmless transgression, not titillation. In mentioning those other games, I mourn the loss of what makes LGoP special and unique.

Sex, gender, and mischief deserve a dedicated post, don’t you think? It’s good, unclean fun, after all.

Next

Tiffany and Trent.

The post Leather Goddesses of Phobos: Is There Life on Mars? appeared first on Gold Machine.

Tuesday, 20. May 2025

Renga in Blue

The Maze: Return to Third Grade

(Previous posts here.) I’ve finished the game, and I was fairly close to the end. The largest jump was simply understanding what the game was even trying to convey. I had incidentally tried to run the car into the door (thinking this would be one method of “smashing” the door) and was simply told I […]

(Previous posts here.)

I’ve finished the game, and I was fairly close to the end. The largest jump was simply understanding what the game was even trying to convey.

I had incidentally tried to run the car into the door (thinking this would be one method of “smashing” the door) and was simply told I couldn’t; I came close to the right idea, as you’re supposed to run the car into a regular wall, getting a good effect.

THE CAR MADE A STRANGE SOUND AND DIED.

You can hop out and turn the crank again to start it; what’s new is there’s now a hammer that fell out from somewhere.

With that hammer, SMASH DOOR now works, leading to a supply of boards.

Nice contrast with Mexican Adventure, where the wood being portable is part of what led me to not realize you could build a whole cart out of it.

I still had the nails from earlier and the hammer, and I also had the BUILD verb un-used off my original list. Given how this was clearly at the end of the game, I figured now was the time.

This is followed by one of the most unfortunate parser moments in the game. You can’t TAKE the ladder because it is too heavy, but you can’t LIFT if either. It is important to note that LIFT is considered a synonym to TAKE, while RAISE is its own verb.

I had already spent enough time puzzling over the verb list I figured out this issue quickly, but I could see someone getting stumped here at nearly the very end.

I decided, despite no ceiling exit in view, to follow with CLIMB LADDER.

This is on top of the maze. I originally didn’t think that because you can still walk around the maze and looks normal as before.

What kept me from wasting enormous time here was my constant attempts to experiment with ways to die. (Adventure game deaths can be funny, sometimes! Or they can give, as you’ll about to see, a hint.) While on top of the ladder where I had raised it I tried JUMP DOWN, not even realizing yet I had made it through the ceiling.

THAT WASN’T THE RIGHT PLACE!

This suggested there was a right place, and established for me, despite the odd way the graphics hadn’t changed, that I was in fact on the roof and just needed to find the right spot to apply JUMP DOWN.

Hence:

This is followed by a long and slow animation, and I have it here below at double speed.

Then text displays (again slowly, there’s a key to speed it up but I forgot what it was):

YOU STUMBLE OUT OF THE DIMLY LIT RECESSES OF THE MAZE, INTO THE STARTLINGLY BRIGHT FORMAL OINING ROOM OF PROFESSOR LA BRYNTHE. SEATED AROUND A LARGE TABLE ARE THE MEMBERS OF YOUR FACULTY COMMITTEE, HEADS BENT TO ONE ANOTHER IN WHISPERED DISCOURSE.

The professor then states that we have had our performance assessed through a real-life version of “the maze through which you have run so many of your experimental subjects” and they are now prepared to bestow a degree based on in-game performance.

TOTAL NUMBER OF MOVES -2145
NUMBER OF TIMES YOU ‘DIED’ -11
ATTEMPTS TO KILL SOMETHING -5
INVOCATIONS OF THE MAGIC WORD -16
NUMBER OF TIMES YOU QUIT -1
NUMBER OF HELPS YOU NEEDED -30
TIMES YOU TOOK INVENTORY -88
NUMBER OF PEEKS AT THE MAP -33

(This likely is inaccurate — it seems to be including things from the previous owner of the disk.) I find it interesting that it tried to account for so many things but aside from me finding move-optimization to be generally tedious without some extra gimmick, I take umbrage at having features like “taking inventory” and “looking at the map” somehow getting a negative tally. Yes, you could restart and avoid those (probably having to delete some sort of file on the disk) but it’s just uninteresting to do so, plus the whole ideal experience of an adventure game is to see the nooks and crannies and results of say, trying to wallop the wine snob.

This was shockingly polished (“polished” in a 1981 Apple II game sense) for a random unheard-of game that may or may not have been sold in a store. It did not make any magazines I could find, although that’s not equivalent to saying it wasn’t published; this was still an era where it was possible to just hang up a disk in a baggie somewhere. My current theory is that this was a college game (especially given the expensive model of Apple II needed for development on top of the collegiate references) and it could have landed in a computer store near a campus (maybe selling 30 copies). Even if this was just a disk swapped amongst students of the University of Rhode Island for fun, I hope one day we’ll get a better idea where this came from.

To bookend all this: the first-person adventures with views in multiple directions we’ve seen have had very different styles. Deathmaze 5000 and the other games from Med Systems (like Asylum) had sparse levels where just mapping them could be a challenge. The Haunted Palace was dense but eccentric and sometimes graphics at different angles didn’t match, but it otherwise went for a “narrow” view. The Japanese Mystery House had randomization and zoomed in views of objects. The Schrag games like Toxic Dumpsite kept the room count very low and didn’t feature any “hallway” sections, and come across the closest to the 90s games like Myst. While I still think it is possible the author(s) of The Maze saw Deathmaze 5000, it is also possible every single author mentioned above was coming up with the concept independently. Because none of them became a paradigm — even with Asylum getting respectable sales, and Mystery House being the first adventure in Japanese — there never was a “genre” established in the same manner as RPG “blobber” games.

UPDATE:

Not worth a new post, but–

I was asked by P-Tux7 in the comments, about the other possible titles. Here’s the relevant code:

9040 SC=NM+10DK+20KI-20MW+20QU+5HP+5IV+10*MP
9050 IF SC<2000 THEN 9060:P$=”THIRD GRADE FAILURE”: GOTO 9200
9060 IF SC<1500 THEN 9070:P$=”HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT”: GOTO 9200
9070 IF SC<1000 THEN 9080:P$=”HIGH SCHOOL EQUIVALENCY”: GOTO 9200
9080 IF SC<600 THEN 9090:P$=”ASSOCIATE OF SCIENCE”: GOTO 9200
9090 IF SC<400 THEN 9100:P$=”BACHELOR OF SCIENCE”: GOTO 9200
9100 IF SC<300 THEN 9110:P$=”MASTER OF SCIENCE”: GOTO 9200
9110 IF SC<200 THEN 9120:P$=”DOCTOR OF MAZEOLOGY”: GOTO 9200
9120 IF SC<50 THEN 9130:P$=”FULL PROFESSOR OF MAZEOLOGY”: GOTO 9200
9130 P$=”CHARLATAN OR TOTAL FOOL”

The curious thing is that “MW” (number of magic words uses) counts to SUBTRACT from the total score. The higher the score, the worse the diploma. What this implies is that at the very end of the game, you can drop the welcome mat, SAY WELCOME over and over to be “polite”, and change your degree from utter failure to a doctorate.

If you use it too many times, the number wraps over past negative into the very high positive numbers. (Correction: it’s <50 that's CHARLATAN, 50 to 200 that's FULL PROFESSOR. It whips from positive to negative conceptually, at least.)

Monday, 19. May 2025

Renga in Blue

The Maze: Unsafe for Walking

This continues directly from my previous posts on this game. Last time, I had a “wine snob” blocking the path, and I had just extracted cheese from a mousetrap (see below). To make further progress I had to overcome confusion about the game’s orientation of obstacles, in a big-picture-theory-of-games sense. In many RPGs that use […]

This continues directly from my previous posts on this game.

Last time, I had a “wine snob” blocking the path, and I had just extracted cheese from a mousetrap (see below). To make further progress I had to overcome confusion about the game’s orientation of obstacles, in a big-picture-theory-of-games sense.

In many RPGs that use grid squares, obstacles are viewed from the squares immediately adjacent to them. If there’s a pit in Eye of the Beholder, and you approach the same square from a different angle, you’re viewing the “same pit” from an entirely new position.

I originally drew my map with this paradigm in mind; thinking of the mousetrap as a “pit”, I made my world-model such that the pit actually occupied the corner square, as the player faced that square.

However, it started to become clear farther in that obstacles only become “active” in the world-universe sense if the player is directly in the appropriate square. That is, if the player is one step away from a pit on the map, they can’t see or otherwise acknowledge the existence of a pit. This is a long-winded way of saying that the trap should have been placed one square up, and I had a blank on the map that I hadn’t reached yet.

I had understood this by the time I had reached the wine slob snob but the mousetrap was the very first thing I placed on my map, and since the puzzle stumped me for a while I hadn’t stopped to reconsider the placement. Going forward once leads to a wineglass on the ground.

This can be taken back to the snob, where you will need:

the uncorked wine bottle
the wineglass
the cheese
the crackers

and…. clean shoes.

To explain that last part, on walking back from stepping over the trap, there’s a strange “dotted” room which I assume represents dirt, or rat droppings, or something else messy.

I was never able to examine the dots. I just know that before there’s no special inventory object, and after there’s “something” on the player’s shoes.

Fortunately, CLEAN SHOES works back on the welcome mat (another use other than hiding a key and teleportation! I love how often what seems initially like scenery keeps showing up again).

With unclean shoes, the wine snob will not be able to smell the wine as you are pouring and you won’t make progress. Alternately, you can just teleport past the messy spot, but that requires using the welcome mat again since SAY WELCOME teleports you to wherever it happens to be.

With the wine poured, the wine snob now demands some cheese, followed by some crackers (here’s an alternate way to work out what that strange graphic is, but this moment would likely come long after finding the object).

And he’s still complaining! Given we’re in “adventure mode” the thing that seems most natural to do might not occur to a player. We can SAY NO.

The “metallic taste” is a hint. Fortunately (?) things are quite breakable in this game and just dropping the empty wine bottle anywhere will cause it to shatter, revealing a second key (the first got used for the violin case).

The map then turns north, leading by some nails…

…and then has two branches, one to the west and one to the east (and the NE corner).

The west branch leads to trouble quite quickly as there is a sign that warns about walking…

…and if you try to proceed on anyway the passage gets sealed off.

This feels like a moment from a CRPG. Now we just need some spinners and portions of the map with permanent darkness.

Fortunately, the remedy is down the other branch. First there’s what more or less look like a garage door…

…this is followed by a “bottle” (“CHATEAU PETROS 1929”) right next to a 1928 MODEL ‘A’ ROADSTER.

The car is empty of gas, but fortunately, the bottle is not the kind you want to drink.

Driving over to the northwest part of the map (you can GO CAR and any movement drives the car by default), the only thing there is a “wood shop”. The door is locked, although BREAK DOOR indicates “you can’t do that yet” indicating we might finally get to use the power of violence.

I’m stumped from here although I haven’t tried much. The only other thing I’ve found is a “bumper jack” left behind at the car’s start point.

I suspect I am quite close to the end; maybe get into the wood shop, and then something from that will help make it to the exit?


The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

June meeting (online)

The Boston IF meetup for June will be Monday, June 2, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will be trying Google Meet instead of Zoom for this meeting! Mike Stage will make a post with the link info on the afternoon of the meeting day (June 2). (Yes, we skipped May. That was a result of […]

The Boston IF meetup for June will be Monday, June 2, 6:30 pm Eastern time.

We will be trying Google Meet instead of Zoom for this meeting! Mike Stage will make a post with the link info on the afternoon of the meeting day (June 2).

(Yes, we skipped May. That was a result of slipping from late-April to early-June.)

Topic preview: Matt Griffin and Mike Stage will talk a little about an IF meetup thing at NarraScope. (Coming up June 20-22!)

Sunday, 18. May 2025

Renga in Blue

The Maze: Without Class or Breeding

(Continued from my previous posts.) Just to recap from last time, I had a WELCOME MAT, TUNING FORK, VIOLIN, CASE, CORKSCREW, and CRACKERS. There was a mousetrap with cheese that would snap upon taking the cheese (I’ll be solving that one, but I’ll save discussing it for later). The beast was where I first focused […]

(Continued from my previous posts.)

Just to recap from last time, I had a WELCOME MAT, TUNING FORK, VIOLIN, CASE, CORKSCREW, and CRACKERS. There was a mousetrap with cheese that would snap upon taking the cheese (I’ll be solving that one, but I’ll save discussing it for later). The beast was where I first focused my efforts.

With the case/box thing resolved, after some testing I realized somehow my attempts at playing the violin were while the game assumed it was in the case (I think if you’re holding both of them at once?) When the violin is out you can successfully PLAY VIOLIN and it does a tune, albeit not necessarily a great one:

Whoops! Fortunately I had the TUNING FORK, and after some fiddling I found TUNE VIOLIN worked while holding the fork. Then playing the violin is more succesful.

You can now refer to the beast as a CAT.

Just past the cat are some eyeglasses. With the eyeglasses worn you don’t have the “dim light” message anymore when pulling up the map with the M key, although the exact system is still a little cryptic:

What appears to be the case is that there’s no real “automap” as far as keeping track of where you’ve been. Rather, the game automatically shows a region near where you are standing, plus some of the area south, with the result you might see a good chunk of map or very little.

This suggests a secret room — see the isolated 1 by 1 spot — but my attempts at HIT WALL and SMASH WALL were for naught. At least WALL is a recognized word. CLIMB WALL gets the response SO IT’S COME TO THAT, HAS IT?

The eyeglasses have an unfortunate side effect. Previously, if you run into a wall, the game just says “OUCH!” but no adverse effects happen. With the eyeglasses on, your eyes start to swim and go blind.

Moving on from there, the hall turns and briefly stops by a niche with a wine bottle…

‘STRAWTOWN CELLARS 1982’
‘WE SHALL SELL NO WINE BEFORE MONDAY’

…with the route eventually stopped by a “wine snob”.

Trying to kill the man is fatal.

You can UNCORK BOTTLE (with the corkscrew) and try to pour it but the result is wine on the floor.

Given the emphasis on politeness, I thought maybe I needed to open with some sort of conversational word via SAY before I could offer CRACKERS or CHEESE or WINE (I don’t have the cheese yet, but I will in a moment). No luck. I even tried YELLing the words given the mention of the man being somewhat deaf, but I got no helpful response there either.

WHAT SHALL I DO? YELL PLEASE

OK – PLEASE
THANK YOU

(That’s the parser responding, not the man, since this happens elsewhere too.)

I did find in the process of this that SAY WELCOME teleports you back to the location of the welcome mat. I don’t know if this is for a puzzle or just meant to be a way to make travel faster. The welcome mat can be moved so I’d expect somewhere you could toss the mat under a door to teleport in, but I haven’t seen any circumstance like that yet.

While being frustrated at the wine snob, I figured out the cheese in the trap, via the process of dropping every item in my inventory.

With this done I could get the cheese safely. After process of elimination I found that either the welcome mat alone or the violin case alone both work; the violin case seems the clear better choice given the teleportation property of the mat.

I will take any suggestions at all. I’m also happy to hear from people who have beaten or otherwise hacked the game (use ROT13 if this is the case, though).

Saturday, 17. May 2025

Zarf Updates

Spring narrative games

Here's a bunch of reviews that have accumulated! Gotta push them out before the stack falls over. There's no common theme here except I played them all since GDC. South of Midnight Old Skies The Horror at Highrook Lab Rat South of Midnight ...

Here's a bunch of reviews that have accumulated! Gotta push them out before the stack falls over.

There's no common theme here except I played them all since GDC.

  • South of Midnight
  • Old Skies
  • The Horror at Highrook
  • Lab Rat

South of Midnight

A girl heads across Louisiana flood country in search of her mother, and falls into the swamps of a Southern-Gothic fairy-tale.

This is action-adventure of a very old stripe. Think Darksiders or any of those early-2000s Price-of-Persia knockoffs. (Lithe wall-runners, not thumping Kratos types.) You run around a very pretty landscape. Sometimes you climb a (ruined) building. If the trail forks, or if you see a place to climb on the side, it will take you to a thoroughly-clued collectible before you rejoin the main track. And then you fight monsters in a bounded arena. All fights are exactly the same except for monster count. Repeat, with plot breaks and the occasional boss fight and runny-jumpy chase scene. Honestly it could be a PS3 game.

It's all well-done. I love me a building climb. There's nothing bad about this formula; it's just that it was already a formula when West Wing was cancelled.

The plot is decent. It oozes atmosphere -- mud and flood, homes and factories cluttered with people's lives. Eerie caverns. Steamships decaying in the swamp. These are the poorest parts of the South, which means the story is about white people doing terrible things to black people, and rich people doing terrible things to poor people, and for the most part I've repeated myself. The game leans into that, as it should.

But it doesn't have bite. Your job (Hazel's job) is supposed to be healing the wounds of people's souls, but the people barely figure into the plot. You meet them, you go find their stories... and you never go back to engage. You're just a witness. The story only comes alive for your immediate family: your mother, her ex-boyfriend. Your rich white grandmother, except there's not much to her either, in the end.

Compare NORCO, which throws you straight into the merciless poverty of Big Muddy corporate greed and never stops screaming. NORCO was personal. South of Midnight is tourism.

I am coming off harsher than I mean to. This was a delightful game to play through. Exploring was always fun. The environments are vivid, alternating fetid-rank and glimmering-lovely, often both. The voice characterizations are first-rate. I set the fights to easy mode so I can hardly complain that they were time-wasters. The bond between Hazel and her mother, off-stage as it mostly was, still caught me by the final scene.

The art style is an interesting take on stop-motion claymation, although the only actual stop-motion is the delightful opening cinematic. The rest of the game makes do with clay-ish surface shaders and hopping bunnies animated on twos. (Harold Halibut did it better on what must have been a twentieth of the budget.) As for the music... there were some good bits, but a lot of it felt like movie-soundtrack takes on Louisiana traditions, rather than the originals. Should have stuck to the pure-quill gospel and old-timey stuff.

But for the setting and visual style, I will forgive all that. I will never, ever get tired of New Orleans dreamscapes with hot jazz swirling over the vèvè of old Voodoo gods.

It was just... not an ambitious effort, in the end. Much ado about what you'd expect.

Old Skies

You're a time cop! Ha ha, no, there are no time cops. You're a time tourist guide, working for the tacky-ass ChronoZen Corporation, leading rich assholes around history on a leash. For an extra fee they can change history -- minor details only, please.

What do you get out of this deal? No friends, no family, and no life. They count as "minor details" and are constantly being rewritten by time-jump ripples. (If anybody you cared about was a fixed point in time, you wouldn't have been hired in the first place.) The only people who remember the changes are other ChronoZen employees, so that's who you wind up spending all your time with. But hey, the pay's good. If you could spend it on anything that didn't ripple out overnight. Whoops.

Wadjet Eye's last point-and-click was Unavowed. I filed that one under "mixed feelings"; its story felt like it was there to justify the puzzle structure. I'm happy to say that Old Skies is a whole new ball game. It's a tight, vivid character story. Fia Quinn and her ChronoZen compatriots come to life as soon as they open their mouths. The supporting players are thinner, but even the rich assholes have depth and motivation. And some of the tourists will turn out to be more interesting than they look.

And let's not forget New York City, the character behind all the characters. This is New York across (real) history, rather than Unavowed's fantasy-in-the-shadows New York. History hits harder. Yes, 9/11 will happen. Yes, the game makes it work. You may also enjoy the wealth of in-jokes and sneaky references. (I know I missed a lot, but I'm always happy to run into my dude Ashbless.)

The puzzles still tend to the clunky side, but now I can say the puzzles are there to justify the story structure. Much the better way around. And your earbud-buddy Nozzo offers generous contextual hints.

As in Unavowed, each chapter is structured as a mini-mystery. Not a formal mystery (there are no time detectives either) but you generally have to figure out who did what, when and where, so that you can make the desired change to history. Or undo it, or prevent it. The clunky part is that the mystery structure is mostly running around asking every NPC every question you can think of, repeatedly, until the next plot bit unlocks. Then somebody shoots you. Death for a ChronoZen employee comes with infinite UNDO, so you get to try every possible action until one of them saves your ass.

I'm being a bit unfair. That's the basic structure, the tutorial. The flow of events (and history) gets knotty after the first chapter, and really starts to hit its stride around chapter four. And there's some old-fashioned adventure puzzles too. But you never quite get away from the "try try again" gameplay. You wind up clicking through a lot of dialogue, whether time-looping or just re-interrogating.

Recommended for the old-school adventure aficionado. If you're coming in from other parts of the narrative game world, you may feel some friction; but the writing and voice acting are worth the effort.

The Horror at Highrook

Four explorers take on a haunted mansion. Gothic-ness will ensue.

This is interesting tack on the narrative RPG. It's closer to worker-placement board game mechanics than tabletop dice-rolling. Everything is a card: characters, obstacles, tasks, resources. You can perform a task or overcome an obstacle by plopping down a character with the appropriate skills and hitting the "go" button. The character crunches away until the task is complete. If your skills aren't high enough, add a resource with the right bonus.

Since you have four characters and lots of tasks, you can parallelize your work. And since you're always up against a rising tide of difficulties, you have to balance resource-mining with all the rest of your tasks. And of course you need to watch your hunger/madness/etc meters, and apply the appropriate palliatives when needed. Watch out for hauntings!

It adds up to a engaging mess of time-and-resource management. The kind of game where you have to stir five pots at the same time, and you can. The pause key helps a lot.

All this on top of a nice occult investigation storyline -- alt-Victorian Gothic with a dash of steampunk. Wandering spirits, creepy artifacts, occult rituals. Black cats and ravens and weird worms scooped from the well. The story leads with Poe and barrels towards Lovecraft. (The title is an unsubtle hint.)

I enjoyed this. But I felt the role-playing aspect didn't live up to the setting or the mechanics.

The mansion -- and the mechanics -- are initially a mystery; exploring them is prime fun. But once you've got a grasp on how everything works, you realize you're just in the business of stocking up on resources and applying them where needed. The tasks show up and you do them; there's no real decisions to be made. You're not solving puzzles. You're mostly not making character choices.

Critically, there are no tradeoffs. This is not the kind of game where the cure is worse than the disease. In a proper Gothic, every step forward costs you something you wish you hadn't lost. In Highrook, it just costs time. Or blood or sanity or what have you, but you can replace those with a bit of task crunching, good as new.

(The cure for lost sanity is booze, and it just works. Come on, folks. Oh, one character starts with an "alcoholism" trait, so I had to be careful about that, but it never became a problem in practice.)

Admittedly I was playing on easy mode. Negative traits piled up slowly and were easily fixed. Maybe the gameplay feels totally different in the higher settings? But I didn't see any sign of mechanics that would support that.

I think the underlying problem is that the game is balanced for a one-run-and-done experience. It's not a roguelite where you have to fail and fail to learn the system. And fair enough! This is a narrative game; the authors want to tell you the story. If you played the beginning ten times, all the wonderful bits of narrative description would be wasted. You'd stop reading them. That would be a different game entirely, and this is the game the authors wanted to make.

But I came away feeling like I'd had a quick snack in between Blue Prince runs.

Lab Rat

Okay, this isn't primarily a narrative game. It's a block-pushing puzzle game with an original color-zapping mechanic -- a pretty simple rule which is extremely productive. The game pulls many chapters of puzzle ideas from its sleeve without ever feeling stale. Full marks for puzzle.

But it's also a narrative game, and the narrative is... a voiceless protagonist being run through through test chambers by a snarky, female-presenting AI who goes mad with power. You have to blow up her memory cores.

We will not stop you if you've heard that one before. You have; the game has; everybody gets to take that for granted. Lab Rat goes to the mattresses inventing variations and substitutions on the underlying Portal trope. It does fantasy, it does noir, it does silly riffs on a dozen game genres -- including doubling down on Portal, just to prove that it can.

It just never stops feeling like it's working for its food pellets.

Oh well. The puzzles are worth it.


Renga in Blue

The Maze: One Word

(Continued from my previous post.) I promised last time to create my verb list. Since it’s been a while since I’ve explained: over the years I have collected verbs that are quite common in adventure games in this era, all the way to verbs that are rare, and I made a list. I then go […]

(Continued from my previous post.)

I promised last time to create my verb list. Since it’s been a while since I’ve explained: over the years I have collected verbs that are quite common in adventure games in this era, all the way to verbs that are rare, and I made a list. I then go through each verb on the list testing to see if that verb is accepted or not.

Some games have parsers which give almost no feedback so this trick doesn’t work (like, for example, “HUH?” for anything that isn’t interpreted) but as long as you give a verb and a noun this game not only gives feedback if a verb is misunderstood it displays the word flashing.

Just like Sierra On-Line games and others at this time, hitting ENTER will turn off the graphics temporarily and just show text.

By doing this, I’m able to get an idea of what kind of commands I should be focused on. Understood words are in green:

Just to give the reference in text form:

DIG, CLIMB, READ, BREAK, OPEN, DRINK, EAT, KILL, THROW, HIT, UNLOCK, SHAKE, POUR, SMASH, JUMP, TURN, MOVE, YELL, MAKE, SAY, CLEAN, WEAR, GIVE, EXAMINE, KICK, SMELL, PLAY, DRAW, OFFER, LIFT, FIX, BUILD, LOWER, SNIFF, EMPTY, START, RAISE, ATTACH

DRAW incidentally goes with DRAW MAP but the game says you need to make your own (weirdly enough, this isn’t quite true — I’ll explain in a moment). YELL and SAY both have “open” nouns meaning you can yell or say any text and it will be repeated back, indicating some possible future code word puzzle. SMELL working is notable (and not the sort of thing I’d automatically check), BUILD and MAKE are in (meaning we likely have at least one instance of combining together things into a new thing where we have to guess the noun) and START is probably the rarest verb on there. It’s also been a while since I’ve seen CLEAN.

None of these really suggested to me what the strange item was last time, but I first need to clarify that I was confused, as CASE and BOX are treated in the game as synonyms.

So when I did OPEN BOX, the game actually dropped the violin, and that picture to the left is a smashed violin. You can pick the violin up and see it described in textual form. That means that the real mystery is the “box object” which isn’t a box.

The game does not have GET ALL or LOOK FLOOR or any of the other types of commands you might think would reveal nearby objects. I did go ahead and test all the other one-letter possibilities past L (turn left), R (turn right), F (move forward), and A (turn around) and on top of the usual I (inventory) I came across two more. Z full on quits the game, which at the very least allows LISTing the BASIC code if I ever need to go there.

M shows the map as visited so far with a message about how “the dim light really hurts my eyes”. The map only shows temporarily before disappearing, although you can see what is most likely the exit in the process:

If the same object density keeps up, filling this in could represent the entire territory of the game. Or maybe there’s a second level and this game’s going to stick around a while.

Bizarrely, using the feature again repeats drawing a map but makes it smaller.

The map keeps getting tinier and tinier, down to just being a squiggle in the corner. I guess this is meant to simulate the dim light, but also in a game sense, discourage too much use of the automap. I’m needing to make a map in order to keep a track of objects anyway, but still, it’s wildly unusual to put the effort into making a feature but also yank it away. Just as a reminder:

With that sideline done, and no helpful commands found, it was time to crack on getting that word figured out. I wanted to try some more generalized crowdsourcing, so I made posts on both Mastodon and Bluesky.

Other tries were JOURNAL, PARCEL, BRICK, SUITCASE, and INTERNET (??). One of the guessers (@ericgerhardt.com) took it upon themselves to find and download the game to try things out themselves, and they discovered that HELP is contextual.

A METALLIC VOICE ECHOES DOWN THE HALL: IT SAYS ‘REG. PENNA. DEPT. AGR.’ THINK IT THROUGH

I admit I had found HELP was acknowledged, but I wasn’t thinking of using it here as I wasn’t considering this to be a puzzle but rather a user-interface frustration. However, based on the fact that even HELP is cryptic here, the author was clearly thinking “figure out what the object is so you can pick it up” was a genuine puzzle!

The Department of Agriculture reference means this is a food. These are CRACKERS.

Via eBay. The diagonal marking is the logo.

As Eric points out there’s cheese (from the trap) and apparently there’s wine later, but still–

As Carl Muckenhoupt pointed out in discussion later:

It’s a good example of how (as I’ve put it before) early adventure game authors didn’t fully distinguish between difficult to solve and difficult to play

That is, while realizing what you’re looking at in order to pick it up would be considered by most modern standards a bug — but what logical reason would you not be able to grab the thing otherwise — with this game the author genuinely blithely ignores the meta-narrative confusion of the whole thing and makes it a puzzle. The most comparable puzzle I can think of is The Sands of Egypt which made guess-the-verb into a puzzle and also gave a hint whilst trying to get off a camel that was slightly indirect.

The hint was “The opposite of mount is?” You’re supposed to type DISMOUNT.

More actual progress next time! I hope! The Beast doesn’t like crackers, though:

I’d guess it’s really a “giant rat” given the context and I need the cheese, but I haven’t figured out the trap yet, and none of the verbs — and I tried all of them — were helpful.

Friday, 16. May 2025

Renga in Blue

The Maze (1981)

IT IS SATURDAY MIDNIGHT, AND A LATE SUMMER STORM IS BREWING OUTSIDE. YOU HAVE BEEN STUDYING LATE, TRYING IN VAIN TO AVERT A THESIS CRISIS — IN LAST MONTH’S ISSUE OF THE RAT RUNNER’S JOURNAL (A PUBLICATION DEVOTED TO YOUR FELLOW INVESTIGATORS OF LEARNING PROCESSES), AN ACADEMIC RIVAL OF YOURS HAS JUST PUBLISHED THE RESULTS […]

IT IS SATURDAY MIDNIGHT, AND A LATE SUMMER STORM IS BREWING OUTSIDE.

YOU HAVE BEEN STUDYING LATE, TRYING IN VAIN TO AVERT A THESIS CRISIS — IN LAST MONTH’S ISSUE OF THE RAT RUNNER’S JOURNAL (A PUBLICATION DEVOTED TO YOUR FELLOW INVESTIGATORS OF LEARNING PROCESSES), AN ACADEMIC RIVAL OF YOURS HAS JUST PUBLISHED THE RESULTS YOU’VE SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF GRADUATE STUDY STRIVING TO COMPLETE.

I’m not sure why this game slipped by me before in my 1981 sequence. It is possible I saw the title screen and skipped on by immediately.

From this screen and the generic titling I might have discarded it as one of the many “generate a maze, now get out in first person” games that’s popped up since the 1970s, like Escape, which inspired Richard Garriot to make his first-person dungeon view in Akalabeth leading to the Ultima games.

1982’s Wayout (by Sirius, of Kabul Spy, etc.) has similar map generation but allows full 360 degree movement.

From Mobygames. I think you’re supposed to be the clown.

However, The Maze is another game along the lines of Deathmaze 5000 or Asylum, with objects and puzzles scattered throughout and plot designed in a way that places it firmly in the rare “adventure blobber” camp.

YOU BEGIN TO DRIFT OFF INTO A FITFUL DOZE, DREAMING OF RATS CAUGHT IN MAZES, WHEN SUDDENLY THE TELEPHONE STARTLES YOU FULLY AWAKE.

I know nothing about Fermented Software, the only credits given on the title screen. This particular disk landed on the Internet in 2006 when someone on Usenet named “Astrp3” listed The Maze amongst disks that were being uploaded to the Asimov (a still-extant Apple II archive). There’s otherwise no information, and “Fermented Software” doesn’t ring up any hits in the usual places.

The game requires 64K (not the default) so the author(s) were using a relatively beefy computer, and Deathmaze 5000 did have an Apple II version so it is possible it was an influence. The reference to a thesis crisis suggests an academic (it’d be an odd plot for someone outside of that particular “rat race” to make up). Perhaps more will be revealed as we get in deeper.

WITH YOUR HEART POUNDING, YOU PICK UP THE RECEIVER ANO HEAR THE VOICE OF DR. LA BRYNTHE, THE NOTED PSYCHOLOGIST AND YOUR THESIS ADVISOR, ON THE OTHER END: ‘JASON, I’M AT MY LABORATORY, AND I THINK I’VE FOUND A WAY YOU CAN USE THE RESULTS FROM YOUR MAZE STUDIES TO COMPLETE YOUR THESIS AND RECEIVE YOUR DEGREE. NOW LISTEN CAREFULLY AND I’LL GIVE YOU THE…
WHO’S THERE??…
   WHAT’S GOING ON… HELP! HELP!

SUDDENLY, THE LINE GOES DEAD…

You grab a raincoat and head to the laboratory, musing about the Professor’s “classified experiments” and also “experiments on animals” that were rumored to be done on humans. Ominous!

The opening mat seen above can be taken; this reveals a key, which can also be taken, giving the first two items of the game.

Movement is not by arrow keys; you can type “R” and “L” to turn right and left respectively, or “F” to go forward. Just “A” flips 180 degrees but I don’t think there’s any way to walk backwards.

Only any “close” walls are shaded, any farther away get the outlined black and white treatment.

It is much more dense than Asylum, at least so far, and I suspect the map is smaller overall. Here’s what I have so far.

Starting with the “trap” in the lower left corner, that’s a giant mousetrap with some cheese. Any attempt to take the cheese are step forward kills you, although you restart at the beginning with the feeling like you’ve been “drugged”.

I tried throwing the mat to trigger the trap but no luck; picking up the mat afterwards causes the same effect.

Rotating around the spaces on the map, there’s a violin case that’s locked. The key fortunately works (although it gets stuck), and inside there is a violin. The game says you can’t play it yet if you try (I suspect you need a bow).

Further along the same path you can scoop up a TUNING FORK…

…a CORKSCREW…

…and a ????.

The question marks are here because while OPEN BOX works to get a thing out of it…

…I have no idea what the thing is or how to pick it up. I have tried various permutations of LOOK and have no textual description of what’s nearby. Any guesses?

It may help to know whatever it is will possibly resolve the one other obstacle (other than the trap) I need to deal with, a “BEAST”.

I haven’t made a verb list yet, but the cryptic object flummoxed me enough — and since it is the sort of thing I can crowdsource to you, my dear readers, I decided it was time to stop for a post. I will do verb testing next time (and knowing the verbs might help figure out what some of the pictures are, if there really is no “describe all the stuff near you in text” command).

Wednesday, 14. May 2025

Renga in Blue

All The Adventures Up to 1982 in Review

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to do one of these; my 1981 in review was posted December 20, 2021. The chart with plot types like Rescue, Escape, etc. just isn’t that helpful up to 1982 — too many arbitrary assignments — but I did do a chart just of Treasure Hunts, that is, […]

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to do one of these; my 1981 in review was posted December 20, 2021.

The chart with plot types like Rescue, Escape, etc. just isn’t that helpful up to 1982 — too many arbitrary assignments — but I did do a chart just of Treasure Hunts, that is, games modeled essentially off the original Crowther/Woods paradigm of gathering X things together.

There’s still some fuzzy aspects — like lost games, or games that have been discovered since I passed a particular year that I haven’t returned to yet — so assume a margin of error. (On top of that, some games are hard to categorize — is Dateline Titanic, where you are rescuing passengers by bodily tossing them in boats, a “treasure hunt”?) In general, you can say while the percentage dropped dramatically at first it went flat starting in 1980 hovering around 40%.

Regarding why, some of this may be the creative version of the Eternal September effect. It used to be, when a new school year started and there was a large influx of people on the Internet, it took a while for standards to take hold so there was chaos in September. Then, with the rise of AOL and other services in the early 90s, anyone could go on the Internet at any time, hence Eternal September. The creative version of the effect is that there are still people in 1982 whose only exposure to an adventure was Crowther/Woods so they do the natural thing and copy it (like Sphinx Adventure); also note that this chart is mixing all countries together, so while US authors like Adams and Kirsch were cranking out enough games to shake off the Treasure Hunt bug, plenty of others were getting started for the first time.

Furthermore, the Treasure Hunt structure is a convenient way to branch the gameplay in a way that requires less work on the part of the author. When there’s an “escape” game, it’s possible to go super-linear, but if the same author wants the kind of branching they’d get from a Treasure Hunt they need to carefully mete out when items and locations are available. It’s easier to simply require 9 things than it is to create interdependencies that form a satisfying structure.

Before getting into 1982, here’s my “curious firsts” list from 1981:

– First use of relative direction: Mystery Mansion
– First use of landmark navigation with no compass: Empire of the Over-Mind
– First defined player character: Aldebaran III
– First use of choice-based interaction in a parser game: Stuga
– First dynamic compass interface: Spelunker
– First dynamic puzzle generation: Mines
– First free-text conversation in an adventure context: Local Call for Death
– First adventure game comedy: Mystery Fun House
– First adventure to use graphics in every room: Atlantean Odyssey by Teri Li
– First Tolkien adventure conversion: Ringen by Hansen, Pål-Kristian Engstad, and Per Arne Engstad
– First Lovecraft game of any type: Kadath by Gary Musgrave
– First graphic adventure with some action solely in the graphics: Mystery House by Roberta Williams
– First adventure written specifically for children: Nellan is Thirsty by Furman H. Smith
– First “stateless” CYOA game written for computer: Mount St. Helens by Victor Albino
– First 3D graphic adventure: Deathmaze 5000 by Frank Corr, Jr.
– First adventure game that involves traveling back through time:
Odyssey #3, Journey Through Time by Joel Mick and James Taranto OR Galactic Hitchhiker by A. Knight
– First adventure game with outside third-person character movement: Castles of Darkness by Michael Cashen
– First adventure game with conversation menus and an action mini-game: Cyborg by Michael Berlyn

Since I last made this list, I looped back to a 1980 game which is worthy of inclusion:

– First adventure game on a console: Bally’s Alley by John Collins

I’ve got deeper into non-English games since last I made the list, so here’s the first occurrence I have so far of languages other than English, not counting translations from English games:

Stuga (Swedish, 1978)
Ringen (Norwegian, 1979)
Dracula Avontuur (Dutch, 1980)
Mission secrète à Colditz (French, 1980)
Das Geheimnisvolle Haus (German, 1981)
Mystery House (Japanese, 1982)
Avventura nel Castello (Italian, 1982)

I’m otherwise not adding games from 1982; we start to get into territory with many caveats. Certainly people were producing original ideas, but they’re hard to encapsulate in “first” bullet points; things like the bizarre combination shmup / adventure game Probe One: The Transmitter or the French pocket calculator game Des Cavernes dans le poquette.

Updating my recommendations, a new item proudly enters the first list:

1. Games everyone should play

Crowther and Woods Adventure, 350 points (1977)
Zork I by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Dave Lebling and Bruce Daniels (1980)
Deadline by Marc Blank

With the above list I truly am referring to everyone, but if you’re reading this blog you’re more likely to be interested in list 2:

2. For adventure enthusiasts

Crowther and Woods Adventure, 350 points (1977)
Voodoo Castle by Alexis Adams (1979)
Local Call For Death by Robert Lafore (1979)
Kadath by Gary Musgrave (1979)
Empire of the Over-Mind by Gary Bedrosian (1979)
Zork I by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Dave Lebling and Bruce Daniels (1980)
Wizard and the Princess by Ken and Roberta Williams (1980)
Gargoyle Castle by Kit Domenico (1980)
Will ‘O the Wisp by Mark Capella (1980)
Zork II by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling
Cyborg by Michael Berlyn
Palace in Thunderland by Dale Johnson and Ken Rose
Frankenstein Adventure by John R. Olsen Jr.
The Black Sanctum by Ron Krebs, Stephen O’Dea, and Bob Withers

I’m going to do one swap, taking out Deathmaze 5000 (fun for what it is, but deeply flawed) and fit in

Asylum II by William Denman

which has the cleanest design of the series while still being absolute suffering in a few places. The plastic surgeon alone makes it worth a play.

El Diablero by Ken Kalish

An absolute surprise to me, with some extremely clever magic using the narratives of Carlos Castenada as a mythical universe and having not just one but two puzzles where solving a puzzle also means “solving” the plot.

Murdac by Jonathan R. Partington

You have to expect the norms of Cambridge games (expect some of your lives to be spent just gathering information) and there’s also one old-school maze, but this otherwise is one of the most solid games I’ve played of the old school.

Starcross by Dave Lebling

The hardest of sci-fi; a game that rewards experimentation in ways that very few games from this era do.

Temple of Bast by Malcolm McMahon

(Make sure your TRS-80 is in Model 1 mode for this one!) Includes one of the most clever puzzles of 1982.

Adventure 200 by C.J. Coombs

I’d normally hesitate to recommend a game with as many mazes as this one does, but the payoff is incredible. What would happen if you had a game framed like a regular treasure hunt, but was actually a heist movie?

Zork III by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling

Might as well finish the trilogy! This isn’t quite as strong as the other two Infocom games from the year — it’s clear it is built from scattered parts — but it’s still a worthy ending.

The Queen of Phobos by William R. Crawford and Paul Berker

A group of four thieves trying to steal a mask, and you need to get to it first. Includes some Apple II vector graphics that actually make the style work.

3. Things I personally enjoyed quite a bit that didn’t make the above list

Also known as my “subjective fun” list, as I know I sometimes enjoy an experience but would have reservations recommending it generally. Previously I had

Trek Adventure by Bob Retelle (1980)
Crystal Cave by Anonymous and Kevin O’Gorman (1980)
Dracula Avontuur by Ronald van Woensel (1980)
House of Thirty Gables by Bill Miller (1980)
Odyssey #3, Journey Through Time by Joel Mick and James Taranto (1980)
Hezarin by Steve Tinney, Alex Shipp and Jon Thackray (1981)
Madness and the Minotaur by Tom Rosenbaum (1981)

To which I add

Ferret by the Ferret Authors

40 years to write, and 6 months to beat. I don’t regret my time spent at all.

Time Zone by Roberta Williams

Another monster, and this one I solved without hints. Despite the flaws I point out during my many posts, I enjoyed myself unironically and this was my favorite of the early Sierra games.

Mystery House by Tsukasa Moritani and Naoto Oyachi

The first adventure game in Japanese. I recommend specifically the FM-7 version which uses a traditional parser (rather than splitting verb and noun into separate lines). As of this writing the FM-7 version has not been translated.

Cornucopia by Brian Cotton

The idea this game could have been lost forever horrifies me. The framing world is genuinely clever and despite some issues with bugs this game had enough underlying systems going on for me to enjoy myself.

The Troll Hole Adventure by Long Playing Software (1980)

I do not know why I found this game for the rare Interact computer so compelling. Sometimes there’s just a wild card for no reason.

4. Some bonus games for historians

Also known as games I had trouble fully enjoying, but I recognize still did fascinating things.

The Count by Scott Adams (1979)
The Prisoner by David Mullich (1980)
Galactic Hitchhiker by A. Knight (1980)
The Institute by Jyym Pearson, Robyn Pearson, Norm Sailer, and Rick Incrocci (1981)

To which I am obliged to add

The Hobbit by Philip Mitchell, Veronika Megler, Alfred Milgrom and Stuart Ritchie

which influenced an entire generation of gamers, some who didn’t bother to try for the ending but just wanted to experiment. It has so many design flaws I can’t recommend the game on its face but anyone who cares about text adventure history should try this.

The Mask of the Sun by Alan Clark, Larry Franks, Christopher Anson, and Margaret Anson

The graphical quality and technology here seem from another universe than my other 1982 games. It has lots of design jank, but it also clearly signaled what the Apple II was really capable of.

My usual disclaimer: I always feel horrible about making these sort of lists because of all the games left out. There are so many clever and worthy moments but out. I can pick a game at literal random and it has something interesting going on (The Breckenridge Caper of 1798, a game trying to teach history about being a spy in the Napoleonic era; The Sands of Egypt with parallax animation coming from the developer’s arcade background; Toxic Dumpsite, a game from a Myst-like perspective for the TRS-80).

The whole point of All the Adventures is to not write reviews as much as view the entire tapestry of adventure games. I want to see the paths of where people went and try to learn why people made the choices they did. (Was there a technical limitation? Was everyone designing a certain way? Was there a specific non-obvious influence?) I want history at an explanatory level in a way that glows with the vital energy that adventure games have.

In order to do that, of course, the best things is to have — more games! Not splitting my multiple-part posts (like Misadventures 1 through 3) I’ve gone through this 434 times now.

1983, at my current list, has exactly five hundred games.

Mind you, there are still some that will likely drop off (I’m not replaying a translation of an existing game, for instance) and some that will sort into a different year (even back to 1982 or earlier) but that’s still more games than for the entire 14 years of the project. I don’t anticipate taking that long — for one thing, there were some gaps in those 14 years, and for another, I’m better at doing this, and for yet another, I’m going to do more combining together of multiple games into a single entry. (Mind you, doing that doesn’t save an enormous amount of time, but it saves some.)

Looking ahead we have
– Five Infocom games, including Planetfall and Enchanter
– Twin Kingdom Valley
– Nearly 150 ZX Spectrum games
– Four games called Haunted House
– The first big text adventure competition
– The year the Japanese adventure market starts revving, with at least 20 new games
– The first original adventure game in Spanish
and many more things, some which I don’t even know about yet!

Coming up: I’m reversing a bit to 1981, as I have a wildly obscure Apple II graphical game I am dying to share. I have other off-beat things scheduled and I’m also planning on taking a break in there somewhere. Somewhere?


IFTF Blog

IFTF 2024 Transparency report now available

IFTF’s 2024 Transparency report is online, summarizing the organization’s activity over the previous calendar year, including its financial income and outflow.

IFTF’s 2024 Transparency report is online, summarizing the organization’s activity over the previous calendar year, including its financial income and outflow.


Announcing IFTF Grant Recipients

In September 2023, we opened our grant program for the very first time. The program exists to disburse small amounts of money in support of projects that serve the interactive fiction community. Since then, half a dozen Grant Advisors have reviewed each submission, providing their recommendations to the grants committee, who ultimately selected four projects to fund. We are happy today to announce

In September 2023, we opened our grant program for the very first time. The program exists to disburse small amounts of money in support of projects that serve the interactive fiction community. Since then, half a dozen Grant Advisors have reviewed each submission, providing their recommendations to the grants committee, who ultimately selected four projects to fund. We are happy today to announce our first batch of funded projects through this grants program!

Interestingly, we saw great diversity in the projects submitted, which altogether touch on the very different areas of interactive fiction. Thank you to everyone who submitted their ideas! Below, you can learn about the awarded projects and the people behind them.

iOS Test Device for Parchment – Dannii Willis

Dannii Willis is the main developer of Parchment, a web interpreter that lets users read and play through interactive fiction on the web. Dannii will receive $500 in funds to purchase an iOS device, allowing him to more accurately test how Parchment functions on the iOS version of Safari, as well as test Parchment’s accessibility in UserVoice. An iOS-native device will help Dannii run these tests and iterate faster than with other tools, in service of supporting iOS users in the community and those who rely on iOS accessibility features.

Teaching Indonesian Authors to Write IF – Felicity Banks

Novelist Felicity Banks will receive $1,000 to fund an IF workshop for 10-20 English-speaking writers in Indonesia at a writing festival next year, focusing on Twine and ChoiceScript. Felicity knows Indonesia well and is experienced in such workshops, especially for raw beginners; the funds will cover necessary travel requirements. Her project is inspired by the benefits that diversity brings to the IF community, and she intends to serve Indonesia’s vibrant writing community by helping them participate by introducing them to the medium and planting a seed towards a budding Indonesian IF community.

Writing with Inform Audiobook – Ryan Veeder

Based on his experience helping blind users get started with Inform 7, Ryan Veeder saw an opportunity to translate “Writing with Inform” documentation into an audiobook format, thereby making it more accessible to the wider IF community. While assistive technology like screen-reading software can help users who rely on it, it often fails to accurately represent the specific punctuation use and other formal considerations that are critical to Inform 7 code. Therefore, Ryan will receive $400 to start producing a few chapters of Inform 7 documentation in a bespoke audiobook format, to demonstrate the utility and feasibility of such a resource.

Improvements to Pre-Existing IF Research – Brian Rushton

Brian Rushton is a prolific chronicler of the history of IFComp and the XYZZY awards, and is the most active reviewer at the Interactive Fiction Database. Based on the positive reception his writing has earned in the community, Brian wants to fill in the years missing from his history and touch up existing research. He will receive $500 to devote his time toward continuing to write the history of IFComp and the XYZZY awards from about 2016-2022, as well as revising and editing other essays to be more professional, along with standardized and uniform citations. The resulting work will be disseminated for the community’s benefit.

It’s inspiring to see the variety of projects proposed in this cycle, each of which serve the IF community in different ways. We thank all applicants, and we’re excited to see how the awarded projects develop! And we would also like to thank this year’s 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!

Congratulations again to our first batch of funded projects, and keep an eye out for our next grant cycle!


2023 Grant Report: “Writing with Inform Audiobook” (Ryan Veeder)

Ryan Veeder is a 2023 IFTF grant recipient who recently completed his project and reached out to share it with us, and we are absolutely blown away by the effort and love put into this project, which can be found by clicking here. Screen reader technology, while helpful, can fail to accurately render the specific punctuation use and other formal considerations that are critical to learning code. R

Ryan Veeder is a 2023 IFTF grant recipient who recently completed his project and reached out to share it with us, and we are absolutely blown away by the effort and love put into this project, which can be found by clicking here.

Screen reader technology, while helpful, can fail to accurately render the specific punctuation use and other formal considerations that are critical to learning code. Ryan’s experience helping vision-impaired users get started with Inform 7 inspired him to create spoken-word documentation for this popular language for creating parser interactive fiction.

We spoke with Ryan about the triumphs and challenges of his project:

“Putting the audiobook together was more fun than I expected. Anyone who’s familiar with Writing with Inform remembers the friendliness and cleverness in its narrative voice, but only when I started recording did I realize that voice was really a character that I’d get to perform and interpret.”

In addition to honing his voice performance, Ryan also discovered that, “as I recorded these sections, it dawned on me very, very slowly that I hadn’t included the examples in my outline—and the examples contain a lot of the most useful (and most entertaining) material! So, just when I thought I was almost done, I realized there were 42 more tracks I needed to record.”.

“I’m very grateful to IFTF for the opportunity to pursue this project. Discovering Inform through the documentation was a huge thrill for me thirteen years ago, and it’s really exciting to think I can help provide that same thrill to a broader audience.”

-Ryan Veeder

We love cheering the successes and sharing in the lessons of our grant recipients, and we’ll continue sharing them here as they come. If you’re interested in participating in our grant program, keep an eye on this blog for updates on this year’s grant application period.


2023 Grant Report: “Chronicling a Community’s History” (Brian Rushton)

Brian Rushton is a 2023 IFTF Grant recipient who has recently completed his project, and we are delighted to share his success with you! The annual Interactive Fiction Competition and XYZZY Awards have a history stretching back decades, and these events have been integral to developing and celebrating the art of interactive storytelling. Brian Rushton, a prolific IF reviewer and chronicler of comm

Brian Rushton is a 2023 IFTF Grant recipient who has recently completed his project, and we are delighted to share his success with you!

The annual Interactive Fiction Competition and XYZZY Awards have a history stretching back decades, and these events have been integral to developing and celebrating the art of interactive storytelling. Brian Rushton, a prolific IF reviewer and chronicler of community history, received a IFTF microgrant to revise and extend his year-by-year writeups of these key community events, helping to preserve this history for decades to come. You can access Brian’s project directly by clicking here.

We had an opportunity to speak with Brian on completion of his book, where we discussed the lessons and discoveries made in the course of his process.

“It gave me more of a sense for more modern games. I had spent so much time in the past playing old IFComp games that I had the top 3 games memorized for many years. But I had trouble even remembering winners from recent years. So this really helped me see new games from a new viewpoint. My overall sense is that skill and polish are at a higher level now than ever before.”

Brian also shared in the challenges he faced while working on the project:

“Citations were hard! I wanted to add them for two reasons: one, out of hopes that people would discover new games or old forum conversations that could help them. The other was to ensure that I was quoting people correctly. But it was so hard to track them all down; I ended up having to write Python programs and learn more about regex and api to automate most of the citations. There ended up being over 900!”

The funds from the grant made it possible for Brian to leave a part-time job to focus on the project, which included adding 13 more articles, including seven more IFComp history articles and six more XYZZY Best Game award articles, as well as updating Spring Thing’s history to the present day. Brian also added almost a thousand citations as well as implementing hyperlinks, an epub version, and an index.

“One feature of my grant is that the book would be free forever. It’s something I’d like to add to, and I imagine keeping it updated at the IFArchive. If it were useful in an academic setting, I’d be happy to have a version of it published as well, but I intentionally kept the style more chatty and conversational, so it lacks some of the rigor that is more popular in academia. So my current plan is to keep it on the IFArchive, Github, and similar hosting sites!”

We’re all so excited to see this book come to fruition, and so appreciative of the love and care Brian has put into this living document.

“This book simply wouldn’t exist without the IFTF’s help. I did the fun parts years ago, and all that remained was a lot of hard work, and I didn’t have much time. The funding from the IFTF gave me both the time to work and the accountability to get it finished. I definitely appreciate the fund and hope that it helps others as well!”

There are so many fantastic ways we’ve seen people in this community engage with what they love, and the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation wants to help in whatever way we can to bring these things into the world. If you know of an IF-related project that may be in need of some help getting to the finish line, then stay tuned to this blog for updates on this year’s grant application period!