Planet Interactive Fiction

Since only four commands are meant to do anything, how much time do we want to spend on commands like *PUT LIGHT IN YELLOW*?

last time, on let’s make IF…

I’m back, after skipping last week’s second post. Why did I skip it? I was getting my own work ready for a bit of playtesting. Look for a couple of posts containing my suggestions about playtesting (your game or someone else’s) very soon!

Last time, I gave general instructions for replacing default responses from the Standard Rules, using my own “default responses template” as a guide. To keep things simple, I’ve copied all of that extension’s rules into our current source code and commented it out. When we need something from it, we can just move it, uncommented, into the main body of our project code. As always, you can find this week’s source at the bottom of this post.

Since I didn’t cover it: do you know where to find these responses yourself? Just open up the Standard Rules (file>open installed extension>graham nelson>standard rules from the top-left dropdown menu in the IDE). This is a good habit to get into. For instance, perhaps you need to know when the response to a “jump” command happens? It’s in the SR. How about taking something before eating it? And so on. It’s worth spending some time in there, even if it doesn’t all make sense. About that jumping response. Let’s do a “find” for the text “jumping”. Here’s what we get.

Report an actor jumping (this is the report jumping rule):
	if the actor is the player:
		if the action is not silent:
			say "[We] [jump] on the spot." (A);
	otherwise:
		say "[The actor] [jump] on the spot." (B).

We know how to read this, don’t we? We have two conditions. In the first, the actor (the character doing the jumping) is the controllable character, AKA the “player.” In the second case, an NPC is jumping. Because we have a named rule (“the report jumping rule”) and a letter in parentheses after printed text, we can call each response by name

the report jumping rule response (A)

is a way to refer to the first of two printed texts. We can replace it with a simple declaration:

the report jumping rule response (A) is "I'm not jumping! No way.".

Note that the default rule uses substitutions to handle different pronouns and verb tenses. We can be more specific in our rule, because it only needs to work in one game–ours!

As a last note, be aware that you can treat these responses like any other text, using formatting, substitutions, and conditions to create reactive, compelling responses. As this project hopefully attests, Inform 7 is great for this kind of thing, so use those features when they make sense!

disabling stuff we don’t want.

In a game with only four verbs to progress the action, how much time do we want to spend on other verbs? For some, we can write low-effort rules or responses that players will enjoy. Others will not be so easy, and will not add much. For instance, “burning” has a default response that we can write quickly. It will reflect our authorial voice and we don’t have to worry about it leading to strange outcomes or messages. Since I’ve copied every response into our source, I’ll just cut-paste the burning response and put in in a new “book” of our project (organization is important!).

Volume 9 (default responses)


Book 1 (actions)

The block burning rule response (A) is "This dangerous act [would achieve] little.".

I’ll put revised action responses in book 1 of Volume 9. This is still the default. What should take it’s place? Anything you want, of course. Important considerations:

• Avoid repetitive snark! If players are going to see a message again and again, a snarky message tends to become very frustrating for players.
• Be careful with snark in general! There’s a tradition–or exaggerated perception of a tradition–of snarky messages in parser IF. A little goes a long way, and, often, none will go even further. Be aware of player patience and balance things appropriately.
• Match the narrative voice. This is why you are probably doing this in the first place, isn’t it? Rewritten responses are a way to make sure that the text of your game is a cohesive whole.
• Be sure the response will always apply. It can be hard to write one response that is always applicable. If cases change in-game, consider revision or adding conditions to your messages.
• Make sure the information is useful. If something will never work, let the player know. Don’t make them think trying later will be a good idea.

Burning is a throwaway verb, in this case, so I just want to do something short that discourages future attempts.

The block burning rule response (A) is "You know it isn't safe to play with fire.".

The more developed our narrator is, the more in-character our responses can be.

What about other cases, though? A particularly grievous offender is the action “inserting it into,” which includes two nouns, which means it will try to disambiguate before getting to our rejection response. You recall that we added a placeholder response for actions we had flagged as “performing a productive action”:

before doing something:
	unless performing a productive action:
		say "That's not productive!" instead.

The road to that before response can be a long one. Here’s some play from the current source.

>put
(on the table)
That's not productive!

>put yellow
(in the table)
That's not productive!

>put light
(in the table)
That's not productive!

>put me
(in the table)
That's not productive!

Come hell or high water, Inform is going to find a noun for our error message. It doesn’t help us or our players, which isn’t a dig against Inform 7, as we are definitely getting away from Inform 7’s general usage.

disabling or redirecting input at the parser level.

We could do a lot of things, here. Rahter than wait for action processing, we could just kill the command grammar at the parser level. One option would be to do a new understand for the action as a whole:

understand nothing as wearing.

This will get rid of our first response above. Unfortunately, “put” as a command is affiliated with many actions, so we will be chasing them all down. Here’s our new output:

>put
(down the table)
That's not productive!

It may not always be clear what action is in play. We can use a debug command, *ACTIONS*, for that.

>actions
Actions listing on.

>put
(down the table)
[dropping the table]
That's not productive!
[dropping the table - ended without result]

It looks like dropping is next! Do we want to disable dropping? Let’s say that we don’t. We could go after the command instead.

understand the command "put" as something new.

Note that we can’t get granular with this declaration. It isn’t possible to say

understand the command "put [something] on [something]" as something new.

Only one word–the verb–is permitted in this understand phrase, and it completely wipes “put” from Inform’s command vocabulary. None of these will work anymore: “put on jacket”, “put hat on table”, or “put wallet in pocket”. Once we use this simple understand phrase, we must (re)write new “understand” declarations for any use of “put” in our work. In this case, though, that isn’t a big deal–we don’t care about using “put” at all.

Still, this is something you need to be very careful with in your own projects. Players are very used to established terms and synonyms, so taking them away is a risk.

In either case, though, there is an issue. Should these two commands generate the same feedback?

>put yellow on table
That's not a verb I recognize.

>adl;sjkhfads
That's not a verb I recognize.

Sigh. I should note here that many players will not care about this distinction, so tailor your effort to the time you have. Fiddling around with this kind of thing makes zero sense for a speed IF work, or for something with a looming deadline. However, for those with more time on their hands, we may want different messages. I know that I do. Why? The first case is a command players will expect to work. The other is not. It seems they should get different responses, doesn’t it?

a detour to nowheresville.

How can we customize responses while preempting the parser’s disambiguation attempts? This is rather high effort, so we need to focus on actions that can’t be dealt with in interesting (a relative term) customized responses. “Put” is probably the greatest offender, though there are a few others. Let’s start with “put” and a new, catch-all action where select junk verbs can go. Typing this will get repetitive, so let’s do something very simple.

failing is an action applying to nothing.
sfailing is an action applying to one thing.
dfailing is an action applying to two things.

before failing (this is the zero nouns failure rule):
	say "[the failure response]" instead.
	
before sfailing (this is the single noun failure rule):
	say "[the failure response]" instead.
	
before dfailing (this is the double noun failure rule):
	say "[the failure response]" instead.

to say the failure response:
	say "To advance the game, choose one of four cards: *O*,*G*,*B*,*R*.".

Why all of these actions? Inform has a lot of built-in behavior that is usually very useful. It will attempt to guess what nouns we intend to use. It will ask us when it can’t guess. However, we don’t want any of that! For that reason, we have three different actions defined, depending on whether the player enters one, two, or zero nouns. Whichever they choose, the output will be the same, a generic “failure” response that guides players to using the right commands. How would we use it with “put”?

understand "put" as failing.
understand "put on/in/-- [something]" as sfailing.
understand "put [something] on/in/-- [something]" as dfailing.

what does the “on/in/–” construction mean? By using it, we are saying that Inform can accept either on, in, or nothing (“–” means nothing). Because our inputs account for every permissible number of nouns, Inform never asks for clarification or guesses about possible nouns. Here’s the output:

>put
To advance the game, choose one of four cards: *O*,*G*,*B*,*R*.

>put blue
To advance the game, choose one of four cards: *O*,*G*,*B*,*R*.

>put on blue
To advance the game, choose one of four cards: *O*,*G*,*B*,*R*.

>put blue red
To advance the game, choose one of four cards: *O*,*G*,*B*,*R*.

>put red on blue
To advance the game, choose one of four cards: *O*,*G*,*B*,*R*.

…and so forth.

As a postscript: you might wonder why we can’t manipulate a parser error into handling every case. There is no “current action,” since the parser has no current action yet. We could do an “after reading a command” rule to check for specific words in the player’s input, effectively bypassing the parser, but that has risks of its own. Besides the risk of missing something or getting something wrong, we might have to worry about managing a long list of possibilities. Where would they go? A table? Things could get overcooked (and fragile) rather quickly. If we really only mean to treat a few verbs this way, let’s go with these “failing” actions. They’ll show up in our debugging commands (*RULES* and *ACTIONS*), something parser errors cannot do. Which others should we look at? The main culprits are–in my opinion–actions applying to two nouns. Perhaps we should chase those down. Do we really have to read every line of the Standard Rules? The answer is no! Let’s have a look at the Index.

Have we talked about the index? That’ll be a good place to pick up next time, as we continue to customize input for our game.

PWW Current Source

next.

Next time: having a look at the index, disabling more verbs, and adding more default responses.

Wield ancient technology to overthrow your mage oppressors! Can your secret order of mage hunters save the kingdom, or will internal strife tear you apart?

Magehunter: Phoenix Flame is an interactive fantasy novel by Nic Vasudeva-Barkdull, set in the same world as Battlemage: Magic By Mail. It’s entirely text-based, 300,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Choice of Games editor Mary Duffy sat down to talk with Nic about the world of Magehunter and Battlemage.

Magehunter: Phoenix Flame will be available on Wednesday, November 27th. You can wishlist it on Steam in advance of its release—it really helps!

We’re so thrilled to have another game from the author of Battlemage: Magic by Mail. Tell our readers about Magehunter and how its setting and characters relate to Battlemage.

Although it’s a standalone story, Magehunter takes place a few generations after Battlemage, but in the same kingdom. Knights and squires are a thing of the past, and the Kingdom of Jubai is undergoing a technological revolution due to the discovery of slipflame, a powerful new energy source. The most important difference is the oppressive rule of the mage class. The monarchy of Jubai is long gone, and Archmage Nylund and his mage council have ruled for decades. All these changes can be traced back to a war with battlemages—the events of which make up the plot of Battlemage. Of course, Battlemage has multiple endings, so the details of that war and its aftermath are unclear to the characters of Magehunter. The history has faded into legend, and it’s up to the player to uncover those legends if they so choose. As far as characters, I won’t give any spoilers but I will say there are Easter eggs to be found if you’re willing to look!

What did you find easier about the writing process this time around?

I think I understood what structure needed to be established to make a better story this time around. In these games, it’s not easy to fit all the character development, romances, and secrets alongside the main plot—which itself needs to include all the most crucial information regardless of which path the player chooses. Planning good stat systems is helpful because it’s the best way to track the nuances of a player’s choices and provide payoffs, but some details still need to be put into place by hand. Planning where exactly I would fit all those details from the start made things much easier this time around. That being said, I think I’ll do even more planning for any future games I make because those tiny but important details still tend to fall by the wayside if you’re not careful. At the same time, those are the details that are the most worth it for me. I love finding out when readers have uncovered my favorite branch or ending, and there are plenty to explore in Magehunter.

I’m especially excited about indirect sequels like this one, that let the player steep themselves in a familiar but new world. What inspired the shift to the future in Magehunter?

I honestly just wanted to write a world with alternate technology, but something unique from, say, steampunk. I was also inspired by the really interesting magic system in Foundryside, a trilogy in which a thiefy main character can change the properties of objects around her by arguing with the rules of the physical world. It’s a fascinating mix of hacking and magic, and there’s a bit of that in the “magic” system of my world in the form of Brutal Flame. I also love the classic Thief games, and I think The Metal Age is an amazing example of narrative design with its fantasy technology in the form of robots and surveillance cameras set in a medieval world. The inspiration of Thief on the dark fantasy setting of Magehunter is obvious from the start. Finally, in Battlemage, I wanted to bend the rules of the fantasy genre because I was always bothered by the hegemonic Britishness of the genre rules. With Magehunter, I wanted to continue that trend and lean toward my comfort genre of science fiction while maintaining the court politics of Jubai. Going to the future also gave me even more distance from the “thees” and “thous” of high fantasy language. I think more contemporary language helps with the fun, adventurous tone I’m looking for. All of these elements just clicked together while I was working on the ending of Battlemage, where the player’s actions literally become legend. I thought, why not build on that legend with another adventure?

Was there an NPC you particularly liked writing?

Honestly, it changed throughout the project. At first, I didn’t really like Gael or Embla, two fellow hunters, but I was determined to write characters outside my personal preferences to give players a variety of friends and romance options. By the end, I really fell in love with them and their respective arcs, and as a result, they are now probably the most fleshed-out characters in the game. Gael is hard to get along with in the beginning, but befriending him can lead the player on an entirely different, slightly nerdy adventure. And Embla is just a sweetheart. She can be a bit cheesy and saccharine at first, but hers quickly becomes one of the more valid viewpoints for the struggles of a divided world (in my opinion, anyway). On the other hand, I liked writing the mage apprentice Frey because his motivations are uncomplicated, but he’s deeper than most of the characters give him credit for. I also liked Rio, the self-declared people’s hero, for being an outlet of gender expression (for me and hopefully for the player too) in a world that’s much freer than our own society. Oddly, Xiaoxi, another fellow hunter, started out as my no-brainer favorite but by the end that was no longer the case—although she definitely redeems herself if you make the right choices.

Players will have a really enjoyable power mechanic in this game. Tell us a little about slipflame.

Slipflame comes in three forms, and it can do anything from manipulating the physical properties of objects (Brutal Flame), to siphoning essence from a living being (Living Flame), to sneakier things like tricking the mind (Silent Flame). The uses of slipflame are really only limited by the player’s slipflame supply. I try to add a unique mechanic to every game I make—it was the combat system in Battlemage, and in this game it’s the slipflame reservoir, which is a pool of slipflame that depletes with each use. But players shouldn’t try to hoard slipflame either, since it recharges over time due to the conduits throughout the city. Slipflame is a public good, and it’s used for everything from lighting up the city to powering small gadgets that citizens use. As useful as it is, mages won’t touch it because its network is maintained by the hunters—a sort of resistance movement/organized crime syndicate that is in a constant power struggle with the mage regime. Since the player is a hunter themselves, they get to enjoy the full power of slipflame, and its different forms allow for play styles that are big and explosive, supportive and peaceful, or cunning and stealthy.

What are you working on next?

I’m making a game called AAA Simulator, a satire of game industry follies. It’s a tycoon game and a roguelike, and I’ve kept that last part secret until just now. It’s also going to be driven by narrative choices similar to the Reigns series, with events inspired by actual game industry blunders (of which there are many). I’ve been dipping my toes into the world of video editing by making devlogs about it on a channel also called AAA Simulator over on YouTube. So far it’s been a ton of fun!

I am delighted to announce that The Beyond will be launching on Steam and Itch on November 4th. (Supporting Mac/Win/Linux/SteamDeck.)

The Beyond is one of Jason Shiga's interactive comic books, #2 in the Adventuregame Comics series. It's an adventure beyond the boundaries of life, death, and the covers of a book. Romance! Pirates! Probably a giant squid lurking somewhere!

• The Beyond on Steam (coming soon!)
• The Beyond on Itch.IO (coming soon!)
• The Beyond as a hardback book

But that's not all! We will also be launching Leviathan for iPhone and iPad on the same day -- that's November 4th.

Leviathan is Adventuregame Comics #1 -- a story of truth, lies, and yes, a giant squid. It's been available on Steam and Itch for a while; now it's making its debut on the Apple App Store.

I don't have a direct link for you, because Apple doesn't believe in "coming soon" pages for its app store. Watch this post or the Zarfhome site for the store page as soon as Leviathan goes on sale.

• Leviathan on the iOS App Store (coming soon!)
• Leviathan on Steam
• Leviathan on Itch.IO
• Leviathan as a hardback book

(Before you write me: Apple does believe in "prepurchase this game" pages. But I'm not a fan of pre-orders so I didn't set that up. Pay your money on the 4th and start playing Leviathan right then and there!)

Of course, Meanwhile has been available on all these platforms for years. You could call it AdventureGame Comics #0 if you wanted. Little Jimmy discovers a laboratory full of fantastical inventions: a time machine, a doomday machine, and a SQUID. What will happen next?

• Meanwhile on the iOS App Store
• Meanwhile on Steam
• Meanwhile on Itch.IO
• Meanwhile as a hardback book

A quick note: I realize that next week is a High-Stress Interval for Americans and, really, everybody else. I apologize for getting tangled up with that. I gotta launch sometime and that week is when the timing worked out. Maybe these games will serve as a Monday diversion? I don't know. I can't fix American politics (and I already voted by mail) but I can keep supporting narrative games. Do what you can. Vote if you're a voter.

Looking beyond this launch and, we devoutly hope, after some much-needed stress relief...

I will of course work to bring The Beyond to iPhone/iPad. I've got the artwork and the layout, so it's just a matter of importing them into my iOS framework. Hopefully that will be available early next year.

Then there's Samurai vs Ninja, Adventuregame Comics #3 -- already available in book form. We have not yet started on adapting this one, so I won't try to promise a release date. We'll make it happen, though.

Thanks for supporting Jason and me all these years!

This continues my previous post identifying adventure games that we don’t have access to at this time, to the best of my knowledge. These new entries have been drawn out of the comments there; thanks to everyone who chipped in!

Three major updates from that list:

First, LanHawk managed to sleuth out Fun House from the esoterically titled SINGLEFILE.dsk in an Atari Age thread. So that’s one less missing game!

There’s also some discussion in that thread on Glamis Castle. Via Atarimania, there have been two attempts at dumping what was packaged as the Atari version of the game, but both had House of Usher instead. Was it also a scam game? Weirdly, based on the files in Haunted Palace, it seems that Glamis was written first. Perhaps only the Apple II versions were finished but Crystalware had to put something on the Atari disks and hope people wouldn’t care; perhaps no version was finished at all (but why would Haunted Palace be done, then, in both Apple and Atari versions)?

I should add that the games from CPS Software I mentioned last time might not have ever existed, and there is a fantastic long examination from The Wargaming Scribe of the one game we do have a copy of (King Arthur, 1983) which is so bad he concludes it was intended as fraud: “King Arthur was not designed to be played or fun, it was designed to exist.”

Other discoveries were made (like a previously unknown variant of Adventure for PolyMorphic Systems computers), meaning the entire thread is worth a read, but I’m only re-printing here the “missing” games that go up to 1982.

One other brief request before I dive into the new list: I’m having trouble running a specific game on a Nascom emulator (it’s tangentially related to a specific lost game). I’ll drop the details on this in the comments if anyone fancies themselves an expert.

Fantasy (1982, Level 9, Nascom)

I wrote about this one fairly extensively back when I introduced Level 9’s second adventure game, Colossal Adventure. It has the weird extra condition that it might exist in a “stolen” version, but I’ve never had confirmation of this. I’ll just quote the relevant section from my post:

Fantasy was an adventure (“a competitive adventure set in a gothic mansion”), and you may be wondering why we’re not starting our Level 9 journey there. Sadly, Fantasy is currently lost to the digital wastes, and one of those with few enough copies sold it may never turn up (although there have been surprises before!)

Pete Austin later described it as “like Valhalla”, a 1983 ZX Spectrum game.

Screenshot from this video walkthrough.

Valhalla features characters that you can give orders to, and if the walkthrough above is any indication, they’d often not be cooperative about following through on the orders.

There were a lot of characters wandering around who changed according to your actions. What I did was to make it print out in proper English.

There’s even further description from this interview in the magazine Page 6:

It was a game with about 30 locations. It had people wandering about and essentially it was one of the few games where the other characters were exactly the same as the player and were all after the gold as well. What made it amusing was that they had quite interesting characters, each had a table of attributes, some of them were cowardly, some of them were strong — that kind of thing and we gave them names. There was one called Ronald Reagan and one called Maggie Thatcher and so on and there was Ghengis Khan, etc so you could wipe out your least favorite person!

The description makes it sound like a world with a lot of independent-moving actors and not much coherent plot, and the gothic mansion plus the addition of people like Reagan strongly suggests it is similar to a game collection featured here before, Atom Adventures, particularly the House module. Atom Adventures was published in the tail end of 1981, later than Fantasy, so I suspect it was a direct rip-off.

Bureaucracy (1980, Med Systems, Apple II, TRS-80)

Samurai (1980, Med Systems, Apple II, TRS-80)

Star Lord (1980, Med Systems, Apple II, TRS-80)

According to research by Will Moczarski, these three games were released in 1980 before their more famous games (like Deathmaze 5000). All three are lost, although Moczarski theorizes that Star Lord is simply a game called Star Trap from 1981 that we do have. In that case, Star Lord isn’t an adventure game. Mentions for Samurai and Bureaucracy can be found in the 1981 Med Systems Catalog.

Samurai only has a small chance of being an adventure game…

…but Bureaucracy probably is. The description makes it sounds like a predecessor of the Deathmaze/Asylum line, and it doesn’t help that it shares a name with a much (much) more famous Infocom game.

Untitled Adventure in Denmark (1980, Peter Ole Frederiksen, Mainframe)

The author’s son has some notes here on CASA about a lost game:

The game was placed on the IBM mainframe in Aarhus, Denmark at least around 1980-81 (possibly earlier)

The game appears to borrow from Egyptian mythology, Alice in Wonderland, the then-current political landscape and other sources.

This would represent one of the earliest adventure game we have in Danish. Unfortunately without even a name it seems extraordinarily hard to search for.

TIKVA (1982, UK101)

Gamal 81 (1981, ZX81)

Toxopholy (1980, Apple II)

Dungeons of Death (1981, Commodore PET)

The Shifting Tower (1981, Acorn Atom)

Unnamed Games by Psychosoft (1981, Nascom)

Martian Adventure (1981, TRS-80)

All of these are mentioned in a thread by Strident of random clippings of unknown games. TIKVA and Gamal 81 seem to be adventure creation kits, while the other games seem to be regular adventure games. I won’t give every ad from the page, but here’s the mention of Toxopholy, which at least has an intriuging name…

… and Martian Adventure is particularly interesting, described as an Apple II game with three Agents:

TRS-80 Source Book (assorted)

Starting in 1980, Tandy accepted what were essentially “classified ads” and compiled them together into TRS-80 Sourcebooks. Rob combed over them and listed the ones we seem to be missing. There’s a lot of these, so I’ll sort them all together.

• Shipwreck, Teller Enterprises
• Haunted Mansion, Teller Enterprises
• Haunted House, Doug Eby
• Action Games Pack W/Adventure Game, Alexander Crawford
• Adventure # 2 – Catal Huyuk, Computer Programs Unlimited
• Adventures 1-5 (by Role Simulations)
• Nuclear Doomsday
• Medusa’s Revenge
• Missile Submarine Warfare
• King Rex III’s Tomb
• Castle of Doom
• Advent2, T.L. Lottes
• Dragonslayer, Graham Software
• Harvey I, Chandler Data Services
• Harvey II: The Lost Civilization, Chandler Data Services
• Medieval Magic, Liberty Software Co.
• Skid Row Adventure, Dale Dobson

The last one exists in a 25th Anniversary Edition, and if the author looks familiar, it’s because he’s the author of the blog Gaming After 40.

Testament (1982, DAI)

The DAI personal computer is Belgian (although initially designed by Texas Instruments UK), and it did have a few adventure games.

Testament appeared in a newsletter in a May 1982 newsletter (specifically, the DAI CLUB FRANCE CATALOGUE), and there might be some other candidates mentioned, although it is unclear what is an adventure.

Cave-In (1982, Apple II, PC, ZX-81, Great Games Ink, Florida)

Computerworld, October 11, 1982.

Might be a scam. Certainly an eccentric choice of ports. Advertised in Computerworld a few times in 1982 as costing $35 with a $1000 contest attached, but then they disappear.

I’d like to start today’s game by talking about something that doesn’t seem special at first but has a remarkable history behind it. Specifically, the REM statements at the start of Ship Adventure (shortened to be ‘ marks); in BASIC they don’t get interpreted as code but are used to make comments.

5 ‘COPYRIGHT(C) CLOAD 1982
30 ‘CREATED BY: JOHN R. OLSON
40 ‘ HOXIE, KANSAS 67740

Thus starts the first lines of Ship Adventure, as put in the December 1982 version of the tapemag called CLOAD (and diskmag after October ’82). This is John R. Olson from Kansas this time (see: Island Adventure) not John R. Olsen from Oregon (see: Frankenstein Adventure).

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

The game is extremely clear on the name and location of the author, and this has been true on every single adventure from CLOAD we’ve seen. From Troll’s Treasure:

1 ‘COPYRIGHT (C) CLOAD 1981
2 ‘BY RICHARD MOFFIE
3 ‘ 20121 LEADWELL ST. #3
4 ‘ CANOGA PARK, CALIFORNIA 91306

From CIA Adventure:

10040 ‘COPYRIGHT (C) CLOAD 1980
HUGH LAMPERT
110 LINDNER PL.
MALVERNE, NY 11565

From Frankenstein Adventure:

by John R. Olsen Jr.
P.O. Box 181
Newberg, Or 97132
(503) 538-3031

Compare with the Adventures of the Month (like Menagerie that I wrote about last); only some of the adventures have clear identifiers, and we still don’t know who wrote Black Hole Adventure even though we have all three ports. Survival was published in Creative Computing in their January 1982 issue with no author identifier within the code, even though it must have been there because it got restored in the 1984 reprinting.

Now, the latter case is understandable: the author is mentioned in the print article, there’s a premium on space. However, this removal from source can still mean games get detached from their sources. The most spectacular case of this was Korenvliet, a Dutch game which was a translation of Stoneville Manor, but the connection was so non-obvious that many years later Korenvliet got translated back into English with no awareness the game was in English in the first place!

As far as why CLOAD was so careful to always print author and location, it has to do with fraud from their earlier days. This story backtracks all the way to 1978, when the publication was founded in February as the first computer tapemag, with Ralph McElroy as publisher and Dick Fuller as editor. (David Lagerquist took over in 1980.)

Source.

September 1978 included a version of Hamurabi…

160 REM MODIFIED BY JOHN OLSEN, BOX 181, NEWBERG, OR. 97132

…but this was derived completely from the same version of David Ahl’s 101 Computer Games. As explained by Ralph McElroy in the October 1978 issue of CLOAD, the file was clearly marked as a derivative of Ahl, but the source code only credits the author who modified the source (Oregon Olsen). Ahl saw the issue, and raised concerns, but:

After some preliminary running around, we got together and worked the situation out to everyone’s nominal satisfaction.

That was an accident, but the very same issue of CLOAD also included a copy of Othello.

As McElroy explains:

The original author (Mr. Donald L. Dilley, of Federal Way, Washington) had sent a copy to Radio Shack, to Kilobaud Magazine, and to his son in southern California. This last copy was evidently sold with his son’s computer system, thereby ending up in New York, from where it was submitted.

To summarize, someone bought a used computer with a piece of computer code that wasn’t theirs and decided to sell it.

Hence, a new policy at CLOAD was announced that “the author’s name and address” needed to be put into REM statements “in the first few lines of code”. This would “discourage” theft (or at least require thieves to have even more chutzpah), and they did not “want other people’s work, no matter how good or how cheap.” (The “first few lines of code” part of the policy must have changed, given CIA Adventure put its notice on the end of its code.)

Enough about TRS-80 REM comment drama —

— John R. Olson’s games have been mechanically simple and straightforward and this one is not an exception, although it is yet another case of shipboard directions (port, starboard, fore, aft) and I’m such a landlubber I had to double check I wasn’t mixing up port and starboard again.

The introduction asks you to find seven treasures, but I need to slow down and explain because both in a plot sense and a gameplay sense this is a slightly different Treasure Hunt than normal.

While I collected my treasures here (at the start) to keep my inventory free, they only count if you’re holding them.

In Crowther/Woods and descendants, the treasures typically serve as markers that you have solved particular puzzles. The treasures are often incidental proof you’ve reached particular rooms as well as a convenient way of making the game non-linear. Here, we are tasked with inspecting a ship that is smuggling treasure, and there is almost nothing gated off by a puzzle: rather, you need to figure out the hiding spots. It is more analogous to a collectathon from the N64 era than a standard adventure game. Sometimes the collectable items are in tricky places, but you don’t need to outwit a dragon first to get to where the Golden Foozle is buried.

This feels like a natural extension from the author who wrote Mansion Adventure; in that game, the play is almost solely in collecting clues to break open a particular lock with a few traps at the end. Here, most of the seven goal treasures are straightforward to find, with only the seventh behind a safe causing trouble. (It turned out to be a text-garbling issue likely having to do with the emulator, I’ll explain when I get there.)

The other thing the author emphasizes — and again this is a continuation of his previous work, although here it feels more systematic — is that there are plenty of objects that are there just because it is a ship and it’d be logical to have them there. There’s a rope on the deck that doesn’t get used, a lantern in a lifeboat that sees no action, a radio in a radio room that doesn’t get turned on. They don’t even feel like “red herrings” exactly; they’re things to prod at to check if there’s a treasure or a tool hiding, but don’t occupy much brain-space otherwise during gameplay.

Three above-deck rooms to demonstrate:

This is the one spot you can die, but at least there’s good forewarning. Notice the educational ship vocabulary tidbits!

There’s one chest with the word SAFE, which is solely there to hint there’s a hidden safe.

There’s a crowbar in one container that later will be useful…

…and one treasure hidden in the crow’s nest…

…but other than that it’s just atmosphere. I did find a “closed, locked hatchway” which is unopenable but it gets described as heavy steel, so I didn’t waste much time trying to open it.

There’s two floors below, let’s head to the bottom first since it is simpler.

This mainly serves to dispense a “screwdriver” in a work area, and a secret area with a diamond unlocked via a lever.

The remaining five treasures are on the middle floor.

A cargo hold contains a ruby, extractable via the crowbar.

The mate’s cabin has a bag with a flag in it that is folded. Open the flag, and out comes a sapphire.

A strongbox in a desk contained in the captain’s cabin has a jade.

Rather more trickily, the cabinet in the infirmary is described as being held by screws. Using the screwdriver from downstairs reveals yet another secret treasure.

This leaves the safe, and it was indeed helpful to have the word “SAFE” earlier since I had a notion what I was looking for. I tried MOVE on all the items I could touch until reaching the captain’s cabin again; the desk not only holds the jade but moves to show a safe.

As far as the combination for the safe goes, there’s an index card in one of the other cabins which is a straight self-contained puzzle.

Yes, the text is glitched here.

I tried 12/2/6 (thinking of the x marks as multiplication) and relatedly, 12/2/120 and 12/2/20. I eventually suspected the text was not displaying correctly and checked the source code.

1870 DATA”CAR”,”A small index Card”,”There is writing on it: 3x/4x+1/2x-1 where 3x + 2 = 20 ! ?”,0,1

Oho! So it’s just supposed to be an algebra problem (Olson was originally a college algebra teacher, remember). With 3x + 2 = 20, x has to be 6; then plug 6 in for x on the other three expressions to get 18, 25, and 11.

There was absolutely nothing sophisticated with the parser or world model, but the author kept to a mode of gameplay the parser could support and given this was supposed to be a short jaunt from a tape/diskmag, this ended up being enjoyable in the same manner as Eno. The author had a style that he ran to its conclusion (even including educational spots explaining what ship parts are) rather than trying to mimic Scott Adams entirely, making it a better game than his other two we’ve looked at so far.

Coming up: The Archive is in a good enough state I can make my second Missing Adventures post, and then we’ll finally wrap around back to the warm glow of the Apple II.

The Boston IF meetup for September will be Monday, October 28, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting. 

I’ve finished the game. This continues from my previous post.

Another picture from the September 1982 cover of Softside.

After getting by the snake (which was a matter of realizing I could take an item from a room even though it doesn’t get described that way) the game was mostly straightforward; the pattern is that you have access to a whole, er, menagerie of animals, and they get used in various ways to solve puzzles. In a narrative sense, the animals are rallying together to assist in your breakout (except for the snake, and another critter you’ll see later).

To recap: I had a deadly snake blocking an intersection, and the only ways I could go were one way blocked by a metal wall, and another with the mirror (shown above) hiding a light rod farther back.

I’m generally used to the Kirsch games being explicit about items in rooms, but the mirror room is an exception. You can TAKE MIRROR, then apply it to the snake.

The “It’s getting darker” is because I didn’t have the pole-on-fire get blown out by the wind in this run. I’m still holding the light rod as shown so it counts as a bug.

I’m glad I had already made my verb list (SHOW might have otherwise still taken a little time to get to). With the snake out of the way (although we have to keep doing SHOW MIRROR passing through the center) we now have free travel of most of the ship. To the west is the bridge, which is only interesting in a narrative sense.

This helps explain why we don’t face much opposition in the events there are to come.

Headed upstairs first…

…the symmetrical arrangement has an empty cage in the middle (I suspect meant for our protagonist), a storage room with some rubber gloves, a meeting room with some keys and the notation north = Mars, south = Earth, a “control room” that clearly needs a battery…

…and a Robot Room with one of the more interesting moments in the game.

The robot is painting EARTHLING and you can come back later to see more letters painted.

This makes for a slightly unnerving timer to the events (if they finish, they catch you) but in gameplay terms the amount of time you have is fairly generous.

Heading downstairs is where all the animals are kept. And my apologies, but I misspoke last time: the animals are NEARLY all from planets other than Earth.

The rooms are pretty description-free (“YOU’RE IN A STALL”) so let’s focus on listing the menagerie. None of these animals talk:

• VENUSIAN METAL EATERUS
• MERCURIAN LAZY CLAM
• NEPTUNIAN TERMITE
• PLUTONIAN DIAMOND-HEAD WOLF
• SATURNIAN PEACOCK
• ELECTRIC EEL (in a water tank)

(If you were paying attention before, you might immediate spot two of them help solve puzzles, but let’s finish listing the menagerie first.)

There’s one completely empty room that will get filled later, and one which had a resident that has now left.

On top of the non-talking critters there’s GALAXIAN WISE OWL that dispenses some hints.

The other hints (picked at random) are “diamonds cut glass” and “ask the cat”. Speaking of the cat, the cat asks for a pearl.

We’ll come back to the pearl in a few; let’s get out the way the electric eel first. With the rubber gloves on you can pick it up and put it directly on the control panel (!!) and the lever will work.

This brings down a force field later. However, you don’t find out about the force field at all if you do this first, and I only learned about the force field by looking up a walkthrough after beating the game.

The METALEATER, as you might also have predicted, goes back to the mysterious wall made of metal. (Past this point, any animal you cart around has to have the chain unlocked first with the keys from the meeting room.)

Right after this wall is a wall made out of wood (bring forth the NEPTUNIAN TERMITE) and then one made out of glass (meaning we now want the PLUTONIAN DIAMOND-HEAD WOLF). The wolf doesn’t cut the glass automatically; we need to type CUT GLASS, suggesting we somehow pick up the wolf and use it as a can opener of sorts.

All this leads to a branching hallway where one way goes to a dead end with a stone wall, and I did not seem to have any creatures that could handle stone. The other way is a navigation chamber.

YOU’RE IN A NAVIGATION CHAMBER.
There’s a large compass standing on a green plush carpet. An arrow on a gauge points “N”. A dial is missing fron the navigation control.

With that route all a dead end, let’s return to the demand of the cat. It wants a pearl.

The CLAM immediately came to mind but the game didn’t understand TICKLE when I tried it (as hinted at by the owl). The game specifically says

Sorry, you can’t do that

which it normally does for actions it understands but won’t ever do, but in this case, I was simply missing the right item in inventory. I needed to go to the SATURNIAN PEACOCK and TAKE FEATHER first and then the clam would give up a pearl.

Once you deliver the pearl the cat has another demand.

This is when a Janusian mouse starts showing up at random. It runs away, but you can drop the half-eaten cheese and wait and eventually it will show up.

But wait! A twist!

You can, of course, ignore the mouse and cart it over to the cat (the mouse keeps repeating “please don’t feed me to the cat”) and eventually get laughed at.

When the cat mentions the landing on Mars, a counter starts ticking to actually arrive; a MARSIAN BULL gets scooped up at that stop and added to one of the stalls. The bull can’t talk but will help you with the stone wall.

Remember, there was a red flag attached to the flag pole at the start.

Behind the wall is a room with the missing navigation dial, so you can bring it back and fix the device.

Using the “north = mars, south = earth” guide…

…it’s almost time to go home. However, a robot is unhappy with your shenanigans (now they pay attention).

Alas, the bull doesn’t help you bust through.

I ended up needing to check Dale Dobson’s walkthrough who himself needed to check the source code. Back at the navigation room there’s a richly-described carpet (and nothing is richly-described in this game); it hides a secret exit, but you can’t just GET CARPET, you need to MOVE COMPASS first (!!).

This lets you bypass the guard robot and sneak your way out as soon as the vessel lands on Earth.

This would be the second game in a row where Kirsch gives a slightly unhappy ending. I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t swipe any artifacts, because the IRS would be after us for undeclared income.

This was simpler than the last few Kirsch games, but with him still cranking out content monthly (and not having any others jump in) it is understandable he tossed a more straightforward game in the queue. It does have his moments of plot beats (the Mars landing doesn’t happen until the cat talks about it), but the theming around animals = solutions means that most puzzles are simple to solve, even if somewhat elaborate in plot terms (I especially liked picking up a BULL and toting it around).

We’re proud to announce that Heavens’ Revolution: A Lion Among the Cypress, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app.

It’s 30% off until October 31st!

In a Persian steampunk empire, will you use your arcane alchemy to repair a spaceship, or pilot a mech? Ignite a revolution, snuff it out, or play both sides against each other?

Heavens’ Revolution: A Lion Among the Cypress is an interactive retrofuturistic fantasy novel by Peter Adrian Behravesh, inspired by eighteenth-century Iran, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—275,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Your training in alchemy puts you at the cutting edge of magic and technology, learning the science that governs the material world and the heavens alike. You can already create gunpowder, design intricate machines, brew potions that can ease the most terrible diseases, and distill fragrant perfumes. Much knowledge of astralchemy has been lost, but you could even learn to repair a khalicraft spaceship to escape to another world, or a giant mech that you can pilot into battle.

Seyj is an ancient city on the brink of revolution. Half a century ago, the She’ri Empire invaded, overthrowing the old ruler and occupying your planet. You are descended from both She’ri colonists and ancient Seyj families, and your loyalties are torn.

Like all citizens, you must serve in the Royalists’ army and defend the satrap governor—and yet you can see the Revolutionists’ protests escalating every day, agitating to overthrow the satrap and restore the old regime.

When the Revolutionists try to recruit you to their cause, will you share their view that they fight for justice? Or will you remain loyal to the satrap, upholding your duty as a soldier? Or will you play a game more dangerous than your fiercest alchemical flame, feeding information from one faction to another as a spy?

You had best hope that you don’t end up on the wrong side of a shamshir’s blade.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, bi, or asexual.
• Master arcane astralchemy to craft powerful weapons, open your own workshop, or secure a professorship at the University
• Rise within the ranks of the military and command an army to defend the satrap
• Or, join the revolution, overthrow the usurper, and restore the old ruler to her throne
• Find love with a fellow soldier, a blacksmith-turned-rebel, or a princess

Is gaining the world worth losing your soul?

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

You may recall that my term as an IFTF board member ended in March. I've now also stepped back as the chair of NarraScope; Matt Griffin and JD Calvelli will be running that show in 2025. (More news on that front soon!)

This leaves me with two big IFTF roles: Treasurer and IF Archive lead. I'm happy with the IF Archive job; I figure I'll hold onto that for a while. But it's getting to be time to hand off the Treasurer job. I've been doing that since, well, since day one.

In fact, I've been doing a lot of work for IFTF that's agglomerated under the "Treasurer" job. I'm the person who sets up servers, pays the bills, tracks donations, configures the email system, keeps most of the passwords for services like AWS... a whole litany of tasks where I've said "Yeah, I'll just do that real quick" because that was easier than delegating.

So we've decided that I should have two successors:

• Treasurer: Manage the bank account and Paypal account; track all expenses and donations; make sure the bills are paid.
• Tech Officer: Manage the core online services (web hosting, domain registrations, email); set up new services when needed; general sysadmin work.

Note that the Tech Officer does not have to administer IFTF's service sites: IntFiction.org, IFDB, IFWiki, IFComp.org, and so on. Each of those programs has a committee and admins to keep them running. The Tech Officer's job is to manage the cloud services we use (Linode, AWS, Github, etc) and make sure the committees have the resources they need.

Obviously these are high-trust positions! We will primarily be considering candidates whose names we know -- people have been active in the IF and IFTF community for a while. Yes, this is a clique-y thing to say, but it just doesn't make sense to bring in a total stranger and give them the keys to the bank account or the servers.

So it's a little weird for me to be posting this on social media. I know! But it's worth getting the word out, and after all, a lot of my followers are folks that I know.

To everybody else: you are awesome too! There's plenty of scope to drop into the IFTF forum or Discord and say "Hey, I'm new here, I'd like to help out, what can I do?" Just, you know, probably not Treasurer on day one.

Okay, awkward part over. Interested in one of these jobs? Check out our forum post! (Which I posted last week; apologies if you've seen it multiple times.)

The doc attached to that post has the info for applying. The post also has estimates of how much work each role takes. (Fuzzy estimates, because it varies quite a bit.)

Oh, and don't worry -- I will give my successors a good long ramp-up for the job(s). And then I'll stick around as advisor to explain any surprises. I don't expect you'll be completely settled in for a full year, since, you know, IFTF does a lot of things that happen exactly once a year.

Thanks for your interest!

You’re on a pasture. Straight ahead you see a strange vehicle which appears to be a spacecraft of some sort. You are being drawn closer and closer, as if by sone magnetic force…

Through the doors you can see an eerie red light, illuminating an otherwise dark, foreboding passage. You can hear strange cries from within.

Suddenly you are rushed through the door, almost as if pushed from some outside force.

The September 1982 issue of Softside Magazine was devoted to computer graphics.

Art from the cover, scan via Atarimania.

Meanwhile, the Softside Adventure of the Month series marched on as an all-text jam (previously: The Mouse that Ate Chicago), with Peter Kirsch once again the author, as credited in the TRS-80 source code (dated June 1982). Once again, there are also Apple II and Atari versions. This time I went with Atari. I’ve already done a thorough job on what we know about Kirsch (including his first game, Magical Journey) so this was an ideal pick to go with while the Internet Archive is still down wobbly.

We’ve been scooped up by an alien spacecraft and the action immediately continues from there.

We’re immediately next to a dark room, and has matches. They’re the kind of matches they light up a room temporarily without any possible action in-between.

This appears on the screen temporarily before the game goes back to the dark description.

You can still pick up the pole while in the dark, the flag just rolls away. You can then light the pole (requiring another match) and treat it as a torch.

(It’s fascinating how there are specific rules being followed here and how different they are from other games. Here, you can walk in the dark safely but can be killed by something specific that is dangerous; you can pick up items while in the dark. There are plenty of games where dark = no manipulation of items in a room other than possibly dropping something. There’s also been plenty of games with matches, and while they usually don’t work as long as lamps or torches, only in a few games have had the mechanics like this, with the room made visible but 0 turns allowed. The ability to pick up items in darkness compensates.)

The snake here is a little farther, and I haven’t gotten past it yet. You might think the pole/torch would be good for prodding it, and that might even be the right action, but I haven’t found the right verb to express this if so.

TICKLE is the main one I wouldn’t normally think of, and it’s useful to know now there’s an emphasis on conversation and SHOWing things.

Fortunately, the snake only blocks some of the exits. Specifically the east-facing exits are all accessible. To the northeast there is a passage to a room of mirrors; you can break one of the mirrors in order to get into a windy passage which blows out your torch. At the end (in a room you can briefly light up with the matches) is a room with a “light rod”, and typing ON ROD (and no other syntax, as far as I can tell) will turn it on.

Directly to the east of the snake is a single room with a suggestive metal wall, but again, if there’s simply a parser action to do, I haven’t found it yet.

While it is not unusual for me to be stuck on a Kirsch game, usually the verbs have been reasonable to find, but given how little I have so far to work with (pole, matches, light rod, and the red flag from the pole which you find after you get some light) that seems like the only possibility. My suspicion is one of the two puzzles (snake or metal wall) will fall and then I’ll have a whole chain of events next time.

Making a game our own.

last time, on let’s make IF…

We are getting closer to a workable template that–let’s hope–anyone can fill in with their own content. In my last post, I reviewed several changes related to printing text based on systems we had already come up with: taking text from tables and printing based on a value (the so-called “magic number”), sometimes in concert with a player’s choice of noun. Hopefully by now, these procedures seem pretty familiar! In this project, I’ve tried to focus on a few core techniques that we can use to produce varied results. Catch up here:

What remains (I think) is some customization: limiting acceptable commands and tweaking default action responses and error messages.

customizing standard responses.

From time to time, I bring up the Standard Rules as an asset to people like us who are learning about Inform, whether we started yesterday or two years ago. It contains very nearly everything needed to compile a game file. If we declare a location, for instance…

lab is a room.

…we have a working game program. There’s not a lot to do there, naturally, but we have many catch-all guidelines and responses for actions–we can start writing our content right away! We’ve been doing just that: setting up actions and action responses that will make up the experience of our project.

But what about everything else? Inform 7 has 77 verbs built into it, and several error messages (responses to flawed input) besides. The messages included with the Standard Rules work fine, and will almost always make sense to players, but they won’t sound like our own narrative voice. To truly make a game our own, we will need to explore these messages and change anything that doesn’t seem to fit. There are two basic, high-level categories we should consider:

• Parser errors: these messages are printed before Inform attempts to act upon the player’s command. That is, they are printed by the parser, Inform’s mysterious shadow world that we don’t touch or control. Unlike the action responses we’ve written in the past, where we have the power to manipulate the world and its clock, there is very little we can do to manipulate what happens when parser errors print.
  • Because of our limited control over the situation, we must take care that parser errors make sense in every imaginable situation where they might apply.
  • We can use some conditional text, i.e., [if the apple is red], but in some cases we are limited. The parser may not yet know what the [noun] is, for instance.
  • Tone is an important consideration. Players will get annoyed by repetitive snark, especially if the problem is on the author’s end. For instance, audiences may bounce hard off of a game that mocks the player for trying to interact with nouns that aren’t there when they are mentioned in room descriptions
• Action responses: these messages are similar to ones we’ve written in the past. The difference is that these are fixed, canned responses.
  • Unlike parser errors, we have a lot of flexibility when it comes to action responses. We can change the game world. We can use elaborate conditions.
  • Tone remains an important consideration. In general, rejection messages require a light touch, especially if there’s a chance that the player is trying to do something reasonable. Try to find that balance between your voice and player expectation. It is a very hard goal, but in an ideal game every reasonable command will receive a reasonable response.

Not too long ago, I shared a link to my Default Responses Template. It’s a list of every response message in the Standard Rules. We could open it up and get started, but let’s narrow things down a bit. We’ve talked about kinds of things and kinds of values. Did you know that there can be kinds of actions, too? Since this a game with only four productive actions, we can create a kind that only applies to actions that will work in our game. Unlike declaring kinds of values or actions, we just jump right in with an action and the name for our kind.

card-picking is performing a productive action.
looking is performing a productive action.
choosing an orange card is performing a productive action.
choosing a red card is performing a productive action.
choosing a yellow card is performing a productive action.
choosing a blue card is performing a productive action.

I prefer long, readable names, but you can call your kind almost anything. Here’s what my rule looks like:

before doing something:
	unless performing a productive action:
		say "That's not productive!" instead.

Lots of Standard Rules responses happen at Check and Instead phases. To get ahead of them, I’ve made a Before rule. You may wonder: why did I include looking? Remember that we’re talking about actions here, and not commands. Even if the player never types the commands “look” or “l”, the looking action occurs regularly. We have to be careful with “big” rules that cover so many conditions at once to make sure we aren’t accidentally excluding something important!

Of course, with a rule so strict, there aren’t many action responses that require attention. They’re all stopped before they can happen! We probably don’t want to go so far. Curious players will want to examine what little there is to examine, for instance, and they’d likely resent it if we stopped them from doing so. This is another balancing act: trying to provide reasonable responses while managing the scope of play. What else might we include? Inventory, probably, and maybe a few others. We should wade through the list of responses and see what might make sense.

My advice is to copy everything into the bottom of your project, then work your way through it. Start with the parser errors first, since that will buy you time to think about which actions you want to permit in your game. Rewriting the messages is easy. Simply replace the quoted text. The template explains when specific parser errors displayed. For instance:

[the most familiar of all these responses, perhaps. Prints when the player's command refers to a noun that is not visible or in scope. or else the noun (or a typo) does not exist anywhere in the game. Be careful with snark.]

The parser error internal rule response (E) is "[We] [can't] see any such thing.".

can be updated to

The parser error internal rule response (E) is "There's nothing like that here".

In this way, we can make the text our own. Note that we aren’t doing anything irrevocable. If we delete the line from our project, the response from the Standard Rules will print instead, so don’t be afraid to experiment! Just test often and pay attention to tone.

It would be a waste of time to write custom responses for actions that don’t work, obviously, so once we’ve decided what to leave in our game, we can begin customizing action responses. My advice is to prioritize common actions that testers will expect. Or that they will enjoy. Perhaps they would laugh at a response to jumping, for instance.

Remember to designate any new actions you have decided to make possible (“performing a productive action” in my example).

performing a productive action.
The report jumping rule response (A) is "Stop being silly.".

I need a little time to consider how I’ll update our shared source code, so stay tuned some updated source later in the week.

next.

We’re getting there! Let’s talk about playtesting next time.

In a Persian steampunk empire, will you use your arcane alchemy to repair a spaceship, or pilot a mech? Ignite a revolution, snuff it out, or play both sides against each other?

Heavens’ Revolution: A Lion Among the Cypress is an interactive retrofuturistic fantasy novel by Peter Adrian Behravesh, inspired by eighteenth-century Iran, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—270,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

We’re excited to announce that Heavens’ Revolution: A Lion Among the Cypress is releasing this Thursday, October 24th!

You can play the first four chapters for free today!

And don’t forget to wishlist it on Steam!

Check in to your hotel, and check out the ghosts! Sexy specters await you – but can you fix up the hotel in style so that the living guests will find luxury, too?

Haunted Hearts Hotel is an interactive erotic paranormal romance novel by Elle Grace. It’s entirely text-based, 140,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination. Choice of Games editor Mary Duffy sat down with Elle to talk about her upcoming game and spooky season!

Haunted Hearts Hotel will be available on Thursday, November 14th. You can wishlist it on Steam in advance of its release—it really helps!

I believe you come to writing for us from a more academic background but with some experience writing erotica too. Tell me a little about yourself.

I’ve made academic writing my career, that’s true. I’ve always enjoyed writing fiction, especially of the spicy variety. A couple of years back, a professor friend of mine asked if I wanted to co-write a chooseable path textbook for her marketing class to help boost student engagement. Brilliant! I had a blast working on that project, and it got me thinking, I wonder if anyone is writing choosable path erotica. That’s what led me to Heart’s Choice.

What inspired Haunted Hearts Hotel? I definitely see shades of places like Berkeley Springs, West Virginia in this game.

While I haven’t heard of Berkeley Springs, I suppose every little haunted spa town likely has a few things in common. Hot Springs and Eureka Springs, both in Arkansas (my neck of the woods), were particularly inspirational. I’ve always been fascinated by hotels like the Arlington in Hot Springs–built in 1875, and the Crescent in Eureka Springs, which was built in 1886. Hot Springs was a hangout for infamous gangsters, among them Lucky Luciano and Al Capone. You can still see bullet holes in the walls and ceiling on a bathhouse tour. The Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs has been called one of the most haunted hotels in America. The tv series Ghost Hunters even did an episode on the hotel back in 2014. Among its haunted histories, “Dr.” Norman Baker–he claimed to be a licensed physician but was not– performed experimental cancer treatments on unsuspecting patients. The hotel’s spa is located in what was once “Dr.” Baker’s morgue. The ghost stories and histories of these places were definitely an inspiration.

The characters and romance options in this game are very exciting. Can you give our readers an overview (minor spoilers are ok!) of who they’ll be encountering?

First, we meet Manfri Booney who basically runs the hotel and loves it dearly. Manfri might have been my favorite character to write. In a nutshell, they’re joyful, spiritual, and fashionable. Then there’s Remington Peabody, the investor with ulterior motives. She’s wily and sophisticated, used to getting what she wants. The romance scenes with Remington were fun to write because here’s this person who likes to be in the driver’s seat most of the time, which means she just might like to take a more submissive role in the bedroom. Next we meet Sunny Thompson, a tv star with a bubbly personality and winning smile. Sunny is interested in the paranormal, and he loves the spotlight. My favorite part about writing Sunny was how uncomplicated he is, how he’s game for anything. Both Remington and Sunny can be male, female, or non-binary. Last but most certainly not least, we have Della, our blast from the past. She’s lovely, self-possessed, and doesn’t mind telling you what she thinks. What can I say, she loves a party. I loved getting to know Della, but one of the best parts of writing her was researching 1920s fashion.

What surprised you about the writing process?

I knew nothing about coding. Like, zero. It was interesting to see how game mechanics influence narrative. This process was quite different from my usual writing process, and I’m not sure I ever quite got into the flow, but it was fun to try!

It’s spooky season! What are some of your favorite Halloween/spooky traditions? Do you have a favorite novel or film you enjoy this time of year?

Oh my goodness! This is my absolute favorite time of year. I adore autumn, and I’m drawn to all things spooky. I would be hard pressed to name a favorite, so let’s try this–an all-time favorite novel / movie for the spooky season has to be The Shining. Plus, the Stanley is an exquisitely haunted hotel. A new favorite might be Late Night with the Devil. It’s set in 1977, so perhaps a theme emerges.

What are you working on next?

I have several ideas swirling around, so we’ll see what finds legs. I have a tiny bud of an idea around using astrology to make your way through some kind of historical catastrophe. Otherwise, I’m always working on my short form erotica.

It’s the ultimate battle between werewolves and human supremacists, and your werewolf pack is caught in the middle of a four-way fight!

Werewolves 3: Evolution’s End is the third installment of Jeffrey Dean’s acclaimed “Claw, Shadow, and Sage” series, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 550,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination. Choice of Games editor Mary Duffy dat down to talk with Jeffrey about the world of Werewolves.

Werewolves 3: Evolution’s End will be available on Thursday, November 14th. You can wishlist it on Steam in advance of its release—it really helps!

It’s been four years since we had Werewolves 2: Pack Mentality and I know we couldn’t be more excited for Evolution’s End, the third installment of the “Claw, Shadow, and Sage” series. Tell me all about what we can expect in this game.

It’s been quite a trip! In the immortal words of the venerable master, Hideo Kojima: “Kept you waiting, huh?”

Now that that’s out of my system, Evolution’s End continues the events of Werewolves 2: Pack Mentality right where they left off, exploring characters and mysteries previously left unanswered. We’ll experience the endgame of the mysterious scientist Maker, and what could very well be a final battle between the main character and the former Colonel, Elan Williams. Depending on the player’s choices, there are many possible deaths to brace yourself for by the end.

I’ve also written enough romance content to fill an actual novel. Each of the five romanceable characters has several unique scenes associated with them and hundreds of lines of dialogue. Warning: It gets spicy!

Some characters who were missed in Werewolves 2 make their return here as well, and I’ll enjoy seeing readers’ reactions to it!

What was the biggest challenge in writing this third part?

The biggest challenge was definitely a little gremlin of mine called ‘scope creep,’ which is easy to get caught up in when you have pre-established characters who all have their own desires and goals.

I wanted to put everything into this installment and I got more than a little carried away over time. The word count for this monster is almost twice that of Werewolves 2–comparable to my other game, Vampire the Masquerade: Parliament of Knives. I wanted to explore every aspect of the story that I could, and that resulted in a longer development period. Gods bless the patience of my editor, Jason!

So, I had to balance the responsibility of reeling in my ambitions to make sure I get the game out to the readers who have been waiting (patiently!) to continue their story from book 2. My partner suggested that I’d either have to invent a time machine or clone myself in order to write down all the ideas I’ve discussed for this game over the last two years of development. I’m still working on the cloning thing. Any day now… (I should have started with the time machine…)

Has it been hard to hold all the pieces of two other games in your head (and your code!) coming into this final stretch?

Not particularly. The hard part wasn’t so much the number of pieces, but shifting gears from Vampire: the Masquerade back to Werewolves. The language used is different and I wanted to make sure there wasn’t an accidental tonal shift in the writing from book 2 to book 3 in the Werewolves series. Dialogue in particular is very different in Werewolves than it is in Vampire: The Masquerade, so I spent some time just writing out conversations between main characters, noting how they talk, etc… Even the main character’s observations are written differently than the MC in Parliament of Knives.

There are a lot of other elements to consider than tone as well, like making sure that I write “humans” instead of “mortals,” that kind of thing. That may sound silly, but when you’ve spent two years writing one way for a franchise, it gets ingrained in your style and it requires a manual shift in one’s brain space.

It took me around two months to fully immerse myself into this world again, and I had to re-read my own Werewolf games multiple times to get myself in the heads of the characters. What helped in this process was writing an extensive interactive recap for returning players. Putting together all the important plotlines and permutations for returning players got most of it sorted in my head right off that bat. Once I was there, it flowed fairly easily.

What do you think will surprise fans of this series the most about Evolution’s End?

There are several surprises in store! I think the biggest one is the return to a setting that most readers probably expected they’d seen the last of and it probably isn’t the first one that comes to mind. Both Maker and Williams have some interesting tricks up their sleeves for the pack, and it will be up to the player to overcome them or even possibly benefit from them if they can put their morals aside.

Oh, and there’s also some significant hints regarding the origins of the modern incarnation of the werewolf race and how they’ve been harnessed and manipulated by secretive government projects over the last century. If you like diving into the lore, there are some real treats in store!

Do you have thoughts about additional stories set in this world?

Absolutely! I had a few people ask me this a while back on the official CoG Reddit. Originally, Evolution’s End was intended to be the final book in the series, and while it largely wraps up several major plot lines in what I feel is a satisfying way, there are still areas to explore that are very relevant to the main character’s life.

Long story short, I have every intention to bring a fourth installment of the series to readers if the demand is there.

In the meantime, I’m actually writing a series of short stories set in the “Claw, Shadow, and Sage” world, and it’s been fun to explore the story from various perspectives outside the main character’s head.

What are you working on outside of interactive fiction?

I’ve put all other projects on hold while I was scrabbling to finish Evolution’s End, but earlier in the year I spent time writing the short stories I mentioned, including the story of Colonel Williams, what happened to Haken between Werewolves 1 and 3, and a series of shorts from the perspectives of Dena and Jolon’s parents. I plan to work on more of these in the future, and possibly start a Patreon to fund their creation if readers are interested in that sort of thing!

I’ve also been working on an (unofficial) prequel novel to Parliament of Knives that follows Sheriff Qui’s arrival in Ottawa during the 1970s. Qui meets and falls in love with his ghoul, Sam, and forges an alliance with Arundel before he was Prince. That’s been an absolute blast to write. Once it’s finished, I intend to make it available for free.

Last but not least, I’ve been outlining some interesting ideas I have for a novel in the LitRPG genre, since I’ve been devouring that type of book lately and would love to take a stab at making one of my own. It’s a bit out of my wheelhouse (No vampires? No werewolves? What?!?) but sometimes it’s exciting to take on something new every so often. Speaking of projects, I’d better get back to work on that time machine or I’ll never get all this writing done! Can’t wait to see what everyone thinks of Evolution’s End this November!

The results of the 2024 Interactive Fiction Competition are now live on the IFComp Website!

If you missed the livestream, it will be available over the coming days on Twitch and will be permanently archived over on YouTube shortly.

Of course, we are already planning for the ‘25 Comp. Please provide your feedback on what went well, what could have gone better, what we should do more of, and what we should consider changing or leaving behind, by filling the Post-Competition Survey:

2024 IFComp Post-Competition Survey

We are so grateful to everyone who helped make this year’s comp happen.  Thank you!

Greetings, Authors & Judges!

The end of the 2023 Interactive Fiction Competition is nearly upon us! We will announce the top 20 results via live stream at 4:00 PM Eastern on Today! Saturday, October 19th.

The stream will be held on Twitch. To confirm what time the awards stream will be for you in your time zone, visit this website.

Hope to see you there!

(My posts on this game in order are here. You should read my previous posts about this game first.)

I’ve finished, and this was an enormous slog.

From the Winter 1982 Dynacomp catalog, via eBay. Two of the other North Star adventures upcoming (Windmere and Zodiac) are listed as “Late Arrivals” meaning Uncle Harry/Whembly came earlier.

I left off last time on a moment I felt was genuinely promising. The game had bestowed some clues where I thought I just needed to interpret them and arrive at the goal, but the only clue of any note is “DIG 1800 GOLDPIECES………”. I still don’t know what the purpose of Alice and the rabbit and so forth are.

I was sidetracked into thinking (because the rabbit had a wristwatch) that maybe 1800 referred to a time, 18:00, which on a clock would be “south”. Just to the south of the painting is a privy, and maybe I could use the rope to go in….?

AGAINST THE EAST WALL. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS A PAINTING OF A YOUNG GIRL HOLDING A RABBIT. THE RABBIT IS WEARING A WRISTWATCH. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND SOUTH.

YOU SEE HERE, A NOTE

NOW WHAT? >S

YOU ARE IN A PRIVY. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND SOUTH.

NOW WHAT? >D

YOU CAN’T GO THAT WAY

No. What you can instead do (with help from Gus and Rob in the comments) is go to the random well in the northwest corner and TIE ROPE to go down. As far as I can tell no clue is related to this.

YOU ARE HANGING AT THE END OF THE ROPE.

YOU ARE AT THE END OF THE ROPE DANGLING OVER A TEN FOOT DIAMETER HOLE IN THE FLOOR OF A LARGE ROOM.

NOW WHAT? >D

YOU ARE IN THE LOWER WELL ROOM. THERE IS A 10 FT. DIAMETER HOLE HERE. THERE ARE DOORS EAST, SE, AND SOUTH.

It isn’t like “climb the well” is unreasonable but it was disappointing to think the game was going in an interesting direction only to find not much going on.

From here is when the slog begins.

YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF HALLS

NOW WHAT? >S

YOU ARE AT A DEAD END

The game decided to give another maze. I sighed and started dutifully mapping. My map is a mess and incomplete so I’m not going to give the whole thing.

Early on there’s a bit of a trap: what looks like a vault door. Perhaps the gold is inside?

NOW WHAT? >OPEN DOOR

THE DOOR SWINGS OPEN WITH A CRASH. TONS OF ICY WATER POUR THROUGH THE OPENING. THE WATER LEVEL RISES RAPIDLY! YOU DROWN!!!

WELL, YOU MANAGED TO GET YOURSELF KILLED! BETTER LUCK WITH YOUR NEXT TRY. HOPE YOU REMEMBERED TO SAVE THE GAME BEFORE TRYING SOMETHING NEW!

After enough trudging I finally hit a room with something different:

YOU ARE IN A LARGE ROOM. IN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM ON A ROUND BASE IS THE STATUE OF A WOMAN. HER ARM IS RAISED AND POINTING AT YOU.

NOW WHAT? > ROTATE STATUE

ROTATE TO WHAT DIRECTION? W

A DOOR IN THE WEST WALL OPENS. THE OTHER DOOR CLOSES.

The rotating arm lets you flip between exits. There’s a switch to a water pump to the west that will drain the water, and a battery in another. Additionally, in a completely random spot in the maze, down a dead end, there is a flashlight to go with the battery. I found the flashlight first and found if you try to light it the game just wouldn’t let me, and the player is just supposed to use their imagination to guess that a battery is required.

With the water drained, you can pass through the vault-looking door to find yourself underneath a pool that marked the center of the castle.

YOU ARE IN A DAMP CHAMBER. THERE ARE PUDDLES OF WATER EVERYWHERE. HIGH ABOVE IS A LARGE CIRCULAR MESH GRATING. YOU CAN SEE THE SKY THROUGH THE GRATING. THERE IS A TUNNEL TO THE NORTH AND AN EXIT WEST.

I thought, well, finally, this is getting back on track. Maybe we’ll have to triangulate directions based on the fact we know the pool is in the middle. Going north required light (LOAD FLASHLIGHT / LIGHT FLASHLIGHT) and I moved forward to gloriously find myself…

YOU ARE AT THE BOTTOM OF A LONG FLIGHT OF STAIRS A TUNNEL LEADS SOUTH

NOW WHAT? >U

YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TUNNELS

…back in another, entirely distinct maze.

The game is nice enough to maintain the rule that if room A goes to B, an exit from B goes to A. However, even given games like Acheton which went overboard with their mazes, I’ve never experienced a game with the mazes as grinding as this. Acheton tried to mix in variety, with things like a “turn-based Pac-man” maze, a hedge maze, and a gimmick maze that required an item; here, it is literally the same action over and over and over and over. Drop items, keep track of exits, repeat.

Incidentally, as part of all this I found an exit going back to the manhole near the cabin. Unfortunately, this is a one-way trip, so this bit that might be nice location continuity (and the opportunity to enter the maze via a different route) ends up being a softlock.

Eventually — after another moment of false promise climbing down a hole which seems like it might be the end, but no — the maze winds its way to the outside.

YOU ARE AT THE BASE OF A LARGE MOUNTAIN. THERE IS A MINE ENTRANCE TO THE EAST. A PATH LEADS NW. THERE ARE DENSE WOODS ON BOTH SIDES OF THE PATH.

NOW WHAT? >NW

YOU ARE ON A PATH IN THE WOODS. THE PATH TURNS NORTH AND SE HERE.

This leads to a fork in the road. On the northeast fork there is a “SMALL CLEARING” with a “WOODEN BENCH” and a “SHOVEL”. To the left are some graves and the last part of the game, so you might think: we are free of mazes, yes? We are now trying to use the clues to find the gold?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha no it’s another maze.

At least this one is interesting to look at.

YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF GRAVES.
A HEADSTONE HERE READS:
SIR JOHN WHEMBLY
1729 – 1818
KNIGHT & PIRATE

NOW WHAT? >S

YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF GRAVES.
A HEADSTONE HERE READS:
P. MORTON CLYDE
HUNG TILL HE DIED
HIGHWAYMAN
1632 – 1688

As I said earlier, the 1800 clue is pertinent: you’re looking for the year. However, there’s not really much reason to look hard, since it is easy to DIG in every room, and the important one is most likely going to come near the end of your mapping due to how the map is structured.

YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF GRAVES.
A HEADSTONE HERE READS:
BABY
AURUM
DIED-A-BORNIN’
1800

NOW WHAT? >DIG

YOU DIG INTO THE GRAVE.
YOUR SHOVEL HITS A COFFIN.

The coffin has a small skeleton (…sad…) but if you LIFT COFFIN you see an extra hole and the treasure.

NOW WHAT? >LIFT COFFIN

BEHIND THE SIDE OF THE COFFIN IS A HOLE IN THE SIDE OF THE GRAVE. THERE IS A CHEST IN THE HOLE.

NOW WHAT? >OPEN CHEST

THE CHEST IS FILLED WITH GOLD COINS.

A SHEET OF PAPER IN THE CHEST READS: CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE FOUND MY GOLD! NOW, LEAVE IT HERE AND SEE IF YOUR FRIENDS CAN FIND IT!!!
JOHN WHEMBLY

For my longtime readers, you know I’m willing to tolerate a lot of nonsense. I’ve played enough games from the era to be able to be “in the head” of a player from that time period and get a feeling how they’d react. I just don’t see even the most maze-crazed of fans being enthused about this. Most of the games I’ve played has kept to the unspoken rule of one (1) standard maze and if you insist on more you need to mix up the configuration somehow. So despite an absolutely standard maze in Murdac it could be one of my favorite games of 1982, and when there was a second maze (the haunted house with the flying furniture) it wasn’t really a maze at all.

But I’m mostly annoyed that the premise didn’t pay off. Uncle Harry had a genuinely good moment with home base (undercut by a bug, but still, conceptually) and I thought the follow-up might have more of that with less of the fluff of mapping an endless freeway system. The endless mazes made this game worse instead.

YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF GRAVES.
A HEADSTONE HERE READS:
HERE LIES IMA PRUDE
BORN A VIRGIN
LIVED A VIRGIN
DIED A VIRGIN
WHO SAYS YOU CANT
TAKE IT WITH YOU?
1740 – 1831

I’ve been on the hunt for R.L. Turner still, and maybe the open possibility that he or she did more games, but I’ve come up empty. However, it’s only recently these games were even unearthed, so I’m still hopeful at least more information will appear in the future.

For now, let’s return to the (fictional) future, as we get help from various animals in an alien zoo to escape a UFO.

As part of their maximalist approach, Dynacomp also did public domain distribution. Disks via eBay.

ADDENDUM: I got so caught up in the maze nonsense that I forgot to mention the resolution to the drawbridge. With the crank, you can LIFT PORTCULLIS as a direct command; the use of the crank is passive and automatic if you’re holding it, so the bit with the small hole can be ignored. With the sword you can then CUT ROPE to open the drawbridge. All this turns out to be meaningless, as there’s no point in going back outside. This seems to be due to a bug. You were supposed to leave the can with gas behind before climbing the vine, and then get it after dropping the drawbridge, then use it to start the generator. Since the generator already has gas — I assume due to a bug — none of this is necessary at all.

The fifth season of The X-Files, spanning from 1997 to 1998, marked the absolute zenith of the show’s popularity, when it put up the best average ratings in its history. Everybody seemed to want a piece of its action; even William Gibson and Stephen King submitted scripts that season.

As we learned in an earlier article, The X-Files was always two shows in one. One show consisted of the “mythology” episodes: a heavily serialized, ever more convoluted tale of extraterrestrial interference in the affairs of humans and a myriad of conspiracies deriving therefrom, in which the stakes were, it had by now been revealed, positively apocalyptic in scope, involving alien plans to exterminate the human race and repopulate the planet with their own kind. The other show consisted of one-off “monster of the week” episodes, which were freer to go to unexpected places in terms of form and content and to not always take themselves so darn seriously. The hardcore X-Files fandom that had sustained the show through its first couple of seasons had been built on the back of the first type of episode, and this was still the type that got the most attention even in the glossy mainstream press. Yet there’s a strong critical consensus today — a consensus with which I heartily agree — that almost all of the most enduring episodes are actually of the “monster of the week” sort.

It was and is almost impossible to reconcile the coexistence of the two types of episode in the same fictional universe. Doing so demands that we accept that Mulder and Scully periodically decide to take a holiday from saving humanity from extinction in order to check up on rumors of Yet Another Freaky Serial Killer in Podunk, Idaho. The creators themselves were by no means unaware of the cognitive dissonance. One argument they deployed in response was a plea to treat Mulder and Scully like Superman, Nancy Drew, or Kirk and Spock had once been treated: as characters who simply have adventures in the abstract, without sweating the details of chronology. “Who knows in what order the fictional lives of Mulder and Scully take place?” said producer-director Rob Bowman. “We never said that that was week two and this is week three in their lives. We are just saying that this is episode two and this is episode three and it happened whenever.” Such hand-waving may have been thoroughly out of step with obsessive X-Files fandom, but it does indeed seem like the most satisfying way to approach the series today, not least because it allows us to appreciate the best of the standalone episodes as the little self-contained marvels they are.

I speak of episodes like Chris Carter’s own “The Post-Modern Prometheus,” whose name is a play on the subtitle of Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. It’s a funny and sad retelling of that story, moved to twentieth-century small-town America and shot in stark black and white, the better to evoke the old monster movies from which the show drew so much inspiration. But it’s more than just an homage; the “postmodern” in the title is amply justified. The story is barreling along toward its inevitable tragic climax when Mulder decides that tragedy just won’t do. He demands to see the writer, who turns out to be a chubby teenager who’s drawing a comic book. And suddenly the entire gang — Mulder, Scully, the monster, and your stereotypical gaggle of pitchfork-wielding villagers, who were getting ready to string the last-named up from the nearest tree a minute earlier — are taking a road trip to see Cher, the monster’s favorite singer. She sings “Walking in Memphis,” his favorite song, and Mulder and Scully dance together with big smiles and glowing eyes while the monster shakes his booty right up there onstage. It’s weird and sweet and funny and yet still achingly sad at its core, and just thinking about it leaves me with a tear in my eye. I’ve just about decided that it’s my favorite episode of The X-Files ever. And it turns out that I’m in pretty good company there: both Chris Carter and David Duchovny have said the same.

Vince Gilligan’s “Bad Blood” is another standout from the fifth season. It has Mulder and Scully investigating an apparent vampire on the loose in a small Texas town — not exactly revolutionary subject matter for the show. Yet Gilligan turns the episode into a riff on Rashomon, letting us see the story from the points of view of both Mulder and Scully. For example, the sheriff of the town seen through Scully’s admiring eyes is the epitome of a handsome Southern gentleman, through Mulder’s jealous ones a bucktoothed hick. Once again, I find myself in good company in highlighting this episode. Gillian Anderson has named it as her own all-time favorite: “It was fun and challenging to film and even more fun to watch.”

Just because a vampire has to buy plastic fangs in a novelty shop, it doesn’t mean he isn’t real.

The fifth-season finale led right into the big X-Files feature film, which had actually been shot almost a year before, during the break between the fourth and fifth seasons. It was a mythology episode blown up in length by a factor of about two and a half, and was neither notably better nor worse than that description would imply. The movie was perhaps most notable for existing at all; it was highly unusual to make a theatrical film set in the world of a television series that was still on the air. Chris Carter and Fox had been inspired by the success of Star Trek Generations, featuring the cast from Star Trek: The Next Generation, but that film and its sequels had come out only after the television series in question had wrapped for good. There was some thought that The X-Files too might transition into a purely cinematic franchise at some point, although it wasn’t clear when or how that might happen. “Hopefully,” said Gillian Anderson in an interview at the time, “the film will be so successful that the series will trail off and we’ll just be doing movies once in a while.”

Despite the limitations which its tight connection to the serialized mythology of the television show would seem to place on its mass appeal, the X-Files movie grossed $84 million in the United States alone, enough to make it the twentieth biggest film of the year there. All told, it was a solid performance, if not quite the gangbusters one that might have prompted Fox to think of turning The X-Files into a spectacle available exclusively on big rather than small screens sooner rather than later.

Even with all of its success, however, the show was navigating some logistical turbulence. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson had both signed five-season contracts at the outset, and Duchovny wasn’t at all sure he wanted to renew his as the fifth season was winding down. He had aspirations of making the leap from television star to becoming a sought-after leading man in movies that weren’t named The X-Files, but this would be hard to do if he had to be off in Vancouver playing Mulder for all but a few months of every year. Further, he had just gotten married to the actress Téa Leoni, whose role on the sitcom The Naked Truth bound her to Hollywood. Duchovny gave Fox an ultimatum: he would join Gillian Anderson in signing a two-year contract extension if and only if the entire production was moved to Southern California.

It was a tough call — the move would make the show dramatically more expensive to produce each week — but nobody could imagine The X-Files without Mulder, and certainly nobody thought the show had run its course as of yet, not when it had just enjoyed its biggest season ever. So, Duchovny got his way. The folks who were working on the show in Vancouver were given a choice between relocation and severance packages. These dozens of people who had their lives so disrupted so that one man could have the arrangement that pleased him might be forgiven for concluding that David Duchovny was a self-entitled jerk. He didn’t do his reputation among them any more favors in the aftermath of the move, when he went around disparaging their hometown of Vancouver and its “400 inches of rain per day” in interviews on the talk-show circuit. But so be it; the show must go on.

The results of the move to California were evident from the first shot of the first episode of the sixth season: a desert landscape baking under a clear blue sky. That wasn’t the sort of shot you were ever going to get in Vancouver. The default tone of the show brightened in tandem with the sunshine quotient, prompting derision from some quarters of its hardcore fandom, who labeled this new Southern Californian incarnation “X-Files Lite.”

But these people do not speak for me. For all that I wouldn’t leap to defend David Duchovny from anyone who said he was a bit of a tool at this stage of his life, I’m afraid I can’t get behind those other criticisms. In fact, I’ll go way out on a limb and say that I like the sixth season the best of all of them, and that at least some of the seventh season isn’t that far behind it in my esteem. To my mind, the standalone episodes got warmer and wiser and smarter and funnier than they had ever been before. Granted, most continue to play with established mass-media archetypes. If not usually original in conception, though, they’re sly and clever in execution, with that good old Mulder and Scully charm and with more willingness than ever to stretch and bend the formal boundaries of the show. In their willingness to burrow deep into the universals of life and fate, I daresay that some of them remind me of nothing so much as the masterful short stories of Ted Chiang.

Vince Gilligan’s “Drive” opens with a helicopter’s eye view of a car chase that is obviously intended to evoke the O.J. Simpson Bronco chase over the highways of Los Angeles. Indeed, it initially presents itself as a special news broadcast that’s airing in place of your normally scheduled X-Files episode; these seasons do a lot of this sort of mucking about with credits sequences, etc., as if the fiction is escaping from the cage in which it is meant to be contained. The episode evolves into The X-Files’s take on the tautly wound 1994 film Speed. Here as there, the plot hinges on a vehicle that cannot stop if dire consequences are to be avoided. In this case, though, it’s Fox Mulder who’s behind the wheel, with a man behind him in the backseat who will die if he doesn’t keep moving. The reason why he will die may be down to the usual conspiratorial mumbo-jumbo, but that has little bearing on the propulsive problem at hand. This was arguably the first time The X-Files went full-on action movie — and, lo and behold, it does it rather brilliantly. (In a meta sense, “Drive” is also famous as the episode where Vince Gilligan first met Bryan Cranston, the man you see in the backseat above. Cranston would go on to become the star of Breaking Bad, Gilligan’s own acclaimed television show.)

At first glance, the most surprising thing about Chris Carter’s “Triangle” may seem to be that it took The X-Files this long to get around to doing an episode about the Bermuda Triangle. It was worth the wait. Defying a promise Carter made in the early days of the show to never fall down the wormhole of time-travel fiction, the script does indeed send Mulder back in time, to the first days of the Second World War, where he winds up aboard a passenger ship that’s about to be commandeered by some of its Nazi passengers. Doppelgängers of both Cancer Man and Scully are aboard, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. The important thing is that this gives William B. Davis the chance to try on an SS uniform that suits him to a tee, and gives Gillian Anderson the opportunity to try her hand at playing a hard-edged femme fatale straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel. The episode is fast-paced and frothy and a little bit campy. Perhaps most of all, though, it’s a tour de force of technical film-making: in conscious emulation of Alfred Hitchcock’s experimental classic Rope, its 45 minutes consist of just 24 ultra-extended single-camera takes. (By way of comparison, the average X-Files episode contained around 1000 switches of perspective.) “To watch ‘Triangle’ now,” writes the critic Emily St. James, “is to remember a time when this was the most daring show on television.”

The two-parter “Dreamland,” written by Vince Gilligan, John Shiban, and Frank Spotnitz, opens with Mulder and Scully on yet another nighttime drive to Area 51 to meet yet another shadowy contact who may or may not be who he says he is. In what can all too easily be read as a meta-fictional message to a certain kind of rabid X-Files fan, Scully idly wonders whether the two of them will ever outgrow this stuff and make better, fuller lives for themselves. Shortly thereafter, they get waylaid by the authorities, the infamous Men In Black who are always lurking around places like this. But then a test of an alien spacecraft creates a quantum disturbance that swaps Mulder’s consciousness into the lead MiB’s body, and vice versa. Much discomfort and hilarity ensues, as Mulder learns that being an MiB is just a government job like any other. While he tries to adapt to life as a paunchy, middle-aged family man, his alter ego embraces with gusto the swinging-bachelor lifestyle that Mulder’s looks have always cut him out for. Lessons are learned on both sides, until a way is found to reverse the trend. In other words, this episode turns all of the stuff about aliens and conspiracies into an excuse to tell a more resonant, universal story about life choices, opportunity costs, and roads not taken. Plus it’s really, really funny.

The ghosts in Chris Carter’s “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas” are played by Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin, two stars from an earlier era of television who probably would never have appeared on the show if The X-Files was still shooting in Vancouver. The episode is another meditation on life choices, this one with a spooky Dickensian vibe, with some crackerjack comic-tragic dialog. But my favorite part is the ending, when Mulder and Scully hunker down in the Mulder’s cozy apartment to exchange the gifts they promised one another they wouldn’t buy. It’s hard to imagine an earlier incarnation of the show embracing the spirit of the holidays in such a forthright, non-ironic way.

“Monday,” written by Vince Gilligan and John Shiban, is another episode that concerns time travel — once that genie had been let out of the bottle, it was hard to stuff it back in — along with, yet again, choices and consequences. It’s The X-Files’s version of Groundhog Day. We see the same day play out over and over, a day in which a desperate man with a bomb decides to rob a bank and Mulder and Scully keep getting caught in the crosshairs in different ways.

“Arcadia” by Daniel Arkin is The X-Files meets The Stepford Wives. Mulder and Scully go undercover as a married couple, moving into a white-bread Middle American neighborhood where residents whose lives are insufficiently tidy have a nasty habit of disappearing. The commentary on the horrors of suburban conformity isn’t groundbreaking by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s great fun to watch Mulder and Scully play house for the benefit of the neighbors, passive-aggressively needling one another all the while. It almost goes without saying by this point that the monster at the heart of the case they’re investigating is the least interesting part of the episode.

One of the ways the show’s brain trust tried to keep their stars engaged during the later seasons was to offer them the opportunity to contribute behind the camera as well, by submitting scripts of their own. This sort of gesture doesn’t always turn out well, but David Duchovny at least proved a surprisingly soulful and agile writer, putting his earlier life as a graduate student in literature to good use. In “The Unnatural,” which he directed as well as wrote, he cleverly juxtaposes The X-Files’s standard version of aliens with aliens of another type: the Black baseball players who braved scorn and violence to desegregate the sport in the 1940s. It’s a lovely, luminous episode that oozes the magical-realist quality the show was embracing so successfully by this point. Sure, it owes a lot to Field of Dreams in tone and feel, but it’s hard to disparage it for that. Given the choice between conspiracy theories and the crack of wood on cowhide on a starry summer night, I’ll take the latter every time.

As we saw in an earlier article in reference to the alien-autopsy documentary, The X-Files loved nothing better than to satirize its parent network’s tackier tendencies. One of the urtexts of Fox’s brand of tabloid journalism was the series called Cops, an early example of “reality” television in which a camera crew rode along in the backseat of a police cruiser on the mean streets of a big American city. (Rather astonishingly, Cops is still on television to this day, being in its 36th season as of this writing.) Vince Gilligan’s “X-Cops” is a picture-perfect re-creation of the show, from the Cops theme song and credits sequence that take the place of the standard X-Files version of same to the shaky handheld camerawork, from the suspects and witnesses who live in a liminal space between sympathy and ridicule to the know-it-all police officers who give us the benefit of their hard-won wisdom in running commentaries. Into this hard-bitten milieu are dropped Mulder and Scully on the trail of a monster of the week. It’s incongruous and bizarre and most of all hilarious, another of those episodes that are so brave and cheeky and completely out of the box that it’s hard to believe they were actually made. Who would ever have imagined during the first season of The X-Files that the premise would someday be bent far enough to yield episodes like this one?

Lately I’ve been indulging in a thought experiment, or maybe more of a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Wouldn’t it have been neat if The X-Files had taken a bow already after a sixth season that was absolutely spectacular? Said season would have been created by junking all of the increasingly tiring and tiresome mythology episodes from the extant sixth and seventh seasons and then throwing out the handful of clunkers among the standalone episodes as well. Do all that, and you’d end up with what I’m going to have the audacity to call one of the best single seasons of television ever created. Such a victory tour would necessarily conclude with Vince Gillian’s “Je Souhaite,” the last standalone episode of the real seventh season, an episode that’s as universal as a fairy tale — which is almost literally what it is, come to think of it. Here Mulder and Scully meet a genie — yes, complete with the bottle — who has the power to grant three wishes. We all know how stories like this tend to go. Be very, very careful what you wish for, kids! When Mulder gets his chance to wish, he asks for peace on Earth — not a good choice, because the easiest way to achieve that is to simply remove the species that has been causing all of the chaos on our planet all these centuries. But then, after using his second wish to undo his first and repopulate the planet, he hits upon the perfect third wish, by looking at the genie herself with eyes of empathy. The best way to change the world, he realizes, is by showing kindness to the people who are right there in front of you. What a perfect grace note that would have been for the show to go out on…

Whether you love or hate the sun-kissed X-Files of the sixth season and beyond, there can be no question that it marked a commercial turning point for the show — and not in a good way. By the end of the sixth season, the average episode’s viewership had dropped by almost 25 percent from what it had been just one year earlier. Measured by the standard metrics, The X-Files was still a popular show, but it no longer took pride of place at the center of the zeitgeist, no longer garnered shiny awards and glossy magazine covers and navel-gazing think-pieces from critics and pundits. It had reached the top of its mountain of destiny a year earlier, and now it was on the downward slope that lay just beyond.

What were the reasons for its decline? I’m tempted to say it had something to do with the mythology episodes that had always dominated in public discussion of the show. These had by now grown so convoluted and ridiculous that it was becoming hard for even the most sanguine optimist to believe they were going anywhere coherent. (Scully is abducted by aliens! Scully is back! Scully has incurable alien-caused brain cancer! Scully is cured! The aliens aren’t real, they were just a carefully engineered distraction all along! No, belay that, actually the aliens are real! Mulder is abducted! Mulder is back!) “The mythology was becoming an awful lot for people to continue to keep track of,” admits X-Files executive producer and writer Frank Spotnitz.

At the same time, though, this objection hardly began with the sixth season. The more encompassing explanation for the show’s decline in popularity is likely the simple fact that even the biggest cultural phenomena always run their course and then give way to fresh things. To wit: right in the middle of The X-Files’s sixth season, the cable-television channel HBO aired the first episode of The Sopranos, a heavily serialized mobster drama that was free of most of the strictures of broadcast television, among them restrictions on language, violence, and sexual content, a rigid 45-minute running time for every single episode, and the need to churn out twenty episodes or more every single season. The Sopranos inaugurated the fifteen-year stretch that some critics today like to call The Golden Age of Cable Television, during which the medium eclipsed theatrical films in many respects to become the most prestigious and satisfying of all forms of moving image. In illustrating that long-term serialized storytelling could attract a mass audience on television in genres other than the soap opera, The X-Files was an important forerunner to shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. But it was not one of their peers.

The gradual decline of The X-Files’s popularity continued in the seventh season. Chris Carter and his colleagues actually went into the season thinking it would probably be the last. Not only were the ratings getting slowly but inexorably worse, but the contracts of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were due to run out once again when the season was over, and Duchovny was less interested than ever in renewing his. In fact, he was suing Fox and Chris Carter personally for allegedly selling syndication rights to the show to a subsidiary network for less than their full market value, which impacted his own residual earnings. As one would expect, the legal battle “didn’t help the creative energy,” as Carter put it.

This late in its run, the show had just one surefire way of making headlines again, however briefly. In light of this, the makers’ handling of the transition of Mulder and Scully from platonic partners to a romantic couple is as bizarre as any monster of the week that ever appeared on the show. In Vince Gilligan and Frank Spotnitz’s “Millennium” — an episode whose main function was providing closure for the semi-spinoff series of the same name, which had been abruptly cancelled after three seasons — Mulder and Scully celebrate the arrival of Y2K by sharing their first ever onscreen kiss. Thirteen episodes later, in “All Things,” which was written and directed by Gillian Anderson, it’s off-handedly revealed that the two are now sleeping in the same bed. And that’s it. Restraint has its virtues, but come on! Shippers who had been waiting 150 episodes for the other shoe — or perhaps some other articles of clothing — to drop were rewarded with this damp squib. I have no idea why the makers didn’t turn “Mulder and Scully finally do the deed!” into a mass-media event. As it was, they squandered their last bit of dry powder from their glory days in about as anticlimactic a fashion as can be imagined.

The show easily could have — and probably should have — ended after the seventh season. Yet it didn’t. David Duchovny agreed to settle his lawsuit with Fox, and then shocked everyone by agreeing as well to play Mulder just a little bit longer — for another half of a season, to be precise. The powers that were at Fox decided that was good enough for them, especially given that they didn’t have any strong candidates to hand to air in place of The X-Files on Sunday nights. And so it was on to the eighth season. It was decided that Mulder would be absent for the first half of the season, having been abducted by aliens. (What other explanation could there possibly be?) Then he would return for the second half, so that the show could finish strong.

An actor named Robert Patrick won the unenviable role of Special Agent John Doggett, the replacement for one of the most iconic television characters of recent history. This may explain why everyone was at such pains not to call him a replacement. “Robert Patrick is an addition to the show,” insisted Chris Carter. When David Duchovny did come back halfway through the season, he immediately began to complain loudly about having become “peripheral. Mulder’s story was one of three stories going on and it didn’t feel like the same show to me.” At the risk of editorializing too much, I must say that my mind is fairly boggled by the egotism on display in this comment. What did he expect would happen?

By the last episode of the eighth season, when Mulder and Scully had a baby together, the proverbial shark had been pretty well jumped. And yet the second half of the season, after Duchovny’s return, actually managed to slightly outdraw the end of the previous one with the viewing public. The show got renewed yet again, even though Duchovny now declared himself to be gone for good — no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

The first episode of the ninth season had yet to air when, on September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked four American passenger planes, flying two of them into the World Trade Center in New York City and one into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. (The hijackers of the fourth airplane, which was intended for the White House, met with heroic resistance from the passengers, and that plane wound up crashing over Pennsylvania, killing everyone onboard.) The X-Files was something of a shambling anachronism already by that point in the eyes of most television viewers, but this tragic day of infamy cemented that status. The mood of the nation changed on a dime; just like that, the epoch that some now call “The Long Nineties” came to a smashing end.

The 1990s had been the Age of Irony, when an anthemic hit single could be named after a brand of teenybopper deodorant, when videogames like Duke Nukem 3D were reveling gleefully in senseless violence amidst the trashy detritus of conspicuous consumption. And why should it have been otherwise, during a decade whose biggest ongoing news story was the dot.com bubble? “We’re the middle children of history, man,” said Brad Pitt of Generation Slacker in Fight Club. “We have no Great War, no Great Depression.”

Earnestness made a big comeback after September 11. Suddenly people had a cause again, Wanted to Believe again — not in the existence of aliens, conspiracy theories about which now seemed like the childish diversions that they had always been, but in the very government and military the conspiracy theorists had spent so many years questioning if not reviling. By September 21, the approval rating of President George W. Bush, who had lost a national popular vote to Al Gore just ten months earlier but squeaked out a controversial win in the Electoral College, had soared to 90 percent, the highest ever recorded.

It was difficult to imagine how any show could be more out of step with the changed times than The X-Files was. “The X-Files is the product of a time that is passed,” wrote the columnist Andrew Stuttaford. “It is a relic of the Clinton years, as dated as a dot.com share certificate, a stained blue dress, or Kato Kaelin’s reminiscences.” All of which is to say that it was all but foreordained that its ninth season would be its last before said season ever aired its first episode. The new standard bearer of the American zeitgeist was 24, another serialized show about a law-enforcement agent, but this time one who had no doubts whatsoever about the righteousness of his country or his government, a two-fisted true believer who wasn’t above a spot of torture when it was the only way to foil the Axis of Evil. Pop music and videogames too heeded the call: Celine Dion’s nerve-jangling rendition of “God Bless America” climbed the charts as the lead single of a charity album of the same name, while Duke Nukem yielded to Call of Duty.

Amidst it all, The X-Files shambled through its last season as best it could. (Raising a defiant middle finger to the scoffers, the makers even named one episode “Jump the Shark.”) David Duchovny, whose career as a cinematic leading man wasn’t going quite so well as he had thought it would, agreed to rejoin the cast for a 90-minute series finale, which endeavored to wrap up the mythology story lines about as neatly as could be done in that span of time. “It gives viewers answer after answer, until it feels like we’re reading somebody’s Geocities fan page for wild theories about the show,” writes Emily St. James of the finale. “But it’s also dramatically, death-defyingly boring.” When all was said and done, Cancer Man got blown up by a helicopter and everyone else rode off into the sunset of a changed America.

But they didn’t go away forever. Anyone at all familiar with the post-millennial media landscape knows that nothing ever seems to go away forever. There have been two attempts to date to revive The X-Files since that last hurrah of 2002.

In 2008, Chris Carter got the old gang back together for a movie. The X-Files: I Want to Believe had a budget less than half the size of the first X-Files film before adjusting for inflation. “It’s funny, but on the series we prided ourselves each week with making a little movie,” muses Carter. “Then, when it came time to do the second X-Files movie, we were given the money and the opportunity to make, literally, a little movie.” Probably smartly, he chose to do an expanded monster-of-the-week episode rather than reopening the Pandora’s box of the mythology. Even so, it was hard to figure out what reason the film really had to exist; it came a little too soon to be a full-blown nostalgia play, even as its moody atmosphere still felt badly out of joint with the times around it during that summer of 2008, when Barack Obama’s “Yes, We Can!” was the slogan of the moment. The critics were not impressed, and its box-office receipts were less than a third of the first film’s — again, without adjusting for inflation.

Seven and a half years later, Carter made a more concerted effort to revive the show, this time as another television series on Fox — albeit one with dramatically truncated episode counts in comparison to those of its original run. By now, the times were falling more into step with The X-Files’s tendency to see everything in the world through the lens of conspiracy. (More on that subject momentarily.) Nevertheless, the new episodes never quite landed like a lot of observers expected them to. The scripts felt underwhelming, the alien stuff way past its sell-by date, and one at least of the two leads seemed a little bored and distracted. Ironically, it was Gillian Anderson now who wasn’t at all sure she wanted to be there, and who most obviously turned in performances that reflected this ambivalence. The fact was that she was a more sought-after actor than David Duchovny this far along in their respective careers, with a larger number of interesting roles in both her past and her future.

Darin Morgan, the man who first made The X-Files safe for comedy, came back to pen “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” one of the few episodes where the revival found some creative traction. The lizard-man in tighty whities who serves as the monster of the week here turns out to be a normal lizard who got bit by a human. After spending some time on a job peddling mobile-phone plans in an anonymous strip mall, all he wants to do is become a lizard once again. And who can blame him?

The revival sputtered out in 2018, after two seasons with a total of sixteen episodes between them. As of this writing, The X-Files’s legacy is once more being left in peace. But never say never, especially in these current times of ours when nostalgia is a bigger business than it has ever been.

And what can we say about the legacy of The X-Files now, a quarter-century after its high time in the zeitgeist?

Well, as I think that even many of its most zealous boosters will admit by now, it was a show subject to wild swings in quality, not just from season to season but from week to week. When all is said and done, The X-Files probably produced only about 20 to 25 episodes — that is to say, about one season’s worth of them, in the course of nine seasons — that might legitimately be called classics. Still, that’s a lot more than nothing, and a better batting average than the vast majority of television shows achieve. And betwixt and between its standout moments of brilliance, The X-Files offered plenty more episodes that remain perfectly watchable today despite their flaws, especially if you’re one of those who can enjoy just hanging out with its two charming leads.

On the broader canvas of television history, The X-Files occupies an important position. It wasn’t the first show to have survived thanks largely to the activism of a relatively small group of passionate fans — the original Star Trek leaps immediately to mind as a much earlier instance of same — but it was the first to be joined at the hip from the get-go with Internet fandom. In this sense, it was a harbinger of a new reality, in which almost every artifact of traditional media would have to adjust to a life spent in a symbiotic relationship with cyberspace.

Then, too, as I already noted, the mythology episodes paved the way for the Golden Age of Cable Television by serving as a demonstration of both the power of long-form storytelling on television and, less happily but no less usefully, of some of the ways it can go wrong. The conspiracy angle in The X-Files quickly became, to steal a phrase from the Cold War historian David Martin, a “wilderness of mirrors.” Partly this was down to aesthetic intent, but it was equally down to practical necessity. The only way to keep the conspiracy story arc going was to just keep putting more and more mirrors in the heroes’ way. Later serialized shows — not all of them by any means, but a lot of them — would use more limited seasonal episode counts, or in some cases entire runs that were planned as limited from the start, to do better on this front. We should never forget that, in this respect as in a number of others, The X-Files was a pioneer, with few if any examples to follow; we therefore shouldn’t be overly surprised that it did so much wrong. Indeed, the media world into which it was born made it effectively impossible for it to do some of what shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad later did so well. In short, The X-Files’s creators played the cards they were dealt as well as they knew how, and there’s never any shame in that.

All that said, there does remain another sense in which The X-Files seems today less like a brave pioneer and more like one of the shadowy agents of evil who featured so prominently in so many of its episodes, and it’s this elephant in the room with which I feel sadly obliged to close this series of articles.

Chris Carter most definitely didn’t invent conspiracy theories; the roots of the modern fixation on evil cabals manipulating events behind the scenes can be traced back at least as far as 1903 and the infamous antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Yet conspiracy theories have been weaponized in the years since The X-Files went off the air to a degree arguably not seen since the Nazis used them as a partial justification for the Holocaust. Carter himself was never a committed believer in UFO conspiracies; he saw them first and foremost as a cool set of ready-made fictions around which to build his show. Many or most fans of said show doubtless saw them the same way. But, by doing so much to break conspiracy culture into the American mainstream, The X-Files must shoulder some small portion of the blame for what seems to be an increasingly post-truth United States, where uncomfortable facts like electoral defeats can be hand-waved away with claims of voter fraud, where essential public-health measures like vaccines can be imagined to be agents of mind control, where people can convince themselves to kill in the cause of thwarting an international pedophile ring being run out of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor, and where duly elected members of Congress can tell us that the current administration in the White House is attacking the parts of the country that it doesn’t like with bespoke hurricanes. This is the poison pill lurking behind that iconic poster hanging on Mulder’s wall. If everyone decides that just “wanting” to believe is justification enough for doing so, this world of ours is going to wind up in a very bad place. It strikes me as deeply unfortunate that, in all of its 218 episodes and two movies, The X-Files never saw fit to address the deeper psychological dilemma of such a smart man who would tack such a dumb poster to his wall. On the contrary, as late as the first revival season in 2016, the show was presenting in a fairly heroic light a conspiracy monger who is quite plainly based on Alex Jones of InfoWars, a pernicious huckster of dangerous, reactionary nonsense. In a recent survey of X-Files fan attitudes conducted by the academic researcher Bethan Jones, one anonymous respondent said that “I always thought of The X-Files in retrospective as an (incidental?) instrument [in] getting people to become paranoid of their government, which is an instrument of the real power to manipulate democracies.” This seems to me a fair assessment.

Of course, The X-Files is at the very worst a small proximate cause of the situation in which we find ourselves today. And yet even its tiny portion of the blame is enough to cast a faint shadow over any retrospective like this one. It took us a long time to go from the alien-autopsy film to QAnon, but it seems safe to say that The X-Files had a hand in propagating both of them. The best we can do now is hope the day will come when it can be remembered as just a groundbreaking television show again, with no further prevarication required. Until then, it will have to remain both a victim and a proof of a force that is more insidiously frightening than any alien invasion: the law of unintended consequences.

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

Sources: The books “Deny All Knowledge”: Reading the X-Files, edited by David Lavery, Angela Hague, and Marla Cartwright; Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to The X-Files by Peter Knight; Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files by Zack Handlen & Emily St. James; X-Files Confidential: The Unauthorized X-Philes Compendium by Ed Edwards; Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum; The Legacy of The X-Files, edited by James Fenwick and Diane A. Rogers; Opening the X-Files: A Critical History of the Original Series by Darren Mooney; and The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman. Computer Gaming World of August 1998.

Online sources include “X-Files Creator Wants You to Chill Out on the Conspiracy Theories” by Jordan Hoffman at Vanity Fair.

We’re proud to announce that Ink and Intrigue, the latest in our “Heart’s Choice” line of multiple-choice interactive romance novels, is now available for iOS and Android in the “Heart’s Choice” app. You can also download it on Steam, or enjoy it on our website.

It’s 30% off until October 25th!

Heed magic’s call! Find love on a lush tropical island among immortal warrior-mages as you explore ancient mysteries, craft dragon-rune tattoos, and discover your true loyalties. What passions shape your path?

Ink and Intrigue is an interactive erotic fantasy novel by Leia Talon, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—300,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

As a seasoned spy from the kingdom of Minare, you have been sent as an emissary to the Kitherin warrior-mages of Ra’zai, whose tattoos give them supernatural abilities and whose magical rites bond them to powerful creatures from another world.

But, as soon as you enter Ra’zai, you hear the call of the Kitherin. The magic has chosen you, and now, your fingertips tingle and your heart pounds. An unnamed need grows within, like a thirst that can’t be quenched. Magic infuses your very breath.

As your magic expands, so does your heart. Which of your new Kitherin companions calls to you? Are you attracted to Teo, the soft-spoken tattoo artist whose muscular body is covered in tattoos and whose eyes blaze with amber fire? When he paints dragon runes onto your skin, do you feel the power of his heart as well as his magic? Or to Kai, whose dark hair contrasts with brilliant blue eyes: his mastery as a warrior is unmatched, but his quest to overturn a corrupt regime has earned him the opposition of the Kitherin Council. Perhaps you prefer Rae, a feisty fellow initiate, with her dark skin and wicked smile. Rae’s determination is legendary—she has failed the trials before, but never stops trying—and her boisterous spirit is unbreakable. Or maybe Thea is the one for you, with her sea-green eyes and copper hair. Elegant and serene, dedicated guardian of the temple—but if you earn her trust, she will show you her playful side, and sing the songs of her Fae ancestors.

But what does this call mean for your duty to the crown? Will you confess the clandestine role you’ve played for your king, or keep your secrets and leave your past behind? What information will you send back? Will you use your position to build alliances with the Kitherin Council and other nations, or will you use your spy skills of blackmail and poison to get what you want?

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, bi, and/or asexual.
• Romance a passionate artist, a serene sage, a feisty initiate, or a determined warrior.
• Choose high-heat or sweet options, or avoid sex scenes entirely.
• Form a psychic bond with a magical creature: choose a dragon, a griffin, or a phoenix.
• Learn how to craft dragon-rune tattoos, and infuse your art with powerful magic.
• Explore a lush island paradise crowned with ancient temples, peaceful healing gardens, a hidden library, and sun-swept beaches with the perfect waves for surfing.
• Indulge in magic elixirs and delectable food as you revel under the full moon.
• Dive through portals to strengthen your ties with your bonded creature, and explore other worlds!

When magic calls, where will your heart find its home?

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

We’re super excited for the release of Hunter: The Reckoning — The Beast of Glenkildove on December 19th!

Today, for the first time, you can try the free demo on Steam! (Don’t forget to add us to your Steam wishlist! The more wishlists we get, the better the game will do on Steam on release day.)

Full moon. Cold night. Dark shadow. Warm gun. The Beast of Glenkildove has stalked Ireland for centuries. Now, you must hunt it.

Hunter: The Reckoning — The Beast of Glenkildove is an interactive novel by William Brown, set in the World of Darkness. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Eight years ago, when you were eighteen, the Beast of Glenkildove killed one of your closest friends. You’ve never returned to Ireland since that day.

It’s difficult to remember what happened. As you’ll soon learn, the human mind blots out the traumatic memories of facing a werewolf.

Now, you must stalk that werewolf across the shadowed glens and fogbound mountains of Ireland, hunting a shapeshifting killing machine with your friends, your wits, and a shotgun.

But you and your friends are not alone. You have entered a world of Hunters, humans who dare to challenge the dominion of the monsters who rule over them. Can you trust the fanatics of the Society of Leopold, the scholars and savants of the Arcanum, the ruthless Duffy crime family, or the enigmatic biotech company Fada?

Can you even trust your oldest friends?

Redemption for some. Retribution for others. A reckoning for all.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; befriend or romance humans and supernaturals of any gender
• Kill, study, capture, document or negotiate with the creatures you hunt
• Craft your own traps, gear, and weapons to take the Hunt to the enemy
• Find camaraderie and romance with the only people in the world that you can trust to fight alongside you
• Adopt and train your own wolfhound to assist you in the Hunt
• Build and maintain your own safehouse at the Wolf’s Head Inn in the Wicklow Mountains

Become the thing that even nightmares fear.

Heed magic’s call! Find love on a lush tropical island among immortal warrior-mages as you explore ancient mysteries, craft dragon-rune tattoos, and discover your true loyalties. What passions shape your path?

Ink and Intrigue is an interactive erotic fantasy novel by Leia Talon, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—300,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

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Continuing to build our framework for a variable IF text.

last time, on let’s make IF…

Last week, I added support for “fake” endings, as well as a clear screen functionality to present eight individual “poems” in a recognizable IF format. The techniques should be largely familiar at this point: text substitutions using tables. You can get a refresher here.

more of the same.

As promised last time, I’m not going to write about the same techniques over and over again. This post will consist mostly of updates based on things we’ve done before. We can start by adding an opening “blurb,” or preamble, to our texts. We already have a “before looking” rule that we can hitch our new text to.

before looking:
	say the fake banner;
	say the preamble.

I’ll follow through with a “to say” definition that references a table, and make the relevant table. You can check it out in the updated source code I’ve shared below.

We’ll also need to change the room description to match our current model. That will work the same way: a definition and a table.

the description of ABR is "[a variable room description]".

to say a variable room description:
	choose row with an index of the magic number from the table of room descriptions;
	say the text entry.

Likewise, a text for the table (the actual thing in the game world, not a code table in our program) printed during the room description (this is a “paragraph about” and not a “description of” the table). We already had something for this, but let’s update it to work the way our other texts do.

rule for writing a paragraph about the table:
	if something is held by the table:
		say "[a table text]";
		say line break;
		list the contents of table, with newlines, indented, with extra indentation;
	otherwise:
		say "This is an error condition. Something should always be on the table.";
	now the table is mentioned.
	
to say a table text:
	choose row with an index of the magic number in the table of actual table information;
	say text entry.

Note that I’ve included an error message. I don’t intend for the cards to be actually takeable, but I haven’t done anything to prevent taking them yet. I’ll leave something in the code as a reminder and/or warning.

Room names:

the printed name of ABR is "[ABR]".

to say ABR:
	choose row with an index of the magic number from the table of room names;
	say the text entry.

Zooming along! The last item on our list is a means for printing multiple card names. Since this is part of a complicated process for listing the table’s contents, things are a bit trickier. Not much, though! We’ve done this all before. Here’s our list-printing customization as it is right now:

rule for printing the name of a tarot (called the current card) while listing contents:
	say "[printed name of the current card][if the clicker of the current card is not zero] (times drawn: [clicker of the current card])".

Since we already have a known noun (the current card), we can use that to look up the right information. First, a short table of contents.

table of card references
tarot	table
redc	table of red cards
bluec	table of blue cards
yellowc	table of green cards
orangec	table of orange cards

Since we have tied individual tables to each card, it becomes a matter of checking the right table against the magic number–familiar territory by now. Here’s the final rule:

rule for printing the name of a tarot (called the current card) while listing contents:
	choose row with a tarot of the current card from the table of card references;
	let t be the table entry;
	choose row with an index of the magic number from t;
	say "[card entry][if the clicker of the current card is not zero] (times drawn: [clicker of the current card])".

There! Since this is only happening during listing, we can leave the “real” printed name alone in case we need it for something.

I mentioned needing to sync up magic number across all outputs, so I moved the “increment the magic number” phrase to the very end of the turn. I also added numbers to our tables, just so we can see that everything is lined up. Here’s what turn 4 of our “game” looks like:

Portrait With Wolf ^_^ 
An absolute delight 
Release 4 / Serial number 241007 / Inform 7 v10.1.2 / F 

Preamble 4.
Room name 4.
Room description 4.

Table paragraph 4.
  a red 4
  a blue 4
  a green 4 (times drawn: 1)
  an orange 4 (times drawn: 2)

>
a placeholder for randomness.

green. 4

This is a fake tombstone entry from the table of fake assertions. 4


   *** fake epitaph 4 ***




Press any key to *RESTART*! 4

There we are! Everything’s pulling from the right tables, at the right time. As always, you can check the updated source code for more details. You can copy and paste it directly into your own IDE and run it for yourself!

This week’s source.

next.

The to-do list is getting shorter! We need to restrict the parser so that players don’t run off with our cards. Similarly, I’ll have to customize parser errors and default messages for our game. That’s an important aspect of any polished game!

I’d like to cap things off with an essay about playtesting… within two weeks, I hope. Stay tuned.

(Continued from my last post.)

The essential vibe that Uncle Harry’s Will had that felt “original” wasn’t necessarily the car aspect as much as deciphering a riddle while applying it to a large landscape. Many adventures have had cryptic instructions as part of their gameplay, but they usually don’t involve what might happen in a realistic “puzzle hunt” where there’s an enormous amount of extra space, and you have to apply the riddles/poems/clues in a way that whittles down the possibilities. The MIT Puzzle Hunt — the in-person component, at least — has an entire college campus as fair game, but only a small percentage is used.

I’ve hit this moment in Whembly Castle, and I’m not sure yet how to decipher the clues. While the game doesn’t start you with a poem there are some hidden within the castle itself.

Cover of one of the Dynacomp catalogs, from Jason Scott.

But first: last time I had stopped right before getting down to the bottom of a ladder under a manhole. At the very bottom is a compass, which can be used at the foggy lake.

YOU ARE IN A SMALL CHAMBER AT THE END OF A TUNNEL. THERE IS A LADDER FASTENED TO THE SIDE OF THE WALL. A LARGE SHAFT RISES ABOVE YOU. A TUNNEL LEADS WEST.

YOU SEE HERE, A SMALL COMPASS

Going west from here leads to darkness. It may simply be a red herring or it may be the tunnel gets entered via the opposite direction later. I don’t have any obvious light sources; while I have a can of gasoline, there’s no method of lighting it. The rusty key, the iron bar, and the oars aren’t helpful; I’ve got the deck of cards, but my character isn’t Gambit.

YOU ARE IN AN EAST-WEST TUNNEL THE TUNNEL SLOPES UPWARD TO THE EAST.

NOW WHAT? >W

IT IS PITCH BLACK HERE. TO CONTINUE WITHOUT LIGHT COULD BE DANGEROUS.

Leaving this be for the moment, I went to take the compass to the lake and got hit horribly by the boat bug again: while in the boat, the game claims you can’t go west (even though you should be able to). Rob suggested dropping the oars but I found it made no difference. I went as far as restarting my game altogether in case I had some corruption. Being able to go WEST ended up just working sometimes at random. I can’t guarantee this isn’t an emulator bug.

Here’s what my playing setup looks like. North Star is being played as an emulator inside an emulator, which works better than you might expect, but there’s still the open possibility of some obscure command being performed wrong.

Finally breaking out into the lake, though, the game uses a grid of rooms:

The Castle is marked by a berm that you can row around.

YOU ARE ON THE LAKE AT THE NW CORNER OF THE CASTLE. A 5 FOOT BERM RUN EAST AND SOUTH HERE. A HUGE TOWER RISES INTO THE FOG HERE.

YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.

NOW WHAT? >S

YOU ARE ON THE LAKE NEAR THE BERM BY THE WEST WALL.

YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.

Hopping out of the boat causes the boat to float away (I think this is meant to be a one-way trip). The south side of the berm has a drawbridge (not openable from the outside) and on the southwest side there’s a tower with vines that indicates you can climb.

YOU ARE ON THE BERM AT THE BASE OF THE SW TOWER.

THERE IS A THICK VINE GROWING UP THE SIDE OF THE SW TOWER. IT LOOKS LIKE YOU COULD CLIMB IT IF YOU ARE CAREFULL.

I had quite a lot of frustration here as CLIMB VINE simply told me YOU’RE UNABLE TO DO THAT with no explanation why. I finally realized this was not a “your command is not being parsed properly” scenario but rather “something is preventing the action but we’re not going to tell you what it is because transparency in error messages is for weaklings”. I tried dropping everything and the climbing finally worked:

YOU ARE HALF WAY UP THE TOWER. THE VINE HERE IS THINNER AND SEEMS TO BE A BIT LOOSE. BETTER HURRY UP.

NOW WHAT? >CLIMB VINE

YOU SCRAMBLE UP THE VINE. NEAR THE TOP THE VINE IS THINNER. YOU CAN FEEL IT BEGIN TO COME AWAY FROM THE TOWER WALL. AS YOU GRAB THE EDGE OF THE PARAPET, THE VINE TEARS AWAY AND FALLS TO THE GROUND. YOU PULL YOURSELF OVER THE TOP.

YOU ARE ON THE TOP OF THE TOWER. THERE IS A HATCH HERE.

(On a repeat test, I was able to climb holding one item. I don’t know what the limit is.)

Going through this lands the player on the second floor of the castle, so let me give the map of that first:

It’s hard to know what to focus on; there’s a lot of places that are clearly just functional but it may be we are supposed to do something vital in a nondescript room just because one of the clues (which I promise I’ll show off soon) signals it.

YOU ARE IN AN EMPTY STOREROOM. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND WEST.

NOW WHAT? >N

YOU ARE AT THE JUNCTION OF THE WEST AND SOUTH HALLWAYS. THERE ARE DOORS SOUTH AND WEST.

The northwest corner has a ornate bedroom with a button next to a mirror.

YOU ARE IN A VERY ORNATE BEDROOM. THIS IS THE MASTER BEDROOM. THERE IS A FOURPOSTER BED AND AND LARGE DRESSER HERE. ON THE NORTH WALL IS A FULL-LENGTH MIRROR. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND EAST.

NOW WHAT? >EXAMINE MIRROR

THERE IS A BUTTON ON THE EDGE OF THE MIRROR.

(PUSH isn’t normally recognized as a verb; it seems the game has PUSH BUTTON hardcoded as a thing that works.)

Going in you can find a tower with a brass key, but also a corpse and some warning about blocking the entrance. The mirror once closed can’t be opened the other way.

YOU FORGOT TO BLOCK THE DOOR WITH SOMETHING! YOU SLOWLY STARVE TO DEATH! TOO BAD!

WELL, YOU MANAGED TO GET YOURSELF KILLED! BETTER LUCK WITH YOUR NEXT TRY. HOPE YOU REMEMBERED TO SAVE THE GAME BEFORE TRYING SOMETHING NEW!

The random leather boot can be used to invoke the command BLOCK MIRROR after opening it, allowing the player to grab the key safely.

A similar “trap room” can be invoked by visiting the first floor…

…finding the power room and pulling the switch (which does not need extra gas to run, although I assume we’ll still need to fill it up later)…

NOW WHAT? >N

YOU ARE AT THE JUNCTION OF THE EAST AND NORTH HALLWAYS. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND EAST.

NOW WHAT? >N

YOU ARE IN THE POWER ROOM. THERE IS A LARGE GASOLINE GENERATOR HERE. AT ONE END IS A SMALL GAS TANK. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS A SWITCH. THERE IS AN EXIT SOUTH.

NOW WHAT? >PULL SWITCH

THE GENERATOR STARTS WITH A ROAR!

…then going back to the second floor (southeast corner) with an “office” that has a button that can be pushed.

THE DOOR SLIDES CLOSED BEHIND YOU

YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM. THERE IS A TABLE AND CHAIR HERE. SEATED AT THE TABLE IS A SKELETON. SCRATCHED IN THE SURFACE OF THE TABLE IS THE FOLLOWING: LAST WILL OF SILAS FRUMP. GOT LOCKED IN THIS ROOM. HOPE THE PERSON THAT FINDS ME THINKS TO BLOCK THE DOOR WITH A CHAIR. I AM STARVING. I WILL LEAVE A CLUE I DISCOVERED. DIG 1800 GOLDPIECES………

You can block again, this time with a chair, but there’s no item as far as I can tell? This means there’s something essential in the text but it’s a fairly vague clue.

Other clues include a note randomly in one of the side rooms…

THE NOTE READS:
GOOD LUCK FRIEND, WITH YOUR ONGOING SEARCH FOR MY GOLD. LEAVE NOT A STONE UNTURNED DURING YOUR WANDERINGS AND IN TIME YOU SHALL FIND MANY NEW CLUES. SOME OF THEM WILL GUIDE YOU STRAIGHT, SOME NOT. ROAM EACH HALL, SEARCH IN ALL PLACES. SOME THINGS WILL VERY LIKELY PASS UNNOTICED, EVEN IF YOU LOOK AT THEM!

…and a secret inscription off the northeast corner, this time found by pulling a hook.

YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM IN THE NE TOWER. THERE IS A BRONZE TABLET FASTENED TO THE WALL HERE. IT READS:
I HAVE HIDDEN IT WELL.
TO FIND MY GOLD WILL
BE DIFFICULT. THE KEY
CLUE SHALL BE NAMED.
YOU SHALL SEE FOR YOURSELF
THE GOLD IF THE SCRATCHES
PLACED ON THIS TABLET
ARE READ AND MADE NOTE
OF. SIR JOHN WHEMBLY

The southwest tower similarly has a clue but is not blocked off:

YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM IN THE SW TOWER. THERE IS METAL PLAQUE FASTENED TO THE WALL HERE. THE PLAQUE READS:
“PUT FIVE TOGETHER. SHE KNOWS WAYS.”
STAIRS LEAD DOWN.

The “five together” might be referring to letters that are scattered randomly through rooms on the first floor. Samples:

YOU ARE IN THE STEWARDS OFFICE. THERE IS A DESK HERE. ON THE WALL IS PAINTED THE LETTER “I”. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH,EAST AND SW.

YOU ARE AT THE SOUTH END OF THE “GREAT HALL”. A LONG, HIGH ROOM USED FOR EATING. THERE IS A LONG TABLE DOWN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM. ON THE WEST WALL IS A MASSIVE FIREPLACE. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS PAINTED THE LETTER “L”. THERE IS A DOOR EAST.

Put all together, there are the letters, I, L, C, E, and A. They anagram to ALICE. This is clearly referring to a picture found at the note I mentioned earlier (the one that mentions “SOME THINGS WILL VERY LIKELY PASS UNNOTICED”).

YOU ARE IN THE STUDY. THERE IS A DESK AGAINST THE EAST WALL. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS A PAINTING OF A YOUNG GIRL HOLDING A RABBIT. THE RABBIT IS WEARING A WRISTWATCH. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND SOUTH.

YOU SEE HERE, A NOTE

I haven’t gotten any significance out of this room otherwise and I suspect I’m missing a parser command. Doing EXAMINE or MOVE give me nothing on any noun other than the note (MOVE isn’t even recognized as a verb).

There’s still other new items lying around to play with (a sword, a rope, a horseshoe, a crank, a silver key in addition to the brass one I mentioned earlier) and there’s one more straightforward concrete puzzle: how to open the drawbridge. With a key (I’m not sure which one, they work passively!) you can get at the drawbridge controls, but I can’t get them to work.

YOU ARE IN THE DRAWBRIDGE EQUIPMENT ROOM. THERE IS A LARGE WINDLASS HERE WITH ROPES LEADING TO THE TOP OF THE DRAWBRIDGE. IN ONE CORNER IS A LARGE PULLY WITH WIRES LEADING DOWN TO THE PORTCULLIS. THERE IS A SQUARE HOLE IN THE PULLY WHEEL. ON THE FLOOR HERE ARE SOME SMALL HOLES LOOKING INTO A PASSAGE BELOW.

TURN WINDLASS is recognized but it is described as rusty. The crank is suggestive but I have not been able to get the parser to recognize any use of it. Other than bespoke commands (which includes turning the windlass) the only ones I have are CUT, DIG, CLIMB, READ, OPEN, LIGHT, UNLOCK, TIE, JUMP, EXAMINE, ENTER, and CHOP — not suggestive for fixing anything, and I’m pretty sure TIE is meant solely for tying the boat at the docks.

I will take speculation at this point on anything (although my one reader, hello Rob, who has solved it already — please hold off on hints for now).

From Daves Old Computers, a very early Dynacomp disk for the Altair.

Recently, the Internet Archive went down, and unfortunately, my next several posts were dependent in some way or another on references there. Hence, I scrapped my schedule and picked something I didn’t need extra research for: the sequel to Uncle Harry’s Will, by R. L. Turner, as written for the North Star Horizon.

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE PERSERVERED TO THE END OF THE SEARCH! THE MONEY YOU HAVE FOUND IN MY CHEST WILL PAY YOUR WAY TO ENGLAND THERE, YOU’LL FIND YOUR NEXT ADVENTURE. SOMEWHERE IN WHEMBLY CASTLE LIES HIDDEN A HUGE TREASURE OF JEWELS AND GOLD. HIDDEN THERE BY YOUR GREAT, GREAT, GRANDFATHER ALMOST TWOHUNDRED YEARS AGO. MANY HAVE SEARCHED, BUT NO ONE HAS FOUND IT. WITH YOUR LOGIC AND INTELIGENCE I KNOW YOU WILL BE ABLE TO FIND IT! GOOD LUCK!

The previous game involved a gigantic map which tried to re-create the roadmap of an entire country, and the player had to follow the instructions of a poem in the manner similar to a gimmick road rally. It was, if nothing else, unique.

Whembly Castle is much more traditional: we’re on foot, we’ve arrived at a castle, we’re looking for treasure with no poem to guide us.

North Star Horizon brochure, from Bitsavers.

We even start adjacent to a forest! Very unexpected, I know.

YOU ARE AT THE END OF A ROAD LEADING NORTH. THERE ARE DENSE, UNPENATRABLE WOODS ON EACH SIDE. TO THE WEST IS A SMALL GATEHOUSE.

NOW WHAT? >W

YOU ARE IN A SMALL EMPTY ROOM. THERE IS A SIGN PAINTED ON THE WALL HERE. IT READS: BEWARE THE ICY WATER!

The start area is meant generally just to stall the player from trying a direct approach.

Entering a gate over a bridge leads to a lake which is a dead end.

YOU ARE AT THE SOUTH END OF A BRIDGE EXTENDING NORTH OVER A VERY FOGGY LAKE. SMALL TOWERS FLANK THE PASSAGE. THERE IS A DOOR INTO THE WEST TOWER.

NOW WHAT? >N

YOU ARE AT THE NORTH END OF A BRIDGE WHICH ENDS ABRUPLY HERE. TO THE NORTH LIES THE LAKE. MISTY WHITE FOG COVERS THE WATER. YOU CAN SEE A DARK MASS IN THE FOG TO THE NORTH.

Trying to enter the lake results in the icy doom warned about in the sign. The proper way to go is the previously mentioned west tower, which has a deck of cards. After picking up the deck of cards, the game rather unusually gives the player ACE OF DIAMONDS through KING OF DIAMONDS as individual objects.

YOU ARE IN THE WEST TOWER OF THE BARBICAN.
THERE IS A BENCH AND A TABLE HERE.

NOW WHAT? >INVENTORY

YOU ARE CARRYING:
AN ACE OF DIAMONDS
A TWO OF DIAMONDS
A THREE OF DIAMONDS
A FOUR OF DIAMONDS
A FIVE OF DIAMONDS
A SIX OF DIAMONDS
A SEVEN OF DIAMONDS
AN EIGHT OF DIAMONDS
A NINE OF DIAMONDS
A TEN OF DIAMONDS
A JACK OF DIAMONDS
A QUEEN OF DIAMONDS
A KING OF DIAMONDS

This is quite unusual and ominous, and I immediately knew this signaled a maze coming, and the objects were intended to map things out. Indeed, heading back to enter the forest, one step in reveals “YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS”.

Topologically, you can consider the map above to be in three sections.

The “main” group is an interconnected set of 11 rooms, with many of them having a “Dead End” branch room. (The idea of random dead ends scattered about dates back to Crowther’s Adventure, even pre-Woods.) In a narrative sense, if someone is stumbling around they’ll essentially go in circles although there’s no special tendencies to force the player back to the start (unlike some mazes, which include special one-way “trap” exits; see the ending maze of Sphinx Adventure for the most extreme example). This is essentially forced by the author’s insistance that if room A goes to room B, there is a path that also lets you go back from B to A. In the context of a cave, one way exits can make sense (you come from above using gravity somehow) but in a forest it doesn’t, so I appreciate the decision.

The “branch” I have marked is miss-able by someone not thorough enough: it leads to a key.

YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS

NOW WHAT? >E

YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS

YOU SEE HERE, A RUSTY IRON KEY

The “ending” section is separated from the main set, making it less likely someone will wander to the end of the maze by accident.

YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS

NOW WHAT? >NE

YOU ARE AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS. TO THE NORTH IS A CLEARING. THE LAKE LIES ALONG THE WEST EDGE OF THE CLEARING. THERE ARE WOODS SURROUNDING THE CLEARING. THERE IS A TRAIL INTO THE WOODS TO THE SOUTH. YOU CAN SEE A BUILDING TO THE NORTH.

This leads to a shack next to a dock and a boat. Just for simplicity of explanation, I’ll assume a player who has already poked ahead to the next outdoor area (a cabin) and returned with a metal prybar lying out in the open.

With the prybar you can bust through a rusty padlock into the shack and find some oars.

YOU ARE AT THE NW CORNER OF THE SHACK. THERE IS A HAND-OPERATED GASOLINE PUMP HERE. THERE IS GAS IN THE PUMP.

NOW WHAT? >S

YOU ARE AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE WOODEN SHACK. ON THE DOOR THERE IS A RUSTY HASP AND PADLOCK. TO THE WEST IS A BOAT DOCK. TO THE NORTH A GAS PUMP.

NOW WHAT? >OPEN DOOR

OK!

NOW WHAT? >E

YOU ARE IN A SMALL OFFICE. THERE IS A DUSTY COUNTER HERE.
THERE ARE DOORS EAST AND WEST.

NOW WHAT? >E

YOU ARE IN A DIRTY STORAGE ROOM.

YOU SEE HERE, A PAIR OF OARS

The oars let you jump in the boat and row around, although I found it quite finicky; the game insisted I not use ROW WEST but instead just type the direction, but at first just typing the direction failed. I am unclear the source of the bug.

Even after getting to the lake, it turns out to be too foggy to move around.

YOU ARE ON THE LAKE NEAR THE EAST SHORE. THERE ARE ROCKS EAST.

YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.

NOW WHAT? >W

THE LAKE IS VERY FOGGY! YOU’LL NEVER FIND YOUR WAY WITHOUT A COMPASS!

There’s another bug with the boat I’ll get to in a second, but let’s check out the final area first.

This is straightforwardly a cabin with another locked door, but rather than forcing it this time, you can use the key from the forest maze.

YOU ARE IN A LARGE ROOM. THERE ARE CHAIRS AND A TABLE HERE. A LARGE DESK SITS IN ONE CORNER NEXT TO A FIREPLACE. THERE IS A BED ALONG ONE WALL. NEXT TO THE BED IS A SMALL DRESSER.

YOU SEE HERE, A GAS CAN

(The desk, dresser, table, etc. don’t seem to be hiding anything.)

The gas can can be filled up back at the shack; I haven’t used the filled can for anything yet, but I do wonder if we get to hit the road somewhere just like the last game. There’s also off to the side a manhole that goes underground.

YOU ARE AT THE NW CORNER OF THE CLEARING.
THERE IS A MANHOLE COVER IN THE GROUND HERE.

NOW WHAT? >OPEN HATCH

THERE IS A LADDER HERE LEADING DOWN TO A CHAMBER BELOW.

NOW WHAT? >D

YOU ARE AT THE TOP OF THE LADDER.
THERE IS A TRAPDOOR ABOVE YOUR HEAD

(Notice how it is referred to as a “manhole cover” but you need to call it a “hatch” to get anywhere. Yes, this game retains the guess-the-noun from the previous one.)

I’ve gotten a little farther, but this seems like a good place to cut off. I did promise I’d return to the boat.

While I was able to enter the boat, I have yet to discern a good syntax for leaving the boat. Out of desparation I just tried leaving east at the docks, thinking it might have my avatar hop out of the boat automatically. Instead, the boat stayed with me.

YOU ARE AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE WOODEN SHACK. ON THE DOOR THERE IS A RUSTY HASP AND PADLOCK. TO THE WEST IS A BOAT DOCK. TO THE NORTH A GAS PUMP.

YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.

Land boat! You can “ride” the boat all the way to the underground, but if you do that, you hit the “fog” condition and end up getting warped back to the docks.

YOU ARE AT THE TOP OF THE LADDER. THERE IS A TRAPDOOR ABOVE YOUR HEAD

YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.

NOW WHAT? >D

THE LAKE IS VERY FOGGY! YOU’LL NEVER FIND YOUR WAY WITHOUT A COMPASS!

YOU ARE ON THE LAKE NEXT TO THE DOCK. THE LAKE IS COVERED WITH A DENSE FOG.

YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.

The last game went up to roughly 200 rooms and I’ve only got 71 so far, so I expect quite a bit to go. I do find it interesting the same room-to-object ratio is still fairly large. In a road trip, it’s understandable you wouldn’t see much by the side of the road worth picking up; here, in a “classic” style adventure, the ratio feels a little more uneasy, but it is possible the game will change things up later.

Source.